Kepler (12 page)

Rudolph had turned slowly away, still with that pained vacant smile, still nodding, and Tycho Brahe immediately jumped in and began to speak loudly of something else. Kepler was annoyed. What did they expect of him! He was no crawling courtier, to kiss hands and curtsy.

The day waned, the lamps were lit, and there was music. Rudolph took to his throne at last. It was the only seat in the room. Kepler's legs began to ache. He had expected much of this day. Everything was going wrong. Yet he had done his best to be upright and honest. Perhaps that was not what was required. In this empire of impossible ceremony and ceaseless show Johannes Kepler fitted ill. The music of the strings sighed on, an unobtrusive creaking. "It was the predictability of astronomical events," the Dane was saying, "which drew me to this science, for I saw, of course, how useful such predictions would be to navigators and calendar makers, also to kings and princes…" but his efforts were not succeeding either, Rudolph's chin was sunk on his breast, and he was not listening. He rose and touched Kepler's arm, and walked with him to the great window. Below them the city was dissolving into the twilight. They stood in silence for a moment, gazing down upon the little lights that flickered forth here and there. All at once Kepler felt a rush of tenderness for this soft sad man, a desire to shield him from the world's wickedness.

"They tell us that you have done wonderful works," the Emperor murmured. "We care for such things. If there were time…" He sighed. "I do not like the world. More and more I desire to transcend these… these…" His hand moved in a vague gesture toward the room behind him. "I think sometimes I might dress in rags and go among the people. I do not see them, you know. But then, where should I find rags, here?" He glanced at Kepler with a faint apologetic smile. "You see our difficulties."

"Of course, certainly."

Rudolph frowned, annoyed not at his guest it seemed but with himself. "What was I saying? Yes: these tables which Herr Brahe wishes to draw up, you consider them a worthwhile venture?"

Kepler felt like a hamfisted juggler, diving frantically this way and that as the balls spun out of control. "They would contain, your majesty, everything that is known in our science. "

"Facts, then, you mean, figures?"

"Everything that is known."

"Yes?"

"The Tychonic tables will be the foundation of a new science of the sky. Herr Brahe is a great and diligent observer. The material he has amassed is a priceless treasure. The tables must be made, they shall be, and those who come after us will bless the name of any who had a hand in their making. "

"I see, I see, yes," and coughed. "You are an Austrian, Herr Kepler?"

"Swabia is my birthplace; but I was in Graz for some years before I-"

"Ah, Graz."

"But I was driven out. The Archduke Ferdinand-"

" Graz," Rudolph said again. "Yes, our cousin Ferdinand is diligent."

Kepler closed his eyes. His cousin, of course.

The music ceased, and a parting glass was distributed. Tycho took Kepler's arm, trying it seemed to crush it in his fist. They bowed, and backed off towards the doors that were drawing open slowly behind them. Kepler halted, frowning, and trotted forward again before the Dane could stop him, muttering under his breath. "Nines, nines of course! Your majesty, a moment. See, sire, it is because of the nines, or I mean the tens, because we count in tens, and therefore the result will always be divisible by nine. For if we computed by nines, now, it would be eight, divisible by eight that is, and so on. You see?" sketching a triumphantly gay figure eight on the air. But the Emperor Rudolph only looked at him, with a kind of sadness, and said nothing. As they went out Tycho Brahe, sucking his teeth, turned on Kepler savagely. "The wrong thing you say, always the wrong thing!"

In the lamplight at the gate a few absent-minded flakes of snow were falling. The horse's hoofs rang on the cold stones, and somewhere off to the left the watch called out. At Kepler's side the Dane snorted and struggled, trying to contain the unwieldy parcel of his rage. "Have you no sense of of of," he gasped, "no understanding of-of anything? Why, at times today I suspected that you were trying,
trying
to anger him."

Kepler said nothing. He did not need Tycho to tell him how badly he had fared. Yet he could not be angry at himself, for it was not he had done the damage, but that other Kepler shambling at his heels, that demented other, whose prints upon his life were the black bruises that inevitably appeared in the places whereon Johannes the Mild had impressed no more than a faint thumb-print of protest.

"Well, it is no matter, in the end," said Tycho wearily. "I convinced him, despite your clumsiness, that you should work with me in compiling the tables. I am to call them the
Tabulae Rudolphinae.
He believes that those who come after us will bless his name!"

"Yes?"

"And he will grant you two hundred florins annually, though God knows if you will ever see it, he is not renowned either for generosity or promptness."

On the bridge the carriage halted, and Kepler gazed for a long time into the illusory emptiness outside. What would be his future, bound to a protector in need of protecting? He thought of that woebegone king immured in perpetual check in his ice palace. Tycho elbowed him furiously in the ribs. "Have you nothing to say?"

"O-thank you." The carriage lurched forward into the darkness. "He does not like the world. "

"What?"

"The Emperor, he told me that he does not like the world. Those were his words. I thought it strange. "

"Strange?
Strange?
Sir, you are as mad as he."

"We are alike, yes, in ways…"

That night he fell ill. An insidious fever originated in the gall, and, bypassing the bowels, gained access to the head. Barbara forced him to take a hot bath, though he considered total immersion an unnatural and foolhardy practice. To his surprise the measure brought him temporary relief. The heat, however, constricted his bowels; he administered a strong purgative, and then bled himself. He decided, after careful investigation of his excreta, that he was one of those cases whose gall bladder has a direct opening into the stomach. This was an interesting discovery, though such people, he knew, are shortlived as a rule. The sky was catastrophic at that time. But he had so much still to do! The Emperor sent good wishes for his recovery. That decided him: he would not die. The fever abated at last. He felt like one of those neatly parcelled flies that adorn spiders' webs. Death was saving him up for a future feast.

Was there a lesson for him in this latest bout of illness? He was not living as he knew he should. His rational self told him he must learn continence of thought and speech, must practise grovelling. He set himself diligently to work at the Rudolphine Tables, arranging and transcribing endless columns of observations from Tcyho's papers. In his heart the predictability of astronomical events meant nothing to him; what did he care for navigators or calendar makers, for princes and kings? The demented dreamer in him rebelled. He remembered that vision he had glimpsed in Baron Hoffmann's garden, and was again assailed by the mysteriousness of the commonplace.
Give this world's praise to the angel!
He had only the vaguest notion of what he meant. He recalled too the squabbling when he had come first to Tycho, the farce of that flight from Benatek and the ignominious return. Would it be likewise with Rudolph? He wrote to Mästlin:
I
do not speak like I write, I do not write like I think, I do not think like I ought to think, and so everything goes on in deepest darkness.
Where did these voices come from, these strange sayings? It was as if the future had found utterance in him.

Pausing in the midst of Weilderstadt's familiar streets, he looked about him in mild amaze. It was still here, the narrow houses, the stucco and the spires and the shingled roofs, that weathervane, all of it by some means still intact, unaware that his memory had long ago reduced it all to a waxwork model. The morning air was heavy with a mingled smell of bread and dung and smoke-that smell!-and everywhere a blurred clamour was trying and just failing to make an important announcement. The lindens in Klingelbrunner lane averted their sheepish gaze from the puddles of sticky buds they had shed during the night. Faces in the streets puzzled him, familiar, and yet impossibly youthful, until presently he realised that these were not his former schoolfellows,but their sons. There is the church, there the marketplace. Here is the house. There was bedlam when the carriage stopped, the children tussling, the baby squealing in Barbara's lap; it seemed to Kepler a manifestation of the speechless uproar in his heart. The street door was shut, the upstairs shutters fastened. Had the magic ofhis long absence worked here at least, bundled it all up and disappeared it? But the door was opening already, and his brother Heinrich appeared, with his awkward grin, stooping and bobbing in a paroxysm of shyness. They embraced, both of them speaking at once, and Kepler stepped back with a quick glance at the starched tips of his winged lace collar. Regina, a young woman now, had the protesting baby in her arms, and Barbara was trying to get at Susanna to give her a smack, and Susanna, nimbly escaping, knocked over little Friedrich, who cut his knee on the step and after a moment of open-mouthed silence suddenly howled, and a black dog trotting by on the street came over and began to bark at them all in furious encouragement. Heinrich laughed, showing a mouthful of yellow stumps, and waved them in. The old woman at the fire looked over her shoulder and went off at once, muttering, into the kitchen. Kepler pretended he had not seen her.

"Well…!" he said, smiling all around him, and patting his pockets distractedly, as if in search of the key somewhere on his person that would unlock this tangle of emotions. It was a little low dark house, sparsely furnished. There was a yellowish smell of cat, which presently was concentrated into an enormous ginger torn thrusting itself with a kind of truculent ardour against Kepler's leg. A black pot was bubbling on the fire of thorns in the open hearth. Kepler took off his hat. "Well!"

Heinrich shut the door and pressed his back to it, tongue-tied and beaming. The children were suddenly solemn. Barbara peered about her in surprise and distaste, and Kepler with a sinking heart recalled those stories he had spun her long ago about his forebear the famous Kaspar von Kepler and the family coat of arms. Regina alone was at ease, rocking the baby. Heinrich was trying to take her in without going so far as to look at her directly. Poor sad harmless Heinrich! Kepler felt an inner engine softly starting up;  God, he must not weep. He scowled, and stamped into the kitchen. The old woman his mother was doing something to a trussed capon on the table.

"Here you are," he said; "we have arrived."

"I know it. " She did not look up from her work. "I am not blind yet, nor deaf." She had not changed. She seemed to him to have been like this as far back as he could remember, little and bent and old, in a cap and a brown smock. Her eyes were of the palest blue. Three grey hairs sprouted on her chin. Her hands.

Laughable, laughable-she had only to look at him, and his velvet and fine lace and pointed boots became a jester's costume. He was dressed only as befitted the imperial mathematician, yet why else had he carried himself with jealous care on the long journey hither, like a marvellous bejewelled egg, except to impress her? And now he felt ridiculous. Sunlight was spilling through the little window behind her, and he could see the garden, the fruit bushes and the chicken run and the broken wooden seat. The past struck him again a soft glancing blow. Out there had been his refuge from the endless rows and beatings, out there he had dawdled and dreamed, lusting for the future. His mother wiped her hands on her apron. "Well come then, come!" as if it were he who had been delaying.

She glanced at Barbara with a sniff and turned her attention to the children.

"This is Susanna,"said Kepler, "and here, Friedrich. Come, say God bless to your grandma. " Frau Kepler examined them as if they were for sale. Kepler was sweating. "Susanna is seven already, and Friedrich is three or is it four, yes, four, a big boy-and," like a fairground barker, "here is our latest, the baby Ludwig! His godfather, you know, is Johann Georg Gödelmann, Saxony 's Ambassador to the court of Prague."

Regina stepped forward and displayed the infant.

"Very pale," the old woman said. "Is he sickly?"

"Of course not, of course not. You, ah, remember Regina? My… our…"

"Aye: the cabinetmaker's daughter."

And they all, even the children, looked at the young woman in silence for a moment. She smiled.

"We are on our way from Heidelberg, " said Kepler. "They are printing my book there. And before that we were in Frankfurt, for the fair, the book fair, I mean, in… in Frankfurt."

"Books, aye," Frau Kepler muttered, and sniffed again. She bent over the fire to stir the bubbling pot, and in the awkward silence everyone abruptly changed their places, making little lunges and sudden stops, setting Kepler's teeth on edge. He marvelled at how well the old woman managed it still, the art of puppetry! Heinrich sidled forward and stood beside her. As she straightened up she fastened a hand on his arm to steady herself, and Kepler noted, with a pang that surprised him, his brother's embarrassed smile of pride and protectiveness. Frau Kepler squinted at the fire. "A wonder you could come to see us, you are so busy."

Heinrich laughed. "Now ma!" He rubbed a hand vigorously through the sparse hairs on his pate, grinning apologetically. "Johann is a great man now, you know. I say, you must be a great man now," as if Kepler were deaf, "with the books and all, eh? And working for the Emperor himself!"

Barbara, sitting by the table, quietly snorted.

"O yes, " said Kepler, and turned away from his mother and her son standing side by side before him, feeling a sudden faint disgust at the spectacle of family resemblance, the little legs and hollow chests and pale pinched faces, botched prototypes of his own, if not lovely, at least completed parts. "O yes," he said, trying to smile but only wincing, "I am a great man!"

E everyone was morbidly hungry, and when the capon had been dispatched they started on the bean stew from the three-legged pot. Heinrich was sent to the baker's, and came back with a sack of loaves, and buns for the children, and a flagon of wine. He had dallied in the wine shop, and his grin was crookeder than before. He tried to make Barbara take a drink, but she shook her head, turning her face away from him. She had not spoken a word since their arrival. The baby was sprawled asleep in her lap. The old woman squatted on a stool beside the fire, picking at her bowl of stew and mumbling to herself and sometimes grinning furtively. The children had been put to sit under Regina 's supervision at the kitchen table. Kepler suddenly recalled a sunny Easter Sunday long ago, when his grandfather was still alive, one of those days that had lodged itself in his memory not because of any particular event, but because all the aimless parts of it, the brilliant light, the scratchy feel of a new coat, the sound of bells, lofty and mad, had made together an almost palpable shape, a great air sign, like a cloud or a wind or a shower of rain, that was beyond interpreting and yet rich with significance and promise. Was that… happiness? Disturbed and puzzled, he sat now sunk in thought, watching shadows move on the wine's tensed meniscus in his cup.

He had been at Maulbronn then, the last of his many schools. Chance, in the form of the impersonal patronage of the Dukes of Württemberg, had given him a fine education. At fifteen he knew Latin and Greek, and had a grasp of mathematics. The family, surprised by the changeling in their midst, said that all this learning was not good, it would ruin his health, as if his health had ever been their only concern. The truth was they saw his scholarship as somehow a betrayal of the deluded image the Keplers had of themselves then of sturdy burgher stock. That was the time of the family's finest flourishing. Grandfather Sebaldus was the mayor of Weilderstadt, and his son Harry, Kepler's father, temporarily back from his profligate wanderings, was running an inn at Ellmendingen. It was a brief heyday. The inn failed, and Harry Kepler and his family moved back to Weil, where the mayor had become entangled in the shadowy litigations which were eventually to ruin him. Before long Harry was off again, this time to the Low Countries to join the Duke of Alba's mercenaries. Johannes was never to see him again. Grandfather Sebaldus became his guardian. A red-faced fat old reprobate, he considered Johannes a fancified little get.

The house had been crowded then. His brother Heinrich was there, a clumsy inarticulate boy, and their sister Margarete, and Christoph the baby whom no one expected would live, and Sebaldus's four or five adult sons and daughters, the renegade Jesuit Sebald the younger, locked in an upstairs room and raving with the pox, Aunt Kunigund, whose loony husband was even then secretly poisoning her, and poor doomed Katharine, lover of beautiful things, now a wandering beggar. They were all of them infected with the same wild strain. And what a noise they made, packed together in that stinking little house! All his life Kepler had suffered intermittently from tinnitus, the after-echo of those years, he believed, still vibrating in his head. His bad eyesight was another souvenir, left him by the frequent boxings which every inmate of the house, even the youngest, inflicted on him when there was nothing worthier at hand to punish. Happiness?

Where in all that would happiness have found a place?

Reeling a little, with a mug of wine in his fist and wearing a moist conspiratorial smile, Heinrich came and crouched beside his brother's chair. "This is a party, eh?" he wheezed, laughing. "You should come see us more often."

Of his surviving siblings, Kepler loved only Heinrich. Margarete was a bore, like the pastor she had married, and Christoph, a master pewterer in Leonberg, had been an insufferable prig even as a child. Still, they were innocent souls: could the same be said of Heinrich? He had the look of a happy harmless beast, the runt of the litter whom the farmer's fond-hearted wife has saved from the blade. But he had been to the wars. What unimaginable spectacles of plunder and rape had those bland brown eyes witnessed in their time? From such wonder-ings Kepler's mind delicately averted itself. He had peculiar need of
this
Heinrich, a forty-year-old child, eager and unlovely, and always hugely amused by a world he had never quite learned how to manage.

"You've printed up a book then-a storybook, is it?"

"No, no, " said Kepler, peering into his wine. "I am no good at stories. It is a new science of the skies, which I have invented." It sounded absurd. Heinrich nodded solemnly, squaring his shoulders as he prepared to plunge into the boiling sea of his brother's brilliance. "… And all in Latin," Kepler added.

"Latin! Ha, and here am I, who can't even read in our own German."

Kepler glanced at him, searching in vain for a trace of irony in that awestruck smile. Heinrich seemed relieved, as if the Latin exonerated him.

"And now I am writing another, about lenses and spyglasses, how they may be used for looking at the stars-" and then, quietly: "-How is your health now, Heinrich?"

But Heinrich pretended he had not heard. "It's for the Emperor, is it, all these books you're writing, he pays you to write them, does he? I saw him one time, old Rudolph-" "The Emperor is nothing, " Kepler snapped, "an old woman unfit to rule." Heinrich was an epileptic. "Don't talk to me about that man!"

Heinrich looked away, nodding. Of all the ills with which he had been cursed, the falling sickness was the one he felt most sorely. Their father had tried to beat it out of him. Those scenes were among the earliest Kepler could remember, the boy stricken on the floor, the drumming heels and foam-flecked mouth, and the drunken soldier kneeling over him, raining down blows and screeching for the devil to come forth. Once he had tried to sell the child to a wandering Turk. Heinrich ran away, to Austria and Hungary, and on up to the Low Countries; he had been a street singer, a halberdier, a beggar. At last, at the age of thirty-five, he had dragged himself and his devil back here to his mother's house in Weilderstadt. "How is it, Heinrich?"

"Ah, not bad, not bad you know. The old attacks…" He smiled sheepishly, and rubbed a hand again on the bald spot on his skull. Kepler passed him his empty cup. "Let's have another fill of wine, Heinrich."

The children went out to the garden. He watched them from the kitchen window as they trailed moodily among the currant bushes and the stumps of last year's cabbages. Friedrich stumbled and fell on his face in the grass. After a moment he came up again in laborious stages, a tiny fat hand, a lick of hair with a brown leaf tangled in it, a cross mouth. How can they bear it, this helpless venturing into a giant world? Susanna stood and watched him with a complacent sneer as he struggled up. There was a streak of cruelty in her. She had Barbara's looks, that puffy prettiness, the small bright mouth and discontented eyes. The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and waded after her doggedly through the grass. A flaw in the window-pane made him a sudden swimmer, and in the eyepiece of Kepler's heart too something stretched and billowed briefly. Just when he had given up all hope of children Barbara had begun to flower with an almost unseemly abundance. He no longer had any trust, thought they would die too, like the others; the fact of their survival dazed him. Even yet he felt helpless and unwieldy before them, as if their birth had not ended the process of parturition but only transferred it to him. He was big with love.