Longing (59 page)

He did not want to go home, and Clara was unable to convince him of danger to themselves. But when she said the children might be in peril, he insisted they hurry back to them, only to discover that the primary threat came from within the house. Carl Helbig, chief among his Dresden doctors, was in attendance upon Henriette, who, he said, was suffering from smallpox.

Disease had no meaning for children. If it had, Marie and Elise, at least, might have taken greater heed of the illness and then the loss of their little brother Emil. It was the war that enthralled them, the sounds of guns and drums and bells and the occasional shudder through the house and the peculiar interruption of household habits, their parents out together in the middle of the day, the absence of music, the vacuum-like pressure of history producing a strange sort of echoing silence in the house until their father filled them in on his grand adventures in the street.

“It is not a fairy tale,” said Clara, as much to him as to them.

It remained just that until the next day, when there was a terrific pounding on the front door. It was for Robert quite an interruption, because he was at the piano, having returned to the composition of music for children to play, easy pieces for the fingers that he felt expressed some complexity of mind even he could not fathom. He was not unaware of the turmoil outside the house—how could he be, with tocsins poisoning the air and cannons engulfing the light!—but felt utterly at peace within the music. In the end, when armies finally disengaged, as they always did, what was left, aside from death (which was the very definition of vacuity and thus was indecipherable), but art? It was the only survivor, finally, in the crush of human discord.

“Someone go to the door!” he said as the pounding continued, which is what he always said when there was a noisy interruption in the world outside his room. He knew he was never heard in such disagreeable edict. He would not offer it otherwise.

Finally, he rose and opened his own door and walked into the hallway, from which he could see Clara at the window, peering out from behind the drape.

“Who…?” he began, only to have her wave violently at him, to urge him back.

He retreated into his music room but left the door sufficiently ajar so he could see her. When she opened the front door, a man's fist came toward her. Her own hand went up, to protect herself, he thought, until he saw she merely meant to catch the man's hand, to keep it from crashing once again into the door. So his fist lay for a moment in her palm, held above her head. What pain the man must feel, to have his fingers crushed in such a hand as hers, that humbled pianos, muscular with music.

There were five men in all, with the black-red-gold hanging from their sleeves and weapons.

“Where is your husband?”

She said nothing. The man stared down.

“Whose baby?”

“My husband's.”

“We'll have him back to you in time for
that
.” He touched her stomach.

“Back from where?”

“The militia. We're fighting for our freedom.”

“There can be no freedom when men are required to fight.”

“There can be no freedom when men do not fight.”

“Then there can be no freedom.”

“Did you hear that, men?” he said to the others. “We're fighting for nothing.”

They were puzzled. The capacity for irony that makes a man a leader confounds his followers when it's put to use.

“Search the house,” he ordered, perhaps to give them something to do.

She stood her ground. “He isn't here.”

“Where is he?”

“Not here.”

“When will he be here?”

“That will be known only when he arrives.”

“When do you expect him?”

“I never expect him.”

To do what?
thought Robert.

“We shall return,” said the man.

“I shall expect you,” said Clara.

Robert was surprised, the moment the door closed on his recruiters, to see Clara rush to him.

He came out to meet her. “That was brilliant!”

“We must leave immediately.” She held tight to him, as if, against her words, to keep him there.

“Did you not once tell me that you wished to see me save you from the barbarians?”

“It's the barbarians who ask you to join them.”

“Who, then, are the kings' soldiers?”

“Barbarians as well.”

“And
I
?”

“You're not here. As I said.”

She took charge completely of their evacuation. Out the back door and into the garden, taking Marie only, and taking her only because she happened to be close by when they fled.

“The children.” Robert had no idea where she was taking him. It was like being led somewhere by your mother, and you cannot bear to be separated from your brother, your dear sister.

“It's you the rebels want.” She opened the garden gate, pushed him well behind her so he would not be visible, and slowly leaned forward until her eyes could see the way was clear.

He laughed. “Your head may be invisible, but your stomach is halfway to Maxen.”

“Let's hope it makes it all the way.”

They had gotten almost to the Bohemian Railway Station when they were stopped by men with scythes.

“Are you armed?”

They were searched despite her answer.

“Why are
you
not armed?” he was asked.

He had perfectly good reasons. In Leipzig, soon after they were married, he was declared, by the Conscription Commission, unfit for military service, for reasons chronicled in written certification that he sometimes feared would outlive his music: Not only was he nearsighted in the extreme and susceptible to vertigo when at an altitude sometimes no greater than his own height, but he had succeeded, through an act of self-mutiliation, in wholly paralyzing one finger of his right hand and partially paralyzing another. In other words, he could not see to aim a rifle; he would not be able to squeeze the trigger even at an inappropriate target; and he might very well start spinning dizzily in the midst of firing, should he be able to fire, and as likely cut down friend as foe.

“I cannot play the piano with a gun,” he answered.

“How about with one of these?” Someone swept toward his feet with a scythe.

“Listen,” he said. “Swing it again. You can hear it in the air. If you all swing your scythes together, at different speeds and through different thicknesses of this smoke, you'll make music.”

Soldiers—even an untrained militia—are made uncomfortable by creativity, let alone what might be interpreted as a lunatic form of it. It was true of these men, who suddenly seemed so eager to have Robert neither on their own side nor their enemy's that they formed a virtual path into the Bohemian Station in order to force this man and his female party out of Dresden.

Thus, as if Schiller had written that it were only by railway that man might make his way to freedom, were they able to take the train to the suburb of Mügeln, whence they walked beneath the afternoon spring sun to Dophna, where they caught another train to Maxen, beautiful Maxen on the Elbe. The insane asylum still dominated its landscape but no longer affected him except as architecture, perhaps because the world had turned mad (what with live bodies flying out of windows and dying from coition with the earth). And accompanying the general madness came a smoothing of what distinction there had been between the sane and what in such times could no longer be called their opposite. Now, he found, he could look at Sonnenstein without threat to the very sanity whose loss might have sent him there.

Indeed, he sat by the window in their room in the large estate of their friend Major Serres and stared until dark at the old castle, quite content, calm, in fact, until they were called for supper and celebrated by the gathered gentry as heroes who had gallantly escaped from the revolutionary canaille, whom these people detested as only the rich can detest others for a desire to be like themselves. Clara became more and more agitated at having to listen to such aristocratic froth but held her tongue for fear of offending their host. Robert, who was known for saying almost nothing out of what were assumed to be reasons peculiar to the suffering artist, and probably were, now found that the usual inner agitation had been disengaged from silence and that the calmness he'd experienced staring at the madhouse was transferred precisely into his staring at these idiots gathered around him. And they left off praising his heroics in supposedly having led his wife and daughter to safety precisely when they realized he was staring at them, staring in what must have been a most intense and eccentric way, for they shrank collectively from his gaze and took to coughing and chattering in such discordance that he could not understand a word they said and therefore experienced for the first time profound gratitude at his own inaptness.

When the sound of cannonading, which he discovered was rendered with great clarity by the night air's fornicate acoustics, joined the prattling of Major Serres's patrician refugees, it all became to him a kind of symphony of negligence, incongruent sounds trammeled into bombast.

But to Clara these guns and echoing of guns and abrupt, scuddering scintillations of firelight through the vaulted night clouds drew her into grim reality, her city lit up and blown up with three-quarters of her children (he did not put into the equation the one precisely 77 percent unborn) left behind, trapped within poor fiery Dresden.

She rose from her chair even as the schnapps was being poured. “Please excuse us,” she said to Major Serres. “We must return briefly to the city to fetch our children.”

“‘Fetch!'” said an old woman. “It is dogs one fetches. Children are summoned.”

Major Serres shrugged off his guest's discourtesy with the convivial indifference of the perfect host and said to Clara, “Are you out of your mind! It's the middle of the night.”

It was, indeed, precisely the middle of the night by the time she was ready to leave, three
A.M.
, Marie asleep in a little room of her own next to theirs, Robert awake at this hour not from his customary insomnia but because he had been granted, he felt, a singular vision of himself, watching himself sit and watch his wife not sit. He made no move to stop her, join her, or replace her on her perilous journey. He knew she would refuse his help because of the same danger that had caused them to flee in the first place: that he be forced into service, to face Prussian guns with a scythe placed in his hands and off he would go from her forever, cutting the air into neat pieces until such time as he could taste his own blood. He would, of course, love to die for a cause, provided the death last no longer than the cause remain just.

But he did not offer his help. He was like a man whose wife cooks (not that he himself was a man whose wife did cook, or who should have cooked when she did, particularly fish) and who watches her day after day, meal after meal, cooking. She keeps him alive with her cooking, and he could no more step across the kitchen to take her place at the stove than he could step across the Rhine. Or he watches her hammer a nail into the wall, to hang a picture. Or empty a chamber pot. Or feed a child. Or climb a tree to fetch, if that is the right word to use for the fetching of a cat, a cat. Or undress herself while he sits watching. Or hide him from barbarians. Or go off into Europe to play the piano. Or play the piano.

He was, like Hölderlin, “poor in deeds and rich in thought.” Such passivity canceled obligation. Such consideration of the self canceled the self. He was removed from life. He was as godly in his powers of observation as in his inability to do anything but observe.

He wanted her desperately but could not have her. There was about her an air of absence, provided perhaps by himself, or at least by his desire, which he knew would increase once she had departed for Dresden with the married daughter of Major Serres's steward, who had agreed to accompany her on that part of the journey safe to go by carriage. He remembered singing in this same house with Anna Laidlaw, “O lovers' eyes are sharp to see,” realizing only now that what they see best is the lover who's not there.

“Good-bye,” she said, kissing him. “Sleep if you can. Don't worry about me. I'll return with the children and we shall have a picnic by the river.”

“Enjoy,” he said, referring not to the kiss he gave her in return but to their absence from each other. He longed for her but not to go with her. He longed for her to be gone.

In going, Clara ceased to exist. How else could he have borne her absence?

The world itself did not exist. He remained awake the entire time, sitting where he sat when she had left, except when he was forced to get up to relieve himself and took the occasion to look in upon Marie, which he did with Clara's eyes. It was she who customarily visited the children when they slept, for though he slept so little and so poorly and thus need never awaken for the purpose of replacing blankets or pouring water for a dry-mouthed daughter—he was, he could have sworn,
always
awake through
every
night!—he feared such tribulation was contagious, particularly in the cool and thin black air, which always seemed to transport torments with imperceivable ease. Imagine, to touch a child's forehead in the night, to breathe a kiss upon her cheek, and from that night forth she would never sleep the night through.

Marie, in sleep, seemed like himself, lost to the world.

He went back to his seat by the window and wrote songs in his head to Goethe's words and wondered if one makes art to shut out the world or one shuts out the world to make art. A true musician must place himself above human miseries; he must draw his courage from within himself alone.

What anxiety he finally felt was only for his wife, whom he could not separate from her children but whom he separated entirely from the rest of humanity. He could still hear the shelling and see its flashes infuse the clouds and felt as if war were some astronomical thing.