Mobius Dick E-Book

Andrew Crumey

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Cult fiction techno-thriller about how real is reality

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Call Me: H.

From The Angel Returns

Predestined

Harry’s Tale

From Professor Faust

Ghosts

Harry’s Tale

A Natural Explanation

Harry’s Tale

Enlightenment

From Professor Faust

Arrival

Harry’s Tale

Author’s Postscript

About the Author

Copyright

CALL ME: H.

The text arrived on John Ringer’s phone as he worked at his desk in the university. He heard a beep, brought his Q-phone from his pocket and read the cryptic message. Call me: H. Nothing more. No indication of who H was, or how he was supposed to get in touch. Only a ‘user not found’ when he hit ‘reply’. Immediately he thought of Helen.

He recalled having read something in the manual about a ‘call trace’ feature, but since even changing the ring-tone on this next-generation device was beyond his abilities, there was little chance of his implementing it. Clutching the slim phone in his hand, stabbing awkwardly at tiny keys designed for teenage fingers, he went through several menus – in the random, empirical fashion modern technology dictates – and by way of a few adverts and a shopping channel found himself looking at the campus events listings. Lunchtime lecture (Modern Literature): Vicious Cycloids.

He wanted to know about H, not the entertainment programme of the arts faculty. He tried backtracking through the menus, regretting that he, a theoretical physics professor in his forties, did not himself belong to the ‘next generation’ who could not only navigate these contraptions with ease, but could do so while simultaneously chewing gum and talking in tutorials. The caller, he reasoned, could not be Helen. He had not seen or heard from his former lover for many years. But perhaps what the message meant was: ‘Call me regarding H’. Some important news. Even a chance to meet again.

Or more probably a stray text, a wrong number. A tiny, trivial piece of another person’s existence that had inadvertently dropped itself into his, forcing him to make sense of it. We are a species of pattern finders. Evolution made us so.

It was like the lecture title he’d stumbled on: Vicious Cycloids. Ringer found it again on his phone, and this too seemed addressed to him. The cycloid is a geometrical curve; not what you’d expect in a talk on literature. Perhaps Ringer’s Q-phone (like his brain) had a way of filtering relevant information; it knew the cycloid to be a classic example of mathematical beauty: the place where art and science meet. He might even once have told Helen about it.

He decided to go to the lecture. As one o’clock approached, armed with his lunchbox, Ringer ventured out of the physics department to a region of the university he had never previously explored; one whose walls lacked the Hubble photographs and conference posters so familiar in his usual scientific domain, yet which nevertheless exuded its own kind of intellectual intimidation, its narrow corridors suggesting the ill-planned labyrinth of a doctor’s surgery. Eventually finding himself at the appointed seminar room, he took a seat – surrounded by humanities postgrads and staff who presumably, like him, had no better way to pass their lunch hour – and waited with high expectations for the show to start.

The speaker – a well-bosomed but disappointingly plain woman, lecturer at some university or other – immediately launched into a discussion of Moby-Dick, whose ninety-sixth chapter is about ‘try-pots’: large cauldrons for rendering whale carcasses. The hero, Ishmael, finds himself inside one, cleaning its shiny metal surface, and its specially curved shape prompts a remarkable discovery. ‘In geometry,’ says Ishmael, ‘all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.’

Herman Melville evidently knew that a pendulum, if it sweeps a cycloid, will keep perfect time. Unfortunately the lecturer hadn’t done quite so much background research. The real significance of the passage, she announced, is that ‘cycloid’ is an old-fashioned word for the personality-type later called manic-depressive or bipolar. So chapter ninety-six of Moby-Dick is not about geometry; it’s about mental health.

At this point Ringer’s attention lapsed. He suddenly understood the difference between the speaker’s discipline and his own. She had latched onto a verbal coincidence and was treating it as a profound insight. Ringer was only here because of a glitch in his mobile phone. The same random leaps were the basis of this woman’s mind and career.

His affair with Helen was a matter of chance, too. They met over lunch; not sandwiches in a seminar room, but a crowded university canteen where they found themselves sharing a table. They each placed a book beside their food as they sat down opposite one another, preparing to dine in polite, mutually oblivious silence. Hers was Doktor Faustus. His was Quantum Fields in Curved Space.

Perhaps, when she finally spoke, it was simply because she’d grown tired of her quiche. ‘I wish I could understand that,’ she said suddenly, her mouth not entirely free of food, nodding in the direction of Ringer’s book. ‘But I was always terrible at maths.’

‘And I’ve never been good with novels,’ he replied.

She looked puzzled; her smooth brow became knotted with a bemused wrinkle. ‘What’s so difficult about reading a novel?’ she asked, following the remark with a mouthful of salad while he paused over his fish and chips.

‘They bore me,’ Ringer said. ‘All those made-up stories about people who never existed. Where are the facts? Where are the ideas? I want a book to give me a window on a new way of thinking; not mirror things I already know.’

‘Then perhaps you should try this novelist,’ she said, tapping the book beside her with the base of her fork. ‘Thomas Mann. Plenty of ideas there, believe me.’

Mann, she explained, was fond of bringing a great deal of background information into his stories. ‘For example,’ she said, ‘take this part here.’ She put down her knife and fork, lifted the German novel and leafed through it. Ringer noticed how pretty she looked, her dark hair tumbling across her forehead, making her resemble a serious schoolgirl before an audience of parents as she carefully located one of several parts labelled with protruding bookmarks of yellow paper. She then began to translate for him a passage that slowly assembled itself into what he recognized to be a reference to cosmological expansion, buried in a novel about a composer who invents a new kind of art and pays for it with his sanity.

‘Perhaps I ought to read Doktor Faustus,’ he said. ‘It sounds better than most novels.’

‘First try The Magic Mountain,’ she told him. ‘That’s about a man who goes to a tuberculosis clinic in the Swiss Alps. It came out in the nineteen twenties, and Mann got the Nobel Prize not long after.’

‘That’s a striking coincidence.’

‘What is?’

‘The fact that we should both be sitting here, you with your Thomas Mann and me with my physics. Because the main subject of my book is something called the Schrödinger equation. It’s the fundamental rule of quantum mechanics. And do you know how Schrödinger found it? One Christmas in the nineteen twenties he went to a tuberculosis clinic in the Swiss Alps.’

Coincidences mean only whatever we want them to. Thomas Mann wrote a novel about a sanatorium, then a year after it was published, Erwin Schrödinger went to a similar establishment and made his famous discovery. Both got the Nobel Prize for their efforts and became celebrated as philosophers of their age. Is there any connection? Absolutely none.

That’s not how Ms Vicious Cycloids would see it, though. When Ringer tuned in to her lecture again, they’d left Melville altogether. Now the subject was the composer Robert Schumann; a manic depressive whose ‘cycloidal’ personality manifested itself in cyclical works like the piano suite Kreisleriana, whose name comes from the German for ‘circle maker’. Or should that be – as the lecturer now asked with a piquant, rhetorical smirk – ‘cycloid maker’? This, Ringer understood, was what counted for logical argument in her line of work: random hyperlinks as arbitrary as skipping from one menu to another on a Q-phone; as fortuitous as sitting down for lunch opposite the person who will become your lover.

With Helen, finding such links was no more than an erudite form of flirting. Vicious Cycloids was a similarly rhetorical exercise in social manoeuvring. The speaker did, to be fair, mention pendulums – but only as a way of then hauling in the name Foucault, and hence another avenue of pointless associations. For her, Ringer realized, there was no truth or falsehood, only ‘texts’ to be ‘deconstructed’. Too bad if any of those texts should happen to be a wrong number, and all interpretation consequently wrong.

He brought out his Q-phone and tried to pull the mysterious message back onto the screen, his menu-hopping instead sending him to the leisure section where a sudden loud and fully orchestrated burst of Rhapsody in Blue caused heads to turn in anger. He sheepishly switched off the phone and put it back inside his pocket.

Call me: H. What did it mean? Almost certainly nothing. And yet there was a chance – only a chance – that it really was connected with Helen.

‘It’s an interesting parallel,’ she’d said to him, pushing a lettuce leaf with her fork. ‘Mann and Schrödinger. I might even be able to work it into my thesis.’ She was studying German literature in relation to philosophy. ‘But how do physicists get their inspiration? I’d be fascinated to know.’ Helen looked at him across the table with eyes that suddenly promised more than conversation.

Sex was Schrödinger’s inspiration. Holidaying at the sanatorium where he had formerly been treated, he arranged for a lover to join him. And somehow this obscure physicist, who had hitherto done nothing of outstanding value, discovered the equation for quantum waves.

Maybe it was a fluke. Who knows, perhaps the great message was really meant for someone else. God mis-dialled, and it was Schrödinger, not the intended recipient, who came down from the mountain with Hψ=Eψ in his pocket. His ticket to world fame, a place in history. Like Mann – like everyone – he never entertained the possibility that his success might be due to luck. When events work to our advantage, we prefer to call it destiny or talent.

‘Perhaps there’s something magical about mountains,’ Ringer suggested.

‘It’s like Nietzsche,’ Helen said. ‘He was hiking in Switzerland when he had his vision of Zarathustra.’

‘And he went totally mad,’ Ringer recalled.

‘Nietzsche lies behind Doktor Faustus,’ she told him gravely, and while her face was lowered he divined, like a faint galaxy, the protrusion of a nipple beneath her red pullover. ‘Nietzsche saw music as expressing the essence of existence. This was Schopenhauer’s notion: it became Wagner’s creed. But Mann realized that with its mysticism, its irrationality, this philosophy of idealism could only lead in the end to the collective madness of fascism.’

Like the cycloid story Ringer found himself listening to years later, this was a neat and entirely untestable theory (unless one could rerun history without Nietzsche and see if Hitler still rose to power). But with Helen he had been more patient, because none of it was about fact or reason. It was about the promise of her naked body; the promise – soon to be fulfilled – of chance and beauty, and the momentary sensation of being truly alive. We are irrational animals: nature made us so. Thus each of his and Helen’s words, no matter how coolly abstract, was only a coded form of a more important communication that read: ‘There is a point in spacetime where you are commanded to make love, and you must find it.’

Or else it said Call me: H. Years after last seeing her, Ringer’s Q-phone had picked up a signal that had traversed the cosmos, and now here he was, listening to a lecture that reminded him of Helen. It was a meaningless coincidence; and the same fictitious force was what kept Vicious Cycloids trundling along.

The lecturer was describing how Ishmael, crouched in the metal try-pot, would have seen his own distorted reflection beneath him; so for a moment he would have acquired a cycloidal doppelgänger and gone slightly mad – just like Schumann, who based Kreisleriana on an E. T. A. Hoffmann novel about a crazed musician scared at one point by his reflection in a curved mirror. This took them to Lacan’s ‘psychoanalytic topology’ – in which the male erectile organ is equated with the square root of minus one – and then on to another chain of absurd connections.

Ringer had heard of E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, thanks to Helen. So anyone might guess it was all terribly significant, this lecture he’d blundered into, with its multiple cross-references. No doubt some imaginative novelist could conceive a logical scheme linking everything: Hoffmann, Schumann, Schrödinger, Mann. Some grand unified theory in which Helen and Ringer would be quantum resonances; their lovemaking (that first time, on the rug before the sputtering gas fire in his flat) a narrative inevitability.

But life is not a novel, except for those vain enough to consider themselves creatures of art. Ringer knew otherwise. The experiencing of his life came to him by means of a mental search engine that sifted and filtered according to subjective relevance. Finding patterns in the output was as easy as seeing faces in clouds.

This was why he had so often seen Helen: strangers who looked like her from behind, or were glimpsed by him through the reflections of a bus window as it set off and sped from view. Women who, if he could look at them properly, would be totally unlike the one he first met in the university canteen, pushing her uneaten salad to one side as their encounter reached its critical moment, then resting her chin on steepled hands and saying simply, ‘So?’ as her eyes flashed their celestial promise once again.

Call me: H. It could not be Helen, because after the end of their affair she abandoned her studies, went abroad, and eluded his every effort to contact her. It was as if she had disappeared from the earth; her name, in the following years whenever he had searched for it, was absent from every phone directory, even the Internet. She might have died, or changed her identity. More likely, she had simply slipped over the horizon of his existence, in the same way that most acquaintances pass unnoticed.

What if he were ever to see her again? She would probably be married with children, like Ringer. Their shared past would be laughably irrelevant; they could instead become passionless friends. Probably best, then, if he never saw her.

The lecture was still rolling on as he rejoined it. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael watches the try-pot, filled with greasy whaleflesh, burn and bubble through the night, prompting morbid thoughts of death and insanity. In the end Ishmael’s not even sure if he’s awake or asleep – the world has become ‘in some enchanted way, inverted’. And that, the speaker explained, is why Melville, in his densely meaningful little episode, made the gleaming trypots cycloidal. They are a symbol of time and madness, of multiplicity and reversal: themes pursued elsewhere by Hoffmann and Schumann. Three years after Moby-Dick was published to murderously hostile reviews, Schumann starved himself to death in an asylum. He was posthumously diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox – schizophrenia – by the psychiatrist Paul Möbius.

And this, it turned out, was the punchline they’d been heading for all along; for now they came – as the speaker triumphantly declared – ‘full-cycloid’; but with a twist, as in a Möbius strip. Melville based his story on a legendary whale called Mocha Dick. Surely, when altering the name for his book, he made the wrong choice. A novel that has a mirrored double-personality at its heart should rather be called Mobius Dick.

And there the lecture ended. Some audience members were able to summon up a question, but the only one in Ringer’s mind was: ‘What the hell was all that about?’ He picked up his empty sandwich box and headed back to the theoretical physics department, fully convinced he had chosen the right degree subject thirty years previously.

Forget the text, he decided. Call me: H meant nothing. Life is not a narrative. To think otherwise is a game novelists play in order to delight and entertain; some professors play it too, but only so as to confuse. Ringer sat down at his desk, and when he brought his Q-phone from his pocket not long afterwards, he saw to his surprise that the text, immune to all his fumblings, had decided to display itself again. Had it resurfaced like a restless ghost? Or had the unknown caller sent it again?

FROM THE ANGEL RETURNS

by Heinrich Behring*

Not an easy journey for a woman of my age, but I made it twice. The first time, in May of 1855, I found Schumann unwell, though not beyond hope. A year later, all hope was gone. Dr Richarz had clearly done a fine job on his most illustrious patient, having made him every bit as sick as the good doctor always guessed him to be.

Richarz is supposed to be one of the more enlightened physicians, but Endenich is a dismal place. A dreary courtyard leading to a dreary house, where a dozen or so patients have their days of madness measured out in grains of sedative. Schumann’s suite was upstairs, offering a view of nearby Bonn he sickened of, and a piano he played seldom, and badly. On my first visit he longed only for escape. On my second, it was clear that one exit alone was left to him.

Richarz is amiable, incompetent and somewhat deaf. Overwhelmed by the success of his unique private hospital, he has had to delegate much of the work to subordinates trained at public asylums; warders who think it therapy to sit silently with their mournful charges in local taverns. At least Schumann was spared this. Instead, while still able, he was taken for long, pointless walks: visiting Beethoven’s birthplace, or picking violets at the roadside.

‘There was really no need to come again, Frau von Arnim,’ Dr Richarz said, mildly flustered, as he received me in his office. ‘Your journey is entirely unnecessary.’ Medical notes burdened his desk in disarray. He sat down and tried putting them in order, peering at me over his spectacles as he rustled the stiff, useless documents.

‘So much paperwork, Herr Doktor,’ I observed.

‘Indeed,’ he said, squaring and at last mastering the heap before disposing of it in a drawer he slammed shut. ‘The essence of science is exactitude. Precision of habit,’ he elaborated, now contemplating the open lid of his silver inkwell, becoming quickly distracted by it, ‘engenders … precision … of …’ He closed the lid, fell silent.

‘Thought?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly, madam,’ he declared, recapturing his thread. ‘Precision of thought. The kernel of science. The artist’s mind, on the other hand, is characterized, so to speak, more by … by …’ The position of the inkwell on his desk appeared to be causing him some disquiet; he slid the object from left to right, as if unsure which hand was meant to dip a pen in it.

‘Vagueness?’ I offered.

‘What’s that you say?’ Richarz squinted at me. ‘Madam, I’m afraid you’ll have to speak up a little.’

I therefore suggested to him, mezzo forte and with clarity: ‘The artist’s mind is characterized by imprecision.’

‘Really, what nonsense!’ Richarz chuckled heartily to himself, almost breaking into a chesty cough. ‘Madam, though you have known the affections of the greatest artists of our age, it seems your feminine charms have served only to make those artists hide from you the very root of their genius. No, my dear Frau von Arnim, the artistic mind has, at its foundation, something very precise indeed. I mean the condition of melancholy.’

Then he sat back, creaking heavily in his chair, and from his waistcoat drew a snuff box with which he began to fiddle. In this way he could at least forget about the matching silver inkwell, which had by now come to rest in the middle of his desk, directly before his myopic gaze.

‘Yes, madam, melancholy,’ he said grandly. ‘Of course, I readily grant that a thousand men might have all the sorrows of Werther, and none of the talent. Melancholy is, as we scientists say, a necessary but insufficient condition of genius. Moreover there appear to have been one or two artists throughout history in whom the melancholic disposition has been suppressed to such an extent, and with such uncanny skill, that to their earthly companions these inspired men seemed almost happy. Oh, yes, I could describe a dozen case histories – poets, composers, painters – all of whom were men of public laughter and good cheer. But look into the dark privacy of their souls, madam, and you will always find a streak of despair where none suspected it; and this hard, thin sliver bears the very sap of genius.’

‘Which brings us, does it not,’ I reminded Dr Richarz, ‘to our friend Robert Schumann?’

The doctor, having spilled more snuff than he had rubbed, now poked some into his nose. ‘His is a very typical case,’ Richarz told me, his eyes watering, though not with emotion. ‘His sap, so to speak, has run dry. It is the inevitable concluding state of his condition.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of one who has completed a difficult calculation, arriving at exactly the required total.

‘If he has reached the final stage,’ I said, ‘does this mean his wife Clara can expect to see him discharged soon?’

Richarz was suddenly deaf again, and ignored my question. Wiping a moist eye, he told me, ‘For some time now we have been offering only basic supportive care. He refuses to eat, and has almost completely lost the power of speech, or of comprehension. Such vegetative degeneration is wholly to be expected, given the causative factors and overall pathology. He’ll be dead in a month or two.’ Richarz turned his head and gazed complacently towards the window’s sickly light. ‘It’s all very sad, of course,’ he said. ‘But Schumann’s end, one might say, is something of an occupational hazard, as much as the hardening of a miner’s lung. Genius and melancholy, inseparably bound, are like … how should I put it … ?’

‘Two sides of the same coin?’ I suggested.

‘What’s that? A coin? Yes, Frau von Arnim, you circumscribe it very amply indeed.’

The asylum of Dr Richarz had been earning a great many coins from Schumann’s illness, most of them donated by sympathetic friends and fellow musicians, since Clara’s earnings as a pianist could not cover the heavy costs in addition to feeding seven children. The last of them, Felix, was born three months after Schumann came to Endenich. Now Robert had been here for more than two years, and in all that time, Richarz had never allowed Clara to see him. It was a drive of several hours: too far to undertake, Richarz insisted, unless strictly necessary. At first he told Clara that emotional stimulation would only further damage the composer’s fragile organism. More recently, Richarz had advised all visitors to stay away, so that they need not witness his patient’s irreparably pitiable condition.

‘A coin, yes,’ Richarz murmured. ‘You speak with the voice of a poet, Frau von Arnim. You, who have known Goethe.’

During my previous visit, Richarz quizzed me endlessly about my most famous friend. Was Goethe’s melancholy manifest, the doctor wanted to know, or else suppressed? Tell me, Richarz had asked, pen in hand; was Goethe’s love, in your opinion, a form of self-punishment?

Then there was Beethoven, of course. Richarz had diagnosed his period of ‘organic instability’ quite precisely. It occurred, he informed me, only a few years after I brought Beethoven and Goethe together for their historic meeting. And do tell me about Liszt, Richarz had added, showing me the piano Franz once played, which Schumann now ignored. For Richarz, these names – men whose company and even love I shared – were merely illustrious specimens, in need of proper cataloguing.

During that first visit, I made it clear to Richarz I was only interested in discussing Schumann. But Richarz was after bigger game, and now once more he raised the hallowed icon of my greatest love.

‘We should not speak of Goethe,’ I told him. ‘It would be indelicate of me; like the gossiping of a physician about a patient.’

Richarz was not too deaf to raise an eyebrow; he knew my meaning. His wagging tongue had made it common knowledge round here: Schumann’s wife had taken as lover the promising and beautiful young Brahms, whom Schumann himself unnaturally doted on. Family problems, Richarz reckoned, were what had made Schumann throw himself into the Rhine only months after Brahms showed up on their doorstep in Düsseldorf and made himself at home. A domineering wife whose performing success eclipsed Schumann’s own failed career as conductor; and now she was unfaithful too. My friend Joseph Joachim tried to save him, but it was too late. Joachim and Brahms were allowed to visit Endenich, but not Clara.

‘Gossip is a vice that does not tempt me,’ Richarz said smugly. ‘I leave that to the fairer sex. But regarding Goethe, whom you knew so intimately, I was thinking only that the two-sided coin with which artists pay for their immortality is a pact the author of Faust must clearly have understood. He, more than anyone, must have known the deep, dark chasm of despondency from which all art springs.’

I left Richarz to pursue this reverie in the seclusion of his own meandering thoughts, but soon found the doctor quoting the poet’s words: ‘Brief joy must be our lot, that woes overwhelm. A flicker of happiness is all we can hope for, Frau von Arnim, followed inevitably by darkness. Such is Faust’s realization. Granted his every wish, he has Helen woken from the Trojan dead: the most beautiful and desirable woman in all history. Yet what can he enjoy with her, except a moment of dream-like pleasure? And after that, oblivion.’

Richarz looked at me with the hollow wisdom of a man who takes as truth exactly whatever he has found written in some other man’s book.

‘I wonder who Goethe’s Helen really was,’ Richarz then asked teasingly. ‘Who was the lost love he raised from the past in his great poetic drama? Or does Goethe perhaps mean Eternal Woman: the spirit that drives men to art, and to despair?’ Richarz waited for me to answer; I gave him none. So he continued, ‘Goethe’s early love for your mother is a story as famous and touching as the one you yourself have told of his later affection for you.’ Still I remained silent. ‘And Beethoven, of course, had his own Immortal Beloved, did he not? Some allege the unknown woman who inspired him was you, madam. My, what a veritable stable of earthly muses!’

Again Richarz chuckled, and again I ignored him. Yes, I – Bettina von Arnim – was Goethe’s lover: my late husband Achim and the whole world knew it. Nature never meant me to be a wife, or a widow; and if now, an old woman past my seventieth year, I should still find myself charmed by a fine young man such as Joseph Joachim, what of it? Richarz would no doubt have been shocked beyond words had I admitted to him my love for the musician who was himself spurned by my own daughter. But I have lived long enough to know that in this world anything is possible, and that everything, if only it can be understood, can be forgiven. Goethe loved my mother before he ever fell for me; and I do not dismiss the idea that love can leap generations in the other direction too, so that after a daughter, a mother is loved, even if she is old.

Very well then, I have adopted young Joachim, just as the Schumanns adopted Brahms. And yes, it was only out of consideration for Joseph that, like him, I visited Endenich; just as Brahms did only in order to please Clara. But should we then conclude, as Richarz apparently did, that the melancholy of geniuses is precipitated always by the fickleness of women?

‘Why do you resist visitors such as myself and Clara,’ I asked him, ‘but not Brahms or Joachim?’

Richarz rocked uneasily in his chair. ‘I would prefer those gentlemen not to waste their time coming here, however I am in no position to resist. They have a legal right of access.’

‘And Schumann’s own wife does not?’

‘Madam,’ Richarz said, ‘please do not put me in the position of having to speak of matters which might embarrass you.’

I was having none of this. ‘Dr Richarz,’ I told him, ‘I am seventy-one years old, a widow, an author of considerable renown, and a woman who has seen all that the world has to offer. If there’s anything you could possibly say that would embarrass me, I think I’d be quite interested to hear it!’

Richarz, his mouth hanging open with surprise, was saved by a knock at the door.

‘Ah, this must be Dr Peters,’ Richarz exclaimed with some relief. ‘Come in!’

The fellow who entered was tall, thin, grey faced, and wore the sorrowfully expectant look of an undertaker. He greeted me civilly, then seated himself near the window.

‘Dr Peters is in charge of Schumann’s day-to-day treatment,’ Richarz explained to me. ‘He can tell you far more than I about the patient’s demeanour.’

I looked from one man to the other, not knowing which of them I trusted less. Peters was waiting for someone to prompt him.

‘How is he today?’ I finally asked.

Peters was unsure how to answer. ‘As before,’ he eventually told me.

‘We shall wait until Schumann is soundly asleep,’ Richarz explained to me, ‘before going up to see him.’

I was puzzled by this. ‘Would it not be better for me to see him awake?’

Richarz and Peters looked at one another, then again at me.

‘No,’ said Richarz. ‘It would not.’ Then he turned to Peters again. ‘Have there been further hallucinations?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And is their content unchanged?’

‘It is, sir.’

I began to understand that Richarz’s dialogue with his subordinate was a way for him to ease his own embarrassment in clarifying for me the nature of Schumann’s latest illness.

‘Tell me, Dr Peters,’ Richarz continued, ‘would it be accurate to say that the patient’s hallucinations principally concern an individual, or individuals, of the female sex?’

‘It would, sir.’

‘And would it therefore possibly be inadvisable for any living individual of that sex to be present while such hallucinations were in progress?’

‘Indubitably, sir.’

Richarz clearly felt he had said enough. He straightened his waistcoat with a victorious air, then slid his ink-well definitively to the edge of his desk.

I turned and said to the cadaverous Dr Peters, ‘Does Robert imagine he is with his wife?’

Peters was uneasy, and spoke quietly. ‘It’s hard to say, madam.’ He looked to Richarz for encouragement; received none, and hence was forced to continue. ‘The patient came to the conclusion some time ago that his wife – as she has never written or visited – must be dead. Since then, he hasn’t been eating. We have to use a tube.’

‘A tube?’ I exclaimed, loudly enough for Richarz to hear.

‘That’s enough, Dr Peters,’ he instructed. ‘We should not expose our distinguished guest to the distasteful physical details of our patient’s medical treatment.’

I interrupted angrily. ‘Are you telling me that Schumann is being force-fed?’ Searching the faces of the two men, I saw nothing but indifference. ‘Has isolation from his family made him lose the will to live? What kind of doctors are you? This is not care, it’s mediaeval torture!’

‘Enough!’ Richarz silenced me, then continued more calmly though with evident irritation. ‘This is no place for hysterical outbursts. We have ways of alleviating such conditions. I assure you, madam, that if you were as fully qualified and informed about the matter as we are, then you would not use such slanderous language.’ He stood up; Dr Peters did likewise. ‘I shall leave you for a moment, Frau von Arnim, while I and my assistant go upstairs to assess the patient. I hope that when we return you will have reconsidered your opinions about our establishment. Otherwise I shall have no alternative but to terminate your visit.’

Then he came out from behind his desk and marched stiffly to the door, followed by Peters who closed it behind them, leaving me to try and guess what state poor Schumann must be in.

Twelve months earlier, when I had last visited, I had found very little wrong with him apart from an excess of nervous energy that the boredom of his confinement had greatly aggravated. On that occasion too, Richarz would not allow me to see him until I had first endured a long delay whose only purpose, it seemed, was to make sure I knew whose will it was that shaped things here.

Then, as now, Richarz had begun with a lecture. ‘The human mind,’ he informed me, ‘is somewhat like …’ And he lapsed into his habitual academic silence, leaving me to try and supply the necessary metaphor.

‘A book, Herr Doktor?’ I suggested.

‘What’s that? No, no,’ he said. ‘A book is written in advance and demands only to be read.’

‘Then is the human mind like the author of the book?’

Dr Richarz laughed. ‘Since you are an author yourself, Frau von Arnim, I can see that the analogy must be appealing. But no; we are not the conscious authors of our thoughts. Why, even from his earliest years, Schumann claimed to possess two separate personalities with separate wills of their own. And he heard the voices of angels, dictating music to him.’

‘Does he hear them still?’ I asked.

Richarz frowned then. Now, waiting for my second encounter with his patient, I recalled that frown and wondered what it meant. Were those angels the stuff of his latest visions?

Joseph Joachim has the face of an angel. So does Brahms, of course. They will be the great men that some old lady like myself one day remembers; and in Brahms’s case, that greatness was bestowed by Schumann himself, in print. New Paths, Schumann called the article where he announced the arrival of a Messiah to counter the Wagnerites. ‘He is come, a young blood by whose cradle graces and heroes kept watch. He is called Johannes Brahms.’ Not bad, as first reviews go. And that’s all it takes to launch a career. Oh, people like Richarz can ponder their lofty nonsense about genius and melancholy, but I’ve seen enough of the world to know how it is that people make it onto the pedestal in the first place. Opinions are formed by intelligent people such as Schumann, or myself. Then they are repeated by common fools like Richarz who turn them into great truths. If Brahms were not so handsome, would Schumann have been quite so indiscreet in his admiration? If Brahms had not knocked unannounced on Schumann’s door one day and made himself a house guest, would anyone ever have heard of this girlish twenty-year-old; this blond blue-eyed lad who they say perfected his piano technique in a Hamburg brothel?

It doesn’t take much to put an angel among the stars. In Brahms’s case, as in so many others, it was merely a matter of the right word from the right authority. Schumann’s prophecy is sure to fulfil itself, and one day busts of Brahms, grown old and famous, will adorn respectable parlour pianos everywhere. Of course I’d heard the rumours: that for Brahms and Clara, Schumann’s imprisonment here was quite convenient. Or even that the seventh child whom Robert never saw is not his own. I leave such matters to the likes of Richarz: the quacks and scholars who need great men as fleas need dogs.

Still no sign of him and Peters. They were making me wait, just like before. Such games must afford them welcome entertainment in a place where mental stimulation of any kind is strictly banned. Even Richarz’s office, where I sat, was largely bare. Uncluttered surroundings, Richarz told me, make for an uncluttered mind. What he really meant, I think, was empty.

Schumann began writing his article about Brahms almost as soon as the young Apollo walked into his life. And a few weeks after that, Schumann conducted his last concert. Joachim told me what a disaster it was. In the rehearsals, Schumann kept dropping the baton, eventually having to tie it to his wrist with string. The Düsseldorf orchestra had seen Schumann grow increasingly erratic in recent months, but now he reached the limit. He was spilling sheets of music from the lectern; he didn’t know where he was. An important horn solo never happened, since Schumann had lost count of the bars and failed to cue the player. Could love alone so turn a head? Was the angelic Brahms, lounging on Schumann’s hearth rug, the cause of such distraction?

The musicians begged Joachim to conduct the evening’s performance, but he refused: he could never do such a thing to a friend. Schumann raised the baton that night, and it was a shambles. Afterwards he was effectively dismissed from his post.

So when Schumann published his article on Brahms, he was not only heralding the arrival of a new genius but also announcing the end of his own career. He was passing the crown to his heir; passing his wife too, perhaps. Four months later he leapt into the Rhine, was dragged out by fishermen, and his incarceration at Endenich began.

Richarz kept me waiting the first time, just like he did again now, possibly hoping I would give up and leave. ‘Frau von Arnim,’ he said to me on that previous visit, ‘how exactly can I explain to you, in terms you might understand, just what it is that the human mind most closely resembles?’

We’d already dismissed books and authors. ‘A cabinet of precious jewels?’ I wondered.

He thought about it for a moment. ‘Not really.’

‘A flower?’

‘Heavens no.’

‘A city?’

Dr Richarz appeared to like this; he rubbed his chin, but then said, ‘No, I don’t think that will do.’

‘Is the mind perhaps like melting snow; or the wheels of a carriage?’

I don’t know how many metaphors I offered him; I could feel my own poetic stock run almost to exhaustion when at last the doctor’s face became illuminated by a happy thought.

‘I have it!’ he declared. ‘The human mind is like … is like the universe itself!’

Well, this was good to know.

‘You do recall, after all,’ he said, ‘that our great poet once set himself the task of writing a novel about that very subject.’

Yes, of course I knew of Goethe’s failed ambition, but I was not to be drawn back to Goethe again. ‘If the mind is like the whole world,’ I said to Richarz, ‘then I can see why your task as healer of minds is as futile as the poet’s lofty goal.’ Of his novel about the universe, Goethe managed little beyond an essay on granite.

‘The world; the spirit,’ Dr Richarz enthused, ‘our philosophers have shown beyond doubt that they are identical and commensurate; that they are inherent within one another and stand in a necessary relation of indiscernible identity …’

‘Yes, Herr Doktor,’ I said patiently. ‘I am quite familiar with Hegel and Fichte and Schopenhauer. But I do sometimes wonder if there really is any more wisdom in them than in the tales of elves and fairies my grandmother used to tell me on her knee.’

Dr Richarz laughed loudly. ‘My dear Frau von Arnim,’ he chuckled, ‘you are one of the most esteemed literary figures of our times; and your late husband, if I may be so bold as to say, must have been one of the luckiest men alive. But really, madam, though you have commerced with geniuses like a shooting star amidst the heavenly constellations, you speak, after all your years of rich experience, with the simple, delightful voice of a schoolgirl.’

That was when he got up and left me; cordially, on that occasion, but with just as much determination to make me wait. That’s what we do at my age: wait. We count the days and think how many have been counted for us already.

Schumann had been at Endenich for a year when I made my first visit. In that time he had made what Richarz considered modest progress, thanks to warm baths, enemas and walks in the woods. Joachim, on the other hand, told me Schumann was so starved of company he had nearly forgotten how to speak. A whole hour passed until at last I saw him then, poor Robert, coming into the room, his face instantly transformed when he recognized me, rushing to embrace me and at first barely able to form a sentence. Once he mastered his tongue, he was like a musician long separated from his instrument, the words beginning to pour from him. Soon he was talking almost too quickly for me to grasp what he was saying, about places he had visited in the past, about his family, and above all about the wonderful music of Brahms.

After that first visit, I wrote to Clara straight away, told her my concerns about Richarz and his establishment. Clara came to Endenich, spoke with Richarz, then went home again without even seeing her husband. In the interests of what she considers right, she can show the cold determination of a well-sharpened blade.

Joachim saw how Clara teaches her pupils. A young girl was there at the Schumanns’ house one day for a piano lesson; a girl with some mechanical talent but not the slightest shred of musicality. The kind, in other words, whose parents provide real musicians with a living.