Longing (67 page)

“Have I spent my whole life unaware of a New Year's Eve rule that prohibits the reading of mail?”

“I meant, it's a time for celebration.”

“In other words, you wish a respite from your labors.”

“Exactly!” Dr. Richarz signaled for wine to be poured into his and Schumann's glasses.

“As I wish a respite from my suffering.”

“I see.” Dr. Richarz now waved off the servant carrying the tapered green bottle, before a drop of wine was poured.

“I shall read them to you myself.” Schumann held his lorgnette to his eyes. He started to read the letters, but he read them silently, nodding here, smiling there, shaking his head ferociously while laughing and ceasing these contradictory activities at the same instant.

“Now I
am
curious,” said Dr. Richarz.

Schumann immediately folded up the letters and forced them back into his vest pocket.

“I said ‘my wife' because these letters concern her.”

“It was your wife you wished to discuss, then? To the exclusion of all else?”

“But not of all others. I addressed my first letter to Johannes in Düsseldorf. He didn't answer it until December 2. Why? Because it was forwarded to him in Hamburg, ‘whither,' he said, ‘I had gone to visit my parents.' What do you think of that?”

“I think it's very nice when children visit their parents. Only my nephew visits me, and he is not comfortable at Endenich.”

“Then what do you think of
this? ‘
I
should have preferred to receive it from the hands of your wife.'”

“Have you these letters memorized, Herr Schumann?”

“I expect to be back in Düsseldorf in a few days. I long for it.' He
longs
to be back in Düsseldorf. What could that mean?”

“Anyone who has been in Hamburg and Düsseldorf must prefer the latter.”

“Only if you prefer French whores to German.”

“Who doesn't!”

“Dr. Richarz!”

“It's New Year's Eve, Herr Schumann!”

“One night a year you are granted a sense of humor?”

“It would appear to be the same night that you are made cruel.”

“It was only tonight that I received his next letter. He didn't write it for a week after he'd returned to Düsseldorf. He waited until he'd had my own next letter, delivered by Joachim. The one in which I took fate in my hands and called him
du
. He thanked me for calling him
du
. And my calling him
du
allowed him to confess that the woman he calls my ‘kind wife' had brightened his heart by using this same word to him, this word he calls ‘intimate.' There, doctor—my wife, as promised. As I am intimate with him, she is intimate with him. ‘How long,' he writes to me, ‘the separation from your wife seemed to me! I had grown so accustomed to her and had spent such a glorious summer with her. I had grown to admire and love her so much that all else seemed empty to me and I could only long to see her again.' Note—the theme of longing. In every letter, he writes of longing. ‘I brought many beautiful things back with me from Hamburg. From Herr Avé the 1779 Italian edition of the score of Gluck's
Alceste.'
Very nice, very nice. ‘In addition, your first cherished letter to me and many from your beloved wife.' One from me, many from her. Do you know what this means, Doctor Richarz?”

“You received this letter only tonight? Your powers of memorization are miraculous, Herr Schumann.”

“It means that she must love him more than I.” Schumann wept.

“Herr Nämlich! Herr Niemand!” called Dr. Richarz.

The attendants came and rescued Dr. Richarz.

*
Schumann had several times visited Rethels in his Düsseldorf studio and had purchased woodcuts from both the
This, Too, Is a Dance of Death
and the
Another Dance of Death
series. His favorite was
Death the Rider
from the latter, dated 1849: Death is on a horse, carrying his scythe, as he approaches a walled city with two large church spires and smoke coming from two chimneys. He bought it because it reminded him how the horror of the revolution had rendered him exuberant with music. Alfred Rethels had been driven mad by having had to wait eight years for an official decision concerning whether the south windows in the Aachen town hall would be filled in to allow sufficient space for him to paint his commissioned frescoes of scenes from the life of Charlemagne. He was so unhinged by the delay that he was able to finish only four of eight; the rest were painted from his cartoons by one of his students. Soon after his conversation with Schumann in Endenich, he was released into the care of his mother and sister and died in Düsseldorf three years later.

Endenich

JANUARY 11, 1855

I should by rights put by my best melodies, ‘Really by Clara Schumann,'

for with only myself for inspiration nothing profound or beautiful can

possibly occur to me
.

Johannes Brahms

The boy wore a plaid shawl. It was frayed at its edges as if he had sat upon every inch of its fringe and even while sitting fidgeted. It was held together upon his right shoulder by a safety pin, which became visible only when he moved his head and his long blond hair melted off the metal. His left shoulder had, upon his arrival, been occupied by his knapsack, which was as full to bursting as Schumann's heart.

He was a boy. He was so young as almost not to exist. The gods did not age, and their beauty never faded.

He sprawled in the upholstered fauteuil, while Schumann paced before him, stopping only to stare down at him in disbelief. Almost a year since he had seen him last in Düsseldorf.

But it was not his first visit, Johannes was firm in declaring. He had come once before, at the end of the summer on his way back to Düsseldorf from a walking tour of Swabia (Heilbron, Ulm, Heidelberg…).

Heidelberg! When Schumann had been a student at Heidelberg, even younger than Johannes was now, he played the piano everywhere, he was quite a success, and one night when he was playing at a ball, a beautiful young Frenchwoman whose name he still remembered, Charlotte, came up to him at the piano and said something like
Oh, Monsieur Schumann, si vous jouez, vous pouvez me mener où vous voulez
.

Johannes laughed but then asked timidly in his high voice please for a translation.
Oh, Herr Schumann, if you'll play, you may have me any way you like
. Well, not
have me
, exactly, more like
take me
, but, then, she was not referring to a trip to Saarbrücken.

Johannes did not find the German as amusing as the French.

On his way back to Düsseldorf from Swabia, he had been allowed by the doctors to view Robert only through a hole in his wall. He apologized; he had wanted to embrace his master.

Hole in the wall!

The boy blushed as if he had given up the secret of the cepionidus.

But Schumann immediately set him at his ease by confessing that he knew all about the hole in the wall. This was an insane asylum, after all, much as it resembled a valley chalet. People were being paid to look at him through a hole in the wall. Sometimes he looked through the hole in the wall himself. Not out. In. He always expected to see himself, as one was said to be able to see one's image reflected in the cepionidus, and never did. This made him feel invulnerable to the spying of others.

Johannes, nonetheless, had seen him smoking his pipe.

Speaking of which, were there any cigars in that knapsack?

There were! Look at that thing—mightn't they be crushed?

His beloved wife, Johannes told Schumann, had packed the cigars.

Indeed, they were not crushed.

They sat and smoked. Johannes chewed as much as sucked on his cigar, until its end was soaked with his saliva and was frayed and had him picking shreds of dark tobacco off his tongue and twirling them between his thumb and forefinger until they were dry enough to drop into the ashtray on the smoking stand. But the smoke from his cigar was fragrant with spice and an earth that could not be found in the gardens of Endenich, the way another's cigar always smelled sweeter than one's own, and Schumann pulled the smoke into him as he paced before the reclining Brahms, danced through the smoke the boy breathed out into the room that sheltered them.

He was living in a small apartment above her, still, yes, on Bilkerstrasse. His mother had advised him against it. Here was her letter. Was he wrong in what he had done: rushing to Düsseldorf at the first news of Robert's illness, moving into the house, taking care of things?

What things?

Was he wrong? Johannes insisted upon knowing.

Schumann read the letter the boy had received from his mother. She was like all mothers, like his own mother, who had wanted him to go to law school, refusing to believe he could make a living with music. She was right! Even his father-in-law had been right!

Johannes's mother wrote of him, “Schumann” (strange to read one's name in someone's letter, even when accustomed to reading it in reviews of his work, and to see himself as “Schumann” and not “the master,” which is what the letter's recipient called him sometimes, or “Robert,” which is what he loved to be called by a young man twenty-five years his junior—it was a form of immortality!). She wrote of this Schumann that he had opened doors but that Johannes must expand his own possibilities. He could not live on his compositions—even the great masters had been unable to do that. She hoped he would have gotten a job if Schumann had not taken ill. On a temporary basis, it was allowable for him to help out. But he could not stay there forever. He was losing time. He was losing money. He might not like hearing it, but respect came only to men with money.

What was it with mothers? A genius emerged from the womb, and the mother feared he would suffer more from lack of funds than from the stifling of his art.

Schumann offered to burn her letter. He touched the tip of his cigar to its corner. But either his cigar had gone out or the letter was as indestructible as any mother's admonition.

He hadn't answered Johannes's question: Was he wrong?

Of course he wasn't wrong.

And Johannes hadn't answered his question:
What things? What did he do
there all day? It was no longer for Schumann an enduring house, as neither was any of the other places he'd lived with Clara. Everything before his vision was cerebral, conceptual, frozen in the brain. What did he
do
there all day?

Johannes was in charge of all household expenses and kept track of everything in the household diary: mortgage payments, school tuition, servants' wages, food, wine, medicines, piano tuning, postage stamps, firewood, coal. When the beloved wife had gone on tour four months after the birth of little Felix, he supervised the children's studies and music lessons and helped out the housekeeper, Berthe, and the other servants in taking care of the youngest children, including Felix, who was small enough to sit in his hand and often did as he danced around the room to amuse the other children, so that Felix had learned to laugh heartily at a very early age, and the other children had learned something they ought not do with a mere infant. He gave the little ones sugarloaf to encourage them to learn the alphabet. He brought Ludwig to his bed when the child missed his mother and was afraid to fall asleep out of fear that Ludwig would need him and dreamed his dreams awake and when Ludwig awakened at dawn they wrestled and the little boy won. He taught Marie and Elise to play
Pictures from the East
for the beloved wife's birthday, for which he had given her a four-hand arrangement of the master's quintet. In return, for Christmas, she gave him the complete works of Jean Paul. And when Frau Schumann needed clothes sent to her in Ostend, Leipzig, Weimar, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Breslau, Berlin, she asked him to search her bedroom for them and send them on. Sometimes he succeeded, and sometimes he failed. How did a woman arrange her clothes? What was the difference between a chemise and a blouse, between
Hemden
and
Blusen?
Why were some buttons buttoned and some not? Why was it more difficult to fold cotton than to write a sonata? What was the purpose of an undergarment that looked in a drawer to be no bigger than to fit an autumn gourd? When was a heel high and when was it merely pitched?

You are asking, Schumann said, the wrong person.

How can her husband be the wrong person?

Schumann had no answer.

Johannes was her husband.

This was a comfort, as well as an excitation, and a grief.

What did the boy make of the marriage diary, Schumann wondered, with its intimacies recorded, night after night, sometimes night after night after night, the cold mathematics of the most heated passion Schumann had known or could imagine? He took a virile pride in being measured by so young a man, if indeed Johannes read and understood the symbols of their fornications and varieties thereof, and he took into him a great sadness that it should be over, and he be replaced, not by this boy he loved but by his own absence. The only place he could be two places at once was within himself.

There was always music. Music, within, was as vagrant as love. But out in the world it was, like love, manifest and gladsome.

The beloved wife had been the first to perform Johannes's work, the andante and scherzo from his third sonata, in F minor. In Leipzig. So she was with both of them the first to perform their work. And for each in Leipzig. And they had both written early sonatas in F-sharp minor, the boy's a kind of homage to his master's, perhaps a lonely cry of his own heart for someone he, too, loved.

In Weimar, with Liszt conducting the orchestra, she played the boy's D-Minor Concerto. He had been writing it first as a sonata for two pianos, and Schumann remembered and reminded him of how he would sit and listen to Johannes and Clara play it together in the house on Bilkerstrasse and each time they began it, he, Schumann, would leap from his seat when Clara played the B-flat chord over the D-minor triad in the bass, and he would shout… he could not remember what he shouted, could not remember even whether what he shouted was in the form of words. He remembered only breathing something uncontrollably out of the confines of his being where he stored all his knowledge of music as well as that uncommon generosity that allowed an artist to hosanna his humiliation before superior genius. When he heard such chords as Johannes had written, logic fled the world, and in its place came the agitated serenity instilled by beauty.