The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  He did, he said, although he only kind of did. Still, it wasn’t hard to imagine electric guitar feedback replicating jets. The drums and cymbals, bombs. The throbbing bass, maybe copters spiraling down into an orange inferno.

  “Even that song over there?” Meta nodded across the fountain toward where the distorted music was coming from. “There’s machine-gun fire in that syncopated riff right before the chorus. Hear it? Duh-dah. Duh-dah, duh-dah, dud-dah-dahdah.”

  “Now I do,” he said, hearing it in fact.

  The two sat for a moment, listening. Children screeched as they ran beneath the fountain geyser. Somewhere a dog barked without letup while skateboarders clattered on. Pigeons cooed, pecking at bread crumbs thrown by an old, bent woman wrapped in shawls.

  “You still have room for dessert, I hope.” Meta pulled out the goodies she had brought with her. “They had cannoli, profiteroles, and napoleons. I wasn’t sure which you’d like, so I got all three.”

  He watched her with a sudden giddy desire, as the daylight caught in her long brown eyelashes and paved smooth panels across the translucent skin of her cheeks and chin. Her wide, porcelain brow had a two-inch-long crescent scar on it, which in his eyes only made her more desirable. Her silk-straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders was parted in an unkempt zigzag down the middle. She repeatedly hooked stray strands of it behind her ear with a flick of the skittish fingers of her right hand. When she did this, her hand took on a curious clawlike shape, somewhat deformed and yet at the same time loose and elegant. At first he thought it might be a tic, but as he began to pay closer attention, he noticed there was something decidedly, physiologically wrong with her hand. Muscle spasm from playing too much? Injury, maybe? He wanted to ask but figured that the story, if there was one, would come out of its own accord. Pointing at an imperfection was hardly the best move to make during what amounted to a first date. Besides, her hair tucking was a mannerism Jonathan found endearing, maybe because it relieved him to think that she too was nervous.

  Meta wasn’t classically beautiful, but she was striking, someone who often drew a second glance from strangers. She looked, it occurred to Jonathan, like a person one had known for a lifetime. The simplicity of what she wore—a black-and-white-striped tank top, faded blue jeans just starting to go at the knees, a pair of pumpkin canvas espadrilles—only added to his feeling of warm familiarity. Later that night, he confessed to Gillian that the alfresco lunch had shaken him to the quick. He was convinced he had, that afternoon in the park, fallen in love with his little sister’s friend Meta Taverner.

  By Christmas they were inseparable. They traded books, recordings, photographs from when they were younger. They went out dancing. They hit as many heavy-metal rock concerts as classical, from Slayer to Stravinsky, Testament to Telemann—Jonathan gamely teased her, “Meta the Metalhead”—not to mention jazz in sacred cellars on Seventh Avenue. Now and then they discussed moving in together, but for one reason or another this hadn’t come to pass. What was the rush anyway, Meta pointed out, reasoning that the studio Jonathan had found on Tompkins Square was right nearby. They were comfortable enough with things as they were.

  The one barrier to absolute openness between them, at least by Jonathan’s lights, was Meta’s reticence about her hand. Seeing that she was never going to broach the subject, he finally gathered up the courage to ask her what was wrong.

  “Long story,” she said, her words all of a sudden staccato.

  “I have plenty of time.”

  Despite herself, unconscious of putting the hand on display, she whisked a bundle of hair behind her reddening ear and said, “Car accident. My father driving too fast. I was in the passenger seat. That’s all, that’s it.”

  “Sounds like there’s a lot more.”

  “Much as I adore you, Jonathan, it’s baggage I’d rather not unpack,” her voice unwontedly pinched.

  “If you ever want to talk—”

  “One day maybe. Just not today,” she said with a tight-lipped smile. “I hope you understand.”

  He didn’t, but told her he did.

  The day after Meta’s party, Gillian called to wish her a happy birthday, apologizing again for missing the bash. “I always feel guilty when I get sick,” she said, coughing. “A hospice nurse really can’t afford to be felled by mere bronchitis.”

  “We’re all allowed to get colds once in a while, nurses included,” said Meta.

  “Maybe so, but that’s not why I’m calling. I still want to give you your birthday present.”

  “It can wait. Let me bring over some matzo ball soup.” “Thanks, but actually, no, it can’t wait. You have a pen and paper?”

  Struck by the sharp, serious tone of her friend’s words, Meta reached for a pad. “All right, shoot.”

  “You remember that elderly Eastern European woman, the cancer patient at your recital at the outpatient facility?”

  “Hard to forget her. She was a real ball of light, despite her illness. I hope she’s still hanging in there.”

  “She is, tells me she can’t believe she’s lived to see the year 2000. I’m not supposed to get involved in these people’s personal lives, but it’s not always possible to avoid. So I went last weekend to visit her in Queens. She’s all alone, refuses to consider inpatient care. I took her a goodie basket, some halvah, nectarines, fresh sesame bagels.”

  “You went uninvited?”

  “I got her address off the insurance records in the database, did everything contrary to hospital regulations. Something told me I needed to go see her and so I did.”

  “You’re too much,” Meta said admiringly, her pencil still hovering over the scratch pad, ready to write down whatever would make it clear how any of this constituted a birthday present.

  “Here’s the deal. She’s been asking after you, so I want you to take down her address.”

  As Meta wrote, she asked, “You want me to go keep her company?”

  “No, listen. She showed me something I think you’d better have a look at. After your recital, she mentioned it every time I saw her, but I didn’t really take it seriously until I was there at her home. She pulled it out of a hiding place under the base of this old trunk, what do you call those—”

  “False bottom?”

  “Right, and showed me one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever laid eyes on. Like something you’d only see in a museum. A music manuscript. She claims it’s from the eighteenth century. Unknown, unpublished, has a whole saga behind it. When she asked about what you did, I told her how, since the accident, you’ve spent your life studying this kind of stuff.”

  “You told her about my hand?”

  “It only seemed right since she hardly talked about anything besides you. She liked the way you played, liked that you volunteer to perform for people who are too sick to go to any Carnegie Hall. The upshot is, she seems almost frantic for you to see this thing. Can you go?”

  “Of course I will. Just so you know, though, the chances are good her manuscript’s a little more recent than all that. But I’m happy to have a look. When are you free?”

  “Meta, you need to see her now. Don’t wait for me. I can’t risk infecting her, and she could well be in her last weeks.”

  “I’ll go right away. Do I call first?”

  “She’s expecting you. Just when you ring her bell, you have to be patient. It takes her a while to get to the door. Happy birthday.”

  “Well, Gillie, as birthday gifts go, this has got to be one of the weirdest.”

  “You know me.”

  “I’m lucky to. Thanks for this. Feel better,” and they hung up.

  One of the partygoers had given Meta a large box of Polish chocolate in a bright red-and-gold wrapper—Maestria, it was called, with a card saying Maestria for la maestra. She packed it into her shoulder bag, threw on her jacket, and headed out.

  Seated on the subway, she realized her thoughts were as scattered as the newspaper pages on the seat and floor beside her.
She was at once tired from having stayed up so late and unnerved by this foray into a neighborhood she didn’t know to see a dying woman she had met only once in passing. As the lights in the tunnel shot by, a small radiant burst caught the corner of her eye and she glanced down at her lap. There on her finger was the ring Jonathan had given her after they made love. He had left the bed and retrieved a small leather box from the pocket of his sport coat.

  “I almost forgot,” he said, handing it to her where she lay propped on an elbow, naked in the tangle of sheets and disarray of pillows, then laughed uneasily. “Don’t worry. Not an engagement band.”

  She opened it to find an antique silver ring set with an oval of dark green malachite. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and thanked him with another kiss after slipping it onto her index finger since it didn’t fit any of her others.

  “Next week we can get it resized,” he said, before turning off the bedside lamp and falling asleep.

  The ring kept her awake for a while before she too drifted off. Despite Jonathan’s disclaimer, she knew—they both knew—that he cherished the idea of marriage and family. He and Gillian had grown up in a big, fairly happy clan, and that was, to him, an ideal as steady and present as the rule of law itself.

  She had never worn jewelry on her fingers or hands, not even a wristwatch, since she got serious about playing piano as a child. The chafing, the constriction, the slight weight bothered her just enough that it never seemed worth the fuss. But now that she was officially out of contention for the concert circuit, reduced to playing for the love of it at hospitals or for public school children or at institutes for the blind, what good was an old habit that prevented her from wearing a ring?

  It had taken her some long, grueling years to come back as far as she had from near paralysis. She’d urged herself through thousands of hours of grinding, arthritic, torturous scales. Several surgeries and intense physical therapy got her to a place where she could perform with quite wonderful competence. But for one whose sole desire from an early age had been to achieve not competence but incandescence, even transcendence, each of Meta’s triumphs during her long recovery was tempered by the inevitable unspoken question, What would this have sounded like if the accident hadn’t happened? Thanks to one of her mentors, she did experience a single, glorious night performing Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at a gala benefit concert for the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The reviews lauding her pianistic dynamism and artistry spent more space on the personal tragedy that had interrupted a potentially major career. As much as being back onstage with an orchestra exhilarated her, she hated the idea of being a curiosity. It was best, she believed, that she limit herself to charitable recitals and teaching young prodigies such as she’d once been. Beyond that she would put all of her knowledge and energy into musicological work.

  No, she thought as the subway jostled around a bend, strange as the ring felt on her finger, there wasn’t any rational reason to beg Jonathan’s forgiveness and take it off. She firmly folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, returned to the present. Was she really about to find an important unpublished score in Queens, of all places? The prospects were slim to nil, she knew. Still, it couldn’t hurt her karma to comfort a dying stranger. Gillie’s birthday gift was a chance to give, she thought as the train pulled into her station.

  Yet there was an infinitesimal chance something might come of it. Hadn’t those chorale works of Bach, the Neumeister Collection, only surfaced in the pop-rock eighties? And in the disco seventies wasn’t Bach’s masterpiece, his personal revised copy of the Goldberg Variations, discovered in Strasbourg like some living, breathing unicorn that had stepped out of a mythical forest? Just the decade before, when the British Invasion was at its peak, weren’t two lost Chopin waltzes, tied together with blue ribbon, unearthed in the composer’s great-grandmother’s trunk in a château outside Paris?

  Sure, life was brief, art long. But the life of art on paper was notoriously vulnerable, unless it happened to be a drawing by Rembrandt or Renoir. Even the manuscripts of writers and statesmen had a better survival rate than music scores, it seemed. Meta wondered, as she walked down the tree-lined streets of Queens toward Kalmia Avenue, if it wasn’t because people could understand and therefore treasure pictures and words. To many, the notes and staves of a music manuscript might as well be an army of ants carrying sticks and flags down a four-lane highway. Either way, she could have been spending the first day of her new decade on lesser pursuits than chasing a unicorn.

  MORE QUICKLY THAN OTYLIE or anyone else imagined it possible, the Nazis reinvented Prague. They reassigned each street and square a German name. The river Vltava, which flowed through the center of the city, became the Moldau for the first time since the Hapsburg rule in the prior century. Czechs, accustomed to driving on the left-hand side of the road, were forced to drive on the right in accordance with German custom. In Prag wird Rechts gefahren! Political parties were abolished, radio and newspapers censored. A torture chamber was established by the Gestapo at Petschek Palace. Jewish businesses were Aryanized even before the deportations began.

  Other things changed too, as the new order crystallized. Concealing weapons was strictly unlawful. Possessing a broadcasting set ensured an appearance before a firing squad. Whenever SS troops paraded down streets, passersby were expected to halt, remove their hats, and stand at attention as a sign of respect for the swastika banners or marching band playing “Deutschland über alles” or the “Horst Wessel Song,” anthem of the Nazi Party. The world Otylie had known since she was nine years old was being annihilated.

  Every day, as the eerie, seething quiet of vanquishment settled over Prague, Otylie walked to Josefov to see what, if anything, was happening at the shop. Not that she expected to find Jakub there sitting on the stool behind his counter reading, as had been his habit before this nightmare began. She had no idea what to expect. More than once she’d taken the key to the antikva with her, intending at least to remove the provocative sign in the window. But sentries were posted on every corner of the Jewish quarter, and she dared not expose herself as being in any way affiliated with the place. Intuition told her not to pause in front of the store lest her interest be noticed and she be taken in for questioning.

  On the fifth day of the Protectorate’s occupation, she side-glanced at the shop facade and saw that the door window had been smashed and boarded up. Jakub’s brave Odmítám sign had been removed and replaced with a poster printed in red and black stating that this establishment was closed until further notice. Otylie knew that it wouldn’t be long before they came knocking on her apartment door.

  She hastily returned home, bracing herself for ransacked rooms. After unlocking the door to find everything undisturbed, she grabbed her suitcase and satchel. Tucking the nameless cat inside her coat—his owner, she’d learned, had committed suicide after being turned away by the Americans—she left the building hoping to make it to Irena’s without being accosted. Doing her best not to appear nervous, she gave a submissive nod to a group of German soldiers who stood on a corner, smoking and chatting. One of them beckoned her over, but only wanted to pet the cat before waving her on. After that, she nimbly kept to deserted alleys and back streets when she could, then made a daring dash across a bridge upriver from the Charles, which was blocked by troops. Otylie was welcomed by Irena inside her courtyard flat, where Jánský vršek terminated at Vlašská.

  Jakub’s wife left no note for him that might lead the Gestapo to her. She knew he would find her hiding place without her laying down crumbs for the rats to follow.

  Within a week of sleepless nights and interminable days her guess was proved correct. But it wasn’t Jakub who knocked tentatively on Irena’s door. Instead it was Marek who turned up again, bearing fresh news, bringing her letters and money. He became their go-between and the one left to plead with her on Jakub’s behalf to emigrate immediately, before the noose was entirely closed, and take
Irena with her. No longer in Prague himself but hiding on its outskirts with a small, growing group of resisters preparing ways to mount an armed insurrection, Jakub had a plan in place for her, for them both. He had even made arrangements for her to work with the Czech resistance once she was safely resettled abroad. Her sedate, educated, humble Jakub, who loved nothing better than to hike with her to the top of Petřín Hill to picnic on Sundays or go to the Municipal House in the evening to hear a string quartet, was now a conspirator against the Reich.

  Bitterness and uneasy pride were what she felt. The confounding part was that her pride made her unhappy with herself and bitterness left her feeling hollow. The anger she’d always felt toward her father for not having stayed with her now began to form like a wicked storm cloud against Jakub.

  What was he thinking? Not of her. Not of them. She sensed her heart was turning on itself, growing black and ugly. Irena reminded her that Jakub had exiled himself from Prague, his birthplace, sending an emissary rather than coming to her himself, because he was trying to protect her from guilt by association. She knew her friend was right.

  Irena’s husband returned from Brno, and although he was a generous man, Otylie could see that harboring the wife of a fugitive—for by then the Gestapo were openly looking for Jakub—made him sick with worry. Marek brought her rumors that summer of England’s and France’s impending clash with Germany. The news was sent by Jakub, whose colleagues monitored the situation on their contraband radios in secret safe houses dotting the forests and farmlands surrounding Prague.

  Jakub says it is now or never, Marek told her. He says you must listen to him if you love him.

  If I love him? she exclaimed. He knows I love him.

  Then you must do as he insists. This is what he says.

  Otylie Bartošová fled occupied Prague in mid-August that year, not two weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France finally declared war on Germany. Marek was to escort her to a safe house in the woods east of the city, where, if things worked out, her hosts would bring her to say goodbye to Jakub. Travel light, bring little or nothing with you, her husband instructed her. And be prepared to abandon the plan to see each other if the situation becomes too risky. More lives than just theirs were now at stake.