Soaked, we fled the wet forest and found the road. We must have been a pitiable sight, for a farmer's truck stopped, and the driver indicated with his meaty thumb that we could hitch a ride in the back. Tess shouted "Cheb?" to him through the rain, and when he nodded, we got in and rode atop a mountain of potatoes for a half-hour all the way to the quaint Czech village. I kept my eyes on the receding woods, the winding road, sure that we were being followed.
Like flowers in a spring garden, the houses and stores were painted in pale pastels, the old buildings in white and yellow, taupe and verdigris. While many parts of Cheb seemed ageless, the buildings and landmarks struck no chords in my memory. A black sedan with a red glass siren sat parked at a crazy angle before the town hall. To avoid the police, we walked in the opposite direction, hoping to find someone who could understand our fractured German. We shied away from the pink Hotel Hvezda, spooked by a severe policeman outside who stared at us for a full thirty seconds. Across the square, past the sculpture of the Savage Man, sat a ramshackle hotel near the Oh?e e River. I had hoped and expected the landmarks to trigger memories of Gustav Ungerland, but nothing was familiar. My vaulted expectations, conjured along the journey, proved too high a hope. It was as if I had never been there before, or as if childhood in Bohemia had never existed.
Inside a dark and smoky bar, we bribed the manager with American dollars to let us dine on sausages and boiled potatoes, and a dank half-bottle of East German wine. After our meal, we were led up a crooked staircase to a tiny room with no more than a bed and a basin. I locked the door, and Tess and I lay on our backs in our jackets and boots on the threadbare covers, too tense, tired, and excited to move. Darkness slowly stole the light, and the silence was broken only by the sounds of our breathing and wild, racing hearts.
"What are we doing here?" she finally asked.
I sat up and began undressing. In my former life, I could have seen her in the dark as clearly as break of day, but now I relied on imagination. "Isn't it a kick? This town was once part of Germany, and before that of Bohemia?"
She took off her boots, slipped out of her jacket. I slid under the woolen blankets and coarse sheets as she undressed. Shivering and naked, Tess moved in close, rubbing a cold foot against my leg. "I'm scared. Suppose the secret police come knocking on the door?"
"Don't worry, baby," I told her in my best James Bond. "I've got a license to kill." I rolled over on top of her, and we did our best to live for the danger.
Waking late the next morning, we hurried over to the grand old Church of St. Nicholas, arriving late for a Mass in Czech and Latin. Nearest the altar sat a few elderly women, rosaries draped in their folded hands, and sprinkled here, small families sat in clumps, dazed and wary as sheep. At the entranceway, two men in dark suits may have been watching us. I tried to sing along with the hymns, but I could only fake the words. While I did not understand the service, its rites and rituals mirrored those long-ago Masses with my mother—icons above candles, rich vestments of the priests and pristine altar boys, the rhythm of standing, kneeling, sitting, a consecration heralded by the hells. Although I knew by then it was just a romantic folly, I could picture my former self done up in Sunday clothes beside her on the pew with my reluctant, sighing father and the twins squirming in their skirts. What struck me most of all was the organ music from the loft above, cascading like a river over rocks.
As the parishioners exited, they stopped to share a few words among themselves and to greet the wizened priest standing in the bright sunshine beyond the door. A blonde girl turned to her nearly identical sister and pointed to us, whispered in his ear, and then they ran hand in hand from the church. Tess and I lingered, taking in the elaborate statues of Mary and St. Nicholas flanking the entrance, and we were the final pair to leave the building. When Tess held out her hand to the priest, she found herself captured in his grasp and drawn closer.
"Thank you for coming," he said, then turned to me, a strange look in his eyes, as if he knew my history. "And God bless you, my son."
Tess broke into a beatific grin. "Your English is perfect. How did you know we are Americans?"
He held her hand the whole time. "I was five years in New Orleans at the St. Louis Cathedral back when I was first ordained. Father Karel Hlinka. You're here for the festival?"
"What festival?" Tess brightened at the prospect.
"Pra?ké Jaro. The Prague Spring International Music Festival."
"Oh, no. We knew nothing about that." She leaned in and said in a low, confidential voice, "We snuck across the border."
Hlinka laughed, taking her remark as a joke, and she swiftly changed the subject, asking him about his American experience and the cafe life of New Orleans. As they chatted and laughed, I went outside, stood in a corner to light a cigarette, and considered the blue smoke curling to the sky. The two blonde sisters had circled back, this time leading a group of other children gathered from the streets. Like a string of birds on a telephone wire, they stood just beyond the gates, a dozen heads peeking over the low wall. I could hear them babbling in Czech, a phrase that sounded like podvr?ené dítě popping up like the leitmotif of their chattering song. With a glance at my wife, who was holding Father Hlinka in rapt attention, I started to walk over to the children, who scattered like pigeons when I came too close. They flew in again when I showed them my back, and ran off, laughing and screaming, when I turned around. When I stepped outside the gate, I found one girl cowering behind the wall. We spoke in German, and I told her not to be afraid.
"Why is everyone running away and laughing?"
"She told us there was a devil in the church."
"But I am not a devil .. .just an American."
"She said you are from the woods. A fairy."
Beyond the town's streets, the old forest bristled with life. "There are no such things as fairies."
The girl stood up and faced me, hands on her hips. "I don't believe you," she said, and turned to race off to her companions. I stood there watching her go, my mind twisted in knots, worried that I had made a mistake. But we had come too far for me to be frightened by mere children or the threat of the police. In a way, they were no different from other people. Suspicion was a second skin for me, and I felt perfectly capable of hiding the facts from everyone.
Tess bounded through the gates and found me on the sidewalk. "How would you like a private tour, baby?"
Father Hlinka was at her side. "Frau Day tells me that you are a musician, a composer. You must try out the pipe organ here. Best in Cheb."
In the loft high above the church, I sat at the keyboard, the empty pews stretching out before me, the gilt altar, the enormous crucifix, and played like a man possessed. To work the fool pedals and get the right tone from the massive organ, I had to rock and throw my weight against the machine, but once I figured out its complexities of stops and bellows and was in the flow of the music, it became a kind of dance. I performed a simple piece from the Berceuse by Louis Vierne, and for the first time in years felt myself again. While I was playing, I became a thing apart, not aware of anyone or anything else but the music, which infused me like hot ice and fell over me like wondrous strange snow. Father Hlinka and Tess sat in the gallery with me, watching my hands move, my head bob, and listened to the music.
When she tired of the violent sound, Tess kissed my cheek and wandered down the staircase to look over the rest of the church. Alone with the priest, I quickly broached the reason for my visit to Cheb. I told him of my research into family history and how the librarian back in Frankfurt had advised me to check the church records, for there was little hope of getting access to the central government archives.
"It's a surprise for her," I said. "I want to trace Tess’s family tree, and the missing link is her grandfather, Gustav Ungerland. If I could just find his birthday or any information about him, I will make up a family history for her."
"That sounds like a wonderful thing to do. Come back tomorrow. I'll dig through the archives, and you can play the music for me."
"But you can't tell my wife."
He winked, and we were co-conspirators.
Over dinner, I told Tess about the musical half of Father Hlinka's offer, and she was happy for me to have the chance to go back to the organ loft. On Monday afternoon, she sat below in the middle pew, listening for the first hour or so, but then went off on her own. After she left, Father Hlinka whispered, "I have something for you." He crooked his finger, beckoning me to follow him into a small alcove off the loft. I suspected that he had found some record of the Ungerlands, and my anticipation grew when the priest lifted a wooden chest to the top of a rickety desk. He blew dust off the lid and, grinning like an elf, opened the box.
Instead of the church documents I had expected, I saw music. Score after score of music for the organ, and not just common hymns, but symphonic masterworks that gave life and presence to the instrument—a raft of Handel, Mahler's Resurrection, Liszt's Battle of the Huns, the Fantasie Symphonique by Francois-Joseph Fétis, and a pair of organ-only solos by Guilmant. There were pieces by Gigout, Langlais, Chaynes, and Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Timpani. Record albums of Aaron Copland's First Symphony, Barber's Toccata Festiva, Rheinberger, Franck, and a baker's dozen of Bach. I was stunned and inspired. To simply listen to it all—not to mention trying my hand at the grand keyboard—would take months or even years, and we had but a few hours. I wanted to stuff my pockets with loot, fill my head with song.
"My only vice and passion," Hlinka said to me. "Enjoy. We are not so different, you and I. Strange creatures with rare loves. Only you, my friend, you can play, and I can but listen."
I played all day for Father Hlinka, who inspected old parish ledgers of baptisms, weddings, and funerals. I dazzled him with incandescence and extravagance, leaning into the extra octave of bass, and hammered out the mad finale from Joseph Jongen's Symphonie Concertante. A change came over me at that keyboard, and I began to hear compositions of my own in the interludes. The music stirred memories that existed beyond the town, and on that glorious afternoon I experimented with variations and was so carried away that I forgot about Father Hlinka until he returned empty-handed at five o'clock. Frustrated by his own failure to find any records of the Ungerlands, he called his peers at St. Wenceslas, and they got in touch with the archivists of the abandoned St. Bartholomew and St. Klara churches to help scour through the records.
I was running out of time. Despite the relative freedom, we were still in danger of being asked for our papers, and we had no visa for Czechoslovakia. Tess had complained over breakfast that the police were spying on her when she visited the Black Tower, following her at the art center on the Ru?ov? kope?ek. Schoolchildren pointed at her on the streets. I saw them, too, running in the shadows, hiding in dark corners. On Wednesday morning, she groused about spending so much of our honeymoon alone.
"Just one more day," I pleaded. "There's nothing quite like the sound in that church."
"Okay, but I'm staying in today. Wouldn't you rather go back to bed?"
When I arrived at the loft late that afternoon, I was surprised to find the priest waiting for me at the pipe organ. "You must let me tell your wife." He grinned. "We have found him. Or at least I think this must be her grandfather. The dates are somewhat off, but how many Gustav Ungerlands can there be?"
He handed me a grainy photocopy of the passenger list from the German ship Albert, departing 20 May 1851 from Bremen to Baltimore, Maryland. The names and ages were written in a fine hand:
212 Abram Ungerland 42 Musikant Eger Boheme
213 Clara Ungerland 40 " "
214 Friedrich " 14 " "
215 Josef " 6 " "
216 Gustav " ? " "
217 Anna " 9 " "
"Won't she be delighted? What a fine wedding gift."
I could not begin to answer his questions. The names evoked a rush of memory. Josef, my brother—Wo in der Welt bist du? Anna, the one who died in the crossing, the absent child who broke my mother's heart. My mother, Clara. My father, Abram, the musician. Names to go along with my dreams.
"I know you said he was here in 1859, but sometimes the past is a mystery. But I think 1851 is right for Herr Ungerland, not 1859," said Father Hlinka. "History fades over time."
For a moment, the six came alive. Of course I did not remember Eger or Cheb. I was a baby, not yet one year old, when we came to America. There was a house, a parlor, a piano. I was taken from there and not from this place.
"No records in the churches, but I thought we should try emigration archives, no? Won't Mrs. Day be thrilled? I cannot wait to see her face."
I folded the paper and stuck it in my pocket. "Of course, Father, yes, you should be the one to tell her. We should celebrate ... tonight if you like."
The pleasure of his smile almost made me regret lying to him, and I was equally heartbroken to leave the magnificent organ behind. But I hurried from St. Nicholas's, the history in my pocket against my heart. When I found Tess, I made up a story about the police sniffing around the church for two Americans, and we slipped away, retracing our steps to the border.
When we reached the forest near the river crossing, I was shocked to see a young boy, perhaps as old as seven, standing by himself beside a large tree. He did not take notice of us, but remained quite still, as if hiding from someone. I could only imagine what might be in pursuit, and part of me wanted to rescue him. We were nearly upon him before he flinched, and putting a finger to his lips, the child begged us to be quiet.
"Do you speak German?" Tess whispered in that language.
