“Good news?” Kate Taverner asked, her voice resonant with excitement.
“Nothing of the kind.”
Meta described her conversation with Petr Wittmann, not dulling the razor edge of his criticisms or softening the raw force of his dismissals or hiding the fact that he had offered her encouragement as well—encouragement to do something more useful with her fledgling career. The sole detail she withheld was that the man had been over an hour late and made only the most perfunctory apology. That would have sent her mother into a fuming tizzy.
“And that’s the last word on the subject?”
“He wasn’t the only one who had serious doubts.”
“I think you might want to take a deep breath and have some serious doubts about their serious doubts,” Kate scoffed, launching into her dual role as protector and champion. She had devoted herself to her child prodigy after her own marriage had gone south and even in the aftermath of the accident, and she wasn’t about to stop now. “My advice, if you want it, is to get away from the music mafia, follow your own nose. Are you at least enjoying yourself a little? Is Prague glorious?”
Meta did take a breath. It was true, she was enjoying herself, in a way, and if what she’d learned so far was how little she knew, it was more than made up for by her friendship with Sam and Sylvie. “Prague’s everything it’s cracked up to be and more,” she responded, trying to sound upbeat. “I promise I’ll tell you when I’m home. No need to run up more minutes on this cell.”
“I’m proud of you. You’re doing everything right. Just a bumpy road is all.”
“I failed,” she said.
“Well, then unfail.”
From the precincts of an anxious dream which seemed so vivid, so real, but began to vanish the moment she opened her eyes in the darkness of the room, Meta fumbled for her cell phone vibrating on the bedside table.
“Hello?” she asked, groggy, dislocated, switching on the lamp and looking at the clock. Two in the morning. Abruptly awake now, she panicked, thinking that something had happened to her mother, or maybe Jonathan, Gillian. People never call in the middle of the night with good news.
“Meta? Really sorry to bother you at such an ungodly hour.”
“Sam? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, no, nothing’s wrong. I couldn’t wait until morning to tell you,” he said. He sounded—not drunk, but exuberant. “I should’ve waited.”
“Tell me what?”
“Remember when I thought I recognized your music that first night you came over?”
“I do, of course.”
“Well, I think I may know where I heard it. Not all of it, just those introductory measures to the outer movement that get cut off on the last page. You said Irena used to live in Malá Strana?”
“Yes. I went up there with Sylvie a few days ago.”
“She was saying. That’s what got my memory going.”
Meta could hear Sam take a long drag off his cigarette. If ever she had been tempted to smoke, now was that time.
“At first, all I could think was I somehow knew that movement you were playing, emotional roller coaster that it is, eccentric as it is. Now I’m sure that was wishful thinking, me trying too hard to help you piece together your puzzle.”
Feeling a little lost, Meta waited for him to continue. A quiet breeze drifted through her open window.
“Maybe when the entire sonata is rediscovered—”
“You mean if,” she interjected.
“—my sense, or hallucination, that I’d heard that movement before will be proved by its musical relationship with the rondo movement. Unlikely but possible.”
“Sam, why are you calling?” Maybe he was drunk, after all.
“I’m sorry, Meta. Because if it’s about anything, it’s all about the rondo. The rondo. That’s what I think I’ve heard before. It has such a simple but strikingly original theme. I don’t know what sort of procedure you follow as a teacher, but with many of my students whose parents can afford a good piano, I go to their places to give lessons.”
“Sure, I do that. Especially if they’re young,” still wondering where Sam was headed with these tangential thoughts.
“Better they work on their own instrument, and plus, they don’t need to get home safely since they’re already home. Anyway, I have one pupil, Andrea, she lives in a house on a blind alley up in Malá Strana, a block off Nerudova—”
Nerudova. She took a sip of water from the glass on the table. “Hear me out. You know when you’ve read a line in a book that really stayed with you, one you meant to underline but didn’t have a pencil handy, so you just kept reading? And when you wanted to find it later you could picture perfectly where it was on the page, even knew it was a left page or right, but not which page it was?”
“I’ve done it many times.”
“Well, it’s like that except the book is Malá Strana and the page is somewhere in the vicinity of Andrea’s. When Sylvie mentioned you’d been exploring together, it triggered a memory, and I thought, I could swear I’ve heard that line, that rondo theme, in Malá Strana. Same key, though it’s truncated in your score and—and it fell into place tonight, when I was prepping for a lesson in that neighborhood. Mulling it over, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard those notes myself walking to or from her lesson. Or maybe even at her house. Her parents have a boarder upstairs who Andrea adores. Sometimes when I get there he’s noodling around on the piano with her. Maybe it’s something he’s played. I don’t know. Now that I’m saying this out loud, it sounds pretty nuts.”
“No more nuts that I am. When’s your next lesson with Andrea?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
Eyes closed, Meta asked, “Is it all right if I come along?”
“I’ll do you one better. After breakfast, I’ll call her mother and see if we could drop by and speak with him in the morning. I’d love to find out myself if he remembers it and knows what it is. Long shot, but worth a try.”
“This whole trip is a long shot, so of course it’s worth a try. Thanks, Sam,” she said, and they hung up. She turned off the lamp and lay back on her bed. Not since the night she’d returned from Kalmia Avenue with Irena’s gift of the Prague Sonata score had she felt so wildly wide awake. She tossed from left to right, sat up, again lay down. She heard a couple whose amorous voices and uneven footfalls echoed on the cobblestones outside suggested they’d had quite a night out on the town. Unthinking, a little lonely, she rose and went to the window in the dark to watch them sway their way down the narrow lane. She didn’t recognize the song they were more or less singing, but she knew that Sam, as aurally hot-wired into the universe as anyone she’d ever met, probably would. She felt happy for the couple and grateful beyond expression to her new friend as she climbed into bed again, suddenly exhausted, but never did get back to sleep.
JAKUB BARTOŠ’S ROAD TO A GRAVE, whether marked or not, was longer and thornier than he would ever have wanted his wife, Otylie, to know. His declaration of refusal to comply with the whole idea of a Nazi Protectorate, his writing the single word Odmítám on a placard and posting it in his shop window that raging fifteenth of March, 1939, had been the beginning of a new life for him. Or no, he thought, not really a beginning. The end of a life he had worked so hard to build.
Now as he waited in the shadow of a leafing tree along a street in the Prague suburb of Holešovice, trying to look inconspicuous though his mouth was dry from fear, fondling the gun in his pocket, he knew his life as a resister was likely at its end. Today was assassination day. Sometimes, as one of his fellow conspirators said the prior evening when they gathered in secret to finalize details of the plan, you must kill to cure. He was right, of course, but Jakub couldn’t help thinking about the moral consequences of what they planned to do. Murder was murder, Otylie would argue. He could almost hear her voice rustling with the breeze and birds in the green canopy above his head, urging him to abandon his post. But the target in their crosshairs was an assassin hi
mself, he contended, looking up into the splinters of light that came through the greenery. One of the worst ever to have drawn a breath of sweet spring air freshened by the Vltava. Heydrich needed to stop breathing Prague air. Berlin air. Any air.
Often during his underground exile Jakub questioned whether he had made a rash, crazy mistake. He loved Otylie more than any person alive. Treasured her more than he did his own life. During low moments, he reassured himself that he had at least managed to spirit her out of occupied Czechoslovakia to the safer shores of England. Yet, by joining the resistance, he’d lost everything that once had given him joy. His wife, his home, his friends, his work. All was gone except for the hot anger he felt toward the false proprietors of his homeland, and a wrenching disgust he couldn’t suppress when watching some of his countrymen capitulate to, or even collaborate in, what he saw as mass cultural suicide.
His wife was speaking to him again through the susurrous leaves. Chiding him, saying that he had always been a kind man. Gentle-spirited. Why do you insist on doing this?
She wasn’t wrong to press him. Hadn’t he lived for over three decades never once imagining he was capable of helping put a fellow human being to death? And though this was the strange, dark path down which his life was taking him, he wondered if his decision to walk it would carry the weight of any moral authority when judged by God. His ancestors’ faith promised that when he died, his soul was to be placed on one divine scale of justice and a feather on the other. Would his determination to fight back, to kill, tip the afterlife scales against him? He had no simple answer for the question he heard Otylie, his conscience, asking. It came down to an ineffable belief, forged on the very first day of occupation, that the gentlest man must stand up for what he loves, for those he loves. This was why he stood here, waiting with others farther up the road who were the vanguard he was to aid if his help was needed. Today was the crucible moment he had both longed for and dreaded, the day the Butcher of Prague would himself be butchered.
When it was announced the year before that the first Reichsprotektor, Konstantin von Neurath, had to step down for reasons of health—in truth, Hitler ousted him for being far too lenient with the Czechs—and the infamous Reinhard Heydrich was named his successor, Jakub understood the implications. The Czech resistance was about to come under merciless attack. Defiant acts of sabotage, such as cutting phone lines to hamper enemy communications or blowing up a German fuel depot or munitions works, were no longer of much use. The godfather of the Final Solution, the Führer’s choice to take over the Third Reich one day, Heydrich was also the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, whose authority carried every last syllable of the weight of that very long title. He was not being sent down from Berlin to tolerate a ragtag clique of Bohemian resistance fighters, to put up with any resistance from any quarter, underground or above.
Not that the Butcher hadn’t initially courted the Czech working classes with what Jakub recognized as skillful savvy. Heydrich knew the mongrels were starving. Many were exhausted by fear and hopelessness. Wages were low. Clothing and shoes were as scarce as fresh vegetables. Productivity and morale were in the ditch. How could they be expected to build tanks and trucks and armaments for the German military if they weren’t fed, paid, clothed? If Heydrich was to turn these riffraff Czechs against the underground opposition, wasn’t it best to show them what German generosity was like? For two and a half long years, in Heydrich’s view, the Reich had mismanaged the Czech situation. A fed dog doesn’t bite.
When Heydrich assumed control of the Protectorate, on a pleasant late September day in 1941, his first move was to gain the confidence of the people. Rather than going directly after the Jakubs in the resistance, he made it his first priority to root out black marketers who were profiting from the misery of others by choking off food supplies and illicitly raising tariffs. Posters went up all over the country. Announcements were made on radio and in the papers. Rewards were offered to citizens who named greedy racketeers suspected of illegal slaughtering and price gouging.
His program was a grand success. For a few months, more pigstickers, cattle slayers, animal skinners, cutters, boners, and meat vendors were hanged than intellectuals and political agitators. This wasn’t such a bad thing, as far as more than a few hungry people could tell. Heydrich was careful to project a show of fairness, arresting some expendable Germans in the mix along with Czechs and Jews, and even some in the upper classes. Jakub was floored by how many in the hamlet of Nehvizdy, where he’d been holed up for three months, bought into the Reichsprotektor’s clever deceits.
False hope settled like so much fairy dust over the Czech motherland. The initial panic over Heydrich’s entry into Czechoslovakia, and the widespread terror that he would surely bring the country under control through an orgy of blood, now seemed the exaggerated propaganda of agitators. To many Czechs, all was well and would continue to be well, thanks to Heydrich’s initiatives. Canteens were established in factories across the country to feed malnourished workers. Unemployment insurance was instituted. Clothing was distributed to threadbare families. The Protectoraterun press hailed these initiatives as triumphs over the resistance, whose members were denounced as spoilers and troublemakers. Morale soon began to take wing among the lower classes. Thousands registered themselves as German citizens, changing their surnames to Schmidt, Klein, Meyer, and christening their children Frieda, Dieter, Hans, even Adolf.
Emboldened, Heydrich soon enough began to orchestrate his real work. Prime Minister Alois Eliáš, suspected of secret collaboration with the exile government in England, was summarily executed. Czech cultural organizations were suddenly, systematically, shut down. Deportation of Jews and other unwanteds to concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere gained momentum and soon became such an everyday occurrence that some bystanders no longer bothered to avert their eyes. Intellectuals were back on the firing line, and Heydrich now clearly planned to keep all universities, those breeding grounds of dissent, closed for good. The police force was officially annexed by the Gestapo.
In the Butcher’s view, the country was coming around nicely. In his self-ascribed role as patron of the arts, Heydrich began to dream of resurrecting Prague as the crown jewel of German musical cities. This place so beloved of Mozart would one day be the home of the greatest opera house in all the Reich. Heydrich fervently supported the city’s up-and-coming German Philharmonic Orchestra and attended concerts in the elegantly refurbished Rudolfinum, a hall that in the nineteenth century had seen performances by such towering German composers as Anton Bruckner, but was later converted by the Czechoslovak government into a dismal Chamber of Deputies. To think that a beery rabble of Bohemian bureaucrats had ordered the demolition of the very pipe organ Bruckner himself once played, in order to install doors connecting one legislative chamber to another. The whole idea made Heydrich furious. It was further proof that these people were incapable of civilized behavior and thus needed one of two things to set them straight. Aryanization or extermination.
Jakub was one of the last of the underground Jews to remain uncaptured. He was no thespian, as he well knew, but became marvelously inventive when it came to creating variations of his identity. He became a shape-shifter. Grew a beard, dyed it, shaved it off, let it grow back only to dye it again. He blended in, managed to look old or young depending on what the moment dictated. For a time Jakub disguised himself as a woman, hunched with a cowl over her head, quasi-infirm, complete with cane and convincing limp. Once a man who loved nothing better than putting his head down on the same pillow every night, he turned into someone who didn’t trust the same beds, the same hiding places. Attics, closets, outbuildings. He learned to stay on the move. Somewhat to his surprise, he became an intrepid insurgent, working daily to disrupt Nazi operations in small ways. He helped to hide others, helped to keep the network of fellow anti-Nazis organized and active. He nearly got caught once cutting the brake lines on a troop carrier in the middle of the night. Turns at engagement and sa
botage such as these gave him meaning.
His rare correspondence with Otylie took place through intermediaries whose lives were forever in danger. He apologized in every missive for exiling the two of them from each other. Wrote that he loved her and wished he were with her. Never knowing whether his letters would arrive in her hands, he told her the truth. Told her if he could relive his life, he would run with arms open across that meadow and wrap himself around her.
My courage was cowardice, he confessed in the last letter he ever wrote to his wife. She, he declared, was the brave one. The real believer.
Heydrich was living large by this time. A bright blond sun shone radiantly on his every initiative. Productivity was up. Morale, up. The resistance, suppressed. A majority of Czechs, he believed, now saw things the same way he did. He had single-handedly turned the country into the most prolific arms producer the Reich had at its disposal. Rumors began to circulate that he was about to be redeployed to France and Belgium, to work the same miracle in those countries now that the Czechs were pacified. The government in exile knew that he had to be stopped lest he turn Paris and Brussels into the next Pragues, just as the man himself was convinced he’d set Prague on its way to becoming the new Nuremberg.
The Reichsprotektor resided with his family on a pastoral estate at Panenské Břežany, twenty kilometers outside the city. On his way to and from work, he defiantly displayed his confidence by having his driver ferry him through the streets and suburbs of Prague in his polished open-air Mercedes. He loved feeling the cool wind flooding over his long, proud face. It was the feeling of mastery, of unchecked control. Sometimes he ordered his chauffeur to let him take the wheel so that he might drive himself. Pure heaven.
Now, Jakub, after two years of youthful military service before engineering school and much time in the underground, had the will but still not the elite English commando training of Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who had been assigned the task of assassinating Heydrich. Jakub’s impromptu shadow role as he saw it was to help provide whatever backup they required. Five long months would pass between their parachuting under cover of night from an RAF Halifax just after Christmas, and the twenty-seventh of May 1942, the sun-bedazzled day Heydrich was scheduled to fly up to Berlin to accept his promotion from the grateful Führer.
The Prague Sonata Page 12