The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  No arguing that point. Otylie shrugged one shoulder.

  “Tell me,” the woman continued, “did this man of yours love you very much?”

  “Of course he did.”

  “Did he love you so much he’d want you to sit around and be lonesome the rest of your life?”

  Otylie took a sip of her port and set it back down on the scratched zinc bar. All this talk of Jakub made her uncomfortable. She’d grown used to speaking with him in her own way, having him to herself. It felt wrong to discuss him like this. She answered, “He never wanted anything for me but my happiness and safety.”

  “Your happiness he wanted? Well, then, let me ask you. Are you happy?”

  The woman was just a little tipsy, but spoke not accusingly or aggressively. Otylie knew she meant no harm.

  “Yes. Happy enough. Anyway, ‘happy’ is one of those words in English that seem to me not to make a lot of sense, if you really must know.”

  “Honey, I don’t mean to pry. Just I was thinking you might enjoy getting out and meeting other people. Let your hair down a little.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  “You’re not coming then?”

  “I need to get back pretty soon,” Otylie fibbed with an apologetic smile.

  That night in her room she sat down to write a long entry in her journal, but wrote to Jane instead. Maybe, she thought, the time had come for her to move on from New York. Grace and Billy were getting older. Soon they would be sent to boarding school or an academy. Grace continued her piano lessons, but now that she was blossoming into adolescence, she had begun to listen to music besides Franz Schubert. Frank Sinatra, more like it. And Otylie’s pork schnitzel, once her favorite dish, wasn’t quite as dreamy as a cheeseburger and chocolate malted down at the soda shoppe on Lexington. The girl still loved her nanny like a second mother, but she’d begun to fledge, was starting to take wing.

  All natural, all for the good. Yet everything Otylie read about life in the old country was discouraging, convincing her that Prague wasn’t a place to return to, although the uncertainty she felt about venturing farther west was strong as well. All the bucking broncos and saloon brawls, the stagecoach robbers and vast wide-open untamed space that Otylie had seen in innumerable Saturday-afternoon cowboy-and-Indian movies gave her pause. None of that hullabaloo on the screen was real beyond the darkened cinema, was it? Either way, unspurred and saddleless as she was, she told Jakub after turning out her bedside lamp, whispering into her warm pillow, it was time to move on, and the only contact she had was across the Hudson into yet another world.

  5

  NOON BELLS HAD JUST FINISHED their pealing when Meta and Gerrit, back at the café below the castle, sat at the same table as before, after saying hello with a kiss and hug somewhat more tentative than their parting at the tram stop had been. Though they had traded places, neither seemed to notice.

  “I’m really happy to see you again,” he told her, reaching out to hold her hands.

  “Me, too, you,” putting hers in his.

  “We’re good?”

  “Completely.” So it wasn’t an aberration, that embrace the other night. Well, this trip was into uncharted territory, she thought. She’d just have to continue trusting herself, see where things led. “Listen, though. I may have something,” she went on.

  “Tell me,” he said, marveling that Meta looked more fatigued and yet more radiant than she had a couple of days earlier. An unfettered excitement was there in her quick-moving eyes.

  “All right, but it’s less a matter of telling you than taking you somewhere.”

  “Don’t you want a coffee?”

  “I’ve already had too much coffee this morning, if you want to know the truth.”

  Gerrit left a tip for the waiter who approached to take their order. “Promiňte,” he apologized, then, following Meta’s lead down the stone declivity of Ke Hradu, he asked, “So where are we headed?”

  They walked close enough that their swinging arms touched in an amicable jostle. Each was aware of how easily they fell into the comfortable rhythms of attraction.

  “Socrates first. Then you’ll see.”

  As they descended the castle heights, Meta reflected aloud on how her trip to Prague had in recent days come to resemble less a scholarly search for a cultural artifact than a personal journey to uncover a family history. “This whole venture,” she said, as they turned left and made the trek down bustling Nerudova, “is starting to feel like one of those trips immigrants’ great-grandchildren take to track down their roots in the old country. I don’t think there’s a drop of Eastern European blood in my veins, but this seems more and more like a hunt to locate ancestors. Does that sound ridiculous?”

  “Not at all,” he replied.

  “It’s strange how close I feel to Otylie’s husband, Jakub. I met his wife’s best friend. I’ve met a man who remembers watching him play chess. I’ve stood in the place where his shop once thrived. From what I’ve heard, he was braver than any man I’ve ever known. When Irena first told me the story and gave me those pages, I thought it would be Otylie’s footsteps I’d be tracking. But it’s all been Jakub.”

  “Where did Otylie wind up after the war?”

  “I wish I knew. Irena looked but couldn’t find her. I know she worked for the Czech exile government in England. I figure I can always pursue that angle if I don’t turn up anything in Prague. There must be records of refugees who fled there and helped with the anti-Protectorate movement.”

  “Any chance she’d still be alive?” he asked, wondering whom he might know in London who might be able to help.

  “Well, a chance, yes. She’d be around ninety, from what Irena told me.”

  “Same age as Socrates,” said Gerrit, crouching down to see if the old cat was loitering under one of the parked cars at the elbow of Šporkova. “Not here today.”

  “I hope that isn’t bad luck.”

  Standing again, Gerrit shook his head. “Socrates would probably say there’s no such thing as luck. So where are we going?”

  “We’re pretty much already there,” and gave him a description of her second visit with Antonín Novák, his recollection of a Johana who seemed to be the J. Langová on Veleslavínova Street, and her discovery of another Lang in Malá Strana. She recounted her stroll on this very lane the night before, and the unpolished, ethereal piano music she’d heard.

  “You were here and you didn’t stop by?”

  She apologized, blushing. “You don’t need a sonata zombie knocking on your door in the midnight hour. Besides, I was a little shy about bothering you.”

  “For future reference? Don’t be.”

  “I won’t.” She explained that after a mostly sleepless night, she’d come straight back to Šporkova. Thinking there was nothing to lose, she knocked on the door, and—

  “—and, no way.”

  Meta nodded, giving in to a suppressed smile. “Remember me telling you about a performance of the complete sonata that a friend of Jakub’s gave before the war?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve not only found his daughter—she’s the one I drank all that coffee with this morning—but when I told her I had to run out, I promised I’d come right back with someone who speaks Czech. And don’t look now, but we may be able to meet the man himself.” They walked the remaining short distance and stood before the Lang/Hašková house. Gerrit turned to Meta and said, “Same door we tried the other day, right?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Well, maybe Socrates will have to offer a revised version of his philosophy of luck. Something more optimistic, like luck is the progeny of persistence.”

  She tapped the lion’s-head brass knocker and they waited for an interminable minute. Meta nervously glanced up and down the rows of tidy sunny houses with colorful painted facades, their window boxes spilling over with early October’s late flowers, their trellises laden with turning vines. Had the woman experienced a change of heart a
fter Meta excused herself to run and fetch her friend?

  Finally a voice inside called out, “Moment, moment.” When the door opened, Marta said, “Hello again, Meta,” and then, “You must be my neighbor Gerrit,” in heavily accented English. She had broad cheekbones, limpid gray eyes, dark blond hair plaited on either side of her head. Regal in her way, she wore a billowy linen blouse with sleeves rolled up, and jeans. “Please, both, come in.”

  The foyer was dark, with a black-and-white-checkered marble floor and stuccoed walls hung with old prints of mountain scenes. Shepherds, flocks, hilltop châteaus. Bygone eras. They followed her through the house toward the back.

  “You know, I was thinking after you left. Your name is close to mine. Marta, Meta. It is so beautiful a day, not cold, so we will go talk in the garden.”

  As they passed a shutter-darkened library in which a closed piano stood, and through the kitchen hung with old copper pans and dried herbs, the woman asked, “You will take some more coffee? A brandy?”

  Distracted by nervousness, Meta didn’t respond at first. Instead, Gerrit spoke. “You said you already had enough coffee?”

  “Three brandies then,” and with that Marta gestured toward a table outside where she left Meta and Gerrit alone in a walled arbor. A pair of heavy gloves and pruning shears lay neatly stacked on the face of a granite sundial. Along the nearby wall was a tangle of wisteria suckers that had just been cut. Meta told Gerrit, “That must be why she was slow to get to the door. She was back here doing end-of-season gardening.”

  Balancing a tray laden with glasses, a decanter, and a small bowl of almonds, Marta returned. After pouring, she handed her guests their glasses, which they raised in a toast.

  “Na zdraví,” Meta said. “Thank you so much for meeting with me again. Did you have a chance to discuss what I mentioned earlier with your father?”

  “I did,” she said. “And what I can tell you is this. I think you are looking for what my father has. Would you mind if we continue in Czech?” then asked Gerrit if he would translate. Meta had told her earlier that she’d picked up just enough Czech to snatch bits and pieces of conversation, as a cat might jump at a proffered string and once in a while grab it away, but Marta spoke too quickly for her to glean much. Both were grateful to have Gerrit as intermediary. His translation leapfrogged a phrase or so behind when the woman paused.

  “ ‘You surprised me this morning,’ she says. ‘I have known about this manuscript for years, but we never did anything since we had no clear idea what to do. Many times my father considered giving it away to a museum, but my aunt thinks it should be sold, that’s it’s worth money—’”

  Museums, Meta thought. If she failed to find Otylie herself, visiting more museums and other institutional repositories would be next on her agenda. Back in New York she had, however, gone through the databases of numerous music collections and come up with nothing. Not that there had been much to work with.

  “ ‘We had it privately examined by a friend or two who knew a bit about these things. Nobody could identify what we had exactly, so we just kept it. Those Russians were even more idiotic than the Nazis’—I like this woman, by the way,” Gerrit quickly added as an aside, then continued translating even as he realized Marta understood what he’d just said. “‘They thought they grabbed every last piece of culture but they didn’t.’”

  Meta struggled to quell her mounting hopes as she replied, slowly and articulately, “So, again, it would be late eighteenth century, a movement of an unpublished sonata that would run roughly ten pages, give or take, about this big”—she gestured—“written out in sepia ink.” She glanced from Marta to Gerrit and asked him, “Do you need to translate that?”

  “You all right?” was his response.

  “I’m—I’m fine,” she stuttered.

  Marta paused before nodding at Gerrit to begin translating again. “‘I don’t know what century it is,’ she says. ‘I don’t know much about music history. It is old, this I know. And it was given to my father during wartime, the occupation, by a man who came to this house running from the Gestapo.’”

  “Was his name Jakub Bartoš?” Meta asked.

  Uncrossing her legs, Marta sat straight in her chair. “Yes, that was his name. He was in the underground.”

  “My God, I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” said Meta, leaning forward. “May I ask where the manuscript is?”

  Marta continued, through Gerrit, saying, “‘Here is the strangest thing. All these years have gone by and my father kept it safe, hoping Jakub’s widow would return to lay claim. Now, just this week, two people have shown up asking for it.’”

  Meta said, “You mean Gerrit and me.”

  “‘No, another. A professor from the university. He had first asked my aunt Johana if she had this piece of music.’”

  The joy, the excitement that had illuminated Meta’s face disintegrated into a look of bald shock. She swallowed hard. “Is his name Kohout?”

  “‘I don’t think so. I have his card in my study,’” Marta said, noting the change in the girl’s demeanor. She and Gerrit glanced at each other.

  “Wittmann? Petr Wittmann?”

  “That’s right. Is he a colleague of yours?”

  “No. Yes, no. He’s a musicologist here in Prague. I asked him for help with this and he told me I was wasting his time—did your aunt give him the manuscript?”

  As Gerrit continued to translate, he noticed his heart was beating harder. He could only imagine what Meta was feeling. “‘She doesn’t have it. My father does. This Wittmann explained he found her because he’d heard rumors about my father and some music. Father lived with her in Josefov after the war, and the professor thought he was still there. So my aunt sent him to me.’”

  “Would you mind saying whether Professor Wittmann made any mention of me and my role in all this?” Meta asked, doing her best to conceal her shock from Marta.

  Gerrit’s voice rode along just behind Marta’s. “‘He did say an American brought a fragment of the manuscript to his attention. He told me he had a copy of it in his office and asked if he could take my father’s part with him for examination at the university. He seemed impressed by its apparent authenticity—’”

  “Impressed? Apparent authenticity?” Meta coughed, incredulous, looking at Gerrit, who found himself wondering just how much Wittmann had sidestepped him during their little interview.

  He was distracted enough that Marta had to repeat her response for him to translate. “Wittmann wanted to come back, she’s saying, with another expert to see it.”

  “Kohout. I should’ve known.”

  Gerrit, looking askance at Meta, saw that her rising anger about Wittmann and Kohout threatened to capsize all the goodwill that Tomáš Lang’s daughter had for her. An early lesson he’d learned when covering a story, interviewing people be they hostile or helpful, was to avoid showing emotion. Not knowing the myriad ins and outs of what was happening here, he decided to toss caution to the wind and make Meta’s case for her.

  “Paní Hašková,” he said, knowing that once again he was about to lie, or at least fudge, just as he had in Wittmann’s office, and continued in Czech. I have met Petr Wittmann. Yesterday, in fact—

  Gerrit paused, looking quickly at Meta, and was relieved to see that she appeared not to have understood his admission.

  —and I can confirm that he’s a well-regarded music scholar. I’ve heard less than flattering accounts of his biography, I might add, but that’s often the fate of someone who has a high profile. What I want to say is that this young woman here from New York—gesturing toward Meta, who was leaning across the table toward him, straining to understand—made a discovery that was possibly quite important, and has sacrificed a lot to pursue her research.

  This is clear, I admire it.

  Well, my suspicion is this professor may be trying to interfere with what she’s doing. Far be it from me to tell you what to do, but at a minimum I think in fairness you sh
ould let her have the same access to the pages as he did.

  “Meta, I have a question for you,” Marta said in English, shifting focus as she shifted in her chair. “Were you in Josefov the other day? Did you and a friend try to visit a lady on Veleslavínova?”

  “We just wanted to talk with her, see if she remembered anything about Jakub and Otylie Bartoš,” Meta answered, recalling the hostile woman.

  “My aunt Johana. She told me about you. Don’t hate her for sending you away,” and she continued in Czech, after nodding to Gerrit. “‘Like so many during the war, she had to make hard, life- and-death choices. She has regrets about some of those choices, but she did look out for my father during his worst days. So when Professor Wittmann came asking for the manuscript, speaking of patriotic duty, and you came soon after, as if led there by Otylie Bartošová’s ghost, it was too much for her to handle.’”

  “I’m sorry,” Meta said gently, wondering just how giving Wittmann the manuscript would constitute an act of patriotism. “My friend and I had no intention of frightening her. And we had no way of knowing about any of these other factors.”

  Marta offered a consoling smile. “My aunt is old. She’s tired. The sad truth is, she does not like people anymore. Thinks they are more bad than good.”

  “She may be right,” Gerrit said. “But I hope you understand that Meta’s intentions are obviously of the latter kind.”

  Realizing what was at stake and that she needed to argue her own case, Meta leaned forward toward Marta. “I don’t think this is about patriotism or good or evil. It’s about music, and all I ask is that you allow me to see the manuscript. I’d be pleased to play for you what I’m fairly sure is the second movement of this sonata. It’ll be clear immediately if the two are by the same composer, part of the same composition.” And over the next quarter hour, Meta told Marta, through Gerrit, everything she had learned and what she hadn’t. The names Otylie Bartošová and Jakub Bartoš, Irena Svobodová and brave young Marek who worked at Jakub’s antikva were like an intimate weft throughout the larger warp of the manuscript’s place in musical and political history.