by J. D. Landis
With her arrival, then, he would play softly, some of Schubert’s sinuous Ländler perhaps, and Emilie would dance around the room, holding an imaginary partner, who Robert wished could be himself if only he could be in two places at once. His brothers sometimes watched from outside the parlor door—never his father, whose emotions were always too close to his eyes, as he put it—but they did not ask her to dance, and Robert never inquired why, because he preferred to go on admiring them. And then, as he would change the dance through one of Beethoven’s folksy Ecossaises, the tempo and volume of his playing would necessarily increase, as would the speed of her feet and the breadth of her movements and the dishevelment of her hair and the wideness of her eyes. She appeared to be living out the dictates of one of the philosophers they had read and discussed together, Johann Hamann, who said all of nature itself was a “wild dance” and those of us who are wild—the outlaws, the visionaries, the mad—hear more of the music of life than do the philosophers and the politicians and the bureaucrats. Robert never knew which brought in Emilie such a burgeoning of intensity to the other, the music or the dance. He knew only, as he improvised madly on themes he stopped drawing from any known source and created on the spot, and she leapt and turned and sometimes wrapped her arms about herself and twirled like lovers soon to love as one, that he could do no more for her than this, nor she for him.
But now he needed her to tell him about love. He knew she knew about love, but he didn’t know how. Such knowledge, he believed, was not so much a matter of experience as a grasping of the essence of the heart. Emilie grasped the essence of the heart with as much strength as she grasped his wrists to keep from flaying herself. She knew with the knowledge of the dispossessed.
Thus, armed with his desire and his inability to have expressed it to anyone but Emil Flechsig, who seemed no more eager for Robert to leave him for these girls than Robert would have wanted Emil to desert him, he knocked on Emilie’s door.
She knew it was he. Only her mother and Robert ever actually came to her door—the rest of the men in the family preferred to confront her at the supper table on those occasions when she wanted to leave the comforting blindness of her room in order to dine en famille, and besides Carl was now off living in Schneeberg and for all she knew Eduard and Julius, who had joined the family publishing business, bless their unimaginative hearts, had found homes of their own in Zwickau.
“Come in, my little pet,” she called.
He entered. Her room always smelled good, fresh, of flowers and the earth, he didn’t understand how or why, given her constant presence. Even the salves she used sometimes, unfruitfully, which inevitably either burned or irritated her skin and thus made her more vulnerable to the rash, and which always smelled of some corrupt herb, could not rob her room of its cleansed airiness. It was a sickroom, yes, but to him it was a place where life was renewed, not diminished. His sister was being eaten alive here, but as her body was consumed, her soul was expanding. To be with her here was to be blessed, as nowhere else, with anyone else.
She was lying on her bed, shadowed by its canopy, reading. It was the smallest bed imaginable, an angel’s bed, so narrow that her thin body barely fit within it and her arms hung off the sides as if she’d tossed them out to sea. She used neither sheets nor blankets, because of how they found their way to her skin no matter what she might be wearing. She lay instead upon the thick, huge pelt made of the remains of what Robert guessed were nearly a hundred rabbits, which their mother had stitched together.
“Listen,” she said before Robert could even greet her, and held up her hand until she found a certain page in her book: “‘I often find surging up within me a wild, mad desire for something I seek outside myself, but with a never-satisfied passion, because that something is my own heart, an obscure mystery, a confused and enigmatic dream of paradise of utter peace.’”
“Yes,” said Robert.
“You know it?” Emilie asked.
“Kreisler,” Robert answered.
“I should have known,” said Emilie.
Johannes Kreisler, the mad musician created by E. T. A. Hoffmann to be Hoffmann’s own double, was the artist that all artists now wanted to be, slightly insane, wholly brilliant, completely mysterious, utterly desirable.
Hoffmann had died two years before. The youth of Germany was still in mourning.
“Now everybody wants to be an artist,” said Robert, “instead of committing suicide like Werther.”
“Did you ever know old Cousin Georg?”
Robert shook his head. He had always found it difficult to keep track of his relatives. There was in him a desire to have no relatives. Not that he didn’t love his family. He simply wanted to be an Isolate, a free spirit born of no man and thus wholly of his own inheritance.
“He killed himself,” said Emilie.
“How?” Robert wondered immediately why that was the first question he asked when he heard about a suicide and not Why?
“He ate himself to death,” Emilie answered.
“You mean he deliberately ate so much that he exploded?”
Emilie smiled. She had a beautiful smile, though she seemed to have let her teeth go a bit. The rash was now so much part of her face that Robert didn’t see it any longer; or perhaps it was simply part of his eyes. He knew, from having held her head against his chest some few times when she was overcome with sadness, that her scalp was as pink with the rash as her face. He lived in fear that she might shave her head and then he would not get to see her toss her hair into absolute anarchy as he played the piano and she danced her way into the oblivion of the music.
“No, I mean he ate himself to death. He began with his toes and eventually consumed himself all the way up to his mouth.”
He watched her fight to level her lips so no smile would betray the extravagance of her story. “He must have had a very long neck,” he said. “Indeed, that is what has always troubled me about the story of Erysichthon—he too was said to have begun his self-devourment with his legs. But how, I have always wondered,” he added, like an old man inquiring into the preposterousnesses of myth, “did he accomplish this?”*
“Actually,” said Emilie, “Cousin Georg hanged himself.”
Now Robert knew how. He was determined not to ask why. “May I sit down?”
There was a chair next to her bed. He never sat on her bed, because it was too small. But when she was suffering, and needed him, she would point with her left hand, as she did now, to a spot on the floor where her rabbit-pad overflowed her bed to become a rug, and he would kneel there and blow gently on her skin if that’s what she wanted or smooth an ointment on her or lock her wrists within his strong hands to keep her from clawing herself.
He knelt beside her. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“You first.”
“It’s about love,” he said.
Emilie’s head flew back deep into her pillows and her mouth opened and flung straight up into the old attic beams an uproarious burst of laughter. Then she grasped his hand. “Tell me. Tell me now.”
“When I’m with Nanni Petsch,” he explained—“you know Nanni Petsch” (though he realized then that Emilie would not have seen Nanni Petsch since Nanni Petsch had been a little girl and would have to imagine what gifts Nature had bestowed upon her)—“I want to fall down on my knees and pray to her like the Madonna. But I can’t say a word. She’s the first one like that. I mean, the first one I truly desired. But then I found I desired Liddy Hempel even more. I asked her to dance at a ball, and she did. I could scarcely grasp what was happening to me. I remained unable to say a word. But her hand—it was in my hand. I could feel her thumb in my palm. It was all I’d ever dreamed of. I wanted nothing more out of life than this. And then a few days later at a party she didn’t seem to know who I was. I mean, she knows who I am, Robert Schumann, but she didn’t so much as acknowledge my existence. And she certainly didn’t seem to know that she had moved into my being and was now as much part of me
as I am part of myself. I didn’t know what to do. I ran out to the tavern and drank so much Tokay I got drunk. I told her I loved her, but of course she wasn’t there. I mean, her body wasn’t there. She was there—here!” He put his hands against his chest. “She is always here. I tell her over and over that I love her. But can she hear me?”
“No,” said Emilie.
“Then how am I going to tell her?”
“Don’t.”
“Not tell her at all? Why?”
“Because for you the agony is far more rewarding than any reply she might possibly make. Do you have fantasies about her?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
“Yes! I do!”
“Act upon them.”
“What!”
“Make love to her.”
“Make love to her! She probably won’t even dance with me again.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But you’re not going to ask her to dance, Robert. You’re going to ask her to make love.”
“I’m fourteen years old!”
“Best get to it, then. Off with you, Robert.”
“I’m not leaving.” He held more tightly to her hand and with his other hand grasped the pelts of some of the poor little rabbits.
“Will you stay with me forever, then?”
“Yes,” he said, relieved.
“Do you know what’s happening to me?”
“Is the itch coming back?” Now he held out both hands to her so she might put her wrists in them. She did not.
“The itch is never gone.”
“I mean the bad itch.”
“They’ve met.”
“Who’s met?” He thought she might be changing the subject, as she sometimes did to try to distract herself.
“The rashes. The one that started here”—she touched her forehead—“and the one that started there”—she pointed toward her feet. “Each day they’ve moved toward each other, down my body, up my body. It isn’t visible, day by day, but I can feel it on the skin, beneath the skin, I can tell when they’ve moved toward each other by a millimeter each. And now they’ve met, Robert. Last night they met. The poison has spread and can spread no more. Now it can only intensify. They’ve met. And the itch…” She brought her arms up beside her on the bed. The fingers of both hands clenched and unclenched in a steady rhythm. It was how she tried to keep from scratching.
“Bad?”
“It is indescribable. It is a desire so great I feel I would sell my soul to be permitted to give in to it.”
“Act upon it,” he said, as she had said to him.
She gave him a weak smile. “It is like love, Robert—do it, and the desire to do it grows. Do it, and you will be consumed by it.”
“I would like to be consumed by something,” he said.
“You have no idea what you’re saying.”
Her hands rose from beside her and stopped above the center of her body. They hovered, trembling, in the sweet air of her room like famished birds over the bounty of Paradise.
Once again he held out his hands to her.
She shook her head. “It will do no good.” Her voice was a choked whisper, as if she were trying not to scream. “It’s too strong.”
“You underestimate me.” He smiled and leaned forward on his knees and reached out to take her wrists in his hands. She acquiesced. She gave herself up to him. His large hands completely enveloped her small-boned wrists. His nails dug into his own palms around them. Half of each of her hands was trapped within his hands. He felt he could hold her till doomsday.
Then she began to struggle against his grip. He didn’t intensify it immediately, because he knew this was just the beginning and that she would grow stronger in her desire to escape, and this was nothing compared with that, she was capable of taking him to the limits of his own strength. He was strong because she was strong.
“Let go,” she said, as she often did.
“Never.”
She tried to pull her wrists away. Down, up, to the side. He was too strong for her.
She raised her back from the bed. She brought her beautiful, veiled face up close to his. She looked sadly into his eyes and spit into his open mouth. Still he did not let go. He swallowed what she’d given him and wondered if she thought he feared contamination. He feared nothing.
She flung her head at him as if to knock him senseless. He moved his head to the side and only their cheeks touched. Hers felt hot, from the exertion or the rash he couldn’t tell.
“You shave,” she announced.
“Yes,” he said proudly and relaxed his grip and realized immediately she had tried to trick him with her flattery.
She swung her legs around and curled them back and pressed her feet against his shoulders and pushed him, and he nearly lost his grip upon her wrists and maintained it only by twisting his body to the side so that her feet slipped from him, tearing the buttons from his shirt.
Then she kicked him. She rained blows down upon his head with her heels. He had to lower his head to her mattress and his face into the fur of the rabbits and to cover the back of his head with his hands and thus with hers. She ended up kicking her own arms until the pain and the contortion of it and perhaps her exhaustion seemed to cause her to lie flat against the bed again with her hands still locked in his over the center of her body.
He had won. She had fought him more violently than ever before. But he had won.
“Is it over?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Do you feel better?”
She did the same.
“What do you want?”
There were tears in her eyes. He had never seen her cry before. Emilie didn’t cry. Her rage and grief were expressed on her skin itself. Her eyes had always been immune to her pain.
“I want it to stop.”
“It will,” he said, because he had always believed that someday she would be free of her affliction. Life was a series of trials, was it not? The universe was in flux. The self was in chaos, torn between joy and pain. But Nature was ultimately good, and Nature would not allow his sister to suffer forever.
“And I don’t want it to stop.”
He took a deep breath. Her wrists went limp in his hands, but he did not let go, he merely loosened his grip and began gently to massage her skin with his thumbs in case he had hurt her. “That’s natural,” he said. “We can love as well as hate our pain.”
“You know nothing!” she screamed and tried to pull her hands from him and down upon her body.
He felt, though she had not yet succeeded in moving, that somehow she had grown stronger than he. He could feel her strength pass through his hands and into his arms and up through his shoulders into his back and down his back into his buttocks and legs and to his feet, the tops of which he pressed through his shoes against the floor to try to resist her. But it seemed no use. As she pulled her hands down toward the center of her body, he felt she could lift him right off the floor.
For the first time, he could not hold her back. He pressed his elbows into her bed and put his bottom lip between his teeth and placed the top of his head against his forearms for added leverage, but she was moving her hands toward her body and taking his hands with them.
As their hands descended, she raised her knees from the bed by bending her legs. He looked up. Her thin, white dress hung between her knees like a bridge. She pulled his hands down until he could feel her dress on the backs of both his hands and beneath it the inside of her thighs, which she pressed together as if to trap him there.
“Emilie!” he screamed as she pulled his hands farther down between her legs.
He let go. His hands flew off like starlings frightened from a treetop.
Her hands, free now, fell down between her legs and threw back the hem of her dress and seemed almost to fight with one another for position as they met where her legs met and her disease met, and she turned her hands upon herself and her fingers dug into her flesh and moved upon
her, and when Robert could look no more he looked up at her face and saw upon it such ecstasy as he imagined he would never see again.
After the piano was tuned, and all the Lyceum students were finishing lunch, Herr Richter stood before them as he often did at this time of day. But instead of lecturing them on some aspect of political philosophy suitable for discussion over dessert, like whether whipped cream itself was counterrevolutionary, or announcing a student debate in which one side would be permitted to speak only Greek (ancient) and the other Latin (necessarily ancient), he told them that the first class after lunch would be canceled for all of them because the new piano had finally arrived from Vienna and their very own Robert Schumann had agreed to, as many students later recalled Herr Richter’s exact words, “deflower it.”
“And I am certain he will play,” Herr Richter went on, “music worthy of an instrument that will become as much a part of the liberal tradition of this institution as the memory of your own dear selves within it. Perhaps some Beethoven, Herr Schumann, or even some Schubert.”
“Or some Schumann,” called Robert from his seat at one of the long tables in the dining room, where he sat with no more than a good view of each of the girls he desired when what he really wanted was to sit so close to each of them that he could taste their food even as they swallowed it.
“Or some Schumann,” echoed Herr Richter enthusiastically. “Bravo!”
The entire school marched to the theater, to which Robert and Herr Richter had preceded them, so that when the students arrived, Robert was alone on the stage, seated at the piano on two boxes, because in tottering combination they best approximated the height of the missing piano bench.
Robert turned to his fellow students and said, “Who is this?”
Even as they whispered among themselves, “Who is who?” Robert began to play.
He played a complex tune, serious on the one hand and not so much frivolous as gentle on the other, moving between the keys of D minor and F major, a little piece full of generosity and hope but growing in tension until it ended in a kind of indefinable disillusion if definitely not sadness.