The Prague Sonata Page 4
She was giddy with excitement at the chance to see him again. Her own life was largely spent indoors, off the streets, out of sight. She traded her valise for a small traveling bag of Irena’s that was just large enough to carry a spare dress, some clean clothes for Jakub, her parents’ wedding photograph, which she’d removed from its frame, and her winter coat.
What to do with the manuscript had preoccupied her for months. The Germans had already decreed in June that Jews were forbidden to participate in the economic life of the Protectorate. All assets were to be registered and valuables confiscated. She could only imagine how empty the antikva must now be. Though she herself was a lapsed Catholic married to a secular Jew, the Nazis would not see their way clear to such nice distinctions were they to find her. Her heirloom, her troubling sonata, if recognized for what it might be, could be a great prize for the Treuhänder, the Reich’s ministry of exemplary thieves. Her father, Jaromir, had boasted that it was the lost manuscript of a great master. Tomáš and Jakub believed her father’s theory might not be so far-fetched. But Otylie doubted all of it, as a nonbeliever might doubt the existence of angels. Either way, to her it was of little consequence who wrote the sonata. What did matter was that the SS not confiscate her father’s dream, or if they did, that they not have the work in its entirety.
No, she would save it by ruining it. She would split it up into three parts, giving Jakub the final movement, on which she wrote a brief, loving inscription, either directly if she managed to reach him or through Marek if not. The second movement, which made her so sad she preferred never to hear it again, she would entrust to Irena with instructions that if Eichmann’s SS larcenists got anywhere near the pages she should burn them. All the better, she thought, that this second movement ended several staves above the bottom of the page’s verso, where the opening of Jakub’s movement began. More frustrating for the warmongers should it fall into their hands. The first movement with its paternal inscription she would take abroad with her, if she was able to get that far.
If and if and if, she thought. Still, she believed the heirloom would have no more value broken into pieces than some shattered Grecian urn whose mythic narrative could only be rightly read by turning it all the way around in one’s hands. If war destroyed her or her husband or her dearest friend, it would also destroy the music the manuscript mapped.
Otylie never did manage to speak with Jakub, but was able to see him standing alone at the far end of a field in a blue-gray copse of trees flooded with morning mist some long miles east of Prague. Sitting in the back of a horse-drawn milk wagon driven by a farmer sympathetic to the underground, she had planned to alight and pick flowers with his wife for them to sell at the market. Under this ruse, it was hoped, she might be able to cross the field and spend a few moments with her husband. As it happened, a Reich convoy came rumbling down the road in the opposite direction, scuttling their scheme. While the farmer continued to drive on without stopping, Otylie spotted Jakub’s leaf-dappled figure just within the forest’s edge. She didn’t dare wave. Looking intently at her, guardedly raising a hand in farewell before disappearing again, he was unable to cross the dangerous expanse that lay between them for fear of being seen by the soldiers. Even as a silhouette he appeared gaunt, pale as skimmed cream, and exhausted. She would have jumped down and run across the meadow of flowers to embrace him but for the urgent whispered warning of the farmer’s wife that by doing so she would jeopardize everything Jakub was doing, forfeit both their lives as well as their envoys’.
This reunion, such as it was, lasted less than a minute but would sustain itself in Otylie’s memory for the rest of her life.
Before setting out on a clandestine journey that dragged on for days into weeks, she entrusted the sonata manuscript movement to the farmer’s wife, asking her to have Marek deliver it to Jakub. Having hidden in wagons, trunks of cars, the closed compartment of a train, and steerage of a boat in rough waters, she finally arrived in London, where she began work with the exile government of Edvard Beneš, whom she and her husband considered the true president of their homeland. That fall, the great vortex began to swallow Prague whole. Many thousands were carried off, never to be heard from again.
After the Allies’ triumph over Germany several years later, the Beneš government returned to power with the help of Stalin’s Red Army. Otylie, already wary of the Soviets, who were moving swiftly to consolidate control in Prague, went back to look for Jakub and Irena. Stunned by the devastation she witnessed everywhere, she knocked on doors in the old Wenceslas Square building but found no one who knew a thing about her husband’s whereabouts or fate. Walking through Old Town Square, she saw that the clock tower, the municipal building, and nearly all the once sumptuous houses that bounded the heart of the city had been damaged. The antikva in Josefov was fire-gutted, a shadowy shaft where mice and homeless indigents nested these days. In Malá Strana across the river, she could locate only one person who had heard that Irena Svobodová had returned from a camp, possibly with her daughter.
Please, please, where is she? Otylie begged.
The woman wasn’t sure. She had heard Irena had left Prague for parts unknown.
Depression hung in the air like the black fumes of burning coal that poured forth from chimneys across the city. Little of the exuberant hope for the future that marked the end of Hitler and Hirohito in other countries surfaced in the Czech world. Stalin and Communist totalitarianism hovered on the eastern horizon like a toxic red sun. Living in a rented room—their homey apartment on Wenceslas Square was occupied now by others who claimed ownership—Otylie continued her search for months, working part-time for the Beneš government.
One morning, as she walked along the river past workers refitting the roads with cobbles that had been removed to build street barricades during the uprising, she caught sight of a mateless swan adrift on the brown water. At that moment, Otylie understood she was alone, a war widow.
Jakub had told her once, through Marek, that if they lost contact she should either stay in London or get to America. If he survived, he would find her. Because Prague was no longer bearable, she returned to England, where she worked hard for half a year to save money. She then booked passage to the States. At least there, she told herself, the ocean would help protect her from any new evils that might arise in Europe. When she packed her few belongings, including the sole sonata movement, Otylie was quite sure that its companion manuscripts were as lost as she was herself.
After a voyage across the Atlantic that passed like dreamless sleep, she arrived at Ellis Island on a brisk, wind-buffeted day in November 1946. Her first impression, as she stood on the ship deck with a throng of other immigrants, was that in Manhattan’s harbor Lady Liberty bore not a sword, as Franz Kafka had written, but a torch. Her second, once she disembarked from the ferry in New York proper, was of what she heard everywhere she walked in this teeming city of skyscrapers. Jazz, blues, classical, gospel, all manner of other styles and sounds utterly unfamiliar to her. The variety was endless, and these Americans seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for it. Even the promised land, she mused with dawning chagrin and unwelcome excitement, was awash in music.
WHEN IRENA DORFMAN OPENED the door to her modest home, she studied the face of the young woman standing on her stoop. She was aware that her perceptions were warped by the vicissitudes of time, illness, nostalgia, faulty memory. But for a fleeting instant, no longer than the wingbeat of one of the birds on her backyard feeder, she felt as if she were looking into the eyes of her daughter.
“Are you all right?” Meta asked, apologizing for disturbing the woman, who was leaning on a walker, even frailer than she remembered from that Sunday afternoon at the facility.
“Yes. I just thought you are somebody else. But I see you are the glorious pianist.”
Meta began to say she was the pianist though not so glorious, but before she could finish, Irena took her by the arm saying, “Come, come,” and welcomed her inside.
The kitchen, where the two of them sat at a round table, seemed more lived-in. The smell of soup—canned tomato, Meta guessed—warmed the room. Its linoleum floors, its old Frigidaire, vintage electric stove, and collection of cut-glass bowls and chalices in a walnut breakfront, sustained the time-capsule feel of Irena’s refuge.
“I enjoyed meeting you that day,” Meta said, unsure how to begin.
“Your concert was lovely.”
“Too bad the piano was so out of tune, but what can you expect of a poor old upright that gets rolled around from ward to ward?”
“You made it sound beautiful. Like an angel of piano,” Irena said, Czenglish still teasing the edges of her words even after so many years in America.
“I brought you this,” and Meta handed her the chocolate.
“You girls are going to turn me fat,” she said, and thanked her.
They chatted for a while, the clock ticking in the other room. Meta described her work as a piano instructor and an aspiring musicologist. She talked about where she lived and how she knew Gillian. But Meta understood that her story wasn’t the priority. She didn’t find it hard to draw out Irena’s past, how she and her daughter and husband had been living in Prague when the Germans took over the country. How their lives were cast into disarray by the Nazis, over the course of a few days followed by a few months that stretched into years—which made Meta wonder if this wasn’t why her home was so preternaturally tidy, everything in its ordered place.
Leaning forward, Irena asked if she was boring the girl, and Meta shook her head. “No, not in the least.”
“You see, I never talk about this,” the woman said, her voice low. “But for you to understand what I am to show you, for part of my past to have some future, I must tell you things hard for me to discuss.”
The woman meticulously opened the box of chocolate and, selecting a piece for herself and another for her visitor, said, “It is a long time ago, yes, but still I feel it like today.”
Meta took the chocolate but didn’t eat, just waited.
“First it was the students,” Irena began, “who were arrested for daring to protest.”
She told Meta how over a thousand of them were forcibly taken by train to Oranienburg, a camp not far from Berlin. Then, after Hitler’s top man in Czechoslovakia, Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated in 1942, thousands more Czechs were deported to Dachau, Auschwitz, and elsewhere. Mostly Jews disappeared but also gentiles who were friendly with Jews, as well as children who didn’t know what a Jew was.
“We didn’t learn the details until much later, of course, but we knew people were being sent away and never coming back. Hell’s gates were wide opened,” she said, going on to tell Meta how the entire village of Lidice, not far from Prague, where Irena had an uncle and cousins, was burned to the ground. How even before the town was torched, all of Lidice’s men were rounded up and murdered by a firing squad. How its women were packed off to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück. And how of the eighty or ninety children who were removed to the Gneisenau camp, only a tiny handful were deemed sufficiently Aryan to be spared for adoption into German families, where they would be reeducated. The rest of the boys and girls, she finished, were either left to languish in the stockades or gassed.
Meta, unblinking and barely breathing, set her uneaten piece of chocolate on the foil wrapper that lay open on the table.
“They say Hitler wants that one of every ten Czechs to be slaughtered like lambs for revenge. Many people, they start taking German lessons. They buy German newspapers and speak up in favor of the Reich.”
“But why?”
Because, Irena explained, they were crushed. They capitulated in order to save their lives. A quarter of a million turned out in Wenceslas Square to honor the martyred Heydrich. Shamefully, but seeing no alternative, they sang the German national anthem and offered the Hitler salute. Spirits shattered, so many of them terrorized into submission, the people of her country hit bottom. Informers abounded. Anyone even slightly suspected of collaboration with the resistance was rounded up. During the day each person looked over his shoulder and at night slept with one eye open.
“They come into the house,” she went on in her disarming present tense. “They arrest my husband and take him down to the courtyard and without asking a word shoot him dead. Me and my child they leave alone for two days but I know they’re coming back. My friend, her name was Otylie Bartošová, her husband, Jakub, is in the underground. She had the score which she give me part, to protect it, you see. Make it worthless to the Nazis because it is broken. Well, I hide it under the floor where there’s a loose board, before they come back and take me and my girl to Terezín.”
Meta listened, stunned by the raw immediacy of this woman’s past. The intimacy of it, nothing varnished or padded, was surely the result of Irena’s sense of urgency. Still, when she heard the name Otylie, she wondered if Irena’s friend had been named in honor of Dvořák’s daughter Otilie, who had married another Czech composer, Josef Suk. Probably not. It wasn’t as if the whole world revolved around music.
Irena was one of the fortunate survivors of the camp. At war’s end, she returned to Prague with her daughter—it was even rarer for a child to have made it through alive—to try to pick up the broken bits of her life. She heard conflicting reports about Otylie. One acquaintance swore she saw her walking the streets, glassy-eyed and speechless, like a lost ghost. Another was certain she’d refused to return from London, where she had worked with the exile government against the Nazis, once she learned poor Jakub had been killed. It was a time of considerable chaos in the capital city, Irena explained. Maybe she’d returned briefly, seen the devastation, and left, heartbroken.
Irena’s flat had been appropriated by Germans who fled when the Allies liberated Prague. Aside from a tottery armchair and chipped china, she recognized none of the belongings left behind by the Nazi occupiers. Nauseated by their abandoned possessions and the foul aura of depredation in her onetime home, she slept on the floor for a week until she found work as a waitress and chambermaid in a hotel in exchange for room, board, and a small wage. To her amazement, no one had ferreted out her hiding place for the sonata movement, so she was able at least to have kept one promise. She’d failed to protect everything else dear to her—including her daughter, who had cruelly suffered—but this one artifact remained.
Life in postwar Prague was a demoralizing grind. Spiritual lethargy spread itself like a low-grade fever over the city, and Irena worried for herself and her daughter. The family who owned the hotel where she worked worried too. They had distant relatives who had left the old country for the United States in earlier decades of the century, and they made plans to join them as soon as possible, along with other Bohemian families in search of a new start.
With nothing to hold her in Czechoslovakia, Irena asked if she and her daughter could accompany them. When they arrived aboard an overcrowded passenger ship in Manhattan, the group dispersed in a host of directions. Some stayed in Astoria, Forest Hills, Flushing, the varied hinterlands of New York City. Others truly went to the hinterlands to farm the prairies of exotic places with names like Nebraska and Oklahoma. Irena told Meta that after all she had been through she didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to go west, so she stayed on in New York.
She asked everywhere if anybody knew what had happened to Otylie Bartošová who fled to England during the occupation, but no one did. She found work in a haberdashery that specialized in wares for well-heeled immigrants. After a year or two, she met an Austrian man who’
d also emigrated following the war, and remarried. Her daughter grew into a fine young lady, went to college on a scholarship, married, and moved out to Minneapolis, where there was a small, thriving Czech community.
“Is that where she’s living still?” Meta asked, immediately regretting the question. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she be here now with her mother?
Her intuition proved right. Irena’s daughter had died of a heart attack a decade ago. Meta did a quick mental calculation. The woman would have been in her sixties. Too young by far; what a crime after all she had survived as a girl. Not wanting to pry further, she didn’t ask if Irena had any grandchildren. The old woman, with her withered face and bluish-white hair done up in an old-fashioned beehive, gave off such a complete air of aloneness that it was breathtaking.
She had outlived her husband, outlived her daughter, outlived nearly all of the friends she’d made here. In many ways, she had outlived herself, she said. She’d had years to straighten out any affairs that were left undone, finish what there was left to finish. The only matter that remained in limbo was the manuscript.
“Do you believe in God?” Irena asked.
Broadsided, Meta said, “Sure.” Her answer was little more than an expedient white lie, as transparent as holy water.
“Neither do I,” Irena said, looking her guest hard in the eye. “I hope he is there on the other side waiting and all is good after we die, but I don’t know and nobody else knows either. But I do believe in responsibility.”
“There we’re in full agreement,” said Meta, aware of the inherent promise she was making. This woman who had carried the manuscript so far needed now to pass it along to someone else.