UTZ [antikvár]

An hour before dawn on March 7th 1974, Kaspar Joachim Utz died of a second and long-expected stroke, in his apartment at No. 5 Siroká Street, overlooking the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. Three days later, at 7.45 a.m., his fiiend Dr Vaclav OrHk was standing outside the Church of St Sigismund, awaiting the arrival of the hearse and clutching seven of the ten pink carnations he had hoped to afford at the florist's. He noted with approval the first signs of spring. In a garden across the street, jackdaws with twigs in their beaks were wheeHng above the hndens, and now and then a minor avalanche would sHde from the pantiled roof of a tenement. While Orhk waited, he was approached by a man with a curtain of grey hair that fell below the collar of his raincoat. 'Do you play the organ?' the man asked in a catarrhal voice. 'I fear not,' said OrHk. 'Nor do I,' the man said, and shuffled off down a side-street. At 7.57 a.m., the same man unbolted from inside the immense baroque doors of the Church. Without a nod to Orhk he then cHmbed into the organ loft and, seating himself amid its choir of giltwood and trumpeting angels, began to play a funeral march composed of the two sonorous chords he had learned the day before: from the organist who was too lazy to stir from bed at this hour and had found, in the janitor, a replacement. At 8 a.m., the hearse - a Tatra 603 - drew up outside the steps: in order to divert the People's attention from retrograde Christian rituals, the authorities had decreed that all baptisms.