Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [106]
Around that time Clara and Johannes, both of them exhaustively busy, both grieving over Robert’s condition, fell into another skirmish in their correspondence. Apparently Brahms had been using the familiar du and now had stopped. Clara noticed his new restraint and responded with a burst of hysteria. He made a peremptory reply to her complaint: “My idea was that I could not avail myself immediately of your kindness and love as you might regret it later on. That is why I always continued to write to you in the [formal] second person.… I take it then that all these tactics of siege and assault had some connection with the unanswered question?”39
Perhaps Clara had only needed to know that the question was still pending. What would their relationship be when Robert was gone? She responded gently and once again he did the same, writing her in an echo of the old tone:
I wish I could write to you as tenderly as I love you and tell you all the good things that I wish you. You are so infinitely dear to me, dearer than I can say.… If things go on much longer as they are at present I shall have sometime to put you under glass or to have you set in gold. If only I could live in the same town with you and my parents.… Do write me a nice letter soon. Your letters are like kisses.40
For all the extravagant language—which sounds like a true lover’s in all senses—the distance still lingers between the lines: set you in gold, live in the same town with you and my parents. To set one’s lover in gold in the presence of one’s parents is not a prospective husband’s fantasy. It means: I want to admire you, be near you, but stay with my own and not touch you.
On June 8, 1856, Schumann’s birthday, Brahms returned to Endenich carrying a large atlas, for which the sick man had begged.41 With Brahms came musicologist Otto Jahn, Klaus Groth, Albert Dietrich, and Brahms’s new friend music critic Hermann Deiters. Brahms left them to go inside the hospital. He returned looking grim. Schumann had recognized him and thanked him for the present, then hardly raised his watery eyes from the new atlas.42 At the beginning of July, Brahms went to meet Clara at Antwerp on her return from England. If he did not reveal the full horror, Clara still understood that a crisis had come.
Robert Schumann slipped away the way one often dies in a hospital—inch by inch, attended by the veiled hints of doctors, the family unprepared, everything dreamlike and confused. The doctors had forbidden Clara to see him since the day he left home in February 1854. For all her strength of will, Clara had submitted to that male authority. In the middle of June she went to Bonn to consult with the doctors, who told her they could not promise Robert would last out the year. It was the first time she realized that her husband was dying.
Little over a week later, as Clara struggled with that, word arrived that she must come to Endenich at once if she wished to see Robert alive. But when she got to the hospital on July 23 the doctors announced that the immediate danger was past and she should not go in to see him; the shock would be too great for both of them. Clara returned home, devastated. Then on the evening of July 27 she came back with Johannes and demanded to be taken to her husband. Only then did the doctors let them into the room.
Robert Schumann opened his eyes to find his wife kneeling by his bed. They had not seen each other since his nights of euphoria and terror over two years before. He struggled to sit up, awkwardly put his arm around her, smiled. The only thing he had left to give her was that sad mute acknowledgment. Clara wrote, “Not all the treasures in the world could equal this embrace.” He sank back to the bed, mumbling incoherently as the moments struggled by. It seemed to Clara that Robert was communing with his spirits. He could hear only them, only they understood him. Now and then his eyes fell on her tenderly and he tried to form words: “My … I know …” She understood; he was trying to say My Clara, I know you.43
Next day she