Longing

by J. D. Landis

  He laughed. “Your head may be invisible, but your stomach is halfway to Maxen.”

  “Let’s hope it makes it all the way.”

  They had gotten almost to the Bohemian Railway Station when they were stopped by men with scythes.

  “Are you armed?”

  They were searched despite her answer.

  “Why are you not armed?” he was asked.

  He had perfectly good reasons. In Leipzig, soon after they were married, he was declared, by the Conscription Commission, unfit for military service, for reasons chronicled in written certification that he sometimes feared would outlive his music: Not only was he nearsighted in the extreme and susceptible to vertigo when at an altitude sometimes no greater than his own height, but he had succeeded, through an act of self-mutiliation, in wholly paralyzing one finger of his right hand and partially paralyzing another. In other words, he could not see to aim a rifle; he would not be able to squeeze the trigger even at an inappropriate target; and he might very well start spinning dizzily in the midst of firing, should he be able to fire, and as likely cut down friend as foe.

  “I cannot play the piano with a gun,” he answered.

  “How about with one of these?” Someone swept toward his feet with a scythe.

  “Listen,” he said. “Swing it again. You can hear it in the air. If you all swing your scythes together, at different speeds and through different thicknesses of this smoke, you’ll make music.”

  Soldiers—even an untrained militia—are made uncomfortable by creativity, let alone what might be interpreted as a lunatic form of it. It was true of these men, who suddenly seemed so eager to have Robert neither on their own side nor their enemy’s that they formed a virtual path into the Bohemian Station in order to force this man and his female party out of Dresden.

  Thus, as if Schiller had written that it were only by railway that man might make his way to freedom, were they able to take the train to the suburb of Mügeln, whence they walked beneath the afternoon spring sun to Dophna, where they caught another train to Maxen, beautiful Maxen on the Elbe. The insane asylum still dominated its landscape but no longer affected him except as architecture, perhaps because the world had turned mad (what with live bodies flying out of windows and dying from coition with the earth). And accompanying the general madness came a smoothing of what distinction there had been between the sane and what in such times could no longer be called their opposite. Now, he found, he could look at Sonnenstein without threat to the very sanity whose loss might have sent him there.

  Indeed, he sat by the window in their room in the large estate of their friend Major Serres and stared until dark at the old castle, quite content, calm, in fact, until they were called for supper and celebrated by the gathered gentry as heroes who had gallantly escaped from the revolutionary canaille, whom these people detested as only the rich can detest others for a desire to be like themselves. Clara became more and more agitated at having to listen to such aristocratic froth but held her tongue for fear of offending their host. Robert, who was known for saying almost nothing out of what were assumed to be reasons peculiar to the suffering artist, and probably were, now found that the usual inner agitation had been disengaged from silence and that the calmness he’d experienced staring at the madhouse was transferred precisely into his staring at these idiots gathered around him. And they left off praising his heroics in supposedly having led his wife and daughter to safety precisely when they realized he was staring at them, staring in what must have been a most intense and eccentric way, for they shrank collectively from his gaze and took to coughing and chattering in such discordance that he could not understand a word they said and therefore experienced for the first time profound gratitude at his own inaptness.

  When the sound of cannonading, which he discovered was rendered with great clarity by the night air’s fornicate acoustics, joined the prattling of Major Serres’s patrician refugees, it all became to him a kind of symphony of negligence, incongruent sounds trammeled into bombast.

  But to Clara these guns and echoing of guns and abrupt, scuddering scintillations of firelight through the vaulted night clouds drew her into grim reality, her city lit up and blown up with three-quarters of her children (he did not put into the equation the one precisely 77 percent unborn) left behind, trapped within poor fiery Dresden.

  She rose from her chair even as the schnapps was being poured. “Please excuse us,” she said to Major Serres. “We must return briefly to the city to fetch our children.”

  “‘Fetch!’” said an old woman. “It is dogs one fetches. Children are summoned.”

  Major Serres shrugged off his guest’s discourtesy with the convivial indifference of the perfect host and said to Clara, “Are you out of your mind! It’s the middle of the night.”

  It was, indeed, precisely the middle of the night by the time she was ready to leave, three A.M., Marie asleep in a little room of her own next to theirs, Robert awake at this hour not from his customary insomnia but because he had been granted, he felt, a singular vision of himself, watching himself sit and watch his wife not sit. He made no move to stop her, join her, or replace her on her perilous journey. He knew she would refuse his help because of the same danger that had caused them to flee in the first place: that he be forced into service, to face Prussian guns with a scythe placed in his hands and off he would go from her forever, cutting the air into neat pieces until such time as he could taste his own blood. He would, of course, love to die for a cause, provided the death last no longer than the cause remain just.

  But he did not offer his help. He was like a man whose wife cooks (not that he himself was a man whose wife did cook, or who should have cooked when she did, particularly fish) and who watches her day after day, meal after meal, cooking. She keeps him alive with her cooking, and he could no more step across the kitchen to take her place at the stove than he could step across the Rhine. Or he watches her hammer a nail into the wall, to hang a picture. Or empty a chamber pot. Or feed a child. Or climb a tree to fetch, if that is the right word to use for the fetching of a cat, a cat. Or undress herself while he sits watching. Or hide him from barbarians. Or go off into Europe to play the piano. Or play the piano.

  He was, like Hölderlin, “poor in deeds and rich in thought.” Such passivity canceled obligation. Such consideration of the self canceled the self. He was removed from life. He was as godly in his powers of observation as in his inability to do anything but observe.

  He wanted her desperately but could not have her. There was about her an air of absence, provided perhaps by himself, or at least by his desire, which he knew would increase once she had departed for Dresden with the married daughter of Major Serres’s steward, who had agreed to accompany her on that part of the journey safe to go by carriage. He remembered singing in this same house with Anna Laidlaw, “O lovers’ eyes are sharp to see,” realizing only now that what they see best is the lover who’s not there.

  “Good-bye,” she said, kissing him. “Sleep if you can. Don’t worry about me. I’ll return with the children and we shall have a picnic by the river.”

  “Enjoy,” he said, referring not to the kiss he gave her in return but to their absence from each other. He longed for her but not to go with her. He longed for her to be gone.

  In going, Clara ceased to exist. How else could he have borne her absence?

  The world itself did not exist. He remained awake the entire time, sitting where he sat when she had left, except when he was forced to get up to relieve himself and took the occasion to look in upon Marie, which he did with Clara’s eyes. It was she who customarily visited the children when they slept, for though he slept so little and so poorly and thus need never awaken for the purpose of replacing blankets or pouring water for a dry-mouthed daughter—he was, he could have sworn, always awake through every night!—he feared such tribulation was contagious, particularly in the cool and thin black air, which always seemed to transport torments with imperceivable ease.
Imagine, to touch a child’s forehead in the night, to breathe a kiss upon her cheek, and from that night forth she would never sleep the night through.

  Marie, in sleep, seemed like himself, lost to the world.

  He went back to his seat by the window and wrote songs in his head to Goethe’s words and wondered if one makes art to shut out the world or one shuts out the world to make art. A true musician must place himself above human miseries; he must draw his courage from within himself alone.

  What anxiety he finally felt was only for his wife, whom he could not separate from her children but whom he separated entirely from the rest of humanity. He could still hear the shelling and see its flashes infuse the clouds and felt as if war were some astronomical thing.

  She returned shortly before noon. He was sitting where he’d sat, the only difference being that Marie had awakened and brought him dried figs her mother had left by her bed and sat beside him, a quiet guardian of his isolation. When Clara entered, framed by Elise and Julie, Ludwig in her arms as he must have been for the entire trip back, Robert could move neither his body nor his mind toward her. It was as if he had partaken of death, not on the battlefields she had crossed but because he himself had become one of those products of the reflective faculty he’d read of in Coleridge, who had himself found through alcohol and opium what Robert could glean from the mere passing breath of life itself.

  Clara was dirty and tired and exhilarated. She sent the children into the care of one of Major Serres’s servants and, standing before Robert as she took off her dusty clothes and unpinned her gunpowdered hair, delivered him aloud an exuberant letter of the sort he had received from her on paper when she was young and they were separated and his longing for her in her absence had been less enigmatic.

  “Oh, Robert, it was such a great adventure! We went by carriage to Strehla. The driver dared not take the road. Or perhaps he could not see it. Or was he drunk? He went across fields. He darted among trees. I was frightened not for myself but for the baby. We were bouncing so much my head was hitting the ceiling of the carriage. But poor Frau von Berg’s head was hitting it many more times than mine. Of course, she was not weighed down by child. Under normal conditions, to judge from what I could see of her figure, I should have been the one more thrown about. She is what is called a sturdy woman. Physically. Temperamentally, she is, to put it delicately, fragile. She was so frightened by our drive to Strehla and by the unending thunder of the cannons and their explosions of light and the glow of fire rising toward us from Dresden that when the driver would go no farther, neither would she. It was just as well. I preferred to go alone. I had found myself thinking more about her than about you. Good riddance, I said to myself—in reference to her, of course—and set out across the field toward the Reitbahngasse. I had walked perhaps four kilometers. And there, coming out of the mist of dawn and that curious smoke from the gunning…I say curious, because it is not like the smoke from the burning buildings, which is bitter and ugly, but it is almost sweet, and it is as fragile as Frau von Berg’s mind, rising and falling in the wind like a veil. Or ghosts. And coming out of it, as I was saying, were ghosts! I thought they were ghosts. They were spread across the field, two thick, in a long line of perhaps twenty creatures that as soon as I saw it, and they saw me, began to close in upon itself. And upon me. They were spectral and ragged and after the events of the past days I was hoping they were ghosts, not men. But then I saw they were carrying those damned scythes. Men! What a disappointment. ‘Are you going to kill me?’ I asked. ‘What a stupid question,’ one of them answered. ‘What a stupid answer,’ I said. Instantly, they parted and let me through. I had thought I was going to die. That’s why I spoke so provokingly. Instead, my impudent tongue saved my life. Not a good lesson to teach a woman! From there I walked as in a dream to our house. I cannot tell you my joy at seeing it still standing. At finding the children asleep in their beds. It was like finding you here now right where I left you. As if there are two worlds and I am able to protect you and the children from the unendurable one. Waking them up was no easier than ever. They act like sleepy immortals. Poor Henriette was no help. What a time to get smallpox! So I dressed them myself and then we had a merry walk home to you! My safe and cherished husband.”

  Her hair was at her shoulders. It left deft scrapings of gray ash on her skin. Her belly and her breasts strained against her underclothes. He so much wanted to rise to take her in his arms, to the extent he could encompass her without the usual tittering brought on by the scope of advanced pregnancy, and to smell the smoke in her hair and take it on his skin so he might also reek of war and sacrifice. But he could only sit and watch his wife, who, undressing, told him with conspiratorial fealty that Wagner had given imperious speeches on the steps of town hall, had raised the black-red-gold from the very apices of his barricades, and had been forced to flee as a leader of the visibly failing revolution.

  “The true revolutionary in this world is whoever does nothing to anyone.”

  “Then that cannot be you,” she answered, “for look what you do to me.”

  He looked, instead, at Sonnenstein and was reminded of it when, barely a year later—the revolution crushed even to the extent that regulations had been issued by Berlin’s new chief of police regarding the height to which women might lift their skirts in order to avoid dragging them in puddles—he was offered Ferdinand Hiller’s job as Düsseldorf’s music director and saw on a map of the city that it held a madhouse in its midst. There were three convents as well, and these, in conjunction with the madhouse, reminded him in turn of his youth in Heidelberg, when he would go from loving one boy to loving another and hang between them like a sinner between the redemption of the church and the indulgence of the asylum.

  This had been Mendelssohn’s job the year before he came to Leipzig. Mendelssohn was dead. Now Chopin was dead, reason enough to flee wherever one was, for death had a way of spooling through a calendar, gathering up lives in order. (Except when it came to one’s children.) Mendelssohn had been the oldest by a year—gone. Chopin older by three months—gone. He would be next. Then Hiller, then Liszt, then Wagner, though Wagner was the sort who might escape his turn to die because for all his exhortations on behalf of the rights of the common man, he behaved as if there were never more than one man in the room.

  Clara hated Dresden as much as he did. Its musicians “dear colleagued” with a buggering unctuousness but in private husked each other’s privates. So did they excise Robert from the list of candidates to succeed Wagner, in exile with Liszt in Switzerland, as Kapellmeister. It was a position he had needed, she convinced him, not merely for the money and prestige but to get him out of the house. In the aftermath of the revolution, as Europe crawled back toward an apparently irresistible despotism and music poured from Robert as it had not since the year of songs in the year that surrounded their wedding, Robert seemed to have left the world in order to inhabit the inside of his own head. He was working himself, as he had before, into a frenzy of accomplishment and melancholy. Still, as easy as it was for him to write a piano concerto, a cello concerto, an opera to Byron’s Manfred, so did he always seem to slip into grief, with no warning but for the bleeding of music. The more he wrote, and the better he wrote it, the more deeply he suffered for it. As patiently as she tended him when he was ill, he could never make her understand not so much why this happened as how it felt. It was nothing more, or less, than a rehearsal for dying.

  He cared less that he had been refused Wagner’s job than he did being denied a church in Dresden, any church, in which to hold a memorial service for Chopin. In Paris, there was a huge funeral at the Madeleine, where Mozart’s Requiem was sung, over the objections of the archbishop of Paris, who felt that the kind of singing demanded by the piece would require jongleurs of such accomplishment that their vanity would permeate the church itself and deliver unto Christianity the contamination customarily produced by conspicuous virtuosity. The Requiem hadn’t been performed in Paris s
ince the return of Napoleon’s ashes to Les Invalides, but it was on that day, for Chopin. Luigi Lablache and Pauline Viardot were soloists and in the audience sat Turgenev, who found he desired Pauline even more because of the stark wretched beauty of the composition, which brought death to life and like all great religious music positively inspirited the flesh. Chopin’s own dead flesh—verified as such, because a fear of being buried alive had caused him to request that his body be cut open after the pronouncement of death—was taken in a grand procession, said to match that given Mendelssohn, though not nearly as geographically prolonged Robert was gratified to realize, to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in what was said to be the unfashionable east of Paris (how should he know? Clara had always gone to Paris without him, perhaps to quarantine the innocence of her doomed and distant love for the unglimpsed, untouched, eternally untroubling Gérard de Nerval, whose madness had come to make Robert’s own seem the mere pout of a passing fish). There it was buried in the Paris earth along with a jar of soil from Poland Chopin had brought with him nineteen years before. In exchange, Poland got his heart: silent, still, empty. It was delivered by train.

  Robert did not grieve for Chopin as he had for Schubert. He considered this a measure of his maturity, not to lie crying in bed all night between two friends but to lie awake all night beside his sleeping wife, performing every insomniac’s fundamental ritual, which is to keep an eye open for death. And because he felt through Chopin’s departure one step closer to his own according to his calculus of chronological eradication, whichever eye remained closed was employed in picturing his own funeral. Try as he might, he was unable to see his body transported by train across Germany to Zwickau or Bonn or Vienna, or carried in a hearse through the streets of this city or that, it didn’t matter which because he had never found a city he loved. All he could see was himself and his wife—not even his children!—the world empty of mourners but for her, into whom he disappeared so there was nothing left of him. Only then did he fall asleep.