The Prague Sonata Page 22

  A voice from inside acknowledged Gerrit’s knock on the pebbled glass of the door, and he entered Petr Wittmann’s office. The two men greeted each other with an amicable handshake and the warm smiles of cautious strangers, and Wittmann offered his visitor a seat.

  May I? Gerrit held up his portable tape recorder.

  Of course. Now what’s this piece you’re working on? Wittmann asked, as he leaned back in his leather office chair. You mentioned puppet theater.

  Puppet theater, Gerrit affirmed, clicking on the battery-powered recorder and hoping his ruse wasn’t transparent. Its Czech roots and heritage and its now internationally recognized genius. As I’ve been researching and writing the piece, I find myself wondering why, with all the theatrical possibilities that puppetry has at its disposal, our puppet theater companies keep going to opera for repertoire.

  Instead of what?

  Of course there’s a tradition of folkloric material that’s drawn upon, but I’m thinking, why not Kafka? Shakespeare? Maybe Beckett?

  Wittmann unexpectedly warmed to the train of thought.

  Beckett’s not good for marionettes because he already writes for human marionettes. He thinks we are all puppets to begin with, so his theater needs the plasticity of actual actors in order to highlight their essential puppetness, their being hoisted on strings they don’t even know exist.

  A damned sharp answer, thought Gerrit, especially for being off-the-cuff and not really directly situated in Wittmann’s field. Maybe Jiří had him figured wrong. Who was to say that with an agile mind one couldn’t negotiate the bureaucratic byways of small-minded tyrants and minor despots without having to sell one’s soul?

  Still doesn’t answer my question, Gerrit said. Why all the nineteenth-century and earlier operas as formula?

  The obvious answer? Because their audiences are now mostly foreigners, Japanese and Brits, Italians, Greeks, Americans and the rest, a real international stew, and they want to feel that they’re spending an evening out doing something that’s fun and cultural at the same time. Most of these puppet shows are meant to attract tourists, and most tourists would rather see Don Giovanni lip-synched by wooden actors and done as slapstick than go to the Estates Theater and see it performed by actual opera singers with years of training.

  And you think it’s just that simple?

  I know it’s just that simple.

  I wasn’t living in Prague during the Communist years, Gerrit ventured. What did the Party make of puppet theater back then?

  Wittmann sat forward at his desk and folded his hands together, instinctively wary. The Communists were every bit as cynical about this aspect of our—you are, I gather, Czech?—

  Born here, raised in the States.

  Wittmann oddly smiled.

  —of our culture as you seem to be.

  Cynical? Gerrit said, admiring Wittmann’s rhetorical skills again. A blatant attempt to put the interviewer on the defensive as a means of getting the upper hand.

  Seamlessly, Wittmann switched into English, “Look, let me offer you this, since I don’t fully understand the purpose of this interview. My bottom line on contemporary puppet theater relying on the musty, dusty classics of operatic compositions to get people to pay a few crowns to fill their playhouses? Where’s the harm? Besides, who knows whether some who attend these events on a whim come away thinking Rossini or Berlioz or whoever is not musty and dusty but quite wonderful. Maybe it moves some recordings, or actually gets them to buy tickets to the Estates to see and hear the real deal.”

  Sensing there was no way to maneuver Wittmann back to a discussion about his days under Communism without looking manipulative, Gerrit said, “Good point. You’re an educator, so it makes sense you’d locate the silver lining here, in terms of pedagogy, or proselytism.”

  “Proselytism? What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing, really,” Gerrit said, noting that the word had struck its intended nerve. “Certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset. Just busy. And unless you have other questions that deal with music and musicology, I don’t think I’m going to be of much use, I’m afraid.”

  “I did have one other question, strictly about music. I’ve been thinking about doing a piece about restitution of artworks confiscated by the Communists, or maybe as far back as the days when the Reich seized power—specifically music manuscripts, which don’t get the media coverage that paintings and sculptures seem to attract. You’re as knowledgeable as anyone about the policies that the Party had in place, I’d imagine, about what music was authorized for broadcast and dissemination, and about how some of the great Czech music collections of famous patrons, Jewish and otherwise, were handled by the regime.”

  “It would make an interesting article,” Wittmann breezed back, showing no sign of disquietude. “But, alas, on this subject I’m going to be of even less help to you than on your puppet-opera piece.”

  “No insights based on your own experiences with the Communists?”

  “Like so many, I was a putative member of the Party. It was strictly understood by the authorities that my membership was for show. I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a reputation that extends beyond Czech borders, and early in my career it was made clear that in exchange for my not denouncing the government at home or when abroad, I would be free to pursue my work. What’s pertinent is that this work never extended to any serious involvement with government affairs. Pertinent, and the truth. So, you see, I have no information for you.”

  Gerrit hadn’t come intending to broach Meta’s manuscript as such, but hoped that Wittmann might mention it himself. Since that now appeared unlikely, he tried one last, more direct approach.

  “I’d imagine that more and more manuscripts and musical artifacts that might have been hidden from the authorities over the years are now beginning to come to light in the first decade after the Velvet Revolution, no?”

  Wittmann offered Gerrit a broad, friendly smile. “Perhaps so, Mr. Mills. Do you have a particular work in mind?”

  “Nothing in particular, no,” Gerrit lied, having no ready alternative.

  “I would be most interested in hearing of any such musical artifacts you may discover. Now is there anything else I can help you with? I need to keep an eye on the clock.”

  Gerrit rose at the cue, thanked Wittmann for his time, and shook his hand.

  “Let me have a copy of whatever you write, would you?” Wittmann said, as he walked with Gerrit to the door. “Czech puppet theater is, for better or worse, one of our most popular attractions, after our marvelous architecture and potent beer, maybe in that order, with beer at the top of the list.”

  “I will,” said Gerrit, feigning a chuckle. “And again, thanks for your time.”

  Gerrit had done hundreds of interviews since he signed on with his New York paper, branched out to do foundational work at the Prague Post, then freelanced for other European newspapers and magazines—that Rolling Stones concert in Prague, the first time liberated Czechs could hear “Satisfaction” live from a stage, sung by Mick himself? Gerrit covered that, scoring a few pithy backstage remarks from the band—but this was his weakest performance. As a professional he should have had no problem directly asking questions about Meta Taverner’s sonata manuscript that might have unearthed fresh insights. Instead, he went dog-paddling and basically drowned.

  Well, he thought as he walked home, at least he could add that nice aperçu about Beckett, give Wittmann his attribution, and turn in the article. Further, he could tell Margery that he’d consulted with an expert, though Meta’s manuscript hadn’t been the focus.

  Then he had an idea. Pulling out his cell phone, he called an older colleague at the Prague Post and asked if he wouldn’t mind running a quick LexisNexis search on Petr Wittmann. The results gave Gerrit pause. Book publications, public appearances, numerous articles on music—these came as no surprise. But he hadn’t known that Petr Wittmann’s name was once floated for a top position in
the ministry of culture. Under cloudy circumstances, the professor had withdrawn from consideration. When Gerrit’s journalist friend commented, “I remember this guy. You have a lead on him or something?” he answered, “Not really. Talked with him for background on a story and was just curious.”

  Whether or not he would tell Meta about his encounter with Wittmann and what he’d learned from his colleague was another matter. What had he finally gleaned? First, that the professor wasn’t someone to dismiss; second, that Wittmann’s not-so-subtle dodginess was, if nothing else, perplexing. Gerrit could see no clear reason why Wittmann would bother to be elusive or unforthcoming with him or Meta, neither of whom posed any threat.

  Much as she wanted to rush straight from the Nováks’ home, past the Klementinum, and around the corner to buzz Johana Langová’s apartment and find out who and where her half-mad brother was, Meta knew the Kettle children had already been thrown off their regular routine by coming with her and Sylvie to Josefov. They’d had a fine time with Antonín’s charming postpunk granddaughter, but now they were tired and cranky. A visit would have to wait for another day. She and Sylvie talked all the way back to Vinohrady. If even a fraction of what the old gentleman recalled was accurate, the sonata manuscript had traversed quite a landscape of human highs and lows during the past century.

  After they got the kids home, she returned to the telephone book, wrote down the exact address of the Lang who lived on Šporkova Street, and walked out again into fading afternoon light. It was impossible to attempt any contact with Johana right now, since Meta knew she would need a translator, that anything said would have to be conducted in careful Czech. But she was too jazzed by Antonín’s revelations to settle down into a domestic evening with the Kettles. No harm in wandering over to see if the listing was right.

  The evening air was soft. Meta got off the metro early to weave her way through the Little Quarter, strolling along tiny quiet side streets, alleys that opened into small squares between noisy Karmelitská and the river. Her thoughts, as both her pace and breathing slowed, floated away from Antonín Novák’s recollections and instead she found herself thinking of Jonathan and Gerrit. Flightiness, fickleness, and flirtation—three troublemaking F’s—had never been part of her character. She was, as Gillian mock-scolded her more than once, sinfully unsinful.

  “All that virtue without being a Bible-hugging child of the catechism,” her friend chided her before Jonathan entered her life. “You need to do a little less concertizing sometimes, and a little more clubbing.”

  Gilliespeak. She was a fine one to talk. Had probably never been to a Meatpacking District club in her life and had the same steady boyfriend since forever.

  Silly thought, maybe, but if the middle movement of the sonata declared in no uncertain terms that happiness can plummet with immediacy into grief, could its opposite equally apply? Might it be true that she and Jonathan had reached the end of their partnership and she and Gerrit, whom she barely knew, had together opened a new theme?

  Meta always found the idea of love at first sight a bit suspect. Her father had once told her that this was how he’d experienced the blind date in Chelsea with his future first wife, her mother, but it hadn’t endured in the end. The concept was sentimental at best, bankrupt at worst. It would be so easy to fall in with Gerrit, who had hardly hidden his interest in her. Much as she was drawn to him—his wise eyes that reacted so openly to nuance, his endearingly unruly hair, his intellectual sensibility, not to mention the urgency of their kiss—she sensed it was better to keep her guard up for the time being, as best she could.

  Here she was again, back in Gerrit’s and Irena’s neighborhood. Its streets had become so familiar that she turned, almost by rote, up past the German embassy, and entered Šporkova, climbing its gentle and narrow rise, enveloped by its flanking houses.

  Then she heard it. A piano. Echoing down the tight corridor of stucco and stone. Not her sonata, probably not her composer. But a piece she knew well. Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat Major. A passage from the beautiful first movement. Roughly played, to be sure. The pianist was either quite young or quite old, hard to tell. But one of her favorite of all late-eighteenth-century works for piano filled the lonely alley as Venus rose and the first faint stars began to blink above.

  Other sounds accompanied the Haydn. The percussive sounds of dishes being washed. The ever-present televised voices. A siren, far off.

  She could not identify with certainty that the piano, whose notes seemed to emanate from a garden behind one of these buildings shuttered against the coming night, was Lang’s. But she did confirm that a Lang, along with a Hašková, lived right here on Šporkova. It was all she could do not to knock on the door, but it was getting late and anyway the moment was too perfect to shatter. She would come back the next day. For now, she stood in the gloaming and listened until the pianist, whoever he or she was, stopped playing.

  She walked past Socrates’s corner toward the foot of the forty-nine steps that led to Nerudova and hovered uncertainly in front of an ornately sgrafittoed building at the foot of Jánská. Gerrit’s flat was just a few paces away. She could so easily ring his doorbell, lead him by the hand to the spot where she’d heard the Haydn, stand there with him, and hope the pianist would play some more.

  Instead, as before, she climbed the stairs and headed back down Nerudova, toward the river and Vinohrady beyond. She gazed up at the Milky Way, unusually bright against the ambient light as it stretched like some nocturnal silver rainbow overhead. It wasn’t as if noon tomorrow, when they’d agreed by phone earlier to meet again, was all that far away. Despite her doubts about love at first sight, Meta did surmise that from the moment she and Gerrit met they’d been improvising a duet on either side of the river. A duet that wanted to evolve into a fugue. One whose harmonic and rhythmic structures moved toward the same resolution.

  4

  OTYLIE SIGHED IN GRIM RESIGNATION when she heard through a fellow Czech exile about the new Prague Music Festival. The Reichsprotektor, it was said, considered it one of his proudest cultural achievements. Rumor had it he’d approached its planning with all the high-minded tenderness of a doting father raising his favorite child. The German Philharmonic Orchestra was specially scheduled to perform that first year. Other ensembles and virtuoso soloists were being imported from all over Deutschland to play alongside the best musicians in the Protectorate. Simultaneous performances were to be held up at the palace, over in the Valdštejn Garden, and down at the handsomely renovated Rudolfinum. In a display of evenhanded altruism toward the occupied Czechs, Heydrich instructed organizers to open the festivities with works by Mozart and Dvořák. This way, both German and Czech musical legacies—the Praguers claimed Mozart as in part their own—would weave through the gentle spring air in the Reich’s subverted jewel by the Vltava. Or rather, the Moldau.

  As a particular treat, the German Music Society invited the Bohnhardt Quartet all the way from Heydrich’s hometown of Halle to perform a romantic chamber work composed by the Reichsprotektor’s late father. The piece enjoyed a warm reception in the banquet hall of the Valdštejn Palace the very evening before assassins attacked their son’s limousine. In all likelihood, Heydrich fils never read the review of this special performance, as he lay mortally wounded when it was published in Der Neue Tag a few days later, on May 29. His festival went on, at least for a while. Bach and Beethoven and Bruckner—celestial music filled the city as the secular sirens bawled and jackboots beat the paving stones.

  Hearing this intelligence, Otylie couldn’t help but remember the last night she saw her father alive. All his carrying-on about war and music, music and war. Yes, her poor father had been drunk and half out of his wits with fear. But she recognized that there was more truth in his reckless doctrine than she had believed.

  Reports out of Prague were sketchy at best, and Otylie assumed that much of what she read or heard was wrong. When, however, she learned of the announcement on Czech radio that anyone inv
olved in the attack would be shot along with his entire family, she knew in her bones this was accurate information. As the news finally came in early June that Heydrich had succumbed to his wounds, Otylie shared none of the general elation felt by the English and expatriated Czechs around her at the Czechoslovak Institute on Grosvenor Place. Beneš and his government in exile proclaimed that the people were rebelling against their oppressors and that the Reich’s power had been delivered a true deathblow, but Otylie could only imagine what grisly reprisals the Nazis would mount now. She wondered if the music-loving Reinhard, evil as he was, hadn’t been less destructive alive than dead. Many years would pass before she learned that the man she worked for, Edvard Beneš himself, had factored Nazi retaliation into his assassination plans. His strategic hope was that Heydrich’s demise would spur the SS to such a reign of terror that the Czech people would rise up as one, winning the admiration of the Allied world as they fought back.

  Wheels within wheels. Those turning them, those caught in their cogs.

  Otylie’s feelings of helplessness only increased as the war ground on. Nor did they end when Beneš reentered Czechoslovakia to assume control of the government, triumphant after the Germans’ retreat in the spring of 1945. Hitler was dead, Heydrich’s successor, Karl Frank, was sentenced to death, the Protectorate itself was dead, and by every indication Jakub was dead. Stalin—whose Red Army marched into Prague as liberators after Eisenhower made the fateful decision to halt Patton’s advance in Sudetenland—was Prague’s new ally. About him Otylie had strong misgivings, despite Beneš’s embrace of the Soviets, in part because Jakub had never trusted Communists. On the other hand, what did her opinions matter? Everything she’d once known had now collapsed.

  Left behind, she was forced to go forward. But where? Jane, her best friend in London, was reunited with her American fiancé after D-Day and the couple moved back to Texas, where they got married. Otylie herself returned to Prague, where she found nothing and no one waiting for her. Retribution against Germans was the order of the day. Czech militias rounded up German soldiers and civilians alike, painting swastikas on their backs and belongings, deporting thousands, interning some, and murdering others. A simmering chaos defined the mood of the city. She asked around about Jakub, but just as she had expected, he had vanished. As for Irena, Otylie assumed, despite what she’d heard, that her friend must have perished in a concentration camp, for her flat was full of strangers’ possessions and empty of life save for a family of mice that had nested comfortably under the floor where some of the boards had been pulled up.