Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  So when Schumann published his article on Brahms, he was not only heralding the arrival of a new genius but also announcing the end of his own career. He was passing the crown to his heir; passing his wife too, perhaps. Four months later he leapt into the Rhine, was dragged out by fishermen, and his incarceration at Endenich began.

  Richarz kept me waiting the first time, just like he did again now, possibly hoping I would give up and leave. ‘Frau von Arnim,’ he said to me on that previous visit, ‘how exactly can I explain to you, in terms you might understand, just what it is that the human mind most closely resembles?’

  We’d already dismissed books and authors. ‘A cabinet of precious jewels?’ I wondered.

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘Not really.’

  ‘A flower?’

  ‘Heavens no.’

  ‘A city?’

  Dr Richarz appeared to like this; he rubbed his chin, but then said, ‘No, I don’t think that will do.’

  ‘Is the mind perhaps like melting snow; or the wheels of a carriage?’

  I don’t know how many metaphors I offered him; I could feel my own poetic stock run almost to exhaustion when at last the doctor’s face became illuminated by a happy thought.

  ‘I have it!’ he declared. ‘The human mind is like … is like the universe itself!’

  Well, this was good to know.

  ‘You do recall, after all,’ he said, ‘that our great poet once set himself the task of writing a novel about that very subject.’

  Yes, of course I knew of Goethe’s failed ambition, but I was not to be drawn back to Goethe again. ‘If the mind is like the whole world,’ I said to Richarz, ‘then I can see why your task as healer of minds is as futile as the poet’s lofty goal.’ Of his novel about the universe, Goethe managed little beyond an essay on granite.

  ‘The world; the spirit,’ Dr Richarz enthused, ‘our philosophers have shown beyond doubt that they are identical and commensurate; that they are inherent within one another and stand in a necessary relation of indiscernible identity …’

  ‘Yes, Herr Doktor,’ I said patiently. ‘I am quite familiar with Hegel and Fichte and Schopenhauer. But I do sometimes wonder if there really is any more wisdom in them than in the tales of elves and fairies my grandmother used to tell me on her knee.’

  Dr Richarz laughed loudly. ‘My dear Frau von Arnim,’ he chuckled, ‘you are one of the most esteemed literary figures of our times; and your late husband, if I may be so bold as to say, must have been one of the luckiest men alive. But really, madam, though you have commerced with geniuses like a shooting star amidst the heavenly constellations, you speak, after all your years of rich experience, with the simple, delightful voice of a schoolgirl.’

  That was when he got up and left me; cordially, on that occasion, but with just as much determination to make me wait. That’s what we do at my age: wait. We count the days and think how many have been counted for us already.

  Schumann had been at Endenich for a year when I made my first visit. In that time he had made what Richarz considered modest progress, thanks to warm baths, enemas and walks in the woods. Joachim, on the other hand, told me Schumann was so starved of company he had nearly forgotten how to speak. A whole hour passed until at last I saw him then, poor Robert, coming into the room, his face instantly transformed when he recognized me, rushing to embrace me and at first barely able to form a sentence. Once he mastered his tongue, he was like a musician long separated from his instrument, the words beginning to pour from him. Soon he was talking almost too quickly for me to grasp what he was saying, about places he had visited in the past, about his family, and above all about the wonderful music of Brahms.

  After that first visit, I wrote to Clara straight away, told her my concerns about Richarz and his establishment. Clara came to Endenich, spoke with Richarz, then went home again without even seeing her husband. In the interests of what she considers right, she can show the cold determination of a well-sharpened blade.

  Joachim saw how Clara teaches her pupils. A young girl was there at the Schumanns’ house one day for a piano lesson; a girl with some mechanical talent but not the slightest shred of musicality. The kind, in other words, whose parents provide real musicians with a living.

  This pupil was sitting bolt upright as required. All unnecessary movement of her limbs had been solved long ago by making her balance coins on the backs of her hands while playing the preludes of Bach. Now, whether it was a Beethoven sonata or a Schubert waltz beneath her fingers, this girl performed with an aloofness born of terror. Should she ever dare love what she played, the imaginary coin might slip from her hand, and she would feel the sharp lash of Clara’s displeasure.

  On this occasion they were studying Robert’s music, Joachim told me. The pupil had mastered Kinderszenen before she was twelve or thirteen; Joachim listened as she played ‘Chiarina’ and ‘Estrella’ from Carnaval, then was coached in the suite Kreisleriana, which, like the Nachtstücke and Fantasiestücke, takes its title from the composer’s beloved E. T. A. Hoffmann.

  Joachim sat listening while the girl began the final movement, so humorous and macabre: a ghost story in music. It depicts Hoffmann’s fictional hero Johannes Kreisler creeping softly through the night. Joachim says that when he once heard Robert play it, it made the hairs on his neck stand up. Clara’s pupil, unfortunately, could not produce the same effect.

  Schumann instructs in the score that the left hand be ‘light and free’. According to Joachim, Clara’s pupil was taking the instruction quite literally; she was playing with the intended rubato, making the left and right hands almost disconnect. Joachim thinks this spectral finale shows Kreisler haunted by his double; or perhaps the lower stave is Kreisler while the upper is his cat Murr, the comical feline philosopher, tripping over moonlit rooftops. Either way, Joachim says, the player’s hands must be allowed a degree of independence, as if telling two different stories at once. But Clara was having none of it.

  ‘The left,’ she bluntly announced, interrupting her pupil. ‘Observe all note values carefully.’

  The flustered pupil was allowed to continue. It sounded even worse than before.

  ‘Halt!’ Clara cried, so suddenly that the pupil gave a start, tearing her hands from the keyboard as if it were a hot stove. Such was Clara’s own distress at the incompetence she had to deal with that for a moment she could not find her words. ‘I was not hitherto aware,’ she finally said, grandly, ‘that my pupil is come of the people of Nineveh.’

  The girl looked down at her lap, where her useless hands were folded, with an air of resignation.

  ‘Do you not know your left from your right?’ Clara said witheringly. ‘Do you not know how to count? Do you not understand that when I ask you to observe the note values in the left hand, it is not my wish that you should instead shorten yet further the already unpleasant staccato it pleases you to peck out with your right?’

  Joachim told me the girl was almost crying by now. He wasn’t surprised.

  ‘Young lady,’ Clara said to her, more softly but with undiminished firmness. ‘We are here not to make merry, but to serve a higher purpose in which our own insignificant feelings and sentiments can have no place.’ Then Clara sat down at the other piano. ‘Let me show you how it must be.’

  She began to play the same passage, her hands gliding with absolute confidence and control across the keyboard, and Joachim said it was like the sudden opening of a window, such was the purity and exactness of Clara’s touch. It was the sound of a truly great musician; yet it was a voice that was hers alone. Clara’s way of teaching is to try and make all her pupils sound just like her. In other words, to drain from them every last drop of individuality, turning them into brilliantly polished imitators.

  Joachim, dispirited, stood up and excused himself from the lesson. He had heard enough, he said to Clara; a remark that apparently left her pupil weeping inconsolably once he had vacated the room, since she had hoped to receive the famous you
ng violinist’s blessings on her own musical career. What he had heard, he told me, reminded him more of the chess-playing automaton that once amused Voltaire.

  Clara won’t allow her pupils to make their own mistakes; instead she makes them faithfully reproduce her own. But there can be no art without love, Joachim told me, even if it is a love that is flawed; and I knew from his eyes that he was thinking of Gisela, my daughter who refused his offer of marriage, though I advised her to accept. There must be love and despair, he said, humour and anger, reason and madness, jealousy and pride. Kreisleriana has all of these.

  When Schumann wrote it more than twenty years ago, he dedicated it to Chopin, whom he had praised in print just as he would later hail Brahms. Chopin, I’m told, took one look at the score and said the cover was very pretty. That is the scorn of a true artist: like the way Goethe shrugged off Beethoven after I brought them together.

  Perhaps when Brahms arrived on Schumann’s doorstep, a genuine artist would have had the upstart kicked back onto the street. But Schumann let him in, this beautiful young brothel pianist who signed his musical works ‘Kreisler’ after his favourite fictional character. Yes, Brahms too is besotted with Hoffmann’s supernatural tales: he arrived at the Schumanns’ house like a creature of Robert’s imagination made magically flesh. Some say Brahms was moved to visit after coming across the score of Kreisleriana, which he read as if it were about himself. So perhaps the ghostly figure in the last movement is Brahms, light and free, preparing to creep up on Schumann years later. Preparing to enter the house, steal the wife, sink his teeth into Schumann’s neck and drink the master’s blood. This was the ghastly vision Clara wrested from her pupil, then played so smoothly.

  But what had happened to Richarz and Peters? What could be taking them so long, upstairs with their patient while I sat waiting like a servant? Twelve months previously, Schumann had been allowed down to see me. Now he was permanently confined to bed, slowly starving himself to death.

  The door opened and I saw Richarz. ‘Frau von Arnim,’ he said. ‘Are you prepared to see the patient?’

  I gave a silent nod.

  ‘And do you undertake to restrain yourself in the patient’s presence from any form of behaviour which might exacerbate his condition?’

  Again I nodded.

  ‘Then you may come with us,’ he told me, and I rose to follow the doctor upstairs.

  ‘Does he ever compose now?’ I asked Richarz as I clasped the banister and slowly mounted the steps, feeling every year of my long life in the stiffness of my joints.

  ‘He has jotted a few scraps,’ Richarz told me, turning to watch my ascent behind him, though not offering any help. ‘Herr Brahms collects everything, yet none is worthy of inclusion in the composer’s collected works. Herr Brahms considers it better to destroy these last sad outpourings.’

  We reached the top of the stairs where I regained my breath. So Brahms was already editing the complete edition. All that was left was for Schumann to die and then the final inconvenient detail would be resolved. The composer’s life had effectively ended only a few months after his last concert, when he threw himself into the Rhine. That was when his life as an artist – the only one anybody cares about – was extinguished.

  We reached Schumann’s door, where Peters stood waiting. There was a metal panel fixed upon it, which Peters slowly drew aside, making a sound like the grinding of a knife. A peephole was revealed through which the captive could be observed.

  ‘Look for yourself, Frau von Arnim,’ Richarz told me.

  Peering into the room, I saw a figure lying unconscious on the bed. His face was not visible to me; all I could see was a thin hand projecting from the bedcovers, which I would not have recognized as Schumann’s had I not known whose it was.

  ‘I wish to be allowed inside,’ I told Richarz.

  ‘I would prefer the patient to be left undisturbed,’ the doctor told me; but I had no more time for his prevarication.

  ‘Unlock this door for me,’ I said to him. ‘Until you do, I promise you I shall not move from this spot.’

  Richarz was annoyed, but another glance at Schumann convinced him the patient was safely sedated, and so he instructed Peters to let me in. With a jangling of keys, Peters opened the heavy door and the three of us went inside and approached the bed. I stood flanked by the doctors as we gazed silently upon the pitiful sight.

  Schumann’s face was changed. It was the emaciated mask of an unburied corpse. I gave an involuntary gasp of horror.

  ‘You can see why it would have been better for you not to come,’ Richarz whispered. ‘And why his family must be spared such a spectacle.’

  Then, as I watched, I realized that Schumann’s lips were trembling, almost imperceptibly. He was trying to speak. I bent to listen.

  Richarz hissed at me, ‘Madam, please!’ But it was too late. Before he could restrain me, I had brought myself close to the bedside, stooping to feel the composer’s faint breath on my cheek as I listened for his words.

  ‘Robert,’ I said, ‘it’s me, Bettina.’

  ‘This is most unwise!’ Richarz anxiously whispered, trying to draw me back.

  ‘Robert, your family and all your many friends send their warmest greetings.’

  Richarz and Peters were tutting behind me like a pair of old fishwives. I silenced them. Robert was saying something. At first I thought he was complaining about a lack of air; I tried to loosen the top button of his night-shirt. Then I heard more clearly what he was saying. Angel.

  ‘I’m not an angel, Robert. I’m your friend Bettina.’

  His words became clearer; perhaps only because I was growing accustomed to the weakness of his voice. ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Where angel?’

  He must be looking for Brahms, I supposed; his eyes were partly open now. Pale and watery, they directed themselves towards a table behind me, and when I turned I saw on it some pages of music that Brahms must have assembled there for destruction. Did Schumann perhaps want me to save them?

  ‘Angel,’ he said again. ‘Came before.’

  ‘Madam,’ Richarz interrupted, ‘please do not encourage the patient’s fantasies.’

  Yet Robert’s voice grew more urgent and insistent. ‘The angel will come again,’ he said. ‘She promised me.’

  He wasn’t speaking of Brahms after all. ‘Clara is well,’ I said, hearing a groan from Dr Richarz. But she, too, was not the angel Robert spoke of. Instead he became still more excited.

  ‘Is it as wife she comes?’ he said. ‘Comes she as queen?’ It was a line remembered from long ago.

  ‘You see the extent of his delusion,’ Richarz said gloomily, and as Robert had now fallen silent and closed his eyes, I raised and straightened myself to hear the doctor’s explanation.

  ‘You might recall,’ Richarz told me, ‘that Schumann laboured for many years over a musical setting of Goethe’s Faust. He completed and published some scenes before he became ill. The project has not died in his imagination.’

  I was amazed. ‘Is he still composing further sections? And is this the music Brahms is destroying? Surely it would be an outrage for such an important work to be suppressed!’

  Richarz shook his head. ‘No, madam, it would be a scandal were these last degenerate scraps ever exposed to public scrutiny and ridicule.’

  Still I protested, so that Richarz was finally forced to explain himself fully. ‘Schumann is no longer the man you knew,’ he said. ‘The power of composition has left him, along with all his other faculties. He has even forgotten his own identity. Instead he has become a player in the drama he once dreamed of scoring. Yes, madam: he thinks he is Faust. He has visions of Helen meeting him here in this room.’ Beside him, Peters gave an embarrassed cough. ‘There you have it: the squalid truth of his condition.’

  While still trying to absorb this extraordinary information, I heard Robert begin to speak once more. I stooped to listen.

  ‘Helen!’ he said.

  ‘What do you want, Robert
?’

  ‘Music. More music.’

  Now I understood. Schumann had often spoken of how he heard music dictated by angels. Brahms had come into his life as the embodiment of one such angel; here in Endenich, he had found another, born of fragmentary memories in his disintegrating mind. I went to the table and looked at the scribbled pages of music. I was saddened by what I saw: the most blatantly discordant, most hopelessly unmusical harmonizations one could imagine, in which all twelve notes of the chromatic scale were thrown upon the stave in equal measure, without any regard for the jarring cacophony that would result if such a random arrangement were ever to be played.

  I went back to Schumann’s bedside and asked him, ‘Where does the music come from?’

  ‘From Helen.’

  No; it came more likely from Mephistopheles. I could see now why Brahms was right to destroy it.

  Richarz said to me, ‘We must let the patient rest. Do not inflame his hallucinations.’

  Robert was lapsing back into unconsciousness. ‘Did Helen visit you today?’ I asked him.

  Suddenly his eyes became focused. ‘Yes,’ he said clearly.

  It chilled me. For a moment it was as if the dream were real: as if a ghostly visitor truly were the author of his strange pages.

  Then the sedative reasserted its gentle power. His eyes rolled in their sockets, and soon he was sleeping. In his last days, Schumann was being granted the mercy of forgetting Clara, the children, and all the loves of his life.

  It was time for me to leave. As Richarz and Peters escorted me from the room, I did not look round for a final glimpse of the sleeping patient. Better to remember him in happier times. I knew, as the carriage took me away from Endenich, that Schumann could have no more than weeks to live. Clara was finally summoned when death was certain, and it is said that he recognized her face before drawing his last breath.

  That was three years ago. Brahms and Clara remain unmarried; Joachim will never understand my love for him. We are each a little closer to the grave. Yet still I wonder where it really came from: that strange, demonic music on Schumann’s table; that hellish un-art of sheer chance. Richarz sought an answer as soon as Schumann’s corpse grew cold, laying it naked on a slab and sawing open the skull, finding there only the same bloody pulp that harbours all our thoughts and dreams, of reason or of madness. Whatever Schumann saw and heard could not be scooped by the crude tools of science.