The Prague Sonata Page 17

  “Could you ask him if he remembers a man named Jakub Bartoš who had a little shop around the corner on Veleslavínova? This would have been in the mid- to late 1930s.”

  Both asked their grandfather at the same time. The girl, who was a year or two older than her sibling, told Meta, “He say he was only a boy, but his father used to go there. He played chess with the man who had this shop.”

  “With Jakub?”

  “S Jakubem?”

  The grandfather gazed first at Meta and then, taking a wistful drag off a cigarette, out the window as he spoke.

  “I don’t think he can remember the name. But he say his father liked this man very much, and his wife too.”

  “Otylie?” Meta asked, catching the old man’s cloudy blue eyes.

  A smile of recognition broke on his face. “Otylie.”

  Meta half-jumped out of her chair. “Otylie? Otylie Bartošová?”

  He nodded, looking past Meta as if seeing the woman there with them in the room. “Otylie Bartošová.”

  “Oh my God,” Meta cried out. “Sylvie, ask him what he remembers about her.”

  As it happened, Antonín Novák remembered quite a lot about Otylie Bartošová. Rapt, with the excitement of a beggar who has stumbled upon a bag of gold, Meta listened through a potpourri of memories that his two grandchildren and Sylvie by turn told her in translation.

  Otylie loved sweets—just like Irena, Meta thought. She always had hard candies wrapped in shiny paper in the pocket of her skirt. She adored children too, was a benign pied piper, Antonín laughed quietly, but instead of playing a pipe she doled out treats to the children of the neighborhood when she came by the shop to bring lunch for her husband. Antonín was older than most of the kids, and often he would give the younger children the candies she handed to him after she’d left. He just liked to be near her. She was, he said, kind and sad. She had no children of her own. So all the youngsters in this part of Josefov kept a sharp lookout for Mrs. Bartošová when the sun was moving into the early afternoon.

  “What else?” Meta asked, touched by what she was hearing. As close as she felt to Irena, her direct benefactor, and to Jakub, whose traces she’d been following, this was the first time she had been able to sketch a picture of Otylie in her own mind.

  She always wore nice clothing and saw to it that her husband’s shirts and suits were stylish and made of good fabrics. The old man could remember, now that he was thinking about it, a suit of—what was her husband’s name again? Jakub, of course—herringbone wool, glorious dark gray it was, with beautiful bone, or perhaps antler, buttons. Antonín always hoped he would one day grow up and wear such a regal suit.

  As much as Meta wanted Sylvie to interrupt his streaming oral history and ask about the Prague Sonata, she realized it was better to let him wander the streets of his childhood, building a portrait that might in itself somehow lead her where she needed to go.

  Otylie worked in the antikva with Jakub. She oversaw everything having to do with money, as far as Antonín could tell, he who knew little about such things then. She spent many hours in the back room doing their bookkeeping, recording inventory, paying bills. How did he know this? Well, because he was often invited to accompany her to the bank where she made deposits and withdrawals. And why did he recall such a boring little outing as that? Because afterward they always strolled together down toward the river, where she bought him a lime ice or a trubička, a sweet cream pastry.

  Jakub loved music. Otylie always claimed she never cared for it but Antonín didn’t believe that. Her father had been a conservatory teacher, and had taught her. She tuned the instruments in the shop. Violins, lutes, mandolins, harpsichords. Anything with strings. She was rumored to have had a beautiful singing voice, although he only ever heard her hum.

  “What did her speaking voice sound like?” Meta asked Sylvie, who translated.

  It was low, he said, and, looking at the captivated Meta after his words had been translated for her, he dropped his own voice. A low voice like this. Her husband often tried to get her to sing for the children who hung around the shop, but she never would. It was said that one of the reasons she didn’t attend church services or go to synagogue with her husband was that she couldn’t stand listening to the hymns and other religious music.

  This was Meta’s moment. Had he ever heard her speak of a music manuscript that she inherited from her father? A sonata for piano?

  When Antonín lifted his hand to scratch his head she saw on his forearm the telltale blue numbers. She said nothing. What was there to say? He looked down at the worn Afghan rug on the floor, then back up. Meta could tell he didn’t want to fail her, and sensed that he didn’t want to lead her astray either.

  “Nepamatuju se. Nejsem si jistý, vopravdu ne,” he answered.

  Sylvie told Meta, “Means, he not remember but not sure.”

  “Why isn’t he sure?”

  They exchanged a few slow words. That his grandchildren had fallen silent meant to Meta that either she had run up against another wall or her quest was about to break loose.

  “Ne, promiňte. Vopravdu si nevzpomínám,” he said, looking meekly back and forth at the two women as he stubbed out his cigarette.

  No, sorry, he really couldn’t recall. He knew nothing about any manuscript. He apologized that he was a tired old man with a faulty mind. He appreciated what these young ladies were trying to find. He was young once too. He lost a fountain pen when he was in his early teens. One that his grandfather had given him at his bar mitzvah. He’d made the mistake of lending it to a school friend who proceeded to misplace it. Even after all he had been through in his long life, that fountain pen haunted him. He could still see its black and chocolate-colored lacquer barrel, its nickel hardware. Now it was out there somewhere in the world, being used, he hoped, by somebody. Maybe a writer of beautiful poems.

  Both Meta and Sylvie took Antonín’s story of the fountain pen as a signal that the time had come to leave. Sylvie asked if they could visit again if Mr. Novák remembered other details about the Bartošes. The smallest recollection might be significant, you never knew.

  Telephone numbers were exchanged and hands shaken. Her letdown aside, Meta thought it astonishing that strangers from such different pasts could meld so freely through the catalyst of loss and memory. She even dared to lean down and give the still-seated old gentleman a kiss on the cheek, so close did she feel, through him, to Otylie and Jakub, then left Žatecká Street in a state of quiet euphoria.

  For days after their encounter with the Nováks, Meta and Sylvie traipsed around Wenceslas Square discovering exactly nothing. The apartment building where Otylie and Jakub once lived had been converted into a commercial property on the ground floor and pricey residences above. No one they asked had ever heard of the Bartošes.

  Doing her best to remain undeterred, the euphoria she’d felt so recently starting to wane, Meta was now prepared to canvass the upper reaches of Nerudova and adjacent streets and alleys in Irena’s old neighborhood. The Kettles’ daughter had come down with a cold, forcing Sylvie to beg off as Meta’s Sancho Panza, as Sam jokingly called his wife—since who was Meta if not Doña Quixote?—until the girl recovered. Sam was meantime drowning in students, despite his American boarder’s help with the overflow during evenings, and unable to step in.

  After meeting with Gerrit and getting his voice mail, Meta had found herself musing about him at the oddest times. When brushing her teeth. As a pupil ran melodic minor scales on Sam’s piano. She had to question whether these stirrings, or whatever they were, these private and inadvertent one-sided encounters with Gerrit, weren’t somehow a specious response to her downward spiral with Jonathan. Maybe yes, maybe no. Either way, she knew she had to focus on what was before her. So she called him, but insisted to herself that this was purely business, nothing more. He’d offered, after all, and she did need something.

  “If it’s not too much of an imposition—” she started, hoping to sound neithe
r sheepish nor presumptuous.

  “Not at all,” he said, his voice encouraging. “What’s up?”

  After explaining, she added, “I was just thinking that it’s your corridor of Malá Strana, and you already know the area. And your Czech’s as impeccable as your English.”

  “Not always impeccable, but more than serviceable.”

  They agreed to meet at an outdoor café up near the castle. Unthinking, she put on her best dress, but just as she was about to leave decided she looked absurd, so quickly changed into jeans and a white blouse. One last glance in the mirror before heading out brought her down to earth, if bringing her down to earth was what the moment required. Her pale drawn face and the bluish rings beneath her eyes betrayed just how exhausted she was from her up-and-down search. She splashed some cold water on her face, toweled dry, and left.

  The day itself was radiant. Prague stretched below the aerie café, its many spires and steeples bristling out of a choppy angular sea of red-tile roofs. Above was a dense blue sky accented by wispy clouds, where a dirigible floated along like an anachronism whose pilot, with a handlebar mustache and monocle, had lost his way from another century. Kittiwakes circled over the Vltava while sparrows flitted in ivy that draped the wall beneath the palaces. The white-noise hum of the city could just be heard as Meta and Gerrit shook hands and sat at a wooden table.

  “I appreciate your taking the trouble to help me,” she said after they ordered coffee. “I’ve got to warn you the chances are good you’ll have wasted your time.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe anything is finally a waste of time. Wasn’t it Thelonious Monk who said there ain’t no wrong keys on the piano? It’s sort of like that. Besides, I was overwhelmed by what you played the other day.”

  “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”

  Gerrit thanked the waiter for the coffee. “This may sound a little layman-naive to a musicologist but the music seemed really biographical to me, like somebody’s story being told in those notes.”

  “I know what you mean,” she agreed, stirring sugar into her cup and noticing the dirigible’s reflection flexing on the black liquid mirror. “It’s hard to imagine the composer wasn’t thinking of himself or someone he loved. I’m so obsessed with it that sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t written for me.”

  “As obsessions go, you could have worse ones,” Gerrit said. “No question that the rondo bit, short as it may be, is a total Ohrwurm.”

  “Rondos as earworms,” Meta echoed. “Hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s true that rondos can get caught on the cortical loop. The thing has so completely taken me over that it’s like some glorious illness I don’t mind suffering even though it causes pain.” She glanced up to see a complicated look of admiration and concern on his face and, suddenly self-conscious, continued, “So, Sam says you’re a journalist. I hope I’m not taking you away from your work.”

  “Unless I’m on a breaking news assignment, I more or less set my own hours.”

  Meta nodded. “What sort of things do you write about?”

  “Right now I’m doing something on Czech puppet theater, which you may know is pretty renowned. Puppets kind of freak me out, actually, but my editor back in the States arranged a generous fee for me to write about it for the Travel section. Honestly, I write about everything under the sun. I’ve even written about things over the sun, if you count a piece I did for the Prague Post on the Meade mirror telescope they recently installed in the Štefánik Observatory not far from here.” He chuckled, shaking his head, went on. “When I got started I was doing field research for a big New York paper, covering the region for them in the late 1980s. It’s a story for another day, but during the Velvet Revolution I found my objectivity was harder to maintain than I expected.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well.” He raised his right hand, cupped as if it were holding an invisible ball, “I took objectivity”—then he raised his left in the same way—“and subjectivity and joined them like this,” bringing his hands together to form a single sphere. “And out of that came a book about how I personally experienced the revolution.”

  “Sounds hard to do.”

  “I won’t say it wasn’t. But in the end it was well worth the struggle,” he said. “Plus, I seem to have maintained my credibility—at least, I still get assignments.”

  They chatted as they drank their coffee. Meta asked Gerrit about his background, his translating; she talked about growing up in New York, studying piano. When he asked about her family, she shrugged, massaging her right hand with her left. “I grew up with my mother. As for my father, he’s long gone, flew the coop. He disowned us, so we disowned him.”

  “Doesn’t sound great,” Gerrit said, and then, “Is your hand all right?”

  Instinctively, she moved it onto her lap under the table. “It’s nothing.”

  “I hope you won’t despise me for being so up-front, but I’ve been wondering what happened. Looks like an injury.”

  Journalist or not, no one had ever been so undisguisedly direct about this. Other than her mother, nobody—not Mandelbaum, not Jonathan, not even Gillie, who knew the whole sorry story—was able to avoid looking at her hand with pity. But Gerrit’s eyes, his whole face, held no pity or judgment.

  “You say you’re not a real pianist, and I believe you.”

  “Wise move,” he said, which made her feel a little more at ease.

  “Well, this is why I’m not one either,” placing the hand between them on the table.

  “Absurd statement, but go on.”

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  “Tell me everything,” he urged her, ordering another round of coffees.

  “Well, I was a mistake. My parents were crazy in love back in the sixties. He was premed. She was an art student. She got pregnant, and instead of listening to him and aborting me—he never wanted to be a father—she went ahead with the pregnancy.”

  “Not very Age of Aquarius of her. So they got married?”

  “Yeah, for a while. They broke up when I was in my early teens. He got a job offer in California. Moved to Los Angeles, met a younger woman, and remarried. Rode off into the sunset in his predictable red Mustang—”

  “You’re not kidding, are you? About the red Mustang.”

  She shook her head and they both laughed for a moment. “How’d you get started with music?”

  “I had this toy piano when I was a little kid, one that sounded like tin ducks being shot in a penny arcade. It was my favorite possession. I named it Molly.”

  “Molly the Piano?”

  “’Fraid so. I loved my Molly, started picking melodies out on her when I was just a toddler. Thing is, I accidentally tripped over her while I was running around one day, more or less smashed her to smithereens, which my mother tells me was a disaster—apparently, I cried my eyes out. Our next-door neighbor came to the rescue. She had a real piano, and I started taking lessons from her before my feet could reach the pedals. By age four or so, I moved on to professional teachers. Then High School of Music and Art, Juilliard, the whole thing. Bored yet?”

  “I’ll stop you when I am, how’s that?”

  Meta gave him a genial shrug. “When I was twenty-one, I was out in L.A. to play in a competition with other emerging pianists from around the world. My father may have run away from my constant practicing when I was younger, but he saw this as the golden chance to show me off to his new friends and my stepmother. I played Rachmaninoff, not my favorite composer, but a crowd-pleaser and technically heavy-duty stuff. After I placed first, Dad threw a party that went on forever. I was staying with the other musicians at a hotel—God knows I didn’t want to stay at his place—so at three in the morning, he finally drove me back downtown from Pacific Palisades. Ocean fog had rolled in. I remember the streets being so eerie, like everything was behind a billowy gauze curtain. I was half asleep myself, but knew he was speeding like a maniac—”

  Gerrit saw where her s
tory was going, and stopped her. He reached out, taking her right hand in both of his. “I’m sorry I brought it up, Meta.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said, remembering, as if she’d ever truly forgotten, why she so seldom spoke about the accident. “That’s my sad little tale, such as it is.”

  “Little, no. Sad, yes. I appreciate your telling me,” said Gerrit, his voice quiet. “One thing it does is make what you’re doing here clearer to me than before. So let’s move forward. What’s your plan for this walkabout of ours?”

  Meta excused herself, went to the washroom, splashed water on her face for the second time that morning. She looked at herself hard in the mirror, past the pasty skin and shadows beneath her eyes, more inward toward her deeper self. What’s happening to you? she whispered, not as an admonishment but as a question. She had no answer, not just then, so straightened herself and headed back outside. Returning to the table, she explained to Gerrit what she had in mind.

  “I know it sounds preposterous, knocking on doors, asking around, but I’ve run out of any other way I can think to proceed aside from giving up.”

  “Not preposterous,” he assured her, considering how he himself would approach such an investigation, even as he felt a little guilty for having hastily jotted a few lines in his notebook about Meta while she was away. Old habit. Plus, the more he heard, the more he realized there was a compelling story here, about both the lost manuscript and Meta herself. Not that he would write it, since helping her out of friendship, or whatever this was, while compiling notes behind her back, would constitute a rotten conflict of interest, would it not? Interrupting his discomfiting thoughts, he told her as he got up from his chair, “Sometimes shoe leather is the best tool in the arsenal. Czechs, as I think you may have seen, are really open for the most part. Good people. They’re the main reason I’m not inclined to leave.”

  “Sylvie Kettlová’s been wonderful to me. And your Andrea seems like a darling.”