The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  No, much as she’d always loved Prague, now she couldn’t bear to walk the streets of Josefov or Malá Strana, much less Nové Město, where she and her husband had lived. A specter stood sentry on every corner, and she was little more than a specter herself. The great square named after good King Wenceslas, where she’d had such a charmed life with Jakub, repelled her. It was generous of the Beneš officials she’d worked with to offer her a job in the new government, but she was bereft of any ambition beyond distancing herself from her war-marred city, and so reluctantly returned to England.

  Postwar London didn’t hold more than stale memories for her either. Its fogs tasted of rotten fruit. Its Thames smelled of feces. Its pubs might have been as inviting as those in the old country but Otylie was never much for alehouses and drunken blather. She became a hermit, a woman in her middle thirties at a dead end beyond which she could see nothing of worth. Besides bitterness and hopelessness, all she’d learned during the war years was English. And if she couldn’t bear to live in her motherland—the only place on earth where her native tongue was spoken—or here in England, then she would have to follow this new language to some other country where she at least stood a chance of being understood. Not that she felt she had much left to say now that Jakub had slipped into the ether.

  During a long walk one drizzly afternoon in Hyde Park she formed a plan. For half a year, she worked in a shop in Hampstead that sold musical instruments and sheet music. She still didn’t care to be around music, but it was one thing she knew well, and if she was forced to capitulate a little in order to afford to move on with her life, so be it. What was more, despite her antipathy, she had to admit that practicing the piano did lift her spirits. Once she’d saved enough for a third-class cabin on a passenger ship to America, she set out for the New World. Aside from her wardrobe and wedding ring, she carried little with her beyond what she’d originally brought to Prague as a young orphan. The photograph of her parents, one of Jakub, and the sonata movement.

  Otylie asked around in New York about old friends of hers, even brought up Jakub’s name whenever she happened to encounter someone from Czechoslovakia in her various wanderings. But Manhattan was a leviathan of a city. Long avenues, right angles, straight lines—the opposite of medieval, patchwork Prague. A teeming clamor of humanity on sidewalks, in streetcars and autos, on trains running overhead and underground, and every one of them in a rush, flying along in the shadows of impossibly tall skyscrapers. She was rootless, friendless, utterly divested of any shared personal history in this place, yet she had to admit she was drawn to some ineffable peculiarity she saw in many of these faces. An unburdened optimism, almost embarrassing for all its green rawness. Even after a war that had brought them so much loss, these fresh-faced Americans, immigrants all in such a young country, seemed unfazed by the weight of the past. In Prague you lived in the same houses, walked the same squares, shopped at the same farmers’ markets where others had for centuries. You moved through—indeed, became—another concentric ring in the trunk of an ancient tree. Here in Manhattan, life was invented day by day, idea by idea, girder by girder. These people seemed innocent of the concept of yesterday. It struck her as equally a strength and a weakness, enviable either way.

  She wondered what Jakub would have made of this bustle and rumpus. Sometimes she asked him, softly but aloud, what he thought of it all. Talking to him was a comfort, but not wanting to turn into some muttering half-wit, she weaned herself off this habit. She reminded herself that she was stuck with her bad memories, her good health, and maybe as much as half a century to live. Better to pull it together rather than be sucked into the black pit that had taken up residence where her heart used to be.

  Her first job was as a cleaning woman for Czech immigrant families who had lived in the city for decades before she arrived. This charwoman work was a grind and more isolating than she might have imagined, despite the fact that her employers often could speak in the old tongue and talk about the homeland in a way that afforded her some sense of having a foothold in the world. When she was offered the chance to work as a housekeeper who doubled as a daytime nanny, she took the job and counted herself lucky to have a child to look after, though the young boy spoke no Czech and was in and out of trouble at school. Otylie didn’t have it in her to scold Douglas when he broke things—a vase, a china plate, objects that exploded into sharp-edged shards—and even when he was caught rummaging in her purse, she didn’t tattle on him to his parents as she probably should have done. When he hit her arm one afternoon so hard that a plum-shaped bruise blossomed overnight, forcing her to wear long-sleeved blouses during the hottest days of August, she knew he was beyond her. She gave notice, never betraying the boy, but never wanting to see him again.

  Her fortunes turned. Answering a newspaper ad, she got herself a job as a live-in nanny for a well-to-do couple who had distant relatives in Moravia. East Eighty-Sixth Street was a new world cocooned inside the New World. She had her own maid’s room, small but cozy, and a life regimented by the daily needs of the two Sanders children. During her interview when she was asked where the rest of her family was, she said she had lost everyone in the war.

  “That’s terrible, tragic,” Adele Sanders said. “Your children too?” Assuming her employment depended upon having raised children, she blurted, “Yes,” and immediately regretted it. After all, what did she know about mothering? Douglas had been proof enough of her incompetence.

  “How many did you have?”

  “Like you,” she said, unblinking.

  “Twins?”

  “No, but two,” improvising away. “A boy and girl.”

  “What were their names?”

  Without hesitation, Otylie said, “Jakub. And Irena.”

  “Grace and Billy are too young to really understand what the war was all about, so maybe it will be best if we—”

  “Not to worry,” Otylie said. “I do not have pictures of them. So they needn’t know.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind terribly. They’ll learn about such things soon enough.”

  “I prefer it that way.”

  “When can you begin?” Adele Sanders said, standing and offering her outstretched hand to Otylie, who took it with a modest, embarrassed smile. “And by the way, you should feel free to talk to me about your poor children anytime in private. Sometimes it helps to share with another mother. Who understands such things better than we?”

  Otylie gazed down at the labyrinth-patterned Oriental carpet that filled the Sanderses’ living room and said, “Perhaps is best we not talk of it either.”

  “Whatever makes you most comfortable.”

  It was surprising to the Sanderses, adults and children both, how quickly the displaced Czech settled into their household routines, becoming something of an extended family member within weeks. Because she was reticent about her past, they couldn’t know that she had been twice torn by war from the comforts of a settled existence. Whether or not she intended to be an inveterate survivor, Otylie was just that. As for the Sanders kids, they took to Otylie and she to them.

  Some things in her life hadn’t changed. The silver print of her parents and a framed photograph of Jakub hung on the wall over her bed. The sonata manuscript lay in the bottom drawer of her dresser, hidden under folded sweaters. But just as she had done when her father was killed in the Great War and she was sent to live with an aunt, long dead now, in Vyšehrad, Otylie gathered her memory wraiths into a secluded corner of her consciousness. Besides keeping her sane despite her grief, it freed her to remain as open as possible to whatever life she found herself in next.

  Central Park became her new Petřín Hill. She walked Grace and Billy there every afternoon after school, except when rain or snow kept them indoors. In the park’s generous embrace she sat with other women, many of them continentals, fellow refugees from a shattered Europe, and watched the children race in circles playing games of tag, or sitting on the grass chattering with dolls, or floating model sch
ooners in the boat basin. Sometimes Otylie would get swept up in the nostalgic memories the women shared about prewar days in France, or Austria, or Hungary, or even Germany. More often than not, she minded the twins and gazed at the buildings that rose at the edges of the park and kept to herself. Like Petřín, which overlooked its bustling city from the quieter vantage of nature, Central Park was an urban refuge where her thoughts could settle. It was here she wrote letters to Jane and made entries in the pocket diary she kept, fantasizing that Jakub was standing behind her, reading her words over her shoulder.

  This diary was her only concession to the old language. Now that she’d left Czechoslovakia behind, including those immigrant families she’d worked for, she was determined to speak, think, write, even dream only in her adopted English. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays she attended night class to improve her grammar and pronunciation. She would always in her heart be Czech, but she wanted to recapture, in some small way, the simple comfort of not feeling like an outsider, an alien. For the same reason, she determined to become an American citizen as soon as she was eligible.

  Grace, seven, became Otylie’s favorite charge. In Grace, she caught unmistakable glimpses of her own childhood self. A lively if moody girl with a full-moon face, she had honey-colored hair cut short like a boy’s, eyes the color of nutmeg, and a delightful singing voice. Otylie, ever the musician’s daughter despite herself, caught the girl humming one morning while dressing for school.

  “What tune is that, Grace?” she asked, standing in her bedroom doorway.

  Startled, the girl turned. “I don’t know. I just made it up.”

  “It’s pretty. Here, let me help you with that,” walking into the room and sitting on the edge of the bed to button Grace’s dress. Without pausing to think about the consequences of her words, Otylie asked, “Have you ever thought about taking music lessons?”

  “What for?”

  “So you can learn to play the piano and sing like the angel Maria Callas someday.”

  “Aren’t angels dead people in heaven?”

  “No, she’s a famous opera singer. The greatest in all the world. Here, we better hurry up. It’s time to go.”

  “You really think I can be as good as, what’s her name again?” Grace was tying her shoes and grabbing her book bag for the walk with Billy to school.

  “Maria Callas. You’ll never know unless you try.”

  This tossed-off conversation marked the beginning of a new, unexpected phase in Otylie’s life. She perfectly remembered her pledge never again to listen to men who talked war, and never to sing or play music. Refusing to speak of war presented no problem, especially now that the defining wars of her lifetime had ended. But she’d already bent her other vow when she worked at the music store in London, and planting in Grace Sanders the idea of studying music broke it altogether.

  “Byla jsem tehdy mladá, co jsem mohla o životě tušit?” she asked herself, breaking yet another pledge by slipping into Czech. I was young then; what did I know about life?

  The Sanders family lived in a “classic seven” apartment, and in the long living room, opposite a wood-burning fireplace, was an ebony Baldwin upright. The piano was more a handsome piece of furniture than a musical instrument. Its bench was neatly stacked with oversize art books, its music stand held a display of old botanical prints, and its top was forested with a dozen framed family photos. A visitor might spend an hour in the room without noticing it hidden beneath all the bric-a-brac. Enthusiastic at the idea of her daughter’s sudden desire to try her hand at music lessons, and not a little surprised that Otylie was an able, if rusty, pianist, Adele helped her daughter and nanny clear the piano.

  “Play something,” Grace begged.

  “It’s been quite a while,” Otylie apologized, then sat and began to play one of her favorite works from when she was young, the prelude to Bach’s Partita no. 1 in B-flat Major. She spun it out gently, slowly. Her trills, especially those in the left hand, were uneven. Notes were missed here and there. The passing of the prelude’s celebrated theme from treble clef to bass and back was nowhere as smooth as she’d once been able to perform it. But for someone who had been mostly estranged from this instrument she’d known so well as a child, Otylie was surprised by her memory of Bach’s peerless phrases.

  Adele and Grace applauded when she finished.

  “Beautiful, beautiful,” the mother said, placing a hand on Otylie’s shoulder. “Would you like to learn to play like Otylie, Grace?” It was settled then and there.

  Scales, she wrote in Czech in her diary. Jakub, I had forgotten what soulful things scales are! The perfection of flowers here in this park, the flowers that know just how many petals and leaves are needed to grow every spring to find their way into the sunlight, that’s what scales are. The musical logic of plants, the vegetable logic of music! This girl is learning them so quickly, eager as a kitten confronted by a bowl of cream. I feel both joy about this and shame that in my stubbornness I refused to open this part of me to you. Like a wife denying her husband a meal or the pleasures of the bed. Please forgive me if you can. My amends are in teaching this girl to play, as best I am able.

  Billy ran his scales under Otylie’s patient eye too. But where he managed merely to do well, Grace excelled. She worked for a few months with a vocal coach who came to the apartment, but it soon enough became apparent that the girl’s talent was in her fingers. Grace possessed a lilting soprano ready for a church chorus maybe, but no challenge to Maria Callas. She shrugged it off and redoubled her efforts at the piano.

  Otylie was diligent with her responsibilities in the Sanders household. She shopped for most of the food, took clothing to the dry cleaner, escorted the kids to and from school, prepared meals. But her favorite effort went into making sure Grace did her exercises, practiced her assignments. The girl particularly liked Franz Schubert, so Otylie took the bus with her to Patelson’s, the best sheet-music store in town, and bought all the Schubert it had in stock. Most of this Grace couldn’t begin to play. But she adored sitting with Otylie and reading through the scores while they listened to recordings on the phonograph of Arthur and Artur—Rubinstein and Schnabel.

  After a year working with Otylie, Grace reached a point in her development beyond which she couldn’t progress without moving on to a professional teacher. This was, at any rate, Otylie’s opinion. Grace vehemently disagreed.

  “We’re doing fine together,” the girl protested. “You haven’t taught me everything you know, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Otylie said. “But I worry my old habits are hampering yours. My father, who taught me all what I know, worked at a music academy for a living. He kept up with new technics—techniques, I mean.”

  “So, there. That’s good, right?”

  “It was good in the early years of the century. But now? It is like you are studying in nineteen-teens instead of the fifties. I don’t want to hold you back.”

  Adele and Otylie by her side, Grace auditioned with a professional instructor and was accepted to continue her studies. It gave Otylie no small joy in being complimented by Grace’s new teacher for the splendid job she had done bringing the girl along this far. At the same time, it was bittersweet to listen to Grace grow away from her. Rather like standing on a pier and watching a boat you’ve helped to build with your own hands take its maiden voyage, seeing it disappear over the horizon on its voyage elsewhere. This was something my father sometimes found painful, Jakub, losing a student to his next musical port of call, but I was too young to understand how he felt, she penned in her diary one night.

  Time feathered by, months blurring into years. Otylie was no longer the gaunt, haunted-eyed woman of wartime London. With the extra income Mr. Sanders had given her for the music lessons, she’d purchased modest but fashionable clothes on the Lower East Side, and cut a stylish figure whenever she ran errands for Adele. She sometimes joined the twins at the cinema, but now that Grace and Billy had outgrown the need for a c
haperone, Otylie found herself left to her own devices more than in times past. She still went to night classes, although her English had become polished, and aside from her whisper-light Slavic accent, she often passed for a second-generation citizen of her adopted country. Her life seemed to her rich enough, full enough. Acquaintances from her Central Park days stayed in touch, and occasionally they would get together for lunch or tea. During one such rendezvous, however, the contentment she’d taken for granted came into question.

  “You are too beautiful to go on living like a widow lady,” a friend told her over a glass of port. They’d met in a French bistro just off Madison Avenue on a Saturday evening Otylie had off. “You oughta come with me to dance tonight. Downtown, where there are many nice men to meet.”

  “I don’t think so,” Otylie said. “I’ve never been much of a dancer.”

  “Well, what do you do to entertain yourself, wallflower?”

  “I like the movies.”

  “Movies? That’s no place to meet a man.”

  “I never said I wanted to meet a man.”

  “Every woman wants to meet a man.”

  “Well, I already did that. He’s gone now.”

  The woman, a well-meaning former nanny who now had a job in midtown working in a secretarial pool, was about five years younger than her Czech friend. She felt, not without reason, that Otylie Bartošová was slowly but surely headed toward early old age and a life of unqualified loneliness. “Yes, but you’re here.”