Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  In all the theatre of seeing off the cabbie, by a display of shouting and asking if he had any idea how poor they were and what they had suffered, Minna had forgotten the dog, and Richard was cowering, in the way he did when one of their minor frauds or confidence tricks was in danger of exposure. He too had forgotten Robber, the faithful friend. Oh Christ! As Minna had thrown herself on the fetid, cold, unpleasantly damp bed and sobbed, and begun asking him whether he had ever done anything right, anything at all – was it not she who had negotiated the taxi, the rooms, everything? – he had sadly and quietly stepped out into the alien British street and searched for the dog. Clever Robber had gone all the way up to Oxford Street when the cab halted. Several people whom Wagner stopped in the street had seen him there.

  ‘Dog as big as an ’ouse!’

  But Wagner, tear-stained, had returned to the lodgings in Dean Street without him, only to find, when he flung open the door, Robber and Minna sitting there. The dog, who had never visited these lodgings in his life, had, after circumnavigating Soho, found his way home.

  When they lost him in Paris in a similar way they had dared to be optimistic. Surely Robber would find them, even if they had been too feckless to keep a watch-out for him. But that was one of the horrors of Paris for them both, Robber’s absence. Wagner had worked hard in those Paris years. Meyerbeer, successful opera composer; Heinrich Heine, great lyric poet; all these German Jews, conveniently enjoying the liberties that Paris then afforded them and which, with its heavy censorship and its cultural narrowness, Germany did not afford. And yes, they’d helped Wagner – Heine had supplied the idea of The Flying Dutchman, Meyerbeer had helped get Rienzi looked at by some theatrical directors, but ultimately …

  No need to go down that road, but it was the poverty of his circumstances, compared with theirs, which made him subsequently resent those Jewish friends in Paris. Meyerbeer, both he and Minna came to feel, had not been a friend. What crap the music was, in any case, the music of Meyerbeer, yet crowds of people queued in the cold to hear it at the Paris Opera. Unadulterated crap.

  Sometimes he and Minna quarrelled, sometimes they made it up in the cold nakedness of rented rooms and – oh God, the remorse, he realized with twenty-year hindsight that she had been so frustrated by his jerky, clumsy lovemaking. She had tried to teach him and he was too eager, too busy to get finished himself to see what she was trying, often so playfully, to teach. He set the joys of sex to music while she got drunk and masturbated, that was their story. Oh, Minna, he knew that now. If there had been some way of explaining it to him, as a young man, what all that stuff in bed was about, for … why women care about it…? And her lost baby, that came back into his consciousness as he sped in the train away from Lyon having heard the news of her death, twenty-five years and more after those Paris times.

  Robber, that was what had bound them together, not the bad sex and the common poverty, but the love of Robber.

  Wagner had been to see Meyerbeer – again. Ever since they’d conceived the idea of running away from their debts and problems in Riga, Minna and Richard had set unrealistic hopes on Meyerbeer’s powers to save them. Wagner had sent the successful composer drafts of Rienzi and begged him to send letters of introduction, to give him an opening with the Paris opera house. Meyerbeer had supplied the letters, but when Wagner got to the opera he had had no luck. And the next time he saw Meyerbeer – God, how he hated being beholden to this talentless man – he had gently said that the letters had been of no effect. ‘I’m not surprised!’ Meyerbeer had laughed. But he had, Meyerbeer, given him, Wagner, some help, rustling up singers who would perform a piece Wagner had written called A Faust Prelude. And on that particular evening Wagner had called on Meyerbeer to see if the singers really were available – and thank God, they were, and Heinrich Heine had been there too, sipping champagne. That was the evening he suggested to Wagner that he should make an opera of The Flying Dutchman.

  Anyway, with his head full of these promising possibilities he had raced off to the cheap restaurant, where you could eat for one franc, and found Minna waiting at a table. It was a warm spring night and she was sitting out of doors on the pavement. As someone who was herself a woman of the theatre, and horribly aware of the ups and downs of the profession, Minna was still prepared, at this stage of their marriage, to follow every twist and turn and up and down of Wagner’s (at that date non-existent) career. And here he was, on the verge at last of getting something performed, and she looked up and said, ‘Oh my dear!’ With sympathy, because the despair on his face seemed to speak of such utter bereavement and sorrow. ‘Damn Meyerbeer!’ she had added.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Meyerbeer has got the singers, they are going to do a performance of Eine Faust Ouvertüre, but you see…’

  ‘But darling, that’s wonderful!’

  But as she rose to kiss him he burst into tears. ‘Minna – by the Quai du Pont Neuf – I’ve just met Robber.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I met Robber.’

  ‘But why isn’t he with you? What happened? Has someone stolen him?’

  ‘I was walking across the bridge, you know, and I was about to turn right into the Quai du Pont Neuf…’

  ‘You mean, where he has his bath – or used to?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  When they had first come to Paris, Wagner and Minna had walked with Robber to a particular spot on the Quai du Pont Neuf each day and allowed him to wash himself and swim about in the river, which he loved to do. The spectacle of this enormous animal in the Seine drew such crowds that the police had cautioned them and said they were causing an obstruction.

  ‘When I saw him there, just near where he used to bathe, I called out, “Robber! Robber, my old boy!”’

  ‘Yes? And? What happened?’

  ‘Oh, Minna! Oh, Minna! He turned and looked at me. It was a look of such strange reproach. We fed him, didn’t we? When we had no money to feed ourselves, we somehow managed to get meat and bones for Robber? And when we had no love left in our hearts for one another we loved him.’

  ‘Oh, God, Richard, what are you saying?’ Minna was crying now.

  ‘He looked at me. And as I went towards him, saying his name and reaching out my arms to embrace him, he…’

  ‘He what?’

  Wagner could not finish the sentence without sobbing it: ‘He ran away.’

  ‘But didn’t you chase him?’

  ‘Of course I ran after him, but he had gone, simply vanished, and I’ve been looking for him for an hour. He’s gone, Minna, gone.’

  That conversation of 1840 replayed itself in Wagner’s head in 1867 while Minna’s soul, released from its unsatisfiable bodily hungers, swooped joyously towards the empyrean.

  Wagner wrote to Doctor Pusinelli in Dresden asking him to arrange the funeral. He would not go himself. An overwhelming tiredness had come upon him and he wanted, after the mistake of Lyon, to return to the routines of work which life at Les Artichauts allowed: days ordered by his housekeeper Vreneli with delicious meals, and soft bedclothes, and walks with dear old Pohl, the pointer.

  They were both inspired pick-ups, Vreneli and Pohl. He had met Vreneli – she was called Verena Weidmann – when he had gone to an hotel in Lucerne to get some peace and finish orchestrating the third act of Tristan und Isolde. Vreneli was his kind of person; they had clicked immediately. There was a bit of flirtation, but it was nothing in the nature of a sexual relationship. She had seen in what ways he needed to be cosseted. He immediately liked her sensibleness, humour, her not needing to be asked to do things because she had already thought of doing them. She was uneducated, had no particular interest in opera or music; she was a peasant. She was a chambermaid at the hotel and, when he checked out, he sensibly took her with him. And she remained with him, supervizing the move of Cosima (when she became part of the story) and the children into the new-built house at Bayreuth.

  Pohl was another fistful from the lucky dip. He was a fairly ol
d pointer. Wagner and he would only spend three years together. It was when he went to live for a while at Haus Pellet on the shores of Lake Tarnberg, fifteen miles south of Munich in 1864. Pohl, this slightly lame old dog, was somehow around and made friends with Wagner almost immediately. By the time he’d left Munich to go back to Switzerland, it was unthinkable that he should leave Pohl behind. And now, travelling back to Geneva from yet another little exile, the mistake of Lyon, he looked forward to being greeted by Pohl’s large dark eyes on either side of that thin, mournful face and, putting his face down to the dog’s, feeling himself licked. That would be his greeting as he came into the hall of the Villa des Artichauts, and it would soothe all his worries, and all the gnawing sadness and remorse for the past years with Minna that were gone and never would return.

  But, oh, as he came into the drive and Vreneli opened the front door, he knew there was something wrong.

  ‘Oh, Master! Herr Wagner!’

  For a split second he allowed himself to hope. The hope was a quite specific one: that Vreneli had heard of Minna’s death and (in spite of all she knew about Cosima and his other amours) she was offering the conventional condolences on the death of his wife. But it was vain to hope this. How could Vreneli, who had never met his wife, possibly know that she had died, far away in Dresden? He had only just heard the news himself, from Dr Pusinelli. No, it was obvious enough that a real tragedy had occurred.

  He went at once to the point: ‘Is it Pohl? Has he hurt himself?’

  ‘Oh, sir!’

  As the stab wound entered his heart, another part of him, the part of the artist’s soul which will exploit any experience and any situation, thought – That is so eloquent. All you need to show that a death has occurred is, not to use words, but for the woman to lift her apron, and stuff one corner into her mouth and pucker her eyes and mouth. That says so much and the music can say the rest.

  It was not Vreneli’s fault, it was the landlord’s, the owner of the house, that the decision had been made, in Wagner’s absence, to bury poor old Pohl in the vegetable garden of Les Artichauts. Wagner at once set to work, getting the gardeners to disinter the corpse, which he wrapped in the dog’s favourite carpet and enclosed in a wooden coffin. On the lid was a marble tablet, which he got the local stonemason to inscribe ‘To his Pohl, RW’. The animal was reinterred in a more dignified setting, beneath a tree near the house.

  They were bleak days that followed, and he was not sure, as he struggled with Meistersinger, which simply had to be completed, whether the sorrow that weighed on his heart was for the old days with Minna or the much more recent ones with Pohl. He felt it was Pohl he missed. He had loved the animal’s way of nuzzling. That long nose came at your trouser-legs, or at your face, warmly expressing love. Or, walking along, Pohl would press his lame old haunches against Richard’s legs in a companionable equivalent of a hug before lolloping a few independent yards away from his friend. Dear old Pohl.

  Vreneli, who noticed everything, tiptoed round Richard Wagner’s grief. She supplied him with favourite dishes: a fricassee of turbot, with shallots and truffles and cream; vast amounts of sausage; poulet au riz; a spectacular stew she used to make, out of oxtails, which he liked eating with beer.

  It somehow did not matter that the butchers, the greengrocers, the bakers, none of them had been paid. Sometimes they remonstrated with Vreneli and told her enough was enough. But somewhere inside her peasant heart-mind Vreneli was a Wagnerian and she knew that the phrase ‘enough is enough’ is a piece of nonsense. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

  She did not mind, either, that it was weeks since she herself had been paid. She had a bit of money put by. Savings. She knew how to salve his wounds. She knew that until they were salved, the work he was doing would not get done, and that if it did not get done he would be nothing more than what people saw – and what his enemies for ever would caricature and revile – a small, rather ugly, passionate man of wolfish appetites, uncontrolled emotions, frequently silly opinions, a cheap sensualist, a con artist. Vreneli was aware of the mystery that out of this hyper-energetic little person there came forth something which was good for the world. He was that unusual man, the one who could speak to millions, both while he was alive and after he was dead, speak to their dreams, speak to their fears, make sense to them of their passions and of the convulsions that had and would rock their world. In the earlier bit of her Bible, much thumbed, which she kept in the kitchen – it was the old Luther version of course though she was a Zwinglian – there were two stories that came to mind. Samson’s riddle about the lion – out of the strong came forth sweetness. And later, much later, the cleverer riddle of the Apostle: my strength is made perfect in weakness.

  Richard Wagner was sitting in the Villa des Artichauts having drunk his morning chocolate and wondering where in the devil’s name Vreneli had gone. Drat and curse and damn the woman, he needed her. He wanted a particular shirt ironed. He wanted to send her shopping. He needed something sent to the post … He sat with his head in his hands on a bench by the porch. He could not face going back into the house where he knew he should be at work on Meistersinger for the King. All the pleasure of being, for the first time in his life, in demand, in royal demand – of being in a position where his operas were going to be performed – all this pleasure had evaporated. The anxiety about his love affair with Cosima, previously an uplift to the spirits, was now a jangle in the nerves. The relief at hearing of Minna’s death had turned to numbness, regret, not mourning, quite, but deep sadness; and there was a gnawing ache where Pohl, dear old Pohl, had been. That was it. Women, and men: they had never given to him – though Vreneli tried – what it was that he so easily established with his canine friends. It was not just slavish devotion. It was the uncomplicatedness of the affection, the fact that, once established, it could not be taken away, which was so comforting. He and Pohl – dear old Pohl – they knew one another. There were no icebergs on the journey. No sudden swimmings into the cold, no moodishness. And there was Vreneli, coming round the corner of the house. Where in God’s name and all heaven had she been? She was coming round the side of the house, from the coach house rather than walking up the small path at the front. So she had been into town without telling him? She and her husband Jakob had taken the brougham? Without being able to justify such anger, he felt it swelling up – as a compensatory variation on the gnawing sorrow within, which clogged the music inside his head.

  ‘I hope you are going to be pleased,’ she said. ‘And there’s no need to put on that angry expression.’

  ‘There’s a shirt I expressly promised myself to wear today. The cream silk one? But you weren’t around…’

  ‘Jakob’ – the coachman – ‘has someone he’d like you to meet.’

  ‘I cannot meet anyone! How many times have I told you that I am trying to compose … that the King has…’

  But there was Jakob, grinning like a zany, in his breeches and his green waistcoat and his open-necked uncollared shirt, leading forward, on a short rope … Robber? Robber had been gone for twenty-five years and more. He must be dead, but this was …

  A Newfoundland puppy, thickly black-furred and already as large as a German Shepherd, was at Jakob’s side. As happened with the best relationships, anyway the best dog relationships, eye contact was made absolutely immediately.

  ‘Come – come … Let him off the rope, he’ll come! Vreneli’ – as if it were he who had brought the dog and she who had been neglecting her duties – ‘have you got a steak for the animal?’

  ‘I thought you’d like to give him his first meal here,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like that?’ he asked his new friend. The huge wet eyes peered into his. From the jaws of Russ, as he would be known, fell a great skein of anticipatory spittle.

  * * *

  I did not know, as you of course did, that our journey to Leipzig was to be our last together and that we would never see one another again. Sometimes I have felt b
itter about this; not angry with you, because I understand completely: you had to get away, from me, from this insane country, from the whole thing. You needed your own life. And, given the degree of surveillance by the Stasi, by the Passport Office, by absolutely bloody everyone, it was inevitable that you should have kept your decision completely under wraps. It is not that you would have feared that I would relay your decision to the police. It is that if you live in a police state, any passing on of information, any at all, is in danger of being intercepted. You needed to get out. The forthcoming tour of your orchestra in Stockholm gave you your chance to defect and you took it. I have no idea what happened to you after that, because not long after our visit to Meistersinger at the Leipzig Opera I was given a flat in a better part of town. It was no bigger, but the smell of the chemical works was four miles further away and the air was just a little clearer. You never knew that address, of course. I do not know if you tried to write. As you know, none of us living in these condominiums has ever had a telephone. There was no way you could have communicated with me, even if you had wanted to. At least I have been spared the knowledge of whether you did or did not want to be in touch. You went. It was the right decision.