Kepler Read online

  "To accept? Yes, yes, I will, of course." Why not? He was weary of standing on his dignity. The baron stared at him, and Kepler blinked: was that contempt in those watery eyes? Damn it, Hoffmann knew nothing of what it was to be poor and an outcast, he had his lands and title and his place at court. Sometimes these bland patricians sickened him.

  "But what, " said Barbara, choking on it, "what of our conditions, our demands?" No one replied. How was it, Kepler wondered, with a twinge of guilt, that her most impassioned outbursts were met always by the same glassy-eyed, throat-clearing silence. The carriage lurched into a pothole with a mighty jolt, and from without they heard the driver address a string of lush obscenities to his horse. Kepler sighed. His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.

  The baron's house stood on Hradcany hill hard by the imperial palace, looking down over Kleinseit to the river and the Jewish quarter, and, farther out, the suburbs of the old town. There was a garden with poplars and shaded walkways and a fishpond brimming with indolent carp. On the north, the palace side, the windows gave on to pavonian lawns and a fawn wall, sudden skies pierced by a spire, and purple pennons undulating in a cowed immensity. Once, from those windows, Kepler had been vouchsafed an unforgettable glimpse of a prancing horse and a hound rampant, ermine and emerald, black beard, pale hand, a dark disconsolate eye. That was as near as he was to come to the Emperor for a long time.

  In the library the baron's wife sat at an escritoire, sprinkling chalk from an ivory horn upon a piece of parchment. She rose as they entered, and, blowing lightly on the page, glanced at them with the distant relation of a smile. "Why Doctor-and Frau Kepler-you have returned to us, " a faded eagle, taller than her husband but as gaunt as he, in a satin gown of metallic blue, her attention divided equally between her visitors and the letter in her hand.

  "My dear," the baron murmured, with a jaded bow.

  There was a brief silence, and then that smile again. "And Dr Brahe, is he not with you?"

  "Madam," Kepler burst out, "I have been cruelly used by that man. He it was urged me, pleaded with me to come here to Bohemia; I came, and he treats me as he would a mere apprentice!"

  "You have had a falling out with our good Dane?" the baroness said, suddenly giving the Keplers all her attention; "that is unfortunate," and Regina, catching the rustle of that silkily ominous tone, leaned forward past her mother for a good look at this impressive large blue lady.

  "I set before him," said Kepler, "I set before him a list of some few conditions which he must meet if I was to remain and work with him, for example I deman-I asked that is for separate quarters for my family and myself (that place out there, I swear it, is a madhouse), and that a certain quantity of food-"

  Barbara darted forward-"And firewood!"

  "And firewood, to be set aside expressly-"

  "For our use, that's right."

  "-For our, yes, use," blaring furiously down his nostrils. He pictured himself hitting her, felt in the roots of his teeth the sweet smack of his palm on a fat forearm. "I asked let me see I asked, yes, that he procure me a salary from the Emperor-"

  "His majesty," the baron said hastily, "his majesty is… difficult."

  "See, my lady, " Barbara warbled, "see what we are reduced to, begging for our food. And you were so kind when we first arrived here, accommodating us…"

  "Yes," the baroness said thoughtfully.

  "But," cried Kepler, "I ask you, sir, madam, are these unreasonable demands?"

  Baron Hoffmann slowly sat down. "We met upon the matter yesterday," he said, looking at the hem of his wife's gown, "Dr Brahe, Dr Kepler and myself."

  "Yes?" said the baroness, growing more aquiline by the moment. "And?"

  "This!" cried Barbara, a very quack; "look at us, thrown out on the roadside!"

  The baron pursed his lips. "Hardly, gnädige Frau, hardly so… so… Yet it is true, the Dane is angry. "

  "Ah," the baroness murmured; "why so?"

  Drops of rain fingered the sunlit window. Kepler shrugged. "I do not know. "Barbara looked at him. "… I never said, " he said, "that the Tychonic system is misconceived, as he charges! I… I merely observed of one or two weaknesses in it, caused I believe by a too hasty acceptance of doubtful premises, that a bitch in a hurry will produce blind pups. " The baroness put a hand up quickly to trap a cough, which, had he not known her to be a noble lady fully conscious of the gravity of the moment, he might have taken for a snigger. "And anyway, it is misconceived, a monstrous thing sired on Ptolemy out of Egyptian Herakleides. He puts the earth, you see, madam, at the centre of the world, but makes the five remaining planets circle upon the sun! It works, of course, so far as appearances are concerned- but then you could put any one of the planets at the centre and still save the phenomena. "

  "Save the..?" She turned to the baron to enlighten her. He looked away, fingering his chin.

  "The phenomena, yes, " said Kepler. "But it's all a trick our Dane is playing, aimed at pleasing the schoolmen without entirely denying Copernicus-he knows it as well as I do, and I'm damned before I will apologise for speaking the plain truth!" He surged to his feet, choking on a sudden bubble of rage. "The thing, excuse me, the thing is simple: he is jealous of me, my grasp of our science-yes, yes," rounding on Barbara violently, though she had made no protest, "yes, jealous. Andfurther-more he is growing old, he's more than fifty-" the baroness's left eyebrow snapped into a startled arc "-and is worried for his future reputation, would have me ratify his worthless theory by forcing me to make it the basis of my work. But…" But there he faltered, and turned, listening. Music came from afar, the tune made small and quaintly merry by the distance. He walked slowly to the window, as if stalking some rare prize. The rain shower had passed, and the garden brimmed with light. Clasping his hands behind him and swaying gently on heel and toe he gazed out at the poplars and the dazzled pond, the drenched clouds of flowers, that jigsaw of lawn trying to reassemble itself between the stone balusters of a balcony. How innocent, how inanely lovely, the surface of the world! The mystery of simple things assailed him. A festive swallow swooped through a tumbling flaw of lavender smoke. It would rain again. Tumty turn. He smiled, listening: was it the music of the spheres? Then he turned, and was surprised to find the others as he had left them, attending him with mild expectancy. Barbara moaned softly in dismay. She knew,  she knew that look, that empty, amiably grinning mask with the burning eyes of a busy madman staring through it. She began rapidly to explain to the baron and his pernous lady that our chief worry, our chief worry is, you see… and Kepler sighed, wishing she would not prattle thus, like a halfwit, her tiny mouth wobbling. He rubbed his hands and advanced from the window, all business now. "I shall," blithely drowning Barbara's babbling, which ran on even as it sank, a flurry of bubbles out of a surprised fish-mouth-"I shall write a letter, apologise, make my peace," beaming from face to face as if inviting applause. The music came again, nearer now, a wind band playing in the palace grounds. "He will summon me back, I think, yes; he will understand, " for what did any of that squabbling matter, after all? "A new start!-may I borrow a pen, madam?"

  By nightfall he had returned to Benatek. He delivered his apology, and swore an oath of secrecy, and Tycho gave a banquet, music and manic revels and the fatted calf hissing on a spit. The noise in the dining hall was a steady roar punctuated by the crimson crash of a dropped platter or the shriek of a tickled serving girl. The spring storm that had threatened all day blundered suddenly against the windows, shivering the reflected candlelight. Tycho was in capital form, shouting and swilling and banging his tankard, nose aglitter and the tips of his straw-coloured moustaches dripping. To his left Tengnagel sat with a proprietory arm about the waist of the Dane's daughter Elizabeth, a rabbity girl with close-cropped ashen hair and pink nostrils. Her mother, Mistress Christine, was a fat fussy woman whose twenty years of
concubinage to the Dane no longer outraged anyone save her. Young Tyge was there too, sneering, and the Dane's chief assistant Christian Longberg, a priestly pustular young person, haggard with ambition and self-abuse. Kepler was angry again. He wanted not this mindless carousing, but simply to get his hands on-right away, now, tonight-Tycho's treasure store of planet observations. "You set me the orbit of Mars, no let me speak, you set me this orbit, a most intractable problem, yet you give me no readings for the planet; how, I ask, let me speak please, how I ask am I to solve it, do you imagine?"

  Tycho shrugged elaborately. "De Tydske Karle," he remarked to the table in general, "ere allesammen halv gale, " and Jeppe the dwarf, squatting at his master's feet under the table, tittered.

  "My father," said Mistress Christine suddenly, "my father went blind, you know, from swilling all his life like a pig. Take another cup of wine, Brahe dear."

  Christian Longberg clasped his hands as if about to pray. "You expect to solve the problem of Mars, do you, Herr Kepler?" smiling thinly at the idea. Kepler realised who it was this creature reminded him of: Stefan Speidel, another treacherous prig.

  "You do not think me capable of it, sir? Will you take a wager-let us say, a hundred florins?"

  "O splendid," cried young Tyge. "An hundred florins, by Laertes!"

  "Hold hard, Longberg, " Tengnagel growled. "Best set him a certain time to do it in, or you'll wait forever for your winnings."

  "Seven days!" said Kepler promptly, all swagger and smile without while his innards cringed. Seven days, my God. "Yes, give me seven days free of all other tasks, and I shall do it- provided, wait, " and nervously licked his lips, "provided I am guaranteed free and unhindered access to the observations, all of them, everything."

  Tycho scowled, seeing the trick. He had let it go too far, all the table was watching him, and besides he was drunk. Yet he hesitated. Those observations were his immortality. Twenty years of painstaking labour had gone into the amassing of them. Posterity might forget his books, ridicule his world system, laugh at his outlandish life, but not even the most heartless future imaginable would fail to honour him as a genius of exactitude. And now must he hand over everything to this young upstart? He nodded, and then shrugged again, and called for more wine, making the best of it. Kepler pitied him, briefly.

  "Well then, sir, " said Longberg, his look a blade, "we have a wager."

  A troupe of itinerant acrobats tumbled into the hall, whizzing and bouncing and clapping their hands. Seven days! A hundred florins! Hoop la.

  * * *

  Seven days became seven weeks, and the enterprise exploded in his face. It had seemed so small a task, merely a matter of selecting three positions for Mars and from them defining by simple geometry the circle of the planet's orbit. He delved in Tycho's treasures, rolled in them, uttering little yelps of doggy joy. He selected three observations, taken by the Dane on the island of Hveen over a period of ten years, and went to work. Before he knew what had hit him he was staggering backwards out of a cloud of sulphurous smoke, coughing, his ears ringing, with bits of smashed calculations sticking in his hair.

  All of Benatek was charmed. The castle hugged itself for glee at the spectacle of this irritating little man struck full in the face with his own boast. Even Barbara could not hide her satisfaction, wondering sweetly where they were to find the hundred florins, if you please, which Christian Longberg was howling for? Only Tycho Brahe said nothing. Kepler squirmed, asked Longberg for another week, pleaded penury and his poor health, denied that he had made any wager. Deep down he cared nothing for the insults and the laughter. He was busy.

  Of course he had lied to himself, for the sake of that bet and the tricking of Tycho: Mars was not simple. It had kept its secret through millenniums, defeating finer minds than his. What was to be made of a planet, the plane of whose orbit, according to Copernicus, oscillates in space, the value for the oscillation to depend not on the sun, but on the position of the earth? a planet which, moving in a perfect circle at uniform speed, takes varying periods of time to complete identical portions of its journey? He had thought that these and other strangenesses were merely rough edges to be sheared away before he tackled the problem of defining the orbit itself; now he knew that, on the contrary, he was a blind man who must reconstruct a smooth and infinitely complex design out of a few scattered prominences that gave themselves up, with deceptive innocence, under his fingertips. And seven weeks became seven months.

  Early in 1601, at the end of their first turbulent year in Bohemia, a message came from Graz that Jobst Müller was dying, and asking for his daughter. Kepler welcomed the excuse to interrupt his work. He detached its fangs carefully from his wrist-wait there, don't howl-and walked away from it calm in the illusion of that sleek tensed thing crouching in wait, ready at the turn of a key to leap forth with the solution to the riddle of Mars clasped in its claws. By the time they reached Graz, Jobst Müller was dead.

  His death provoked in Barbara a queer melancholy lassitude. She shrank into herself, curled herself up in some secret inner chamber from which there issued now and then a querulous babbling, so that Kepler feared for her sanity. The question of the inheritance obsessed her. She harped on it with ghoulish insistence, as if it were the corpse itself she was nosing at. Not that there were not grounds for her worst fears. The Archduke's interdicts against Lutherans were still in force, and when Kepler moved to convert his wife's properties into cash the Catholic authorities threatened and cheated him. Yet it was with trumpetings of acclaim that these same authorities welcomed him as a mathematician and cosmologist. In May, when it seemed the entire inheritance might be confiscated, he was invited to set up in the city's market place an apparatus of his own making through which to view a solar eclipse which he had predicted. A numerous and respectful crowd gathered to gape at the magus and his machine. The occasion was a grand success. The burghers of Graz, lifting a puzzled and watering eye from the shimmering image in his camera obscura, bumped him indulgently with their big bellies and told him what a brilliant fellow he was, and only afterwards did he discover that a cutpurse, taking advantage of the ecliptic gloom at noonday, had relieved him of thirty florins. It was a paltry loss compared to what was thieved from him in Styrian taxes, but it seemed to sum up best the whole bad business of their leavetaking of Barbara's homeland.

  She burst into a torrent of tears on the day of their departure. She would not be comforted, would not let him touch her, but simply stood and wound out of her quivering mouth a long dark ribbon of anguish. He hovered beside her, heart raw with pity, his ape arms helplessly enfolding hoops of empty air. Graz had meant little to him in the end, Jobst Müller even less, but still he recognised well enough that grief which, under a grey sky on the Stempfergasse, ennobled for a moment his poor fat foolish wife.

  Returning to Bohemia, they found Tycho and his circus in temporary quarters at the Golden Griffin inn, about to move back into the Curtius house on the Hradcany, which the Emperor had purchased for them from the vice chancellor's widow. Kepler could not credit it. What of the Capuchins' famous bells? And what of Benatek, the work and the expense that had been lavished on those reconstructions? Tycho shrugged; he thrived on waste, the majestic squandering of fortunes. His carriage awaited him under the sign of the griffin. There Would be a seat in it for Barbara and the child. Kepler must walk. He panted up the steep hill of the Hradcany, talking to himself and shaking his troubled head. A troupe of imperial cavalry almost trampled him. When he gained the summit he realised he had forgotten where the house was, and when he asked the way he was given wrong directions. The sentries at the palace gate watched him suspiciously as he trotted past for the third time. The evening was hot, the sun a fat eye fixed on him with malicious glee, and he kept looking over his shoulder in the hope of catching a familiar street in the act of taking down hurriedly the elaborate scenery it had erected in order to fox him. He might have sought help at Baron Hoffmann's, but the thought of the baroness's steely gaze was n
ot inviting. Then he turned a corner and suddenly he had arrived. A cart was drawn up before the door, and heroically encumbered figures with splayed knees were staggering up the steps. Mistress Christine leaned out of an upstairs window and shouted something in Danish, and everyone stopped for a moment and gazed up at her in a kind of stupefied, inexpectant wonder. The house had a forlorn and puzzled air. Kepler wandered through the hugely empty rooms. They led him back, as if gently to tell him something, to the entrance hall. The summer evening hesitated in the doorway, and in a big mirror a parallelogram of sunlit wall leaned at a breathless tilt, with a paler patch in it where a picture had been removed. The sunset was a flourish of gold, and in the palace gardens an enraptured blackbird was singing. Outside on the step the child Regina stood at gaze like a gilded figure in a frieze. Kepler paused in shadow, listening to his own pulse-beat. What could she see, that so engrossed her? She might have been a tiny bride watching from a window on her wedding morning. Footsteps clattered on the stairs behind him, and Mistress Christine came hurrying down clutching her skirts in one hand and brandishing a fire iron in the other. "I will not have that man in my house!" Kepler stared at her, Regina with her head down walked swiftly past him into the house, and he turned to see a figure on a brokendown mule stop at the foot of the steps outside. He was in rags, with a bandaged arm pressed to his side like a beggar's filthy bundle of belongings. He dismounted and plodded up the steps. Mistress Christine planted herself in the doorway, but he pushed past her, looking about him distractedly. "I went first to Benatek," he muttered, "the castle. No one there anymore!" The idea amused him. He sat down on a chair by the mirror and began slowly to unpack his wounded arm, lowering to the floor loop upon loop of bandage with a regularly repeated, steadily swelling bloodstain in the shape of a copper crab with a wet red ruby in its heart. The wound, a deep sword-cut, was grossly infected. He studied it with distaste, pressing gingerly upon the livid surround. "Porco Dio," he said, and spat on the floor. Mistress Christine threw up her hands and went away, talking to herself.