The Prague Sonata Read online

  “What does your lawyer friend think about all this?”

  Frowning, Meta said, “That’s changing the subject. Will you help me or not?”

  He held the first leaf up to the light, candling its watermark, then drew a notebook from his trouser pocket, whereupon he proceeded to sketch the watermark with his fountain pen. “The historian in me knows how small the chances are that, one, the other movements survived, and that, two, you—or anyone else, for that matter—will be able to find them. Slim to nil, I’d say.”

  Now Meta paced to the window and gazed down at the street filled with cars, trucks, jaywalking pedestrians. “When I was on the train headed out to meet this woman, I had the exact same thought in the exact same words. My chances of finding something of this magnitude in Irena’s little house on Kalmia Avenue were slim to nil. By the same token, what are the chances anyone could sit down and write something as beautiful as that”—turning back and pointing at the manuscript—“and for it not to be published and heard by thousands, hundreds of thousands of people over the centuries?”

  “It’s not unprecedented.”

  “That’s right. But it’s definitely unprecedented in my life.”

  Mandelbaum saw that his protégée was at the edge of her patience. He might have felt guilty but for the fact that he believed it was his job to insinuate a bit of dull reason into her stardusted view of the matter. What was more—and this was a truth that stirred old thoughts he might rather not deal with—he had a good insight into just how valuable this manuscript might be.

  “One last time,” she said. “Will you help me or not?”

  “In any way, shape, or form I can,” he answered, walking over to her, suddenly dead earnest. With his long fingers he reached out and took Meta’s hands, which were cold but clasped his in return with a surge of gratitude and trust. “Promise me you’ll put it somewhere secure. No more moldy mothballs for this artifact, please.”

  “I was going to ask my mother to hold it for me, actually. Her apartment windows don’t leak. And besides, women protected it all these years. Why change that?”

  “I appreciate the impulse,” Mandelbaum countered. “But at least let her keep it in a bank vault.”

  “For the time being,” she said.

  “Fair enough. With your permission, can I have a try at this too?” he asked, nodding his head toward her piano.

  Meta let go of his hands. “As you noticed, my piano hasn’t been tuned in a while,” she warned.

  “That’s all right, neither have I.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  Mandelbaum sat and arranged the manuscript before him. Straightened his back after adjusting the bench. Raising his hands to the keyboard, he began to play.

  META NEVER SAW IRENA SVOBODOVá DORFMAN AGAIN. The woman had died alone in her bed a few nights after their meeting. Meta and Gillian did return to Irena’s neighborhood, to attend her funeral at Flushing Cemetery. Standing with others, strangers all, amid the vast, amaranthine rows of graves in that metropolis of headstones and bones beneath trampled grass, they paid their last respects. One of the mourners was a handsome woman whose hair was styled in the same old-fashioned beehive Irena had worn.

  After the brief service, they joined the handful of mourners for a midafternoon lunch in Irena’s honor at a Bohemian restaurant in Astoria, Queens. Feeling out of place with the others, Czech immigrants and an Austrian gentleman who had been a friend of Irena’s late husband, they ate what was ordered for the table to share. Klobása, roast pork loin with heavy dumplings, a fried breaded cheese called smažený sýr, and what had apparently been Irena’s favorite dish on the menu, pečená kachna, a crispy Long Island duck served with red cabbage and potato pancakes. They drank Czech beer and did their best to converse with these people who had known Irena. When Meta floated a couple of questions about the manuscript the deceased woman had placed in her care just days before, she was met with blank stares. None had ever met Otylie, but all had heard Irena speak of her best friend from the old days. Openly sentimental, they hoped the two women were now having their own lunch in heaven.

  Most of their reminiscences were about Irena’s little quirks and habits. The way she had sewn all her own dresses and coats because she could never find exactly what she liked in stores here. How her second husband had been a good man, a little given to drink, but she never complained. Meta was left with the impression that the woman she met just that once was precisely the one these people had known for years. Forthright, clearheaded, honest. If Meta harbored any doubts about Irena’s story or how much the manuscript had meant to her, they were erased by the time lunch wrapped up and the bill was paid.

  Before they rose from the table, Meta made a point of exchanging names and phone numbers with the woman whose hairdo matched Irena’s and who proved to be her hairdresser of many years. Not that she would necessarily be of any help. Nor that Meta would ever dial the number. Just having it, though, made her feel as if her only tie to the sonata movement’s past wasn’t extinguished from her life.

  The group stood chatting outside the restaurant, delaying their final leave-taking if only to postpone what would mean a last farewell to their friend. While Gillian shook hands with the Austrian gentleman, Meta, her mind adrift, listened to the half-English, half-Czech conversation around her until one detail caught her ear: a street near where Irena had lived in Prague. It was mentioned in passing, and Meta hadn’t quite heard it. Fumbling in her pockets for a pen, Meta asked the name of the street again.

  “Nerudova,” one of them blurted in her direction and returned to the conversation.

  Not wanting to draw attention to herself and not finding anything to write with, she decided to look into it later, making a mental note that the street name was oddly similar to that of the famous Chilean poet. One might speak of Prague and Kafka in the same breath. Or Werfel, Rilke, Klíma. Even the pre–Velvet Revolution rock group Plastic People of the Universe. These were Prague-souled artists all. But who in the world would associate Prague with Pablo Neruda?

  Next morning, after lessons with a couple of her piano students, Meta bought herself a detailed map of the Czech capital at a shop near the Morgan Library and pored over it at the table of a local coffee shop. She could have looked it up online or gone down the list of street names in the index in search of a match, but chose instead to start by touring the city in two dimensions, taking a kind of sight walk hither and thither—a habit she’d developed on the concert competition circuit, when she rarely got out to actually see the cities where she performed. Not the easiest way to track down a name in the melted honeycomb that constituted Prague’s tiny, twisty streets. Given how comfortable she was reading complex concertos and experimental piano works, some of whose late-modernist scores looked less like music notation than medical schemata for the nervous system of an alien species, she wasn’t deterred. Her eyes watered and her vision blurred, but the real problem was that she heard in the back of her mind a small, skeptical voice saying, Can’t you see? You’re already wasting your time. Just look at the freaking index.

  She shook her head as if to silence this inner speaker whom she fairly or unfairly identified with her absent father. Kenneth Taverner, crashist, rationalist, abandonist extraordinaire. The doubter who even now in his audacious correspondence with her dropped hints, gilded by what he surely thought were appropriate hues of paternal concern, that she might want to consider looking for a real career, one with both feet planted in this world, as he had put it in his birthday note. But that was him through and through. Thinking that his daughter, whose life had always been her hands, ought to find her way into the world of feet. And planted feet at that. The same man who had never taken responsibility for the accident that deprived her of the perfect, unfettered use of one of her hands, the man who always blamed the other driver, though the particulars were murkier than he cared to admit or the police investigation managed to sort out.

  Then she saw it. Nerudova. Hardly her
Chilean laureate, she learned from the travel guide that she bought at the Strand on her way home. The street was named for the nineteenth-century Bohemian storyteller Jan Neruda, who’d lived there. And just as Bob Dylan named himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda—originally the unwieldy Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto—took the Czech writer’s name as his own early in life and kept it. The son of a poor South American railroad employee honoring the son of a poor Prague tobacconist and grocer.

  This would serve as her starting place. Irena had said that the only performance she’d ever heard of the sonata was in this same neighborhood, Prague’s Left Bank, where she’d lived some sixty years ago. The chance of locating anyone who might have knowledge of such an event was more ephemeral than a grace note, but Meta had to begin somewhere.

  During the few weeks that followed her morning revelation to Jonathan and her visit from Mandelbaum, she grew increasingly edgy. It was as if there were two Metas nervously circling each other. The new, strange Meta went surreptitiously to the Cooper Station post office to renew her passport without a concrete travel date in mind. The normal, familiar Meta made sure that when Jonathan’s case was thrown out of court, she organized a private victory party for the younger attorneys in the firm at a local bar managed by a friend. Between giving piano lessons, she spent two days in her small kitchen preparing platters of hors d’oeuvres and elaborate finger foods for the celebration. After Jonathan left for work, the new Meta set about meticulously copying the sonata manuscript at her desk like some secular sofer writing out the Torah. And though she also had a friend make high-resolution scans of each page, which she then printed out on art paper that approximated the weight and color of the original, and even went to the unnecessary length of typing the composition into a Sibelius computer program, she knew that by writing it out in her own hand she would forge a more intimate connection with the heart and mind of its maker. Just as painters often honed their art by copying the masters, many composers copied out works of their mentors as a means of getting closer to the music, note by note, measure by measure. So why not she?

  Evenings were about practicing piano to keep her fingers limber, making dinner, doing dishes. Days found her haunting libraries, reading histories about how the Second World War unfolded in Czechoslovakia, devouring books and monographs on sonata theory, poring over and playing unrecorded scores, immersing herself in recordings of every late-eighteenth-century piano sonata she could find, hunting for echoes, commonalities, sister notes and passages. At night, propped up in bed while Jonathan slept next to her or after he had left for the night, the insomniac Meta, who was strung out somewhere between her contented and restless selves, read and reread accounts of the Nazi occupation of Prague, projecting herself into Irena’s life, and Otylie’s. They were just about her age when the sky fell in on them. How did they manage from day to day? What furious nightmares must have tormented them as they lay in their beds, knowing that when the sun rose, or even before the night was over, the Gestapo might come knocking? Would Jonathan, a liberal Jew, have been able to sleep in the dark, dangerous world Irena had survived and Otylie and her husband, Jakub, struggled against? Maybe so. He was pretty strong willed. Had Meta herself been bequeathed a handwritten sonata from a fond, eccentric father, would she have had the guts and the wisdom to split it into three orphaned movements in hopes of protecting it from the enemy?

  She didn’t know the answer, but she doubted that her strength ran to those depths. No one she’d ever met, she realized, wide awake at three thirty in the morning, possessed the courage that Irena and her clutch of friends and family had shown in wartime Prague. Was it possible that their defiant commitment to art in the face of violence, their heroic grasp of what it meant to give everything to preserve a tiny fragment of culture, was all but gone from the world?

  By the hazy hot days of mid-August, Meta felt she was cracking up. She played the movement compulsively a dozen times and more every morning, and again in the afternoon. It was the first thing she thought about when she woke up, the last thing nettling her mind before she fell asleep. Not only had she learned its intricacies by heart, she could perform the work in its entirety in her head. Sometimes she urgently wanted to stop hearing it over and over, but couldn’t. She felt as if she were nearing the pathological, so fully had the music infected her.

  This Meta, the one whose life had become so obsessed with the score that she worried she was nearing a breakdown, finally decided to tell her best friend what had crystallized into an inevitability.

  They met in the hospital cafeteria at Mount Sinai during Gillian’s lunch break.

  “So. Talk to me,” she said after they sat down across from each other in the bright room, tuna niçoise salads on the table between them still in their unopened plastic clamshells.

  “Gillie, I’m going over the edge,” said Meta, flat as she could manage given the stirrings in her gut. “I’ve done just about everything I can do here. Unless you can convince me otherwise, I’m calling school and all my private students and telling them I need to take a leave of absence.”

  “What in the world do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m going to Prague.”

  “Prague? Wow, Meta. Can you really afford to do that?”

  “I’ve got some money saved up. Not a ton, but if it came down to it, I could always sell my piano.”

  “Never. You’d sooner die,” Gillian insisted. “I have to wonder if going to Prague might not cause more problems than it solves. You’ve just started your dissertation. School begins in a few weeks. You’re going to chuck it all? Plus, I thought you said you took on more students.”

  “I know, I did. Maybe I’m having some kind of early midlife crisis,” said Meta, elbows on the table, face in her palms.

  “And here I thought you were happy.”

  “I was,” she said, eyes reddening as she reached out to hold one of Gillian’s hands. “But I don’t know what else to do. If I don’t at least try to track down the other movements I know I’ll always regret it. I’ll be disappointed in myself for not living up to what I promised Irena. More than that. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t answer the call. I can’t help it, Gillie, but crazy as it sounds I feel like I’ve been called.”

  “It doesn’t sound totally crazy. But maybe you don’t need to turn everything upside down. Can’t you build it into your dissertation or whatever? Make it meld with the work you’re already doing?”

  Meta shook her head. “That’s the problem. The work I’ve been doing these past years doesn’t hold a candle to this. It makes my dissertation seem so mundane, even trivial. Can you understand?”

  “I’m trying,” Gillian said with an encouraging smile.

  “Look, Gillie.” Meta half-smiled in return. “I’m not sure I’ve got the right words to explain myself any better. The more I think about it, the less I understand. It’s like”—she let go of her friend’s hand and glanced at the fluorescent ceiling, then down, resigned—“like the harder you try to hold a fistful of sand, the faster the sand runs between your fingers. I don’t think I’ll be able to figure out what’s happening to me unless I stop thinking about it so much and take a few steps, see what there is to see.”

  “You should eat,” said Gillian, knowing that she was going to back Meta whether or not she believed her friend was acting on a hasty impulse. “I think you’ve lost weight.”

  They opened the plastic containers and started on their salads.

  “People say Prague’s the most beautiful city in the world,” Gillian went on in the hopes of lifting the mood. “Maybe Jonathan can get some time off and go with you.”

  Here Meta hesitated for a moment before looking Jonathan’s sister straight in the eye. “I need to do this by myself, Gillie. It’s not a vacation.”

  “He means well. Eat, Meta.”

  “He means more than well, but there’s a good reason it took me a while to tell him.” She breathed in deep, her shoulders rising, then dropp
ing as she exhaled and took an absentminded bite of salad. “I knew from the beginning he didn’t understand music, and that’s okay. Why should he? He’s certainly more accommodating than my father ever was, running off to California because he got sick of every waking hour revolving around music.”

  “Music’s your motherland, and Jonathan supports that,” Gillie said, not wanting Meta to dwell on bitter memories of Kenneth Taverner. “He knows how important your studies are to you.”

  “Musicology’s been a great fallback since I lost my concert career. Teaching’s super fulfilling and I love doing the volunteer recitals you line up. But when Irena heard me gimp my way through Haydn’s E-flat Major and decided to pass this manuscript on to me, it was like a chance at, I don’t know, rebirth. My purpose was taken away in the accident. I’ve been industrious but meaningless. This gives me another shot at what I’d been working for all my life. This is my chance for meaning.”

  Gillian saw that the fingers of her friend’s right hand were seizing up, as if they were grasping a crab apple made of air. “How long will you be gone?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. However long it takes to find the other manuscripts or confirm they were destroyed.”

  “Well, you know I’m behind whatever you do.” The two took the stairs back up to street level and said goodbye in the lobby. “I’m sorry, but part of me can’t help wishing I’d skipped your birthday present this year.”

  Meta looked down, shaking her head. “Truth is, I’ll never be able to thank you enough. It’s the best, most difficult present anybody has ever given me.”

  Meta’s year with Jonathan had been marked by such an even-keel calm that they sometimes joked about having become a settled old couple before they’d fully experienced being an adventurous young one. In spite of this, she could see that he had grown more and more troubled in the days since her announcement about Prague. She had taken the step of buying an airline ticket, nonrefundable, as a way of making her decision final. After all, she reasoned, Jonathan was the most skilled debater she had ever met, and her gallivanting off to the Czech Republic, solo, wasn’t a move he blithely embraced. How could she blame him? She, too, was nervous about the decisions she was making. No, she was petrified. But she didn’t want to give him the chance of orating her out of her resolve.