The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  “I’m glad those days are over,” he said.

  “So am I,” she admitted, marveling at how much her horizons had expanded beyond European music of the nineteenth century and before. If early in her American life Otylie had been told that a day would come when she’d love upbeat swing music, weepy cowboy ballads, the music of Woody Guthrie and other American folksingers, she would have dismissed the notion as an insult. But as it turned out, many were the Saturday nights when she and Danek dressed up in the appropriate outfits and joined others at dances in a regional Grange hall, in the church basement, even out under the stars during summer gatherings before a park band shell with live music. Music grew to be central to her and Danek’s lives. Twice a month, Otylie hosted a potluck dinner recital at their home, inviting anyone who owned an instrument—accordion, guitar, clarinet, washboard—to come on over and play after a smorgasbord meal of macaroni and cheese, meat loaf, cole slaw, and all the rest. She and Danek invested in a turntable and speakers, and made biweekly trips to their favorite record stores to add LPs to their collection. From classical to bluegrass, their tastes were eclectic, and music emanated from their windows from morning to night.

  On occasion, though less frequently over the years, when Danek was on his shift and no pupils were scheduled to come to their modest bungalow in Woods Park for a lesson, Otylie pulled out the sonata manuscript and played the first movement. Sometimes tears welled in her eyes as she did so, tears of remembrance, tears of frustration, but also tears of joy—or something akin to joy. She had long since dismissed her father’s drunken theory, from their last night together, that war is music and music is war. This passage of music had survived its share of wars and more often than not offered Otylie peace. At other times she simply marveled at what she was playing and wondered if her father’s speculations about who composed this actually did have merit or were, as she had always feared, fanciful illusions.

  The man had been a dreamer, but also a true musician. And this fragment of unknown paternity—illusions be damned—proved without a doubt that his taste in music was unerring. She regretted not having made copies of the other movements so that she would have the work in its entirety, but reminded herself how brutal were those hours in which she was forced to make so many life-and-death decisions. Her focus had been on Jakub, his abrupt disappearance into the resistance, and when she looked back she began to realize that she’d chosen to break up the manuscript not only in an attempt to make it worthless to the Nazis but as an act of solidarity with Jakub himself. If the sheaf had finally made it from that gaunt boy—wasn’t his name Marek? it was so long ago—to her first husband, then at least he’d had something of hers to comfort him, maybe, in the darkest hours.

  Though the photograph of her parents, its details now somewhat sun faded, hung in the guest bedroom, and she occasionally reread randomly from the clutch of unsent letters she had written to Jakub, Otylie tried not to dwell in the past. When, one evening during dinner, Danek mentioned out of the blue that a colleague at the hospital had a brother who worked as a private detective and had, as he was told, “a hunting dog’s nose for tracking down anyone and anything, anywhere,” he asked Otylie if she’d like him to discuss locating Irena Svobodová. “Or maybe see about finding the lost parts of your father’s manuscript.”

  Otylie stared at her glass of water. Saying nothing, she took a drink from it, set it down. Finally, with the saddest smile on her face Danek had ever seen and with her eyes averted, she thanked him and said, “I think this is not what I want to do.”

  “You’re sure now? We can afford to have him look for you. Our savings are good. It wouldn’t cost too terribly much.”

  “You are so dear to offer this,” she said, a firm weight of finality in her voice. “But I think no.”

  Danek asked, “Can you tell me why? I know Irena was your best friend.”

  “She will always be.”

  “So then?”

  Otylie confessed, “It’s selfish of me. I hope you won’t think I’m a bad person.”

  “Never,” he said.

  “I just don’t want to risk disappointment, I cannot. Any hopes about that are over and it is better they are. I am here now. With you. It is enough, more than I ever dreamed possible.”

  He reached over and pressed her hand, which was neither cold nor trembling, and knew never to broach the subject again. Nor did he once during the twenty-three rich and affectionate years that followed, during which time the Hajeks grew old together, retiring as planned from Lincoln to the hamlet of Prague where, after his usual stroll up to the cemetery hill and back before supper on a perfect summer’s evening, Danek collapsed while taking off his jacket in the hallway of their house.

  Otylie, having heard an odd muffled cry and soft dull sound, came rushing from the kitchen in the back, expecting to find that a neighbor’s child had wandered in—no one locked doors in Prague—and maybe tripped and fallen. Expecting it was her imagination playing tricks on her. Expecting anything other than her husband lying there inert and unresponsive. She tried to revive him, tears spilling onto his face and shirt as she pushed her palms against his chest, thinking he’d suffered a heart attack. Seeing that her efforts were failing, she rushed to the phone and called the local doctor, a fishing buddy of Danek’s, who came immediately. But there was nothing for it. An unsuspected aneurysm in the brain had burst and her husband was gone. Otylie began to shiver as she watched him taken away, and though a neighbor placed the heavy crocheted afghan from the sofa around her shoulders, she felt she would never be warm again.

  Jane and Jim Burke as well as several others made the trip up from Texas to attend the funeral, along with former colleagues from the hospital, friends from Lincoln days, and a host of Praguers. The small hillside prairie cemetery rarely saw so many people gathered at once from such different walks of life—doctors, farmers, pupils, the local pharmacist, the village banker, the mechanic who only the week before had installed new brakes in the Hajeks’ Chevy. Some were Czech Americans, some not. Some knew Danek well, others in passing along the sidewalks of town. More than a few showed up to support his widow, who had taught them to play music, which, along with family and church, was one thing that deeply bound this community.

  As she listened to the eulogies, Otylie couldn’t help but admit to herself that she had always quietly hoped it would be she who went first. Danek would have missed her, she knew, just as she was now fated to miss him, but he was always so resilient. He would have survived, even thrived. Not that she herself wasn’t a proven survivor, but being a survivor meant that you lived to some degree in a chronic state of mourning, like a low-level fever that waxes and wanes but is never truly eliminated.

  While the minister read a psalm from scripture, Otylie strayed from his words and found herself wondering if she would ever fathom life, ever understand herself. Was that what we were here to do? Fathom life? Understand ourselves? Even if it were possible, she mused as the last prayers were uttered and the funeral drew toward a close, what then? Understanding was a fluid thing because, like music, it flows and shifts and reinvents itself with every passing moment. Worthy of reaching toward, yes, always. But finally beyond our human grasp. It was too mercurial, too capricious, too unstable to rely on as a sturdy truth.

  She had friends here, some of whom would stick by her for a little while, she knew, and others whom she could count on as her own life moved forward. So she determined to set aside her darker thoughts about mortality and understanding and try her level best to be heartened by the outpouring of kindness and condolences shown to her following Danek’s interment. The wildflowers that grew in abundance on this hushed hill nodded as if in assent.

  Still, though, when everyone left—including darling Jane, who stayed with her for three whole weeks after the burial—there she was, alone again. This time, she believed, for good. Her life would now be a matter of sheer routine. Rising, going through the day, sleeping, dreaming. Rising, going through the day.
Nothing more of importance would ever happen to her. Rather than being depressed by this thought, Otylie Bartošová Hajek accepted it. For all of the storms in her life, she believed she had been more fortunate than many.

  7

  WITH TIME TIGHT and resources getting tighter, the side excursion from their starting point in Prague, Arkansas, to the all but nonexistent community of Praha, Texas, was an admitted indulgence. But what was one more day on the road?

  “Besides,” said Meta, “we’re just following your philosophy of life.”

  “Really now.” Gerrit raised his eyebrows. “And what philosophy of life is that?”

  “You don’t remember what you said on our first date, do you.”

  “I don’t remember that we officially had a first date.”

  “Sure, up at that open-air café in Hradčany near the castle? You told me you didn’t believe that anything is finally a waste of time. I thought you were just trying to cheer me up. But now I think you’re exactly right.”

  Having struck out completely on their first stop—no Bartošovás in municipal records, nursing homes, cemetery logs—they decided that an afternoon in tiny Praha was all they needed to determine that Otylie was not there. Very few people from the past or present were. There was no town hall, so they asked at the parish church, where a man in bib overalls who appeared to be the custodian told them, in a mix of Spanish and English, he knew nothing that would be of help. Nor did a nearby antiques, or rather junk and funky knickknacks, dealer have any ideas. They checked the cemetery, smaller than the one in Arkansas, but found no sign of Otylie.

  For all that, as they drove up I-35 North together in the silver Accord they’d rented in Little Rock, they felt closer to each other than at any moment in the past. After phoning Gerrit’s family to say he’d be visiting New York soon with someone he wanted them to meet, as well as Meta’s mother to let her know they’d landed in Arkansas and were on their way to Nebraska—“You’re what?” she’d exclaimed—they took turns at the wheel. They stopped for take-out cheeseburgers and chatted about sights along the way during their seven hours’ drive up from Texas to Oklahoma City, just another couple, in love, on the second leg of their first road trip together.

  From the moment they stepped off the plane in Little Rock, each of them had felt the strangeness of being back in America. In her performing days, besides playing on both coasts, Meta had taken the stage at festivals in the Midwest and West—Chicago and Minneapolis, Aspen and Santa Fe. But this part of the country was new to her, exhilarating and exotic in its way—the impossibly theatrical sky, the only partly tamed wildlands—if disconcerting. And while Gerrit had visited these parts before, simply having been away from America for so long left him in a bit of culture shock.

  Throughout the drive east from Oklahoma City to their next Prague, a heavy wind buffeted the car, propelling bits of debris and the occasional tumbleweed across the highway. In distinct contrast to the travelers, the weather had a bad-tempered cast to it, with gray and old-bone-white clouds snaking around themselves, and with spitting rain blowing sideways in gusts.

  “I’d say we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Gerrit joked.

  “And we haven’t even gotten to Kansas yet.” Gesturing at the landscape, she said, “I know there are people who would totally hate spending five minutes in Manhattan, and I get it, but I doubt I could make it out here. You really need to have a pioneer heart to live under a sky like this, knowing it can drop down and erase you and your town whenever it likes.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m not predicting a tornado in our near future. Don’t think it’s the season.”

  “Hope your meteorology’s up to speed. But I guess I’m wondering how Otylie managed the transitions from Prague to London and then out here, assuming that’s what she did. My sense is that if anybody could handle it, she could.”

  The car was buffeted again. Silence settled for a time between them as another mile clicked by, and then Meta exhaled hard, slapped her palms against the steering wheel, and said, “Damn it, Gerrit. I hope to God she’s still alive.”

  “I’m with you on that,” he said, surprised by her sudden stridency.

  “But for personal reasons. It’s crazy, but I feel so bonded to her. It’s like I actually miss her.”

  A highway sign and an auto-shop billboard that read “Czech Us Out!” made it plain they were near. When they turned off the highway and drove into town, the wind was whipping worse than before. They parked on Jim Thorpe Boulevard—named after the great athlete who was the town’s most famous native son—and entered the chamber of commerce building. A birdlike woman in a brown worsted suit was eager to help, and together they went through town records and more contemporary census accountings on the chamber’s computer, but without luck. When she said, “The Historical Museum is open this afternoon if you’d like to try there,” they thanked her and, undeterred, walked over to Broadway, a street wider than the highway so that farm equipment drawn by teams of horses could make U-turns in the days before Thorpe was born. The museum, a squat squarish brick affair, proved to be a treasure chest of Bohemian memorabilia. Two women volunteers assisted them as they read handwritten ledgers and historical records, looking for an Otylie or a Tilly or anyone named Bartoš or Bartošová who might have lived in Prague during the last fifty years. But again, they were forced to concede they had come up empty.

  “You’ve been so helpful,” Meta said, trying to hide her sense of defeat, especially in light of how deep-rooted this community’s investment was in its Czech legacy.

  “Wish we could have found what you’re looking for,” one of the volunteers replied. “There’s three cemeteries. The Prague cemetery on the road out toward Paden, the Catholic cemetery, and the Czech cemetery. But I misdoubt she’d be resting in any of them if there’s no record of her here.”

  The day was getting old and dark, the sky and wind no less ugly. They left this most recent Prague in time to make it back to Oklahoma City for the night, and checked into the first motel they spotted just before the daylong winds finally ushered in cold rain. In the morning, drinking from Styrofoam cups the thin coffee they brewed in their room, they spread out the maps they’d picked up at a gas station and plotted their next move. The skies had mostly cleared overnight. A sunrise of frosty pinks and silvers was reflected in puddles in the parking lot outside.

  “Well, our last and least Prague is about four hundred and sixty miles north of here. Should take us seven, maybe eight hours.”

  “Why do you say ‘least’?” asked Gerrit. He had awakened before Meta and lain in bed worrying about how she was going to handle not finding the first movement of the sonata. Her brief outburst in the car had startled him into the realization that if this third and final American Prague didn’t turn up Otylie Bartošová, Meta could easily make the mistake of considering her quest a failure.

  “Oh, I don’t mean it derogatorily. The opposite. Just it’s the smallest of the three Pragues and pretty much my last chance. If we drive straight through and the weather stays nice, by tomorrow sometime we’ll have been able to knock on every door in town. Then we’ll know.”

  “Meta. Remember Venus de Milo, hear me?”

  She nodded at him without saying anything, but he could see the worry there.

  “Besides, it’s not your last chance. We’ll go back to New York and regroup. We haven’t checked national census records yet, and there are other ways to find people. We’re not out of options.”

  He weighed whether to share with Meta the information he’d learned about Wittmann when they were in London. It had been quite a stretch since then—four days? Five? The travel from Prague to Pragues began to blur. He decided to wait until after the trip north. “Some breakfast first?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  “I’m famished,” she agreed. “Shall we just grab something and eat it on the road?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  They packed their few belongings after a quick s
hower and set off for, as Gerrit had taken to spelling it in his notebook, having learned how the name was pronounced out here, Praygue.

  UNNERVED BUT UNBOWED, WITTMANN lit the first of many cigarettes he would smoke that day, then tossed his match into the gutter as he stood looking up and down the street in front of Mandelbaum’s hotel. Not that he expected to see the man’s back as he disappeared around a corner like some tawdry rat. Mandelbaum was neither tawdry nor a rat, he knew, but rather had become someone who no longer seemed to understand how the world worked.

  To think he, Wittmann, had been naive enough to believe he had formed a collegial pact with his American friend. Not collaborative, no. Not symbiotic. But, at minimum, the beginnings of a civilized negotiation. Moving uneasily together toward a common goal, improvising their way as they had done in times past. For him to have checked out like this without the common courtesy of a forewarning, a simple call? And where precisely were his acolyte and the goddamn manuscript? He couldn’t remember feeling such a combination of disgust, chagrin, even dread—of not being in firm control of his corner of the world.

  Now here he stood with nothing more than a note on hotel stationery, sealed in an envelope with its fancy engraved coat of arms, which the desk clerk handed him while they exchanged a few cordial unpleasantries of their own.

  Please, Wittmann had tried, offering the younger man in his somewhat military-style hotel uniform a gracious smile. I’ve been trying to call him since yesterday. I expect that if you dial him from the front desk, you’ll have better luck getting through.