Kepler (21 page)

"I hold it self-evident that matter is incapable of transmutation. The body and soul of Christ are in Heaven. God, sir, is not an alchemist. "

In the stillness there was the sense of phantom witnesses starting back, shocked, their hands to their mouths. Hafenreffer sighed. "So. That is clear and honest. But I wonder, Doctor, if you have considered the implication of what you say? I mean in particular the implication that by this… this doctrine, you diminish the sacrament of Communion to a mere symbol. "

Kepler considered. "I should not say
mere.
Is not the symbol something holy, being at once itself and something other, greater? It is what may also be said, may it not, of Christ himself?"

That, he supposed afterwards, decided it. The affair dragged on for another year, but in the end Hitzler won, Kepler was excommunicated, and Hafenreffer broke with him.
If you love me,
the Chancellor wrote,
then
eschew this passionate excitement.
It was sound advice, but ah, without passion he would not have been who he was. He packed his bags and set out for Ulm, where the
Tabulae Rudolphinae
were to be printed.

Elsewhere too the Keplers had been attracting the gigant's bloodshot glare. In the winter of 1616, after years of muttering and threats, the Swabian authorities moved officially to try his mother for a witch. She fled to Linz with her son Christoph. Kepler was appalled. "Why have you come? It will be taken for an admission of guilt. "

"There has been worse already, " Christoph said. "Tell him, mother."

The old woman looked away, sniffing.

"What worse?" Kepler asked, not really wanting to know. "What has happened?"

"She tried to bribe the magistrate, Einhorn," said Christoph, smoothing a wrinkle from his doublet.

Kepler groped behind him for a chair and sat down. Susanna laid a hand on his shoulder. Einhorn. All his life he had been hounded by people with names like that. "To
bribe
him? Why? How?"

Christoph shrugged. He was fifteen years younger than the astronomer, short and prematurely stout, with a low forehead and eyes of a peculiar violet tint. He had come to Linz chiefly to see his brother sweat over the bad news. "A wench," he said, "the daughter of this Reinbold woman, claims she suffered pains after our mother touched her on the arm. Einhorn was preparing a report of the matter for the chancery, and she offered him a silver cup if he would omit it. Didn't you, ma?"

"Jesus God," said Kepler faintly. "And what was the result?"

"Why, Einhorn was delighted, of course, since he is very thick with the Reinbold faction, and straightway reported the attempt to buy his silence, along with the other charges. It is a pretty mess."

"We are glad to see, " Susanna said, "that the matter is not so serious as to trouble you greatly."

Christoph stared at her. She met him stoutly, and Kepler felt her fingers tighten on his shoulder. "Hush, hush," he murmured, patting her hand, "we must not fight. "

Katharina Kepler spoke at last. "O no, he is not much put out, for he and your sister Margarete, and her holy husband the pastor, have sworn the three of them that they will desert me willingly if I am found in the wrong. So they told the magistrate. Isn't that a fine thing. "

Christoph reddened. Kepler contemplated him sadly, but without surprise. He had never managed to love his brother.

"We have our own good names to think of, " Christoph said, thrusting his chin at them. "What do you expect? She was warned. This past year alone in our parish they have burned a score of witches."

"God forgive you," Susanna said, turning away.

Christoph soon departed, muttering. The old woman stayed for nine months. It was a trying time. Old age nor her misfortunes had not dulled her sharp tongue. Kepler regarded her with rueful admiration. She had no illusions about the peril that she faced, yet he believed she was enjoying it all, in a queer way. She had never before had so much attention lavished on her. She took a lively interest in the details of her defence which Kepler was busy assembling. She did not deny the evidence against her, only challenged the interpretations being put on it. "And I know," she said, "what they are after, that whore Ursula Reinbold and the rest of them, Einhorn too, they want to get their hands on my few florins when we lose the action. Reinbold owes me money, you know. I say we should ignore them, and they'll get tired of waiting. "

Kepler groaned. "Mother, I have told you, the case has been reported to the ducal court of Württemberg. " He did not know whether to laugh or be angry at the flicker of pride that brightened her ancient eyes. "Far from waiting, we must press for an early hearing. It is they who are delaying, because they know how weak is their case and want more evidence. Enough damage has been done already. Why, I too am accused of dabbling in forbidden arts!"

"O yes," she said, "yes, you have your good name to think of."

"For God's sake, mother!"

She turned her face away, sniffing. "You know how it began? It was because I defended Christoph against the Rein-bold bitch."

"You told me, yes."

She meant to tell him again. "He was in some business with her tribe, and there was a dispute. And I defended him. And now he says he will abandon me. "

"Well, I shall not abandon you."

He was writing off cannonades in all directions, to Einhorn and his gang, to acquaintances in the juridical faculty at Tübingen, to the court of Württemberg. The replies were evasive, and vaguely menacing. He was becoming convinced that the highest powers were conspiring to damage him through the old woman. And behind that fear was another, harder to face. "Mother," he ventured, squirming, "mother tell me, truly, swear to me, that… that…"

She looked at him. "Have you not seen me riding about the streets at night on my cat?"

The trial date was set for September, in Leonberg. Christoph, who lived there, appealed at once to the ducal court and had the proceedings transferred to the village of Guglingen. When Kepler and his mother arrived, the old woman was taken and put in chains with two keepers in an open room in the tower gate. The gaolers, merry fellows, enjoyed theirjob. They were being well paid, from the prisoner's own funds. Ursula Rein-bold, seeing her prospective damages dwindling, demanded that the guard be reduced to one, while Christoph and his brother-in-law, Pastor Binder, reproached Kepler for allowing the expenses to mount alarmingly: he had insisted that her straw be changed daily, and that there should be a fire lit for her at night. The witnesses were heard, and the transcripts sent to Tübingen, where Kepler's friends in the law faculty decided that the evidence was such that the old woman should be questioned further under threat of torture.

It was a tawny autumn day when they led her to the chamber behind the courthouse. A breeze moved lazily over the grass, like a sweeping of invisible wings. Einhorn the magistrate was there, a wiry little man with a drop on the end of his nose, and various clerks and court officials. The party made a slow progress, for Frau Kepler was still suffering the effects of her chains. Kepler supported her, trying in vain to think of some comforting word. The strangest thoughts came into his head. On thejourney from Linz he had read the
Dialogue on ancient and modern music
by Galileo's father, and now snatches of that work came back to him, like melodies grand and severe, and he thought of the wind-tossed sad singing of martyrs on their way to the stake.

They entered a low thatched shed. It was dark here after the sunlight, except in the far corner where a brazier stood throbbing, eager and intent, like a living thing. A tooth in Kepler's jaw suddenly began to ache. The air was stifling, but he felt cold. The place reminded him of a chapel, the hush, the shuffling of feet and the muffled coughs, the sense of rapt waiting. There was a hot smell, a mingling of sweat and burning coals, and something else, bitter and brassy, which was, he supposed, the stink of fear. The instruments were laid out on a low trestle table, grouped according to purpose, the thumbscrews and the gleaming knives, the burning rods, the pincers. Here were the tools of a craftsman. The torturer stepped forward, a fine tall fellow with a bushy beard, who was also the village dentist.

"Grüss Gott,"
he said, touching a finger to his forehead, and bent a grave appraising eye upon the old woman. Einhorn coughed, releasing a sour waft of beer.

"I charge you, sir, " he said, stumbling through the formula, "to present before this woman here arraigned the instruments of persuasion, that in God's grace she may bethink herself, and confess her crimes. " He had a wide smudged upper lip, a kind of prehensile flap; the drop at the end of his nose glittered in the glare of the brazier. Not once during all the days of the hearing had he looked Kepler in the eye. He hesitated, that lip groping blindly for words, and then stepped back a pace, colliding with one of his assistants. "Proceed, man, proceed!"

The torturer in silence, lovingly, one by one displayed his tools. The old woman turned away.

"Look upon them!" Einhorn said. "See, she does not weep, even now, the creature!"

Frau Kepler shook her head. "I have wept so often in my life, I have no tears left. " Suddenly, groaning, she fell to her knees in a grotesque parody of supplication. "Do with me as you please! Even if you pull one vein after another from my body, I would have nothing to admit." She clasped her hands and began to wail a
paternoster.
The torturer looked about uncertainly. "Arn I required to pierce her?" he asked, taking up an iron.

"Leave it now," said Kepler, as if calling a halt to an unruly children's game. The sentence had been that she should be threatened only. A general snuffling and muttering broke out, and everyone turned away. Einhorn scuttled off. Thus years of litigation were ended. The absurdity of the thing overwhelmed Kepler. Outside, he leaned his head against the sun-warmed brick wall and laughed. Presently he realised that he was weeping. His mother stood by, dazed and a little embarrassed, patting his shoulder. The seraph's wings of the wind swooped about them. "Where will you go now?" Kepler said, wiping his nose.

"Well, I will go home. Or to Heumaden, to Margarete's house," where, within a twelvemonth, in her bed, with much complaining and crying out, she was to die.

"Yes, yes, go to Heumaden. " He knuckled his eyes, peering helplessly at the trees, the sky of evenings a distant spire. He realised, with amazement, and a sick heave, that he was, yes, it was the only word, disappointed. Like the rest of them, including even, perhaps, his mother, he had wanted something to happen; not torture necessarily, but
something,
and he was disappointed. "O God, mother."

"There now, hush. "

By decree of the Duke of Württemberg she was declared innocent and immediately set free. Einhorn and Ursula Rein-bold and the rest were directed to pay the trial costs. It was for the Keplers a great victory. Yet, mysteriously, there was a loss also. When Kepler returned to Linz he found his old friend Wincklemann the lens grinder gone. His house by the river was shuttered and empty, the windows all smashed. Kepler could not rid himself of the conviction that somewhere, in some invisible workshop of the world, the Jew's fate and the trial verdict had been spatchcocked together, with glittering instruments, by the livid light of a brazier. Something, after all, had happened.

Weeks passed, and months, and nothing was heard of the Jew. Kepler was drawn again and again to the little house on River Street. It was a pin-hole in the surface of a familiar world, through which, if only he could find the right way to apply his eye, he might glimpse enormities. He worked a ritual, walking rapidly twice or thrice past the shop with no more than a covert glance, and then abruptly stopping to rap on the door and wait, before giving himself up, with hands cupped about his face, to a long and inexplicably satisfying squint through the cracks in the shutters. The gloom within was peopled with vague grey shapes. If one of them someday should move! Stepping back then he would shake his head and depart slowly in seeming puzzlement.

He laughed at himself: for whose benefit was he performing this dumbshow? Did he imagine there was a conspiracy being waged against him, with spies everywhere, watching him?

The idea, with which at first he had mocked himself, began to take hold. Yet even in his worst moments of fright and foreboding he did not imagine that there was any human power behind the plot. Even random phenomena may make a pattern which, out of the tension of its mere existing, will generate effects and influences. So he reasoned, and then worried all the more. A palpable enemy would have been one thing, but this, vast and impersonal… When he made enquiries among the Jew's neighbours he met only silence. The locksmith next door, a flaxen-haired giant with a club foot, glared at him for a long moment, his jaw working, and then turned away saying: "We minds our own affairs down here, squire." Kepler watched the brute clump away into his shop, and he thought of the lens-grinder's wife, plump and young, until his mind averted itself, unable to bear the possibilities.

And then one day something shifted, with an almost audible clanking of cogs and levers, and there was, as it seemed, an attempt to make good his loss.

He recognised him a long way off by his walk, that laborious stoop and swing, as if at each pace he were moulding an intricate shape out of resistant air before him and then stepping gingerly into it. Kepler suddenly remembered a crowded hall at Benatek, and the summoner coming down from his master's table and saying silkily, as so often,
you ar wanted, sir,
the great head smiling up from its platter of dingy lace and one hand settling stealthily on the edge of the table like saurian jaws. But something was changed with him now. His gait was more tortured than of old, and he advanced with his face warily inclined, clutching jealously the stirrup strap of a piebald pony.

"Why, Sir Mathematicus, is it you?" palping the air with an outstretched hand. Second sight was all that was left him, his eye sockets were empty asterisks: he had been blinded.