“We’re both good at theorizing, or we used to be. Correct?”
Wittmann nodded, a deep frown carved into the flesh of his lips.
“I’ve heard everything you’ve said, and while I might have differing opinions, I’m not deaf. Nor am I dumb. Dumb in any sense of the word.”
“No one said you were—”
“Please, Petr. Your turn to listen. You might not hate what you’re about to hear, so let me speak.”
Wittmann lit another cigarette and snapped out the match flame with several quick flicks of the wrist, trying to betray nothing though his irritation now edged toward curiosity.
“Meta trusts me and listens to me,” the American continued. “If—and this is a very theoretical if, mind you, the iffiest of ifs—if she fails to locate the initial owner, and if I were to tell her to give you the originals of both movements so they may be offered for sale to whatever collection you feel would be best suited for their preservation here, would you agree, privately but in writing, to two things in return?”
“One ‘if’ calls for another, though you’ve presented two. I will agree if I logically can.”
“The caveats are easy enough to guess. One, Meta gets full credit for her discovery and you help her as originally requested with authentication and attribution. That much you already knew. Two, she benefits from the proceeds of the sale—”
“But—”
“Hear me out. She benefits together with the Lang family, assuming their partial ownership is proved. Details will remain, as in times past, confidential. I’m not saying you should be cut out, by the way. Whatever commissions, finder’s fees, contractual arrangements, and all that, you should certainly be accorded.”
“What about you?”
To Wittmann’s surprise, Mandelbaum answered, “I will take twenty percent of your twenty percent. In the old days we shared far more equally, but you’re left to do the heavier lifting this time.”
Wittmann stared past his colleague into the smoky room. “Why the change of heart?” he then asked, abruptly fixing his eyes on Mandelbaum.
“I don’t wish to see Meta or, for that matter, you, end up hurt. Not when there may be a compromise in which everyone gets what they want. Or mostly. You’ll need to make peace with her for this to work, you know. At the moment she’s not very pleased with you.”
“Do you think your displeased devotee could find such terms acceptable? She seems more intransigent than you ever were, and that’s saying something.”
Mandelbaum let the jab go by. “Well, that’s where more of the iffy part of this idea comes in. But I think if I tell her that you’re considering going to the authorities—a risky proposition, given your own Achilles’ heel in all this—it might soften her intransigence. Besides, she’s borderline broke.”
“Just what makes you think Johana Langová will agree to all this?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Mandelbaum said, with a faint forced smile.
“I already have,” Wittmann retorted, his voice dry as flame, any hint of banter gone. “The score must be kept in neutral hands until such time as the widow Bartošová is found, a highly unlikely scenario, but there it is. I doubt you would trust me to hold it myself, and I don’t particularly trust you or your young friend, no offense. Let us place it in the joint custody of Lang’s sister and daughter. Get them a bank box and give them the key with the understanding no one’s to have access until you and I both say so. Agreed?”
“Shall I broach the proposition to Meta then?” ignoring both question and proposal.
“You may,” said Wittmann. “But also, if you would, tell her that I’m not absolutely convinced I want or need to proceed this way.”
“Your friends in high places?” Mandelbaum frowned as he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his wallet, and said, “It would be best if I went to her with a more solid assurance than that.”
“Well, see what she says and get in touch.”
Each, as if on cue, placed on the table more than enough money to settle their bill.
“Let me know soon. Tomorrow would be good.”
“Day after would be better,” Mandelbaum countered. “I have to sit her down and talk all this through, give her time to think. As you yourself said, she can be obstinate and I don’t imagine I’ll have much luck persuading her to agree to any of this if I look like I’m forcing the issue.”
Curiously, Wittmann seemed to stare at the money on the table and made no response.
“Always good to see you, Petr,” Mandelbaum said as he got up. He pulled on his overcoat, which was hanging on a nearby peg next to others of various shapes, weights, and lengths, and slipped out of the cozy bar-restaurant into the wet Prague darkness.
4
JANE AND HER HUSBAND threw a barbecue for Otylie and Danek the night before they headed to Nebraska. The Burkes loved their parties, and though their friends would be back in a week, this was still a welcome excuse. In Otylie’s honor, Jim decided he would try to add something Czech to his standard baby back ribs, shell steaks, and chicken. His attempt to make fried cheese on the grill was a disaster, though, as it caught fire and dribbled into the bed of briquettes. The laughter this mishap provoked, he told his friends, was well worth the cost of the block of frozen Muenster. A self-appointed bartender poured highballs, and people helped themselves to bottles of beer from a big wash-tub filled with ice water. Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole floated over the backyard gathering from the hi-fi in the family room that gave onto the patio. When the two women found themselves alone in the kitchen, Jane slipped Otylie a sealed envelope.
“Now, you have to promise me you won’t open this until you get to Lincoln.”
“What is it?” asked Otylie.
“Nothing much. Just wanted to make your trip a little extra special.”
“Oh, Jane. You don’t have to make more of this than there is to it. I’m just going along for the ride to keep Danek company.”
“You never know,” said Jane.
When she opened the envelope several days later, at the Cornhusker Hotel in downtown Lincoln, Otylie found fifteen dollars inside. Jane’s note read, Told you it wasn’t much, hon, but please do me a favor and get yourself a dress with some pretty prairie flowers on it, promise me you will?
A sweet gesture, typical of Jane, but Otylie hoped her friend wouldn’t mind if instead she bought an inexpensive floral blouse and used the balance to help Danek with food and gas money. Since he’d allowed her to share some of the driving, which she loved to do, she felt it only fair that gas stations and eateries along the highway pocket her cash as well as his.
Riding in Danek’s years-old Fairlane, windows down as they made their way north, Otylie didn’t want to listen to any country-music radio stations, preferring Danny’s voice as he commented on every curious sight they saw. Little seemed to escape his notice. He pointed out creeks with quaint names like Running Turkey, Little Emma, Smoky Hill. Where the soil was red in Oklahoma, he remarked, it was black in Kansas. Around Salina, a grain elevator looked to him like Goliath’s tombstone.
“That crop there is sorghum, farther along it’ll be corn,” he said. And, “Look at all those redwing blackbirds, not usually a flocking type, and those white egrets fishing the aqueduct there.” Otylie listened with delight.
True to Danek’s word, they stayed in separate motel rooms, after dinner at a roadhouse or Mexican joint—Otylie had a weakness for sopaipillas and honey—and a twilight walk to stretch their legs before bed. For the first time since her younger days, she found herself wondering what it might be like to fall asleep in a man’s arms, or rather Danek’s arms, nestled next to him for the night. Which raised conflicted feelings about loyalty to Jakub, her Kocourek, her little tomcat, gone all these years. There was also this—it was well and good to carry on her inner dialogue, but what if Danek intended to maintain nothing greater than a close friendship with her?
Even if it all came to naught, Danek
had helped open her more to the world. Like him, she was in her mid-forties—well, forty-seven, to be honest—but could pass for years younger. Friends said she looked good, and she knew she was in robust health, for all the devilments of her earlier years. She fell asleep on her first night in Nebraska fully aware that she might have half a lifetime ahead yet to live, not squander.
Next morning, after breakfast, Danek went off to meet his potential new employers at the hospital while Otylie explored the city, really more a spread-out town. She visited the capitol with its colorful mosaics and murals and rather amusingly bawdy, to her mind, statue of a man sowing seeds atop the golden dome of its phallic-shaped tower. She wandered the grounds of the university, reminding herself that the novel Jane had given her to read was written by the same Willa Cather who went to school here. The blocks of unpretentious houses with their brick walks; the downtown barbershops and five-and-dimes and, yes, movie theaters with handsome marquees; the plaintive wail of steam engines rolling into or out of the busy rail yard; the singing meadowlarks—all that she saw and heard made Otylie feel oddly at home. And look, she thought, as she returned to the hotel to meet her companion, she hadn’t yet visited the namesake Prague! The Prague of the plains nestled in a small valley notch—they called it a “bottom” here—due north.
Danek liked what he saw at the hospital, the facility itself, the people he met. “More modern than I expected,” he told her over drinks in the Cornhusker bar. He weighed a palmful of salted peanuts he’d taken from a bowl on the counter, selected one and placed it in his mouth, the look on his face more contemplative than this trivial gesture might merit.
Otylie didn’t know whether to be excited or worried. “What’s the next step?”
“They want to see me again the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Peanuts?”
She shook her head. “And you’re going, right?”
As if waking up from a dream of sitting in another bar, speaking with another Otylie, eating other peanuts, Danek looked up from his palm and said, “Oh yes, absolutely.”
“That means we can drive up to Prague tomorrow?” She was careful to pronounce the name with a long a, Prāgue.
“Sure does. One of the interns gave me the name of a man there, Kliment, very nice I’m told, family goes way back in Saunders County. A wonderful musician, he said.”
“Music or polka?” Otylie teased.
“Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
Danek fell serious again, finished the last of his peanuts, and took a sip of Scotch.
“Did they tell you more about Prague?” she encouraged, wondering what was troubling him.
“Well, if we were looking for a settlement of Czech immigrants, this is the right place. Vavra, Janaček, Wirka, Rak—I’m only remembering a few names he told me,” Danek said. Then, out of the blue, “Otylie, they offered me the job—”
“I knew they would,” she exclaimed.
“—I’m not the most suave man,” he continued. “I’ve been a widower for a long time and I’ve been so grateful to have your friendship. What I want to say is, I don’t really want to accept their offer unless you’d consider coming with me. I mean, we’ve only just got here and tomorrow we’ll go up to Prague and give it a look-see. But I would only be interested in moving if you came too.”
Stunned, Otylie reached over and took both of Danek’s hands in hers.
“Look,” he said, lightly clearing his throat, “whether we move here, stay in Texas, or live on the moon, I’m wondering if you would marry me.”
She didn’t want to cry but did despite herself, nodding her head yes. “I will be honored to be your wife, dear Danek.”
Waking the next morning for the first time ever beside a man not Jakub Bartoš, Otylie experienced a cluster of emotions. She was grateful to have a fresh chance, she who’d rarely hoped for such a thing. Nervous, daunted, as well. Would she, who had so settled into a life of solitude and self-sufficiency, be able to make a good wife for Danek, a solitary and self-sufficient man? As he stirred her to life from a deep sleep, Otylie made a silent farewell to Jakub, whom she would or wouldn’t rejoin after death—she retained her doubts about the existence of hell and heaven beyond this world—telling him that she would always love him but now she had to live fully with her husband-to-be.
The drive from Lincoln up to Prague began in dense fog, under a pewter sky thick with low-running clouds, and ended in steady soaking rain. The metal roofs of barns caught the spare light and glimmered like square jewels in the distance. A small swift fox, wet and muddy, looking for all the world like a mysterious denizen of some secret underworld, crossed the raised road as they approached Valparaiso. All along, tatters of mist-clouds chased across their path like sails of ghost schooners that had come detached from their masts.
Hardly the popular vision of romance, Otylie thought, as the heavier rain let up and gave over to drizzle, but this was a day in her life she would never forget. Had the prairie sun been shining bright gold in a sky unblemished by a single cloud, it would have been the same to her. She felt feather-light and certain of the rightness of what she was doing.
The farther north they drove, the more the landscape rolled, hillier than they might have expected. After they’d crested a long rise that gave onto another long, shallow bowl of land, Prague finally came into view. The drizzly fog beginning to lift, they turned off the county road, crossed a bridge over a small stream, and soon enough found themselves driving alongside one of the grain elevators ubiquitous in this part of the world until they reached the foot of the town’s modest main street, where they parked.
“Place seems deserted,” Danek commented.
“I love it,” said Otylie, wondering what it must be like for an American of Czech descent to go to the homeland for the first time, stand on the Karlův most, gaze up at the castle, the Pražský hrad, and marvel at its centuries of history. Here, in this midwestern Prague, the centuries of history had nothing to do with citadels and statues, and everything to do with the earth and sky. It reminded her of childhood, and day trips she used to take with her parents into the countryside before the First World War, when her mother was strong.
They left the car and umbrella behind and walked the quiet streets of Prague, some of which simply dead-ended at the edge of a cornfield. Up behind the town rose a hill where there was a small cemetery near the town’s water tower, the tallest structure they saw aside from the grain elevator and church steeple. Hand in hand, they watched the last clouds break apart, in layers upon layers, allowing blue to emerge and an intermittent sun to shine on the wet trees and roofs of perhaps a hundred houses, a dozen commercial buildings, not many more, and unbounded farmlands. Otylie could only wonder if some folks who settled these fields and made a livelihood here so distant from Czechoslovakia had family or friends who had known any of her family and friends. The odds seemed small, but that didn’t stop her from turning to Danek and saying, “This may sound silly, but I feel more at home here than I’ve felt since I was exiled from Praha all those years ago.”
“Not silly at all. Shall we walk down, see about finding this Mr. Kliment and having lunch?”
The whole village, it seemed, or at least its farming men, were huddled in a small bar-restaurant on the main street. Weather had kept them from their soggy fields, and the grain elevator was silenced as well. When the couple entered, the air was dense with cigarette smoke; and taciturn camaraderie of the sort that comes from having grown up together in a tiny settlement where parents and grandparents had been raised. The visitors sat on stools since all the tables were already occupied by men, young and old, in overalls. Though welcomed by a brightly smiling waitress who passed them menus across the counter, Otylie for a moment wondered if this Prague was such a tight-knit community that outsiders might find it hard to fit in. As she and Danek ordered the daily special of duck and cabbage, most of the dialogue she heard was spoken in flat midwestern American accents although now and then she overheard snip
pets in Czenglish, which she found embarrassingly heartening. Nearly everything they said had to do with forecasts.
Finding Mr. Kliment wasn’t hard. They asked their waitress and, as it happened, her uncle, Josef Kliment, known to everyone in town as Joe, was a few stools down, nursing a cup of coffee and biding his time along with everyone else. Danek got up and introduced himself to Joe, whose unshaven face broke into a smile as friendly as that of his niece. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, Danek brought him over to meet Otylie.
“Joe, my fiancée. Otylie, Josef.”
“Těší mě,” tried Otylie, not knowing whether he would understand her or not.
Joe said, “Potěšení je na mé straně”—The pleasure is mine—with a clear American accent but in otherwise perfect Czech. “Your man tells me you’re from the old country.”
“Praha,” she nodded.
“Well,” said Joe, planting a pair of large hands on his narrow hips, “our Prague ain’t so grand as the original. But we like it here. Except for when it rains too much. Grinds the local industry to a halt, like you see.” He sat next to the couple as his niece brought his cup, set it down, refilled it. “So you could be moving up to these parts, Daniel here told me.”
“We haven’t worked out the details, but that’s the general idea,” Danek said, sitting again. “Through the hospital in Lincoln we’ll have subsidized housing to get started. But Otylie thinks one day she’d like to put down roots right here in Prague.”
“People here are friendly. Honest working folks. Just keep in mind there ain’t much to do unless you farm or raise a hive of kids.”
“Otylie’s a music teacher,” Danek said. “Is there much interest in music here? I was told you’re a musician yourself.”
“Me, I’m polka. But there’s all kinds of music out in the country.” After lunch, promising to come back and get a guided tour of the town—“It don’t take long”—they were given Joe’s telephone number. During the drive back to Lincoln, Otylie basked in the warmth of their visit. Because Prague was a little farther away from Lincoln than she’d imagined when looking at it on a map back in Texas, she settled in with the idea that they might live in Lincoln, visiting Prague often, attending its recitals and dances, then one day retire there if fate allowed. She even floored Danek by saying, “You know, I think I might try to get myself to like the polka. What’s to lose?”
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