Longing (65 page)

Has he closed off his longing within himself?

Clara Schumann

Schumann was held on either side by his attendants, Herr Niemand and Herr Nämlich.

“Herr Nämlich,” directed Dr. Richarz.

“Herr Niemand,” Herr Nämlich corrected him.

“You always confuse us,” said Herr Niemand.

“I
mistake
you. It is
you
who confuse
me
.”

“Perhaps if we were not required to wear the same uniform …,” said Herr Nämlich.

“Outfit. Not uniform. Outfit. This is not a prison. And you are no longer in the army.”

“Perhaps if we were not required to wear the same …
outfit
,” said Herr Nämlich.

“Perhaps if you were not
twins
, Herr Niemand.”

“Herr Nämlich,” Herr Niemand corrected him.

“Forgive me,” said Dr. Richarz.

“And we are not even brothers.”

“Forgive me,” Dr. Richarz repeated, this time to Schumann, as he directed the two large, strong, seemingly identical attendants to hold out one of Schumann's arms apiece so he might slip them into the straitjacket.

Endenich

APRIL 21, 1854

The whole time he has not asked after me even once
.

Clara Schumann

Schumann was in bed, no longer restrained.

“Am I alive?”

“I
hope
so,” replied Dr. Richarz.

“
Hope
so?”

“Can you see me?”

“Of course I can see you. Have you given up organicism for optometry?”

“You make me laugh, Herr Schumann.”

“That, I cannot see.”

“I said you
make
me laugh.”

“Evidence to the contrary.”

“Can you see me?”

“Not laughing.”

“If you can see me, and you are dead, then what am I?”

“Dead.”

“Aha! That is why I say I hope you are
alive
.”

“
That
is why?”

“For your own sake, too, of course. But tell me: Why did you ask?”

“About optometry?”

“No. Whether you are alive.”

“Because I thought I was dead. I thought I was in Heaven.”

“Of course.”

“You knew that?”

“Only because you proclaimed it. Screamed it, in fact—deliriously. That you were in Heaven, and you saw your first wife there.”

Schumann tried to sit up in bed. He was excited enough almost to succeed. “I
did
!”

“Your
first
wife?”

“Yes!”

“How many wives have you had?”

“I've never had yours.”

“Of your
own
.”

“None.”

“Then how do you account for the fact that you saw your first wife in Heaven?”

“Because she was dead.”

“Did you want to kill your wife?”

“No need—she's in Heaven.”

“And your second wife?”

“She's in Düsseldorf.”

“You
do
remember her.”

“Don't be ridiculous. How could I? I've been married but once.”

“That much is true, Herr Schumann. And yet you say you've had no wives. How can this be?”

“How can
this
be?” Schumann pounded his fist on his mattress. “Am I still tied up?”

“Can you not tell?”

“I feel tied up. I feel in the grip of something.”

“That's the medication. I didn't like you in the jacket. I had it removed. I would prefer to restrain you from within.”

“Ah, medication.
Pharmakon
. Did you know it means both
remedy
and
poison?
It's the word Socrates used in
Phaedrus
to describe what writing is. I'd considered being a writer. But I gave up writing for music. And I gave up music for Endenich. Or music gave me up to Endenich. And what have
you
given me? What medication? What remedy? What poison?”

“Chloral hydrate.”

“And here I had mistaken you for Dr. Clitandre.”

Dr. Richarz opened Schumann's file in his lap and proceeded to look through its papers. “I have no record of your having been seen by a doctor of that name. If indeed that is his name. Was he your gynecologist?”

Schumann laughed.

“I thought it was pretty funny myself,” said Dr. Richarz.

“I'm laughing at the fact that you don't know who Dr. Clitandre is.”

“Who is he then?”

“He doesn't exist.”

“Then why did you say you had mistaken me for him? Are you trying to tell me
I
don't exist? Just as your wife does not seem to exist for you?”

“Dr. Clitandre is a character in a play by Molière. He says he heals through words while other doctors use leeches and emetics and enemas.”

“Oh, I am a great believer in enemas,” said Dr. Richarz.

“Don't speak to me of such things,” said Schumann. “I am asleep.”

“How can you be asleep and talking at the same time?”

He was by then having chloral hydrate dreams.

Endenich

MAY 29, 1854

His case is considered hopeless
.

Dwight's Musical Journal

Waving a magazine, Dr. Richarz approached Schumann where he was standing in the Endenich garden with Dr. Richarz's nephew, Herr Oebeke, himself a medical student. They were supposed to be walking. The nephew enjoyed the fresh air much more than did the attendants, who usually ended up sitting with patients in a nearby tavern, proudly sedating them with drink while complaining that their salaries weren't half that of the doctors. And Herr Oebeke walked them for free. But unlike the other patients, who always seemed grateful to be taken out for a relaxing stroll along the paths that produced an illusion of tranquility in the midst of a nature that had abandoned these ramblers to their minds' caprices, Herr Schumann wasn't walking. He was standing completely still, carrying on a conversation not with Herr Oebeke, who would have loved to talk to him about music and the famous wife he seemed unable to remember he had, but with himself.

“That is not true!” Herr Schumann remonstrated. “That is a lie!”

Herr Oebeke seemed delighted to see his uncle. He fairly fled across the grass, from the side of his ward.

“Herr Schumann is having a terrible argument with himself, Uncle Franz.”

“He hears things.”

“Music, I was led to understand. I had thought, when he stood still in the garden, to lean toward his head to listen. Imagine—to hear music in the making!”

“And did you?”

“Hear it?”

“Did you
attempt
to hear it? Did you listen?”

“I did,” Herr Oebeke confessed.

“That is wrong,” lectured his uncle. “You know I insist we respect our patients' privacy.”

“You inject them with drugs, uncle. You feed them with tubes when they will not eat. And then you give them enemas when they will not… reimburse what they have eaten. Are these not invasions of privacy?”

“We do not put our heads up against theirs in order to hear their private music.”

“Only because you know you
can't
hear it, uncle. It would seem to me that your very job is to invade your patients' privacy. They are all privately mad, after all. They are all suffering in the terrible isolation of the insular self.”

Dr. Richarz put an absolving hand on his nephew's shoulder. “And to think we are told that romanticism is dying.”

“Besides,” challenged Herr Oebeke, “how would you know Herr Schumann is hearing things if you didn't listen to him yourself?”

“Oh, I do listen. But I listen to what he actually says rather than to what is said inside him. I listen to his voice when he talks to himself, and I listen to his voice when he talks to me. He hears things, it's true. The music of life, he calls it, to which he says he dances a wild dance within himself. He hears voices no one else can hear. But
I
hear his rendition of these voices. And this is more important than hearing these voices themselves. For they are phantom voices. But his voice, reporting what they've said, is real.”

“And what do they say?”

“They say the worst thing a man could hear.”

“Oh, no!” said Herr Oebeke.

“Yes,” said Dr. Richarz gravely.

“How humiliating!”

“Do you have any idea what his voices say?”

“I can only imagine.” Herr Oebeke cringed.

“No, I don't think you can.” Dr. Richarz moved away from his nephew and onto the grass toward Schumann, who stood rigidly in the middle of the garden path, only his head moving, as if slapped on either cheek successively, while he berated his invisible adversary. And then, whispering so that his nephew had to run up to him in order to hear, Dr. Richarz said, “The voices tell him that his work is not his own.”

“Whose do they say it is?”

“That's hardly the point.”

“Then what is the point, uncle?”

“The point is that you should have to ask what the point is. What kind of world does he live in?”

“What kind of world
do
I live in?” Schumann bellowed.

“Herr Schumann?”

“He heard you, uncle.”

“What
kind
of world?” he asked argumentatively.

“
This
kind of world.” Dr. Richarz waved the magazine. “This is what I've come to show you.
Dwight's
. All the way from Boston. An article about you. Of course it's last month's issue. So it is old news to you if new news to the world.”

“Does it review my
Faust
?”

“No, it does not.”

“My
Faust
begins in a garden such as this. Gretchen picked a flower such as that. She tried to read Faust's love in the petals of the flower. Faust destroyed the flower with the power of his love for her.”

“I love a good allegory,” said Herr Oebeke.

“Quiet, you idiot,” said his uncle.

“Symbolism,” insisted the nephew.

“Precisely,” said Schumann, inspiring a smile of delight or perhaps of reprisal from Herr Oebeke.

“Not that Faust actually destroyed the flower,” Schumann conceded to Dr. Richarz. “He destroyed its
meaning
. And in so doing, of course, he destroyed its symbolism. As for my
Faust
, it was performed in three cities—Leipzig, Dresden, and Weimar—on the same day. It was the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's birth. And all I wished was that I could have been like Faust himself for that one day, everywhere at once, hearing everything there was to hear. I wonder if I would have recognized the music. It had been in my desk for five years. I had even forgotten I'd written it.”

“We often forget what most we love,” said Dr. Richarz.

“Symbolism,” accused Schumann.

“Thank you,” said Herr Oebeke.

“Idiot,” said his uncle.

“The magazine.” Schumann pointed.

“It's not about
Faust
. It's about you. It's not about what you've produced. It's about your life. Imagine, having such fame as you have that as far away as Boston, Massachusetts, your deeds are reported. Does that not in itself give you reason to live? That what you have created is considered of such importance that what you have done is reported to all the world?”

“Deeds? What deeds? What
have
I done?”

“This article is about your miraculous brush with death. About how you were saved from the river. But that's not why I have brought it to your attention. I have brought it to your attention because it says …” Dr. Richarz opened
Dwight's
and read, “‘The overexcitement of an active brain, always intensely occupied with the creation and execution of new musical creations was the true secret…' So you see. There it is—just as you and I have been discussing.”

“The true secret of
what
?” Schumann reached for the magazine.

Dr. Richarz closed it hastily and put it behind his back with one hand while with the other he gestured for his nephew to move closer to his patient.

“The true secret of why you felt it necessary to enter the river in the first place.”

“Oh, they know about how I jumped in to retrieve my wedding ring?”

“Your wedding ring? What is this about your wedding ring?”

“So they don't have that in the magazine.” Schumann reached for it again. Herr Oebeke grasped his hand.

“So you are married, Herr Schumann?”

Schumann removed his hand from Herr Oebeke's and held it and the other up before Dr. Richarz. “How can I be? Look, no wedding ring.”

“I thought you said it fell into the river.”

“So I did. And so I did. And do I not stand here before you?”

“Yes, you do.”

“And do I not not have a wedding ring upon these fingers?”

“You do not.”

“I do not not, or I do not?”

“You do not.”

“And I do not not as well. Have a wife, that is.”

“Then you do!” said Herr Oebeke, who had followed the logic of this conversation with all his might.

“Then where is my wedding ring?”

He held up both hands again before surrendering them to Herr Oebeke, who walked backward along the garden path with Schumann in tow.

He asked Dr. Richarz to let him read the article in the magazine from Boston, but the doctor demurred.
*
Schumann inspected the flower beds through his lorgnette.

*
The actual “true secret” that the April 22, 1854, issue of
Dwight's
claimed to divulge was of what it called Schumann's “lamentable state.” Dr. Richarz saw no good to come of revealing this uninformed opinion to his patient.

Endenich