Longing (72 page)

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.

Dr. Richarz, far more experienced in the subterfuges of the involuntarily invaded, merely commented rhetorically, “What have you been eating?”

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

“Heinrich Heine is dead in Paris.”

“When did you learn of this?”

“Yesterday. But he died—”

“I know when he died.”

“And you've kept the news from me? For two months?”

“Not long enough, clearly. Is that why you've burned your papers?”

“No. But it's why I'm not eating.”

“Did he stop eating?”

“The opposite. He said the only way he was able to kill himself was to starve himself to death, and that was against his principles. He was too weak to do anything else. But I'm not too weak to do something else. So I choose to do the one thing he could do but would not.”

“I fail to follow the logic of that. It's madness.”

“What's mad is to look for logic in suicide.”

“There's always logic in suicide, Herr Schumann. Only death itself is illogical.

“Clean him up!” he ordered Herren Nämlich and Niemand.
*

*
Heinrich Heine had died in Paris on February 17, after eight years in bed, so paralyzed in the end that starvation remained the only possible means for him to hasten his death. (Even his eyelids were paralyzed; he had them propped open with matchstick fragments in order to read.) Earlier he had contemplated hanging, poison, defenestration, gunshot, and an overdose of the morphine, of which he already was administered seven grains every twenty-four hours, for which purpose moxas were burned along his spine for cauterization and the morphine rubbed into the open wounds. This was painful, but its aftereffect was the opposite, which is to say he felt not pleasure but nothing. This Jewish convert to Christianity, who was accused by his critics of having no religion whatsoever and offended everyone by saying that when he died God would pardon him because that was God's job, proclaimed he did indeed have one: opium. Lying in bed, he relinquished his dark fantasy of escaping to America, where, he wrote, “there are no lords and no aristocracy, where all men are equal, that is to say, equally brutish, except of course for several million people with black or brown skin who are treated like dogs.” He even gave up his fantasy of walking again on avenue Matignon when one day his wife had pushed his bed near the window and he looked down at a dog pissing on a tree and realized he envied the dog. It was the last time he looked out the window at anything, even the sky. His wife, who would leave Paris before his funeral and not return for several months, left more and more of his care to the young and beautiful Camille Selden, whom Heine called, as if she were some mark of beauty on the ugly face of humanity, La Mouche, and for whom at the end of his life he wrote a poem called “La Mouche” that reminded Schumann of his own desire for Clara to appear before he died, as Heine's image of La Mouche reminded Schumann of Clara as a girl, for whom he had been paralyzed in his desire:

I waited for you yesterday in vain

Until darkness became kind

And hid your absence in my pain

And my pain in the loss of my mind.

Endenich

APRIL 30, 1856

Your letters are like kisses
.

Johannes Brahms

Dr. Richarz and Brahms sat back to back in the dos-à-dos, while Schumann lounged in the fauteuil with an atlas on one thigh and a large notebook on the other. He was dressed in his bedclothes, which hung loosely from his shoulders and his knees, though the slimness of a middle-aged man that emerged out of evaporated fat was visibly orbed and quaggy. As he bent over writing in the notebook, he chanted,
“Babababababadadadadadada, babababababadadadadadada
.”

“You see what I mean,” whispered Dr. Richarz directly into Brahms's ear.

For once, the strange configuration of the dos-à-dos was of some use, as it allowed discreet conversation without forcing the confabulators to engage in any direct visual intercourse, though Dr. Richarz, when he moved his lips back from Brahms's ear, tried to wrap his gaze around the delicate maidenlike profile of this exceptionally beautiful young man.

“Does he say nothing else?”

“He eats almost nothing and says almost nothing.”

“What is it he suffers from?”

“What is gone from his life—you, when you are not here; his wife; his music; the children; pleasure from the body; pleasure from—”

“Forgive me, doctor. I meant, what disease does he have?”

“As I told you when I summoned you, we feel he's become incurable. Of what, we have no idea. What cannot be diagnosed cannot be cured. As you can observe, his brain is unquestionably exhausted, but we have no evidence that it has softened. His body is exhausted. But that's because he won't eat. One day he says his food is poisoned, and the next he claims we're feeding him the excrement of other patients. From time to time, he takes some wine, and some jellied consommé, but they don't sustain him. He'd die if we weren't able to nourish him gastrically.”

“What other way is there to be nourished?”

“Permit me to spare you the details.”

“Shall I ask him myself?”

Now Dr. Richarz turned even from the beauty of Brahms's face and whispered toward the open window that brought in spring breezes from the greening of the distant Siebengebirge. “Through a gastric tube we introduce food into his stomach.”

“What kind of food?”

“Decoctions of meat, which are very healthy and energizing, though he won't keep them down. Milk, of course. Saltwater for the sodium. Sometimes even wine. Though, as I said, he takes wine on his own, quite a bit of it, he calls it save, a word from Chaucer, so he claims, though he makes no claims it saves him, merely produces oblivion, which sometimes seems to me in my darkest moments the only salvation there might be for all of us. Usually he takes it—the wine, I mean—with tobacco, though I worry he will set himself on fire even before he manages to starve himself to death. He purports to be one Erysichthon and gnaws on his toenails as if to mock me with such spurious nutrition.”

“He professes Erysichthon to be sacred—the god of artists,” said Brahms lightly, proud to be unburdened of a bit of scholarship that also demonstrated more than a little intimacy with the professor himself. “But tell me—where does this tube go?”

“To the stomach.”

“I meant—”

“Oh, in the mouth. When, that is, he allows it. The jaw is very strong, Herr Brahms. When we cannot breach it, we must enter through the nostrils.”

Brahms brought his hands protectively to his face. Dr. Richarz turned now to look at him directly, to stare at those eyes covered by those long fingers.

“There are experiments being done with rectal feeding tubes. I have so far resisted that temptation here. But if I must—”

Brahms left the dos-à-dos and walked toward Schumann, who had been silent for a time and now as Brahms approached began to speak again, not in nonsense syllables but in rhythm to the words he copied from his atlas into his notebook.

“Cologne … Emmerich … Frankfurt … Hanover … Heidelberg … Lorelei … Lübeck … Neckar … Rotterdam … St. Goarshausen …”

Dr. Richarz, who had cupped his ear in his hand, said, “He sits with his atlases and makes lists of places. In alphabetical order, which in its precision is confounding. He says they're places to which he wants to escape from here.”

“These places he's named now are places I have described to him from my visits to them with his beloved wife.”

Brahms sat down on the end of the fauteuil at Schumann's feet.

“She's in England now,” he told his friend. “I took her myself to the night train for Calais. She stays in London, in Hanover Square. She's scheduled to play in Liverpool and Manchester and Dublin, but for now she's in London. I get a letter from her almost every day. She's most homesick. She says her whole heart is in Germany and that only her lifeless body is in England. She's met the queen and likes her very much but says that playing in her presence is difficult because the queen takes all attention from the music upon herself, though she doesn't mean to. Your wife says it's not easy to be the queen but it's easier to be the queen than to be someone else in the presence of the queen. Oh, good—I found that funny as well. As you will this perhaps as well: Clara was playing one night in the private home of Lord and Lady Overstone, but the guests wouldn't stop talking when she played—it must have been one of my pieces, though she was too kind to say so—so they wouldn't be quiet, as I said, and so she just stopped playing, she put her hands in her lap and just stopped playing, and soon all the talk died away and there was silence and she looked at them with that look she has that makes you feel at once ashamed of yourself and grateful to be observed with such concern. And when she got back to Hanover Square, there had arrived there already a letter from Lady Overstone herself, who apologized not only for herself and her guests but for all the English, who she said had not gained the sophistication necessary for an appreciation of German music. She also wrote me of some gossip she heard that night at the Overstones': Charles Dickens has boarded up the door between his dressing room and his wife's bedroom to help him resist the temptation to visit her. He has too many children as it is, he says. Ten, she writes me, though one died. And she would have had ten with you, she says, had not one died and two been lost before birth. And so imagine how she feels for Catherine Hogarth—that's the name of Dickens's wife—whose husband builds a wall between them. What a thing to do for love, she says. What a terrible contradiction. She says they say all London speaks of it and no one understands the …”