by J. D. Landis
Dr. Richarz, far more experienced in the subterfuges of the involuntarily invaded, merely commented rhetorically, “What have you been eating?”
“Nothing.”
“Why?”
“Heinrich Heine is dead in Paris.”
“When did you learn of this?”
“Yesterday. But he died—”
“I know when he died.”
“And you’ve kept the news from me? For two months?”
“Not long enough, clearly. Is that why you’ve burned your papers?”
“No. But it’s why I’m not eating.”
“Did he stop eating?”
“The opposite. He said the only way he was able to kill himself was to starve himself to death, and that was against his principles. He was too weak to do anything else. But I’m not too weak to do something else. So I choose to do the one thing he could do but would not.”
“I fail to follow the logic of that. It’s madness.”
“What’s mad is to look for logic in suicide.”
“There’s always logic in suicide, Herr Schumann. Only death itself is illogical.
“Clean him up!” he ordered Herren Nämlich and Niemand.*
*Heinrich Heine had died in Paris on February 17, after eight years in bed, so paralyzed in the end that starvation remained the only possible means for him to hasten his death. (Even his eyelids were paralyzed; he had them propped open with matchstick fragments in order to read.) Earlier he had contemplated hanging, poison, defenestration, gunshot, and an overdose of the morphine, of which he already was administered seven grains every twenty-four hours, for which purpose moxas were burned along his spine for cauterization and the morphine rubbed into the open wounds. This was painful, but its aftereffect was the opposite, which is to say he felt not pleasure but nothing. This Jewish convert to Christianity, who was accused by his critics of having no religion whatsoever and offended everyone by saying that when he died God would pardon him because that was God’s job, proclaimed he did indeed have one: opium. Lying in bed, he relinquished his dark fantasy of escaping to America, where, he wrote, “there are no lords and no aristocracy, where all men are equal, that is to say, equally brutish, except of course for several million people with black or brown skin who are treated like dogs.” He even gave up his fantasy of walking again on avenue Matignon when one day his wife had pushed his bed near the window and he looked down at a dog pissing on a tree and realized he envied the dog. It was the last time he looked out the window at anything, even the sky. His wife, who would leave Paris before his funeral and not return for several months, left more and more of his care to the young and beautiful Camille Selden, whom Heine called, as if she were some mark of beauty on the ugly face of humanity, La Mouche, and for whom at the end of his life he wrote a poem called “La Mouche” that reminded Schumann of his own desire for Clara to appear before he died, as Heine’s image of La Mouche reminded Schumann of Clara as a girl, for whom he had been paralyzed in his desire:
I waited for you yesterday in vain
Until darkness became kind
And hid your absence in my pain
And my pain in the loss of my mind.
Endenich
APRIL 30, 1856
Your letters are like kisses.
Johannes Brahms
Dr. Richarz and Brahms sat back to back in the dos-à-dos, while Schumann lounged in the fauteuil with an atlas on one thigh and a large notebook on the other. He was dressed in his bedclothes, which hung loosely from his shoulders and his knees, though the slimness of a middle-aged man that emerged out of evaporated fat was visibly orbed and quaggy. As he bent over writing in the notebook, he chanted, “Babababababadadadadadada, babababababadadadadadada.”
“You see what I mean,” whispered Dr. Richarz directly into Brahms’s ear.
For once, the strange configuration of the dos-à-dos was of some use, as it allowed discreet conversation without forcing the confabulators to engage in any direct visual intercourse, though Dr. Richarz, when he moved his lips back from Brahms’s ear, tried to wrap his gaze around the delicate maidenlike profile of this exceptionally beautiful young man.
“Does he say nothing else?”
“He eats almost nothing and says almost nothing.”
“What is it he suffers from?”
“What is gone from his life—you, when you are not here; his wife; his music; the children; pleasure from the body; pleasure from—”
“Forgive me, doctor. I meant, what disease does he have?”
“As I told you when I summoned you, we feel he’s become incurable. Of what, we have no idea. What cannot be diagnosed cannot be cured. As you can observe, his brain is unquestionably exhausted, but we have no evidence that it has softened. His body is exhausted. But that’s because he won’t eat. One day he says his food is poisoned, and the next he claims we’re feeding him the excrement of other patients. From time to time, he takes some wine, and some jellied consommé, but they don’t sustain him. He’d die if we weren’t able to nourish him gastrically.”
“What other way is there to be nourished?”
“Permit me to spare you the details.”
“Shall I ask him myself?”
Now Dr. Richarz turned even from the beauty of Brahms’s face and whispered toward the open window that brought in spring breezes from the greening of the distant Siebengebirge. “Through a gastric tube we introduce food into his stomach.”
“What kind of food?”
“Decoctions of meat, which are very healthy and energizing, though he won’t keep them down. Milk, of course. Saltwater for the sodium. Sometimes even wine. Though, as I said, he takes wine on his own, quite a bit of it, he calls it save, a word from Chaucer, so he claims, though he makes no claims it saves him, merely produces oblivion, which sometimes seems to me in my darkest moments the only salvation there might be for all of us. Usually he takes it—the wine, I mean—with tobacco, though I worry he will set himself on fire even before he manages to starve himself to death. He purports to be one Erysichthon and gnaws on his toenails as if to mock me with such spurious nutrition.”
“He professes Erysichthon to be sacred—the god of artists,” said Brahms lightly, proud to be unburdened of a bit of scholarship that also demonstrated more than a little intimacy with the professor himself. “But tell me—where does this tube go?”
“To the stomach.”
“I meant—”
“Oh, in the mouth. When, that is, he allows it. The jaw is very strong, Herr Brahms. When we cannot breach it, we must enter through the nostrils.”
Brahms brought his hands protectively to his face. Dr. Richarz turned now to look at him directly, to stare at those eyes covered by those long fingers.
“There are experiments being done with rectal feeding tubes. I have so far resisted that temptation here. But if I must—”
Brahms left the dos-à-dos and walked toward Schumann, who had been silent for a time and now as Brahms approached began to speak again, not in nonsense syllables but in rhythm to the words he copied from his atlas into his notebook.
“Cologne … Emmerich … Frankfurt … Hanover … Heidelberg … Lorelei … Lübeck … Neckar … Rotterdam … St. Goarshausen …”
Dr. Richarz, who had cupped his ear in his hand, said, “He sits with his atlases and makes lists of places. In alphabetical order, which in its precision is confounding. He says they’re places to which he wants to escape from here.”
“These places he’s named now are places I have described to him from my visits to them with his beloved wife.”
Brahms sat down on the end of the fauteuil at Schumann’s feet.
“She’s in England now,” he told his friend. “I took her myself to the night train for Calais. She stays in London, in Hanover Square. She’s scheduled to play in Liverpool and Manchester and Dublin, but for now she’s in London. I get a letter from her almost every day. She’s most homesick. She says her whole heart is in Germany and
that only her lifeless body is in England. She’s met the queen and likes her very much but says that playing in her presence is difficult because the queen takes all attention from the music upon herself, though she doesn’t mean to. Your wife says it’s not easy to be the queen but it’s easier to be the queen than to be someone else in the presence of the queen. Oh, good—I found that funny as well. As you will this perhaps as well: Clara was playing one night in the private home of Lord and Lady Overstone, but the guests wouldn’t stop talking when she played—it must have been one of my pieces, though she was too kind to say so—so they wouldn’t be quiet, as I said, and so she just stopped playing, she put her hands in her lap and just stopped playing, and soon all the talk died away and there was silence and she looked at them with that look she has that makes you feel at once ashamed of yourself and grateful to be observed with such concern. And when she got back to Hanover Square, there had arrived there already a letter from Lady Overstone herself, who apologized not only for herself and her guests but for all the English, who she said had not gained the sophistication necessary for an appreciation of German music. She also wrote me of some gossip she heard that night at the Overstones’: Charles Dickens has boarded up the door between his dressing room and his wife’s bedroom to help him resist the temptation to visit her. He has too many children as it is, he says. Ten, she writes me, though one died. And she would have had ten with you, she says, had not one died and two been lost before birth. And so imagine how she feels for Catherine Hogarth—that’s the name of Dickens’s wife—whose husband builds a wall between them. What a thing to do for love, she says. What a terrible contradiction. She says they say all London speaks of it and no one understands the …”
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!