The Prague Sonata
Page 19
Slivovice? Ah yes, this is possible, said Tomáš, who briefly left and returned with a bottle of the traditional hard plum liquor. Jakub raised his eyebrows at Tomáš’s having such a luxury on hand, when rations were so tight. As Tomáš poured him a glass, he asked if Jakub had heard about Heydrich, suspecting the answer was yes and that it had some connection to his sudden appearance in Malá Strana.
“Nejen slyšel,” Jakub answered. “To jsem viděl na vlastní oči.” I didn’t just hear. I saw it with my own eyes.
Both wonder and terror crossed Tomáš’s face in the light of the milk-glass ceiling lamp. He knew that Jakub’s presence in the kitchen of his house constituted treason against the Protectorate. If his friend had anything to do with what had happened in Holešovice that morning, Jakub was a walking corpse in search of a grave. He also knew that Jakub, no fool, understood that Tomáš had done what was necessary to survive. He would never have been so well off had he not taught lessons to some of the best and most promising children of Nazi officers and Protectorate bureaucrats. He had even performed from time to time for German audiences and spoken highly of Heydrich’s many efforts to enhance Prague’s musical culture. Indeed, Tomáš was scheduled to perform the very next evening in a program that was part of the Reichsprotektor’s pet project, the spring music festival. And, of course, all through the dark years, it hadn’t hurt his chances of ingratiating himself with the occupiers that his last name was German. Tomáš Lang. He and his sister had both used the heritage suggested by their surname to avoid trouble.
But Jakub, suppressing a flash of rage at what the liquor clearly meant, did not press him. Instead, he thanked Tomáš for the drink. Thanked him for taking him in off the streets for a moment to catch his breath, and at considerable personal risk, though he needed to leave now. Something in Jakub’s eyes told Tomáš that, despite any misgivings the fugitive might have, he believed that Tomáš wouldn’t turn him in, that the pianist was still worthy of trust. Jakub then made a gesture that would stay with Tomáš Lang for the rest of his long life. He unbuttoned his shirt, carefully pulled out a sheaf of paper he’d concealed there, and without uttering one word or taking his eyes off Tomáš’s, passed the manuscript across the table.
“Kde je zbytek?” the pianist asked, after looking through the pages. Where’s the rest?
Jakub explained quickly and finished by saying, “Ujmeš se toho?” Will you take care of it now?
In this moment, Tomáš felt that every mistake, every poor judgment he had ever made in his life could at least be partially erased. Confronted by the wisdom he saw in his friend’s face—for this is how he viewed Jakub, not as a broken man but whole—Tomáš was ready to do more than safeguard the sonata manuscript. He wanted to right his wrongs by helping Jakub, protecting him, using his connections to spirit him out of the country. It might take a while given the uproar that clutched Prague at the moment. But he felt sure it could be accomplished. Gushing, he expressed his willingness to harbor Jakub, help him to safety.
“Pozdě,” Jakub said as he rose from the chair and offered to shake Tomáš’s hand. Too late. He asked only if he might wash his face and comb his hair. Afterward, the pianist accompanied him to the door, where they shook hands again.
Jakub’s last words were consoling. Thank you, he said, for your offer to shelter me, but you can’t protect what I’ve asked you to protect if I’m here. If it should ever be possible to get this back to Otylie, I would consider it the greatest favor anybody ever did for me. I know where to go now.
Good luck to you.
Good luck to us all.
Jakub had learned from Marek, the last time he saw the boy alive, about a safe house on Malostranské náměstí where a friend of a friend could help him if he ever got into a mortal jam. Since few of Jakub’s activities had been centered in Prague proper, he had nearly forgotten. Remembering tidbits like this, however, had saved his life in the past. It was a long shot, but worth a try.
The best way to avoid being noticed, he decided, was to walk right down the street in plain view with his hands in his pockets. No one special, just a person on his way home as directed by martial law. He climbed Šporkova and the stairs that led up to Nerudova, and strode down toward Saint Nicholas Church, as nonchalant as if he were going to hear an organ concert there or attend a christening. Not looking behind to see whether he was being followed, he stopped at a nondescript house just before the church square and knocked on the door. A voice asked who he was and what he wanted. For the second time that day, Jakub made a leap of faith. Looking furtively left and right, seeing nobody nearby on the street, he stated his name and needs. Without a single further question, he was immediately taken in by a partisan—there were many hidden around Prague—who risked everything for the cause.
At dusk the city was all but immobile. The railways into and out of town had been shut down. Buses and trams and all other means of public transport had been suspended. A curfew was announced on Prague radio and by loudspeaker trucks that rumbled over the stones in every quarter. Jakub sat cross-legged with several others in darkness, not daring to speak above a whisper, listening to the sounds that filtered in through an open second-story window. Two other men and a widow with a little boy sat listening to a city that hovered in limbo before the onslaught.
Soon enough it came. Not long before midnight Prague broke into the music of war that Otylie’s father had spoken of on his last night with her. The grinding engines of the Nazi motor corps that echoed in the streets. The marching feet of three battalions of Wehrmacht that spread across the cowering city. The shouted orders, the reverberations of doors being knocked on, then knocked down, the shattering of glass, the pleas and cries of people dragged out into the streets for questioning. Every member of the SS, the SA, the secret police, right down to the lowest-ranking cops, fanned out from Nusle to Dejvice, from Libeň to Košíře, in search of the would-be killers. The siege lasted longer than any of the resistance fighters holed up in that room might ever have expected.
But for them, at least, it did come to an end. The woman, hungry and tired of sitting around waiting to be caught, left with her boy and one of the men, hoping to reach the forested outskirts of Prague as they had done in times past. Their host, an elderly lady named Jana, was urged by the two remaining men to walk away from the house and stay with friends elsewhere. In all these years she had never been suspected by the Gestapo. It was not the time for her to risk being interrogated with anti-Nazis hiding in her upstairs study. She agreed, reluctantly, knowing that if they were caught it wouldn’t be long before she was too. She brought them the rest of the foodstuffs from her kitchen cupboards. Told them to take anything from her house they needed—clothes, blankets, medicines. Shook their hands in farewell and departed. Before noon the next day, Jakub and his companion were discovered and detained. While their individual interrogations took the inevitable turn from being questioned under threat of torture to being questioned while undergoing torture, they did manage to keep their stories about Jana straight. No, they didn’t know her. Yes, they’d broken into her house. No, they had no idea where she was. They could only hope the ruse would work.
As for the assassins Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, Otylie initially heard through the exile government grapevine, and then read in the London papers, that they managed to evade the Germans well into the month of June, hiding first with families in safe houses in Žižkov and elsewhere in Prague, then later in the dank, light-less crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Betrayed by a fellow resister named Karel Čurda, who, in Gestapo custody, spilled the Judas information needed to lead the enemy to the church, they were soon besieged by some seven hundred German soldiers. Every effort to smoke them out of their subterranean refuge, to flood the crypt with the help of the fire department, to kill them with grenade blasts and gunfire failed. Ultimately the Butcher’s assassins took their own lives as a best-case means of avoiding capture and execution. Years later, Otylie learned that
the informer Karel Čurda’s guilt-inspired attempt at suicide was unsuccessful. He was convicted of high treason by a tribunal after the war and hanged. About her Jakub there was no news, private or public, to be had.
3
CLIMBING DOWN Jánský vršek’s forty-nine steps, Meta silently counted to see if Gerrit’s numbers were accurate. She wasn’t surprised that they were. At the bottom of the stairway, Jánský vršek continued straight ahead, but Gerrit turned right where two other narrow streets forked. Meta recognized the short street on the right. Jánská, where he lived with the Hodek family. To the left was Šporkova, down which she’d never wandered. They passed by an ocher house, with its gated front garden, at the crossroads.
“There are a couple ways to get to the embassy. This one’s my favorite because of a friend you’ll meet in a minute, I hope.”
They walked along, their footfalls echoing in the corridor. The street took a hard left at a small triangular open area. Here Gerrit knelt down, squinting under several parked cars of locals, and whistled a two-note call—an E followed by a C at a regular interval done quickly a few times in one breath.
Soon enough a shaggy, ancient, pearl-eyed cat came striding out from under an old Renault. Gerrit stood, pulled a small plastic bag from his jacket pocket, and handed it to Meta. “If you want to really know this neighborhood, this is where your lesson begins. Meet Socrates, our mayor.”
Meta grinned, took the bag, shook out a few of the treats onto her palm, and, stretching out her hand, whistled the same notes Gerrit had.
Socrates made his way toward her in slow slinking strides. He was clearly listening and smelling, but not seeing a thing. First he walked up to Gerrit, rubbed against his calf, and then warily approached the crouching Meta. The cat took his time but once he found his way to Meta’s palm he ate the dry nuggets, sat down, and promptly, elegantly began to clean his matted fur.
Gerrit said, “Looks like Socrates has given you his blessing. I imagine his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather cruised this street back when your manuscript was still in one piece. A shame he can’t talk.”
“He probably can. Just that we don’t understand him,” handing Gerrit back the bag of treats.
They continued down Šporkova in silence. Near the bottom of the lane, Gerrit stopped and pointed to the left. “There’s a piano, a bit out of tune, in this house, on the parlor floor, I think. This one’s memorable because I feel sorry for the pianist. Decent player who deserves a better instrument. I don’t know how he can hear what he’s doing through all the rámus.”
“Rámus?”
“Noise, din. Your vocabulary word for the day. The piano makes its own racket I’m sure he or she doesn’t intend. Do we knock?”
Meta did, but no one answered. She made a mental note of the place and they moved on. From the square in front of the German embassy they proceeded first down Vlašská, nipping into courtyards where Gerrit believed he had heard a flutist, a soprano, somebody attempting reggae on a reedy Farfisa organ. If he’d ever heard the plink of an African thumb harp or the drone of a didgeridoo, Meta was certain, he would have gone ahead and pressed the door buzzer. His sole criterion was music. When she asked if it wouldn’t be more efficient to focus on keyboards, his response was, “Probably. But again, don’t forget this is a village and we want villagers to talk to each other.”
Whenever a door was opened, Gerrit apologized for the intrusion, explained what Meta was looking for and, after the occupants shook their heads, he handed them his card, just in case. Meta found his deliberate, carefully spoken Czech easier to make out than that of most natives, whose words barreled past her limits of comprehension like lightning-quick glissandi. More often than either of them had hoped, people directed them across the way or a couple of streets over, to where a musician lived—thus expanding their circuit and, Gerrit hoped, their chances at success.
Has anyone heard of Otylie Bartošová, Jakub Bartoš? Meta gently coached Gerrit.
Sorry, no, was the response, over and again.
Irena Svobodová, survivor of Terezín?
This grandmother or that grandfather might have known her. There was more than one Svobodová who lived around here for a time. But one died last year, of emphysema, and the other in Dachau.
I know a Tomáš who plays piano, but I’m afraid he’s only seventeen. Apologies and good luck with your search.
Having spoken with more than a dozen other neighborhood residents without luck, and seeing that the light was fading, they said farewell, albeit reluctantly, and agreed to get together and continue their search the next afternoon.
Seven fruitless hours of touring the quarter the following day seemed less tedious than it might have—but each encouraged the other to continue, in part because the objective was so important, but also because their conversation was so warmly engaging. By the time they started up Břetislavova, the sun had set and it was getting to be dinnertime, too late in the day to disturb strangers. Not ready to part company, they agreed to have a pub supper at U Kocoura. After a couple of pints of řezané—a measured mix of dark and light beers—conversation meandered through music, inevitably, then work, family, daily life. The things new acquaintances talk about. When Meta mentioned she’d celebrated a landmark birthday in this millennial year, talk turned to New Year’s Eve. Gerrit described watching fireworks from the palace ramparts with his friend Jiří Pelc and his family. Meta said she’d gone with her boyfriend to Times Square early in the morning to see Jumbotron broadcasts of the celebrations from tiny islands perched on the cusp of the International Date Line.
“It was eerie,” she said, blushing at her reluctance to make any further mention of Jonathan. “Imagine standing there just before dawn, bathed in Times Square neon and watching people in the South Pacific on islands like Kiribati and Fiji up on the screens who were, technically speaking, a whole century ahead of you. A whole millennium.”
“You must have felt pretty medieval,” he said.
“Still do,” she replied with a straight face. “Who but somebody way behind the times would go chasing after an eighteenth-century sonata manuscript when what the twenty-first century really wants is hip-hop, rave, and electro?”
Gerrit was tempted to ask about this boyfriend, but didn’t. Instead, they talked politics, art, books. They compared places where they had been. She had performed in Vienna when she was young, an unmemorable recital but a chance to see some breathtaking art, which prompted Gerrit to rhapsodize about Brueghel’s paintings in that city’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
“His finest series is of the seasons,” he said, hardly containing his enthusiasm. “He did six panels and three of them are there. Another’s in New York at the Met.”
“I know that one. It’s made up of harvest scenes?”
“That’s right. Rumor has it your famous Lobkowiczes own one, also about the harvest, that was confiscated by the Nazis and then reconfiscated by the Stalinists when it was their turn to occupy this country.”
“That makes five. Where’s the sixth?”
He lifted his glass, finished off the last of his řezané, set it down. “It’s lost. I imagine a whole multitude of Metas have searched for it over the centuries, but nobody’s ever found it. Chances are, I’ll get to see the Czech-owned panel one day. But that last painting in the cycle will always elude me.”
“Unless you go find it.”
He smiled. “Let’s find your lost sonata movements first. Brueghel can wait. By the way, I apologize,” as they got up to leave. “There’s no such thing as a multitude of Metas.”
Neither had been oblivious to the flirtation in all this. Gerrit walked her to her tram stop and waited close beside her. Even in the wake of a long afternoon and evening together, neither felt like parting company. Their animated conversation was now thrown into restless silence which Gerrit broke, asking, “So should we get together again, keep going?”
“If you have the time, I’d love nothing better.”
“You know, I wouldn’t mind going right back up there now.”
“Well,” he said, taking her hand, “shall we?”
Without thinking, she leaned toward him and, tentative, even timid, pressed her lips against his cheek, then his open mouth, before settling into an embrace that felt strangely natural. After a long minute, they caught their breath, Meta’s heart beating hard, and held each other at arm’s length, not knowing whether to apologize or simply kiss more.
“I—” Gerrit began, but Meta tenderly placed the fingertips of her injured hand on his lips. “Please, let’s not say anything,” while thinking, This is a perfect moment and not one to be ruined by language.
Too soon her tram pulled into the stop. After a final kiss good night, Meta reluctantly climbed aboard and found a seat from which she waved at him on the curb. In the tenebrous light he waved back, then watched the streetcar recede between the facades of shops and houses before disappearing around a curve.
As the tram crossed the river Meta stared at the glossy shimmer of city lights on the unsteady face of the water. What had just happened? The whole encounter should have felt like a dream, she thought. But there was nothing dreamlike about any of it. Gerrit was the most wakeful and awakening man she had ever met.
Loyalty was one of her cornerstones, probably the result of what she’d suffered at the hands of a disloyal father. Awakening or not, wonderful or not, this development presented problems. Feeling guilty, she got off the tram, pulled out her phone, and gave Jonathan an unscheduled call. Maybe she should reconnect with her real life, distant as it had become.
When she didn’t find him home, a surge of distrust ran through her. How hypocritical. She didn’t leave a voice mail—he might catch something in her voice or the wording of her message—so she tried him on his BlackBerry. Again, no answer. What had she been thinking all these weeks, now going on two months? That Jonathan would just sit by the phone? Tend to her persnickety orchids and scrawny ficus tree while she roamed around overseas, knocking on strangers’ doors like an imbecile? She walked the rest of the way back to the Kettles’, chagrined with both Jonathan and herself.