An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

  2

  The Boot and Thorn

  In my first year in Basel, I was given a book. I was only thirteen, still apprehensive of my new life, an uprooted sapling fighting to grow new roots in hard soil. Master Johann was a rocky cliff that I grasped, and my roothold in his house was wholly tenuous. I was ignored or mocked in my classes. Then, what a pleasure it was to be befriended! For Daniel, who was a twenty-year-old man of note, took note of me; first with cordial greetings, next with amicable conversations, and then with the full shine of his winsome character. Finally, on a morning three months after my arrival in Basel, he’d sought me out as I was sweeping his mother’s kitchen and tossed a leather volume into my hands.

  “You say you like books?” he said. “This one’s new, just from the printer. See if the ink’s dry yet!”

  I didn’t know it then, but I’d been given a challenge and not just a book; it was only later that I learned that particular gleam in Daniel’s eye. On that morning I only saw the pages of Latin and symbols and equations, and my heart leaped.

  “Thank you!” The ink was plenty dry and I was caught like a fish. A page describing the Mathematics of Likelihood was open before me, and I read the lines and paragraphs without hope of being able to close it. The words were astonishing.

  “Hold, hold!” Daniel had laughed. “That’s terrible stuff, there. You’ll need help to understand it.”

  “I’ll take any help,” I said, and meant it, but it seemed plain to me. The Latin was lucid and straight, though wordy, and in just that one page I knew the thesis. “Who wrote it?”

  “It was Cousin Gottlieb who made the manuscript and bundled it off to the printer. But he’s only the scribe. The author’s someone else. Have you heard of Uncle Jacob?”

  I pulled away from the text and found the title page. The title was Ars Conjectandi, the Art of Conjecturing. The author was Professor of Basel, member of the Societies of Paris and Berlin, and of my Master Johann’s family but not my Master. It was Jacob. And below the title was the explanation, Opus Posthumum, published after his death.

  “I don’t know Jacob.”

  “Gottlieb took his notes and made a book of them, and that was ten times the labor of a stonecutter carving Cupid from a boulder.”

  “But who was he? Tell me about Jacob!”

  “Father’s brother, father’s teacher, father’s Master. But don’t tell me you can read it!”

  “I can,” I’d said eagerly. “Oh, thank you, Master Daniel! Is it mine?”

  “It’s yours,” he said. “And if you can read it so well, then I’ll have you explain it to me!”

  Even making his joke, he was still treating me as an equal. I was in awe of him then! This was a young man who’d spent a year in Heidelberg and had returned to Basel to finish his doctorate in medicine, and was the son of my revered Master Johann. And I hoped to use his good favor to gain an extra step in my climb of Master Johann’s steep ladder.

  That next Saturday, five years ago, I approached my Master’s house with confidence and Uncle Jacob’s book both tucked under my arm. I was taken upstairs and through the door. I still felt very much on trial, having to be perfect in my preparation and understanding each week just to earn my next week’s session. So I sat in my chair and set my papers on the table, and then with pride and desperate hope, I placed my offering, the Ars Conjectandi, on the table for him to notice. My young heart skipped as I waited for my Master’s hard face and the severe gaze to soften.

  He took one glance. He recognized the title. Then he transfixed me with the most hostile stare I’d ever experienced. I hadn’t known that such animosity existed, and I was its target! He held me on his sword point for an eternity. Then he proceeded with my lesson, never mentioning the book.

  As soon as I could, I slipped the volume into my lap, out of his sight. He ignored the motion. I endured the two hours in agony. I walked home through streets of fire. I ate no dinner but only ran to my room and sobbed my heart out, and vowed never to pester Master Johann with my miserable existence again.

  I didn’t keep that vow. I did return, and repaired over months the damage done in that one moment. I believed Daniel should have warned me, but he may not have thought to, or that I would be bold to show off my possession. And since then, I have wondered what became of that boulder of notes from which Gottlieb carved his Conjectandi Cupid. I never have asked Master Johann, of course. Besides stirring his anger at their mention, I was never sure he knew himself where they were.

  Years later, when he was in Italy, Daniel sent me a copy of his own book, Exercitationes, Mathematical Exercises. His note with it said, “More leather for your excellent shelf, Leonhard, and more bait to anger the Bear, if you didn’t learn your lesson before.” But I had learned my lesson, and Master Johann never saw that in my hand; and I’d had my first introduction to Uncle Jacob; and most important of all, both the meticulous Conjectandi and the elegant Exercitationes were gems.

  So I went forth Saturday night to meet with Daniel, setting my foot on the dark evening streets of Basel. As always the windows were shuttered. Just pins of light pricked out. There was little to fear with the Night Watch always close. I walked with one of them, he swinging his lantern and his jaw, and I listening for those moments to tales and tall tales of battle and adventure. In the Barefoot Square, the windows of the church were unshuttered and bright. The inn was lit with darker light. Through its weary door I left the overworld.

  Enter the Boot and Thorn! Steifel und Stachel, Tavern primeval, vast beamed of ancient trees, smoked by the unquenchable flame, dark unyielding to light. Inside the door was a passage with no seen end, twisting into distance. Doors and stairs lived in it, and dragons. On its walls were pictures painted before there was light or color, and rails and moulds carved by gnomes. The air was soot and hay and mead. A gray cat with white eyes was named Charon and was Cerberus. I paid for my passage with a bow and crossed the hallway Styx.

  On the right was a fissure, and through it the Common Room. A gaping, howling hearth lit the room, and oil lamps burned with more smoke than flame. Driven up through each table was an iron spike with a candle fixed on it. These were the best illumination in the room. As the evening would pass and each candle breathed its last, and the lamp glasses would blacken and strangle their glow, only the conflagration in the ruddy fireplace would enlighten.

  The pillars that held the ceiling were not cut by human hands. They, and the ceiling they supported, were really a primordial forest of trunks and branches that grew themselves into that room with its soil floor. Shelves, eye-high, belt-high, high as good thoughts and high as foul plots ran the circuit of the walls. Tankards packed them. They were wood and clay, little gargoyles who watched in benign grotesquerie over the transacted business.

  The tables were immovably heavy. They might have been filled or near empty and it would have appeared the same. The presence of men in the room was heard and sensed, not seen, and to enter the room was to be made part of it, to be made subterranean, to be lit by fire and breathe earthen air.

  As I stood in the entrance, my vision was blunt but my ears were sharp, and I quickly knew where Daniel was. He would have preceded me, likely by hours. Only when I came close did I see that his brother Nicolaus was there, also.

  A Master from Oxford, a Chair of Mathematics on a visit once to Master Johann, told me that in England there were coffee rooms for gentlemen in taverns, separate from the commons. Here was no division. Black and white mingled with brown. I wouldn’t know which I was meant for if I had to choose. The Room, like temptation, was common to all men. I hadn’t been noticed and I paused while Daniel spoke.

  “There’s no word,” he was saying to his brother. “Not a breath of a whisper. I was sure there’d be a letter waiting.” He had a cup of dice in his hand and tossed them to the table. “Who else could have won the prize? There’s not a one who could have beat me.”

  Nicolaus answered him, “It’s a hundred who could.”

&nbs
p; “I’ll go to Paris myself and see. I’ll have them show me a better piece than what I sent them. I know I won the competition.”

  “Then where’s the letter?”

  “I’ll go to Paris and get it.” I could see his peeved frustration in the dark as well as I could hear it. He pulled the dice back into his cup. His words interested me, but the dice in his hand did more. The subject of Master Jacob’s Ars Conjectandi was Likelihood or Chance, what had more recently been named Probability. The Conjectandi presented the rolling of dice as a type of equation, but not one that gave a result. Instead the Mathematics gave possibilities of results. It was an odd prophecy, to say with certainty what might happen, but not what would happen. I had wondered at the role of Providence in guiding affairs: Did God know how the die would land?

  “Daniel,” I said.

  “Leonhard!” There was no chance to that. His greeting was certain and exactly as I’d known it would be. He pushed a bench toward me. “Still breathing? Not smothered by your hours in the Holy of Holies?”

  “I’m breathing. It’s the air in here that would smother a man.”

  “Then breathe it deep and listen to me.” Now, Daniel had his winning smile and friendly ways. All the ire he’d had a moment before was gone. “I’ve come back to Basel with a goal.” The hearth glare fell full on him. It made his grin fiery. “You have a part in it.”

  “Tell me, then. I want to know what it is that I want nothing to do with,” I said.

  “Your part’s easy enough. It’s about Uncle Jacob.”

  “That’s poking bears, Daniel.”

  “That’s reason enough itself.”

  “I won’t help you, not for that. You know it’s a rule that he isn’t discussed in the Master’s house.”

  “I just want to know how Jacob died, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “If you want to know, just ask.”

  “I am asking.”

  “Ask someone who knows!” I said. “Your mother.”

  “She’d tell Brutus that I asked.”

  “Ask your cousins. You have plenty.”

  “It’ll all get back.” He leaned into my shadow. “There are nets laid and webs spun, and I don’t want a whisper of anything to reach those ears.”

  The answer to this seemed evident. “Ask your Uncle Faulkner.” This man was the Chief Magistrate of Basel, and Mistress Dorothea’s brother. “He’s part of no one’s net.”

  “But I can’t hold him to confidence, either. No, you’re the only one I can ask.”

  “And I’m the only one who can’t answer. I don’t know how your uncle Jacob died.”

  “But you can find the answer. I know you can, Leonhard.” He’d always been this way. Daniel had made friends in every street in Basel, as he pried open the closed doors and searched their shadows. Whoever knew him was fond of him, and whoever knew him well distrusted him, as well.

  “There’s something amiss,” I said.

  “There is,” he said, “and I want to know what it is.”

  “Amiss with you. It’s your own uncle, and your own family, and I’m the one you’re sending into a lion’s den.”

  “I can’t let the lion know what I want. It has to be you.” He laughed. “You’ve nothing to fear, old friend! Just throw a few little words, an innocent question. Then listen very close.”

  Nicolaus had been silent the whole time, and he’d been listening very close. “And are you a part with this?” I asked him.

  “I’m no part.”

  “He’s part and parcel,” Daniel said. “It’s his plan anyway.”

  “It isn’t,” Nicolaus said.

  “It is, all of it. Nicolaus is the cunning one, you know. I said Uncle Jacob? and Nicolaus said Leonhard! and I said Oh, that’s our man! ” And Nicolaus said nothing.

  “I know Jacob’s epitaph because I’ve seen it, and I’ve heard a few other bits. He was Chair of Mathematics here and he died twenty years ago. And you know all that.”

  “I know it,” Daniel said.

  “And I know his Mathematics,” I said, “because of his book that you gave to me.”

  “You only know what dearest cousin Gottlieb put in the book. That’s all any of us know.”

  “Except Gottlieb himself,” Nicolaus said.

  “There must be more,” I said.

  But that was not Daniel’s interest of the moment. “There’s only one thing I want to know,” he said, “and that’s how Jacob died.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Nothing more. Was it in his bed, or in the river, or in between?”

  In Basel, to die in the river was an evil thing. There was a history to it, of burning and drowning, and Daniel had made a poor joke. “And why do you want to know? Why did you come back to Basel?” I asked him.

  “You answer my question, Leonhard,” he said, and he shook his cup. That rattle was the only sound in that room that cut through all the other sound. He tossed the dice and put his hand over the numbers, hiding them. “And I’ll answer yours.”

  Daniel had always been a mule. The more he was pulled on, the less he’d move. I’d only get more perplexity from him and I’d had enough. Besides, as we had talked there in that Underworld, its Lord arrived.

  This was Old Gustavus. He was an innkeeper and a blacksmith and looked both with heavy arms from pounding and a heavy brow from scowling and a black beard like a burned forest. He was old but not aged; he’d hardened like mortar. He came in with a barrel on his shoulder and set it at the counter and then nearly extinguished the lamps with his stare. He fixed on Daniel and drew heavily near.

  “Good evening, Master,” he said. “An honor for you to visit here.” He spoke cavernously, when he spoke. Most often a nod of his head and glint of his eye would get done what he wanted. “Is there anything you require?”

  “A Chair at the University,” Daniel answered. He had no fear of the man. He’d bought him over many times with the money he’d spent in that room. “Mathematics would do well, though I’d take nearly any of them.” He laughed and didn’t wait for any answer. “But I’d settle for less. What do you have in the stable tonight?”

  “Horses, Master.”

  “I thought you would. I might want one for the month.”

  “There’d be one.”

  “Send Willi around with it. I’ll look it in the mouth.”

  Gustavus’ dark darkened. “Willi’s gone with the coach to Freiburg, Master. I’ll send Fritz.”

  “With the coach?” Now Daniel was curious. “What would Knipper want with him on the coach?”

  “Willi drove it, Master. There was no Knipper.”

  “He never came?” I asked. I was not afraid of Gustavus, either; not much.

  “No.” No Master for me. I was in brown.

  “Where’d he get to?” Nicolaus asked, and it was odd he’d spent the words.

  “No place I know” was the answer. “I’ll send Fritz around with the horse, Master.”

  “No need,” Daniel said. “I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll want it Monday. About noon.”

  “Where are you riding?” I asked. Then, as a joke, “Russia?”

  “Russia?” Daniel was authentically amused. “Not in an afternoon. It would be a fast horse for that.”

  “Paris, then?” I asked, still with my joke, and that brought less amusement.

  “Not Paris, either.” He turned. “That’s all,” he said to Gustavus, and that was all. Daniel was ready to leave, to return to the living streets, so I was pleased to return with him. We left the eternal dark for the simple black of earthly night, and I turned our conversation toward Italy. This was my interest. I’d always been so curious about the peninsula and all the world beyond Basel and I even coaxed a few words from Nicolaus on it. He knew the land well; before he took the Chair of Law in Bern, he’d been Chair of Mathematics in Padua, the same Chair Daniel now had. Even Gottlieb had held the Galileo Chair of Astronomy there years before. I wanted to go myself
to Venice and Rome and Padua. Someday I’d Knipper south. We talked awhile before they left toward their home and beds, and I watched them leave. But I stayed in the Barefoot Square.

  It has always been the poor whose feet were bare. Their Square was named for the church on it, and their church was plain and very large and worth more to them than shoes. It was built in old times by barefoot friars who knew poverty. I went in. It was lit by a few candles and they brightened more than all the fires in the Boot and Thorn.

  The ceiling was higher inside than the roof outside, so far above the stones of the floor that the air inside the church was pulled thin by it. It was plain timber, not like the decorated toppings that crown wealthier churches. Two central walls hung from the ceiling a short distance, then split into peaked arches. Long pillars gripped the arches, held up by their tight hold. The pillars reached down to the stone floor and pulled upward on it, so the whole church was supported and lifted by its highest steeple. The floor grasped the crypt and the crypt was bedded in the rock and soil of the earth, which meant that Basel, and the whole planet, was held up by the church and the church by the heavens. If the chains to heaven were cut, the planet would plummet. The heavens would also be freed from the earth then, and would rebound away like a tree branch pulled down and released. But the chains were too, too strong. They would never break. I sometimes feared, though, that the church might break loose from its foundation and be wrenched into the sky. If it did, I hoped to be in it.

  It was important of Basel that it was caught like this, held taut between earth and heaven like a knot between ropes. It was part of each but was not either. One day the city might be pulled fully to one side, and what a sundering that would be.

  That night it did not. I sat some minutes on the back bench in a corner, a place where I listened and watched. That night in the Barefoot Church I saw winged Michael in holy flame, and slue-foot Lucifer in brimstone, the two of them in dispute, and between them a slab of cold stone. I knew it must be the body of Moses they were contending over, but I couldn’t see clearly.