The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  Meta was told he’s a master musicologist too.

  May well be, probably is. But in the old regime days he wouldn’t walk your crippled grandmother across the street unless there was a payoff waiting for him on the far corner. I hope your Meta counted the rings on her fingers after shaking his hand.

  Meta doesn’t wear rings, Gerrit said, then took a long quaff from his beer. Jiří raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  With slow deliberateness, Gerrit set his glass down and said, Speaking of the bad old days, you remember when I showed up in Prague to cover the revolution and you told me to report what I saw but also to jump headfirst into the protest?

  Same advice I would give you today if you asked, said Jiří.

  As a matter of fact, I don’t remember asking your advice back then.

  Jiří laughed, knocking some cigarette ash into the tray.

  This time I do want to ask you something.

  About this woman?

  About her, yes.

  If you want to know whether I think you should marry her, I’ll have to meet her first.

  Ignoring him, Gerrit said, When I heard her story—Meta’s, and the women who saved it, the sonata, I mean, its incredible history, its potential significance—my first impulse was to grab my pad and start taking notes.

  You mean you didn’t?

  Well, no, I did. But I felt guilty, like I was stealing from her.

  Jiří shook his head. You gave up thinking that way about your work years ago.

  What can I say? This is different.

  Looking away, Gerrit’s friend scanned the crowded pub as he continued. Well, I’m not a New York editor, obviously, but 1989 was a revolution. The stakes were too high for you to watch from the sidelines. At the end of the day, you managed to cover the revolution, be part of it in your way, and write a book about it too.

  This isn’t the same, and you know it.

  So this time you either break what could be one of the most interesting stories you’ve uncovered—music, human interest, history, all that—and lose a chance at love, or you chuck the rules of journalism, not to mention a potentially big byline, and offer yourself up as this girl’s romantic research assistant. Either way, your life gets in the way of your life and you lose. Am I right? leveling his eyes at his friend.

  Gerrit knew it would be unfair to be angry with Jiří. He’d asked for what he was hearing, had he not? After all, wasn’t Jiří one of the two dedicatees of his book, along with Margery? The highly passionate and strictly dispassionate set in type, side by side, on the dedication page? He managed to say, You know it’s not that simple a dichotomy.

  Or, okay, third possibility. You tell this Meta what you have in mind.

  That’s the problem, said Gerrit. If I tell her I want to write about her and her project, she’s going to think I’m just interested in her for selfish reasons. She wouldn’t be wrong to accuse me of being an opportunist. And I can’t just spy on her, write about it without saying anything. It’d be more than a betrayal, it’d be a breach of professional ethics.

  Jiří toyed with his cigarette before replying. I don’t mean to make light of this. I know how strongly you believe in your professionalism. But I also know that you’re capable of hiding behind your notebook.

  Gerrit ordered another round and changed the subject. Together they strayed away from their dialogue about Meta, manuscripts, journalism, art, love, objectivity, and all the rest. Only when they were saying their good nights did Jiří bring up the issue again.

  So what’re you going to do about Meta?

  Try to help her find that manuscript. And try to do my job.

  In other words, you have no idea?

  In other words.

  Back at Jánská, he let himself into the house as quietly as he could. It was late. He was tired. Jiří’s marathoner endurance with pilsners, bocks, and porters would always exceed Gerrit’s, but he was relieved to have sifted through concerns with his old friend. The inchoate feelings he had for Meta guaranteed nothing in return. He needed to listen, in that old phrase, to head and heart alike.

  As Gerrit climbed the stairs he made a promise to himself that he’d seek out Petr Wittmann for an interview. He would have to invent a nimble reason for their meeting, so as not to disturb whatever relationship the professor had, or scarcely had, with Meta. If he decided not to write about lost music manuscripts, at least he might write about lost musical souls.

  The next day, he called New York. Margery listened to Gerrit describe Meta’s story, and those of Otylie, Jakub, Irena, and the others, but her first question caught him off guard. “That’s all very interesting, but who composed it?”

  The Czechs have a phrase for when something is hidden in plain sight—Pod svícnem je největší tma. It’s darkest under the candlestick. Gerrit had been so enthralled that this rudimentary detail had gotten sidelined in the narrative shuffle.

  The rest of the conversation went more or less the same way. Had he asked Meta who she thought the composer was? Not yet. What had he confirmed about its purported history? Not much. Had any outside experts verified its legitimacy? No, but that count at least he’d anticipated, though his interest in interviewing Wittmann was more personal than Margery needed to know.

  “I haven’t yet tapped into those aspects of the story,” he said. “Right now I’m just feeling you out on the lead. What’s seemed most important to me so far is the cultural legacy that inspired the original owner during the war and Meta’s quest to reassemble this thing that was partitioned, not unlike Germany itself, though for different reasons, of course. The manuscript was broken up to save it from the Germans. The Germans were separated to save the rest of us from them.”

  “Let’s stay with attribution instead of manufacturing metaphors,” said Margery, which made him grin as he jotted down the words Partitioned, like Germany itself. “Gerrit, you’re onto something intriguing. As it stands, it’s not news by any stretch. Move the thing along a little more, and then we can pitch it to Arts, see what Arthur or maybe Clive thinks about all this.”

  After hanging up, Gerrit looked through the telephone directory for Petr Wittmann and found both his office and residential numbers. Deciding it was best to contact him at the office, Gerrit wrote the number in his notebook and went out to get some air while he thought through how exactly he was going to frame his questions. This was how he had always preferred to work, walking a story through as far as he could before actually interviewing a contact—assuming Wittmann would agree to it.

  Atypical of how he worked, his subject matter was not clearly delineated. He was sort of pursuing Wittmann for Meta, sort of pursuing him for Jiří, and sort of doing it for himself, and none of it aboveboard. But he continued to propose to himself possible articles that Wittmann might find worth sitting down with him to discuss. Something just generally about Czech cultural heritage? No. Progress being made by the present government in supporting the musical arts in the decade after the downfall of Communism? That angle might draw him out, but it could also make him suspicious and defensive if Jiří’s all but KGB portrayal of Wittmann was even partly accurate. What about asking him about the music they used in these ubiquitous puppet theaters for which Prague had a growing reputation around the world? That piece was due in a couple of days and at least had the possibility of looking entirely legitimate since Wittmann would probably see it published soon enough.

  Gerrit phoned the music department, asked the secretary if Dr. Wittmann was in his office. She put him through and, first surprise, the professor picked up. After introducing himself and making apologies for such short notice, Gerrit asked if Wittmann might be willing to make himself available for a brief interview for the Prague Post. Second surprise, Petr Wittmann agreed. Owing to a canceled appointment, he happened to be free to meet at eleven.

  Great. I’ll see you then, and Gerrit hung up before Wittmann had a chance to change his mind.

  Meta’s thoughts were anywhere but on
the lovely Chopin mazurka she was teaching that morning. The A Minor, op. 17, no. 4. Her student was as earnest as death. He knew all the notes, had memorized them like multiplication tables. One day he would grow up to be a damned good industrial engineer. Or maybe a devoted math teacher. But whatever ineffable quirks of neural, auditory, haptic coordination were fundamental to gifted pianism, this boy didn’t have them in quite the right balance. Still, Meta’s role was not to dampen his enthusiasm but to ignite it.

  You must play it from here, she said in her rough Czech, placing her palms on her chest.

  Students like this usually inspired her to try her hardest to encourage them to reach beyond their natural skills. Today she felt impatient. What was she doing instructing a twelve-year-old boy whose parents were hoping to round out his education, rather than pounding the streets with Gerrit?

  “Ne, takhle ne,” she said, breaking into her thoughts to correct his fingering.

  “Like this?” he asked, trying again.

  “Ano. Like that.”

  The door to the studio had meantime been noiselessly opened. Sylvie did not want to interrupt. Sam had once advised her to break in on a lesson only if the building was on fire. And if she thought there was time for him to finish and still get their family and the student out safely, the rule was not to disturb.

  “Sylvie?” Meta asked.

  “You have a phone call.”

  Meta told the boy to practice that troublesome passage until she returned.

  “Who is it?” she said, walking toward the entrance hall where the phone sat on a small table next to a chair. This foyer, which had doors at either end, was the most private room in the apartment, despite the fact that one of the doors led to the common corridor outside.

  “Antonín Novák. He remember more something. Say important to talk to you.”

  Behind her, Meta could hear her student busily working. “Can you translate?”

  Meta hovered beside her, catching phrases here and there. But when Sylvie thanked Antonín and hung up, Meta understood the look on her face with ease.

  Late morning, not yet noon. Meta and Sylvie brought the Kettle children along to Josefov after Meta finished her lesson. They had no time to find a sitter, and Sam was going to be out all Friday into the evening with teaching appointments. On their way from the tram, they stopped long enough for Meta to buy a small basket of wrapped hard candies, as Otylie might have done, and an inexpensive but pretty fountain pen in a nice dark blue box as presents for the old gentleman. Antonín’s granddaughter greeted the four of them at the door. Her hair had already changed, now entirely bright red, and her fingernails were painted with silver glitter. Today she wore an orange jumpsuit, one strap stylishly undone, over a striped T-shirt. The Kettle kids were dazzled and both eagerly accepted her offer of sodas.

  “He is waiting for you in there.” The granddaughter pointed, leading the children away toward the kitchen.

  On seeing the two enter the room, Antonín greeted them with a kind of impatient urgency that would have been alarming but for the spirited shimmer of his faded blue eyes and the childlike look that larked across his face. He thanked them for coming so soon—At my age you can forget things even before they happen to you, he muttered in Czech—while setting the candy basket on the table to share and carefully sliding the pen into a pocket of his double-breasted sweater.

  There is a woman, he began, after they sat across from him. A woman he’d been trying to remember after Meta and Sylvie had left last time. This woman knew Otylie and Jakub. Her name was Langová, Miss Johana Langová.

  Meta and Sylvie exchanged a glance.

  After their first meeting, he found himself reminiscing about his youth, he continued. He’d been thinking about the music manuscript they were looking for, and had suddenly recalled with the absolute clarity of an old man who has become a stranger to sleep that Miss Langová had a brother who back in those days was friends with Jakub Bartoš. This brother used to come by the antikva now and then to play chess with Jakub while he, Antonín, and other young chess fanciers watched. He was a good chess player, the brother. And he played piano like a dream. Whenever Jakub got in a new instrument, a harpsichord or pianola, anything with keys, Miss Langová’s brother dropped in to play it and argue with Jakub over its aesthetic merit. Sometimes his sister came with him.

  The neighborhood kids all called her “Zlá Johana”—Nasty Johana. He remembered she was of German extraction. Maybe from Sudetenland, he couldn’t be sure. Part of the reason he might have forgotten about her when Sylvie and Meta first came by was because he didn’t care for the woman. She wasn’t mean to him, but she struck him as cold, brittle, distant. She was nothing like Otylie, who was memorable for her kindnesses.

  Sylvie translated, though by dint of sheer focus Meta was comprehending some of what he said. She nodded, as a way of urging him to go on.

  Well, Miss Langová. During the worst years of the Nazi occupation, so many people in this district were forcibly taken away to camps, only the fortunate few to return—here he held up the tattooed wrist Meta had noted before. She didn’t suffer such problems. People did what they had to do in those days, Antonín said, shaking his downturned head. The world was not in its right mind. This does not make such things forgivable.

  Sylvie asked, unprompted by Meta, What was the brother’s name?

  That was the crazy part. He knew his memory was faulty and fading, but he couldn’t understand why recovering this man’s name, the name of someone he liked before the war, stumped him, while recalling the nickname of the sister, whom he loathed, was easy. He supposed it was simply because the brother was gone while she was still his neighbor, an unpleasant apparition in the local bakery from time to time.

  His face, shrouded in the blue smoke of his cigarette, was keen, thoughtful. Earned wisdom was present, Meta thought, in its rivering wrinkles.

  Here was the main point. After the Germans surrendered and Antonín came back home to Josefov with his mother, having lost his father in Auschwitz, he had walked through his old neighborhood in shock. Forced by the exigencies of war to grow up in a far bigger hurry than most, he wasn’t naive about what had caused so much destruction, displacement, and misery. But even though he’d been told by grown-ups that Prague was in much better shape than cities in firebombed Germany and faraway atom-bombed Japan, he was speechless when he walked past his old school, his friends’ homes, past places where he used to like to go before everyone’s life was shattered.

  When he went to see if Otylie and Jakub might be at their antikva, he found it abandoned. The whole street was a mess but for a couple of apartment buildings that were still partially occupied. He volunteered to help with the restoration of his city, though he was far too young to heft a sack of sand or do more than tote a cobble at a time. But he got to know people and heard the scuttlebutt. One name from his past that he did recognize was Miss Langová, who it turned out was now living across the street from where Jakub’s shop had been. Thinking that maybe she knew what had happened to the Bartošes, he went by her apartment and knocked on the door. She wasn’t there, but a man answered. It was the same man who used to play chess and piano at Jakub’s antikva. Antonín couldn’t have been more excited when he saw the man’s face in the dim light of the shabby hallway.

  “Pamatujete si na mě?” he asked. Do you remember me?

  No, the man answered, suspicious. He was unshaven and his eyes were black holes. Antonín remembered peering past him into the flat and being surprised at how nicely it was appointed. Fancy wallpaper, upholstered furniture, landscape paintings in gold frames.

  “Jakub Bartoš a jeho žena,” he added. Jakub Bartoš and his wife. I used to visit them across the street.

  The man shut the door in his face. Puzzled by this odd response to his innocent question, he started asking around. Miss Langová’s brother, people said. A collaborator who may have worked both sides of the fence. They say the Nazis burned his place in Malá Strana in t
he days of the uprising, when the Germans were destroying everything they could as they exited Prague, and he fled to Josefov. They say that he was afraid of the Nazis but now he was even more afraid of the Soviets. When Antonín told his story about the brief, unfriendly encounter, people weren’t surprised. The war had driven him insane. Anyone who bothered to think about him believed he was just another example of what war does to people. And just imagine, someone added. He used to be such a promising pianist. But he was reduced to a poor withdrawn drinker who, deep in his cups, would sometimes bray about how he owned an original Mozart manuscript that the Nazis never confiscated.

  “Mozart,” Meta interrupted. A shiver shot through her.

  Shaking his head disdainfully, Antonín blurted, Mozart one night, heaven knows who the next. Nobody took his ravings seriously. I felt sorry for him myself.

  Meta asked if Antonín had ever seen this manuscript.

  Of course not. Nobody saw it. Why? It didn’t exist. But one thing is for sure. When the Communists took over all the art and artifacts the Germans had confiscated, this crazy man shut up about his imaginary manuscript.

  “Sylvie, please, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Meta said, her hands gripping each other. “Could you please ask him if he knows what became of this pianist brother?”

  He was afraid he didn’t know. He’d grown up and become interested in things that mattered more. Anyway, his mind was a holey sock. How he wished it was something that could simply be darned or, better yet, replaced with a fresh one made of silk.

  They laughed politely at his joke.

  Girls, he said. All this was generations ago. Times then were so bleak they seemed barely worth remembering other than to shrug at the craziness of mankind. Jakub and Otylie, this Miss Langová and her brother, me myself, every single person in this world of Prague and far beyond—what were we all but pawns in a game of impossible brutality and lunacy? I hope this remembrance will help, flawed as it is. Flawed as I am. It is all I have.

  “A ted’ si dáme bonbóny,” he said, reaching his opened hands toward both of them and gesturing toward the basket of sweets. Now let’s share some candy.