Longing (22 page)

He stayed at the piano. Despite the pain in his right hand, he felt as the music poured forth in descending fifths, from A down to D, E down to A, that flowers and gods were flowing out of his fingers.

Zwickau

NOVEMBER 19, 1832

Someday you must marry my son
.

Christiane Schumann

Clara stood with Robert's mother at the window in the very house in which he had grown up. Below them, in the market square, the merchants shrank into their clothes against the chill wind, which she could see and hear but could not feel in the comforting warmth of this sitting room.

It was most peculiar to be here. Robert had lived in her house in Leipzig, it was true, and had spent many hours up in her room, playing games with her and her brothers. And she had spent even more hours in his room, listening to him make music and watching him breathe and touching his face with the back of one finger. But to be in the house where he had been a child—it confused her. There was too much of him here. There was all the unobtainable evidence of his departed presence in the shapes of the rooms and the drape of the cloth and the seams where walls met clasping their secrets. She did not want him to have a past. She did not want him to have existed before he existed for her.

Yet here was his mother, to whom he displayed a filial devotion that Clara felt put her own to shame. While she loved her absent mother increasingly as she grew to esteem her stepmother less with Clementine's every giggle and gaucherie, Clara didn't write to her mother nearly so often as Robert wrote to his, and Clara had replaced her as the first one in her heart with the very son of this woman who stood next to her now and somehow made her feel it was precisely where she belonged.

“Were you frightened last night?” Frau Schumann asked.

“By my dreams?”

Frau Schumann shook her head but asked nonetheless, “Have you trouble sleeping?”

“Never.”

“Robert does.”

“Yes.”

“It is one of the worst things for a mother. The night has always seemed a prison in which one's children are locked away.”

“Sometimes he would play all night,” Clara said, to show that she was guarding him faithfully. “The piano,” she added.

“Did it keep you awake?”

“Never,” said Clara again. “But I heard every note.”

Frau Schumann nodded and said, “I meant were you frightened by the riot at the hall?”

Clara laughed. “It wasn't a riot, Frau Schumann. Besides, I am used to it by now. They mistake me for an object of desire.”

She had played the night before in the hall at Zwickau, as part of her tour of Saxony, and upon her completing Herz's Bravura Variations, with which her father had insisted she open in order to be sure to please the audience, that audience rose seemingly as one, though she knew it was not, and, applauding and vociferating madly, moved toward her like a river breaching its banks and surged through the orchestra, knocking over the music stands, pushing aside the musicians, the string players futilely trying to defend themselves with their bows, and stopping only when Clara could smell the garlic and beer and eau de cologne rising off the lips and skin of those admirers nearest her. They had no intention of molesting her, she knew, or even of touching the hem of her dress. They merely wanted to see her more clearly. They always want to see you more clearly, some to try to solve and some to try to deepen the mystery of how such music could come from
this
, a frail share of flesh in a white dress.

It was unfortunate that the next piece was what Robert had thus far written of a symphony, in G minor.
*
This was the first time Zwickau residents had been privileged to be presented with one of his compositions. Yet they seemed to hear little of it and jabbered on as it was being performed and made sour faces at one another when they did bother to listen. Robert later told her jocularly that it was just as well the audience and his symphony had proven to be so antipodean, because the local orchestra had ruined any parts of it that he himself had failed to ruin with his inexperience at orchestration. But she knew he was merely disguising his pain: From behind the curtain she had watched him in his seat as his music was being played, and he sank ever more deeply into it.

“This is your town,” she told him. “Your symphony, and not the Herz, should have been the first thing played.”

“It was not me, or Herz, they came to hear.”

She might have taken this as an accusation had he not been looking at her with some of the same wonder in his eyes as other members of the audience had displayed as they had pushed close enough to touch her. But they hadn't, and neither did he, despite her longing.
Do touch me
, she thought while he stood there looking at her as if, had he ever seen her before, it was in another lifetime.
Touch me
.

But she received no more from him than a sweet wash of wine from his breath, which, when he departed to find his way toward another glass, she inhaled and held within her until she felt quite drunk, or at least lightheaded, herself.

Now, the next morning, it was Frau Schumann who was touching her, taking her sleeve as she said, “Mistake? There could be no mistake. I find you very beautiful.”

Clara found herself wanting to put her hands over her face. “You are too kind.”

“Perhaps,” said Frau Schumann. “But not in this regard. And to think you are so young—a woman's beauty never truly manifests itself until…”

“Yes?” demanded Clara, who was desperate to have someone to talk to about these things.

“You are…how old?” asked Robert's mother.

“Thirteen.”

Frau Schumann smiled deeply into Clara's face. “Robert was right.”

Clara flushed. “I hope he didn't say that I was merely a child—”

“No. He said—”

“—who happens to play the piano well.”

Now Frau Schumann frowned. Clara was afraid she had offended her through her interruption. But then, when Frau Schumann spoke, Clara realized it was the gravity of the conversation and not its configuration that caused such solemnity to possess Frau Schumann's kind face.

“When Robert wrote to tell me you would be playing in our little town, and he would be accompanying you and your father on this part of your journey and thus I would have the opportunity to meet you, he said you would give me something to think about.”

Something to think about? What, Clara wondered, could that mean? One could think anything about anything. It was just like Robert thus to dwell on private matters of the mind. Some things he himself confessed to thinking about were so excruciatingly morbid that she often wondered why she loved so much to hear of them. Death and doubles, despair and doom—how did he manage to cloak himself in such raiment and yet appear constantly wrapped in radiance? Perhaps, she thought, it was just she who dressed him thus with her eyes.

“And so you have,” added Frau Schumann, causing Clara to wonder for a moment if this woman had somehow managed to capture within her own mind the image at that moment in Clara's—her enfolding Robert within the transparent beauty of undissolute light.

“You have given me much to think about,” Frau Schumann went on. “I will confess to you that I did not want Robert to become a musician. It was your father who convinced me, by holding up yourself as an example. But after last night…I could feel his humiliation.”

“Yes,” said Clara.

“It was not your fault.”

How she would love to be able simply to fling herself into the arms of this woman. How she missed, with a sudden yearning, her own mother. No one had held and comforted her for years, she realized. The closest thing to a true and long embrace were her and Robert's names together for the first time on last night's program. And even that did not envelop her flesh.

“His music is…” Frau Schumann could not find the word.

There was no word for it. But if there had been, it wouldn't be the word Frau Schumann was unable or unwilling to say. “Brilliant,” Clara provided, as inadequate as it was.

“That too,” said Frau Schumann.

Because they were having their first disagreement, however subtle, and it was over something as important as Robert's music, they could not look at one another, and so both were staring self-consciously down into the square and thus both saw Robert at the same time as he walked toward them, upright and seemingly oblivious of the cold, not even wearing his usual leather cap so that it was left to his thick, dark hair to protect his handsome head.

He looked up, squinting, at his house,
as one would when cold and heading home
, thought his mother, and
as one would when one's beloved is inside
, thought Clara, and he waved, though whether at one of them or both neither could tell.

The next moment Frau Schumann did, quite abruptly, take Clara into her arms and, with tears in the eyes that followed her son across the square, said something to this little girl that caused Clara to wonder if she could possibly have heard what she heard.

*
Lost.

Leipzig

JULY 4, 1833

A chain of sparks now attracts us to one another
.

Robert Schumann

Just as he had feared and—to himself only—had predicted, his little nephew Robert had died, not yet one year into this life and on the very eve of the very eve of Robert's own birthday, his twenty-second.

He had not known that his brother Carl and Carl's wife, Rosalie, would name the baby Robert, and when they had, he had been afraid to tell them of his fear that in creating a double of himself in this way, they were dooming one or the other of them to imminent annihilation.

The relief he had felt upon hearing the news of little Robert's death had been subjugated almost fully beneath the weight of his guilt over this relief. So he had been in a kind of despair ever since, bereaved in particular for, among the living, Rosalie, who had become in his heart nearly the sister that his own sister Emilie had been, and for, among the dead, little Robert himself, who roamed the land of the ex-animate in his own place and who had left him roaming the land of the living, empty and afraid, as happens to any supposedly fortunate survivor when his double has died.

But now, he was convinced, he had found a new double, and one who would not be doomed, or doom him, for they had been born strangers to one another and shared no natural blood.

He had taken her with him in April so that they both might be elucidated by Dr. Karl J. Portius's psychometer, which its inventor and thus far sole trained operant called the Electromagnetic Soul Machine. It was their first time out alone together when they were not simply taking a walk somewhere, anywhere, for the exercise that Wieck insisted all his students get daily to make them equal to the rigors of playing the piano. Before this, he and Clara would spend two or three hours a day walking to Connewitz and back, or round-trip to Zweinaundorf, she skipping and running around like a child when she wasn't tugging on the back of his coat so he wouldn't trip over stones in the middle of the footpath. She talked all the while, and he took increasing pleasure in observing how her gifts of heart and mind kept developing, leaf by leaf, as he described it in a letter to his mother. One particularly dry day, as he and Clara were walking back from Connewitz trailed by the dust they kicked up, she quite absentmindedly chanted to herself, “Oh, how happy I am! How happy!” He, who knew he had never been as happy himself and who had by this time in his life, like so many of his cerebral contemporaries, embraced melancholy as a kind of philosophical imperative, moved closer to her side on the path as though to absorb from without such joy as he was not capable of begetting from within.

He told her she mustn't tell her father they were going to visit Dr. Portius, not as subterfuge but as kindness toward the skeptical if not yet suspicious Wieck. Nonetheless, Clara took this directive as the former and seemed to revel in the intrigue. On their way through the streets, she wore a hood up about her head and face and spoke to him only in excited whispers.

The Electromagnetic Soul Machine itself was a deceptively simple-looking contraption, much like Dr. Portius himself, who was by profession a schoolteacher and shared with many other teachers the expressionless gaze of the person to whom so many stupidities have been uttered over so many years that he has himself been rendered lamebrained.

He was also, as his psychometer itself proved to be, nearly monosyllabic.

“We have an appointment for, or perhaps one should say with, your Electromagnetic Soul Machine,” Robert began.

“Ah,” said the doctor.

“What do you require of us?” asked Robert.

Doctor Portius held out his hand. “Money.”

“I meant—,” began Robert.

“Money,” repeated Dr. Portius.

This response caused Robert to abandon his plan to engage Dr. Portius in a discussion of just how much he might have been influenced by Johann Lavater's intriguing studies in magnetic-trance conditions. Robert handed over the fees for both himself and Clara, which caused Dr. Portius, once he had extracted the cash, to grasp the same hand and wrap it around the iron rod that protruded out of the small machine. Immediately the magnet caused the arrowed gauge to settle upon the word
hypochondriacal
.

“Silly machine,” said Clara.

“No, no!” Robert defended the device. “It is accurate. It is honest. It is forthright and unintimidated. I
am
hypochondriacal! Indeed, I do on occasion imagine myself to be suffering from something with which I am not genuinely afflicted.”

“I trust you are not referring to me,” teased Clara.

“How could you think such a thing?” Robert responded with utter seriousness, when what she wanted was for him to tease her back and tell her that her afflicting him was quite genuine indeed. Perhaps he was simply too taken with this ridiculous machine, to whose master he turned and said, “As you are no doubt aware, it was the belief of Dr. Isenflamm of Erlangen that hypochondria is in and of itself a fatal disease. What is your machine's alternative to
hypochondriacal
?”