by J. D. Landis
Johannes appeared with his knapsack, hand thrust within. “What are you two laughing at?”
This only amused them further. They would not tell him.
“This is it.”
“It’s a box,” Clara observed.
“A cigar box. With my name engraved.”
“Are there any cigars inside?” Robert held out his hand.
“No cigars.” Brahms put the box into Robert’s hand.
Robert looked inside, shook his head, closed the box, and stared at it. “Who is ‘Brams’?”
“Aha!” Brahms jumped off the floor.
“Well,” said Clara, “if you fell asleep while I played, I would spell your name wrong too.”
“As long as you call me Chohannes,” he replied.
He did not fall asleep at that moment, but he could without a moment’s notice. The great, youthful energy he displayed in everything he did—at the piano, in perilous acrobatics upon virtually any flat or angled surface, in seizing upon ideas and reading books with a zeal that cracked their bindings—he could set aside with no more thought or preparation than a bird bestows upon the stream of air beneath its wings. He glissaded into sleep at any hour, in any place, so that they might come upon him napping in any room, on almost any surface, though he seemed to favor chairs over couches and floors (if carpeted) over tables.
When one of them happened to come upon Brahms sleeping like this, he or she would fetch the other and there they would stand side by side, watching him, as they sometimes watched their own children sleep. But this was not a child, for all they called him boy. This was their young deity, and his sleep protected them as much as they protected him and it, standing over him, able to stare into his features and limn his figure and breathe with the breath they saw migrate through his chest and move the strands of golden hair upon his shoulders like fingers on a piano.
Robert, in particular, tried to learn from Brahms to sleep so simply. He stood and matched him breath for breath and even closed his eyes upon the only thing he now could look upon with unambiguous joy. Sleep had always been his enemy. But when he saw it like this, embracing, and embraced by, a young man whose indisputable genius appeared disconnected entirely from disquietude, it seemed a whole new science, the invention of contentment. He had been insomniac, he guessed, his whole life. It was one thing not to sleep—and when he was young, he had prided himself on spending night after night awake, all fired up and in flames, seething in sweet and fabulous sounds all night, free, light, and blessed as he swam in the pure ether of dangerous emotions while writing music, smoking, drinking, until finally, one morning, the sun would so hurt his vision that he would clamp his lids against it and feel the alcohol paint his brain to rest. But it was another to lie awake and hear what Dr. Helbig called auracular delusions and Robert called his inner concerts.
Dr. Helbig proclaimed hearing the most animate of the senses once night had come, the last to shut down and the first to awaken. It was also, he said, the sense most closely related to the emotions and linked with the forces affecting discretion, aggression, revenge, and the appreciation of music. Imagine—a doctor so percipient that he is able to find a connection between hearing and music!
To draw anxiety from Robert’s brain, Dr. Helbig attempted what he called transcranial magnetic stimulation by putting a magnet to Robert’s head and moving it gently across his scalp and face and then, in apparent frustration, with enough force against the back of his neck to suggest to his patient the shoeing of a horse.
“You handle that thing like Lavater trying to galvanize the genitals.”
“Your brain is impervious to science,” complained Dr. Helbig.
“Likewise, I’m sure,” said Robert, who was immediately presented with evidence only that Dr. Helbig was impervious to humor.
Robert nonetheless allowed Dr. Helbig to proceed to hypnotize him, which he did by swinging a large key before his eyes, with the result that the fear of keys Robert had confessed years before to Dr. Reuter was reinforced and augmented—the house of death was now on both sides of the door.
Dr. Helbig told him he was working too hard on his music for Faust, in which, fittingly enough then, as now, who should arise during the midnight scene but the figure of Anxiety, blinding Faust for his part in the deaths of Philemon and Baucis, whose story, in Ovid, had moved Robert to tears from the early days of his marriage, when he realized he could not imagine life on Earth without his wife.
“Dr. Helbig said he had observed my symptoms of overwork in two professions. Mine and one other. Can you guess what the other was?”
“Prostitution,” said Brahms with a wicked smile dancing through his eyes. So long as the children weren’t in the room, he seemed eager, always, to allude to his teenage piano-playing days in Hamburg’s harborside Kneipen, where the whores worked the sailors and used him as a kind of bait, kissing and fondling him one after the other until such time as she was hired.
“Close.”
“Oh, Robert, it’s not close at all.” Clara knew this story well.
“Tell me!” Brahms retained a child’s enthusiasm for information; their lives, to him, seemed a series of riddles, the answers to which were always diverting.
“Accountant.”
“No!” The boy leapt to his feet. Whether it was amusement or outrage he could not contain was impossible to tell.
“Accountant,” Robert repeated.
“And you let this idiot hypnotize you!” Johannes was practically dancing in place. “What did you see when he hypnotized you?”
“I saw what I see in my dreams. Horrible visions of people I love—distorted into ghosts that stretch from sky to Hell. And dreams themselves. I dream of dreaming. I observe myself both as the creator of and the participant in nightmares.”
“And yet you long to sleep.” Johannes did not resist the exaggerated effect that words forced on such affliction. He entered sympathetically into the experience without making the mistake of being seduced by it into either imitation or incense. He early on displayed the clemency and curiosity he brings to Endenich.
“Because when I don’t, I hear my inner concerts. Hallucinations in sound. Not always beautiful. Sometimes, but not always.”
“And so you work all night.”
“‘The night cometh when no man can work’”—he quoted the book of John oracularly, before pausing to give his words their utmost bathetic effect—“that’s why Clara bought me my tepee.”
“Oh, show him your tepee!”
On her second tour to Paris, she had once again had a fantasy that she might sit down with Gérard de Nerval. But she learned Nerval had traveled in reverse direction, from France to Germany, when the woman he loved had left him for a flutist, the news of which made Clara believe that she might capture him, until she was further informed that in Austria he had fallen in love with that treacherous Camilla Pleyel. And what did this have to do with a tepee? Johannes might wonder.
“It’s such a delight to hear you talk that I’m impatient only that you continue.”
“You remind me of myself when I used to try, and fail, to say such things to Agnes Carus.”
“He brings her up,” said Clara, “to chide me for my mention of Gérard de Nerval. Whom I have never met, let alone kissed, by the way.”
“And yet adored.” He wondered if Brahms was, for her, Nerval come to life, or come into her life—a dream of a youthful lover, whom she had never had. Those we never see remain immortal. Nerval himself was older than Robert and had served his term in the madhouse, out of which had come Aurélia. Gautier had described him as “comme un oiseau,” in direct reference, once again, to Plato’s Ion, in which the divinely mad artist is a bird who pulses in the air, ever looking upward, careless of the world below. “‘Il s’en alla disant,’” Robert quoted his wife’s ideal lover: “‘Pourquoi suis-je venu?”
“Please,” said Brahms.
“‘He went away asking: Why did I come?’” he translated. “Is it not
the most meaningful line of poetry every written?”
“Perhaps my Nerval did not mean it metaphysically,” Clara commented wickedly.
“The tepee?” Brahms surrendered, though whether to inquisitiveness or discomfort was unclear.
She had learned in Paris that Nerval carried a tepee whenever there was the slightest chance he might not sleep at home, which was often indeed. Therefore, no matter that a bed or mattress might be offered him, whether in the aftermath of one of Petrus Borel’s orgies or in Théophile Gautier’s garret, he would unfold his tepee, set it up, crawl within, and, with the floor beneath him and a mere saucer of ceiling visible above, fall immediately asleep.
“May I try it?” was the first thing Brahms said after Robert had erected his tepee in the middle of the sitting room, where the three of them spent most of their time together when they were not making music.
He was on his knees and halfway through the flap when Robert said to him, “It’s impossible to sleep in there,” and to Clara, “Forgive me, darling—it was the most thoughtful of gifts.”
They heard no more from Johannes, who curled up in the shape of the tepee’s base. They watched him sleep and collaborated in their love for him.
“He wants what I have,” whispered Robert.
“And do you want what he has?”
“I want to be him.”
“And he wants to be you.”
The month after his arrival the two men’s portraits were done by Jean-Joseph Laurens, a fastidious Frenchman who admired Robert’s music but had never heard of Brahms and so would not sketch the two of them in a joint portrait. Robert had to persuade him to sketch Brahms at all.
“Sit by me,” Robert said to Brahms.
“You confuse my eye,” said Laurens.
“I should be so fortunate,” said Robert.
He gave Brahms things to read so he would not be bored and saw in his mind a portrait like Filippino Lippi’s drawing of St. Sebastian and his bookish friend.
But what emerged from the silver stylus of Laurens’s pen was a truth in contrasts: Johannes in profile, a dream of beauty, his hair like a woman’s not in its length but in its careless skew, its embrace of that noble head and its tentative touch upon the cheek, to frame his face like a curtain framing a stage; himself dead on, stupefied almost, hair ill-fitting, face bloated, eyes insane.
Was there ever better evidence of Goethe’s draussen/ aussen lines? No part of us is completely inside or outside. The interior determines the exterior. The body is a map of the mind.
“Thank God I didn’t let Dr. Helbig make a plaster cast of my head. Remember, Clara, how he tried to trick me by saying that history would want to compare my skull with Haydn’s and Mozart’s and Beethoven’s, when the entire purpose of the scheme was to subject this poor cephalon to some psychical scrutiny that might reveal the source of its inner tumult. Imagine having to live with a three-dimensional version of that.” He pointed to the portrait. “Of this.” He pointed to his head.
“I love to live with it,” said Clara, bringing it to her bosom and only then telling him that Laurens had noticed, while drawing Robert’s eyes, that his pupils had become enlarged.
“I was just trying to stay awake.”
“I thought you could not sleep,” said Brahms, at whom Robert looked up from his wife’s breast as he looks up at the portrait beside his bed in Endenich, Brahms’s hair glowing in the moonlight, and waits to die to wait for Clara.
He had in the past been separated from her, when she was not touring, only by the revolution, so called, which fizzed into Germany, like so many other inebriate illusions, straight out of France. There, King Louis Philippe was deposed, the Second Republic declared, and Louis Napoleon elected president. Germany had seemed to have been freed from repression either by our marriage, Robert told Clara, or, because it occurred in the same year as their sacred union, by the death of Prussia’s King Friedrich William the Third, who had fired the brothers Grimm, of all people, from the Göttingen University faculty (because they would not take a loyalty oath), banned smoking on all but the Charlottenburg highway in Berlin (on which thousands of shameful exiles then appeared at the lunch hour, in so great a cloud of smoke that the king’s espions were unable to identify one from the next), and so cozied up to his friend Metternich in Vienna that Germans, as well as Austrians, came to believe that subversion lay in every thought and therefore every thought must remain either spoken or unspoken, the king could never remember which. So when his son, FW IV, assumed the throne, everyone believed it was the dawn of a new era. Or was it the Schumann/Wieck marriage that brought such hope?
Friedrich William the Fourth did pardon the brothers Grimm, in the process of which he mixed that blessing by making them members of the Berlin Academy, the kind of appointment that for any artist signals an approbation virtually guaranteed to stifle audacity, not to mention the baneful weight with which it burdens one’s résumé and the vainglorious gasbags it confers as one’s drinking partners. He also tried to do away with the CIA (the Central Investigation Agency, not to be confused with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, its mirror in repression and yet its greatest enemy, spies being the very priests of earthly communion and therefore jealous of both the favors and the strictures of their common god). But the CIA told the king that if it did not exist, the state itself could not exist, for like a religion the state demanded the rooting out of secrets that would not be secrets if there were not someone in authority to name them so and to punish those who tried to hide what were otherwise thoughts unthought and therefore unindictable. The king, realizing that the CIA possessed the arcanum arcanorum itself (i.e., freedom is an illusion fostered by the state for the purpose of compassionate subjugation), countenanced its continued operation while pretending to the public that he had dissolved it, a rather delicious secret in itself and one whose revelation, no matter how discreetly whispered—or whose realization, no matter how profoundly masked beneath such quotidian concerns as weather or health or what’s-for-supper—was punishable by death or such alternative to death as the state deemed homogeneous.
But the king was confused in his patriotism. He forced the resignation of Professor Hoffmann von Fallersleben not because he didn’t love to sing the professor’s famous new song—“Teutschland, Teutschland über Alles,” in the king’s antiquated pronunciation—but because Professor Hoffmann had waited so long to write the song, waited centuries. The king blamed his subject for having been born in the modern age. (Who isn’t?) Hoffmann had not, like most people, merely outlived his usefulness—he had outlived, period! So had the king himself, and this drove him mad. He wanted to govern like kings of old, riding his horse (if anything would kill the monarchy, and thus bring an end to civilization, it was the railroad!) through his towns, bowed to by contented peasants, paid his Peter pence by honest landleasers, prayed for by devout and obedient clergy, given hot baths and moist damsels by his princes. It was a romantic vision that left no room for the kind of federal constitution put in writing. The written word was an insult to the ideal of ruling. No sheet of paper would come between God in Heaven and Germany. And if people wanted a parliament, then to hell with the railway between Berlin and Königsberg—pay for it yourselves!
And pay for your own goddamned potatoes. It was one thing for the Irish to begin to starve after the failure of two years’ crops. That alone would have been enough to raise potato prices in Germany. But the blight showed no respect for the high seas or the great mountains or boundaries forged by war and language; it attacked the defenseless German potatoes that had heretofore grown with enviable profligacy in Saxony and Thuringia and Hesse. And who ate more potatoes than German peasants? German pigs! No more Schweinebraten! No more Ripple mit Linsen and no more salty Bierschinken, and not just because the pigs were perishing. Lentils weren’t growing! The gentle female flower of the Humulus was being raped by Nature in the upper valley of the Main, whose phallic cone became the hops in beer. Beer shortage! No wonder
there were riots. Starvation and sobriety formed a tragically potent coalition for social change. What did Germans need to keep them docile? Ham and scissors, boots and garters, wool and soap and yarn and beer. Most of all beer!
The king tried to blame the Jews, until it was explained to him that only they would not suffer from an absence of pork on the table, and if Jews could not suffer from their actions, they simply would not act.
But it was, the king declared, a contemptible Jewish clique responsible for the attempt to destroy the natural order between the governed and their spiritual superiors. The Jews wanted to throw all the estates together! The Communist Manifesto was riding into Germany like a sodomite on the backside of French liberal poules mouillées. No longer was communism itself vegetating in unheeded attics on wretched straw pallets, as that traitor Heine had observed six years before; though even then he had warned of a new apocalypse to be led by such beasts as would make St. John’s seem like gentle doves and amoretti in comparison. Christianity could do nothing against the martial ardor of the Teutons. The cross had rotted away. A drama would be played out in Germany that would make the French Revolution seem like a school play.
How nice of Heine to warn his ex-countrymen! One might have pardoned him if he hadn’t turned around and warned the French, “You have more to fear from a liberated Germany than from all the Holy Alliance with all its Croats and Cossacks put together.” France fear Germany? As the old song went: The French invaded; the Germans paraded. Germans would never soil their bloodlines with the polluted offspring that came from foreign irruption and the gift women insisted upon making of themselves to their conquerors.
He hated everyone, Heine. That was the only redeeming thing about him. Nothing disgusted him more than the nobility, particularly the Prussian nobility, unless it was everybody else. What torture it must be to despise oligarchy and democracy both, to have faith in neither men nor Man, to realize that there could be no constitution adopted by no diet—no laws made to assure justice to all men and comfort to all mortals—that would prevent what he called the old frenzied madness from breaking out again and again and again across the landscape of time.