An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

  “Stallion, Master. Spirited as you’ve preferred.”

  “Come on and let’s see him, Leonhard. Want a ride? Come with me. They’ll have another in the stable. Did you say you wanted to see Paris? Or Russia? Those are an odd pair for you to have asked of. Have you heard something?”

  “I only listen to my Master’s lectures, and I have one this afternoon, so I can’t ride with you.”

  “What do you have left to hear? You should be giving lectures. Who is it you’re hearing?”

  “Master Huldrych.”

  “Aged Huldrych! Still here? How is he?”

  “More so,” I said, and we were in the Barefoot Square with the ironshod horse, black as anything and eyeing Daniel thoughtfully. Daniel gave him the same look back.

  “So Huldrych’s still alive,” Daniel said, and then to his black horse, “and the ride’s to begin. And Leonhard won’t come to moderate us. We’ll be wild and free.” The horse was satisfied.

  3

  The Death Dance

  I returned to my room to become a student. On my dresser, beside my wig, I kept two artifacts and one marvel. Two wooden bowls, man-made, were the artifacts, but the marvel was purely God’s creation. It was a conch shell that my father had given me. I didn’t know from what far seashore it came. Sometime I would stare at it and become lost imagining how it came to be, and I would run my finger along the ridge of its top; this was the most marvelous part of it, because it formed a spiral more perfect than any which could be drawn by hand. How could it have been made? I believed that it proved that Mathematics was deep in all Creation. I even wondered, between Mathematics and the physical world, which was deeper. But Master Huldrych disagreed.

  Master Huldrych held Basel’s Chair of Physics. Twenty years ago he held it, when it was the Chair of Natural Philosophy, and forty years ago he held it. Perhaps sixty years ago; no records had been kept.

  He was a genial and cautious man in his narrow house on the Death Dance Street. The street floor was a single room where his lectures were held. The room above was a laboratory where various scales, quadrants, sextants and octants, lenses, and less recognizable objects were engaged in a lengthy experiment which concerned the accumulation of dust. On the highest floor, the Master himself lived in an advanced state of bachelorhood. I had been in this room on a few occasions, as the class occasionally had to select one of its members to arouse the Master from his deliberations when the lecture was to start. The basement of the house opened to the river bank. It flooded at any opportunity and was thus kept clean and empty.

  Other floods had scoured the houses of Basel from time to time. Nearly three hundred years ago the Black Death came to the Rhine and passed the city walls. There’d been no count or memory of how many died or how many lived. Instead, the wall of the cemetery of the Preacher’s Church was painted with the city’s Death Dance. Many cities had these Dances of Death; the Black Death swept many, many cities. Basel’s was famous, though, for its size and artistry. It was a mural a hundred feet long on the cemetery wall, made in the plague years, just opposite the house where Master Huldrych now lived. Perhaps he lived in it then, as well.

  I’d seen engravings of other Dances from other cities and they all had the same form of a line of many panels, and in each panel a man or woman danced, with a partner. Every dancer’s station in life was easily recognized from their dress despite centuries’ difference. There were kings and priests and farmers, bakers, knights; children and aged; monks and nuns; paupers, and scholars and students and knaves. But the partner was always the same. It was a sprightly cadaver, Death, grinning, spouting worms and decay, and enjoying the gavotte much more than the reluctant living. In every scene he mocked his mate, twirling the farmer’s plow or brandishing the knight’s sword or wearing lopsided the king’s crown.

  These dances were drawn and carved in observation of the Black Death’s sweep and carelessness. Even now there were churches in Germany standing empty and alone in old wide fields. Their villages dead and worn away, the stones of God’s house were the only remainder.

  Though drawn in that time centuries ago, the Dances’ meaning was just as painful now. Everyone would die. The dance showed that no one, no one, would escape, whatever their station, rank, or achievement. Life was only a dance with death.

  That Monday afternoon I took my place in Master Huldrych’s lecture room along with the dozen other students who paid the Master for his lectures. We were all in black and white for lectures, and we jested and teased and ignored the moral lesson available to us so close by.

  In my first years I was often the object of the jeering, being younger than the others. Now I was the same age as them and I still received a generous share of their torment, but I didn’t mind. I also received a share of their purses for tutoring them in their Latin and Greek. I wasn’t asked to tutor other subjects: I had gained a reputation of becoming too enthusiastic and lengthy in my sessions.

  Finally, as the church bells began their noon lecture, Master Huldrych appeared to begin his. We sat on a bench built around the walls of the room and the Master stood at a podium. He was expert in the Physics current in his youth but not the Physics current in his old age. He still referred to the subject as Natural Philosophy. He was one of the few masters at the University who still lectured in Latin. I wasn’t sure that he knew that he did. His great energy had dwindled though his curiosity was unflagging. He questioned any visiting scholar on the newest discoveries and ideas, but nothing new would ever seep into his lectures.

  He was aware that the atmosphere was a gas, and that it exerted pressure on surfaces. He had himself collected gases in containers and observed that the volume and pressure in the container were somehow related. But the basic principle eluded him that this relation was a simple Mathematic inverse proportion, though Mr. Boyle stated that sixty years ago. He had described to us the experiments and proposals he’d entered into the Paris Competition, though he had not competed for many years. He had never won the competition. He may not even have entered, but only remembered that he had.

  His lecture that morning was on the theory of waves, and I was in misery! I was fascinated by waves. From the square behind the Munster I would watch them on the Rhine. And this was my theory, as ridiculous as Master Huldrych found it: that sound was a wave.

  I believed this because I was convinced that waves could move through volumes, not just across surfaces. How could a bird in flight be heard? What was the sound? Huldrych said it couldn’t be a wave, because no surface connected the bird and the ear, and plain observation showed that waves occurred on surfaces. I believed instead that sound showed that an invisible wave might occur in a gas. There were so many invisible things!

  The air itself was invisible. It had been a century since Monsieur Pascal stated he believed that we were not surrounded by a vacuum, but by a type of matter like water, that filled our world like an ocean. At the time, Monsier Descartes derided him by saying the true vacuum was between Monsieur Pascal’s ears; but later, Mr. Boyle in England was able to evacuate the air from a bell pressed firmly against a tabletop. This true vacuum had many strange properties, including the phenomenon that no sound could penetrate it: a small, jangling bell inside the vacuum couldn’t be heard outside. So, air was necessary for sound.

  Daniel agreed with me; we had exchanged letters on this subject while he was in Italy. The difficulty was in the Mathematics. What were the equations that described these waves? I believed I had a solution, but there were so many difficulties. Oh, how I loved difficulties! How I loved these invisibilities! And how difficult it was to listen to Master Huldrych lecture on his simple, visible waves of water.

  The lecture ended. The students exited respectfully but I lingered, and when the others were gone, Master Huldrych noticed I’d remained. “Leonhard?” he asked, and peered carefully to see that it was. There was a mass to him, a bulginess, that was both height and girth; he was like a ruin of a castle. His wide robe contributed to his in
definition.

  “Master,” I answered. “How long have you lectured at the University?”

  “How long? Very long. Very, very long.”

  “Has anyone been longer?”

  “Oh, no. No one.” He shook his head in wonder at the very thought. “How could they?”

  “Even Master Balthazar? He’s had his Chair of Law for a long time.”

  “He has. He has. I remember when he came.” He smiled at me. “So I must have been here before, mustn’t I! All of the other Masters, I remember them all coming.”

  “The Master of Greek?”

  “Desiderius? That was only five years ago.”

  “The Master before, I meant. I don’t remember who he was.”

  “Master Jankovsky. He had been Chair fifteen years, but he was young when he was elected. That was very unfortunate, what happened to him. It would have been expected he’d have lived longer. I have. Or it would have been expected that I wouldn’t.”

  “Twenty years ago, then,” I said.

  “And Master Stuber before Jankovsky. He was old. He was very old.”

  “Master Johann has been here for twenty years.”

  “I remember that day very well. Johann and Jankovsky were elected the same day.”

  “The same day?”

  Master Huldrych nodded slowly and his thoughts seemed focused on something long ago. “When Master Jacob died.” He turned his head upward, as if he were looking toward heaven. Or perhaps just toward the ceiling. “Much has changed!” he said. “I think it’s best to not talk about that year.”

  The Death Dance paintings had faded over their many years, as had Master Huldrych, though they were still clear; but one scene seemed far more live and real than the others. It was the Lawyer. Every scene had written above it Death’s pronouncement and the Living’s appeal. I knew the Lawyer’s words well: God gives all laws, as are found in books; no man may change them: hate lies, love truth. But it wasn’t the Lawyer watching me from the wall. It was Nicolaus standing in front and matching the mural’s stance.

  “Old Huldrych,” he said.

  “Old but durable,” I answered. “He’ll outlast us all.”

  “His Chair’s worth having.”

  “Once it’s empty, and it isn’t.”

  “He’s mortal,” Nicolaus said again; and flanked by hundreds of feet of Death Dance, he was irrefutable.

  “So was your uncle. Do you remember him?”

  “No.”

  “Was he alive when you came to Basel, or had he already died? You were ten years old. If you tell me, I can tell Daniel, and you won’t report any of us to Master Johann.”

  Nicolaus only asked my question back. “What have you learned of my Uncle Jacob?”

  “I know his Mathematics,” I said. “He was Master Johann’s teacher.” Though Nicolaus had the Chair of Law in Bern, he was more a Mathematician than many who taught Mathematics.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve read the Ars Conjectandi and I’ve had my Master’s lessons. I can see what he learned from his brother.”

  “I know the lion by his paw.” Nicolaus said it oddly. It was a saying in their family, with a meaning of recognizing one thing from another. “I don’t know that he was alive when we came. We had stopped a month in Strasbourg on our way.”

  “A month?”

  “There were armies on the Rhine, and battles. We had to wait. And no news from Basel. But Gottlieb went on. He’d been living with us.” Then he said nothing else.

  It was odd how the conversation mirrored his mother’s, how the journeys had been symmetric. I asked, “What does Daniel want, do you think?”

  “He bears watching.”

  “He means to cause trouble, I guess.”

  “He has reason.”

  I was unsure if this meant he had a reason, or if he could reason. It was Nicolaus’s manner of speech, always leaving me unsure.

  “Did you come to Basel to watch him?”

  “I have reason, too. I am only the lion’s paw.” He smiled at me. “What reason do you have, Leonhard?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  He nodded to me and even tipped his hat, and our talk was over.

  Late in the afternoon, just as the shadows of western houses were at the feet of eastern houses, I passed through the Barefoot Square on an errand. There had been many walls around Basel, of sod and wood and stone, but the oldest standing was the Old Wall, the inner wall built six hundred years ago. The New Wall was a century or two younger and enclosed three times the area. The Barefoot Square, between the church and the inn, had the inside of the Old Wall as one of its sides, and the Coal Gate as an entry; a man entering from Coal Street had the Boot and Thorn on his left and the Barefoot Church on his right. I called it the Half-Shod Gate.

  The Wall and its gates, though deep inside the city now, were still maintained. On the key of the gate’s arch was a shield carved with a Bishop’s crook, which was Basel’s emblem, though there’d been no bishop since the Reformation. But the shield had cracked, sometime recently. I saw scaffolding up the side of the wall at the gate, and a workman repairing the shield. It was Lithicus. He saw me watching from below and set down his hammer. “Would you make this of paper?” he said.

  “No. Nor any of the Wall.”

  “Nor the houses, nor the church.”

  “I’ll ask you a question,” I said. “I’ve looked at Master Jacob’s epitaph stone often, and I wonder if you remember its spiral.”

  “Spiral? I remember it!” His countenance was instantly angry. “I remember it too well!”

  “What do you remember?”

  “That it’s a spiral and you won’t tell me it’s not.” And he was fearful, too.

  “Oh, it is,” I said.

  “Some say not, and they say what isn’t is.”

  “What do they say is?”

  “Stretched bendings that no one could carve.”

  “Who says—” I began to ask, but exactly then I was knocked from my feet by a black stallion. I’d always been an inattentive fellow when I walked the streets, and I’d had practice enough picking myself up from collisions. A hand took hold of mine and pulled. It was Daniel, and his other hand still held the stallion’s rein.

  “Keep an eye out,” he said, laughing.

  “Or you keep an eye on me,” I said, and laughed with him. “And you had a good ride?”

  “Wild and free,” he said. “And the innkeeper’s waiting for his horse, so I’ll take it to him.” In the doorway of the Boot and Thorn, Gustavus had his eye on Daniel, and I thought it was Daniel he was waiting for, and it was Daniel that he led into the inn.

  Later, I was cast ashore into my grandmother’s kitchen, to a supper of fish and dark bread. I felt troubled, as I had Sunday morning before, and I asked my grandmother’s counsel. “Who is king in Basel?”

  “You know that the town’s Council and its Mayor are all Basel has of a king, and the Magistrates are its judges.”

  “I know those,” I said. “But who is king?” I was as unsure of the question as of the answer.

  “Whose laws are followed is king,” she answered. “Whose laws do you see followed, Leonhard?”

  There was a great deal to consider about laws. There were the city’s laws that lawyers read and the Magistrates judged on, and people obeyed these laws mostly, so the Council was a king. Also, there were laws of gravity that everyone obeyed, so the earth was our king; and laws of civility and custom that weren’t written but ruled us. There was an elegance that each law had its giver and its reason, wise or poor. And there were deeper laws of good and evil in which we chose our own Master. “God gives all laws, as are found in books; no man may change them: hate lies and love truth,” I said. “Grandmother, do you remember when Master Johann’s brother Master Jacob died?”

  “I remember the man well.”

  “Was it before or after Master Johann came back from Holland? I think it must have been close either way.”<
br />
  “I don’t know. Jacob was alive and Johann was away, then Jacob was dead and Johann was here. It wasn’t told beyond that.”

  “I think Knipper would remember that ride,” I said.

  “Ask him when he comes with the coach tomorrow.”

  “He didn’t go,” I said. “Gustavus had to send Willi with the coach. But I’d have to find him, and Gustavus couldn’t. Or maybe when Willi comes back, he can tell me if Knipper was still in Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen when he went for the trunk.”

  Tuesday began with water: a steady rain falling and I fallen upon, fetching from the fountain rain that had fallen in the weeks before. A barrel beneath my bedroom window caught rainwater from the roof, but it wasn’t full yet.

  Just as the people of Basel carried the blood of the ancients, the veins of the city were as ancient. In the inner city, the old city, the streets must have been laid sometime, some year. One evidence of this was the fountains. They were fed by pipes or tunnels beneath the streets. Every person in Basel used the fountains but no one knew when they were set, or how, or by whom.

  There was a stream, the Birsig Flow, that entered the city from the southwest. Before it came into the city, it split in three parts. One fed the moat and another passed between houses inside the city, then disappeared. That was a foul course of water and no one would drink from it. But the third split dove beneath the wall into an ancient tunnel. It must once have been unfettered on its journey to the Rhine, but very long ago it was covered over by the streets and houses of Basel. Now even its path was unknown. I believed it fed the fountain in the Barefoot Square. That one always had a sharp taste.

  I sheltered for a moment from the rain inside the door of the Boot and Thorn, and caught Old Gustavus as he passed, like the stream, toward some hidden place. “Master Daniel’s made himself well at home here,” I said. “He likes what he finds in the Common Room.”

  “He finds what’s Common to all men.”

  And with that wet answer, I took my buckets and carried home water through the rain.