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duets. There followed a discussion on the merits (or otherwise) of Kafka, whom Utz revered as a demiurge and Orlík dismissed as a fraud. It was right for his books to be abolished.
    â€˜Banned, you mean?’ I said. ‘Censored?’
    â€˜I do not mean,’ said Orlík. ‘I said abolished.’
    â€˜Paf! Paf!’ Utz flapped his hand. ‘What foolishness is this?’
    Orlík’s case against Kafka was the doubtful entomological status of the insect in the story ‘Metamorphosis’. Again, I thought we were in for trouble. Again, the brouhaha simmered down. We drank a cup of anaemic coffee. Orlík extracted from me my London address, scribbled it on a scrap of paper napkin, rolled it into a pellet, and put it in his pocket.
    He intercepted the bill and waved it in Utz’s face.
    â€˜I will pay,’ he announced.
    â€˜You will not pay.’
    â€˜I will. I must.’
    â€˜You will not,’ said Utz, who snatched at the paper Orlík held for him to snatch.
    Orlík’s eyelids dropped in acquiescence.
    â€˜Aah!’ he nodded gloomily. ‘I know it. Mr Utz will pay.’
    â€˜And now,’ Utz turned to me, ‘you will permit me to show you some monuments of our beautiful city.’

U tz and I spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through the thinly peopled streets of Malá Strana, pausing now and then to admire the blistering façade of a merchant’s house, or some Baroque or Rococo palace — the Vrtba, the Pálffy, the Lobkovic: he recited their names as though the builders were intimate friends.
    In the Church of Our Lady Victorious, the waxen Spanish image of the Christ Child, aureoled in an explosion of gold, seemed less the Blessed Babe of Bethlehem than the vengeful divinity of the Counter-Reformation.
    We climbed the length of Neruda Street and walked around the Hradschin: the scene of my futile researches during the previous week. We then sat in an orchard below the Strahov Monastery. A man in his underpants sunned himself on the grass. The fluff of balsam poplars floated by, and settled on our clothes like snowflakes.
    â€˜You will see,’ said Utz, waving his malacca over the multiplicity of porticoes and cupolas below us. ‘This city wears a tragic mask.’
    It was also a city of giants: giants in stone, in stucco or marble; naked giants; blackamoor giants; giants dressed as if for a hurricane, not one of them in repose, struggling with some unseen force, or heaving under the weight of architraves.
    â€˜The suffering giant’, he added without conviction, ‘is the emblem of our persecuted people.’
    I commented facetiously that a taste for giants was usually a symptom of decline: an age that took the Farnese Hercules for an ideal was bound to end in trouble.
    Utz countered with the story of Frederick William of Prussia who had once made a collection of real giants — semi-morons mostly – to swell the ranks of his Potsdam Grenadiers.
    He then explained how this weakness for giants had led to one of the most bizarre diplomatic transactions of the eighteenth century: in which Augustus of Saxony chose 127 pieces of Chinese porcelain from the Palace of Charlottenburg, in Berlin, and gave in return 600 giants ‘of the required height’ collected in the eastern provinces.
    â€˜I never liked giants,’ he said.
    â€˜I once met a man,’ I said, ‘who was a dealer in dwarfs.’
    â€˜Oh?’ he blinked. ‘Dwarfs, you say?’
    â€˜Dwarfs.’
    â€˜Where did you meet this man?’
    â€˜On a plane to Baghdad. He was going to view a dwarf for a client.’
    â€˜A client! This is wonderful!’
    â€˜He had two clients,’ I said. ‘One was an Arab oil sheikh. The other owned hotels in Pakistan.’
    â€˜And what did they do with those dwarfs?’ Utz tapped me on the knee.
    He had paled with excitement and was mopping the sweat from his