Longing (74 page)

Four days after that, unsummoned by anyone but Robert himself, and by him silently, within her mind, she returned to Endenich. When she demanded one final reunion with him, and it was granted without hesitation by Dr. Richarz, she wished to flee and whispered to Johannes that perhaps so long as she did not see Robert, and he not see her, he would live. But Johannes told her that someday Robert would die, whether he saw her or not, and to die without seeing her would be to die without grace or salvation.

It is dusk when she enters his bedroom, candles lit and shadows from the half-drawn, wind-stroked drapes purling through the room and gathering her toward him. The others wait in the darker shadows by the door to his sitting room while she approaches him where he lies in bed, covered, clearly thin, almost nothing left of him but his face, which, as if he has been waiting for her all this time, since he'd been torn from her without so much as a farewell, smiles. He takes her to his eyes and smiles.

She is afraid to touch him. Afraid for both of them. But he raises a twitching, shaky arm, tangled in his sheet, until he frees it and motions for her to come closer and puts it around her as she bends to him. She cannot tell his trembing from her own. When she feels his arm weaken, she keeps it around her with her hand on his wrist, unwilling to surrender that embrace for all the treasure in the world. His breath washes across her face, uncorrupted, cleansed, and with her eyes on his she traces his features with the first finger of each hand and feels she is painting a picture of pain. Pulsing in the candlelight beside her face is the Laurens portrait of Johannes.

He tries to speak and does speak, but she cannot understand a word. He babbles, ever more loudly, until he becomes agitated and thrashes beneath the sheets. Dr. Richarz approaches and motions for the two men with him to do something to Robert, she can't imagine what, but she waves them all away and withdraws herself but only so far as the foot of the bed, upon which she lies and from which she stares up at him, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting for the silence that finally comes, so that all she can hear is his breathing and the softening sounds he makes out of which she finally understands only this: “Clara.”

The next morning she and Johannes return early from the Star Family Hotel in Bonn and do not leave until dark. Most of the day they take turns looking through the window in his wall, as he lies on his bed twitching and tossing his head and ranting argumentatively and without satisfaction. Because she loves him so dearly, she prays for him to be released.

Only when she is permitted into the room and insists on feeding him does he calm down. She dips her fingers repeatedly into a jar of cold calves'-foot jelly, which, as it warms upon her fingers and in the breath she breathes upon it, reminds her of the warmth that spread from him to her, from man to woman, as they passed the nights of marriage. He sucks it off each time as if he's not eaten since last they were together at their table at home. His mouth is warm inside, his eyes ecstatic.

The day after that, July 29, Tuesday, at four in the afternoon, while she and Johannes are at the train station in Bonn to pick up Joseph Joachim so he too may be there at the end, Robert dies. A half hour later, a half hour too late, she kneels beside his bed and feels a magnificent spirit hover above her and fly off, too soon for her to be taken along.

Johannes brings her flowers from the Endenich garden. She lays them on her husband's head. As for her love, he has taken it with him.

Epilogue

Where are our lovers, our girls? They are in their tomb
.

Gérard de Nerval

There were more people buried in the tiny churchyard of Bonn's Alter Friedhof than attended Schumann's funeral two days following his death. Joseph Joachim had indeed been on the train the time of whose arrival prevented Clara from being at her husband's bedside when he died; he and Brahms walked before the coffin. Clara walked behind, as did Ferdinand Hiller, who had journeyed from Cologne and who, though he was separated by nearly sixty years from his renown as a child prodigy, Clara imagined in her mind as young as Johannes was now and making love to her rival Maria Moke in Berlioz's apartment and pictured him watching her in Paris with her white dress flying high as she vaulted over Chopin. But what, she wondered, did he envision when he saw her now, thirty-seven years old with eight children torn from her belly and two more bled from between her legs and grief at war inside her with release?

Robert's coffin was borne by even younger men than Brahms and Joachim, members of the Düsseldorf Concordia male choir, a few of whom had endured his distracted conducting and a few more of whom he would have found beautiful had he been alive to see them.

On what would have been Schumann's forty-seventh birthday, a headstone was erected on his grave, as much the work of Brahms as the Beethoven monument had been that of Liszt and for this reason vastly more simple and obscure. It would be another twenty-five years before Schumann received a monument in his likeness on that site, so cold in its resemblance to him that Clara could not bear to look at it. At its unveiling, on May 2, 1880, Joachim played and Brahms conducted. Money had begun to be raised for the statue seven years earlier, at a concert where Brahms conducted and Clara played, described by her daughter Eugenie as looking like a young girl, a bride; when she finished, at least a hundred and fifty bouquets came flying at her.

Friedrich Wieck was sentenced to eighteen days in prison for what were taken to be his libelous accusations against his son-in-law, who of course went on to live a life that proved some of them to be accurate. By the time he died in 1873 at the age of eighty-eight, Wieck had reconciled with Clara and felt safe, with her husband long dead, in leaving her a small fortune, his pride at this bequest unpricked by any sense that this money had been hers to begin with.

A statue of Felix Mendelssohn was sculpted by Erwin Stein and placed before the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1892. There it stood until November 10, 1936. On that date, Sir Thomas Beecham arrived in Leipzig with his London Philharmonic Orchestra and requested of the city's mayor, Karl Goerderler, permission to place a wreath upon the statue. Goerderler said such a gesture would honor both the city of Leipzig and the memory of Mendelssohn. But the statue was not to be found in its place before the Gewandhaus. It had the night before been taken away and smashed to pieces. This was done under directive from the government in Berlin, which had demanded the destruction of the “monument to the one-hundred-percent Jew” (so much for the asylum of conversion) in order, in the words of the
Leipziger Tageszeitung
, “to exterminate the damage done to our cultural heritage by Judaism.” So embarrassed was Mayor Goerderler by the confusion caused the delegates of the London Philharmonic, not to mention the shame to his city, that he eventually joined the 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, for which he was executed in 1945.

Mendelssohn, on pedestal, had lasted longer than Heine, on paper. All Heine's writings were burned countrywide in festively public autos-da-fé in March 1933. Because he had written in “Almansor,” “where books are burned, they end up burning people,” there were Germans after the war who blamed Heine for the incinerator camps, arguing that prophecy is as much the cause as the forecasting of event and that had Heine not written such words, no Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, vegetarians, nudists, pickpockets, herbalists, evangelists, mimes, stutterers, journalists, dentists, dwarves, or any other undesirables would have burned. Thus, because Heine himself had been a Jew (or why else would it have been necessary to burn his work?), it was a Jew who by his very prophecy had caused the holycost, whatever that was.

Heine, after nearly eight years lying on his mattress tomb, embraced his Judaism. Where he had once been, he said, a life-engulfing, pleasure-devouring Hellene who smiled condescendingly upon austere Nazarenes, he was now nothing more than a poor, doomed Jew, an emaciated image of anguish. Prophecy in the flesh.

The marches Schumann had written around the time of the 1849 revolution, including those for male chorus and military band, he had either never published or were so bad that even the Nazis couldn't march to them. But there were parts of
Paradise and the Peri
so rousingly martial that they were played in the sacred service of patriotism and by coincidence were used to inspire German pilots on their way to bomb London, where Clara had sung in the
Peri
chorus as her husband lay dying in Endenich.

The large house in Zwickau at Number 2 Amtsgasse, to which the Schumann family moved in 1817, as much to gain space for August's growing business as for the six children to run around in (particularly with Emilie spending more and more time alone in her room on the third floor), was destroyed in an Allied air raid in early 1945.

One of Felix Mendelssohn's favorite quotations (Seneca's
Verum gaudium res severa est
) was chiseled into the façade of the site of his greatest triumphs, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and together with the rest of the building was reduced to incoherence by bombs in World War II. True enjoyment is serious business, say Seneca's words, now dust in the cosmos.

In the dark of the night of February 13, 1945, Dresden was firebombed by the Allies and 80 percent of the city destroyed. Many of the Schumann family papers (letters, diaries, etc.) were ruined, not by fire but by water meant to extinguish the fire. Their content, however, had been preserved on microfilm in 1938, and survives.

Endenich, the suburb, became incorporated into the city of Bonn as Bonn expanded. Endenich, the insane asylum, was hit by bombs during the aforementioned war. There were still small pieces of Robert Schumann lying here and there.

But not his head. It, together with the rest of his body, had been opened by Dr. Richarz on the day after Schumann's death, for the purpose of autopsy. This autopsy achieved no definitive explanation for the physical deterioration and eventual death of Robert Schumann, which has resulted in numerous posthumous explanations: hypertension; pneumonia;
Osteitis Deformans
(Paget's disease); meningitis; pituitary apoplexy; syphilis; Korsakoff's encephalopathy; a manic-depression so powerful it might have eaten away at Schumann's brain, which was found to be considerably atrophied and to weigh approximately seven ounces less than was normal in a male of his years; cumulative concussive marasmus as a consequence of repeated drunken gravitations; self-starvation; overwork.

It was the last that Dr. Richarz determined was the cause of what he could only vaguely name the progressive organic disease that claimed his patient's life. In short, he concluded, Schumann was killed by his music.

So frustrated were later Schumann votaries (death and time, in their sneering complicity, drew to his music people the likes of whom it had repelled in his lifetime) at not knowing why he had left them for no apparent reason at so reasonably young an age (and with so accomplished a wife; with so many charming children, few of them able to remember him) that they dug up his head.

Actually, they exhumed all of him, but appropriated only the head. It was examined in 1885 by Professor Hermann Schaafhausen, a medical anthropologist, who declared on the basis of his examination of the skull (everything packed back into the skull after the 1856 autopsy had by that time dematerialized, to put a kindly term upon it) that it was normal. How it might have compared with Haydn's and Mozart's and Beethoven's was left unstudied.

Yet so rare was this head (unless it was merely inconsequential) that it was never returned to its body in the tiny churchyard of Bonn's Alter Friedhof and has been missing ever since.

Thus, when Clara was buried next to Robert on May 24, 1896, her eyes, could they see, would have seen through the wood and soil and leaves and bugs that her beloved husband, whose troubled, beautiful head she had cradled so often to her bosom, had no head and thus was not, in essence, her husband.

She had died of a stroke four days earlier. Johannes was vacationing in Ischl and rushed to be at her funeral. In his weary grief, he missed his connection in Attnang and rode endlessly in the wrong direction, spent an entire night in the Linz station, journeyed to Frankfurt, where she lived and he assumed she would be buried, only to discover that the funeral was in Bonn, where he arrived the next day in time to see the funeral procession moving away from him as if in perfect imitation of death.

In his exhaustion, he caught a cold while standing there shivering and seeing through his tears the refracted image of his one great love floating briefly on the very skin of the world. He never regained his strength and died less than a year later.

Out of fear that their relationship would never be understood, Clara and Johannes late in their lives returned their letters to one another and, as agreed, destroyed them. Clara, many years earlier—almost immediately after Robert's death—had anticipated not only lack of understanding but hostility and wrote in her diary a letter to her children about her relationship with Brahms. In it, she told them that only Johannes, as she called him in the letter, was able to comfort her through the illness and the death of their father. He shared her sorrow. He fortified her heart. He enriched her mind. He lifted her spirits. He was her friend in the fullest sense of the word. They shared an exquisite harmony of soul, and her dear children should never listen to those parochial and envious souls who begrudged him her love and friendship and therefore tried to reproach him or even to decry their relations, which they could not, and never would, understand.

When Clara's safe was opened after her death, this letter was found, as well as the little box and its letter in praise of her given her by Goethe, and Robert's favorite cigar case with several cadaverous, exfoliating cigars within, and the note she had found beneath his hairbrush on the day he disappeared from their house in Düsseldorf and she never saw him again until she saw him at Endenich. “Dear Clara,” it said, “I will throw my wedding ring into the Rhine. Do the same and both rings will then be united.”