Kepler (3 page)

"That is not riches, no. "

"Yes, papa."

"Still, you know, two hundred monthly…"

Barbara's eyes flew open.

"Monthly?" she shrieked. "But papa, that is
per

!"

"What!"

It was a fine playacting they were doing.

"Yes, papa, yes. And if it were not for my own small income, and what you send us from Mühleck, why-"

"Be quiet!"
Johannes snarled.

Barbara jumped. "O!" A tear squeezed out and rolled upon her plump pink cheek. Jobst Müller looked narrowly at his son-in-law.

"I have a right, surely, to hear how matters stand?" he said. "It is my daughter, after all. "

Johannes released through clenched teeth a high piercing sound that was half howl, half groan.

"I will not have it!" he cried, "I will not
have
this in my own house."

"Yours?" Jobst Müller oozed.

"O papa, stop," Barbara said.

Kepler pointed at them both a trembling finger. "You will kill me," he said, in the strained tone of one to whom a great and terrible knowledge has just come. "Yes, that's what you will do, you'll kill me, between you. It's what you want. To see my health broken. You would be happy. And then you and this your spawn, who plays at being my lady wife-" too far, you go too far "-can pack off back to Mühleck,
I
know."

"Calm yourself, sir," Jobst Müller said. "No one here wishes you harm. And pray do not sneer at Mühleck, nor the revenues it provides, which may yet prove your saving when the duke next sees fit to banish you, perhaps for good!"

Johannes gave a little jerk to the reins of his plunging rage.

Had he heard the hint of a deal there? Was the old goat working himself up to an offer to buy back his daughter? The idea made him angrier still. He laughed wildly.

"Listen to him, wife," he cried; "he is more jealous for his estates than he is for you! I may call
you
what I like, but I am not to soil the name of Mühleck by having it on my lips."

"I will defend my daughter, young man, by deeds, not words."

"Your daughter,
your daughter
let me tell you, needs no defending. She is seven-and-twenty and already she has put two husbands in their graves-
and
is working well on a third. " O, too far!

"Sir!"

They surged from their chairs, on the point of blows, and stood with baleful glares locked like antlers. Into the heaving silence Barbara dropped a fat little giggle. She clapped a hand to her mouth. Regina watched her with interest. The men subsided, breathing heavily, surprised at themselves.

"He believes he is dying, you know, papa," Barbara said, with another gulp of manic laughter. "He says, he says he has the mark of a cross on his foot, at the place where the nails were driven into the Saviour, which comes and goes, and changes colour according to the time of day-isn't that so, Johannes?" She wrung her little hands, she could not stop. "Although
I
cannot see it, I suppose because I am not one of your elect, or I am not clever enough, as you… as you always…" She faded into silence. Johannes eyed her for a long moment. Jobst Müller waited. He turned to Barbara, but she looked away. He said to his son-in-law:

"What sickness is it that you think has afflicted you?" Johannes growled something under his breath. "Forgive me, I did not hear…?"

"Plague,
I said."

The old man started. "Plague? Is there plague in the city? Barbara?"

"Of course there is not, papa. He imagines it."

"But…"

Johannes looked up with a ghastly grin. "It must start with someone, must it not?"

Jobst Müller was relieved. "Really," he said, "this talk of… and with the child listening, really!"

Johannes turned on him again.

"How would I not worry, " he said, "when I took my life in my hands by marrying this angel of death that you foisted on me?"

Barbara let out a wail and put her hands to her face. Johannes winced, and his fury drained all away, leaving him suddenly limp. He went to her. Here was real pain, after all. She would not let him touch her, and his hands fussed helplessly above her heaving shoulders, kneading an invisible projection of her grief. "I am a dog, Barbara, a rabid thing; forgive me," gnawing his knuckles. Jobst Müller watched them, this little person hovering over his big sobbing wife, and pursed his lips in distaste. Regina quietly left the room.

"O
Christ,"
Kepler cried, and stamped his foot.

He was after the eternal laws that govern the harmony of the world. Through awful thickets, in darkest night, he stalked his fabulous prey. Only the stealthiest of hunters had been vouchsafed a shot at it, and he, grossly armed with the blunderbuss of his defective mathematics, what chance had he? crowded round by capering clowns hallooing and howling and banging their bells whose names were Paternity, and Responsibility, and Domestgoddamnedicity. Yet O, he had seen it once, briefly, that mythic bird, a speck, no more than a speck, soaring at an immense height. It was not to be forgotten, that glimpse.

The 19th of July, 1595, at 27 minutes precisely past 11 in the morning: that was the moment. He was then, if his calculations were accurate, 23 years, 6 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 20 hours and 57 minutes, give or take a few tens of seconds, old.

Afterwards he spent much time poring over these figures, searching out hidden significances. The set of date and time, added together, gave a product 1,652. Nothing there that he could see. Combining the integers ofthat total he got 14, which was twice 7, the mystical number. Or perhaps it was simply that 1652 was to be the year of his death. He would be eighty-one. (He laughed: with his health?) He turned to the second set, his age on that momentous July day. These figures were hardly more promising. Combined, not counting the year, they made a quantity whose only significance seemed to be that it was divisible by 5, leaving him the product 22, the age at which he had left Tübingen. Well, that was not much. But if he halved 22 and subtracted 5 (that 5 again!), he got 6, and it was at six that he had been taken by his mother to the top of Gallows Hill to view the comet of 1577. And 5, what did that busy 5 signify? Why, it was the number of the intervals between the planets, the number of notes in the arpeggio of the spheres, the five-tone scale of the world's music!… if his calculations were accurate.

He had been working for six months on what was to become the
Mysterium cosmographicum,
his first book. His circumstances were easier then. He was still unmarried, had not yet even heard Barbara's name, and was living at the Stiftsschule in a room that was cramped and cold, but his own. Astronomy at first had been a pastime merely, an extension of the mathematical games he had liked to play as a student at Tübingen. As time went on, and his hopes for his new life in Graz turned sour, this exalted playing more and more obsessed him. It was a thing apart, a realm of order to set against the ramshackle real world in which he was imprisoned. For Graz was a kind of prison. Here in this town, which they were pleased to call a city, the Styrian capital, ruled over by narrow-minded merchants and a papist prince, Johannes Kepler's spirit was in chains, his talents manacled, his great speculative gift strapped upon the rack of schoolmastering-right! yes! laughing and snarling, mocking himself-endungeoned, by God! He was twenty-three.

It was a pretty enough town. He was impressed when first he glimpsed it, the river, the spires, the castle-crowned hill, all blurred and bright under a shower of April rain. There seemed a largeness here, a generosity, which he fancied he could see even in the breadth and balance of the buildings, so different from the beetling architecture of his native Württemberg towns. The people too appeared different. They were prome-naders much given to public discourse and dispute, and Johannes was reminded that he had come a long way from home, that he was almost in Italy. But it was all an illusion. Presently, when he had examined more closely the teeming streets, he realised that the filth and the stench, the cripples and beggars and berserks, were the same here as anywhere else. True, they were Protestant loonies, it was Protestant filth, and a Protestant heaven those spires sought, hence the wider air hereabout: but the Archduke was a rabid Catholic, and the place was crawling with Jesuits, and even then at the Stiftsschule there was talk of disestablishment and closure.

He, who had been such a brilliant student, detested teaching. In his classes he experienced a weird frustration. The lessons he had to expound were always, always just somewhere off to the side of what really interested him, so that he was forever holding himself in check, as a boatman presses a skiff against the run of the river. The effort exhausted him, left him sweating and dazed. Frequently the rudder gave way, and he was swept off helplessly on the flood of his enthusiasm, while his poor dull students stood abandoned on the receding bank, waving weakly.

The Stiftsschule was run in the manner of a military academy. Any master who did not beat blood out of his boys was considered lax. (Johannes did his best, but on the one occasion when he could not avoid administering a flogging his victim was a great grinning fellow almost as old as he, and a head taller.) The standard of learning was high, sustained by the committee of supervisors and its phalanx of inspectors. Johannes greatly feared the inspectors. They dropped in on classes unannounced, often in pairs, and listened in silence from the back, while his handful of pupils sat with arms folded, hugging themselves, and gazed at him, gleefully attentive, waiting for him to make a fool of himself. Mostly he obliged, twitching and stammering as he wrestled with the tangled threads of his discourse.

"You must try to be calm," Rector Papius told him. "You tend to rush at things, I think, forgetting perhaps that your students do not have your quickness of mind. They cannot follow you, they become confused, and then they complain to me, or…" he smiled "… or their fathers do. "

"I know, I know, "Johannes said, looking at his hands. They sat in the rector's room overlooking the central courtyard of the school. It was raining. There was wind in the chimney, and balls of smoke rolled out of the fireplace and hung in the air around them, making his eyes sting. "I talk too quickly, and say things before I have had time to consider my words. Sometimes in the middle of a class I change my mind and begin to speak of some other subject, or realise that what I have been saying is imprecise and begin all over again to explain the matter in more detail. " He shut his mouth, squirming; he was making it worse. Dr Papius frowned at the fire. "You see, Herr Rector, it is my
cupiditas speculandi
that leads me astray."

"Yes, " the older man said mildly, scratching his chin, "there is in you perhaps too much… passion. But I would not wish to see a young man suppress his natural enthusiasm. Perhaps, Master Kepler, you were not meant for teaching?"

Johannes looked up in alarm, but the rector was regarding him only with concern, and a touch of amusement. He was a gentle, somewhat scattered person, a scholar and physician; no doubt he knew what it was to stand all day in class wishing to be elsewhere. He had always shown kindness to this strange little man from Tübingen, who at first had so appalled the more stately members of the staff with his frightful manners and disconcerting blend of friendliness, excitability and arrogance. Papius had more than once defended him to the supervisors.

"I am not a good teacher, ' 'Johannes mumbled, "I know. My gifts lie in other directions. "

"Ah yes, " said the rector, coughing; "your astronomy. " He peered at the inspectors' report on the desk before him. "You teach
that
well, it seems?"

"But I have no students!"

"Not your fault-Pastor Zimmermann himself says here that astronomy is not everyone's meat. He recommends that you be put to teaching arithmetic and Latin rhetoric in the upper school, until we can find more pupils eager to become astronomers."

Johannes understood that he was being laughed at, albeit gently.

"They are ignorant barbarians! " he cried suddenly, and a log fell out of the fire. "All they care for is hunting and warring and looking for fat dowries for their heirs. They hate and despise philosophy and philosophers. They they they-they do not
deserve
…" He broke off, pale with rage and alarm. These mad outbursts must stop.

Rector Papius smiled the ghost of a smile. "The inspectors?"

"The…?"

"I understood you to be describing our good Pastor Zimmermann and his fellow inspectors. It was of them we were speaking."

Johannes put a hand to his brow. "I-I meant of course those who will not send their sons for proper instruction. "

"Ah. But I think, you know, there are many among our noble families, and among the merchants also, who would consider astronomy
not
a proper subject for their sons to study. They burn at the stake poor wretches who have had less dealings with the moon than you do in your classes. I am not defending this benighted attitude to your science, you understand, but only drawing it to your attention, as it is my-"

"But-"

"-As it is my
duty
to do. "

They sat and eyed each other, Johannes sullen, the rector apologetically firm. Grey rain wept on the window, the smoke billowed. Johannes sighed. "You see, Herr Rector, I cannot-"

"But try, will you, Master Kepler: try?"

He tried, he tried, but how could he be calm? His brain teemed. A chaos of ideas and images churned within him. In class he fell silent more and more frequently, standing stock still, deaf to the sniggering of his students, like a crazed hiero-phant. He traipsed the streets in a daze, and more than once was nearly run down by horses. He wondered if he were ill. Yet it was more as if he were… in love! In love, that is, not with any individual object, but generally. The notion, when he hit on it, made him laugh.

At the beginning of 1595 he received a sign, if not from God himself then from a lesser deity surely, one of those whose task is to encourage the elect of this world. His post at the Stiftsschule carried with it the title of calendar maker for the province of Styria. The previous autumn, for a fee of twenty florins from the public coffers, he had drawn up an astrological calendar for the coming year, predicting great cold and an invasion by the Turks. In January there was such a frost that shepherds in the Alpine farms froze to death on the hillsides, while on the first day of the new year the Turk launched a campaign which, it was said, left the whole country from Neustadt to Vienna devastated. Johannes was charmed with this prompt vindication of his powers (and secretly astonished). A sign, yes, surely. He set to work in earnest on the cosmic mystery.