Without being coaxed or cajoled, I admitted that I had renounced-at least for the present-whatever credible claim I might have to the moral high ground that was supposed to be a police officer's habitat. “Some day, Helena,” I said, my mood wistful, “when I'm long into my dotage and have nothing to lose, I see myself parked in some working-class tavern and, over a glass or two of beer, raising the eyebrows of fresh-faced young colleagues with tales of my misdeeds. But do you think they will understand?”
“Not for a moment,” Helena said. “Nor would you have understood until the Schumanns turned your life upside down. Life is really about disorder, isn't it?”
“Perhaps I ought to become a monk, then. Or at least retire to a monastery as Franz Liszt proposes to do, and spend an orderly year in search of my soul.”
“Hermann, you are expert at many kinds of investigation,” Helena said (I had the feeling she was trying with difficulty not to laugh at me), “but men will land on the moon before you discover the whereabouts of your soul.”
That said, my confessor, in her own way, offered me absolution, gracefully given, and gratefully received.
Once again my father-or to put it more accurately, the man whom I was brought up to regard as my father- proved to be wrong. There was such a thing as a good surprise.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The English have a saying: Leave well enough alone. Ironically, it's a piece of advice the English notoriously fail to heed, judging by their penchant nowadays for marching, or sailing, into far-off places, ignoring the local populations there, planting their Union Jacks in foreign soil, and proclaiming ownership of that soil. Frankly, it's a characteristic of the English that I've always admired, that ability to preach one thing but do the very opposite. Which accounts for what I did one day, but let me explain: After my final encounter with Clara Schumann, the day I dropped the tuning fork into the Rhine then, as an encore, tossed Adelmann's monograph into the fire, I told myself that my involvement with the Schumanns, while not neatly settled by any means, should be considered at an end. I wanted nothing more to do with them, or with their circle for that matter.
Leave well enough alone.
The Commissioner's irritation with me faded, and I found myself restored in his sight now that I had begun to throw myself into my regular line of police work with greater devotion. Several memoranda of praise actually landed on my desk from my superior, although I've no doubt he penned these encomiums bearing firmly in mind my connection to Baron von Hoffman)
Helena Becker swore I had changed for the better, despite breaching my sworn duty as an officer of the law, and her tenderness towards me now carried with it a tinge of respect, something I confess I hadn't always earned in the past in my dealings with her.
As for my relationships with my fellow officers, I became less stand-offish. After spending so much time exposed to the pretensions, jealousies, and unabashed backstabbing that prevails in Düsseldorf's cultural world, I suddenly found the simplicity of Düsseldorf's taverns refreshing. There is more honesty in beer than in wine.
Leave well enough alone. And that is what I did; I left well enough alone.
Then, some fifteen months after Maestro Schumann's arrival at the hospital at Endenich, I awoke one morning before dawn after an inexplicably restless night and, as though sleepwalking, dressed, left my rooms, hailed a cab, and found myself at the train station purchasing a ticket for passage on the recently installed rail line to Bonn. Several hours later, still in a trance-like state, I took a cab from the centre of Bonn to the outskirts, Endenich, instructing the driver to take me to Number 182 Sebastianstrasse. I had not been in Bonn for a number of years, and under ordinary circumstances, I would have taken in the sights like a typical tourist as the horses clopped along, but I recall little or nothing about that carriage ride until the driver pulled into the stone-paved entranceway, swung round in his perch and, giving me a sad-eyed look, asked, “Do you need some assistance, sir? I can call for help if-”
Only then did I snap fully awake, or so it seemed. “No, no, I am not a patient,” I quickly assured him, though I'm afraid my protestation was not convincing, since he continued to look at me with nothing less than pity. “I'm here to visit a patient, but thank you anyway.”
If the hospital I was about to enter was a place for the storage of the insane, one would never have known it from the look of the place. Apart from a discreet bronze plaque which announced that it was a hospital (in fact the only private mental hospital in the Rhineland), everything about the building and the acres of ground upon which it sat suggested that here was an estate anyone of noble birth or recently acquired wealth would be proud to inhabit, an estate where great parties could be given and where, on a fair June afternoon such as this, on lawns upholstered with patches of meticulously arranged flowerbeds, guests could meander as though they hadn't a care in the world, except to locate the next glass of Champagne or a canapé.
This was the hospital of Dr. Franz Richarz, the domain of perhaps the only psychiatrist in Germany, indeed in Europe, who at the moment regarded mental illness as exactly that-an illness-rather than some form of moral failure or punishable evil.
The main building was a two-storey structure Dr. Richarz had remodelled to house no more than fourteen psychiatric patients. I presented my credentials to the doctor at his office on the ground floor. “I apologize,” I said to him, “for not communicating with you in advance about my plan to visit Dr. Schumann, but the pressures of my occupation are such that I never know from one day to the next…”
Dr. Richarz's eyes struck me as the kind that were capable of looking not only directly at me but through me, and whether or not he believed my flimsy excuse, he graciously accepted it. “I am aware of your interest in Dr. Schumann's troubles,” he acknowledged with a forgiving nod, “and, if you will pardon me for saying so, the only surprise is that you didn't come to see him sooner.”
His tone, though gentle, seemed to call for an apology for this, too. “Police inspectors are not prized, I'm afraid, for their hospital visitations,” I said. “Usually when we show up at someone's bedside, we serve only as a grim reminder of some crime that's been committed.”
The doctor gave me a warm smile. “No fear of that here, Inspector Preiss. Dr. Schumann is not bedridden…at least not much of the time, only occasionally…and I'm certain he'll be glad of the company. Let me escort you to his room.”
Mounting the broad stairway that led to the second storey, I asked if Schumann received many visitors. “Not many,” Dr. Richarz replied, “but the few who come are obviously close to him and of great importance to him, which is gratifying not only to the patient but to me as his doctor. It is so vital that he remain connected to the world outside, you see. Much of the treatment I render is based precisely on personal contacts being maintained as often as possible between the patient and his family and friends and professional colleagues.” At this point, Dr. Richarz halted suddenly and looked intently into my face. “Please understand, Inspector…Robert Schumann is not a freak.”
“But I never thought of him as a freak.”
“Others did. Others still do. I'm sorry if I offended you, Inspector Preiss.” We continued up the stairs. “Fortunately, his friend Brahms and his favourite violinist Josef Joachim visit fairly frequently. Paul Mendelssohn, the brother of the late Felix, sends letters, and I happen to know that he has assisted Madam Schumann financially because of her worries about money. A woman by the name of Bettina von Arnim paid him a visit not long ago; I gather, however, that, unlike the others, she was not favourably impressed with our facilities, nor with me apparently. Word got back to me that she found everything here, to quote her, ‘dreary’.” At the top of the stairs, the doctor paused again, and sighed. “I like to think that I've made some progress discerning the human mind, but women?”