by J. D. Landis
The king was mad. He reminded Robert of his father, who had worshipped the past by writing about it and thus lived his dreams of chivalry and heroism within the smoke (he would have said the mist, as Robert himself would say the veil) of creation; but how much more healthy that was than to try to live such dreams as if one’s visions became corporeal through the very act of dreaming. In this, Robert and the king were alike. Music sometimes ate the paper on which he wrote it, and sometimes ate his mind.
The revolution and the Schumann family rode into Dresden at precisely the same moment.
The former came not merely from France but also by way of Vienna—whence Metternich himself was sent into exile, the words “tout est fini” spit from his teeth (little did he know how soon the counterrevolution in the form of Croatian mercenaries would evacuate him back into what Clara called the great universal whirlpool)—and from Hungary, where the rebels had recently been annihilated by the imperial armies of the Hapsburgs, who thought to restore order by mass executions, which didn’t work, and then by proclaiming all Jews the enemy of the state (and at the same time charging them a special tax for the privilege of having been made pariahs), which did.
The Schumanns came merely from a lunch in the countryside. It was a fine day in early May, the air serene, the sun descending with languid restraint. Clara was brimming over with baby, not merely Ludwig only just learning to walk and laughing as he stood holding her knees and bounced before her off the bumpy floor of the bumpy carriage, but also with the baby bouncing within her, due in two months. Unlike many women, Clara was no more beautiful pregnant than not; but unlike any other woman he had ever seen, she was never not beautiful. He realized this might have less to do with how she looked at any given moment than with how he looked at her. She had never become part of him. Perhaps that was the secret. He always saw her as someone who was so much not himself that he was continually filled with the desire to contain and invade her both.
Across from them, Marie, seven, sat with Elise, five, and Julie, four, sisters all together with their little brother bouncing before them on the floor. They should have had another brother with him, though where would he have sat, Emil? He would, Robert reckoned, be three years, two months, twenty-three days old, were he not locked forever at the age at which he’d died, one year, four months, fourteen days, exactly one year, ten months, eleven days ago, ailing all the time and miserable, from the day of birth, whining and screaming and without a single pleasure in the world, not the breast, not music, nothing ever made him smile, not once in his entire existence, though when he died, finally and mercifully, a new child was alive within his mother. As soon as Robert saw he was a boy (he needed to see him; aural evidence was not to be trusted), he named him Ludwig. This was as much in commemoration of pain as of love; almost unendurably, a friend had died and now a son had died. This new being, then, this Ludwig, would, like art itself, embody nature, love, death, despair, and martyrdom. Yet Ludwig—look at him!—was born containing all the laughter in the world and seemed ambitious to give it back. He bounced now with a rhythm not the carriage’s.
“Drums.” Clara located the source of Ludwig’s inspiration.
Robert listened. “They disturb my counting.”
“Money?” She smiled, though this was a sore subject, in that it should be a subject at all.
“How old the children are.”
“So long as you don’t include me in your mathematics.”
He closed his ears against the beating of the drums. She was twenty-nine years, seven months…never mind how many days, she didn’t want him to calculate, and he had tried in his life with her to go against her wishes neither in the world nor in his head, the former having proved the more governable realm, because there are many times when one seems to have more control over distant kingdoms than over one’s own mind. Besides, when you love a woman—desire her—when she is a girl, it is always as a girl that you see her, desire her. Like a Raphael Madonna, Clara was half-girl, half-woman. She needn’t fight against her aging, which quite escaped his eyes and the passionate regard in which he held her.
“The drums are sounding the alarm.” She pulled Ludwig into her lap.
“And bells,” noted Julie, whose age more precisely than four he was unable to calculate because of the music in the air. She was the most beautiful of their children, so comely as to be almost frightening. Because he held her less than he did the others, he was always presenting his arms to her, as he did now. But she came into them less than did the others. Thus had they reached an accommodation regarding her beauty.
“And what is that?” asked Marie, who, as the oldest, did not like to hazard guesses about things of which she was unsure.
“Guns,” said Robert, covering his ears and smiling at his children.
The next day he and Clara went for a walk, looking for news, as Lamartine had written of the ancient Athenians, only to discover that cannons blasted in reply. What else was news, mostly, but some pale reflection in words of gunpowder’s report and the names of the recognizable dead?
They left the children with Henriette, their nanny, who was too sick to get out of bed. This was their excuse to the children—desperate to find out for themselves what all the shouting and shooting were about—for not taking them along: They must stay home to see after Henriette until the doctor arrived.
The farther they walked into the city, the more intense the strife. Robert felt like a seed in the center of a ravened fruit, an inconspicuous pip that could be neither swallowed nor bitten.
Yesterday’s gunfire, they learned, had come primarily from the arsenal, which the rebels had tried to seize after having attempted to detain the fleeing king of Saxony by removing the poles from his carriage. This angered and humiliated Friedrich Augustus, who sent his troops to the arsenal with orders to defend it to the death. He then made plans to ride out of town in a less conspicuous carriage, which he did that night, to Königstein, and in the meantime he sent a message to the king of Prussia to send his troops to save him should he fail to save himself.
The rebels, unable to take the arsenal, were armed with such household instruments as knives, hammers, pitchforks, and scythes, the last in greatest number because the scythe afforded the most defensive distance from one’s adversary and for psychological protection bestowed upon its proprietor a certain Grim Reaperishness. It was, however, neither long nor bulky enough to offer much protection against bullets, which kept entering and dropping the bodies of men who but a moment before were slicing futilely at the air before them with that stately, sweeping rhythm Robert remembered seeing in the summer fields around Zwickau once the earth had begun to recover from the insults delivered by the feet of Napoleon’s vast army.
Because their weapons were proving useless against the superior power of the combined Saxon and Prussian armies, the rebels had erected barricades in the streets, quite in the French tradition and thus a triumph of delusion over design. Indeed, their design was said to be the work of Richard Wagner, who had been preaching for several years that the new Germany was like a bronze statue awaiting a single hammer blow in order to be freed from its mold, as well as from the fungus of Jewification. These ramparts were a collaboration of paving stones, rubble stones, wooden beams, iron rods, rags, broken glass, deranged chairs, vegetable matter, and such humans as were foolish enough to think such a pile of rubbish might have the force of the commandment Thou Shalt Not Shoot Me and so stood shakily upon these quavering cumulus displaying the black-red-gold imperial colors appropriated by the democrats in the common misconception that symbolism has meaning in a witless world.
Robert stopped to count fourteen corpses in the courtyard of the hospital. This was no easy task. They were being arranged by Prussian soldiers for public exhibition, and this display was clearly meant to discourage others from challenging authority. To mock these dead and perhaps to indicate the dispersion of the mind as written on the permutability of the body, one man’s head was being put on
another’s neck, another’s hands on another’s wrists, some were given two left feet, while halves of men, severed latitudinally at the waist, never east/west, were joined in incongruous fusion, though all the resultant carcasses, Robert realized, were almost exactly the same height. Thus at least one point was made: You want democracy, we’ll give you democracy!
Robert wanted democracy. He was a republican in theory. But how could he admire wholly and genuinely those to whom his music, when they troubled to hear it, which they never did, was as foreign and distasteful as their unsettled cadavers were to him, if of considerably less interest?
He felt able to stare at them for hours, and might have, had Clara not turned him away from the direction of the Rächnitzer Höhe, from which were rising huge clouds of smoke as evidence that artillery bombardment was coming from that side of Dresden. He had no desire to be blown to bits, especially today, when the expanding chaos of this war gathered inside him into a peculiarly indivisible asylum. His inner peace grew in direct proportion to disorder. He had to be pulled by her strong hands away from the sun-soaked smoke.
As it was, bodies fell even from the shrouded sky. Robert himself saw two of them in midflight, though by the time he turned Clara’s attention to this incredible phenomenon—those two men who had been falling into the morning so visibly full of life, mouths in unabridged dilation, eyes biting at the very air—those two men were dead, the breathtaking drama of their departure noted only by himself and by their Prussian executioners leaning out the windows to watch, the way a child does a coin he sacrifices to the physics of his curiosity.
“Cl-ara!”
He could not get even her name out fast enough.
The air remained smoky from gunpowder and fires—the opera house was in flames, a mixed blessing—and the shucking of the pavement for the barricades. She offered him a handkerchief, apparently thinking such vapor caused his breathlessness.
He pointed. She saw. “They are throwing people out of windows.”
He remembered imagining her at her window ten years before in Leipzig, pressed against the glass, transparent in her desire for him, surrendering to time and space, to the air between them, so he might catch her when she sailed to him. All he’d really seen was her white towel, signaling him, an emblem of surrender then, and now, as men in windows waved the same at soldiers who desired them, for what else was murder but a coupling?
In the Scheffelgasse, there were twenty-six corpses lined up. All students, they were told, unnecessarily, for these were clearly students, long-haired, ink-nailed, thin and mostly handsome, wearing vests and Mayfair scarves and pants too short and shirtsleeves too long and small conformist beards on those mature enough and on the upper lips of others hair so delicate he wished he were breeze to move it. They had all been hiding in one room, which he imagined must have been invigorating until the soldiers actually arrived, bodies warm from fear and warm from sweet propinquity, ideas swarming the way they do among the young, foolish ideas sometimes but ideas whole and unassailable, voices low against discovery but intrepid in the voice they gave to freedom, which now they had. They had not been mutilated like the bodies at the hospital. They lay in strict surrender to the geometry of death, rather like keys on a piano, but he longed to lie down with them as much as to put his hands upon them, to live within the four strong walls of death.
Clara was weeping. Dresden was on fire as it had not been on fire since it had been incinerated in 1681. It was difficult to imagine that a city might actually burn like this, particularly Dresden, which had been rebuilt to spin like a wheel away from such disaster. But who would have known that fire might come from the sky like this, a mockery of rain?
Three tall houses on the Zwingerstrasse burned together, martyrs on stakes, each racing the others toward the fugue of ash while spectators made wagers on which would vanish first. And flames spread horizontally as well, through the holes carved out of buildings so the rebels could move unobserved through such tunnels as now squealed with fire.
The Zwinger Palace itself, on the other hand, was relatively untouched, the Atlantes carved by Balthasar Permoser poised just above the fires, which gave the illusion of having eaten them off right through the genitals, when in fact they had been sculpted cockless, preening on their narrow columns.
He could not distinguish, he found, between the hundreds of prisoners being guarded in the Frauenkirche, where they displayed their great supply of black-red-gold ribbons on the retable shelves above the altar and from all three levels of gallery, and the even greater number of Prussian soldiers who were resting from their feral labors on the great communal straw mattress raked out over the whole of the Altmarkt. He had no feelings of right or wrong, only of a vague contentment at withdrawal into whatever part of him erected barriers against the fouling of his art.
He did not want to go home, and Clara was unable to convince him of danger to themselves. But when she said the children might be in peril, he insisted they hurry back to them, only to discover that the primary threat came from within the house. Carl Helbig, chief among his Dresden doctors, was in attendance upon Henriette, who, he said, was suffering from smallpox.
Disease had no meaning for children. If it had, Marie and Elise, at least, might have taken greater heed of the illness and then the loss of their little brother Emil. It was the war that enthralled them, the sounds of guns and drums and bells and the occasional shudder through the house and the peculiar interruption of household habits, their parents out together in the middle of the day, the absence of music, the vacuum-like pressure of history producing a strange sort of echoing silence in the house until their father filled them in on his grand adventures in the street.
“It is not a fairy tale,” said Clara, as much to him as to them.
It remained just that until the next day, when there was a terrific pounding on the front door. It was for Robert quite an interruption, because he was at the piano, having returned to the composition of music for children to play, easy pieces for the fingers that he felt expressed some complexity of mind even he could not fathom. He was not unaware of the turmoil outside the house—how could he be, with tocsins poisoning the air and cannons engulfing the light!—but felt utterly at peace within the music. In the end, when armies finally disengaged, as they always did, what was left, aside from death (which was the very definition of vacuity and thus was indecipherable), but art? It was the only survivor, finally, in the crush of human discord.
“Someone go to the door!” he said as the pounding continued, which is what he always said when there was a noisy interruption in the world outside his room. He knew he was never heard in such disagreeable edict. He would not offer it otherwise.
Finally, he rose and opened his own door and walked into the hallway, from which he could see Clara at the window, peering out from behind the drape.
“Who…?” he began, only to have her wave violently at him, to urge him back.
He retreated into his music room but left the door sufficiently ajar so he could see her. When she opened the front door, a man’s fist came toward her. Her own hand went up, to protect herself, he thought, until he saw she merely meant to catch the man’s hand, to keep it from crashing once again into the door. So his fist lay for a moment in her palm, held above her head. What pain the man must feel, to have his fingers crushed in such a hand as hers, that humbled pianos, muscular with music.
There were five men in all, with the black-red-gold hanging from their sleeves and weapons.
“Where is your husband?”
She said nothing. The man stared down.
“Whose baby?”
“My husband’s.”
“We’ll have him back to you in time for that.” He touched her stomach.
“Back from where?”
“The militia. We’re fighting for our freedom.”
“There can be no freedom when men are required to fight.”
“There can be no freedom when men do not fight.”
> “Then there can be no freedom.”
“Did you hear that, men?” he said to the others. “We’re fighting for nothing.”
They were puzzled. The capacity for irony that makes a man a leader confounds his followers when it’s put to use.
“Search the house,” he ordered, perhaps to give them something to do.
She stood her ground. “He isn’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“Not here.”
“When will he be here?”
“That will be known only when he arrives.”
“When do you expect him?”
“I never expect him.”
To do what? thought Robert.
“We shall return,” said the man.
“I shall expect you,” said Clara.
Robert was surprised, the moment the door closed on his recruiters, to see Clara rush to him.
He came out to meet her. “That was brilliant!”
“We must leave immediately.” She held tight to him, as if, against her words, to keep him there.
“Did you not once tell me that you wished to see me save you from the barbarians?”
“It’s the barbarians who ask you to join them.”
“Who, then, are the kings’ soldiers?”
“Barbarians as well.”
“And I?”
“You’re not here. As I said.”
She took charge completely of their evacuation. Out the back door and into the garden, taking Marie only, and taking her only because she happened to be close by when they fled.
“The children.” Robert had no idea where she was taking him. It was like being led somewhere by your mother, and you cannot bear to be separated from your brother, your dear sister.
“It’s you the rebels want.” She opened the garden gate, pushed him well behind her so he would not be visible, and slowly leaned forward until her eyes could see the way was clear.