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 ex-travagance, 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 Ružový kopeèek. Schoolchildren pointed at her on the streets. I saw them, too, run-ning 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 Ger-man ship Albert, departing 20 May 1851 from Bremen to Baltimore, Mary-land. The names and ages were written in a fine hand: 212 Abram Ungerland
42
213 Clara Ungerland
Musikant
Eger
Boheme
40
"
"
214 Friedrich "
14
"
"
215 Josef "
6
"
"
216 Gustav "
½
"
"
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 mys-tery. But I think 1851 is right for Herr Ungerland, not 1859," said Father Hlinka. "History fades over time."