“Did you ask him to explain the difference?”
“Of course, Hermann. And he said in that flat know-it-all way of his that there is an entirely different phenomenon underlying Robert Schumann's case. ‘You must accept my expert judgment in the matter,’ Möbius said. And with that he slammed his notebook closed, wrote out the prescription and handed it to me with an unmistakable air of finality.”
“Did you attempt to question what he meant by ‘an entirely different phenomenon’?”
Helena shifted a bit closer to me. “Give me your hand, Hermann.”
Puzzled, I said, “What's that got to do with-”
“Just give me your hand,” she insisted. Obediently, I placed my right hand in hers. “There, you see what I mean?”
I began to understand. Her hand was warm, soft and smooth almost beyond belief, and somehow she managed to make it tremble ever so slightly, so that a kind of subtle but unstoppable energy seemed to be flowing from her body into mine. “You see,” Helena said, not taking her eyes from mine, “this is how I took Möbius's hand as I rose to leave. And while I was doing so, I asked if he could explain to a poor unscientific person like me what he meant…about the phenomenon thing.”
“And his explanation was?”
She paused, trying to recall Möbius's precise words. “Something about…how an event, no matter how impossible it seems, can become probable if the cause can be traced with sufficient clarity. He said it's a theory he's been working on for a number of years. It's what he calls ‘the philosophy of science’.”
I gave Helena a skeptical look. “He told you this while you were holding his hand?”
“This, and more,” she said, still holding my hand. “Truth is, I hadn't the foggiest idea what Möbius was talking about, so I asked him to put it in terms that I, a mere cellist, could try to comprehend. I was so humble! And Möbius loves that. Female humility seems to arouse some men, doesn't it?”
I withdrew my hand. “I wouldn't know,” I said. “Can we please stick to the topic…I mean Möbius's so-called philosophy of science?”
“Perhaps Möbius's explanation will help-the one he offered when I said I didn't quite comprehend. He said,” again Helena paused to recollect, “he said, if people fear a certain possibility long enough and intensely enough, the possibility they fear will become a probability. In other words, the event they're terrified of will probably occur. It sounds like absolute nonsense to me, Hermann.”
With a start, I rose from the divan and stepped quickly to my desk. I took a fresh sheet of stationery from the drawer, dipped my pen into the inkwell and was poised to write. To Helena, I said, “Will you repeat- slowly, please-the example Möbius gave.”
Helena looked at me as though I was losing my senses. “Hermann, you're not taking this stuff seriously!”
“Please,” I said firmly, “tell me again slowly, in his exact words.”
She repeated what Möbius had told her, word for word, giving me time to get it all down on paper in large easily readable letters. I then propped up the piece of stationery against a pile of books, read it and re-read it. I could not take my eyes from it. I said the words aloud: “If people fear a certain possibility long enough and intensely enough, the possibility they fear will become a probability. The event they're terrified of will probably occur.”
“Tell me the truth, Hermann,” Helena said, “is the world about to come to an end? Should I be making my peace with God?”
“On the contrary,” I replied, my gaze still fixed on what I'd just written. “Nothing is coming to an end. In fact, the very opposite is happening!”
Chapter Twenty
My encounter with Professor Wieck and Willy Hupfer, though brief, struck me as bizarre, indeed so bizarre that I felt compelled to relate the scene to Schumann while the details were still fresh in my memory. I hoped that, though the Maestro might find the apparent acquaintanceship of these two disturbing, he might shed some light on it that would reinforce my newfound suspicions. Next morning, I decided to pay Schumann a visit. I expected that he and his wife would have returned from their “escape” to Bad Grünwald, and it turned out that I was right. What I did not expect, however, was to find that the Maestro was already fully (even rather nattily) dressed for an outing and emerging from the Schumann residence, a stout walking stick firmly in hand.
“Good morning, Preiss,” he called out as I alighted from my cab. “What a pleasant coincidence!” He seemed in unusually high spirits.
“Coincidence?”
“Yes. You're just in time to join me for a walk. A wonderful morning, eh?” With his walking stick he pointed to a cloudless sky. “Haven't seen sunshine like this for days. We must take advantage of it. Exercise, my friend: good for a man's body, mind and soul!”
I am a night person, and the prospect of physical exercise, even at mid-morning, was less than appealing. “Thank you, Maestro,” I said, “but the only time I take a walk at this hour of the day is when duty absolute requires it.”
“Then consider it your absolute duty to accompany me,” he countered with a cheerfulness I had never before witnessed in him.
“Very well,” I said, making no secret of my reluctance. “Once around the block then.”
“Nonsense!” he said, laughing. “I'm off on my favourite route. It'll do you a world of good on a brilliant day like today, Preiss. In fact, it'll do us both a world of good.” I began to protest, but he wouldn't hear of it. “Whither I go, there also goest thou!” he said with mock severity.
“It sounds as though you're off to St. Lambertus,” I said, referring to the famous thirteenth century church not too distant. ‘You're not going to try to make a religious man out of me, are you?’
“No indeed, Preiss. The very opposite. We're heading for the real heart of Düsseldorf, my friend.” I knew he meant Königsallee. Where else?
“I'm always up for a visit to Königsallee,” I said, though such a visit wasn't remotely on my agenda at the moment.
“I enjoy going there too,” Schumann said, as we headed west toward Königsallee, a distance of about three city blocks from Bilkerstrasse. “I call it ‘The Poor Man's Champs Elysées’…about the only place we have in the whole damn country that reminds me of Paris.”
I'd never been to Paris but had read enough to understand what he meant.
So much of Düsseldorf is marinated in the past. Many of its parish churches and cathedrals date back to the 1600s and even earlier. The Old Town takes up a square kilometre on the banks of the Rhine. Within its borders, one can hear history in every creak of its rusted hinges, every groan of its ancient floorboards, every clatter of a wooden wheel rim on its rough cobblestone lanes. I can look toward the Rhine from any street in the Old Town and have no difficulty imagining myself to be a fifteenth century farmer toting a burlap sack of onions over my hunched back to market, or a potter pulling a cart heavily laden with my latest earthenware for sale there, or a tattered follower of Martin Luther crying aloud from some makeshift street corner pulpit to passersby to turn their backs forever on Rome.
Königsallee, on the other hand, is the brightest, liveliest, most fashionable precinct in the whole of Düsseldorf. I fell in love with Königsallee the first time I walked its length years earlier as a penny-pinching recruit. Its luxurious offerings of clothes and jewellery and food were there to be looked at, and maybe touched, but nothing more at the time. To a young man from Zwicken, Königsallee was heaven on earth, and in the early days of my career in the constabulary, that one street had more to do with my burning ambition to succeed than all the homilies that rained down upon my youthful head from parents and teachers and clergymen, not to mention my superiors in the force.