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Jouer.

Jouer is to play. Honoraires. Fees are Honoraires.
Papillons means Butterflies.

Look at the map, he says. The black lines are rivers. Whole rivers. These stretches with no names are sea. One is fatter than the land mass, all water. It looks terrifying. She can't imagine so much water and says so. Water is irrelevant, he says. He brought the map to show her something else. There are new partitionings, new provinces: the map is old but it'll do for now, he says and he spreads it out on the floor. LEIPZIG is overwritten with SAXONY, splitting the word in two; DRESDEN that takes such a long time to reach is inches away, off to the right. She recognises CHEMNITZ and PLAUEN, BERLIN a spidery mass to the North. Past Westphalia, further than Frankfurt, on another page entirely, sits PARIS. The centre of the civilised world, Friedrich says, pleasure in his voice. Young Liszt who puts himself about so much; Herz, Pixis, Kalkbrenner, all live there. Heine too and who can blame him? The French were arrogant but they had cause, and PARIS was it. PARIS. A shattered-egg at the top of pastry-shaped France. They speak another language. Clementine's brother, the painter fellow, speaks it like a native because he is. They have a relative in situ who can find them lodgings, help with translation, set up introductions. Friedrich is well aware of his luck. And now the so-called unplayable Variations are ready, so is Clara. Chopin. How on earth was one to pronounce it? At any rate, this Chopin, who plays, they say, like no one else, was on his way to Paris too and Clementine's brother knew someone who knew him! They'd meet, perhaps, get more introductions still! They might even - here he winks heavily - storm the gates. Haha. An excellent joke - storm the gates. No one understands it save the lodger. He doesn't laugh, but he lifts his eyes from his book at least. He looks up.
You think they have a sense of humour in Paris? Wieck asks.
The young man says nothing.
It's somewhere you've been? One of your student haunts?
No, the boy says. He's pink. Not Paris. Paris isn't - then he stops in mid-sentence, done.
Not what? Wieck asks.
Not. Switzerland.
Switzerland, Wieck says. Paris isn't Switzerland?
No, I didn't travel to Paris. I travelled to Switzerland. He coughs. Italy. Parts of Italy.
Ha! Wieck's eye fixes on the boy's face. He's in the mood for a joke. You avoided Paris on purpose! Every musician in the world holds the opinion Paris is what matters, what counts. But not you. Perhaps you think the Swiss more refined? That cow-population is a greater indicator of a country's worth?
No, the boy says. Not at all. But in his opinion - in the opinion of some of his more travelled friends too - Paris was ... over-rated.
His neck colours darker in the silence.
What I mean, he says, stammering, is that a German way of thinking musically, independent of Paris, is something to consider. Dresden is as beautiful as Paris, Hummel says, and Weimar is just as -
Hummel? Wieck says. Hummel? His eyebrows go up an octave.
The young man stops.
The Hummel whose pupils retreat to this house in search of a teacher who has some understanding of method? Who hasn't produced a pupil who's stuck in the public imagination longer than one season? That Hummel? Wieck persists. Is that the Hummel you mean?
The boy shouldn't have mentioned another teacher. He knows that. Before it gets worse, he tries for lightness, mock-flattery. He fishes instinctively with charm.
I must try to make you change your mind about leaving somehow, he smiles. Why - he casts around, nods at Clara - who may I rely upon when you are gone?
He is appealing when he smiles, has a vague awareness of the fact. Wieck, no fool, draws him a look the length of his nose.
Why, he says, folding the map as he speaks, Dorn will take care of your fingers upon request. It's already arranged. If you don't like it, Herr Schumann, I suggest you try the as yet undreamed of prospect of relying on yourself.
The map, now folded into manageable size, slots neatly into his pocket.
If you are trying to say you will miss us, Robert, I have no doubt you are right. From the capital of the musical world, however, a place you have never been, you will not miss reports of our success. Take comfort in that.
The girl follows him out as he leaves, hair swinging behind her, pinafore squint, not even looking back. The three boys with whom he has been left wait, watching to see what he will do next, so he turns back to his book and pretends to focus on it. His chest is tight but he picks up a pen, tries to look idle, unaffected, while his head races to piece together Wieck's full meaning. Dear God, new rooms. He can't stay here with an absent man's pregnant wife. He'll have to find new rooms, hire an instrument all over again. He'll have beg more money from his mother. Selfish, he writes. His ears buzz. Selfish his pen digging scores in the paper. Pompous, Boastful, Tedious not caring who sees. A boor, a monster, as rude as a bear. His writing is illegible in any case. HIS NATURE IS JEWISH AND HIS CAUSE IS MONEY. And, damn him, he thinks, his eyes hot, wondering how soon he can stand up, find a drink, a smoke, the quickest means to a reassuring stupor; damn him. He's right. Not about Paris, not at all, but about his pupils' own weaknesses: about those he could not be righter. Herr Schumann would indeed miss the house, the company, the piano, the laid-on cooking, even the babysitting duties he had willingly taken up. He liked children. He liked telling stories. He liked the little girl out there cutting a career. A little girl, moreover, who had drunk in music with mother's milk, and not had to plead her case, to beg and cajole her mother, not had to study the damnable, boring detail of law till, out of charity as much as anything else, someone had taken her on as someone fit to study music. And too late. Was it possible he was already too late? Clara was not thirteen, pigtails still railing down her back. Her confidence surely came from ignorance, from lack of awareness of what in life can go terribly, irrevocably astray. Ignorance of sickness, mortality, loss. Herr Schumann feels suddenly older than his years, lonelier and unpleasantly wiser. He feels, maybe more than anyone may ever understand, that he will miss them very much indeed.

False starts and ill-mannered weather. Sickness, road blocks and border guards twitchy as mice. No sooner had Wieck set up the Paris dates than everything was out of sorts. Everything conspired against him, and even Schumann, no great observer of the practical world in anyone's book, noticed. Between Politics and Nature, he said, cheerful to the point of drunk, they'd need to stay put a little longer.
Heat and instability, the invariable combination, would eat the whole of June and July. He also told them, stood on a chair to do it, he was not one man now but two, a Poet and a Hero, each with different names and different temperaments though they liked each other well enough and finally, Wieck laughed. Herr Schumann was a box of tricks, he said and ordered champagne. Two bottles. Straight on the slate. In August she was full of measles and Berlin was full of cholera and that was the heat's fault too. Still blotchy on her September birthday, she walked with Schumann to Connewitz, leaving her father to his cursing and refixing of dates.
Herr Schumann was not like her father. Herr Schumann was frothy and talkative. He was writing a novel, an opera, a play, he said, then he was always writing something. He carried fat volumes of Jean-Paul Richter full of indecipherable jokes, Menzel and Schlegel, books of poems and pamphlets and handfuls of notes. Did she know Jean-Paul? he asked. Everyone should know Jean-Paul! He read her single lines, licking the words on his lips like salt. Gottwald was blue-eyed and soft; Vult was a black-haired, black-eyed villain. He lowered his voice. Sunburned maidens with white teeth shaded their eyes with sickles that they might look undazzled upon the flute-playing student. This, a favourite, he assumed to have more than a little to do with himself. The flowers and the dead lie buried together, he intoned, and he narrowed his eyes to see her shiver. I have a secret, he whispered, leaning so close her ear burned. I am so sensitive that sometimes even music disgusts me. And Clara, fresh as a peeled green plum, was shocked and thrilled to her roots. Then Clara believed every word the lodger said. Her father, on the other hand, believed nothing: all those hints of despair, those melodramatic threats, the hypochondria - who could take that sort of stuff seriously? It was just Schumann, how he behaved. Keeping a clear eye on the future, forcing one's plans upon it - that was serious and Schumann hadn't enough manliness for that, not yet. Neither had he patience, and patience in the end was what won through. To prove it, after months of delay, he told her everything was ready. The world awaited Clara Wieck. In a matter of days, so did the coach tickets. Schumann turned morose and withdrawn. She wondered if he was sick.
On his last day at GrimaisseGasse, though she would not know until she was a woman with children of her own, Schumann sneaked into Clara's already abandoned room and flicked through her drawers and papers. Her handkerchiefs smelled of starch, her old diaries, already a stack, of linen. He read more than he should, but she was a child. She had not the same need of privacy as an adult. It wasn't spying. And besides, he needed to know. She really was twelve years old. Really and truly. Quite so.
Clementine, pregnant again, saw them off as far as Bitterfeld with the children. Schumann stood beside her, waiting.

She recalls his face, or thinks she does, growing smaller, whiter; the interior of the coach a black frame round his shrinking form. After that she thought of him hardly at all. If he got drunk for three days solid, wrote letters to himself, passed out, played Bach till he was dizzy, wept and laughed alone in his terrifying new rooms she knew nothing of it. Not then. A Poet and a Hero. Christ. Christ.

 Gone these six months, what did she do?

What did he do? Ha!
He moved rooms twice, played, wrote, rejoiced, despaired and masturbated till his wrist cramped. He read. He read a great deal. He read about cholera and jaundice, typhus and flu. He studied Beethoven and cures for chronic skin complaints. He read Goethe, Bach, Herder and Wenzel and enough Shakespeare to cause indigestion. He scanned texts on nervous debility. He devoured Hoffman and Heine, Schubert and Chopin, essays on syphilis, sight-problems and gout. He read letters from his mother full of blame made to sound like love, bad love-letters full of exquisite, racking pain. He felt guilt, fear, shame and loneliness. He worried. He didn't sleep enough. He read even more of Jean-Paul to while his sleepless hours - Lord! Here were men come back from the dead, looking into their own graves! Branches tapping the windows! - and slept even less. He was raddled with sensibility. He drank too much, hated himself, drank more, lit cigars; sang till the small hours and woke among sheets spattered with burn-holes, butt-ends, trails of wine. He resolved to CHANGE. To CHANGE. To drink less, smoke less, spend less, to leave his cock alone. And so he did. Till next time, when it started all over again, again, again. Many times he wished for a soul-mate, a dear friend, a brother in thought and spirit: someone as unlike his real brothers as possible. Some men were married and settled by his age, they were famous. Mendelssohn, the darling of London; Chopin with two concertos under his belt. Mozart - christ! Mozart didn't bear thinking about. Some were in the army. Just thinking about the army brought him out in a rash. He dreamed they came to get him, all uniforms and bad boots and bayonets, that he told them his eyesight was poor and they drafted him anyway, woke sweating, sick, white. For comfort he read his journals and no comfort came. It was just as he thought. He'd become nervous. A year ago - there it was in black and white! - he'd felt fit to trust his luck. He had given up his lawbooks, landed the teacher of his choice, set his heart on Music at last at last. He had his portrait painted. He had chanced upon Variations by a young Polish composer in an out-of-town music shop and couldn't believe his ears; he had gorged on the only writer who understood. He had memorised great chunks of it, a repository for courage now and then and muttered it under his breath when things seemed out of hand. Niagara scattered in a thousand tiny rain-showers. Thus fortified, he had played for the charity student at Wieck's, a mezzo with a dark voice who had followed him back to his rooms, who came inside without waiting to be asked, who slid her finger in his mouth to stop him suggesting she sing. Christel, sweet jesus, a mouth round a thumb. He had Jean-Paul, he had this brilliant new Chopin, he had a woman. Something wholly unsuspected - a woman. For the first time, he was a man, he thought. He was not alone. He was - what? The more he thought about it, the more the same answer came back. He was - two. Like Vult and Walt, Abelard and Heloise, Hamlet. Everything meaningful sprang from duality: why not himself? Life darkened by great suffering led to sunrise: youth led to age. Gottwald drank at the left breast, Vult at the right. If Jean-Paul was right, and he was always right, the human being had a great double role in life that required only to be recognised. And he, the young Schumann as the young god Schubert before him, would recognise and play it to the full. Some days his head raced with new knowledge and he felt invincible, stuffed with being: other days he felt melancholy, even withdrawn - a splitting that had become more marked these past two years. Now, he understood this was not an inconsistency. It was a ripening. He was coming into his own as, patently, two people. In the same instant he knew this, he knew the first one's name. Florestan. Beethoven's hero, a man at the heart of a great operatic destiny: what more explanation was required? He was Florestan without a doubt. The other side named itself later, tumbling from the pages of a dropped book; a Saint's Day Almanac too near the edge of the table, brushed to the floor by the skirts of an angel, falling open at Eusebius. Saint Eusebius, martyred for his nobility of thought. And his name day was two after Clara's on the calendar. A sign. Robert picked up the book trembling: on his fevered days, everything was a sign, and this might as well have come with thunderbolts, choruses, shafts of light. Florestan and Eusebius, he had it now! Both beyond question, and both himself. It certainly explained things. Those days when he felt his head was at war with itself, shifting his mood from laughing to crying irrespective of his own wishes - now it was obvious why. Perhaps they fought with each other, his two halves; perhaps they switched in rapid rotation. Whichever, he knew both were in his seeing, his hearing, his whole existence, which is to say this twinned state was his normal state, not madness, as he once horribly feared. He had heard it said often enough that madness was akin to genius, indeed, some people expected the appearance of madness from their creative sorts. He had even seen some affect variations on lunacy the better to be thought Artistic by potential patrons who hadn't a clue. What he had suffered had seemed wholly different. What he had suffered did not go away when the audience did: it had worsened into terrors and visions that scared all joy of living away and replaced it with mechanical writing, hideous drawings, things fit only to hide away and be afraid of. Now, however, now he grasped it, these were birth pains: the twins pulling in their separate, rightful, directions. He was, now it had finished, simply how he was. How he both was, haha! A jest was the core of all meaning, after all. Not only that, but Gottwald was blue-eyes and soft, and Vult was a black-haired, black-eyed villain, and he, Robert Schumann of Zwickau, knew what this felt like from the inside. He could remember his childhood and the proofs were there too, he could remember his conception and two selves had been present then too! Moreover, this maturing or whatever it was, was not finished yet. One day, these two would merge to make one more, as he and Clara did when they played Schubert four-handed, the two of them side by side on the piano stool. This perfected self would be RARO - ClaRA RObert, a fusion yet to come. Florestan, Eusebius, RARO. These three explained everything: all his striving and present being, his promised future: they held the private codebook for how he might plot the novel of his life. For the first time, the first time, he saw it all and with dazzling precision. He could stand at his window, open the shutters wide and see all the way to Alsace if he tried; all the way to America, the moon, the stars. He was at ease with himself – to be at ease with oneself, what a feeling that was! - his first piece newly-published, his sheets stiff with sex, his head full of champagne: Herr Schumann felt stout as Napoleon. How long had it lasted? Two weeks? Three? Then his cock started bleeding again, the novel, the opera, the poems dried up, and he turned twenty-one. He put Narcissus water and arsenic on his foreskin and stopped answering the door. He wept. Twenty-one! Draft age! A marker on a road that led only forward, the path behind him melting into oblivion. On bad days, he suspected his youth was finished, his chances gone, his conscription to some lunatic skirmish on the Prussian border a foregone conclusion: on bad nights, he knew it for sure. Twenty-one. He drank himself senseless, burned candles, developed stomach cramps and a cough. He had syphilis, he knew it. Every twitch was a spiroid infection, worming deeper into his nervous system, his brain and bones! When his mother wrote that Julius, the brother who looked most like father, was coughing too, moreover coughing blood, Robert recalled a portrait he'd had painted when the world was at his feet, and took to his bed, terrified. A likeness of himself, a dopelgänger, did nothing but tempt fate. The storm comes, he repeated it over and over; the storm comes and the water is rising. People were falling like skittles in Berlin - cholera, typhus, lordknew what else. Cholera was the worst. Cramps and dysentery first, then stools like rice-water flaked with bits of intestine. He knew this and more because Wieck told him. Wieck told him other things too, hurtful things about the slapdashness of his playing that threatened to drive him mad, personal things about his lack of manliness, but those were the kinds of things Wieck said. To his sons he said worse, and they were children. The Old Man had to be endured. He had to be endured because there was no arguing with him. Because he was the best teacher in Saxony. Because Robert could never find the words when he needed them. Most of all just because. Because he was there. Nomatter how confusing the rest of life became, you had something solid if you had Wieck. He was a rock, and Robert was grateful for it. When he heard the rock was packing its bags for Paris, then shock to his system and all parts attached was frightful. In six years I will make you a virtuoso to equal Moscheles, he had said: had he meant it? At all? Or did he mean that prize only for his daughter, a girl of barely twelve? He felt ashamed and pitiable suddenly, unable to speak. The girl, he remembered, noticed. I will miss you, Herr Schumann, she said as they left. I will buy you something pretty in Paris. And he had watched them go, the Chopin pieces he had discovered along with them, went back to his new digs alone. A long walk. He would reinvent, he thought, leaves blowing up at his face like slaps. He would change his whole direction. Spiteful, he chose a new role-model. Belleville, Clara's nearest rival - moreover a rival with breasts - struck him as a fine idea. He bought a new hat, a coat with longer frocking, a finger-stretcher. Four hours a day he practised with his wrists high, looking somewhat effete but not caring. In addition, he weighted his fourth finger to make it strong. For a time it worked. Then it didn't. He added more weights. By the time Clara's accolades were arriving by post, his digit was curling in on itself, numb as a carrot. The more her read her reviews, the more glowing those reviews became, the worse his indisposition got. Holding the pen as best he could, he wrote to his coughing brother, his mother, his sisters-in-law, pouring out his fears. What if it never got better, if he could no longer play? What would happen then? His mother sent money as he hoped she would and Rosalie, sweet Rosalie, Rosalie who married his sniffy brother Carl, came all the way from Schneeberg with a cake. It didn't help. Dr Reuter and Dr Carus and lordknew who came as well, but still his finger sickened. It drew towards the centre of his palm, like a spent penis. What, he thought, suddenly horrified, if it's punishment? Only Guilt brings Nemesis. What if everyone else could see it too? That evening, when Christel arrived with flowers and beer, he wouldn't even open the door. Safe, he decided, to keep himself and his extremities out of her way. He had wasted time, injured himself. He would waste no more. Eusebius would think only lofty thoughts: Florestan would be resolute. There would be no more brooding or late, lost nights, no more wrist-flexing under the sheets. No more dwelling on the debts, the awful letters from mother with the catalogues of disease, blame and fear, no more empty bottles outside the door or fretting about his bastard fingers. The cure for despondency was discipline. Wieck told him that too: Wieck's advice was tough as hide but always sound. And since his hand stopped him speaking at the keys, he turned to the pen. The Divine Schubert had done this; had turned to paper with a quill in his hand, had paced his room wringing his hands to find the phrase that would capture the graceful, the mad, the simply true. He would be like Schubert, then. He'd write. Not a novel, not an opera, not reviews, but music itself. He'd done it before, now he'd do it again, but in earnest. Mere months later, when the blossom was back on the cherry trees and the nights no longer began at four o'clock, when Alwin arrived, running - Herr Schumann, they're coming! They're home - he was ready. He straightened his neck-tie, adjusted his cuffs. Past the Thomas Church, through the town square, along Grimaissestrasse, his new sideburns brushed, his new pieces, the Papillons, pinned to perfection under a cover of cherubs, ivy, trailing vines. The hole in his boots, like Paris, was irrelevant. Jean-Paul himself had said it: the butterfly is as powerful as the bear in the right hands. His hands were the right hands and they carried the proof. He had something else to show for himself - for both himselves and to the people who mattered. Wieck was home, Clara was home. He couldn't wait.

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