The Prague Sonata Page 14

  Let’s not forget, said Gerrit, my folks fled this country when I was very young and you weren’t even floating in your mommy’s womb yet. I hate Jakeš and the rest of these Communist assholes as much as anybody, and I resent this long occupation too. But I’m here to report on what I see. There’s international interest in what’s going on, don’t think otherwise. If you want people outside Czechoslovakia to know what’s happening—

  I want people to change things. So do all my friends. Since others won’t do it for us, we have to do it for ourselves.

  You and I have no quarrel, Georgie. But we’ve talked about professional practices and you know I’ve signed a contract with my paper about conflicts of interest, so don’t push too hard. I’ll do my best to be who I am.

  I know you will, said Jiří with a broad smile, touching the base of his glass to Gerrit’s on the table. Friends?

  Always.

  Gerrit spent the rest of that evening and the week that followed taking notes on what Jiří Pelc had learned at plenary meetings, shadowing him as he attended gatherings about planned demonstrations and strikes that were to come. When he wasn’t with Jiří, Gerrit interviewed student leaders. He snapped pictures with his worse-for-wear Nikon. His pockets rattled with film canisters and microcassettes as his notebook filled. He converted his data into articles, then transferred the work to his contact in Prague or phoned it in to the rewrite desk in New York, repeating the spellings of difficult names and double-checking details over transnational phone static.

  Walking the restless streets, Gerrit thought about his conversations with Jiří. He understood his friend wasn’t wrong. The boundaries between observer and participant had already slipped in Berlin—although he hadn’t been there as a freelancer—and the frailer-than-iron curtain that kept these impulses separated was difficult, once opened, to close again. It was going to be hard not to go native.

  Organizers had anticipated a crowd of as many as three or four thousand to gather in front of the Institute of Pathology, the spot where Jan Opletal’s funeral procession had begun fifty years ago. Fifteen thousand came.

  Speakers recalled Hitler’s bloody crackdown in November 1939, when he’d closed down Prague’s universities and had the Gestapo round up nine leaders of the student union, executing them without trial in the SS barracks at Prague-Ruzyně. They condemned his henchmen, who broke down doors of residence halls throughout Prague, murdering students who resisted and arresting twelve hundred others, promptly shipping them to a concentration camp in Oranienburg. To the cheers of the crowd, they called for the resignation of the current government, which was nearly as repressive in its slow-boil way as the National Socialists before it.

  Jiří and the rest of the chanting throng carried flags, flowers, and candles and sang the national anthem. Pressed in among them, camera dangling from its strap around his neck, Gerrit marched up to the Slavín, the cemetery on a bluff overlooking the river where the demonstration was supposed to end. He pulled his recorder from his pocket and started talking into it, trying to describe every last detail of what transpired. Somebody handed him a candle and, in the middle of recording a statement from a woman about the “living altar” that the streaming mass of protesters had now become, he took it without thinking. Among the many impressions flooding his mind as evening fell was that history, to these people, had nothing to do with textbooks. Jan Opletal might as well have died that morning, so present and passionate were these children of his struggle. Then Gerrit remembered who he was—a Czech American, yes, but a reporter—and snuffed the candle, stuck it in his pocket.

  What happened next happened quickly and without permission from the authorities. The growing crowd didn’t want to disperse. Gerrit heard calls from every side to continue the march back to Wenceslas Square. It was then, as everyone reversed course and headed down the hill, that he realized he had lost track of Jiří and his friends. Alone in the crush, he continued to record what he saw.

  At first the mood was lighter, more exuberant than before, although rumors abounded that riot police had cordoned off Gottwald Bridge and were blocking other routes to the center of town. As the demonstrators made their way along the Vltava, tram and bus drivers blew their horns while their passengers disembarked to join the human river that now spilled into every side street. Local residents along the embankment leaned out of their windows to cheer them on, waving the tricolor, hanging impromptu homemade banners with fresh-painted demands for reform. More and more onlookers were drawn into the miles-long flow of protesters, whose ranks had by now swelled to over fifty thousand. Turning at the National Theater and proceeding toward Wenceslas Square, those at the front of the march shouted that they were unarmed and wanted no violence. To the square and then home, they cried in near unison.

  Gerrit knew that his press card probably wouldn’t save him from spending a night in jail if he remained in the midst of the throng, but he managed to wend his way toward the choke point, where protesters and cops stood in a face-off. His heart beat hard as he took photo after photo of boys and girls younger than Jiří sitting in the middle of the street together with men and women old enough to remember the Nazi days of Jan Opletal himself, holding carnations and singing “We Shall Overcome.” Thousands of others jangled their keys overhead to protest their jailers. All of this reminded Gerrit of the old Czech saying Co Čech, to muzikant. Short and sharp on the tongue, easy to remember, it translated simply, One Czech, one musician. Was there ever stronger proof of its truth than here with so many hands held high in the air chiming dissent?

  Suddenly overwhelmed, he threw his head back and listened with eyes closed. The elation he had felt at the Berlin Wall returned to him in full spirit here in Prague. House keys, car keys, skeleton keys, keys to offices and stores and schools and brothels and bakeries and churches. Keys to safeboxes and keys that no longer fitted in any lock, all ringing like bells of freedom, accompanied by voices caroling the national anthem in a tangle of musical keys, off-key, and there in the middle of it all the melee began.

  Fifteen hundred policemen in full riot gear managed to segregate and surround more than five thousand people trapped at the front of the demonstration. The thick curtain of cops soon parted, offering a single route of escape down an arcade lined with yet more police, truncheons raised, standing at the ready. They beat everyone who fled, screaming, tripping, stumbling, single file down this narrow corridor. In the sickening crush heads were bloodied, eyes blackened, teeth broken, the fallen were kicked by the enemy and trampled by innocent friends. Gerrit’s jacket was torn off his back, his camera yanked away, and when he resisted, twisting and falling to the ground as he grabbed his notebook and recorder and shoved them under his belt, a billy club repeatedly struck him from behind. His notes safe, he abandoned his jacket and camera, and surged forward with the others, finally emerging into Mikulandská Street, his face a Rorschach of blood, gasping for breath. Hundreds were injured, the youngest thirteen, the oldest born before Czechoslovakia became a nation. Staggering back to Kampa Island, he saw people cudgeled as they tried to enter metro stations or board trams and buses headed toward home.

  Before withdrawing to file his report, Gerrit filled the Pelcs in on what had happened, insofar as he was able to understand why and how such a peaceful protest had devolved into bloody chaos. Jiří was nowhere to be found. His family almost hoped he was in jail rather than lying injured or unconscious in a hospital somewhere. Phone lines were mysteriously jammed, so they would have to wait to find out.

  As the kitchen sink ran pink with blood and soap, and Věra Pelc dressed his wounds, Gerrit realized he needed to find an answer to Jiří’s query back in U Fleků. What was his role here? Exactly who was he supposed to be after this? Behind the closed door of the room he shared with Jiří, he sat awake writing in his bloodstained notebook every last detail he recalled about the demonstration, confronting the dilemmas that were raised for him that violent and pivotal night.

  META GREETED SAM a
t the western end of the Charles Bridge. From there they walked toward the foot of Nerudova Street. The day was drenched with crisp light, and the smooth-faced cobbles winked as if they were wet. A dwarfish man in a brown double-knit jacket and clown-like baggy gray pants stood in the shade of Saint Mikulaš Cathedral feeding a flock of cooing, pirouetting pigeons from a sack of bread.

  “He’s something of a fixture here,” Sam said, nodding in his direction. “Nobody knows where he lives, but it’s said that after dark the pigeons fly him up to the castle towers where he nests with them. In the morning, they carry him back and set him down by the local baker, where he buys two loaves, one for them and the other for himself. It’s good luck to put a little change in his cap.”

  Meta said, “Well, I could use some luck,” walking over to where the man stood before the baroque facade and depositing some coins in his upturned porkpie on the steps. When she rejoined Sam, she added, “That’s one of the things I love best about Prague. Everything and everyone seems to bring a fable to life.”

  “Home of the Golem and crazy Rudolf’s equally crazy alchemists, not to mention Kafka’s bug.”

  “Some days I feel a little like Gregor Samsa myself.”

  Sam laughed, but his expression was serious as he turned to her and said, “Meta, I may be totally wrong about this. You know how sometimes ideas that come in the middle of the night look different in the morning? I just hope I’m not wasting everybody’s time.”

  “No worries, Sam. I’m grateful for the lead however it pans out.”

  They strode up the hill on the narrow stone sidewalk, which forced them to step into the street at times when oncoming pedestrians didn’t give way.

  Sensing they must be nearing their turn, Meta asked, “So tell me again who this guy is? What’s his story?”

  “He boards with the Hodeks, Andrea’s family. She’s crazy about him, has a big crush. Dual citizenship, Czech American. He wrote one of the best books I’ve read about the Velvet Revolution, and was one of the founding staff members of the Prague Post, which originally was a small paper for American expats but now it’s read all across Europe and overseas. His name’s Gerrit, easy enough to remember since he lives in the garret apartment in her family’s building.”

  A steep flight of stone steps down off Nerudova and a hard right turn at the bottom put them on Jánská Street. The house they sought was near the end of this blind alley. Sam pressed the Hodeks’ buzzer and they were welcomed inside, then led up another flight of stairs and into the living room, where Meta was introduced to his piano student and her mother. Andrea, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Gerrit’s landlords, was a button-bright precocious girl with a ready smile. Meta liked her at once.

  “I go up to his floor, see if he home,” she said in English for Meta’s benefit. “He tell you he don’t know about this music, though.”

  “We’ll see, Andrea. Music’s sticky, like honey or tree sap. You never know when it will get into your head and stay there.”

  “Tree sap?”

  “You know, like the clear blood that comes out of a tree when you cut it.”

  “I see. Tree sap,” said Andrea, giving Meta a quick nod as she turned to go upstairs.

  Smiling back, Meta admired Sam’s impulse to help people find their way to things. Whether toward an understanding of music or English or, in her case, a shot in the semidark at a lost sonata movement, Sam seemed always ready to engage.

  Reflected sunlight washed through the street-side windows, giving the room a deep golden glow. Andrea’s mother having excused herself, the two Americans were standing at the window nearest the piano, looking out over the rooftops toward the lush green foliage on Petřín Hill, when Andrea reentered the room with Gerrit.

  Shaking Sam’s hand with a firm, friendly grip, Gerrit said, “I know we’ve met in passing, but it’s good to finally meet you for real. Andrea here thinks the world of you.”

  “Unless I make her practice her scales too much when she’d rather be listening to Madonna. Then the world she thinks of me isn’t such a wonderful place.”

  “Lháři,” Andrea shouted, with a genial frown. Liar!

  Sam turned toward the woman hovering at his side. “This is Meta Taverner, another fellow traveler in the land of music.”

  Until that moment, Gerrit hadn’t looked directly at her. As they shook hands he finally saw the face of this young woman whose chestnut hair was coppered by the sunlight. Her burl-brown irises took on a golden hue in the changing light. She smiled, or half-smiled, as she said hello. It was clear at once to Gerrit that she was nervous, tucking her hair behind her ear, which in turn made him feel a bit nervous. When he let go of her hand, his eye held hers for an extra moment.

  “By fellow musical traveler, you mean you two,” he said, breaking the brief spell.

  “You play too, don’t you?” Kettle asked, finding his opening quickly as they sat, Meta and Sam on a divan between the windows and Gerrit in a green baize wing chair opposite.

  Andrea, perched on the chair arm next to Gerrit, with the confident familiarity of a daughter, said, “Sure” at the same time Gerrit said, “No.”

  Kettle saw no reason not to press ahead and, after a good-natured laugh, continued. “Andrea wins the point on that one. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard you playing once or twice.”

  “I took piano lessons when I was a kid. But I fiddle now, is all. That is, if one can actually fiddle on a piano.”

  “Your technique is unpolished, I’ll admit, but I really like what I think I’ve heard you fiddling.”

  “Well,” Gerrit said with a slight shrug, wanting to direct their focus elsewhere. The last thing in the world he thought Andrea’s piano teacher would come to Jánská Street to discuss was his less than stellar pianism. He barely had technique to polish, for heaven’s sake. “You live in Prague too?” he asked Meta, turning to look at her again.

  “New York,” she said. “This is my first time in Prague.”

  “So, what brings you here?”

  “Music,” Kettle answered for her.

  “You’re performing somewhere?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for two lost manuscript movements of a piece of music that was broken up during the Second World War, somewhere in this neighborhood. That’s why Sam and I are here.”

  Trying to keep up, Andrea asked Gerrit for a translation into Czech as Meta detailed what she knew about the sonata. Gerrit listened intently to the wartime story she related, then turned to his young friend, who was leaning lightly, a bit possessively, against him, and filled her in. The more Meta spoke about the Prague Sonata, the more Gerrit felt perplexed by the visit. It was left to Sam Kettle to make the connection for him.

  “This may sound like a pushy question coming from somebody you don’t know, but do you have any classical compositions committed to memory? Something you ‘fiddle’ from time to time?”

  Puzzlement settled on Gerrit’s face. “Classical compositions committed to memory?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam went on. “I don’t mean to sound mysterious. It’s just that I know I’ve heard a passage from the score that Meta here has discovered, the beginning of what could be a rondo that follows at the end of her manuscript, but I don’t know what it is myself. I thought I might have heard it here. That’s why I ask.”

  “I know a few old standards,” Gerrit said, “but none in their entirety. When I play, it’s more guess-as-I-go improvisation than any traditional readings of your Brahmses and Bachs.”

  “In the eighteenth century, improvisation was considered the true mark of a virtuoso,” Meta said.

  “Only problem is, I’m not a virtuoso and it’s the twenty-first century.”

  Meta bent forward, clasping her hands out before her knees, on which she rested her wrists. She had such an earnest look of supplication in her eyes that Gerrit felt sorry for her. Her attitude was almost of prayer, given how her long fingers knotted themselves so tightly together. He half expected Meta Tavern
er to ask him to sit, then and there, and perform, as best he could, every single work he knew.

  “Look,” he proposed, “maybe if you play me the piece, I might recognize something.”

  “Of course, happily,” said Meta.

  “Andrea, all right with your mom, you think?” Sam asked.

  “Sure,” delighted to hear someone else play her piano.

  “Shall I play the whole movement or just the rondo?” Meta asked no one in particular.

  “Play it all,” Gerrit said.

  She adjusted the stool height and sat. Without saying a word, she closed her eyes and for the hundredth time let herself be lifted away into the introductory phrases that by now were second nature to her. Andrea and Sam were mesmerized by the music. Hearing it again made Kettle realize once more why he had become an activist, if that was the right word for his role, in Meta’s quest.

  As for Gerrit, he couldn’t help staring at her hands. He tried his best to listen to the music, but his attention was divided. He had not seen anything in a long time so compelling, so stirring, as those hands. The blood vessels that fanned into deltas across the backs of them, threading between her knuckles, were a healthy blue beneath her skin. Her hands were as beautiful as the music they created with every press and release of the keys. And yet, wasn’t there something off about the right one? What was the story behind the white wormlike scars that crisscrossed those blue veins? Her fingers seemed more curled too, and reminded him of the spidery tendrils of some graceful orchid. Whenever both hands hovered above the keyboard, the left was motionless while the muscles in her right were clearly cramped and palsied a bit, as if it were much older than its mirror-image twin.