Utz (7 page)

Or the Argentine? ‘Grande mangeuse de viande' — or so the waiter said. Utz had stood behind her baccarat table at the Casino, mesmerised by her scarlet talons; by the carefree gestures with which she manoeuvred her chips over the green baize; by the vein in her neck that bulged over her collar of pearls. Not her either! She was joined by her husband.

And then he saw her, one afternoon, in the lobby: a tall, white-limbed woman in tennis whites, her dark hair plaited in a coif, slipping a cover over her racquet and thanking, in a tone of firm finality, the over-eager pro for his lesson.

Utz heard her conversing in French, although he thought — or was he imagining this? — that he detected a Slavic resonance in her accent. She was not the athletic type: there was an oriental torpor in her movements. She might have been Turkish, this ‘femme en forme de violon' with her appleblossom cheeks, her dimples, her quivering forelip and slanting green eyes. She wasn't beautiful by modern standards: the kind of woman they once bred for the seraglio.

‘But she has to be Russian,' he reflected. ‘Russian, certainly. With a touch of Tartar?'

She was no longer young, and she seemed very sad.

He spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of feverish excitement, waiting for her to re-emerge from the lift, and attempting to compose a history for her. He imagined the downward spiral of émigré life: the rented apartment in Monaco; later, when the jewels ran out, the lodgings in Paris where her father drove a taxi and played chess after hours. To pay for his medical bills, she had sacrificed herself to the businessman who kept her in a certain style, but also kept a younger mistress. He had taken the mistress to the Riviera and sent his wife, who was childless, to Vichy.

She came downstairs before dinner, still alone, wearing a spotted grey dress and white open-toed shoes. And when Utz saw her little dog, a Sealyham, trailing at her heels, he called to mind the lady in the Chekhov tale and felt for certain the meeting must happen.

He followed her at a distance into the park beside the Allier, stationing himself on a bench which she was almost sure to pass, inhaling the odour of lilac and philadelphus.

‘Viens, Maxi! Viens! Viens!' — he heard her calling the dog; and when she came to a choice of forking paths, she chose the path that led towards him.

‘Bonsoir, Madame!' Utz smiled, and was about to call ‘Maxi!' to the dog. The woman gave a start, and quickened her pace.

He continued to sit, miserably listening to the crunch of her footfalls on the gravel. At dinner, she passed his table and looked the other way.

He saw her again in the morning, in the passenger seat of a silver sports car, her arms around the neck of the man at the wheel.

He asked the concierge who she was and was told she was Belgian.

H
e turned his attention to food.

On his first day at Vichy he had bought, from a bookshop in the Rue Clemenceau, a ‘gastronomic guide' to the region. He had always cared for his stomach, always befriended chefs.

How often, in the war years, especially in moments of terror, did he recollect the pleasures of the table! The day the Gestapo took him for questioning, he had been unable to focus on the abstractions of death or deportation: only on the memory of a particular plate of haricots verts, at a restaurant by a white road in Provence.

Later, during the worst of the winter shortages, the months of cabbage, cabbage, cabbage and potatoes, he comforted himself with the thought that, when sanity returned and the frontiers were open, he would eat once again in France.

He studied the guide with the fastidious dedication he usually reserved for porcelain-hunting: where to find the best ‘quenelles aux écrevisses', the best ‘cervelas truffé' or a ‘poulet à la vessie'. Or the desserts — the ‘bourriouls', ‘bougnettes', ‘flaugnardes', ‘fouasses'. (One could hear the gas in those names!) Or the rare white wine of Château Grillet, which was said to taste of vine flowers and almonds — and behave like a capricious young woman.

Putting his new-found knowledge to the test, he reserved a table at a restaurant beside the Allier.

The day was warm and sunny: sufficiently warm to eat outside on the terrace, under an awning of green-and-white striped canvas that flapped lazily in the breeze. There were three wine glasses set at each place. He watched the reflections of the poplars z-bending across the river, and the sand-martins skimming over its surface. On the far bank, fishermen and their families had spread their picnics on the grass.

The waiters were fussing over a ‘prince of gastronomes' who was paying his annual visit. He had come in after Utz, flushed crimson in the face and perambulating his stomach before him. He tucked his napkin inside his collar, and prepared to plough through an eight-course luncheon.

At last, when the menu came, Utz gave a grateful smile to the maitre d'hôtel.

He ran his eye over the list of specialities. He chose. He changed his mind. He chose again: an artichoke soup, trout ‘Mont Doré' and sucking-pig ‘à la lyonnaise'.

‘Et comme vin, monsieur?'

‘What would you suggest?'

The wine-waiter, taking Utz for an ignoramus, pointed to two of the more expensive bottles on the list: a Montrachet and a Clos Margeot.

‘No Château Grillet?'

‘Non, monsieur.'

‘Very well,' Utz acquiesced obediently. ‘Whatever you recommend.'

The meal failed to match his expectations. Not that he could fault its quality or presentation: but the soup, although exquisite, seemed savourless; the trout was smothered in a sauce of Gruyère cheese, and the sucking-pig was stuffed with something else.

He looked again, enviously, at the picnickers on the opposite shore. A young mother rushed to save her child, who had crawled to the water's edge. He would like to be with them: to share their coarse, home-made pies that surely tasted of something! Or had he lost his own sense of taste?

The bill was larger than he expected. He left in a bad mood. He felt bloated, and a little dizzy.

He had also come to a depressing conclusion: that luxury is only luxurious under adverse conditions.

I
n the afternoon the clouds came up and it began to rain. He lay down in his room and read some pages of a novel by Gide. His French was inadequate: he lost the thread of the narrative.

He put the book aside, and stared vacantly at the chandelier.

Why, he asked himself, when he had steeled himself to the horrors of war and revolution, should the free world present so frightening an abyss? Why, each time he sank onto the mattress, did he have the sensation of falling, like the elevator, through the floors of the hotel? In Prague he slept soundly. Why did sleep elude him here?

He would lie awake and fret over his finances. In Czechoslovakia he had no finances to speak of: or none that he could lay his hands on. Now, at two and three in the morning, he would spread his sharecertificates over the bedspread and tot up the figures of his portfolio, searching for a flaw, a mistake; trying to explain why, in a rising stock-market, his fortune in Switzerland had shrunk. Why, with enormous sums invested, were the sums on paper so small? Someone, somewhere was cheating him. Taking advantage while his back was turned! But who? And how?

From the same bookshop he had bought a pocket atlas of the world; and, leafing through its pages, he tried to imagine the country he would like to live in. Or rather, the country that would make him least unhappy.

Switzerland? Italy? France? Three possibilities. None of them inviting. Germany? Never. The break had been final. England? Not after the Dresden raid. The United States? Impossible. The noise would depress him dreadfully. Prague, after all, was a city where you heard the snowflakes falling. Australia? He had never been attracted by the colonies. Argentina? He was too old to tango.

The more he considered the alternatives, the clearer the solution seemed to him. Not that he would be happy in Czechoslovakia. He would be harassed, menaced, insulted. He would have to grovel. He would have to agree with every word they said. He would mouth their meaningless, ungrammatical formulae. He would learn to ‘live within the lie'.

But Prague was a city that suited his melancholic temperament. A state of tranquil melancholy was all one could aspire to these days! And for the first time, grudgingly, he felt he could admire his Czech compatriots: not for their decision to vote in a Marxist government . . . Any fool knew by now that Marxism was a winded philosophy! He admired the abstemiousness of their choice.

He continued to stare at the idiotic chandelier, turning over in his mind the most troublesome question of all.

He was desperately homesick, yet hadn't given a thought for the porcelains. He could only think of Marta, alone, in the apartment.

H
e felt remorse for having left her: the poor darling who adored him; who would lay down her life for him; her passionate heart that beat for him, and him only, concealed under a mask of reserve, of duty and obedience.

He had thought of taking her to the West. But she spoke no language other than Czech, and a few words of German. No. She'd be . . . he groped for the appropriate cliché . . . she'd be a fish out of water.

He remembered the times when, breathless from climbing the stairs, the snowflakes twinkling on her fox fur hat, she would return from a successful deal on the black market. Her capacity for bargaining was prodigious, even with a single dollar bill.

She would stand for hours in a food queue: nothing mattered if the object of her quest would bring him pleasure.

Some days, she filled her shopping-bag with muddy potatoes. No one knew better that the type of policeman who would pry among her purchases was the type to mind muddying his hands. And afterwards, when she had dumped the potatoes in the sink, she would pull from the bottom of the bag a pheasant or a hare that someone had brought in from the country.

Her contacts with the countryside functioned like the bush-telegraph.

‘Where did you get those eggs?' he'd ask, as she rushed a golden soufflé to the table.

‘A woman brought them,' she would answer vaguely.

She understood, by instinct, why he insisted on the details: the sauce in a sauceboat; the starching of shirt-cuffs; the Sèvres coffee cups on Sunday – for a coffee composed of roasted barley and chicory! – the minor acts of style to demonstrate that he had not given in.

He recognised her attentions as the tokens of her love. He could not bring himself to thank her: nor would she have wanted this.

T
heir happiest time together was the mushroom season, towards the end of August, after the first late summer cloudbursts. They would catch the early morning train to Tábor; the bus to České Křížové; and from there, taking care to avoid the big house, take their picnic into the woods.

Mushrooms, he said, were the only reason for revisiting the scenes of his childhood.

He and Marta were like children at play, oblivious of caste or class, as they called to one another through the pine trunks: ‘Look what I've found . . . ! Look what I've found . . . !' – a russet-cowled boletus, an edible agaric, or a cluster of chanterelles pushing their orange caps above a carpet of moss.

No one but they and a few woodcutters knew the clearing where, as master of the estate, he had sawn himself a rustic table and seat: from the timbers of a beech tree that had been split by lightning.

They would spread their finds on the table, gills uppermost, discarding those which were spongy or grub-ridden, cleaning off the larger lumps of earth yet leaving the odd pine-needle or a scrap of fern frond.

‘Don't clean them too much,' she would scold him. ‘A bit of dirt makes them taste much better.'

Then she fried them in butter over a spirit stove, and stirred in a dollop of cream.

One day, on their way back to Prague, they stopped in the town square at Tábor where local mushroom fanciers had set up stalls, under awnings of sackcloth to prevent the sun from shrivelling their treasures.

A hubbub of cheerful voices greeted him. A peasant woman, a white headscarf wrapped low over her weather-beaten face, stood up and cried, ‘Look! It's the master come back!' He watched his old doctor, a mushroom fanatic, bartering furiously with a professional mycologist from the university over some very rare specimen. And there was Marianna Palach! — the laundrywoman, wizened to a husk now, who none the less went mushrooming, and had set up shop.

Everyone in the market was laughing, haggling, giving, taking, proving beyond all doubt, whatever the zealots had to say, that the business of trade was one of life's most natural and enjoyable pleasures, no more to be abolished than the act of falling in love . . .

‘W
hat am I doing here?' Utz roused himself from his daydream.

He looked at his wristwatch. He was late for dinner. He knotted his tie in front of the bathroom mirror. He trimmed his moustache. (I still cannot be certain if I'm imagining a moustache.) He examined his stubborn little mouth, and said, ‘No!'

He was not going to join the flow of exiles. He would not sit complaining in rented rooms. He knew that anti-Communist rhetoric was as deadly as its Communist counterpart. He would not give up his country. Not for them!

He would go back. But he knew that, once he got back, the porcelains would re-exert the power of snobbery. The ladies of the Dresden court would turn their vitreous smiles on Marta, dismissing her to the kitchenette – where she would sit, patiently, in her shabby maid's uniform and black stockings with holes at the knee.

He went down to dinner in the restaurant. At a table nearby, a pair of married couples were engaged in a merciless argument over the merits or otherwise of an ‘Alaska', an ‘Île flottante' or an ‘Omelette norvégienne'. The women had rasping voices. The men were fat and wore rings.