When Your Song Breaks the Silence

Natalie Jacobs

When Your Song Breaks the Silence

Natalie Jacobs

Copyright © 2012 by Stanley and Judith
Jacobs

Kindle Edition

All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this work in any form.

In memory of Natalie

Contents

Patterns

1. Girls and Boys

2. St. Cecilia's Day

3. Therese

4. Vogl5. Zseliz
I

6. Mayrhofer

7. Senn

8. De Profundis

9. An die Freude

10. Zseliz II

11. Winter is a Place

12. The Lark Ascending

Afterword

Patterns

(and what is music, really,
but the patterns that sounds make in their passage through time? that was what
he heard, all his life; the patterns, the sounds, and time which is the silence
that surrounds them.)

He is making what he hears into structures that he can understand: the
sound of his mother's voice, the tread of his father's feet; the intricate
melodies of words. Sounds beat down on him relentlessly, sometimes terrifying,
sometimes soothing, but always present, even in the quietest room. He imagines
he can hear the sounds that the grass in the courtyard makes as it grows.

Franzl, put your hand there. Can you feel the baby kicking?

Oh, yes.

His mother smells a little of soap, the fatty-smelling stuff she brews
in the kitchen, and a little of the powder she sometimes dusts on her face and
hair, which comes off on his lips when he kisses her cheek. She says that great
ladies cover themselves in powder, and they used to wear wigs as big as houses,
all gray with powder. When she first came to Vienna she saw the great ladies in
the streets, in their coaches. But that was before Napoleon's war.

Will it be a boy or a girl?

Only God knows that, little bird.

If he presses his ear to the curve of her belly, he can hear the thumps
the baby makes when it kicks, getting ready to be born. He wonders if the baby,
too, can hear the patterns that sounds make. He was there too, where the baby
is, a long time ago—his mother told him so. What did he hear in that
place behind his mother's skin?

He comes to realize that sound is a language that he must learn in the
same way that he must learn to read. These patterns mean something, they have
secrets inside them. He is starting to understand. And meanwhile the patterns
are everywhere: in the sounds of the priest giving Mass, in the sounds of his
brother Ignaz practicing the piano, in the sounds of his mother's murmured
words of comfort after he wakes from a nightmare.

Shhh, Vögelein. Geh' zu ruhe. Go to sleep, love.

I can't.

In the darkness of his brothers' room: the half-opened door, the dark
shape of his mother above him, and further back, silhouetted, his father in his
dressing gown. His mother's belly under her nightgown is huge now, and solid.
During the day she wears stays to make it smaller. Inside her belly is a secret.

As he listens for the patterns, he finds the world around him beginning
to fade. Everything is blurry. He cannot tell his brothers apart at a distance;
his mother's features meld into a single blankness until she leans down; his
father is only a large indistinct mass. Somehow, for some reason, when the
world loses its clear edges, he begins to hear more.

Behind the wall, his mother is screaming.

He curls up in bed and puts his hands over his ears, but he can hear it
anyway. Soon you will have a new little brother, said the lady who came to the
house. He had seen her before, last year. His baby sister had lived one day.
Her body looked like a wax doll in its little blanket. His father said she was
in Heaven, which he didn't understand, because she was right here.

He can't stop listening. Even the screaming seems to make sense, it
seems to have a pattern to it. It comes and goes in a rhythm, rising and rising
and then falling again. He can beat time to it. He can hardly believe that he
is hearing this. It must be a sin of some kind. His father says he is too young
to sin.

The baby is a girl. Her name is Maria Therese. His mother calls her
Resi. She is pink and has black hair. His father has her baptized right away.
Everyone gets very excited about her, even his brothers. He doesn't know what
to think, except that his baby sister is ugly. Maybe she'll die too.

Her crying at night is a new pattern. He weaves it into the other
patterns. He hopes it'll go away because it makes the other sounds ugly. But it
doesn't go away.

He likes to hide under his bed in the evening after dinner and lie on
his tummy and play mumbledy-peg with his brother Ferdinand's penknife. His
mother and father never know he's there. Under his bed it is dusty and there is
a spider that lives there, which is brown with white spots. The knife makes a
thunk-thunk-thunk in the wood. He can hear all the sounds of the house
vibrating through the floorboards: his father's voice below him, big and deep,
Ferdinand complaining about something and his mother replying, and then the
shrill hurting sound of the baby.

Stupid baby. It's been a long time since she was born but everyone still
thinks she's wonderful. And his mother doesn't call him her little bird
anymore.

Ignaz finds him there, on a night when the house is more full of noises
than ever, and all he wants is to make everything go away. Ignaz is his oldest
brother. He's twelve and has a hunched back because he was born
wrong—though once their father was angry and said Ignaz had a hunched back
because he was a "bastard boy." He is tall and so his face is always
blurry, because it's so far away. But when he's peeking under the bed, his face
is clear. His voice has a funny sound to it, like a frog.

Do you want to hear me practice? Come on, let's go to the music room.
And stop sulking, will you?

Everyone always says he's sulking. Even when he's not.

In the music room, where the drapes are always drawn, Ignaz sits and
plays the piano while Franz listens. The piano is a great dark shining thing,
like a whale, heaped up with books and papers. The sounds it makes are the best
sounds because (he is learning this) they are there on purpose. All sounds mean
something but these are put together that way in order to mean a certain thing.
When Ignaz plays, he takes the sounds that are on the paper and makes them
real.

Sound can be written down like words. Once Ignaz let him look at some of
the writing. Lines and squiggles and circles and spiky things: they didn't look
the way the music sounded. Ignaz says that you have to write down sounds so
people can make them again later.

Just like people write down stories, so they can tell them again later.
Like the story of the man on the desert island, do you remember that? Well, you
wouldn't know about that story unless someone had written it down.

He chews on his nails while Ignaz plays music by a person named W.A.
Mozart. W.A. Mozart is dead now, Ignaz told him.

Do you like this? Do you like this music?

Every sound has a meaning and creates a pattern but these sounds that
Ignaz plays are a language more difficult to understand. They tell a
story—not like the man on the desert island but a story with no words and
with no people in it either, but it's still a story. It has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. Some of the pieces his brother plays have happy endings and
some of them have sad endings. But all of them—he doesn't know how to say
it—all of them have things inside them. They aren't just sounds. The
patterns are like spider webs that capture all sorts of things—feelings
and thoughts and sometimes pictures, too.

When he listens to the music by W.A. Mozart, he sees people dancing and
birds flying and remembers a trip to the park when he played with a little dog
and threw stones in a fountain. And then he sees all the sounds flying
around—they look like little silver things—and joining together.
They draw shining lines in the dark behind his eyelids.

Listening to this music is the best thing in the world. Better than
sweets, even.

His birthday is in the winter. His mother says he was born during the
first part of the war, only a little while before the army marched off to meet
Napoleon, and everyone waved out the windows and cheered, and his mother held
him up to see the parade. He doesn't remember any parade. Sometimes, though, he
dreams about being born and coming out into white light and snow falling
outside the windows. Maybe it's a true dream.

On his fifth birthday, his mother makes him a little cake and Ferdinand
and his other brother Karl give him a set of jacks that they bought with their
own pocket money. Resi doesn't give him anything because she's still a baby.
His father doesn't give him anything, either. His father says birthdays aren't
important. Name-days are what matter, the day of his patron saint, St. Francis,
who talked to the animals. His name-day, St. Francis's day, is in October, and
so is his father's. But his birthday is in January, which is now.

A little while after his birthday Ignaz lifts him up onto the piano
seat.

You're old enough now, I think.

The snow is white on the windows, like in his dream. The room is very
cold. Ignaz has lit a taper on top of the piano because it's dark here even in
the afternoon, and in the orange light he can see Ignaz's face very clearly. It
always has a sad look and his eyes are big and dark. He is thin and has long
fingers.

Go ahead. Make noise.

He puts his hands on the keys. He is almost too frightened to do
anything. He is not allowed to touch the piano. His father says he's too
little. But if he plays and his father hears, then it'll be Ignaz who gets in
trouble. But maybe Ignaz talked to their father and he said it was all right.

He presses down a white key. It makes a sound. He can feel the sound as
well as hear it, in the air vibrating, against his bottom on the piano seat. It
is a lovely sound.

That's a C, says Ignaz.

Every key has a name. Ignaz teaches him the names: A, B, C, and B flat,
C sharp, D sharp, and all the other names. It's hard to remember them at first.
But he listens and finds out that each key, each sound, has its own face; he
can tell them apart, in the same way he can tell people apart. C doesn't look
anything like F sharp. He's not sure why Ignaz can't do this. Ignaz has to look
at the keys to know which note is playing.

His father says it's all right for him to learn to play the piano. That
makes him feel better. He goes on learning.

Some notes like to be with each other. A and D, for instance. They're
friends. Some notes don't like to be with each other: C and C sharp, for
instance. They're enemies. Ignaz tells him that it all depends on the
intervals, the spaces between the notes. He plays all the intervals for Franz,
and Franz can hear which intervals are friends and which are enemies. Then
there are groups of intervals, and those are called chords. He learns the
chords and their names.

Everything has a name in music. He remembers all the names and what they
mean, but the names are too small for how the music makes him feel. A D-minor
chord, for instance, makes him feel dark and terrible; he can see darkness in
his head when he plays that chord. The words don't say that. The words only say
what his fingers are doing.

Ignaz has him play things by W.A. Mozart, just easy things. Then he
starts to learn harder things, by people with different names, like Czerny and
Hummel. His fingers get tangled up in each other sometimes. It's hard for him
to hear the music and make his fingers work properly at the same time. Ignaz
never shouts at him. Sometimes, if Franz does well, he gives Franz a sweet.

Their lessons are always at five o'clock, before supper. Every day it's
lighter in the parlor: spring is coming.

He still hears the patterns, the sounds, but something is happening. The
sounds have names now, they form themselves into the notes of the piano. They
form chords, and tunes. He plays them on the piano when he arrives early to his
lessons. He likes doing that. He can make good sounds. He can make music.

And people listen.

1. Girls and Boys

Spring,
1815

It was a carnival, it was a circus, it was a freak show and a menagerie
where everyone and anyone of consequence was on display. People hung out of
their windows to watch the rich coaches go by, and great crowds gathered around
the palaces hoping to catch a glimpse of the mighty Duke of Wellington, who had
tamed Napoleon, or the King of Denmark and his Viennese mistress, or the mad
Czar Alexander in one of his religious manias. There were spies everywhere,
too, running here and there on Metternich's business, rummaging through rubbish
bins and tailing the dignitaries all over the city. At night, music poured from
the windows of the great houses, and everywhere there were whores in all shapes
and sizes, their faces rouged and their skirts tucked up, offering themselves
to foreigner and Viennese alike. The Congress of Vienna was in full swing.

The tumult spilled over into the outskirts as well; it was impossible to
keep such a carnival confined within the city walls. It was quieter, of course,
away from the storm's center, but still the streets rang at night with shouts
and curses and the rumbling of coach wheels and drunken laughter, and by day
confused foreigners wandered around trying to find their way to the historical
monuments (of which there were none in Liechtental), since these were not only diplomats
and their entourages, but tourists as well, come to the city which had fallen
twice to Napoleon and which now celebrated his fall in turn.

For Franz, still living in his father's schoolhouse in Liechtental, it
was a good time in some ways. He got his teaching certificate the month before
the Congress started, so he no longer had to trudge back and forth between his
home and the teaching college, which was located in the Annagasse, one of
Vienna’s many red light districts.

With his certificate, he was free from the whores, then, but he
exchanged their ministrations for a much worse prison: teaching school. At
first, it was all right, even fun. He liked children. He taught the young ones,
the six-year-olds who were just learning to read and write. He taught them sums
and grammar and religion. Every so often, his father would stop by the
classroom—all the children sat very still in their seats and looked
frightened, and Franz did, too—and then walk away again without a word,
whereupon the lesson would continue. The children seemed to like him; more
importantly, they paid attention to him. That was in the beginning.

He learned very early on, though, a fundamental piece of knowledge: he
could not reason with the children. He could cajole them, threaten them, bribe
them, but he could not reason with them. They simply wouldn't listen. Even his
threats and bribes stopped working after awhile, when they discovered he was
too weak to carry them out. He had no authority and they knew it. He suspected
they also knew that he didn't want to be there. From the beginning he had
brought his manuscripts to class so he could work while the children were
studying, and those children, while lazy, noisy, and dirty, were not stupid.
They knew he wasn't grading their papers. They knew he wasn't really a teacher,
just a composer pretending to be a teacher, and took full advantage of that
fact, until he wasn't sure whom he wanted to shoot more, them or himself. Once
the Congress started, discipline went from almost impossible to completely
impossible.

Outside the schoolroom, however, in that narrow window between the end
of classes and bedtime, good things were happening. For a composer, this was a
grand time to be alive, for never were people more hungry for music; even
extremely young and stupid composers who taught six-year-olds benefited. His
Mass in F was performed twice, once in the Liechtental Parish Church and once
in a church in the Inner City. He conducted both times, and Therese sang the
soprano solo both times. His teacher Salieri was present at the second
performance, along with several strangers whom he knew to be dignitaries of one
kind or another, judging from their strange clothes and important bearing. (In
fact, they were English, part of Lord Castlereagh's entourage, still enamored
of German music after Haydn's visit to London just before Franz was born.) His
Mass was not in Salieri's favorite Italian style, but after the performance
Salieri came to him, his smile creasing his leathery old face into a thousand
wrinkles, and told him he was a "molto buono bambino." The English
visitors said things to him that he didn't understand, but he smiled and
thanked them anyway.

He talked to Therese a little, before he went home, thanking her for a
second good performance. She wore a new dress of pale pink cut low to show her
fine bosom, and a silver locket; her familiar homely face was radiant and
reddened from her exertion, her forehead beaded with perspiration. She clutched
her score to her chest and said, "Oh Franz, thank you so much for letting
me sing. It was so beautiful." Then she kissed him. He was so surprised
that he stood open-mouthed for a whole minute before she laughed and told him
his parents were waiting outside for him.

That sparked things in his head, that kiss. In that moment as their lips
met he was almost certain that he was in love with her. Every time he thought
of her he got a nice warm feeling inside him. Every time he spoke to her he
felt nothing but happiness. She brought him joy. Surely he was in love with
her. What else could it be?

She came around to his house a few weeks later in a dark-blue dress with
white trim, her thick dark hair neatly tied back in a bun; she had come to see
his new piano. His father had been so proud of him after the Mass that he had
bought him this gift. It was hard to believe, such a gift for a useless
scribbling son, but Therese said, laughing, "He's just glad you're still a
schoolteacher!" The piano had six octaves and came from the firm of Conrad
Graf, which made Beethoven's pianos. It was beautiful. The day it was delivered
to the house, he played it for three hours, learning its ways and its weak
points, accustoming his fingers to the lovely new keys. When Therese came, they
performed some of his new songs as she sat next to him on the bench, and he
decided he liked the warmth of her body next to his. But he was too shy to kiss
her.

There was so much happening in his head now. Not just
Therese—everything. Maybe it was the Congress that filled him up like
this, that electrified him, but he couldn't stop thinking, and he couldn't stop
writing. He was writing so many songs he couldn't keep track of them all. At
night, he read books of poetry he bought or borrowed from Spaun or Spaun's
law-student friends, and every poem he read, it seemed, took on its own music,
the words transforming into tunes as quickly as he read them. His song-writing
was shaping itself into something new and strange, and, he thought, very good.
When Therese sang his setting of Gretchen's lament from "Faust,"
while he accompanied her on his new piano, she was in tears by the end and
could hardly gasp out the final refrain. He had never made anyone weep before.

His thoughts kept coming back to her, circling around his interior
vortex of sound and patterning; was he in love with her? And then, an even
stranger thought: did he want to marry her? He couldn't answer. He liked to
have definitive answers to things, he didn't like things to be hanging. If he
started writing a piece, he wanted to finish it, especially if it was a good
one. He certainly liked her very much. But marrying her. . . It was certainly a
thought. But he had no money. And if he married her—on their wedding
night…He had no erotic feelings toward her at all: she was just Therese, with the
pretty voice and the good figure and the ugly face. That was all.

He thought about it more. It seemed that his mental perambulations were
too full of "oughts" and "shoulds." He felt he ought to
marry Therese because it was something every young man should do, to fall in
love and get married. But the more he thought about it, the more he knew he was
not in love with her; he knew that with his heart, even while his mind was
saying that he did love her and that settling down with her would be a good
thing to do.

When he played Gretchen's song with Therese, the answer was very clear,
though he turned away from it at first. The song, sung by Gretchen after having
been abandoned by her lover Faust, was in two parts, with the sorrowing refrain
"My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I'll find it never and
nevermore." It rose to a climax, a piercing high note, as Gretchen recalls
her lover's kiss and then again as she longs to dissolve into his kisses. The
accompaniment was monotonous and on-running which was how he meant to mimic the
sound of her spinning wheel. As Therese's glorious soprano arced high over the
sound of his piano, he heard Gretchen's words and knew how it felt to be in
love:

I stand by my
window,

I seek only him;

I run from my
door

To be but with
him.

His noble gait,

Lofty and wise

The smile on his
lips,

The force of his
eyes;

In the flow of
his words

Is magical bliss,

The clasp of his
hand

And ah! his kiss!

He had never felt like that about anybody. He did not feel like that
about Therese. And yet, somehow, he managed to convince himself that he did.
Somehow, even while he recoiled at the thought of her body, at night, he
dreamed not of her but of the boy in the Seminary a few years ago, whose lips
had tasted sweet.

* * *

"What do you think's going
to happen?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think it'll be all right?"

"Maybe."

He had come to a conclusion: he was going to speak out, he was going to
say it. It was the first warm day of spring. He lay on his back in the grass
and looked up at the blue sky, watching a bird circling and circling on the
wind. Therese sat next to him, along with her netting and the remains of the
bread and cheese they had brought with them. It was still a little windy for a
picnic, and the paper they had wrapped the food in had already blown away.
Therese wore a sprigged lawn dress and a bonnet edged with lace. He felt
pleasantly drowsy, though part of his mind was spinning like a top.

They were about a mile from Liechtental, on a small grassy hillside
overlooking a sea of corn. A few apple trees provided shade and the new grass
was soft and damp with dew. Looking south to the city, one saw a dark grim
bastion, a smudge against the landscape, and one rejoiced at escaping to this
place. It was one of his favorite places to go whenever he wanted to get out of
the city. Therese seemed to like it, too. She hummed to herself softly as her
needle flashed in the sunlight.

Everything seemed so calm. You would never guess, by looking at this
lovely place, that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and was heading toward Paris
to gather an army. One might think the earth would groan at the abomination and
the sky turn black with mourning, but there was nothing of the sort. It hadn't
even crossed his mind until Therese mentioned it.

He had been thinking about a score by Gluck he had been looking at last
night, that old Salieri had brought out to show him as an example of
counterpoint. Salieri always wanted him to look backward. Not that Gluck was
bad, by any means, but aping the past seemed a poor way to get ahead in the
world now that Beethoven had broken all the rules. Of course, who could do
anything after Beethoven?

"Do you think you might be conscripted?" Therese looked up
from her netting, her needle poised. He imagined her as one of the Fates,
holding the thread of his life.

"I don't think so. They don't take schoolteachers."

"Why not, I wonder?"

"Because they've all been driven mad."

The bird circling had been joined by a second. A few clouds drifted into
view, then moved on, pushed by the sharp wind. He thought he felt a drop of
rain, but the sky was still clear. He could sense Therese's closeness to him,
the warmth of her body, even when he could not see her, and struggled between
the desire to move away and the desire to move closer. He did not want to feel
her flesh against his. But it occurred to him that this place would be a good
place to ask her what he had been planning to ask her, or at least take another
step nearer. His friends had tried to talk him out of it, but he knew he had to
do it. He just had to find the right place in the conversation (and at what
point do you bring a new theme in? Was this conversation in sonata form, was it
strophic or through-composed?).

"I quite liked the Congress, though, it was exciting. I liked
having a bit of action going on. It gets so boring, sometimes. You wouldn't
know."

"I know about boring. Believe me."

"It seems so quiet now. Nothing happening. Oh, did you hear about
the King of Würtemberg?"

"The one who was so monstrously fat?"

"Even fatter than Louis XVII, or the English prince, whatsisname,
George the Regent. That's what they said."

"We've got a rash of fat kings."

"Anyway, I heard he had to have a table with a piece cut out of it
so he could get to his food. Isn't that funny?"

"If all the food he ate went to people who needed it…."

"Then there'd be no more starving people left. I think that's
funny, anyway. Well, maybe it's not that funny. It was interesting. Here,
you've got a bit of something on your spectacles -" Her hand descended and
wiped away a smudge that he hadn't noticed before. Now he could see the lower
right-hand corner of the sky much more clearly. There was a crow flying there.
"Thank you."

"I also heard that the King of Würtemburg's going to marry one of
Prince George's sisters. Poor woman, she'll be crushed."

"Literally, or just disappointed?"

Therese laughed. "Both, I expect."

Here was the entrance point. He said cautiously, "What do you think
about getting married?"

"To the King of Würtemburg? Or just in general?"

"In general."

He turned his head to one side to look at her. She paused, looking down
at her netting, then shrugged. "I'll get married when the time comes. It's
not that important to me. Some girls get excited about it but it's just another
thing one's supposed to do, like having babies. It all seems pretty boring to
me. Anyway, who would I marry?"

The words were on his lips—You could marry me—but they
wouldn't come. His stomach contracted into a little knot. Therese, oblivious,
went on netting and he looked up at the sky, taking a deep breath, feeling the
earth warm and solid under him. I didn't want this anyway. I don't want her. I
do want her. I love her. He was so entangled in the lies he had made up for
himself that, now that he wanted to find a way out, he found himself trapped.
He felt ashamed even though he had done nothing to be ashamed of. He thought,
Don't speak another word, or it'll all be over with you. You'll make even more
of a fool out of yourself than you've already done.

The clouds were travelling more swiftly across the sky, throwing their
little picnicking spot into alternating light and shade. He imagined his body
sending roots down into the grass, growing like the trees did, living off the
soil and the wind and rain. Therese said, "You didn't answer my question.
Who would I marry?"

"Napoleon," he said absent-mindedly, and she laughed so
uproariously that it startled him. She certainly did have a beautiful voice,
even a beautiful laugh; he hoped she would sing his songs forever, as long as
they both lived. Beautiful Therese. Lovely Therese. He really did love her. He
did not love her at all. He was very confused. . .

He did not ask her. He couldn't make himself speak. But he did kiss her,
when they had come back to Liechtental; she laughed and kissed him back, on the
cheek. "What a sweetheart you are, Franzl!" she cried.

He felt a little better then.

* * *

A few weeks after Waterloo, when the city was still celebrating, he set
about writing a long letter to his friend Holzapfel, from the Seminary, who seemed
to be the only person who might be able to help him in this business with
Therese. Holzapfel had always been sensible. Spaun would be disapproving,
Mayrhofer wouldn't understand at all, Senn didn't concern himself with petty
things like love, and of course he couldn't talk to his brothers or, God
forbid, his father.

It was a pleasant summer's day. The children were quiet, for
once—they were taking a spelling test—and outside, through the
half-opened windows, he could hear that odd rumble or roar of sounds peculiar
to summer: an amalgam of voices, carriage wheels, footsteps, opening and
shutting doors, and other street sounds. When he was little he thought it was a
giant, rumbling by in the distance.

He wrote, paused, chewed on the end of his pen, and then wrote some
more. It was hard to say what he meant. Words were not his native language. He
beat about the bush for awhile and then at last got to the point:

"I love her [did he?] and I would like to marry her. I have not yet
gotten up the courage to ask, though I have come close. I think that she would
answer me in the affirmative. But my problem is this: I have not the means to
support a wife, even now, as a teacher—and were I to follow the path of
my heart and give myself entirely to music, I should be in an even more
uncertain position than before. But if I do not ask her hand now, heaven knows
what may happen in the future. She might choose another, or another might be
chosen for her. Her mother, I think, is anxious for a good match for her, and she
is no beauty—eligible men are not likely to come calling for her! But you
see what a fix I'm in. You were always a good fellow at the Seminary. Rack your
brains a little and see if you can find a way for me."

Well, not very eloquent, but it might do. The children were finishing up
their test. One of the boys, who was very quick, had finished before anyone
else and was busily defacing the top of his desk with his penknife. On any
other day, Franz might have boxed his ears, but today he felt merciful. He took
the knife away instead and, returning to his desk, folded up the letter and
sealed it. He did not know Holzapfel's address but he would find that out. He
would mail it tomorrow, after breakfast.

He got the reply the following week. He read it in the classroom, while
the children vied with each other to catch a fly that had gotten in through the
open window (they were supposed to be learning grammar, but he let that go).
Holzapfel, that forthright soul, told him straight out to give it up.
"It's impossible in your current position, don't you see, friend Schubert!
There's other fish in the sea! Wait till you've got a leg to stand on before
you find a wife!"

Of course, he was right. Franz felt a great gloom and sadness. Looking
down at the manuscript he had been working on (a waltz for piano) he had the
sudden urge to tear it into little pieces.

Then he thought, in a sudden upsurge of relief, Thank God.

2. Saint Cecelia's Day

On St. Cecelia's Day Franz went to the Liechtental parish church to
light a candle for her, the patron saint of music. It was November and very
cold, the wind whipping through the streets laden with leaves and rubbish, and
inside the church it was almost as cold, so that his breath showed and he kept
his hands in his pockets as long as he could. A lay brother smiled at him as he
threaded his way among the chairs set up for the evening service. He smiled
back, somewhat wanly. He was tired.

A penny for the candle was almost more than he could afford. He lit the
little taper from one of the other candles that flickered in rows under the
picture of the saint and set it down in an empty spot. For warmth he held his
hands out to the group of flames. The fire shone red through his fingers. His
hands were covered with ink-stains and were so dry that his knuckles and joints
were cracked and bleeding, the calluses on his fingertips beginning to peel
off. He had been working all day grading papers and writing songs, sometimes
getting mixed up so that he would start checking a song for spelling errors or
scrawl out staff lines on a student's paper. He was working too hard.

He was trying to think of a prayer for St. Cecelia. He had never been
good at things like that. He could reel off a Hail Mary or an Our Father fast
enough, but finding his own words for things wasn't his gift. He struggled with
a few different turns of phrase, but all of them sounded stupid. Finally, he
just whispered, "Thank you," and crossed himself, and went out again
into the cold-blowing autumn afternoon.

She had brought him a lot, St. Cecelia had, almost too much. In the past
year he had written several hundred songs, an opera, two symphonies, another
mass, and numerous other things he couldn't even remember. It seemed like his
head was never quiet. He would finish one thing and straight away start on the
next, and the notes followed each other so fast he could hardly keep up with
them. It was wonderful and frightening at the same time, this flood of music;
sometimes he even thought he might be going mad. Most of what he wrote—the
songs especially—was not all that good. He was still trying things out,
seeing what he could do. He was learning, as he always was.

He had written an excellent song last month; this weather reminded him
of it. It was called "The Erlking," a setting of Goethe's poem about
the spectral elf king and his pursuit of a father and son rushing through the
forest on horseback. The accompaniment, so fast that Franz could not play it
himself, mimicked with triplets the frantic galloping of the horse's hooves, while
the right hand played flourishes meant to invoke the gusts of autumn wind.
Writing it, Franz thought of blowing leaves and tatters of clouds, and imagined
himself as the poor father with his child rushing headlong toward tragedy. Now,
walking through the empty streets toward home, he looked up at the darkening
sky and saw the Erlking himself in his mind's eye, strange and terrible and
beautiful, his horned head crowned with leaves.

St. Cecelia had brought him all this, or so his father would say, so the
priests would say, this music in his head that mirrored myth and passion, and
he had paid homage to her as he felt he should do. But he didn't really think
this music came from her, or from God. He lit a candle for what St. Cecelia
represented, the source of the river that flowed through his mind and filled it
with sound; he did not believe that she was, literally, that source. That
source was hidden to him. He didn't know where the music came from. All he knew
was that he shaped and patterned it to the best of his ability, which was
growing day by day.

He felt uncertain, still, of his power, though his friends showered
compliments upon him and even his father offered grudging praise. He knew he
could get better and stronger. He had to work harder. The music pushed at him,
wanting to be born, and he tried to keep up with it, but there were so many
other things to do: teaching, going out with his friends, playing the good son
to his family (who had only the vaguest notion of what this music was doing to
his head). None of these things were as important to him as the music, but they
could not be pushed aside. He would work harder. He pledged to St. Cecelia that
he would work harder.

Really, though, he thought as he bowed his head against another powerful
gust of wind, he ought to be offering something to Apollo, the true god of
song, the god who invented song. But there were no temples to Apollo in Vienna,
which was just as well; the Greek gods, he knew, liked animal sacrifices, and
he was a little short on fatted heifers these days.

His house up ahead was an island of lamplight in the growing darkness.
He wondered if he would have time to work tonight before his friends dragged
him away for another night at the coffeehouse, and then banished that thought.
Of course he would have time to work. He would make time. He had promised the
patron saint of music that he would. He generally kept his promises.

* * *

"Hello, are you Herr
Schubert?"

The man standing in the doorway was tall and expensively dressed. His
face was square-jawed and handsome and he had a small moustache. He wore many
rings.

"I'm one of them, yes."

"Franz Schubert? The composer?"

Franz looked at the heap of manuscripts beside him on the desk.
"Yes."

"Ah, I've been looking for you. I'm sorry, am I interrupting
something?"

Theoretically it was a study time for the children, but most of them
were engaged in other pursuits, such as carving their initials in the desktops,
fighting among themselves, or throwing things out the second-story window.
Franz himself was grading yet another set of spelling exams, in between working
on his third Mass, which was in B flat. "No," he said, sounding a
little cross.

His visitor didn't notice. He came into the room and looked around.
"Well! Spaun told me you led a humble life but I didn't think he was being
literal!"

"Excuse me," Franz said, "but I didn't catch your
name."

"Ah, I'm sorry." The man turned around and extended a hand.
"Franz von Schober. I'm a friend of Spaun's. Last week he played me some
of your songs, and I knew I had to meet you, they were so marvelous." His
handshake was strong, his hand free from calluses. His smile was dazzling
white.

"I'm glad you liked them," Franz said. Behind his visitor, a
couple of the boys were really pummeling each other. Franz irritably motioned
Schober to move aside, and shouted, "Heinrich! Peter! You stop that this
instant or I'll box your ears! Do you hear me?"

"But he -" "I'm not -" the boys whined in unison.

"I mean it!" Franz yelled. The boys slunk into opposite corners
of the room, where they glared at each other fiercely.

"So this is what you do for a living," said Schober, who was
standing with his arms crossed, eyeing the scene dubiously.

Franz shrugged. "Better than nothing."

"'Better than nothing'? My God! Your songs, Schubert, your songs
are truly of divine inspiration. You are a man with an extraordinary gift. Why
don't you give up your life to your art? Why are you sitting here shouting at
children? Go, get out! Feed yourself with music!"

Franz looked at him, tapping his pen. "What do you do for a living,
Herr von Schober?"

Schober was silent.

"I thought so. I have a lot of work to do. It was very nice meeting
you. I'm glad you like my songs. Good day."

Schober left, still silent.

Franz graded some more papers and then tried to work on his Mass, but he
was too distracted. The children's study time was almost over and it was nearly
time for the mathematics lesson. He frowned at his manuscript in irritation.
The music was spinning around and around in his head but it wasn't going to
come out—not now, anyway. He sighed.

He hated it when people like that were right.

* * *

If he stayed a teacher, he would be shouting at unruly children for the
rest of his life, trying to squeeze his music in on the side. The most important
thing in his life would take second place to making money. He might rise in the
ranks in his father's school or strike out on his own and get a teaching job
elsewhere, but either way, it would be nothing but a hopeless jumble of sums
and songs, spelling and sonatas. He would get a good wage somewhere, he would
settle down, even marry—though not Therese—and that would be fine,
but the price would be too high.

If he gave his life to music, life would be very uncertain. His work
might not sell. He would be living hand to mouth most of the time. He would
never earn a steady wage, he would probably never be able to settle down, and
if he married, it would only be if he found a rich patron or somehow happened
upon some tune or other which would appeal to the public and make him lots of
money. And yet he would be totally free. He could hardly imagine an entire day
given over to composing, but every day would be like that. He could compose
whenever and wherever he liked. He would be his own man and earn money through
his own talents.

He didn't know. He couldn't decide. He hated having to make the decision
at all. He wished everything wasn't entirely governed by money—where he
lived, what he did, even whether he married—it was ridiculous. And he
couldn't stop thinking about it. He lay awake at night trying to decide. He
didn't talk to anyone in his family about it, of course; he knew what they
would say. His friends all said different things. He didn't know whom to listen
to, and as long as he didn't trust his own heart, he knew he would never make
up his mind.

* * *

". . . The artist has no responsibilities but to himself and God.
His is the highest calling, to lift up the hearts and minds of his fellow men
through his own realization of the works of the Creator and all the gifts of
Nature. Everything else is immaterial. Love is important, certainly, but love
of the body, even love of the spirit, must take second place to the most
exalted type of love, which is love of beauty."

Franz von Schober talked like that all the time, in rehearsed speeches,
in long lines of oratory, like a preacher or a salesman. When he worked himself
up, his eyes would flash, he would perspire, his face would flush, but he
always maintained poise. He never foamed at the mouth and never lost control,
even when everyone else heckled and laughed at him, as they did sometimes.

Franz never laughed. He would sit listening, and smile when Schober
pointed to him as an example, as he often did, but he never said anything to
support or refute Schober's claim that the artist was second only to the Deity.
At any rate, it was easy for Schober to say, since he was not an artist
himself, despite his constant desire to talk about the artist's
responsibilities or lack thereof.

Schober was, in fact, a law student, a friend of Spaun's, and had heard
of Franz through Spaun, who played him a few of Franz's songs one day at
Spaun's house. Schober had been particularly taken with one song,
"Restless Love," one of Franz's Goethe settings and one which Franz
himself thought was quite successful. In his coffeehouse lectures, Schober
would often point to the song as an example of a perfect fusion between the two
most noble arts, poetry and music. Franz hadn't really thought of it that way.
It was mainly an exercise in trying to get music to reflect a single, very
specific emotion—in this case, agitation—through the judicious use
of tone-painting and key changes. The experiment had been successful, not only
because it did indeed reflect the love-sickness of the poem, but because it had
made another person glad, which was always a good thing.

He had guessed correctly at Schober's origins. Plenty of people had the
aristocratic "von" in their name, but only a few really lived the
life, and Schober was one of them. His father had been a Swedish nobleman whose
death had left Schober's mother a wealthy widow and Schober at loose ends,
since, being rich, he had no need to work for a living and thus could do
anything he liked. His current avocation as a law student was a passing one, by
his own admission; he was starting to get bored with it, he said, and mocked
serious Spaun for being so dedicated to his education. Spaun overlooked the
teasing, but Mayrhofer, though hardly in love himself with the idea of becoming
a lawyer or a civil servant, regarded Schober with undisguised contempt.
Aristocrats, he often said, were like flies buzzing around the shit of the
State, and he was particularly apt to say this when Schober was present.

Franz himself didn't know what to make of Schober. He couldn't decide
whether he liked him or not. Until he decided, he simply sat and listened to
the man, which was usually the best policy, as Schober was apt to ignore people
who tried to criticize or to interpolate one of their own comments into one of
his speeches about truth and beauty.

One night in December, a cold clear night with no snow and the sky full
of stars, Franz found himself walking alongside Schober as he left the tavern
after a long night of talking and drinking. This had happened once or twice
before—Franz's route home was the same as Schober's for a few
blocks—but always there was someone else with them. This time they were
alone.

"So, Schubert," Schober said, "what did you make of all
of Bruchmann's nonsense about Napoleon?"

"I wasn't really listening." Franz turned up his collar
against the wind. It had been an unusually warm winter so far, but tonight the
wind had a real bite to it.

"You were listening to your inner music," Schober said.

"No. I just wasn't listening."

Schober grinned. In the darkness, his teeth flashed white. "You
just won't do it, will you? You just won't play along."

"Eh?" They had nearly reached the corner where Franz would
walk on toward the city gates and Schober would turn aside toward his mother's
house. Their pace slowed and then, on the corner, they stopped.

"God's speaking to you, but you pretend it's nothing special. 'Oh,
well, just wrote another twenty brilliant songs yesterday.'" Schober
laughed. "You're a very strange person, Schubert. I can't really fathom you."

"I'm sorry. Shall I stop wearing a neckcloth and sleep with every
woman I see? Shall I go deaf for you? I think I can arrange to go deaf. My baby
sister screams loudly enough."

"Oh, don't bother. You're all right. But speak up more, will you?
You're too quiet." Schober leaned down and briskly kissed Franz
good-night. His lips were cold and he smelled of eau de toilette, and his
moustache was bristly. "Will I see you tomorrow, then? At Spaun's
house?"

"Maybe."

"Good-night."

"'Night."

Franz walked on toward Liechtental. It was really a glorious night.
There was a fine layer of frost over everything and the sky was so velvety
black it seemed you could reach out and feel how soft it was. He recognized a
few of the constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion. There was a crescent moon as
well, lending a faint silver radiance to the scene. Every blade of grass on the
glacis sparkled.

Tomorrow he would work again on the opera he was writing to Mayrhofer's
libretto. It was called "The Friends of Salamanka" and it was quite
good so far. He had started it last month. That was taking up most of his time
these days, and his head seemed to have emptied out for the time being: his
brain was resting. Besides, it was almost Christmas and he had done
enough—he could stop for awhile, it wouldn't hurt him. After New Year's
he would start again.

The kiss Schober had given him still lingered on his cheek. He touched
the place wonderingly with his numbed fingers. He had kissed people goodnight
before, and accepted their kisses in turn, but this felt different. He wasn't
sure why. But he liked the feeling.

Maybe Schober was all right after all.

* * *

"No. . . no, I don't think you're right. You've got it all mixed
up. Artists do have responsibilities. They're not prophets, you know, wandering
in the wilderness. Of course, some people might call Vienna a wilderness. .
."

"But their calling supersedes all earthly considerations! They must
do what's right for them, what's right for their art. When God speaks, who are
we to question?"

"God? Do you think it's really God?"

"Now, Schubert, you can't talk like that." Schober grinned.

They were in a coffeehouse. It was about four o'clock; Franz's class was
over for the day, and Schober rarely went to classes. They had each had about
five cups of strong coffee and Franz, at least, felt as if he had been hooked
up to an electric battery. Having just gotten paid, he had been eating
croissants as well, though Schober stuck to coffee. It was the second day of
the New Year, 1816, and it was snowy.

"Seriously, though," Schober went on, "artists should be
able to do as they please. They're the ones who are exalted, after all. Of
course, to a certain extent, everyone should follow their desires, but artists
more than others."

"You're always talking about artists being exalted. I don't feel
exalted."

"Ah, Schubert, it's all a result of your upbringing. Your family
celebrates the drudgery of teaching school. And so their brilliant phoenix
thinks he's a common barnyard chicken."

Franz smiled. "I do agree with you that artists are special people.
Touched by God, even. I don't know. But not having responsibilities…Schober, if
I shirked my responsibilities toward my fellow men by killing you, would I be
absolved because I wrote 'The Erlking'?"

"Ah, well. I'm still working on that part of my theory."
Schober waved over a waitress, who filled their cups for the sixth time.
"Thinking it over, though, killing me is not a responsibility, that's a
violation of morality, and there's a difference."

"I don't want to get into morality. I can't talk about morality. I
didn't do well in my religion classes."

"Is that why you think your gift doesn't come from God?"

"Do you think it comes from God?"

"Well, it's got to come from somewhere."

"Does it?" Franz shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe it does.
In which case, He doesn't seem to mind that I haven't gone to confession in two
years."

"Maybe the God that gives you your gift is less petty-minded than
the one we know."

"Maybe." Franz looked into the black depths of his coffee,
then up at Schober. He had a nice face. When he wasn't posing and preening, he
had a warm smile, too, and kind eyes. He liked talking to Schober. It was
different from talking to Spaun or Mayrhofer, who were both almost old enough
to be Franz's father. Well, they weren't that old, but they were old, and
always seemed a little condescending, good as they were. Schober, on the other
hand, was only a year older than Franz himself. It was nice to talk to someone
his own age.

They saw each other quite often now, on their own as well as with Spaun
and the law student crowd. Twice now, after a long night of drinking, Schober
had let Franz stay the night at his house in the Inner City. It was Schober's
mother's house, actually, a fairly ordinary, nicely-appointed town house,
except for Schober's room, which had been decorated in a preposterous
faux-Oriental style, with Persian carpets on the floors and red velvet hangings
on the walls. There was no bed, only a lot of satin-covered cushions scattered
around. Sleeping on them gave Franz a terrible crick in his back.

Schober wasn't perfect, of course, and that ridiculous room, with its
delusions of royalty, was proof of it. He may have thought he was perfect, but
he wasn't. But Franz liked him anyway. And each time they talked, Franz liked
him more. He really didn't know when he had liked someone this much. They still
hadn't pledged their friendship yet, but no doubt they would soon, probably on
Franz's birthday, at the end of the month. He was looking forward to it.
Addressing Schober formally seemed so cold and unfriendly now that they were
really friends.

He looked up from his coffee. Schober was still gazing at him, with a
little half-smile on his lips. "If God really is speaking to you," he
said, "He couldn't be the one in the Bible. He must be a very kind sort of
God. A God of beauty, of true beauty. No other deity could have inspired your
songs."

"Maybe," Franz said again. "It doesn't really matter,
though. I don't think any god or muse or anything gives one the right to be. .
. the right to be an adulterer and treat one's wife like a scullery maid."
He was thinking of Lord Byron, whose escapades had been in all the papers
lately. "But on the other hand, I think being an artist does make one, I
don't know, different from other people. Maybe even better. I don't want to
sound arrogant."

"Go ahead, be arrogant," Schober said. "I always thought
you weren't arrogant enough. Doesn't Beethoven claim he's an intimate of God?
That aristocrats should bow to him? Go ahead, go on. Modesty's for girls and
fools."

"All right, then." He thought for a minute, while Schober
drummed his fingers on the table top. "Any artist—any artist that
speaks true, not a hack, someone who's an artist because that's what he does,
that's all he can do—they're a tribe distinct from other men. They can
see -" He couldn't say what he was thinking, though he could hear the
music he would make of it. "They can see what's behind the world. They can
see the world of the spirit, the fundamental world, the invisible world. They
can make it visible to other people. It's God's gift to them, that's the reason
artists are exalted, if they are exalted. The greatest artists not only make
visible what only they can see, they draw people into their vision. That's what
Beethoven does, or Mozart. . ."

Schober was nodding. "That's right, that's right. Of course.
Artists see what others can't see. And that's why they shouldn't have to bear
the responsibilities that the rest of us have to bear. If one's always looking
at the sun, one shouldn't have to worry about tripping over stones."

"But looking at the sun all the time will make you blind."

"Schubert, you've mixed one metaphor too many. What time is
it?"

Franz pulled his father's old gold watch out of his pocket. "Five
o'clock."

"I'd best be off. I'm supposed to be studying, I think. What day is
it?"

"Thursday."

"Hm. I think I was supposed to be studying. . .Well, it doesn't
matter. No, that's all right, it's my treat. Maybe you can buy me a glass of
wine tonight. You are coming with us tonight, aren't you?"

"I've got papers to grade."

"Bah! You work too hard."

After Schober paid, they put on their coats and hats and scarves and
went out into the glittering snowy day, darkening toward evening. They kissed
each other goodbye, Franz standing on tiptoes, which always amused Schober, and
then went their separate ways.

His boots made high creaking sounds in the snow. He had noticed that the
colder it was, the higher the sound one's footsteps made. Today was very cold,
so the resultant sound was like a violin being played sul ponticello, above the
bridge. It was the sort of cold where you could feel all the little things in
your nostrils when you inhaled. He pulled his hat down firmly over his ears and
hurried toward the city gates.

He didn't really want to grade papers, of course, but he had to. And he
had work to do—some little piano pieces wanted to be written, they were
pushing at him very hard—and he wanted to go out. He loved walking with
Schober at night in the moonlight, watching his breath cloud over his handsome
features as Franz trotted along beside him. He liked being drunk when it was
cold, too, when you were warm inside despite all the cold outside. But he had
to grade those papers.

There was plenty of time to be with Schober, he knew that. There was all
the time in the world. It seemed like there was never enough time. He had to
keep reminding himself that it wasn't as if Schober were going to leave town
any minute, or die, or suddenly disappear. Schober would always be there.

* * *

Franz turned nineteen at the end of January and as befitted such an
auspicious occasion, he and all his friends got stinking drunk. Beer, wine, and
some incredibly fiery liquor from Scotland were consumed in massive quantities,
and toward the end of the evening Franz and Schober pledged friendship over
glasses of Tokay, drinking up with ritualistic solemnity and then kissing each
other on both cheeks while everyone else cheered. From now on they were true
friends: they would address each other by the informal "du," and call
each other by their first names. Schober was distressed by this latter
development. "But he's Franz and I'm Franz, it's just too confusing! One
of us will have to be addressed by his last name. But which one?"

"Flip a coin." Mayrhofer didn't drink. He sat slightly apart
from the others at their usual table and gazed on the proceedings with a look
that, if Franz hadn't been so drunk, he might have interpreted as contempt.

"It doesn't matter," he said. Part of him was slightly alarmed
at how slurred his speech was. "It doesn't matter, because you're my
friend, and we can call each other whatever we damn well like."

"Hurrah!" Spaun cried, raising the little flask of Scottish
liquor. Everyone cheered again. "Let's hear it for our prodigal son, our
second Mozart, our one and only Franz Peter Schubert!"

"Hurrah!" everyone shouted, except Mayrhofer.

"Speech!" Streinsberg yelled.

"Composers don't make speeches, idiot," Schober snapped.
"That's why they write music."

"Speech!" Streinsberg yelled again, doggedly.

Franz raised his beer stein for silence. "I will make a
speech," he said, choosing his words very carefully. "I would like to
say. . . that you are all lovely people, and thank you very much for this
lovely party. And Schober, you are my very good friend." He emphasized the
informal address: du bist mein sehr guten Freund. The "du" felt good
in his mouth. "Sorry, that wasn't much of a speech."

"It was a very good speech," Spaun assured him. Franz felt
very happy and warm and stupid. He was lucky to have such good friends.
Especially Schober.

The tavern was closing. Franz and his friends spilled out into the
street, their laughter ringing out into the winter night. It was still very,
very cold, and there was a dusting of snow on the cobblestones, and a
nearly-full moon whose silver light gave the scene an unearthly appearance,
like something out of a fairy tale. "Will you be all right going
home?" Spaun asked Franz, as everyone made their farewells and prepared to
stumble on their separate ways. Franz was the only one of them who didn't live
in the Inner City.

"I think so," Franz said uncertainly. The world was starting
to spin, always a bad sign, he knew, even though he didn't have much experience
in drinking.

"You can stay with me, if you like," Spaun said.

"Or me," Schober said.

"All right," Franz said, not sure whom he had said yes to.
After he had walked a few yards he realized he was with Schober. "Can you
stand up?" Schober looked down at him with his kind smile. "You had a
little too much of that whisky, I think. So did I, come to think of it. .
."

"That stuff was foul." Franz found he could walk if he went
slowly.

"Oh, but it does the trick, it does the trick. Come on, not much
further."

They stumbled along. The wind was cutting. Schober stopped in an alley
to piss, and then Franz stopped later on. He wondered whether his piss froze
when it hit the ground. A little later they stopped again because Schober
thought he was going to throw up, but it was a false alarm. At last, after much
staggering and laughing, they got to Schober's house. It was hard to stay quiet
once they got inside. They managed to get upstairs to Schober's room and shut
the door before collapsing in hysterical laughter. Franz wasn't sure what was
so funny, but something certainly was. Schober's room was cold, but he didn't
care; right now even the pillows seemed comfortable. He lay down where he was,
in his clothes, and either fell asleep or passed out or maybe a little of both.

He dreamed of the stars circling, the planets revolving, all seven of
them dancing and shining against the backdrop of the universe. He was spinning
with them, and part of him knew that it was only his drunkenness that made it
seem as if he too danced with the solar system, but part of him rejoiced in the
spinning and the patterns the planets made as they revolved around the sun.

When he woke, he was lying on his back. There was a pillow under his
shoulders, another under his knees, and a third wedged under his right hip. His
head was so far back that he could see the window behind him and the moon
shining through into his eyes. His glasses had fallen off one ear. He sat up
with a grunt of effort—every muscle in his body was sore—replaced
his glasses, and struggled out of his coat. He didn't know where his hat had
gone, or his scarf.

The moonlight made everything look black and white. Beside him, Schober
was lying on the floor, head resting on his outstretched arm. His face was
invisible in the shadows, but after a moment, as Franz watched, he stirred, and
sat up as well. He was luminous: he seemed to give off his own light; his hair
was all lit up, and his eyes. He was swaying a little, or maybe Franz was
swaying, it was hard to tell—the room was still spinning, though not as
quickly or vigorously as before.

Schober reached out to him for balance, or maybe it wasn't for balance,
but he reached out, and they held on to each other. Franz could feel Schober's
breath against his ear, and then a whisper: "Franz. . ." They turned
their heads almost in unison and their lips met.

As they kissed, they fumbled at each other's buttons with cold fingers
that soon warmed. It was all by touch. It was too cold to take off all their
clothes and too dark to see even if they could undress. Schober's body felt
very good, very strange: not like a woman's body, but not like his own. They
kissed again and again, not the friendly kisses they always exchanged but the
real thing, open-mouthed and enthusiastic. Schober's mouth tasted of Tokay,
rich and sweet.

The strangeness of it all never left him, even afterward, as they lay
together in the moonlight and Schober slept unmoving with one leg thrown
heavily across Franz's hip. What have I done? he thought. He didn't know what
the answer was. He watched his friend's still face, silver and white, and after
awhile he left words behind and dove down through circling currents of music,
then into sleep and confused dreams.

* * *

His music changed according to the seasons and according to what was
happening around him; it did not change to the outward ear, but in his inner
ear it took on different qualities; a song written in the twilight of autumn
felt different in the clear frosty light of February. So, now, as his life
shifted, and he composed by the glare of sunlight off snow, his songs and
operas and sonatas grew richer, they gained depth and strength, at least in his
own mind. He didn't know if anyone else could hear these changes. They were not
in the notes themselves but in the collective impression those notes invoked.

So all through the winter they were lovers, and all through the spring
which was cold as the farthest reaches of Hell. In the middle of May Franz
would go out to the Danube and see the water filled with chunks of dirty-white
ice, and his breath would show and his face would sting with the bitter wind.
Nobody knew why it was so cold. It was cold all over Europe. There was a theory
circulating that the cannon explosions at Waterloo had disturbed the
continental climate somehow. Other theories suggested divine punishment for
some unknown sin, or possibly malign intent on the part of the Devil or his
servants. Franz's friends talked about it at their nightly coffeehouse
meetings; they laughed at the supernatural explanations but didn't find the
natural ones any more convincing.

Franz didn't care. St. Cecelia was still pouring her gifts upon him, and
if it were cold or hot it only mattered to him when he wasn't working. In March
he wrote songs; in April he wrote songs and a sonata and his fourth symphony,
in C minor, his best yet, in his opinion. He was especially proud of the slow
movement. In April, also, Spaun took it upon himself to put together a
collection of Franz's Goethe settings to send to the great poet in Weimar. The
collection included "The Erlking," "Restless Love," and
"Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel," some of Franz's best
songs—though they were only really good because of the poetry, he
thought. It was kind of Spaun to do this for him, but Franz did not expect to get
any sort of answer from Goethe, or even an acknowledgement of the gift. Goethe
was too far above him.

Another thing he did that spring was apply for a post as a music teacher
in Laibach. He had seen the post advertised and managed to get testimonials
from Salieri and some of his other teachers at the Seminary and sent off to
that distant corner of the Empire with his application. He hardly knew where
Laibach was, and he had the strong suspicion that teaching there would be as
bad as teaching here, but at least it would be a change. It would pay more,
too. He could only wait and hope.

Meanwhile, he labored away in Liechtental, and every once in awhile,
since she did live in the neighborhood, he saw Therese. He could hardly look
her in the eye any more, after all the things he'd done. She was so sweet, she
was like an angel, and he—he had changed. He did not think he had done
anything wrong, but he had changed. He wasn't silly little Franz anymore. He
was a man. And yet at the same time he yearned after her sweetness, and he
thought sometimes that he was still half in love with her and thought that he
should try to make things work with her again. When he thought that way, he
remembered the passage from the Bible about a fool returning to his folly. And
what did he need with a woman, anyway? He had Schober.

During that cold May he moved in for a week with Spaun at the house of
Spaun's professor, Herr Watteroth, where Spaun lived along with his friend
Josef Witteczek, who was courting Watteroth's daughter. The temporary respite
from teaching was a godsend, but it was hard getting used to living in a house
where silence reigned. Spaun, Witteczek, and the Watteroths were not
unnaturally silent people, but there were no children in the house, no
squalling babies, no squabbling aunts and cousins, no clattering kitchen
implements. Franz had never realized how accustomed he was to being bombarded
with sounds. When he first tried to compose in the house, he almost found
himself paralyzed, his ears searching for that background noise and finding
nothing. Only after a day or two, when he had grown accustomed to the silence,
was he able to compose.

He had forgotten how much he valued silence. He so rarely encountered it
these days. He realized that he needed silence, he fed off it, and it nourished
him. He could work without it, but true music, he knew, is woven out of
silence; the rests are far more important than the notes. Without at least a
little silence he would never become the composer he wanted to be.

That realization at last hardened his resolve. He must quit being a
schoolteacher and leave his parents' house and find his own peace and quiet.
But when? How? What would he do? It didn't matter anymore. He would live with
Schober and think of something. His friends would help him, and among them they
would find a way.

Toward the end of May snow gave way to rain. It rained every day for a
month. He sat in the classroom as the rain pounded on the roof and the children
scribbled, and he wrote a little in the diary he had begun keeping. He was not
much of a writer, but he thought he might try keeping a diary anyway, just to
record some of his more notable thoughts. He wrote some aphorisms he had
thought of, about the vagaries of fate and the hopelessness of finding a good
wife (he was thinking of Therese); he recorded impressions of paintings he had
seen and a concert he had attended. The words came out flabby and lifeless. It
annoyed him. It was so easy to say what he wanted to say in music that he
thought words should be equally simple, but it never seemed to be that way. And
yet, he knew that for most people it was the other way around.

The most important thing he recorded in his diary were the two events
that pushed him toward his final decision about leaving the classroom. One was
a concert held in honor of his old teacher Salieri on the occasion of Salieri's
fiftieth year in Vienna. There was a program of original music composed by
Salieri's students, including Franz himself, and Franz thought he had never
seen anything more touching than the sight of the old man, wrinkled as a walnut
and smiling from ear to ear, sitting amidst his young pupils, having passed his
musical knowledge on to the next generation over half a century of teaching and
composing.

The other notable event came the very next day. He composed for money
for the first time. A friend of Spaun's wanted him to write a cantata for the
name-day of Professor Watteroth, which he did, and received 100 florins. He was
now a professional composer.

What more excuses did he need? He couldn't leave home before the end of
the school year, in autumn, but he was now absolutely determined, and the
sooner he confronted his father the better. He was frightened about it, but
Schober and Spaun drummed courage into him the night before, and once in
Schoolmaster Schubert's study he managed to look his father in the eye and
announce his decision. His father did not get angry, as he expected, but rather
very, very disappointed, and he left his father's study with the feeling he had
committed some terribly grievous act, had done some sort of irreparable harm.

It didn't matter. In September he moved into the Inner City, into his
lover's house, and began his life as a full-time composer. He had made good on
his promise to St. Cecelia: he had devoted his life to her. It was a new and
wonderful thing. He hoped it would last.

3. Therese

Let me tell you this: I would have married her, if I could. No, don't
look at me like that, I mean what I say. I was in love with her. I think. I
mean, it felt like love at the time. I don't know.

The first? Oh, some whore in the Annagasse. I went to school there,
that's where I got my teaching certificate. I must have been about seventeen. I
can't even remember where I got the money from. She was skinny and blonde and
very pale, no color in her cheeks at all. Her name was Amalie. Isn't that a
pretty name? I think so. It was . . . I don't know, it was strange. Was it like
that for you? Well, I suppose it's different for everyone. . . It was strange,
though, I couldn't believe I was actually doing it, and when she spent I
thought I'd hurt her or something and I started apologizing! I know, I know,
typical. So that was the first. And there were others after that. Lots of
others, actually. So don't take too much credit for introducing me to sin,
Liebling. We were well acquainted before you ever came along.

But as for Therese. . .Therese Grob was her name. She wasn't pretty,
exactly, but I'm no treat for the eyes, either- oh, hush. She was a lovely
girl, though, really. Very sweet. Oh no, we didn't—I mean, she would
never—she was a very respectable girl! We kissed a bit. It was nice. She
was a singer. She sang some of my songs—a perfectly wonderful voice, a
very high soprano, very clear and pure. She sang the solo for one of my Masses
also, did a wonderful job of it. No, that wasn't the only reason I liked her.
She was—she was just very straightforward and bright and not at all
stupid or silly like a lot of girls around these days. You could really talk to
her, not just small talk but real conversation. I hardly ever meet girls like
that. And she loved music, she really understood it. I wanted to give her
composition lessons to see if she'd a knack for it. Oh, stop it, for God's
sake, you are so stupid. What do you mean, women can't—that's nonsense.
They're just not given the chance. Look, I've met a lot of very
talented—I don't want to argue about it.

Anyway. It was a hard time back then. You remember, I was still teaching
at my father's school, and it was—oh, this sounds clichéd, but it was like
being in prison. I couldn't do anything I wanted to do. I'd get the most
heavenly ideas for things and then all of a sudden, before I had time to even
write anything down, it was time for class or there was homework to grade or
something stupid like that. I'm not a good teacher, I never will be. I don't
think I'd even make a very good music teacher. If someone doesn't understand
something, then they're just stupid and I don't care if they learn it or
not…Yes, I know they were just children. I suppose I might have done all right
if it had been just one child, or two—my half-sisters, maybe—you've
met them, right? Ah, you'll have to meet them. But a whole roomful, all
fighting and wriggling and throwing things at each other—and they knew I
didn't want to be there. You saw it, you remember. It was pathetic.

And then there was the Congress going on, and then there was Waterloo
and all of that—and it was so exciting—and I was stuck there inside
with a bunch of six-year-olds, it was just ridiculous. So at night, I had to
get away from the house, at least for a little while, or else I'd go mad. So I
went to see Therese.

They liked me there at their house. She lived with her mother, who was a
widow, and one of her brothers. They were always glad to see me. Frau Grob
would make tea for me and ask if I was writing any music, and maybe I'd bring
some songs with me and we'd try them out on the piano. My parents couldn't care
less if I'd written songs or—well, that's not fair. They did care. But
they wanted me to be good, and you know how I am, I'm not good at all. I'm very
wicked. Aren't I?

Sometimes it would be just me and Therese alone in the music room
together, if Frau Grob was off making the tea or something. I would play and
she would sing. She sang "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel" for the
very first time, just a few hours after I wrote it. The accompaniment to that
is a bit difficult and I stumbled over it a few times, and she laughed right in
the middle of it, right at the bit where it's getting very intense, just before
the part about "And ah! His kiss!" So now I can never hear that song
without remembering her laughing. She had a funny little laugh. . . I don't
think it was rude. It was funny. We did it over again, so it would sound right.

Right. So we would be alone together, and she would be sitting next to
me on the piano bench, and I would just think about how nice it would be to
hold her and kiss her, like in the song. And she'd look at me while she sang,
from under her lashes, sort of a sly look, and it was such a nice feeling, you
know, but a bit frustrating too, because her mother was right there, and I was
too shy to do anything, anyway. With a whore, you know, that's what she's there
for, that's what she's expecting, but with someone who's your friend, you don't
even know—they might laugh in your face, or push you away, or—oh,
I'm sure you've never felt this way. Girls like you. But, I mean, look at
me—I'm so ugly—I am, I am, you know it. You know it.

So I suppose I was in love with her, yes. If that's how it feels. We did
talk about it. And sometimes, when we were alone together, when we were out
taking a walk or what have you. . .Well, I did work up my nerve, and I kissed
her and everything. And I talked about marrying her.

Yes, I did. It's not funny, so stop laughing.

She wanted to marry me. Can you believe that? Me, of all people. As soon
as I got a proper job, outside the schoolhouse, we would ask our parents about
it. Oh, God, I was only eighteen…I didn't know what I wanted. I don't know if
she knew what she wanted, either. She said she loved me. But I think she was
mixed up too.

Of course, we couldn't get married right away. But we spent as much time
together as we could, and I was really happy for awhile. . . it was nice just
to be with her. I miss that feeling. I really do. It's hard for me to talk
about, harder than you think. Love is blind, they say, but I think it must be
mute, too. Or nearly so.

I know you must think this is all ridiculous. I mean, here I am with
you, and you know about me, and I'm talking about being in love with this girl,
and—have you ever been in love? Ever? Oh, you must have. Well, use your
imagination.

Well, to make a long story short, I tried applying for a job in Laibach,
a music teacher position—I would have died there, I know that now, but it
seemed like the right thing to do at the time—and I got rejected. I can't
remember when this was. By then I really did want to leave my father's
school—you know this part—and of course Therese couldn't marry a
poor composer, her family wouldn't have it. We just sort of drifted apart after
that. We still saw each other once in awhile, but it wasn't the same. So it
ended before it really began. . . and then I met you.

She just got married last month. To a baker, for God's sake. She'll never
sing again. I hope she's happy, at least. She deserves to be happy.

I still love her. I do. A little bit. My Therese. . .

Well. What's done is done. But I do wonder what might have happened if
things had turned out differently, if I had moved to Laibach, with Therese as
my wife. We'd have children by now—ha! Yes, lots of little children with
little spectacles all writing little string quartets. I wonder if I'd be happy?
I'd miss all of you. Would I still love Therese? I don't know. I don't know.

But here I am, anyway, and here you are, Herr von Schober, and it's
nearly seven o'clock, and I think we need to go get something to drink, don't
you? Come on, my dear friend, my slug-a-bed. They’re waiting for us at the inn.

4. Vogl

The Court Singer, Johann Michael Vogl, was tall. That was the first
thing Franz noticed about him and the last. He was tall: not just above
average, or a little on the tall side. He was nearly seven feet tall and had to
duck his head to get through doorways, and walked with the swinging long-legged
stride of a huge horse. His voice was stentorian, booming from his great barrel
chest, and when he spoke he nearly drowned out everyone else in the room.

Franz had heard that voice from the stage at least ten times, in operas
and singspiele. Whenever it rang out, filling the theater with music, he would
lean forward and marvel at it—its subtlety, its flexibility, its amazing
range that went from the deepest baritone to the highest, most quavering
countertenor. All it lacked was a certain fluidity and smoothness which only
the younger singers possessed. Vogl was nearly fifty and was reaching the end
of his career. But gods remain gods, even when they grow old, and Franz looked
up to Vogl's dizzying height with an awe he usually reserved only for the likes
of Beethoven.

It was one of Schober's little soirées, as he liked to call them,
pronouncing the French word with a bit of a snigger. There were a few people
that Schober knew, a couple of Franz's friends from the Seminary including
Spaun, and also Vogl, a friend of a friend, whom Schober had invited with the
express purpose of introducing him to Franz and Franz's music. Franz had
brought a few manuscripts for the great singer to look at, but now, faced with
the man himself, he couldn't bring himself to present them. He clutched a glass
of wine and stood all the way across the room from Vogl, who was discussing
Catullus with one of Schober's friends, every word of Vogl's side of the
conversation clearly audible even from a distance of several yards. Franz
didn't know anything about Catullus; he had forgotten most of his Latin, except
the words of the Mass, and wasn't Catullus supposed to be dangerously risqué?
He clutched his manuscripts and felt stupid and cowardly.

He said as much to Schober when Schober came to see how he was doing.
Schober patted him on the shoulder. "That's all right. I'll be your
spokesman. Come on, we're going to meet Vogl." He took Franz by the arm
and steered him toward the singer. "Your Lordship! I have a young man to introduce
to you."

Vogl, who was seated, looked up. Franz had never seen him up close
before without stage makeup. He had a handsome, intelligent face, though a
little aged and pockmarked, and looked altogether a little like Goethe, a
resemblance, it was said, Vogl was rather vain about. "Yes, what is
it?" said that wonderful voice. "Who are you?" A scornful glance
at Franz, little Franz, who withered, and wished Schober had never brought him
here.

"Your Lordship," Schober said smoothly, "allow me to
introduce you to Franz Schubert, a composer of the most marvelous songs, whom I
have brought here tonight for the express purpose of meeting you and
enlightening you with the brilliance of his genius."

"It's a great honor to make your acquaintance, sir," Franz said
in a meek voice. He felt like an idiot, and privately made a note to throttle
Schober after the guests had gone home.

"Another musician." Vogl snorted contemptuously. "God, do
they drop from the sky in this idiotic town? And what do you do, young man? What
wonderful feats do you perform? I guarantee you, I've seen them all."

"Sir," Schober said, drawing himself up, "I assure you
that Franz Schubert is one of our city's finest young composers. In fact, I
believe I mentioned him to you only last month. If you would be so kind as to
glance at one of these—"

"Pah!" Vogl waved an enormous hand. "I've heard it all
before. Every composer's brilliant, every composer wants me to look at his
marvelous songs. Old hat. I thought I'd be free of all that at my age."

"See? I knew this would happen," Franz whispered to Schober.
"Let's just give up, all right?" But Schober was undeterred. He went
on talking, cozening, persuading—his one indubitable talent—and
finally, after nearly half an hour, Vogl gave in, and took the manuscripts
Franz offered him. "Accompany me," he ordered, rising and rising from
his seat and going over to Schober's piano. Franz trotted after him obediently,
secretly wishing he could cut his throat or jump out the window, and seated
himself at the keyboard. His hands on the keys steadied him, and the sight of
his handwriting on the pages. He was aware of Vogl looking over his shoulder,
but aware also of Schober behind him, and Spaun, his old mainstay, watching as
well. There was nothing to fear. He began to play.

Vogl did not give full voice to the songs: he hummed, at first, then
sang under his breath, indifferently. Even sotto voce his singing was wonderful
to hear. He sang one song and then Franz thought he would stop, but to Franz's
amazement he did not. He sang another song, and then another, his voice growing
in volume each time, until, by the time they had reached Franz's favorite,
"Ganymed," he was singing almost at full volume, and the sound of the
great Vogl giving voice to Goethe's rapturous hymn made Franz so proud and
happy he almost wept. When the song was over, everyone applauded, as if they
had been giving a real concert. Vogl bowed. Franz looked down at the keyboard
and smiled.

Vogl bent down. "Very good, very nice, young man," he said, his
deep voice so close to Franz's head that he could feel the little hairs inside
his ear vibrating. "But you are too little the actor, too little the
charlatan. You squander your ideas too freely, you do not develop them. You
must learn to be less prodigal. And you must learn to speak up for
yourself!" Franz looked up at him, puzzled and pleased at the same time,
and, true to form, could not think of anything to say.

* * *

The best thing about living at Schober's was the piano. His own piano he
had left at home; he had no choice in the matter, and anyway it was redundant,
as the Schober family piano was of much higher quality. He never composed at
the piano, unlike many composers, because he didn't need to—he could hear
the music perfectly well in his head—and because it broke his train of
thought, but he liked to play for fun and to keep himself in practice. He would
play in the afternoon while Schober was off studying or whatever he did when he
was out of the house, sometimes improvising and sometimes playing other
people's music, until at length he would look up and see Schober standing there
in the doorway, all lit up in the westering sun and smiling.

Now that he was no longer teaching, he composed all day, from six in the
morning to one in the afternoon, not even bothering to get dressed or to eat,
and only stopped when the pangs of his stomach forced him away from his writing
desk. It was wonderful, this freedom, wonderful to be able to think about
nothing but what he loved most, to swim in his own element with no
distractions, no interruptions. He couldn't get used to it at first; he would
break off, pace around the room expecting a bang on the door or a shout from a
student, and sometimes it would take half an hour or more to get back to work.
He had to invent new rhythms of working for himself now that there was no need
to structure his time around grading papers or going to church. Sometimes he
was interrupted, indeed, but only by Schober's mother offering him something to
eat, or by Schober himself, asking if there was anything he could do. Franz
would always say no, and Schober would say "Too bad," and close the
door.

They respected him here. They knew what he needed. He was never
respected at home. This was where he belonged, not in the Schober household
specifically, but in a place like this where he was a composer first and
foremost, not a teacher or a son. He liked it very much.

For his twentieth birthday, in January of 1817, Schober took him to a
whorehouse. It was Schober's typical sense of humor. He kept watching Franz to
see how he would react, clearly convinced that Franz would play the wide-eyed
innocent, but Franz was merely bemused. In the brothel, he allowed a skinny
dark-haired fifteen-year-old to get inside his trousers while Schober watched.
It was all right, though the boy wasn't very good-looking.

He was twenty years old. It was a stupid thing to think, maybe, but he
began to feel a little the weight of mortality; two decades seemed like such a
long time. Was it ten years ago that he was in the Seminary? Was it eight years
ago that the city was bombarded? It didn't seem like that long. He looked at
himself in the mirror a few days after his birthday, and saw very tiny lines
around his mouth, though he barely ever smiled, and noticed that his hair was
just beginning to recede. One small, superstitious part of him announced that
his debauched habits caused this premature aging, but he knew that it wasn't
premature at all; plenty of people lost their hair young—his father had—and
those lines were almost invisible. Nevertheless, he wondered if he shouldn't
stay away from Schober for awhile and not accept any more invitations to
whorehouses.

In March, he had written the song that would entrance the Court Singer,
"Ganymed." It was a lovely poem, an ecstatic hymn to the beauty of
springtime, the speaker first addressing the spring like a lover, then at last
crying out to the "all-loving Father," begging to be swept up into
the heavens like Ganymede in the myth. Franz knew the story of Ganymede, Jupiter's
beautiful boy servant, and read between the lines of the poem to find a meaning
that Goethe certainly had not intended. Naturally, his setting of the poem did
not reflect that meaning, but he tried to put in a little of how he felt toward
Schober, and how he felt toward his art, a higher and purer love, surely closer
to Goethe's true intentions.

With this song he had caught the eye of Johann Michael Vogl. He didn't
know what that said about the Court Singer, nor what that said about the song,
but it didn't really matter. What was important was that he now had the
respect, or the grudging respect, of a notable musical figure. Vogl's powers
were certainly declining—everyone said so, and Franz agreed; after all,
he was nearly fifty—but he was still famous and well-respected, and if he
became Franz's advocate, things might go very well for Franz indeed. And if he
managed to get some of his things published, as Spaun was urging him to do, he
would be well on his way to being a professional composer. Maybe he would even
write a popular tune, and become rich. He doubted it would happen, though. He
didn't have the stomach for getting famous. One needed to be strong, and he
wasn't strong.

In the early morning, as he sat in Axel von Schober's bedroom, wearing his
bathrobe and his socks and chewing on the end of his pen, he would think about
what it would be like to be like Beethoven: famous, respected, even
feared—and powerful, not only in everyday affairs but in his art as well,
moving in the element of music with grace and strength and beauty. He always
felt so awkward and stupid when he compared himself to Beethoven. And Mozart.
He knew he was good at what he did but he was lacking something. Pride, maybe.
The arrogance he was so reluctant to display to Schober. He needed to become
more arrogant. He thought of himself standing up to the Court Singer, snapping
back at him: Why, yes, in fact, I am an excellent composer, now listen to my
songs! He had no ability to command. It was not a charlatan he needed to be,
but a Napoleon.

When he thought like this, he would look down at his manuscript,
whatever he was working on, and smile. He had his own strength. Maybe it wasn't
what he needed to become famous, but it was enough to finish a Mass or a
symphony, or to write seven songs in one day. And as for grace—well,
everyone was clumsy compared to Beethoven. He knew what he could do. He knew he
was worthy of Johann Michael Vogl's respect, and he didn't need to be a
charlatan to prove it. All he needed to do was show Vogl what he could do.
Which he would, very soon. He knew that for certain.

* * *

The summer of 1816 had been one of rain, endless rain. It was as if once
all the unseasonable snow had thawed, it had turned into a downpour that hardly
relented until the first frost of autumn. The summer of 1817 was shaping up to
be a little more pleasant. Spring came on schedule, and he took walks in the
woods as he always did, alone or with Schober or another friend. When it
rained, he sat inside with his manuscripts in the room which was not his but
felt as if it belonged to him and listened to the rain falling. Sometimes he
could hear voices in the rain, or even tunes, though the voices never said
anything he could understand, and the tunes were all incomplete.

He wrote mostly songs that spring, as well as a sonata in A flat. He
found that he was working more slowly, pacing himself. The great outpouring of
music had ceased—or rather, he had learned to hold it back, he had tamed
it; it came and went when he wanted it now. He was relieved and a little sad at
the same time; he missed that constant, pushing presence in his head, the music
trying to get out, but then, it had always rather frightened him. He wanted to
be in control of the music, not the other way around. Now that he had mastered
it, or at least gotten it under control, he could get to work and start writing
things that were really good. He wondered, though, how many other composers, or
artists of any kind, nameless and forgotten, had also experienced this great tide,
this onslaught of the creative impulse, and drowned in it, unable to make
anything of what the gods had given them.

The poems he set in the spring were by Mayrhofer, Schober, and Goethe.
Besides "Ganymed," his favorite was a poem by Schober called "An
die Musik." He played it for his friend on Schober's fine piano on a
scruffy sort of day in March, a few days after he met Vogl for the first time.
Franz was not a very good singer; with the change of his voice, of course, he
had lost his fine soprano and now had a rather weak tenor-baritone. It was
serviceable enough, though it was hard to make himself heard. Schober sat close
by so he could hear properly, and Franz sang for him, aware of his presence but
keeping his eyes on the manuscript. In the Schobers' carpeted drawing room, the
notes of the piano and Franz's awkward voice fell into plushy silence. It was a
short song, but he had put his heart into it. He played and sang and then was
done, and the only sound was that of Schober leaning forward in his chair to
kiss Franz on the cheek, very tenderly, like a mother.

He didn't understand Schober. He thought he did, but he didn't. He
didn't understand anyone, really; he understood notes on paper and the music in
his head, which were far more real to him than the people around him. It had
always been like that for him; music seemed to have weight and substance in his
head. Whereas people tended to blur into each other, even his friends, music
always remained constant. He had gotten used to that, but now that he was with
Schober it became more problematic. He couldn't make Schober blur into the
background. Schober was insistent, he was arrogant, he was demanding and
mercurial, and prideful, and he was, Franz discovered, easily hurt. If he was
not willing to put up with Schober’s lecturing or idle chatter, Schober's eyes
would fill with tears and he would call Franz a "barbarian," cruel,
heartless, and how could he do such a thing? But then, sometimes, he would
merely laugh it off. It was very perplexing. At least music remained
stable—a chord wouldn't change key because it was angry at you.

* * *

"That's a fine one," said Vogl. He was breathing hard, and his
great bell-like voice was a little raspy. "That's an excellent one. Have
you thought of getting it published?"

Franz looked up. His hands ached. "No, sir. I mean, yes—but I
don't think anyone would take it. It's too difficult."

"Oh, it's difficult all right. But it's very good, very good. The
dissonances there—and there—where the boy cries out—it's
perfect. The poem was a fine one to begin with, but you have breathed life into
it, like Pygmalion and Galatea." When Franz looked at him questioningly,
he looked stern, like Franz's father teaching a class. "Don't you know
that story, boy?"

"No, sir, I'm afraid not."

"Well, you must learn it. You must learn all the old tales; every
educated man must know them. Now, what else have you got for me?

It was only a few weeks since he had met the Court Singer, whom he had
not expected to meet again in this lifetime. The whole night after Schober's
party he had lain awake, mortified with embarrassment, going over and over the
scene in his mind and thinking what a fool he was for ever going along with
Schober's stupid scheme. Even if Vogl did like his songs, he had still behaved like
a stupid, stammering child. If only he had been able to talk back to him, if
only he could stand up for himself. But it was too late. The opportunity was
gone.

Then, on one of the rare days that Schober went to class and Franz was
alone in his room, a call came up from one of the Schober family servants.
Franz had a visitor. The tone of the footman's voice was respectful. It was
Spaun, Franz thought, Spaun being the closest to respectability of all of
Franz's friends. But when he went to meet the caller he found himself looking
up and up and up into the stern face of Johann Michael Vogl.

"I have been thinking, boy," said the great deep voice,
"about your gifts. Your songs stayed with me. I found myself singing them
without thinking. They ran through my brain like a stream. I am thinking there
is more to you than meets the eye. You're no little mouse, even if you look
like one, eh? You're no tired tunesmith. You're a real composer, the genuine
article. Hard to come by these days. I thought you might have more things to
show me."

Franz refused to be overawed, though he wanted to cower. Be a Napoleon,
he thought. "I do," he said, "many more."

"How many?" Vogl demanded, staring at the enormous heap of
manuscripts that Franz took out of a box. The Court Singer seemed even more
huge in Axel von Schober's room: he seemed to scrape the ceiling, and his voice
echoed like a bell. "How many? A hundred? Two hundred?"

"These are the songs I've written while I was living here. There's
about a hundred or so. Back home I have about two hundred, maybe two hundred
and fifty."

"Good God. Then there's no time to lose. Show me one."

Franz picked "The Erlking," the song that everyone seemed to
like the best. He had played through the song many times for his friends, but
always with himself or someone equally unskilled singing. Now, with Vogl
singing, though his voice strained on the high notes and wobbled on the low,
the song changed. It unfurled, revealed depths and distances that he had not
realized were there; it took on a new urgency, a new terror and grandeur. The
song became real. Later, when Vogl taught him the story of the sculptor
Pygmalion and his creation, he thought that it applied equally well to what
Vogl did to his songs, turning notes on paper into a living creature. It awed
him and filled him with gratitude, that this great man would consent to work
such magic on one of his songs.

And it was like that the whole time Vogl was there. No matter what song
Franz showed him, even some of his lesser efforts, Vogl found in the song
something new and unexpected, something which might have been in the song all
along but which Franz had somehow overlooked. Only one thing marred Vogl's
performances, apart from his failing voice: he had a tendency to embroider on
the written notes. Perhaps thinking that Franz was too miserly with his musical
expression, he would add grace notes, trills, melismas, and so forth, though
the amount of ornamentation varied from song to song. Franz wondered why, if
Vogl thought Franz was such a musical genius, he did not trust in Franz's
ability to put the right notes in the right place, in the proper amounts. It
only bothered him a little, though. On the whole, he was so awed at the
presence of the Court Singer that he did not think of objecting to the great
man's interpretations until after he was already gone.

He had stayed two hours and left with a sheaf of Franz's manuscripts,
promising to return very soon. Franz saw him out and noticed the parlor maid
and Schober's mother peeking in from the drawing room with great curiosity.
"This is a fine thing for you," Schober's mother said. She was a
tall, gracious blonde woman, with her son's dignified bearing and long,
handsome face. "You'll go far with a man like Vogl looking after you."

"The songs were beautiful," the parlor maid whispered.

"Thank you," Franz said. He felt a little dizzy with
excitement and had to go sit down in his room for awhile to think things
through.

When Schober came home, having apparently spent the entire day in the
coffeehouse down the street rather than in class—at least, judging by the
fact that he had no books with him—Franz told him of the adventure as
they both sat among the pillows in Schober's preposterous bedroom. "How
marvelous!" Schober cried. "See, I told you this would happen! How
could anyone hear your songs and not be moved?"

"Goethe could," said Franz dryly. The old man at Weimar had
never responded to Spaun's gift of songs from the year before, though Franz
hadn't expected anything to come of it.

"Hush!" Schober said. He punched Franz in the shoulder.
"What's the matter with you? Can't you see success looking you in the
face?"

"I've got a long way to go until I find success," Franz said,
"and longer still until I deserve it." But he smiled, he couldn't
help himself.

* * *

He tried to imagine himself successful. He would have lots of money, of
course, but more importantly he would have audiences, ears to listen; he would
perform his songs with Vogl and look up to see a sea of rapt faces, all
entranced by his music. He would be recognized in the streets. The nobility
would praise him and grant him favors and patronage. He would meet
Beethoven—but there his imagination failed him, because he could never
imagine himself worthy of meeting Beethoven, let alone as an equal.

It was all foolish, anyway. That he had the favor of the Court Singer
meant little. If he was going to become successful, he would have to publish,
and he would have to get better. He had to keep working, improving himself,
sharpening his talent. Only then would he have a chance of getting what he
wanted, which was not really success at all, or not what most people considered
success. He wanted to live freely, to let his music feed him, and he wanted
that audience, those listeners. He cared little for patronage or the smiles of
princes. A living wage and a modest following was enough. He was not a person
of many needs. It was one of the things he liked about himself.

It would come. He had faith in himself. It was only his friends who
champed at the bit. He could wait—for after all, had he not been waiting
all his life?

5. Zseliz I

Four words: igen, nem, köszönöm, bocsanat.

Yes, no, thank you, sorry.

He had repeated the words often enough until they had become like a
mantra, a magic talisman: his four Hungarian words. They tasted sharp and
sibilant on his tongue. In the week before he left for Zseliz, amidst his
frenzy of packing and farewells, he spoke the words to himself, aloud or
internally, any time he got too frightened or excited, as if to ward off the
unknown by speaking its language.

The coach trip took two days. It was mid-July and extremely hot, and he
didn't dare take off his coat or his neckcloth because there were ladies in the
coach with him, or more precisely, a lady and her nine-year-old daughter, very
proper and bourgeoise. At first they studiously avoided each other's eyes, in
the time-honored manner of travellers, but as the trip wore on the lady deigned
to speak to him, perhaps realizing that the little man in the shabby frock coat
posed no threat to her sense of propriety. She was a stout Viennese woman whose
husband, she said, was a Hungarian soldier stationed in Budapest, where she was
headed. He gathered that the child beside her was illegitimate, the result of
some liaison during the war, and had probably never met her father. He never
got a chance to ask, but then, such a question would be extremely impertinent.

After a few hours in the hot sun, the lady dropped off to sleep and he
at last dared to take off his coat. Sweat was dripping down his forehead and he
mopped his face with his handkerchief. He noticed the little girl was staring
at him very intently. She hadn't said a word during his conversation with her
mother and was altogether a rather peaked-looking child with great circles
under her eyes, but now she blurted suddenly, "You look like an elf."

He laughed out loud, then lowered his voice so as not to wake her
mother. "Well, that's because I am one."

"Can you do magic?"

"No, but I can play the piano."

"Phooh! You're not an elf if you can't do magic."

"All right, then, maybe I'm not an elf. I know some games,
though."

"Like what?"

He taught her how to play Rock, Scissors, Paper, which she then insisted
on playing for the next hour. Meanwhile, the landscape beyond the windows,
drenched in sun, grew ever more beautiful as the tumult of Vienna died away
into rolling countryside, fields of wheat bordered with poplars and patches of
dark woods. Occasionally a village or a few scattered houses would appear, all
thatched roofs and stone walls, which he would have called "quaint"
if it didn't seem like such a clichéd thing to say. Gemütlich, perhaps.

Last August he had had to leave the Schobers; he was forced to return
home and, much worse, to teach again to pay his way. But then came this
wonderful opportunity, far from Vienna. It was all new to him, everything he
saw. He had never travelled beyond the vicinity of the city where he was born,
and now he was headed a hundred miles into the country, bound for the first
real job he had ever had as a professional musician. True, he was only going to
be a music teacher and live-in composer for a family of aristocrats, but at
least he was getting paid for his talents, and more importantly, he was no
longer a schoolteacher, which was what really mattered.

He recited again to himself his litany: igen, nem, köszönöm, bocsanat,
as the little girl pinched his paper painfully hard with her scissors.

No more chalk dust. No more boxing children's ears when they yelled too
loudly in class. (He hated making them scream, but he got so angry sometimes
that he couldn't help himself.) No more fatherly lectures on the vast
importance of God and Emperor. No more spitballs, children throwing up in
class, flung erasers, scrawled essays to read and grade, enforced nap-times, or
irate parents who had heard tales of Herr Schubert the demon-spawn, their
little darlings' crazed first-grade teacher, and demanded to know exactly what
he was teaching their children. All of that gone, banished with the magic four
words: igen, nem, köszönöm, bocsanat.

He cut short the thousandth game of Rock, Scissors, Paper to point out,
high in the bleached-out sky, the small but distinct shape of a sparrowhawk
hovering against the wind. Its wings were a continuous blur of motion and its
tail swiveled like the rudder of a ship. The little girl, having forgotten
whether rock crushed scissors or the other way around, stared in what seemed
like religious awe. She was like him, a city child—she had probably never
seen a wild animal before, other than rats and starlings. Neither had he, for
that matter. The sparrowhawk was a portent, a sign: he was well and truly free
of Vienna, and he was so happy that he wanted to shout his joy to the whole
countryside.

* * *

His joy had faded considerably by the time he reached Zseliz, thirty hot
and aching hours later, and discovered that he would have to live in the
servants' quarters like any common maid. His room was tiny and cramped and
there was no way he could get a bath until tomorrow morning, since the fires
had gone out, so he was forced to present himself to Count and Countess
Esterhazy still covered with drying sweat, with visible rims of dirt where he
had washed his arms, face, and neck in the washbasin. The Count, a large and
ponderous man with a great rumbling bass voice, took no notice, but the haughty
Countess, fanning herself vigorously as if to drive away his smell, pursed her
lips at his appearance and informed him in high nasal tones that he was
expected to dress for dinner.

Despite this command, he dined that night and every night thereafter
with the servants. He had no idea whether this was because of his initial
grubby appearance or whether they had planned to treat him as a servant all
along. The latter seemed more likely, seeing as how he was not even permitted
to live in the castle; perhaps the presence of a mere poor Viennese musician
would have tainted the nobility of the great Esterhazy family. He was good
enough to teach them music and entertain them with his piano playing, but not
to sleep or eat in the same building as they. Nevertheless, despite the obvious
snub, he was rather glad not to have to make conversation with them. They were
a little too high and mighty for him; even the two young Countesses, to whom he
was giving piano lessons, seemed deeply put out whenever he made any
impositions on them, such as forcing them to practice on their own time.

These were minor unpleasantnesses, however. For the most part, at least
at first, he enjoyed himself very much. The music room was lovely, with a great
shining new piano and a bay window that looked out onto the fields beyond. He
did most of his composing there, when he had time, and also gave his lessons
every afternoon and entertained the Count and Countess and their aristocratic
cronies in the evening. Apart from those duties, his time was his own. He spent
some time composing and the rest of the time exploring the castle and its
environs. The castle itself was actually more of a glorified country house than
any type of fortification, which disappointed him, as he was expecting some
vast gloomy fort crumbling atop a hill somewhere in the wild. It was a nice
place anyway, very tasteful, with a large garden in the back and fields beyond,
bordered by woods. He and the other servants lived in a smaller house built in
the same style as the main castle.

The first few days he spent walking around the estate and through the
fields where the farm workers were bringing in the hay. None of them spoke much
German, so he was able to use his magic four words, and learned a few more:
szervusz (hello), szivasen (you're welcome), tessek (pardon me), and the word
for "goodbye," which was rather long and always seemed to slip his
mind. Since he couldn't say much to them other than that, he never found out
what their status was on the estate, whether they were tenant farmers or
servants of some sort, and never discovered how they regarded their masters,
the Esterhazys, who were in Vienna for much of the year anyway. They seemed
fairly happy: weathered, gnarled people, in rough homespun clothes, many of
them very dark or even swarthy, perhaps from their Hunnish ancestry, usually
singing and laughing among themselves as they worked. Though he couldn't
understand them, he did listen to the songs they sang, in that rolling sibilant
language which bore no resemblance to German or any other European tongue, and
he took note of the peculiar harmonies they employed.

What he liked best, though, far more than talking to the farmers, was to
walk beyond the estate to the nearby woods. He would walk the borders of the
fields, waving to the workers who called out greetings to the Esterhazys' new
pet musician, and pass from that world of sunlight and sweat into a different
place altogether. Among the trees, in the shade, it was cool and smelled of
earth and dead leaves. These woods were darker and thicker than the Vienna Woods
where he liked to walk when he was at home. There was a palpable aura of age
about them, of ancient majesty, and in the evening with the moon shining down
between the leaves, the rustling of the wind among the branches seemed filled
with whispering voices. It was here, he thought, that creatures like the
Erlking lived, and when he was in the woods long enough, especially in the
evening or early morning, he could almost believe in such beings and even
imagined he saw their pale faces smiling at him from the undergrowth.

Here he walked, in silence, pursuing the deer paths that wound between
the trunks and died away into the undergrowth. It was easier to think here than
in the castle or in his room, where there always seemed to be people talking or
geese cackling. There were some forty geese on the estate, which made so much
noise that a busy Vienna street filled with vegetable sellers and ballad
singers seemed positively tranquil by comparison. Even when he grew more
homesick later on in the summer, he was never homesick when he was in the
woods. How anyone could feel any discontent amidst this loveliness was beyond
him.

In these woods he came one day upon a stream which flowed in the
direction of the Danube some forty miles away. Unlike that great filthy river,
this stream was clear, swift and cold, probably originating from run-off in the
mountains. Since it was very hot that day, he washed his face in the water and,
after some hesitation, knelt down and drank. It tasted a little muddy. He got
up, dusting off his trousers, and followed the stream further on into the woods
until he reached a place where a boulder blocked the current and the stream
widened out into a large pool some ten feet across and, perhaps, five feet deep
or so, surrounded by steep grassy banks. He sat there for awhile and listened
to the ever-changing music of the water flowing. He had brought a notebook and
a pencil with him, under the impression that it would be romantic to compose in
the shadows of these ancient trees, but his ears were filled up with the
chatter of the stream and nothing came to him there, that day or any other day
that summer.

It was there, in that stream, that he taught himself to swim a few days
later when it was even hotter in the outside world and there seemed to be no
relief in sight. He had thought swimming would be very difficult, but it wasn't
at all. He wasn't even frightened of the water; he was more worried about being
seen naked by one of the farm workers than he was scared of drowning. The
secret, he discovered, was not to fight the water but to let it take you where
it wanted; like a good tune, it had a mind of its own and there was no point in
arguing with it. The touch of the cool water against his skin was very sensual,
almost erotic. Underneath the surface, a dim shimmery place shot through with
bubbles and the occasional fish, the stream sang a very different song,
overlaid with the sound of his own heartbeat.

Sitting on the bank, combing out his wet hair with his fingers and
humming aloud to himself like an extremely ugly Lorelei, he started for the
first time to feel a little lonely. He thought it would be nice to make love
with someone here on this grassy slope, to lie in a lover's arms until the
sweat dried on their skin in the cool darkness of the trees. Or if not a lover,
he would have at least liked somebody here to share this beauty, his
contentedness, somebody to be with him here in this lonely place where the
stream ran singing to the Danube and the Erlking spied on him from among the
mossy tree trunks. What good was beauty, after all, if there was nobody to
share it with?

And on his way back to the castle in the fading twilight, as a lark hung
on the wind and sang in mindless joy far above him in the last rays of the sun,
he saw that the beauty had dimmed somehow; the knife-edge of his happiness was
gone. From an exalted god, swimming joyous and naked in the cold water of the
stream, he had fallen back into the flesh of a tired mortal. Ahead of him was
the house where he lived and dinner waited for him, the faces of the other
servants uneasy and a little contemptuous of him, the lowly musician, putting
on airs. And he knew that throughout the rest of the summer here, no matter how
keen his pleasure at being away from the city, he would no longer be exulting,
merely enduring.

* * *

The loneliness sank into him more and more as the days went by. He was
not used to being lonely; he had been among other people all his life, and in
the city his main concern was to get away from people so he could think, not to
seek them out. Here, though, everything was different. He was lonely for his
friends, for people to talk to; he was lonely for a lover, somebody to be close
to, and neither problem seemed soluble as long as he was here.

He had found nobody here that attracted him. The young Hungarian men who
worked in the fields alongside their parents, with their sloe-eyes and shining
black hair, were all shy of him and there was no way he could entice them with
"please" or "thank you." He had had a little more success
with the girls, though not much. The day before, one of the farm girls, about
fifteen years old, had kissed him shyly behind the barn and then ran off.
Judging by her giggling, she had done it on a dare—maybe her friends had
asked her to discover if Viennese men were really good kissers. He hoped he
hadn't shamed his city. As she ran off, he called out after her,
"Köszönöm!" She giggled even more and vanished around the corner.

One kiss did not a love affair make, however, and he wasn't much
interested in the girls here anyway, though many of them were pretty and some
of them seemed to like him. One of the maids in particular, a girl named Pepi,
stuck by his side like a burr. He thought perhaps she had a crush on him, or
maybe on the idea of him, a rebellious Viennese bohemian. She was very
attractive, with blond hair and great green eyes like a cat's, and had that
sort of native intelligence one finds in people who are not at all educated but
still clever nevertheless. She liked to sneak into the Count's library on the
pretense of dusting and steal books to read in her room. She had just read
Faust in this clandestine manner and confessed to Franz as they sat in the
music room together one evening that she didn't really understand it, but the
poetry was lovely. He played his song from Faust for her, "Gretchen at the
Spinning-Wheel," which nearly had her in tears by the end. She was so
upset, in fact, that he had to play another Goethe song,
"Heidenröslein," to cheer her up.

He liked Pepi. He hadn't ever thought women had much to say for
themselves, but she did. She had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid to use it, a
trait he had always admired. The only problem with being her friend was that
her beau, the manager of the estate, was convinced that Franz was now his
competitor. More than once he had blocked Franz's path in one of the castle
hallways or en route to his room in the inspectorate—a big blond Viking,
twice Franz's size and practically bursting out of his cheap frock
coat—telling Franz in a loud blustery voice to keep away from "his
girl." Since Franz did want to keep his job, despite his discontent, he
declined to explain exactly why he wasn't interested in having Pepi as a lover,
pretty as she was, and managed to avert the manager's wrath by telling him that
he would certainly make an effort to keep away from Pepi as much as
possible—something he never actually did, of course.

Pepi claimed she wasn't interested in the man, though he could tell,
from the way they looked at each other, with secret smiles and touching of
hands, that they were lovers. He was a little jealous of both of them; they had
something he didn't have: intimacy, a connection.

At night, if he kept a candle burning in his room, Pepi would tiptoe
down the hall and knock timidly on his door. He would let her in, radiant in
her white lace nightgown and her great tide of wheat-colored hair down around
her shoulders, and they would sit and talk until one or two in the morning.
They had very little in common, but they were both lonely and bored, which was
enough for their friendship to grow. Pepi's whole family had been "in
service” as far back as they could remember; a great-aunt worked as a lady's
maid for the main branch of the Esterhazy family, the one that had employed
Haydn. Franz told her about the horrors of being a schoolteacher and she
commiserated, though she said she wanted to have children someday. "It's
probably easier to bear them than to teach them."

"I don't want children," said Franz. "With my luck,
they'd all look like me."

"Oh, shush. Silly man."

Sometimes, after she left, Franz wondered what it might be like to marry
someone like Pepi, a sweet, pretty girl, much prettier than Therese, and
smarter too. He couldn't bear the thought of being attached to one person
forever, though, a woman especially, no matter how pretty she was. There were
too many other sweet things in the world for him to devote all his attention to
just one, and anyway, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't find any love
for women in him, only liking, which wasn't enough to base a marriage on. And,
of course, one couldn't marry boys.

Late at night, when everyone in the castle slept, and even Pepi dreamed
in the arms of someone who loved her, he lay awake in the warm darkness and
felt himself alone in the entire universe. The empty, sleeping countryside
wheeled out around him, overflowing with the chirping of crickets and the
choiring of frogs, the startling cries of the farm cats and the occasional hoot
of an owl, and not one creature wondering if he woke or slept, or lived or
died. Everyone had their lover except him. Half asleep, he would be too drowsy
to castigate himself for this overwhelming self-centeredness but would only
feel his singularity wash over him like the cold water of his stream, drowning
him.

* * *

In September, when he had been in Zseliz for a month and a half, he
wrote to his friends:

"In Zseliz, I am obliged to rely wholly on myself. I have to be
composer, author, audience, and goodness knows what else. Not a soul here has
any feeling for true art, unless it’s the Countess now and again (unless I am
mistaken). . . Have no fear, then, that I shall stay here any longer than
absolutely necessary."

This was the second dissonant note in his countryside idyll: nobody, not
even his employers, seemed interested in what he was being paid for. He wasn't
there because the Esterhazys had any high regard for his talent (such as it
was). He was there because all good aristocrats had a live-in musician; the
Esterhazys' distant cousins had employed Haydn, and they only wanted to follow
in those noble footsteps. Nor was he there because any of them were
particularly fond of music. They weren't, any of them.

Naturally, he should have realized this from the very beginning, when he
was lodged in the servant's quarters. The Esterhazys regarded music as part of
the decor, like embroidered drapery or watercolors of Italian scenes, a
fashion, something to show off to other aristocrats or to ignore as part of the
background scenery. Franz was thus reduced to the status of statuary. When he
played for the gathered family in the evening, trotting out the obligatory
Mozart chestnuts or perhaps a bit of Beethoven if it wasn't too daring, he
would sometimes look up from the keyboard and see the Count asleep in his chair,
the Countess engaged in embroidery, and the two young Countesses deeply
involved in some sotto voce spat while a lap-dog or a kitten struggled to
remain balanced on one girl's knees.

"Oh, they're all stupid," said Pepi one day in early August
when the summer heat had intensified until it was almost unbearable. They were
in Franz's stuffy little room, Pepi with her bonnet off, sitting at the
dressing-table, Franz lying on the bed with his shirt unbuttoned, fanning
himself with an accordion-folded letter from his parents. Pepi went on
heatedly, "They're all stuck-up and stupid, and I ought to know. They
don't deserve all the money they've got. They don't deserve you as their music
slave!"

"Well, maybe." He was reluctant to insult anyone who was
giving him money. "But the Countess seems to have a bit of sense. Last
night I was playing one of Beethoven's sonatas and she actually seemed to be
paying attention. . ."

"Oh, Franz. You're grabbing at straws."

"I know, I know. . ."

It only added to his loneliness that he had nobody to talk to about his
music, or about anything artistic. Pepi was sweet, but she was ignorant. She
knew nothing of the arts apart from what she gleaned from her masters, or from
him. Her understanding was quick, and had she been educated she would have been
a very clever woman, but she had only learned to read and write and embroider
in dame's school, and he didn't know anything about embroidery. The Countess,
the one person in the household who seemed even slightly interested in the arts,
was, of course, too haughty to speak to him; the Count was a boor, as were most
of his hunting cronies, and when an educated guest did visit the castle, Franz
would only be able to speak to him or her briefly, since he was only a servant.

After a couple of months in this atmosphere of stultifying
anti-intellectualism, he felt his brain beginning to atrophy and turn soft and
useless. There was nothing to think about here; there was pleasure, certainly,
in the landscape and the indolence, but nothing to seize the mind, to make it
work. He remembered the conversations he had with his friends back home that
sometimes rose into heated arguments or even attacks, the shifting in positions
and viewpoints back and forth across a table littered with coffee cups or beer
glasses. And there were the political arguments which, out of necessity, they
were forced to conduct in private (for Metternich had spies everywhere), and
even then he was forced to remind his friends to keep their voices down, for
Mayrhofer in particular, an absolutist on the subject of free speech, would
rave like a madman on the subject until he was almost foaming at the mouth.
Then Schober, always the peacemaker, would break up the tension with a joke or
a bawdy double-entendre, and even Mayrhofer, sweating and red in the face,
would laugh.

He was comfortable there among his friends as he never was here, except
when he was alone. The grime and squalor of the city, however, was not
something he missed, and he wished that he could have the best of both worlds,
the beauty of Zseliz and the liveliness of Vienna. Failing that, he would take
Vienna. It was his home, as Zseliz would never be. Here he was lazy and
half-asleep; in Vienna he was fully awake and in possession of his senses, and
he preferred to be awake.

That he was able to compose here, in such an atmosphere of indolence,
was nothing short of a miracle, but compose he did—nothing special, but
nothing really terrible either. He thought, with a small twinge of arrogance,
that it would take a wretched situation indeed to dry up the stream of his
inspiration. What he mainly wrote were piano duets for the Esterhazy girls to
play. He had never been good at writing for a purpose, or writing on demand.
The results of his current attempts were all right as far as such things went,
but it put a damper on his enthusiasm to imagine the duets being hacked to
pieces by the Countesses' clumsy fingers. Neither of them had the makings of a
musician. The piano lessons were obligatory, icing on the cake, as it were;
after all, every rich girl ought to know how to play the piano. As he patiently
tried to get Countess Marie to hold her wrists at the proper angle rather than
letting them rest on the edge of the keyboard, or scolded Countess Caroline for
not practicing her scales, he wondered how on earth Beethoven, with his fiery
temper, had managed to give lessons to spoiled girls like these. It probably
helped that he had been sleeping with the girls in question.

Franz certainly had no desire to sleep with either of the Esterhazy
girls. Marie, who was sixteen, wasn't bad-looking but was full of airs and
whims, and, though she was respectful most of the time, when she was put out
she would make fun of Franz's Viennese accent by repeating his instructions in
a mocking, sing-song voice which made him want to slap her. At least she worked
hard at her lessons and applied herself in all seriousness. Her sister seemed
more interested in pulling the wings off flies and chasing the barnyard dogs.
Caroline was thirteen, but there was something not quite right about
her—she lisped like a five-year-old and didn't seem to understand
everything he said, even when phrased in the most perfect Hochdeutsch he could
manage. Marie said she was "simple."

Every afternoon he gave lessons to these girls, fruitless as it
occasionally seemed. Every evening he performed for the family and a few of
their house guests. Sometimes he had to provide music for a country ball,
although he thought an automaton would have done just as well for that service.
At night and in the morning, he composed. And so the days went around and
around, every one pretty much like the one before. Half entranced by the
endless cycle of drowsy days and the nights filled with the chirping of
crickets, he didn't realize how bored he was getting until a letter arrived
from his friends in Vienna, brought to him while he was attending a farm
auction (it was something to do and got him out of the house). He was so happy
at seeing the name of Schober on the envelope that he ran back to his room with
the letter to read it over and over again in a delight that exceeded the joy he
had felt in first leaving Vienna.

It was the city where he belonged. The certainty of it took hold of him
as he read again the crabbed hieroglyphs of Schober's hasty handwriting. Never
mind the countryside, never mind the pretty Hungarian boys. Schoolteaching or
not, the web of connection and intimacy that was embodied here in this letter
was what drew him back to his birthplace. Here were people who cared about him,
here were people who knew of art and music and would share their knowledge with
him. All his claims of being happy in Zseliz, which he had poured out
enthusiastically to his friends and his brother at the beginning of the summer,
grew false and hollow. He needed to go home, money or no money.

The novelty of being here had worn off. The countryside was beautiful,
to be sure, but it was only countryside, after all. Cooler weather was setting
in and his stream was getting too chilly to swim in. His patience with the
Esterhazys was beginning to fray, and the lessons he gave the Countesses were
starting to remind him uncomfortably of teaching school. When he lost his
temper at Caroline and shouted at her for not practicing, sending her running
from the room in tears, he realized that it was probably time to go home.
Enough was enough. But he was a servant of a noble family and subject to their
whims. He had to stay.

In October, he wrote to his brother, "My longing for Vienna grows
daily."

In November, the Erlking's season, he was at last permitted to go home.

The countryside had faded into shades of red and brown, sadly
diminished. Pepi was busy helping the Countess and her ladies pack up for the
move back to Vienna, so he rarely saw her. The young Countesses were terribly
excited about going back—Marie was going to make her debut this season,
and several well-born men had already expressed interest in her hand in
marriage—and spent their lessons with him staring out the window or
fiddling with the lace on their dresses. Since he had nothing to lose, as he
would soon be out of a job anyway, he shouted at them more often and threatened
to box Caroline's ears. She cried, and he felt ashamed of himself.

His last lesson with the Countesses came on the day before they all
left. Marie was sullen and distant but banged out her exercises dutifully and
played through a few pages of one of his duets. At last, after all this time,
he thought he glimpsed a few glimmerings of talent in her. As she rose to
leave, she performed a little clumsy curtsy and said, "Herr Schubert, I'm
sorry I wasn't a very good student."

He was surprised. "Oh, well. I've had worse. I think you might make
a good pianist if you keep practicing your scales."

"Mama says I don't need to be good. I just need to know how to
play."

"Don't listen to her. If you love the music, you should feed your
love and learn how to play as best you can. That's what's important."

Marie smiled and ducked her head, picking at an imaginary bit of lint on
her dress. "Goodbye, Herr Schubert. Maybe I'll see you next summer."

"Maybe you will." He didn't know whether he meant it or not.
"Goodbye, Countess." Marie curtsied again and ran off.

Caroline was late. She came rushing in after he had been waiting for
fifteen minutes, and without apologizing sat down with a thump on the piano
bench and, staring at the music Marie had left, said, "I can't play
this!"

"That's your sister's music." Franz felt a small stir of
loathing for this idiotic girl, but suppressed it and dug out the easier
exercises that Caroline was supposed to be working on. She got halfway through
a Bach minuet and then impatiently banged her fists on the keyboard. "I
don't want to do this anymore. I don't have to listen to you. You're
stupid."

And so, my dear, are you, Franz thought. "Well, then. Why don't you
run along and tell your mama and papa they've been wasting their money?"

Caroline stared at him blankly. "I don't like you," she
announced after much thought.

"Wonderful. Now, finish the bloody minuet, please." Caroline
pouted and he made as if to box her ears again, which made her cringe and turn
back to the keyboard. Franz felt as if he were training a pet dog. When she
finished, he managed to coax her into playing a little Mozart piece which was
easy enough for her to play well, and when it was time for her to leave, she
was smiling and pleased with herself. As she ran out of the room, Franz felt as
if a great weight had been lifted from him.

Later that afternoon, he walked out through the fields, which now had
been reduced to nothing but brown stubble, for a last farewell to the
countryside. The day was chilly and overcast. A parliament of rooks had
gathered in the trees on the outskirts of the woods, at least a hundred birds;
the branches were black with them. He had heard about these parliaments but had
never seen one, since the rooks that came to the Vienna Woods were usually
scared away by boys with slingshots or amateur hunters. The birds flapped and
fluttered from tree to tree and spoke in a continuous murmur of low, croaking
voices. They were telling stories to each other, or so he had heard.

His stream was bordered with ice but still ran swiftly between banks
that were no longer verdant but yellow with dying grass. He knelt down and
drank from the water, as he had the first day he had come here: a benediction,
of sorts. The pool was further downstream, but he didn't feel like walking that
far. Watching the water roll by, he tried again to remember the Hungarian word
for "goodbye," but it had slipped his mind again. It began with V, or
maybe F. He couldn't remember. He said goodbye to his stream in German instead
and, a little reluctantly, turned to go.

Four hundred florins richer but with little else to show for his five
months' sojourn, he left with as little ceremony as when he arrived. Nobody saw
him off, and only Pepi said goodbye, the night before in his room, with a
chaste kiss on the forehead which dispelled his suspicions that she had had a
crush on him, and which (rather inexplicably) disappointed him a little. She
gave him the last rose from the garden as a going-away present. The idea of it
was nice, but unfortunately the rose was already blown and withered up during
the night, so he had to throw it away.

This time, he was alone in the coach. Apparently nobody wanted to go to
Vienna at this time of year. He watched the Esterhazy castle dwindle in the
coach's rear window and thought of Schober and Spaun and Mayrhofer waiting for
him in Vienna. He wished the coach would go faster.

Around the time the coach crossed the border into Austria and he was
joined by three middle-aged German businessmen who all reeked of garlic, he
finally remembered the Hungarian word for "goodbye": viszontlatasra.
It meant the same as Auf Wiedersehen —"see you later."

God, I hope not, he thought.

6. Mayrhofer

October,
1819

"Where were you last night?"

Mayrhofer stood at the head of the stairs, barely visible in the
early-morning gloom, one hand gripping the railing, the other holding a glass
of water. He was in his dressing-gown, which was moth-eaten red silk, and one
of his more ragged pairs of trousers, and his hair stood straight up as if
electrified. He was breathing hard. His glass shook in his hand.

Franz, on the landing, looked up at his room-mate. "Does it matter?
I'm sorry if you were worried." He started up the stairs—he was
tired, and wanted to go to bed—but Mayrhofer threw down his glass with a
crash that must have woken the landlady and everyone else in the building.
"Tell me where you were!"

Franz paused on the stairs. The glass hadn't broken but rolled down past
him to the landing. He didn't know if Mayrhofer was just having a passing fit
or if he was really angry. It was hard to tell. A soft word turneth away wrath,
he advised himself. He continued up the stairs and met Mayrhofer at the top.
"Don't worry about it. Do you want any coffee? We've got some from
yesterday, I think. Unless you burned it." He moved toward their room, but
Mayrhofer blocked his path. "You were with a girl, weren't you? Some stinking
whore, right? God, you make me sick."

This was not the time to get angry. If they fought in the hallway like
this, the landlady would have them out on their ears. "I really don't
think it matters," he muttered, "and for God's sake keep quiet, will
you?"

Mayrhofer wouldn't move. "Was it a girl? Did you fuck her?"

"Get out of my way."

"Or was it a boy? I know you like a fine peacock, Franzl. Was he
pretty?"

He was smaller than Mayrhofer but stronger; unlike him, he wasn't
starving to death because he was frightened of catching cholera from a dinner
plate. He shoved past Mayrhofer into the bedroom and shut the door behind him,
leaving Mayrhofer stranded in the hallway. Behind the closed door, he heard
Mayrhofer say in a loud, trembling voice, "If you ever do this again, I'll
kill you. You belong to me. You're mine."

It's the other way around, Franz thought, as he turned the key in the
lock. Poor bloody bastard.

* * *

The landlady had a cat that liked to lie at the foot of Franz's bed. It
was also named Franz, for the Emperor (the landlady was very patriotic), and
looked a bit like Franz as well, being small and round and a bit short-sighted;
it never seemed to be fast enough to catch the mice, and sometimes when it
tried to jump up on the furniture, it would fall short. It was gray with green
eyes and it liked to curl up on the piano and purr. Mayrhofer hated it and
threw books at it whenever it had the temerity to come into the room while he
was there. He only rarely threw books at the human Franz, though he often
seemed tempted.

The room itself was dingy and dark, with a couple of sagging book-cases
and an ancient clapped-out piano which was woefully out of key. The walls were
peeling and the ceiling was convex, and every time it rained, Mayrhofer became
convinced the plaster was going to give way and bring the roof down on them.
Even during the day they were forced to use candles, since a neighboring
building blocked out most of the light that came into the room. Their landlady,
Frau Sanssouci, was a tobacconist and owned a shop on the ground floor of the
house which both room-mates patronized frequently. The whole house smelled of
tobacco, not just their room but the hallways and the stairwells and the
closets as well.

It was Mayrhofer's room originally. The books on the shelves, mainly
books of poetry and philosophy, in several different languages, were his.
Franz's own books were ignominiously relegated to a box in the corner which he
had been meaning to unpack ever since he moved in the year before but had never
gotten around to. He dug through it to find the books he needed and put them
back when he was done. Some had become possessed with a bookish wanderlust and
had migrated onto Mayrhofer's shelves to enjoy the company of their brothers.

He had thought, when he first moved in, that this would be a nice quiet
place to work and stretch his imagination, which seemed to be growing again
after his indolent summer in Hungary. Mayrhofer was a poet, and Franz imagined
the two of them working away together in happy silence, with the cat purring on
the piano and the fire crackling in the hearth. In other words, he had no idea
what he had let himself in for.

Mayrhofer raged and fumed in the hallway for another hour, while Franz
lay in bed with the pillow over his head and made a futile effort at falling
asleep. He added "staying out all night" to his rather long mental
list of the things which made Mayrhofer angry. Then he thought of last night,
and smiled in idiotic pleasure. He was glad he hadn't told Mayrhofer where he
had been. It was much nicer when it was a secret. A fine peacock, indeed.

At last Mayrhofer remembered the spare key under the doormat—he
had been so angry that it had slipped his mind, apparently—and let
himself in. Franz heard the rasp of his slippers on the floorboards and an
indrawn breath preparatory to shouting, but then the expected tirade didn't
come. "Sleep, then," he heard Mayrhofer mutter. "You don't care
about me, anyway. Nasty boy with his whores. . ." Franz buried his head
more thoroughly under the pillows, and went to sleep.

When he woke up a few hours later, Mayrhofer was gone. Franz, relieved
at his absence and not caring where he had gone, got out of bed, washed and
shaved and dressed, and then got back into bed with his staff paper and his pen
and a book to write on, since there was no writing desk in the room. It was so
quiet in the room now, with Mayrhofer gone, that he could hear the timbers of
the house creaking as they expanded in the heat of the invisible noonday sun.
Balancing his book on his knees, he set to work.

His current project was a piano quintet that he was composing as a favor
for an amateur cello player he had met over the summer. He was convinced that
it was by far the best chamber piece he had ever written. It was also the most
enjoyable; working out the complex interplay between cello and double-bass and
the call-and-response of the violin and the piano in the first movement were
wonderful challenges. The results were, so far, very gratifying. He hoped his
cello-playing friend would be pleased, though the cello part was rather
difficult. The scraps that he tried out on the piano sounded perfect and once
even managed to bring a smile to Mayrhofer's face.

Right now he was finishing up the fourth movement, a series of
variations on his song "The Trout." It was hard trying to think of
new ways to set forth the tune, since he liked the original so much. One of the
variations was mock-Beethoven, filled with stormy bravado; another featured the
lower instruments playing the theme while the violin wandered off on its own,
as if thinking about something else. The last variation, which he was writing
now, echoed the original song, with its piano arpeggios that were meant to
mimic the leaping of the eponymous trout. The instruments traded off playing
the theme and the accompaniment, and altogether the effect was quite pleasing.
He looked forward to performing it.

He worked all day, with only a short break for lunch. During the latter
half of the afternoon he was accompanied by the feline Franz, who pushed the
door open with his paws and sauntered in as if the room belonged to him. He was
a polite cat, however, in that he didn't walk all over the manuscript with its
wet ink, or perhaps he just didn't want to get ink on his fur.

Around supper time, the human Franz took another break and went to the
little inn across the street, the proprietor of which, a pleasant old Czech
lady, let Franz take his supper back to his room on a covered plate. She had
heard of him, the young composer across the way, and always asked him whether
he was writing more songs like "The Erlking." He always lied, in a
friendly way, and told her yes, yes, many more songs, all of them just like
"The Erlking," or even better, and she would hear them all very soon.

He ascended the stairs carefully, with his cutlet and fried potatoes and
fork and knife balanced precariously on the plate she had given him and found
the door to the room ajar. Mayrhofer was home. He was sitting in a chair facing
the window (which looked out on a brick wall), smoking his pipe. When Franz
came in, he glanced back briefly over his shoulder, then turned back to the
uninspiring view. Naturally, the cat had fled to more friendly climes. Franz
sat down on his bed and rested the plate on his knees. He began to eat.

"I don't know how you can eat that swill," Mayrhofer said.

Franz said nothing.

"That's why you're so fat, you know. Because you eat so much."

Franz paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, then went on eating.

Mayrhofer turned the chair around and glared at Franz. "Goddamn it,
don't you ever get angry?"

"Never yet," said Franz mildly.

"I don't understand it."

"You don't have to."

Mayrhofer made a disgusted sound and picked up a book that had been
lying by the chair. It was one of his own volumes, an English novel, some trash
by an anonymous author. He read in silence for awhile, as Franz went on eating,
then, still behind his book, said, "So, did you keep it up all night? Did
you make her spend?"

"You're a worm, Mayrhofer."

"Ah-hah, at last he shows his true feelings!"

Franz set down his fork and knife. "Really, I didn't know you cared
so much about where I put my prick."

"Your prick, my little darling, is mine, along with the rest of
you."

"That's news to me." Franz noticed the cat peering through the
open door and offered him the leftover bone from his cutlet, but the cat knew
that his nemesis lay within and wouldn't come into the room. "Go on, then,
feed your trash to the little monster," said Mayrhofer. "You're two
of a kind, you're both parasites." His voice began to get louder.
"You stay in my room, you little shit, you scribble away at your stupid
songs, and what thanks do I get? What thanks? You stick your goddamn little
prick into every pretty arse that moves and stay out all night while I worry
sick about you, worry sick, and get back here and look at me with that stupid
Bavarian peasant look on your face just like that, bold as brass—"

"For God's sake, Mayrhofer, shut up about it already!"

"Go to hell!" Mayrhofer bellowed. The book he had been reading
bounced off the wall next to Franz's head and landed on the bed, open to the
title page: FRANKENSTEIN.

Franz was not impressed by the outburst. He sat with his plate on his
lap and stared impassively at Mayrhofer until the other, red in the face,
turned away, muttering, and put his head in his hands. No doubt he was going to
have another migraine, and then he'd be up all night moaning and swigging
laudanum for the pain. Well, it was no matter. They were supposed to meet
Bruchmann and Senn and some of the others at the Green Anchor tonight, unless
Mayrhofer had forgotten about it in his frenzy over his little bird flying the
coop.

He hadn't forgotten, and he did have a migraine. Franz, putting on a
clean shirt, watched him measuring out the drops of laudanum into a sherry
glass, rubies and diamonds in the lamplight. Sometime, Franz thought, someone
would jog his elbow and he'd take too much, and then what would happen? He
didn't like laudanum, himself. It made him fuzzy-minded, which was only a good
thing if you were really ill or couldn't sleep for some reason, neither of
which happened to him very often. And the more often you used it, the more you
had to take. He once heard of someone who drank it from a jug. Mayrhofer wasn't
at that point yet. But with his glass of sleep, and his rumpled black clothes
and gaunt face, he looked like a modern image of Death, lacking only a scythe.
That is, until he knocked back the laudanum and growled, "What are you
looking at? We're going to be late!" and Franz hurriedly buttoned up his
shirt, found a clean neckcloth and a coat without any ashes on it, and they
were off.

* * *

After the gloomy atmosphere of their room, the October twilight seemed
bright by comparison. The crescent moon was just coming up over the spires of
the cathedral, a striking effect; when it balanced atop one of the uppermost
spires, it was as if the Turks had succeeded in conquering the city and St.
Stephen's had been transformed into a mosque. The sunset smeared the horizon
with sullen shades of red and purple. In the semi-darkness, the people in the
street all around them seemed to have no faces, only dark forms with smudges of
white where their features should be. Everyone seemed to be headed in the same
direction, and everyone was dressed in black, as if for a funeral; the women
wore dark pelisses over their bright lawn dresses. It occurred to him that
these people were probably going to a concert or some other such event. It
didn't really concern him, but it looked strange.

Mayrhofer walked ahead of him, nearly invisible in the growing darkness,
stabbing his umbrella into the ground at each stride and probably imagining
that its sharp point was going through his room-mate's heart. Franz trotted
after him, three steps behind, wondering how much of his life he had spent
struggling to keep up with older, taller men: his father, Spaun, Vogl,
Mayrhofer. He was getting rather tired of it.

"Little bird, little bird," came Mayrhofer's weary voice
through the dark. "What are we going to do with you?" He paused, as
Franz caught up with him and then went on walking. "You can't keep this
up, you know. You're going to wear yourself out."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your precious fluids, Franz. You're using them up. You must be
more careful with them. No more whores."

"Oh, bollocks, Mayrhofer."

"Exactly. They're the only ones you have. You see, every time you
spend, you lose a little of your inspiration. Didn't you know that?"

"They used to tell us that in the Seminary. Or something like
it." Franz snorted. "When you touch yourself, the saints cry."

"Don't mock. It's true. Not about the saints, though, that's just
superstition. You see, all your gift, all your music, it's all locked up inside
you. But when you give yourself away, you can't get it back. Women are the
worst for it, of course, like Delilah. That's why I'll never go near one. Once
a cunt gets hold of me, I'll never write again. Boys aren't as bad. If you must
fuck, stick to boys. They've got enough of their own so that they're not hungry
for yours. Don't snigger, little bird. Many a great artist's been unmanned
through being careless with his spunk. It's all quite true. Be careful where
you put your prick."

"Oh, I'll definitely keep that in mind." Franz rolled his
eyes. If spilling seed caused a lapse in inspiration, then he would have been
all used up a long time ago. It was the nonsense from the Seminary all over
again: a boy who masturbated would be weak, drained of life, cowardly and
effeminate, since he wasted the source of his masculinity. It hadn't stopped
him from masturbating, it just filled him with good Catholic guilt. Now, ten
years and goodness knows how many Hail Marys later, the guilt had faded, though
he nevertheless rather regretted all of his youthful onanism, since he
suspected that this early spilling of seed had possibly contributed to his lack
of height, if nothing else. However, he soon discovered that it had no effect
whatsoever on his inspiration.

Surely Mayrhofer didn't believe all of that. Probably it was just
another ploy to get Franz into bed. He tried it every so often, probably more
to see if he could do it than out of any desire on his part. Or maybe he wanted
a bit of Franz's inspiration. On those long winter nights when Franz's pen
danced on the paper and Mayrhofer struggled for hours over a single line, no
doubt he longed then for a bit of Franz's precious fluid, the elixir of life,
or so he seemed to think of it, as if a lifetime of craft and skill could be
distilled and expelled so easily. At any rate, Franz definitely was not
interested. As if he would fuck an old man like Mayrhofer when the streets were
burgeoning with pretty peacocks.

It was still a long way to the Green Anchor. As they walked through the
darkening streets, Mayrhofer tried to convince him some more of the evils of
whoremongering with some absurd examples, but he was gone; he was in the
thickets of the piano quintet's final movement and didn't have any time to
discuss spunk. He had already wrung everything he could out of his
"Trout"—the fish swam its way through every kind of variation
he could manage—and now he wanted to carry on in the same mood. The last
movement would be a country dance, a little like the dances he had heard in
Hungary. He could hear the whole thing entire in his head in one moment of
time, the shape and feel of it, everything about it; what instrument would play
what and when would come a little later. But he knew what he was going to do.
And by the time he had worked out the opening measures (a forthright chord from
piano and strings, then the statement of the theme from the violins), they had
arrived at the bar.

They sat at the back, at a table littered with glasses of punch and beer
and books with dog-eared pages, three members of their group: serious,
passionate Bruchmann, so earnest that a joke from him was as rare as rainfall
in a desert; an old friend, Streinsberg, whom Franz knew from the Seminary; and
their leader, the mighty lion with his mane of black curly hair and his great
brassy voice, Senn the poet, who held power in his words and his face, and who
cried out now, "It is true, I tell you, it is ones like us who will bring
the whole stinking charade tumbling down! The artists, the poets, the
musicians! The strength is ours, in the words we speak, the pictures we paint,
to raise the German people to glory again!"

"When was the last time a poem brought down a tyrant?"
Bruchmann asked.

"Not much poetry going around with the censor still in place,"
said Streinsberg. "We've got to do something about that first."

"Here are our fellow warriors," said Senn. "Hello,
Schubert and Mayrhofer. You've caught us being unlawful again."

"Lawbreakers are ten a penny," said Mayrhofer. "We're
probably breaking a law just by breathing. Schubert here is shorter than regulations
permit."

"It's true. And my songs have illegal dissonances."

The conversation halted for a moment as the two new arrivals were plied
with beer. Mayrhofer, as usual, refused, but Franz accepted. Maybe if he had
some beer inside him, he'd be able to join in the conversation more. He hated
just sitting by and letting everyone else talk. It made him feel stupid.

"Milton," Senn said, as Mayrhofer lit his pipe and Franz drank
his beer, "now there's a good example. The English poet? A revolutionary,
helped bring down the English king. They beheaded him! The king, I mean, not
Milton."

"Nobody wants any beheadings," said Streinsberg.

"Was it a poem of his that caused the blade to fall?" asked
Bruchmann. "I grant you, art can be powerful, certainly. But literal
power—there's a difference. The hearts and minds of men, certainly, but
it can't replace political power, or force."

"The hearts and minds of men are where revolution begins,"
said Senn. "A man won't lift a gun unless he knows the cause is true. And it's
art that can convince him."

"You're talking about propaganda," said Streinsberg.

"Propaganda isn't art," said Mayrhofer. "And God knows we
need more of the latter, and less of the former."

"Is everything that stirs the heart to action propaganda?" asked
Senn. "What you call 'Wellington's Victory'?"

"Hack work unworthy of the master," said Franz, and went back
to his beer.

"Oho! Listen to him!" Senn guffawed. "He sits there all
quiet and then somebody mentions Beethoven and then we hear a word from him!"

"Look," said Streinsberg, "this stuff about the 'hearts
and minds of men' is all fine and well, but when it comes right down to it, why
should Germans be painting pictures instead of picking up guns? I don't
understand. Does one necessarily lead to the other?"

Senn pondered this. Sunk in thought, he looked more leonine than ever;
he looked as if he should be in repose on some mountain crag with the wilds of
Africa spread out below him. Finally he said, "The power of the artist is
the power of Prometheus. It is us, not the politicians, not the soldiers, who
can see the world as it will be, as it can be; we have the power to make it
new, as Prometheus created mankind and brought the world fire."

"And look what happened to him," said Mayrhofer. Everyone laughed,
except Senn.

"I think Schubert should speak," said Bruchmann. "He's an
artist, after all. Franz, tell us, can art remake the world?"

Franz was well into his second beer now and was beginning to feel a
little light-headed. He said, "I don't know. I don't know what to say.
Senn, you talk about art as if it were a person, like Metternich or Napoleon,
someone with real power, political power—as if it could make people do
things. I don't think that's what art does. I think art changes people. Really
great art—Beethoven, or Handel—it opens you up, it makes you see
the world in a new way, it turns you upside down. That's why so many people
dislike great art, you know. Because they don't want to change. But art can't
remake the world. Only people can do that."

"Bravo, Bertl," said Bruchmann.

"You're thinking too small," said Senn. "You're limiting
yourself. Don't set any limits on your vision! You can change the world too,
you know. You have the power—we all do. Bring the world fire,
Franz!"

"And then the censor will put it out!" cried Streinsberg,
laughing. "Come now, Senn, don't you know it's illegal to be Promethean in
a public place?"

"They banned verbs yesterday," said Mayrhofer. "They
might spur young men to action. And coffee is now restricted to women and old
people, since it makes men too excitable and then they might rise up against
the Emperor."

"The key of C major is banned," said Franz. "It's too
martial-sounding."

Senn snorted. "Stupid jokes about oppressive laws are banned as of
this minute, by Under-Secretary of Immorality Johann Senn. I think you lot need
more beer to settle your stomachs." So they ordered another round. Again,
Mayrhofer drank nothing. Probably his laudanum was wearing off.

The talk turned to poetry for awhile—some discussion of
Grillparzer and whether Byron was a genius or a hopeless poseur—and then
to Franz and Mayrhofer's collaborations, which were beginning to accumulate to
a considerable degree. Franz had already set ten of Mayrhofer's poems this
month. "I don't know how he does it," said Mayrhofer. "He picks
them out of the air, I think."

"No, I work harder than you."

Everyone laughed, and Mayrhofer turned red in the face. Franz went on
drinking his beer with equanimity. He was, at this point, about midway between
sober and drunk, not enough to send him out of his orbit but enough to make him
wobble a bit. In vino veritas, he thought, looking at Mayrhofer's sour
expression. It was going to be a long walk home.

As the room became more hazy, his friends' faces stood out in sharp
relief as he sat silent amidst their laughter. They were very young, except
Mayrhofer. They talked about fire and revolution and yet they had all lived
through the invasion, had seen the city bombed and the walls demolished and
foreigners filling their streets, Napoleon engulfing Vienna like the insatiable
snake that he was. Surely Senn and Streinsberg remembered when a howitzer
grenade hit the Seminary building when they were twelve, during the second
invasion. All the students had been sent home and if they hadn't been, they
would certainly have all been killed. Franz could still hear the sound of the
cannons, audible even where his parents lived, like far-off kettle drums,
muffled thuds each with its own tone. All this talk of "Down with the
police" and "Down with Metternich"—what did it mean but
more guns? It wasn't that he liked things the way they were, but the only
alternative seemed to be Napoleon. Maybe wiser people could think of a better
way. Maybe Senn would, once he got over trying to be Prometheus.

Again the conversation turned back to politics for a little while, this
time talk about an uprising in northern England which had been brutally put
down by the police and the army. It had even been in the papers, phrased in
such a way, of course, as to cause no alarm, but it was clear what had really
happened. The discussion as to what the rioters had done wrong or right was on
the verge of getting heated when a gaunt blond man in a battered hat and coat
came in and sat down at a discreet distance from them. Senn recognized
him—he was a spy. "I see him everywhere," Senn said.
"It'll take more than him to silence me." But the presence of the
Naderer, the spy, put a pall over the talk, and after some idle gossip they
decided it was time to go home. It was one in the morning.

In the clear, crisp October night, voices carrying as if shouting down a
well, Franz staggered a little on the uneven cobblestones and pulled down his
hat over his cold ears before getting his balance back and stumbling off to piss
in a nearby alleyway. His piss steamed in the night chill, a phenomenon that
had never ceased to fascinate him. He buttoned up his trousers, looking over
his shoulder for passing policemen, and went out into the dark street again to
wait for Mayrhofer, who was still inside saying goodbye to Senn. The others had
gone home. Mayrhofer would probably want to go home too, since he was such a
pathetic old man, but Franz would have liked to find himself another boy with
an agile mouth and strong limbs and fuck him until his eyes changed color.

"You sot." Mayrhofer had emerged from the bar along with Senn,
who, sensing a disturbance, bade farewell to both of them and went off to his
den of political sin. This left Mayrhofer standing there with his umbrella
under his arm, his skinny legs sticking out from his overcoat like pipe stems.
"Look at you, drunk as a fish."

"Save it for another night, old man. Are you going home or
what?"

"Yes, I'm going home, shrimp. It's late. And you're coming with
me."

"Oh, am I? Do tell."

"Yes, you are, you whoremonger." Mayrhofer jabbed
threateningly at Franz with the sharp point of his umbrella. "Come on,
little bird. You haven't got any money left to pay the whores. Come on, now.
Fly away home."

"Bah!" Franz started to walk in the direction of their house,
dragging his feet a little, with Mayrhofer following behind. The old man was
right; he didn't have any money and anyway, he couldn't get it up when he was
drunk.

"Pick up your feet, little bird. I want to be home by
sunrise." Another jab in the ribs from Mayrhofer's umbrella. Franz yelped
and fell down, skinning his hands on the cobblestones. Mayrhofer was laughing.
The image of him blurred, separated into two and merged again. "And it's
little sots like you who carry the flame of German liberation, is it?"

"Just because you write the way a constipated man
shits—"

"Be quiet and get up, unless you want another one."

"I think you're the one who should be quiet." Franz got to his
feet. His palms were bleeding a little but the drink numbed them. When he
looked at Mayrhofer an anger grew in him that took its own form, nothing to do
with him, and his own voice, echoing flatly against the buildings and the
cobblestones, seemed to fill the city. "You don't talk to me like that.
You don't know who I am. You don't know anything about me. Shut up!" as
Mayrhofer opened his mouth to speak. "Because it's not you who's got the
power. You're nothing. You're nothing at all, you're a worm in the mud. It's
me. I'm the one: I'm the one who will set everything on fire."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You don't understand, do you?" He was swaying on his feet now
and his mouth seemed to run on without him. "Prometheus. Prometheus, the
maker of worlds. The artist, the one with the power. Don't you see? I'm
Prometheus, it's me Senn was talking about, it's me who'll turn everything
upside down, not you! I've got it and you haven't! You're nothing, do you hear
me? Nothing! You're not fit to lick my boots, old man! And in a hundred years
it'll be Franz Schubert they'll be talking about, not you! So shut your
stinking filthy mouth and leave me alone!"

He was red in the face and trembling, and as his voice got louder and
louder Mayrhofer stepped back from him as if he might explode.

"Now, if you'll excuse me," he went on, "I have to go
home. I have work to do tomorrow. I don't know about you." And he turned
on his heel and marched off, not caring whether Mayrhofer was following him or
not.

* * *

He had a hangover the next morning. He was squinting at the manuscript
page and kept seeing stars. Mayrhofer was still asleep. The laudanum bottle was
by his bed, and it looked tempting, but he couldn't write a double bass part
after taking laudanum. Any other instrument would have been fine, but not
double bass. Why did he put a double bass in the piece to begin with? What a
stupid combination of instruments. The whole thing would sound bottom-heavy. As
a joke, he had given the double bass a solo—four E's, played
fortissimo—which would probably cause the audience (if there was one) to
walk out. People were touchy about things like double basses. Anyway, he had a
headache.

Well, maybe Mayrhofer would be in a good mood today. He changed
according to the moon, the weather, the migration patterns of birds, the amount
of trash on the street, and whether or not the Emperor's bowels were moving
properly. Stupid old man. Mayrhofer, not the Emperor. Although the Emperor was
a stupid old man as well.

It was a gusty sort of morning. The wind came in through all the cracks
in the walls and sent dust bunnies skittering across the floor, and the windows
rattled as if someone (the Erlking, maybe) was trying to get in. Franz chewed
on his pen while his head pounded. He had only a dim memory of the conclusion
of last night's adventure; besides skinning his hands (they still hurt), he
recalled shouting a lot. That embarrassed him. He wasn't the sort of person who
shouted a lot. It was like dropping your trousers in public, to make a
spectacle of yourself like that.

He couldn't work now. He could hear the patterns interlocking, could see
how they would go, but the flow from head to hand was gone; he wasn't up to it.
A little later, maybe. He put down his paper and his pen and immediately the
cat barrelled into his lap, seizing the day, where it settled down as if it
lived there and began to purr. He leaned his head back against the headboard
and tried to imagine that he had gone to bed at seven last night and had slept
long and peacefully.

He was stitching something together with a big needle; the thing
squirmed and struggled under his hands, and he couldn't make it hold still.
"This is for your own good," he said, over the cries of pain. But by
the time he had finished stitching, it was dead. He couldn't think of how to
bring it back to life. He reached into his mouth, and brought out the fire,
which seared his hand, but when he gave it to the poor dead thing it only
burned, with a smell like roast pork.

"Franz."

"Uh?" He jerked upright, and the cat ran away. The light in
the room had changed. Mayrhofer was sitting up in bed staring at him. "You
were making noises."

"I was? I'm sorry if I woke you up."

"You didn't wake me up." Mayrhofer lay down again but still
stared at him, as if he had grown wings during the night. He looked thinner,
somehow, as if something had drained out of him since the night before, and his
eyes were timid and filled with fear. Why had he never seen that before, the
fear?

He watched Mayrhofer watching him as he gathered up his tumbled
manuscript pages, feeling a little separated from himself as he did when he was
woken suddenly, half his mind still in the dream place. Mayrhofer's eyes
continued to follow him as he got out of bed, went to the wash-stand, and
washed his face and his still-aching head. The water stung in the scrapes on
his hands. He looked over his shoulder at Mayrhofer and said, "It was a
boy."

"What?"

"It was a boy with very pretty blue eyes. I found him near the
Opera House. He wore boots that were too big for him. He was about fifteen,
maybe. Fourteen. His voice hadn't broken yet. He must have had a lot of
practice, he was very talented. I gave him more money than he asked for and he
was very grateful and kept calling me 'Lord.' I said I was a schoolteacher's
son but it didn't matter to him—anyone with money and a prick to suck was
a lord to him, he said. . ."

Mayrhofer remained silent. After awhile, he said, "You know where
to put the knife."

Franz shrugged. "You asked." He turned back to the wash-stand
and, pulling his razor out from a heap of dirty handkerchiefs, put soap on his
face and began to shave.

"Sometimes. . ." said the dry voice from behind him, as he
rinsed his razor, "sometimes I hate you so much I could kill you."

"Then kill me."

"What you have isn't fair. It makes me question God that you should
exist. My poems only live when you give them music. You write music for angels
to sing while I'm stuck down here in the mud. You are right, you are
Prometheus, the bringer of fire in the body of a peasant. You're stupid and
ugly and a mindless hedonist. You're an animal. And yet. . . and yet. . ."

"Yes?"

Franz could see Mayrhofer in the mirror, still lying in bed, staring up
at the ceiling. His voice, when he spoke again, was choked. "You're a
little bird," he whispered. "I wish I could keep you."

Franz turned around, half his face still unshaven, his razor held up in
his hand. His room-mate's eyes were now shut. He remembered now what he was
saying last night, about Prometheus. If I were Prometheus, if I were really
him, he thought, I'd make Mayrhofer over again. Someone made a mistake with
him. The wrong parts got stitched together. But of course he couldn't say that.

"I'm sorry," he said.

7. Senn

Report from High Commissioner of Police

March, 1820

Concerning the stubborn and insulting behavior
evinced by Johann Senn, native of Pfunds in the Tyrol, on being arrested as one
of the Freshman Students' Association, on the occasion of the examination and
confiscation of his papers carried out by regulation in his lodgings, during
which he used the expressions, among others, that he "did not care a hang
about the police," and further, that "the Government was too stupid
to be able to penetrate into his secrets." It is also said that his
friends, who were present—Schubert, the school assistant from the Rossau,
and the law-student Streinsberg, as also the students who joined later, the
undergraduate Zechenter from Cilli and the son of the wholesale dealer
Bruchmann, law-student in the fourth year— chimed in against the
authorized official in the same tone, inveighing against him with insulting and
opprobrious language. The High Commissioner of Police reports this officially,
in order that the excessive and reprehensible behavior of the aforesaid may be
suitably punished. The Chief Constable observes that this report will be taken
into consideration during the proceedings against Senn. Moreover, those
individuals who have conducted themselves rudely toward the High Commissioner
of Police during their visit to Senn will be called and severely reprimanded,
and at the same time the Court Secretary as well as the wholesale dealer
Bruchmann will be informed of their sons' conduct.

I said nothing, I did not speak, I can't defend myself, I have no
excuses. Senn is gone, my friend, and I could not help him. I was too
frightened.

All enemies have a human face. When I was eight, during the first
invasion of Vienna, a French soldier found me playing jacks outside our house,
and though he spoke no German he joined me in the game for awhile, until my
mother saw me with the dreaded devil and pulled me inside the house, where I
got the spanking of my life. I couldn't understand; he was just a man in a
uniform, that was all, and I was better at jacks than he was. But when the
police came for my friend, I knew what their uniforms meant, that they were an
enemy worse than the French, for they were our own countrymen, and I could not
see them for what they were, men blinded with Metternich's paranoia, only that
they had the power of life or death over us, over me.

I was working on my cantata then, Lazarus, about faith and the hope for
resurrection. I never finished it. It seemed a lie after Senn was gone, for
Senn was not dead, yet he would never return. I never saw him again. They took
him away from me, my friend.

They came because somebody spoke too much, too freely, somewhere, in a
coffeehouse or on a street corner; it might have been Senn himself, or somebody
else. It might have even been me, though I never recall forgetting myself in a
public place. I hope it wasn't me. They said they only wanted to search Senn's
room—"only," that was the word they used, as if invading a
man's home was a mere trifle, and Senn, that lion with his great roaring voice,
lost his temper. He would have been arrested anyway, no doubt; he had subversive
books and pamphlets in his room, and the police were more paranoid than ever
after the murder of the playwright Kotzebue the year before by a student no
older than Senn. But Senn was angry and his anger compounded his crime. It was
his passion which drew me to him, but it was his passion which brought him down
in the end, as I witnessed.

I find myself in awe at the power of words, the terrifying ability they
have to heal or kill, to raise up and break into pieces. A word brought Senn
down; a word might have saved him. And now he has nothing left but words, in
his prison cell.

When the two policemen came, they were polite at first, but then when
they were met with anger and mockery, they also got angry. The floods of paper,
the toppled heaps of books as they searched desperately for signs of
subversion! Senn was furious. My friends mocked the police and their words grew
louder and increasingly cutting as the officers tossed books and manuscripts
and pamphlets every which way and Senn raged in a voice like thunder. I was so
frightened that I didn't know what to do: if I spoke, my trembling voice would
betray my fear, and if in my terror I said something to incriminate Senn, I
would not be able to live with myself. I could not bear the power given to me
at that moment. I could not even muster up hatred for the police and what they
were doing to my friend, and so even as a radical I fell short. I could lie, of
course, and say that my heart was afire against Metternich and the paranoia he
spread through the city and the laws which prevented a man from speaking his
mind without fear of reprisal, but I've always been a bad liar. Naturally I
could nurture that hatred in the safety of a coffeehouse or Mayrhofer's room,
but when face to face with the enemy? I didn't think any of those things as the
policemen tore Senn's room to pieces. I was thinking of how I could save my own
neck.

I failed him through my selfishness and my fear. What did I have to
lose, after all? A man can compose in a jail cell as well as anywhere else.

Despite my silence, I was arrested along with the others. The officers
were furious, and I was wild with fear, and when they took hold of me I fought
their grip and nearly broke free. Senn cheered and Bruchmann called out,
"Don't let them bully you, Schubert!" One of the officers knocked my
glasses off and punched me in the face, whereupon Senn roared with fury and
there was very nearly a free-for-all then and there, amidst the subversive
pamphlets and spilled manuscripts. The other officer managed to calm everyone
down. By the time we reached the local police station, my eye had swollen
nearly shut.

A black eye is not much of a stigmatum, really, when you think about it.
And that was all the direct harm I suffered. Senn was not so lucky.

He doesn't get letters or visitors in prison. He is a subversive, after
all, and could be plotting escape or revolution, even behind bars. I don't know
if they trust him enough with pen and paper to allow him to write his poetry,
or whether they think even poetry too subversive to be permitted.

He was sentenced to fourteen months, whereupon he will be transported in
a closed carriage to his home town in the Tyrol. He will not be permitted to
return to Vienna, nor are his friends permitted to visit him. Such is the fate
of subversives in our great and glorious nation.

As for myself, when I returned home from the police station that night
and told Mayrhofer the whole absurd, repulsive story, he seemed as upset about
my black eye as he was about Senn; he said I was an "innocent" caught
up in the wrongdoings of Metternich's system. I could have told him how wrong
he was, but even then I had no words to speak, being still half-strangled with
fear and horror.

I am no innocent. I knew exactly what was at stake. And I know that I
could have helped Senn—somehow, I don't know how—if only I had
overcome my fear, and that the others present, Bruchmann and Streinsberg and
Zechenter, also could have helped had they not, like Senn, succumbed to anger.
But it's no good talking about what could have been, not now. Senn is gone, as
good as dead. And I would give everything I have just to hear him speak again,
to tell me not to be afraid, that someday, sooner or later, Metternich must
fall, the oppression must end.

The black eye has faded to yellow. I have stopped working on my cantata;
there seems to be no point in going on, though what I have written is worth
keeping. I still live with Mayrhofer, who is quieter, less passionate, now that
the wages of sin have been revealed to him. He misses Senn also. Our circle
still meets every week, but nobody seems to have anything to say.

The police know who I am now; there is a file with my name on it
somewhere in the offices of Count Sedlnitzsky, the Chief of Police. I am now
officially under suspicion as a radical, a revolutionary. My blackened name
will transfer to my father and my brothers; guilt by association is endemic in
this city. And yet I did nothing, I said nothing. Words retain their power to
destroy even in their absence.

I walk in great fear of the power of words.

8. De Profundis

The boy on the corner in the threadbare gray frock coat was tall, much
taller than Franz, his hair was honey-colored, his eyes nearly colorless in the
light of the street lamp. Shadows lingered in the hollows under his eyes and
below his prominent cheekbones. His name, he said, was Johann. Franz had seen
the strange hollow face from across the street, felt a surge of strange
emotion—a mingling of pity and desire—and, though he was down to
his last few coins, tired and somewhat tipsy, crossed the street to stare up
into the haunted face and see the thin lips smile.

They spoke together for a few minutes. The night air was cold and
Johann, holding his coat tightly around his thin body, shivered and said,
"Let's go back to my room."

In dappled light and darkness they went, through the silent streets;
their footsteps were the only sound in the vast autumnal night. Johann glanced
upward to where clouds hid the stars. "Rain tomorrow," he said.

"How do you know?"

"I can smell it."

Franz, who could smell nothing but city dirt and moldering leaves,
shrugged. They moved on through the streets, occasionally casting glances at
each other when the light permitted. Johann had a dark smudge by his mouth,
possibly left over from a late-night encounter with a pastry or a chocolate.
Franz, with the automatic tidiness of one who has spent too much time with
children, reached up to dab at the smear with his handkerchief. Johann pulled
away, ducking his head. "Here we are," he said abruptly, stopping
outside a nondescript apartment building. They went in, Johann pushing ahead as
they mounted the creaking staircase.

He would not light the lamp. He undressed by the light of a single
candle on the washstand as Franz sat on the bed and watched. He looked to be
about sixteen: he was all arms and legs, jutting collarbones and wiry muscle
and his skin was very fair. His gold-red hair and colorless eyes shone in the
uncertain yellow radiance. He stood there, not at all self-conscious in his
nudity, as Franz worked at the buttons on his own shirt, and when the last
article of clothing dropped to the floor he looked solemnly at Franz, then bent
down and with a deliberate, calm sensuality kissed him on the lips, his tongue
pushing hard against Franz's teeth. Franz closed his eyes and shivered.
"Come on, then," he whispered, and made room for Johann on the bed.
The boards creaked noisily under their combined weight.

He liked Johann's skinny body, so unlike his own; he cherished the play
of candlelight over collarbones, shoulder blades, shins, ribs, a bony hip.
"Oh, I've always been like that," Johann said, lying on his stomach
and looking over his shoulder at Franz. The flickering shadows pooled in the
long, sinuous line of his backbone. "I could eat a cow and I'd still be
like a skeleton. My mother always used to worry that I was sick. . ." He
had a peasant accent and Franz wondered what story he might tell, if he dared
ask him. He dared not.

They made love more than once that night; he was never sure, later, how
long it went on. In the microcosm of the dark room they created their own time.
Only Johann made any sound during those minutes which may have been hours.
Franz bit his lip until it bled and dug his nails into Johann's shoulders; even
as he was drenched in sweat and ready to scream, he made no sound at all. He
didn't like to make a scene as some people did; he was painfully conscious, as
always, of the thin walls in the rooms he visited and what the neighbors might
do if they heard two men crying out together in an agony of pleasure.

Finally, the spell broke. Johann rolled out from under him, complaining
of a crick in his back from the sagging mattress and Franz, exhausted, settled
down beside him. The candle had gone out and the only light left was the faint
glow of a streetlamp outside. Lying there, they talked for awhile in the dark
where they could not see each other's faces. Johann whispered to him in his
alien accent that he was from the Tyrol, like Senn, and had come to Vienna to
escape his father, who beat him. He had wanted to get a job as an apprentice of
some sort, but. . . He let the sentence trail away unfinished.

To fill the silence, Franz told Johann about his music, what he was
working on now. Johann had never met a composer, he didn't know anything about
music, he said. Franz hummed one of his songs to him and he said he liked it.
He said he wished he could sing but he didn't have the voice for it.
"Neither do I," Franz said. Johann laughed then. It was a cold sound.

They lay there quietly after that. He thought he might like to talk to
Johann some more, just to hear the music of his voice again, the strange accent
that made him remember his lost friend. Was the boy still awake? No way to
tell. It sounded like it, judging from his breathing. At any rate, he had no
words for him, there was nothing left to say. They had come together briefly,
now they would move apart. That was the way it always was.

He yawned. The sound made Johann shift position and sigh. Franz stroked
Johann's hair, which was very soft, and turned his face away from the
too-bright windows. A faint patter came from outside. True to the prediction,
it was starting to rain. The sound followed him down into sleep, where he
dreamed of a deluge which consumed a desert. In the dream, he was a hermit who
sang songs to pass the time, and he was sitting out in the desert singing as
the gray water slowly rose around him.

The gray water turned into the gray light of morning. He had no idea of
the time, but it seemed early. It was still raining, and Johann was still
asleep. The room, now revealed to the light of day, was shabby, with peeling
flowered wallpaper and cheap furniture: a chest with a sock hanging out of one
drawer, a washstand and a cracked china jug. The curtains appeared to be old
bed sheets.

He raised himself on one elbow and looked at the supine body beside him
in the bed. It was the first time he had seen Johann by daylight. He was
surprised now at the great size of the boy—he took up the whole length of
the bed, his big bony feet hanging off the end of the mattress. One arm was
flung over his eyes to block out the light and the other rested on his stomach,
where it rose and fell gently with the rhythm of his breathing. The blanket had
slipped down to his waist, exposing his ruddy nipples and a delicate gilding of
hair on his chest and belly. In the soft hollow of his throat, where the skin
was as pale and translucent as white muslin, a pulse beat four-four time.

He wished he could take this beauty and incorporate it, make it part of
himself. Looking at it was not enough. He would have liked to weave it into the
pattern of his music, if that were possible. Through some mysterious alchemy
the notes would sing of light, shading, and color, the softness of skin and the
smell of the rain.

He lay there watching for awhile, until some inner instinct told him it
was time to leave—he had stayed long enough. He disentangled himself from
Johann carefully so as not to wake him and got dressed, shivering a little; the
room was unheated and the floor was freezing cold under his feet. "I'm
going," he whispered in Johann's ear when he was done dressing. Johann
made a small noise, not opening his eyes. One of his hands lay palm-up on the
pillow. Franz put the coins in Johann's palm and curled his inert fingers
around them. "Goodbye," he said. Johann never moved. Franz shut the
door quietly behind him and set out for home.

It was a long walk in the rain back to Schober's house, where he was
staying now. The streets were nearly deserted because of the rain and the early
hour. Except for the occasional street urchin and a passing milk wagon, he
could almost imagine that the deluge of his dream had emptied the city, that he
was the only person left in Vienna. It had been raining for some time and
everything was dripping; the angels and soldiers in the public sculptures
looked as if they were weeping, water running down their stone faces to form
puddles on the pavement below.

He heard a rhythmic clicking alongside him and turned to see an absurdly
small dog trotting along in the middle of the street, its formerly curly hair
plastered to its body. He realized he must bear a strong resemblance to the dog
at this point. He was soaked. He liked it, though, and didn't bother walking
under the eaves of the buildings. The drenching made him feel pure, a natural
baptism. He licked the water from his lips—it had a bitter
taste—and watched as the dog took off after a bedraggled pigeon with a
series of miniature yaps and growls. It turned the corner and was lost to
sight.

The rain increased, falling in a nearly solid sheet. He turned up the
collar of his coat and hurried on. He would be wet through by the time he got
back—he hoped he wouldn't catch cold. Schober must be wondering where he
was. He had slipped away from the cafe last night in silence, the way he liked
to do things, not minding the indignant day-after questionings of his friends.
He would return in silence, too. It was nobody's business where he had been,
not even his host's.

It was a lovely noise, the rain, rippling across the cobblestones as the
wind gusted. He found different rhythms in it depending on which way he turned
his head and whether or not he was walking past dripping eaves. He thought it
might be expressed by a low murmur of strings, mainly cellos, or violas; the
muted, dark sound of violas would be a good match for a day like this. Looking
up at the clouds, he hummed a tune which had come to him at that moment, soft
and insinuating like the sound of the rain. It would sound good played by a
plaintive-sounding instrument, an oboe or a clarinet. He liked the tune. It
made him think of the transparent not-color of Johann's eyes, the same color as
the clouds overhead, bright, hard, cold.

He felt so pure. He felt good. He turned up his wet face and sang his
tune to the clouds, which answered with a slow ceasing of the rain, as if
nature herself were falling silent to listen to his music.

* * *

It began with a rumbling from the cellos and double basses, and then the
other strings came in, a low murmur, soothing like the rain. And at last the
clarinet entered, soaring high above the strings in its plaintive song. The
brasses came in and the whole piece grew and grew until culminating in a
massive chord. Then, softly, gently, a horn led the orchestra into the second
theme, lilting along in three-quarter time. And that theme grew and expanded,
and so it went.

The symphony blossomed on the paper. He relished returning to it every
morning, carefully constructing and polishing each passage until it was
perfect, then moving on to the next passage. Day by day, bit by bit, it grew,
first as pianoforte sketches, then as full-bodied orchestral scores. He threw
himself into the work with a passion he had not known he possessed. Every
waking moment, it seemed, was devoted to the symphony— it dominated his
thoughts almost constantly, and even when he was engaged in other pursuits it
loomed in the distance like some huge, half-finished Gothic castle.

He was nearly frantic about finishing it. He needed to know how it came
out. It was so different from anything else he had done; he had no idea of what
unexpected twists it might take before the final chord. It was not that it was
so different in style or structure— the music was still recognizably his,
there was no drastic change from his previous work—but there was
something indefinably new about it, a new vigor, a new assurance. With no sense
of arrogance he perceived the symphony to be extremely beautiful. He burned
with an almost physical desire to hear it played.

He felt incredibly powerful these days, as if he could do anything at
all: make a universe or tear it down, create a cathedral or a mountain with
nothing more than ink and staff paper. He was a magician, a master-builder. The
new power surged in his veins, cold and pure, filling him almost to the point
of bursting. To stay away from his work for more than a day was more than he
could bear. At these times, he thought he might go mad with the effort of
trying to hold back the battering force within him.

Every evening he would emerge from the resonant depths of his symphony
to go out to the cafe with his host. Schober was always convivial, always with
a joke or a song; he had a huge laugh that made people at neighboring tables
turn and stare. It was somewhat jarring to be with him after a day spent
immersed in music, but it was good, Franz thought, to take a break for awhile.
The hard work was wearing him out. It didn't seem hard when he was actually
engaged in it, but when Schober knocked on his door and pulled him out of the
music's web, he found himself giddy with exhaustion, his shoulders cramped and
his knees weak. The remainder of the day was spent resting from the morning's
labor.

When he went out, everyone made a point of asking what he was working on
now. Any songs? they would ask eagerly. Anything for us? Well, yes, he would
reply. Besides working on his symphony, he had also written several songs, including
one to a poem by Schober (who was very flattered) and a great sprawling piano
piece which he liked nearly as much as his symphony. That one wasn't for his
friends. He liked to be working on several things at once; if he grew tired of
working on one piece, he could start work on another. But his symphony always
had top priority.

When he was almost done with the first movement, in early November, he
discovered something disturbing while undressing for bed: two sores or lesions,
a sickly pink in color, crusted over with red. They looked as if they should be
immensely painful but there was no feeling from them at all; it was as if they
had been part of his flesh all along and he had simply never noticed them
before. There was a crawling sensation in his stomach when he looked at them
and he had to restrain the urge to vomit. He wanted to touch them but didn't
dare. He knew other people who had gotten things like this, but he didn't know
what they had done about it. It wasn't the sort of thing one usually discussed.

In the end, he decided to do nothing and see what happened. After a few
weeks the sores faded and finally vanished, as quickly and painlessly as they
had arrived. The only evidence they had ever been there at all, in fact, was a
couple of faint scars, hardly noticeable unless you knew where to look. Nothing
more remained. He was relieved.

December was ushered in with warm wet snow, ankle-deep, which made
walking difficult. The sky was now perpetually overcast. He was working on the
third movement now, a scherzo; he had just started on the first pianoforte
sketch. The snow, besides serving as an excuse for him to stay indoors, was
also ideal for snowballs, as Schober and the others were quick to discover. His
windowpane was soon splattered with their attempts at drawing his attention
away from his music.

In the second week of December the sun came out for the first time in a
month. He looked up from his manuscript in some surprise, blinking to see the
blue sky and the gold orb set within it like a carefully-wrought ornament. The
light fell across his desk and made the wet ink glisten; it caught in the
crystal ink stand and scattered wildly across the wall. He sat in the midst of
it with his dirty shirt, dusty spectacles and tangled hair now all lit up for
the world to see. He bestowed his bemused smile upon the glittering white
landscape beyond his window, then plunged back into work.

His pen moved steadily across the page, leaving its black footprints.
His head was starting to hurt. He had been suffering from headaches lately,
approaching migraines in intensity; it felt like another one was coming on. And
he'd also been getting backaches, above and beyond mere fatigue. He was sure
something was wrong: the influenza, perhaps. Even when there was no pain, he
didn't feel quite right physically anymore, as if somebody had taken him apart
and put him back together incorrectly. A visit to the doctor produced only an
injunction to take some time off from work, which he couldn't do. He went on
working, took laudanum for the pain when it bothered him, and forgot his body
in the building of the symphony.

Yes, the headache was definitely getting worse. Perhaps he should stop
and lie down. Or work on that Goethe setting. Well, he would just finish this
page first….

There was a silent explosion in his head, pure pain, shattering in his
skull and melting down his back. When he was able to move again he tottered
over to the bed and collapsed.

He stayed in bed all day with his face turned to the wall. He wanted to
get up and go back to work, but every time he moved his head it throbbed
unmercifully. In the evening Schober came in, called him a weakling in a huge
hearty voice, and tidied up the heaps of half-finished manuscripts at the
invalid's request, grumbling loudly the whole time. Then, relenting in his
hardheartedness, he asked, "Can I get you anything? Coffee, maybe?"

"Please. And finish my symphony, while you're up."

"Slug." Schober laughed his immense laugh and left.

The pain ebbed gradually over the next few days and soon he was able to
get up again. The pain was replaced, however, by more disturbing symptoms. His
glands swelled. A peculiar red rash appeared on the palms of his hands and the
soles of his feet. Like the lesions, it did not hurt, nor did it itch. Even
worse, his hair started to fall out, at first only a few hairs at a time, then
in larger clumps, leaving moth-eaten patches through which his scalp gleamed
palely.

He went to the doctor on the third day after the rash appeared. He wore
gloves and kept his hat firmly pulled down over his ears. He felt like a leper,
and indeed his dreams had been inhabited lately with lepers ringing bells,
lepers in white gowns with scabrous faces. Every morning he woke with a shudder
and checked his fingers and toes to see if they had fallen off, but they were
always still there, peppered with their scarlet stigmata.

He was not working on the symphony anymore. Looking at it made his head
throb with remembered pain. Its abandonment left him at loose ends; he was currently
casting around for a new project without much success. He thought about this
problem as he tramped on toward the doctor's office, letting ideas and melodies
circle around in his mind to the march-time of his moving feet.

The doctor told him what was wrong. Even though he knew already, it came
as a shock, almost like a physical blow. He sat naked on the examining table
and rubbed at the rash on his hands, waiting for obscene jokes or leers, but
thank God there were none. Dr. Rinna was a good man. Mercury, he said, would
take care of the problem—he would write out a prescription right away.
But don't take too much of it, he warned. He painted a ghastly picture of
mercury poisoning—teeth falling out, layers of skin coming off—the
cure sounded worse than the disease. But that was only if you took too much,
the doctor said. Just a little bit, that would do it. Drop by drop. Then he
smiled. "You know what they say," he said. "Ten minutes with
Venus and a lifetime with Mercury. . ."

Franz looked at the doctor's friendly face without comprehension. The
doctor's smile vanished and he handed over the prescription quickly. " You
can get dressed now. I'll see you in a month, all right? Sooner if it gets
worse."

He got dressed slowly and, buttoning his coat, stepped out into the
snow-covered street. He stood there for a moment, orienting himself. He felt
dizzy. He thought of a young man's face under the streetlamp, filled with
shadows. Johann. That was a long time ago. October, it was, the beginning of
October. That was when all of this started. . . it must have been. This sort of
sickness, it didn't come out of the air, and he had been too busy to stay out
all night since then. Johann.

He started to walk, not sure of where he was going. He had to get away
from where he was. He walked for a long time.

Vienna at this time of year resembled a great frozen sweet, its marzipan
statues frosted with snow or glazed with ice, icicles like drips of sugar
hanging from gilded eaves. Angels strained skyward with ice-clogged wings,
their trumpets full of snow or dripping slush. A stone equestrian was unable to
brush the white covering from his cocked hat. Over all the city there was a
hollow silence: no matter how loudly people spoke, the winter hush swallowed
their voices. The sun had gone away again and the sky was the color of iron.
The city glittered in its cold mantle. It looked sweet enough, even beautiful,
but at the center of it all was the icy void.

He heard the music of the void as he walked. If he could have written it
down he would have, but the paper would have crackled with frost, the ink
turned hard and shining. He was numb and hardly able to put one foot in front
of the other, but he kept going. He had to keep walking. He didn't know what
might happen otherwise, but he suspected that if he stopped walking, he would
start thinking, and that would too much for him. He kept walking.

* * *

He was so cold. He sat in his room and shivered while he worked. Every
so often one of his half-sisters would put her head in and ask why he hadn't
lit the fire. "I like it like this," he would say shortly and go back
to work.

It was strange living at home, as if he had retreated back into
adolescence. Schober had been terribly hurt when he moved out, but he had to do
it. There was no way he could let Schober watch him get sicker and sicker, with
no cure in sight. It wasn't fair to Schober, the man was his friend and his
host, not a nursemaid or a doctor. So he came back home, closing the circle: he
returned to his beginnings, to the room where he had lived when he was
seventeen and a disgruntled assistant in his father's school. He found some old
manuscripts in the desk drawer from the summer of 1814, almost nine years ago.
The paper was turning yellow, as if not eight but eighty years had passed since
he was last here.

The room was musty with memories. He remembered the air ringing with the
sound of other people's voices. He remembered sitting with his friends here,
writing here, playing the piano here, sleeping and eating and cursing the fate
that made him the son of a schoolmaster. Once, half-seriously, he had written
out on a sheet of staff paper the pros and cons of killing his entire class of
six-year-olds—with a rifle, maybe, or poison. He was unable to come to a
decision because the gallows really did seem like a viable alternative to
teaching school. Finally he burned the paper and watched the ashes fly up the
chimney into oblivion.

That was someone else who did all those things. Not him.

It was the winter recess, so he did not have to teach, which normally
would be the condition for his living at home. His family left him alone for
the most part, and as he worked and worked, day after day, the weeks seemed to
blend into each other, turning into one long cold blur, without even human
contact to distinguish them.

He was not up to anything complex. Most of what he turned out that
winter consisted of dances and songs for his friends to listen to. He missed
his friends, though he would not admit it straight out, and told himself he
wanted to be alone with his sickness. His chief contact with the outside world
consisted of letters, mainly to his publisher, Diabelli, offering up the rights
to his early opuses for what he thought was a ridiculously low price, though
Diabelli disagreed. This resulted in some haggling, a pittance which would not
cover his doctor's bills, and a resolution to change to a different publisher
as soon as possible.

He did venture outside occasionally, but the light, even dim gaslights
at night, made his head throb and he was usually forced to retreat. His hair
continued to fall out at a prodigious rate. He took the mercury regularly but
it produced no effect, except for leaving a metallic taste in his mouth and
turning his teeth gray.

On 30 December Schober came around to ask him to his circle's annual New
Year's party, but he was too sick. The ache in his bones made it almost impossible
for him to walk. 1823 was ushered in with a headache like an exploding bomb.

31 January was his birthday: he was twenty-six. He was in no pain that
day but nevertheless felt too weak to go out. Schober and Schwind stopped by in
the evening and he talked with them for awhile. They seemed so healthy,
bright-eyed and quick-tongued, Schwind, especially: a laughing golden-haired
boy with cheeks flushed pink from the bitter weather. The visitors brought with
them a seemingly endless volley of good wishes and messages from other friends.
After they left, he was so tired out from talking to them that he had to sleep
for several hours.

In February he started work on a piano sonata, lavishing on it the same
care and passion he had given to his symphony. The rash spread to his face and
limbs; his family thought he had the measles and he was again relieved from
having to teach. He didn't go out at all anymore. Instead, he stayed in and
worked all morning, then spent the rest of the day in bed, lying on his back
and staring at the ceiling.

His mind didn't seem to operate in words these days. When he tried to
think in words, it was like the spasmodic flexing of a muscle: nothing rational
or coherent came, only sensations, images, and sometimes music.

Once, when he was well enough to get out of bed, he tried to write down
what he was thinking, trying to translate the images into words. But they all
jumbled together in his head and became confused with each other, so the result
of his effort was limping doggerel verse which made him shudder when he re-read
it.

Mein Gebet (My
Prayer)

Deepest longing,
holy fears

Striving up to
purer spheres,

Would lift this
darkling space above

To the almighty
realm of love.

Give thy son, O
mighty Father,

As reward thy
sorrows rather,

And at last, him
to redeem,

Send thy love's
eternal beam.

See, destroyed in
dust and mire,

Scorched by
agonizing fire,

Lies my life, its
mortal woe

Nearing eternal
overthrow.

Slay it, and slay
me at last,

In the stream of
Lethe cast

And, O great one,
let me then

Stronger and
purer, rise again.

But that's not what I was thinking, he said to himself in some distress.
Or rather, it was, but then again it wasn't. He stared at the horrible verse
and put his head in his hands. It was no good trying again. He would never get
it right. He felt weak and helpless; the words on the paper in front of him
blurred together and finally he put the paper away and locked the drawer.

He wandered in a place between waking and sleeping, a gray land where he
dragged his diseased carcass along behind him like so much carrion; he could
not get rid of it no matter how hard he tried. The air had a metallic stink to
it. There was no sunlight here and there would never be any. The music of this
country, which he heard from far away, beyond the sky, was desolate and cold,
with strange wailing harmonies. If he kept moving, he would be able to hear it
more clearly and write it down. But his body was so heavy. It pulsed with pain
and brought him back to his room, his head throbbing.

There was another place besides the gray country. He never went there,
but he thought about it often. It was outside of his four walls, outside the
city, outside the world. Perhaps it was Heaven, or God. He always saw it in a
haze of golden light. There, everything was essential, there were no masks.
What one only snatched at in this world, one grasped and encompassed in that
other one. He wanted to go there, to that golden place. If he could get out
somehow—push through the barrier of his skin and the four walls and the
sky—he could forget everything, leave the world and his body behind, and
there would be no more struggle.

* * *

In May, a few days after he wrote the poem, he was admitted to the
hospital. His hair was almost all gone now and though the rash had faded, his
glands were grotesquely swollen, he was feverish and dizzy and sores had
appeared around the corners of his mouth. His teeth were entirely black from
the mercury and his head ached so badly that he sometimes felt as if his brain
were being smashed in a vice.

They called it "the salivating ward." They gave the patients
here calomel, a tincture of mercury, which made the patients drool helplessly.
The patients, with their rashes and moth-eaten hair and lesions, mopped at
their mouths with whatever came to hand and would not meet each other's eyes.
Every two days the ward doctor came to bleed him. He looked the other way as
the basin filled with blood from his arm; afterward he would feel even worse,
if that could be possible. Sometimes he fainted. The doctor said it was the
disease.

He was not allowed out of bed. He lay very still on the hard mattress,
on his face or on his side, and spoke very little. He would go for days without
saying anything at all. He overheard the nurses one time referring to him as
Stummerl, the little mute one. But there was nothing to say. Outside of the
hospital he could still speak, though fitfully; sometimes he had to speak, as
in his awful poem, if only to describe the strength of his feelings. In the
hospital, though, which was gray and stank of mercury and vomit, all words ran
dry. Even the desire to use them was gone.

He had asked his friends not to visit him. He didn't want them to see
him like this. They sent him books, which he looked at once in awhile when he
could sit up without feeling dizzy. One book was a volume of poetry by someone
named Müller. All the poems were about springtime and running water and growing
things. He sank into them as if into the ocean. When he went to sleep the night
after he read the poems for the first time, the words echoed in his mind and
ran through his veins. They circled around inside him: they sang to him. The
music was quite lovely. He tried to remember it so he could write it down when
he woke up.

When the nurse shook him awake the next morning, the bottle of calomel
in her hand, the music had gone away. He had forgotten it, every last note. All
he could remember was the vague sound of running water. He gulped down his
sludgy medicine and wondered where it had all gone. Then he wondered if this
would keep on happening every time he thought of anything, if the music would
slip through the fingers of his mind and lose itself before he could capture
and hold it. There were holes in his head now. Everything ran out through them.
He wondered if the music would come back. He hoped so. It was all he had left.

* * *

Leaving the hospital was like being reborn. He blinked up at the summer
sun and, when he reached the corner, put down his valise for a moment to simply
luxuriate in the sensation of being outside again. It was June, a hot dusty
month in the city, but he breathed in the dust with pleasure and turned his
face up to the sun, drinking in the warmth. Even his old clothes felt
unfamiliar and wonderfully strange—the fabric of his coat, the feel of
his shoes—as if he had been supplied with a new skin. He tottered a
little when he walked.

When he arrived home he was welcomed with extravagant kisses from his
stepmother and his brothers and sisters; his father was busy teaching, as it
was early afternoon and school was still in session. His stepmother remarked
that she had been about to make something he liked for dinner, but she didn't
know whether he was well enough to eat. He said untruthfully that he could eat
a horse and while she set about making dinner, he went upstairs to his room.

He threw open all the windows, admitting a tide of sunlight and dust-laden
wind which sent the piled manuscripts on the piano fluttering; it drove out the
musty sickroom smell that had been lingering since February. He stood in front
of the window, the breeze ruffling his clothes and what was left of his hair, a
dry dark stubble that felt rough under his fingers.

He inhaled the dust and the thick Föhn wind as heavy and palpable as a
disease. The city was sick. He had caught the city's sickness. If he left the
city, the sickness would fall from him and he would fly away into the sunlight,
singing. Yes, he would leave—he would go away to the country with Vogl
again this summer, to the mountains, and everything would be better. He could
begin again. Perhaps he could even start on his symphony again, that glorious
structure half-built, which he had nearly forgotten about. The sunlight had
brought the memory of it back to him.

He smiled, thinking of it. His feet hurt—he wasn't accustomed,
yet, to being up and about. A few walks in the woods would cure it. They did
hurt terribly, didn't they? He would go sit down in a minute. He wanted to look
out for awhile longer; he had not yet drunk his fill of the outside world.

The ache from his feet moved upwards into his legs, long sharp pains,
pins and needles. It was not the ache of fatigue.

No. No, he was getting better. The doctor said so. It was all in his
imagination. His imagination did tend to run away with him. He had always been
like that, too imaginative for his own good. If he did something else, the pain
would go away.

He leaned on the windowsill and gazed out with unseeing eyes at the
world beyond his four walls, the ranks of houses, the sky wreathed in wispy
clouds, the faint heat-blurred horizon where mountains staggered past in an
endless circle. The mountains and the houses seemed to turn their backs on him.
Only his body belonged here; he would leave it here when he died. His
soul—or his spirit, or whatever one called it, though it lived in this
world for now, in truth belonged to the gray country of his dreams. He thought
he knew the name of that country now.

He would go there tonight, and every night; the desolate harmony of that
place would find its way into his music. There was no point, really, in going
on with the symphony. His art was tainted now—it would be like building
half a castle in marble and the rest in brick. A lopsided effect. He could go
on writing, perhaps, but he could not bridge the gap between the man he was now
and the man he had been.

The ache in his long bones grew stronger. It did not go away and he knew
he had been lying to himself.

In one of those houses out there—he did not know which one—a
farmer's son pulled out handfuls of gold-red hair, or stared disconsolately at
a scarlet rash. What would Johann do now with a body no longer worth selling?
His livelihood was gone. Perhaps he would go back home, or perhaps he would
wear a wig and hide his rash with makeup and go on with his current profession.

Or perhaps he would become a permanent resident of the gray country, the
country whose name was Despair.

As for myself, Franz thought, looking up at the luminous clouds which
now hid the sun, I will stay here for awhile, I think.

He turned and hobbled to his bed, where he slept dreamlessly for several
hours until he was awakened by the voice of his stepmother calling him down for
dinner.

9. An die Freude

May 7,
1824: An Ode to Joy

The night of the concert was a warm one, unusually so for early May, and
outside the theater the spring stars glinted in a velvety sky devoid of the
usual smoke and clouds that hung over the city. Franz had heard it said, only
half-jokingly, that the elements were celebrating the passing of the infamously
wicked English poet, Lord Byron, less than a month previously.

He walked alone through the darkening streets, trembling a little, a
halt in his step, one hand clenching the ticket that he had bought with some of
the money he earned from publishing his quartet in A minor. As he walked he
hummed over some of the variations from the quartet he had just finished, which
was in D minor, like the symphony he was going to hear tonight. Different
permutations of a theme, the piano accompaniment to his song "Death and
the Maiden," and another permutation: ten years ago he had sold his
schoolbooks to see "Fidelio" and had hurried along these same streets
to the Kärtenthor Theater with his heart full of happiness. He was all empty
now; the happiness was gone and everything else, except for his music and his
worship of the one who walked before him, his master Beethoven.

It was a year since he had been in the hospital and he was pulling
himself back together, knitting his mind into a new whole. It was hard. It was
hard to work, and live in joy and music, and leave the manuscript page to look
at himself in the mirror: his poor patchy hair, the ghost of the rash on his
cheeks and forehead, his face thinner and older and a wary, flinching look in
his eyes. Yet through it all, every day, he surprised himself with what he
could do. His new quartets were like dreams, self-contained worlds, woven
together with his finest handiwork. They seemed not to belong to him and yet
they bore his mark on every page—they were his and nobody else's. When he
looked at them he knew he was strong, though he felt weak.

Tonight, maybe, things would turn around for him, if only a little bit.
He hoped to find a little light to shed on the problems of where to go next
after he finished his quartet in D minor. He wanted to make his way toward a
symphony, and yet he was almost frightened to start again on a symphony after
the last time—so many fine things wasted there, his half-finished edifice
gone to ruin. Tonight would provide no clues for him, nothing tangible, but it
might somehow spark an idea or two, convince him that yes, it could be done,
one could say something new and glorious even out of the depths of inner
darkness. A voice shouting out of silence. One could only hope.

He was early. The theater was just starting to fill up. He made his way
among the empty seats to his own and sat down, trying to get in a position
where his back would not ache after hours of sitting. He was beginning to enjoy
himself already, though the orchestra had not even assembled yet. He always
liked going to theaters; looking up at the arch of the roof, all that empty
vertiginous echoing space, he wanted to fill it all up with his own music and
shake the rafters with himself. He had been thinking lately of putting on a
concert of his own. He wondered whether anyone would come besides his friends.
Though a Schubertiade on a grand scale wouldn't be half bad, come to think of
it.

His seat was on the main floor, the cheapest spot, though it was a
stroke of good luck that the person who ended up sitting in front of him was an
old man nearly as small as himself, and so he could see the stage. His friend
Josef Hüttenbrenner, who had lived upstairs from the Mayrhofer menage during
those two years, was singing in the chorus and knew the master personally; he
had offered to get Franz in for free, but Franz wanted to pay his way. It was
the right thing to do.

He waited, then, and looked at all the people assembled in the galleries
and the boxes, some eating their suppers, others drinking wine, the women in
their high-waisted dresses and the men like parrots in their bright coats and
waistcoats. A few faces he knew there among the crowd: Anselm Hüttenbrenner,
Josef's brother, who waved to Franz from his box seat; the Frölich sisters, all
four of them, looking rather intimidating in identical white dresses; and
wasn't that the Great Lord himself, Johann Michael Vogl, the Court Singer,
towering head and shoulders above his companions? He nodded formally at Franz
when their eyes met and then turned away, as if embarrassed that he had
acknowledged the composer who had given him a new voice to sing with.

According to the handbill, the concert would begin with an overture,
"The Consecration of the House," and then three pieces from a Mass in
D. They were not called a Mass, since there was a law against liturgical music
in the theater, but a Kyrie, a Credo, and an Agnus Dei could be nothing else.
After the intermission, a new symphony in D minor, with a choral finale from
Schiller's "Ode to Joy." A chorus in a symphony? How would it be
done? It was either completely brilliant or completely mad. Either way, it
would be glorious, certainly; the master would surely not stoop to writing
another "Wellington's Victory." But then, who could say?

Resigned to his lack of knowledge, Franz folded the handbill neatly and
settled himself down to wait.

At last, the orchestra assembled and a heavy hush fell over the
audience, broken only by the faint expectant rustle of skirts and handbills.
The oboe played its A and all the instruments echoed it: a long, drawn-out tone
composed of many voices, which thrilled him in a strange way, not because of
any inherent beauty in it but because of its potential: all the timbres and
colors of the orchestra, all notes and chords, contained in that single
readying sound. It seemed funny to feel that way. But it was true. He had felt
the same way in the Seminary orchestra, playing that primal A on his violin.

The conductor came out on stage with the score under his arm, followed
by—was it? yes—the man himself, beetle-browed, his head held high.
His unruly gray hair, combed into a semblance of neatness for the special
occasion, had no sheen in the bright light of the stage. There was applause for
him, but he did not respond, of course. He seated himself to one side of the
orchestra. He too had a score and a baton, but Josef Hüttenbrenner had said
that the orchestra and the choir had been strictly adjured not to pay any
attention to him.

He looked different in daylight—a thick-set man with a compressed,
angry face, stumping along the streets of Vienna, sometimes shouting or singing
to himself as people moved aside or followed in his wake, nudging each other
and pointing. Franz would see the gray head coming through toward him and his
stomach would contract, his palms sweat; much to the amusement of his friends,
he would then go pale and cross the street as the great man stalked by.
"Why don't you go talk to him?" Schober might say, the voice of
reason. "He won't bite, you know."

But he could and did. Everyone had heard the stories. He was angry at
the world, and since the world could not be raged at, he raged at the people
around him. Franz would sometimes go to the inn where he liked to have dinner.
Sitting amidst a crowd of embarrassed-looking friends, the great man would rant
and pontificate for hours and all anyone could do was smile and nod. Franz
would never have been able to get close to him, and even if he could, it would
have been more than he could bear to be rejected by the man who knew God.

Once he had almost done it, a few years ago before his troubles began.
He was walking in the Graben—he had just bought a new hat at one of the
fancier shops and felt pleased with himself—when he saw the man walking
toward him with a teenage boy at his side—a relative, judging by the
family resemblance. As they approached, Franz could hear the master's voice,
too loud, in the manner of the deaf: "Now, you tell that lying bitch to
keep her hands to herself, do you hear me?" At that moment Franz passed so
close to them that he could have seized the great man's sleeve—spoken to
him, stammered his gratitude, kissed his hand, made his worship understood
somehow —but he did not. He could not.

In short, Franz was afraid.

If God were a madman, he would be worshipped from a safe distance.

The conductor was looking at the master now, as the anticipation in the
air became a living thing, and at last he turned his fierce bulldog face to the
orchestra and gave the tempo with a sharp motion of his hand. The conductor
lifted his baton, and brought it down, and the music began.

He was a little disappointed at first. He listened, aimlessly shredding
his ticket stub into confetti, and found that he could see clearly what the
master was doing—the patterns, the intent. There was no mystery. But
then, the pieces from the Mass—then, everything changed. It was very
beautiful. He lost himself in the intricate interplay of soloists and chorus,
the grandeur of the orchestra and the cries of belief which shook the roof, and
came out of it again in astonishment, wondering at a faith so strong that it
could produce music of this splendor. "Glory to God in the highest!"
Beethoven cried, along with a thousand other composers living and dead, but for
him the words had meaning and weight; he held them in his hands and they came
to life. For Franz, they were words. He had never been able to understand
faith. He knew that Christ had died for him, but it was the pain of the
Crucifixion which moved him, the sweat and blood and tears, not the greatness
of God. Beethoven always outshone him.

He felt a little dizzy by the end of the Agnus Dei. It may have been the
music, but then he had been up late the night before. The doctor kept telling
him to take better care of himself, but he forgot. He had a bad memory. When he
got up to go out to the lobby, his vision went blurry and he had to sit down
again. Too much beautiful music—bad for your health. Like too much rich
food. Beethoven as a Sacher torte. He fanned himself with the handbill like a
fat old lady on a hot day and waited until the other people in his aisle filed
out before he tried getting up again. This time, he was successful.

He emerged into the lobby, feeling a little lost amidst the crowd of
avidly chattering concertgoers, and came across Anselm Hüttenbrenner there,
looking a little sly and weaselly as he always did, and pleased with himself.
He may have been a little too proud of knowing Beethoven, but he was a good
fellow for all of that, and a fairly decent composer as well. He was drinking
wine with some girl, but upon seeing Franz, he rushed over and greeted him
effusively with a peck on the cheek, like a maiden aunt. "Good Schubert!
How goes it with you? Schwind said you've been ill. Are you feeling
better?"

"Every day is a little better. Are you enjoying the concert?"

"Of course, of course, anything of Beethoven's is fine by me. And
you? I see you've worn out the knees of your trousers with worshipping. Or have
you been worshipping someone new?"

"Oh, hush. Good evening, sir," he added, looking up and up to
the towering height of Court Singer Vogl. Vogl, looking down with grave
benevolence, said, "God's greetings to you, boy. Have you any new songs
for me?"

"Only string quartets, sir. And the Mayrhofer songs you've seen
already."

"Too bad," said Vogl and strode away majestically.

"Polite, isn't he?" said Anselm.

"Oh, he's all right. He's been good to me."

"I'll bet he has. Look, speaking of which, after the concert I
think I ought to introduce you to your false idol, the old man. Don't you think
it's about time? If you're worried about talking to him, it's all right, you
just write everything down in one of his notebooks and he
understands—he's really not as frightening as you think. Oh, for God's
sake, don't look at me like that. I know what you're going to say. God, you're
predictable. Well, it's your loss. Oh, there's the bell."

Franz followed him back inside without saying a word and made his way to
his seat again. For a moment there he had actually been tempted, but of course
common sense had taken over. Anyway, it didn't matter. It was time for the new
symphony. He was so excited that he soon forgot about Anselm and everything
else. He banished all other thoughts from his mind and opened himself up to
whatever there was to hear.

It took some time to get the choir all assembled on the stage again.
Josef Hüttenbrenner looked as if he had been drinking, as did the bass soloist.
Typical Viennese. The women soloists looked very nervous—the contralto
was biting her nails—while the orchestra members furiously practiced
elaborate runs and scales in weird remote keys, all of which seemed to be part
of the symphony. He couldn't imagine what it would sound like.

Then the conductor came back out, and the master with his score and
baton. He had been making conducting motions throughout the first half of the
concert but it was clear that he had no idea of what was going on. Franz had
watched him, when he was not listening to the music: odd mingled expressions of
bliss and frustration passing across that scowling, pock-marked face as he
gazed at the silent ministrations of orchestra and choir. Sometimes he looked
so enraged that it seemed a vein might burst in his forehead. But now he looked
quite calm as he gave the tempo, and the music began.

Or had it begun? What was going on? There was just a pianissimo murmur
of strings, open fifths, and Franz thought for a moment that there had been
some sort of mistake and the orchestra was tuning again—except they were
playing D, not A. But then he realized what was happening. It was the primal
moment, the chaos before creation, as the other instruments added descending
cascades of open fifths, the simplest chords. Franz thought of God moving on
the face of the waters, in darkness and silence. And then the music grew,
expanded, exploded into a huge statement of the first theme that made him jump
in his seat. Behold, the creation of the world!

From then on, he knew he was in the presence of something very
wonderful, very new, altogether new. For in no other symphony had music remade
the world. And the music around him rose and rose, blossoming into a million
fantastic shapes, while he watched and listened, trying to understand even
while the music transformed him into a vessel filled with sound, shaking with
it, all conscious thought purged from his mind, burned clean. He felt as if he
could fall into the music, soar through it like a bird, swim in it like a
dolphin, drink it like rich heady wine. He was drunk with it, and as it sang
through his veins, he forgot it all: his failing body, his failing art, all
gone, lost in this vast and wonderful ocean of sound.

He wished he could take it and pull it into himself, make the brilliance
a part of himself. The idea of making something as wonderful as this was beyond
his comprehension. How did the man do it? How could he possibly be holding this
inside him? He looked so insignificant down there, hunched over his score,
unaware of the glory all around him.

This is why he's deaf, Franz thought. He's been listening to God too
much. The thought was absurd and would have made him smile had he not been grinning
with elation already.

The second movement, which would have been the slow movement in any
ordinary, earthly symphony, began with sharp blasts from the horns and the
pounding of tympani, so loud and abrupt that it frightened him—it sounded
like thunder. The rest of the audience broke out into a mix of shouting,
clapping and booing, so loud that it nearly drowned out the music. The
conductor stopped the orchestra and looked around with an irritated expression.
The master looked bemused. "This is nonsense," said a man somewhere
behind Franz. "I want my money back." Franz contemplated ways of
hideous death for the man while the conductor prepared to begin again. This
time, the music proceeded unhindered.

A molto vivace slow movement. My God. Would the man stop at nothing? But
then, in the fourth movement, there was the choral part coming up. Would the
audience boo? Would they be angry that the symphony was being remade before
their eyes? He knew that nobody would ever write a symphony the same way again.
His plans for a grand symphony of his own had just died horribly, struck down
by those blasts from horn and tympani. There was no way he could say anything
more after this.

And then, finally, the music gathered itself up, flung itself out in a
grand triumph of strings and horns, and poised in midair. The silence came. And
into the void, a great voice cried,

O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne!

And the other parts came in, alto and tenor and bass, and it was
beautiful.

So you could have voices in a symphony, after all, he thought. Why not?
And how beautiful, how lovely. . . Listen to that, the soloists together, and
the chorus there, Deine Zauber binden wieder. . . and he hasn't even brought in
the sopranos yet. There they are. What a dreadfully high part. Poor ladies. Oh,
my. . .

He had set this poem himself, back in his vortex year, but it hadn't
been anything like this. This was the harmony of the spheres. And if he had to
stand back from the Mass because he could not believe, he could believe this:
not the words of brotherhood and joy so much as what the music was saying,
about harmony from chaos, about the ability of music to carry the world on its
shoulders.

It was a symphony in itself, this choral part. There was that wonderful
swinging march, about setting forth like a victorious hero (Freudig, wie ein
Held zum Siegen!), and the slow strange part with its peculiar cadences, and
the joyous bouncing hymn, and at last a wild presto which had the orchestra
members sweating profusely and the chorus members on the verge of collapse,
repeating again the words "Joy, thou lovely spark of God!" until
everything all at once crashed to a halt, and it was done.

A stunned silence. Then the applause.

It went on and on. Franz clapped automatically, a spasmodic movement,
until his hands ached and his palms turned red, one applauder among hundreds.
Still the applause continued. The conductor, shining with sweat, bowed; the
soloists bowed in succession, one at a time; the choir and orchestra beamed,
red-faced. People shouted and waved their hats and handkerchiefs. After the
fifth ovation, a voice shouted "Silence! Be quiet!" from the back of
the theater. It was the Police Commissioner in full uniform, obviously worried
that this Beethoven maniac had succeeded in causing some sort of insurrection.
Nobody paid any attention to him.

Amidst all the tumult, only one person sat without noticing, still
looking at his score with his back turned. Finally, as his name rang in the
smoky air, the contralto soloist came forward and, taking him by the arm, led
him to the edge of the stage. The applause redoubled as he stood there
blinking, a smile sitting awkwardly on his blunt features and the score tucked
under his arm. Perhaps he saw all the mouths speaking his name, perhaps not. He
certainly saw the clapping hands, like opening and shutting doors that made no
sound, not even a whisper. For all the shouting of his heart, he was wreathed
in silence, alone.

10. Zseliz II

The coach ride seemed longer this time around, maybe because he was no
longer casting ahead to his destination—he already knew what was coming.
The weather was stormy, the air heavy with withheld rain. As the coach rattled
along he watched the storm clouds passing to and fro over the hillsides,
casting vast dark shadows amidst the intermittent sunshine. In the distance,
over the horizon, heat lighting flickered.

His travelling companion was a large, jovial-looking Hungarian man with
a bushy black mustache and slightly protuberant eyes, who carried with him an
inordinate amount of luggage and wrapped parcels of food that had been pressed
on him at the station outside Vienna by a family that seemed to number in the
dozens. Franz, remembering his scanty Hungarian, said "Szervusz" to
him politely as he got into the coach, and—every traveller's greatest
fear when speaking a foreign language that he didn't really know—was met
with a tide of rapidly-spoken Hungarian, to which he could only reply meekly,
"Kein Hungarisch, nur Deutsch." Not to be dissuaded, his companion
continued to address him in Hungarian throughout the journey. Franz just
nodded, smiled, and said "Igen," which seemed to satisfy him.

Back again he went, backtracking like the dog in Proverbs returning to
its own vomit. For money, he was so greedy, just for money. To pay his doctor's
bills, though, that wasn't really greed. It didn't matter. He had answered the
siren's call and was now condemned once more to sojourn in the Esterhazys’
Hungarian prison. He wondered if he would be staying in the servant's quarters
again. Perhaps his employers would deign to let him dine with them. He had made
a name for himself since those days, after all. He wasn't some 21-year-old
nobody; he was Schubert, Franz Schubert, the composer of operas and songs and
symphonies (and other things that nobody cared about, especially his
publishers). Would they let Franz Schubert molder in the servants' quarters?
Surely not. Surely. . . well, maybe not.

His brother Ferdinand had seen him off this time around. Everyone else
had other things to do. Let's see—Kupelwieser was still in Rome (and
probably having the time of his life); Spaun was in Linz; what was Schober up
to? No good, of course, but besides that, he was trying to be an actor and
probably making a hash of it, silly boy. Mayrhofer was busy moping, no doubt.
Schwind, too. He had some new girlfriend he was mooning over, Anna Hönig, whose
name meant "honey" but who was not as sweet as her name implied. She
had Schwind on a short leash. It was funny to watch them sometimes; other times
it was simply pathetic. Mayrhofer ought to give him his lecture about sticking
to boys.

He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. The Hungarian man looked up from
the book he was reading and said, "Mi a baj?" "Igen," said
Franz, not knowing what he was talking about. The man frowned, shrugged, and
went back to his book.

Franz looked out the window for awhile, leaning his head against the
glass, though it rattled unpleasantly. It was sunny now, for the moment, and
from the half-opened coach window a muggy breeze stirred his scanty hair, which
was still only a few inches long and had just begun to curl. Schwind called it
a "cygnet's down," and it did seem to be growing back finer than
before, though otherwise unchanged. He had half-hoped that it would come back
some strange color, red or gold or black, or improbably straight, but it was
the same, still curly and brown, still receding; he would be bald again by the
time he was forty.

Off to Hungary. . . again, not again. . . it was so stuffy in here, even
with the window open. . . and over there, birds riding the updrafts, lots of
wind on a day like today, but no sparrowhawks. They looked like eagles or maybe
even vultures.

Strings played long drowsy phrases, broken here and there by the soft
pulse of a cello; the music seemed to hold inside it every sleepy summer
afternoon he had ever spent. And then there were those storm clouds out there
over the mountains, furious interruptions of the somnolent upper strings by
one, no two cellos shouting warnings of the coming rain. Two cellos—how
strange. . . Not a string quartet at all, though he thought it was. It was
something to keep in mind, anyway; he wanted to keep working on chamber music
for awhile, maybe another quartet. He was getting better at string quartets.
Four instruments, you'd think it'd be easy, but it was very limiting; you had
much less to work with. Like writing a sonnet, only fourteen lines and all
that. . .

The Hungarian man said something and he opened his eyes. The man looked
rather proud of himself. He said it again, and Franz realized it was broken
German—"Es regnet," it's raining. It certainly was raining; the
storm had come at last, and rain was starting to get into the coach
compartment. "Well, close the window, then," Franz said, but the man
only repeated, "Es regnet," smiling, and Franz realized it was the
only German phrase he knew. Franz closed the window himself. When the man said
"Köszönöm," Franz replied, "Szivesen," and that was the
extent of their conversation for the duration of the trip.

* * *

When he saw Pepi again, he hardly recognized her. She was taller, and
much more beautiful, and she was wearing a nice though slightly threadbare
white dress instead of her dark maid's uniform. She stood in the doorway of the
music room, a strand of thick gold hair straggling down from her careful
chignon, her face overlaid with rippling patterns from the rain against the
windows. "Hello, Franz."

He heard her above the Bach fugue he was using to determine how
out-of-tune the piano was. He stopped and looked up in surprise.
"Pepi?"

"It's me." And, as he rose to greet her, she came running into
the room, threw her arms around him, and kissed him on the lips, much to his
surprise. He started laughing—she was giggling hysterically—and sat
down again on the piano bench, leaving room for her to sit down beside him.
They looked each other up and down.

"You're bigger," he said. "I like your dress."

"Thank you. It's my day off. Oh, Franz, what happened to your
pretty hair?"

"It—I was sick, and they had to shave it off."

"Oh, no! Was it smallpox? You haven't any scars."

"It was something else."

"That's too bad. Oh, I heard you're staying in the castle now! And
you're to dine with the bigshots tonight, that's what the cook said. Is that
right? You'll get to see the countesses. They've changed a lot, at least I
think so. Countess Marie is getting married, did you know that?"

"That's what her father said. I haven't seen them for awhile."

"Well, she and Caroline are much nicer now. They were such little
brats when you were here, weren't they? I swear, I wanted to box Caroline's
ears so badly. . . but then I would have been fired. I felt sorry for you,
having to be around them all the time."

"At least I got paid for it."

"Not very much." Pepi paused, still looking at him and
smiling. She had a very direct, serious gaze which he found hard to meet; he
knew she knew he was lying about his sickness, and anything else he might lie
about, she would probably see through that as well. She said, "You know,
Franz, I'm glad you're back."

"I'm glad to see you again."

"You're the only interesting person who ever comes here—the
only interesting person that talks to me, anyway. . . Franz, will you promise
me something?"

"What's that?"

"Promise me that—now that you're living here with the
bigshots—promise me you'll still talk to me and sit with me and sing me
songs, all right? Don't turn into a snob just because you're a famous musician
and I'm just a chambermaid. Will you do that for me?"

"Oh, Pepi, don't be stupid. Of course. What do I care if you're a
chambermaid? Who do you think I am, anyway?"

Pepi grinned. "You're the only decent person in a house full of
idiots, that's who. And it's almost time for you to go to dinner."

She was right: it was five o'clock, and he had to go dress for dinner.
He had forgotten the way back to his room. Pepi showed him how to get there; in
the semi-darkness of the corridors she floated ahead of him like a ghost or a
will-o'-the-wisp in her white dress, and he followed dutifully with a sheaf of
sheet music in hand. The room was in a disused part of the castle, which, Pepi
said, was shut up except during grand balls or hunting parties, when large
numbers of guests came to stay. That didn't happen very often. Franz had often
supplied the music for smaller parties, with fifty or so guests from the
surrounding countryside, but a real grand ball he had yet to see here. He hoped
that, in the event of one, they would hire an orchestra and let their pet
composer stay out of the spotlight for awhile.

The room itself was a corner room, rather musty and damp with watermarks
on the ceiling, but with a view of the fields and distant woods shared by the
music room downstairs. "This is a much nicer room than I've got,"
said Pepi, twirling around in the long dusky space between the door and the
window. "I've got to share mine with this nasty Silesian girl who smells
like licorice. I hate licorice."

"So do I. It's probably the only sweet I don't like. Look, I've got
to get dressed up for dinner with the bigshots, so I have to throw you out,
love. I'll see you tonight, all right?"

"Oh, all right. Save me a bit of cake, or I'll never talk to you
again." And with that she was gone, like a shaft of light hidden behind a
cloud. She made him feel old and ill. It tired him out to talk to her.

He felt like an idiot dressed up in his best suit (the only nice clothes
he owned, in fact), sitting at the table with the noble family trying to figure
out which fork to use. The dining room was modest: a few paintings on the
walls, heavy velvet drapes to block out the view of the rain and the barnyard,
two tall candles casting light and wax over the small table. No doubt they had
a more grandiose dining room for special guests—which, of course, he was
not. He sat next to Countess Marie's pallid fiancé, who looked consumptive and
toyed with his food without eating any. The young countesses' haughty mother,
Countess Rose, sat at the foot of the table, icily beautiful and resplendent in
a peacock-blue silk dress and many strands of pearls. The jovial, blaring-voiced
Count (in shirt-sleeves and a stained waistcoat) was at the head and the young
countesses were across from Franz. A couple of footmen in faded livery lurked
in the background.

Pepi had been right: the countesses had changed. Marie had lost her pout
and sullen demeanor and had gained a bit of her mother's hauteur; she held
herself rigidly upright and dissected her meat with the precision of a surgeon
and not one shining black hair was out of place on her head. But she smiled at
Franz when he came in, a genuine smile and not one of frozen politeness like
her mother's, and he wondered whether the hauteur was only an act put on to
impress her parents and her fiance. He felt a little sorry for her then.

Her sister was another matter. Franz remembered Caroline as a
dirty-faced and somewhat simple-minded thirteen-year-old, always late for
lessons, her fingers clumsy on the keyboard and her eyes like boarded-up
windows. She was nineteen now and surprisingly pretty, with a sweet face and a
bright smile, which she beamed on him along with her sister; dressed up in a
nice pink muslin dress, she was quite attractive. But there was still that
disturbing emptiness there behind her dark Hungarian eyes and her polite
greeting; she seemed to have learned proper behavior by rote, like that trained
ape some English aristocrat kept in his home.

Throughout the meal (which was very fine) she kept up that weird vacant
smile every time he caught her eye. As he was sitting across from her, he could
hardly avoid this. That constant scrutiny, along with the presence of his
employers and that sickly boy at his elbow, made him clumsy in his growing
nervousness; he kept knocking things over and spilling the salt, which must
have made the Count wonder why he let this bumpkin out of the servant's
quarters. Nobody said anything, but he was embarrassed. The next time he caught
Caroline staring at him, he frowned fearsomely, but she only stuck out her
tongue. He sighed and paid close attention to his roast meat, and the next time
the Count told a dirty joke, he tried as hard as he could to laugh.

* * *

She wouldn't leave him alone. Everywhere he looked, whenever he was in
the castle, she was there, peeping around a corner or sitting across from him,
pretending to read a book; it was as if she anticipated his every move. She
never said anything or bothered him and after a time of trying to avoid her, he
eventually gave up. It didn't seem to make any difference what he did; she was
going to follow him no matter what, so there was no good in trying to
discourage her.

He referred to her jokingly in a letter to Schwind as "a certain
attractive star," for she was attractive, and like a star or some other
celestial body she rotated continuously around him, bound to him through
gravitation or simple perversity. He might have called it a schoolgirl crush,
but she was too old to be a schoolgirl, and at any rate, didn't girls usually
have crushes on handsome, dashing coachmen or young noblemen? Having a crush on
a small homely music teacher didn't make much sense. He sometimes tried to
puzzle it out, but he never came to any good conclusions, and it was no good
asking her; she only giggled and blushed. Maybe it was just that he was someone
new—although he had known her for a long time, she no doubt had a short
memory—or maybe she wanted someone to pay attention to her, or maybe she
was just bored. He couldn't tell.

Countess Marie, when he asked her about it during one of their lessons,
only sighed and shook her head. "She's like a little dog. She follows
people around. I don't know why she does it. Just ignore her."

Franz shrugged. "It's none of my business, really. I was just
wondering. Now, I know you're very busy with your fiancé and
all"—Marie hardly ever left the side of her pallid young man—“but
I hope you've been getting a little practicing in as well. I've got a set of
variations you might like to try sight-reading, if you can read my
handwriting."

"I can usually read your writing, except for the scribbly bits. Let
me see it, maybe I can give it a try."

Now here was a good pupil, nice and tractable. And she was very skilled:
he had done a good job with her. He played alongside her, watching her
engagement ring flashing in the long rays of summer sun as her fingers ran up
and down the keyboard. She took her lessons seriously, without a doubt; she
only stumbled when she came to the "scribbly bits" where he had
crossed things out and her eye had to leap over the blots to where the music
began again. The variations had been inspired by Beethoven's
"Diabelli" variations that he had written to a theme that Franz
himself had used, but in which the master had found a universe of wonders.
Franz's variations, on a theme of his own, were smaller but, he thought, quite
good. Marie played them well. He was proud of her.

When they were done, he asked her if she would reconsider getting
married and become a concert pianist instead. She laughed, massaging her sore
hands, and twisted her engagement ring around and around on her finger.
"But Mama wants grandchildren."

"Let your sister have grandchildren."

Marie gazed at him seriously, her eyes clear and level and dark, like
her sister's, only with a bit more sense in them. "Herr Schubert, do you
really think anyone would ever marry her?"

No, of course not, she was right, and of course she would have to be the
one to start yet another generation of Esterhazys, who in their turn would
probably capture and torment yet another composer somewhere down the line. It
was getting to be almost a family tradition.

Countess Caroline's lessons were always late in the afternoon, around
four, or whenever she remembered it; she still came to him every day, while her
sister now only came twice a week. When the sun began dipping down toward the
trees that bordered the family property, marking the beginning of the end of
another long summer day, she minced into the music room in a dove-gray dress
with a ripped hem, which she wore most of the time except when it was being
washed, which was thankfully often. The dress was close-fitting and had a lower
waist than was common—it was the new style—and showed off an
hourglass figure that was sharply at odds with her sweet, vacant face.

"It's me, Caroline—I'm here for my lesson, Herr
Schubert," she announced, as she stood in the doorway; she always did
that, as if he might have forgotten who she was in the few hours since he last
saw her. He was putting away Marie's music but left out the variations, which
he thought might be easy enough for her to play. "Come in and sit
down," he said, as he always did. He wasn't much in the mood for teaching
today, for coaxing and patience and explanations, something Caroline still
needed though her sister didn't. Meanwhile he was thinking about arranging some
of his two-handed pieces for four hands and possibly writing another sonata for
the publishers to turn down, and he had heard that some aristocrat with an
excellent tenor was coming to visit, and—but Caroline was tugging on his
sleeve. "Can we start?"

At least she wasn't whiny and bratty any more, and she could focus on
something for more than ten minutes. He made her play some scales and some
exercises, which she plodded through mechanically, rocking back and forth a
little against the rhythm but playing tolerably enough. She looked up at him
eagerly when she was done. "Was that all right? Did I do all right? Should
I do it again?"

"That was fine." He smiled at her. She was like a little dog,
or a small girl; when she wasn't annoying him, she made him feel curiously
paternal and benevolent. He didn't really know why. "Did you cut your
nails like I asked you to?"

"Nurse did it for me. See? Do you chew your nails? I do. But I
don't swallow them. No, you don't chew your nails, you wouldn't do that, you're
too smart."

"I used to chew around my nails and they'd bleed. But I stopped.
Would you like to try sight-reading something new? I wrote it for you and your
sister to play. See, here it is."

"Oh! Oh, did you really write it just for me? Is my name on
it?"

"Well, no, but -"

"Why don't you write something with my name on it? Write something
just for me! I'd love you forever and ever."

"Oh, everything I write is just for you, Caroline." He was
teasing her, and was happy when she finally figured out that he was teasing and
laughed so much that she nearly fell off the piano bench.

Maybe it wasn't that she was simple, maybe it was that she was a woman,
and that was why he didn't understand her. A simple man he might have been able
to understand, but women had their secrets; their minds were like dark pools of
water, while men's minds were all clear and open to the sky.

Her eyes were on him always, except when he was in his room, and Pepi's
as well, for Pepi as well as Caroline seemed to have a talent for seeking him
out. He began to feel as if there was some conspiracy of women in the castle,
spying on him, trying to find his secrets. He tried to think that the women
were only looking out for him, that their constant scrutiny was only maternal
and protective, but it was hard to think that way when he watched the Hungarian
boys in the fields, their muscles flowing under their sallow skin, and
wondered, as he watched, who might be watching him.

* * *

It was several weeks before he had time to get out beyond the fields
into the woods, where the stream was. He learned, though, in conversation with
the Count, that the stream was a tributary of the River Gran that flowed
through the town of Zseliz. The Count told him the name of the stream, but he
had forgotten it. It disappointed him a little that his stream had a name; he
thought that only he knew about it, and he liked to imagine it flowing nameless
through the forest on its way to the sea. But it didn't matter, it was still
his private spot, nameless or not, and he looked forward to seeing it again.

On a stiflingly hot day in late July, when Caroline's lesson was over,
he set out across the fields, carrying his coat over his arm and whistling the
first movement of Beethoven's "Pastoral" symphony. The farm workers
were bringing in the hay. He remembered watching the same activity six years
ago, and if he came back six years from now, they would be doing it again, and
in all the years intervening. Different people, but the same act, over and
over, on and on, as the earth moved around the sun and all the works of Nature
came back from the dead each year, the eternal Resurrection.

A few of the farm workers recognized him and waved to him, calling out
in their sibilant language. He waved back, and wondered why they bothered. He
was a hated Austrian, after all, a servant of the same people who ruled over
them. Perhaps they knew that the power didn't lie with him, that he was not
responsible, or perhaps he was inferring too much. All they saw, after all, was
a man, a rather small and harmless man, going for a walk in the countryside.

Under the shade of the trees the air was cool and musty, like somebody's
cellar. Insects hummed and buzzed in the undergrowth. The forest had grown less
tame since he had last been here; there seemed to be more bushes to fight
through and fewer paths to walk on. But he could hear the stream singing, and
that was his beacon; he could not lose his way. When he came to the water, he
knelt and drank, as he had done before, and followed the water downstream. It
flowed faster than he walked, continuously changing, its music never still.

His pool was so clear it seemed like a basin of air. He had forgotten
how beautiful it was. He watched a leaf float by in its depths, rolling over
and over in the slow current until it tumbled over the rocks to the faster stream
below. As he began to undress, there came a shrill call from a nearby tree: a
small black-and-white bird that he had never seen before. It called again and
then flew away. He shed his skin, left it in a heap on the riverbank, and stood
naked under the trees as a cool breeze curled around him and brought out goose
pimples on his arms and legs.

This body, this bag of bones, it had carried him here, far from home. He
considered its parts and its wholeness and its mortality as he stood there in
that old forest by his secret river. This body had betrayed him. The lesions
were gone now, and the rash; he renewed himself, he came back from the dead,
but the burden was still there. He had turned, like bad wine.

It was his sin come back to haunt him: it was divine retribution.

No. No, it was not. He had not sinned. He was a good man. What happened
to him was bad luck. That was all.

Which was worse, divine justice, punishing him for a sin that harmed no
one, or simple arbitrary fate? He didn't know. But either way, his body was the
instrument of his suffering. And he had suffered, was suffering now, would
suffer always. Always and always.

And his music cast out from him like the leaf in the water, running
nameless to the sea; all his power gone, his power wasted. A thousand
manuscript pages, his two operas, wasted. A thousand more: all the sonatas and
symphonies and string quartets no one would hear, that the publishers sneered
at, that the critics mocked. "Not to be despised as a first-born," a
newspaper said of his A minor quartet—his thirteenth!—and as for
that other one, his finest, so beautifully wrought, the music of his soul, that
had taken all his craft and his skill to write. . . nothing. No one would hear
it. Wasted.

He crouched down then, feeling the earth under his feet, the damp soil
and the cool grass, and curled into a ball. He squeezed himself so small that
all his bones and muscles creaked and cried a little in helpless self-pity,
overcome with the weight of himself, his burden of mortality.

He lay there for awhile listening to the sound of his breathing and the
wind in the leaves and the river flowing, and after awhile a little life began
to come back to him. He rubbed his eyes. Pull yourself together, he told
himself. For God's sake. He sat up, brushing off some dead leaves that had
clung to his skin. He was a bit chilly, despite the hot day. The water would be
colder, but he didn't care. He looked down at himself, all goose-pimpled and
pale, and rubbed his arms to bring a little warmth into them. His body would
carry him a little further yet, he reckoned. Just far enough.

He got to his feet and looked around at the woods, smudgy and formless
without his glasses. There was no movement; even the wind had died away. Then
he turned and walked into the river.

The current was swifter and the water deeper than he remembered; it was
a hot summer following a hard winter, and there was more run-off from the
mountains than before. He kept his footing on the pebbly bottom as he made his
way to the deepest part, which had previously come up to his chest but was now
almost over his head. He was a little worried that he might have forgotten how
to swim. He lifted his feet from the bottom, floundered momentarily in the deep
water, and found himself down below, where he kicked against the current to
stay in one place as tiny fish shot by him like arrows. He felt a stupid,
animal happiness here in this dark cool place, which did not leave him when he
surfaced, gasping for breath under the trees, the birds singing and the sun
shining through the leaves and the whole world turning toward death and
dissolution and the end of things.

* * *

The days were getting shorter. Earlier and earlier each day the sun
shone through the windows of the music room, which faced west, and lit up all
the dust on the piano lid. Even when he was not giving lessons, he spent most
of his time there at the piano. He did a lot of writing and sometimes
entertained guests of the Count, and sometimes, when he was alone, improvised
for an hour or two. It was a fine piano, a Broadwood from London, six and a
half octaves, with good escapement and a sustaining pedal. When he improvised,
the piano sang to him all manner of songs, wandering songs that grew like
vines, branching and twining and throwing out leaves and flowers here and
there. He only wrote down a few of them. They seemed better when they only
existed for a short time.

Sometimes, while he played, Countess Caroline would creep into the room
and sit by the piano listening, or else actually crawl under the piano and lean
against his leg, so much like a faithful dog that he was occasionally tempted
to scratch behind her ears. He didn't mind her sitting there. It was even a
little comforting. Pepi would also come in to listen, under the pretense of cleaning
the music room; she would flit around the perimeter of the room, dusting the
bric-a-brac, in the shadows looking like a magpie in her black and white
uniform. Once in awhile other servants would gather by the door. He would look
over his shoulder, hearing a cough or a murmur and see a crowd of three or
four, all in uniform, listening quietly. They were the most polite audience he
had ever had.

On a day in September, when autumn had begun to add red and yellow to
the vista of green beyond the music room window, he played for two hours,
Caroline's head on his knee, Pepi standing in the shadows, the Count's valet (a
good-looking sloe-eyed Hungarian) sitting by the door. The sun was still
getting up toward noon, and the room was dark and a little cool, with a faint
smell of burning leaves. He had been sick the night before and had not slept
much. He dreamed terrible things when he did sleep, waking to find himself
curled in a ball with his hands clutching an imaginary rosary.

So his eyes were slow and his fingers stiff when he sat down to play. He
improvised for awhile, then, when he felt sufficiently warmed up, played a
Mozart sonata, marveling as always at the composer's crisp elegance that masked
the depths of his feeling. He wanted to hear something hypnotic and structured
then, so he played what little he could recall of Bach's Goldberg Variations.
He did not know Bach very well except as a supplier of teaching exercises.
Salieri had disapproved of Bach, finding him too German and lacking in emotion,
and he was indeed very German, very northern, and passionless in a way. But the
Goldberg Variations possessed clarity. They were like water flowing.

From playing Bach he passed, without pausing, back into the stream of
his own improvisation and came full circle. The music now was soft and filled
with the sounds of wind and growing things, summer music. He went into it over
his head, lost his way in long arcs of melody, and then passed through to the
other side, watching as if from an oblique angle his fingers on the keyboard
and wondered where he was going.

Two string quartets. The octet, this spring, "just like Beethoven's
Septet," went the request. All that four-handed stuff for the Countesses.
More four-handed stuff forthcoming—it seemed he could not think of a
piano alone, lately, and even now what he played sounded more like one half of
a duo than something meant to stand by itself. He had four-handed pieces on the
brain. But was any of this getting him anywhere? Even now—shouldn't he be
working on something large and grand, instead of playing games? Stop enjoying
yourself this instant. No dessert until you finish your symphony, young man.

Everything had been going all right until Beethoven got in his way, he
thought, and then felt a little guilty at thinking rancorously of the master,
as if Beethoven were a jealous god spying on his thoughts. He had made a pledge
to himself that his chamber music would pave the way toward a symphony, but
that was before the voices singing Joy and the sound of the planets spinning
around the sun that Beethoven had shown him in May (and he would never forget
that day, even if he lived to be a hundred), before that great cosmic music
shrunk his ambitions down to size. Fit only for exercise pieces and nice little
songs, he was, now that Beethoven had made the symphony into the voice of God.

He stopped playing to rest his fingers. His back hurt. The Countess
stirred by his side and whispered loudly, "What's the matter? Keep
playing!" But Pepi twirled around the room in a little dance of her
own—she had not been listening at all—and looking over his shoulder
at the valet, he found that worthy had fallen asleep. So much for his talents.
Although falling asleep was not the worst insult one could offer a composer.
And weren't the Goldberg Variations written for a nobleman with insomnia?

At any rate. . . He had ideas for how he might go about a grand
symphony, but they were only ideas. He was thinking, as he did with that other
symphony he had started on last year, in terms of melody and not structure;
Beethoven's symphonies were very structured, almost architectural, for all
their tonal daring. He had an idea for a long opening theme played by a horn,
as that other symphony had its clarinet solo, but the orchestra would take it
up on a much grander scale—it would not melt into a second theme but grow
and shake the earth. He thought he might like to do a little earth-shaking.
Fate had rattled him around enough; now it was his turn.

Yes. And it would not be an Ode to Joy. It would be joyous, yes, but it
would not sing to the stars, it would be a dance, a celebration, not like
Beethoven at all. Because there was so much anger there in Beethoven's
symphony, wasn't there? Bitterness. God, you made me deaf, now I shout at you
though I can't hear myself. And then it rose above bitterness through the
strength of its beauty. While he carried his own burden, his music would not
hold bitterness or anger or rancor or any of those things, but it could hold
joy.

It could hold hope, as well, and maybe, after all, there was a little
hope?

The thought was almost alien to him. And yet he could hear the horn
calling, gold in the darkness, and hesitantly, certain that nobody was
listening, he played the call on the piano. It was in C major, slow and
sonorous. It was very beautiful. It did not sound anything like Beethoven. As
he played it and began to elaborate on it, hesitantly but with increasing
sureness, he saw it as a path leading him away from the master, away from his
own pain, upward into the place of light he saw only in dreams.

* * *

It was very kind of the Baron to let him ride in his carriage, which was
much nicer than the stagecoach and had cushioned seats and a splendid coat of
arms painted on the outside in gold, red, and blue. His tailbone was happy. So
was his pride, which swelled every time people by the road bowed or saluted as
the coach went by, as if Metternich himself were within. Still, he missed the
opportunity to practice his Hungarian again for the last time, and he missed
the solitude. He didn't like having to make conversation.

The Baron kept asking him about Countess Caroline, and Pepi. He had been
there when Franz bade farewell to Caroline in the yard by the coach, when she
kissed him all over his face and knocked his glasses off. He had not observed,
however, Franz's farewell to Pepi, which, like the last time, was quiet and a
little awkward. She had kissed him on the forehead very sweetly, like before,
and this time it was his turn to present a flower, a faded yellow one which he did
not know the name for, which he had found near his stream the day before. Then
she had walked with him out to the Baron's coach in the gusty October morning,
her black skirts fluttering around her ankles. "Well—till next
time!" she said brightly, and then the Baron had come out with all his
luggage and they got into the coach, and he waved to her as they pulled out of
the courtyard.

His travelling companion and provider of transportation, Baron Karl von
Schönstein, was a friend of the Count's, so close a friend, in fact, that he
habitually referred to the Count as "Hansi" (short for Johann, the
Count's Christian name). Franz had met him briefly six years before but had
forgotten him. He was the aristocrat with the fine tenor voice Franz had been
told to expect, and a fine tenor voice he had—indeed, an excellent voice,
far better than Vogl's disintegrating upper range—which adapted itself
very well to Franz's songs. His rendition of "Wandrer's Nachtlied II"
held the Esterhazys transfixed like pinned butterflies, and he sang the
"Maid of the Mill" songs equally splendidly. He was a handsome man
with rather absurd mustaches that he oiled and waxed, like Schober's but more
impressive. Schönstein shared a few of Schober's other affected mannerisms as well—he
seemed a bit of a dandy—but none of Schober's blithe arrogance.

He was, however, a bit of a gossip.

"Countess Caroline seems very fond of you," he remarked, only
about an hour or so into the journey. He was wearing brown kid travelling
gloves and had been reading a little volume of Novalis in an affected sort of
way, arching his eyebrows at the particularly poignant passages and moving his
lips. Franz had been revising one of his four-handed pieces but had paused to
watch the gaudy spectacle of the Baron absorbing Art.

"I suppose she is," Franz said. He wiped off his pen and began
to sharpen the point with his blunt pen knife, a somewhat fruitless task.

"I used to see her, you know, with her head on your knee."

"Really."

"Yes, it was very affecting, the regard she had for you. I suppose
you felt the same about her?"

"I wouldn't say that."

The Baron seemed vaguely disappointed by this and abruptly suggested
they play a game of cards. Franz, with some small sense of triumph, went along
with this. They laid out the cards on his little lap desk and he compounded his
triumph by beating the Baron thoroughly at whist. "I suppose you see it
all as a musical conundrum," said the downhearted loser, gathering up the
cards. Franz merely smiled in his most mysterious way.

He had already noticed that the Baron regarded him as gnomic and
puzzling. When they performed together in the Ezsterhazys' music room, the
Baron would finish off one of his splendid performances by remarking on how it
seemed strange that such a young man could write such marvelous songs, and
certainly he must be a clairvoyant, attuned to voices from a higher sphere.
Franz sometimes wondered why people kept thinking of him like this; was it
simply because he was young? But twenty-seven was not so young. Or maybe it was
because he didn't have much to say, silence interpreted as wisdom. Maybe that
was it.

While the Baron returned to his Novalis, Franz stared out the window at
the bleak countryside and luxuriated in his relief at leaving his Hungarian
prison. He wouldn't be going back, that was for sure. Though it wasn't as bad
this time as it was the last time, he had had enough of hiring out his talents.
He wanted to be paid for his life's work, not for coaxing girls through
lessons. And God knows he had gotten little enough work done. He would probably
be able to sell all those four-handed pieces—everyone liked
those—but the part-song he had written for Caroline, that was unlikely,
and he hadn't written any other songs. Caroline liked the part-song, though; that
made him glad. He had dedicated it to her, just as she asked, and the whole
family performed it one night in August, with himself at the piano. Her face
was all lit up and she seemed as if she might swoon with delight. It made him
feel good to be able to make someone so happy, even if was only poor benighted
Caroline Eszterhazy.

He might miss her a little. Marie, too. He would not be giving either of
them lessons any more, back in the city. Of course, he would also miss Pepi.
Last night, she had confessed to him that she fancied that Hungarian valet and
he fancied her; they had kissed in the kitchen one day and she thought her
heart might burst. He was glad for her, if a little jealous, as he had been
before.

Now, in the coach, with the cold windowpane bumping against his forehead
and the writing desk heavy on his lap, he thought of Caroline and Pepi and his
secret river and almost wanted to go back—and then remembered where his
life was, ahead of them on the road, in the city of his birth, where his friends
waited for him and where his symphony waited to be born. Vienna, city of
dreams. . .

He yawned. Then he stretched, not thinking about how small the
compartment was, and to his vast surprise managed to put his hand through the
back window of the coach. "Oh my God!" the Baron cried, dropping his
Novalis. "Are you all right?"

"Oh dear." He looked over his shoulder at the broken
windowpane, through which a bitterly cold wind was starting to blow. "I'm
really very sorry. I didn't think—I'm very, very sorry! Oh
dear—I'll pay for it, when we get back."

"Never mind that, are you hurt?" The Baron seized his hand in
both of his gloved ones. "There's blood, my God, you're bleeding! You've
hurt your hand!"

Franz considered swooning melodramatically, just to please the Baron. My
livelihood is ruined, what shall I do? There was a long cut across his knuckles
which would make piano playing a little hazardous for a few weeks, but it
wasn't deep. It bled a lot, though, and looked impressive. The Baron wanted to
find a doctor, but instead Franz used the Baron's flask of brandy to douse a
clean handkerchief, then wrapped his hand up in it. The cut stung horribly.
"It's all right, really," he said to the Baron. "I'm more
worried about freezing to death!"

They did almost freeze to death, but the Baron was very good-natured
about all of it. To take their minds off the cold, they played a few more games
of cards—Franz won every time—and then the Baron plied him with
more questions about his love life. He seemed very disappointed that Franz had
no great love. What was a proper artist without a great love? Of
course—Caroline Eszterhazy must be his great love. After all, Pepi
couldn't be, since she was only a chambermaid. The Baron was very proud of
himself for conceiving of this and embroidered upon it at some length,
oblivious to Franz's denials, until he had transformed him into the brilliant
clairvoyant, genius radiating from his brow, his noble lover clinging to his
arm and doting on his every utterance. His words were filled with wisdom and he
sang like the angels. The gods poured inspiration down upon him but all the Art
that emanated from him was dedicated to the immortal soul of the Countess.

This went on for so long that Franz began to feel almost guilty for
being loveless and ordinary. But then, thinking about it, he realized that he
would certainly rather be himself than the Baron's conception of him. For that
divinely inspired creature may have had a lover, but he didn't have a grand
symphony in his head. And all his suffering, all his wasted effort, all his
isolation, did not take away the gift he had which that imaginary artist did
not: the gift of hearing the patterns and making them fit together, of hearing
the sounds the planets made in their courses. That gift was all his own and not
from the gods at all. It was better than any lover. If the Baron didn't or
couldn't understand that—well, too bad for him. If nobody else understood
that—but somebody did. He thought it might be Beethoven.

11. Winter is a Place

He felt it growing in him like a tumor, during the bright year of 1825
and the dark year of 1826, the year everything went wrong. He felt it growing,
an emotion that he could not name. He could step back from it as if it were not
part of himself and look at it from all sides, but he could not lay hands on
it, tap into it. It was there, though. It came from somewhere in him. It
frightened him.

He walked through the world with this vast darkness in him and pretended
it was not there. He wrote songs and played them; he wrote his finest quartet,
in G major, on a trip to a village outside Vienna with Schober and Schober's
mother. That was a good trip. It was high summer and he thought the sun might
kill whatever this terrible thing was inside him; he thought Schober's easy
laughter might help, but of course it didn't. For awhile, though, he could
pretend things were all right. He wrote some fine songs on that trip as well,
and all of his friends liked them, even Vogl. That made him happy.

His hair had all grown back and the rash was no more than a faint
mottling on his face and hands; in the winter it could easily be mistaken for
an effect produced by the cold air. He still had the headaches and the aches in
his bones. But once in awhile he could pretend that there was nothing wrong.

In August, the various publishers told him that his work was no good.
Too difficult, and he asked too much money for them. One publishing firm
remarked that it was "as yet wholly unacquainted with the mercantile
success of your compositions," a turn of phrase which made him dizzy with
rage. He told himself it would turn out for the best, for all of that. He had
his grand symphony and his new quartet, the best things he had ever done; he
was not all that ill, and his friends were always rallying around him. He would
be all right. And when he composed, he could forget everything. He wrote the
new quartet in ten days, in a fever, the notes coming almost too fast for his
hand to transcribe, and it was beautiful. He had nothing to fear.

But still the darkness sat inside him. It was waiting very patiently. It
would emerge sooner or later and when it did, he didn't know what would happen.
When it did emerge, though, he promised himself that he would listen to what it
had to say, he would not fight it. Perhaps it, too, could become something
beautiful. He thought he was powerful enough to make it into a good thing. He
hoped so.

* * *

It was his misfortune to have been born in the darkest time of year, the
end of January, when it seems as if winter has gone on for an eternity and will
continue for another eternity. It was always hard to be happy at that time of
year, though with the aid of his friends and plenty of drink, he usually
managed all right. This year was a special birthday, since he was turning thirty.
He was in good spirits. The month before, Spaun had held a great Schubertiade
with dancing and performances by Vogl and Franz's talented pianist friend von
Gahy, who played Franz's pieces infinitely better than Franz himself. Franz and
Vogl performed more than thirty songs and then Franz played dance music for
several hours, until he was sweating and red-faced and had to go lie down in
another room for awhile. He had a perverse liking for supplying his friends
with waltzes and gallops: he didn't dance himself but he liked watching
everyone else spinning around to the strains of his music. It made him feel
powerful. So that was fun, and he had a good time at New Year's as well,
especially since he had been ill the year before. And his birthday celebration
finished things off nicely; everyone got drunk as usual and teased him about
turning thirty and wished him well for the year to come.

He was a little preoccupied during that celebration, though he
participated in it with enthusiasm. He had come upon a set of puzzling poems a
few weeks before, which he was setting to music very slowly and laboriously,
without the fluency that he had become accustomed to, and which other people
seemed to find so strange. The poems were by Wilhelm Müller, the same man who had
written "The Beautiful Maid of the Mill," but while those poems were
sweet and melancholy, these poems were dark and bitter, the tale of a man
rejected by his lover and wandering alone in an icy landscape, bereft of joy or
hope. Müller's poems, while not of the highest order, had a peculiarly lucid
quality to them: they presented clear, simple pictures, and the words seemed to
hold music inside them. They wanted to be made into songs. Franz was only
obeying their prompting, but the music was being dragged out of him with great
reluctance and he didn't know why. It was a mystery, to be sure.

He was living alone again, which he didn't like very much. He missed
having someone around to talk to when he was tired of working; living only with
the sounds inside his head grew tiresome after awhile. He got bored with
himself. And his struggle with the Müller poems was getting to be very
tiring—some relief would have been nice. He had begun to think of the
poems as a sort of fortress that he had to storm one way or another. His first
attempts at setting the poems were like the opening volleys in a siege: they
had little effect, but the battle was on, and he was determined to win it.
Little by little, as he forged ahead, the walls began to crumble.

The progress was slow, though. He knew how the songs were supposed to
sound and yet he couldn't find a way to express it. It was extremely
exasperating. He realized at one point that this was how most people confronted
the creation of a work of art, any kind of art—the creative act was a
struggle, the work to be pulled piece by piece from the mind and then
painstakingly assembled. He had never struggled. He had difficulties,
true—sometimes the music would not flow for him no matter how much he
wanted it to—but this was different. It took him a long time to
understand why, but at last he figured it out.

The music for these poems, the only music that would fit, was the music
of his darkness. It was the music of the gray country that he had seen during
his illness. It was the music of despair. And he put it on paper with such
difficulty because it frightened him, because he hated it, because he wanted it
to go away. As he put it down on paper, even the look of the notes on the page,
in his own familiar handwriting, seemed strange and terrible, their power
hardly reined in by the cross-hatching and blots and other scribbles that
marked the painful journey from imagination to reality. He could not imagine
the songs being sung. He thought they would freeze the throat of whoever sang them.

After awhile, though, as the songs rounded themselves out and took on a
quality of closure and completion, they did not frighten him so much. He was
growing used to them. He was growing used to living with the state of mind
which produced them, which sent him into the gray country and back again with
his cargo of despair to be turned into music, and the fact that he was growing
used to despair frightened him much more than the songs themselves.

* * *

Words, and a landscape, and the weather; trees against a white sky, an
icy stream, a gust of wind.

Reimagined as music, Wilhelm Müller's twelve poems sang in twelve
different voices, telling the story of love frozen and shattered on the hard
stone of winter. "Winterreise," "Winter's Journey," they
were called, and the first song set the pace with its walking rhythm that took
the angry and bitter wanderer from the door of his former lover's house. From
there, the wanderer pushed on further and further into the cold and dark, and
the music froze and wept and whirled like the bitter winter winds all through
the dark months of January and February as the songs took shape.

He was himself transformed as he sat there working in the early hours of
the morning by the light of the false dawn. Outwardly he was still the same,
but winter had come into him and frozen his heart, so that he saw the world as
if through a layer of ice, remote and icy and transient, not of his concern.
The world outside his head had never been a place he was very comfortable in,
anyway, and these days he was busy working down in the cold places, down in the
snow and below the ice of frozen rivers.

There was no narrative to these songs, and the landscape they described
was uninhabited. The wanderer staggered through this landscape weighed down with
the burden of his past, his thoughts alternately frozen with anguish or flaming
with sorrow and bitterness. There could be no drama here, no tragedy of the
traditional type, and the music could only turn in on itself as it repeated the
clarion call of misery that echoed throughout the poems, over and over and
over, like the endless call of a carrion bird. Nevertheless, he gave it
movement, opened it up, propelled it forward. The great danger here was of
monotony, he knew that, and he broke up the flat expanse of snow and ice by
painting winter in all its moods, still and storming, freeze and thaw. He knew
winter very well; he had been born there, after all. And the winter of the
heart was a place he knew just as well.

So the wanderer sang his sorrow and sang Franz's sorrow as well, the
terrible music of the gray country, which seemed now a wintry wasteland like
the one through which the wanderer travelled, peopled only by crows and
snarling dogs and bad memories. He walked its borders and listened to the music
that came from there, and brought it back to bring Wilhelm Müller's poems to
life. And as the days went by, slowly, very slowly, under his hands, the songs
took shape, like sculptures carved out of ice. They were beautiful and sad and
very frightening. They held winter inside them and he was very proud of them,
though he could hardly stand to look at them or to hear them in his head. They
were too close to him; he could hear his death in them, in their anguish. The
wanderer's voice was too much like his own.

* * *

At the end of February, when spring seemed almost in sight though there
was still snow on the ground, Franz bent over the twelfth Müller song,
"Loneliness," and wrote a single, triumphant word on the final
manuscript page: FINE. It was over. And when he had bundled up all the songs
together and looked at them there on his desk amidst the other songs he had
written during those two months (it wasn't often that he worked on only one
thing at a time), he drew a deep breath, as if surfacing from a long sojourn
underwater, and began to feel a little life coming back into him. It was high
time for a thaw.

In March, he moved back in with Schober, in a house down the street from
the old Schober family residence. This time he had two rooms to himself, plus a
little closet for his piano and his writing desk, while Schober, with the same
amount of space at his disposal, set himself up again as a Persian prince, with
his carpets and velvet hangings and Oriental engravings. It was good to be with
Schober again. The rhythms of life with him were easy and familiar and the
sound of his voice, though ever-present, was soothing. They fit well together,
as they always had. Franz liked that. He didn't want to be alone anymore.

In the month of March, he did not write anything at all. He was
unaccustomed to sloth and at first couldn't seem to find anything to do with
himself. The weather cleared up a little and he went walking a lot and went out
with Schober to the usual round of coffeehouses and taverns. He had hardly gone
out while working on the "Winter's Journey" songs and his various
friends were glad to see him again. They told him that Schuppanzigh, the
renowned violinist, might perform the Octet in April as part of a subscription
concert. The news made him wonder again about the possibility of putting on a
concert of his own, featuring only his compositions. It was definitely a good
idea. He would have to think about it.

During the second week of March, he heard from his friend Anselm
Hüttenbrenner that Beethoven was extremely ill, possibly dying. It was terrible
news. He could hardly imagine Beethoven dying; it would be like the sun going
out, an unimaginable loss. The man was not even that old—only in his
fifties—and still in his prime as a composer, still three steps ahead of
everyone else. But he was sick, Anselm said, had been sick for months, and the
crisis had come. There was no hope of recovery. It made Franz feel awful.

It didn't help any that Anselm once again began urging him to visit the
master; "He can't hurt you now," Anselm said, "and both of you
would benefit from it, I'm sure of that." He thought about it—not
long, because he knew there wasn't much time—and thought about it for a
few long and wearisome nights. He saw himself by the bedside of his hero, his
face clouded with concern for the great man's illness, and saying—what?
It was the same old thing all over again. What would he say to a deaf, dying
man? Or he could stand there and say nothing, which was just as bad. It wasn't
that he was frightened of seeing death, either; he knew death very
well—he had seen his mother's body and these days felt death doing its
work in his own flesh, laboring away there inside him. No, it wasn't that. It
was his own inability, his weakness in the face of that which was greater than
himself.

At his final refusal to visit Beethoven, Anselm did not laugh or tease
as he usually did. He just looked sad. "If that's what you want," he
said. It was not truly what Franz wanted, but he saw no other alternative.
Though he had finally made the decision, he found that it gave him little
peace.

Snow fell toward the end of March, very unseasonably, though there was
hardly an inch on the ground. It stayed for a few days. He went out walking in
the snow with Schober, who tried to identify friends of theirs by their
footprints outside the house, usually unsuccessfully, since the snowfall was
too light to hold a print for very long. The weather put him in mind of his
winter songs, which he was getting ready to send to a publisher. But snow in
March was not the same, he thought, as snow in January; there was the promise
of spring here, whereas three months before, as in his songs, the only promise
that lay in the snow and gray sky was of despair.

On the night of March 26th, he was woken out of a sound sleep by a flash
of lightning followed by an enormous crash of thunder, so sudden and startling
that he screamed out loud. He hated thunder, and for half an hour afterward he
huddled under his blankets, terrified that a storm would break right overhead.
There was nothing, though, just that one crash. It was very strange.

He discovered later that it was at that moment, as the thunder crashed,
that Beethoven died.

He was asked to march in Beethoven's funeral as a torch bearer, one of
thirty-six, a group that included such luminaries as the great violinist, fat
Schuppanzigh, and Franz's bitter and eternally jealous friend, the poet
Grillparzer, who had also written the funeral oration. The day of the funeral
was a nasty, cold day, though most of the snow had been washed away by rain
that turned the ground dangerously sludgy underfoot. There was an enormous
crowd following the procession, which made Franz feel a little claustrophobic,
but he held up his torch proudly and tried to pretend that his black funeral
clothes fit him properly and he wasn't getting mud on his shoes.

Beethoven would have thought this whole business a foolish charade, he
thought with a certainty that struck him as a bit immodest. Beethoven would
have laughed to see all these people praising him, who thought him a madman
when he was still alive. What good did praise do him now? And all this pomp and
circumstance—rubbish. His music speaks of his greatness far more than
these priests and orators.

He couldn't really grieve, though. He hadn't known Beethoven, after all,
except through his music, and of course, that only gave a partial picture of a
man. One doesn't write with one's whole soul, only with the part that yearns
toward heaven and the eternal. That's how horrible people can create wonderful
music—or poetry, or novels, or paintings—because they only create
with that one part of them, the good part. (He had just thought of this theory
now, as his arm began to get sore from holding up the torch and the funeral
procession wound on toward the cemetery.) And that applied to Beethoven as
well. He had heard tell from Anselm and others that Beethoven could be cruel,
vicious, and uncouth, however beautiful his music might be. Franz had never
encountered that ugly side. It was only his beauty that had been lost and Franz
grieved for that, but not for the whole man.

A little later, as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, Franz
had another thought. It made him feel guilty at first, but it grew on him.
Beethoven was dead. The strain of trying to live up to him was gone. "Who
can do anything after Beethoven?" he had asked Spaun once, but that didn't
matter anymore. He was free. It was a terrible way of gaining his freedom, but
still, there it was. And all of a sudden, he saw opportunities opening up, a
world of music making itself apparent. He could do anything he wanted now. The
only question now was not whether he could live up to the master, but whether
he could take advantage of his new freedom. He intended to find out as soon as
possible.

12. The Lark Ascending

November,
1828

They had to help him into the sitting room, Ferdinand at one arm and his
half-sister Josefa at the other. The quartet was setting up, tuning and
arranging their music. His heart beat a little faster as he heard Holz, the
second violinist and Beethoven's factotum, playing the sprightly little tune
from the Presto movement by way of practice. It was really very kind of Holz to
arrange all of this. Franz was sure it would make him feel better, more than any
earthly medicine. He had wanted to hear Beethoven’s C- sharp minor quartet for
months, ever since it was published. Surely it would help him.

Once they got him in an armchair, Josefa made a big fuss about making
sure his pillows were arranged and the blanket tucked properly around his legs.
"Leave off, girl," said Ferdinand, laughing, "he'll let you know
if something's wrong."

"He won't, that's the whole problem." Josefa gazed at him
sternly. "Now, I don't care what quartet this is or who wrote it, but if you're
feeling bad, you tell me right away, do you hear me?"

"Yes, miss," he said meekly, cowed by her already remarkable
resemblance to their father. The Schubert schoolmastering ability seemed to
have skipped over him and his brothers and landed squarely on her. And only
thirteen, too.

"Are you ready? Is everyone ready?" Holz called out. He was a
handsome, suave sort of person, a little oily, maybe, but to Franz he possessed
a radiance conferred by his close friendship with the great master, God rest
his poor soul. But enough: they were tuning now. He wished he felt better. He
was terribly tired and feverish; his eyes felt hot and he hadn't eaten for a
week. He couldn't even take water or tea, except a little at a time. The doctor
had bled him and blistered him to draw off the fever; his back hurt like a bad
sunburn, and it was hard to sit back on the pillows Josefa had arranged for
him. It wasn't his old trouble that was making him ill, either; he thought he
might have been poisoned, he had eaten some bad fish a couple of weeks ago and
you never knew if bad food might make you sick, fish in particular. He could
still taste it in his mouth, especially when he was thirsty.

Everyone was ready. Anna, Ferdinand's wife, came in with tea for
everyone, and Therese, Franz's niece, who had been fussing with something in
the bedroom, came rushing in and sat next to Franz, so that he had her on one
side and Josefa on the other, his royal guard of thirteen-year-old girls. Anna
had made special tea for him, with lemons in it. The sour stuff was the only
thing that didn't make him feel nauseated. The steam warmed his face as he
settled back to listen.

The quartet poised their bows: a phalanx of warriors, they seemed to be,
with their swords at the ready. He was struck again by the physical beauty of
music-making—the elegant coordinated movements, the rich brilliant colors
of the instruments, the dexterity of the players. Then, at a nod from the first
violinist, they began to play, and he forgot all about earthly things and went
straight to heaven.

There was nothing else like this quartet. It sounded as if it had flown
in from another planet, with its seven continuous movements and rich fugal
structure and the strangest modulations imaginable. It was the music of the
future—the very distant, unknown future, where men no longer thought the
way men today did. What the master had been thinking when he wrote this, God
only knew; Franz had hardly been able to believe it when he saw the published
score. People said this quartet and the others Beethoven had written shortly
before his death were "difficult," the inward-turned work of a deaf
man who was also possibly deranged. Hard to understand, certainly—people
would not begin to understand Beethoven for many years—but deranged,
hardly. Beethoven knew exactly what he was doing, odd as that seemed.

By the last movement of the quartet he had terrible chills. Though he
said nothing, not wanting to break the spell of the music, Josefa saw him
trembling and, as she got up to fetch another blanket, gave him a very hard
pinch on his upper arm. Even through his dressing gown it hurt. But the music
was so marvelous that he didn't care. At the final chord, he lay back in his
chair, the half-empty cup of tea forgotten in his lap, and thought he would
just about die from the beauty of it. "Oh, that was wonderful. That was
stupendous! Thank you so much!"

"It was our pleasure," said Holz, whose name meant
"wood," and who liked to tell people about how Beethoven had referred
to him as "a chip of our Redeemer's cross." That he was: he had
brought this splendor to Franz's sickbed. The angels would reward him.

"You'd better get back to bed, brother," said Ferdinand.

"He's getting overexcited," said Anna.

"I am not overexcited. Could you—would it be too much for you
to play some of it again? Would that be all right? Just the variations movement
-"

Holz laughed. "Go back to bed, Schubert."

"If you don't get hold of yourself," Ferdinand told him
severely as he and Anna helped him back to his bedroom, "we might have to
call the doctor again."

"All I wanted -" His voice took on a petulant whine which he
hadn't really intended.

"Get into bed, little brother!"

He was still trembling. Josefa came in and smothered him with woolens,
but it didn't help much. He didn't care, anyway. She stood over him, her arms
folded. She wore a dress of dark stuff with a white collar that made her look
like a nun or a schoolmarm. She had hair the same color as his own, in curls
around her face, and the Schubert dimpled chin. "Well," she said,
"I'd ask you if you wanted anything but I know you wouldn't tell me."
She bent over him and put a hand on his forehead. "You're on fire. How
could you be cold if you're burning up?"

"Ask a doctor. I'm freezing."

"This is all the blankets we have."

"I'll freeze, then."

"You'll have to." She sat on the edge of his bed and continued
to gaze at him steadily.

"Did you like the quartet, Josefa?"

"I didn't really understand it. It was too strange for me. I like
your things better—I wish I could hear more of your songs, I like
those."

"When I'm better, I'll sing some of them for you. But you mustn't
prefer me to Beethoven. That would be wrong. . ."

"I like what I like. You should rest."

"You're right. . ." He sighed. He didn't want to sleep. But he
was very tired. Maybe listening to that wonderful music hadn't been so good for
him after all—like eating rich food when his belly was in such a state
(and at the thought of rich food, his stomach turned).

"Don't you think you ought to take your glasses off?" Josefa
asked.

"I like to wear them when I'm sleeping so I don't need to look for
them when I wake up."

"Don't you roll over on them?"

"I sleep on my back."

"Well, just in case -" He was too weak to stop her snatching
his eyesight away from him and the world degenerated into blurs. Now there was
nothing to look at. Then Ferdinand called her and she went away, so he couldn't
get them back, and there was nothing to do but stare at the ceiling.

That quartet. . . pushing music beyond the boundary, into a new space.
Beethoven was always doing that. The way poets played with language, giving it
new meaning, new potential, more than marks on paper but patterns in time.
Music could hold much more than anyone suspected. Not just sounds. Not just
pretty things. Not just tunes. He was too in love with tunes. He was starting
to free himself. For instance, the quintet. Tunes, yes, but integrated into a
greater whole, pushing beyond the boundaries, speaking words unspoken. . . The
dark shadows of the Heine songs with their dissonances. "Du Doppelgänger,
du bleiche Geselle. . . " And his winter's journey. He could frighten
people, the way Beethoven frightened people. Nothing made him feel better. For
beauty was frightening sometimes.

There was a long way to go for him. His music went before him, hidden
subtleties showing him the way. As soon as he was feeling better. . . And he
cursed his failing body that held him here, as Beethoven must have cursed his
world of silence. In a better place, they would both find what they wanted. He
was almost sure of that now.

He rolled over on his side and went to sleep.

* * *

The next day he was still bored. In the morning, with Ferdinand's help,
he tottered to his writing desk and finished his corrections for the galley
proofs for the second volume of "Winter's Journey." Even the sight of
the last song on paper made him feel strange and terrified. He did not feel as
if the songs were a part of him any more. He had cut off that part of himself,
like a frozen limb, and put it away. Wonderful and horrible they were, still,
though they were no longer his, and still he could feel pride in them. All down
the years people would sing these songs and feel winter in their hearts, down
the years, down the decades, the fear and horror and desolation, eternal
winter.

He thought he might like to go back to bed soon, but he still felt well
enough to write to Schober in Dresden and ask him for some books. He had read
everything he had brought with him. He didn't know whether Schober would
comply, scatter-brained creature that he was, but there was always a chance.
Ferdinand would send it for him. What a good fellow he was, taking care of him
like this. He didn't deserve it.

He did not want to call Ferdinand to help him back to bed. Feebly he
rose and, leaning against the wall for support, made his way to the chamber
pot—there was almost nothing to piss, he had hardly drunk anything for
eleven days—and then, progressing slowly around the perimeter of his
little room, the floor cold against his fever-hot feet, came to his bed again
and collapsed, worn out by that tiny effort. His pulse beat hard in his temple
and he was out of breath. Pathetic. He laughed at his own weakness and Josefa
came in to find him there laughing and smiled herself. "You're feeling better,
then?

"No, worse."

"What a silly person you are. Here, let me tuck in your
blankets."

Oh, silly me, silly Franz and his silly songs. He grinned stupidly as
Josefa tucked him in. She looked like him, she really did. His little mother,
his little daughter, with his stolid sullen look sitting awkwardly on her
woman-child's face. He should have had a daughter. Or a son. His works were his
children. But they didn't have curly hair or a dimpled chin or that stern
schoolmaster's look she gave him now as she went away and left him alone in his
bed with no mooring, like a mariner riding the sea of his sickness.

She had not taken his glasses away this time. He pushed them up on his
forehead and slept.

* * *

He could not get out of bed anymore. When he tried, with Ferdinand at
one elbow and Anna or Josefa at the other, his knees buckled and it was all
they could do to get him back to bed. Now his weakness did not seem so funny.
He was angry, and then very bored.

He marked the time by taking the medicine Dr. Rinna had prescribed at
four hour intervals; he hung his watch on the bedpost to keep track. He
memorized all the cracks in the ceiling. He built up towering, teetering
edifices of music, impossible to play, with finger-breaking thirty-second note
runs and high F's and G's that not even the doughtiest soprano could have sung
without injuring her voice box permanently. Then he broke it all down into long
languorous melodies that died away into silence, only to return with
frightening dissonances and violent modulations that echoed the music of the
"Winter's Journey" and the Heine songs.

When he thought like this for too long, he got tired. He never knew
thinking could make you tired. All he was doing was staring at the ceiling.
Then Josefa broke his train of thought with a glass of water. It was after
supper and she smelled a little of garlic, which made him feel sick, and when
he tried the water he threw up again right afterward. Josefa clucked her tongue
as if he were responsible and went away.

He slept and woke and slept again. Various dreams came to him in
different shapes. The doctors came—not Dr. Rinna, who was ill himself,
but Dr. Vering, a friend of Dr. Rinna's and a specialist in his old trouble,
and a Dr. Wisgrill, whom Franz did not know. They poked and prodded and bled
him again. They said he had Bauchtyphus, a fever in his stomach. Only time
would tell. Dr. Vering told him privately, when Ferdinand and Josefa were out
of the room, that the old trouble had weakened his body. "You have not
been taking good care of yourself—have you been drinking much? Not
getting enough sleep?"

"I do what I have to do," he said, and Dr. Vering frowned, and
left him.

Josefa came in then with her usual question: was there anything she
could do for him? "Stay and talk to me," he said.

She touched his hot cheek. "You should rest."

"I'm bored. What's it like outside? I wish I could go
outside."

"Don't worry about it, it's nasty out. It was raining today.
There's been no sun for weeks. It's waiting for you to get better."

"It might have to wait awhile."

"Maybe." She shrugged diffidently with one shoulder, looking
out the window, and he recognized the half-shrug as one of his own gestures.
How strange to see himself in the body of a girl. He had not seen it in her as
she was growing up, though he hadn't seen her much since she was a baby.

* * *

His dreams were a whirling hodgepodge of unconnected images: a circus
filled with horrible animals, a dwarf playing a flute, a black bird in a tree
laden with poisonous fruit. He blundered through them, aware all the while that
the bed was hot from the fire in his body, and his mouth was dry, and he
thought he was going to die, and finally he clawed his way up through the
layers of fever to daylight.

Despite the cool breeze wafting in through the opened window he was
sweating profusely, moisture trickling off his forehead to soak into the
pillow. He moaned and fireworks went off behind his eyeballs. The world began
to vibrate, moving back and forth at a sickening rate. He shut his eyes but the
red-brown darkness behind his lids was oscillating in the same mad rhythm.
"Josefa!" he called out in a cracking voice. "Ferdinand -"

A blur entered the room. The world, abashed, gave one last feeble pulse
before subsiding. The blur approached the bedside and resolved into his
brother, his face creased with ill-disguised worry. "How are you feeling,
Franz?"

"Terrible."

"Do you want something to drink?"

Despite himself, he smiled a little, his dry lips cracking. "Do you
want me to throw up on you?"

Ferdinand laughed. "You couldn't be feeling that bad."

"I am, though."

"Should we call the doctor again?"

"No, no. . ."

"Well, all right. But seriously, brother, you look parched. Are you
sure you don't want anything to drink?"

He pondered the possibilities. "Do you still have that wine you
bought last week? The really sour stuff?"

"Of course. I'll go get you some."

He left, and then Anna came with a wet cloth to put on his head. She was
a good person, round and friendly-looking. He would have liked to marry someone
like that. The cloth was more lukewarm than cold, but it felt good. She went
away and Ferdinand came back in (they can't exist in the same room together,
Franz thought inanely, thinking about doppelgängers or some such phenomenon).
The wine had turned and was now delightfully sour and cold, or at least cool.
He sat up on the pillows and drank. His hands were trembling, he noticed.

"You always liked sour things," said Ferdinand. "Remember
when you fought Karl because he took your lemon sweets?"

"He pounded me so hard I was sore for a week."

"It was brave of you to fight, though. He was a lot bigger than
you."

"I'll risk my life for lemon sweets. "

"That's noble of you. But I think you'd better rest now. Don't
you?"

"All right, all right. . ."

Ferdinand left with the cup, and he got himself back into a lying
position. He felt better, though there was a spot just between his eyebrows
which burned terribly, as if someone had stuck a brand there. Slowly the spot
spread. It's the mark of Cain, he thought. It hasn't worked very well, though,
has it?

God, I hate being sick.

Looking up at the ceiling, he began to weave again some music that
seemed to carry in it the message of the Beethoven quartet. He let it circle
and intertwine, turned it over on its back to see what it would do, changed
tonalities, changed tempos. Thought music. He wondered what sounds the little
particles in his brain made as they flew around in his skull. What about the
sound of his blood, the sound of his heart, or his bones? Body music!

He considered the situation very deeply and came to the conclusion that
the Trio of the string quintet pointed the way. A weather cock. (The deceiving
weathervane of the winter's journey—in this house lives a faithful
lover!) The whole quintet was alive. It was knit together with sinew and bone
and skin and it breathed and moved and lived. It was healthier than he was.

He was getting sleepy. O great darkness, heal me.

If he could only. . . if he could only get out of this bloody bed. . .

Too late. He was asleep.

He had a strange dream. It was a dream about silence. He dreamed that
silence came in buckets from a well, and people would drink it, and from then
on they were filled with silence. He did not want to drink from the well but
when he did he found the taste was sweet. Yet he could not speak, nor could he
hear. It was as if he had a mask over his face, and the world became small and
gray and altogether flooded with silence which he waded through, thick as jelly
and foul-smelling. He found himself wondering whether he had ever smelled
something in a dream and then he knew he was dreaming. He decided to grow wings
and fly away from all the silence, and he grew a splendid pair and flew off but
found that the sky was made of tarnished metal, with a tarnished bronze sun in
the middle of it.

"Franz?"

"He's asleep."

"He looks terrible."

"Well, he's been sick for weeks, poor fellow."

"Franz, wake up, it's me, Bauernfeld, and Spaun is here too."

"Uncle Franz, your friends are here."

He couldn't get through the sky and battered his wings against it like a
bird battering against a window and finally shouted so loudly that the sky
shattered and he went up into the beyond, which was very cold and filled with
stars and echoing voices, except that every voice was a star and vice versa. He
decided to stay there.

"Franz, it's Spaun—maybe we should leave him alone?"

"It's all right." His voice seemed disembodied from him; it
seemed to be emanating from somewhere to his left. A small cold hand alighted
on his forehead. "You're feeling better," said the voice of his
niece.

"I am feeling better," he repeated, and opened his eyes.

They looked so worried about him. Poor Spaun—what a concerned look
he had, like that time in the Seminary when Franz had confessed how lonely he
was and Spaun tried to comfort him. Bauernfeld was gnawing on his knuckles.
Therese hovered around, asking if Franz wanted anything and when he said no,
she left, with a distinct air of relief. She was one of those people who were
frightened by sickness and invalids. She didn't like to be in Franz's room if
she could help it.

"So, how do you feel, Bertl?" Bauernfeld asked.

"Oh, not too bad. . . only, I can't get out of bed, and sometimes
it feels like my head is on fire."

"That sounds pretty bad to me," said Spaun.

"Oh, I'll be all right. . . Look, tell me how everyone's
doing—I'm a little out of touch. And Bauernfeld, we have to talk about
the opera."

They stayed for an hour or so, talking. He had difficulty seeing them as
anything but flattened paper dolls, even with his glasses on, but that only
bothered him a little. He and Bauernfeld discussed their opera at
length—the libretto had not passed the censor but Bauernfeld wanted him
to continue anyway, though Franz thought it a waste of time. Then, passing from
music to gossip, he learned of the various follies of Schwind (still infatuated
with his honey-girl) and of Schober (in Dresden avoiding Franz, perhaps afraid
of contamination). Hearing about the outside world made him feel a little more
human, though he found now that he had difficulty thinking about any place
beyond these walls, as if his mind had fallen in on itself under the weight of
his sickness.

"Just you wait," he said, as his friends were getting ready to
leave. "I've got some marvelous things in my head—all sorts of new
harmonies and things. I'm finding out new things every day. You'll be hearing
from me soon—I've got all sorts of new things to say."

"Whatever you have to say," said Spaun, "we'll
listen." He smiled.

"Go with God, Bertl," said Bauernfeld.

Then they were gone, and after awhile he forgot they had ever been
there.

It was supper time. Josefa came in to try him on a bit of soup, but he
threw it up again at once. "I seem to be throwing up on you a lot
lately," he told her apologetically.

"You're very tidy about it," she said, peering into the basin
for some reason. "You always warn me first."

"Well, it's the polite thing to do."

She thought that was funny. He hadn't intended it to be funny. Oh, well.
. . She left, with the basin, and he turned over on his side so he could look
at the wall instead of the ceiling for awhile. He did not think about anything.
He was feeling feverish again. His head hurt and his stomach had squeezed into
a tiny knot. He tried to think about it but his thoughts had all come to
pieces. He tried to find a little music but that too was coming apart.

What was the matter with him? A few minutes ago he was fine.

He closed his eyes.

He was not asleep. He was not awake. He did not dream but felt his
sickness rising in him like a tide, drowning him, swift and strong like his
river in Hungary, and underneath the surface he kicked and fought and woke -

Terror. Absolute overwhelming fear, a great pain in his head and in his
guts and in his whole body and there was something in the room that was going
to kill him, it had climbed in the window it was hiding under the bed it
was—oh God oh God oh God oh Jesus and all the saints my blessed St.
Francis help me in this my hour of need -

Hands were holding him down in the bed. He struggled and thrashed and
screamed. The sound of his own voice was shocking to him—it was so loud!
"Oh, for God's sake get hold of yourself, you stupid man!" said
Josefa from somewhere in the room, and as if she had a witch's power, the fear
lessened and he lay still.

"Franz, Franz, listen to me, you mustn't get out of bed." It
was Ferdinand speaking in an urgent whisper. "The doctors are trying to
make you well, but you mustn't get up. I can get you something if you like.
What would you like?"

"I don't know. Nothing."

"Are you thirsty?"

"No. No, go away. Leave me alone. I'm sick." He dug the heels
of his hands into his eye-sockets and saw sparks. Something inside his head
seemed to snap with an audible click; the feeling was unnerving. Now his mouth
was parched. He must have water. "Ferdinand," he whispered.

But Ferdinand was gone. The room was empty. What happened?

He was all empty, the fever had burned him dry. He had the patterns
still, though. Every word with its own music. Poetry and music meet and mingle
in his hands, he holds them both in his power. Franz Schubert, famous composer
of Vienna. Beethoven shaking his fist at the thunder. His is the power and the
glory and the world everlasting. Listen to the Adagio of his string quintet:
every drowsy summer's day, the heat and silence and thunder on the horizon. Is
he awake or asleep?

What's happening to me?

O for a muse of fire. Who said that? I am the muse of fire. I am on
fire. The son of the muses, where will he have rest? Muse is the root word of
music; there are nine muses, three times three, maiden mother crone, there are
nine musics too, but I can't remember them, only mine. Nine mines. And O, I
cannot believe that I have lost my beloved!

Though Schober's lips tasted
like Tokay—and Therese, poor ugly girl -

He rolled his head back and forth, imagining his brain to be a liquid
that sloshed noisily inside his skull, and began to sing softly. "Meine
Ruh' ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer..."

"Poor dear," somebody murmured. He didn't recognize the voice,
a woman's. The woman herself was only a vague blur at the foot of his bed.
"Hush, now, Liebchen, you'll only wear yourself out."

"Who are you?"

"Your brother hired me to take care of you. No, no, you mustn't try
to get up, Liebchen, you'll only make it worse. Lie still."

"I want Josefa. Where's my sister?"

"She's worn out from taking care of you, Liebchen."

"Am I that much trouble? I should die, then, and save her the
effort."

"Don't be silly, Liebchen. You're not going to die."

"How do you know? There's nothing inside me."

"Of course there is. You have bones and a belly and a brain and a
heart, like the rest of us. Maybe better than the rest of us—your brother
says you are a very great composer. So sleep and get well and make more songs
for us to listen to. I would like to hear more of your songs. Sleep, Liebchen.
I won't let anything happen to you."

"Thank you." He closed his eyes. The bed rocked beneath him.

Time folded up like a fan.

An unfamiliar room by daylight. They had moved him. This bed was not
his; that chair over there was not his. The smell of the place was all wrong.
And the light was so terribly bright, and the air so cold! Where was he? He was
scared. He put his hands over his eyes and hoped that when he took them away he
would be back in his own room, but nothing happened. He was still in the same
place, and a brilliant golden light was coming in through the windows. He
thought he might know where he was, but he wasn't ready for that yet, the
bright place, the golden place. He wasn't ready to die. But he had no idea of
where else he might be.

"Please," he said, "take me back to my room. Please, I
don't want to be here. Somebody please help me."

The light darkened all of a sudden and he was even more frightened: what
had he done? He had been buried, he was being punished now for his
protestations. "Oh no, oh no, I only want to go back to my room, please.
Please don't leave me underground. I don't want to be underground. Oh, please,
oh please -"

"It's all right. You're in your room, Liebchen. Your brother is
here, can you see him?"

But he was starting to cry. He had seen the golden place and Beethoven
was not there. And now he was underground. "Where is he, where is
Beethoven? Oh, don't bury me, don't leave me here. . ."

"See, your brother has brought the priest. Can you see the priest?
Open your eyes."

A voice chanted quietly, a low, sing-song voice, soft and monotonous. He
lay still, listening to it. He knew the words. Spoken to his mother, spoken
over babies choking and convulsing, the oil, the prayer: extreme unction, the
sacrament for the dying.

There was something cold on his forehead and somebody was pulling away
the covers. He stirred and batted weakly at the invader. The cold touch was
repeated on the soles of his feet—he jerked them away—and on his
hands. Smudges resolved themselves into vaguely human forms and the darkness
fell away. It was the priest chanting, a slight, elderly man with thinning gray
hair and a sharp face. He had the bottle of sacramental oil in one hand and his
prayer book in the other.

"Franz Peter Schubert, can you hear me?" the priest said.

"Yes."

"Have you any sins to confess?"

There were too many to name. He turned his face away and heard the
priest sigh in exasperation, but he didn't care, he had returned underground,
back to the hole in the ground, and the blankets were his shroud, and his cold
and clammy skin bore witness to his death.

He was attached to himself only tenuously, dimly aware of himself in the
bed, his body still, the blankets over him and the pillow under his head, but
he swam in the river in Hungary, his breath silver and shining and the sun
dancing overhead.

He took hold of the sun and it burned in his hands. His stolen fire. He
stepped out of himself, he was great and shining, and his hands full of flame,
he held it up to the sky and it was light and music together, dancing, shining,
and it came from him, and scattered radiance everywhere.

The patterns of sound, the music, his life was music, all of it was only
a pattern, a phrase in the song that God was singing. He had only tried to
write down a little of that song, find a few of the patterns that made up Eternity.

He is small, though the fire lives in him; he speaks the words that bind
him to the universe.

And he has wandered far from himself, though the thread is there that
holds him back. He follows it back and comes into his body again, to feel his
lungs expand and contract, the slow pulsing of his heart, the small involuntary
movements of his limbs. How quiet it is here in his body; this tiny music that
it makes is nothing at all.

His eyes are shut tight but his lids are transparent: he can see
everything. His brother sits by his bed, and his half-sister; they are silent.
The light behind the window shades is golden. It's time, he thinks. Just about
time. It's a shame, he did want to stay longer. He'd had some good times along
the way. Schober's sweet kiss and his secret river and oh, his music, the sun
and moon and stars and the sky that holds them aloft, what gave his life
meaning and coherence, what truly gave him joy.

and his bonds to his body loosen

and he gets ready, it's hard to get ready but he does his best

and last of all, he turns on his side, and puts his hand to the wall.
its cool solidity anchors him for a moment, as he stands on the threshold.
"here is my end," he says.

he crosses the threshold then: the thread that ties him to this place snaps,
and the last sound he hears is of his brother weeping.

that too is music

for music is only the patterns of sound in time

Afterword

Natalie Jane Jacobs was a gifted writer from a very early age. She once
confessed a special affinity with Franz Schubert. When she was eleven, she
wrote a story about the composer as a young child trying myopically—she
too was very nearsighted—to interact with his family and surroundings.
Like him, although confident of her creative gifts, she was unsure of herself
and hesitant to bring her writing to a wider audience. Although writing was
always very important to her, she did not intend it to be a career. Instead,
she completed several years of midwifery training and planned to practice it.

Natalie died suddenly of viral myocarditis in 2008 at age 35. After her
death we gave her computer to a longtime friend in Portland, OR where Natalie
had moved from her native Ann Arbor, MI. A short time later, her friend told us
of a body of writing she had discovered on its hard disk. To our great
surprise, Natalie had left the manuscripts of several short stories, a novella
set in contemporary England, and a full-length historical novel about Schubert.

Natalie usually wrote about what she knew; she had spent her junior year
abroad in England and drew from her experiences to write her novella. Later,
after her move to Portland, she became deeply involved in alt-country and other
music, performing, composing, and attending and reviewing concerts; this
informed her most recent story, “Festival,” about a young Portland musician.
But the creation of the present manuscript, creative nonfiction about the life
of Franz Schubert, is a mystery. Natalie was not especially interested in
classical music and she had never been to Vienna. But anyone reading the work
would have trouble believing this. She had a strong scholarly bent, so it is
not quite as surprising how thoroughly she researched the history and the music
scene of Schubert’s time. Years ago she had sent us two stories about Schubert
which she intended as chapters in a longer narrative. But it came as a surprise
to us that she would leave a finished novel, nor do we know when she completed
it; we suspect that she had worked on it over many years. She hadn’t given it a
title, so we added one posthumously. “When Your Song Breaks the Silence” is a
line from one of Schubert’s lieder, “The Solitary” (“Der Einsame,” Op. 41, D.
800).

Like most of Schubert’s music, Natalie’s writing was unpublished during
her lifetime. (“An die Freude,” a chapter from the novel, appeared in the
December 2010 issue of Battered Suitcase magazine.) Tragically, Natalie and
Schubert were similar in one more way: both died of catastrophic illness in
their early 30’s, only four years apart in age.

This novel was clearly dear to Natalie. We hope she would have been
pleased to see how, like the infants she delivered as a midwife-in-training,
her own creation has been brought into the world, and that it will serve as her
legacy for all to share.

Judith, Stanley, and Jennifer Jacobs

Ann
Arbor, MI and El Cerrito, CA

2012