The Prague Sonata Read online

  ALSO BY BRADFORD MORROW

  The Forgers

  The Uninnocent

  The Diviner’s Tale

  Ariel’s Crossing

  Giovanni’s Gift

  Trinity Fields

  The Almanac Branch

  Come Sunday

  THE PRAGUE SONATA

  A NOVEL

  BRADFORD

  MORROW

  Copyright © 2017 by Bradford Morrow

  Cover design by Becca Fox Design

  Cover photograph © Radoslaw Maciejewski/Shutterstock

  Endpaper map © Charles University, Faculty of Science, Map Collection, mapovasbirka.cz

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, entities, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2017

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2715-0

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8923-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

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  For Cara

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Bradford Morrow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Dedication

  I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  A Note on Czech Pronunciation and Usage

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  I

  We are in the situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light at the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light at the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties.

  —Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1917

  1

  ALL WARS BEGIN WITH MUSIC. Her father told her that when she was nine years old. The fife and drum. The marching songs, sung to the rhythm of boots tramping their way to battle. The bugle’s call for an infantry to charge. Even the wailing bassoon sirens that precede bombardment and the piccolo whistles of the falling bombs themselves. War is music and music is war, he said, breath strong from his evening stew and mulled wine.

  The girl looked up from her pillow and said nothing. This soldier father of hers, in peacetime a piano teacher at the local conservatory, the man under whose strict instruction she practiced until her fingers ached, was all she had left. She had no siblings. Her mother, already suffering from tuberculosis, had just succumbed to the influenza that was beginning to cut like a scythe across Europe. She knew she needed to remember what he said even if she didn’t really understand. She did her best to focus on him, a raving blur in her candlelit bedroom, more a delirious dream than a man, his voice melodic if a little slurred.

  Not just the outset but the end of war is music, he continued with a sweep of his arm as if conducting an invisible orchestra. Screams of the fallen will always play counterpoint to the crack of gunshots, just as dirges of the defeated are the closing theme in any symphony opened by the fanfare of victors. Think of it as God’s duet of tears and triumph, from the day war is declared to the day the surrenders are signed.

  Why do people fight wars? the girl asked.

  Because God lets them, he answered, suddenly quieter.

  But why does he let them?

  Her father thought for a moment, tucking the wool blanket under her chin, before saying, Because God loves music and so he must abide war.

  Don’t go back, she pleaded in a voice so faint she herself hardly heard the words.

  He traced his fingers over her forehead, moving her fine brown hair away from her face so he might see his daughter better. When he kissed her cheek, she could smell the vanilla and cinnamon she’d mixed in with his wine. And that was how she would always remember him, there where he stood by her bed, her papa, whispering his good nights, this wiry wisp of a man in his tattered uniform and thin boots, with coal-dark eyes and a rich tenor voice that never failed to convince the girl of whatever puddings came into his head. She fell asleep lullabied in the arms of a beautiful tune he often hummed to her.

  The following day, Jaromir Láska’s furlough was up—his commanding officer had granted him a brief week to bury his wife and make arrangements for his daughter—and he was gone before she woke, leaving her in the care of a widow neighbor. Under her pillow he had tucked what she knew was his most prized possession, a music manuscript he kept protected in a hart-skin satchel. She did not take this as a good sign.

  Within a month of his drunken evening rhapsody he was dead, one of the unfortunate last to fall in the war that was supposed to end all wars. Barraged, as she pictured him, in some muddy trench as the tanks rolled through and mustard gas settled over the ruined land like clouds of ghosts, leaving her another orphan of the Great War.

  She was packed off to live with a Bohemian aunt in the Vyšehrad district of Prague, capital of what was now to become the independent state of Czechoslovakia. On the crowded train out of Olomouc, clutching a valise containing her few clothes, a photograph of her parents on their wedding day, and that antique manuscript her father had acquired in Vienna long before hostilities began, Otylie made a pact with herself. She would never again listen to men who talked war. And she would never sing or play music as long as she lived.

  When war came raging into her life once more on a gray morning, the fifteenth of March, 1939, she thought of her doomed father’s last words. She heard no fife and drum. No bugle blared. The timpani of gunfire didn’t shatter the air. But music was there on the first day just as he had promised. Voices rose up together as masses of Czechs crowded Wenceslas Square to protest the German troops marching into Prague.

  Otylie, now thirty, saw the unfolding nightmare from behind the sheer curtains of her third-floor apartment window as a wan sun struggled to peek through the clouds. Many thousands of men and women bundled in overcoats and scarves were pushed aside by t
he advancing soldiers, shoved against the facades of buildings as they defiantly sang the Czech national anthem. A frigid wind blew across the cobblestones under a sky dim as an eclipse. Crisp snow fell over the spires and statuary while the crowds sang with patriotic anger at the occupiers, Kde domov můj … Where is my homeland? The opening line of the anthem had never before made such poignant sense, Otylie thought. A requiem for the dead had begun and, look, the first shot hadn’t even been fired.

  Her immediate concern was for her husband. Jakub had gone to work early. Would he get back home before the inevitable violence broke out? So many of Prague’s narrow, serpentine streets would be dangerous to negotiate if a throng were to stampede or the troops began making arrests. His shop was near the river by the university, in Josefov. There he sold antiquarian artifacts, religious objects, some musical instruments, a miscellany of collectibles.

  If he had any knowledge of what was happening, he would right now be spiriting the most precious items to his back-room safe so he could lock up the shop and return to the flat on Wenceslas Square that his family had inhabited for generations. First he would move the finger-polished ivory mezuzot, ornate menorahs, and old siddurim out of the display window. Next would come the early violins and rare wind instruments. Under an old horse blanket he would hide the harpsichord with its cracked soundboard, dating back to the year Mozart completed Don Giovanni here and conducted it over at the Estates Theater. Some first editions and manuscripts by lesser composers—Franz Christoph Neubauer, for one; or cellist Anton Kraft, who worked closely with Haydn—would be locked in the bottom drawer of his desk along with a clutch of letters from Karel Čapek, who had coined the word robot. Jakub Bartoš’s shop was a mishmash of culture, Jewish and Czech, his twin birthrights. It wouldn’t be so much a matter of salvaging inventory, Otylie knew, as protecting heritage.

  Whispers and shouts echoed in the hallway of the apartment building. Someone asked what in the world was happening and another answered, Didn’t you hear the radio this morning? Our army’s under German command now.

  I don’t understand.

  The Führer ordered President Hácha to an emergency meeting last night, the first woman rasped as Otylie pressed her ear to the door. Dragged him up to Berlin without notice, sick as the old man is. They’re saying Hitler threatened to bomb Prague into rubble if Hácha didn’t hand us over to the Reich’s protection. So he signed in the middle of the night.

  Doesn’t sound like he had much of a choice, the other voice responded.

  No, and besides, the Germans had already overrun our army in Moravská Ostrava. The radio said Prague would be occupied this morning, but I didn’t believe it until I saw the troops with my own eyes. Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler they’re called.

  I call them monsters. Ježíš Maria, what are we supposed to do?

  Stay calm, the radio told us, and go about our business as if today were any other day of the week. Imagine!

  Otylie heard more shouting. The conversation came to an abrupt halt. Hands quaking, she sat at the kitchen table and tried to gather her wits. They needed to escape. Jakub was too well known in intellectual circles here to hope the invaders would ignore him. She and her husband had read about the bloody pogroms in Austria just the year before and understood what Hitler had in mind despite his public assurances to the contrary. Maybe the train station hadn’t been secured yet. Perhaps they could get to France or England. Or even from there to America, where Czech immigrant communities, they’d heard, thrived both in its cities and out in the countryside.

  Her husband would scoff at such a plan. I may not be the most courageous man, he would say, but I’m no runner.

  The problem was, as she well understood, that an important difference separated her from Jakub. She had been devastated by war once, lost nearly everything. He hadn’t. Kubíčku, my Jakub, she thought, panic rising like some flaring ember caught in her chest.

  Another neighbor, an émigré named Franz Bittner who had recently moved into the next flat, knocked on her door to see if she was all right. No one in Prague is all right, she managed to say. He shook his head and handed her his marmalade cat, asking if she wouldn’t mind taking care of it until he came back. He’d been outside and said the Germans were advancing in continuous columns across the Charles Bridge. Shaven, grim, disciplined boys in uniform and helmets, each with a jaw set as square as a marionette’s, they marched with rifles bayoneted, past the statues of the Madonna and John the Baptist and the rest. Not one of them glanced up at the sculpted figures mounted on the bridge pillars. All stared ahead toward the towers of the Týn Church as if they already owned the city.

  Where are you going? she asked him, holding the poor squirming beast in her arms. No time to explain other than that he’d been a Social Democrat before he fled Sudetenland, was known to the Gestapo as an anti-Nazi, and was going to seek asylum at the American legation. She wished him luck and, after locking the door behind him, set out a bowl of milk for the cat, realizing that in the confusion of the moment she’d forgotten to ask its name.

  Her eyes darted around the room before settling on the wedding photograph of her father and mother, posing before a Rhinelandish painted backdrop. She took the silver print down from where it hung and sat at the kitchen table, studying their steadfast if nervous faces, longing to embrace them and ask what she should do.

  So many different tones of fear, she thought. Chromatic scales of terror, dissonant chords of dread. Her parents’ was simply the newlyweds fear of somehow failing to make life work out perfectly, to draw the dream toward them as if it were tethered on a golden string and all they needed to do was gently, tenderly pull. She too had felt that fear, though she and Jakub shared a golden-dream life, despite not having had any children. Love’s early anxieties now seemed so innocent. For the first time she fully comprehended her father’s panic at returning to the fields of battle; his wine-inspired lecture about music and war was a heroic, misguided attempt to meld what he most loved and hated.

  Otylie rose and peered out the tall window that overlooked the square. More Germans down there now than Czechs. Some in long open-air staff cars carrying officers, flanked by heavily armed SS Guard Battalions. Others, motorcycle troops with sidecars two by two in perfect parallel. Marching men hoisted banners emblazoned with the swastika. It was a brazen show of organization and supremacy.

  Maybe Emil Hácha understood what was best for his country, Otylie tried to convince herself. Maybe this wasn’t an aggressors’ invasion, but instead was a way of defending Prague against the depravities of other forces. As she watched the surging masses, she couldn’t help but wonder about those young soldiers marching in tight ranks down alien streets, hearing outraged mobs sing words that were not welcoming. Were they, too, frightened behind their fresh, pink-cheeked military reserve? She saw tussling between day laborers and the German columns along the periphery, beneath the unleafed trees. Several heavy pounding sounds in the distance and a roar went up from the crowd. A drumbeat, also far away. And did she hear the strains of an ambulance or was that the cat crying?

  Several hours had passed since the first troops made their appearance. Jakub would surely have left the shop in Josefov by now. The antikva was small, just a narrow cavern with high ornate ceilings, its facade a door and display window. Otylie had to believe he’d finished hiding the valuables, shut off the lights, closed, and locked up. This meant he was either delayed by the growing crowds of townspeople and Nazis flooding the squares and streets or that he had been detained.

  Without further thought, she pulled out a suitcase from the back of their bedroom closet and began to pack. Some shirts of his, underclothing, a pair of flannel trousers, and a jacket. His favorite cravat, the black silk one he wore to graduation exercises at engineering school, before he left that trade for the shop inherited from his father. For herself, she folded a few dresses, a sweater, toiletries, a pair of lace gloves her mother had passed down to her. Lace gloves, she reflected, wincing, a
nd set them aside. The silly things we cherish.

  She also packed the photograph of her parents. Her chest was heaving although no tears filled her eyes. The room reeled as she tried to catch her breath. With effort, she got the overstuffed suitcase closed and buckled its leather straps in place.

  Then there was the matter of the manuscript, a piano sonata in three movements, its staves scored with musical notes in sepia ink by an anonymous hand sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It had been her birthright and burden for these two decades since her father’s death. Birthright because it constituted her father’s most treasured bequest to his daughter. Burden because it never failed to remind Otylie of how that last war stranded her in the world, alone with a child’s memories of a man whose mad and maddening words on their last night together had turned her against the thing.

  Guard it as if it were your own child, he’d told her when she was still a child herself. One day this will bring you great fortune.

  I don’t want it, she had said, remembering how bitterly her parents argued over the manuscript. Even years later, her mother considered what he had done an outrage, spending three months’ wages to acquire it.

  Otylie’s father, like her husband, had always been an aficionado of antique things. But whereas Jakub knew what he was doing, her father, who worked so hard as a musician and instructor and who loved his small collection of old hymnals and early printed music scores, was an easy mark for an unsavory dealer with a trunk full of fake illuminated medieval psalters and supposedly original drafts by a famous composer. When Otylie’s mother contracted tuberculosis, he sold off his precious scores, for a fraction of what he’d spent on them, to pay her medical expenses. The only jewel he kept from his hoard was this one, although he never told his dying wife that he’d hidden it in a corner of the attic reachable only by a ladder she’d become too weak to climb.

  In melancholy moments over the years Otylie wondered if this manuscript with its haunted history ought to be destroyed. What reason did she have to believe it was any more authentic than the rest of her poor delusional father’s stash? But sentiment, and maybe faith, always got the better of her. Besides, her father had personally inscribed it to her at the top of the first leaf in the language of his favorite composers, Engelsmusik für mein Engelchen, Alles Liebe, Papa—Angel-music for my little angel, Love, Papa—and still it lay protected in its well-worn satchel. Though reluctantly, she too loved passages of the sonata, remembered how much her father used to adore playing it for her or singing its sweet-sad melody to her as a bedtime lullaby. Once in a while, despite her resolutions, she caught herself humming one of its themes when walking along the river or nodding off to sleep at night.