The Prague Sonata Page 8
She needn’t have worried. They both knew that if he managed to talk her into staying, it would be a Pyrrhic victory, no victory at all. One evening, over a glass of wine while they were preparing dinner together in his kitchen, he told her he admired her chutzpah and, despite his concerns, applauded her commitment.
“This is your chance to make your mark,” he said, though she protested that he was putting a heavier spin on the project than it was likely to merit. They’d rarely been apart since they met, and it took them both some serious acting efforts to remain smiling and upbeat. She knew, glancing over at him while he chopped vegetables, that Jonathan’s mood was darker than he let on. He had more than once offered to join her, but she had evaded the subject whenever it came up.
“You’d be bored anyway,” she said, when that night he again raised the possibility. “I’m not going as a tourist, you know.”
“There might be ways I could help. Some people think I’m a pretty solid researcher.”
She set down her glass of wine, gave him a kiss on the lips, and said, “Don’t worry, I don’t think I’ll be gone all that long. There aren’t that many dots to connect, at least not from what I can tell. Mandelbaum’s made a few introductions for me with people at Charles University in Prague, and a couple of others in Brno and Vienna. They’re intrigued, but none of them has said anything overly promising or given me any real leads.”
“Sounds like a lot of dots to me.”
“Look, either I’ll catch an unexpected break or else it’ll be clear early on that it’s impossible. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I’m being as realistic as I can.”
Nothing further passed between them until they sat down to eat.
“I’m going to miss you,” he told her, quietly, raising his glass.
“I’m going to miss you too.”
Lying beside him in bed that night, sleepless again and restless without her books, she wondered what more they could have said. He was being honest with her, was all, and she with him. But missing each other wasn’t going to change her mind. She felt as if her very life, her purpose, hung in the balance. Was this hubris? Kids, she thought, weren’t capable of the cataclysmic downfalls of overambitious kings and warrior generals found in Greek epics. But if they clung to fantastic dreams while they aged into adulthood, weren’t they setting themselves up for nasty falls?
Meta refused to give in to hubris. She needed to do this right. The time had come for her to validate everyone who had ever believed in her. Her mother, Gillian, Mandelbaum, her teachers and colleagues, her students. Jonathan, too, whether or not he fully backed what she was doing. She felt a deep, bristling need to come through for Irena Svobodová Dorfman, whom she’d known for all of an hour. And to honor Otylie Bartošová, whom she had never met and hoped but didn’t expect ever to meet.
As she watched from the airplane window while the twinkling island of Manhattan disappeared below her in the gathering russet evening, she realized that all of the wishes she had made that birthday night not so long ago, after wandering through her apartment like a perfect fool, blowing out candles on sills, shelves, tables, stands, had risen into the realm of possibility. True, they had been the same wish. Charge my life with meaning. Charge my life with meaning. She had asked this in thirty different ways as she stood before each of the candles, improvising a theme with variations. Now it was up to her to make that wish come to pass.
3
BOTH HIS FATHER AND MOTHER had played roles in naming the boy. And both had used the opportunity to weave their love of music into his name. Meta shifted in her cramped seat and turned the page of the book she had brought along for the flight. The boy’s mother insisted that he should be christened Reinhard—one wise in counsel—after the hero in her husband’s favorite opera. And his father called him Tristan, in honor of the master of Bayreuth, Richard Wagner. Both parents were disappointed, in their different ways, over their own ultimate failure to rise as high into the upper echelons of cultured society as they believed they deserved, and hoped their eldest son would one day ascend to a grander tier of accomplishment and fame.
Raised in Halle an der Saale—even his birthplace had a melodious ring to it, Meta thought—young Reini, as he was known, grew up in a household whose rooms were filled with every kind of music. His father, a gifted singer, aspiring composer, and generally inept social climber, served as the founding director of the first conservatory in the provincial town of Halle. His mother, the daughter of a musical dynasty in Dresden, had been trained as a pianist. The golden age of Wagner was just coming off its dizziest heights, but this was still a time when a musical education was considered an integral part of a proper upbringing, and their school was modestly successful.
With his mother, the boy went every Sunday to Mass, where his head swam with beautiful chorales that inspired in him a love for singing voices. By the age of five he had learned the art of music notation and was gaining mastery over his fingers by practicing thorny Czerny études on the piano. Beethoven and Bruckner played in his dreamy mind. So did his father’s orchestral works and operas, with their simple, inspiring titles, like Peace and The Eternal Light. His violin lessons went well, and though he was withdrawn, a quiet child, he showed every sign of having a fine future. His mother taught him discipline and religion. His father instilled in him the desire to get ahead, to be creative and thrive. From the limited vistas of Halle, the First World War was not yet on the horizon, so the boy grew up in a world of relative calm.
As his parents became more involved with running their school, he and his older sister and younger brother were raised by their Silesian nurse. Left to his own devices, Reini began to change. He became, by daily shades, more and more stubborn, increasingly introverted. Try though his mother and nursemaid might to get him to run errands or play games with his siblings, he averted his eyes and turned his gaze inward. From the sanctuary of his growing isolation, whether sitting in the classroom or with his family at the dinner table, the boy showed a deepening disdain and iciness toward those around him. He spent a lot of time behind the closed door of his bedroom, sometimes practicing the violin, sometimes sitting in silence. When his mother saw fit to discipline him with a good Christian spanking, whipping him a dozen, two dozen times with the rod, he refused to cry. He would simply stare ahead until she finally gave up.
No one could say he wasn’t a bright youngster. At the Reform-Realgymnasium he studied math, physics, history, and languages, and did well in all these subjects. His first love was chemistry. For a while he became convinced this was to be his life’s work. But at the same time he continued to consolidate his role as angry loner, outsider, brooder. A slim rangy youth with a Nordic shock of blond hair, he took to walking down sidewalks, his chest stuck out like a spring robin’s, forcing anyone coming in the opposite direction to step aside and make way. One day, just for show, he scaled the gymnasium building and leered at everyone below from its tallest peak. He lashed back in a fury when classmates started to tease him about his high falsetto voice and bony face, nicknaming him die Hebbe, the goat.
Was it after his adolescent voice finally dropped into a maturer register, when the same crowd began taunting him with the gleeful, contemptuous cries of Isi, Isi—Jew, Jew—based on a specious rumor about his father’s heritage, that Reinhard Tristan Heydrich’s fate jelled? His brother, Heinz, stopped the hecklers by threatening them with a knife, but had something in Reini snapped?
Maybe, but probably not that simple, it seemed to Meta, somewhere over the Atlantic, frowning at the biography on her lap. After the 1918–1919 German Revolution swept Kaiser Wilhelm II out of power and the narrow but comfortable universe of Halle an der Saale was destroyed, Reini would nurture a hundred other reasons to do what he did, to become who he became. Nor would anyone dare contradict those reasons when, in the early forties during the war, he had achieved a pinnacle of overwhelming power as the Nazis’ Reichsprotektor of Prague. This boy, who even in adulthood liked to sit a
lone in his room and practice the violin to escape the world he had played such a prominent role in pushing to the brink of apocalypse, would become an iron-fisted favorite of Hitler. “Butcher of Prague” became his new nickname, one he liked better than die Hebbe. Better to slaughter the goat than be the slaughtered goat.
Yet in the end it all proved to be one fatal grand opera. Even in the final hours of his life, after his car had been bombed, he spoke to his colleague Heinrich Himmler—whose first name, he surely had noticed, sounded so much like his own last—about the nature of fate and death in musical terms. Evoking his father’s fourth opera, his magnum opus, Amen, he quoted the lines
The world is just a barrel organ
Played by God himself.
We all must dance to the tune
That happens to be on the roll
which moved every one of the high-ranking Nazi officers and doctors who stood in shock around his deathbed. Himmler would later say that the martyred Reinhard Tristan Heydrich was one of the finest SS men he had ever had the honor of working with, never knowing how much Heydrich had despised him, just as he despised most people he met.
Having dropped her bags at the inexpensive pension where she was staying, Meta tucked her map, with Nerudova Street circled, into her pocket and made her first foray into the mid-morning streets of the same Prague that once had been governed by this man whose life, like hers, was rooted in music. As she strolled toward the town center to get her bearings, she couldn’t help wondering whether Irena’s husband had died as the result of Herr Heydrich’s signature on a piece of paper. He had signed the death warrants of so many of Irena’s countrymen with the same calm stroke of the pen one might use to sign a pub tab for stout and sausages. If Reini had only followed in his composer father’s footsteps, would Meta be here now?
She reached the heart of the city, treading cobbled corridors not half as wide as the narrowest street in Greenwich Village, and emerged wonderstruck into Old Town Square. What fortitude the stucco and stones, the urban flesh and bones of this ancient place, had shown over the centuries. How many depredations it had survived, Meta thought, as she gazed in awe at the elegant spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn, Heydrich’s villainy being but one. And yet, look. Of all the major European cities that had suffered through the Second World War, which constituted the latest Armageddon—because there’s always another Armageddon waiting in the wings—Prague had emerged as one of the most unscathed. True, the city had undergone its postwar restorations, but it was as if a protective spell had been cast upon it generations ago. A spell stipulating that its citizens were fated to suffer from era to era, but what they and their ancestors built up with their hands would remain as testimony.
A sudden chiming interrupted these thoughts as she found herself amid a gathering crowd beneath the medieval astronomical clock on the near corner of the square. Its hourly procession of carved and painted saints appeared from behind small doors, and she gaped as a skeleton, nodding “Yes,” pulled a cord to ring a little bell beside a musician with a mandolin, who shook his head from side to side as if to say “No” to death.
Farther along, at the center of Staroměstské náměstí, a ragged quartet of old street musicians, who would have been right at home in Tompkins Square Park, had attracted a small audience near the green-patinated monument of the reformist Jan Hus. She listened to them play and sing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” Rain clouds had collected low over Prague, forming a silver dome into which the city’s tallest spires disappeared. Sun, dim through mist, made the grand assembly of buildings eerily glow, as if illuminated from within the stones and baroque pastel stucco facades. Meta was mesmerized by the singer who fronted the group with a cardboard megaphone in one hand and his trumpet delicately dangling from a finger of the other. Not a half-bad impression of Louis Armstrong, who was buried a stone’s throw, or at least a trumpet blast, from where Irena now lay, in the same Queens cemetery as Dizzy Gillespie.
Dizzy and Satchmo, she thought. Twin Gabriels to announce Irena’s arrival into the heaven she never quite believed in. This present Satchmo scatted with all the soul a freckled busker might ever hope to summon and, to Meta’s ear, the homage was spot-on. His gravelly voice hit the nuanced notes of Pack up all my care and woe as if he had written it himself. When Meta tore herself away from this unexpected echo of home in order to head back across the Vltava to Irena’s old neighborhood, the clouds shredded and fled, allowing the sun to shine into the square even as rain began lightly to fall.
Karlova Street was a gauntlet of souvenir shops. She passed windows filled with mass-market crystal, tray after tray of gold and garnet jewelry. Beneath a bronze plaque commemorating the astronomer Johannes Kepler were shop fronts cluttered with Don Giovanni puppets, pseudo-military Russian badges, rabbit-fur hats, postcards. The last made her think of Jonathan, as she dropped into one of these cramped shops to buy an umbrella. Would he consider a postcard from Prague somehow insulting? And what would she write? Wish you were here? He’d accompanied her to Kennedy Airport, seen her off. Had even helped her pack for the trip. But during their last days before her flight, it was painfully clear that he was straining to put on his best, most confident courtroom face. Subtle, sly digs had never before been in character for him, but he seemed unable to resist them now.
“You won’t forget the little people when your discovery makes you famous, now will you?” was the ridiculous zinger that irked, or rather hurt, the most. Not knowing how to respond, she hugged him, remembering what it was like to feel somebody was about to abandon you. Her father still received his daughter’s defensive barbs whenever they spoke. But this was different, she thought, as Jonathan apologized, “I so didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”
The day she left, only yesterday, already seemed impossibly distant. Jonathan had taken the afternoon off from work to spend time with her before her flight. He’d booked a reservation for lunch at an outlandishly upscale restaurant. For dessert, he had ordered ahead as a surprise a platter of cannoli, profiteroles, and napoleons in honor of their first date. She thanked him, leaned across the table, and kissed him as conflicted tears welled in her eyes.
Jonathan’s birthday ring glinted in the slanting sun as she stepped back into the street glazed by the short cloudburst and made her way to the Charles Bridge. Feeling guilty but at the same time certain the gesture was something she needed to do, she removed the ring and put it in her buttoned breast pocket.
She had read about the famous bridge, but none of the descriptions or photographs did it justice. According to tradition, the Czech word for Prague, Praha, derives from práh, or threshold. Meta, earnest fool or not, believed Prague was her threshold now too. As she passed through the archway of the Old Town bridge tower, she looked at the glistening soot-blackened statues of saints and other holy figures, then gazed at the green-brown water where wild swans paddled lazily upstream. Shimmering on the hill above this, Pražský hrad, Prague Castle, put her in mind of Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Fantasyland but was so far beyond any Disney confection that she felt embarrassed by the comparison.
A scent of roses hung in the air together with that of stale sweat. She walked past vendors selling handmade jewelry and sketching caricatures of tourists. Past an organ grinder with a round crimson face, wearing lederhosen and collecting coins from passersby in a felt tricorne cap set out on the drying stones. Meta heard birdsong, the cries of children, hippies strumming untuned guitars on the far shore of the river, and church bells chiming the midday hour—an improvised symphony of the city’s sounds. In the time it took her to cross to the other side, she heard people exchanging words in half a dozen languages. And how perfect was it that where the world’s largest statue of Stalin once stood, now a seventy-five-foot metronome kept time for the whole orchestral city from atop the highest hill of Letná Park? If all the world was a stage, here was its bandstand.
She climbed up and down Nerudova Street, memorizing it as she might a score she was to perfo
rm. Then she began exploring nearby side streets and blind alleys. Not the grays and brick reds of New York, buildings here were pea green, mustard yellow, salmon pink, ocher, citron, pale blue. Although houses were numbered just like those back home, here they had two numbers—street and quarter. Many were also known by older signs fashioned of painted plaster, gilded wood, carved stone, or forged metal—the pictorial representations of something meaningful to those who first lived or worked within their walls. Twelve Nerudova/210 Malá Strana bore the sign of the Three Little Fiddles because it had once housed a famous school for violin makers. Elsewhere along her path were other emblems—a red eagle, a green lobster, a golden horseshoe. Near the top of the cobblestone street she located the House at the Two Suns, where Jan Neruda himself had lived. Here she lingered, marveling at how little must have changed since the writer had gone in and out through this door. She couldn’t help wondering if Pablo Neruda had ever come and stood on this very spot to pay homage to his adopted namesake. Yes, she decided. He must have.
As she continued her ramble, Meta noticed that many of the businesses along the crowded main thoroughfares, but also in the echoing capillary side streets so narrow that only a single car could pass at a time, were beer halls, tiny pubs. She indulged in a Pilsner Urquell, then a second. Beer in the States didn’t taste like this and, besides, wasn’t she on her great adventure? Her meeting with the first of Mandelbaum’s contacts was scheduled for tomorrow. Today was hers alone. Other than exploring the quarter where Irena and Otylie had walked more than half a century ago, and seeing what remained of the world they’d known, breathing their air, she had no plan. This was a full pause in the stream of her life. How wonderfully strange it felt, she thought, to be tethered to nothing but an idea. And a chimerical idea at that.