When he forced his eyes away from her hands, he couldn’t help but furtively trace her outline. Her profile was, to Gerrit, as classic as some maiden’s in a painting by Vermeer. Her eyes were shut, though it wasn’t as if she had closed them, as some musicians do, for dramatic effect. She just clearly could hear things better that way. In his untutored view, her whole approach to the keyboard was restrained, calm, masterful. Her back and shoulders were straight but not stiff. She was exceptional not because of any extravagant glamour but because of simplicity and depth of spirit.
He was startled when the performance ended and the room dropped into fast silence, but also because her eyes were wide open and staring directly into his with the question she wanted him to answer, if he could, here, now. He fumbled through an apology and asked the first question that came into his mind. “Who did you say wrote this?”
“I didn’t say, because I don’t know yet. Finding the other movements would make that part of the process a lot easier.”
“Especially,” Sam added, “if the composer’s name is on the first page.”
“Makes sense” was all Gerrit could think to say. “I’m sorry, but would it be possible for you to play to it once more? Especially that rondo bit?”
Instead of offering him the impatient frown he felt he deserved, Meta said, “No problem.”
He too shut his eyes this time, and when she reached the rondo fragment at the end, he realized the melody was indeed familiar—he had heard these notes before. But what was it? He tried his hardest to search through the melodies he knew, or kind of knew, and had dabbled with, on hotel uprights or friends’ spinets in France, Germany, England, wherever his job had carried him. Even now, during quiet patches of an evening when the Hodeks were out, he would sit at their piano and improvise, reimagining in skeletal play-by-ear notes, approximations of what he had once studied, had maybe heard. He loved to run simple scales for the pleasure of feeling his fingers produce something more than the hollow clacking sound of his banged-up Olympia portable and computer keyboard.
“Anything?” Sam asked, once she finished.
“Not sure. I don’t want to raise false hopes, but I do think I’ve heard this before. Especially that last bit.”
“The rondo opening?” Meta pressed.
He nodded, searching his memory for where he possibly could have encountered it.
“Well, that’s promising,” said Sam. “Now I don’t feel so alone. What about you, Andrea?”
The girl shrugged.
“Can you give me a little time to think about this?” Gerrit asked, glancing first at Sam, then at Meta. “Who knows, maybe I’ll remember where I picked it up if in fact I did.”
“Of course,” Meta said. “I’m so grateful.” She took a pen from her leather knapsack and wrote down her mobile number on the back of Professor Kohout’s business card, since she didn’t have a piece of paper. It gave her a bit of satisfaction crossing out his name and university address on the front. “This is how you can find me, at least until my money runs dry and I’m forced to head home.”
They rose at the same time. Gerrit hesitated before shaking her hand again, oddly unwilling to part company with Meta yet.
Could he really have recognized what she played? Or was it wishful thinking born of the impulse to help this young woman find what she was looking for? Trudging back upstairs he felt compelled to make a few notes about the encounter before returning to his article on marionettes. He’d been a journalist too long not to recognize the scent of a good story. Even if it proved to be a minor composition, it had political and human implications that went beyond music. He would bide his time, but wanted to see her again, knew that something had just happened to him, for better or worse, beyond merely a lead, beyond meeting a stranger who played for him a beautiful piece of anonymous music.
BLACK FRIDAY WAS FOLLOWED, as Gerrit and Jiří and everyone else who attended the Jan Opletal demonstration quickly saw, by a barrage of sketchy information. Of misinformation, disinformation, and no information at all. Shaken by both the number of demonstrators who had descended on Wenceslas Square and the nationalist zeal they’d displayed, the besieged authorities in Prague Castle cranked their pettifoggery machines into high gear.
How can they lie like that? Jiří fumed as he read the Communist Party newspaper, Rudé právo, with disgust. But for the fact that his fist was wrapped in a gauze bandage, he might have pounded it on the table. Like Gerrit, though neither knew it at the time, he’d been one of the unfortunate several thousand corralled by riot cops and forced to run their gauntlet. Jiří had tripped, been trampled, then wandered home in a daze hours after Gerrit got there. His badly sprained hand looked like a fresh-skinned baby rabbit in a butcher-shop window.
Gerrit, you work for a newspaper. How can they lie like that and get away with it?
All media make mistakes, but I don’t work for any Rudé právo, Georgie. You know as well as I do, their job isn’t reporting, it’s about keeping the proletariat calm and ignorant. Sedated as a patient on an operating table.
Rudé právo—Red Truth, Jiří sneered. It ought to be called Žadné právo—No Truth.
Jiří only grew more frustrated when official state news reports downplayed the massive protest as the work of antisocial dissidents and drunken hooligans. Both the head counts of those who participated and the tally of heads busted by the police were skewed. The minister of health assured the country that fewer than a dozen troublemakers had been sent to the hospital. Yet at the same time, as Gerrit discovered that Saturday morning when he managed to get a call out to his girlfriend in Paris, Agence France-Presse was reporting, wrongly, that four students had been killed in violent clashes with police, and that the students had provoked the bloodbath. Clear government plant, he thought.
What did your paper say happened? Jiří pressed Gerrit, as they walked toward the city center to attend a matinee at one of the many theaters where the first strikes were to begin. They had no real interest in the play that was billed, but wanted to be there to see if the performers, as promised, would abruptly switch roles onstage from actors to dissidents.
I don’t know yet, but when I reached my contacts here in Prague and New York, I reported the story as I saw it. What really happened will get out, don’t worry.
Gerrit didn’t tell Jiří how close he had come to losing his notebook in the fracas. Phone numbers and addresses he wouldn’t want the secret police to know, including Jiří’s, were scribbled in the back of that book. Not good. The anxious Czech leadership was, as Margery had phrased it when Gerrit finally reached her, “pissed as hell at Western newspeople right now. Just don’t get yourself in trouble.”
“I won’t,” he’d answered, knowing that to stay close to the center of the upheaval he had to put himself right back in harm’s way. Still, he made sure to switch to a fresh, blank notebook in which no sensitive information would be written, not even his own name.
As they entered the theater hall, his worries receded when he and Jiří witnessed what took place. The actors didn’t perform a single line of dialogue for the packed Saturday-afternoon house. Instead, they read aloud the students’ edicts against the government and announced that actors, directors, playwrights, producers, set designers, musicians, ticket takers, and everyone else involved in theater around the country were going on strike. The audience rose in a standing ovation and began to sing the national anthem.
That evening Gerrit and Jiří joined others at the statue of Saint Wenceslas in an impromptu display of perseverance. Dozens became hundreds became thousands. Candles were lit. Banners unfurled like vesper flowers. The chanting began. Who if not us, when if not now? A group of protesters formed a human cross and, mobilized by what Gerrit noted as a “common intuition, many bodies inhabiting a single idea,” they made their way down the long public square, intending to march to the very gates of Prague Castle, the seat of Communist power. Twenty thousand streamed behind them.
This is
it, Gerrit jotted in the fresh notepad. The revolution. Roll over, Stalin, and tell Karl Marx the news. More strikes to come, more protests. But the weight of inevitability is behind these people and they feel it. So do I.
A mile-long phalanx of policemen with Plexiglas shields and billy clubs at the ready blocked bridges and surrounded the castle, thwarting the marchers. It hardly mattered. Their voices were heard at the top of the hill. A call for calm on Sunday night by a high-ranking member of the Central Committee was met with derision. By Monday, students and their professors had shut down every university in Prague and many more across the country. Artists and nontheater musicians joined the actors’ strike. Cinema screens went black and moviegoers used the auditoriums for political discussion instead. Metro station walls were papered with typewritten announcements and handmade posters that went up faster than police operatives could tear them down, and Gerrit, using a camera he’d borrowed from Anton Pelc, photographed them to wire to New York.
The mood was charged with excitement inside the classrooms and lecture halls where students organized, even though many felt sure that tanks would come clanking across the cobbles any day, just as they had in times past. Václav Havel and other core dissidents met in the basement of the Magic Lantern theater and within a few fast days emerged as a unified opposition group, Civic Forum, with specific demands. The hard-line Communists were to resign. Prisoners of conscience were to be released from Czech lockups. Officials behind the violence wrought upon innocent protesters on Black Friday were to be brought to justice.
Elegant in his old-school suit and tie, Alexander Dubček joined the messy-haired Havel on a balcony in Wenceslas Square and addressed ever-larger crowds as the revolution hurtled forward. Everyday citizens—bakers, housewives, truck drivers, janitors, secretaries, mechanics, stonemasons, factory workers—now outnumbered the students. Volunteerism rose. Crime fell by two-thirds. An almost idyllic spirit of community was seen in Prague and beyond. Be kind to one another was one of the altruistic chants Gerrit often heard, and rather than sounding naive, the words shimmered like diamonds, hard and brilliant.
By November 25, certainty had set in. Three quarters of a million strong, peaceful but adamant protesters sang and cheered in Letná Park, within earshot of the government offices on Hradčany. That there was no retaliation, no bloodshed, was one more sign to many in the crowd that collapse was imminent.
Gerrit continued relaying reports to his contact in Prague and met his deadlines, sending dispatches to New York, interviewing prominent protest leaders, and detailing what he observed. But more and more he found himself singing and cheering and jangling keys over his head along with the others. Jiří and a circle of his friends had become Gerrit’s constant companions. Even he could tell that his reporting had drifted toward a pro-revolutionary posture. When he wrote of the Communist regime, terms such as “willfully blind” and “intransigent” peppered his language. The wry sense of humor shown by demonstrators—a facet of the Velvet Revolution that was coming to be seen as one of its hallmarks—now cropped up in Gerrit’s descriptions of events. When he transmitted to New York that Rudé právo was turning from red to white, he became the target of protest himself.
Margery’s first words on the phone were “What the hell’s going on over there?”
He hesitated. “You’ve been getting my filings, right?”
“Oh, I’ve been getting them.” Her voice combined worry and anger. “‘Economic destabilization, understandably frightening to many in the labor force, may be, according to various forward-thinking members of the Student Strike Coordinating Committee, a necessary endgame to bring down the implacable Old Guard’?”
“I wrote that? ‘Forward-thinking’? ‘Implacable’?” he feinted, silently scolding himself for putting them both in this awkward position.
“Well, I sure didn’t. Nor will I run it. Nor am I inclined to edit it into anything even slightly approaching impartial journalism. I’m surprised by you, Gerrit.”
He hardly knew what to say.
“I guess I may have gotten a little partisan recently,” he admitted.
“You think?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, wincing. “I didn’t realize how much all this would affect me. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Do. Because if it does, I’ll have no choice but to send you back to Paris. Put you on a story that doesn’t get your blood boiling,” she warned him. “Now get back out there. Give me the straight goods. No more gonzo cowboy stuff.”
Despite his disappointment, Gerrit recognized that Margery had done him a real favor. As a freelancer, he wasn’t even owed two weeks’ notice or severance pay. She could’ve wired him train fare home and written him off. But he knew she believed in him, had from the beginning, and didn’t want to lose her young reporter because of some overzealous statements. He knew her criticism was right. Knew that the very notion of journalist as propagandist was against everything he stood for, especially after seeing it up close and personal here during the rusty old Iron Curtain days.
The catch was this. Gerrit had come to understand that he was in Prague now as much for himself, his past and possible future, as for his fledgling career. A mini-revolution had been building within him from that first night. There was no more turning it back than the larger revolution he was in Czechoslovakia to cover. He knew that the resignation of the general secretary, Miloš Jakeš, and the implosion of the Czech Communist presidium were at hand, and he didn’t want to read about any of it in Paris, or see the images streaming out of Prague on his girlfriend’s portable black- and-white set. He wanted, needed, to be right here.
Life spun itself out with spidery quickness after the Velvet Revolution went down. Gerrit kept his roiling thoughts to himself, at least in the written accounts he turned in. The Communists were gone, replaced by a cadre of dazzling nonprofessionals who took back their country from outsiders for the first time in over half a century. If some of Gerrit’s dispatches were tinged with giddiness, Margery understood it to be a function of the prevailing mood in the newly minted republic.
Gerrit returned to Paris that winter just long enough to invite his girlfriend, Adrienne, to move to Prague with him. Since she no more wanted to leave than he wanted to stay, they agreed to remain friends. When Gerrit kissed her goodbye at Gare du Nord, he looked into her eyes and knew he faced many a night ahead when he’d regret this move. Two valises in hand, he found himself back in Malá Strana not a full month into the new year, greeted by gray snow, gray skies, and silvery glowing optimism in every face on the street.
His primary order of business was to find a place to live. The Pelcs offered to put him up for as long as he liked. He needed his own apartment, though. Having lined up some gigs writing for additional news outlets as well as doing some translating, he could afford it. Anton Pelc had friends with space to let, rooms formerly inhabited by relatives who’d emigrated to Canada the minute the borders were opened. Accompanied by Anton and Jiří, Gerrit strolled from Kampa Island up the narrow lanes until they reached the even narrower lane of Jánská, where he was introduced to the Hodek family. The rooms offered were in dire need of plaster and paint. The plumbing had a medieval cast to it and the kitchen was rudimentary. But the apartment was airy, with vistas out the windows. Seeing winter sunlight glancing off the cubist array of red rooftops and whitened terraces of Petřín Hill in the distance, Gerrit immediately felt at home. Monthly terms were easily settled, an informal agreement was signed, and he moved in the next day.
The first letter he sent from his new address was to his parents. He wondered what they’d think of his decision to live in Prague. To say they had a long-standing ambivalence about the motherland was an understatement. Was it possible, though, they might be curious about this experiment that was about to shed the bedraggled name of Czechoslovakia and become a democracy? More likely, they would think he had lost his mind.
A FEW NIGHTS AFTER THE MEETING on Jánská, Meta fo
und herself walking across the Charles Bridge with no destination in mind. Mandelbaum’s contact list was exhausted, without much progress to show for it. And for all of Sam Kettle’s good intentions, her hopes were pretty much shattered. She hated to admit it, but naysaying Wittmann might have given her the best advice. Give up, pack up, leave.
She looked at the lights dancing on the black river from mid-span. The Vltava was running high. Its shallow falls just upstream roared, their wide cascade barely visible in the gloom. A brightly lit sightseeing boat with a few night-owl tourists aboard chugged under the great stone bridge. As Meta wandered toward the Old Town tower with its pinnacled wedge spire glistening in ambient light, she reflected on how many souls as perplexed as she had passed through its Gothic stone archway over the centuries.
Small comfort. A wretched smirk played on her lips. She couldn’t remember being so down on herself. Her mood was as dimly churning as the river. Then there was the matter of Jonathan. When she first arrived in Prague, she spoke to him daily. Within a couple of weeks, their calls had tapered off to Wednesdays and Sundays, with the agreed-upon excuse that they were costing too much. A new timbre colored his voice. Darker, rounder. More pavane than saraband, she thought, lurked behind his fading encouragements. Without a doubt, Jonathan had modulated into a minor key, and gone, or at least diminished, were his earlier encouragements to return to New York and salvage her studies and teaching.
“What stones are left for you to turn?” he’d asked when she called to let him know that the visit with Gerrit proved inconclusive.
Jonathan had just come back from her apartment to water the plants. Simple as the task was, she could hear that it irked him. She hesitated before admitting that she and Sylvie planned to start asking around the three places—Wenceslas Square, Malá Strana, and Josefov—where Meta knew the manuscript had been when it was intact.
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