Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “I called her Christel,” he said, to spare Clara the pain of learning that he had called her Charitas. He remembered how bitterly Clara had reacted to his having given Ernestine a nickname, and Ernestine had been his fiancée, not merely a girl with whom he had shared an intimacy so shallow (if, at the same time, profound) that he had not until now learned her surname.

  “So who was Charitas?” asked Clara immediately. “Yet another of your conquests?”

  “I had no other conquests,” he answered, to try to evade his lie with what was, he realized, the truth. “How did you learn of her?”

  “My father told me.”

  Robert was shocked. “How did he know?”

  “Papa has made it his business to learn of anything he might use to keep me from loving you, and then of telling me of it. But there’s nothing he could tell me, or you could tell me, that would succeed in that. So is it true: Christel and Charitas were your only other women?’

  “She was,” he said.

  She nodded at his tacit confession. “And the rest?”

  “Only whores.”

  “Whores?”

  “Whores.”

  “Many whores?”

  “Oh, yes, many whores.”

  “How many whores?”

  “I have no idea. One doesn’t count whores, after all. One may count lovers, and children, and one certainly counts beats to a measure, but not whores. I mean, a man—a vulgar man, it is true—might boast, ‘I have had twelve mistresses.’ But I have never heard any man, no matter how vulgar, say, ‘I have had a hundred whores, and tonight I’m going to have my hundred-and-first.’”

  “A hundred! You have had a hundred whores?”

  “Come to me,” he said, opening his arms.

  She looked at him skeptically before leaning forward, kneeling into him until her head and hair settled on his shoulder.

  “I have no idea how many,” he said. “I was usually drunk and had no memory in the morning of what I’d done the night before. For all I know, I had no whores. All I meant to say was that whatever and whoever I had before you, it was nothing and no one. As it feels to me now, you are my life, you have always been my life, and you will always be my life.”

  She let her body go, and slid beneath the thin hotel sheet and comforter, and there she held him as together they fell asleep and left forever the world that had known them as children.

  *Mr. Lonely

  *Miss Lost and Betrothed

  *A Schnabel can be both bill or beak and spout or nozzle, so it is not clear whether Clara was punning on Christel’s surname in reference to a kiss upon the lips or, more likely, given her mood, the taking of a gambol with the male member.

  Part Three

  Distant Beloved

  Dresden

  FEBRUARY 15, 1836

  I love you unspeakably.

  Robert Schumann

  “Give me his letters. Give me all his letters.”

  How strange, she thought, that in the middle of her father’s latest tirade against Robert, and against what he imagined she and Robert had done in his absence (she nearly smiled at remembering what they had done), he should ask for Robert’s letters. Unknown to her father, a letter had arrived this very day. It had been written in the coach station at Zwickau, where Robert had gone to pay respects at his mother’s grave. As the snow and sleet came down, and Robert was trapped by the closed roads while he waited for the Leipzig express, he was, in his impatient misery, given the opportunity to write of his love for her. She recalled that night and how she had stood at the little window in this same room on the third floor of the Reissigers’ house and watched the snow swirl aloft like dancers’ arms and listened to the frozen rain tap out a message she imagined was from him. It would not be the first time they had communicated through the air.

  But what joy it had been to receive this palpable evidence of their connection and to learn he was indeed writing to her at the very hour she had been at her window looking for his image in the darkness and listening for the sound of his fingers on her skin.

  She hid this new letter beneath her even as she refused to take from the desk between them those other letters from Robert, which her father knew were all the letters and little notes Robert had ever sent or slipped to her. She traveled with them always, to have his disembodied voice with her, addressing her from childhood until now, his first letter since he had embodied her wholly, and she him, in such a way as she had never imagined in all her imaginings.

  As her father continued to hold out his hand for the letters, he said, “He’s not right for you. You may think he’s right for you. Corruption is a magnet that attracts the corruptible. You’re like your mother in that—drawn to the flesh. But you have art far beyond what she had, and I had thought—mistakenly, I learn—that it would keep you from such wantonness. You disgrace me with your deception and behavior. But most of all, you disgrace yourself. He is not right for you. He drinks too much. He suffers from illnesses and an imagination of illness that’s worse than illness itself. He has, by his own hand, crippled his hand and thereby taken from himself his one best chance to earn a living. Is this the act of a sane human being? Or does he suppose he can live on the income from those dissonant, nerve-wracked pieces he composes, that no one in the world but you and I appreciate or understand? His mind is as weak as his will is irresolute. He will betray you with other women with no more thought than a man eating fowl after fish. Or have you forgotten you’re not the sole student of mine whose virtue he’s transgressed? Tell me—have you?”

  “No longer.” Now she could not help smiling.

  “Then I have told you something that will succeed in keeping you from seeing him ever again?”

  “Oh, no,” she answered. “He admitted it himself. After I had let him know I knew. And I thank you for having given me that information, Papa. My knowing it allowed him to be unashamed in telling me about his whores.”

  As she said the word, she remembered how four years before in Paris she and her father had come upon prostitutes in their enviably garish dresses and how at that time she had been too frightened even to comment upon their constant and exciting presence. How interesting, she thought, that my language should now be freed in the aftermath of the liberation of my body. She felt almost giddy with the power of provocation.

  “Whores!”

  “A hundred whores at least.”

  Her father could say nothing. He reached out his hand, not to comfort her, she knew, but that she might put his letters into it, as if they were literally Robert and that to give them up would be to give him up.

  She recalled what his latest letter said, the one she sat upon, and how hopeless was the wish that he wished within it: “Perhaps your father will not withdraw his hand when I ask his blessing.”

  She put her own hand, empty, into her father’s. If only he would take it, in place of Robert’s, and recognize her love for him, her father, who had taken her before she’d learned to speak and set her down on his lap and then before the piano and taught her how to speak through music and how to listen to herself through the music she made so that she grew to love her wordless voice long before her Robert came and read to her and played with her and asked her what she thought of things and finally helped her find the voice within that called out with a woman’s pleasure to the world.

  Her father took her hand and turned it over and opened it and placed within it, brought up from his belt, the pistol he carried on his travels. He pressed the gun into her palm, not releasing it but, with his other hand beneath hers, in what would otherwise be a gesture of warmth, not allowing her to let it go.

  “If I see him near you, I’ll shoot him.”

  For a moment, before he snatched it away, he let the gun lie by itself, heavy and foreboding in her hand.

  She trembled at the thought of it, that she might be the one to cause his death, by causing him to come to her, or herself to go to him.

  With the same hand that had held the g
un, she reached beneath her and withdrew Robert’s letter and gazed down within its words, as much to keep from looking at her father as to read again what she had nearly memorized.

  A strange desire came over her, that she might ask her father to help her with the letter, to interpret what Robert meant, not when he said that he and she were intended by fate to be together or that he felt her presence in that cold station house so close to him that he could feel her in his arms but when he said he loved her unspeakably. What did that mean? That he could not express his love for her? That the love he felt for her was somehow objectionable, to others if not to themselves? That there were no words available to tell her how he felt? That only silence was left for them?

  He must have known, she thought. He must have known that we may never be together again.

  She pushed the letter toward where her father had been standing across the desk from her, but when she raised her eyes to meet his, she found him gone.

  Leipzig

  FEBRUARY 20, 1837

  The way it stands now is that either I can never speak with her again

  or she will be mine entirely.

  Robert Schumann

  As Robert lay in Anna Laidlaw’s arms, he longed for Clara Wieck.

  It had been more than a year since he had spoken to her or so much as had a letter from her. He wrote to her but had no way of knowing if she’d received his letters. Her father had most likely intercepted them. All he’d had back from her were his own earlier letters, bundled up and tied with ribbon, not a word of sorrow or explanation to accompany them, merely his words thrown back at him like rain that falls hard from the earth into the clouds. He could not bring himself even to untie them, let alone read them, though when he’d had enough to drink he would hold them to his nose and sometimes found himself awakening in the morning with his head on his desk or piano and the letters there beneath his cheek or forehead. When he slept in his bed, he placed the letters on his bedside table, not to have her near, for she had forsaken her presence in the words he had written to her, but so that he might in his dreams be inspired by her betrayal to dream of her no more.

  He knew from Karl Banck that Wieck had thrown him and Clara back together and that Wieck had said he would kill Robert if he came near his daughter. To Robert’s face, Banck told him that Clara no longer loved him. To others in the New Journal of Music office, Banck spread stories of Robert’s dalliances with other women. These stories were not untrue. Robert knew that Banck was telling them to Clara as well. He did not mind that, not merely because they were true and not because he wanted Clara hurt and jealous, though he was jealous of whatever favors Banck might be winning from her, the most painful to contemplate being the mere sight of her, which to him, now, was more precious than the possession of her body. He did not mind her knowing of his love affairs because they only served to increase his longing for her. What he no longer knew was what he preferred: her, or his longing for her.

  He had seen her but once since they had left their bed in Dresden, when both were back in Leipzig. And that, upon the unknowing instigation of Frédéric Chopin, was through a window.

  Chopin had come to Leipzig for one day in September on his way back to Paris from Marienbad and Dresden, to each of which he had followed Maria Wodzinska in the hope of winning both her love and her hand.

  On September 12, Robert heard a faint knock on the door of his newly rented flat in a house near Leipzig’s Booksellers’ Exchange. He was living alone once more—Wilhelm Ulex having moved out, apparently over jealousy of Clara—and was in the habit of ignoring knocks on his door, because with each potential intrusion he instantly weighed the worth of solitude against the worth of companionship and usually chose the former. Since the death of Ludwig Schunke and the loss of Clara Wieck, he had preferred to be alone, until the demands of the flesh might cause him to seek out a woman, and when he was with people, he found himself even more given to silence than he had been in the past. The sounds he heard now, and preferred, were memories of Clara’s voice and the music he was writing for the piano with greater fervor than he had ever written before, including revisions of his Fsharp Minor Sonata, a new Sonata in F Minor, a group of symphonic études, some dances, and a C-Major Fantasie as a possible contribution toward the Beethoven statue to be dedicated in Bonn at a memorial ceremony being organized by Franz Liszt.

  He was resting from work on this last piece when, because the knock on his door was so quiet as to be merely a suggestion of desire to enter, he decided to answer it, half expecting to see only a gentle breeze clothed in fairy form, like the ghost of his sister or a whispered, secret greeting from his lost love, borne upon the wind.

  But there stood Chopin, alone, pale and small, pristinely elegant in contrast to Robert’s ash-dappled dishevelment. They stood in the doorway looking at one another, until Robert finally opened his arms, though he was frightened of crushing this frail man, and Chopin, if for no other reason than to escape the dangerous grasp of so much larger a person, walked right around him and into his home.

  Robert had not seen Chopin since their first meeting a year earlier. He had recently written to Chopin in Paris, if only to remind him of his existence, and thus, in a way, to remind himself of the same. Once you have given your love to someone, Robert had discovered, and that love is thwarted, you become lost not only to your beloved but also to yourself. Every gesture, every breath, every written word, every inked-in note of music is an attempt to remain alive in a world from which you have felt yourself begin to disappear. Chopin’s presence at his door, before he could possibly have received the letter, was for Robert evidence, however fragile, that he had not wholly lost his power to ruffle the universe.

  “You do me great honor,” he said.

  Chopin did not dispute that. He removed his coat and walked straight to the room with the piano, drawn by its heat in the aftermath of Robert’s playing.

  He played études, mazurkas, a nocturne, a Ballade in F Major, and finally parts of a sonata still in progress, full of disordered progressions and certain to estrange and mystify the public, a smiling, mocking sphinx of a piece. Robert found Chopin’s playing perfect, except for his annoying habit of moving a finger silently over the entire keyboard as he finished each work, as if to dispel some dreaminess of sound and move the music out of hearing.

  “Do you approve?” They were Chopin’s first words.

  Before Robert could answer, Chopin said, “Of course you do. I seem to have come so under your spell that I am writing ballades to Adam Mickiewicz’s poetry. I am seeing images in my head and putting to music what I see. Can you guess what my F-Major Ballade represents?”

  Robert had no idea. “The agitato toward the finish…,” he speculated, hoping Chopin would supply the context.

  But when Chopin merely stared at him, Robert added, “And how you move into A minor at the very end…It’s quite…”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s quite…no, very…it’s very…beautiful.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “I see salvation,” said Robert, who had seen nothing. “I see rescue from the storm.”

  “Do you see women?” asked Chopin.

  “I always see women,” answered Robert.

  Failing to find this amusing, Chopin rose from the bench of the piano and went to join Robert on his modest blue sofa, sitting as far as he could from Robert’s cigar, which gave forth its gauzy smoke to match the common perception of Chopin’s music. What Robert found in Chopin, however, was great power, a kind of muscularity of mind that in trying to please itself alone discovered beauty in dissonance and subversion in the only apparently delicate.

  Like someone telling a story to an amiable but stupid child, Chopin recited with a kind of deliberate dispassion the tale told in Mickiewicz’s poem: “A group of beautiful Polish girls are captured by the Russians and are about to be ravished by them. They beg God to open up the earth and let them be swallowed by it. God hears their prayers and
indeed opens up the earth. As the girls sink within, they are turned to beautiful flowers on the shores of the lake of the Willis. Any man who touches them will die.”

  “I’ve known women like that,” said Robert, resigned to the fact that Chopin would not find this funny either.

  “I have just come from one of them,” said Chopin, who explained he had gone directly from the coach station to the Wieck house, expecting to find Robert and Clara there together. “With Mendelssohn away, you are the only two I come to see in Leipzig.”

  “Did she speak of me?”

  “Her disagreeable father was in attendance at every moment,” Chopin offered. “It was clear when I inquired after you that neither you nor even the sound of your name is welcome in that house.”

  “But did she speak of me?”

  “Perhaps through her music. I have never heard a pianist who so combines audacity with purity of style. Who can improvise as well as she can sight-read. Whose warmth of feeling is always conveyed by beauty of touch. She is, you know, the only woman in Germany who can play my work properly.”

  “And my work?”

  “She played her own for me. I insisted. I particularly liked the A-Minor Concerto and of course her Bellini Variations. She is very gifted, this girl.”

  “Was I in her music?” asked Robert.

  “Perhaps,” repeated Chopin.

  “She is in mine.”

  Robert went to the piano and played what he had written of his Fantasie. He wanted the music to draw Chopin to him and in so doing to bring him in contact with Clara, who but hours before had perhaps touched Chopin’s hand and been in his eyes and in the breath he swallowed.

  When Robert had finished the piece, Chopin said only, “Like Beethoven.”

  Robert jumped to his feet. “Yes! I’m writing it for the Beethoven memorial. I call it ‘Ruins.’ It’s dedicated to Liszt, who I understand is behind the monument, if you’ll pardon the play on words. But it’s written for her. The first movement is the most passionate thing I’ve ever done. A lamentation—because I’m in ruin myself. And the Beethoven within it is one of my messages to her. At the end of that first movement I have woven in one of his ‘Songs for the Distant Beloved,’ the sixth song, do you know it? It goes, ‘Take them, these songs I sing you, songs of passion, songs of pain. Let them like an echo call back our love again.’ You see—passion, pain…the distant beloved. That is our story. She will understand that. I have also included these falling five notes of hers”—Robert bent over the piano to play them—“so she may hear herself inside the music, as I hear her inside myself. And I have included some words of Schlegel as an epigraph: ‘Through all the notes that sound within the earth’s resplendent dream, one whispered note alone sounds for the secret listener.’”