The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  “You’re telling me that you intend to go door-to-door and talk with strangers, in a foreign language, I might add, about something that went astray sixty years ago?”

  It did sound ludicrous when laid out in such blunt terms. “It’s all I’ve got left to work with. Every one of the musicologists came up empty-handed. Besides, Sylvie and I did this before when we went looking for Jakub’s grave in Vyšehrad.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t find it.”

  “I found it wasn’t there. That’s its own kind of important verification, isn’t it?”

  Jonathan sighed. His exasperation was so thinly disguised that Meta was sure even he must have heard it.

  “Sylvie and I are going back to the municipal archives,” she went on. “We’ll look for exact addresses for Jakub and Otylie’s apartment, his shop, whatever else we can find. If I come up with nothing, I’ll be on the next flight out of here.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” he said, and immediately apologized.

  She forgave him the wisecrack, tried to quell the defensiveness rising in her. If this was to be her last-ditch effort, she wasn’t going to let Jonathan’s skepticism dampen her determination. “Sam Kettle is being nice enough to let me take on a few students he doesn’t have time for in his schedule. Only ones who know a little English.”

  “That’s kind,” Jonathan said, recovering his equilibrium.

  “He and his wife have offered to let me move in with them, save some money. I’m going to crash in a sleeping bag in his piano studio. Well, actually, under the piano. I’m moving over to Vinohrady tomorrow.”

  With this, Jonathan’s misgivings seemed to subside. He even ventured, “Far be it from me to be upset with anybody who’s so committed to an idea,” and added that he’d known investigators in the past who were often reduced to just such primitive methodology as ringing doorbells, canvassing neighborhoods.

  “I know the pressure’s really on once I move in with them. They’re being generous, but I can only sleep on Sam’s floor for so long before going mad. Last thing the Kettles need is a madwoman living under their piano.”

  Mad, or outlandishly hopeful, as she might be, her saner self had begun to believe that Sam was wrong. The only other option was that Gerrit, or someone somewhere, had improvised a line or two, stumbled upon a brief phrase that by sheer chance resembled the passage at the end of Irena’s manuscript. Twelve brave little notes constitute the Western chromatic scale. Though it might seem the possibilities for their permutations were all but endless, there were still chances of overlap or glancing echoes. Whether on purpose or by accident, the rising arpeggiated figure that opens Beethoven’s first piano sonata is identical to the opening of the finale in Mozart’s G Minor Symphony, just one whole step down in the key of F minor, both in second inversion. And how many blues songs were based on the same three-chord sequence? Quotes, echoes, accidental replications are part and parcel of music.

  Much as Gerrit—what was his last name?—seemed to want to help, he too had failed to connect what she played in Andrea’s house with any music he knew. While she was on the phone with Jonathan, she’d ignored an incoming call, which proved to be from Gerrit with nothing to report other than apologies. “Just wanted you to know I’m still sifting through my memory here,” he said in his voice mail. “Call if you need anything.”

  Call if she needed anything. What she needed, Meta mused as she wandered toward Old Town, was a miracle. She found herself thinking about Gerrit, the air of self-reliance that surrounded him, the warmth, even intimacy, he conveyed. His familial kindness toward Andrea was endearing, and Meta hadn’t been blind to his gaze when they were introduced. It was not a come-on, more a frank assessment, and it hadn’t left her feeling small.

  But small or not, her feelings were now beside the point. Meta was in fact running lower on funds than she was able to admit to Jonathan. Gillie, bless her, had offered to send enough money to get her through another month. “A loan to be paid back either someday or never, whichever comes last,” as she put it. But Meta couldn’t in good conscience agree to the offer. It wasn’t as if Gillian had vast resources to draw upon. Besides, only the week before, Paul Mandelbaum had posted her a money order for what she considered an extravagant three hundred dollars.

  Finally got around to your big bad B-day present, he said in an accompanying typewritten letter, since e-mail and money transfers were technologies he refused to embrace, not unlike Meta, who only reluctantly participated in the digital world. Ten dollars a year for you, though you deserve far more. Take yourself out. Get the best seats in the house at the Prague State Opera or the National Theater for you and Ma and Pa Kettle. Make it Mozart. Then dinner, something gourmet, no damn goulash on my dime. Bonne anniversaire!

  She wanted to tell him she couldn’t accept this much money, but knew he’d be offended if she refused the gift. She didn’t let him know that after paying off her pension bill and setting aside the rest for food and sundries, she barely had enough to go see a movie, let alone a production of Die Zauberflöte.

  Meta had long desired to take a seat at one of the outdoor restaurants that fronted the Týn’s towers and idly watch passersby in the Old Town Square. Were Mandelbaum here, he’d scold her if she denied herself such an innocent indulgence. She sat under one of the large umbrellas warmed by big propane heaters and ordered a drink, facing the resplendently ancient square as she people-watched and listened to the distant strains of live jazz emanating from a cellar club somewhere. This was to be her last night at the pension, where she’d never enjoyed one good night’s sleep. Tomorrow the endgame would begin. In his message to her, Gerrit had said, “Keep up what you’re doing here. It’s important.” And it was true. This was important, what she was trying to do, worth those sleepless nights.

  The after-theater and postconcert lingerers gradually trickled away, along with the tourists. Only a handful of customers still loitered under the canopies as restaurants extinguished their spirit stoves and nightlife retreated indoors to dance clubs and blues bars. Breaking in on her reverie, a waiter asked if she wanted anything more.

  “Děkuji, ne,“ she said, signing a check in the air with an invisible pen in case he couldn’t understand her foreigner’s Czech.

  As she finished the last of her wine, she heard the voices of two men entering the square from fashionable Celetná Street. Their footfalls echoed across the cobblestones. Meta stood and edged past the array of empty tables and chairs. While she was setting off toward the narrow lanes that would take her to the pension, one of those voices caught her attention. She hadn’t spent more than twenty minutes with the man. Half an hour, tops. But Petr Wittmann’s baritone had a depth of confidence that made it unmistakable. He and his companion were laughing, speaking rapidly back and forth.

  Meta followed them, weighing whether or not to interrupt, say hello to Wittmann, let him know she was still here working on her project. He would at least have to acknowledge that she was no quitter. More than once she’d wondered if he would have engaged her more about the manuscript if he hadn’t been in such a hurry the day they met. The two men passed the Jan Hus monument as she came up behind them and blurted, “Professor Wittmann?”

  Wittmann turned, said, “Yes?”

  Even caught unawares, he had recognized an American accent and responded in her language.

  “Dobrý večer,” she said, as amiably and with as careful an accent as she could manage.

  Her heart sank as she looked into his eyes. What did she think she was doing? How she wished she had stayed within her wine-warmed cocoon.

  “Good evening to you too, Miss Tavener. A pleasure to see you again.” He bowed a little, shook her outstretched hand. The self-assurance Wittmann exuded was breathtaking. His white silk scarf against his white turtleneck and black jacket suggested the kind of elegant poise she’d seen only in famous conductors and composers. Hadn’t Stravinsky affected a scarf like that?

  The other man turned around to s
ee who had broken in on his pleasant dialogue with Wittmann. Under the faint stars that hovered over the broad plain of stones in Staroměstské náměstí, Kohout acknowledged her with a nod.

  “What brings you out so late?” Wittmann asked.

  “It was a beautiful evening. I decided to take a stroll.”

  “How is the research coming along?”

  “Well enough.”

  Kohout shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

  “That must mean you’ve had some success then.”

  “You know how it goes,” she hedged, hoping he wouldn’t ask further.

  “I don’t, actually. But I’m glad to hear that you’re making progress. Please let me know if you have anything new to show me. I’d be interested in looking at it.”

  This was a very different tune from the one Petr Wittmann had whistled during their earlier truncated encounter. While he awaited her response he pursed his lips as if he were about to whistle in fact, then startled her by warmly smiling.

  Seeing Kohout’s impatient expression, she thanked Wittmann for the offer and, drawing her jacket lapels with both hands around her neck, bade them good night. As she moved to leave, however, Wittmann stopped her, saying, “My colleague and I were just parting company. Perhaps you and I might have a quick word, Miss Tavener?”

  That was unexpected. She turned toward Kohout in time to see the surprise on his face slide into the awkward smile she remembered from their meeting.

  “A pleasure to see you again,” Kohout told her, then raised his eyebrows at Wittmann, saying, “We will talk again tomorrow,” before striding across the square.

  Facing him directly in the uneven light and shadows, Meta waited.

  “I find,” said Wittmann, “that some of my obligations at school have cleared up, my Mahler is done, and I have a bit of unexpected time at my disposal.”

  Again Meta just looked at him, unsure how to respond.

  “So, I wanted you to know that while I still have serious reservations about the manuscript you and Paul Mandelbaum brought to my attention, I believe there are aspects about it that merit further consideration.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” she said, wary but open. “I’d be pleased to meet with you again, maybe play it for you this time—”

  “No need. I’ve already played it myself from your copy. Not the performance I’m sure you would give. Be that as it may, I wonder if we ought to address it in the context of historical musical fraud. As I said before, it’s both too good to be true and too unpolished to be false. Working together we might approach it as optimistic skeptics.”

  Meta bit her lip. “I appreciate it, but that’s not the research I want to be doing right now. Optimism and skepticism have their places. What’s important to me is finding the other movements. If I can do that, I’ll eliminate all these subjective issues.”

  “Well,” said Wittmann, undiscouraged, “if you change your mind, give me a call. And if, by the way, you have the original with you, I would like to see it.”

  He pulled out his wallet, withdrew a business card, and handed it to Meta. She thanked him, shook his proffered hand, and said good night a second time.

  Under the dirty peach light of a rising moon she hurriedly found her way to the Charles Bridge, running the gauntlet of its statuary on either side. Her hard-won calm had been scuttled by this encounter. She had no idea what to make of Wittmann’s sudden collegiality. Rather than feeling heartened, she felt confused, mistrustful.

  Maybe she was tired, maybe a little tiddly, but instead of walking straight to her pension, Meta found herself climbing Nerudova toward Gerrit’s house. Not that she could explain what compelled her to do so. She had met the man only once. She knew little unto nothing about his life. But she sensed he might understand, somehow, why she was unsettled by what she’d just experienced. She made her way to Jánská and soon enough stood before the Hodeks’ building, looking up at what she believed were his windows. If she was right, Gerrit was home, since the lights were on. For a few minutes she stood there, swaying a little while weighing what to do, then left without ringing his bell.

  WITH SYLVIE AT HER SIDE, Meta began to trawl for information in the Josefov quarter of the city. After days of false leads and bad information, they had finally identified, through copies of pre–Reich Protectorate documents found in the state archives, the address of Jakub Bartoš’s antiquities shop on Veleslavínova. Meta, bucking weariness and self-doubt, began there less because the location held the greatest possibility for a breakthrough than because the street was short. Just a block between the much busier thoroughfare of Křižovnická, fifty paces away, where cars rushed and clanging trams ran; and Valentinská, which terminated at the Klementinum, where Meta had only a few days earlier attended a free concert of Beethoven’s Fifth in the Mirror Chapel, performed by a string quintet and, of all things, a saxophone.

  Since Irena said Jakub’s shop had been pillaged by the Gestapo soon after the Nazi takeover, the chances were good they wouldn’t encounter one soul who knew a thing about the Prague Sonata. At least this way, Meta figured, she’d be able to rule out one of the three locales where she knew it had been. She had joked with Sam over breakfast, when he raised an eyebrow at their plan, that it was “failure as a form of accomplishment”—a quip Jonathan would not have found funny.

  Now a modest books and prints shop—an antikvariát and galerie—occupied Jakub’s former premises. Its proprietor, a peaked man in a nubbly argyle sweater, had heard that the space once housed an antique store of sorts, but knew nothing about its former owner. When he excused himself to talk with a customer who’d entered the shop and asked about a volume on one of the high shelves, Sylvie gave Meta a shrug. Clearly, this was a dead end. Meta used the brief moment to marvel that the sonata movements had actually been together, as a single work, in this room. Two of her lifetimes ago. Whatever exhilaration the idea aroused in her was quickly undermined when she conjured images of Jakub’s terror within these walls. And imagined, as best she could, what the SS troopers breaking down the door must have looked and sounded like as they began to ransack his antikva.

  “You all right?” Sylvie asked her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just thinking.”

  After the bookseller rang up his sale, he returned to the two women, apologizing for the interruption. Business was business, Sylvie assured him.

  “Ask if he has any customers old enough to remember Jakub’s shop back in the days before Communism,” Meta told Sylvie.

  Following some back-and-forth with the owner that lasted for a few minutes but felt, to Meta, more like an hour, Sylvie reported, “He does know people who family lives here then. He gives me the address.”

  “Really? Wonderful,” Meta said and turned toward the bookseller, clasping her hands and gratefully nodding her head. “Would you mind letting him have your telephone number in case he thinks of anything else?”

  Sylvie wrote her number on a piece of paper the man gave her, then thanked him.

  The first address was across the street, three doors down on the same block. Langová was typewritten on the buzzer label for the second-floor apartment. On either side of the stucco building’s rough-carved double doors were alcoves whose entryway statues had long since been stolen. An empty beer bottle stood forlorn in one of them.

  Her voice distorted by the antiquated intercom, a woman asked who they were, what they wanted. Sylvie apologized for disturbing her and explained.

  “Jděte pryč,” was the woman’s lightning response. Go away.

  Meta and Sylvie looked at each other. Her brusque dismissal felt like a blind-side slap after the warmth they had encountered across the street.

  “Mohly bysme s vámi na chvilku mluvit?” Sylvie gently persisted. Please, can’t we speak with you for just a moment?

  “Nechte mě na pokoji.” Leave me alone, the woman answered before launching into a rush of garbled words. She sounded to Meta not so much guarded or standoffish
as hostile.

  “She say we leave our name and phone on paper. Put in her letter box.”

  “Well, at least that’s not a definitive no,” said Meta, taken aback by the woman’s vehemence. “Were you able to tell her everything?”

  “As much as she lets me.”

  Sylvie wrote their names along with the Kettles’ address and telephone number on a sheet of paper torn out of Meta’s notebook.

  “Write at the bottom that there’s no reason for her to be afraid of us.”

  “She not call.”

  “You’re probably right, but you never know.”

  Meta opened the creaky door to the rusted mailbox marked Langová, J. and dropped the folded slip into the receptacle.

  “Onward?” she asked Sylvie, who agreed, “We go,” and read the next address on the shopkeeper’s piece of paper. Žatecká, another tiny street, one block over. Walking back down Veleslavínova, about to turn right toward the library to head to their next stop, Meta gave in to an urge to glance over her shoulder. A frail woman with hair as white as any flag of surrender was leaning out the second-story window of the building they had just left, staring at them. For a moment, Meta wondered if she had changed her mind and was willing to speak. The woman, however, seeing Meta hesitate on the sidewalk, ducked swiftly inside.

  Žatecká Street proved to be a kinder call despite the enormous bat-winged devil figure over the door of the sooty pre–World War I building. The Novák family listened to Sylvie’s story and invited her and Meta inside. Three generations of Nováks gathered in their front room. A girl and boy in their late teens showed every sign of being thoroughly westernized. Both wore bell-bottom jeans, and the girl, whose hair was raven black with red highlights, sported a Metallica T-shirt. Their mother, a handsome, work-worn woman in her early forties, greeted Meta in halting English. It was her father, who had lived there his whole life, to whom Meta directed her attention. He spoke no English, but his grandchildren were eager to bridge the language gap on his behalf.