Longing

by J. D. Landis

  “Your wedding ring? What is this about your wedding ring?”

  “So they don’t have that in the magazine.” Schumann reached for it again. Herr Oebeke grasped his hand.

  “So you are married, Herr Schumann?”

  Schumann removed his hand from Herr Oebeke’s and held it and the other up before Dr. Richarz. “How can I be? Look, no wedding ring.”

  “I thought you said it fell into the river.”

  “So I did. And so I did. And do I not stand here before you?”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “And do I not not have a wedding ring upon these fingers?”

  “You do not.”

  “I do not not, or I do not?”

  “You do not.”

  “And I do not not as well. Have a wife, that is.”

  “Then you do!” said Herr Oebeke, who had followed the logic of this conversation with all his might.

  “Then where is my wedding ring?”

  He held up both hands again before surrendering them to Herr Oebeke, who walked backward along the garden path with Schumann in tow.

  He asked Dr. Richarz to let him read the article in the magazine from Boston, but the doctor demurred.* Schumann inspected the flower beds through his lorgnette.

  *The actual “true secret” that the April 22, 1854, issue of Dwight’s claimed to divulge was of what it called Schumann’s “lamentable state.” Dr. Richarz saw no good to come of revealing this uninformed opinion to his patient.

  Endenich

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1854

  Now I want to play with you, the way angels do,

  from eternity to eternity.

  Robert Schumann

  “Come. Sit down. Have a glass of wine.”

  Schumann didn’t wait for a response. He pointed Dr. Richarz into his usual place on the dos-à-dos and poured each of them a glass of a Riesling from the Bacharach vineyards in the Rheinburgengau, not far from the Rhine gorge.

  “Too young,” said Schumann.

  “You are too kind,” replied Dr. Richarz.

  “I was referring to the wine.”

  “But we haven’t tasted it yet.”

  “Too young for it to taste of me. The soil in which these grapes are grown is nourished by the waters of the Rhine. These, of course, were picked before I took my fatal plunge. Perhaps next year’s wine will embody my flavors.”

  “In that case we shall have to keep it as a sacramental wine.”

  “You are too kind.”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “Oh, not at all. I don’t take you seriously enough to mock you.”

  Schumann raised his glass in expiatory appreciation. He motioned for Dr. Richarz to do the same. “A toast.”

  “What is the occasion?”

  “Do you know what today would be?”

  “Whatever it would be, it is. It’s in the nature of time to be unconditional.”

  Schumann laughed. “If I’d wanted a philosopher instead of a psychiatrist, I’d have leapt into the fire of the sun rather than the ice of the river.”

  “Well, if I were a philosopher—which, as you know, neither I nor anyone else can be, because, as Schlegel says, one can only become a philosopher, not be one, for as soon as one thinks he is one, he stops becoming one—but if I were one, I would ask of you the same question I find myself asking as a psychiatrist: What would today be if today were not what it is?”

  “My wedding anniversary. So let us drink to the memory of my wife and of the children we had.”

  “Memory?”

  “Aren’t they dead?”

  “How can you imagine such a thing?”

  “I haven’t heard from my wife in so long I can assume only that she and the children have died. Why, otherwise, would I have no word from her in all this time?”

  “You have denied her existence, Herr Schumann. You have dealt with the terrible pain of separation from your loved ones by disavowing them. But this… but now… this is a sign of health. This is a sign of recovery. Your wife is alive again—in you. Let us drink, then, to your anniversary. But let us also drink to this redemption of your mind.”

  Because of the strange configuration of the dos-à-dos, they had each to take a quarter-swivel in order to look one another in the eye and to touch glasses. This they did. Dr. Richarz then took a good long swallow of the young white wine to Schumann’s quick sip. Schumann rose immediately to his feet with his glass raised over his head. Dr. Richarz was halfway to his own feet and his glass slightly above his hair and heading higher and the words, “To your health!” dripping from his teeth when Schumann turned his glass upside down. The wine disappeared into the small, worn prayer rug that Schumann had obtained, he claimed, from the widowed husband of the woman who was the lover of the man he himself had most loved before Herr Brahms.

  “There’s poison in my wine.” It was said as a statement of fact, not an accusation.

  September 14, 1854

  Beloved Clara,

  How happy I was in your note dated but yesterday (you see I continue to compose at white-hot speed) with your very handwriting, which put me in mind not only of the many letters I had had from you in the Past (I emphasize that word to distinguish my real Past from the time I have spent in this prison) but of your hands themselves, which brought forth music from my passion and passion from my being. Happy too to learn that you still think of me affectionately and so do the children. Hug them for me. I wish I could see you all and talk to you, but we are too far apart. There’s so much I want to know—how you are, where you live, whether you still play gloriously, whether Marie and Elise are progressing in their music, where my scores and manuscripts and letters are being kept.

  Speaking of which, I need some music paper, because sometimes I want to write down some music. And perhaps you can find and send the variations of that theme in E-flat major I heard howling through my head in my sleep. (Nothing like that here; here all hallucinations are in minor keys.) New clothes too. Washed and ironed, I mean, not literally new. Though new clothes might be called for since I have gotten fat despite occasional walks into Bonn and strolls through the garden here that are so boring I end up talking to myself. It may be, in the words of Hölderlin, “the season of the ripening vines,” but what I see now in Nature is what he saw in the midst of plentitude: “summer’s empty fields.”

  Trips to Bad Godesberg too; endless hydrotherapy in the very place where I had those seizures you’ll remember well in heat not unlike this past summer’s, though I did not notice the heat when it descended, only in retrospect, when everybody said, “Hot enough for you?” In fact, I wore wool and a vest all summer and everyone looked at me the way I have always looked at village idiots in overcoats hovering around our picnics at the solstice. “Looky, looky, here comes the kooky”—remember how those words that were chanted by the children in Würzburg at patients who had just been released from the Würzburg asylum became a chant we heard everywhere? Like a popular song. “Looky, looky, there goes the kooky.”

  And send me cigars. I very much want you to know this. Cigars. I lead a very simple life here and take great delight in the views of the Siebengebirge out my window. There’s so much I want to know and so many things I need. If only I could ask you for them in person. But if you want to draw a veil over some of them (but not the cigars—danger of fire!) I’ve asked you for, fine. I don’t know what I’m doing here. That must be why they keep me.

  Do you still have all the letters with the words of love I wrote you from Vienna to Paris? Oh, how I long to hear your wonderful playing once more.

  I bid you farewell, my beloved Clara. You and the children. Including the new one. I appreciate your having postponed the christening in the hope that I might attend and participate in the naming. Felix! May he be both happy and lucky! And do thank Johannes for standing in for me as your son’s godfather.*

  I wonder if you would be so kind as to send me his portrait (Johannes’s). That and the cigars!

 
; Your old and faithful,

  Robert

  December 15, 1854

  Dear One!

  First, I thank you for your tenderness and goodness to my Clara. Now that she communicates with me once again (I believed she was dead! I should have known she could not be dead with you to care for her as you do) she writes about little else but you.

  This splendid wife of mine has sent me your portrait. Upon my request. Now I may look upon your familiar features whenever I like. I have memorized its place in my room, which is not the room I am now in writing to you but is the room where I sleep. I have put you under my mirror by the bed. How kind you are to let me see yourself when I might otherwise see someone who looks no better (to put it mildly) than he did on that day our portraits were finished, you so beautiful and I with insane, popping eyes and fatted cheeks.

  If only I could come to you, to see you and to hear you. I am gravely shaken by your variations on my theme. Clara, too, has worked from this same theme (which I stole from my dear friend Mendelssohn’s Andante) but not to the troubling degree that you have. I say “troubling” because you have taken a simple thing of mine and put it out of reach. Transcendence is a bitter gift, however that word (“gift”) might be used.

  If only I could come to you. If only you might come to me.

  Robert

  *Joseph Joachim had been invited by Clara to join Brahms in becoming godparent to her new son. He was forbidden by Düsseldorf authorities because he was a Jew. Out of this personal insult, and in order to gain what he called a “privileged position” in the Royal Hanoverian Orchestra, he fed the hand that bit him and converted to Christianity soon thereafter.

  Endenich

  DECEMBER 31, 1854

  All my thoughts and dreams are of the glorious time when

  I shall be able to live with you two.

  Johannes Brahms

  It was New Year’s Eve. Dr. Richarz held a party in his own home for his doctors, nurses, and those of his patients who could be trusted with the cutlery. Schumann was surprised to recognize Alfred Rethels, an artist from Düsseldorf.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Ten minutes. And still no drink!”

  “I meant in the asylum.”

  “What asylum?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Rethels shook his head sadly and edged away from Schumann. “I wish I could help you.”*

  While such attendants as Herren Niemand and Nämlich were in attendance, their part in the festivities was purely “vigilant,” as Dr. Richarz did not hesitate to inform even those who did not ask why the attendants were ringed around the large sitting room in which the Biedermeier clashed with such romanticism as was represented by the collective madness of his patients.

  “Vigilance,” said Dr. Richarz, “is a medical term for insomnia. And this is, after all, New Year’s Eve.”

  “What difference does that make?” said Schumann. “With insomnia the criterion, every night in Endenich is New Year’s Eve.”

  He was dressed in his usual dark wool suit. His vest pockets were stuffed with cigars, of sufficient number that he looked as if he were greeting everyone with an extra pair of dark, fat-fingered hands.

  “Christmas gifts?” questioned Dr. Richarz.

  “Why should I? I received nothing from you.”

  “I’m not asking for a cigar, Herr Schumann. I’m asking where you got them.”

  “My wife.”

  “Wasn’t that thoughtful of her.”

  “She didn’t send them to me. They were brought to me last week by Herr Joachim. Christmas Eve. My very first visitor. Why?”

  “He must know how much you love to smoke.”

  “I enjoyed his visit. My very first visitor. Months, then, of having lost what might have been enjoyed. But he says Brahms will come. I gave him a letter to give to Brahms. I called Brahms du. What do you think of that?”

  “I make it a policy not to get involved in discussions concerning du and Sie. I’ve seen too many lives wasted in consideration of that distinction.”

  “She calls him du.”

  “And I’ve read too many novels with that line in them. I’m quite serious, Herr Schumann—no du and Sie.”

  “But she won’t let him call her du.”

  “Do you think that would be proper?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  “Do you deliberately make my point for me, Herr Schumann?”

  “Somebody must.”

  “But I did so myself. Several times.”

  “This is Endenich, doctor. What’s said here has no reality until it’s confirmed by others.”

  “Endenich is no different from the world.”

  “That must be why I’m here.”

  “You asked to come, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “All the more reason, then, for me to be here.”

  “What you say makes no sense, Herr Schumann.”

  “To ears that will not hear it.”

  “I make no secret of the fact that I am losing my hearing. Nonetheless—”

  “I make no secret of the fact that what I said about hearing has nothing to do with one’s ability to hear.”

  “What you say continues to make no sense, Herr Schumann.”

  “Let’s drink to that.”

  Schumann raised his glass like a baton, its stem pinched between thumb and forefinger, his arm so far extended that he nearly touched Dr. Richarz’s nose, and his wrist upheld at such a degree that wine spilled over the rim of the glass and onto the cuff of his shirt, which, like most cuffs in most asylums, was a bit soiled; the white wine cleansed it.

  “No poison in there this time,” Dr. Richarz joked as he touched his glass to Schumann’s.

  “To the contrary.”

  Schumann conducted the glass to his lips and drank down all that was in it. He then reached into one of his vest pockets.

  “But you have a cigar in your hand,” said Dr. Richarz casually; he was accustomed to redundancy in the behavior of his patients, though usually it was in actions by which they inflicted distress upon themselves.

  But Schumann reached behind his row of cigars and brought forth tightly folded papers.

  Slightly changing the subject, Dr. Richarz said, “In the matter of cigars, when a moment ago I asked you where you had obtained them, and you said, ‘My wife,’ but you then said it was not your wife from whom you had obtained them, why did you say it was your wife from whom you had obtained them?”

  “Are you asking me for a cigar?”

  “I don’t smoke,” said Dr. Richarz wearily.

  “You really should. It soothes the nerves.”

  “What have you there?” Dr. Richarz changed the subject decisively.

  “Letters from Johannes Brahms.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “Have you been reading my mail?”

  “Of course not, Herr Schumann! But we are aware of what mail our patients get. We deliver it to them, after all.”

  “I want you to read it. That’s why I’m showing it to you.”

  “I would not be comfortable reading your mail. Besides, it’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “Have I spent my whole life unaware of a New Year’s Eve rule that prohibits the reading of mail?”

  “I meant, it’s a time for celebration.”

  “In other words, you wish a respite from your labors.”

  “Exactly!” Dr. Richarz signaled for wine to be poured into his and Schumann’s glasses.

  “As I wish a respite from my suffering.”

  “I see.” Dr. Richarz now waved off the servant carrying the tapered green bottle, before a drop of wine was poured.

  “I shall read them to you myself.” Schumann held his lorgnette to his eyes. He started to read the letters, but he read them silently, nodding here, smiling there, shaking his head ferociously while laughing and ceasing these contradictory activities at the same instant.

  “Now I am curious,�
�� said Dr. Richarz.

  Schumann immediately folded up the letters and forced them back into his vest pocket.

  “I said ‘my wife’ because these letters concern her.”

  “It was your wife you wished to discuss, then? To the exclusion of all else?”

  “But not of all others. I addressed my first letter to Johannes in Düsseldorf. He didn’t answer it until December 2. Why? Because it was forwarded to him in Hamburg, ‘whither,’ he said, ‘I had gone to visit my parents.’ What do you think of that?”

  “I think it’s very nice when children visit their parents. Only my nephew visits me, and he is not comfortable at Endenich.”

  “Then what do you think of this? ‘I should have preferred to receive it from the hands of your wife.’”

  “Have you these letters memorized, Herr Schumann?”

  “I expect to be back in Düsseldorf in a few days. I long for it.’ He longs to be back in Düsseldorf. What could that mean?”

  “Anyone who has been in Hamburg and Düsseldorf must prefer the latter.”

  “Only if you prefer French whores to German.”

  “Who doesn’t!”

  “Dr. Richarz!”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve, Herr Schumann!”

  “One night a year you are granted a sense of humor?”

  “It would appear to be the same night that you are made cruel.”

  “It was only tonight that I received his next letter. He didn’t write it for a week after he’d returned to Düsseldorf. He waited until he’d had my own next letter, delivered by Joachim. The one in which I took fate in my hands and called him du. He thanked me for calling him du. And my calling him du allowed him to confess that the woman he calls my ‘kind wife’ had brightened his heart by using this same word to him, this word he calls ‘intimate.’ There, doctor—my wife, as promised. As I am intimate with him, she is intimate with him. ‘How long,’ he writes to me, ‘the separation from your wife seemed to me! I had grown so accustomed to her and had spent such a glorious summer with her. I had grown to admire and love her so much that all else seemed empty to me and I could only long to see her again.’ Note—the theme of longing. In every letter, he writes of longing. ‘I brought many beautiful things back with me from Hamburg. From Herr Avé the 1779 Italian edition of the score of Gluck’s Alceste.’ Very nice, very nice. ‘In addition, your first cherished letter to me and many from your beloved wife.’ One from me, many from her. Do you know what this means, Doctor Richarz?”