Pavel’s grandmother didn’t like to talk about his origins, and only did so when a ridiculous assignment at school forced the issue. ‘Bring in a memento of your folks’ usually launched the instructions, and never did any other kindergartener come with a final postcard of his mother, or a fragment from her favorite poet, Wislawa Syzemborksa—written well before anybody’s recognition of her as a Nobel Prize laureate. Pavel was born in 1972, the year the Polish poet published (to whatever extent the government allowed) a collection entitled Could Have, and Pavel’s Polish mother convinced his Moravian father to drive up to Krakow to hear a spring reading.
They were engaged but not yet married: Martyna had been studying literature and Jaromir music theory at Masaryk University in Brno, an hour south of Olomouc, where they dropped off the baby to spend two nights with the less-than-approving grandmother. ‘Why not bring him with you, this Pah-whel of yours? You obviously have your heart set there, even more than on my son.’ ‘Oh, Babi,’ Martyna said with a giggle, ‘bud’ spokojni!’ Jaro blushed at his girlfriend’s familiar use of Russian—easy enough for any Slav to decipher but a fretful precursor as to how they might raise their son. ‘Be at ease, Mama,’ he whispered in Czech as he kissed her and the sleeping baby good-bye.
The recital was among several events they attended in the festive atmosphere of Krakow; college students were everywhere, burning candles on all ends, cramming fun before their looming exams. Perhaps, Martyna posed to Jaro on their return drive, it would be good to keep Pawel in Olomouc until the term is over. Yes, maybe, Jaro groggily replied, tapping the steering wheel to stay awake…. Among the gleanable objects in the ensuing crash were the scribbled lines of “Theatre Impressions”:
For me the tragedy’s most important act is the sixth:the raising of the dead from the stage’s battlegrounds,
the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,
removing knives from stricken breasts,
taking nooses from lifeless necks,
lining up among the living
to face the audience.
So this was what the grandmother harbored and pulled out for a kindergarten display. The postcard, for the record, was salt to the wound: ‘Dearest Paw-Paw (the baby was barely a year old, so Babicka would have to read it to him so), Do you see the trumpet-player high in the tower? That’s going to be you someday. Your daddy and I will see you soon.’
Independent of such elementary needs for catharsis, his grandma raised Pavel well, if shrouding him from the culture staked in Krakow. Every afternoon the phonograph played Janecek, Smetana, Mahler, Mozart and, occasionally, some sub-Alpian masters. The grandmother hummed to these as she cooked dumpling dinners, while the boy played with toy trucks and his own, quiet sense of regimented traffic.
When Pavel was an impressionable and precocious boy of sixteen, and when pimples didn’t get the most of him, he loved performing the sole bassoon part in his gymnasium orchestra. There wasn’t much pressure in the preparations, even as his conductor forthrightly assumed a demeanor of austerity, preoccupied always on his greater responsibilities for the junior national philharmonic, which drew from conservatories all over the country. Despite such leadership, Pavel’s gymnasium was simply adequate, not altogether dedicated to the art. Probably eight or nine bassoonists nationwide would qualify ahead of Pavel, especially since the conductor already knew his flaws: technical lapses and the tendency to daydream about the non-instrumental lives of the flautists or the harpist or, more directly, Magdalena, whose part he liked to think was most Shakespearean—the ‘hautboy’, he mused, of high, mournful oblivion. Magda also wouldn’t make it beyond their present level, but when she played the small fugal descant in the chorale ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme’—“Sleepers, Awake” (he imagined his conductor tossing his baton at his drifting reverie)—no one, nothing, not even the composition itself was more beautiful. But how was that? Magda only plugged into the major fifth and sixth as any faithful button-pusher would. And Pavel’s steady contrapunt to the light melody was written to rebuff her syncopated entrances and keep a Clydesdale’s beat to the requirements of the entire, unsung hymn. Her part and his were the sum function of about eighteen pipes in the preferred varhala, the one-man instrument that Bach understood as the closest channel to spiritual ecstasy.
But for modern sensitivities, that notion was too cathedral. For Pavel, all religion was in the form of Magda, the back of her sweater swaying serenely just centimeters from his knee rising to keep beat—all ligaments and connections beyond the banalities of even the practice sessions for this very moment affirmed that there was nothing he’d rather do than play bassoon for…, well—even his own funeral, as thoughts would so tumble. After all, he had never been at one, even if he could fully imagine…
In which case, it would be the Air from Suite #3 in D major, which precluded any wind instruments: he’d have to learn cello and picture Magda playing viola. Yes, that composition, and then—mutely mincing the matter—a line or two from Syzmborska.
All death and adolescence aside, a quarter-century later, Pavel was now a computer programmer, not particularly versed in musical software like Ovation or Magix, the applications his ten-year old son was fond of tooling with. A bit concerned about the twenty-first century in general, Pavel took his son and little daughter to Bach’s homeland, the Thuringer province of eastern Germany, the insular shell of the sturm and dram environs of Weimar. He had been there several times before, wiggling through the cobwebs of failed communism in burgher cities like his own Olomouc and the ludicrous Karl-Marx-Stadt, that now had the equally abominable name of ‘Chemnitz’: it might have designated some stony stream of ancient importance, or the historic hand-off of one Lutheran Martin to another, but Pavel envisioned a culture of chemical potions, mass-produced to try to sterilize the foibles of any outmoded, well-intended design for sociological rectification.
Instead of the more logical route through Silesia (where Bach’s family purportedly served a small exile) and onward to Dresden-based Saxony, Pavel honored his daughter’s wish to see the white tigers at the Liberec zoo—indeed a curiosity that would help make the trip palatable for all concerned. His son Lukas was a burgeoning hockey fan who appreciated the context of this esoteric mascot of the Liberec team, so he too began to imagine the outing as relevant to him. At any rate, beyond his predilections, he silently honored what his father needed to do.
For there was something driving this journey beyond the ennui of glass-encaged tigers or the rendition of baroque music: Lukas remotely recalled his dad’s account of first slogging to Leipzig alone, getting caught in a snow squall that almost ran him off the road at the mountain pass between borders. He stumbled into a Lenten service at St Nikolas church, where bas relief palm fronds topped each towering column and a varhala chorale bid sleepers to awake, as if naïve to the private circumstances of the listeners—beguiling and almost insidiously exquisite; the late winter storm still beat against the building, but Pavel melted in the nostalgic warmth within, a puddle to pool in the surrender of his senses.
That was the mid-nineties, and Lukas must have been four, barely conscious that his native Czechoslokavia had devolved into Czech Republic. Pavel and his wife conceived a second baby at the behest of the new nation: only a handful of countries in the world were under the unusual threat of losing population by the year 2025, and while Bulgarians and Ukrainians and Czechs could see such an exclusive reality as auspicious, there were among them some restless politicians who knew that replacement labor or (less vocalized) immigration quotas would not favor their long view. The Czechs had an emerging business sense and decided to attack the problem with a billboard campaign, to create a vision of the ‘big picture’; then, adding ingenuity to a figure of genius, they exploited a somewhat archaic idiom that passers-by had to puzzle out:
NEDAVEJTE SI BACHA, BUD’TE JAKO BACH.
Don’t be too careful, be like Bach. The first clause only coincidently brushed upon the composer’s name, but the second implored a sexual revolution, throwing familial caution to the wind as Bach did, even if half his twenty children died before they were school-aged. The visual comprised of a large standing figure of the prolific father and twenty pint-sized children looking just like him, regardless if they were boys or girls. Neither of their mothers made the editors’ cut, perhaps because the billboard was cluttered enough. When their little girl was born, Pavel suggested to his wife the name Johana to show the nation they had done their duty, and although he was joking and they were loathe to play out such a throwback to imposed patriotism, the name indeed fit their curly-haired baby.
Now, the three of them (Mom staying home to work) made their way chronologically through the great composer’s life, bee-lining from Liberec to Eisenach for the humble origins, Weimar for the coming-of-age context, then Leipzig for the fullness of effect. “Though fullness had its fulsome qualities as well,” Pavel explained to his less-than-half-listening back seat. The Leipzig diocese paid relatively little for his labors, then axed him without compunction after an eye surgery gone wrong, forcing an early and anxious retirement…; the understated funeral and obscurity that followed…; the irony of Mendelssohn extending a Jewish hand to resuscitate the interred music of the Reformation. Lukas asked a few questions but was just as eager to count with Johana all the modern windmills they passed.
In Leipzig both Cathedrals were rather dormant, and the museum of Bach’s house was being refurbished. ‘Great,’ thought Pavel—‘the trip sort of amounts to nothing.’ There was a free concert on Thomaskirche square, as menial as that was, and this by an undistinguished Polish quartet that called itself ‘Xerxes’. They were Krakow natives, the playbill detailed, all in their early twenties. The only one pictured making eye contact with the camera was the woman who would play cello, a sort of invitation to the wavering Pavel, who would otherwise relent to the alternative of a water park outside the city. Waiting in the hot square for two hours would test the children’s patience, but…bud’ jako Bach, he tacitly insisted. “Bud’te”, he pluralized for his kids.
They ate a soup and sandwich lunch nearby the square, then ice cream cones precariously in the press of people jockeying for a spot close to the small platform beneath the stature of Bach. A German woman among the throng pointed out to Pavel’s kids little plastic chairs front and center, with courtesy bags of crayons and flipbooks and lollipops—perfect for Johana and (a little old for this) tolerable for Lukas. Pavel thanked the woman and wiggled his way to the far side of the statue, less for his optimal view of the performers and more for the angle to mouth ‘shush’ to his chattering kids, when the time would inevitably come.
A grand entrance by the master of ceremonies anticipated such a shush, though his booming voice through his microphone compelled everyone’s attention. He was Günter somebody—Übermensch flashed into Pavel’s brain as the man stepped onto the platform and off, engendering instant delight to the majority assembled, flourishing his urbane words of welcome with efficient jokes that the heaviest patrons in the front lines of folding chairs encouraged with throaty laughter. Xerxes waited behind the statue, pressing ears to their instruments in subtle, nervous fidgets. They apparently knew German, as no one was beside them to cue in Günter’s swaggering set-up. Pavel looked at his kids sizing up to the barrel-chested man, wondering how they were making sense of the bombast, any better than himself.
The quartet, announced with due epithets and ebullient applause, took their twenty steps from behind the statue to their chairs. They adjusted music into their stands and did a final tuning, as if for show, and the violinist said something self-deprecating, in fragmented German, to further please the crowd. Pavel watched them from the side, but had a more direct view of his children, who had diverted their attention to their coloring books.
They began with Beethoven’s Pastoral from Symphony #6 in F Major, followed by an obligatory Bach—slyly challenging the halcyon occasion with ‘O Man, Bemoan thy Grievous Sins’ from St Matthew’s Passion. Then, to introduce a composer from their homeland, they played a fragment from Krzesimir Debski’s double concerto for violin and viola. Pavel remotely remembered this composer from a ‘Taniec Sudecki’ effort he played at Masaryk University: the dance of the Sudetens would perhaps be ill-received here in the loose-thread associations of ‘Sudenland’, as none of its modern, southern inhabitants referred to the range.
In between pieces Günter would wield his craft, his gift for gab. Naturally there would be some playing to the crowd, assembled here this beautiful afternoon, all the way from München—what, not yet in the mood for Oktoberfest?—to Koningsberg—yes, that little (cough) Russian (cough) enclave that still boasted Kant over Kalinin. Pavel wondered whether the little critters in the front row would receive Günter’s attention: there were a half dozen more installed next to Lukas and Johana, oblivious, like them, to the banter.
But after the penultimate piece Günter acknowledged their presence. With ‘gross magnanimity’, Pavel thought he heard, we should hear what the least of these are hearing today: “Wie heisst du?” Günter posed, and leveled the mic to Lukas’ face. Pavel half mimicked his son’s instinctive whiplash: he wanted nothing of this parlance. On cue, Günter flipped the mic upwards and into his ready quip, which set the audience laughing, then deadpanned another question to Lukas, who mumbled something in no language Pavel could decipher. Günter probably made the same observation back into the mic, along with some kind of ‘kinders say the darnedest things’, which this time, with the guffawing crowd, set himself on an amplified ‘Ha, Ha, Ha!’ Lukas looked at his dad, who offered little commiseration if self-evident consternation. “Nevadí,” Pavel mouthed—“don’t worry.” Xerxes started the strains of a modified version of Zarathustra, and Günter slipped into the shade behind the statue, to enjoy a well-earned smoke.
Now Pavel wanted to jam the cigarette down his throat. What nerve to assume a little kid from Olomouc—never willingly part of any reich—would necessarily know what to say to this grandstanding guy. How would his majesty fare with the same verbal challenge in Olomouc? And would he deign to hear Xerxes there, at a venue that might stand more to reason? Or in Krakow, preserved in principle during Nazi occupation but geographically smack between the smog of Auschwitz and Majdanek? Pavel was not the type to act on such ire—hostility wasn’t in his weltanschauung—but just as he stepped in the direction of the unsuspecting charge d’affaires, Lukas stirred from his little chair and scampered toward his father. He’d been writhing in embarrassment, red-cheeked and blurry-eyed, and Pavel had to hold him, even if that did little to satisfy.
‘Feel like clocking him?’ Pavel wanted to say. ‘Imperial pigs—it starts in little stages. The smallness of self-aggrandizement, the ignorance of what Othello calls “the cause. It is the cause, my soul. / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!” Or what Syzmborska crops in “Hitler’s First Photograph”:
No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.
That, son, is from People on the Bridge—what we are, not people on any itinerary of our own drafting. We can only ‘sin boldly’, as Luther observed, and that must mean making goddamn Günter eat his cigarette. You surely see the difference: he sins like a coward, above and below reproach. And Lukas—’
“Dad,” he broke into what seemed like furious silence, “I want to go home.”
Then Pavel looked over to Johana, watching Xerxes as intently as any of the adults behind her. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed her brother’s escape. Her curly head bobbed ever so slightly to the strokes of the cellist and she could have sat there into the evening. Provided, of course, she knew she was not abandoned. “Lukas, I know it may not settle the shame—and I mean this jerk’s shame, not yours—but you’d be the best big brother in the world if you went back to sit with Johana. I’ll stay here, and afterwards we’ll leave.”
Lukas demurred, shifted his weight away from the whole scene, but then, upon hearing his dad’s cheerier whisper—‘nedavej si bacha’—pursed a knowing smile and walked toward Johana.
Nothing worth rationalizing, Pavel melted anew.
