They sat at the table, shaking their heads at how unexpected Tomáš’s death was given what fine form he had been in during the private recital. They made the small talk people at a loss for words, thrown together in mourning, must make.
“He was not a young man,” Marta offered, tasting her brandy and staring at the lights reflected on its jostled surface as she set the snifter back on the table.
“We feel so fortunate to have met him,” said Meta.
Thanking her, Marta switched to Czech, too exhausted to string together her thoughts in English, and relied on Gerrit to fill Meta in. “‘Given that he survived not one but two oppressor regimes, it is a miracle that he didn’t go permanently insane. Of course, he did lose some part of himself over time, but unlike most people when they get older, he was less, how should I describe this, less … dementiaed than when I was a young girl.’”
“I didn’t really live here under the Party,” Gerrit commented, “but I remember the euphoria in the air when I first moved back to Prague. He must have felt it like everybody else, that new sense of freedom.”
I’m sure you’re right, Marta agreed.
Meta had been listening intently to Gerrit’s translation as Marta aired her thoughts. Now she spoke. “One thing I regret is that he’ll never know if I was able to find Otylie.”
Here Marta had to smile. A flat sort of smile that meant, even before she said it in so many words ahead of Gerrit’s translation, “‘I hate to dampen your optimism. You may one day find the missing part of the music, but the chances of Otylie Bartošová being alive? I’m sorry to tell you, Meta, but that will not happen.’”
Having held back her tears all day, Marta finally broke down.
Meta rose and stood behind her, placing both hands on the woman’s shoulders, saying nothing. Gerrit looked at Meta as she remained there for a minute in a wordless tableau. What was there, finally, to say?
Marta apologized and left the room, telling her guests she would be right back. They assumed she wanted to dry her tears in private. Meta sat beside Gerrit again, took his hand into hers on her lap. Her mind was awash in crosscurrenting thoughts. On the one hand, she was grateful that she had managed to find Tomáš, talk with him, discuss the sonata, play it in his presence. On the other, Marta’s blunt statement unsettled her. Everything seemed wrapped in death. Mere months ago, Irena had opened a steamer trunk and handed over a sheaf of music. Now she was gone. Only yesterday, Tomáš might have been sitting in the very chair where Meta herself now sat clutching Gerrit’s warm hand, utterly unaware that the angel of death was perched on the roof of his house.
“Don’t think like that,” Gerrit whispered, interrupting the image of a thin, leathery black figure flexing his wings on the cornice somewhere above them.
There he went again, reading her mind. “Like what?”
“Like it’s hopeless you’ll find Otylie.”
“I have to admit, she’s probably right.”
“You found Tomáš before he died, didn’t you? You managed to meet Irena.”
“Well, she found me, not the other way around.”
“Doesn’t matter who found whom. You’ll get there, maybe not to Otylie herself, but at least to the other pages of the manuscript. I have faith in you—”
“So do I,” Marta said, reemerging unexpectedly from the dark hallway to sit with them again. “Please, don’t misunderstand. My father and I both think—or thought, I guess now for him—that you have the, how do you say this, the right passion in you. The will. The people who have the pages, they were just trying to survive and keep it safe, the manuscript. I never did know Otylie Bartošová, but always I expect one day she might show up at our door. She didn’t. That means for me she cannot.”
“There might be other reasons, though. You said this house didn’t exist here for a lot of years. That it was burned down. Maybe she came looking and saw it was destroyed and made some of the same assumptions you’re making.”
Instead of pursuing further speculation and counter-speculation, Marta laid Otylie’s two letters on the table. “My father wanted you to have these. He said you needed them.”
“You’re sure?” Meta asked.
“He was sure. This was important to him.”
“Thank you,” said Meta, holding them before her as if they were paper amulets. “I’ll keep them with the manuscript.”
“He would like that. It is where he kept them too.”
“How I wish I could thank him.”
“Find that first movement. This is the way you can thank him.”
Back at Jánská, Gerrit helped Meta go through the two missives sentence by sentence, as they hadn’t had time to do when Tomáš first brought them out. The letter dating from 1978 especially touched Meta. Do you have any idea what became of the sonata manuscript? I can’t forgive myself for ever having broken it up. Her words conveyed all the tragedy that Meta felt every time she played the second passage of the work’s likely second movement, that dropping-into-the-abyss mood it proposed. One of the standard premises she had been taught about music and meaning was that it was a very tricky, iffy, slippery business to attribute literal story lines to the abstract, ineffable gestures of music. Mandelbaum had always been as strict as a penal code when it came to overinterpretation.
“More often than not, music means music” was what he’d told his students. “It’s not a poem about a tree. It’s not an essay about nematodes. It often stands for nothing greater or lesser than itself.”
But she never believed him. Listeners’ spirits soared or sank because of something the brain linked to story or portrayal or even landscape, no matter what Mandelbaum said. Interpretation logically assumed narrative framing in some degree and form. At any rate, the words in this letter were written by one who knew what the sonata meant in profounder ways than anyone else could possibly experience.
Having heard nothing from Mandelbaum, Meta tried to reach him at the hotel before going to bed. The rain had tapered off to a light drizzle and the wind had died down as she listened to the phone in his room ring a number of times before the receptionist came back on the line.
“I am sorry but no one is answering. You would like to leave a message?”
“Yes, could you say that Meta Taverner called.” She spelled her name and gave the woman her cell number.
That night in bed with Gerrit, Meta found her thoughts flowing back and forth from Otylie’s desperate words to the harsh reality of Marta’s. The one glimmer in her musings, which were otherwise dark and chill as the night, was Otylie’s mention of her friendship with a wonderful girl, and about having found a good man. This made her happy for the woman. But wasn’t it also possible that the existence of this friend and lover meant she had a network, a coterie or circle, and was thereby just a little more traceable?
London. Meta had performed there. That there was no language barrier for her to hurdle would help. Still, London was a prodigious megalopolis compared with Prague’s relatively compact medieval web. These were night thoughts, of course. In the morning she’d be able to embrace the fact that tracking a Czech who worked for the Beneš government in London during the war would surely be much easier than wandering streets with names like Veleslavínova or Žatecká using a compass without a needle.
UNEASY, AS FIDGETY AS THE NEGATIVE POLES of two magnets forced together, Wittmann and Mandelbaum huddled in a dark corner of Konvikt’s rear room. Though they had arranged to meet earlier in the evening, Wittmann pushed the hour back with the excuse that something unavoidable had come up. Personal matter. Couldn’t be helped. Sincere apologies.
The last person he felt like speaking with at the moment was Paul Mandelbaum. He hadn’t enjoyed their conversation at the hotel any more than had his colleague. Sniping, however civilized, wasn’t their forte. What was more in their wheelhouse was whether Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s rethinking of the complete keyboard works of Ravel and Debussy merited all the attention it was getting—Paul thought yes, Pe
tr no. They might have been closer comrades in musical arms had they lived on the same continent. Still and all, even with an ocean dividing them, snail mail, the occasional conference, and sporadic telephone marathons had kept the fire of friendship burning.
The problem of the sonata blanketed all this warmth in a layer of frosty dissension. Mandelbaum’s position was, to Wittmann, parochial. He was unable to see beyond the immediate research of his acolyte. The resourceful, enterprising, risk-taking accomplice Wittmann once counted on was now as absent as were the low-level Communist curators who’d acted as his suppliers in exchange for modest remuneration and simple considerations such as a bottle of vodka or an hour with a genial prostitute.
Hadn’t he for the most part spared Mandelbaum some of these more sordid details? All the American needed to know was that such trafficking was dangerous but ultimately in a just cause. Paul must have suspected that the manuscripts might never be repatriated even if the Reds did ever fall. But for reasons of his own, he never asked. Then, one day in Amsterdam, he’d told Wittmann that he would take this parcel to New York and deliver it to an address he had visited twice before, but that he was getting married and his role as courier had to come to an end. Too touch and go. And what with a tenure-track professorship offered at the same time, he simply had to get out.
Wittmann had almost felt sorry for the man back then, and in a way still did. Mandelbaum had wanted, in lieu of further payment for his role as wary mule, Wittmann’s assurance of absolute confidence in the matter. He’d done his bit, and done it less for the money—though money had helped in those church-mouse-poor graduate-student days—than because he mostly believed he was in it for the common good.
Idealism unanchored by realism was something Wittmann never found terribly useful or effective. This was one of the several reasons he was here tonight. And the primary reason he found himself working against his old accomplice.
Never had they felt so uncomfortable with each other. The foam on their untouched pints settled toward flatness. The last-call supper they’d ordered, as a polite way of putting off the inevitable, would arrive at the table soon, though neither had much of an appetite. Mandelbaum, who had demanded his colleague meet him on neutral ground, broke the silence, if only because civility suggested he must.
“That was you, or somebody sent by you, who did a little illegal enter and search at Gerrit’s, wasn’t it,” he asked, although the tone in which his question was posed didn’t so much invite an answer as a confirmation.
“You make me smile,” Wittmann said, unsmiling. He slowly flicked ash off his cigarette—he’d capitulated to the urge to start smoking again—into the tray.
They spoke in English, not only because Wittmann’s English was better by far than Mandelbaum’s Czech but to protect themselves from eavesdroppers at nearby tables such as those they had drawn during their breakfast in the hotel restaurant. It seemed probable that they would be revisiting unpleasant truths, and the Konvikt crowd of blue-collar locals sudsing away their day jobs were less likely to understand those truths—or lies, for that matter—if they weren’t exchanged in the native tongue.
Satisfied he’d gotten one of the confessions he was looking for, Mandelbaum aimed for a second. “What did you have in mind to do with the score if you’d found it?”
Wittmann now did take a sip of beer. “Do you remember when you and I strove so beautifully together to do the necessary work that the larger international community could not effect? Like Maisky and Argerich playing one of the Bach gamba sonatas, so in sync with each other we were. So much on the same wavelength.”
Taken aback by the outrageous analogy, Mandelbaum opened his mouth to comment, but Wittmann raised a warning hand, palm out.
“No, let me finish. I know you remember. What I’m wanting to ask, since it seems we’re here to ask questions, is if you think what we did was good or bad.”
“May I speak now?” Mandelbaum said, leaning back in his chair.
A brief flourish with the same hand, a go-right-ahead gesture.
“I doubt Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich would appreciate your comparison, not to mention Bach. Ethics aside, what we did was against the law in at least one country, yours. That much we both know. Whether it was good or bad? With forty or so years of hindsight to bring to bear, I suppose you could make a pretty strong case either way.”
“And you think I’d be the one making the case that it was good, while you’d advocate it wasn’t. Am I right?”
“That may or may not be true. But you know what, Petr? It’s water under the bridge, clean, dirty, or otherwise. We’re not here to discuss the past. We’re here to discuss Meta’s sonata manuscript.”
“Ah,” Wittmann laughed, or sneered, or groaned—it sounded as if he’d managed all three with that single exhalation. “There you are. What do you mean, ‘Meta’s’ sonata manuscript? Its ownership is Czech, about that there’s no question. This woman, Otylie Bartošová, was the original owner, a Czech. Tomáš Lang—yes,” he said, seeing Mandelbaum’s raised eyebrows, “I told you I knew about the final movement being in his care—Tomáš Lang and his sister, both Czechs whose family hailed from Sudetenland. Irena Svobodová, pure Czech. Jakub Bartoš, a true Czech hero, it would seem.”
“So I understand. But neither Irena nor Bartoš is alive, and it remains to be seen whether Bartoš’s wife is. Until such time—”
“Until such time as her existence or demise is determined, it is our responsibility to see that this manuscript is handled as we both know it merits, and to consider all appropriate options. Failing acquisition by an institution here, the score must be placed in the private hands of a Czech who would be able to act as custodian and curator,” he said, gazing coolly at Mandelbaum. “Several people come to mind.”
“Needless to say, you deem yourself the most fitting of these several,” said Mandelbaum, stomach churning. Despite the sophistry of Wittmann’s claims, Mandelbaum knew this man was potentially as dangerous as he was striving to present himself, and might in fact be capable of having the manuscript seized. The situation would have to be handled with a surgeon’s care.
“I never said that,” Wittmann scoffed, as the aproned waiter suddenly appeared and set their plates of food before them. A roseate birthmark covered one side of his face, which Mandelbaum caught out of the corner of his eye. Stay focused, he scolded himself.
Need anything else? the waiter asked.
Both men ignored his question as if he weren’t there. Impatient, he walked away.
“Last time we spoke about this, you were willing to work with Meta, help her. What happened?”
“What happened is she seduced that fool Lang into giving her the original, when in fact, in private, and with Karel Kohout as my witness, he expressed profound confusion about the matter. Frankly, I think he was so agitated by the whole thing that he either took his own life or died from worry about it.”
“Tomáš Lang is dead?”
Wittmann frowned. “You didn’t know? Part of the reason I delayed our meeting is that I had to pay a call on his grieving sister, Johana. She blames much of this upheaval in her family’s lives on your obstinate Meta, and I can’t say I disagree. Johana was too distraught to discuss it in depth, but my impression is that she’d be willing to press charges that the original score of the third movement was stolen, or at minimum taken without the full understanding or permission of its owners. I have friends in high places who would agree with me, I might add.”
“Meta tells me she has written proof of ownership of the second movement, and Lang’s daughter witnessed her father giving her the original of that outer movement. So in point of fact, who cares about your friends in high places?”
“Your Meta might want to care,” Wittmann said, gazing at his dwindling cigarette nipped between long fingers. “I told her so when she barged in on my lecture.”
“Please. This is all bluster on your part, and you know it. You’re making me wish I’d never tr
usted you to help. I feel I’ve gone and thrown her to the wolves.”
“Charming words coming from an old comrade in arms.”
“Damn it, Petr. You’re so good at what you do, one of the best. Why do you need to behave like this? Is there something I’m missing here?”
“What you’re missing is your problem, I imagine,” Wittmann sniffed. “What I’m missing is an old colleague who used to have some bone in his back.”
“You sound less like a musicologist than a melodramatist,” Mandelbaum said, shaking his head as calmly as he could. “Just what did Renata do to you on her way out? Is the divorce what’s pushed you to this? Or do you miss the bad old days that much? Has simple academia gotten too dull?”
A rare flash of anger betrayed the open wound that Mandelbaum’s barb had struck. “Renata has nothing to do with anything. You and I always used to speak between the lines, so how was I to know that you sent this document my way with any intentions other than to acquire and place it?”
Mandelbaum said nothing, waited.
“Listen, have you ever had a serious exchange with your Meta about the dialectic of that second movement, what’s happening there musically? And I mean note for note, measure for measure? And how to interpret the jejune nature of that rondo?”
“Jejune shot through with exquisitely radical dynamics here and there, you mean.”
“My point exactly. Does the girl really know what she may have here? Do you?”
“And what does she have here? That is, beyond two thirds of a lost score?”
Wittmann shook his head with disgust. “You want me to help her. But how can the wolf, as you so nicely put it, help the innocent lamb? It’s against the wolf’s nature. And, I might add, the lamb’s.”
Mandelbaum knew it was time to move in a different direction. “All right. Let’s stop for a minute and think this through.” He exhaled through pursed lips, smiled.
The abrupt change in tone, the unexpected visage his colleague now presented, did stop Wittmann in, as it were, his wolf’s tracks.
The Prague Sonata Page 38
