“That all sounds terribly exciting for you,” Otylie said, feeling a sudden pang of abandonment.
“Hear me out. They’ve asked me if I would mind driving up to meet with them, see the facility, with the idea that if things worked out I would be given a better job there, more responsibility and higher pay, and what I’m wondering is if you might want to come along on the trip. I have vacation time I haven’t taken, and if you could steal a week off from your piano lessons, maybe—”
“You know I’d love to go, see this American Prague town too, if we could—”
“That’d be half the point. Of course we’d visit there, to boot.”
Otylie hesitated, feeling ridiculously prudish when she asked, “Would it be considered a little improper—is that the right word?—being that we’re not married?”
Danek surprised her by laughing. “No, no, dear Otylie. We’ll stay in separate rooms at the motels. Everything right and proper. Besides, it’s not like we’re not old enough to take a road trip together without a chaperone.”
“It’s a wonderful offer, Danny. And to get out of this Texas heat for a break—”
“Oh, they got their heat spells up there too. That’s corn belt territory.”
She wasn’t exactly sure what corn belt meant, but rather than asking, she said, “Do you mind if I sleep on it?”
“Not at all. Only want you to come along if you’d find pleasure in doing so,” he said, and they passed the rest of the morning chatting as they always did about politics—Danek liked this Nixon’s chances; Otylie preferred Kennedy—friends, movies, weather, whatever came to mind.
When Otylie told Jane later that day, she wasn’t surprised that her friend was madly enthusiastic to hear that things were, as she put it, “finally warming up” between the two. “I’m telling you flat out, girl. Nothing ventured, like they say.”
“Like who says?”
“Oh, it’s an old dusty attic of a phrase, ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ Forget that, though. The prairie’s beautiful, what with its honey-gold fields and sandy-bottom rivers so shallow you can wade across barefoot. Go, live!” To underscore her enthusiasm, she pulled down one of her favorite books from childhood, My Ántonia, and gave it to Otylie. “This was written years ago, but the heartland of Nebraska and the Bohemians who settled there haven’t changed all that much. Time kind of stands still on the prairie.”
That night, reading in bed, Otylie found the prose of Willa Cather’s novel simple enough to understand yet powerful, as if it had been written with her in mind. Skipping ahead to the final page, she read lines that especially moved her. They conjured a “road of Destiny” that
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
While Jakub could never travel any farther than he already had, Otylie realized that her road, no matter how it turned and twisted, no matter whether she traveled it alone or with a companion who possibly loved her—not as Jakub had, but in his own way—would surely reconnect with her husband’s when she, like he, took ultimate residence in the forever past.
3
THE TEMPO OF EVENTS QUICKENED in the wake of Meta’s revelation to Gerrit about the sonata’s possible origins. And as the tempo sped up, the purpose of every day, every hour, intensified. More than once, Meta had to remind herself to stop and breathe. Now that the pages were back in her hands, she was galvanized. If she had been committed to bringing together the three sonata movements before, now she wouldn’t rest until that came to pass.
When she finally got through to Mandelbaum in the morning, his tone was jarringly different than she might have expected. A flow of imperatives cascaded from the other end of the line, in a voice more clipped than she was used to hearing. Yes, he was relieved the manuscript had turned up, and yet, he continued, “Best not tell anyone you’ve found it. Too bad I was asleep when you called, but no matter. I’m meeting Wittmann again later on, and I don’t want him to know that we’ve spoken.”
“All right.”
“Also, I want to examine both movements before I see him,” he continued. “Is Sam free, you think?”
“I can ask, but I’m afraid I already told him I found it.”
“That’s fine. Sam’s the exception,” said Mandelbaum. “Call him and set it up, if you would. Do you have everything in order here in Prague?”
“What do you mean, ‘in order’?”
“Any outstanding business left, any loose threads dangling?”
“Not really, I suppose.”
“Good. Call Sam. Let’s meet as soon as possible.”
With that he hung up. In all her years of knowing Paul Mandelbaum, in the course of more than a hundred telephone conversations, he had never before hung up on Meta, nor had she ever heard him sound so agitated. That role had historically, if rarely, been hers. His had been that of the genial, teasing, methodical patriarch—her “old owl.”
They convened midday at Sam’s place. Mandelbaum was already there when Meta and Gerrit arrived, listening to Sam play the second movement, which he had nearly perfectly learned himself. When Meta heard the familiar music she felt the immediate equanimity of when she was a girl and their Saturday-morning apartment was filled with the warm sound of Jean-Pierre Rampal, her mother’s favorite flutist, on the record player.
“Here,” she said simply, handing Mandelbaum the leather attaché case.
The man withdrew the manuscript, and quietly studied the work, note by note. Seeing the two originals together for the first time made it clear to him, as it had been to Meta, that they were part of the same score. Dimensions were identical. Stitch holes large enough to accommodate cord or thin binding ribbons were punched down the fold at just the same places. A cursory glance was enough to let him see that both movements had been written by the same hand. The third movement was faded and its first and last leaves were damaged by unfortunate smearing, not to mention creasing and tears along the edges. On the first leaf, he noticed some faint words in Czech partly missing at the chipped top of the page. Neither Sylvie nor Gerrit could make them out. These disparities aside, the pair of movements had a similar, almost sibling-like, appearance. Their most conspicuous difference was plain as day. Irena’s movement, however peripatetic its history after it left Otylie’s possession, was in far better condition than Jakub’s—as if the manuscripts themselves were biographical likenesses of those who had carried them.
Arms crossed, Mandelbaum stood by the studio window as Meta performed the work through twice more. Gerrit couldn’t help but shoot furtive glances over at him, trying to get a measure of what he was thinking as the music unfolded, revealing itself like a formerly unknown species of avian life to an ornithologist whose whole world was birds. Though he presumed Mandelbaum was impressed by this lovely rondo, the professor’s face—blank while Meta played, enigmatic afterward—betrayed little. If he felt moved or mesmerized or vexed by the music, it didn’t show. It was as if he had left his body here in the studio with the rest of them while attending to more important business elsewhere.
The room went silent a second time as the last notes faded. A bittersweet wistfulness fell across the air, as weightless as a shadow. Not until this moment had the sonata seemed to Meta so destitute in its state of incompleteness. Was it possible for two ideas to actually yearn for a companion idea that might fulfill them? She, Paul, and Sam knew very well that a sonata need not by definition be in three movements. Nor were sonatas necessarily clear logical progressions from one movement to the next. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis—this was not the analytical morphology of the classical sonata. But what the three of them were hearing, each in a different way, was a story whose fountainhead of first notes was still wanting. The artist who wrote this music had an originating idea, a movement that had begun, like a life, with spontaneous energy
. Surely, it was out there somewhere.
Unlike the gathering on Šporkova, the several run-throughs in Vinohrady lasted only an hour. No celebration followed Meta’s performance. No dancing, no jubilant lifting of glasses. Instead, the manuscripts were collated and placed back inside Meta’s leather briefcase, and the visitors took leave of the Kettles with hugs and handshakes all around. Sam read in Mandelbaum’s pensive expression that he might not be seeing his old teacher again for a while. The idea made him unhappy but he understood. A break-in and the strange disappearance, then resurfacing of the movements—it was enough to make the most intrepid soul want to spirit the documents to a safer haven.
Once they were down in the streets, Mandelbaum’s disquietude only grew. “My intuition tells me that you might want to leave Prague sooner rather than later.”
“You don’t think Wittmann’s really going to escalate this, do you?” asked Meta. “We can put it in the safe at your hotel, like we should have in the first place.”
“Let’s deposit it there temporarily, since I don’t have a better idea. But it may not do for long.”
“Why?” she asked, perplexed.
Hearing the worry in Meta’s voice, Mandelbaum said, “Please forgive me. I don’t mean to be mysterious, but you don’t know everything and I’m not sure there’s time to catch you up. Let me talk with Petr and I’ll answer your question afterward.”
“Well,” Meta said, as they continued to walk, “if it’s all right with you, I think I’ll just hang on to it myself after all. I’ll feel better if I have it with me.”
“I’m not sure” was all the professor managed.
Gerrit squeezed Meta’s hand, an anticipatory gesture suggesting she might want to leave Mandelbaum to his own devices. He sensed there was much more to what the man was thinking about than the music they had heard.
Misinterpreting Gerrit’s clasp as a simple sign of affection, she asked her mentor, “You remember when I first spoke with you about this and instead of taking it out to Princeton I insisted you come to New York to see it?”
“Of course.”
“You laughed at me and said, ‘Very Conan Doyle of you, Meta,’ when I wouldn’t tell you more. Who’s being Conan Doyle now, Paul?”
A faint smile broke on Mandelbaum’s lips. “I can’t fairly disagree.”
“What’s wrong?” she pressed.
“After, I promise you. Besides, maybe I’m mistaken.”
Gerrit, seeing their impasse, took this as his opportunity to alter the landscape. “Can I ask what you thought of the music?”
“I would have imagined my response to it would be clear as the noon Angelus bells in Rome. It’s wonderful. But what’s even more interesting is—”
Meta picked up Mandelbaum’s sentence without missing a breath. “—that it’s a bit immature? Brilliant but just a little unpolished, right?”
“Unpolished?” Gerrit asked, dumbfounded.
“Well, unpolished might not be the most courteous term,” Mandelbaum agreed, brightening, the pedagogue in him rising to the fore now.
“Okay,” Meta interjected. “Knotty, rough, unfettered. I mean, there are a lot of terms one might apply. Still learning, but at the same time vigorous as a hurricane and virtuosic as—”
“Meta’s a better pianist than most, even after her injury,” Mandelbaum told Gerrit. “But as a vigorous young musicologist who’s still learning, she’s a bit unfettered herself.”
“Oh, please. We’re thinking along the same lines, aren’t we?” she countered, this time squeezing Gerrit’s hand, signaling that a meeting of the minds, a disclosure, possibly loomed. “It’s not Hummel or Hiller or somebody else who came later to the scene working in early Beethovenian modalities and voicings. Not to my mind, and not to yours either.”
“Well, as far as minds go, I think we may well both be out of ours,” Mandelbaum said, hurrying them along the cobblestone sidewalk as a less-than-gentle rain began to fall.
NO ONE BUT MARTA WOULD EVER KNOW that Tomáš committed suicide the night after the musicologists Wittmann and Kohout paid the pianist a visit. His death was his decision alone. And Marta believed that his decision needed to be privately honored. After a lifetime of trying and often failing to live up to others’ expectations and demands, he deserved not to be judged now.
She discovered him in bed the morning after the professors left Šporkova, the empty bottle of sedatives upright on the bedside table next to his bifocals. A volume of poems by Goethe that he had been reading was placed neatly beside the lamp. The look on his pale bluish face was serene, dignified. It was clear he hadn’t taken the handful of pills for insomnia, accidentally overdosing. As she stroked his cool forehead, Marta understood that her father had reached a turn in his road where he felt at peace, or at least squared, with the life he’d lived, and he had chosen to leave the path.
Breathing hard, she disposed of the pill bottle before calling the authorities. She would insist he’d died of natural causes. If the coroner’s office reached other conclusions, she would do her best to keep them confidential. She also secreted away the note Tomáš had written and left on the table. Curiously, it was not a letter of farewell or apology as Marta had expected when she first caught sight of it. The note, signed, stated that Tomáš intended to give the American girl Meta Taverner the two letters Otylie Bartošová had sent him so long ago. She needs them more than I do were the last words of the note, written in Czech in the old man’s shaky script.
Marta was comforted to see that her father’s final outward gesture was to help Meta in her quest to locate Otylie. If anything, she thought while seeing his body removed to the funeral home, it was Wittmann and Kohout, decorous and dignified with their nice suits and smooth urgency, who were to blame for this. Tomáš seemed to have aged a decade after their quietly terrorizing visit.
What’s the matter? she’d asked him as they sat down to dinner after the two left.
Nothing, nothing.
Aren’t you hungry? You haven’t touched a thing on your plate.
At that, Tomáš gamely took a bite of roasted potato and absentmindedly chewed.
What did those men want?
Nothing really.
That’s just not true and you know it. I was listening and I didn’t like what I heard. You want to discuss it?
No, he said, shaking his head as he reached for his cane to leave the table.
Fortunately, this was not their final exchange. When she took him his evening cup of steamed milk sprinkled with cinnamon, they spoke about how the weather was getting colder. Marta fetched a heavier goose-down comforter for his bed from a clothes press in the adjacent room, and filled the water decanter he kept on the same table where she would find the note the following morning.
“Dobrou noc,” she said, closing his door.
“Dobrou noc,” he answered, lifting his eyes from the page of Goethe bathed in lamplight. Good night, his last words.
Close friends in the neighborhood spent the morning with Marta, consoling her and one another, talking about funeral arrangements and reminiscing about how contented Tomáš had seemed since moving in with his widowed daughter. When Johana turned up from Josefov, however, the conversation took a darker turn.
If that American girl had never come here, my brother would still be alive, she said. The professor warned me she was nothing but trouble, and he was right. Ringing my bell at all hours, leaving me notes.
Aunt Johana, you’re wrong. But it’s not the time to—
She talked Tomáš into giving her our family’s treasure, the woman interrupted, her white crepe-skinned face growing even more blanched.
She did nothing of the kind. I witnessed the whole thing. It was what Father wanted. Besides, I need to remind you it was never our family’s treasure in the first place. It’s been in our care for a long time, so it may feel like it’s ours. But it belongs to the Bartošes.
Those ghosts? That Bartošová woman abandoned it years ago, just l
ike her martyr husband. Left it to my brother to hide in my house, put us all at risk, and you a tiny baby, that thing hidden in my wall. Imagine. And now look. The strain of it finally killed him.
Marta glanced around the room apologetically, then said, If anyone caused him undue strain, it was your friend Professor Wittmann. Now we should talk of other things.
Johana looked down at the carpet in the parlor as if the truth were somehow written in its pattern, then up again, startled, oddly, to find everyone staring at her. Maybe you are right, maybe wrong. I’m just an old lady, so don’t listen to me. He was my only brother, a fool sometimes. But I loved him from our earliest days and won’t stop loving him now that he’s gone.
With that, she began to weep. Marta heard insincerity in her aunt’s words, but also confusion, and went over to put an arm around her. The shock of Tomáš’s sudden death has overwhelmed her, she reminded herself. Grief takes many forms.
Only when she was finally alone in the house was Marta able to attend to Otylie’s letters. She saw no reason to delay fulfilling Tomáš’s last wish, sitting down to telephone the Hodeks, with whom she knew Meta was staying. The young woman, who in no way resembled the covetous interloper her aunt had described, deserved to know that her benefactor had died. In any case, now that everyone had left, Marta had to admit that she didn’t want to be by herself this evening. The rooms were too quiet. The ticking clocks bothered her. The dripping kitchen faucet chipped away at any hope of sad calm. Her father was gone, and Meta would appreciate the fact that with him went part of an era.
Within the hour, Meta and Gerrit were at Marta’s door, huddled under a wet umbrella. Handing her a bouquet of flowers, Meta said, “I can’t believe it. We’re both so sorry.”
“Come in before you get pneumonia.” Marta took the flowers, thanking them and giving each kisses on both cheeks. After they had hung up their coats in the foyer and stowed the sopping umbrella in a large amphora-shaped urn, she led them down the corridor to the kitchen. “The first time we met, we shared some brandy, I recall.”
The Prague Sonata Page 37