The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  “Můžu vám říct víc, jestli chcete,” he said, intuiting her words, the fingers of his right hand resting on the keyboard. I can tell you more one day, if you want.

  “Ano,” Meta said, nodding at Marta’s translation. “Prosím vas.” Yes, please.

  Marta left the parlor to answer the door, leaving the two pianists alone together for the first time. They regarded each other with open stares, benign but intense. The moment was not unlike that when a handshake between strangers goes on a touch too long, or people walking down the street who have never met catch each other’s gaze and allow it to linger until they pass. Meta didn’t know Tomáš. Never really would. She hoped that keeping his promise to Jakub Bartoš would allow the sonata of his own life to resolve at least into a tonic minor. Then, unexpectedly, he removed the manuscript from the piano stand and presented it to Meta with a slight formal nod.

  “Není to moje, takže vám to nemůžu dát. Ale dává vám to Jakub, abyste to vrátila Otýlii,” he whispered. This is not mine to give you. Jakub gives this to you so you can give it back to Otylie.

  Buoyant, Meta needed no translation. Nor did Tomáš when she held the score in both hands and said, “Thank you. I will do my best.”

  Tomáš, unburdened from his wartime promise to Jakub, felt lighter as well. His buoyancy was limited, though. This earnest, gifted American girl was not going to be very happy with him, he feared, when she found out what he’d done. Nor was his sister, Johana, going to be anything less than livid once she learned he had given the original to Meta. Maybe this had been his great character flaw all along. Hedging his bets. Coming to a crossroads and trying against the odds to take both paths. He might have learned by now, might he not, that it was better to make the wrong choice and live with it long enough to correct the mistake than to embrace opposing sides.

  Meta gently pressed the manuscript to her breast, then replaced it on the piano stand for her recital. Smiling one last time at Tomáš, she noticed his features weren’t as calm as a moment ago. All of this must be overwhelming for him, she figured. Then, hearing voices in the corridor, she turned to face the entering guests.

  What began as a brief recital evolved into a lively musicale. After Meta finished an encore playing the sonata movements a second time, she asked Sam to come to the piano and show them what a real pianist sounded like. Scoffing at the comparison, he sat and gave an account of Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” that was so sure and solid it transformed Lang’s limping piano into an exultant instrument. Andrea was coaxed to the front of the room next, where, after bowing extravagantly to the applause, she made Sam proud with a not-half-bad crack at the first waltz of Erik Satie’s slow-dreamy Trois Gymnopédies. And for her own encore, a noisy version of “Louie Louie,” as Gerrit and Meta cheered her on. Caught up in the spirit of the afternoon, Tomáš himself was finally cajoled into playing an excerpt from the middle movement of the very Haydn sonata he’d performed in the 1930s during his gathering with Otylie and the others in the ghost of this room.

  “You should play too,” Meta nudged Gerrit, as Tomáš hoisted himself up on his cane to more applause.

  “No way. It’s like asking a meadowlark to listen to a toad croak.”

  “I don’t think toads croak.”

  “Sure they do.”

  “Toads don’t make any sounds, do they?”

  “Better yet. My point exactly.”

  Everybody had come with wine and beer. The Hodeks brought a basket of local cheeses, fresh bread, ripe figs; and the Langs’ cupboards and refrigerator were opened wide. An impromptu party began. Another party Mandelbaum was going to miss, Meta rued, toasting Tomáš, who in turn raised a glass to Otylie and Jakub Bartoš. Sam and Andrea found the stereo and began to spin an eclectic mix of Bo Diddley, Aretha Franklin, the Ramones—all bootleg stuff that Marta’s husband had obsessively collected in the Iron Curtain days. It was out with the old longhair music and in with the new longhair music. Sam asked Gretja if she’d like to dance. Andrea dragged Gerrit by the hand out onto the improvised dance floor that spilled from the parlor into the kitchen. Even Tomáš, who hated pop music, sat at the kitchen table and tapped his cane absently to the beat.

  Meta watched this revelry feeling curiously maternal. If she never did another good thing in her life, she had come this far, made it to this day. She knew about the butterfly effect but had never really believed it before. Yet right now, just for a passing instant, wasn’t she herself the butterfly who flapped her wings and created a weather system on the other side of the world? All these people were here because she had taken the subway out to Kalmia Avenue on a warm summer day to visit Irena Svobodová Dorfman, regift her some Polish chocolate, and listen to a life story from the precincts of hell. She had to admit to herself, if nobody else, that she’d never fully believed she’d locate a sister movement to go with Irena’s. If she’d been reasonable, pragmatic, whatever the word was, she would not be here now. Well, she thought, sometimes the haystack needle is found.

  “He wanting dance with you, Meta,” Andrea said, snatching her out of her thoughts.

  “You sure you don’t mind sharing him with me?”

  “He wanting you.”

  “Andrea,” Gerrit warned. “Stop it already.”

  “Shall we dance, mister?” Meta said, ignoring his embarrassment and offering him her hands. Gerrit pretended to frown at Andrea, then smiled at Meta, who had transformed herself from an elegant classical musician in a black silk skirt and sensible black shoes to a barefooted terpsichorean tossing her hair from shoulder to shoulder with abandon. Sylvie, who hadn’t known what had developed between them, saw it at once. She and Sam, as they swung slowly back and forth in an embrace to the Marvin Gaye ballad that came next, felt as if they suddenly had an older daughter, one who was impossibly close to their own ages. In Czech, Sam whispered, We’d better get a bigger piano, if you know what I mean.

  A few hours fled by. Most of the guests, not a little tipsy, said goodbye, thanking Marta and Tomáš for the hospitality. Andrea pleaded to stay with Gerrit when her parents announced it was time to go. Her father told her that they had no need of a chaperone, even an indulgent chaperone like Andrea. She responded with a compliant pout.

  Gerrit told her in English, “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Satisfied, the girl gave Meta a kiss on both cheeks, and the Hodeks gathered their things and left. While Marta busied herself with seeing guests to the door, Meta and Gerrit sat with Tomáš. Now that the nexus between the two manuscripts had been established, Meta saw no reason not to immediately begin her search for the first movement, the one Otylie had kept. With Gerrit acting as interpreter, she asked Tomáš if he had any idea what had happened to her after she split up the sonata and departed for England.

  Taking a sip of beer and setting the glass on the table with such focused care that one might have thought it was fragile crystal holding some rare elixir, Tomáš pursed his lips and told Gerrit what he recalled about her time in London.

  “He says what I think you already knew. Jakub helped her get work with the Beneš exile government, maybe as a secretary. He says he thinks the couple always believed that when the war was over they would reunite in a free Czechoslovakia and take up their lives where they’d left off—I’m sorry, můžete to zopakovat?” Could you repeat that?

  Staring at his tabled hands, Tomáš filled in what Gerrit had missed, and then continued.

  “‘Such optimism, but that’s how they were. Infectious idealism, not a cynical bone in their bodies.’ As for Otylie, he says he knows she was in Prague after the war.”

  “How does he know? Did he see her?”

  “He got a letter from her, he says.”

  “You’re kidding. Ask him if he still has it.”

  Tomáš nodded and conversed with Gerrit for a minute.

  “What’s he saying?” Meta interrupted.

  “If I’m getting this right, she wrote to him a couple of times and he wrote back,
but he thinks she never got his replies because she never answered the questions he asked her, didn’t respond to his offer to return the manuscript. Strangest of all, she never requested details about his last encounter with her husband. That seemed very much unlike her. So he assumes she never read what he wrote.”

  “Can we see her letters?” she asked, unable to contain her stirring impatience.

  Before Gerrit had finished translating Meta’s questions, Tomáš reached into his jacket breast pocket, pulled out several sheets of folded paper, and handed them to Meta.

  Tell her, he said to Gerrit, that there were some others from London, but they’re gone now. These are all that I have left.

  Heart racing, she opened and flattened them with her palm, then looked at the front and back of each sheet of the two missives. Otylie’s tidy signature was there in blue-black ink at the end of both, and each began Milý Tomáši. One bore the dateline Praha, 1946, and the other, Prague, 1978. She handed them to Gerrit and sat shifting in her seat as she waited for him to tell her what Otylie had written.

  There wasn’t much to translate. Written in a carefully rounded script on blue, billet-sized paper, the first letter was brief. How much useful information could be there, Meta wondered, trying to curb her hopes.

  “Dear Tomáš,” Gerrit translated. “Praise heaven this horrid war is over! I’m back in Prague looking for my Jakub. Do you have any news of him? And you? Where are you? I came to your house but it is in ruins like too much here. You can find me at the Inn of the Golden Hart. I long to hear from you. Your affectionate friend, Otylie Bartošová. P.S. I address this to your Šporkova house and hope one day it may reach you.”

  “Does that hotel still exist?” asked Meta.

  Gerrit queried, and Tomáš assured him it closed long ago.

  Undeterred, Meta said, “I think I already know the answer to this, but could you confirm that Tomáš never saw her?”

  Gerrit asked the old man, who shook his head as he spoke.

  “He didn’t get the letter until several months after she wrote it, he says. He went immediately to the inn but she’d checked out.”

  “What about the other one?”

  Written on cream stationery, the second letter ran to two sheets. Gerrit read it through, then translated for her.

  “Dear Tomáš, You have been on my mind these past years, and as fate would have it I met a boy today, a new piano student, whose name is Tom, and I thought to write. I wonder if you are still alive and, if so, whether you ever feel lonely for those days as I sometimes do. Oh, I have friends in this new world, that wonderful girl I met during the war years away from home who I’ve told you about, and now even a man, a very good man, although sometimes I wonder if I am living two lives, one as a ghost and the other waiting to become one. I write this knowing you may never see or read it. How I loved our lives back in the old days. We had no idea how fortunate we were. Did you ever hear anything of Jakub or Irena? Do you have any idea what became of the sonata manuscript? I can’t forgive myself for ever having broken it up. Your friend forever, Otylie.”

  “Is there a return address on that second one?”

  Gerrit turned the leaves front and back, said, “No, just Prague and the year.”

  “Could you ask him if he still has the envelope? Maybe she added it there.”

  The old man told Gerrit that his sister had probably thrown it out. He was able to salvage these letters, but Johana was never comfortable with his friendship with the Bartošes, and he had no idea what else she might have tossed. “‘The Nazis may have been defeated,’ he says, “‘but prejudice is less easily overcome.’”

  Meta clasped and unclasped her hands, suddenly aware that they ached from the strain of the performance, then laid them flat on her thighs. “Unless you can think of more questions, I don’t know what else to say other than to thank Tomáš for sharing these with me. It’s heartening to know that Otylie made it through the war and beyond.”

  “Let me ask him about this wonderful girl she mentions,” Gerrit said, then translated Tomáš’s response, that he only remembered they were together in London. Beyond this, his memory was a blank.

  Tomáš continued speaking for another minute before Gerrit told Meta, “He says she sounded so sad in the later one that even if he’d known where to reach her, it would have been a hard letter to write. He knows the truth about what happened with Jakub, or he’s pretty sure. It would have been terrible to be the bearer of the news, though at least he could’ve returned the manuscript.”

  “Tell him—,” she started, looking not at Gerrit but at Tomáš.

  Gerrit hesitated before asking, “Tell him?”

  “Tell him if Otylie’s still alive, I swear I’ll put it into her hands myself, just like he put it in mine.”

  When they left Šporkova Street that evening, the manuscript wrapped in the same brown envelope it had been stored in for years, Meta’s first concern was to figure out the safest place to keep the treasured pages.

  “Much as I trust the Kettles, their children tend to get into things, like all little kids do,” Meta said, as they passed Socrates dozing on the cobbles. “And there’s also an endless parade of students and their parents into and out of Sam’s. Just too much risk.”

  Gerrit thought for a few quiet paces. “There’s an old writing desk at my place, one of those antique secretaries with a lid that folds down. It’s got a lock and key. Just a generic skeleton key, I admit, more symbolic than secure. But I think it’d be safe there until you find a better spot for it. It certainly has the virtue of anonymity.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “Why would I mind? It’d be a privilege.”

  Meta hadn’t yet been up to Gerrit’s attic apartment. She was struck by its spartan yet lived-in, comfortable look.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “What are you having?”

  “Boring as it sounds, I could use a cup of strong black tea.”

  “Me too,” she said. As he left the room, she asked, “Okay if I look around?”

  “Feel free,” he answered, checking to make sure his notebook that contained observations about Meta’s quest was still in his jacket pocket.

  One wall was papered with color photographs he had snapped all over Europe on assignments. Judging from a number of the images, he had seen firsthand his share of history, some of it triumphant, some of it violent. Another wall was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of secondhand books. History, poetry, biography, philosophy, novels in several languages—his interests were broad. Gerrit’s desk by the window was stacked with manuscripts, microcassettes, recorder and earphones, newspaper clippings, and more books whose pages were tagged with slips of paper, no doubt references for projects in progress. A porcelain jar held a quiver of pencils next to a laptop that centered the workspace. The furniture in the front room was eclectic, from distressed baroque to unornamented nouveau. An imaginative apartment, she marveled, lived in by an unassuming, thinking inhabitant.

  Until now, Meta had always found herself drawn to bright guys, who were, in a word, slobs. Jonathan’s one-bedroom was the archetypal New York bachelor pad with laundry growing in every corner, a sink full of unwashed dishes, a bed that never got made until his once-a-week cleaning woman came by to set the place in temporary order. Not that he didn’t always put himself together like the professional he was. His shirts were impeccably pressed, his suits handsomely cut. But looking at him from the outside, one would never guess at the not uncharming mayhem that was his apartment.

  How unlike Jonathan was Gerrit, who presented to the world at large a persona far closer to the way he lived: precise without being fussy, smart without being overbearing. She felt at home here and was struck by his—for want of a better word—maturity.

  “I love your place,” she told him, turning to see that he’d returned from the kitchen to the main room through an open arched doorway. “So who are these people?” p
ointing to a framed collage of black-and-white photographs on the dormer wall beside the desk.

  “Key players in the Velvet Revolution. That’s Alexandr Vondra, and that’s Jiří Křižan, Michael Žantovský there, and this is Havel speaking at a huge rally in his heyday.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a photographer.”

  “I wouldn’t characterize myself that way,” he said, “but as a freelancer I have to be my own photographer sometimes. And anyway, I like to take pictures of people and things that interest me. I thought about bringing my camera to your sonata party this afternoon.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because it was your moment, and my taking pictures might have distracted you,” he responded, only then realizing that if Meta and her sonata were to become a feature story, he’d blown an opportunity to record a milestone in her search. Jiří would likely have applauded this bit of negligence.

  “Just as well. I was nervous enough as it was.”

  “Besides,” said Gerrit, “you can’t photograph music, which was the main point of the gathering.”

  Meta took a sip of tea, and commented, “You’re more of a world traveler than you let on. Is this the fall of the Berlin Wall I’m seeing in this one?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be there, but yes.”

  “You have any pictures of yourself when you were young? Shots of your parents, where you grew up?”

  “I’m happy to show you, but I’ve got an idea. I have a sort of family portrait gallery where I’d like to take you. My best friend, Jiří Pelc, is a painter. He has an open studio coming up, and if you’d like to join me, I’ll show you my walk-through family album on the way. Game?”

  “Sounds intriguing. And I’d love to meet your friend.”

  “Done,” he said. “Now I have a present for you.”

  He set down his cup, went into his bedroom, and returned holding a vintage leather dispatch case, dark-brown calf with roan edging and brass hardware tarnished to a mellow gold. “I bought this in France years ago. Saw it in an antique-shop window and thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on. I’ve never owned anything precious enough to put in it. Here, it’s yours now. To protect the manuscript.”