The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  I can assure you, sir, that no one will answer the phone. There is no one in the room.

  Can you confirm he has checked out? Or would it be possible for you to let me see for myself?

  Sir, as much as I would like to accommodate—

  I’m concerned he left something behind in the room that is our joint property.

  The housekeeper, who has already made up the room for our next guests, would have brought it to my attention if she found the gentleman had forgotten anything.

  What about the hotel safe?

  Shall I get my manager for you?

  That won’t be necessary, Wittmann said, certain that the clerk was right and Mandelbaum had in fact left nothing behind.

  Then I’m afraid there’s little else I can do. Perhaps your friend will have notified you of his plans in the letter he left. You’ll excuse me, sir.

  With those words he turned gratefully to a couple trailed by a luggage-laden bellhop, and set about checking them in.

  Outside, Wittmann was tempted to tear the envelope to pieces and toss it into the gutter beside his spent match. But though there was a time before the revolution—not so long ago, a mere decade—when he might have made some calls and had Mandelbaum detained at the gate before his flight took off, those days were over.

  For as long as it took him to slide his forefinger under the flap, open the square blue envelope, and pull out Mandelbaum’s note, hesitating before reading, Wittmann experienced a numb, even paralytic, minute in which he regretted ever getting involved with this sonata manuscript. Of its importance, historically and musicologically, he was long since convinced.

  The movement Meta had brought to his attention, unlike the concluding rondo that had been in the Langs’ possession, did not resemble the work of anyone from the period in which it was evidently composed. Except, that is, Beethoven, who alone was capable of such unique bravura combined with what Wittmann discerned as the profound spiritual conscience that informed the more meditative, lachrymose passage, a harbinger in some ways of full-blown romanticism. Though he hadn’t physically handled Meta’s original, he was sure, on the basis of Mandelbaum’s assessment if nothing else, that the paper on which its companion rondo was written was from the same period, as the central movement.

  Yes, he might have approached things differently. Rather than attempting to finesse her to gain access to the original, he might have sincerely apologized to the young lady that night when he and Karel ran into her in Old Town Square. Could have really tried to assist rather than thwart her, hoping to discredit her with both Johana Langová, who was willing to see Meta discredited if there was any advantage to it, and Tomáš, who wasn’t. Some of the claim to the discovery might have been his, had he played by the rules. But he hadn’t done any of that, and whether he liked it or not, he now paced in front of this elegant hotel with a letter in his hands and an unshakable determination to follow through on his decisions. There had to be some logical means whereby he would come out on top.

  Finally unfolding the paper, his cigarette clipped loosely in his lips, he forced himself to peruse Mandelbaum’s handwritten note.

  Petr, it read, I have not given up on you, but neither can I allow you to ruin yourself and others over this matter. The score is in a safe place. Meta has left the country together with her companion. As you can surmise, so have I. Let her track down the lost movement, if she can, without interference. Myself, if you wish to contact me, I’ll be home, easy to find. There was nothing left for me to do in Prague. I’d have preferred more gemütlichkeit between us, but maybe next time. I continue to admire you, Petr, and hope your actions will allow us to remain friends. S pozdravem, Paul

  While he had anticipated everything in Mandelbaum’s letter, it stung to see matters laid out in so many flat words. And as Kohout had fallen by the wayside, an aging man more concerned with retirement than discovery, Wittmann was on his own now. By the same token, he realized, when had he not been?

  Having walked swiftly back to his office, the note tossed into a trash receptacle along the way, Wittmann sat on his swivel chair and looked at the framed book jackets, awards, and degrees, both earned and honorary, arrayed on his wall in French-parlor style. He pressed his palms together, elbows on his desk, and, as a ribbon of blue cigarette smoke curled from his ashtray, deliberated how to proceed. As Mandelbaum had written, there was nothing left to do in Prague. He stared for a moment at his phone, then lifted the handset and made three calls.

  The first was to his travel agent. Round-trip ticket to New York, business class, with an open date for the return flight.

  The second was to a personal assistant of Charles Castell, the collector who was more avid to acquire the manuscript than the Czech musicologist had implied over breakfast with his American counterpart. Shaven headed and lean as a vegan ascetic, with warm, gray eyes and a disarming, soft voice that navigated a number of languages, he was a businessman who, as Wittmann had told Mandelbaum without sharing the man’s name, liked to speculate in things other than just stocks, gold, consumer commodities.

  Castell’s assistant transferred the call and, after a brief silence, an amicable voice said, “Hello, Petr. Good of you to call. So where do we meet in Prague?”

  “I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan, Charles,” Wittmann said, hoping not to convey anxiety.

  “News of the opening movement?”

  “Not yet,” he said, then admitted that the score had been removed from the country, and proceeded to inform Castell of what he knew, leaving out elements he sensed were neither integral to their dealings nor favorable to himself as broker.

  Not one to be perturbed, Castell asked, “What’s the next move?”

  “I just booked a flight to New York, leaving tomorrow. I need to track down the person who first brought it to me for authentication and advice.”

  “Meta? The one who was mentioned in that little article?”

  Knowing he shouldn’t appear caught off guard by Charles Castell’s attentiveness and reach, he was caught off guard nonetheless. Best to respond with the truth. “Yes. I planted that hoping to generate a response.”

  “Makes sense. That’s what I would do. No results, I gather.”

  “Not yet.”

  “All right, I was going through Prague on my way back to the city”—spoken like a true New Yorker, Wittmann thought—“but since you’re leaving, we’ll just catch up in the States. You have my private number. Get in touch when you have something?”

  “Will do.”

  “And, oh, Petr,” said Charles Castell just before hanging up. “The woman’s name is spelled ‘Taverner.’ I think you’ll find she lives in the East Village and her mother is over in Chelsea. Look forward to hearing from you.”

  Embarrassing, Wittmann thought. He had planted that squib through an insider at the paper in the hope of flushing out information about Meta’s whereabouts. And he had succeeded not because she contacted him to complain but because Castell’s people were ahead of him. Well, at least it proved that Charles Castell still depended on him to obtain the manuscript rather than independently approaching Meta. But this was as it always had been in earlier dealings. Anonymity was a priority. The man cherished privacy and revealed the treasures in his collections only when he so desired, whether to lend, donate, or sell.

  Wittmann’s third call was a long shot, but he wasn’t in a frame of mind that proposed capitulation or defeat. Yes, his highest contact in the ministry of culture had expressed interest but offered little help when Wittmann first approached him regarding the sonata—its ownership in question, its provenance murky, its cultural importance not fully established. Now that the material had been taken out of the Czech Republic, he was emboldened to inform the ministry that his fears had come to pass. Trying not to sound the acerbic notes of I told you so, he reached out again to his old comrade who’d weathered the revolution as a mid-level bureaucrat and parlayed his experience into increasingly responsible government positi
ons.

  Well, it happened, Wittmann said, exhaling to add a little dramatic spice.

  And what is that?

  You know what I’m referring to.

  This purported Beethoven manuscript.

  It’s gone, left the country. And that’s a crime in more ways than one.

  Ah. Well, Petr, I do understand the depth of your concern. I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on our last conversation and have even discussed it with others here at the ministry. We collectively feel that you should simply file a lawsuit, or help the putative owners do so. I don’t know how far you will get with such an action, however, since there is no clear evidence a crime has in fact been committed.

  The suspicion of transporting stolen property across national boundaries—

  I in no way wish to minimize this, but your news only complicates things. Please understand that we can’t approach the American embassy about the matter without firm evidence of wrongdoing, and we just don’t have enough to make an international case of it.

  Stymied, Wittmann said nothing.

  I’m afraid this is all I can do for you, Petr. Get an attorney, level charges, as you please. But the ministry cannot assist.

  There was a time—, Wittmann started to say, but hung up. From hotel clerks to government functionaries to erstwhile colleagues here and abroad, he got neither advocacy nor respect, as he saw it. This was not how Wittmann was accustomed to being treated and he didn’t like it. The disgust and chagrin he had felt earlier were joined by new sensations, ones he had experienced the night Marta had turned him and Kohout out onto the streets of Malá Strana, terminating his plea to Tomáš to give him the original of the rondo movement. Bald, scalding indignation. Indignation and, of all things, helplessness.

  THE SUN ON THE SNOW outside her windows was filtered, its light gaunt. Occasional stray flakes corkscrewed down from a sky the color of a house wren’s breast. Though her front room was warm, she would rather have liked to burn a fire in the corner potbellied stove, but she only lit it when it was storming hard and she needed the extra heat, or when the electric power went out. Otherwise it would be bad for the piano, a baby grand, the treasured gift from her late husband. She had known from youth that dry heat and pianos with their taut strings and exquisite woods were not friends. Her father taught her that way back when. She made sure to refill the two baking pans that sat on the radiators near the piano with fresh water every morning. They weren’t lovely to look at, but they worked nicely as humidifiers.

  If only pans of heated water could make her knees feel better on wintry days like this, she thought. How many more winters would she have? Her doctor and friends marveled at her health. Good genes, they all agreed, although she had no way of proving it, since both her parents died young through no fault in their gene pool. Otylie felt lucky that she wasn’t afflicted with arthritis in her fingers like most friends of her age. Only her neighbor Anna, a quilter who at eighty-seven was still producing colorful Pride of Nebraskas, crazy quilts, and log cabins that won prizes at the local county fair, was as nimble.

  Like many others in tiny Prague, she tended to eat her main meal of the day not in the evening but in early afternoon. That day’s dinner was chicken casserole and frozen peas cooked in broth and butter. Her habits and chores around the small house were not unlike what others of her generation and even a generation younger would be doing on a nippy, gray day like this. Perhaps the only difference was that on her hi-fi she was listening to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, conducted by Sir Colin Davis in Dresden in 1984, with Margaret Price, one of her favorite sopranos, singing the role of Pamina.

  The doorbell startled her. Who would be out in this weather? Otylie had just put on the first record of her box set to listen to while she ate, so she was only at act one, scene two. Papageno, playing his panpipe and singing, had come down the path carrying on his back a cage housing all sorts of birds. Tamino, performed by another of her favorite opera stars, the tenor Peter Schreier, had asked Papageno, “Sag mir, du lustiger Freund, wer du bist?”—Tell me, my cheerful friend, who are you?—to which Papageno responded, A man like you! What if I were to ask you who you are?

  She knew every word of the libretto and continued to hum Tamino’s next lines, that he was a man of princely blood whose father ruled over many lands and peoples, as she reached for her metal cane, rose from the kitchen table, and made her way to the front door.

  Peering through one of the three small door windows that let light into the foyer, she saw a young couple who were clearly from elsewhere. She pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders and opened the door.

  “How can I help you?” Otylie asked, a little nervous in front of these strangers.

  The young woman gulped a deep breath of cold prairie air and said, “Excuse us for bothering you. But we’re looking for Otylie Bartošová, and some nice people down in the local café said she lives here. Or Otylie Hajek?”

  “And who is looking for her, may I ask?”

  “My name is Meta Taverner,” she said, feeling her pulse quicken. “And this is Gerrit Mills. We’ve come a very long way looking for her because I have something, a music manuscript, that I believe is hers.”

  Otylie looked hard at Meta, then at Gerrit, and then past them over the leafless trees toward the snowy horizon. Meta stared in wonderment at her pale, wrinkled face framed by silver hair pulled back into a bun. Finally, in a voice abruptly hoarse and small, the woman said, “Pojďte dál,” reverting unawares to Czech. Do come in.

  Still unsure what to think, but sensing that this was a moment in her life she would never want to forget, Meta said, “Děkuji—I mean, Děkujeme,” switching to the plural to include Gerrit, and they stepped over the doorsill into the entry hall and warm living room. Hearing The Magic Flute, seeing the piano with sheet music propped open, and above all watching the woman’s eyes as they searched her own—Meta knew, she knew this had to be right, this had to be her.

  When Otylie said, “Let me turn this down,” Meta said, “No, please. This is where Tamino sings, ‘I doubt if you are human,’ right?”

  Otylie nodded, said nothing, her mind racing, bewildered, and yet trusting this girl who was so earnest, clearly, and led them back into her kitchen. When she walked into the room, Meta was overwhelmed by the memory of Irena’s kitchen, every bit as tidy, old-fashioned, and marvelous as this one. Instead of canned tomato soup, here the room was redolent of baked chicken. Meta and Gerrit sat, waiting for this woman to utter the next words.

  “I am Otylie Bartošová,” she confirmed, a tentative smile working at her lips. “You have some of the manuscript that I broke up, what, fifty, sixty years ago? Is that what you are saying?”

  “A piano sonata. Eighteenth century?”

  Rather than appearing happy, Otylie seemed disoriented. “It cannot be true.”

  Meta looked at Gerrit, speechless.

  “It is true, Paní Bartošová,” he assured her.

  “How, how is this possible?” Otylie had never liked to cry but she was struggling.

  “We have stories to share, but—” and Meta reached into the leather briefcase Gerrit had given her, pulled out Irena’s burgundy goatskin portfolio, then carefully withdrew the manuscript pages of the second and third movements of the Prague Sonata. With both hands she passed the manuscript to Otylie, who slowly looked it through before setting it on the table, placing both palms on top as if to keep it from blowing away in some phantom wind.

  “Forgive me,” she said, her eyes wet. “I have thought for so many years these pages were lost forever. That this part of my life was closed and done,” she managed, her voice cracking.

  Meta and Gerrit glanced at each other, remained quiet, each realizing that for weeks, months they’d thought of Otylie’s pages as the lost ones.

  “Two times, kind people offered to pay for private investigators to go searching for Irena, who I knew might still have the part I gave her. I was too scared to risk bad news. But here, look. You m
ade the search and—” She pressed her lips together, shook her head.

  Meta softly asked, “We didn’t make a mistake, did we, bringing them back to you?”

  Otylie brushed away tears. “No. No, not at all.” After taking a moment to collect herself, she went more carefully through the manuscript. When she turned to the third movement, Meta pointed to the faint handwriting at the top of the leaf.

  “Gerrit says this is written in Czech, but we can’t make it out.”

  Otylie squinted, raising the page closer to her eyes. She read what was there and looked at the young woman, smiling. “I wrote these words for Jakub when I gave the movement to a boy—I can still see his face; I think his name was Marek—to pass along to him in hiding.”

  With her fingertips, she lightly touched the paper.

  “Many times I scolded myself for doing what I did,” she went on. “I had to think too fast. I didn’t mean to put such a burden on my poor husband and friend, who had their own lives to save, not some piece of music.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, I believe it might have given them a reason to live, or at least a tangible connection to you, whom they loved,” Meta said, and described in detail how she’d met Irena Svobodová through her friend Gillian, how she’d visited Irena at her home in Queens, how she listened to Irena’s account of the harrowing events of 1939, and how the sonata manuscript came into her possession.

  At this mention of Irena, Otylie’s eyes brightened. “Is she well?”

  Meta gently broke the news to her. “I only really talked with her that once, but I can assure you she felt it was urgent that the manuscript get back into your hands.”

  “Queens,” mused Otylie with a sigh. “You know, I lived in Manhattan for a time and I swear one day I saw her walking along Park Avenue. I chased her but couldn’t catch up. And there was no Irena Svobodová in the phone book, so I assumed it was my mind playing tricks. I loved her, you know.”

  “She loved you too,” Meta said, imagining how bittersweet this all must be for Otylie, a coil of unexpected elation and melancholy. “I have the phone number of one of her friends in New York. I met her at the funeral and took it down, not really knowing why at the time. Now I do.”