Longing

by J. D. Landis

  I have written you before with sympathetic ink and am doing so now between these visible lines. Be sure to hold this letter over heat in order to find those words I want no one else to see.

  I understand from the doctors that you have suggested I be galvanized. I appreciate your concern for my health. My fear, however, is that these quacks will hook me up to the electrostimulation machine at the same time they are giving me one of their endless enemas (“endless” repetitive, not “endless” continuous). That’s all I need—dynamized turds. That’s all they need!

  As it is, I am fed the selfsame calomel given at the end of his life to my much adored and much mourned Schunke. It is both diuretic and sialogogue, so that I am the very model of a baroque fountain, albeit one perpetually in the wind, spraying from distant latitudes. It’s a remedy for whores, I suppose, but whores’ what?

  I am also now and then threatened with the application of mustard plasters as a form of counterirritation. Imagine—to attack pain with pain. They might as well cut off one’s head to put an end to doubt and misgiving.

  I have been working on several pieces. A reduction of your Heinrich overture and piano accompaniment for the Paganini Caprices. My dream is that the two of you arrive together to play for me. My own music is now silent—at least outwardly.

  Where is Johannes? Is he with you now? Is he flying high or only under flowers? I should dearly love to be at his side on his flight over the world. Does he still allow no trumpets or timpani to resound? Tell him to remember how Beethoven begins his symphonies and then do the same thing. He must begin—that’s the main thing. Once you’ve begun, the end arrives to meet you. Just like life itself.

  Where is Johannes? (Forgive me. I didn’t mean to repeat that in visible ink but am too weary to write this whole thing over in order to hide it.)

  Yours,

  Robert Schumann

  *The last letter she would receive from her husband.

  *The last piece for solo piano she would write.

  *On March 26, 1827, during a violent storm, Beethoven shook his fist at the sky in the midst of a peal of thunder so great it pierced even his deafness. Having thus conducted the music of heaven, he fell back dead.

  Endenich

  JANUARY 11, 1856

  I could spend a whole day calling you beloved

  and still not have said enough.

  Johannes Brahms

  Schumann sat at the square piano. With his vest unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up and ashes from his smoldering cigar flecked upon his shirt front, he looked like a student again. His hair, unwashed and oily enough to ignite from his cigar, was wholly black still, unusual for a man of forty-five and almost freakish for a man of forty-five in an institution like this, where hair went gray as if it were required in the regimen of cure. Indeed, Dr. Richarz considered it a bad sign when hair did not go gray, for it meant the patient was fighting mightily against the dispersion of stress. Stress did not literally rise up out of the head, but, as a consequence of the intransigent intimacy of mind and body, it seemed to, turning the hair gray, or even white, on its way out. Antonio Vivaldi’s red hair, Schumann had told him, had not gone gray either, and he was in his sixties when he died, disordered from his prodigality, far away from home, in Vienna, where Clara was at this very moment and so was Vivaldi, but no one knew where, because his grave, like Mozart’s, was unmarked, and why not, for we are all walking tombstones and might perhaps prefer a little anonymity once we’ve pitched.

  Schumann’s hands flew over the keys of the piano, as the saying went, but in truth they flew across the keys, upon the keys, into the keys, and therein lay the problem. What he played was unbearable, as if the mind from which it issued were totally paralyzed.

  “Bravo,” interrupted Dr. Richarz.

  Schumann ceased in what seemed mid-note.

  “Fugues. Shall I take up where I left off?”

  “How could you?”

  “That is one of the magic properties of fugues. They seem unstructured to the ear but to the mind are structured to the breaking point. I can prove it. Shall I take up where I left off?”

  “Please.”

  Schumann poised his hands over the keyboard.

  Dr. Richarz locked open his mouth as a way to reduce his hearing.

  “So where did I leave off?”

  “I’m to tell you that?”

  “Of course. You’re the one who heard it.”

  “I’m to tell you what note?”

  “Not what note. What difference does the note make? I want the sound. Sing it for me up to where I stopped. I’ll take it from there.”

  “I couldn’t possibly.”

  “Embarrassed to sing in public?”

  “I sing in church.”

  “That’s not singing. That’s conforming. Here, this is singing. This is how you sing a fugue: da da da da, dadadadadadada, da da da da, dadadadadadada, da dadadadadada, da dadadadadada, da da, da da, da da, dadadada. There. You see. A fugue. Fugues are my therapy. I’ve told you how when I was young I copied out every note of the Art of the Fugue and when I was finished I was purged of all madness. Fugues offer a vision of perfection with none of perfection’s perfection. They are the ideal parent, strict and forgiving at once. Elastic and secure. And they come with many voices, just like me!”

  “Yes, I remember—Fugenpassion.”

  “Forget Fugenpassion—Fugenwut!”*

  “But perhaps it’s when passions become frenzies that the mind becomes ill. Think of politics.”

  “Yes, but think of love.”

  “Frenzy?”

  “The mind must match the body in the idiom of love. It must explode!”

  “But Endenich is where people come when their minds have exploded.”

  “Or when their minds have … what is the opposite of ‘explosion’?”

  “Implode, I suppose.”

  “No … recoil—that’s what I mean! Do you have any idea what it feels like to go mad?”

  “Yes, I have some idea.”

  “Do you have any knowledge?”

  “I know the symptoms, certainly.”

  “But the feeling?”

  “No, not the feeling, I’m happy to say.”

  “Shall I tell you?”

  “Of course.”

  “It feels like this.”

  Schumann brought both fists down violently upon the keys of the piano, knuckles first. He held them there so the sound was sustained in his small sitting room and then removed one finger at a time so the absonant chord he made was decomposed note by note until there was a tiny sound in the air that finally, though he kept that one finger down upon the key, dissolved.

  “Look at your hands!”

  His knuckles were bloodied. There was also a smear of red visible upon the white keys.

  “You ask me to look, and I ask you to hear. We remain far apart in our approach to my madness. Now bring me some paper. Music paper. There’s something small I want to write down.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “What?”

  “What you just played.”

  “My fugue?”

  “No. That chord. That chord you say represents your madness.”

  Schumann stared at the end of his cigar. He shook his head. He touched the end of a finger to it. He shook his head again.

  “Don’t worry. I have the chord memorized. You can’t think much of my future as a composer if you think I would ask for music paper in order to write down a single chord.”

  “For what, then?”

  “I’m writing songs again. Songs for my distant beloved.”

  “Ah, Beethoven.” Dr. Richarz smiled the proud little smile of the allusion-savvy.

  “Well, these are really my own. Shall I sing you one? Don’t worry—I won’t smear the blood all over the piano. I’ll just sing. Listen.”

  Oh, won’t you come to Endenich

  Or would that not be politic

  For you to come to Endenich

>   To see your favorite lunatic?

  I beg you come to Endenich

  And I suggest you get here quick

  So that you’ll be here in the nick

  Of time left me in Endenich.

  It’s not a place that you might pick

  To come to whether well or sick

  But judge me not a heretic …

  We all end up in Endenich!

  Schumann found a match in his pocket and lit his cigar with it, nodding all the time at Dr. Richarz as if simultaneously to solicit and to influence his opinion of the song.

  Dr. Richarz touched the index finger of each hand to the meatus of each ear. “As you know, my hearing—”

  “That’s no excuse! Don’t you know the old saying that musicians love to quote after performances by their rivals?—Never blame the hearing for what the heart detests.”

  “Detests? I didn’t detest it. I merely thought…”

  “Thought? I ask you to listen, and you think!”

  “I thought it was not true—we do not all end up in Endenich.”

  Schumann laughed. “Oh, I don’t mean here.” He swept his arm around to take in the entire institution, leaving a trail of smoke and ashes floating in the air. “I meant… Endenich. Not your Endenich. Not my Endenich. But Endenich. Who can deny that? ‘We all end up in Endenich,’” he sang the last sentence.

  “But will she like it? Will she not be terribly disturbed by it?”

  “Who?”

  “Your distant beloved.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “She … her … your wife.”

  “And you think this song is addressed to her?”

  “Is it not?”

  “‘Beloved’ is not singular, sir. I address it to everyone. After all, we all end up in Endenich.”

  Dr. Richarz rose, shaking his head. “I hesitate to bring you paper on which to write down such a song.”

  “Oh, I’m not planning to write out this song. I’m still composing this song. In my mind. You remember my mind. You used to visit it with some regularity. Before you became more enraptured by my poor body. No, it’s not this song. It’s another. Shall I sing it to you?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “It’s not mine. It’s nearly three hundred years old. I’m merely harmonizing it. I’m doing my own little setting. Bach did three of this same piece. I told you it was just something small. My Endenich piece is not small. It’s less than small. But this piece is merely small.”

  “What is it?”

  “A hymn.”

  “I like hymns.”

  “I should think you would. Shall I play it?”

  “I don’t trust you, Herr Schumann.”

  “I should think you wouldn’t.”

  Schumann turned his back on Dr. Richarz and placed his hands on the keyboard. His knuckles were now more raw than bloody, but the blood on the keys themselves seemed somehow not to have dried, and he moved it with the tips of his fingers to whatever note he played, as he sang,

  When my final hour is at hand

  To leave this blessed earth

  I beg Thee Lord Jesus Christ

  To comfort me in my suffering.

  Lord, my heart at the end

  I entrust into Thy hands.

  Thou well knowest how to protect it.

  *Fugal passion; fugal frenzy. Schumann had learned that the study of counterpoint, so demanding in its formality, might ease the informality of madness, its, literally, derangement. And so he studied both the influential theoretical work of Friedrich Marpurg (who when he was not theorizing upon fugues was, as if to balance inevitability with improbability, director of the Prussian State Lottery) and what Schumann called his “grammar,” Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, whose fugues he claimed could strengthen one’s very morality (by which he meant not behavior but the purity of one’s relationship to art). In 1845, when terrifying thoughts had brought him to the “verge of despair,” he was advised by Clara to write fugues of his own. This he did for both the piano and the pedal-piano, which had an extra set of strings and hammers and which Schumann, in the midst of his Fugenwut, believed would become a standard in the catalog of indispensable musical instruments. As much as he valued the study of the fugue, Schumann was also fond of quoting the following anonymous definition of same: a composition in which one voice races away from the others—and the listener from them all.

  Endenich

  APRIL 15, 1856

  If only Johannes had been with me,

  he would have provided comfort.

  Clara Schumann

  Schumann bent his weak, thin frame slowly toward the floor and touched the bright gold-red end of his cigar to a corner of the gauzy paper on which his wife’s hand lay. The paper quickly caught and gathered to a fist, consuming her hand and all the words it spoke. From it, other papers caught, and more from them, until even the prayer rug beneath them began to burn, and he screamed, “Fire!”

  Herren Nämlich and Niemand burst into his sitting room. They, too, screamed, “Fire!” but to each other, as if they needed to confirm such madness before they could act to douse its consequences.

  Together they went into the bedroom and emerged with two vessels, one filled with water and the other with urine.

  “Wait!”—they hesitated only because this was one order no human being could ignore, however briefly. “Let them burn.”

  Herr Nämlich poured on the water and Herr Niemand the urine. The smoke of the burning paper and wool of the rug, which had been sweet, immediately became bitter, sour, with the smell not of flesh but of its waste.

  Schumann puffed on his cigar. Nothing issued from it but a slight sprinkling of ash that fell into the fire and disappeared into its greater ash.

  “I merely wanted time to light up. Either of you have a match?”

  They grasped him and held him until they seemed to realize together that in this posture they were unable to summon aid.

  Herr Niemand let go only after he had put both his hands over Herr Nämlich’s and squeezed them even harder into their grip upon Schumann’s arms.

  When Herr Niemand returned to Schumann’s suite, he had Dr. Richarz by the arm, pulling him into the room as he might a surgeon into surgery.

  “What have you done!”

  “Fire,” said Schumann.

  “You might have… “ Dr. Richarz thrust his hand up and out from his body until he held all of Endenich in his mindful palm.

  Schumann shook his head. “It was I who called, ‘Fire!’”

  “And you who started it.”

  “Actually, it was my cigar.”

  “What have you done here?”

  “I will confess it, then: Started a fire.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To burn my papers.”

  “So these were not for conflagration only? They were not incendiaries toward a graver purpose?”

  “Grave enough, this.”

  “What papers were they?”

  “Music. Unfinished music. But unlike Gogol, I—”

  “What else?”

  “What else is there?”

  Dr. Richarz kneeled by the fire. He blew on his fingers before raking them through the corona of ash.

  “This appears to be your wife’s stationery.”

  “Impossible!”

  “You haven’t burned your wife’s letters, then?”

  “How could I?”

  “How could you, indeed. And the prayer rug?”

  “Because this was a sacred holocaust. Also, it was so very beautiful. The rug, I mean. Not the fire. The fire smells like piss.”

  “Your music … your wife’s letters … what does this mean?”

  “Nothing. It means nothing.”

  “Then why would you do it?”

  “I told you—it means nothing.”

  “You did it because it means nothing, or it means nothing that you did it?”

  “Clearly, doctor, we differ about the meaning
of nothing.”

  “What does it mean to you?”

  “It means nothing. Therefore, it means everything. Otherwise, why would I do this?”

  “Destroy your past? Is that it?”

  “I was thinking more of the future.”

  Endenich

  APRIL 16, 1856

  Can I wish him back to me in this state?

  Clara Schumann

  The sitting room still smelled of smoke and wet ash and urine. This odor had spread to the bedroom, where Schumann was being administered an enema by Herren Nämlich and Niemand. They permitted him to kneel with his head in his pillow, which eased the insertion of the tube and allowed them, at the proper time (if such an expression may be used), to swing him back like a pendulum and hold him over the bedpan, which they had stationed at the end of the mattress.

  Dr. Richarz waited at the foot of the bed for his specimen.

  “This is the last shit you’re getting from me,” said Schumann.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Is it that you can’t hear me or you distrust what you’ve heard?”

  “Your voice is muffled by the pillow. And my hearing isn’t at its best today after yesterday’s tumult. Why don’t you just wait till you’ve gone to speak to me.”

  “Gone where?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “This is the last shit you’re getting from me!”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  “Half the time you study my shit, and half the time you study my brain. What kind of life is that?”

  “I’m a doctor. I do what’s—”

  “I meant for me. What kind of life is that for me?”

  “I’m only trying to help you, Herr Schumann. After two years, I still have no idea where your illness originates.”

  “Well, if it’s in my ass, you can stop looking. No more enemas.”

  “There’s no need for vulgarity.”

  “Tell that to them. They’re the ones sniffing around my ass.”

  Without his usual warning, which consisted of the involuntary moans and groans and grunts of the enemaed, Schumann let go.

  Herren Nämlich and Niemand were taken aback, literally.