The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  Working out of his safe house just east of Prague, Jakub wasn’t mobilized to play any role in Operation Anthropoid, as it was code-named. But he found himself involved after a local miller and a gamekeeper discovered Gabčík and Kubiš, injured and disoriented, having been dropped in the dead of night many miles away from their planned point of entry. Fortunately for the resistance, the two Czechs were ill-disposed toward the Nazis and helped the paratroopers get in contact with Jakub and others whom the Gestapo had not yet run to ground. The infiltrators needed to be fed, sheltered, covertly moved into position. Jakub helped as best he could, trading boots with one of them, who had sprained his ankle during the jump, and giving the other his only pair of warm gloves.

  The assassination, like the parachute drop, was not fated to go off quite as planned. After surveillance of Heydrich’s routes and routines that winter and into the spring, it was decided that a hairpin curve on a hill in Holešovice gave them their best shot. Heydrich’s car had to be braked and downshifted to make the turn. He would be, for a brief promising moment, very vulnerable.

  On the day of the attack, however, it seemed to Jakub from his vantage point a bit farther down the street as if the man were above and beyond death itself. As if Death had too dear an accomplice in Reinhard Tristan Heydrich to want to see him destroyed. When the Mercedes Cabriolet B convertible made the sharp right turn from Kobylisy Street onto Kirchmayer, Jakub saw Gabčík emerge from where he’d been hiding, take aim, and try to fire his Sten submachine gun. Nothing happened. Had he neglected to release the safety? Was the gun jammed? To Jakub’s horror, an undaunted Heydrich stood in the passenger seat as the car ground to a halt. The Nazi quickly unholstered his own pistol and fired at his assailant, who dropped his gun and fled. It was then that Kubiš stepped forward and threw his high-powered grenade, a Mills antitank bomb, at the Mercedes. An explosion rent the air.

  Though no one had instructed him to do so, to be there as a witness to this moment in history, Jakub held his ground. He had no training as an assassin. Everything he knew about acts of insurgency he’d learned on the fly from others in the underground far more skilled than he. Whether from instinct or shock, he stayed put, the gun the gamekeeper had given him still concealed under his jacket, and waited to see if Kubiš needed help. He saw Heydrich collapse on the street, still trying to shoot his attackers.

  Silence descended over the neighborhood. Out of the corner of his eye, Jakub saw a man in uniform rush past, a blurry figure that abruptly stopped, turned, and glared at him where he stood loitering suspiciously under his tree. Jakub was about to pull out his pistol and fire, but the dreamlike quiet was broken by a baby’s crying somewhere behind an open window. The man, having memorized Jakub’s face, turned again and hastened to help the fallen leader. Glancing around, Jakub saw that both assailants had gotten away, one on foot, the other on his bicycle. As discreetly as he could, he walked from the scene himself while others helped Heydrich into the back of a baker’s truck, where he lay on the floor in obvious agony, though he neither cried out in pain nor showed the least sign of fear.

  Later, when he learned Heydrich hadn’t died that morning—it would happen a little over a week later, of blood poisoning from the limousine fender and seat shrapnel, dirty horsehair stuffing, and bits of cushion springs—Jakub wondered if he should have finished off the wounded man himself. During the last hours of his own life he couldn’t help questioning if he would have been able to pull the trigger. Otylie, whispering to him in the capricious spring breezes, assured him he had done what he was meant to do.

  The SS and Gestapo cordoned off Prague. The attempt on the Reichsprotektor’s life gave the Nazis free rein in the capital and countryside to round up and execute anyone they pleased. Jakub had no chance of slipping past them back into the rural woodlands. If his father-in-law, a soldier he never met, had been right that all wars begin and end with music, Jakub could only hope that this violent, ecstatic, percussive gesture not only opened the finale of Heydrich’s dark interlude in Prague but served as prelude to the golden requiem for the Reich. He was certain he wouldn’t live to know the outcome.

  As he made his way toward Malá Strana, his last act of resistance was to head for the Svobodas’ house before being captured, or to find Tomáš, to give one of them the sonata movement. He had no idea whether his old friends were still to be found there. Or if they were alive. The manuscript his wife entrusted to him had for these years been his only possession. He no longer owned any of the clothes he was wearing when he left Josefov. Even his wedding ring had at one dire turn meant the difference between buying off an informant or being turned in. His onetime go-between, Marek, had disappeared nearly a year ago. It was like that with people in the underground. One day they were there. The next they were gone. He didn’t dare ask around about his young colleague, for fear of betraying himself. But the sonata had never left Jakub’s person.

  Sometimes, alone at night, he would try to read the score by candlelight. To recapture in memory that single performance by Tomáš. He remembered how lovely his wife looked that evening, in her dark blue silk dress that set off her favorite pearl necklace. She’d worn her hair down for the occasion, and Jakub remembered with fantastic precision how it swept, wavelike, across her bare shoulders. He couldn’t recall what the music sounded like, except in the most nebulous of ways. But he bravely improvised in his various secret caves and haylofts, following the scales that ran up and down the staves, making up passages as he did. The manuscript he sometimes tenderly placed to his face, as he believed its paper still bore the scent of his wife. It smelled of gardenias, he thought, and somehow of the sea.

  Now he walked along with it hidden under his shirt, held tightly against the curve of his gaunt, drumming chest. One day this war would be over, and his Otylie would return to look for him. She would not find him. But if she found this, she would know that he never stopped loving her, that he never gave up. It was their only chance at reunion.

  II

  What seems so far from you is most your own.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

  1

  WHEN THE WALL CAME tumbling down on the ninth of November 1989, Gerrit Mills reveled along with the teeming floodlit multitudes in Berlin. A sea of ecstatic women and men and children sang and chanted and waved banners and hugged and kissed each other, rejoicing in their newfound freedom. Witnessing this mass jubilation, Gerrit had never felt so exhilarated, despite the fact that this was neither his country nor his liberation.

  He wasn’t even supposed to be here. Germany was a side trip, hastily added and wholly unauthorized, on his way from Paris to Prague. His editor at the newspaper in New York, where he worked as a stringer for the foreign desk, had been keeping a close eye on the wall weeks before it finally fell. Gorbachev’s perestroika was gaining such unstoppable momentum that reunification no longer seemed impossible. But Margery Raines didn’t ask Gerrit to go to Berlin, and for all the elation he felt experiencing firsthand that pivotal moment, Berlin wasn’t his story to cover. Instead, he needed to return to Czechoslovakia, where he was convinced an even more depreciated people were about to shake themselves free after Communist-strangled decades. Though his home base was still nominally Paris, he had filed stories from Prague as recently as September, and had kept in close touch with his contacts there as the situation developed.

  “Poland got out from under the Soviets in June,” he had earlier reminded Margery, calling her from his studio apartment in Montmartre, jotting notes almost as quickly as he spoke, aware that he had to make a strong case for himself to score the assignment. “And now there are workers straight out of the Gdańsk shipyards sitting side by side with Red party bureaucrats in Parliament. This playwright Havel and his rock-and-roll pals are next in line to topple a regime.”

  “You’ve done good work there, it’s true,” said Margery, thinking out loud.

  “Plus, don’t forget I have dual citizenship and friends in the middle
of the unrest. They might be able to help me drill deeper into the student dissident underground than your more senior journalists.”

  “All right, so when can you leave?” she asked her youngest reporter in the field.

  Gerrit was thrilled. The byline wouldn’t necessarily be his, but some of the inside research would, and maybe he would get a “with reporting by” credit. Either way, he didn’t want to let Margery down. She had been his advocate from early on, when he came to the newsroom as a fledgling intern straight out of Columbia’s journalism school. While he understood why she dispatched her most seasoned staff reporters to above-the-fold historic scenarios like the Berlin Wall, he also knew it was thanks to a soft spot in her mentoring heart that she’d sent him to help cover the opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border earlier that spring, a watershed event in the sundering of the Iron Curtain. No one, not even the astute Margery Raines, had guessed that fifty thousand East Germans, many pretending to go on holiday in Hungary, would cross the open borders into Austria when the checkpoints were relaxed and frontier fences ripped down. But they did, old and young, all seeking a new life in the West. When Gerrit heard that East Germans were scaling the walls of the West German embassy in the Prague neighborhood of Malá Strana after abandoning their tin-can-cardboard Trabant cars on the streets, keys left in the ignition for anyone who cared to drive them home, Margery sent him there straightaway. He found several thousand refugees crammed into a makeshift camp in the gardens behind what used to be the Lobkowicz Palace while diplomats negotiated their safe passage to West Germany; then he talked his way into the Associated Press office to wire the story to New York. Heady days. The oppressed and disenchanted were rising up across the globe. In Sofia, in Timişoara, in Bucharest, in Tiananmen Square. A political tsunami was cresting and for a brief flicker of time there was no stopping it.

  He thanked Margery before they got off, and said, “Consider me already there.”

  Still, he couldn’t resist the temptation to make his way back to Czechoslovakia via West Berlin. Despite his devotion to Margery, Gerrit occasionally stretched the rules when he felt it was for a good cause. He wasn’t in it for the money, since there wasn’t much to be had anyway, or the transient glory of seeing his name in print. No, he liked working in the field because he wanted to see raw history for himself, breathe it unperfumed, hear it live and unfiltered. When he was a boy, history had seemed to him not a series of events left behind but an organic, swirling storm worth chasing. And this time his small sin of traveling roundabout in hopes of catching up to it paid off. Celebrating with exultant Berliners that epic day, taking a hard swing himself at the symbol of tyranny with one of the sledgehammers being passed around, Gerrit knew that luck and curiosity had converged in his favor. On the train down to Prague, he wrote in one of his ever-present notebooks a detailed reminiscence of what he had seen, heard, and in his small symbolic way participated in. This act was an integral part of Gerrit’s life, as ordinary and essential as breathing.

  He stayed, as always, with friends on Kampa Island, in the heart of Prague. The Pelc family, who’d known his parents and grandparents, had a spare bed that was always his for the asking when he was in town. He’d wired ahead to let them know that he’d probably be there for a while, unlike his whirlwind in-and-out in September, and when he arrived, his hosts set out a spread of baked ham, knedliký in paprika sauce, and boiled potatoes.

  Since they hadn’t had time to talk earlier that fall, they sat down to catch up on family news. How were things going at his father’s shop? His mother, still enjoying her public school teaching? And how was Gerrit’s life in Paris? Didn’t he feel a little betwixt and between living neither in America nor his native Czechoslovakia? He looked thin. Was that French girlfriend of his feeding him enough? What he needed was a good Czech girl. One who could cook a Bohemian pork roast with all the fixings, make him some nice fried cheese.

  So the conversation with three generations of Pelcs always went, a comfortable stroll down a familiar path. Nothing much had changed since Gerrit was last here. At least not on the surface.

  But the streets were about to fire to life. Gerrit had felt it the instant he got off the train. Aging Anton and Lenka, along with their son Pavel and his wife, Věra, seemed to sense it as well. The elderly couple’s politically active grandson, Jiří, who studied painting at Charles University, certainly did. Every last soul in Prague, to differing degrees, knew something was in the air. It was as manifest yet shrouded as the layers of autumn mist flowing inexorably along the river embankment.

  For good reason. The next day would mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jan Opletal. A soft-spoken, middle-class medical student shot dead by Hitler’s police during an anti-German rally in 1939, Opletal was one of the Czechs’ most revered martyrs. No activist who struggled against the Nazis, nor any who later rose up against the oppressive Communist regimes, failed to embrace Jan as an inspirational comrade in arms.

  After dinner, Gerrit invited Jiří out for a beer. They both knew where to go. U Fleků was the pub where Opletal’s wake was held half a century ago, a place popular with students then and in a way hallowed to them now. The hangout overflowed with young people, many wearing buttons and badges with pro-democracy slogans, everyone in high spirits, scoffing at Czechoslovakia’s buffoonish party leader Miloš Jakeš and his hard-line stooges.

  So, you think I look too thin, Georgie? he asked his friend in Czech, raising a glass. Gerrit’s unruly black hair, subjected to a barber’s scissors only once a season, was threaded with a few strands of premature silver at the temples. His taut face and green eyes, flecked with gold and framed by fine wrinkles, made him seem older than his twenty-five years.

  Don’t listen to my mother. She loves you like a son, that’s all. Anyway, you’ve always been lean as a pole. Na zdraví.

  Gerrit thanked him, said he was lucky to be part of the Pelc family. After taking a swallow of beer, he set his mug on the table and looked around at all the students, trying to read their faces. Most were about Jiří’s age—nineteen, twenty—and there were faculty types in the crush as well. The room was thick with cigarette smoke and edgy camaraderie.

  You want to know what’s going to happen, don’t you.

  Without a change of expression, he glanced at Jiří and then went back to surveying the crowd. Everyone here wants to know what’s going to happen as much as I do. Why, do you know?

  Can I ask you a question, Gerrit?

  Jiří’s face was not unlike the photograph Gerrit had seen of Jan Opletal himself. Bright crescent eyes that turned down at the corners, ruler-straight nose with flared nostrils, confident full lips over a strong cleft chin, and cheekbones as prominent as a pair of apricots—a sturdy youthful face that projected nothing but the most promising future.

  Of course, fire away.

  Are you here as a Czech or an American?

  I’m here as a journalist.

  A man without a country, in other words.

  I never thought of it like that, but I suppose so, in a way.

  You know we’re friends, right?

  I should hope. Our families go back forever and then some.

  So don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you what to do.

  That may be, but you’ve never been shy about speaking your mind.

  Jiří chuckled, took a deep drag off his cigarette, exhaled. I hope you can be in your Czech skin while you’re here. It’s important that the world knows what’s actually going on, that the uprising is real.

  That’s my intention, Jiří. What are you getting at?

  What I’m saying is that if push comes to shove I hope you’ll help us protest, as a fellow Czech, as my friend, instead of standing there, just watching and writing.

  Be dispassionate and passionate at the same time? Be both observer and actor?

  Jiří shrugged and said, Guess that’s one way to put it.

  Gerrit took a swallow, stared at the foam on his beer after he
set it down. He hadn’t been in Prague a full day and here he was already plunged deeper into the story he’d been dispatched to cover than he might have wanted. Jiří, no fool, was asking that he commit the cardinal sin in journalism. Take sides, bias his report. Or worse, become one of the players in the story itself. While Gerrit couldn’t honestly claim that he didn’t feel a strong affinity for the endless stream of East German families fleeing across the Hungarian border into Austria earlier that autumn, he hadn’t helped carry the fugitives’ luggage any more than he had written a slanted account of what he’d witnessed.

  Jiří, if the world needs to know, don’t I need to write it down?

  You can do both. I know you, Mills.

  Jiří rarely called Gerrit by his last name. It was disconcerting, but brought into tight focus what was at stake.

  Where’s this idealism coming from, Pelc? You’re my reliable cynic, the guy who insists that the Czechs have always been burned by history. That dashed hopes are spliced into the DNA of your national psyche.

  Your psyche? It’s ours. That’s what I’m saying, man. Be with us on this. You were just in Berlin, you know about the huge demonstrations in Leipzig, right? Everybody here in Prague does too. If Poland, Hungary, and now East Germany did it without reprisals from the Soviets, why not Czechoslovakia?

  Jiří’s points, forcefully posed, were much the same as those Gerrit himself had impressed upon Margery. They both knew that the great promise of the post–First World War governments of Tomáš Masaryk and, later, Edvard Beneš had ended with the invasion and iron-fisted rule of Hitler. And that the end of the Second World War merely set the stage for Stalin to take over. A glimmer of hope arose in the spring of 1968, when the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Alexander Dubček, tried to lift some of Moscow’s more oppressive restrictions. But, as sure as water evaporates, the hopes of Prague Spring vanished, and by autumn Dubček was arrested and tanks clattered into Czechoslovakia to crush its people once again.