The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

Their unwritten contract in place, Irena reached for her walker and slowly rose. Meta followed her back into the living room. Beneath the bay window that overlooked the street sat a steamer trunk. At Irena’s direction, Meta opened it and removed several quilts, placing them neatly on a stuffed chair. Irena herself tugged out the lightweight false bottom of the trunk and retrieved the manuscript, which was housed in a modest and somewhat scuffed portfolio of dark burgundy goatskin.

  “Otylie, her complete original,” she said, walking to a nearby sofa and patting the cushion beside her, “it used to be in a leather pouch from the turn of last century. So when I get myself to America, I have a neighborhood cobbler make this to protect it.”

  Two other passages of music had originally accompanied the manuscript. She was pretty sure hers was the middle movement, adding, however, that Meta had “best not rely on an old lady’s foggy memory.” Nor could she remember which one had been entrusted to Jakub and which Otylie kept herself. She did recollect an evening long ago when the work had its only performance, at least in her lifetime. A friend of Jakub’s played it, though she didn’t recall his name. Meta assured her host that she would probably be able to confirm where this piece of the puzzle fitted with the other movements through an analysis of the music.

  “That will be relatively easy,” she told Irena. “More difficult and more essential, I think, will be to try to locate those lost parts. To restore the manuscript to wholeness, if it’s even possible.”

  “You will do this?” clutching the artifact in shaking hands. Assured that the young woman would try, Irena passed the satchel over.

  “May I?” At Irena’s nod, Meta unstrung the thong that was wound around a bone button, pulling an oblong sheaf of pages out into the afternoon light. Edges were yapped and frayed here and there, some smudges and stains obscured notations on the top leaf, but without any shadow of doubt what she held in her hands was not contemporary. Meta had studied quite a few nineteenth-century manuscripts, and even a cursory glance suggested this document was earlier than that. The cursive, the manner of hand-scribing the staves, the weight of the deckled paper, the whole appearance and feel of the document. In the silence of the room, ignoring the ticking metronome on the wall, she read the first dozen measures and heard the music in her head, and that was that. She was galvanized. If it proved to be a fake, it would be an exceptional fake, one of historical interest.

  Irena gently placed her hand on Meta’s forearm. “There is one more thing,” she said. “Look in the pouch. You will find a letter there.”

  Meta peered inside and indeed there was an envelope at the bottom of the portfolio. She pulled it out and handed it to the old woman, who withdrew and unfolded a sheet of pale blue paper. Someone had hurriedly written a few lines on the front, Meta assumed in Czech since she couldn’t read a word of it.

  “This is from Otylie. It says my responsibility is to take care of this until it can be put back with the other parts. Says I own it until that is possible, but I never think of it that way. Says too that I destroy it if the Nazis try to take it, but”—and here she smiled—“it is good I never had to do this.”

  She retrieved a pen from her purse, which was lying on the kitchen table, turned the letter over, and wrote on the back in a meticulous if somewhat shaky hand, This manuscript now the property of Meta—“How are you spelling your family name?”—Taverner until such time she is able to return this to Otylie Bartošová or heir, with agreed that she try to recover entire manuscript as were Otylie Bartošová’s stated wishes. Irena signed and dated the letter and handed it to Meta, who was speechless.

  The two sat for a moment in silence before the older woman said, “I’m tired now, dear.” She walked Meta to the door, where her jacket was hung on a coat tree. There they embraced like kinswomen.

  “I’ll come back to visit you in a few days, as soon as Gillian’s feeling better. Would you like that? We’ll bring you some more sweets to make you fat. Meantime, I will take good care of this, I promise.”

  Irena lingered on her front stoop, watching Meta walk away down the sidewalk under the shadow-puppeting shade trees with the portfolio cradled under her arm.

  2

  BACK IN HER OWN NEIGHBORHOOD, Meta felt disoriented. As if Queens were a fairy-tale dream from which she hadn’t fully awakened. Yet here was this satchel in her arms. She double-locked her door, cleared her desk, wiped it down with a dry cloth, and set the portfolio in the middle of this empty space. Then she went to the bathroom, washed her hands, and toweled them dry. Pushing up the sleeves of her blouse like a midwife about to assist in a birth, she carefully drew out the manuscript and set the leather folder to one side. On her face swam a look of mingled wonderment, focus, even fear.

  With reverent delicacy, she turned the pages one by one, eyes traveling across the busy staves that filled each leaf. This wasn’t going to be easy to play. Unaware she was doing so, she hummed an occasional phrase, tapped her toe gently on the floor. Meta might have sat down with the manuscript at her piano and performed it then and there. But she didn’t want to listen to it until she’d had time to study the piece, learn what its composer was saying.

  This was not your everyday second movement of a sonata, despite Irena’s recollecting that’s what it probably was. Brazen in its initial runs, the music settled now and again, only to move away into knotty clusters of sixteenth notes, like an impish acrobat who pretends to teeter off his tightrope high above the crowd, flails his arms as if he’s about to fall, until, nimbly, in slow motion, he moves on.

  Then, a plunge off a cliff—everything shifted to blacker registers. Gone was the acrobat. Gone were the playful, bucolic pace and tone of the earlier passage, which was, it now occurred to Meta, a feint, a dramatic setup. The meat, the soul of the dolorous passage had such a rich, slow sadness to it that, surprised, she turned back to the opening and reread the movement up to this radical shift in mood.

  With its moments of staggering power and slyness, the music seemed as fresh that day, to this young woman in her barbell flat, as it must have sounded when it was conceived. Who was the conceiver, though? And where were the fore and aft of this noteworthy craft? Halfway down the last page, the movement reached its resolution, its finale.

  There was more. Half a dozen measures, clearly the tantalizing first notes of the next movement, which ran to the last measure on the bottom of the verso, then simply dropped off into silence. A very different mood, a different texture, was hinted at here. Could it be a rondo theme gestating in these few measures? Whatever form the next movement took, it promised joy in the wake of the quasi-requiem tones of the adagio.

  What was most dumbfounding, she realized, sitting back on her wobbly oak chair in a state somewhere between grace and shock, was that she had never heard a single note of this work before. There were resonances with other music from the final important decades of the eighteenth century, when she suspected it might have been composed. But she had never encountered this particular series of notes and chord progressions. She couldn’t begin to claim to have heard all the piano music written during those years—that would be a lifetime’s endeavor—but this was one of her fields of expertise. Yet expert and expertise were terms she always distrusted because somehow they seemed so very dead. So terminal. As if once you were an expert, your life was essentially concluded because your trials and discoveries lay behind you.

  Expert or no, Meta understood that the manuscript was potentially a discovery of a high order. It was, at least, an important moment in her life. If her own thirty years constituted a first movement of a sonata, she sensed in her gut that she was right now living the opening notes of the second.

  At dinner with Jonathan that evening at their favorite Japanese restaurant, Meta found herself struggling to concentrate. The case his law firm was involved with had been inching its way toward the front pages of the newspapers. The alleged offenses were nothing new, but to anyone who read the tabloids, the corporate players were becoming ho
usehold names. Jonathan had been assisting one of his firm’s partners from day one of the litigation, and that afternoon the judge had thrown out the tampering charge and expressed concerns about the viability of the entire case. This major victory for the defense team resulted in no small measure from some of Jonathan’s own fieldwork.

  Meta had been following his progress with interest. But as he launched into a detailed account of how the wheels and cogs of justice turned, her mind ventured back to Irena. Those piercing blue eyes. The woman’s strength. The trust, the faith she had placed in Meta.

  “You look tired,” Jonathan said, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Me?” She glanced up from the wooden platter of yellowtail and tuna sushi, as guilty as if she’d been caught stealing. “I’m sorry. Guess I am.”

  “So tell me what you did with the first day of the rest of your life.”

  “Nothing special,” she hedged, knowing she wasn’t ready to share the magic of it with him yet. Not until she’d fully absorbed the day’s events. She couldn’t risk listening to Jonathan comment on possible legalities regarding ownership, rights, anything that would unsettle her quiet euphoria. But the next day, she telephoned Gillian. No way could she keep this from the one who had acted as catalyst.

  “It’s real,” Meta said, without preliminaries.

  “You’re sure?” Gillian asked.

  “Real as you or me.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet but I didn’t sleep last night thinking about it.” She glanced toward her desk, where the leather satchel still lay, and confessed she’d been too unsettled to play it out loud yet. Needed to study it more before committing it to the air. “But even slow sight-reads tell me volumes. Gillie, it’s magnificent, overwhelming.”

  “Irena’s going to be thrilled.” Gillian coughed, excused herself. “Have you told your guru yet?”

  “Mandelbaum’s my next call, but Gillie, I’m bringing you chicken soup today and won’t take no for an answer.”

  “This cough isn’t as bad as it sounds. So how old do you think it is?”

  Meta said it was far too early to offer anything beyond speculation, but she sensed it was a transitional work. “There are hints of late Mozart, stylistically traditional for the time but with some very weird, totally idiosyncratic stuff going on too. I’m not saying it couldn’t be later, written by someone fluent in the language and tropes of that era. But the paper looks to be period. I don’t know. I can tell you this. If it’s some sort of counterfeit, the person who did it was a genius in his own right. It doesn’t feel fake to me, though.”

  “Based on what?” She coughed again, said, “Okay, maybe I will take you up on that soup.”

  “Thank you. How can I put it? The musical decisions are just too strange to be fake. If you’re creating a fraud, you want it to conform, not revolt. This thing breaks the rules too much to blend into the crowd. Either way, Mandelbaum’s the only one I can trust to think it through with me.”

  “What did Jonathan say about it?”

  Here Meta hesitated. Then, guiltily, she said, “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “Why not?”

  She took a deep breath. “It’s hard to explain, Gillie. I just don’t think he’d get it, and I’m not even sure myself what I have on my hands. Please don’t say anything to him. I need time to figure out what to do.”

  The beat of silence at the other end of the line gave Meta a sinking feeling. But had she been asked by a dying mother to assume the responsibility of raising her crippled child, it wouldn’t have been a more serious commitment. Through every crisis she had suffered, music had been the lifeline that got her through. Neither love nor friendship, prayer nor sex, nature nor art, other than this one made up of noises produced on what were finally quite quirky machines—violin, oboe, French horn, double bass, the whole quaint graybeard crew that constituted an orchestra—had ever given her a deeper purpose. Music was a form of worship for Meta, and somehow Irena’s manuscript seemed destined to be her charge. She never talked with others in such overwrought, romantic terms about this core part of her life. But its centrality was never far from her mind. Much as she knew her friend’s brother loved her, she also knew he didn’t truly understand this about her.

  Gillian was speaking. “Well, I’m sure you’ll sort things out. I wouldn’t have sent you to her if I hadn’t thought you’d look after her wishes.”

  “I hope I can live up to your gift.”

  “You already have.”

  Paul Mandelbaum was the most lively minded music scholar Meta had ever met. Professor emeritus of the department of music at Columbia, and with a stack of honors and awards he’d never bothered to hang on any wall, Mandelbaum had recently retired with his wife to her childhood hometown, Lawrenceville, just outside Princeton, where he continued to write and publish and attend symposia at which he was accorded star treatment. Meta had been a darling of his while she was taking his classes as a visiting student from Juilliard, and he saw to it she was admitted to the Columbia musicology program with a full-ride fellowship once it was clear her performing days were over. She worked as his research assistant for several years before he rusticated to the Jersey flats, where he jokingly planned “to molder merrily away.” If she loved anyone unconditionally besides her mother, it was Paul Mandelbaum.

  “Hello? Me here. So, look, when do you have to be in the city next?”

  He shook his head at the voice on the receiver. That was his Meta. A curious, and to him endearing, counterpoint of impulsiveness and gravity. They hadn’t seen each other for months and this was how she began their conversation?

  “You forget. I’m retired, put out to pasture. I have no need to be in the city. Life’s already too exhausting.”

  “Oh, stop,” she scoffed. “You begged off my birthday, which was fine. But this is way more important than a birthday party. I have to show you something.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You just have to see it and tell me what you think.”

  “What’s to prevent you from getting on the train and bringing this thing, whatever it is, out to Princeton? We can have lunch on Nassau Street and then come back to our place. You can see your future as a retired musicologist living in a small stone house surrounded by people living in big stone houses.”

  “I’d rather not take it anywhere.”

  “Very Conan Doyle of you, Meta. Very foggy heaths and dripping grottoes. I hope no one’s been murdered.”

  “I’m serious, Paul. Let me show you what I’m talking about, get your opinion on it, and I’ll take you to lunch afterward. T-bone for two at that restaurant you like on University Place, with the half-moon booths and Hirschfeld drawings. Creamed spinach, onion rings, a dry martini or two, the works.”

  “The Knick?”

  “You got it.”

  “Well, all right then. I can’t very well turn down a chance at free creamed spinach, can I?” he mock-sighed.

  That night, as Jonathan slept, she knelt beside him, watching him breathe in and out, and tried to think. When they had made love earlier, he had shown unusual ferocity. After entering her, his belly to her back, he ungently rolled her facedown and began to thrust. Involuntarily, feeling oddly alone, she clenched her fists. It didn’t hurt, but there wasn’t pleasure in it either. After he came with a soundless shudder, Jonathan stretched himself out beside her, stared into the murky light of the room, and breathed heavily, whispering, “I love you” before falling asleep.

  Seeing him dream, twitching in his sleep, she pulled the sheet over his shoulders, realizing that Jonathan did, after all, have the instincts of a raptor. He must have felt an invisible tether, one of many that bound them together, come loose on her birthday and slip its cinch. Without so much as a harsh word exchanged between them, he had sensed her deception. What he communicated to her in bed that night, aside from his reassuring words, was that he was afraid. Afraid as a falcon might be, wary
and aggressive at the same time. She slid her head under her pillow, feeling herself to blame.

  After Jonathan had left the next morning, she went to her own trunk, opened it, and drew out the satchel containing the manuscript. The battered footlocker, with its broken lock, was one of the very few possessions given to her by her father. He pawned it off on his daughter, she figured, because in his rush to leave his family for another woman and a fresh start in Los Angeles, he hadn’t wanted to be bothered with such a cumbersome piece of junk. She kept spare linens in it. Winter clothes during summer. Summer clothes during winter. An unlikely repository for something precious, but hadn’t a worse-for-wear steamer trunk sufficed for Irena all those years?

  The time had come to play. To hear the fragment freed from the page.

  Meta sat at her piano, positioned the music on its stand, and placed her fingers on the keys, walking them through the first notes. The music sounded even more passionate than it had in her imagination, in her intuitive and highly trained inner ear. Its first tones were saturated with happiness, even joy. If music were colors, the opening refrain was painted in the primary red of a roulette wheel, the gold-leaf halo of a Renaissance Madonna, the blue of oceans seen from space. Brilliant, heartening colors done up in the circular forms of sacred things and things that spin. Then, as she had noticed the day before, came the brusque, precipitous descent into raw despair. A radical twilight settled over this round aural world. Blues became black. Blacks exploded like slow-motion blossoming flowers into shades of violet and dark orange. How odd to be thinking more in terms of some psychedelic rock-and-roll light show than a classical sonata. But the music merited such imaginative abandon.

  Replaying the movement at half tempo, careful of her right hand, which was already a bit sore, Meta now heard, in the tragic middle section, a deep, subterranean coherence and vision at work here. And through a sharp, sly contrast of the two moods, the brief final section combined rising and falling arpeggios like a sorcerer’s game of ladders and slides, moving steadily toward a resolution that proved to be no definitive resolution at all.