Utz by Bruce Chatwin Page B

of paying routine calls on him: to check that the collection was intact.
    The visits seemed to amuse him: especially when one or other of the curators brought a puzzling piece of porcelain, on which to test his expertise. But in July of that year, his right arm paralysed, he agreed to sign a paper confirming that, on his death, the collection would go to the State.
    He also agreed to import his ‘second’ collection from Switzerland: with the proviso that, since the visits now distressed him terribly, they would leave him thereafter in peace. The Director of the Museum, a humane man, consented. Two hundred and sixtyseven objects of porcelain were given special clearance through the customs, and were delivered to Utz’s apartment.
    The funeral, as we know, began at 8 a.m. on March 10th 1974 – although there was some confusion over the timing of the arrangements. As a result, the Director and three of his staff missed the church service and the burial altogether, and were thirty minutes late for breakfast at the Hotel Bristol.
    Two days later, when they kept their appointment at No. 5 Å iroká Street, no one answered the bell. In exasperation, they called for a man to pick the lock. The shelves were bare.
    The furniture was in place, even the bric-à-brac in the bedroom. But not a single piece of porcelain could be found: only dust-marks where the porcelains had been, and marks on the carpet where the animals from the Japanese Palace had stood.
    â€˜And the servant?’ I asked. ‘Surely she must know?’
    â€˜But we do not believe her story.’

A fter breakfast next morning, I asked the concierge to call the National Museum to find out if a Dr Václav Orlík still worked there. The answer came back that Dr Orlík, although officially retired, continued to work in the mornings, in the Department of Palaeontology.
    On my way to the Museum I took the precaution of reserving a table for two at the Restaurant Pstruh.
    A museum guard conducted me through a maze of passages into a storeroom heaped with dusty bones and stones. Orlík, now white-haired and resembling a Brahmanic sage, was cleaning the encrustation from a mammoth tibia. Behind him, like a Gothic arch, was the jawbone of a whale.
    I asked if he remembered me.
    â€˜Is it?’ he scowled. ‘No. It is not.’
    â€˜It is,’ I said.
    He left off scouring the mammoth bone and examined me with a myopic and suspicious glare.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said. ‘I see it now. It is you.’
    â€˜Of course it’s me.’
    â€˜Why you not reply to my letters?’
    I explained that, since I was last in Prague, I had married and changed addresses five times.
    â€˜I do not believe,’ he said flatly.
    â€˜I wondered if you’d like to lunch with me?’ I said. ‘We could go to the Pstruh.’
    â€˜We could go,’ he nodded doubtfully. ‘You could pay?’
    â€˜I could.’
    â€˜So I will come.’
    He made the motion of running a comb through his hair and beard, set his beret at a rakish angle, and pronounced himself ready to leave.
    On the way out he left a note saying that he had gone to lunch with a ‘distinguished foreign scholar’. We went outside. He walked with a limp.
    â€˜I do not think you are distinguished,’ he said as he limped along the pedestrian underpass. ‘I think you are not a scholar even. But I must say it to them.’
    Nothing much had changed at the restaurant. The trout were still swimming up and down their oxygenated tank. The head-waiter – could it really be the same head-waiter? – had grown a balloon-like paunch, and the disagreeable face of Comrade Novotný had been replaced by the equally disagreeable face of Comrade Husák.
    I ordered a bottle of light white Moravian wine, and raised my glass to Utz’s memory. Tears trickled down the creases of Orlík’s cheek, and vanished in the wilderness of his