The Prague Sonata Read online

  The fact was, she knew the manuscript was probably important. Jakub himself had done some research once she finally told him about its existence. He had shown it to a pianist friend named Tomáš, who expressed great excitement about the possibilities of its origins. This was several years into their marriage. One would have thought it a dirty secret, the way she had kept the sonata hidden from Jakub for so long. Puzzled but also curious about the manuscript’s history, he tried probing Otylie’s girlhood remembrances. Where and how had her father obtained it? What was its provenance? After several outbursts the likes of which he’d never seen from her, Jakub understood that the personal, emotional connection between the document and her father’s death finally wasn’t his business, so he never delved further into the matter.

  The artifact itself, however, fascinated, even obsessed him a little. Its fleur-de-lis within a crowned shield and the name H BLUM in the watermark, he told Otylie, suggested that the paper might have been fabricated in Germany or Austria, but it wasn’t a watermark he recognized. The brown ink, the stitching holes down the left side of the leaves that indicated it had once been bound, even the pagination in a dark russet crayon from a later period—the more he learned, the more everything about the object only underscored its authenticity.

  Questions preoccupied him. When was the sonata composed? Where? Was this a copyist’s hand or the composer’s own? Why had someone set down staves of hastily penned music in yet another hand on the unused paper at the end of the first movement, notes toward what appeared to be a completely different composition? And who had written these three enlightened movements?

  What an unforgettable evening it had been when Tomáš was finally allowed to perform the piece in his atelier in Malá Strana, on an honest if aging Bösendorfer grand piano, before an audience of a dozen acquaintances, including Otylie’s best friend, Irena Svobodová, who had long urged her to make peace with the manuscript and what it represented.

  Three sonatas were performed that night on Šporkova, a short elbow of a street that curves from the bottom of Jánská around to a square where the Lobkowicz Palace stands. The private concert began with the last of Joseph Haydn’s piano works, Sonata no. 52 in E-flat Major, followed by Beethoven’s F Minor, his audacious first, a work the younger composer dedicated to Haydn, who had been his teacher in Vienna. Both might well have been performed in their own time at the palace just down the way. After these came Otylie’s nameless sonata.

  The mood in the room was uneasy, hopeful, doubtful. Otylie and Jakub’s friends were excited by the chance to hear the mysterious manuscript played. And yet everyone wondered what would drive Tomáš to premiere this untried work in the wake of such obvious glories. It seemed somehow unfair to the unknown composer.

  He performed the first two compositions with real panache. Then, after the clapping ceased, he nodded to Jakub, who brought the manuscript to the piano. Tomáš began to play, his friend carefully turning the pages for him. What unfolded in the first movement was energetic and pleasing, if standard and rather Mozartian. The small audience nodded approval when this classic sonata-form movement reached its satisfying final chord. What transpired in the second movement, however, was unexpected. Melodious descending scales concluded in lyrical eddies, pools of euphony, that defied all laws of spiritual gravity when the waterfall of notes cascaded upward again. The music conveyed joyous esprit that mesmerized its unwary listeners. Then, abrupt as water hitting stone, its rich, poignant tapestries of sound ceased. What followed, without foreshadowing, without warning, was a passage of unspeakable darkness. While Tomáš edged forward through this unsettling soundscape of purest dejection, Otylie found herself hearing the differences between his execution and the way her father used to play these very notes. As dark as Tomáš painted these musical phrases, her father’s interpretation, which she related to her mother’s death, was more tragic yet. Fighting back tears, she shifted in her seat through the third movement, a lovely traditional rondo that brought the sonata to its graceful conclusion.

  Silence hung in the parlor after the last note resounded and died away, but then the reaction was spontaneous and overwhelming. A collective gasp and a sudden burst of applause filled the room. Hobbled as the sonata had been by the fact that its performer was playing the work without benefit of much rehearsal, not to mention the unsympathetic acoustics, it was clear even to the most unmusical ear in attendance that here was something significant.

  You absolutely must allow this to be studied and published, Tomáš exclaimed.

  But Otylie would have none of it. She refused to say why. Even Irena, who knew that the middle movement was deeply painful for her friend to hear, was unable to persuade her to listen to reason. As trays of wine and beer were brought around, Otylie Bartošová thanked Tomáš for his memorable performance. Then, unnoticed, she carefully slid the manuscript back into its satchel, and there it had remained ever since.

  Now she could do nothing but wait. Though the sky hadn’t grown brighter, she left the lights turned off and the curtains mostly drawn. The passageway outside her door had fallen quiet. Others had taken to the streets to watch the spectacle or else were cowering at home just as she was. She would never leave without Jakub. At this moment she oddly remembered a joke of her father’s about two barristers who walk into a pub eating baguettes. When they order their beers, the waiter warns them they’re not permitted to eat their own food here. The barristers shrug, trade baguettes, and calmly continue to eat. The thing was, Hitler had pulled a sleight of hand on Hácha. He now held both baguettes and had usurped the pub too. Otylie frowned, wondering if she wasn’t losing her sanity.

  Not until sometime past noon did her husband manage to send word to her through an emissary. A rail-thin young man named Marek appeared at her door, a first-year university student who swept the floor at the shop, made deliveries, did odd jobs in his spare time. She let him in, stood with her fists clenched together against her mouth, unable to speak, believing she was about to learn that her husband had been arrested or killed.

  But he wasn’t dead. He had vanished into the fledgling underground resistance that had begun organizing as the first rumors of a possible invasion circulated, and was making arrangements for Otylie to leave Prague. Shaken, Otylie was at the same time unsurprised by Jakub’s sudden conversion from shopkeeper to partisan. She knew that though her husband was Jewish, he was driven by a love not just of religion or culture or antiquities, but of country. For Jakub to have so quickly coordinated with like-minded Praguers meant, of course, that he must already have been in contact with them about the growing threat and had kept it from her in deference to her loathing of talk about war. So many people passed through his shop. It had been a meeting place, a microcosm of Prague’s intellectual society. Yet just because she was not caught off guard by his decision didn’t mean she had to agree with it. She glared at this kid with his curly dark blond hair and large soft eyes, exhibiting such rage that he took a couple of awkward steps back toward the door.

  You tell my husband, she said, her voice hushed but firm, that I’ll do nothing of the kind and that he must come home. Hned, hned ted’! she suddenly shouted, startling both of them. Immediately, now!

  I can tell him, Marek said. But I’m not sure he’ll listen.

  Do your mother and father live in Prague?

  Marek nodded, a bit sheepish for one his age.

  Once you’ve told my husband what I said, go to them, make sure they’re all right. Leave the underground to gravediggers.

  Somebody’s got to fight these jackals.

  Only fools fight the inevitable, she said, but even as these words came out of her mouth she felt the stinging shame of them, the embarrassment of defeat without a struggle.

  After Marek left, she passed an excruciating hour stealing back and forth from chair to window like some hapless spy before finally putting on her coat and scarf and going outside into the mayhem to search for her husband. Things were more desperate in the
streets than they had appeared to be from her aerie. Men and women freely wept, many of them shouting obscenities at the Germans, who either couldn’t understand them or were indifferent to what they were saying. Dejected Czech soldiers in drab khaki uniforms looked on in disbelief. Some people threw themselves from windows. A couple of boys from the farmers’ market lobbed square cobbles at an armored truck and then ducked away into the swarm of protesters; otherwise the occupation proceeded almost entirely without overt resistance.

  Yet the people continued to sing. Singing was their sole salvo against this tyranny. They sang as if music were a kind of fusillade, as if their voices rising together could meet in battle against the clatter of tank treads and jackboots.

  She threaded her way across the city toward Josefov, shoving forward while herself being shoved from every side. On reaching Staroměstské náměstí, Otylie paused, looked at the Old Town Hall clock and the cathedral spires, the pastel facades of the buildings lining the square, and, farther along, glimpsed the fairy-tale castle atop the hill in Hradčany that had towered above Prague for many centuries. What washed over her despair like baptismal water was the belief, the certainty, that all this would survive every soldier in the streets. The politics and plunderers of any given day eventually fade into a dust of unreality, she thought, but the best of what people forge with their imagination persists. More than persists, thrives. Otylie clung to this idea, found in it the strength to continue pressing ahead. It was a simple enough epiphany, perhaps overly hopeful, but the extremity of the moment made the idea seem immense.

  When she reached the shop and saw that the lights were off, the curtain on the door was drawn, the door locked, she stood staring for a moment at the handwritten sign Jakub had affixed to the display window.

  Odmítám, it read. I refuse.

  At that moment Otylie understood that Jakub’s impulses were right. And she realized she might never see her husband again.

  Not that she didn’t spend the rest of that freezing, frenetic day looking for him. She knocked on the door of every friend they had, forced her way through the surging multitudes past ranks of soldiers and more soldiers, questioning whether the Reich really needed to send so many to secure the peace among an already defeated people. After spending an hour with Irena, who rued the fact that she was alone with her ten-year-old daughter in the midst of all this chaos while her own husband was off in Brno on business, Otylie arrived home just as the first curfews were announced, in both Czech and German, on wall posters and traffic boxes. Loudspeakers blared in the dusk, ordering people to clear the squares and curbs. That night, alone in bed for the first time since she had been married, she cried until her eyes ran dry. It gave her no solace to know that thousands of others were doing the same.

  THIRTY FLICKERING CANDLES lit Meta Taverner’s narrow brownstone apartment in the East Village. Its walls trembled with the light of tiny flames. Candles crowded her bookshelves and windowsills. They adorned her baby grand piano. She held one aloft, a bristling little flag of fire at its crown, between her fingertips. It was well past midnight on a Sunday in late July, the first July of the new millennium, and Meta’s birthday. What better way to celebrate than by turning her whole home into a birthday cake?

  All the party guests having finally left, her boyfriend now followed her with their two glasses of champagne as she walked from candle to candle—living room, kitchen, corridor—blowing them out, making a wish at every stop. Soon, her railroad flat was scented with sweet smoke and bathed in urban darkness, glowing with the pale amber of ambient street light.

  The last candle sputtered in her cupped hands in the bedroom at the end of the hallway. She sat on the bed, still wide awake despite having partied since late afternoon with a dozen or so friends—fellow former Columbia and Juilliard students, a couple of professors, a few of Jonathan’s colleagues—who had brought presents, food, bottles of wine, beer, vodka. Her final wish, like the others, was difficult, maybe even impossible. But what good were wishes if not to stretch beyond the possible? She blew out the remaining candle and set it on the lip of her bedside table before reaching into the spinning darkness to wrap her strong, lean arms around Jonathan’s hips and pull him down, as if in slow motion, on top of her. They lay in a warm, dampening mesh of limbs, mouths locked in a kiss, writhing out of their clothes. When he finally entered her, she couldn’t tell whether she was giggling or sobbing or both.

  When she woke midmorning, Jonathan had left. For the past month, he’d been working seven-day weeks along with others at his firm, fighting the biggest judicial case he had yet been involved in. Antitrust suit; marquee business names. A positive outcome meant a probable turning point in his life, a promotion at the least, but he still found time to make her a pot of fresh-ground coffee. There it sat on the counter next to her favorite cup, with its portrait of Erik Satie wearing John Lennon sunglasses.

  Jonathan was a thoughtful guy, always patient with her and her cloistered, quirky crew of friends and colleagues who, she knew, tolerated more than embraced him. They were monomaniacs every last one—tunnel visionaries who breathed, ate, and drank nothing but music, music, music. How did he manage to stay sane when talking with her musical pals, to whom the Iberian Peninsula was less a spot to take a pleasant vacation than the hallowed ground where Domenico Scarlatti composed? How did he tolerate, bored though hiding it well, listening to them argue at the top of their lungs about Hermann Keller’s claim that Scarlatti was, finally, behind his times because he failed to return in his later movements to primary themes as Bach had done, yet didn’t rate as a Preclassic innovator because he introduced nothing to pave the way for Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? Lunatics all of them, her friends, she knew. Lovable, but nuts.

  And those were just the musicologists. The pianists were in another league altogether. One of her pianist friends just last night, tipsy on martinis, had explained to Jonathan, “You need to understand that all great pianists are heliocentric. They’re both the sun and what the sun shines on. The world is divided right down their center. Their left hand is one hemisphere, and their right is the other. Nothing exists outside this sunlit world when they are playing, moving the notes of the universe back and forth, through and through them, keeping the supreme center intact while the sperm flies.”

  “Sperm?” Jonathan asked with a laugh.

  “Of course, sperm! And lots of it, oceans. Bach had twenty children, if you count the ones who didn’t survive birth. He’s not a composer who wrote the B Minor Mass sitting at the keyboard and staring out the window for inspiration. Bach was nothing but a human musical orgasm. The music came and came out of the man. You know the one about why he had so many children?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because he didn’t have any stops on his organ.”

  While all this was bandied about, a favorite CD spun in the stereo. The speakers strained with each word of one of Frank Zappa’s anti-establishment anthems. When a neighbor came to the door and asked Jonathan, who answered, if they could turn it down, he went over to the stereo to comply.

  “Don’t touch that dial,” warned a lanky man standing at his shoulder.

  “Why not?” Jonathan asked, ignoring him as he lowered the volume.

  “Because the only way to listen to an insurrectionist like Zappa is cranked up all the way. Anything less is a sacrilege.”

  Jonathan was a sweetheart, Meta thought, to put up with all this. She’d met him the summer before when he’d moved back from Boston, where he had gone to college and law school, to take a job at a New York firm. He had stayed for a few weeks with his younger sister, Meta’s best friend Gillian, who was more surprised than anyone to see Jonathan and Meta falling for each other. “You know he doesn’t have a musical bone in his body,” Jonathan’s sister warned Meta, “but that might not be a bad thing. Get you out of your head.”

  “I’m already out of my head.”

  “Very funny,” Gillian said. “My sole proviso is that you keep me away
from the flames if everything goes up in smoke.”

  Their first time alone together was when they met for lunch in Washington Square Park. Jonathan brought homemade sandwiches. Meta showed up with pastries from her favorite Italian bakery on LaGuardia Place. Late spring, the blue sky daubed with shape-shifting clouds headed out toward the harbor and ocean beyond. The day was as perfect as an opera set staged by Zeffirelli. They sat on a bench under a plane tree and traded notes about his sister, since what else did they have to talk about, until Meta commented on the distant song playing on a kid’s boom box, saying how much she liked “Crosstown Traffic.”

  “You’ve got to be the only person in New York who does.”

  “No,” she laughed. “Listen, hear that? Hendrix.”

  Jonathan, a little embarrassed, laughed at himself.

  “You know,” she continued, head tilted to the side, “I don’t think I ever understood the war in Vietnam until I really paid attention to Jimi Hendrix. It was all words in textbooks and horrible images on the movie screen, but when I heard the Woodstock recording of him playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ it just clicked. Know what I mean?”