The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  “Does your mother-in-law know where Otylie—Tilly, I mean—is now?”

  “Well, I’m sorry but after the war she went back to Czechoslovakia to find her husband. I gather he was in the underground.”

  “And Jane?”

  “Jane went back to Texas to marry her soldier fiancé.”

  “What was Jane’s last name, or the name of the soldier? Does your mother-in-law remember?”

  “I thought you might want to know that. But I’m afraid she says it was so long ago that all she remembers are their first names, how supportive they were of each other, how much they liked going to the picture shows. She tried to think of others who might have known them, but I’m sorry, Miss Taverner, she just couldn’t.”

  Meta thanked the woman and hung up. Wide awake now, she told Gerrit what she’d learned. While the information wasn’t specific enough to lead them to her door, Otylie Bartošová had suddenly become more real than ever. Their trip to London, haphazard as it was, had borne fruit.

  After a quick breakfast, they each got down to their separate agendas. Rather than taking the tube, Meta walked along Marylebone Road for a brisk three quarters of an hour to the British Library. The sky above London was overcast, with clouds running low and swift, and though it wasn’t too chilly, the pearly light had a deep autumnal cast. She couldn’t help thinking, as she made her way through the morning crowd, that the odds were against her.

  The reading rooms were busy, but a hush blanketed the air. She sat at a long table and looked over a well-used atlas of England and another of continental Europe—this time giving in to using the index—in the hope of locating a city or town named Prague other than the Czech Republic’s capital, Praha. There was a Rome in upstate New York, a Versailles in Kentucky, a Manhattan in Kansas. A British or Irish or Welsh or Scottish Prague didn’t seem out of the question. Was looking for a place in Europe any different from searching for one woman in Prague or in London? At least places, unlike people, generally stayed put.

  The idea had occurred to her back in Malá Strana, when she’d first noticed something in one of Otylie’s letters to Tomáš Lang. She’d meant to mention it to Gerrit at the time—the inconsistency of Otylie’s having written Prague, 1978 on her second letter to the pianist, rather than Praha—but with everything else going on neglected to bring it up. Later, after reflecting on it a little, she’d shrugged off her initial perplexity and dismissed the matter. This morning, though, when Gerrit set off for the newspaper bureau, Meta pulled the letter out again. There it was in Otylie’s sure and steady hand. Prague. Probably meant nothing. She might simply have gotten used to saying Prague while living in London. Yet in the earlier 1946 letter, she did use Praha. Why the switch?

  Either way, there wasn’t a town called Prague in all the British commonwealth. Nor did it take longer than an hour to conclude that she’d come here on a fool’s errand.

  But maybe not. She pondered for another moment, then pulled down a detailed atlas of the United States. This is probably wrong too, she thought as she turned to the index. Breathing unevenly, she ran her finger down the columns past the Petersburgs and Pleasant Valleys, the Pittsburgs and Plainviews, until it hovered next to what she sought.

  “Eureka,” she whispered, blinking in disbelief.

  Way out in the flat, sparse heartland states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, there were not just one or two but three Pragues. What was more, she soon discovered that Texas boasted a Prague of its own, one that used the original Czech spelling, Praha. Was it possible Otylie Bartošová, having fled two wars in her native Europe, might burn all her bridges to the past and migrate to the middle of America, and from there write her old acquaintance Tomáš Lang one last letter?

  Sure, Meta and Gerrit could continue to trace gossamer threads around London. But she had to wonder if a road trip in a rented car from Prague, Arkansas, over to Praha, Texas, then straight north to Prague, Oklahoma, and from there along exactly the same longitude line to Prague, Nebraska, might not be as good a plan, if not a better one. There was even a New Prague, Minnesota, farther north and east, though Otylie’s letter bore only the single word.

  She made notes and left the library in a hurry to meet Gerrit in Regent’s Park. They could fly to New York, crash at her place—hard to believe she still had an apartment of her own—and do some Internet research at Gillie’s, or at a bare minimum check out the white pages. But had Otylie changed her name by now? She’d made mention of a man in her life. Maybe she had remarried. Unless Gerrit had a eureka moment of his own, this seemed like the best, the last, and the only way to proceed. As with everything in her life these days, she was ready to, for want of a better phrase, go for it. One of the many reasons she loved Gerrit was that this seemed to be his modus operandi too.

  Meta reached the park first and sat on a bench where they’d agreed to meet. The clouds had dispersed to form a filigree, leaving a rich blue dome over the city. Enough of a breeze remained to hoist several kites above the trees, and jacketed children played on the grass, kicking a ball about, or chasing one another as mothers and nannies looked on. It couldn’t have been a more bucolic setting, even surrounded as it was by the incessant drone of double-decker buses, taxis, scooters.

  As she waited, thoughts drifting, she wondered how things would be at home with Gerrit by her side rather than Jonathan. Would Gillian like Gerrit? Would her mother? Would Gerrit’s family approve of her? And what of her students? Would they have moved on or would she be able to teach lessons again to help pay for all this travel?

  Would, would, would—and all at once Meta understood that going to New York, no matter how briefly, was not the best course. She had more miles to travel before she could face all the comforts and difficulties of homecoming and risk slowing her momentum, scattering her focus. No, unless Gerrit strongly disagreed, they should fly from Heathrow on as direct a flight to Arkansas as they could afford, rent a car, and take a drive that would connect the Prague dots. These Pragues looked to be relatively small towns—from barely a few hundred people to barely a few thousand—where, she imagined, most everybody knew everybody and history was a thing of the present. Even if Otylie had changed her name a dozen times, they could ask around, Meta figured, and locate her through her story and the sonata itself.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Gerrit, slipping onto the bench beside her.

  Meta started. “Hey, not fair to frighten a person like that. Anyway, how do you know my thoughts might not be worth pence instead of just a penny?”

  “Really now. Tell me.”

  “First, what did you learn?”

  “Well, for one,” said Gerrit, hoping not to betray the nervousness he felt, “I learned that my exasperated editor says I may still have a job if I behave myself. I had to tell her what’s been going on, get her up to speed, in order to ask for help.”

  “That’s wonderful about the job, but how much did you tell her?”

  Here he hesitated. “Pretty much everything.”

  “What does ‘everything’ mean?”

  “It means I told her you have two of three movements, that you believe it’s a lost Beethoven sonata. She knows about Wittmann, that we’re together in London.”

  “Gerrit, I don’t—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, but hear me out. Margery thinks it’s a great story—”

  “When did this go from a love song to a news story?”

  “—maybe as big as that front-page article you once fantasized about. And honestly, so do I.”

  “But that was a fantasy I rejected, Gerrit. Have you forgotten why we’re here, what Paul told us? We’re practically in hiding. And you go and tell your editor everything?”

  When she looked at him, hurt and confused, he took her hand and said, “Meta. Listen. Margery gets it that you’re not ready to go public yet and that if any of this was published prematurely it would cause more harm than good.”

  “That’s really thoughtful, but I’m su
rprised you’re talking about publication. Have you still been taking notes behind my back? You never stopped, did you.” She gently removed her hand from his, stood, and, crossing her arms, looked across the park toward two boys trying to launch their kite.

  Gerrit got up from the bench and embraced her from behind. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry. This is what I was afraid of all along, that you wouldn’t understand. That you’d think I was using you as fodder for a story.”

  “And you’re telling me that’s wrong.”

  “I’m telling you what you’re doing is important, Meta,” he said, moving around to face her, “and at some point people will want to know about what happened from the first moment this sonata entered your life. I can’t help writing it down, asking questions and following threads, and I can’t help loving you. Whatever you think, if I’m able to use what I do to help you, well, I can’t help that either. That’s why I talked to Margery. And there was a dividend at the end of our conversation.”

  “I’m not so sure about all of this, Gerrit,” she said, but knew in truth that if he fully trusted Margery, she’d be wrong not to follow his lead. They were, after all, in it together. Swallowing her anger, she continued, “So what’s this dividend?”

  “First, we’re all right?”

  “I understand your motivations are good.”

  Drawing her down beside him on the bench, Gerrit said, “Margery had an intern look into it while I was at the bureau. Turns out there was an Otylie Bartosova, no accent marks, naturalized as an American citizen in the early ’50s, not that many years after our Otylie disappeared from the timeline.”

  “I knew it,” Meta burst out. “This couldn’t be more perfect. Everything fits.”

  Now he was startled. “What do you mean? Did you find something at the library?”

  As she filled him in, Meta could hear how preposterous her proposed next step might sound, but as she realized Gerrit was not going to think her out of her mind, some of her upset began to drain away. He did wonder whether it might be more efficient to, in the good old Yellow Pages’ advertising phrase, let their fingers do the walking, or ask Margery for another hour of her intern’s time. Meta shook her head.

  “This is how I’ve done it all along. Phone books and interns don’t lead to memories, or personal recollections, or private networks. I’m thrilled Margery came up with that information, assuming it’s the same person, but Irena didn’t find me through a database. We didn’t find Tomáš that way, either. Or each other.”

  “Can’t disagree with a word you’re saying.”

  “If we go to these Pragues personally and don’t find her, or at least a gravestone, a death certificate, then I’ll know I did everything I could. I hope that doesn’t sound fanatical.”

  “It sounds like good investigative journalism, oddly enough,” Gerrit said, taking her hand as they left Regent’s Park. “One thing’s for sure. Wittmann won’t be looking for us in Arkansas.”

  “Who knows? The man’s complicated.”

  “Dangerous and harmless. Brilliant and stupid. Powerful and strangely weak.”

  “There but not all there,” added Meta, and Gerrit was relieved to see a real smile.

  “At least he’s not here.”

  When they reached the hotel to make travel arrangements, Meta said, “By the way, if there turns out to be a story to write—big if since an important part of the sonata’s still missing—I wouldn’t want anyone else to write it.”

  “You know,” pulling her to him and kissing her, “despite the fact that Venus de Milo is missing her arms, she still represents classic beauty, and you can find her in enough art history books to fill a library. Your incomplete sonata is also a thing of classic beauty, and it’s already a story of real interest. Everything about you is, as I see it.”

  “Yes, but you’re blind.”

  “So was Homer, and it didn’t stop him.”

  Given that Meta was mollified enough to chuckle at his little joke, Gerrit hadn’t the heart to tell her that the first thing he had done at the office wasn’t to place that call to Margery but to check the wire service, see what was being reported out of the Czech Republic. A small piece surfaced in which a noted Czech music scholar had claimed that an eighteenth-century music manuscript of considerable import, the property of an unidentified Czech family who had survived the Holocaust, had gone missing and was possibly stolen. Gerrit had smirked at that reference since the Lang family Wittmann was trying to claim it for were anything but Holocaust survivors. It came as a relief to note that in the single sentence mentioning Meta, either the reporter or Wittmann himself had misspelled her last name as “Tavener,” and she wasn’t outright accused of the theft. The information offered was simply that this young American musicologist had brought the manuscript to Wittmann’s attention and was working with the original when it disappeared. Why Wittmann’s name wasn’t specified in the brief piece was unclear. There was no mention of Paul Mandelbaum or, for that matter, Gerrit Mills. Gerrit’s assumption was that Wittmann was testing the waters, making his first public accusations without setting himself up for a slander suit.

  Gerrit didn’t much relish the idea of keeping this from Meta. But it was a pathetic squib, misinformed, and hadn’t apparently been picked up by other news outlets. He and Meta needed to move forward, take their journey to America, and tend to neither the distraction nor the threat that was Wittmann.

  6

  OTYLIE HAJEK, formerly Otylie Bartošová, settled into the newest phase of her life with the transparent joy of a lapsed believer who had once again found God’s path. Which was not to say she ever finally embraced organized religion. That would always be for others, though her wedding in Texas was officiated by the groom’s favorite minister, Reverend Pursel Moore, in the First Methodist Church where Danek had been a congregant since childhood. The ceremony took place on a sunny Saturday afternoon, with colorful jewels of light dappling the sanctuary from the stained-glass windows, before a surprisingly large group of friends, cousins, colleagues, and others. Otylie nearly fainted when, just as the minister was about to begin, her onetime charge, Grace Sanders, all grown up and more radiant than ever, appeared as a surprise guest. Grace, a college graduate now with a fiancé of her own accompanying her, had never lost touch with Otylie over the years. They always spoke by phone on their birthdays, caught up on each other’s doings as if they were contemporaries rather than decades apart. With both Jane and Grace present, impromptu flower girls beside her near the altar, Otylie felt represented by true family. This was what faith was all about, she thought as she said her vows.

  Jane had promised the newlyweds a reception back at her house that would not soon be forgotten, a shindig so festive it might be deemed sinful, and she made good on her word.

  “You’ve invited the whole county, Jane,” Otylie gushed, seeing her soon-to-be-former piano students running around the backyard while many of Danek’s coworkers from the local hospital milled near the bowl of spiked punch, dancing and laughing, and told the couple how much they were going to be missed.

  “We’re not moving to another planet, mind you,” Danek assured his closest friend from the congregation. “Just a couple of states away. Besides, we’ll be visiting and you’re always welcome up in Nebraska.”

  In Lincoln, whenever Danek attended Sunday services throughout the course of what would evolve into a long, close marriage, he not only didn’t begrudge his wife her resistance to church religion but took it as a matter of honor that she followed her heart as she saw fit. He reminded himself that neither did she grouse when, on a perfect Sunday morning in early June, he passed an hour listening to a sermon about the stormy weather of the soul before they got in the car and drove out to Branched Oak Lake for a buttermilk-fried-chicken picnic or over to Prague to visit newfound friends for a hand or two of bridge. Once, when he asked Otylie more about her upbringing, especially her religious upbringing, she told him she’d grown up in a hous
ehold where music was the religion and composers were its saints. Cantatas were chapels. Pavanes were prayer. Fugues were the firmament and God existed in every note. Just as Jakub had before him, Danek loved Otylie more than theology, more than Judaism or Christianity. And like Jakub, Danek made peace with this single schism in their otherwise unusually harmonious life together.

  Work at the hospital was more rewarding, but also more grueling, than what Danek had been used to at the Texas facility. Never much of a complainer, he rolled up his sleeves and threw himself into his job with zeal. Otylie noticed that, in part because of the hospital’s seniority system and in part because her husband had a habit of volunteering to take on duties others might not, Danek was often called in for shifts at odd hours.

  “They are working you hard,” she once remarked when she’d gotten out of bed to make him bacon and eggs in the middle of the night because he was called in to cover the short-staffed emergency room.

  “Any other job, I might consider it hard work,” he said, washing down his toast with black coffee. “But where there are people, there are sick people, hurt people. I just happen to be one who knows how to help them.”

  “You’re a good man, Daniel Hajek.”

  One thing he kept from Otylie was how many patients, an inordinately high number, he felt, were admitted to the emergency room because of injuries to their hands, injuries so horrific he didn’t dare tell her what he’d seen. Mangled or lost hands in particular bothered him, as he knew how essential hands were to a farmer’s work, any laborer’s, not to mention a musician such as Otylie. And he adored his wife’s hands. After they’d settled here, she had taken on a number of students, voice and piano, and was well loved by the Lincoln kids who studied with her. When he glimpsed her demonstrating arpeggios for them on the piano, or making a three-bean salad for lunch after lessons, or gesticulating wildly as she spat furious curses at the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on their black-and-white television, he always loved those hands. Her fingers had thickened over the years, but what Danek saw were intricate instruments, skilled and delicate, always alive. The veins that made such strong mosaics on the tops of them and flowed their way past her prominent, elegant knuckles into her fingers. When she confessed to him that for a long time she had renounced music altogether, he found it hard to imagine.