Utz

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
Utz

“
Utz
wonderfully depicts that sad, romantic city of Prague, the ham-handedness of East European politics, a small gallery of deftly drawn characters. Chatwin's deepening portrait of Utz is cunningly achieved . . . . It is triumphant.”

 

“Bruce Chatwin has set a story as delicate as the skyline . . . . In this mordant and suggestive story, he masters the grace, the damp, the dilapidation and the ghostly comedy of the city that produced Kafka and
The Good Soldier Schweik, The Golem and Don Giovanni
, and the inflamed reasonableness of spring, 1968.”

— Richard Eder,
Los Angeles Times

 

“Combining specific and the quotidian . . . Chatwin's Prague is a palpable place . . . . The modeling is deft, the color bright, and the miniature scale of the piece displays a decorative mantelpiece charm.”

—
The Boston Globe

 

“In a style that is spare, precise, understated and transparent, he offers a clear but distanced view of a curious character and his world. It's enhanced with shadows, rather than flashes, of humor — the Kafkaesque, European humor of resignation.”

 

“Written in his usual crisply graceful style, in which seemingly simple descriptive passages resonate like lines of haiku . . . an elegantly ironic narrative that can be read merely for the pleasure of its concise but vivid language, for the wit and style of its characterizations, even for the suspense of discovering just what has become of Utz's fabulous collection.”

 

“
Utz
, with all its tricks and ideas, is constantly interesting . . . . [Chatwin's] prose is as precise and stylish as when he soared onto the literary scene with his nonfiction book
In Patagonia
in 1977.”

 

“A marvelously elegant character study.”

Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940, and was the author of
In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines,
and
Utz
. The last three he considered works of fiction. His other books are
What Am I Doing Here, Anatomy of Restlessness,
and
Far Journeys
, a collection of his photographs which also includes selections from his travel notebooks. Chatwin died outside Nice, France, on January 17, 1989.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,
Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

 

Copyright © Bruce Chatwin, 1988

All rights reserved

 

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-52283-7

IBN .1576 5 (pbk.)

 

 

A
n hour before dawn on March 7th 1974, Kaspar Joachim Utz died of a second and long-expected stroke, in his apartment at No. 5 Široká Street, overlooking the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

Three days later, at 7.45 a.m., his friend Dr Václav Orlík was standing outside the Church of St Sigismund, awaiting the arrival of the hearse and clutching seven of the ten pink carnations he had hoped to afford at the florist's. He noted with approval the first signs of spring. In a garden across the street, jackdaws with twigs in their beaks were wheeling above the lindens, and now and then a minor avalanche would slide from the pantiled roof of a tenement.

While Orlík waited, he was approached by a man with a curtain of grey hair that fell below the collar of his raincoat.

‘Do you play the organ?' the man asked in a catarrhal voice.

‘I fear not,' said Orlík.

‘Nor do I,' the man said, and shuffled off down a side-street.

At 7.57 a.m., the same man unbolted from inside the immense baroque doors of the Church. Without a nod to Orlík he then climbed into the organ loft and, seating himself amid its choir of giltwood and trumpeting angels, began to play a funeral march composed of the two sonorous chords he had learned the day before: from the organist who was too lazy to stir from bed at this hour and had found, in the janitor, a replacement.

At 8 a.m., the hearse — a Tatra 603 — drew up outside the steps: in order to divert the People's attention from retrograde Christian rituals, the authorities had decreed that all baptisms, weddings and funerals must be over by 8.30. Three of the pall-bearers got out, and helped each other open the rear door.

Utz had planned his own funeral with meticulous care. A blanket of white carnations covered the oak coffin — although he had not foreseen the wreath of Bolshevik vulgarity that had been placed on top: red poinsettias, red gladioli, red satin ribbon and a frieze of shiny laurel leaves. A card offered condolences (to whom?) from the Director of the Rudolfine Museum and his staff.

Orlík added his modest tribute.

A second Tatra brought the three remaining pall-bearers. They had squeezed themselves into the front seat beside the chauffeur while, on the back seat, sat a solitary woman in black, her black veil awash with tears. Since none of the men showed any inclination to help her, she pushed the door open and, shaking with grief, almost fell onto the slushy cobbles.

To relieve the pressure on her bunions the sides of her shoes were slit open.

Recognising her as Utz's faithful servant Marta, Orlík rushed to her assistance — and she, collapsing onto his shoulder, allowed him to escort her. When he attempted to carry her brown leatherette bag, she wrenched it from his grasp.

The bearers — employees of a rubber factory who worked night-shift and doubled for the undertaker by day – had shouldered the coffin and were advancing up the main aisle: to music that reminded Orlík of the tramp of soldiers on parade.

Halfway to the altar the procession met the cleaning woman, who, with soap, water and a scrubbingbrush, was scrubbing at the blazon of the Rožmberk family, inlaid into the floor in many-coloured marbles.

The leading bearer asked the woman, most politely, to allow the coffin to pass. She scowled and went on scrubbing.

The bearers had no alternative but to take a left turn between two pews, a right turn up the side aisle, and another right to pass the pulpit. Eventually, they arrived before the altar where a youngish priest, his surplice stained with sacramental wine, was anxiously biting his fingernails.

They set down the coffin with a show of reverence. Then, attracted by the smell of hot bread from a bakery along the street, they strolled off to get breakfast leaving Orlík and the faithful Marta as the only mourners.

The priest mumbled the service at the speed of a patter number and, from time to time, lifted his eyes towards a fresco of the Heavenly Heights. After commending the dead man's soul, they had to wait at least ten minutes before the bearers condescended to return, at 8.26.

At the cemetery, from which the snow had almost melted, the priest, though wrapped in a thick serge overcoat, began to suffer from a fit of shivers. The coffin had hardly been lowered into the earth when he began to shove the moaning Marta, by the shoulderblades, towards the waiting limousine. He declined Orlík's invitation to breakfast at the Hotel Bristol. At the corner of Jungmannova Street he shouted for the chauffeur to stop, and jumped out slamming the door.

It was Utz who had arranged, and paid for, this valedictory breakfast. An acrid smell of disinfectant flowed through the dining-room. Chairs were piled on tables, and more cleaning women were swabbing up the mess from a banquet held the previous evening, in honour of East German and Soviet computer experts. In the far left corner, a table covered in white damask was set for twenty people, with a fluted tokay glass at each place.

Utz had miscalculated. He had counted on at least a handful of his more venal cousins turning up, in case there was anything to be had. He had counted, too, on a delegation from the Museum: if only to arrange the transfer of his porcelains into their grasping hands.

As it was, Marta and Orlík sat alone, side by side, ordering smoked ham, cheese pancakes and wine from the slovenly waiter.

At the far end of the table stood a huge stuffed bear, reared on its hind-legs, mouth agape, forepaws outstretched — placed there by some humorous person to remind the clientele of their country's fraternal protector. On its plinth, a brass plaque announced that it had been shot by a Bohemian baron, not in the Tatras or Carpathians, but in the Yukon in 1926. The bear was a grizzly.

After a glass or two of tokay, Marta had apparently given up grieving for her dead employer. After four glasses, she twisted her mouth into a mocking grin and shouted at the top of her voice: ‘To the Bear! . . . To the Bear!'

I
n the summer of 1967 — a year before the Soviet tanks overran Czechoslovakia — I went to Prague for a week of historical research. The editor of a magazine, knowing of my interest in the Northern Renaissance, had commissioned me to write an article on the Emperor Rudolf II's passion for collecting exotica: a passion which, in his later years, was his only cure for depression.

I intended the article to be part of a larger work on the psychology — or psychopathology — of the compulsive collector. As it turned out, due to idleness and my ignorance of the languages, this particular foray into Middle European studies came to nothing. I remember the episode as a very enjoyable holiday, at others' expense.

On my way to Czechoslovakia I had stopped at Schloss Ambras, outside Innsbruck, to see the Kunstkammer or ‘cabinet of curiosities' assembled by Rudolf's uncle, Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol. (Uncle and nephew had a friendly but long-standing quarrel as to who should possess the Hapsburg family narwhal horn, and a Late Roman agate tazza that might or might not be the Holy Grail.)

The Ambras Collection, with its Cellini salt-cellar and Montezuma's headdress of quetzal plumes, had survived intact from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries when imperial officials, mindful of the revolutionary mob, removed its more spectacular treasures to Vienna. Rudolf's treasures — his mandragoras, his basilisk, his bezoar stone, his unicorn cup, his gold-mounted coco-de-mer, his homunculus in alcohol, his nails from Noah's Ark and the phial of dust from which God created Adam — had long ago vanished from Prague.