“You’re delusional.”
“And you’re blind, tunnel-vision blind, as well as guileless, and if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re acting like a horse’s ass.” Meta had no idea how to respond.
“I apologize,” Jonathan continued, a bit breathless. “I know I’m overstating my case, but that’s how I feel.”
“Your case? You’re not my attorney, Jonathan.” She was struggling to keep her voice to a whisper. “I’m sorry but I think we ought to get off the phone. I finally get a chance to hear—to play—some of the music I’ve been searching for and I don’t need all this percussion crashing around in my head all night. I’ll talk with Petr Wittmann myself. I’m a bigger girl than you think.”
“I never said that.”
“Well, in fact you did. But let’s drop it.”
“The way you’ve dropped me?”
“That’s not funny,” she said, her ears warming.
“I’m not trying to get a laugh here. I’m telling you, you’ve come unmoored, you’re gone, I don’t know what to do with you anymore.”
“Do with me? You make me sound like I ought to be put away.”
“Well, sometimes I wonder, Meta. You’ve given up everything you had going here. And for what? If you want to know the absolute truth—”
“Absolutely.”
“—I don’t think you’re up to this quest of yours. I’ve had a lot of time to come to this conclusion and I’d like to lay out my reasons for you.”
“That won’t be necessary. Goodbye, Jonathan.”
Fitful in her sleeping bag and adjusting and readjusting her pillow, Meta admitted to herself that the schism between her and Jonathan seemed all but unbridgeable. Absence made the heart grow harder? And there was no denying that her growing attraction to Gerrit served to undermine any sense of groundedness left to her. She was out to sea, was she not? On the other hand, wasn’t that the nature of exploration?
Still, Jonathan wasn’t wrong about Wittmann. She was now certain that he and the Rooster had been consulting, if not colluding, from the beginning. It was clear as ice water. While it was true that their shady behavior actually underscored the importance of Otylie’s sonata, Meta had known something was off since that night in Old Town Square. Wittmann, so polite, so solicitous, had been—well, too polite, too solicitous. Jonathan once told Meta that the only reason she wouldn’t have made a good lawyer was that she lacked the “killer instinct.”
“That’s because I have no desire to kill,” she quipped. They’d been walking toward Chelsea, mitten in glove, as late-afternoon snow twirled down around them, on their way to meet friends to see a movie. “I feel bad swatting a fly, as you know.”
“My point exactly. You have every other necessary quality.”
“Being?”
“Being, a phenomenal memory. Good verbal skills. You’re insightful, empathetic. Dogged as can be. A sixth sense that lets you, when you’re willing, see through the malarkey to the heart of matters. You’re persuasive, attractive, and don’t think that doesn’t matter in a courtroom because it does, fair or not. Above all, you’re not judgmental. But, but, but”—his breath was billowing several small frosty clouds. “Zero killer instinct.”
“Well, if that’s a shortcoming, it’s one I don’t mind having,” she said, and drew him closer for warmth as they crossed the darkening blue avenue.
The swirling, teeming confusion Meta felt was reminiscent of the days when she used to amble down the hallway of practice rooms at Juilliard. Although the doors were closed they were not altogether soundproof. You could hear all the pianos behind them being played at the same time. Shostakovich, Ravel, Bartók, even somebody sneaking a little Scott Joplin ragtime into the mix. What a lovely, crazy cacophony, she thought. Music of the spheres!
Whereas that charming chaos brought a smile to Meta’s face, this was just plain old turmoil. To rub out all the inharmonious voices, she turned her mind to rondos. Deliciously sane, sane-making rondos. Rondos in which the musical theme was stated, followed by a subordinate theme, then back to the main theme to reassure the listener—sometimes with a simple ornament or filigree—before a second subordinate theme emerges, all in an amity of braiding, a settled pattern.
Next morning, hasty arrangements were made by phone. Because it was a Sunday, nearly everyone invited was free to join them. Aside from a couple of the Langs’ neighbors, elderly Šporkovans, Meta felt a kinship with all the invitees. Tomáš and Marta would of course be there. Sam had canceled his couple of Sunday lessons in order to go with Sylvie and the kids, and invited several favorite students, Meta’s struggling Chopin pupil among them. Gerrit was to attend with Andrea and her parents. Even Gretja, the musicologist whom Meta had encountered when she first came to Prague and who’d asked to be kept “on touch” with progress, was invited. Only Jiří, who wasn’t able to get anyone to cover his restaurant shift on such short notice, couldn’t make it.
She still had one phone call to make, Gillian having agreed to call Meta’s mother on her behalf. However upset she was about things Jonathan had said, Paul Mandelbaum needed to know what was happening.
“Are you sitting down?” she asked.
“At my age, I don’t care for standing anymore. So, yes, consider me seated.”
“At your age,” she mocked. “Stop it. I have something important to tell you,” and in a tumble of words, her excitement returning now that she was speaking with an ally, Meta explained that she’d found another of the movements and would be performing it for a small gathering that very afternoon. “Not only that, but in the home of the man who protected it from the Nazis and the Czech Communists over half a century.”
Mandelbaum’s end of the line was silent as he processed. Finally, to Meta’s surprise, he said, “I’m going to book a flight out of Newark. I’ve been envious of you hanging out in Prague ever since you left, so it’s a perfect excuse to come over. Be nice to see Sam too. Can you get me a hotel room? You have a moment for such mundanities?”
“For you, old owl? Just let me know when your flight’s arriving and I’ll meet you at the airport. I’ll be so glad to see you, and there are other things we’ll want to talk about when you’re here.”
“Such as?”
Meta hesitated. “Well, for one, I’m finding your friend Petr Wittmann increasingly, what, confusing. First he dismisses out of hand the manuscript I showed him. Then I find out he’s doing everything he can to talk the owner into giving him the original of this third movement, saying it’s of great importance. Help?”
It struck her as odd how long it took for Mandelbaum to respond. When he said, “Let me talk to him. Meantime, it’s best you steer clear,” Meta caught a tone she’d never heard before in her mentor’s voice.
“All right. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something,” she agreed, but it did make her wonder. “I have a request myself. Pretty big nuisance of a request.”
“Shoot.”
“If you really are coming, would you be willing to go into the city before you grab your flight? I can ask my mom to get the manuscript out of the safe-deposit for you to bring, and—”
“You sure you want to risk that?”
There was that unfamiliar tone again. “How else can we definitively compare all the physical continuities, unless we see the originals side by side?”
“You can do that when you get it back here, Meta.”
“But he hasn’t given me the manuscript, and there’s no guarantee he will. He’s just letting me play it. This may be our only chance to actually see them together. I know it means a couple extra hours and I promise I’ll make it up to you somehow. I’ll buy you chocolate soufflé every night you’re here and won’t tell Annalise, how’s that?”
“Tempting, but you don’t have enough money to buy me chocolate soufflé every night, and my waistline doesn’t need it anyway. Look, what if my plane goes down? What if they try to confiscate it at customs? Anything might happen. It’s safest where it is.”
“Why would they possibly confiscate it? Besides, it’s not like the manuscript has an appraised or intrinsic value, as such. Aside from you, and maybe Wittmann, no one believes it’s of any serious worth except me. And I questioned myself at every turn. I can’t force you to do this. But I’d appreciate it.”
“Well, I think you’re being hard-headed, but it’s your call,” Mandelbaum said. “Just so we’re clear, I’m on record as strongly against it.”
“Thanks, Paul. Besides, what better place to rejoin them than here in Prague where they were originally separated?”
“That’s too saccharine an idea for me to respond to.”
Ignoring him, she said, “I need to tell you something else you won’t want to respond to. I think it’s over with Jonathan. And I think I’m falling in love with someone else.”
“Boy problems,” Mandelbaum sighed. “All the more reason for me to get overseas as soon as possible. See if I can’t save you from yourself.”
When they hung up, Meta stared out the back kitchen window at rusting balcony railings and empty clotheslines, wondering whether she had made a mistake mentioning Gerrit to Mandelbaum, however much of a father figure he might be. What in the world possessed her? She hadn’t even articulated to herself the idea of falling in love. Curiously, Beethoven came to mind. The poor bastard fell in and out of love every time he met the pretty sister, the buxom cousin, the handsome wife of a new friend. He rarely just fell either. He plunged, plummeted, crashed and burned in love. He was in love with love, much to his lifelong distress. Her own father, Kenneth, was a little like that too, she thought, and look where such impulsiveness had landed him.
Seeing the breakfast dishes stacked in the sink, she mechanically started washing them. As she ran the soapy scrub brush in circles around a dirty plate, she questioned her own impulsiveness. Had she been pulling a Kenneth Taverner since her birthday, stepping out of her settled life because she had fallen in love first with a manuscript and then with a man? Just as well that Sylvie wandered into the kitchen, unintentionally interrupting her thoughts. Enough, Taverner, Meta scolded herself. Impulsive or not, her purpose right now was this sonata. It, and seeing where intangibles led her with Gerrit, and making sure she didn’t break any of these dishes.
“Why you washing? I take care of them.”
“That’s all right, the warm water feels good on my hands.”
Sylvie shrugged, grabbing the dish towel and drying the plates and cups Meta had placed in the rack by the sink. “Today is the day you looking forward to since I know you,” she said. “Sam still think it crazy this Tomáš not give you the music to practice.”
“I would have kept you up all night if he had.”
“We do not care.”
“It feels like something in a fairy tale, that whoever plays the music has to be tested to prove they’re worthy. Anyway, he’s allowing me to show up an hour early to run through it a couple of times, so I won’t be doing the whole thing cold. I don’t think he’s ready to let it out of his sight yet. Can’t say I blame him.”
After finishing the dishes, Meta retired to the piano studio, where she put on the best clothes she’d brought with her. She was used to dressing in dark attire when she performed, a suggestion made by one of her coaches, as a way of pushing the focus away from the pianist and toward the music instead. She slipped on a burgundy silk blouse and a black silk skirt from her favorite East Village secondhand store. Sylvie lent her an antique floral scarf her grandmother had given her, also silk. Meta did her hair up in a loose bun before spending half an hour at the piano running through warm-ups. Since she was to sight-read a rondo, she rehearsed by playing a couple using Sam’s sheet music—the last movements of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven’s Sonata in C Minor, op. 13, the “Pathétique.” She didn’t practice Otylie’s unattributed movement if only because she wanted to hear it fresh today, not as a lonely orphan but with a sibling score to interact with. Sam and Sylvie wished her luck, told her they’d see her later at Šporkova, and she left to catch the tram.
Gerrit had offered to meet her early and walk her to the Langs’, but she had declined.
“I appreciate it,” she told him on the cell from the streetcar. “But this is something I have to do by myself. We’ll be together afterward, whether I tank or triumph, right?”
“You’ll triumph. You already have.”
Marta answered the door, then led Meta down the hall to an arched entryway that gave onto the parlor. The shutters were all flung aside today. Midafternoon sun streamed into the room. Marta had arranged a hodgepodge of chairs—upholstered, wooden ladder-back, even a couple of the wrought-iron ones from the garden—into rows in the room, salon-style.
Tomáš was sitting at the far end of the parlor by the window. His white hair glowed in the light as he rose to shake Meta’s hand, which was, despite her efforts to calm herself, mildly trembling. Both Tomáš and Marta saw her nervousness, but rather than view it as a shortcoming they understood it as another manifestation of how important this was to her.
“Budu vám otáčet stránky,” he said, placing the score on the music stand and miming his words. I will turn for you.
Meta thanked him, adjusted the height of the bench, spidered some arpeggios up and down the keyboard to get a feel for the action. Sluggish but better than she’d anticipated. As promised, it was out of tune—the rámus Gerrit had mentioned when their search began—but not so much as to prevent her from being able to hear, deeply hear, what was written.
Tomáš sat on a stool next to her as she slowly read through the pages. Every so often her fingers would drop onto the ivories to sort out the phrasing of a passage, but for the most part Meta followed her settled routine of hearing a score first with her eyes before ever playing a note. Air your errors in your head, not with your hands, one of her earliest teachers had advised her, and it stuck. Over the years, Meta had gotten so adept at mute sight-reading that she could almost hear the movement as it might have sounded on Tomáš Lang’s original Bösendorfer Imperial with its characteristic sweet singing tone, and was so moved by it that she could no longer see the score. She rested her hands on her lap for a moment, composed herself after wiping her eyes with Sylvie’s scarf. Tomáš asked if she was all right, if she needed a handkerchief, and Marta translated. But Meta, who had wept for joy more in the last two days than she had for any reason, happy or sad, in the past two years, shook her head.
For all its occasional idiosyncrasies, flashes of genius, it was soon clear this was an archetypal third-movement rondo with its constant return of the opening line. And just what any listener would expect—though sonatas could be unruly little monsters that defied cut-and-dried theory—was a resolution at the end. The human ear begs for the reassurance of the tonic key. Dah dah. We’re home.
Nor was it by a minor composer. For its overt niceties of convention, this music was too quietly quirky to have come from someone who wasn’t a bit headstrong, who didn’t view music from a different angle. C. P. E. came to mind again as did Beethoven, hard as that reasonably was to imagine. Haydn and Dussek still couldn’t be ruled out.
Again, though, speculating about composers wasn’t the immediate issue. She needed to get through the piece itself. Nodding at Tomáš with a blanched smile, she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her flushed ear, and began her first foray. She moved nimbly through the opening theme, Tomáš turning the pages at just the right moment, a measure and a half ahead of her fingers. As she played, a calm settled over her, the kind that harkened back to her youthful days when her mother baked bread and the apartment filled with its savory aroma. Sure, she dropped notes in some of the more vexing phrases. But by the time she neared the end, the original theme naturally recurring there like a welcoming echo, Meta experienced a childlike rapture. She played it again from the top at a livelier tempo. Tomáš indicated passages in the movement where she might adjust her fingering and dynamics.
After her thi
rd run-through, quiet settled over the room. Not since she first performed some of her favorite variations in Bach’s Goldberg set, a girl not yet in her teens already reaching for mastery, had she felt this enthralled. Whereas true keyboard virtuosity would forever elude her, Meta sensed that her Prague Sonata might not.
This was the concluding movement she’d been searching for. Not only did historical accounts of its provenance line up, but both the manuscript and its music fit together like an old architectural blueprint that had been torn and could now be mended so the building—a sonorous temple, as far as Meta was concerned—might be seen for what it was meant to be. And to think another wing of this temple, with its facade and front gates, was out there waiting to be discovered.
Marta was speaking to her after Tomáš had offered a few emphatic words in Czech.
“I’m sorry,” Meta said, recalling herself. “You’re saying?”
“He wants to make sure you understand he doesn’t mean to interfere. Just that he’s had many years to think about this music and you’ve had minutes.”
“I’m open to every idea he has,” said Meta. “Ask him if he’d prefer to perform it himself and let me play the second movement? It’d be a duet that way. It would bridge the time he performed it for Otylie and Jakub and Irena with today, here, now.”
Marta translated for Tomáš, who, with a grateful shrug, held his gently palsied hands before her. His daughter said, “He says he likes this idea, but his fingers are too old to do proper justice. He says he can draw, but you paint it.”
“Mine are pretty ruined and rusty too, but I’m good to go ahead as planned,” she told Marta, as the first guests were heard ringing the doorbell. She added that they might have to live with some flubbed notes, but the overall performance of the movement would be much more coherent thanks to Tomáš’s suggestions.
The Prague Sonata Page 26
