The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  Sam Kettle, up after the others had gone to bed, was a little surprised but also accommodating toward his friend when she asked if he had something in the house to drink. “Anything so long as it’s nice and stiff, please.”

  “Sure,” he said. “What are we celebrating?”

  “What makes you think we’re not mourning?”

  “Fair enough,” as he poured a couple of strong whiskeys. “So what or whom are we toasting then?”

  “Brueghel.”

  Sam took a drink, squinched his face, asked, “Brueghel the Elder or Brueghel the Younger?”

  “Brueghel the Lost.”

  “Well, then. Here’s cheers to Brueghel the Lost,” he said as he raised his glass, having no idea what she was talking about.

  Over their nightcaps, Meta, not quite meeting Sam’s eyes, described to him what she and Gerrit had done that afternoon. Sam tactfully refrained from pointing out how many hours ago the afternoon had ended. He had, in his own way, grown to adore his houseguest, and hadn’t had the courage in the past weeks to rain on her parade. Hadn’t even mentioned to his own wife behind closed doors, their heads on pillows in the quiet of an otherwise sleeping household, how much Meta had begun to worry him. She wasn’t sleeping well, he knew, as he could hear her rustling on the other side of the thin wall of his bedroom. She rarely sat at the piano to play for her own joy, and she’d ceased playing the sonata movement altogether. Maybe it just meant that she had grafted the piece so fully into her cortex that there was no need to bring her fingers to the dance. But could she be getting tired of it? In some ways, rotten as Sam felt to think such a thing, he hoped so. This latest business of touring the streets beneath Nerudova frankly struck him as hysterical. He’d never developed a strong sense about her boyfriend. Kind of surmised he might not like the guy if they ever met. Still, he found himself uncomfortably in league with the lawyer about the folly of her carrying on like this much longer. She had a life to lead, to reclaim, and an article to further research and publish on the movement that had already come into her fortunate hands.

  Pouring her the last of the whiskey, he ventured, “So, my friend. I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Don’t hate me for this, promise?”

  “Promise,” she said, returning his gaze. She had never seen Sam quite this serious.

  “You know you’re welcome to live under my piano for the rest of your life. Barring your getting married and starting to raise a family under there. But don’t you think it would be wise to set yourself a deadline? Christmas, say. Easter. Cinco de Mayo, whatever you like. You know, just as a reality-check kind of thing.”

  “I hear you,” she told him with a frown, setting her drink on the kitchen table. “I’ve been wondering myself whether I’m losing my grip on reality.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, all right? I’m not pushing. Just a thought.”

  She stared at the empty glass in her hands. How could she drink so much and still be this sober, she wondered, dismayed. “I hear you and you’re right. Let me think on it.”

  “Go easy.” He placed a fraternal hand on her forearm. “Maybe the wind feels good in your sails. I just want you to do what’s best for the good ship Meta. No sinking now.”

  Nodding off that night, Meta felt her thoughts drift in directions that branched like the fork in the road leading up Jánská and down Šporkova.

  Jánská took her to Gerrit. Resisting the easy, arbitrary metaphor, she dismissed the voice inside that warned her that he, like Malá Strana, might be a capricious dead end. Gerrit was no more a dead end than the sonata itself. She was still convinced the manuscript could be somewhere in Irena’s old stomping grounds, and thanks to him she believed she still had a chance of locating it. When she set off for Prague, she’d assumed fellow professionals would pave the way. Not this writer who lived alone in an attic apartment and claimed a precocious young girl and a moth-eaten alley cat as friends. As for the rising affinity, the affection, she felt for him, Meta tried to write it off as simple forgivable loneliness.

  The other path, the Šporkova fork, as she conceived it, contradicted the first. Call it the shoe-leather fork, the walking-in-circles-of-desperation fork. Gerrit’s image of Irena’s onetime neighborhood, now his, as a nest of villages, made a pretty picture, but knocking on doors hadn’t produced a result yet, had it? Jonathan once told her that when a crime’s committed—a murder, the abduction of a child—with every fleeting hour the evidence evaporates, the trail disappears, the case goes cold. Pounding on the door of every musician in Prague was not going to change the inescapable fact that seven hundred or so months, half a million vanished hours, meant there was no trail left to trek.

  The bifurcated road was, she realized, like the second sonata movement itself. One path full of hope; the other, despair. The optimistic seeker, the forlorn loser.

  What was she missing here? What was she overlooking? Was it nearing time to admit defeat? Kind people had tried, were still trying, to help her. Others hadn’t the time, will, or interest—which was fair enough.

  Then it struck her, as she lay in her sleeping bag under Kettle’s piano. That Langová woman across the street from Jakub Bartoš’s former antiquities shop on Veleslavínova. Why had she responded to Sylvie’s narration about the manuscript with such bald anger or fear? And that look on her face when she leaned out the window. What possibly lay behind that tableau of paranoia?

  Dead tired as she was, Meta crawled out of the bag and quietly slipped into the hall. She retrieved the Prague phone book from the drawer of the telephone table and brought it back into Sam’s studio. Sitting on the piano bench, she turned on the gooseneck lamp used to illuminate music scores on the piano’s rack. She flipped through the pages to listings for Langová. Not surprisingly, there were a number. Running her eye down the column, she located the name Johana on Veleslavínova.

  “Just who are you, Johana?” she asked in a whisper.

  Glancing farther up and down the list of names she paused when she saw an address on Šporkova. Lang/Hašková. Her breath quickened. She’d walked right past the house earlier that day, may have knocked on the door. Probably meant nothing. She calmed herself, leaving the phone book splayed open to the page on the piano and turning off the light. But it might be worthwhile to see if the Lang in this Lang/Hašková listing knew anything about a white-haired namesake in Josefov and why she might have acted as if she’d seen a ghost.

  LIKE A WRIT OF CONDEMNATION, the manuscript of the third movement of Otylie’s sonata lay on Tomáš’s kitchen table for several days and nights before its new trustee could bring himself to carry it over to the piano. He had placed on the manuscript, as a paperweight, a polished ivory egg, a keepsake from a trip to Berlin before the hostilities began. And there the movement had rested until he could gather the courage to address the fact of its presence in his life, and all its presence meant. Jakub’s last word still echoed in his memory. Pozdě. Too late.

  After his old friend had dropped by for that feverish quarter hour, Tomáš couldn’t bear to touch the thing, stained with sweat where Jakub had held it against his chest under his shirt. Tomáš was drawn to it and terrified of it by turns. More than once he found himself wishing he’d never met Jakub Bartoš and his wife, never encountered these anonymous handwritten pages. Life would now be far simpler if he hadn’t. He remembered so well that evening when he played all three movements for a select group of friends. Even now he could hear the opening notes in his memory. Every one of them sounded the word sympathizer. Or, worse, collaborator.

  It had occurred to Tomáš that he could surrender the manuscript, tweak enough details about how it had come into his possession to exonerate himself from any hint of guilt by association. If the authorities believed his story, there was a chance that in return he might expect even more preferential treatment than he already enjoyed as a result of keeping secret tabs for the SS on Czech students’ parents who managed to earn enough mo
ney to afford such luxuries as piano lessons.

  He could burn it, bury the ashes in his tiny garden, erase all memory that Jakub came here. That is what his sister would have insisted he do if she’d had any inkling that he had turned up at Tomáš’s door. Fortunately, Johana—who even before the war broke out had scorned his friendship with the Jewish Bartoš—wasn’t likely to be dropping by for a visit. Like others in Prague, her movements were restricted until Heydrich’s would-be assassins were run to ground.

  Or else he could claim it was something he had always owned—who could contradict him?—and dump it into the thriving black market in antiquities. Maybe Johana’s lover, who himself was a member of the secret police, would be willing to help him in exchange for a cut. But no, he concluded. Altogether too dangerous. The officer who had taken Johana as his mistress, who lived with her in a large apartment that had been confiscated from a family in Josefov, always seemed to have his eye on Tomáš. And more to the point, despite his wavering, fearful heart, Tomáš understood that he had to seize this second chance Jakub had placed before him. He had to take care of the manuscript as if it were a foundling displaced by the harlotry of war. He owed it to his friend, to himself, and to the music.

  While his thoughts seesawed about what to do, he knew he dared not ask around about poor Bartoš. Any display of curiosity about an enemy of the Protectorate would raise suspicion. And to raise suspicion meant you risked putting not just yourself but all those you knew before a firing squad in the ever-bustling execution grounds in Praha-Kobylisy. The Gestapo saw insurrectionists in every shadow. Though he had friends in middling-high places, he knew that in the current state of emergency such friends wouldn’t think twice about turning on him.

  As the clampdown in Prague continued, Tomáš went outside only to buy his rations and Der Neue Tag, the Reich-run newspaper, which he pored over at home, looking in vain for Jakub’s name on the long lists of the condemned. Restaurants, cinemas, shops, pubs were closed. Heydrich lay unconscious, stricken by septic shock, in the Bulovka Hospital, even as his beloved fellow Nazis were making great progress on other fronts. Rommel was marching across North Africa like a fiery sandstorm. A quarter of a million Soviet troops had surrendered to the Germans in Kharkov. Murmansk bowed to the Luftwaffe. It seemed that the war was going nicely everywhere except, because of this outrage visited upon the Reichsprotektor, for Prague.

  When it was announced that Heydrich had finally died, four days into June, Tomáš’s vigil, his turmoil, came to a head. The martyr’s body lay elaborately in state in the main courtyard of the castle, having been conveyed there on a gun carriage by the most elite German troops throughout the Czech lands. No civilians were allowed to be present during this solemn processional. It was as if a god were being borne across the city of his divine creation to a resting place in Hradčany, the seat of ancient Bohemian kings, of astrologers and metaphysicians of old. Once the catafalque was arranged with appropriately grandiose stagecraft, huge lit torches flanking the flower-bedecked bier and a large Iron Cross serving as a backdrop—made not of iron but of wood, yet impressive enough to awe the rabble—the gates of the castle were thrown open so tens of thousands of mourning Czechs could file past, paying final respects whether they privately hated the Nazis or not.

  Tomáš knew he had to attend. He put on his best suit and mechanically tied his black cravat. These were the darkest days of the occupation, days in which every window framed a prying eye as neighbors spied on neighbors. If anybody had happened to see Tomáš’s visitor acting out of the ordinary, it would have been only a matter of time before the SS came knocking. Aren’t I just a musician? he thought. What do I know about politics and the workings of power? Then he bitterly smirked. Such hollow words.

  Before making the short walk up the steps to Nerudova and toward the castle, where he would stand in line for hours so he could pass by Heydrich’s coffin, he finally worked up the courage to touch the manuscript. Whatever dampness had remained from Jakub’s sweat was now dry. It took all of Tomáš’s nerve to carry it over to the piano by the shuttered window in his first-floor parlor. He took a deep breath and played the opening measures.

  Strange, that. The music at the top of the first page began midstream. Had Jakub lost one of the earlier leaves? What a shame, but wasn’t everything that had happened these past years shameful? Weren’t everyone’s beginnings cut off from their ends?

  Blinking away a pathetic tear, he turned the page and continued. It was as if another life, his earlier life, were being opened to him again through the music. He had lost so much. Lost any claim to moral purpose. Not that he’d been a terribly useful informer, so far as he knew. Maybe an arrest or two, none that triggered deportation. Not like Johana, who seemed to take a grim, patriotic satisfaction from turning people in. He had always suspected she was behind the arrest of the Bartošes’ friend Irena Svobodová and the execution of Irena’s husband for having sheltered Otylie—a gentile loyal to her Jewish husband. And that was only the people closest to home. Still, each innuendo he had imparted was like a great chunk chiseled away from his diminished sense of self-worth. A paltry rat bent on saving his own pelt, he couldn’t even feel sorry for himself.

  But here, now, the music Tomáš played proposed that nothing in this world was ever completely lost. Or if something had been lost, it could be recovered so long as one was alive and willing to dedicate oneself to setting the matter right. He played the movement, a rondo, several times, realizing that it was missing but a few introductory measures that could be reconstructed from repetitions of the theme. After closing the lid of the piano, he hid the manuscript and set out to join the multitudes in their cowed mourning of Herr Heydrich’s death.

  He dreaded what he was about to do, raise his right arm in the Hitler salute as he passed the fallen Reichsprotektor. No one would be the wiser that his bloodshot eyes had nothing to do with the loss of the Butcher of Prague, the infamous Hangman as many secretly called him. None would know he wept for Jakub Bartoš, not Reinhard Heydrich. Cloaked in music, he climbed the hill to face his sometime master and his marrow-deep shame.

  RATHER THAN WALKING back to Jánská after saying goodbye to Meta, Gerrit set out toward Kampa. His mind was traveling in circles like the waterwheel of the Grand Prior’s Mill on Čertovka, the Devil’s Stream, on the island’s west side. The man he most needed to talk to right now was his old friend Jiří Pelc—Jiří possessed deep common sense and was never afraid to tell Gerrit what he thought.

  As luck had it, his friend was home. When Jiří graduated from Charles University after the revolution, he found a job working evenings as a waiter in Old Town, and this was his night off. The wages and tips, though by no means lavish, were enough to pay for canvases, brushes, and tubes of colorful oils, as well as his portion of the cheap rental of an unheated industrial studio a half-hour tram ride upriver, where he painted during the day. Knowing that under the Communists he would have been vigorously dissuaded from squandering time and materials on the large abstract images he was driven to paint, Jiří didn’t take his newfound freedom lightly. That he continued to live with his parents was, as Gerrit knew, nothing unusual. Many of their unmarried friends either lived at home or piled into small shared flats.

  What’s happening, man? Jiří asked, opening the door to find his friend standing there.

  Free for a couple, Georgie?

  Always, he answered, taking his frayed black leather jacket from the coat tree and stepping outside into the evening.

  I’m surprised to find you in, Gerrit said as they crossed the park in the purple light back toward Malá Strana. I figured you’d be getting ready for your open studio out in your warehouse.

  My atelier, you mean? I was there earlier but paint’s like laundry. It’s got to dry before you can do anything with it.

  They walked over to a favorite local dive and ordered beers as Jiří lit a cigarette. Shaking his match and dropping it into an ashtray, he said, So what’s up? You
seem a little off.

  Gerrit finger-kicked a coaster back and forth a couple of times before telling his friend about the unusual visit Meta had paid to the Hodeks’ house, the backstory that brought her to him, and the afternoons he had just spent walking the neighborhood with her in search of a lost manuscript. It was obvious to Jiří that his friend was smitten not just with Meta’s story but with the woman herself. It was so obvious, in fact, that it need not be broached, Jiří thought, until and unless Gerrit wanted to discuss it. But when Gerrit mentioned, as a throwaway detail in passing, that she’d shown the sonata passage to, among others, Petr Wittmann, Jiří started in his chair.

  Wittmann? he sneered.

  Right, Petr Wittmann, Gerrit said, startled by the sudden vehemence in Jiří’s voice. I knew the name when she mentioned it. Classical-music scholar. He pops up in the cultural news from time to time. What, is there some problem with that?

  Jiří wrapped both hands around his pint glass as if it were a neck in need of strangling and said, And how do you think he managed to build such a pretty reputation for himself, unless he had Party connections? He was a two-faced bastard during the revolution. I actually heard him speak at an underground meeting in favor of Havel. When I called him on it afterward, he asked me my name.

  What happened?

  Nothing except I suddenly found myself on disciplinary probation.

  I remember that. You’re sure Wittmann was behind it? He wasn’t even in the art department.

  I know, but the fucker had pull. Even kept his position at the university after the Marxist brothers were thrown out of power. The man’s a master apparatchik. Your friend better watch out who she’s running around with.