Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  The reaction to this performance was spontaneous and overwhelming. When the final notes died away, there was a collective gasp and sudden burst of applause in the small room. Hobbled as the sonata had been by the fact that its performer was playing the work for the first time, without benefit of rehearsal or more than an hour’s study of its pages, not to mention the unsympathetic acoustics of the room, it was clear even to the most unmusical ear in attendance that this was something important. A critical moment in the life of music. Its rich polyphonies, harmonic poignancies, expansions, recapitulations, and sophisticated figurations reminded Tomáš, the pianist that evening, so much of Mozart’s final sonata that he had to wonder if this wasn’t a treasure that had been dropped onto the planet by some Mozartian genius from another galaxy. It combined joyous esprit with passages of unsettling, unspeakable darkness. Torrential cascades of scales were set against lyrical eddyings that seemed to defy all laws of spiritual gravity. You absolutely must allow this to be published, Tomáš exclaimed. But Otýlie wouldn’t hear of it. Even Irena was unable to persuade her friend to listen to reason. She carefully slid the manuscript back into its satchel and there it had remained ever since.

  Now she could do nothing but wait. Though the sky hadn’t grown brighter she didn’t turn on any lights and left the curtains mostly drawn. The passageway outside her door had fallen quiet. Others had taken to the streets to watch the spectacle or else were cowering in their caves just like she was. Of course she would never leave without Jakub. At this oddest moment she remembered a joke of her father’s about two barristers who walk into a pub carrying baguettes. When they order their beers, the waiter warns them they’re not permitted to eat their own food here. The barristers shrug, then trade baguettes and calmly begin to eat. The thing was, Hitler had pulled a sleight of hand on Hácha. He now held both baguettes and even usurped the pub. Otýlie frowned, wondering if she wasn’t losing her sanity.

  Not until some time past noon did her husband manage to send word to her through an emissary. A young man named Marek appeared at her door, a first-year student at the university who swept the floor, made deliveries, did odd jobs at the shop in his spare time. She let him in, stood back away from the boy with her fists clenched together against her mouth, not able to say a word, believing she was about to learn her husband had been arrested or killed. But he wasn’t dead. He had agreed to join the fledgling underground of resistance fighters that had begun organizing even as the first rumors of a possible invasion circulated, and was making arrangements for Otýlie to leave Prague. She glared at this kid with his curly brown hair and large soft eyes, exhibiting such rage that he took a couple of awkward steps back toward the door. You tell my husband, she said, her voice quiet but firm, that I’ll do nothing of the kind and that he should come home. Hned, hned ted’! she suddenly shouted, startling both of them. Immediately, now!

  I can tell him, Marek said. But I’m not sure he’ll listen.

  Do your mother and father live in Prague?

  Marek nodded, a little sheepish for one his age.

  Once you’ve told my husband what I said, go to them, see if they’re all right. Take care of them. Leave the underground to grave diggers.

  Somebody’s got to fight these jackals.

  Only fools fight the inevitable, she said, hearing the crazed edge in her voice. Even as these words came out of her mouth she felt the stinging shame of them, the embarrassment of defeat without a struggle. Not quite thirty years from that day, long after the Germans were gone, when Soviet tanks would roll into Prague in 1968, and her glorious city, already under Moscow’s influence, was yet again invaded and occupied by foreign military forces, Otýlie would remember her words with such deep disgust that she would be tempted to go and throw herself under the grinding treads of one of those tanks, put an end to her lifelong dance with war.

  After Marek left, she passed an excruciating hour stealing back and forth from chair to window like some hapless spy before finally putting on her coat and scarf and going outside into the mayhem to search for her husband. Things were more desperate in the streets than they had appeared to be from her aerie. Men and women freely wept, many of them shouting obscenities at the Germans, who either couldn’t understand them or were indifferent to what they were saying. Pitiful, dejected Czech soldiers dressed in drab khaki uniforms looked on in disbelief. Several people suicided themselves from windows, which put Otýlie in mind of some new defenestration of Prague. A couple of boys from the farmers’ market who were both brave and ignorant of their situation threw snowballs at an armored truck and then ducked away into the swarm of protesters; otherwise the occupation proceeded almost entirely without resistance. Yet everyone continued to sing. Singing was their sole weapon, their salvo against this tyranny. They sang as if music were a kind of fusillade, as if their voices rising together could meet in battle the loud clatter of tank treads and jackboots on the stone streets.

  While she threaded her way toward Josefov across the city gone insane and riotous, a strange feeling came over Otýlie. She gazed at the Old Town Hall clock and the cathedral spires, the pastel facades of the buildings lining Staromĕstské námĕstí, and glimpsed the fairytale castle atop the hill in Hradčany that had towered over the city for many centuries years, and she realized that all this would survive. Had to survive long after every soldier and citizen in the streets was dead. The people and politics of any given day eventually fade into a dust of unreality, but the best of what men forge with their imaginations survives. Hers was a simple enough epiphany, but the extremity of the moment made the idea seem monumental. When she reached the shop and saw that the lights were off, the curtain on the door was drawn, the door locked, she stood staring for a moment at the handwritten sign he had affixed to the display window.

  Odmítám, it read. I refuse.

  Simple, firm, dignified.

  At that moment Otýlie realized two more things. She understood Jakub’s impulses were right. And she knew she might never see her husband again.

  Not that she didn’t spend the rest of that freezing, frenetic day looking for him. She knocked on the doors of every friend they had, forced her way through the surging, hysteric multitudes past the ranks of soldiers and more soldiers, questioning whether the Reich really needed to send so many to secure the peace among an already defeated people. After spending an hour with Irena, who rued the fact that she was pregnant and her husband was off in Brno on business in the midst of all this chaos, she arrived back home just as the first curfews were announced, in Czech and German, on wall posters and traffic boxes. Loudspeakers blared in the dusk, demanding people clear the squares and curbs. That night, alone in bed for the first time since she had been married, she who’d believed she would never weep again cried herself to sleep. It gave Otýlie no solace to know that hundreds of thousands of others were doing the same.

  More quickly than she or anyone else might have imagined it possible, the Germans reinvented Prague. They recast every street and square with their former Germanic names. The river Vltava, which flowed through the center of the city, became the Moldau for the first time since the Czech parliament banned German in the last century. Whereas before Czechs drove on the left-hand side of the road, now they were immediately forced to drive on the right in accordance with German custom. In Prag wird Rechts gefahren! Political parties were abolished, radio and newspapers were censored. A torture chamber, very medieval in this medieval place, was soon to be established by the Gestapo at Petschek Palace. Jewish businesses were Aryanized even before the deportations to death camps began. Small things changed, too, as the new order crystallized. Concealing weapons was strictly unlawful. Possessing a broadcasting set would assure an appearance before a firing squad. Whenever SS troops paraded down streets, passers-by were expected to halt, remove their hats, stand at attention as a sign of respect for the swastika banners or marching band playing “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Song,” anthem of the Nazi Party. The wo
rld Otýlie had known since she was nine years old was being annihilated before her very eyes. Czechmate, one of her English-speaking friends said, a pale attempt at levity. Neither woman laughed.

  Every day, as the eerie, seething quiet of vanquishment settled over Prague, Otýlie made her way to Josefov to see what if anything was happening at the shop. She of course didn’t expect to find Jakub there sitting on the stool behind his counter reading, as had been his habit before all this horror came down on their heads. She had no idea what to expect. More than once she’d taken the key to the antikva with her, intending at least to remove the provocative sign he had left in the window. But sentries were posted on every corner of the Jewish quarter and she knew she dared not expose herself as being in any way affiliated with the place. Intuition told her not even to pause in front of the store lest her interest be noticed and she be taken in for questioning. When, on the fifth day of the Protectorate’s occupation, she side-glanced the shop facade and saw that the door window had been smashed and then boarded up, the Odmítám sign removed and replaced with a poster printed in red and black stating that this establishment was closed until further notice, she knew that it wouldn’t be long before they came knocking on the apartment door on Wenceslas. She hastily walked home, fully anticipating the rooms to be ransacked. When she unlocked the door and found everything undisturbed, Otýlie grabbed her suitcase and satchel. Tucking the nameless cat inside her coat, she left the building hoping to make it to Irena’s without being accosted. It was a preposterous idea, she knew, to try to walk in the streets with a suitcase and cat in tow, but staying home was impossible. Otýlie was welcomed by Irena inside her house on a narrow winding street in the same quarter where the sonata had been performed that time years ago, having made a daring dash across one of the smaller bridges up-river from the Charles, which was totally blocked by the Germans. She had been stopped once, asked a few questions, then allowed to move on in part because she had lied that the cat was sick and she needed to take it to the home of her sister, whose husband was a veterinarian. These were the days before identity cards and martial law. Chance miracles still played out now and again.

  Otýlie left no note for her husband that would lead the Gestapo to Irena’s door. She knew he would figure out her hiding place without her leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs for the rats to follow.

  Within a week of sleepless nights and interminable days her guess was proven right. But it wasn’t Jakub who knocked tentatively on Irena’s door. Marek turned up, bearing news, bringing her letters and money. He became her go-between and the one left to plead with her on Jakub’s behalf to emigrate immediately, before the noose was entirely closed, and take Irena with her. No longer in Prague himself, but in hiding on its outskirts with a small but growing group of resisters discussing ways to mount an armed insurrection, Jakub had a plan in place for her, for both of them. He even had work for her to do on behalf of the Czech resistance once she was safely resettled abroad. Overnight, it would seem, her husband had been galvanized. Her sedate, educated, religious, humble, adoring Jakub, who loved nothing better than to hike with her to the top of Petřín Hill to picnic on Sundays, or go to the Rudolfinum in the evening to hear the symphony, was now a conspirator against the Reich.

  Bitterness and uneasy pride was what she felt. The maddening part was that her pride made her unhappy with herself and her bitterness left her feeling hollow as a bone. Life had become an impossible tangle, and the anger she’d always harbored against her father for not having listened to his daughter’s wishes on that final night together now began to form like a wicked storm cloud against Jakub. What was he possibly thinking? Not of her. Not of them. As heroic as his acts might seem to others, to Otýlie they were nothing more than a selfish death wish born of ignorance. She felt her heart turning on itself, felt it growing black and ugly. The old saying about how love and hate were kith and kin had always seemed a bit of foolish fluff, but Otýlie now began to understand the depths of experience and wisdom that lay behind these words. Irena reminded her that Jakub had exiled himself from Prague, his birthplace, sending an emissary rather than coming to her himself, because he was trying to protect her from guilt by association. She knew her friend was right.

  Otýlie Bartošová fled occupied Prague in mid-August that year, not two weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany. Irena had given birth to a baby girl earlier that month and the apartment was too small to accommodate four, Otýlie believed. Irena’s husband had returned from Brno, and although he was a decent and generous man, Otýlie could see that their harboring the wife of a fugitive—for by then the Gestapo was looking for Jakub—made him sick with worry. Marek brought her rumors that summer of England and France’s impending clash with Germany from Jakub, whose colleagues monitored the situation on their contraband radios in safehouses dotting the forests and farmlands surrounding Prague. It was now or never, he told his wife. Marek was to escort her to an abandoned house in the woods south of the city, where, if things worked out, they could say goodbye. Travel light, bring little or nothing with you, Jakub instructed. And be prepared to abandon the plan to see each other if the situation becomes too risky. More lives than just theirs were now at stake.

  Otýlie was beside herself with excitement at the chance to see him again. Her own life was largely spent indoors, off the streets, out of sight. If she didn’t have Irena’s baby to help feed and change, she would have gone crazy by now. She traded her valise with Irena for a small traveling bag that was just large enough to carry some clean clothes for Jakub, her parents’ wedding photograph, which she’d removed from its frame, and her winter coat.

  What to do with the manuscript had preoccupied her for months. The Germans had already decreed in June that Jews were forbidden to participate in the economic life of the Protectorate. All assets were to be registered and valuables confiscated. She could only imagine how emptied the antikva must now be. Although she didn’t yet know it, every last precious object in it would either be sold to help finance the deportation of Jews to Dachau and elsewhere, or set aside for the proposed museum of Jewish culture that was envisioned as part of the Final Solution. A natural history museum for an endangered species soon to be made extinct. Herr Eichmann, the so-called Jewish expert, had already established headquarters in an expropriated mansion near town and was hard at work preparing the mass expulsion and cultural rape of Otýlie’s community. Even though she herself was a fallen Catholic married to a Jew, the Nazis would not see their way clear to such nice distinctions were they to find her. Her heirloom, her troubling Prague sonata, if seen for what it surely was, would be a great prize for the Treuhänder, the Reich’s ministry of exemplary thieves. What if it proved to be a late lost manuscript of the prolific Mozart or midcareer Haydn? Or even, as their pianist friend Tomáš improbably but repeatedly theorized, a juvenile manuscript that Beethoven had dashed off for Mozart to review when the young prodigy had hopes of studying with the master, who unfortunately died before that dream could be realized? To Otýlie it was of little or no consequence who wrote the sonata. But it did matter to her that the SS not confiscate it, or if they did, that they didn’t have the work in its entirety.

  No, she would save it by ruining it. That is, she would break it up into three parts, giving the first movement to Jakub, either directly if she managed to reach him or through Marek if not. The second movement she entrusted to Irena with instructions that if Eichmann’s SS larcenists got anywhere near the thing she should destroy it. The third she would take with her abroad, if she was able to get that far.

  If and if and if, she thought. Still, the heirloom her father had transferred into her care would have no more value broken into pieces than some shattered Grecian urn whose mythic narrative could only be rightly read by turning it all the way around in one’s hands. If the war destroyed her or her husband or her dearest friend, then it would destroy the celestial music the manuscript mapped as well. She didn’t li
ke to keep secrets from her husband or her friend. Truth had always been something Otýlie, who was otherwise not particularly religious or concerned about the science of human ethics, held in the highest esteem. Being truthful was as close as she got to being pious. But her supposed indifference to the music she heard that night in Malá Strana and her refusal to allow the manuscript to be circulated further were acts of prodigious falsity. Perhaps the greatest lies of her life. While professing to Jakub and Irena the night of the performance that she’d thought the Prague sonata was unfocused, derivative, a mediocrity finally, she knew it was anything but. An exquisite act of human imagination was what it was, nothing less. But the thing was also bad luck and like a sleeping tiger best kept in its suede cage. It had terrified her from the night her father had given it to her and marched off to his early demise. Now it would rest, at least in part, in the hands of others.

  She never did manage to speak with Jakub, but was able at least to see him standing alone at the far end of a field in a copse of trees flooded with morning mist. He was looking intently at her. She saw him place his palm over his heart, and even very guardedly wave once before disappearing again, unable to cross the empty expanse that lay between them for fear of being seen. He looked gaunt and exhausted, and she herself would have run across the fallow ground to embrace him but for Marek’s warning that by doing so she would jeopardize everything he was doing, and likely forfeit both their lives as well as the envoy’s. Their reunion, such as it was, lasted all of a quarter minute but would sustain itself in Otýlie’s memory for the rest of her life.

  At the end of a dizzying subterranean journey that lasted nearly a month, hidden in wagons, trunks of cars, in the closed compartment of a train and steerage of a boat in rough waters, she did arrive in London, where she began work with the exile government of Edvard Beneš, the true president of her homeland. That fall, the great vortex began to swallow Prague whole. Many thousands were carried off, never to be seen again. After the allies’ triumph, Otýlie returned to look for Jakub and Irena. She was certain she would not find them, and she was right. For months she searched in vain before booking passage to America. She arrived at Ellis Island on a brisk day in October 1946. Her second impression of this new country was that she was surprised to see in Manhattan’s harbor Lady Liberty bearing not a sword, as Franz Kafka had written, but a torch. Her first was that she heard no music.