The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  Irena’s final wish was that I seek out the missing movements and reunite them as a way of honoring her lost friend Otylie, Gerrit translated into Czech.

  “Milá Otylie. Otylie je tady?” Dear Otylie, came a voice from the shadowed doorway that gave onto the garden. Is Otylie here?

  “Ne, táto,” Marta replied, rising to take her father’s arm to help him outside into the bower. “Tohle je Meta. Přijela z Ameriky, aby našla Jakubův rukopis.” No, Papa. This is Meta. She’s come from America to find Jakub’s manuscript.

  Impossibly frail and so stooped he resembled a hunchback, Tomáš rested his cane against a stone bench in order to shake her hand. His sudden appearance, the living and breathing Tomáš, left Meta speechless. Gerrit, seeing this, jumped in and introduced himself with a respectful bow, explaining that he was Meta’s friend and lived in the neighborhood.

  “Je tady s Wittmannem?” Tomáš asked, squinting at Gerrit with irises glazed as white by cataracts as Socrates’s. Is she here with Wittmann?

  His daughter steadied him as he lowered himself into the nearest wrought-iron chair, then explained what brought Meta to Šporkova. Tomáš listened intently as familiar names from the distant past drifted by him like the first notes he had ever learned. Yes, he had sat with Wittmann not that many days ago. He had been impressed by the scholar’s erudition. Yet as ancient as Tomáš now considered himself to be, he was, when lucid, endowed with enough street smarts that he wondered, after the spirited professor left, whether he’d been taken in by some apparatchik. He’d seen a cavalcade of Wittmanns in his time. They were ever smooth and often smart. They spoke with grace and ease. But here now was a woman who, on first impression, seemed not to be cut from that fancy brocaded cloth. Her hands fairly crawled all over themselves like nervous little animals.

  “Jak se daři Ireně, po takové době?” he asked her. How is Irena doing after all this time?

  Gerrit continued to translate for Meta, answering Tomáš by saying that before Irena died she recollected the faraway evening recital of the sonata here in Malá Strana. Years later, she still marveled at how Tomáš performed the work with great artistry. She never forgot that night, she’d said.

  I’m sorry she’s gone. Fate of the old. But yes, it was a night none of us would ever forget, Tomáš mused. I’m the only one left alive in all likelihood who remembers it.

  Seizing the moment, Meta asked Tomáš if he’d mind telling her more about his recital and also what happened after Otylie’s manuscript was delivered into his care. Fill her in about his years as its custodian. This was not the kind of question that Wittmann had bothered with. Even if it had been, Tomáš might well have concluded the man was a spy come to gather more evidence against him, dredge up a life’s worth of the guilt that had already broken him in flesh and spirit. But this open-faced woman appeared genuinely interested in breathing life into the story of the manuscript, and that swayed him.

  Tomáš turned to Marta, asking if she might sketch a portrait for the young American. If it’s all the same, he admonished his daughter, forgetting that one of his guests spoke fluent Czech, tell her in a way that she’ll not think ill of me. Gerrit sat as mute as the paving stones beneath his feet until Marta asked him if he would continue as interpreter.

  “‘You see,’” Marta began through Gerrit, “‘the Nazis were always, how to put it, good to my father during the years of the Protectorate. By good I mean they allowed him to go about his business as a musician undisturbed. In truth, this made my father’s life both easier and harder. The threat of being deported to one of the camps didn’t hang over his head like a black cloud, but those that the Gestapo did harass mistrusted him. With the Nazis, though, the time for being in their good graces was always going to be limited. When they heard rumors that a suspicious man had visited him on the day the insurgents went after Heydrich, they began calling him in to Petschek to ask questions. They never arrested him. But they kept a close eye on him after that. He had fallen from favor, that much was clear.’”

  Meta noticed Tomáš shift in his seat, discomfort creeping across his wrinkled face.

  “ ‘When the uprising started near the end of the war, some of the last of the Germans killed Czechs before fleeing or being killed in the streets themselves. My father hid with Aunt Johana, who had managed to stay above the fray, until the Russians marched in to liberate us’”—she traced quote marks in the air. “‘When he returned home he found the house had been burned to the ground. This place he loved was a black shell.’”

  Here she paused to collect herself.

  “I’m sorry,” Meta said. “What did he do?”

  Marta replied in English. “His piano was his saddest loss. It was all burned, but the brass pedals and part of the—what do you call this?—music board with the Bösendorfer?”

  “The soundboard, yes,” Meta said, and explained to Gerrit, “A Bösendorfer’s like the Stratocaster of pianos.”

  “The label on the soundboard didn’t burn completely. So he saved that.”

  Tomáš recognized the word Bösendorfer and glanced over at Meta, who’d been eyeing him as his daughter spoke. From the crestfallen look on his face, it was clear that hearing his life recounted was painful, and the mention of his Bösendorfer particularly so.

  “‘The second floor of the house had collapsed onto the first and the roof had caved in,’” Marta went on as Gerrit followed in English. “‘He’d been very wise to anticipate problems, and had given the sonata pages to Johana, who hid them behind her bureau where the wallpaper had come loose. After the fire, he stayed on with her. There was nowhere else to go. He wanted to fix the house he’d inherited, but the Communists confiscated the property, and anyway, why did this lowly pianist with a German surname deserve better than his Czech comrades? He could get some training at a vocational school, do something useful with his life. Learn how to repair a tractor or glaze a window. Music that wasn’t made to energize the masses was as much a capitalist abstraction as going to church and praying to a god who didn’t exist.’”

  “What about the manuscript?”

  “‘It stayed where it was behind that bureau. Since my aunt Johana didn’t have a piano, he never played during those days. He kept his head down and learned how to be a fair stonemason. To make a long story short, he married a neighbor of my aunt and she moved in with them. That’s how it was in those postwar days, generations of families crammed into apartments like maggots in rotten logs, just getting by. I came along. My mother died when I was only a baby, so I was raised by my father and aunt—’,” and here, for a moment, Marta switched into English—“I don’t think he likes for you to know this, but he lost his will after my mother died. He was much more in the pubs. He had nothing but me and that manuscript, and he liked to talk about it, what is the word, bragging? But nobody cared. Later, I married a man who has a little money, not rich, but enough. Like my father here, he was a man who can do anything with his hands.”

  “Was?” Meta asked.

  Marta nodded, looked away, abstracted, then back once more in focus, glancing at Gerrit, who continued. “‘After the Communists were ousted, we applied for restitution of this property. Once our paperwork came through and it was retitled to my family, my husband and I built the place up from scratch. And like too many things that happen in life, just when he’d finished the house and was really looking forward to living in it, he had a heart attack, and died. That was when I asked Father to come live with me here so I could take care of him and not be alone. We got a piano so he could play again. It had been a long time but his fingers still remembered.’”

  Meta and Gerrit glanced at each other. Seeing how hard this was for Marta and her frail father, Meta offered, “Would it be better if we came back another day? I’m so sorry about your husband.”

  “No, no,” the woman said, noticing that Tomáš was staring at Meta.

  “Marta, may I ask, does your father still play the piano?”

  “He will s
it and play some evenings, you know, with open windows for fresh air. I love it when he does. His fingers pain and he is not so agile, but these are the only times I know for sure he is happy.”

  “Does he sometimes play the sonata movement?”

  “Now and again. He has to improvise the opening since it was missing from Jakub’s pages.”

  Meta bit her lip, hopes rising. “It’d be very possible for him to reconstitute it, since the nature of a rondo is that its theme repeats.” Turning to Gerrit, she said, “That’s what you must have played, you and Andrea that day, if Sam really heard you. Or else he heard it himself, Tomáš playing some version of the rondo melody. It’s catchy, easy to recall.”

  “Well, his piano is part of the Malá Strana soundscape. I’ve lived nearby for a decade, so it’s feasible I’d have picked up echoes of what I heard walking by. Or that Sam, who really has an ear, would have.”

  Broadly smiling, Meta shook her head. “Not just feasible. I’m convinced it’s what happened.” Turning to Marta, she said, “Thank God your father likes playing with the windows open.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then, knowing he had far less to lose if the question was met with resistance, Gerrit put into words what each of them knew must come next. “Do you think it would be possible for Meta to see the manuscript?”

  “For me, I think, yes, she must. But it’s my father’s decision.” She asked, “Můžu jim to ukázat, táto?” Can I show them, Father?

  Meta would never forget the look on Tomáš Lang’s face as he nodded. Some mirror, some reflection of his troubled life, but also of the simpler times before the war, illuminated his eyes. When Marta brought the manuscript out and handed it to her, Meta, fingers nimble as a surgeon’s, unwrapped the tissue paper that protected it and knew at once just by its physical presence—the paper, the staving, the hand—that this was it. She read the first page, her hands now lightly trembling.

  Yes, yes, yes! Here was the mid-phrase continuation of the rondo theme that launched into empty silence at the bottom of the last leaf of Irena’s manuscript. Pure eighteenth century, simpler by far than the dramatic narrativity of the earlier movement, Mozartean but with some curious chromaticism in the episodes that followed the exposition, not to mention notated dynamics that were more extreme than anything she’d seen in Mozart. While she turned the pages, delicately and carefully—this part of the manuscript was in far worse condition than Irena’s—it was all she could do to restrain her joy.

  Gerrit broke into the music soaring in Meta’s head to ask, “Is it right? Does it fit with what Irena gave you?”

  Blinking away tears, she nodded while looking over at Tomáš. “I feel like the most blessed person on earth right now.”

  Marta translated for Tomáš, who, sitting in the stippled light, lifted his outstretched arms toward Meta. Handing the manuscript to Gerrit, she went to the old man and gave him a long hug. Overwhelmed, Tomáš buried his face in his squarish, muscular fingers when Meta stepped away. The sun had begun to sink, and a rose-gold glow settled within the confines of the bower. He excused himself and left the garden, waving his daughter away. At the doorway, he slowly turned and thanked Meta and Gerrit for what they’d done.

  Tomorrow afternoon, he said in Czech, if you are willing, I would like to hear you play Otylie’s music. My fingers are too stiff to manage the faster passages in tempo. It would give me great pleasure to hear the sonata movements performed as they deserve to be.

  Invite a few friends, Marta added. Four o’clock, say? We will celebrate.

  Gerrit translated Meta’s response, saying that nothing would make her happier but that she’d do a better job if she could take it home and practice overnight.

  A suspicious, or maybe mischievous, twinkle shone in Tomáš’s rheumy eyes. No, he said. The first time Otylie Bartošová let me play it, she allowed me little opportunity to practice. You’re a very good pianist, I imagine. I saw your fingers as you read those first measures. It will be a wonder to hear both movements after so long. Tomorrow, then.

  After checking with Gerrit to be sure that she’d understood Tomáš, Meta said, “Tak zítra,” repeating his final words, honored and intimidated by his challenge. If that was how he wanted to do this, that was how it was going to be. Both her strong hand and her weak one would have to work harder than they had in some time.

  After they left and—dumbstruck, enraptured—made their way up Šporkova, Gerrit stopped. “So now what?” he asked.

  Grabbing his hands, she let out a shriek of joy. “Now what? Now we’re going to share the best bottle of champagne they have in Prague is what. Or at least a decent bottle of Moravian wine. Even the mighty Professor Wittmann can’t ruin this moment.” Neither Moravian nor any other wine had ever tasted better to Meta, celebrating with Gerrit in one of his favorite nearby pubs. When she reluctantly decided to head back to the tram, knowing she had to get some rest before performing the next day, Gerrit walked hand in hand with her to the stop, and kissed her again on opened lips as they stood, swaying a little, anonymous in the lamplight. They lingered as one tram passed—“I’ll catch the next,” whispered Meta—then another. Boarding the third tram, Meta waved goodbye and Gerrit walked home to Jánská. His mind was swirling with the wine they’d shared, but more potently with his new self-defining interests in life. Meta and Meta’s quest.

  Falling in love with her, which he could not deny he was doing, was one thing. He had never met anyone so fired by talent, devotion, unself-conscious elegance. And yet—this damned dilemma again of being drawn to her narrative, skewing her into a subject. Not since the heady days of “the Velvet” had he come across a human interest story so fundamentally compelling to him. He admired Meta for wanting to curate a lost fragment of the world’s culture, with no clear gain in mind other than to set something right. But hiding his increasing little hoard of secrets—his not-quite pitch to Margery, his so-called interview with Wittmann, and now, this late evening back in his rooms, his compulsive note-taking about the extraordinary encounter with Tomáš Lang—was becoming more and more troubling.

  Pathetic. Enviable and pathetic at the same time. Hadn’t he lost Adrienne those years ago, when he left Paris to chase history? This was even closer to the bone. Meta couldn’t be separated from the history she herself pursued, and he felt unequal to chasing both of them.

  Like some gone-native ethnographer, Meta found herself stepping away from the scholar’s role into the living world of the sonata itself. The recital, she realized, meant that she was herself becoming a part of the manuscript’s history. When she knocked on Sam and Sylvie’s bedroom door, giddy from her celebration with Gerrit and their good night kisses, the three of them danced like ecstatic children in the semidark, Sylvie in her nightgown, Sam in his boxer shorts, Meta with her coat still on. A drowsy note of complaint from David and Lucie’s room brought them to their senses.

  “Why in the world didn’t he give you a chance to practice?” Sam whispered.

  “I don’t mind. Anyway, this sonata seems to live by its own rules. I hope it’s okay if I make a couple of phone calls. I promise I’ll be quiet.”

  “No problem, we’ll talk in the morning. Huge congrats and sweet dreams.”

  When Meta telephoned Gillian and Jonathan behind the closed door of the piano studio, their reactions were wildly dissimilar.

  Gillie screamed, dropped the phone. Meta laughed as she heard her friend enact the same celebratory dance, an ocean away, that she herself had just done with Sam and Sylvie. When Gillie got back on the line, she said, “I knew it, I knew you’d do it! Now listen, girlfriend. My birthday’s coming up at Christmas, so I insist you play it for me as a present.”

  Meta wanted to point out that she hadn’t really done it yet, and might never finally marshal together the whole sonata, but allowed herself to be happily, tidally swept away in the moment, promising Gillie that one way or another she would come through with this command performance.

 
Though glad for Meta, Jonathan was less exuberant. “I guess you’ll be coming back pretty soon then?” he said, after offering congratulations. She changed the subject. If anything, the discovery would keep her in the field searching for the first movement, assuming Tomáš’s manuscript was, as she believed, authentic, and Wittmann hadn’t somehow beaten her to the other missing piece. There was, as well, the issue of Gerrit. Instead, she told Jonathan what Wittmann was up to along with the shadow man Kohout. This did get a rise out of him.

  “You’ve got to call Mandelbaum and demand that he read his friend Wittmann the riot act. I’ll make the call myself, if you want.”

  “Before I go accusing Mandelbaum of throwing me to the wolves, I ought to hear Wittmann’s side of the story, don’t you think? It’s not impossible that I’m being paranoid because I don’t like his friend Kohout.” She caught her voice rising and, remembering the sleeping children in the bedroom behind her, lowered it again.

  “How freaking naive can you get, Meta? You already know his side of the story. These guys are totally in cahoots. They’re using your discovery to advance their own twilighting careers.”

  “Wittmann’s career is hardly in twilight. He doesn’t need to filch other people’s scholarship in order to get ahead. He is ahead.”

  The silence that fell between them was, she thought, as deafening as the John Cage piece in which silence was the music. In which the music consisted of the coughs and sneezes and squirming noises the audience made in the concert hall while the pianist sat onstage without playing one note.

  When Jonathan finally spoke, his voice dropped into a register of warm impatience. “Look, it’s your life, your search. It’s your time and money and effort. But I think you’re being foolish by refusing to call Mandelbaum and at least ask him to discuss this with Wittmann. By the way, how do you know Mandelbaum himself isn’t involved here in some way?”