Longing (60 page)

She returned shortly before noon. He was sitting where he'd sat, the only difference being that Marie had awakened and brought him dried figs her mother had left by her bed and sat beside him, a quiet guardian of his isolation. When Clara entered, framed by Elise and Julie, Ludwig in her arms as he must have been for the entire trip back, Robert could move neither his body nor his mind toward her. It was as if he had partaken of death, not on the battlefields she had crossed but because he himself had become one of those products of the reflective faculty he'd read of in Coleridge, who had himself found through alcohol and opium what Robert could glean from the mere passing breath of life itself.

Clara was dirty and tired and exhilarated. She sent the children into the care of one of Major Serres's servants and, standing before Robert as she took off her dusty clothes and unpinned her gunpowdered hair, delivered him aloud an exuberant letter of the sort he had received from her on paper when she was young and they were separated and his longing for her in her absence had been less enigmatic.

“Oh, Robert, it was such a great adventure! We went by carriage to Strehla. The driver dared not take the road. Or perhaps he could not see it. Or was he drunk? He went across fields. He darted among trees. I was frightened not for myself but for the baby. We were bouncing so much my head was hitting the ceiling of the carriage. But poor Frau von Berg's head was hitting it many more times than mine. Of course, she was not weighed down by child. Under normal conditions, to judge from what I could see of her figure, I should have been the one more thrown about. She is what is called a sturdy woman. Physically. Temperamentally, she is, to put it delicately, fragile. She was so frightened by our drive to Strehla and by the unending thunder of the cannons and their explosions of light and the glow of fire rising toward us from Dresden that when the driver would go no farther, neither would she. It was just as well. I preferred to go alone. I had found myself thinking more about her than about you.
Good riddance
, I said to myself—in reference to her, of course—and set out across the field toward the Reitbahngasse. I had walked perhaps four kilometers. And there, coming out of the mist of dawn and that curious smoke from the gunning…I say curious, because it is not like the smoke from the burning buildings, which is bitter and ugly, but it is almost sweet, and it is as fragile as Frau von Berg's mind, rising and falling in the wind like a veil. Or ghosts. And coming out of it, as I was saying, were ghosts! I thought they were ghosts. They were spread across the field, two thick, in a long line of perhaps twenty creatures that as soon as I saw it, and they saw me, began to close in upon itself. And upon me. They were spectral and ragged and after the events of the past days I was hoping they were ghosts, not men. But then I saw they were carrying those damned scythes. Men! What a disappointment. ‘Are you going to kill me?' I asked. ‘What a stupid question,' one of them answered. ‘What a stupid answer,' I said. Instantly, they parted and let me through. I had thought I was going to die. That's why I spoke so provokingly. Instead, my impudent tongue saved my life. Not a good lesson to teach a woman! From there I walked as in a dream to our house. I cannot tell you my joy at seeing it still standing. At finding the children asleep in their beds. It was like finding you here now right where I left you. As if there are two worlds and I am able to protect you and the children from the unendurable one. Waking them up was no easier than ever. They act like sleepy immortals. Poor Henriette was no help. What a time to get smallpox! So I dressed them myself and then we had a merry walk home to you! My safe and cherished husband.”

Her hair was at her shoulders. It left deft scrapings of gray ash on her skin. Her belly and her breasts strained against her underclothes. He so much wanted to rise to take her in his arms, to the extent he could encompass her without the usual tittering brought on by the scope of advanced pregnancy, and to smell the smoke in her hair and take it on his skin so he might also reek of war and sacrifice. But he could only sit and watch his wife, who, undressing, told him with conspiratorial fealty that Wagner had given imperious speeches on the steps of town hall, had raised the black-red-gold from the very apices of his barricades, and had been forced to flee as a leader of the visibly failing revolution.

“The true revolutionary in this world is whoever does nothing to anyone.”

“Then that cannot be you,” she answered, “for look what you do to me.”

He looked, instead, at Sonnenstein and was reminded of it when, barely a year later—the revolution crushed even to the extent that regulations had been issued by Berlin's new chief of police regarding the height to which women might lift their skirts in order to avoid dragging them in puddles—he was offered Ferdinand Hiller's job as Düsseldorf's music director and saw on a map of the city that it held a madhouse in its midst. There were three convents as well, and these, in conjunction with the madhouse, reminded him in turn of his youth in Heidelberg, when he would go from loving one boy to loving another and hang between them like a sinner between the redemption of the church and the indulgence of the asylum.

This had been Mendelssohn's job the year before he came to Leipzig. Mendelssohn was dead. Now Chopin was dead, reason enough to flee wherever one was, for death had a way of spooling through a calendar, gathering up lives in order. (Except when it came to one's children.) Mendelssohn had been the oldest by a year—gone. Chopin older by three months—gone. He would be next. Then Hiller, then Liszt, then Wagner, though Wagner was the sort who might escape his turn to die because for all his exhortations on behalf of the rights of the common man, he behaved as if there were never more than one man in the room.

Clara hated Dresden as much as he did. Its musicians “dear colleagued” with a buggering unctuousness but in private husked each other's privates. So did they excise Robert from the list of candidates to succeed Wagner, in exile with Liszt in Switzerland, as Kapellmeister. It was a position he had needed, she convinced him, not merely for the money and prestige but to get him out of the house. In the aftermath of the revolution, as Europe crawled back toward an apparently irresistible despotism and music poured from Robert as it had not since the year of songs in the year that surrounded their wedding, Robert seemed to have left the world in order to inhabit the inside of his own head. He was working himself, as he had before, into a frenzy of accomplishment and melancholy. Still, as easy as it was for him to write a piano concerto, a cello concerto, an opera to Byron's
Manfred
, so did he always seem to slip into grief, with no warning but for the bleeding of music. The more he wrote, and the better he wrote it, the more deeply he suffered for it. As patiently as she tended him when he was ill, he could never make her understand not so much why this happened as how it felt. It was nothing more, or less, than a rehearsal for dying.

He cared less that he had been refused Wagner's job than he did being denied a church in Dresden, any church, in which to hold a memorial service for Chopin. In Paris, there was a huge funeral at the Madeleine, where Mozart's Requiem was sung, over the objections of the archbishop of Paris, who felt that the kind of singing demanded by the piece would require jongleurs of such accomplishment that their vanity would permeate the church itself and deliver unto Christianity the contamination customarily produced by conspicuous virtuosity. The Requiem hadn't been performed in Paris since the return of Napoleon's ashes to Les Invalides, but it was on that day, for Chopin. Luigi Lablache and Pauline Viardot were soloists and in the audience sat Turgenev, who found he desired Pauline even more because of the stark wretched beauty of the composition, which brought death to life and like all great religious music positively inspirited the flesh. Chopin's own dead flesh—verified as such, because a fear of being buried alive had caused him to request that his body be cut open after the pronouncement of death—was taken in a grand procession, said to match that given Mendelssohn, though not nearly as geographically prolonged Robert was gratified to realize, to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in what was said to be the unfashionable east of Paris (how should he know? Clara had always gone to Paris without him, perhaps to quarantine the innocence of her doomed and distant love for the unglimpsed, untouched, eternally untroubling Gérard de Nerval, whose madness had come to make Robert's own seem the mere pout of a passing fish). There it was buried in the Paris earth along with a jar of soil from Poland Chopin had brought with him nineteen years before. In exchange, Poland got his heart: silent, still, empty. It was delivered by train.

Robert did not grieve for Chopin as he had for Schubert. He considered this a measure of his maturity, not to lie crying in bed all night between two friends but to lie awake all night beside his sleeping wife, performing every insomniac's fundamental ritual, which is to keep an eye open for death. And because he felt through Chopin's departure one step closer to his own according to his calculus of chronological eradication, whichever eye remained closed was employed in picturing his own funeral. Try as he might, he was unable to see his body transported by train across Germany to Zwickau or Bonn or Vienna, or carried in a hearse through the streets of this city or that, it didn't matter which because he had never found a city he loved. All he could see was himself and his wife—not even his children!—the world empty of mourners but for her, into whom he disappeared so there was nothing left of him. Only then did he fall asleep.

He might as well have dreamt of what Dresden would do for him if they wouldn't even permit a church-begirded memorial service for Chopin, who had done the city the retrospective honor of coming to it even before the age of twenty and had played here at least three years before he had played in Paris.
This
was Chopin's Germany city, and it would not even pray for his soul. What would it do for the soul of Robert Schumann?

What would Düsseldorf do?

He wrote a song:

Oh, what do they do in Düsseldorf?

In Düsseldorf what do they do?

They apportion a ration

Of Bach's St. John's Passion

In Düsseldorf that's what they do.

And because they were French

Until eighteen fifteen They have sex all the time

With no thought of hygiene,

While the sound of the choir

Can keep to no beat

As it bleats to the heavens like

Hartebeests in heat.

They drink upon rising,

And then they drink more;

As Mendelssohn said,

Half the town's drunk by four.

But the worst thing 'bout Düsseldorf—

I swear this is true—

Is no one in Düsseldorf

Knows what Düsseldorf do.

“‘Düsseldorf do?'” As usual, he could not tell how much criticism dwelled within the charm of her laughter.

“Sometimes one has to bend the syntax,” he replied, which was his excuse as well when she questioned something in his music.

But it was he who began to question hers. He had her replaced in a performance of his piano quintet because a woman couldn't understand the complexity of the piano part (and did not all his chamber work give emphasis to the piano?) and then demanded her withdrawal as accompanist of the Düsseldorf chorus for almost the same reason: A woman was too weak for such banging as was required, especially with this chorus, which made more noise shuffling its feet than singing, and better noise it was too.

“Why do you turn against me?” she asked.

“It's myself I turn against.” He was not so crazy that he failed to understand
this:
He did not merely take out his frustrations upon her, which was common enough behavior even for men whose marriages were matters more of contiguity than of enchantment; he deliberately did what he knew would hurt her most, because he never suffered so much as when she suffered. That he should have inflicted the pain caused him all the more anguish.

Still, he saw she tried to help him. She took to the piano during rehearsals of his orchestra and marked time with her head far more accurately than did he with his intractable baton from the conductor's desk. So taken was he with that bobbing movement of her head, mouth open, eyes half-closed, that he looked at her instead of at the score and conducted accordingly, which further distorted his intentions and thus the tempo of whatever music they were jointly, if surreptitously, conducting together.

But she was not there—not on the stage—when he scandalized all of musical Düsseldorf in conducting Hauptmann's mass at the Maximiliankirche.

The entire piece went exceedingly well. He conducted brilliantly—even he knew this, and such knowledge was difficult to come by for any conductor, who is as engulfed by the music flying from his hands as a painter is by the colors he no sooner gives off than they assail his eyes and blind him to their worth and thus to his own.

The singers had sung more competently than he might have expected, given their disgraceful behavior during rehearsals, when they would sit down while singing and bang their feet to the music in protest against what they considered his indolent tempos, wholly unappreciative of his informing them that the more slowly God was celebrated, the more likely He was to have time in His busy schedule to hear the music!

And the musicians made their entrances when they ought to have, again contradicting such rehearsals as when he was forced to rebuke the trombone player for performing his solo so softly, only to be informed that the trombone player had missed his cue entirely and played not a single note. “So what was it I heard?” “Silence,” came the answer, which brought him great pleasure.

As for himself, he did not once either drop or throw his baton, which had become for him such a commonplace in rehearsals that he had taken to tying it to his wrist with a string, no easy task and performed solo because when he asked Clara to tie it for him, she turned away with tears in her eyes.