Longing (21 page)

It was only when she raised the knife toward her head—a gesture he had practiced playfully, unconsciously, if always knifelessly, as if to slit his throat—that he announced his presence, with a gasp.

She turned around and pressed her sleeve against her forehead, wiping away the perspiration from her effort at honing the knife blade but leaving her arm as a shelter over her eyes as she looked at him.

He found it impossible to say anything to her. She was a stranger to whom he had not been properly introduced. During the seven months of her absence he had withdrawn from the world as he never had before, living alone for the first time, seeing almost no one aside from Christel and Dorn, his teacher, and a woman at a window, and now and then some men he knew in a tavern where he would speak only when drunk and then cease to speak entirely when even drunker, alone with his music and his wrecked hand. Now here she was, returned, and the world with her, opening a door back into existence through which he found himself unable to enter.

Harry Heine, in Paris, had written in an article about her that she might be taken for nothing more than a charming little girl of twelve, but if you looked more closely, you saw in the small, pretty face a peculiarly voracious glance and a wistful mouth that opened into a mocking smile. She excited in Heine a strange feeling, about which he used the word “confess,” though he could not, or would not, confess what this feeling was.

Thus was Heine once more linked to him, through this shared desire to possess Clara somehow, to break through the grip that music had upon her and thereby to impose themselves upon the story of her life. It was a story Heine envisioned would be “woven out of joy and pain.”

Robert sensed a shyness in her now, this little girl who had always encircled him with her exuberance and teased him with the irony of her childhood. Language, not to mention girlish shrieks and laughter, had poured out of her at any given moment when she was not at the piano, as if her inability to talk had survived until that same moment. But now she could say nothing. The two of them stood there in the kitchen staring at one another, shrinking the half year of their separation into this astounded silence.

When finally she lowered the knife, he could see that the sleeve of her dress was wet and there were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, at which she caught him looking. She used her bottom lip to dry the top.

He didn't know where to look and so looked away. As soon as his eyes had left her, she walked off. He was tempted to follow as he might have done months ago before the Paris trip, howling like a ghost and breathing like a demon in pursuit of his giggling prey. But he remained where he had been standing, looking back at the space she had occupied and at the knife on the table that had moments before been in her grip.

He was not surprised when she returned. He felt he had willed her back.

She handed him a narrow package, in which he discovered a silk tie from a shop in Paris whose name meant nothing to him and a note in her hand:

Dear Herr Schumann:

Here is something to catch the soup I shall make you. Votre amie,

Clara Wieck

He could say nothing. Her eyes pleaded for him to speak, but he could not.

He turned and, with the tie draped over his wrist, walked away.

He was closing the door of the kitchen when finally she spoke.

“I would like to eat some tripe, Monsieur!”

He was charmed to hear in her German a French accent, which Leipzig would soon enough, he knew, drive out of her.

Leipzig

MAY 28, 1832

“It has pleased or it has not pleased,” people say;

as if there were nothing better than to please people
.

Robert Schumann

He wore the tie she'd brought him from Paris. Wieck's anger with him over the injury he had done his hand was assuaged at least in part by his Opus 2, the
Papillons
, which had been published during Wieck and Clara's absence and that Wieck proclaimed scintillating and original.

Robert told him the
Papillons
represented the beginning of the destruction of the sonata. The old music had pretended that there was some form to man's existence on this earth, a symmetry in which exposition and development appertain to recapitulation and coda, a structure amid the constant destruction, a neat development where one thing led to another in the progress of the universal soul, and that music sought to mirror this wholly imaginary, ridiculously idealistic, configuration. The fact was that in the world, all things, like all beings, were alone, discrete; and one thing—everything—led to nothing, just as all music led ultimately to the silence out of which it had been born.

The
Papillons
were poems in sound. He had been inspired by the masked ball at the end of Jean Paul's
Time of the Young
, with a bit of Goethe's funeral masque from
Wilhelm Meister
, when Mignon, who insists upon dressing as a boy, is robbed of her energy and her life as a consequence of being stripped of her male clothing. In Jean Paul's work, the brothers attend the ball each dressed as the other so that the outgoing Vult might win the heart of the angelic Vina for the shy Walt, and he does, but he loves her too, and so to avoid betraying his brother, he departs forever, alone. Once the low D in Robert's music has been held beneath meandering harmonies for twenty-six measures, the clock in the tower finally strikes six, the sound of the carnival is silenced, and the single being that Walt and Vult had represented is divided forever against itself.

It was through this music that Wieck inadvertently brought Robert and his daughter back together, for he insisted Clara learn the piece just as he insisted that Robert play it for the guests at his musical soirée on May 28.

The music came slowly into Clara.

“Your hand is too heavy,” Robert told her.

“Because of the pianos in Paris,” she replied.

“You play like a hussar.”

“And you look like one. You should shave that ridiculous mustache.”

“It makes me look older.”

“Then perhaps I'll grow one.”

“It would certainly improve your appearance.”

“Then why has it not done so with you?”

He could not teach her the music. She was uncertain of the rhythms, confused by the harmonies, and ignorant of the meaning. All the pieces but the simple third (which he, in his passion to bestow upon the ephemeral the substantiation found in the very act of naming, called “Vult”) continued to elude her. She became anxious over her failure and cold as he tried to explain and capricious as he attempted to flatter her and whiny as he showed her how it might be done, “my nine fingers to your ten.”

She was, he concluded, too young for his music.

And he was too old, or too injured, or too frightened.

He told her father he would not play at the party.

Wieck shook his head in disgust. “Then Clara will play your
Papillons
.”

“How dare you use her to threaten me?”

“How dare you use her to threaten
me
?” Wieck replied, leaving Robert to wonder if between them they might divide Clara forever against herself.

On the night of the soirée, when Clara was about to play, Robert separated himself and his wineglass from a group of men to whose conversation he had been pretending to listen and sat down next to Agnes Carus.

“What an interesting tie.” As she fingered the silk, the back of her hand rested against his chest.

“Clara brought it from Paris.”

“Look, Ernst,” she said to her husband on her other side, “how this tie brings out the blue in Robert's eyes.”

Dr. Carus looked first at Robert, then at his wife. “And look how you bring out the red in his cheeks, my dear. Perhaps it is the cut of your dress. As Talleyrand said, it is impossible to show more and reveal less.”

Robert wanted to hide his face in the very bosom her husband was so inaccurately maligning, to evade the embarrassment of Dr. Carus's distressingly nonchalant acknowledgment of the passion Robert felt for his wife and also to touch in reality, after an infinity of caresses in fantasy, the skin-burstingly perfect breasts of his A-flat spirit, his very Leonore, whom he would like to dress up like a boy so she might steal him, as Beethoven's Leonore does her husband, from the prison of his life.

Clara appeared then, a little girl in white with her hair in Dutch braids, her thin ankles flashing above her long shoes because she had grown too tall for her dress, and her own breasts discernible perhaps only to those who had known her as the almost invisibly thin child who nonetheless drew to her then, as she did now, all the attention in a room.

“I shall play for you the
Papillons
, twelve short pieces written by my friend Robert Schumann, who is sitting among you now unless his fear of hearing me ruin his work has driven him away.” As she delivered this strange little speech, she stared directly into his eyes, her expression at once confrontational and convivial.

Most of the audience laughed politely, including Agnes, who, just as Clara began to play the rising octave scale in D major of “Larventanz,” whispered, “I must see you later, in private.” Such promise as was held by this demand, which was accompanied by the blithe touch of the outside of her hand upon the outside of his thigh, was extinguished by the sound of Clara playing his music.

What had been heavy in practice was now mercurially light. What had been slovenly was graceful. What had been ignorant of his intentions was now uncannily divinatory. She played the music as he would have liked to have been able to play it and would never have been able to play it even if he'd managed to stretch his fingers to the width of the keyboard.

And she played it from memory, as she had told him she had played an entire recital in Paris, which was one thing, however novel, to do in France and quite another in Germany, where adherence to the text was expected not only in how a piece was played but also in how one sat while playing it. But he could see that the absence of the score had freed her from the need to lock her eyes upon it no matter how well she might know it and to anticipate the turning of the page, whether by herself or another, with the anxiety that often made pianists raise their arms and shoulders as if they were ducks attempting to rise out of murky waters.

Thus, she closed her eyes, and opened them, and tilted her head slightly side to side, or leaned it back upon her neck so that she exposed her throat to the music rising from her fingers, which he took to be a direct reference to their silent encounter in the kitchen on the day of her return and the knife she had seemed about to bring to bear upon herself. With no text before her, she gave the impression of containing the music actually within herself, and relinquishing it, phrase by phrase, to her grateful Stein, which responded, as pianos will, by attempting to impress her with its tone and touch and finally its surrender. In possessing his music, she possessed him.

When she was finished, and was bowing as deeply as the polite applause would allow, he looked around and saw the others in the room shaking their heads and attempting to catch the eyes of anyone else who might have upon his or her face a similar look of profound stupidity.

“Excuse me,” he said to Agnes and rushed to Clara, who stood by the piano surrounded by people whose jabbering ceased the moment he appeared.

He took her hands in his as he had when she was a child and, walking backward, pulled her away.

“I never expected to hear it played like that,” he said.

“You mean you still don't like it?”

“Don't like it!”

Clara smiled. “I'm teasing you.”

“It's as if you've brought a dead flower to blossom.”

“If it was dead, it was only because I killed it. Which of course gave me a chance to bring it back to life.”

“I feel you've done the same with me.”

Her father approached them. “Well done,” he addressed her, “under the circumstances.”

“I thought she was magnificent,” said Robert. “Better than Anne de Belleville.”

“That's very kind of you to say,” said Wieck, “but Belleville's technique is better, at least for now.”

Clara smiled indulgently at her father.

“Belleville is a poet,” said Robert. “Clara is poetry itself.”

“Very eloquent,” said Wieck. “Now if you would only extend that eloquence to your music.”

“I thought you liked my little
Papillons
.”

“Tonight they sounded odd. American. Did you see the response? People shaking their heads. Straining to grasp the changes. They weren't ready for this kind of music.”

“Yes, I could tell,” said Robert. “But I suppose I was ready to write it. And Clara to play it.”

“Art to be art must be comprehended,” said Wieck.

“Art to be art must only be realized,” responded Robert.

He excused himself and went in search of a glass of wine but found Agnes, who said, “I thought you had forgotten me.”

“Only in the music,” he replied by way of confession.

“I've never heard music like that before.”

He smiled. “Good.”

“I didn't say I cared for it.”

“No, you didn't.”

“And I didn't. Care for it, I mean.”

“That's all right.” Robert smiled. His affection for her had little to do with her critical capacities.

“We have always been honest with one another.”

“No, we haven't,” he said.

She laughed and took him by the hand and led him into one of the practice rooms, where she lit the lamp and sat him down next to her at the piano.

“What would you like to hear?” he asked. “Of course my poor hand…”

She kissed him once, a soft, lovely kiss, full upon the lips. It was the first genuine kiss he had received from Agnes, after so much yearning, so many nights in his twisted sheets dreaming of her, a holy image sleeping chastely in his soul but quite the opposite in his imagination. As her lips left his and her fingers struggled to become disentangled from his thick hair, he felt her disappear forever, though she remained with him until her tears had stopped and she lifted her head from the wet shoulder of his jacket and only then left the little room and closed the door behind her.