Longing (55 page)

He leapt to his feet and went to Brahms and went to put a hand upon his head. But he could not touch him. So his hand hovered over the boy's fair hair like a halo, protection and glorification both.

The boy went on playing. He seemed accustomed to the attention, or oblivious to it.

“Stop.”

But he didn't. It was not that he was playing like a maniac, or a Liszt for that matter, letting the notes whip his body, his body assume the music's corporeal form. Nor were his eyes closed. It was concentration in fulfillment of itself, as well as some vast pleasure in the music that he was unwilling to relinquish, for such was youth, drinking until drunk, indulging in the pleasures of the afterlife long ahead of time.

“Please wait a moment.” Oh, to touch his head. “Clara must hear this.”

Not “my wife”—“Clara,” he realized he had said. That it was this name that made the boy stop, or seemed to. Such an intimacy—to say one's wife's name to one who's never met her. She was, of course, famous, though not as famous as she'd been as a child; marriage, and its ever-present consequence, motherhood, had seen to that. Nonetheless: In Europe, the name “Clara,” by itself, could mean only Clara Wieck Schumann, as she insisted she be called upon her programs, since the fame of Clara Wieck had not arrived undiminished upon Clara Schumann.

Brahms smiled, not up at him but over at Marie, who, if she had been confused at her father's strange behavior, was enlightened, literally, by the young man's cheerful discomposure. She beamed and floated halfway off her chair.

Robert rushed from the room to the foot of the stairs. “Clara, Clara, come here at once!”

So she was there at once, running down the stairs, concern for him shadowing her face. How he had darkened her, in these thirteen years of marriage almost to the day; now, when he called her to share his joy, she assumed it was pain to which she traveled.

“Is something the matter?”

It was so incongruous—the meeting of her anxiety with his ecstasy—that he laughed. He was brimming over with amusement and relief. It had been so long since he could announce such pleasure. “My love, you must hear this. You've never heard music like this in your life.”

He led her to him. Marie had risen wholly and was standing next to Brahms, looking down at him who looked only at his hands. She was so like her mother, years ago, waiting for the chance to touch his face.

“Please be so kind as to begin your sonata from the beginning, young man.”

Brahms played, it seemed, for hours, one piece after another, beginning like Beethoven with the first chord of his first sonata and in his second, in the same F-sharp minor of Robert's first, beginning like Robert himself, with an even grander, more aggressive chord, and continuing like Robert until, in its finale's ferment of scales and trills, he broke free from such homage and, as had been the case in the first sonata's folkish andante, became himself, one, as Clara was to say, who comes as if sent from God.

“Why have you said nothing?” Brahms asked when he had played all that he could, or would, play.

“What is there to say?” asked Robert in return. What, indeed? “You and I understand one another. Won't you join us for lunch?”

“I don't understand,” said the boy.

“So long as we understand
each other,”
said Robert.

“I
still
don't understand.” There was a petulance to this sweet-faced, broad-shouldered young man, which gave a twist to the winsomeness of his lips and cinched them into a brief snarl of caustic testiness. What a pleasure to find, at an audition, arrogance not the auditor's.

“As Shakespeare said,” said Robert, who had lately returned to a reading of Shakespeare he had begun with Clara soon after their wedding for the purpose of copying every word that English master had written about music, ‘I understand thy kisses, and thou mine.'”

“I don't understand about
lunch
. Have you not eaten lunch?”

Marie laughed and nodded vigorously, to confirm the young man's genius and at the same time excuse her father's eccentricity.

“I meant
tomorrow
.”

Robert touched Brahms finally, putting a hand on his shoulder to guide him to the front door, where they parted without another word, though Robert watched Brahms as he walked away, raising his arms to Heaven, as indeed he should, even if it was only so he might allow his knapsack to descend from his hands down his arms and over his shoulders until finally, just as he turned the corner and disappeared, it settled enviably into the fanned channel of his spine and carried him away.

They could barely wait for his return. They spoke of nothing and no one else. He knew she had understood perfectly why he had sent the boy away. They could not share their pleasure in him were he to remain. The world was always tested first within the shelter of their marriage.

But then he did not come. The table was set, the food cooked, the children bathed and lectured about manners and hospitality with the usual reference to Greek gods coming to Philemon and Baucis in disguise (in this case not much of a disguise), Marie gently teased but put in charge of the others, made into a little mother so that when the boy arrived she might assume the role of woman and flutter slightly less in her display of instant love.

Robert was surprised to find Clara as anxious as he when the time for luncheon passed and still Brahms did not appear. He was accustomed to her soothing him when he could not sleep or a migraine ate his brain or hemorrhoids his anus or when drums beat inside his head and trumpets blew (in what else but C major) behind his eyes and every noise within the world became a musical tone and visions appeared because of what Dr. Helbig identified as labyrinthitis—finally, Robert thought, the perfect diagnosis for a man lost within the confines of his own existence, like a tone within an endless fugue, and saved each day, and night, by the cord played out by his tender Ariadne, who sometimes knelt sadly before him and sucked his fears away.

“You're making me nervous,” he told her, as she paced before the front door, now and then stopping in mid-stride to open it violently, as if the boy were some sort of eidolon who might dissolve if not secured within the depths of her great dark eyes.

“
I'm
making
you
nervous!”

They laughed. His nerves had long since become the family joke, whenever the family was in a mood to joke. Brahms seemed to have brought such ease to their household.

“Go look for him. I'll stay here and keep the food cold.”

She was out the door before he could see if he'd amused her in return or even wonder why he'd not gone himself. Often, when he went out alone, he questioned if he would come back. Surely this was a question most men occasionally asked. But not men who loved their wives as he loved his. And so he always returned. But never more had he wished for a double, who might be thrown into the river to swim for himself.

It seemed hours she was gone. It
was
hours. He would normally have been filled with images of her in terrible distress—caught in a burning building, crushed beneath carriage wheels, forced to conduct the Düsseldorf Gesangverein in his stead and letting fly the baton into her own heart, as he was known to loose the thing upon his unprotected musicians. These were always mere substitutes for the image of himself in the distress he would suffer should it be she who would disappear from his life, whether through such accident or choice. Perhaps the true cause of madness was the inability to think without oneself at the center of one's thoughts.

But because he imagined her searching for Brahms, he imagined her happy. So she was when she finally returned, as was he, because there with her was Brahms himself, dressed exactly as he had been the day before, if a little dirtier, a bit more worn for being away from home and thus more free. Clara actually had him by the hand as they crossed the threshold, pulling him along into the house, where they stood before Robert, who had himself not sat down since she'd left.

“Where did you find him?”

Brahms did not let her answer. As he put the back of his hand to his forehead, in a gesture of self-mockery, he pulled her hand along with his; she might have been about to wipe his brow, as she did Robert's when he lay in bed cold with terror. “Stupid me! I was still in my squalid little hotel. I didn't think you really wanted me here. I thought I was a sacrifice to diplomacy.”

“I had to convince him of the truth of our enthusiasm!” Clara stepped away from Brahms and stared at him exaggeratedly. He was not to be believed.

“For his music?” asked Robert.

“As well as for himself,” explained Clara.

“We are hardly diplomatic,” said Robert. “Indeed, we are perhaps the strangest couple in all of Düsseldorf. Or I the strangest man, and Clara the sacrifice to
my
diplomacy—or lack thereof. Which is to say, you would not be here if we didn't want you here. And if we didn't want you here, we wouldn't be who you think we are.”

“Who I think you are, and who I thought you might be, or were, are no longer the same.”

“Have we disappointed you?” asked Robert.

“A long time ago,” said Brahms, which for him, barely twenty, turned out to have been three years earlier, when Frau Schumann and Herr Schumann had come to Hamburg and Jenny Lind had sung with them and Robert had conducted Clara in his piano concerto, which only he, Brahms, seemed to have admired—admired so much, indeed, that he left a package for Herr Schumann at his hotel, a package containing his compositions and a letter asking for advice and begging for a chance to obtain this advice in person.

“And what did I say?” Robert had no memory of the music or the boy. He wondered if he might have contained both for these three years and that their secret presence within him would then account for how rapidly and completely he had given himself to the boy, and taken him to him.

“You said nothing.” Such anger from so sweet a mouth. “You didn't even look. The package was returned to me unopened.”

“Now I understand!” Robert spread wide his arms, not that his wife or their new friend might rush into them, though he would have welcomed both, but because he felt some new crack open into the world of which he believed we are all, at every moment, a reflection.

“That you are not who I thought you might be?”

“‘No more packages,'“ said Robert. “That's what I understand: ‘No more packages.' And so it shall be. Now we understand each other completely. Shall we eat?”

Brahms moved between their table and the children's, as did Marie, who customarily sat within the crowd of siblings and was rewarded for this custodial service with a glass of wine in the evenings, at which she sipped while distracting her three sisters and two brothers from the endless conversation their parents seemed to carry on with one another, in their father's case to the exclusion of conversation with the rest of the world. But this day, when late lunch had become early supper, Marie slipped into a chair directly across from Brahms, who seemed relieved to have such intimate company nearer his own age than were the adults at either side of him. When the other children, absent Marie, began to quarrel, Brahms went to them first, asked them to tell him their names again, and then made up a song using their names so he might celebrate them and memorize them:

Elise, Elise, I ask you, please,

Won't you kindly pass the cheese,

All the way around to me

By way of tiny Eugenie

So I may take some with my hand

And pass it on to Ferdinand,

Who so as not to be a pig

Hands the plate on to Ludwig.

And Ludwig gives it to Marie

Who's taken such good care of me

Yet saves the last for pretty Julie—

Wonderful children, I love you truly!

They loved him in return. It became a happy battle, between the children and the children's parents, for the attention of their young visitor, who came to them every day, for food and music and admiration shared.

He played games with the children on the floor and then, seemingly, in the air itself, as he ran up the front stairway, stood on the landing with his arms aloft like a conductor of the six-piece orchestra gazing up at him, and then grasped the banister, shot his feet into the air, and walked all the way down to the ground floor on his hands. The applause brought Clara and Robert, for whom Johannes was convinced to repeat his performance. Clara held her fingers to her lips as he descended.

He was eager to see every room in the house. “Look at all the books,” he said. “Look at all the glasses—my God, you could go for days without washing a single one of them. And a wine cellar! I have always dreamed of having a wine cellar.”

“You need a house first,” said Clara.

“Oh, a house is the last thing I want.”

“Just a wine cellar?” Robert inquired.

“Just a wine cellar.”

The two men sat and smoked for hours at a time, Johannes the cigarettes he rolled and the occasional cigar Robert was able to convince him to accept, Robert his cigars and sometimes a pipe, the same pipe Johannes would observe in his mouth the first time he was allowed to visit Robert at Endenich and the doctors had him watch his friend through the little judas in his wall.

They needn't always talk. Robert found in Johannes someone unintimidated by silence, to the same degree he could embrace conversation, with an excitement for words and ideas as yet neither restrained nor corrupted by a knowledge of the limits of words and the failure of ideas. They might sit side by side with books in their laps, smoking, only occasionally reading aloud to one another from their Jean Paul Richter or their E. T. A. Hoffmann.

“Those pieces I sent you in Hamburg,” Johannes told him—“I had signed them ‘Johannes Kreisler, Junior.'”

“Had I known that, I would have looked at them.” Perhaps the obscure mystery was finally to be solved, his wild, mad desire satisfied, not with, but within, his own heart. Johannes was like Emilie to him, except her suffering had been replaced by his joy.