“I can’t possibly.”
Gerrit took the sonata manuscript from where it had been sitting on his worktable. He undid the straps on the leather brief, carefully laid the sonata inside, then stepped over to the antique writing desk he had mentioned. After sliding the brief under a shelf of pigeonholes, he lifted the mahogany lid into place, and locked it. Handing her the skeleton key, he said, “There you go. It was always meant for you. I’ve just been its custodian for a while.”
The rest of her world and those in it were swept off into some other verity. One that seemed less solidly real or comprehensible than what was here in this room. Without another word she slipped herself into Gerrit’s arms and kissed his warm face, his mouth. Silent, with no words or music to accompany her, she crossed the threshold from her old life into this new one about which she knew little, but fully understood she had to enter. It was almost as if she had taken her own hand and led herself into the refuge of another Meta. She could feel his heart beating against her own chest and wondered which of them was more amazed.
6
MANDELBAUM WOULDN’T ARRIVE until the next day. Anxious as she was to see him, Meta welcomed the brief respite. Once he was in Prague, a kind of hard, home-based reality was going to enter the scene. Any self-deceptions Meta might have been relying on to get from hour to hour—about the sonata, about Wittmann, not to mention Gerrit and Jonathan—would burst like so many bubbles against the sharp needle of Mandelbaum’s pragmatism. Even if, deep down, she welcomed the reality check he represented, these radiant hours were going to be hard to leave behind. Not that all was happiness. Not in the least. But all was directed toward happiness.
The morning after the recital, she showered at Gerrit’s flat before returning to the Kettles’ still wearing her performance outfit.
“Don’t ask. You already know” was her hasty, mildly embarrassed greeting to the grinning Sam when she arrived in Vinohrady. Before he could respond, she changed the subject. “Will you be coming with me to fetch the maestro at the airport?”
Sam reacted to her obvious deflection with a widened grin. “I’d love to tag along, but I think you ought to go by yourself. Our boy’s flying here because of you, not me. That said, I’m looking forward to our big reunion dinner in Old Town.”
Meta removed Sylvie’s scarf and carefully folded it, intending to wash it and return it to her later. Sylvie and the children were out somewhere, given how quiet the apartment was. “You know how he pretends to hate kids. Calls them puling pip-squeaks, filthy little rugrats, and like that—I’m sure you’ve heard him on this topic. But I think under all the crustiness, he actually loves them.”
“He’ll love these, I hope. They’re the only ones I’ve got. Will you be able to book him a room in the hotel I suggested, or do you need help with that?”
“We got it all organized earlier this morning, thanks,” said Meta, thinking, Listen to me, already using we.
“Where’s the manuscript?” Sam asked, nodding at Meta’s empty hands.
“Under lock and key at Gerrit’s, temporarily. You don’t have a safe-deposit box at the bank, do you?”
Sam’s second grin was like his first. Nothing patronizing. Just the tender hint of a fraternal smile. “How long have we been living cheek by jowl—your smooth cheek, my stubbly jowl? What possible use would I have for a safe-deposit box? This here’s all I got, girl. A family and a piano, none of which would fit in a bank drawer vault. The pages are safe on Jánská.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
Sam glanced at his watch. “Look, I have to leave for a lesson now but I had an idea and insist you agree. You should take a day off from all things sonata. When Mandelbaum gets here, I’m not sure which way the wind’s going to blow, but I’m sure it’ll blow,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, a tic that Meta interpreted as his way of expressing kindred exhaustion. “I’m going to sub your lessons while he’s here, and won’t take no for an answer. You have more important things to worry about.”
Meta hugged him, and said, “Thanks from the heart, Sam. That’s the best idea I’ve heard in ages. I have something I need to do with a clear head, and this will help.”
Sam held her away, looking her fondly in the eyes. “Now go change your clothes.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, grateful for such a sane and decent friend.
It was true, she thought, when the rooms fell into a rich silence after Sam departed, there was something that needed doing. And now, not later. She had been abroad far longer than either she or Jonathan ever anticipated. The tectonics of their once content relationship had shifted in ways that, last summer, would hardly have been imaginable. Occasional friction in some of their earlier phone conversations had given way to calls that invariably ended up in ditches. Jonathan’s voice, formerly softened by a solicitor’s training, now often blazed with frustration, even anger.
He had every right, she supposed. Open-eyed, she’d left him behind while she went off chasing after chimeras. But now that she’d actually caught one? Impulsiveness had never been in her nature, Meta thought. Duplicity either. She’d never slept with another man behind a boyfriend’s back. Even when the boyfriend—one of her pale, slender, undeniably gifted musician boyfriends back in her early twenties—thought monogamy was some obscure rule of harmony used in Gregorian chants, or that fidelity really only referred to sound quality on an old LP. When she and Jonathan began thinking of themselves as boyfriend and girlfriend, monogamy and fidelity were unstated, unquestioned pacts. But that had changed. Standing by the kitchen sink, she drank a glass of water before dialing Jonathan on her cell.
“What time is it anyway?” he asked, in lieu of any hello.
“Why are you whispering?” Meta asked in turn.
“Three in the morning, for crying out loud. Look, hang on a second.”
She could hear muffled talking before Jonathan said, in his regular voice, “I’m glad you called actually. I was going to try to reach you today.”
“Well, it’s good that I—” she started to say.
“No, listen,” he interrupted, a delicate resolve underscoring his words. “I do have something I need to tell you, Meta, and I’ve been racking my brain to find an easy way to say this, but there is no easy way, except—”
“We both know things have changed. I feel bad that—”
“Please, Meta. I need for you to know that I’m seeing someone else.”
That did silence her.
“Someone else,” she echoed, flat as ice. “Does Gillian know?”
“Nobody knows. It only just happened. You were going to be the first person I told.”
His announcement was so blunt that Meta felt faint. Sure, she knew it wasn’t fair to expect him to sit home while she dashed around Prague for two months now hoping to bag “phantom butterflies with a net full of holes”—one of Jonathan’s nastier criticisms of her quest during yet another recent exchange. But for all the strife and her own guilt about Gerrit, she hadn’t really believed it would come to this. Leaning hard against the countertop, she tried to think what to say next. Surprise, anger, relief, an absolutely unfair trace of jealousy, curiosity, a weight lifted—Meta experienced quick waves of contradictory emotions, some of them riptides, others calming a rough sea.
“So, well, I guess I’m happy for you,” she managed, voice cracking, hearing the words issue from her and knowing how insincere they sounded.
But Jonathan felt compelled to continue. “Gillian told me you’re looking into selling your piano. I wanted you to know I’d like to buy it and give it to you as a kind of peace offering, or whatever you’d want to call it.”
“That’s kind but I don’t think so. Who is she?”
“No one you know.”
“Somebody at the office,” she conjectured aloud, not as a question or an accusation. It occurred to her that the other voice she’d heard must have been Jonathan’s new lover in his bed at this very moment.
“Yes. Her n
ame—”
“That’s all right.” Her face felt warm and cold at the same time. “As you say, I don’t know her.”
“Meta, I’m sorry. It all happened very unexpectedly. I’ve told her everything about you and she feels terrible about the situation, but she really respects what you’re doing.”
She had called to confess to him about Gerrit but hesitated. A rotten damned-if-she-did, damned-if-she-didn’t dilemma. She needed to come clean, but had no desire to appear competitive. Was the best compromise to leave her confession until later? Jonathan was not like past boyfriends. He was a good man, just not her good man.
When she didn’t speak, he continued, “I want to help you if there’s any way I can. A loan, whatever you need.”
“Oh, God, no. That’s all right, Jonathan. I’ll get along.”
More silence poured over the line before Jonathan filled it with a last offer. “I can still take care of your mail and plants and the rest until you get back.”
“Watering my ficus tree is not a priority. Honestly, don’t worry about it. I can ask Gillie to pick up the slack.”
“If she’s too busy—”
“My mother can help out, or give them away. You need to move on, Jonathan, make a clean break. Maybe one thing you could do would be to take your clothes out of the closet, whatever other personal stuff, sometime before I come home.”
“To be sure,” he said.
“Oh, and the ring. I can either send it back to you, or when I get home we can make some arrangement.”
“Keep it, please.”
“No, I’m sure you paid a lot for it. That’s not fair.”
“Listen, do me a favor. Would you sell it, and keep the money?”
Meta wanted neither to sell the ring nor to keep any money from its sale, but hearing the awkward strain in his words, she knew it was best to drop the matter. “I’ll give it some thought. Meantime, I’m sorry I haven’t handled things better on my end. I mean that.”
They hadn’t finished saying goodbye for five minutes before Meta called him back to admit that she hadn’t been a saint, hadn’t been faithful, and gave him the faintest sketch about Gerrit Mills and herself. It was imperative to get this off her chest. Even though she knew it didn’t matter anymore, she needed to apologize.
“So we’re even, looks like” was his curiously toneless response, neither accepting nor rejecting her apology.
“It’s not about being even,” she said. “That’s not how I see things. I just didn’t want you to feel bad that you were the only one who strayed.”
“I’ll take it all under advisement.”
That was him, she thought after they hung up the second and final time. That was the Jonathan she could never fully wrap her life around.
Gerrit was waiting for her in front of the Sternberg Palace, museum tickets in hand. When she saw him waving, trepidation about what she was doing receded, though she still felt the pressure of threatening tears. “Picture album, then Jiří’s opening?”
“I’m all yours,” she said.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “So this is your family portrait gallery?” She held his hand, stayed close to him as they entered the museum.
In the first years after he’d settled in Prague, Gerrit often found himself wandering the halls of the Sternberg Palace, a baroque pile that housed the National Gallery’s collection of European art. So many favorites were here. El Greco, Rousseau, Kokoschka, not to mention Brueghel. Whenever he needed a break from an assignment, wanted to clear his head, he had haunted the Sternberg. What compelled him about the paintings was not so much style and period, but rather the people depicted in them. To Gerrit, the faces weren’t of long-deceased painters’ models. Instead, they were regular people one might encounter on any given day. Costumes and equipage might change, the scenery might be of other eras, but in a good painting the faces were always as contemporary as his friends and family. These were real people who lived in real times, ate, drank, loved, fought, prayed, hoped, and died.
“Would you like to meet my mother first?”
“It seems only polite.”
He led her to a second-floor gallery. Frans Pieter de Grebber. Portrait of a Young Lady, 1630.
“Not everything here is exactly right. Grebber got a few details wrong. But this is basically her.”
“She’s lovely.”
“The eyes are probably the closest. Hers are exactly this blue. The high, broad forehead is right on the money. And my mother has rosy cheeks just like this. She blushes on a dime.”
“What’s her name, your mother’s?”
“Helena,” he said, adding, “and my father is Alex, Americanized from Aleš when they moved to the States, which is kind of funny since he insisted we speak Czech at home until I was in grade school. He’s in another wing. You’ll have to forgive him his tights and rapier. Usually he wears a business suit.”
“Shall we visit him?”
“I want to show you somebody else first. His name was Emil.”
Gerrit had grown serious, an almost imperceptible shadow passing across his face. She now sensed they were here for more than a lark.
The galleries were all but empty, earlier crowds having left as the sunlight in the tall windows dimmed. Meta and Gerrit walked hand in hand past sarcophagi and still lifes, their footfalls resounding on the polished wooden floorboards.
“Here he is.”
Meta squinted at the placard. Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos, circa 1520. Giovan Francesco Caroto. A moody oil of a young man with luxuriant long brown wavy hair, seated on a rampart, abstractedly watching a black bird peck at an open Bible.
“Early sixteenth century,” she read. “Your friend Emil is even older than your mother,” turning to Gerrit to offer him a smile for bringing her here, introducing her to the people in his life in such an endearing and original way. But Gerrit’s face had fallen. She waited, looking from the dreamy idealistic saint to this pained man who unconsciously squeezed her hand. “You want to tell me about him?”
“This isn’t Emil, obviously. But I think if he’d lived and grown up, at one point in his life he might have looked a little like this. He was my brother, ten years older than me. He died in the Prague Spring.”
“He was only, what, thirteen at the time? You said you were three when your parents fled the Communist crackdown.”
Gerrit led her away toward one of the triple-height windows along the corridor that looked out over a series of walled gardens and tile roofs beyond. Meta leaned against him as he described how his brother had joined some friends protesting the Soviet tanks and wound up getting shot in the stomach. At first it seemed he was going to pull through, but he apparently suffered a sudden hemorrhage in the hospital one night, couldn’t be saved. Gerrit’s parents buried him in a cemetery near the small cottage they rented each summer up in the mountains, and after the service they decided to continue over the border with their younger son rather than risk staying in a brutalized country. His grandparents followed soon after that, the whole family settling in and around New York.
“In all these years,” he continued, “even after the revolution, my parents have refused to come back to visit me. I used to plead with them, tell them everything’s different now, but I gave up a long time ago. I get their trauma and have to respect their adamance. Every so often I visit Emil on behalf of all of us, put flowers on his grave, clear the leaves.”
“I’m so sorry, Gerrit.” Her voice was as soft as the fading light. “Sorry for your parents too. Do you have any actual photos of him?”
“I’ll show you sometime,” placing his lips briefly against her temple. “But really, I prefer seeing Emil in that painting, thinking of him as somehow still around.”
Together they toured other galleries, pausing now and then as Gerrit showed Meta oils in which his grandfather, grandmother, old girlfriends, college pals were depicted. Meta joined in herself, telling him that the young woman in a seventeenth-c
entury portrait looked much like her friend Gillian.
“Just that Gillie is allergic to lace. Gives her a rash.”
Although he might not have fully understood it before, Gerrit realized that Meta’s presence here in Prague kindled a reawakening in him beyond the love he’d begun to feel for her. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution—not since those days a decade ago had he felt history as raw and unfettered as he did now, seeing Meta’s frustration and joy, hearing Tomáš’s story, holding in his own hands manuscript pages from centuries before. Finding himself again in the midst of living history gave him a jolt of purpose.
For her part, Meta realized as they left the Sternberg Palace that she’d never felt closer to anyone. She knew her breakup with Jonathan, which she’d tell Gerrit about later, was sad, a loss—music might better express what she felt than these paltry words—but in its way it was also a blessing. She knew, too, that war had never directly touched her life, while Irena, Otylie, Jakub, Tomáš, and Gerrit had all been shaped in one way or another by different wars, different political conflicts. Now their wars seemed to be reshaping her.
After a quiet tram ride up the river, they walked to Jiří’s warehouse atelier. As they made their way down the long central corridor of the industrial building, which had been divided into individual studios, Meta was reminded of the small pulsating galleries back home in Soho and Chelsea. Some of Jiří’s fellow artists were at work on sculptures and paintings, visible beyond open doors. Pop and jazz music emanated from these colorful interiors, as did the mingled odors of oils, acrylics, and welding. It was, Meta thought, the diametric opposite of the Sternberg, which was hushed with dignified calm and smelled of floor polish and the faintest perfume of female museumgoers.
Vivid and kinetic as the art was that she glimpsed in passing, nothing prepared her for the explosion of crimsons, cobalts, viridians, ebonies, and other hues in the spectrum that greeted them when they entered Jiří’s studio and pushed through the noisy crowd. His canvases were enormous. Some were rectangular while others stretched into idiosyncratic shapes, octagons and trapezoids. It was immediately clear that Jiří was both serious and radical.
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