Kepler (7 page)

He drew up a horoscope. It promised all possible good, after a few adjustments. The child would be nimble and bright, apt in mathematical and mechanical skills, imaginative, diligent, charming, O, charming! For sixty days Kepler's happiness endured, then the house was pierced again by screams, miniature echoes of Barbara's lusty howls, and Oberdorfer again sculled himself up the stairs and Kepler snatched the infant in his arms and commanded it not, not to die! He turned on Barbara, she had known, all that pain had told her all was wrong, yet she had said nothing, not a word to warn him, spiteful bitch! The doctor clicked his tongue, for shame, sir, for shame. Kepler rounded on him. And you… you…! In tears, his vision splintering, he turned away, clasping the creature to him, and felt it twitch, and cough, and suddenly, as if starting in amazement, die: his son. The damp hot head lolled in his hand. What pitiless player had tossed him this tender ball of woe? He was to know other losses, but never again quite like this, like a part of himself crawling blind and mewling into death.

Now his days darkened. The child's fall had torn a hole in the fabric of things, and through this tiny rent the blackness seeped. Barbara would not be consoled. She took to hiding in shuttered rooms, in cubbyholes, even under the bedclothes, nibbling in private her bit of anguish, making not a sound except for now and then a faint dry sobbing, like the scratching of claws, that made Kepler's hair stand on end. He let her be, crouching in his own hiding, watching for what would come next. The game, which they had not realised was a game, had ended; suddenly life was taking them seriously. He remembered the first real beating he had got as a child, his mother a gigantic stranger red with rage, her fists, the startling vividness of pain, the world abruptly shifting into a new version of reality. Yes, and this was worse, he was an adult now, and the game was up.

The year turned, and winter ended. Spring would not this year fool him with false hopes. Something was being surreptitiously arranged, he could sense it, the storm assembling its ingredients from breezes and little clouds and the thrush's song. In April the young Archduke Ferdinand, ruler of all Austria, made a pilgrimage to Italy where at the shrine of Loreto, in a rapture of piety, he swore to suppress the heresy of Protestantism in his realm. The Lutheran province of Styria trembled. All summer there were threats and alarms. Troops were mobilised. By the end of September the churches and the schools had been shut down. At last the edict, long expected, was issued: Lutheran clergy and teachers must quit Austria within a week or face inquisition and possible death.

Jobst Müller hurried up from Mühleck. He had gone over to the Catholics, and expected his son-in-law to follow him without delay. Kepler snorted. I shall do nothing of the kind, sir; mine is the reformed Church, I recognise no other, and stopped himself from adding:
Here I stand!
which would have been to overdo it. And anyway, he was not so brave as his bold words would have it. The prospect of exile terrified him. Where would he go? To Tübingen? To his mother's house in Weilderstadt? Barbara with unwonted vehemence had declared she would not leave Graz. He would lose Regina then also; he would lose everything. No, no, it was unthinkable. Yet it was being thought: his bag was packed, Speidel's mare was borrowed. He would go to Mästlin in Tübingen, welcome or not. Farewell! Barbara's kiss, juicy with grief, landed in his ear. She pressed into his trembling hands little packets of florins and food and clean linen. Regina tentatively came to him, and, her face buried in his cloak, whispered something which he did not catch, which she would not repeat, which was to be forever, forever, a small gold link missing from his life. Floundering in a wash of tears he stumbled back and forth between house and horse, not quite knowing how, finally, to go, beating his pockets in search of a handkerchief to stanch his streaming nose and uttering faint phlegmy cries of distress. At last, dumped like a wet sack in the saddle, he was borne out of the city into a tactlessly glorious gold and blue October afternoon.

He rode north along the valley of the Mur, eyeing apprehensively the glittering snowcapped crags of the Alps looming higher the nearer he approached. The roads were busy. He fell in with another traveller, whose name was Wincklemann. He was a Jew, a lens-grinder by trade, and a citizen of Linz: a sallow wedge of face, a bit of beard and a dark ironic eye. When they came down into Linz it was raining, the Danube pock-marked steel, and Kepler was sick. The Jew, taking pity on this mournful wayfarer with his cough and his quiver and his blue fingernails, invited Kepler to come home with him and rest a day or two before turning westward for Tübingen.

The Jew's house was in a narrow street near the river. Wincklemann showed his guest the workshop, a long low room with a furnace at the back tended by a fat boy. The floor and the workbenches were a disorder of broken moulds and spilt sand and wads of oily rag, all blurred under a bluish film of grinding flour. Dropped tears of glass glittered in the gloom about their feet. A low window, giving on to damp cobbles and timbered gables and a glimpse of wharf, let in a grainy whitish light that seemed itself a process of the work conducted here. Kepler squinted at a shelf of books: Nostradamus, Paracelsus, the
Magia naturalis.
Wincklemann watched him, and smiling held aloft in a leaf-brown hand a gobbet of clouded crystal.

"Here is transmutation," he said, "a comprehensible magic."

Behind them the boy bent to the bellows, and the red mouth of the furnace roared. Kepler, his head humming with fever, felt something sweep softly down on him, a shadow, vast and winged.

They climbed to the upper floor, a warren of small dim rooms where the Jew and his family lived. Wincklemann's shy young wife, pale and plump as a pigeon and half his age, served them a supper of sausage and black bread and ale. The air was weighted with a strange sweetish smell. The sons of the house, pale boys with oiled plaits, came forward solemnly to greet their father and his guest. To Kepler it seemed he had strayed into the midst of some ancient attenuated ceremony. After the meal Wincklemann brought out his tobacco pipes. It was Kepler's first smoke; a green sensation, not wholly unpleasant, spread along his veins. He was given wine lightly laced with a distillate of poppy and mandragora. Sleep that night was a plunging steed carrying him headlong through the tumultuous dark, but when he woke in the morning, a thrown rider, the fever was gone. He was puzzled and yet calm, as if some benign but enigmatic potential were being unfurled about him.

Wincklemann demonstrated the implements of his craft, the fine-honed lapstones and the grinding burrs of blued steel. He brought out examples of the glass in all its forms, from sand to polished prism. In return Kepler described his world system, the theory of the five perfect solids. They sat at the long bench under the cobwebbed window with the furnace gasping behind them, and Kepler experienced again that excitement and faintly embarrassed pleasure which he had not known since his student days at Tübingen and the first long discussions with Michael Mästlin.

The Jew had read von Lauchen's
Narratio prima
on the Copernican cosmology. The new theories puzzled and amused him.

"But do you think they are
true?"
said Kepler; the old question.

Wincklemann shrugged. "True? This is a word I have trouble with." He never looked so much thejew as when he smiled. "Maybe yes, the sun is the centre, the visible god, as Trismegistus says; but when Dr Copernic shows it so in his famous system, what I ask you do we know that is more wonderful than what we knew before?"

Kepler did not understand. "But science," he said, frowning, "science is a method of knowing. "

"Of knowing, yes: but of understanding? I tell you now the difference between the Christian and thejew, listen. You think nothing is real until it has been spoken. Everything is words with you. Your Jesus Christ is the word made flesh!"

Kepler smiled. Was he being mocked? "And the Jew?" he said.

"An old joke there is, that at the beginning God told his chosen people everything, everything, so now we know it all-and understand nothing. Only I think it is not such a joke. There are things in our religion which may not be spoken, because to speak such ultimate things is to… to damage them.

Perhaps it is the same with your science?"

"But… damage?"

"I do not know. " He shrugged. "I am only a maker of lenses, I do not understand these theories, these systems, and I am too old to study them. But you, my friend, " and smiled again, and Kepler knew that he was being laughed at, "you will do great things, that's plain."

It was in Linz, under Wincklemann's amused dark gaze, that he first heard faintly the hum of that great five-note chord from which the world's music is made. Everywhere he began to see world-forming relationships, in the rules of architecture and painting, in poetic metre, in the complexities of rhythm, even in colours, in smells and tastes, in the proportions of the human figure. A fine silver string of excitement was tightening steadily within him. In the evenings he sat with his friend in the rooms above the workshop, drinking and smoking, and talking endlessly. He was well enough to travel on to Tübingen, yet made no move to go, though he was still in Austria and the Archduke's men might seize him any time. The Jew watched him out of a peculiar stillness and intensity, and sometimes Kepler, bleared with tobacco and wine, fancied that something was being slowly, lovingly drained from him, a precious impalpable fluid, by that gaze, that intent, patient watching. He thought of those volumes of Nostradamus and Albertus Magnus on the Jew's shelves, of certain silences, of murmurings behind closed doors, of the grey blurred forms in their sealed jars he had glimpsed in a cupboard in the workshop. Was he being magicked? The notion stirred in him a confused and guilty warmth, a kind of embarrassment, like that which made him turn away from the uxorious smile the Jew sometimes wore in the presence of his young wife. Yes this,
this
was exile.

It ended. One day a messenger from Stefan Speidel came galloping to Wincklemann's door out of a stormy dawn. Kepler, barefoot and shivering, still stuffed with sleep, stood in a damp gust and with trembling fingers broke the familiar seal of the secretariat. A fleck of foam from the horse's champing jaws settled on his eyebrow. The Archduke had consented that an exception be made to the order of general banishment. He could go home again.

Later he had time to consider the ravelled mesh of influence that had saved him. The Jesuits, for their own shady reasons, were sympathetic to his work. It was through aJesuit, Fr Grien-berger of Graz, that the Bavarian Chancellor Herwart von Hohenburg, a Catholic and an amateur scholar, had first consulted him on questions of cosmology in certain ancient texts. They corresponded via the Bavarian ambassador at Prague and the Archduke Ferdinand's secretary, the Capuchin Peter Casal. And then, Herwart was the servant of Duke Maximilian, Ferdinand's cousin, and those two noblemen had studied together at Ingolstadt under Johann Fickler, a firm friend of the Jesuits and a native of Kepler's own Weilderstadt. Thus the strands of the web radiated. Why, when he thought about it, he had advocates everywhere! It worried him, obscurely.

He returned secretly disappointed. Given time, he might have made something of exile. The Stiftsschule was still closed, and he was free, there was that at least. But Graz was finished for him, used up. Things were not so bad as they had been, and other exiles had quietly begun to trickle back, but still he thought it prudent to stay indoors. Barbara in November announced another pregnancy, and he retired to the innermost sanctuary of his workroom.

He began to study in earnest, consuming ancients and moderns, Plato and Aristotle, Nicholas of Cues, the Florence academicians. Wincklemann had given him a volume by the cabalist Cornelius Agrippa, whose thinking was so odd and yet so like Kepler's own. He went back to his mathematics, and honed to a fine edge that instrument which up to now he had wielded like a club. He turned to music with a new intensity; Pythagoras's laws of harmony obsessed him. As he had asked why there should bejust six planets in the solar system, now he pondered the mystery of musical relationships: why does for instance the ratio 3:5 produce a harmony, but not 5:7? Even astrology, which for so long he had despised, assumed a new significance in its theory of aspects. The world abounded for him now in signature and form. He brooded in consternation on the complexities of the honeycomb, the structure of flowers, the eerie perfection of snowflakes. What had begun in Linz as an intellectual frolic was now his deepest concern.

The new year began well. At the core of this sudden rush of speculations he was at peace. Then, however, gradually, a fearful momentum gathered. The religious turmoil boiled up again, fiercer than ever. Edict followed edict, each one more severe than its predecessor. Lutheran worship in any form was banned. Children were to be baptised only by the Catholic rite and must attend only Jesuit schools. Then they moved on the books. Lutheran writings were rooted out and burned. A pall of smoke hung over the city. Threats whirred in the air, and Kepler shivered. After the burning of the books, what would there be for them but to burn the authors? Things were out of control. He felt as if, head and shoulders back and eyes starting in mortal fright, he were strapped to an uncontrollable machine hurtling faster and faster toward a precipice. The child, a girl, was born in June. She was called Susanna. He dreamed of the ocean. He had never seen it in waking life. It appeared an immense milky calm, silent, immutable and terrifying, the horizon a line of unearthly fineness, a hairline crack in the shell of the world. There was no sound, no movement, not a living creature in sight, unless the ocean itself were living. The dread of that vision polluted his mind for weeks. On a July evening, the air pale and still as that phantom sea, he returned to the Stempfergasse after one of his rare ventures abroad in the frightened town, and paused before the house. There was a child playing in the street with a hoop, an old woman with a basket on her arm limping away from him on the other side, a dog in the gutter gnawing a knuckle of bone. Something in the scene chilled him, the careful innocence with which it was arranged in that limitless light, as if to give him a sly nudge. Dr Oberdorfer waited in the hall, regarding him with a lugubrious stricken stare. The infant had died. It was a fever of the brain, the same that had killed little Heinrich. Kepler stood by the bedroom window and watched the day fade, hearing vaguely Barbara's anguished cries behind him and listening in awe to his mind, of its own volition, thinking: My work will be interrupted. He carried the tiny coffin himself to the grave, besieged by visions of conflict and desolation. There were reports from the south that the Turk had massed six hundred thousand men below Vienna. The Catholic council fined him ten florins for having the funeral conducted in the Lutheran rite. He wrote to Mästlin:
No day can soothe my wife's yearning, and the word is close to my heart:
 
vanity…