Longing (11 page)

“For God's sake, how did Theresa reply?”

Clementine had spoken for her, in her vulgar way.

Herr Schumann answered without looking away from Clara. “She said she would marry him. His heart took flight. But he had no prospects—he was only a poor composer, only a genius whose work would therefore be appreciated by only a few, among whom I include ourselves. And so her family would not let her marry him and arranged for her to marry a rich baker, who has seen to it that she is now as wide as two cows. Yet Schubert loves her to this day, fifteen years since he saw her last.”

“Is that a true story?” asked Clementine.

“As true as I can make it,” answered Herr Schumann.

“How old were they—Schubert and Theresa?” Clementine pushed on.

“Seventeen.”

“My Fridolin is seventeen.” Agnes pushed her fingers into his hair.

Not even twice her own age, Clara figured. In ten years, he would be but a third older than she. In fifty years, no one would be able to tell them apart.

“If I can't hear you talk, I might as well hear you play,” Herr Schumann said to her. “Play for us, Clara. Let us see just how good a teacher your father is.”

“What a good idea!” said Agnes, leading Robert away by the arm.

“Clara,” she whispered, saying her name to herself as he had said it to her, and to himself and to anyone who would listen, for the first time.

*
To become in due course a prisoner of war camp.

Leipzig

DECEMBER 28, 1828

The state should keep me. I have come into the world

for no purpose but to compose
.

Franz Schubert

When news of Schubert's death reached Leipzig, he had been dead for one month, ten days. This delay was occasioned not by a paucity of technology capable of transmitting such news with greater speed—my God, a man might have walked on his hands from Vienna to Leipzig in that time!—but because such news was not, in essence, news at all. Robert would have been as likely to have been informed of the death of a Viennese pastry filler as of Schubert's. Schubert was just another impecunious artist (genius!) barely out of his twenties whose death was announced with the taciturnity reserved for the unknown and the unmourned.

Robert was living on Am Brühl
*
with Emil Flechsig, whom he'd followed from Zwickau to Leipzig University. Among its three courses of study—law, medicine, and theology—Robert had chosen the first, not because he was particularly interested in the law but because medicine would leave him no time for music or girls and theology was the refuge in Leipzig as everywhere else for the ambitious poor. It had been thus for poor Friedrich Hölderlin, who had been forced by his poverty to seek his education at the seminary in Tübingen, where he wrote in praise of revolution rather than of God, and then as tutor to a banker's children fell in love with the banker's wife, Susette, who became the Diotima of his great poems and the cause—more because she loved him in return than if she had not loved him at all—of the madness into which he had fallen five years before Robert was born. Every time he read Hölderlin's work—such inspiring words as, “He who steps upon his misery stands higher”—Robert could not help but think about the man who wrote them, who was at that very moment living outside his own mind, or so deeply within it that there was no difference.

What if this were to happen to him? What if Agnes loved him as he loved her and her husband sent him away, and Robert went mad and were locked up forever in a madhouse?

All because he'd gone to law school.

At least he didn't have to live at the school, as Hölderlin had been forced to live at the seminary. But he was no longer happy living with Emil. Emil had been the sort of hometown boy who, when he goes off to the big city, seems in one's mind to acquire all the virtues of the big city: worldliness, geniality, savoir vivre, profligacy, voluptuousness, and a superior haircut. But Emil in reality was no better-looking than he'd been in Zwickau and was as uncouth in his Bavarian temperament as he was pedantic, a strange combination that rendered him simultaneously crude and fussy.

Robert no longer loved Emil, which made living with him something of a nightmare, particularly since there were others he did love.

One of them was Gisbert Rosen, a Jew who had left him and transferred from Leipzig's law school to Heidelberg's because in the university at Leipzig the burgeoning of the
Burschenschäften
was threatening Gisbert both bodily and spiritually. The
Burschenschäften
were fraternities organized around principles of bumptious nationalism that had come to encompass a distaste for, if not yet an utter disgorging of, Jews, and held together by a celebration of the male body that had everything to do with its aggressiveness and nothing to do with its beauty. The
Burschenschäften
boys had betrayed one of their own heroes from the century before, Johann Winckelmann, who had loved the male form (equally in marble and in flesh) but had no idea it would end up being promoted as the German version of a living, breathing weapon, as physically perfect as it was morally corrupt.
*

Robert missed Gisbert terribly. Immediately before Gisbert had settled in Heidelberg, the two of them had shared their love for Jean Paul by going off on vacation to Beyreuth to visit Jean Paul's grave. From there they made their way to Augsburg, where they stayed with Dr. Heinrich von Kurrer, who had years before lived in Zwickau and been August Schumann's best friend. The sadness Robert felt at seeing his late father through the eyes of someone who himself had seen the same man when he was not much older than Robert was now (and what man is a more beloved if confounding mystery to his son than his own youthful father?) was immediately transformed into a kind of passionate joy when Dr. Kurrer's daughter, Clara, appeared. Fortunately for the two boys, if more so for Clara herself, she was betrothed to another. But they left with something of greater value than either her virtue or the loss of their own: a letter of introduction from Dr. Kurrer to Heinrich Heine, in Munich.

The capital of Bavaria combined Leipzig's veneration of music and Dresden's of painting and sculpture. As Robert and Gisbert walked through the streets in search of Heine's house, everyone they observed seemed either to be singing a song to himself or viewing a work of art behind his eyes. They all seemed quite mad, or at least distracted. Never had the two youths been so bumped into and jostled by seemingly intelligent people who were not yet—the boys' coach had arrived early in the morning—drunk.

Robert had expected Heine to be moody and misanthropic but found instead a veritable Anacreon, at thirty-one nearly the same age as that great poet was when he died and like him able to contain a reckless freedom in subject matter within a graceful and confining prosody that gave form to his raptures and made art of his passions.

He had also expected Heine to be surrounded by followers and sycophants, for he had recently become immensely popular with the publication of two volumes of
Travel-Sketches
and his
Book of Songs
. But Heine was alone when he answered their knock on his door and, when Robert mentioned Dr. Kurrer's name, shook hands warmly and immediately welcomed them in and engaged them in the kind of conversation Robert had always dreamed he might have with a great artist.

When Robert told Heine that he and Gisbert were in law school, Heine smiled with a kind of ironic bitterness and said, “I was sent off to study Roman law myself. I studied Roman law in Bonn. In Göttingen. In Berlin, of all places. But all the while I studied law, what I learned was literature. I memorized the law; I absorbed
Don Quixote
. So what do you think of Dr. Kurrer's daughter?”

“Don't ask,” said Gisbert.

“She killed me and brought me back to life with a single glance,” said Robert.

Heine's smile turned positively wistful. “I had a cousin like her. She won my heart and destroyed it, if not with a single glance then a single word.”

“What word?” asked Robert.

“The worst word a woman can say to a man.”

“What word
?” insisted Robert.

‘“No.'”

“Ah,” said Robert.

“Ah, indeed,” Heine amplified.

He asked Gisbert if he was Jewish, and when Gisbert said he was, Heine said, “They've recently excluded all Jews from academic positions in Prussia. With the departure of Napoleon, if you were a Jew and forwent a good dunk into the bloody river that flows from the fundament of Christian doctrine, you could scarcely find work at all. When I wrote for the newspaper in Augsburg they put a Jewish star next to my contributions. Presumably to signal both my corruption and the corruption that might envelop anyone who read my words. I hated it, but better that than a cross, no? The morbid little sect of Nazarenes that gave birth to Christianity also gave birth to the kind of asceticism that sets such limits upon its followers that it cuts off their balls and cuts out their hearts and then sends the poor, doubly emasculated souls out into the world with the injunction, ‘Go forth, and be miserable.' I should know—I'm like you now,” he said to Robert.

“I'm not like that!” Robert protested.

“Baptized, I mean,” explained Heine with an expression that fused upon his lambent features a furious rage with an appalled contrition. “I was led to believe that the baptismal certificate was the price of admission to European culture. Some culture! It thrives on the detestation of the incompatible. When I was a Jew, only Christians hated me. What should have been a mark of distinction I was so immature as to take for a mark of Cain. Now
everybody
hates me. As well they should. I am an absurdity: Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, according to my baptism of June 28, 1825, at Heiligenstadt. But you, my friends, may call me Harry.”

So Harry Heine fed them lunch in his garden and then took them that very afternoon for a walk through town and then for a tour of the Leuchtenburg Gallery, where he was approached, and they with him, by dozens of admirers, who seemed not to hate him at all but crowded around this small, trim, handsome man as if for no other purpose than to absorb some minute portion of his being into their own. This is what it meant to be an artist, Robert realized: to remain whole even as you fed yourself to others. What a glorious way to live. No one else—no emperor, no priest, no general, no physician, no courtesan, no streetsweeper, no seer—gave to mankind what the artist did. The artist, who created beauty out of the raw material of his self, was the only possible savior. Man without his politicians and police was at worst man disorganized; man without his artists was man erased.

Robert's joy at meeting Heine was tempered by his separation from Gisbert, who left Munich for Heidelberg while Robert made his slow way back to Leipzig behind a series of geldings whose very asses mocked his loneliness. There he found Emil waiting for him when he would much rather have found the man he had so recently left at the station in Munich, to whom he wrote, “I think of you most lovingly, though even while both asleep and awake I see sweet Clara's image perpetually before my eyes.”

But there were others Robert loved and with whom he was able to replace Emil, in his heart if not actually in his dwelling. Chief among them was Wilhelm Götte, with whom he had lately been learning to get high, as he called it, in taverns and, while high, carrying on with Wilhelm an endless conversation about what Jean Paul called
Sehnsucht
, a longing for what was not there, which Robert had concluded was the essence of music, not merely in its creation, whether on paper or improvised, but in one's experience in listening to music, that great longing music brought forth in our beings for what had been lost and what had been forgotten and what had simply never been at all.

Robert compared Wilhelm not to a Greek poet or a Roman god but to Napoleon in his twenty-fourth year, still noble, trim, distingué, superhuman. When not talking with Wilhelm, Robert wrote about him and how he felt for him the “nameless and infinite something that cannot be spoken, the overwhelming desire inspired in those of a lyrical nature like myself when the world of sounds breaks open or when the sky is rent by thunder or when the sun comes up from behind the mountains.”

He also wrote for Wilhelm, and dedicated to him, an essay that he called a “Fantasie Scherzando” and entitled “On Geniality, Getting High, and Originality,” in which he called love “the true sensorium of chaste sobriety” and intoxication—whether from alcohol, tobacco, black coffee, or women whose shape alone beneath gauzy gowns causes arousal—a means to inspiration.

He wrote poems as well to Wilhelm, finding words before music the accurate means for the expression of his feelings:

And how madly one boy loves the other boy,

And how he holds him, and how they weep together…

It was Wilhelm Götte who delivered the news of Schubert's death. He entered Robert and Emil's rooms without knocking and found the latter reading and the former composing at his ducat-a-month rental piano, his nearly black cigar pointing upward to keep the smoke from his eyes, his eyes squinting nearsightedly downward at his hands, his face contorted with the effort to see and smoke at the same time and also because he liked to whistle while he wrote and it was probably more difficult to whistle while smoking than it was to write music in the first place.

Robert was so happy to see Wilhelm and so eager to impress him that the moment he became aware of his presence he doubled the tempo of his playing and began to improvise, changing the key from F major to E-flat minor, so that his friend might see his fingers operate almost wholly upon the black keys.

Robert signaled with his head and the cigar that Wilhelm should approach him. But Wilhelm merely stood in the doorway with a stricken expression upon his perpetually suffering and therefore always striking face.