An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

  It was only a few steps from the Boot and Thorn, and the Barefoot Square, to my own home. I lived with my mother’s mother. She had a tidy house very near Saint Leonhard’s church, where she was revered. Her husband was pastor there until his death. My father was also, until he left for the village of Riehen soon after my birth. It was hoped that I would follow them to the pulpit, and I would never have regretted if I had. But for good or ill, I’ve had an even deeper love. So I was here in Grandmother’s care. Riehen was only five miles from Basel, but too far to travel daily, so for these last five years this house has become my home. I have left my father’s house to walk among men, placed by him in my grandmother’s and Master Johann’s care.

  At supper, after I told Grandmother my day and all the doings at my Master’s house, she gave me a warning. “A family should be for peace, Leonhard. There’s trouble enough outside the door. Keep a watch on yourself for all you have to do with them.”

  “They’ve always been this way,” I said.

  “Every kettle only holds its own measure and no more. Someday they’ll reach that and overflow.”

  And then late, as I laid my head on my pillow, thinking about the day and my Master’s family, I could hear an overflowing. Not a kettle, but a river. Not the Rhine, but something else, something rising and disturbed. I heard it murmuring, and felt its pull, and was pulled by it to sleep.

  That had been Thursday. The next morning, Friday, I was out early to fetch water. There were three fountains equally near and I chose the one in the Barefoot Square so I might see Knipper before he was off to Freiburg. The coach was in front of the inn and the passengers were impatient beside it and the horses restless in their harnesses, but the whole was Knipper-less. I was careful to fill the buckets only to their measure and not overflow them; and there was still no driver. I set the buckets on the paving stones, not too close to the horses’ edgy hooves, and asked. I had an earful back. “Where is he? I’d like to know where is he! I’m told to be up at dawn and the driver’s still sleeping!”

  I was sure he’d soon be by. Knipper kept a schedule as ancient and immutable as the planets: Thursday from Bern to Basel, Friday Basel to Freiburg, and Saturday Freiburg to Strasbourg. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday he turned his horses back. Inns in the four cities owned his coach and paid him to drive it and deliver his passengers to their front doors. He linked Basel to the French, German, and Swiss lands that surround it. Basel was properly a part of Switzerland, but to its own people it has been a land separate to itself.

  The keeper of the Boot and Thorn was Old Gustavus, and he would be closest of anybody to knowing anything of Knipper. He was standing at the door smoldering. He came out to look close at the coach to see, I thought, that it really had no Knipper. Of course I was as curious as all the rest, but it was time for me to be on to more chores and I turned away from the inn. Right at my elbow I found Daniel.

  “What’s the rumpus?” he said.

  “Knipper’s been lost.”

  “Knipper? Oh, the driver? Then where is he?”

  “Lost means not knowing where he is.”

  “Well, it’s you I want anyway, and you’re found.”

  “I’ll be to your kitchen in an hour,” I said.

  Daniel had put his hand on my shoulder in pity. “You still labor for him, Leonhard? It’s brutes that labor, and not you for the Brute.”

  “But I do and I’m glad to. What are you wanting with me? And did you have peaceable words with him last night?”

  “Words, not peace. Supper was tolerable though. But you were lost before I could talk to you, and I want your help with an idea I’ve been hatching.”

  “If it’s your idea, then it’s cracked.”

  “There’ll be cracking.” Daniel’s other hand took hold of my other shoulder, and we were face to face between his arms. “It’s why I came back to Basel,” he said, and there was a hard passion behind his soft smile. “It’s to do with Uncle Jacob.”

  Uncle Jacob: that was a scorpion’s egg he was hatching. I’d heard very little about my Master’s oldest brother, and he was very firmly not discussed in my Master’s house. “What about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  I knew that. “I’ve seen his epitaph.”

  “But why is he dead?”

  I had thought much about mortality and so answered, “For his sins.” I didn’t mean it uniquely to old Jacob, as he died before I was born and I never met him, but I had always been firm on this point. And Daniel would benefit from a reminder. “And for a fever, too, most likely, and with every hope for resurrection. Your father is the youngest of ten children, and he’s nearly sixty. You should expect to have dead uncles. And you know Master Johann is touchy on Jacob.”

  “Because he has reason to be, and that’s why I’m back in Basel, Leonhard. I’m going to look into Uncle Jacob, and the more Brutus doesn’t like it, the more I will.”

  “I won’t be part of it.”

  “Sure you will. I need your help.”

  “I won’t have time this morning.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tomorrow night,” I said. “After my lesson.”

  “That’ll do. If you can still talk or think after that bruising you go through.” He nodded toward the Boot. “I’ll be at the inn tomorrow night.” And today’s night, I was sure, and many another. I took my leave and my buckets.

  Away from the Barefoot Square, I came into the Wages Street. Paving stones and packed soils carried Basel’s traffic, its wheels and shoes; houses, churches, and structures constrained it. I would often stand at a corner or in a doorway and watch the motion. I would see the good citizens and their horses and carts. I watched University scholars with books under their arms. I saw grand merchants and councilors, the Day Watch and the Night Watch. And I would also see Reformers in vast robes contending for their faith. In the open squares I saw Romans with swords and barbarians with pikes, and marching through the gates I saw knights in chain mail with Crusader crosses on their shoulders. In narrow alleys I saw long corteges, cart after cart on misty mornings, filled by the plague’s harvest. In the church cloisters I saw monks chanting and druids moaning, and Irish friars storytelling, returning the faith of the Roman city to the city of Goths and Vandals. And in archways I would see angels, and in stairways, saints, and in shadows, shadows. It had always been that I would see invisible things.

  Then I was to the Hay Street and my grandmother’s house. Even on the most clouded days the sun always shone on her door. There had always been an anchor that held her firm, and none of the ages in the street outside would ever shake her.

  So I brought in my water and took in as much of her calm as I could hold, and readied myself for the rest of the day.

  Next in the mornings, Monday through Friday, after my chores at home I would present myself at Master Johann’s back door. Mistress Dorothea would scoop me into the kitchen. The Mistress was the wife of a very great man besides being the sister of the present Chief Magistrate and the daughter of a previous, but she was no idlewoman; no one in Basel, no matter how great, didn’t work. A wealthy family would hire labor, though, and this Mistress did. She had a girl, a seamstress’s daughter, who helped her with washing and cooking. I did the heavy work. I would stoke the fire and empty the grate and chop wood and fetch water, and most days there would be a floorboard to hammer back or a pot to undent; I’ve been apprentice carpenter and tinker and smith and cooper. It was mostly the same that I did for my grandmother, but for a grander house and household. I would never see Master Johann these mornings. I would see the others of the family, and it was in years past that in these hours I met the sons and made my friendship with Daniel.

  The seamstress’s daughter was fourteen years old, a good laundress and passable cook, but she was flawed: she chattered continually. Worse, she and the Mistress together were deafening. The clatter and slap of dishes and ironing and kneading and all else would be bearable; the gossip and pure inanity that congested
the air were not, but I bore them anyway. The ridicule I endured from my friends was as hard: working with women made me a laughingstock with them.

  And I wasn’t paid a copper for any of it! Every morning but Saturday and Sunday I did this. I stopped my ears against Babel, I submitted to the common labor lot of man, passed from Adam to Noah to Greece to Rome to my Mistress’s kitchen, and I toiled. Yet, yet, like Jacob’s for Rachel, my labor seemed fleeting, for my wages were worth so much more than anything I could have been paid in money. Though Daniel scoffed, he knew well what great value I received for my chopping.

  That Friday morning I saw no more of Daniel or any of Nicolaus. Little Johann was waiting alone for me in the kitchen, kneading a ball of dough. I didn’t think he talked to anyone else. He’d never liked work, though he did his share. Breadmaking was an odd hobby for him. “You should have seen us last night,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t have. Who was glad for the homecoming? I know the Mistress was.”

  “Poppa said he was, even despite Daniel’s ungrateful pernicious heart. Daniel said he was glad, too, to see every familiar stone in the city and even the one where Poppa’s heart should be, and Nicolaus told the two they weren’t father and son but plain squabbler children, and Gottlieb said he would like very much to know why Daniel had come back at all.”

  “Did Daniel say why he had?”

  “He said it was because he’d missed Gottlieb so dearly. Then I went to my room.”

  “Does it vex the Mistress?”

  “She frets and worries, and she doesn’t believe they mean what they say.”

  “Do they, Johann?” I asked. In truth, he’d know better than they did.

  “Not all.”

  “And you?”

  He was pounding and shoving his dough. “I’m angry that they’re all angry. I want Daniel to go back to Italy.”

  “He said supper was tolerable.”

  “No one talked but Mama. If the rest just stay quiet I don’t mind them.” I felt badly for him and for his ball of flour. Then the Mistress and her maid joined us and no other talk was possible. When I left her kitchen, the streets were silent as midnight in comparison.

  My labor ended for the morning, it was time for solemn seriousness. I ran back home. For me, the path between my grandmother’s house and my Master’s was well worn. I ate my quick lunch of bread and cheese and went to my room for my stark transformation.

  I removed myself from the rough brown garments I preferred and pulled on white shirt and black breeches, then white stockings and black waistcoat, then black and buckle shoes and black justacorps coat.

  I had an extra head in my room. A white wood ball on a short stand, it considered life from the top of my dresser. It did this without sight or hearing, which surely improved its ruminations. It wore a white wig and black hat. Each day would I borrow these, transferring them between heads, from the one on my dresser to the one on my shoulders. If any of that wooden block’s thoughts transferred also, I was the better for them. The hat wasn’t tricorne, which was for men of gravity, but had a wide brim turned up on each side.

  All in black and white I was a changed man. I stepped more steadily. I didn’t run, or not much. I seemed thoughtful. But despite my best effort, in essence, I would remain myself. Yet observers noticed only appearance, not essence, and so for the next few hours I appeared a peer to my peers.

  Later in the afternoon I made my de-conversion. I moved my wig from one block of wood back to the other and hung and folded my blacks and whites. A world where everything was only one or the other would be preferable in many ways, but we lived in a world of browns.

  Finally at dinner I told my grandmother that I would be at the tavern Saturday evening. “It’s Daniel. He wants my help.”

  “Help to make trouble?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know what, so I’ll go to find out.”

  “A wise man runs from strife. I have a worry, Leonhard, of what will happen with all that family back in the city.”

  “Blessed are the peacemakers,” I said. “I have a hope, Grandmother, for what could happen.”

  I’d refused Daniel for that Friday evening because I had work to do, work that had to be finished before Saturday afternoon. I planted myself in my room, rooted to my chair, and soon sprouted leaves all over my desk: large leaves of white paper, which the birds of the field roosted in. One particular bird, a goose feather in my hand, was making its nest of inky black scribbles.

  Saturdays for me began very early. I’d be out for water and breakfasted by sunrise. I had kept this schedule even in the summer when the sun was also an early riser. I’d quickly finish all my other chores. Grandmother was as strict a taskmistress for me as she was for herself, and only when she was satisfied might I go on to the list of tasks from my other masters that must not be incomplete come Monday. Some weeks I was thorough enough with my time that the list was empty; but if not, I’d fly through it. If I’d been industrious and swift, it was still well before noon. I wouldn’t take time for lunch, and a full stomach would muddle me anyway. Instead, I’d settle at my desk and clear my brain to prepare. Saturday was my Sabbath of hardest labor, my rest from idle life.

  First, and crucial, I would take down a book.

  Leibniz and Newton waited at opposite ends of my shelf, and Descartes in the center, and Fermat and Pascal, MacLaurin and Taylor, de Moivre and L’Hopital, Hooke and Boyle, and many others between. I would have planned this choice through the week and reached the decision in the last waking minutes of the Friday night before, in the dark of my bed.

  Then, with that book on my desk, I would take out my folio of notes and thoughts from years of Saturdays past. I would set paper and ink and quill beside them all. And finally I would read.

  I would pour myself into it and I would pour it in to me. I’d think on every word and every equation, of what it means, and what it means more, and what it finally means, and what it means past that, and why, and why, and why. I only read with a pen in my hand. I’d write to myself but I could never write enough. And always I would push on.

  If there had been a shadow on all this, that this was devotion stolen from my devotion to God, it was always beyond me to stop. What else could I do? The hours passed and the book’s pages turned slowly while my own piles of paper grew. I lost my senses, and the world I sensed with them. I lived in an invisible world of logic and theorem more evident to me than ink and paper, more rigid and immutable than the desk and hard chair I’d been sitting on, purer than air, more part of me than my own hands, and unmatched in perfection among all other created things.

  But then my cock would crow.

  I’ve taught myself to hear the clock in Saint Leonhard toll three. When it did, I’d blink and firmly close my book: If I didn’t immediately I might not until the bell tolls that three again, which would be far into Sunday morning! But I was never dismayed, because even this pure time would have been only a preamble.

  Then I’d dress myself in my student finery, buckles to wig, and on this day when no other student in Basel cared much how they look, I cared most. Grandmother would inspect and correct me, and I’d tuck my folio under my arm and set out. I have done this every Saturday for five years, and always with trepidation and anticipation together.

  This Saturday, at the very instant of three thirty, I pulled the bell on the grand doorway in the Munster Square. It was opened by silent Mistress Dorothea, who saw me all other times in peasant brown at her back door with so many words. Now I was to receive the wages I’d earned by my labors of the week. She solemnly ushered me into the dark hall and escorted me up the stairs to a hallway that was smaller but the same dark, and knocked on a door, so firmly closed that it seemed a wall of stone.

  I still remembered the first time, when I was thirteen and trembling in my shoes, that she knocked and how nearly I fled at the stony voice that in answer commanded, “Come in.” Now it thrilled me, though I still took stock one last time whether I was c
ompletely ready. The Mistress opened the door.

  The room was as dark as the whole house, but a single bright candle burned on the table, which with its two chairs was the only furniture. In one chair was Master Johann, and the other chair was empty. It was for me. For two hours I would sit alone under his instruction, and he was the greatest Mathematician in the world.

  My Master was a man of substance, not to be trifled with, celebrated across the continent, distinguished in every manner, Basel’s first citizen, impressive and remarkable. His eyes, reflected in his sons, were heavy and brooding and pierced like spears. He did not speak often and his mouth and jaw were hard in his wide face. He wore an old wig in our meetings and his forehead was very high. He was short and broad compared to others, especially his sons. His hands were somewhat thick with short fingers yet he had a beautiful script, the equal of any scribe. This physical skill was surprising for a man whose abilities and efforts were mostly centered inside his head. And in his opinion, the whole world was centered about his head. He has lacked any vestige of modesty, sympathy, generosity, leniency or, sadly, paternity.

  Master Johann was the Professor of Mathematics at the University in Basel. He’d had his Chair for twenty years. He was the second man to hold that Chair. Before him was the Chair’s founder, his brother Jacob.

  During the two hours that he taught me, I was like Little Johann’s ball of dough: pounded and stretched and rolled, and finally brought out thoroughly baked, in need of cooling. My head was full and my stomach empty and I then would stumble, top-heavy, home. I had so much to think about. The papers in my folio, to be read slowly and thoroughly, would give me hours more of thought. They were like a river to be poured down a rabbit hole.

  I’d be ravenous when I arrived home, and I wouldn’t even change out of my black and white. My strict grandmother allowed herself one weekly moment of sympathy: she’d have a table full for me and I’d wolf it and tell her what I’d learned. For my sake she had made herself interested in Mathematics. My final challenge of the very challenging day was to distill two dense gold hours with Master Johann into twenty simple crystal minutes with Grandmother. If I could do that, then I had mastered my lesson.