“If I ever had a daughter, she’d be the one I’d want,” he said.
Meta stood and turned to look out over sprawling Prague below. The dirigible had disappeared behind and beyond the castle. “So, Gerrit—what’s your last name?”
“Mills.”
“Well, Gerrit Mills,” she continued. “Are you going to tell me more of your story sometime? It’s not fair that you listened to my dreary tale of broken families and broken bones and I don’t get anything in return. You owe me.”
“I promise, but first let’s hit the road,” he said, putting money on the table to pay their bill. “By the way, what’s that?”
While they’d conversed Meta had absently torn her paper napkin into a mess of small shreds. They lay like white fluttering petals around her empty cup. She reached down, closed her hand around the little pile, and put it in her pocket.
“Confetti,” she improvised, turning to leave.
“For when you find the needle in the haystack?”
“For when I find the needle in the haystack.”
The streets were full of midday crowds as the two descended into Malá Strana to begin their search. So many of the pedestrians seemed to be in a buoyant mood that Meta too felt unwarranted hopefulness rise within her. What was the line? Nothing hoped for?
Gerrit led Meta downhill toward Nerudova. “I’ve done my share of wandering this neighborhood. For example, I know there are exactly forty-nine steps from Nerudova down Jánský vršek to Jánská. Also, I’m no barfly, but I do happen to know every last pub in the area, including the ones tourists don’t, where some of the elder statesmen of the quarter hang out. What I propose is to give you a guided tour past houses where I’ve heard musicians playing, because Sam probably heard his notes from an open window, not from me. Or I got a few of them and passed them to him, like some melodious virus.”
“Okay,” she agreed.
“One last thing you may already have noticed. Prague’s not a city. It’s just a bunch of small villages set side by side, like a honeycomb. And this neighborhood in Malá Strana’s one village inside another village. Point is, walking around in the summer when windows are open everywhere, you get to know a lot about the lives of people inside without ever setting foot in their homes. You want to knock on doors, we’ll knock. And when you’re tired of that, we can haunt a few places like U Kocoura—At the Cat—and Baráčnická rychta, a pub that’s more off the beaten track. Ask around if anybody knew this pianist from the early days. What did you say his name was?”
“Tomáš.”
“No surname?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“The haystack just got bigger and the needle just got smaller.” He turned right off Nerudova toward the very steps he’d just mentioned, thinking to head down toward the German Embassy, which was situated in the old Lobkowicz Palace, and venture out from there. “It’s an impressive old pile,” he told her. “Complete with stone statues of the Valkyries on the roof. Well, macho Athenian maidens, anyway.”
“How many palaces and castles did that family have, for the love of God? I visited another one a while ago in Nelahozeves. The manuscripts they own from the same period I think this sonata comes from are astonishing. They’re still sorting out what’s left in their archives after all those years of Nazis and Communists confiscating everything imaginable.”
“Blatantly and brazenly stealing, you mean,” Gerrit said. “What I have to offer is a little less edifying than your Lobkowicz treasures,” pointing down the cobblestone street at the foot of the steps. “Our first musicians in the neighborhood. One’s an aspiring electric guitarist who lives there on the left, bless his tattooed heart. The other’s a singer with a voice that sounds like industrial noise, farther down across the way. I’ve often thought I should introduce them. They could start a band.”
“They could call it the Forty-Nine Steps.”
Gerrit enjoyed this small talk with Meta. Not to mention the inherent pleasure of walking beside a woman who had the capacity to move him with such simple gestures as a quip, some torn pieces of paper, the story of a smashed toy piano.
This was dangerous terrain, he knew. Soon enough, when her quest ended, whether in triumph or failure, she would leave Prague, and he’d miss her. Not that his life was lonely or bad. He hadn’t dated anybody seriously since his breakup with Adrienne. Casual nights now and then with casual friends, nothing serious. “Friends with benefits,” as his friend Jiří, always current with English jargon, referred to it. But Gerrit hadn’t sensed any real absence in his life that needed filling, and he loved his work, its variety, its engagement. So he had to ask himself what gave him the temerity to anticipate missing Meta Taverner. Preposterous, he thought. Still, he had to admit there was nothing he could’ve done to prevent these feelings—real as a pebble in his shoe; real as a wind that might make a kite soar—from the instant he saw her standing, nervous and serious, in young Andrea Hodek’s gold-tinged piano room.
2
NINETEEN THIRTY-NINE was the year the World’s Fair opened in New York and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi confirmed the successful splitting of the atom. It was the year Rudolph was introduced as Santa Claus’s ninth reindeer, not by a children’s-book writer but by the Montgomery Ward dry-goods company. The same year Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were Hollywood’s biggest hits. The year Batman comics hit the racks and the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats died. In the United States, average life expectancy was not quite sixty. A gallon of gas cost a dime and a postage stamp three cents. The first televised heavyweight boxing match—Max Baer versus Lou Nova—was broadcast that year. The very year Germany invaded Poland after signing a nonaggression pact with Soviet Russia, and Franco sacked Madrid, ending the Spanish Civil War. The Yankees won the World Series that year, while Italy invaded Albania, and Hungary broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The song “Jeepers Creepers” climbed to the top of the pop charts that year, the year Albert Einstein wrote to inform President Roosevelt that nuclear chain reactions could possibly be used in bombs. It was the year England and France declared war against Germany and the Physical Review published the first paper about the discovery of black holes. It was the year Prague was kidnapped and a mass cultural tyrannization began. The year in which the Stockholm committee decided that no one in the world deserved to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
It was also the year in which Jakub Bartoš lost contact with his wife. The year he arranged for her to leave besieged Prague for England. The year she passed into his hands the third movement of that star-crossed sonata. It was the year Jakub, like so many of his friends, should have been arrested and executed.
Somehow, over the course of the three excruciating years that followed, he managed to slip past the Nazi dragnets. Though he was grateful to have carried on his work in the underground, he thought often, alone at night in some hiding place, trying and failing to sleep, about how unfair this was. How brutal. Fair or not, brutal or not, he knew his luck had run out the morning in May 1942 when Heydrich was attacked.
Otylie always called her husband Kocourek. Little tomcat. Sometimes, after they made love, she liked to stroke his soft reddish beard and he would make her laugh by purring. Now his ninth life was about to be spent. No reason to hope otherwise. As he half-stumbled beneath flowering chestnut trees, ducking into niches in walls, into the sheltering shade of doorways, he thought of his wife. He wished he could feel her palm on his cheek once more. Wished he could lie with her in bed and hear her say, “Můj kocourku,” and they could kiss.
Instead, he heard sirens screaming all across the city. He heard sporadic gunfire. His side ached and he was breathing hard. How badly he wanted to sit and rest. But he didn’t sit and rest. He pictured his wife and pressed onward.
Jakub would have been happy if, by some magic, he could have known what Otylie was doing that day, her one day off during the week. She had been assigned to work as a staff secretary for Beneš’s chance
llery in the Putney area of London. To fill her empty evenings she decided to do some volunteer work at a hospital. Soon enough her English was quite good, a fact she attributed to her musical upbringing. She acted as a nurse’s assistant and sometimes a translator for the wounded—those who had made it out of not just Moravia, Bohemia, and Sudetenland, but other Eastern European theaters. Fugitive fighters, underground agents, escapees, informers, fellow exiles committed to the cause of thwarting the Reich who had managed to make the difficult passage from the widening front to England. News of Jakub himself rarely reached her, although she was persistent in asking. When it did, she rightly questioned the veracity of what she was told. She wrote him letters almost daily and kept them in a discarded medical supply box with the intention of sitting him down to read them together, like an open diary, one day when the war was over.
Colleagues of hers who worked for the government in exile respected Otylie and felt sorry for her. She had arrived in their company shaken, if not shattered. She made friends easily enough but allowed no one to get particularly close to her. Since coming to England, she’d lost her appetite. The couple of dresses she brought with her hung on her body like mismeasured drapery. Any rosiness that once spread across her cheeks had blanched away under the damp Thames fog that rolled across the river from Bishops Park and directly, it seemed, into her foreigner’s lungs. Nor did she ever go out with the others for an evening’s entertainment in downtown London. Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, none of the swinging big band music stirred a bit of joy in her heart. Her closest friend was another displaced woman, an American nurse whose fiancé was stationed in France. She’d volunteered to transfer to London because she felt closer to him here than sitting around back home in Texas.
Even as Jakub made his dangerous flight through the streets toward Irena’s house, and Tomáš’s, Otylie and Jane Decker were enjoying their Wednesday afternoon walk to a nearby movie house. Though the Blitz forced leaders in the exile government to relocate to three rural villages in the Aylesbury Vale district of Buckinghamshire, Otylie and others remained behind in London to assist with daily operations. Matinees constituted her one weekly escapist treat. Today a new picture starring Cary Grant was showing. Jane claimed to have seen every movie he had ever made, from This Is the Night forward.
“His bad ones are better than anybody else’s good ones, if you ask me.”
Otylie didn’t mind. She liked most any movie. She even enjoyed the newsreels and cartoons that came before the feature. The news often offered grainy footage from the front, with pro-Allied voice-overs that stirred pride and patriotism in her despite her hatred for the war. And the cartoons made her chuckle, silly though they were with their Daffy Ducks and Bugs Bunnys, who always found themselves in dire straits but never, ever died. She sometimes wished the world were animated. In a cartoon universe, you might get thwacked on the head with a frying pan but your head always sprang back. You might be blasted to smithereens with a shotgun but once the smoke cleared, there you were, blackened from head to toe, still standing, arms crossed and tapping your foot.
After paying the cashier and handing their passes to the ticket taker, a gentleman old enough to have served in the Crimean War, the two women entered into the smoky womb of the theater.
“So, Tilly. If me and Jim have a son first, you know what we’re going to call him?” Jane asked, while they walked, half blinded by the sudden blackness, down the aisle.
“Cary?”
“No, that’s too obvious. Grant, of course.”
“What if it’s a girl?”
“Why, then she’ll be Carrie with two r’s and an ie. You see, I got it all figured out.”
They laughed and settled into their seats near the front row, where Otylie gave her friend a handful of gumdrops she’d smuggled inside in a worn paper bag.
Otylie had never written as much in any of her many unsent letters, but she was convinced that if Jakub ever came to serious harm she would know it at once. She’d gotten the idea in her head sometime early on during her exile from Prague, and by now it had formed itself into a fixed article of faith.
The movie was good. Romance, psychological thriller. Jane whispered that she’d seen Cary play a dandy, a playboy, but never a potential murderer before. It was a revelation, yet another facet of his genius. But Otylie’s thoughts were not centered on the screen. They wandered from its fake Sussex black-and-white sets back to the realities of Prague. She would never finally ascertain the exact time or circumstances of Jakub’s arrest and would learn only scraps and minims of what happened to him once he was taken into custody. As she sat, however, watching Joan Fontaine vacillate between trust and terror on the screen, she felt a murmuring, a dark whispering, in the reaches of her intuition.
When she read about the courageous attempt on the Butcher’s life in the papers the following day she was gripped by panic. In her room, on her knees, in tears, she prayed that Jakub hadn’t been apprehended by the Gestapo. His life wasn’t a newsreel, pumped up with impossible hope and narrated in heroic tones of valiant sacrifice and victory. It wasn’t a cartoon whose violence ended in instant rebirth. She kept writing him letters. More furiously than ever. As if writing them would somehow keep him alive. She told him she had a friend here in England named Jane who spoke with the funniest accent. How he needed to see a Cary Grant movie sometime. How lovely the gardens were here. The magnificence of the English roses and leafy commons. The boys rowing beneath the Thames Embankment, war be damned. The sweet brown wrens flitting in the hawthorn bushes. She kept telling him how proud she was to be his wife. But her headstrong conviction, the stubborn belief she once held that he would someday sit beside her on Petřín Hill and read her letters one by one, had evaporated.
For his part, Jakub managed to get close to Irena’s courtyard flat, but the streets were crawling with Waffen-SS and collaborating Czech gendarmerie. He had no stomach for testing his fake identity card on them, especially since he knew he reeked of fear and guilt. They would probably have searched him anyway, and the manuscript would have been confiscated even if he’d managed to talk his way out of trouble.
He had one last hope. If he was able to skirt the forested hillside that backed the Lobkowicz Palace and cut across the cloistered gardens behind the Franciscan hospital, he might make it to Tomáš’s place on Šporkova Street. He’d have to do some trespassing. He would have to scale walls and hope nobody saw him. But he was out of options.
The final leg of his trek was more difficult than he’d anticipated, though not because of soldiers or police. As he neared the last wall in the Vlašský špitál complex, hopelessly tall and barren of trees with overhanging limbs that would set him down on the far side, a dog started barking at him. Brown as liver, with yellow fangs bared, it was tethered to an iron post. The animal strained against its leash, heaving hard at Jakub, who stood thirty feet away from both it and the wall. Without a second thought, Jakub made a dash for the stone bulwark, grabbing at the ivy that covered part of it, and abruptly found himself tumbling over, all akimbo, onto a cobbled walk on the safe side of the garden. The dog continued to bark, invisible to him now. Its owner, who had apparently come outside to see what all the racket was about, shouted a string of epithets that could have been directed at either the dog or Jakub. He got up and looked in both directions before hurrying down Šporkova to his destination.
As he knocked on Tomáš’s door, trying to slow his breathing, he had to wonder whether his old friend lived here anymore. Wondered if he were even still living. For all Jakub knew, some boy in a Hitler Youth uniform was about to answer. Or a finger-pointer who might view him as good fodder for trading with the Gestapo.
He looked at the fob watch he’d bartered for some cigarettes in a safe house back at the hamlet of Nehvizdy. How was it possible it had taken so long to get here? Several hours had passed since the bomb detonated, tearing into the shiny metal of Heydrich’s Mercedes convertible. How had he not heard the noontime church bells toll
ing?
Unbeknownst to Jakub, as he waited for Tomáš to answer the door, Hitler was already on the telephone with Karl Hermann Frank, whom he designated temporarily in charge of Prague, authorizing a cash reward of ten million crowns for the assassins’ capture. Hitler was apoplectic. Ten thousand people, he demanded, must die at once. It scarcely mattered who, just so long as they were Czech. Himmler refined Hitler’s demands by ordering that the chief concern should be the immediate detention and mass murder of any of the intelligentsia suspected of favoring the opposition. The capital, the entire country, had to be cut off from the rest of the civilized world until these perpetrators were found. One of the largest manhunts in European history was about to begin just as Jakub’s friend, the pianist who once had performed Otylie’s sonata so brilliantly, opened the door, gripped him by his forearm, and without a word pulled him inside.
“To snad není pravda,“ Tomáš said, embracing him. This can’t be true.
They walked down a hallway and at the rear of the apartment sat at Tomáš’s kitchen table, each man stunned to be in the other’s company. Tomáš had shuttered his windows after he’d heard about the assassination attempt on the radio, so the room felt safe, cave-like. Not that the Gestapo would be inclined to bother him, but he couldn’t bear the inevitable cacophony of mobile loudspeakers and the drone of planes circling the city. Jakub saw how the years of occupation had aged Tomáš and it made him wonder how he himself must look to his friend. Not only older, but leaner, wearier. All but broken.
Tomáš described the many times he’d heard that Jakub had finally been caught, tortured, deported to a death camp, executed. He had never expected to see him again but here he was, like a miraculous flesh-and-blood apparition. What could he do to help? he asked. Did Jakub need money? Did he need food, something to drink?
I know it’s impossible, but I would love a taste of our old favorite from back in the days when life made sense.
The Prague Sonata Page 18