Free Utz by Bruce Chatwin

billboards.

U tz was one of those rare individuals who, throughout the Cold War, persisted in the illusion that the Iron Curtain was essentially flimsy. Because of his investments in the West — and powers of persuasion that mystified both himself and the bureaucrats of Prague — he succeeded in keeping a foot in both camps.
    Year after year, he made the ritual pilgrimage to Vichy. By the end of April, his resentment against the regime rose to boiling-point: for its incompetence, nothing more – he considered it common to complain of collectivisation. By April, too, he felt acute claustrophobia, from having spent the winter months in close proximity to the adoring Marta: to say nothing of the boredom, verging on fury, that came from living those months with lifeless porcelain.
    Before leaving, he would make a resolution never, ever to return – while at the same time making arrangements for his return — and would set off for Switzerland in the best of spirits.
    The journey was always the same: to Geneva, for meetings with his bankers and an antiquaire: on to Vichy, and to Vichy only, to taste the waters, to breathe the fresh air of freedom that rapidly went stale, and order more expensive meals which would disgust him.
    He would then bolt for home like a man pursued by demons.
    One year, he went to Paris for the week-end: but that completely upset his equilibrium.
    These arrangements suited no one except himself. For Marta, his absence was a time of torment, almost of mourning. For the officials who issued his exit visa – men who seriously believed that so incurable a decadent belonged in Vichy, America or some such corrupted place, and who. prided themselves on their leniency in letting him go – his return was the act of a madman.
    It was equally puzzling to a succession of consuls in the French and Swiss embassies. Accustomed, as they were, to think of Czechoslovakia as a country from which people of Utz’s standing fled, in an eastwesterly direction, the idea that any normal person might prefer home to exile seemed excessively perverse: an act of ingratitude. Or was there some sinister motive? Was M. Utz a spy?
    No. He was not a spy. As he explained to me in the course of our afternoon stroll, Czechoslovakia was a pleasant place to live, providing one had the possibility of leaving. At the same time he admitted, with a self-deprecating smile, that his severe case of Porzellankrankheit prevented him from leaving for good. The collection held him prisoner.
    â€˜And, of course, it has ruined my life!’

I n an unguarded moment he also confessed to a secret cache of Meissen, stored in a numbered safe deposit, in the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva.
    Whenever his share prices rose above a certain level, he siphoned off a sum of money to pay for yet another object: the calculation being that if, over the years, the cache in Geneva approached the quality, not necessarily the quantity, of the collection in Prague, he might once again be tempted to emigrate.
    One year – I believe it was 1963 – the New York dealer, Dr Marius Frankfurter, made a special trip to Vichy to offer Utz a piece of porcelain that was quite outside his usual range: a model known as ‘The Spaghetti Eater’, made not at Meissen, but at the CapodiMonte factory in Naples.
    In the same baby blue bedroom, Dr Frankfurter unwrapped the object from its multiple layers of tissue-paper and set it on the commode, with the reverence of a priest exhibiting the Host. Utz could hardly help comparing its pearly glaze with the warted epidermis of the dealer. But that was life! The ugliest men loved the most beautiful things.
    â€˜So?’ said Dr Frankfurter.
    â€˜So,’ Utz pursed his lips.
    The object was adorable. He was not going to say so.
    A figure of Pulchinella – the ‘Charlie Chaplin’ of the Italian Comedy — sat lounging in a kind of invalid chair, wearing a collarette of green