If it is possible for a member of the faculty to drop out of school that is what Arthur and his daughter did. He disappeared and left his colleagues with four classes adrift like bottles in midocean. Rinse decided to bus one bunch to Oberlin for the Fauré Requiem and regretted the ride. Buses, when every seat is occupied by a stranger, can be cheap, convenient, and restful ways to travel. Unless the bus careens over an embankment and tips, it gives the hits, it does not receive them. But when a bus is transporting what is called a group, there are likely to be singing and other forms of merriment—jokes, nips, make outs, disorderly glee—and a weakening of the leader’s position. It was unlikely that the man who spoke with his hands left by car because he didn’t seem to drive. Perhaps his hands were too busy with their obedience to God’s will. Perhaps he took a bus to Uhrichsville and the train from there. Perhaps he had his goods shipped, whatever they were. His flute. His piccolo. His recorder. Dottie’s clarinet.
The last time Professor Skizzen saw Professor Arthur Devise the man was sitting on a campus bench like an ampersand. Skizzen studied, from a safe distance, those hands, but what he saw was a very ordinary clench.
From The Prague Sonatas
Bradford Morrow
… we are in the situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light at the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light at the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties.
—Franz Kafka
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1917
ALL WARS BEGIN WITH music. Her father told her that when she was nine years old. The fife and drum. The marching songs, sung to the rhythm of boots tramping their way to battle. The bugle’s call for an infantry to charge. Even the wailing bassoon sirens that precede bombardment and the piccolo whistles of falling bombs themselves. War is music and music is war, he said, his breath sharp with garlic from their evening stew and mulled wine. He was frantic with the truth of his idea.
The girl looked up from her pillow and said nothing. She had no siblings, and her mother was already dead of the influenza that was sweeping across Europe like a scythe. This soldier father of hers, in peacetime a devoted piano teacher at the local conservatory, was all she had left. She knew she needed to remember what he said even if she didn’t really understand. She did her best to focus on him, a raving blur in her candlelit room, more a mad dream than a man, his voice melodic if a little slurred. Not just the outset but the end of war is music, too. Dirges of the defeated will always be played in counterpoint with the fanfare of victors. The screams of the fallen are the second measure in the symphony opened by the crack of gunshots. Think of it as God’s duet of tears and triumph, from the day war is declared to the day the surrenders are signed.
Why do people fight wars? the girl asked.
Because God lets them, he answered, suddenly quieter.
But why does he let them?
He thought for a moment, tucking the wool blanket under her chin, before saying, Because God loves music and so he must abide war.
Don’t go back, she pleaded in a voice so faint she herself hardly heard the words. He traced his fingers over her forehead, moving her fine brown hair away from her face so that he could see his daughter better. When he kissed her forehead, she could smell the vanilla and cinnamon she’d mixed in with his wine. And that was how she would always remember him, there where he stood by her bed, her papa, whispering his good nights, this wisp of a man in his tattered uniform and thin boots, with coal-bright eyes and a deep tenor voice that never failed to convince the girl of whatever puddings came into his head. She fell asleep lullabyed in the arms of a song she had heard some men singing on the village road in a language she could not understand. It’s a long way to Berlin, but we’ll get there, boys. The following day, her father’s furlough was up and he was gone before she woke, leaving her in the care of a widow neighbor.
Within a week of his drunken evening rhapsody he was dead, one of the unfortunate last to fall in that war that was supposed to end all wars. Barraged in some desperate muddy trench as the tanks rolled through and mustard gas settled over the ruined land like clouds of ghosts, leaving her another orphan of the Great War. She was packed off to live with a French-Bohemian aunt in the Vyšehrad district of Prague, capital of what was now to become the independent state of Czechoslovakia. On the crowded train, clutching a valise containing her few clothes, a wedding silver print of her parents, and an antique musical manuscript her father had inherited from her grandfather, and before that from her grandfather’s grandfather, Otýlie made a pact with herself. She would never again listen to men who talked war. And she would never sing or play music as long as she lived.
When war came raging once more into her life on a gray morning, the fifteenth of March, 1939, she thought of her father’s last words to her. She didn’t hear his fife and drum. No bugle blared. The tympani of gunfire didn’t shatter the air. But music was there on the first day just as he had promised. Voices rose up together as masses of Czechs crowded Wenceslas Square to protest the German troops marching into Prague. Otýlie, now thirty, saw the unfolding nightmare from behind the sheer curtains of her third-floor apartment window as a wan sun struggled to peek through the blustery clouds. Another mad dream. Many thousands of men and women bundled in overcoats and shawls were pushed aside by the advancing soldiers, shoved against the facades of buildings as they defiantly sang the Czech national anthem. A wintry wind blew across the cobblestones under the sky dim as an eclipse. Crisp snow fell over the spires and statuary while the crowds sang with patriotic anger in the faces of the occupiers, Kde domov můj … where is my homeland? The opening line of the anthem had never before made such poignant sense, Otýlie thought. A keening requiem for the dead had begun and, look, the first shot hadn’t even been fired.
Her immediate concern was for her husband, Jakub. He had gone to work early that day. Would he get back home before the inevitable violence broke out? So many of Prague’s narrow, serpentine streets would be dangerous to negotiate if a throng were to stampede or the troops begin making sweeps. His shop was by the river near the university, in Josefov. Antiquarian artifacts, religious objects, some musical instruments, a miscellany of antique things. If he had any knowledge of what was happening, he would right now be spiriting the most precious items to his backroom safe so he could lock up shop and return to Wenceslas. He would move the finger-polished ivory mezuzot and old siddurim, the silver Torah ornaments and havdalah sets, the porcelain seder plates and ornate menorahs out of the display window. A virginal with a cracked soundboard that dated back to the year Mozart completed Don Giovanni in Prague and conducted the opera at the Estates Theater here, he would hide under an old packing blanket. Some manuscripts by lesser composers, Franz Christoph Neubauer, for one, or Anton Kraft, whose best-known Cello Concerto in D major had actually been composed by Haydn, would be locked in the bottom drawer of his desk along with a clutch of letters from Čapek, the Czech writer who coined the word robot. His shop was a mishmash of culture. It wouldn’t be so much a matter of salvaging inventory, she knew, as protecting heritage.
Whispers and shouts echoed in the hallway of the apartment building. Someone asked what in the world was happening and another answered, You didn’t hear the announcement on the radio this morning? What announcement? President Hácha was summoned to an emergency meeting with Hitler last night, the first woman rasped as Otýlie pressed her ear to the door, eavesdropping. Dragged him up to Berlin on no notice, sick as he is. Berlin, she thought with a scowl. The same crazy Berlin those johnnies sang about two decades earlier. They’re saying the Führer threatened to bomb Prague into rubble if Hácha didn’t put us under the Reich’s protection. So he knuckled under and signed in the middle of the night. Doesn’t sound like he had much of a choice, the other voice responded. No, and besides, the first SS troops, Leibstan
darte Adolf Hitler they’re called, had already crossed into Moravská Ostrava and overrun the fortifications there. They said on the radio that Prague would be occupied this morning, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. Our army’s under German command now. The police, the government. Everything’s just turned upside down overnight. Hitler promised if we resist in any way we’ll be crushed. Prague will cease to exist, is what he said. Ježišmarja, what are we supposed to do? Stay calm, the radio told us, and go about our business as if today were any other day of the week. Madness!
She heard more shouting, and the conversation abruptly came to a halt. Otýlie, hands quaking, sat at the kitchen table and tried to gather her wits. They needed to escape. Jakub was too well known in intellectual and Jewish circles here to hope they would ignore him. She and her husband had read about the bloody pogroms in Vienna just the year before and understood what Hitler had in mind, despite any initial assurances he might make to the contrary. Maybe the train station hadn’t been secured yet. Perhaps they could somehow get to Paris, to London, and from there, with luck, to America. She knew her husband would scoff at such a plan. I may not be the most courageous man, he would say, but I’m no runner. The problem was, as she well understood, there was an important difference between her and Jakub. She had been touched by war once, and he hadn’t. Kubičku, my Jakub, she thought, panic rising like some flaring ember caught in her chest.
Another neighbor, an émigré named Franz Bittner who had recently moved into the next flat, knocked on her door to see if she was all right. No one in Prague was all right, she managed to say. He shook his head and handed her his cat, asking if she wouldn’t mind taking care of it until he came back. He’d been outside and said they were marching in endless columns of three across the Charles Bridge, their rifles bayoneted, past the statues of the Madonna and John the Baptist and the rest. Shaven, grim, disciplined boys in uniforms and helmets, each with a jaw set square as some marionette with a fixed mouth. Not one of them glanced up at the sculpted figures mounted on the bridge pillars, he said, but stared dead ahead toward the Týn Cathedral towers as if they already owned the city. Where are you going? she asked, holding the poor squirming beast in her arms. No time to explain other than that he’d been a Social Democrat before he fled Sudetenland, was known to the Gestapo as an anti-Nazi, and was going to seek asylum at the American Legation. She wished him luck and, after locking the door behind him, set out a bowl of milk for his marmalade kitty, realizing that in the confusion of the moment she’d forgotten to ask him its name. Later that same day she would learn he had committed suicide after being turned away by the Americans.
The world was about to change, radically and forever. Her eyes darted around the room before settling on the wedding photograph of her father and mother with their confident faces almost stolidly serene. She took the photograph down from where it hung on the wall and sat at the kitchen table, studying their faces. So many different tones of fear, she thought. Chromatic scales of terror, semitones of horror. Her parents’ was the simple newlywed fear of somehow failing to make life work out perfectly, to draw the dream toward them as if it were tethered on a golden string and all they needed to do was gently, tenderly pull. She too had felt that newlywed fear, and she and Jakub had lived a golden-dream life, despite not having had any children. Love’s early fears now seemed so innocent. For the first time in her life she could comprehend her father’s terror at returning to the deadly fields of battle; his fond, drunken lecture about music and war was a heroic, misguided attempt to mitigate what he most loved and hated. Her own terror, here, now, like his had been, arose from the deep certainty of being cornered, trapped, doomed. Her end might wait until tomorrow, it might be delayed for a month or even a year. It might coil itself like a viper around her this very day. But whether today or some other day, she knew for a visceral fact that Otýlie Bartošová was not going to escape this new specter that had just entered her life.
She rose and peered out the tall window that overlooked the square. More Germans down there now than Czechs, some long open-air staff cars carrying officers, flanked by SS Guard Battalions armed to the hilt, and motorcycle troops. Men hoisting banners emblazoned with the swastika. Maybe Emil Hácha knew what was best for his country, Otýlie thought for one thinly hopeful moment. Perhaps this wasn’t the aggressors’ invasion it appeared to be, but instead a way of defending Prague against the depravities of other forces. As she watched the surging masses, she couldn’t help but wonder about those soldiers marching in tight ranks down alien streets, hearing outraged mobs sing words that clearly were not welcoming. Were they, too, frightened behind all their fresh pink-cheeked military reserve? She saw some tussling between day laborers and the columns of soldiers along the periphery, beneath the unleafed trees. Several heavy pounding sounds in the distance and a roar went up from the crowd. A drumbeat, also far away. And was it possible she heard the strains of a brass band or was it just the cat crying?
Jakub would surely have left the shop in Josefov by now. Two hours had passed since the first troops made their appearance. The antikva was small, just a narrow cavern with high ornate ceilings, its facade a door and display window. Otýlie had to believe he’d finished hiding the valuables, shut off the lights, closed, and locked up. This meant he was either delayed by the growing crowds of townspeople and Nazis flooding the squares and streets or that he had been arrested. Numb, without giving matters further thought, she pulled out a suitcase from the back of their bedroom closet and began to pack. Some shirts of his, underclothing, an extra pair of flannel trousers, and a jacket. His favorite cravat, the black silk one he wore for graduation exercises at the engineering school, before he left that trade for the shop he inherited from his father. His grandfather’s worn tefillin and wool tallit woven with gold threads. For herself, she folded some dresses, toiletries, hose, a pair of lace gloves her mother had passed down to her. Lace gloves, she smirked, the silly things we cherish. Just like the last time she was displaced by war, she also packed the photograph of her parents. Her chest was heaving although no tears filled her eyes. She used to be a weeper when she was a little girl but that was centuries ago. With effort, she got the overstuffed suitcase closed and buckled its leather straps in place.
Then there was the matter of the manuscript. Both her birthright and burden for these two decades since her father’s death. Her birthright because its fragile pages, whose staves were scored with musical notes in sepia ink by a furious, impassioned, anonymous hand sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, had been passed down through seven generations of her family, gaining an air of mystery and hieratic status with every decade. Her burden because the sheaf never failed to remind Otýlie of how that last war stranded her in the world. Left her with a girl’s memories and little else of value besides that studio portrait of her mother and father and this piece of unidentified music, a sonata in three movements entrusted to her by a man whose mad and maddening words on their last night together had turned her against the thing. Guard it as if it were your own child, he told her when she was still a child herself, and indeed, she’d more than once cradled it in her young arms. She could almost hear her father telling her, Get it away from them, don’t let them take it from you at any cost. Over the years there had been times, melancholy moments, when she wondered if this handwritten manuscript with its watermarked paper and haunted history—like some bad-luck talisman—ought best be destroyed. But reason, or perhaps sentiment, got the better of her always and it still lay protected in the deerskin satchel where it had survived for lifetimes on end.
She knew the manuscript was more important than she cared to admit. Jakub himself had done some research into it, once she finally told him about its existence. He had shown it to a musicologist friend who expressed great excitement about the possibilities of its origins. This was several years into their marriage. One would have thought it was a skeleton in her closet, a dirty secret, the way she had kept it
s very existence hidden from him for so long. He even asked her if it had been stolen, perhaps, by some great-grandfather whose moldering memory she wanted to protect. But when he realized the connection between the document and her father’s death, he never delved into her ambiguous feelings about it again.
He did delve as deeply as he could into the manuscript itself, though. It fascinated him, even obsessed him a little. The three moons and letters AV in the watermark, he told Otýlie, suggested that the paper was fabricated in Austria during the late seventeen hundreds. The brown ink, the holograph style of the score, the stitching holes down the left side of the leaves that indicated it once had been bound, even the pagination in a dark russet crayon from a later period—the more he learned, the more everything about the object only underscored its authenticity. Questions about it chased around in his mind. How did it come to be in the possession of his wife’s family? Was this a copyist’s hand or the composer’s own? Who had written it? Would it be possible someday to unravel its story?
What an unforgettable evening it had been the summer before last, when Jakub finally convinced Otýlie to allow the piece to be performed by a pianist who was friends with the couple, in his atelier in Malá Strana, on an honest if defective Bösendorfer grand piano, sight-reading the score before an audience of a dozen acquaintances, including Otýlie’s best friend, Irena Svobodová, who had long urged her to make peace with the manuscript and what it represented. Three sonatas were performed that night. The private evening concert began with the crown of Haydn’s piano works, the Sonata in E-flat major, followed by Beethoven’s F minor, his audacious first, a work the younger composer dedicated to Haydn, who had been his teacher in Vienna. After these came the Prague sonata, as Otýlie had come to call it since much of its nameless, mute existence, so far as she could determine, had been spent here.
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 28
