Measuring the World (12 page)

This wasn't good, said Humboldt. They were surrounded by water, and they were sitting on the highest point. They must hope Mr. Franklin was wrong in his theory of lightning strikes.

Bonpland didn't say anything. He pulled out his flask and drank from it.

And he was surprised, said Humboldt, that there were so many lizards in among the rapids. It contradicted the suppositions of biology.

Bonpland took another swallow.

On the other hand there were known examples of fish that could even climb waterfalls.

Bonpland raised his eyebrows. The thunder had become a single, deafening, relentless uproar. At the other end of the island, not fifty feet away, something large and dark heaved itself onto the rock.

If they died, said Humboldt, nobody would know what had happened to them.

And if they did, said Bonpland, throwing away the empty flask, dead was dead.

Humboldt looked apprehensively at the crocodile. If they managed to return to the coast, he would send everything off to his brother: plants, maps, diaries, and collections. On two separate ships. Only then would he leave for the Cordilleras.

The Cordilleras?

Humboldt nodded. He would like to see the great volcanoes. The question of Neptunism had to get settled once and for all.

Soon they lost all sense of how long they had been waiting. Once a dead cow was propelled past them, then the lid of a piano, then a chessboard and a broken rocking chair. Humboldt carefully took out the clock, listened to its Parisian tick-tock, and peered at the hands through its waxed cloth cover. Either the storm had only begun a few minutes ago, or they'd been sitting fast for more than twelve hours, or then again perhaps the storm hadn't just wreaked chaos on river, forest, and sky, but on time itself; and simply washed away the hours, so that noon had now merged with the night and the following morning. Humboldt wrapped his arms around his knees.

Sometimes, he said, things made him wonder. By rights he should have been an inspector of mines. He would have lived in a German castle, had children, hunted deer on Sundays, and visited Weimar once a month. And now he was sitting here in the middle of a flood, under foreign stars, waiting for a boat that would not come.

Bonpland asked if he thought he'd made a mistake. Castle, children, Weimar—that would be something!

Humboldt took off his hat, which the rain had reduced to a useless lump. A bat rose from the forest, was caught by the storm, forced down by the rain, and after a few wing beats was dragged away by the current.

The thought had never occurred to him.

Not even for a second?

Humboldt leaned forward to look at the crocodile. Then he shook his head.

*
Translator's note: Alert readers will recognize this as a scientist's prosaically exact rendition of Goethe's “Wanderer's Nightsong.” It must be said that Goethe did it better.

T
HE
S
TARS

After he had announced where and when the planet would appear next time and of course nobody had believed him, and the poor lump of rock had materialized out of the night punctual to the very day and the very hour, he became famous. Astronomy was a popular branch of science. Kings involved themselves in it, generals followed its development, princes endowed prizes for discoveries, and the newspapers reported on Maskelyne, Mason, Dixon, and Piazzi as if they were heroes. A man who enlarged the horizons of mathematics forever was a curiosity. But a man who discovered a star was a made man.

Yes, said the duke, now it was obvious. Now he'd done it.

Gauss, who didn't know how to respond to this, said nothing and bowed.

And what else, asked the duke after the usual pause for reflection. Personally? He had heard there was a desire to marry?

Yes indeed, said Gauss, yes.

The audience chamber had changed. The mirror on the ceiling, obviously no longer in fashion, had been replaced by gold leaf, and there were fewer burning candles. Even the duke looked different: he had aged. One eyelid sagged, his cheeks were puffy, and his heavy body seemed to press painfully hard on his knees.

A tanner's daughter, if he was correct?

That was correct, said Gauss, and smiled as he added Your Highness. What a form of address! What a place. He must get hold of himself lest he become disrespectful. Yet he liked this duke. He wasn't a bad man, he tried to do things right and by comparison with most people he wasn't even stupid.

A family, said the duke, must be fed.

It couldn't be denied, said Gauss. Which is why he had dedicated himself to Ceres.

The duke looked at him, puzzled.

Gauss sighed. Ceres, he said slowly and clearly, was the name given to the planetoid that Piazzi had been the first to sight and whose orbit he, Gauss, had worked out. He had only applied himself to the problem because of his wedding plans. He had known that he needed to achieve something practical now that people could understand, even people who were less … He stopped. Even people who weren't interested in mathematics.

The duke nodded. Gauss remembered that he must not look at him directly, and dropped his gaze. He asked himself when the offer would finally be made. Always this boring toing and froing, always these circumlocutions. All this time wasted in chatter!

Along these lines, he had an idea, said the duke.

Gauss's eyebrows shot up, miming surprise. He knew the idea was Zimmerman's, who had spent hours talking to the duke.

Perhaps it had occurred to him that Brunswick still had no observatory.

None too soon, said Gauss.

Pardon?

It had occurred to him.

Now he was wondering if the town shouldn't have one. And Doctor Gauss, despite his youth, should become its first director. The duke put his hands on his hips, and his face broadened into a big smile. That would surprise him now, wouldn't it?

He wanted the title of professor to go with it, said Gauss.

The duke said nothing.

The title of professor, said Gauss again, enunciating every syllable. An appointment at the University of Helmstadt. A salary twice a month.

The duke paced up and down, made a noise between a rumble and a hum, looked at the gold-leaf ceiling. Gauss used the time to count off some prime numbers. He already had thousands of them. In fact he was sure that there would never be a formula to determine them. But if one counted off several hundred thousand, one could establish the likelihood of their occurrence asymptomatically For a moment he was concentrating so hard that he jumped when the duke said that one didn't bargain with one's ruling prince.

He had no such intention, said Gauss. On the other hand he felt it incumbent on him to admit that he had received an offer from Berlin and another from the Academy of St. Petersburg. Russia had always interested him. He had often thought about learning the Russian language.

Petersburg, said the duke, was a long way away. Berlin wasn't nearby either. If one thought about it, the nearest place was right here. Every other place was somewhere else. Even Göttingen. He was no scientist so he begged to be corrected if he was mistaken.

Indeed, said Gauss, eyes fixed on the floor. That was correct.

And if one wasn't held back by love of one's native land, one could at least reflect on the fact that travel was exhausting. One must make a home elsewhere, one had worries, moving cost money and was a hideous operation. And perhaps one also had an aged mother at home.

Gauss felt himself go red. It always happened when someone mentioned his mother; not out of shame, but because he loved her so much. Nevertheless, he had to clear his throat and say it again: nevertheless, one couldn't always do what one wanted. If one had a family, one needed money, and one had to go wherever it was to be found.

One would find some agreement, said the duke. The title of professor would be possible. Even if not with a twice-monthly salary.

But what if one wanted the title because of the salary?

Then one would not be doing honor to one's profession, said the duke coolly.

Gauss realized he had gone too far. He bowed, the duke dismissed him with a gesture, and a servant immediately opened a door behind him.

While waiting for the written offer from the Court, he busied himself with the art of calculating orbits. The path of a star, he said to Johanna, was not just merely a movement, it was the necessary result of the influence that all bodies exerted on a single body in the void: the line, in other words, that was formed with exactly the same curve on paper and in space, when one hurled an object into the void. The riddle of gravity. The tenacious attraction of all bodies.

The attraction of bodies, she repeated and struck him on the shoulder with her fan. He tried to kiss her, she retreated laughing. He had never found out why she had changed her mind. Since her second letter, she had behaved as if it were the most self-explanatory thing on earth. And he liked it that there were things he didn't understand.

Two days before the wedding he rode to Göttingen, to visit Nina one last time.

You're getting married now, she said, and not to me, naturally.

No, he replied, naturally not.

She asked if he hadn't loved her.

A little, he said, as he loosened the ties on her dress and simply couldn't believe that in two days’ time he'd be doing this with Johanna. But he was going to keep his other promise, he was going to learn Russian. And although she swore it meant nothing, in her profession you became sentimental, it amazed and also displeased him that she was weeping.

The horse snorted angrily when he pulled it to a halt out in the open country on the way home. He had realized how to derive Jupiter's mass from the distortions in Ceres’ orbit. He looked up into the night sky until his neck hurt. Even recently there had been nothing there but glowing points of light. Now he could distinguish their formations, he knew which of them marked the most important degrees of latitude for ocean navigation, he knew their paths, the times of their disappearance and reappearance. Spontaneously and apparently merely because he needed money, they had become his calling and he had become their reader.

There were not many guests at the wedding: his old father, now very bent, his mother, weeping like a child, Martin Bartels, and Professor Zimmerman, plus Johanna's family, her horrible friend Minna, and a secretary from the Court who seemed to have no idea why he had been sent. During the frugal celebratory dinner, Gauss's father made a speech saying that one should never be forced to bow, not to anyone, ever, then Zimmerman got up, opened his mouth, smiled adorably at everyone, and sat down again. Bartels nudged Gauss.

He stood up, swallowed, and said he had not expected to find anything like happiness, and fundamentally, he didn't believe in it even now. It seemed to him to be something like a mistake in arithmetic, an error, and he could only hope he would not be caught out. He sat down again and was surprised to see people looking blank. Quietly he asked Johanna if he had said something wrong.

In what way, she replied. It was exactly the speech she had always dreamed of for her wedding.

An hour later the last guests had left and he and Johanna were on their way home. They said little. Suddenly they were strangers to each other.

In the bedroom he closed the curtains, went to her, felt her instinctively want to pull back, held her gently but firmly, and began to undo her dress. Without any light, it wasn't easy. Nina had always worn clothes that made things simpler. It took a long time, the material was so resistant and there were so many fastenings that he himself could hardly believe that he still hadn't got it all undone. But then it finally worked, the dress fell to the floor and her naked shoulders gleamed white in the darkness. He put his arm around her shoulders, she instinctively covered her breasts with her hands, and he felt her holding back as he led her to the bed. He wondered how he should proceed with her petticoat, the dress had already been difficult enough. Why didn't women wear things one could open? Don't be frightened, he whispered and was surprised when she answered that she wasn't, and reached for his belt with a sure hand and a purposefulness that nothing had prepared him for. Have you done this before? What did he think of her, she asked, laughing, and next moment her petticoat was billowing on the floor, and she hesitated, so he pulled her with him so that they were lying together, breathing heavily, and each of them was waiting for the other's heartbeat to slow down. As he let his hand slide over her breasts to her stomach and then, he decided to dare it even though he felt he should apologize, on further down, a sliver of moon appeared between the curtains, pale and watery, and he was ashamed to realize that in this very moment he suddenly understood how to make approximate corrections in mismeasurements of the trajectories of planets. He wished he could jot it down, but now her hand was creeping down his back. She had not imagined it was like this, she said with a mixture of fear and fascination, so full of life, as if there were a third creature with them. He threw himself on her, felt her shock, paused for a moment, then she wound her legs around his body, but he apologized, got up, stumbled to the desk, dipped the pen, and without lighting a candle wrote
sum of square of dijf betw. obs'd and calc'd Min.
It was too important, he couldn't forget it. He heard her say she couldn't believe it, and she wasn't believing it either even though it was happening right in front of her. But he was already done. On the way back he hit his foot against the bedpost, then he felt her underneath him again, and it was only when she pulled him close that he realized how nervous he actually was, and for a moment it seemed astonishing that the two of them, who hardly knew each other, were now in this situation. Then something else happened and he was not shy any more, and toward dawn they were so well acquainted that they might have been practicing with each other forever.

Did happiness make one stupid? When he leafed through the
Disquisitiones
in the following weeks, he couldn't quite believe that the book was by him. He had to pull himself together before he could understand all the derivatives. He wondered if his intellect was sinking into mediocrity. Astronomy was a cruder science than mathematics. One couldn't solve the problems by pure thought; someone had to stare through an eyepiece until his eyes hurt while someone else had to tabulate the resulting measurements at mind-numbing length. The person who did this for him was a Herr Bessel in Bremen, whose only talent lay in the fact that he never ever made mistakes. As director of an observatory, Gauss had the right to requisition assistance—even if the foundation stone of this observatory hadn't even been laid yet.

He had asked for an audience more than once, but the duke was always busy. He wrote a furious letter and received no reply. He wrote a second, and when there was still no response to this, he waited so long outside the audience chamber that a secretary with tousled hair and untidy uniform eventually had to send him home. On the street he met Zimmerman and complained bitterly.

The professor looked at him as if he were an apparition and asked if he were really oblivious that there was a war on.

Gauss looked around. The street lay quiet in the sunshine, a baker was passing by with a basket of bread, the tin weathercock glinted dully above the church roof. The air smelled of lilacs. War?

It was true that he hadn't read a newspaper for weeks. Bartels hoarded everything. He went to his house and seated himself in front of a stack of old journals. Grimly he leafed past a report of Alexander von Humboldt's about the highlands of Caxamarca. Was there any damn place this fellow hadn't been? But just as he reached the war reports, he was interrupted by the crunching wheels of a column of wagons. Bayonets, cavalry helmets, and lances paraded past the window for the next half hour. Bartels came home panting to announce that the duke was lying in one of the coaches, shot at Jena, bleeding like an ox, and dying. Everything was lost.

Gauss folded the newspaper. In that case he could go home.

He mustn't say it to anyone, but this Bonaparte interested him. Supposedly he dictated up to six letters at the same time. Once he had found an outstanding solution to the problem of how to divide a circle with fixed compasses. He won battles by being the first to announce with absolute authority that he'd won them. He thought faster and deeper than other people, that was his whole secret. Gauss wondered if Napoleon had ever heard of him.

The observatory was not going to come to anything, he told Johanna at supper. He would have to keep observing the sky from his parlor, a complete disgrace. He had an offer from Göttingen. They wanted to build an observatory there too, it wasn't far away, and from there he could visit his mother every week. They could do the move before the baby arrived.

But Göttingen, said Johanna, now belonged to France.