Longing

by J. D. Landis

  When he finished, his fellow students started to applaud, but Robert held up his hand for them to stop and repeated his question: “Who was that?”

  After a few moments’ silence, one brave soul ventured, “Herz?” and another “Hünten?” and Robert pretended shock at the names of these popular composers at the same time as he shook his head disparagingly but with a smile just as Herr Richter would when he meant to criticize without demeaning the student who had given so foolish an answer.

  Now there was a longer silence, until finally Herr Richter himself ventured, “Was it I?”

  “You pass with honors!” shouted Robert as he raised his hands over the piano and brought them down into a slow melody full of yearning that increased in tempo until it sounded like the sound of a horse rousingly pulling a sleigh through the snow as within it sat a girl whose slim, dark body rose and fell with the rhythm of the ride and whose skirts billowed high in the wind as she gave herself passionately to the music and to the musician himself, who bent ever closer to the keyboard until his lips were practically upon it as his own bottom left the boxes on which he sat so that just as he finished they toppled over and the uppermore came crashing to the floor.

  The students laughed almost uproariously until one among them rose from her seat and was, in fact, forced to hold her skirt high up off the floor as she pushed her way down the row and then flung her skirt down again while nearly running up the aisle and out of the theater.

  “It’s Liddy Hempel!” said several voices together, and many other students sighed in recognition and agreement.

  “Very good,” said Robert as he rearranged the boxes and sat down again and began his next piece, which was trembly and dizzy like Robert himself until he moved his hands down the keys to produce chords that were lush and full and teasing in the lack of resolution in their progression and finally angry in their jealousy and yet haughty in their distance from the tonic.

  “It’s Nanni Petsch!” came the nearly universal cry.

  Nanni, rather than rush from the theater, stood gamely and proudly at her place and, turning about so all could see her pretty face and full, lush figure, gave herself to the admiration of the crowd as she would never, despite his apprehension of her in his music, give herself to Robert.

  *The Bee was banned by the Central Bureau of Political Investigation (a more intemperate version of the aforementioned Federal Bureau of Investigation) in 1833, at the very time Robert was planning a revolutionary magazine of his own.

  *What August Schumann admired most about Byron’s life was in fact countererotic. Barely a month before Robert was born, August celebrated with the rest of Europe the news of Byron’s swim across the Hellespont in his successful attempt to duplicate Leander’s nightly journey into the arms of Hero. What Byron could not duplicate was Leander’s notable potency. Indeed, Byron found the journey so enervating that he was led to question whether Leander’s “conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise.”

  *Erysichthon, a Thessalian prince, made the mistake of cutting down some trees sacred to Demeter, who was as serious about trees as about eggplants. For punishment, Erysichthon was given so great a hunger that he devoured his own flesh, either the legs alone or, indeed, his whole body, depending upon which version of the myth one credits. In either case, his hunger proved fatal, which is why Erysichthon was often seen as an archetype of the artist, who also eats himself, though he usually starts with the heart or the brain, depending upon what sort of artist he is, or was before he got so hungry. (The artist also regurgitates what he has eaten, a fate spared both Erysichthon and any audience Erysichthon might have had.) Erysichthon is also renowned as the father of a beautiful daughter, Mestra, who gave herself to Poseidon, for which license she was granted the power to assume the shape of any animal she liked. Each animal Mestra became, her father sold at market; once arrived, zoöidalized, at the barnyard of her hapless owner, she would change herself back into a girl and run home, there to recommence the lucrative process. Mestra is known as a goddess of actresses.

  Leipzig

  MAY 12, 1824

  The tree of knowledge has robbed us of the tree of life.

  Johann Georg Hamann

  All she heard was music. Music was all she heard. She wasn’t deaf. She was mute. But she wasn’t deaf. She could hear music.

  Words, which is to say speech, meant nothing to her. She had no idea speech was made of words, any more than she knew, when she was four years old, that music was made of notes. But music spoke to her. It was speech that did not yet speak to her.

  And so on this day that her mother took her and together they left her father, neither of them told her where she was going or why. But she knew why.

  Her mother was music. Her mother sang. Her mother played the piano, as did her father, but her mother played the piano better while her father sold pianos and strange contraptions like finger stretchers and trill machines and dumb keyboards that he used to help his pupils learn the instrument, for her father was a piano teacher.

  When her mother played the piano, or sang while accompanying herself or was accompanied by her own teacher, Herr Bargiel, whom Clara knew as the man who made her mother smile and put her hands to her face as if to stop her smile, Clara would listen.

  Sometimes she would listen from her room, or from the rooms of her two little brothers, or secretly from the room where her older brother, Adelheid, had lived before he died and where nobody lived now because her mother could not bear to go into that room, though Clara didn’t mind, in fact she liked Adelheid’s room best of all. The music filled it when her mother played in the parlor right below, and Clara felt she was able to speak to Adelheid by passing the music on to him, her brother, who had died before Clara was born and yet was somehow the only person Clara felt could understand her when she spoke. She would climb into Adelheid’s crib, which made her realize that Adelheid must have been younger than Clara was now, four, when he died, and sing to her baby brother with their mother’s voice as it rose through the floor and filled both of them with joy.

  Other times Clara would go down to the parlor and stand outside its doors and listen to her mother. She was never able to stand there for long. The sound of her mother singing and playing or just playing would draw her in. She would open the door and walk through the parlor right up to where her mother was sitting alone at the piano or with Herr Bargiel next to her on the piano bench, and she would sit down next to her mother or squeeze in next to Herr Bargiel and watch her mother’s hands on the piano keys and think that this is how you learn to talk, you learn to move your fingers up and down upon yourself and something beautiful comes out.

  Her mother never minded she was there. Her mother knew that the music made her happy. And Clara knew that her mother was never happier herself than when she was playing the piano and Herr Bargiel was there and he was making her smile and Clara walked in and her mother was able to show her how music and love could speak as one.

  That is why, on this day when her mother took her and together they left her father and neither told her where she was going or why, she knew why.

  Zwickau

  NOVEMBER 15, 1825

  Man is a footnote in the book of Nature.

  Jean Paul Richter

  Robert was in mourning. Jean Paul was dead. He had died the day before in Bayreuth.

  Robert sat on the bank of the River Mulde, as he did nearly every day until the snow came. He was Robert of the Mulde and preserved that name for all eternity on his first volume of poems, A Hodgepodge from the Pen of Robert of the Mulde, to which he added at least one poem a day as he sat here writing and dreaming and imagining his poems being read by all the girls who appeared in them. As they could recognize themselves in his music, surely they would be able to recognize themselves in his poetry.

  Robert was two people. But which was real and which was the double: the writer or the musician?

  Man is not a footnote in the book of Nature, he
realized, but a question mark for himself to answer.

  Robert wished he had been born in 1796, the year Jean Paul Richter had created the double in Siebenkäs. Another reason he wished he had been born that year was because that would make him the twin of Emilie, whose double he also was, the male part of her, as she was the female part of him, mixed together within both of them, for we are neither male nor female but a combination of both, and those who recognize this and live by this truth are the only humans who are allowed to, and are able to, live as gods on Earth.

  Now, just before he died, Jean Paul had written at least a volume of a new work with an irresistible title, The Time of the Young. In it he had created his own twins, Walt and Vult, and the two of them were exactly who Robert was singly within himself, the gentle poet who dreamed his life away and the passionate artist who lived his life away.

  When Robert wrote a poem, a great calm settled over him, his blood seemed almost to stop flowing, and time was suspended.

  When Robert wrote music, or improvised, his whole being became agitated, his blood literally beat out the rhythm in his groin and in his head, and time was destroyed.

  No one understood this like Jean Paul. And now he was dead.

  When Robert had been still in love with Liddy Hempel, he wrote a poem that began:

  I see you riding through the snow

  and dream of things you’ll never know.

  If you’re superior to me

  why can’t you see the things I see?

  But ever since Liddy had said that Jean Paul was corrupt in his thinking about doubles because God had made each of us unique and given each of us a destiny we could not alter, which was the reason she could not let Robert kiss her even if she had wanted to, and it didn’t matter if he sent his double or his quadruple, she wouldn’t kiss any of them—ever since such apostasy, Robert had disdained her and, miraculously, as his vision of her as an ideal vanished, no longer pictured himself stretched out beneath her.

  But he couldn’t forget her, and so, because he had already written so many poems to her and about her, he wrote another:

  The news has come—Jean Paul is dead!

  But you don’t care, you dunderhead.

  No longer will you be my queen,

  For you’ve become a Philistine!

  It was a strange feeling to have someone die. The only person who had ever died was his sister Laura, and she had died before he was born, which meant that while he had thought of her and dreamed of her and spoken to her and done everything he could to bring her to life inside himself—and had succeeded in this!—she had been unable to do the same with him. But Jean Paul, though he was not a Schumann and as a human being was more god than man, had been able to communicate more to Robert than had his own sister. Robert had spoken to Jean Paul, and Jean Paul had spoken to Robert. Was this not the sacred benefaction of art? And was not art the highest calling to which a man might summon himself? But when the artist died? When one voice was shut off and the other left giving off its lonely cries? It was sad, of course, but it was also somehow just.

  Death was the greatest mystery of all. What better place to think about it than by a river? As in one of the mystical sixteenth-century landscapes by Albrecht Altdorfer, whose work Herr Richter had asked the Lyceum art classes to practice duplicating, its waters flowed like time, never to return. And on its banks a young man could dream in the sweet breeze blowing through the box elders with their fingery leaves and through the hairy sumac and Norway maples with the milky juice ejaculated from their leaf stems when he snapped them and the juice ran down his fingers to their very webs.

  Snipes chortled. Geese yawped in migratory diminuendo. Hawks cruised silently above the tree he leaned his head upon to hold the weight of all its poems. Detritus from the cold-killed meadowsweet lay scattered on the ground, its powers lost to make the drink his father read him of in Chaucer, save, a name that Robert joked belonged to wine because it was the only thing that to drown in was to be saved. He had picked toadflax in a field on his way to the river, because its yellow flowers still spent their color upon his skin and because he’d read that the plant could yield a salve that might cure the kind of rash his sister had.

  He closed his eyes and thought of lines to add to his poem about Liddy and the death of Jean Paul. Perhaps it could become an elegy, for Jean Paul himself and for the death of his love for Liddy Hempel, a way to conjoin sex and death, as they were said to meet as the “little death” in the climax of the very making of love itself, which he had yet to experience with anyone but himself, alas.

  The notion of the Philistine was a good one for such a poem, because it aroused a heroic image of the defense of fragile goodness against the brute and crushing force of ignorance. On the other hand, the word “dunderhead” was not sufficiently threnodic even when used to describe the enemy of art. And lines with four beats were really too short for an elegy, which needed the graceful elongation of the more extended line to represent both lamentation and testimonial.

  He fell asleep under the influence of such rhetorical retrospection and dreamed the dreams that wakefulness did not provide. Liddy loved him then. He heard her scream and wondered at the sound, if women cried out thus in pleasure. It frightened him—the strident passion of the sound itself, and the monstrous chasm between desire and experience—and excited him. He saw her dressed in white, a pretty dress, adhering to her skin so that her body was before him unadorned. Her hair was wet, and on her eyelids glistened drops of dew or sweat or something unknown put forth by women in their ardor. She seemed exhausted now, wholly spent, floating by before his eyes before he’d chanced to touch her. It was not fair. Her leaving him without…

  He opened his eyes. There, through the trees, he saw her, all in white, her dress so wet her skin showed through, her breasts, the sacred pyramid between her legs, her head thrown back so as she moved away from him, he saw her eyes, upside down, bounce open and look back at him from a maiden’s radiant countenance. She was a phantom floating through the forest, suspended between the fallen autumn leaves and the unforthcoming Saxon sky.

  Four men carried her. She seemed no burden, but they were downcast. He wondered had they had her; he’d heard tales of men within these very woods taking women brutally, which sickened him, though not as much as his mind’s unwillingness to stop imagining the scene. Her arms and legs were casually tossed over the men’s own arms as they carried her away from him and toward the town.

  He gathered up his books and pens and flowers and leather cap, then hurried to his feet and off to follow her. Even moving, he felt contained in his dream, trailing this buoyant woman as she wafted through the spiny shadows of the nearly undressed autumn trees.

  He heard his name. He heard it called with the same hoarse resonance in which he’d heard this woman scream her rapture.

  It was his mother. She appeared before him suddenly, out of or into his dream, and for a moment he believed he was a small boy again, the night he’d come home from Frau Ruppius and had fallen asleep with the sound of his mother’s singing and awakened in the dark from an unremembered dream to find her standing there, looking at him and saying his name as if she could not believe he was alive, or hers, come home, reality.

  Now she said his name again and again, but without fondness, only anger. She took his arms within her hands and pressed her nails into his flesh and shook him. She was hurting him, and confusing him. Yet even as he tried to absorb what he knew was her suffering, he wanted to break from her grasp and follow the woman who was floating out of sight through the forest.

  “She’s dead,” his mother said.

  “Liddy?” Where was the despair? Why was he somehow either relieved or released, he could not quite locate the emotion?

  His mother pushed him from her but did not dig out her fingers. She shook her head and showed him what was in her eyes.

  “Emilie!” he cried and tried to break from his mother’s grasp. But she held him and held to him so he cou
ld not desert her.

  “Drowned,” she said.

  He could not picture it.

  “Herself.”

  He took that to mean she had been alone.

  “In the river.”

  He turned around to look at it. He hoped to see her as he might have, if only allowed by serpentine time, Madeleine au Bois d’Amour, alive on the bank of the Aven, painted by her brother who no more knew than Robert did that she, too, would soon be dead.

  His mother, who would not let go of him, turned with him, as in a dance, so now she faced the receding procession in the midst of which her daughter floated dead.

  Robert looked into the River Mulde and knew then what had happened. In the very moments when he had been sitting on its bank, lost within its influence on him, its inspiration, its assurances that through it he was the very questing hero in the book of Nature, his sister had been drowning down around the bend.

  He and his mother followed the body home.

  When his father came out of his study, pipe still lit and spectacles on, he rushed to his daughter and grasped her so hard she nearly fell from the arms of the men who had carried her from the river. Robert could hear some embers from his pipe hiss against the wetness of her dress. His father threw his pipe to the floor, where its stem flew off and bowl shattered, and put his face to his daughter’s breast and locked his arms around her and wept in a way that Robert had never imagined a man might weep. He did not release her until the doctor arrived, and only then at the doctor’s insistence.

  The doctor shook his head sadly and said, “It is for the best.”

  Robert wondered whether the lie was contained within the doctor’s gesture or his words. Angrily, he said, “Save her!”

  The doctor looked at him as if he were mad, or just a child, and turned away and asked, “How did it happen?”