Longing (7 page)

Death was the greatest mystery of all. What better place to think about it than by a river? As in one of the mystical sixteenth-century landscapes by Albrecht Altdorfer, whose work Herr Richter had asked the Lyceum art classes to practice duplicating, its waters flowed like time, never to return. And on its banks a young man could dream in the sweet breeze blowing through the box elders with their fingery leaves and through the hairy sumac and Norway maples with the milky juice ejaculated from their leaf stems when he snapped them and the juice ran down his fingers to their very webs.

Snipes chortled. Geese yawped in migratory diminuendo. Hawks cruised silently above the tree he leaned his head upon to hold the weight of all its poems. Detritus from the cold-killed meadowsweet lay scattered on the ground, its powers lost to make the drink his father read him of in Chaucer, save, a name that Robert joked belonged to wine because it was the only thing that to drown in was to be saved. He had picked toadflax in a field on his way to the river, because its yellow flowers still spent their color upon his skin and because he'd read that the plant could yield a salve that might cure the kind of rash his sister had.

He closed his eyes and thought of lines to add to his poem about Liddy and the death of Jean Paul. Perhaps it could become an elegy, for Jean Paul himself and for the death of his love for Liddy Hempel, a way to conjoin sex and death, as they were said to meet as the “little death” in the climax of the very making of love itself, which he had yet to experience with anyone but himself, alas.

The notion of the Philistine was a good one for such a poem, because it aroused a heroic image of the defense of fragile goodness against the brute and crushing force of ignorance. On the other hand, the word “dunderhead” was not sufficiently threnodic even when used to describe the enemy of art. And lines with four beats were really too short for an elegy, which needed the graceful elongation of the more extended line to represent both lamentation and testimonial.

He fell asleep under the influence of such rhetorical retrospection and dreamed the dreams that wakefulness did not provide. Liddy loved him then. He heard her scream and wondered at the sound, if women cried out thus in pleasure. It frightened him—the strident passion of the sound itself, and the monstrous chasm between desire and experience—and excited him. He saw her dressed in white, a pretty dress, adhering to her skin so that her body was before him unadorned. Her hair was wet, and on her eyelids glistened drops of dew or sweat or something unknown put forth by women in their ardor. She seemed exhausted now, wholly spent, floating by before his eyes before he'd chanced to touch her. It was not fair. Her leaving him without…

He opened his eyes. There, through the trees, he saw her, all in white, her dress so wet her skin showed through, her breasts, the sacred pyramid between her legs, her head thrown back so as she moved away from him, he saw her eyes, upside down, bounce open and look back at him from a maiden's radiant countenance. She was a phantom floating through the forest, suspended between the fallen autumn leaves and the unforthcoming Saxon sky.

Four men carried her. She seemed no burden, but they were downcast. He wondered had they had her; he'd heard tales of men within these very woods taking women brutally, which sickened him, though not as much as his mind's unwillingness to stop imagining the scene. Her arms and legs were casually tossed over the men's own arms as they carried her away from him and toward the town.

He gathered up his books and pens and flowers and leather cap, then hurried to his feet and off to follow her. Even moving, he felt contained in his dream, trailing this buoyant woman as she wafted through the spiny shadows of the nearly undressed autumn trees.

He heard his name. He heard it called with the same hoarse resonance in which he'd heard this woman scream her rapture.

It was his mother. She appeared before him suddenly, out of or into his dream, and for a moment he believed he was a small boy again, the night he'd come home from Frau Ruppius and had fallen asleep with the sound of his mother's singing and awakened in the dark from an unremembered dream to find her standing there, looking at him and saying his name as if she could not believe he was alive, or hers, come home, reality.

Now she said his name again and again, but without fondness, only anger. She took his arms within her hands and pressed her nails into his flesh and shook him. She was hurting him, and confusing him. Yet even as he tried to absorb what he knew was her suffering, he wanted to break from her grasp and follow the woman who was floating out of sight through the forest.

“She's dead,” his mother said.

“Liddy?” Where was the despair? Why was he somehow either relieved or released, he could not quite locate the emotion?

His mother pushed him from her but did not dig out her fingers. She shook her head and showed him what was in her eyes.

“Emilie!” he cried and tried to break from his mother's grasp. But she held him and held to him so he could not desert her.

“Drowned,” she said.

He could not picture it.

“Herself.”

He took that to mean she had been alone.

“In the river.”

He turned around to look at it. He hoped to see her as he might have, if only allowed by serpentine time, Madeleine au Bois d'Amour, alive on the bank of the Aven, painted by her brother who no more knew than Robert did that she, too, would soon be dead.

His mother, who would not let go of him, turned with him, as in a dance, so now she faced the receding procession in the midst of which her daughter floated dead.

Robert looked into the River Mulde and knew then what had happened. In the very moments when he had been sitting on its bank, lost within its influence on him, its inspiration, its assurances that through it he was the very questing hero in the book of Nature, his sister had been drowning down around the bend.

He and his mother followed the body home.

When his father came out of his study, pipe still lit and spectacles on, he rushed to his daughter and grasped her so hard she nearly fell from the arms of the men who had carried her from the river. Robert could hear some embers from his pipe hiss against the wetness of her dress. His father threw his pipe to the floor, where its stem flew off and bowl shattered, and put his face to his daughter's breast and locked his arms around her and wept in a way that Robert had never imagined a man might weep. He did not release her until the doctor arrived, and only then at the doctor's insistence.

The doctor shook his head sadly and said, “It is for the best.”

Robert wondered whether the lie was contained within the doctor's gesture or his words. Angrily, he said, “Save her!”

The doctor looked at him as if he were mad, or just a child, and turned away and asked, “How did it happen?”

“I was sitting by the river—,” began Robert.

“She drowned herself,” said one of the men.

“Yes. I thought so,” said the doctor. “I'm not surprised. But we mustn't judge her harshly,” he added, to Robert's parents. “Her torment had become unbearable. The infection had spread to her vulva. The itch she had experienced periodically over the rest of her body became intensified when it reached the delicate tissues of the genitalia. To see her try to alleviate it…” The doctor shook his head. “Her efforts were as tragic and unsightly as the disease. And there was nothing to be done. I tried everything, as you know. There was nothing to be done.”

“Try this!” screamed Robert as he threw the crumpled blossoms from the toadflax at the doctor and ran toward the stairs to escape from existence in the room where his sister had left her suffering to him.

Leipzig

JANUARY 22, 1826

An angel-child floats down from on high
,

Sits at the keys, and the songs sweep by
.

Robert Schumann

Friedrich Wieck celebrated the first anniversary of his divorce from Clara's mother by having a new Stein piano delivered for his daughter.

He could not believe she was his. It was not the possession of her, to which he was entitled by law, but the possession
of her
, precisely
her
being possessed by what he could not have given her himself. She was a genius at playing the piano. And he, while he might be a genius at teaching the piano, was not at playing it. And genius was not something to be taught, only nurtured. Therefore, she did not come to her genius through him. Therefore, he could not believe she was his.

But she was his. She was his by law, and she was his by love. It was even his love for her that had allowed him to let her, his firstborn after the death of little Adelheid, go off to Plauen with her faithless mother and her lover, Bargiel, for the summer of 'twenty-four. She was female, and she could neither speak nor hear (words only; he was convinced she could hear music), and he let her mother keep her for the few months until her fifth birthday. Then he sent for her. He didn't care whether she could talk to him or hear him talk to her. He wanted her for the music he knew was in her.

Her mother had no choice in the matter and did not try to keep her. By Saxon law, thank the good Lord, Clara was his property, to do with as he wished. And what he wished was to nurture her genius.

Marianne had begged him to allow her to deliver Clara personally. But he couldn't bear the sight of her, his beautiful wife, who had betrayed him with his own good friend and colleague. And he couldn't bear the idea that she might come back into this house where she had allowed herself to be courted by the man who had become her husband in place of him. So he had sent his maid to Altenburg, halfway between Leipzig and Plauen and thus a compromise in itself, to fetch Clara and bring her to him.

“Hello, Clara,” he said when Fräulein Strobel appeared with his daughter. Her eyes, which had always seemed unnaturally large, perhaps in compensation for the apparent uselessness of her mouth, now appeared positively monstrous, perfect black eggs set in the pearl of her face.

She looked at him blankly.

Fräulein Strobel shook her head sadly.

He didn't care she could not speak. Or even that she could not hear—language, that is. In fact, he thought she might be all the better a pupil if she couldn't talk back to him or ask questions of him and if he didn't have to talk to her but merely demonstrate and play and thus guide her only by touch and the sound of the piano. Music and words were inimical.

He did not believe that instruction should begin before the pupil's sixth birthday. Never mind that Mozart had become celebrated overnight when he played publicly in Vienna at that very age in 1762. So he planned to wait a year before sitting Clara down at the piano.

He lasted a month.

On October 27, 1824, five years, one month, two weeks after her birth, he conducted her first lesson.

He did not believe that pupils so young should have more than three lessons a week. But Clara was not young musically. So he gave her a lesson every day, without fail.

But before he even put her at the piano for the first time, he took her to the table in the kitchen and, because the chair was low and could not be adjusted like the piano stool, sat her on his lap and placed her hands on the tabletop. Because she neither spoke nor heard words, he said nothing. He put his hands on top of hers and was prepared to cup and flex hers up into the proper position, when he felt the pressure of the back of her hands on his palms and realized that her hands were moving into position by themselves.

With her dark, sweet hair in his face, and her thin legs wrapped around his as if she knew she was about to be appropriated by powers greater than herself, she made music on the table by moving each finger discretely up and down, learning how familial they were, born together but destined to play apart.

Thus he began to train her physically. There was the hand, which encompassed for some pianists the wrist and the arm, though Wieck preferred the Clementi style of someone like Moscheles, on whose arm it was said one might successfully balance a full glass of water while he played the most strenuous piece. And there was the ear.

For the former, she continued to practice upon the kitchen table, even when she became tall enough to sit there by herself, and at the piano to play scales, which she enjoyed more than he'd ever seen anyone enjoy them, so that he had to limit them, as was his custom, to fifteen minutes a day, in all keys, fast and slow, loud and soft, staccato and legato. He gave her various exercises so that she might master the eternal passing under of the thumb and in the end, as he called it, “dethumb” her hand and turn the demon of the thumb into an angel (albeit never as graceful as the others in its shape) of a finger. (As it was, she very early on could easily take tenths in both hands; a tiny, skinny girl with big hands was like a little man with a huge zubrick, disproportionately admired, inequitably skilled.) He also had her play the scales with separate hands, so that the hands, like the fingers on each, would be forced to become independent of one another and thus not attempt to hide, like twins, one another's faults. “Hands alone,” he called this, and while later it would prove a fine technique for her early forays into J. S. Bach's fugues, it was a phrase that always brought to her a feeling of loneliness, even estrangement—her hands from one another; her hands, together, from the rest of her being—and was also the first musical words that registered as words within her mind.

Within the practice of scales came the flowering of technique. Fingers were to be held close to the keys. The keys were to be squeezed, never struck; the sound of the finger on the key should be no sound at all, neither of the exertion of muscle nor the application of skin nor the click of fingernail; the only sound to be heard should be musical sound.

In other words, you draw music from the piano, you do not make music upon it. The music is in there; it is your job to find it.