Utz

by Bruce Chatwin

  I felt I was on firmer ground with Košík’s second story: here, at least, there was a measure of agreement among his drinking companions.

  They agreed that ten or twelve years ago – more maybe – a taxi used to bring an elderly couple to the village for a Sunday afternoon stroll. The man was shorter than the woman, shuffled his feet, and had to be supported on her arm. They would walk along the lane, as far as the wire fence surrounding the dump, and then walk back to the taxi.

  I walked along the lane.

  The fields were overgrown with ragwort and willowherb. Factory chimneys were churning clouds of brown smoke in the direction of the city. The sky was tied in a tangle of electric cables.

  I came to the fence. A rank of bulldozers stood outside a shed. Beyond lay the dump: an area of raw earth and refuse, with seagulls screaming over it.

  I walked back to the village, thinking over the various possibilities.

  Had Utz or Marta smuggled the collection abroad? No. Had the museum officials smuggled it abroad? No. Dr Frankfurter would have known. Did Utz destroy his porcelains out of pique? I was doubtful. He loathed museums, but he was not a vindictive man.

  But he was a joker! I felt it might have appealed to his sense of the ridiculous that these brittle Rococo objects should end up on a twentieth-century trashheap.

  Or was it a case of iconoclasm? Is there, alongside the tendency to worship images — which Baudelaire called ‘my unique, my primitive passion’ — a countertendency to smash them to bits? Do images, in fact, demand their own destruction?

  Or was it Marta? Did she have the vindictive streak? Did she connect Utz’s love of porcelain with his love for opera singers? If so, having got rid of one lot, she might as well rid herself of the other.

  No. My impression is that none of these theories will work. I believe that, in reviewing his life during those final months, he regretted having always played the trickster. He regretted having wheedled himself and the collection out of every tight corner. He had tried to preserve in microcosm the elegance of European court life. But the price was too high. He hated the grovelling and the compromise – and in the end the porcelains disgusted him.

  Marta had never given in. She had never once lowered her standards, never lost her craving for legitimacy. She had stayed the course. She was his eternal Columbine.

  My revised version of the story is that, on the night of their wedding in church, she emerged from the bathroom in her pink art-silk dressing-gown and, unloosing the girdle, let it slide to the floor and embraced him as a true wife. And from that hour, they passed their days in passionate adoration of each other, resenting anything that might come between them. And the porcelains were bits of old crockery that simply had to go.

  The village of Kostelec lies close to the Austrian border, near the watershed between the Danube and the Elbe. The wheatfields have been invaded by biblical ‘tares’: but the cornflowers, the poppies, knapweed, scabious, and larkspur make one rejoice in the beauty of a European countryside as yet unpoisoned by selective weedkillers. On the edge of the village there are water-meadows and, beyond, there is a lake where carp are raised, half-encircled with a stand of pines.

  The houses of the village have red-tiled roofs, and their walls are freshly washed with ochre and white. The women plant geraniums in their window-boxes. On the village green, there is a well-tended chapel with a tiny dome.

  Beside the chapel there is the base of a monument which once would have borne the double K’s — Kaiserlich und Koniglich — of the Dual Hapsburg Monarchy. It now supports a rusty, lopsided contraption commemorating a Soviet foray into space.

  A storm was passing. The thunderheads rolled away, and a rainbow arched over the water-meadows. The sun illuminated gardens of yellow rudbeckia, purple phlox and banks of white shasta daisies.

  I unlatched a wicket-gate. A snow-white gander flapped towards me, craning his neck and hissing. An old peasant woman came to the door. She wore a flowered housecoat, and a white scarf low over her forehead. She frowned. I murmured a word or two and her face lit up in an astounded smile.

  And she raised her eyes to the rainbow and said, ‘Ja! Ich bin die Baronin von Utz.’