Utz by Bruce Chatwin

that history is always our guide for the future, and always full of capricious surprises. The future itself is a dead land because it does not yet exist.
    When a Czech writer wishes to comment on the plight of his country, one way open to him is to use the fifteenth-century Hussite Rebellion as a metaphor. I found in Prague Museum this text describing the Hussites’ defeat of the German Knights:
    â€˜At midnight, all of a sudden, frightened shouting was heard in the very centre of the large forces of Edom who had put up their tents along three miles near the town of Žatec in Bohemia; in the distance of ten miles from Cheb. And all of them fled from the sword, driven out by the voice of falling leaves only, and not pursued by any man . . .’
    As I scribbled this in my notebook, I seemed to hear again Utz’s nasal whisper: ‘They listen, listen, listen to everything but . . . they hear nothing!’
    He had, as usual, been right. Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber; a void where confused signals buzz about at random; where a murmur or innuendo causes panic: so, in the end, the machinery of repression is more likely to vanish, not with war or revolution, but with a puff, or the voice of falling leaves . . .

I was staying at the Hotel Yalta. Among the guests there was a French reporter on the trail of a Peruvian terrorist. ‘Many terrorists come to Prague,’ he said, ‘for facial surgery.’
    There was also a party of English ‘dissidentwatchers’ : a Professor of Modern History and three literary ladies — who, instead of watching animals in an East African game-park, had come to spy on that other endangered species, the East European intellectual. Was the creature still at large? What should one feed it? Would it compose some suitable words to help the anti-Communist crusade?
    They drank whisky on their credit cards, ate a lot of peanuts, and plainly hoped they were being followed. I hoped that, when they did meet a dissident, they’d get their fingers bitten off.
    On the following day, I checked for an Utz in the Prague phone book. There was no one of that name.
    I ventured past the sickly stucco medusa-masks above the door of No. 5 Å iroká Street, past the ranks of overflowing dustbins in the entrance, and rang the bell of the top-floor apartment. Beside the bell-push, I saw the screw-holes where Utz’s brass plaque had been.
    On the landing below, I tried the bell of the soprano who, twenty years earlier, had appeared in a peonyprinted peignoir. She was now a shrivelled old lady in a black, fringed shawl. I said the name ‘Utz’. The door flew in my face.
    I had got as far as the next floor when the door re-opened and, with a ‘Psat!’, she called me back.
    Her name was Ada Krasová. The apartment was crammed with the mementos of an operatic career.
    She had sung Mimi, Manon, Carmen, Aida, Ortrud and Lisa in ‘The Queen of Spades’. One photograph showed her as an adorable Jenůfa in a lace peasant blouse. She kept fingering the tortoiseshell combs in her hair. In the kitchen a cat was being sick. There were arrangements of peacock feathers in Chinese vases. The profusion of faded pink satin reminded me of Utz’s bedroom.
    I came quickly to the point. Did she, by any chance, know what had happened to Utz’s porcelains? She gave a little operatic trill, ‘Oooh! La! La!’ – and shuddered. Obviously she did know, but was not letting on. She gave me the name of a curator at the Rudolfine Museum.

T he museum, a grandiose edifice from the ‘good old days’ of Franz Josef, had been named after the Emperor Rudolf to commemorate his passion for the decorative arts. Along the front facade, there were sculptured bas-reliefs representing various crafts: gem-cutting, weaving, glass-blowing. A pair of grimy sphinxes sat guard over the entrance; burdocks were sprouting through cracks in the steps.
    The Museum was shut