by J. D. Landis
“You’re making me nervous,” he told her, as she paced before the front door, now and then stopping in mid-stride to open it violently, as if the boy were some sort of eidolon who might dissolve if not secured within the depths of her great dark eyes.
“I’m making you nervous!”
They laughed. His nerves had long since become the family joke, whenever the family was in a mood to joke. Brahms seemed to have brought such ease to their household.
“Go look for him. I’ll stay here and keep the food cold.”
She was out the door before he could see if he’d amused her in return or even wonder why he’d not gone himself. Often, when he went out alone, he questioned if he would come back. Surely this was a question most men occasionally asked. But not men who loved their wives as he loved his. And so he always returned. But never more had he wished for a double, who might be thrown into the river to swim for himself.
It seemed hours she was gone. It was hours. He would normally have been filled with images of her in terrible distress—caught in a burning building, crushed beneath carriage wheels, forced to conduct the Düsseldorf Gesangverein in his stead and letting fly the baton into her own heart, as he was known to loose the thing upon his unprotected musicians. These were always mere substitutes for the image of himself in the distress he would suffer should it be she who would disappear from his life, whether through such accident or choice. Perhaps the true cause of madness was the inability to think without oneself at the center of one’s thoughts.
But because he imagined her searching for Brahms, he imagined her happy. So she was when she finally returned, as was he, because there with her was Brahms himself, dressed exactly as he had been the day before, if a little dirtier, a bit more worn for being away from home and thus more free. Clara actually had him by the hand as they crossed the threshold, pulling him along into the house, where they stood before Robert, who had himself not sat down since she’d left.
“Where did you find him?”
Brahms did not let her answer. As he put the back of his hand to his forehead, in a gesture of self-mockery, he pulled her hand along with his; she might have been about to wipe his brow, as she did Robert’s when he lay in bed cold with terror. “Stupid me! I was still in my squalid little hotel. I didn’t think you really wanted me here. I thought I was a sacrifice to diplomacy.”
“I had to convince him of the truth of our enthusiasm!” Clara stepped away from Brahms and stared at him exaggeratedly. He was not to be believed.
“For his music?” asked Robert.
“As well as for himself,” explained Clara.
“We are hardly diplomatic,” said Robert. “Indeed, we are perhaps the strangest couple in all of Düsseldorf. Or I the strangest man, and Clara the sacrifice to my diplomacy—or lack thereof. Which is to say, you would not be here if we didn’t want you here. And if we didn’t want you here, we wouldn’t be who you think we are.”
“Who I think you are, and who I thought you might be, or were, are no longer the same.”
“Have we disappointed you?” asked Robert.
“A long time ago,” said Brahms, which for him, barely twenty, turned out to have been three years earlier, when Frau Schumann and Herr Schumann had come to Hamburg and Jenny Lind had sung with them and Robert had conducted Clara in his piano concerto, which only he, Brahms, seemed to have admired—admired so much, indeed, that he left a package for Herr Schumann at his hotel, a package containing his compositions and a letter asking for advice and begging for a chance to obtain this advice in person.
“And what did I say?” Robert had no memory of the music or the boy. He wondered if he might have contained both for these three years and that their secret presence within him would then account for how rapidly and completely he had given himself to the boy, and taken him to him.
“You said nothing.” Such anger from so sweet a mouth. “You didn’t even look. The package was returned to me unopened.”
“Now I understand!” Robert spread wide his arms, not that his wife or their new friend might rush into them, though he would have welcomed both, but because he felt some new crack open into the world of which he believed we are all, at every moment, a reflection.
“That you are not who I thought you might be?”
“‘No more packages,’“ said Robert. “That’s what I understand: ‘No more packages.’ And so it shall be. Now we understand each other completely. Shall we eat?”
Brahms moved between their table and the children’s, as did Marie, who customarily sat within the crowd of siblings and was rewarded for this custodial service with a glass of wine in the evenings, at which she sipped while distracting her three sisters and two brothers from the endless conversation their parents seemed to carry on with one another, in their father’s case to the exclusion of conversation with the rest of the world. But this day, when late lunch had become early supper, Marie slipped into a chair directly across from Brahms, who seemed relieved to have such intimate company nearer his own age than were the adults at either side of him. When the other children, absent Marie, began to quarrel, Brahms went to them first, asked them to tell him their names again, and then made up a song using their names so he might celebrate them and memorize them:
Elise, Elise, I ask you, please,
Won’t you kindly pass the cheese,
All the way around to me
By way of tiny Eugenie
So I may take some with my hand
And pass it on to Ferdinand,
Who so as not to be a pig
Hands the plate on to Ludwig.
And Ludwig gives it to Marie
Who’s taken such good care of me
Yet saves the last for pretty Julie—
Wonderful children, I love you truly!
They loved him in return. It became a happy battle, between the children and the children’s parents, for the attention of their young visitor, who came to them every day, for food and music and admiration shared.
He played games with the children on the floor and then, seemingly, in the air itself, as he ran up the front stairway, stood on the landing with his arms aloft like a conductor of the six-piece orchestra gazing up at him, and then grasped the banister, shot his feet into the air, and walked all the way down to the ground floor on his hands. The applause brought Clara and Robert, for whom Johannes was convinced to repeat his performance. Clara held her fingers to her lips as he descended.
He was eager to see every room in the house. “Look at all the books,” he said. “Look at all the glasses—my God, you could go for days without washing a single one of them. And a wine cellar! I have always dreamed of having a wine cellar.”
“You need a house first,” said Clara.
“Oh, a house is the last thing I want.”
“Just a wine cellar?” Robert inquired.
“Just a wine cellar.”
The two men sat and smoked for hours at a time, Johannes the cigarettes he rolled and the occasional cigar Robert was able to convince him to accept, Robert his cigars and sometimes a pipe, the same pipe Johannes would observe in his mouth the first time he was allowed to visit Robert at Endenich and the doctors had him watch his friend through the little judas in his wall.
They needn’t always talk. Robert found in Johannes someone unintimidated by silence, to the same degree he could embrace conversation, with an excitement for words and ideas as yet neither restrained nor corrupted by a knowledge of the limits of words and the failure of ideas. They might sit side by side with books in their laps, smoking, only occasionally reading aloud to one another from their Jean Paul Richter or their E. T. A. Hoffmann.
“Those pieces I sent you in Hamburg,” Johannes told him—“I had signed them ‘Johannes Kreisler, Junior.’”
“Had I known that, I would have looked at them.” Perhaps the obscure mystery was finally to be solved, his wild, mad desire satisfied, not with, but within, his own heart. Johannes was like Emilie to him, except
her suffering had been replaced by his joy.
“Well, I couldn’t very well have put that name in the return address.”
“Are you afraid people will think you’re a madman?”
“It’s no longer chic to be mad.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He suffered, he told Johannes, from the furor divinus described by Plato in his Ion, at least so far as, like Plato’s poet, he sang his beautiful melodies in a state of inspiration. But he did not agree with Plato that the spirit by which he was possessed was not his own. It was precisely the fact that everything he did and everything he was came from within that rendered his insanity divine. The artist was his own god. And the madness through which Plato said in Phaedrus we receive the greatest benefaction comes not as a gift of Heaven but as a kind of blessed curse from the self.
Robert and Johannes toured the shelves of books like travelers who carry flambeaux toward the walls of churches, who try to memorize a sunset. With them, always, was Clara, a memory for Robert and for Johannes a dream of travel yet to come, which sometimes is the best of travel, to sit at home and picture what it will be like to get where you will, though you do not yet know it, finally get to go.
Robert took down Either/Or and told the boy how he’d missed his wife the first time she left him as his wife, to go to Copenhagen, where she’d met the author of this book. And how fortunate that had been, for otherwise Robert might never have come upon the story Kierkegaard tells of the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris, who executed his prisoners by putting them in a bronze bull and setting a slow, hot fire beneath the bull, yet when their shrieks of agony reached his ears, they were transformed by having passed over the reeds he’d placed in the bull’s nostrils, so that all Phalaris heard was music so sweet he could not bear to have it stop. This, then, was the artist, as he made his way to freedom the only way he could, through beauty, turning anguish into beauty, dying like Saint Eustathius himself as he sacrificed his family to his unwilllingness to appease the false gods who tempted every artist into the simplifying subversion of his art.
But the anguish wasn’t always quite so veiled, as evidenced by the Bulwer-Lytton shelf, the most weighted in most people’s libraries, with such prolificacy of more than symbolic meaning, for here was a man who, like me, said Robert, worked himself through the exhaustion of toil and study into madness, which he called “anxiety and grief.” Bulwer-Lytton ended up at a place named Malvern, about which he wrote Confessions of a Water-Patient, his copy of which Robert placed in his new friend’s hands. “I have had my own hydro-treatments,” he explained. “I had gone from Dr. Carus to Dr. Glock to Dr. Reuter to Dr. Carl Carus—relative of Dr. Ernst Carus but not so blessed in marriage—to Dr. Walther to Dr. Helbig to Dr. Hasenclever to Dr. Müller, none of whom I ever abandoned for reasons other than geography, and none of whom ever abandoned me, aside from dear Dr. Reuter, who died before his patient, which is always cause for a kind of retroactive concern. Each had his specialty, of which Dr. Müller’s seems to be treatment by water. A couple of years ago he had me bathing naked in the Rhine each day for three weeks. When that didn’t work, he packed me off to Scheveningen, in Holland, where the water, being of the sea, was even colder, and Clara lost a child. How was I to know, after that, whether I remained sad and anxious because I was merely sad and anxious or because another of our children drowned before birth?” He snatched back Confessions of a Water-Patient and in its stead, like a flower for a weed, presented the startled young man with The Last Days of Pompeii. “I gave this to Clara for her sixteenth birthday,” he said, replacing at least in his own mind the image of the disconsolately relieved wife at Scheveningen with the girl he had not yet corrupted.
Brahms seemed unable to get enough of the books or of their peculiar owners, who saw no error in the equation by which their lives (time, home, children, food, affectionate regard) would be exchanged for his music and his presence. It was so easy to seduce him with their routines and their possessions, and so easy to be seduced in return by his spirit and his physical beauty and the music that was sometimes so difficult to comprehend, not as much for its form as for its source. Robert saw him sprung whole from the head of Zeus. Clara could not help continuing to think he had been sent by a god who spoke German.
He carried around The Last Days of Pompeii until he had been presented with so detailed a description of Clara’s sixteenth birthday and the parties attending it that he felt, he said, finally, if momentarily, no longer the youngest person in the room. He looked at her as if she were sixteen, and he twenty, as he was, attempting to read the past in her body and in so doing to obliterate those lost years.
They passed him between them like a gift to each other. When he and Robert were alone, they read and talked and smoked and played chess and indulged in the newly popular table-turning, which allowed Robert a chance to communicate with the dead and in the process to introduce his compassionate new friend to his old friends and family passed away. Otherwise, Clara had him to herself.
Robert could hear them at her piano, she instructing, Brahms playing, each time a bit differently, as he was literally absorbing her into his hands.
“Chohannes,” she would say, her voice impeded still by the affliction of her childhood, but only when she addressed him privately. She struggled otherwise for a certain propriety in the public represented by the rest of the family, trying to breathe his name correctly.
She had been taking on students for years, even during her concert tours. Such money as she made from this seemed to Robert tainted, because she should not have had to earn it. Yet with such a pupil as Brahms, whose payment came in his mere willingness to be taught by her, her teaching became a gift given back to herself through him.
He played for them each evening—a fantasie he’d written, songs of his own and Hungarian folk songs, both piano and violin parts of a violin sonata—and each evening through his playing moved more deeply within their lives.
“Tell Robert about Liszt,” she said, laughing as she said it, full of a kind of private pleasure that made Robert envy not only Brahms and Clara, for what they shared, but himself for having reason to envy them.
“I fell asleep,” said Brahms.
“That’s the punch line!” Clara touched him on the shoulder.
“You fell asleep while Liszt played!”
Clara now turned to Robert. “How did you know?” And to Brahms: “Did you tell Robert this story before you told me?”
“How did you know?” Brahms reached out and put his hand on Robert’s sleeve.
Robert tapped himself on the forehead.
“Music is not your only supernatural power,” Brahms flattered him.
“Robert can see into the past,” teased Clara.
Brahms had fallen asleep some four months earlier while visiting Liszt in Weimar at the Altenburg, the grand home of his mistress, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, who had inherited thirty thousand serfs from her father and from her mother the vastly more commutable strength in her thighs that allowed her to stay in her horse’s saddle for eight hours straight and to lock Liszt in place as no woman had before.
“I liked her,” said Brahms. “She had black teeth from cigars. She kept them in a box she told me was from Egypt.”
“She kept her teeth in an Egyptian box?” asked Clara.
“Her cigars!” The boy’s laugh was as high-pitched as his voice; it joined with Clara’s and made Robert shiver with delight. He had not seen her so frolicsome since that part of her girlhood she’d spent with him, nor so provocative with a man since she had been so with him.
“The cigar box was lined in pearl,” Brahms went on. “She would take my hand and put it in and run the tip of my finger along the pearl lining and then close my hand over the biggest, fattest cigar. That one was mine. She smoked small cigars. But she smoked them all the time!”
“And Liszt?” insisted Clara. “Is he not still the same insufferable cock?”
“Oh, I don’t thin
k he is,” said Brahms. “He doesn’t wake early.”
They were not able to determine, when they discussed this later, whether his naïveté was real or assumed. It hardly mattered, for it flattered him, and it flattered them, that he should be so unashamedly childlike in their presence, when he must know that both saw him as a god.
“He asked me to play for him, and when I wouldn’t—I was frightened by his reputation, and I hated the room—he took my scherzo from me and put it on the piano and sat down to play. You’ve seen it—it’s scored in my own hand. My own father wouldn’t be able to read it. But Liszt—he just sat there and played it. It was even better than I thought—my piece, I mean, though so was his playing.”
“And still you fell asleep?” Robert found this hard to believe; Liszt had sight-read Robert’s work, and he didn’t sleep for three nights after that experience.
“Not when he played my work,” Brahms answered.
“Oh, no!” said Robert.
“Yes,” said Brahms. “He said he was going to play a sonata of his own, in B minor, something new, something revolutionary. Of course it put me right to sleep.”
“How terrible.” Robert found the story delightful as an anecdote but at the same time distressing when he considered either of its principals, the sleeper or the fallen-asleep-upon. Sometimes it seemed the only place for art was beyond the human capacity to defile it with indifference.
“It was the music that was terrible,” said Brahms. “To call that a sonata would be like calling rain wine. That they are both liquid will not make water intoxicating.”
“So what did Liszt do?”
“He didn’t play my music again. And I didn’t play his. But he did give me a gift when I left Weimar. Wait here—I’ll show you.”
Brahms almost ran from the room, as he almost ran practically everywhere.
“Do you know what it is, darling?”
“Probably an undergarment—though whether Franz’s or the princess’s I won’t hazard a guess.”
“Perhaps they share it.”
