Kepler Read online

  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 i
n 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…

  Jobst Müller came up again to Graz, demanding that Kepler convert: convert or go, and this time stay away, and he would take his daughter and Regina back with him to Mühleck. Kepler did not deign even to answer. Stefan Speidel was another visitor, a thin, cold, tight-mouthed man in black. His news from court was grim: there would be no exceptions this time. Kepler was beside himself.

  "What shall I do, Stefan, what shall I do? And my family!" He touched his friend's chill hand. "You were right to oppose the marriage, I do not blame you for it, you were right-"

  "I know that."

  "No, Stefan, I insist…" He paused, letting it sink in, and distinctly heard the tiny ping of another cord breaking. Speidel had lent him a copy of Plato's Timaeus on the day they first met, in Rector Papius's rooms; he must remember to return it. "Yes, well…" wearily. "O God, what am I to do."

  "There is Tycho Brahe?" Stefan Speidel said, picking a speck of lint from his cloak and turning away, out of Kepler's life forever.

  Yes, there was Tycho. Since June he had been installed at Prague, imperial mathematician to the Emperor Rudolph, at a salary of three thousand florins. Kepler had letters from the Dane urging him to come and share in the royal beneficence. But Prague! A world away! And yet where was the alternative? Mästlin had written to him: there was no hope of a post at Tübingen. The century approached its end. Baron Johann Friedrich Hoffmann, a councillor to the Emperor and Kepler's sometime patron, on a visit to Graz, invited the young astronomer to join his suite for the journey back to Prague. Kepler packed his bags and his wife and her daughter into a broken-down carriage, and on the first day of the new century, not un-amused by the date, he set out for his new world.

  It was a frightful journey. They lodged at leaky fortresses and rat-infested military outposts. His fever came on him again, and he endured the miles in a dazed semi-sleep from which Barbara in a panic would shake him, looming down like a form out of his dreams, fearing him dead. He ground his teeth. "Madam, if you continue to disturb me like this, by God I will box your ears." And then she wept, and he groaned, cursing himself for a mangy dog.

  It was February when they arrived in Prague. Baron Hoffmann settled them at his house, fed them, advanced them monies, and even lent Kepler a hat and a decent cloak for the meeting with Tycho Brahe. But there was no sign of Tycho. Kepler detested Prague. The buildings were crooked and ill-kept, thrown together from mud and straw and undressed planks. The streets were awash with slops, the air putrid. At the end of a week Tycho's son appeared, in company with Frans Gransneb Tengnagel, drunk, the two of them, and sullen. They carried a letter from the Dane, at once formal and fulsome, expressing greasy sentiments of regret that he had not come himself to greet his visitor. Tyge and the Junker were to conduct him to Benatek, but delayed a further week for their pleasure. It was snowing when at last they set out. The castle lay twenty miles to the north of the city, in the midst of a flat flooded countryside. Kepler waited in the guest rooms through a fretful morning, and when the summons came at noon he was asleep. He descended the stony fastness of the castle in a stupor of fever and fright. Tycho Brahe was magisterial. He frowned upon the shivering figure before him and said:

  "My elk, sir, my tame elk, for which I had a great love, has been destroyed through the carelessness of an Italian lout. " With a wave of a brocaded arm he swept his guest before him into the high wall where they would breakfast. They sat. "… Fell down a staircase at Wandsbeck Castle where they had stopped for the night, having drunk a pot of beer, he says, and broke a leg and died. My elk!"

  The vast window, sunlight on the river and the flooded fields, and beyond that the blue distance, and Kepler smiled and nodded, like a clockwork toy, thinking of his dishevelled past and perilous future, and 0.00 something something 9.

  II

  Enough is enough. He plunged down the steep steps and stopped, glaring about the courtyard in angry confusion. A lame groom trundling a handcart hawked and spat, two scullery maids upended a tub of suds. They would make him a clerk, by God, a helper's helper! "Herr Kepler, Herr Kepler please, a moment…" Baron Hoffmann, panting unhappily, hurried down to him. Tycho Brahe remained atop the steps, strenuously indifferent, considering a far-off prospect.

  "Well?" said Kepler.

  The baron, rheum-eyed grey little man, displayed a pair of empty hands. "You must give him time, you know, allow him to consider your requests."

  "He, " raising his voice against a sudden clamour of hounds, "he has had a month already, more. I have stated my conditions; I ask the merest consideration. He does nothing." And, louder again, turning to fling it up the steps: "Nothing!" Tycho Brahe, still gazing off, lifted his eyebrows a fraction and sighed. The pack ofhounds with an ululant cheer burst through a low gate from the kennels and surged across the courtyard, avid brutes with stunted legs and lunatic grins and tiny tight puce scrotums. Kepler scuttled for the steps in fright, but faltered halfway up, prevented by Tycho the Terrible. The Dane glanced down on him with malicious satisfaction, pulling on his gauntlets. Baron Hoffmann turned up to the master of Schloss Benatek a last enquiring glance and then, shrugging, to Kepler:

  "You will not stay, sir?" "I will not stay. " But his voice was unsteady. Tengnagel and young Tyge came out, squinting in the light, sodden with the dregs of last night's drinking. They brightened, seeing Kepler in a dither. The grooms were bringing up the horses. The dogs, which had quietened, hunched with busy tongues over their parts or ruminatively cocked against the walls, were thrown into a frenzy again by the goitrous blare of a hunting horn. A haze of silvery dust unfurled its sails to the breeze and drifted lazily gatewards, a woman leaned down from a balcony, laughing, and in the sky a panel slid open and spilled upon Benatek a wash of April sunlight that turned the drifting dust to gold.

  The baron went away to fetch his carriage. Kepler considered. What was left if he refused Tycho's grudging patronage? The past was gone, Tübingen, Graz, all that, gone. The Dane, thumbs hitched on his belt and fat fingers drumming the taut slope of his underbelly, launched himself down the steps. Baron Hoffmann alighted from the carriage, and Kepler mumbling plucked at his sleeve, "I want to, I want…" mumbling.

  The baron cupped an ear. "The noise, I did not quite..?" "I want-" a shriek "-to apologise." He closed his eyes briefly. "Forgive me, I-"

  "O but there is no need, I assure you." "What?"

  The old man beamed. "I am happy to help, Herr Professor, in any way that I can. "

  "No, no, I mean to him, to him. " And this was Bohemia, my God, repository of his highest hopes! Tycho was laboriously mounting up with the help of two straining footmen. Baron Hoffmann and the astronomer considered him doubtfully as with a grunt he toppled forward across the horse's braced back, flourishing in their face
s his large leather-clad arse. The baron sighed and stepped forward to speak to him. Tycho, upright now and puffing, listened impatiently. Tengnagel and the younger Dane, downing their stirrup cups, looked on in high amusement. The squabble between Tycho and his latest collaborator had been the chief diversion of the castle since Kepler's arrival a month ago. The bugle sounded, and the hunt with Tycho in its midst moved off like a great rowdy engine, leaving behind it a brown taste of dust. Baron Hoffmann would not meet Kepler's hungry gaze. "I will take you into Prague," he muttered, and fairly dived into the sanctuary of his carriage. Kepler nodded dully, an ashen awfulness opening around him in the swirling air. What have I done?

  They rattled down the narrow hill road. The sky over Benatek bore a livid smear of cloud, but the hunt, straggling away across the fields, was still in sunlight. Kepler silently wished them all a wasted day, and for the Dane with luck a broken neck. Barbara, wedged beside him on the narrow seat, pulsated in speechless anger and accusation (What have you done?). He did not wish to look at her, but neither could he watch for long thejoggling view beyond the carriage window. This country roundabout of countless small lakes and perennially flooded lowlands (which Tycho in his letters had dubbed Bohemian Venice!) pained his poor eyesight with its fractured perspectives of quicksilver glitter and tremulous blue-grey distances.

  "… That he will of course," the baron was saying, "accept an apology, only he, ah, he suggests that it be in writing."

  Kepler stared. "He wants…" and eye and an elbow setting up together a devil's dance of twitches "… he wants a written apology of me?"

  "That is, yes, what he indicated." The baron swallowed, and looked away with a sickly smile. Regina at his side watched him intently, as she watched all big people, as if he might suddenly do something marvellous and inexplicable, burst into tears, or throw back his head and howl like an ape. Kepler regarded him too, thinking sadly that this man was a direct link with Copernicus: in his youth the baron had hired Valentine Otho, disciple of von Lauchen, to instruct him in mathematics. "Also, he will require a declaration of secrecy, that is, that you will swear an oath not to reveal to… to others, any astronomical data he may provide you with in the course of your work. He is especially jealous, I believe, for the Mars observations. In return he will guarantee lodgings for you and your family, and will undertake to press the Emperor either to ensure the continuation of your Styrian salary, or else to grant you an allowance himself. These are his terms, Herr Kepler; I would advise you-"