Longing (73 page)

As Johannes spoke of Clara, Robert began to see her, for the first time since he had left her in Düsseldorf, and to hear her voice as if she herself were reading aloud the letters the boy described, and to sense not her presence in his room but her absence from it, and from his life, his arms, his mind. Even her own letters to him had been no more than words on paper. They had not brought her back but had served to cast her farther out, in that he could read what she had written and touch the paper she had touched and because he felt nothing feel that with each passing day there was less of her in him. So he had burned her letters, to keep what little of her he had left. But still she'd fled until now, when through the tales and telling by this boy they loved her spirit returned to him, her flesh as well, because he could see her real in front of him, sense her shape in the air, her smell off his own hands, hear her voice in the boy's voice, feel her in him as he sat at his feet and gave her to him as he had given her to him. She was memory, he knew, but memory was all he had and all he'd have until he died. He was overtaken by memory, driven quite mad by it so that for the first time he felt mad, mad from within and no longer dependent on others' descriptions of his being mad. He saw her as a girl, and as a woman, and was unable to distinguish between these visions of her young and grown, and she came quite together in him then. And bitterness was replaced by knowledge.

“
Il voulait tout savoir mais il n'a rien connu
.'”

“Oh, my God, now he's speaking French!” said Dr. Richarz.

“Please,” Brahms whispered to Schumann.

“‘He wished to know all things but discovered nothing,'” he translated her imaginary lover for the one who loved her most.

Endenich

JULY 27, 1856

My beloved, as soon as you are here again the sun will come out
.

Johannes Brahms

She was in London when the news first came, and sent him lilies. They're surely dead by now, almost a month. Mercy they're called, their insides like a woman's. Like a woman's flower where Mr. Sweetfoot finds his nectar. She hasn't doubted he would note the likeness or consider it a cruelty for his memory thus to be requited. Robert is her husband and the father of her children, all of them, alive and dead and never born, and each was conceived in passion. She has feared to see him sick and shrunken as much to preserve the memory of him bonny, as they said in England, vigorous, copious, as out of fear that his diminishment will diminish her. Two years and four months and more they've been apart. Their eyes will couple like strangers'. How can they not? Intimacy, even such as they had shared that made the intimate seem merely proximate, cannot survive such distance. Time is real, it is a fence that grows, and they both fenceposts on opposing ends, each day uprooted further, pushed by now beyond their invisible horizons. She counts days as he had their ages, though not as accurately, and with loss alone to match the growth he'd so delightedly, if annoyingly, charted. Nine hundred days and nights almost, since she has seen him. If he had merely moved around the corner, she would be afraid to glimpse him in the street. But Robert is in Endenich.

She'd grown tired of London and England and Ireland when Johannes once more saved her. If it could be considered saving to summon her home for what might be the death of her husband. In the past, she had come home from her tours for the comfort of home life. There was no home life among the musicians of England. They tried to earn livings all day long, snatching a mouthful of their dreadful food whenever they could find a moment, and didn't meet to make music until late at night, when they were half dead, worn out from the burden of what passed for their lives, and what life passed them by. Their music suffered and so no doubt did their copulations. The men were limp and the women pallid.

She had been invited to England by William Sterndale Bennett, who had been the same age as Johannes when first he came into their lives twenty years ago in Leipzig and stole Robert's heart as much from Robert's cast-off Ernestine as from her. Now he was the supreme English man of music (which was saying little), married and a father, who, when he had not been conducting the orchestra accompanying her at her New Philharmonic Society concerts in London, reminisced for her and anyone else who would listen about his wild youthful days in Leipzig with Robert Schumann, drinking all night and making music all day. Whenever there was a piano nearby in someone's drawing room, he would sit at it and sing the song he'd written about Robert at the time:

Herr Schumann is a handsome gent.

He smoked cigars where'er he went.

Three decades old, I would suppose,

With short-cropped hair and a cute little nose.

She hadn't loved Sterndale Bennett young or old. Or Ludwig Schunke. Or any of the other boys or men who were handsome and talented and caused Robert to worship them as much for some ideal of manhood as for their visible energy and dissolute eyes. It is only in Johannes that their love has met in anyone aside from themselves and their children. And he had arrived at almost the last moment in which he might save them. He carries them back and forth to one another between Endenich and the world. He preserves their love over time and distance, through sickness and, soon, she knows, beyond death.

When she saw Johannes, who had come to meet her in Antwerp, she was confused. It had been their longest time apart, as every day added to the longest time she'd been apart from Robert since the day they'd met when she was eight years old. Even the ill will of her father had not been able to separate them for as long as had Endenich.

Her confusion was not between Johannes and Robert. It never had been. It was between her utter pleasure at seeing Johannes and the preparation in her body for the pain of what message he would deliver concerning Robert. They both love Robert. Robert loves both of them. She loves the two men. The two men love her. It would be a peculiarly perfect round of love were not one of them suffering and the others suffering for him.

Parting from Johannes had been the most painful yet. She'd felt stunned. When she'd written him that her body was lifeless in England, it was not merely to allude to her fidelity but to present him with an image of her wrung out, torpid, dead, so he would think of nothing but bringing her back to life. Away from him, she was like Robert, living, it would seem, for no other reason than to see him.

The news from Endenich continued bad. Johannes held her as he told her more of what he'd hinted in his letters. She could not help contrasting the warm reality of his embrace with the image he presented of her husband, whom Johannes had paid a birthday visit on June 8 and found confined to his bed, thin but for some swelling in the feet, unembarrassedly incontinent, quiet except when he coughed and trembled and said thank you for the atlas Johannes had brought to celebrate the day and because he'd asked for it, thank you and little more, recognizing him, Johannes was sure, because he smiled at him with runny eyes before he turned away to open his large new book and continue his search for some escape into the cold colors of the maps and the rigid sprinklings of tiny names.
Should I go to him?
she wondered, but not aloud, because she feared Johannes would say she should. Even Düsseldorf was too close too soon, so when she heard Johannes say that all he'd ever seen of the sea was the closed-off sea from harbors like this one and like that of his hometown Hamburg, she insisted they go to Ostend, where they spent two nights and a day and he ran across the warm July sand of the North Sea beach like a boy, while she sat on his plaid shawl.

He is two years younger than she than she is younger than Robert. But she never thinks of him as younger than she, because she feels she has grown young with him. He quite frightened her at first, but she learned to give herself up to the truest joy in his presence. Her friends complained that he was too young for her, though they never said what they meant when they said
for her
. He isn't too young to take care of her or her children. He isn't too young to handle the finances or the help or the heat in the two winters and three autumns past or to hold together her breaking heart. She never thinks of his youth, only of his power, which stirs her and instructs her both. It is Robert who had always seemed young, almost childish, perhaps because his passions overpowered his ability to control them.

They returned to Düsseldorf together on July 6, and eight days later, at her insistence, Dr. Richarz met her in Bonn, where she begged him to escort her in his carriage or hers down the road to Endenich so she might see her husband. He refused. Doctor, she told him, no matter how bad her husband is, he could be no worse than she imagines him. Nor, to judge from what their friend told her, could his—Dr. Richarz inquired whether the friend was Herr Brahms—could his seeing her make
him
worse. And, yes, of course the friend is Herr Brahms!

Dr. Richarz seemed as confused as the rest of the world about Herr Brahms. Only she and her husband appeared to understand that Herr Brahms was no intruder between them but in fact the very mortar squeezed into the crack that had opened in their lives when Robert could no longer live at home and fled to Endenich. Johannes brought her more than news of Robert; he brought Robert himself, in his eyes and between his fingers and in the compassion of his grasp. And he took to Robert more of her than she could send in letters or any longer with her mind the way they once played music when apart and sent it to one another so it might join in the air in what she had come to realize, once Robert had truly joined himself to her, was quite a lovely facsimile of intercourse but a mere understudy in the actual role.

Even when she and Johannes had been apart, he would tell Robert they had been together. He had asked her not to be shocked at his brazen lying to her husband about seeing her when he had not. He believed, as he had written her in one of his countless letters when they actually were apart, that by telling Robert about her, and nothing but her, he could cause Robert to become filled with a longing to be hers again. He told her he would write to Robert about their summer trip together along the Rhine and describe it to him in such a way that he would be neither hurt nor distressed.

They had walked nearly a hundred miles, accompanied only by Berthe the maid, and she only because Johannes exaggerated Clara's celebrity and told her there was a danger that whatever they did together would “get into the papers,” as he put it, and be regarded as improper. He was like her prudent friends in that, while she was confident enough in the strength of her love for her husband to know that her love for Johannes took nothing from that husband or anyone else, including the children, but gave them all whatever cheer there was to be gotten from her life. She had been gossiped about all her life and was aware when she performed in public that forms of gossip often took up the space of music in the minds of the people, who speculated to themselves about her clothes and her skin and her hair and those parts of her body and mind invisible to the eye and mind and the nature of her passion.

Berthe had her own bag, but she and Johannes lived out of his knapsack, which they emptied of their clothes in inns along the way and packed with food and drink for their hikes along the Lorelei cliff and up from the old gate of St. Goarshausen to the Katz Castle and into woods along the river in which they would stop for lunch and she would tell him the things that occupied her mind. As they drifted in a little flat-bottomed boat at the base of the Lorelei cliff, she held him so that if he heard the nymph sing to him, he would not, however tempted, be able to run to her. There in the tranquil valley, leaning against each other in the mass of rocks, they heard only the wind blowing lightly over grief and suffering, silencing them, there where the primrose dreamed.

Johannes himself dreamed of living with Clara and Robert and told her so at the same time he wrote that he wished to God he were allowed that day instead of writing this letter to tell her with his own lips that he was dying of love for her.

They are all dying of love. That's what love does. Requited love is no less painful than love unreturned or even unacknowledged. The more deeply two beings bore into each other, the greater the pain, not from the penetration itself but from the wound it leaves.

Dr. Richarz would not understand. He sent her away “for the good of the children,” no longer concerned, it seemed, with what she might do to Robert or he to her. He'd given her up for lost now, lost to her husband, who had been lost to her.

But nine days later, he finally summoned her to Endenich itself, at such time as she could do no harm. The end was near, he said in his telegram. If she wished to see her husband before he died, come now.

And so she went, with Johannes, and saw Endenich for the first time. Saw Endenich but not her husband. He had improved since the telegram. Dr. Richarz apologized for the inconvenience, but he felt it best she not see him now. She was finally there, and she could not see him because he was getting better! It was only when Johannes emerged from Robert's rooms and agreed with the doctor that she left. It would not, Johannes said, kill her beloved husband to see her, as she had feared everyone there thought. And while it would not kill her to see him, it would upset her terribly. Johannes alone had been allowed to see him. He had been, for some time, the only person allowed to see him. Johannes bore all the terror of that sight, for her, for the world, and whatever she saw of her husband she must see in him.

Before returning to Düsseldorf, they walked through the Endenich garden, profuse with flowers and insects and leafy shade in the summer heat. She was tired from the trip and from the preparation in her mind to see her husband and the terrible combination of disappointment and relief that she was not to see him. All she wanted to do was leave the garden path and lie down on the grass beneath a tree with Johannes—those two trees, she pointed out the very trees and told him the story of Philemon and Baucis as Robert had always told it to the children, Philemon and Baucis who were visited by Zeus and Hermes disguised as beggars and were the only human beings who gave them food and shelter and in return were offered by these gods anything they wanted, and they said what they wanted most was to die at the same time so they would never be apart, in life or death, and their wish was granted and they were turned into trees, two trees, side by side; like your mother and me, Robert told the children, never to be apart, because we are kind to strangers and we shall love each other eternally. Johannes did not lie down with her beneath those trees but led her instead back toward the main building and showed her Robert's windows and then took her by the shoulders and turned her around so she might see what Robert saw from the other side of those windows, the river and the mountains and the arrows of the sun.