Longing (68 page)

Because even in the madhouse he received issues of his old magazine—the one in which he had introduced Johannes to the world, God help him!—Schumann had seen Liszt's piece about Clara's appearance in Weimar. Liszt wrote that she had once been a delightful plaything of the Muses (no doubt during their tryst in Vienna), which was a wonderful description of her as Schumann had known her, but that she had become a stern priestess who gazed at men with unhappy, penetrating eyes.

It was he, Schumann, who had caused her such sadness. He had been sick for years, and Clara had grown pinched within the crevice of his sufferings. But when Johannes had arrived… plaything of the Muses did not do justice to her delight. No little girl as he had known in Leipzig, enchanting and brilliant and provocative of visions of a whole life lived within her spell, should be
stern
, should be
priestly
. Little wonder he'd forgotten her for months and remembered her through remembering Johannes. He could not see one of them without seeing the other.

Johannes assured him he would continue to care for the beloved wife.

He then put down his cigar to play for him.

He played his variations on Schumann's
Bunte Blütter
theme. As he played, and Schumann followed with the manuscript in his lap as finally he sat by taking Johannes's place on the fauteuil and even smoked the boy's discarded cigar, he heard Mendelssohn in the piece and Clara and himself, all put together for what would surely be forever by this boy, this angel, this master, who had written on the title page:

V
ARIATIONS FOR THE
P
IANO

O
N A
T
HEME BY
R
OBERT
S
CHUMANN

D
EDICATED TO
C
LARA
S
CHUMANN

BY
J
OHANNES
B
RAHMS

Endenich

JANUARY 29, 1855

I am dying of love for you
.

Johannes Brahms

Dr. Richarz, as was his custom, kept the patient's file in his lap during any discussion. The presence of the file in so distinguished a precinct signaled to the patient conscious of such distinction that he or she was not going to be subject to the shame and inconvenience of such physical treatment as force-feeding, enema, pupillary scrutinization, or the measuring of the cranium, and instead was expected to approach madness autocathartically.

“What is it you are asking?” asked Schumann. He was on his bed but not in it. He had been dozing. He was wearing his usual suit, though when he napped he loosened his cravat. This was his signal to his doctors and attendants that he was not dead.

“A bit of medical history.” Dr. Richarz tapped the file. “I need you to fill in the blanks.”

Schumann tapped his head. “I need
you
to fill in the blanks.”

“The mind has no blanks, Herr Schumann. It is never empty; always full. Sometimes too full. Anxiety manifests itself in the body, and in behavior, but it enters the body from the mind. When the mind can no longer contain itself, it bursts into the body. It insinuates itself into the flesh. It causes such symptoms as you have suffered over the years. The trembling, the itching, the cold feet, the insomnia, the indigestion, the weeping, the screaming, the drinking, the—”

“I hope you're not going to say ‘smoking.'”

“Of course not.”

“And yet you do not smoke yourself.”

“Oh, I would love to. But it makes me sick.”

“Have a cigar.”

Dr. Richarz declined. Schumann lit his own.

“What is it you're really after?”

“The true secret.”

“Of why I went for my swim?”

“Much more than that. I want to know why you're here.”

“I'm here because I went for my swim?”

“You're here because you're ill. But I don't know what you're ill with.”

“You know perfectly well what I'm ill with! Surely you're not as nosologically deficient as that. What you don't know is why I remain ill.”

“I am, I can assure you, a nosologist not to be trifled with. Which is precisely why I can say that you would not remain ill if I knew what you were ill with.”

“You have a cure for everything?”

“I have a cure for what I know I can cure.”

“Mind or body?”

“I hate that question.”

“And I hate enemas.”

“I'm not asking you to have an enema, Herr Schumann!”

“Wrong!”

“I merely want your history. All of it.”

“All of it?”

“So I may plot the trajectory of your suffering.”

“Down.” Yet Schumann seemed so delighted with this answer that he pointed his cigar straight up.

“Were you never happy?”

“I was always happy.”

“And your misery? Your—?”

“What do you think, doctor, we are vessels filled at one moment with joy and the next with despair? I was
always
happy. Who would not be?—with music and so many children and a wife like mine, who made desire seem a sacrament. And I was
always
wretched, aware of great dis-ease within myself, for the same reasons—music, children, woman. I feared to lose them. And look at me—I have!”

“Why do you proclaim this with such glee, Herr Schumann?”

“Glee? You're right! There it is! My point exactly!”

“But what
caused
this confusion in yourself?”

Schumann sat up in his bed, leaning toward Dr. Richarz. “What a fine way to state it. This confusion in myself. You are not saying
I'm
confused; only that I contain confusion.”

Dr. Richarz did not respond. The long ash on Schumann's cigar fell between his legs onto the bed; he scooped it carefully from one hand into the other and deposited it whole into the ashtray that sat beneath the portrait of Johannes Brahms on his night table.

Endenich

FEBRUARY 23, 1855

I can no longer love an unmarried girl
.

Johannes Brahms

“You look like young Werther.”

Brahms had been admitted to Schumann's sitting room and was approaching the master with an inkstand under one arm and a box of cigars and a painting under the other. He wore yellow pants, a blue jacket, and high boots.

“All the fashion,” said Brahms.

“Eighty years ago!”

“Well, what kind of fool would want to wear the fashion of his own time!”

“A fashionable one?”

Brahms blushed unashamedly.

“I had a Werther love once,” Schumann said, reaching for the box of cigars. “Agnes Carus was my Lotte. In Colditz. Her husband was one of my doctors. Yet it never occurred to me she was married. Her husband was a prop in the play of my life. I merely had to watch out not to knock into him in my haste to get to her. Not that I ever did. Get to her, that is. By the time she offered herself to me, I was in love with someone else.”

Brahms proffered the painting, around which was wrapped the shawl he would have worn had he not been dressed as the quintessential unrequited lover.

Schumann balanced the painting on his new inkstand and unfolded the shawl. Tears filled his eyes as the image held beneath his friend's familiar wrap was revealed. He picked up the painting in both hands and brought it close to his face. “How long I've waited for this.”

“She's been afraid you've forgotten her.”

“I could no longer see her. Now I can see her.”

“I shall tell her of your tears, though they'll bring the same to her.”

Schumann put down his wife's portrait and wrapped it carefully in the boy's shawl.

“What else at home?”

“Felix has his first tooth. It's come in on the bottom, in the front. He feels it with his tongue and tries to see it. He goes quite cross-eyed in the effort.”

Schumann smiled but said, pointing at the hidden woman, “What else of
her
?”

“She travels. She performs and teaches. She plays my music now in public. She says it reminds her of playing yours—no one likes it!” Brahms in delighted solidarity grasped Schumann by both shoulders. “Verhulst hated it in Holland. Jenny Lind in Hanover. Everyone else everywhere else.”

“Everywhere else
where
?”

“I have been with her to Hamburg. My mother and father were happy to meet her. They have agreed to let us stay with them in April when we are there for your
Manfred
. But first we are going to Cologne for the
Missa Solemnis
.”

“All the better to prepare for
Manfred
.”

“All the better to prepare for
Manfred,”
Johannes generously agreed.

“But more of where you've
been
. I am far better able to imagine what hasn't yet happened than to picture what has.”

“I was with her as well in Hanover. And Lübeck. Then it was time for her to make that trip to Holland. I was filled with terrible pain while I watched her pack. You must be able to remember for yourself. Each piece of clothes, each shoe, each ribbon, each sheet of music is like something stolen from oneself. I couldn't bear to say good-bye. So I went with her on the river steamer as far as Emmerich. Then I returned home to see to your children in their mother's absence. But after two days I could no longer bear it. I spent almost all my money to get to Rotterdam. But it was worth it! I was able to keep her company for six days until she left for Utrecht. And I to wait for her in Düsseldorf. But no sooner was she back than off she went again, to Berlin and Danzig and Pomerania, and I to you here to bring you news of her and her picture and cigars and the inkstand you wanted. And now that you have them, you should write to her! There is nothing more I should love to carry back from you than your love in a letter I might give to her with my own hand.”

Schumann looked about him in a panic. “But I have no paper!”

“No paper?” It was impossible from Brahms's tone to determine what subtle difference there might be between incredulity and disbelief.

“No paper!” Schumann had seated himself aside his new inkstand, pen in one hand, forehead in the other, eyes on the paperless surface before him.

Brahms went to the door and opened it and called out, “Herr Nämlich! Herr Niemand!”

“What is it?” said whichever one of them it was, and with such haste it seemed superfluous to answer him.

“Herr Schumann says he has no paper.”

“More fugues?”

“Stationery
.”

“Ah, a letter. To you?”

“What would be the sense of that? To his
wife
.”

“Of course.” He turned to go. “Paper,” he announced his commission.

“Thank you, Herr Niemand.”

He returned with but one sheet. Schumann remained poised to write, ink dripping off his pen onto the table, which Herr Niemand wiped clean before putting the sheet before him.

“Shall I wait?”

“I think you make him nervous,” said Brahms.

“The moon lightening the sky at full noon,” said Herr Niemand.

“Enough poetry, Herr Nämlich,” said Schumann, waving him off and in so doing sowing beads of ink like bullets across the gray frontage of his uniform.

As soon as Herr Niemand closed the door behind him, but even before he could resume his place at the window in the wall, Schumann attacked the paper before him, bringing his pen down toward it, letting it hover there above the paper without touching it, and then bringing it back, looking at the full quota of ink upon its nib, nodding in agreement with himself that he needed no more ink, and once again stabbing toward the paper, without so much as writing a word or even depositing a dab of ink within the chaste silence.

Brahms took the pen from his hand. “You are overwhelmed with feeling. You have too much to say to say it. Come, let's play together.”

Schumann resisted for a moment his friend's hand hooked into his elbow to take him from the paper he stared at quite as if it were the woman herself to whom he could not move the words he held within. Were it not for the portrait wrapped up in the shawl, he would not see her at all.

“What shall we play?” asked Brahms as they walked arm in arm to the piano.

“Do you recall my
Julius Caesar
arrangement for four hands?”

Brahms grinned. “After you.” He motioned for Schumann to sit at the bench where he would take the lead.

Schumann pushed away and took the left side of the bench. “I am the bass.”

They began together but soon diverted.

Brahms laughed. “We need to practice. I should move in with
you
.”

“Out of tune,” said Schumann.

“Oh, I should think we'd get along just fine.”

“The piano!”

Brahms rested his head for a moment on Schumann's shoulder. “I knew what you meant.”

Brahms signaled the time of his departure by retrieving his shawl from around the painting.

“I shall walk you to the station,” said Schumann.

“Are you allowed?”

“Of course. I may go anywhere I like.”

“With the likes of me?”

“I doubt it.”

“Let me get my coat.”

Johannes found Herr Niemand outside the door.

“May Herr Schumann walk me to the station?”

“Ask the doctor.”

“Where is he?”

“Herr Nämlich!”

Herr Nämlich led Brahms to Dr. Richarz.

“May Herr Schumann walk me to the station?”

“Your idea or his?”

“Mine.”

“Tell me the truth, Herr Brahms.”

“His.”

“It doesn't matter which. Of course he may walk you. Discreetly attended, needless to say.”

“Why did you ask me whose idea it was?”