Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “Stop screaming!”

  “He cannot,” said Clara, who held Robert’s hand while Dr. Hasenclever tilted his tall frame away from his patient, his own little perversion of the physician’s salutary stance. “He screams when he hears the sound.”

  “What sound?”

  “A single note.”

  “What note?”

  What note indeed. Robert could remember when at least what he hallucinated could be named by its pitch. He had once driven his friend Hieronymus Truhn nearly mad by asking him over and over, “Can’t you hear that A? Can’t you hear that A?”

  He was no longer able to sustain the illusion that anyone could share his torment.

  Dr. Hasenclever seemed willing to wiggle out of a diagnosis because of his patient’s inability to name the note that brought him such pain. And he certainly had nothing to prescribe to end the pain.

  But as was often the case upon the termination of an appointment with one’s doctor, the pain went away as soon as the doctor went away. He did not so much take it with him as obliterate it with indifference.

  Out of that solitary note grew strange music more glorious, played by instruments sounding more exquisite, than any music ever heard before. Voices, rising above distant background brasses, sang in magnificent harmonization Bach’s “Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott.” Then there were symphonies played from beginning to end by entire orchestras that seemed squeezed into his brain and unlike the lazy Düsseldorf orchestra were indefatigable. Out of the last chord of one piece grew the beginning of the next, none of the music recognizable until nine nights after his first attack he heard angels sing to him and rose from their bed and wrote down the melody.

  In the morning, he played it for Clara. “It was given to me by Schubert and Mendelssohn together,” he said. “They came to me in the night. They had never met on this earth. But now they are together. ‘Is there room for me where you are?’ I asked them. ‘There is so much room where we are that you would not be able to find us for all eternity.’ An equivocal answer, true, but I noted that the ‘would’ was not a ‘will’ and so was given hope. And is it not wonderful that they should be joined together inside me? They have chosen me as the medium for their collaboration. I shall put their names together on this piece.”

  “But that is your music, my darling,” she said.

  “Only that it comes out of me. It was put in me by them.”

  “Listen.” She played the theme, without looking at what he’d written down. “Do you not recognize it?”

  “Music from the dead,” he replied.

  “Music from your violin concerto. From the slow movement. Listen again.”

  At the moment she had managed to make clear that the angels had tricked him into believing that a variation of his own theme had come from the souls of two of the composers he most loved (Bach having shown up first with his cantata), those same angels transformed themselves into demons.

  They sang to him and then they talked to him. “Sinner,” they called him. He could not remember sinning. At worst he had made love to people he did not love as much as the one he loved most. He drank wine and beer more for their ability to dull than to embolden his mind. And he had written some execrable marches because he had felt bad at not having taken up the scythe against the cannons of pseudoconstitutional autocracy. The devils were not creatures of the air, like the angels. They did not fly about his head but circled him like the jungle creatures he used to conjure in order to scare Clara and her little brothers. He could actually see them now, drooling tigers and gum-baring hyenas. They raked him with their claws as they pestered him with comments about the value of his compositions. Alas, he took them more seriously as critics than as ecclesiastics of the damned. He accused them of driving him mad and could offer as defense only such books as he’d read—Lenhossek on the emotions, Karl Heydenreich’s Philosophical Remarks about Human Suffering—which he launched against them not by reference to their futile content but as missiles. He hit Clara with one of them and was told by his demons to throw another at her. They wanted him to earn his way into Hell.

  She brought the book back to him, who had never before struck her or threatened to strike her or harmed her in any way except by filling her piano with children to keep her from playing and leaving her more often than she left him though he never went anywhere without her except into his room to write and to the tavern from which she was compelled to fetch him each evening because, through the fault not of drink but of his incapacity to remember sometimes who he was and thus where he lived, he was no longer able to find his way home.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked.

  The devils would not let him say the devils made him do it. “Very,” he answered.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not worthy of you.”

  Beneath all the noise—from the first repeated note to the shrieking of the demons—he could hear, as he realized he had always heard, the hum of time. There was a sound in the world that was always there, beneath speech and beneath music and beneath the wind when it blew and the abrading of the light when it didn’t. It was the hum of time, and whether it was time passing or time standing still, it was a disruptive, awful sound. All who heard it would go mad.

  “How can you say that?”

  “I can say it because if I were worthy of you I could never say it.”

  “How can I help you, Robert?”

  “Pack.”

  “Pack?”

  “Yes, you can help me pack. As you always do. You know I have never been able to pack for myself. Not if I am to have underwear in Altenburg.”

  “Are we going to Altenburg?”

  “I use it as a figure of speech. Do you remember how we met once in Altenburg and I had forgotten my underwear?”

  “I did not pack for you then.”

  “Will you now?”

  “For Altenburg?”

  “Not for Altenburg.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Only I.”

  “Where?”

  “I have been banging my head against the wall of insignificance,” he answered. “All this time.”

  “Perhaps it’s my mistake to think the wall has suffered more than has your head.”

  “All my life I’ve followed you. Now it’s time to follow my head.”

  “Where?”

  “I cannot say it. It’s hard enough to think it. My demons tell me it’s that or Hell. And still I hesitate. You know where.”

  She disappeared. He had to pack for himself.

  When she reappeared, he was in the bedroom.

  “I’ve sent for Dr. Böger.”

  “To take me there or keep me here?”

  “Robert, do you really want to abandon your wife and your children?”

  “Until I’ve recovered.”

  “Recovered what?”

  “I am not an upholsterer!”

  “Am I to laugh?”

  “You see. Everything has changed. You have never before had to ask my permission to laugh.”

  “It wasn’t your permission I was asking. It was your meaning.”

  “If it’s philosophy you want, go look in your Kierkegaard. I am no longer his town crier of inwardness. Henceforth, I go out, not in. Or I shall if you will only help me pack. Look at what I’ve done. I have my whole life spread out before me but nothing packed. What is packing? Is it choosing what to pack or packing what you’ve chosen? What do I really need where I’m going, Zilia? Clothes?—they will probably dress me in a uniform, or how else will they tell me from the others? Money?—I want you to have all the money I have failed to make. Music paper?—oh, certainly—there is no greater cure for madness than to continue along the path of self-destruction. My Beethoven pen?—a knife in my heart. My watch?—but then I shall never be able to ask, ‘What time is it?’ of those to whom this very question is once and for all beyond necessity. And will I need my hat?—only to hold the poison in my mind. Cigars?—yes! Cigars
I need, the little devils. And if I am not permitted to smoke them, I shall hold them to my nose right down to the stub. I know how much you hate that—how I take them so far down. Now you shall be free of me and my cigars. Thank you for helping me pack.”

  Dr. Böger was sufficiently convinced Robert might do harm to Clara that he not only told them they must sleep in separate bedrooms but put a guard in with Robert, a Herr Bremer, who wore a military uniform (Dr. Böger worked primarily in military hospitals in order to be assured of a fresh flow of patients and to avoid having to treat women, because his admiration would not allow him to tinker medically with their delicate natures). Robert enjoyed having Herr Bremer keep him company. He deliberately did not ask Herr Bremer what it was like to wear a uniform, which omission he knew kept Herr Bremer up all night, while he himself, for what felt like the first time in his life, fell asleep and slept until morning.

  When he awakened, Herr Bremer was gone. Robert put on his dressing gown, which he would never have worn in front of a man in military uniform, even if he was merely a nurse in a military uniform, because it was covered with green flowers. Then he opened the door that led to Clara’s sitting room, and there he saw Marie, sitting at Clara’s desk, watching the door he had just opened, guarding him.

  He loved his daughter, his oldest child, but he was insulted it might be thought he was so diminished in capacity that so young and thin a person, especially when compared to Herr Bremer, might keep him imprisoned. “Oh, God!” he groaned, so she would realize he was not blaming her.

  He closed the door and wrote a note to Clara and left it beneath his hairbrush and put on a coat over his dressing gown. Only then did he look out the window and discover that rain was pouring down. So he put his bare feet into his slippers before he exited the room through another door that went into the hall. On his way out of the house, unashamedly going toward the front door onto Bilkerstrasse, he heard Clara’s voice saying his name and Dr. Hasenclever’s voice saying his name back to her. Even before he was in the street, he began to weep for having been the cause of such repetition as he would never allow in his music. His name was ruined.

  To make matters worse, he had forgotten his hat! If he hadn’t been going to need it in the madhouse—and he had decided before walking out in the rain that he wasn’t even going to go to the madhouse—the hat had become a necessity by virtue of its rescinded expendability. Quite the opposite of life, which was rendered unnecessary by its very essentiality. Not to mention the cold rain, which coursed through his hair and confused his tears and must have made him look, with his hair greasy wet and the flowers of his dressing gown blooming through his coat and his slippers sloshing in the puddles that collected in the cobblestones’ arteries, like a madman escaped from the asylum instead of the madman escaped from the asylum that he was. Yet all around him, others were the same, or worse, dressed in masks and motley and terrifying capes while drinking beer from hideously ornate tankards that had done more to ruin German reputation in the arts than all of Wagner’s bombast.

  It was a relief to encounter in the tollgate at the little pontoon bridge off the Rathus Ufer two men in customary uniform.

  “Why is everyone so strangely dressed?” he asked.

  “Fasching,” answered one of them, while the other seemed to express disbelief at Robert’s outfit.

  “Oh, I am not dressed for Carnival,” he explained, which seemed to confuse the man further. Nor had he ever dressed for it. Lent was difficult enough to understand; the idea of preparing for it with excess and debauchery was stupefying.

  “Toll, please,” said the first man.

  They were on the west bank of the ice-bejeweled Rhine. Robert had no intention of reaching the east.

  “I’m here for the scenery.”

  “Toll, please.”

  “My sister drowned in the Mulde.”

  “Toll, please.”

  “I want to give to the river, not take from it.”

  “Toll, please.”

  “Here is my wedding ring.”

  “Toll…”

  “It is for the river, not for you.”

  “Toll, please.”

  “I have no money.”

  “Toll, please.”

  He took from the pocket of his dressing gown a silk handerchief. He thought to give it to the men and realized he might instead wipe his wet hair and face with it. But that would be redundant.

  “A gift from my wife,” he said as he handed it over and started to run off across the bridge.

  Then he stopped to look back. The men were not following him but had both poked their heads out of their little shelter, into the rain. “A gift to me, I mean,” he clarified.

  He then opened the hand in which he had been clutching his wedding ring, to keep it dry and keep it safe, and threw it off the bridge into the ice-defiled water, noticing it had left a tiny halo in his palm, and threw himself after it.

  As he fell to his death, he remembered Harry Heine’s Edith Swanthroat, discarded by her lover, the king of England, but alone able to identify his body among the countless bodies on the battlefield of Hastings. But what if King Harold had been swept to sea? A proper death implies a total disappearance.

  He also thought he heard a clock strike in some tower, silencing forever the Carnival, and his music, as death would both divide him forever against himself and unite him for the first time with his life if not with its meaning.

  The first thing he saw in the water was Clara, swimming toward him, but not seeing him at all. Her mouth was opening and closing, against the laws of survival, but he could hear nothing of what she was telling him. All he heard was music, beautiful music, unheard before on Earth or wherever it was he now inhabited, which he feared was the same place from which he had just leapt to his death.

  The second thing he saw was the bottom of a boat and out of it hands, four of them, palm-gloved hands with huge naked fingers that would have made an oboe cringe and a woman too, for they were raw around what should have been the chaste arc of fingernail and cast a nasty red even into the pallid gauze of the brumal, belching Rhine.

  It was colder in the air than in the water. They threw him in the bottom of the boat among their fish, some of which seemed more alive than he, dancing themselves to death while he just lay there picking up their smell but none of their will to live.

  “Why?” each of the men said, “Why?” as if he hadn’t heard the other. They sounded like hysterical Italian tenors.

  He was so cold he wanted to die. The rain was drowning the flowers of his dressing gown. His slippers were lost to the river. But when the fishermen came at him with a thick blanket, on which he noticed scales of fish like silk adornments sewn haphazardly into the stubbled wool, he jumped up toward the blanket, not into it, and threw himself back over the side of the boat, or thought he had, until he realized that a man who’s frozen to death moves with the swiftness of a distant star and is as easy to clasp if as difficult to understand.

  It was in that same blanket he was carried home, through the masked revelers who had gathered on the bridge to watch what, to judge from their lack of revelry, they had hoped would be not the rescue but the recovery of his body. They were all unrecognizable, but one of them was able to identify him even through the mask he wore of ice and grief and failure. “It’s Herr Musikdirector Schumann!” No cheer went up among the gaping mummers. But at least those kind enough to carry him home now knew where to carry him. The two fishermen placed themselves at the positions of honor, and as if he were indeed a table, three took to one side of him and three to the other and thus they dined off him as the most unusual and applauded prop in the entire Carnival as the commencement of the holy season was celebrated in the streets of Düsseldorf.

  Dr. Hasenclever answered the door. “Sorry,” he said, as what doctor would not to two flocculent fishermen and half a dozen dripping men in masks?

  “Herr Musikdirector Schumann,” said the man who had first identified him.

&n
bsp; “Run off,” explained Dr. Hasenclever, not unlike Gotthold Lessing’s manservant.

  “Herr Musikdirector Schumann!” The doctor’s gaze was directed down toward the blanket, which was then folded open from around its burden to reveal a man who had left his slippers and his wedding ring in the Rhine and his mind in some unfathomable sea of discomposure.

  But Dr. Hasenclever took him for a victim of the rain. “He ran off without an umbrella. And look at how he’s dressed!”

  “He tried to kill himself,” said one of the revelers.

  “Well, you can certainly catch your death by going out into this weather in such clothes as these.”

  “We fished him out of the river,” said one of the fishermen.

  “Him and me,” said the other.

  “That cannot be!”

  “It can. It is,” whispered Robert. “I’m cold. Let me in my house.”

  “Not yet,” said Dr. Hasenclever, who fetched Berthe the maid to stand at the door while he went off to get Clara. Or so Robert thought, until Dr. Hasenclever returned alone and said to Berthe, “The coast is clear. Have them take him directly to the bedroom.”

  And so eight strangers followed Berthe’s amplitudinous backside up the stairs, wholly content that the sight of it was payment for their efforts in saving his life, as it was his payment too, for as he raised his head to watch her waddle up the stairs and down the hallway, he thought how good it was to be home and alive.

  Berthe had become Clara. He found himself unable to think of Clara, or to picture her, or desire her, except to the extent that he thought of his absence of thought about her. It must be what life is, if there is life after death—an awareness only of what had been, which now was no more and therefore did not exist, for if it did, how did one bear the separation? He had died and had awakened in a vacant Paradise.