Longing (43 page)

“Beethoven,” she said.

“Actually, my name is Liszt. Franz Liszt.” He laughed at his little joke. “Or, more accurately, Ferenc Liszt, for as such was I born not thirty miles from here, on the Hungarian side of the border, thank Heaven, except for the Ferenc, naturally. I sometimes think had I been named a manly Friedrich, like a million other men, I might never have left Hungary in the first place. And, yes, that was Beethoven, but the D Minor of course, which I prefer to Rabbi Sonnenfels' D Major. And, yes, that was the first and thus far the only word you have spoken to me: ‘Beethoven.' A reference, perhaps, to what I understand was your absolutely revolutionary introduction of these fusty old Viennese to the Appassionata?”

“And it was still too much for them!”

She had amused him, and she was glad, and while she watched him take pleasure in her sarcastic little gibe at the expense of the conservative Viennese musical establishment, she realized he'd been right, she'd not said a word until she'd said, ‘Beethoven.' That was not like her any longer. Since the day she had met Robert for the first time at the Caruses', when she had not spoken in his presence, she had learned to talk until sometimes she chattered on and could hardly be shut up, while Robert had traveled in the opposite direction, from a kind of boisterous enthusiasm over everything into silences she knew struck others as brooding but were, she understood, almost literally part of his music. And when she played his music, so full of sound, almost unendingly gorged with feeling, containing, like a broken heart, so few rests, she felt she could hear behind the music those silences that had been necessary to its creation, emotional counterpoints to the passions in his sound and as necessary to an understanding of his work as were the very notes that fell from her fingers.

“He told me to give you a smile,” she said.

“Beethoven?” Liszt was very good at seeming serious while joking or teasing. He neither smirked nor smiled but looked into her eyes as if it were actually possible she had communed with Beethoven, or at least with his spirit, and that Beethoven might have told her to look at him warmly.

“My Robert,” she said, employing the possessive not, she realized, to indicate that he was hers but that she was his and that if Liszt wanted her heart, or a piece of it, he would have to fight for it. I am taken, she thought, and therefore must be taken to be had.

“And did he indicate whether it is to be a smile merely transferred from him to me through you, or truly your own?”

Never before, in all the men who had approached her, in the past for her piano playing and now for her fame, and attempted to seduce her with as much allure as they could gather into stance and speech and silly grin or melancholy cockatrice, had she encountered such a master of flirtation as this. She felt his charm light up her face.

“Oh, that looks like one of your own,” he said, causing it to become wholly that.

“Whether it is or not,” she replied, hearing her amusement in the lilt of her voice, “Robert was more grateful for your review than you might ever realize. Until you wrote about him as you did, he was, when written about at all, and when spoken about always, maligned.”

Liszt's review of two of Robert's sonatas and of his impromptus based on a little theme of her own had appeared in Paris in the
Gazette Musicale
about a month after Clara had left on her tour. Robert had sent it to her, and she felt upon reading it that Liszt had understood as much about Robert as he did about his music, which is to say that each was an expression of the other and therefore the art as difficult and profound as the man, and the man as the art. So had Liszt, who had never before encountered anything by Robert or even heard his name, directed his music toward those of contemplative mind, those who could not be satisfied by the superficial work that was taken as art by the vast majority. Schumann's ideas, he said, must be penetrated to be understood, dug into deeply for the life they held that like all transcendent aspects of life escape one's initial experience of them. Only Chopin, Liszt had written, matched Robert for the individuality and depth of his music. Thus was Liszt's review very like Robert's own about Chopin in
New Journal of Music
, when Robert had announced to the world that a new and unknown genius had arrived and suggested hats be taken off to welcome him. Liszt was not as dramatic a writer as Robert, and so his piece had not caused the same stir, except in Robert, who had asked her to give Liszt one of her sweetest smiles. So she had.

*
Maria Theresa's hatred of Jews had, like execration of any group, been inherited, through not the silence of the blood but the ignorant prattle of what passes in family and school alike for the teaching of history. As is well known, the teaching of history is to history as the troth of a seducer is to love—fraudulent self-interest in the service of darkness. Jews had been forced to live in their own section of Vienna in the thirteenth century and a hundred years later (in observance of the seemingly eternal Viennese rubric
Die Juden sind an allem schuld
—the Jews are to blame for everything) were blamed for the rising of the Danube, an earthquake, and, despite their ghettoization, for the plague. Such spurious culpability survived for a hundred years (in other words, beyond the lives of all who first invented it), indeed was amplified by the passage of generations as parents said, in essence, to their children, “We want you to have the privilege of hatred to a degree that was denied to us.” Thus, in 1421, those Jews not burned at the stake were told to leave Vienna, and those Jews who did not leave Vienna were burned at the stake. Only some rabbis escaped either fate: In the ghetto synagogue that had been built with its back to the rest of Vienna because no Jewish house of worship was allowed to face the street, these rabbis, to avoid the humiliation of forced exodus or the special, horripilating pain of the flames, slit their throats with butcher knives (kosher, of course). When the Jews were allowed back into Vienna a bit more than a century later (were begged, in fact, to return, because the German banks had failed and you-know-who were the only ones who could rescue the economy), the warmth of their welcome was goosefleshed by a strange sartorial requirement: all Jews must wear, sewn prominently upon outer garments, a yellow globe of cloth, yellow being the most visible color from a distance, particularly when worn against black.

Leipzig

JUNE 8, 1838

I am no longer a moonlight knight
.

Robert Schumann

As Clara had ordered, Robert stood in the shadows at exactly nine o'clock in the morning staring at her window. He had been there, as she had not ordered, for at least an hour before that. It made no difference to him what time it was. He had once again been unable to sleep and had spent the night thinking himself more and more deeply into her, her soul, her sleep, her dreams, until he cried out into the darkness, “Clara, I am calling for you!” and waited in the silence until he heard her voice loudly and distinctly, from next to him on his bed, “Robert, I am with you.” He reached for her, knowing she was not there. A kind of dread came over him, as he realized how spirits can communicate over great distance and yet never carry with them the small comforts of materialization. He had called for her almost every night and had thought that the nights on which she did not call back were the worse. But so unstrung had he felt himself by the clarity of her voice and the absence of her flesh that he had decided never to call for her again. Such determination, however, had not kept him from standing outside her window calling to her silently.

Having seen nothing but the glass of the window growing opaque in the rising sun, he was surprised, at exactly nine o'clock, to see the signal she had hoped to send, the movement of a small white towel. He looked for her hand upon it, or at least its shape within it, knuckles, fingers, a ring he had given her. But all he could see was the towel, waved, he thought, with a lassitude that did not match his excitement at learning that her stepmother had spent the night with her own mother, Frau Fechner. Clara, who had been ordered to fetch Clementine home, therefore had an excuse to leave the house and could meet him. It was for him such intrigue as is as appealing in a book as it is tedious and demeaning in life.

As she had further ordered, he immediately left his post and walked to the market square, slowly, almost dragging his feet, listening for her footsteps behind him, hoping to be surprised by her, a whisper in his ear, perhaps even a hand thrust between his bicep and his ribs if she dared touch him in public in daylight. But as keenly as he listened for her, and told himself he would judge the depth of her love according to how quickly she came to him, he was taken wholly by surprise when he felt his arms pinned to his sides from behind and her lips against his neck and heard her breathless giggle in his ear.

“Robert, Robert, Robert. Happy birthday, Robert! Here is your gift.”

She swung him around, or herself around upon him, so they were face to face, held together by her arms until he put his own around her, though he was unable to bring himself to hold her with as much strength as she held him. Even when they met at night, huddling in doorway darkness for a few minutes, he could not believe they might not be discovered, no matter whether Nanny was along to stand guard. He was not afraid her father would shoot him, but he had never been afraid of that; dead, he was of no use to the suffering the world seemed to need in order to fill its quota of disillusion. He was afraid that if they were discovered together, they would be torn apart forever. To have her, he often felt, he must forsake her. To possess her, displace her. To touch her, touch her never again.

Now she took his arm and pulled him along, not toward Frau Fechner's house but in the opposite direction.

“Where are we going?” He tried to interrupt the flow of her words, which had continued from the moment she had taken her lips from his.

“To Vienna.” She laughed. “Papa has now written down his consent. That is what I have been dying to tell you. He says he will never let us live together in Leipzig, where we would forever remind him of what he calls our treachery. ‘What is our treachery, Papa?' I ask him. Oh, how angry that makes him. I think it refers to our sin, Robert? Do you?” She squeezed his hand and pressed her arm against his. “He suggests you go on ahead to Vienna and make arrangements to move the magazine there and then, perhaps, to sell it. That way, he says, you may begin to have enough money for us to live. He claims I need two thousand thalers a year to spend. Or at least that's what he seems to take from me. But I can earn hardly three pfennigs from my art in Leipzig. Yet in Vienna I am quite the darling. The public loves me, the court adores me, and the aristocracy treats me precisely like what Liszt calls a conjurer or a clever dog, which he despises for himself but I quite like, so long as they pay me. For a single concert during the winter season in Vienna I can make a thousand thalers. They charge an absolute fortune there! If I didn't know how to play the piano, I wouldn't be able to afford to hear myself. Not that I'd want to, if I didn't know how to play. But still. I can get more there for my music than for my body. Alas. And if I give a single lesson a day, I can make another thousand each year. And you a thousand also. So there! We're almost rich in Vienna, and we haven't even moved there. What do you think, Robert? Please say you'll go.”

“Vienna?” Now that the word was out, he took her arm and stopped her from walking, as if he actually believed he was on his way there by foot. “He just wants me out of Leipzig.”

“Of course he does,” she said with such agreeableness that he felt she somehow represented all that might be good in her father and was able to act as a kind of purifier even of her father's most duplicitous motives.

“And you?”

“And I?” She leaned against him. “They search me, you know. When Dr. Reuter comes, they suspect he has given me a letter from you, and they make me stand with my arms like this”—she moved a step away to show him—“and go through my pockets and she goes through my clothes as I stand there like this, full of anger and humiliation. So, yes, I, too, want you out of Leipzig. But only so that when I leave Leipzig myself I will have someplace to go and someone there to keep me when I arrive.”

“And have they found any of my letters in their unholy searches?”

She threw her arms around him. “Not where I have hidden them!”

Her body shook as he held her. “Are you laughing or crying?”

“Neither.” She took his arm and pulled him on their way.

“Are we walking to Vienna?”

“Only as far as your house.”

He shook his head. “We cannot go there.”

“Of course we can.”

“What about your stepmother?”

“Oh, I don't think we should invite her.”

“Are you making light of my desire?”

“Are you making light of mine?”

“You may walk me home. No farther.”

“I want to come in, Robert. I want to be alone with you. At least for your birthday. I want to lock the door and shutter the windows and hold out my arms like this so you can search me for the message I carry to you.”

“What does it say?”

“There is only one way to find out.”

He shook his head. “If someone sees you coming in, or leaving, or hears you while you're there, or hears me call for you when you have left, or sees the bruises of your kisses on my neck, or catches in my eyes the reflection of my memory of you, and your father learns that you have been with me, he will turn this Hell he's made us live in to whatever Hell becomes when Hell becomes too hellish for itself. You know I want you, but I want you so that in my having you, and you me, we hide as little from others as we do from ourselves.”

“Then we should surely be sent straight to Hell anyway.”