Utz by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online Page A

his safe return.
    The man insinuated that they had ‘ways and means’ of finding out where he went in Western Europe, and if he actually turned up at Vichy. Utz was astonished that no one bothered to ask how he would support himself in a foreign country. Was this, he wondered, a trap?
    â€˜What can they expect of me?’ he asked himself. ‘Subsist on air?’

O n the eve of his departure, his tickets and passport in order, he took leave of the collection piece by piece. Marta was cooking in the kitchenette. He had ordered dinner for two.
    She had spread a fresh damask cloth over the glass-topped table; and as he surveyed the sparkling Swan Service plates, the salt-cellar, the cutlery with chinoiserie handles – he came close to believing in his fantasy: that this was the ‘porcelain palace’, and that he himself was Augustus reincarnate.
    Marta, whom he had taught to make a soufflé, asked what time the guest would arrive. He stood up. He straightened his tie. Then, without a hint of condescension, he pressed her calloused hand to his lips.
    â€˜This evening, my dear Marta, you are to be the guest.’
    She coloured at the neck. She protested. She said she was unworthy, and in the end accepted with delight.

M arta was the child of a village carpenter who lived near Kostelec in Southern Bohemia. His wife’s early death, from tuberculosis, drove him to drink, and in a tavern brawl he almost killed a man. Ostracised, accused of the evil eye, he sent his two elder daughters to live with an aunt, and took the youngest along on his travels. He found work as a woodcutter on Utz’s estate at Čéské Křížové. When he also died, crushed by a falling tree, the bailiff evicted the girl from their cottage.
    She earned a few pennies doing chores for the baker or laundrywoman. Later, to avoid being sent to a workhouse, she went to live on a farm, where she slept on a straw-filled pallet and looked after a flock of geese.
    She sang strange, incoherent songs and was thought to be simple: especially when she fell in love with a gander. Children in peasant Europe believed the tales they were told: of werewolves, of stars that were ducks in flight, or the gander who turned into a shining prince.
    Marta’s gander was a magnificent snow-white bird: the object of terror to foxes, children and dogs. She had reared him as a gosling; and whenever she approached, he would let fly a low contented burble and sidle his neck around her thighs. Some mornings, at first light when no one was about, she would swim with her lover in the lake, and allow him to nibble her long fair hair.
    One morning, sometime in the late Thirties, as Utz was driving his Steyr coupé from the castle to catch the early train to Prague, he caught sight of a girl in dripping clothes being hounded down the street by a mob of villagers. He braked the car, and asked her to sit beside him.
    â€˜Come with me,’ he said kindly.
    She cringed, but obeyed. He drove her back to the castle.
    A new life opened up for her, in domestic service. She followed her master’s movements with an adoring gaze: frequently he had to prevent her from kissing his hand. Four years later, when he had put her in charge of the household, his other retainers, puzzled by the habits of this solitary bachelor, spread rumours that she shared his bed.
    The truth was that, in a world of shifting allegiances – and since the death of his grandmother’s faithful major-domo – she was the only person he could trust, and, at the same time, use. Only she knew the hay-loft where the Hebrew scholar Dr Kraus – and his Talmuds — was in hiding: she would risk her life to fetch him food. Only she had the key to the cellar where, throughout the War, the porcelains were stored.
    Later, in the months after the Communist takeover, when the peasants, still bemused by propaganda, believed that the new ideology allowed them to divide