Utz Read Online Free Page B

reaction was to swivel his neck inside his collar and say, blankly, ‘Dr Orlík is also a collector. But he is a collector of flies.’
    â€˜Flies?’
    â€˜Flies,’ assented Orlík.
    I began to form a mental picture of his lodgings: the unmade bed and unemptied ash-trays; the avalanche of yellowing periodicals; the microscope; the killingjars and, lining the walls, glass-fronted cases containing flies from every corner of the globe, each specimen pierced with a pin. I mentioned some beautiful dragonflies I had seen in Brazil.
    â€˜Dragonflies?’ Orlík frowned. ‘I have not interest. I have only interest for Musca domestica.’
    â€˜The common house-fly?’
    â€˜That is what it is.’
    â€˜Answer me,’ Utz interrupted again. ‘On which day did God create the fly? Day Five? Or Day Six?’
    â€˜How many times will I tell you?’ Orlík clamoured. ‘We have one hundred ninety million years of flies. But you will always speak of days!’
    â€˜Hard words,’ said Utz, philosophically.
    A fly had landed on the tablecloth and was sopping up some soup that the waiter had let fall from the ladle. With a flick of the wrist Orlík upturned a glass tumbler, and trapped the insect beneath it. He slid the glass to the edge of the table and transferred the fly to the killing-jar he took from his pocket. There was an angry buzzing, then silence.
    He flourished a magnifying glass and scrutinised the victim.
    â€˜Interesting example,’ he said. ‘Hatched, I would say, in the kitchen here. I will ask . . .’
    â€˜You will not ask,’ said Utz.
    â€˜I will. I will ask.’
    â€˜You will not.’
    â€˜And what’, I asked, ‘brought you and the house-fly together?’
    Expelling carp bones through his beard, Orlík described how he had devoted thirty years to studying certain aspects of the woolly mammoth: a labour which had taken him to the tundras of Siberia where mammoths are occasionally found deep-frozen in permafrost. The fruit of these researches – though he was usually too modest to mention it – had culminated in his magisterial paper ‘The Mammoth and His Parasites’. But no sooner was it published than he felt the need to study some lowlier creature.
    â€˜I chose’, he said, ‘to study Musca domestica within the Prague Metropolitan area.’
    Just as his friend Mr Utz could tell at a glance whether a piece of Meissen porcelain was made from the white clay of Colditz or the white clay of Erzgebirge, he, Orlík, having examined under a microscope the iridescent membrane of a fly’s wing, claimed to know if the insect came from Malá Strana or Židovské Město or from one of the garbage dumps that now encircled the New Garden City.
    He confessed to being enchanted by the vitality of the fly. It was fashionable among his fellow entomologists – especially the Party Members – to applaud the behaviour of the social insects: the ants, bees, wasps and other varieties of Hymenoptera which organised themselves into regimented communities.
    â€˜But the fly’, said Orlík, ‘is an anarchist.’
    â€˜Sssh!’ said Utz. ‘You will not say that word!’
    â€˜What word?’
    â€˜That word.’
    â€˜Yes. Yes,’ Orlík pitched his voice an octave higher. ‘I will say it. The fly is an anarchist. He is an individualist. He is a Don Juan.’
    The four fat Party Members, at whom this outburst was directed, were far too busy to notice: they were ogling their second helping of trout whose flesh, at that moment, the waiter was easing off the bone and blue skin.
    â€˜I am not from the People,’ Orlík said. ‘I have noble blood.’
    â€˜Oh?’ said Utz. ‘Which nobility?’
    I thought for a moment that lunch was going to end in a slanging match – until I realised that this was another of their well-rehearsed