Longing by J. D. Landis

Author:J. D. Landis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504007399
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Part Three

Distant Beloved

Dresden

FEBRUARY 15, 1836

I love you unspeakably.

Robert Schumann

“Give me his letters. Give me all his letters.”

How strange, she thought, that in the middle of her father’s latest tirade against Robert, and against what he imagined she and Robert had done in his absence (she nearly smiled at remembering what they had done), he should ask for Robert’s letters. Unknown to her father, a letter had arrived this very day. It had been written in the coach station at Zwickau, where Robert had gone to pay respects at his mother’s grave. As the snow and sleet came down, and Robert was trapped by the closed roads while he waited for the Leipzig express, he was, in his impatient misery, given the opportunity to write of his love for her. She recalled that night and how she had stood at the little window in this same room on the third floor of the Reissigers’ house and watched the snow swirl aloft like dancers’ arms and listened to the frozen rain tap out a message she imagined was from him. It would not be the first time they had communicated through the air.

But what joy it had been to receive this palpable evidence of their connection and to learn he was indeed writing to her at the very hour she had been at her window looking for his image in the darkness and listening for the sound of his fingers on her skin.

She hid this new letter beneath her even as she refused to take from the desk between them those other letters from Robert, which her father knew were all the letters and little notes Robert had ever sent or slipped to her. She traveled with them always, to have his disembodied voice with her, addressing her from childhood until now, his first letter since he had embodied her wholly, and she him, in such a way as she had never imagined in all her imaginings.

As her father continued to hold out his hand for the letters, he said, “He’s not right for you. You may think he’s right for you. Corruption is a magnet that attracts the corruptible. You’re like your mother in that—drawn to the flesh. But you have art far beyond what she had, and I had thought—mistakenly, I learn—that it would keep you from such wantonness. You disgrace me with your deception and behavior. But most of all, you disgrace yourself. He is not right for you. He drinks too much. He suffers from illnesses and an imagination of illness that’s worse than illness itself. He has, by his own hand, crippled his hand and thereby taken from himself his one best chance to earn a living. Is this the act of a sane human being? Or does he suppose he can live on the income from those dissonant, nerve-wracked pieces he composes, that no one in the world but you and I appreciate or understand? His mind is as weak as his will is irresolute. He will betray you with other women with no more thought than a man eating fowl after fish.

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