An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

  I looked out the window again. The roofs had a different shape than those in Basel, and the houses were darker colors and lower. It might have been Strasbourg.

  “Then I will withdraw,” Gottlieb said. “The Inquisitor is required to stay within Basel.” He stepped back across the threshold into his own city, and through the doorway faced the Magistrate in his. “A corpse was sent to Strasbourg and I have been instructed to learn why. To do so, I must know the reason you have come here.”

  Caiaphas stood, angered beyond his control. “My reasons have nothing to do with your Inquiry!”

  “Basel, not you, appointed me. I am Inquisitor and I will ask my own questions. Why did you come? Why did you open the trunk? What is important enough to bring you here? I will have those answers.” Then his voice changed, less sharp but more pointed. “Twenty years ago we faced each other and you had the better of it.”

  “Yet now you have what you wanted,” Caiaphas said, suddenly less angry.

  “That has nothing to do with you.”

  “What if it does?”

  Gottlieb asked, slowly, “Is that why you’ve come?”

  Caiaphas said, slowly, “It is one of my reasons.”

  “The Inquisitor can only serve his own city. Not anyone else.”

  “A servant doesn’t choose his Master!”

  “The Inquisitor has only one Master, which is the Town Council of Basel.” He turned from the threshold border between cities and disappeared from our sight.

  His repatriation had been too sudden, and I was still in the room. I realized I’d been abandoned, or I had abandoned my superior by not moving quickly with him, and I jumped to follow. But the border closed.

  “Stop him,” Caiaphas said, and the gendarme blocked my way. I turned back.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What are you writing?”

  “I’m Master Gottlieb’s clerk,” I said. “I’m instructed to write his inquiries.”

  “Where have I seen you before?”

  “Yesterday evening, sir. You sent me to fetch a magistrate.”

  “That was you?”

  I’d been in brown. Now I was in black and white. It was as if a stone had become bread; neither could be trusted afterward. “Yes, sir.”

  “What is your position?”

  “I’m a student, sir.”

  “In what?”

  “Mathematics.”

  The bread had become something else, I couldn’t tell what.

  “I see. What is your name?”

  “Leonhard, sir.”

  I might have hoped that his questioning was only his habit and not for a reason. But my answer and my name were significant to him. “You are the one?”

  “Sir?”

  “You ordered the stablehand to put the trunk on the coach.”

  “Not me, sir—”

  “I am now aware of you, Master Leonhard.” He nodded to Gendarme Foucault. “Release him.”

  So I did go. But I didn’t feel that I’d been released.

  I made my labyrinthine way to the light of the front door. Gottlieb was there in silhouette. “What took you?” he asked me.

  I’d only been a few words behind him in leaving the room, and I’d hurried to catch up, so I didn’t know how I could have more than seconds later reaching the Common Room. But it seemed that he’d been waiting a longer time. “Magistrate Caiaphas held me back.”

  “Oh, he did?”

  We came out into the sun of the Barefoot Square. The face of the Barefoot Church was whiter than paper. “He asked what I was writing in my notes.”

  “And anything else?”

  “What I was studying, and then who I was.”

  “Now he knows who you are.”

  “He had heard my name. What did you mean, that you’d met him twenty years ago?”

  “On our return to Basel. We stopped in Strasbourg. How old are you, Leonhard?”

  “Eighteen,” I answered.

  “I was eighteen then.”

  “You said he had the better of your meeting.”

  “Just as he’s had the better of his meeting with you. That was how it started.”

  “And he never answered any questions of yours.”

  “He only wanted to see that I was who he thought, and I the same.” Then, without a pause, he said, “Next we will question Master Huldrych.”

  “Daniel wasn’t genuine when he accused Master Huldrych. He was only mocking.”

  “He might not have been.”

  Master Huldrych did not have a housekeeper, and so his house was not kept. At other Masters’ houses, the students knocked and waited to be admitted. Students quickly learned to enter the house of Physics on their own. That was not for Master Gottlieb, however; we knocked, and with all the authority of the City of Basel. Repeated knockings and minutes were required until the Chair opened the door.

  He tried to make sense of what he saw. First of me. “It isn’t class, is it? It isn’t Monday. I know it isn’t. Or Thursday. No.” Then of Cousin Gottlieb. “Gottlieb? A meeting of the faculty? But I don’t remember that one was scheduled. No.” Then of my hat. “Another Black Death? But no, that was you, Gottlieb, when Jacob died.” And then he nodded. “Another trunk, then?”

  “No, no!” Cousin Gottlieb answered, suddenly very, very annoyed at Huldrych’s wandering. “I am here to inquire.”

  “Oh? Inquire? About what?”

  “Knipper.”

  “Oh! Oh? Oh. ” He said each as its own full meaning. “Knipper?”

  “Knipper.”

  “You’re the Inquisitor, then, Gottlieb?”

  “I am.”

  “That’s an odd turn.” Huldrych stepped aside to allow us in. “What questions?” We passed with him through the tiny entry and into his lecture room. I’d sat there many times, but now it was upside down as Cousin Gottlieb stood while Huldrych sat. At least I was taking notes as I always did there. The room had a small window to the front. Windows in Basel were not meant to be seen through, only to allow in light, and that to a people who preferred dimness. There was another small window in the back, which must have looked out onto the river. I’d never seen it unshuttered.

  Gottlieb continued to stare for a moment, and longer. Then he calmly, and even gently, asked, “Why was Knipper in Jacob’s trunk?”

  “It’s odd if he was,” Huldrych said, not any surprised, though I was. “But was he?”

  “I saw it. Why was Knipper in it?”

  “He must have been, if you say he was. But why? That’s harder to say.” Huldrych looked slowly and mournfully to the floor. “And he can’t say, can he? He’s dead. I’d heard that. In the trunk? I don’t know why he’d be there.”

  “How’d the trunk come to the Boot and Thorn?”

  “To the Inn? It was there? Then it wouldn’t be here, would it? It wouldn’t. But I’m sure it is. I’ll look at where it is, or where it isn’t, if it isn’t.” He stood, as vague under his robe as the thoughts in his head. He moved, as ponderous as those thoughts. We went with him and he climbed the stairs to his laboratory.

  I’d seen into this room a few times, looking for the Master when students were waiting for him, though I’d learned soon enough he was never in it. Only dust was. The many tables and their very many objects were coated with dust as a chicken with feathers, so that shapes were clear but softened and colors muffled. Master Huldrych looked about as if he’d never seen the room before.

  “Who moved it?” Gottlieb asked and the dust rose just at the abruptness.

  “I put it here,” Huldrych answered. That seemed to be the same as saying it wouldn’t move ever again.

  “When, sir?” I asked. It wasn’t my part to ask questions, but I was quite amazed at the thought of any motion in that space.

  “When I first had it.”

  That was all I had the temerity to ask. But Gottlieb didn’t scowl. He pushed me on. “Ask him more,” he said to me, and I was thrust, in that moment, into the place of Inquis
itor myself, and over my own Physics Master.

  “When did you first have it?” I asked. But this was not the question I had been meant to ask.

  “I know that already,” Gottlieb said. “Ask a better question.”

  The day was Wednesday and in the morning, but I felt Saturday afternoon anxiety, as if Master Johann himself was testing me. I grasped for the better question, and Huldrych waited patiently for it. “Where did you put it in here, sir?”

  “Well, just here, of course.” And he pointed. Of course we all turned to see where, including Huldrych himself, and the motion of his arm and our quick spin raised a strange new cloud of the omnipresent dust; and I was reminded of the cloud that followed Knipper on his last drive into the city. Light from the window opaqued the haze and all we saw for the moment was a solid block of golden, glowing air. Then it faded to translucent, and to transparent, and we were staring at a glow and a wall and floor, lit by the same light that had filled the dust, released. It was the far wall from the door. The floor against it was occupied by blank space, between a table on one side and a cabinet on the other. The trunk could well have sat there, as the emptiness was just the size of it, but the space was so heavily coated with the ever-dust that nothing could have been there for a very long time. “It was there,” Huldrych said. “I quite remember putting it.”

  “Was that long ago?”

  “It must have been, I think.”

  I’d already put myself forward into Gottlieb’s role. Now I tried an even bolder request. “May I go look?”

  “Go?” Huldrych said. “Of course. Why shouldn’t you?”

  That no one ever before had seemed a possible reason, at least no one in at least a half inch, with time measured in dust. But I put my foot deliberately forward and then again, and walked as slowly across the floor as if it were slick, thin ice. Clouds rose against me, disturbed from their sleep, and I was blinded. I paused and moved again, and finally I came close to where the trunk wasn’t. I stopped.

  Years at least had passed since anything had held that place. I very slowly leaned down and in the dust I saw a line where the trunk’s edge had been. And even very faintly, I could perhaps see the press of feet placed wide in the brown and gold dust, and more faintly yet a shade of gray dust in those places. I moved my own feet back to the door. “It was there,” I said. “But it’s been moved long ago.”

  “How long?” Gottlieb asked, of me, and Huldrych, and the dust. Huldrych answered.

  “I don’t remember anyone coming for it. Not after you did.” Then he coughed. The dust was choking him.

  “What was in it?” I asked.

  “Just what’s always been in it,” Huldrych said, struggling to breathe. “You remember, don’t you?” he asked Gottlieb. He coughed again, more violently. “It’s the—”

  “I know what was in it. I want to know when it was taken. You should have been watching it, Huldrych.” That Master couldn’t answer, besides that it seemed he didn’t know the answer, because he was choking and gasping. I’d been fearful of the dust and held my sleeve over my mouth. Gottlieb had stepped back from the cloud.

  I took Master Huldrych’s hand and led him back from the doorway. “But who’d want it?” he asked, finally, when he could.

  Gottlieb shook his head. “That’s all. We’re finished.” We would have left Huldrych there, regaining his breath, and the hallway gray and clouded, but he still seemed weakened. I stood with him a moment and Gottlieb waited.

  In that moment the air cleared. “I’m right now, Leonhard,” Huldrych said.

  In the street, I didn’t know where we would go and I waited to be told our destination. I still had plenty of paper and ink. “Who is next?”

  Gottlieb only stared at the wall opposite and the many figures on it. “Next? I don’t know who will be next.” He was still contemplating the wall. “There is no coach driver in the Dance.”

  “There’s a peddler.”

  “That’s closest. He goes town to town and lives in none. And there,” he pointed, “is an innkeeper, and there a laborer, and there an Academic, and there a gentleman. And there a Magistrate, or what they had of them in those times. The Black Death took them all.”

  “What did Master Huldrych mean about the Black Death?”

  “Something he shouldn’t have remembered. There is no one else for us to question,” he said, in answer to my first question. He’d meant it completely: We were finished. I wondered myself, looking at the wall, which of the characters I might be.

  “Master Gottlieb?” I said. “What was in the trunk? Where did it come from?”

  He might have dismissed me and my audacity, and I could see that his gaze wasn’t on anything near, especially on me. But he did focus back and said, “It is no coincidence that it should appear just as my cousins have returned from Italy.”

  “But . . . why was Knipper put in it?”

  “That must not be a coincidence, either.” And that was a dismissal and his plain answer to me that he would not answer me. I wasn’t finished trying.

  “There weren’t many replies to your questions. Did you learn anything from them?”

  “Not from the questions. From the trunk. Now hand me your papers and go. The Inquiry is tomorrow and you’ll appear with me.”

  “Is there anything I need to do?”

  “It’s already done.” And I think he meant more than just the notes that I’d given him. But I still tried once more.

  “Can you tell me, sir, why you returned back from Italy yourself?”

  His answer surprised me, not least that he even answered, or answered plainly. He gave me a curious look that reminded me of the one wink he’d given Daniel the night before. “For a Chair in Basel, of course.”

  5

  The Barefoot Church

  In black and white I wandered the streets. Others did, also. In the Market Square, beneath the Town Hall’s festal brick, the stalls were very crowded. Farmers sold their vegetables, grains, and rustic wares. Goliath was there, with a grindstone, sharpening customers’ cutlery. Near him, David was selling wool and slings, keeping count of his business with smooth stones. Demetrius sold his silver, Paul his tents and Lydia her purples, though Basel had no imperials to want them. There was a commotion as someone upset some tables of moneychangers, but I walked on.

  I came to the Barefoot Square. Lithicus was on his scaffold, chiseling, and I watched him awhile and thought of spirals. Then I stepped over a white threshold into the Barefoot Church and sat on my customary bench.

  The Church of Bare Feet was the oldest church in Basel. It wasn’t the first established, but it had been the most sturdy.

  The Black Death had come to Basel nearly four centuries ago. It had first come to Italy and spread like the ripples on a pond, always moving, always outward. In a year it reached to Basel. Once it did, nothing could stand against it. Death danced in Basel.

  The citizens of the city were, of course, greatly confused, and terribly frightened. Soon an accusation was made: the Jews, who lived in Small Basel, were dying at a lesser rate. That was unfortunate for them. It was taken as proof of their guilt. They were assumed to be poisoning the wells and causing the epidemic.

  On a day in January, with the sickness at its height, and despite many pleas on their behalf by the town leaders, the general population, incited by the trade and craft guilds, gathered the Jews together and rowed them to a wood barn on a small island in the Rhine. The barn was burned and the six hundred souls in it. The victims were left unburied, their cemetery destroyed and their synagogue turned into a church. Their 140 children were not included in the flames, and were raised as Christians. Basel was not alone in this, at least. Many cities in Europe reached the same conclusions. In Strasbourg, the next month, two thousand Jews were killed. Of the Christians in Basel, it was the Bare Foot Friars and their church that strove hardest to prevent the massacre. Their defiance of the popular will placed them in great danger themselves.

  But they’d
withstood the anger. They had a deep foundation in their faith.

  Eight years later an earthquake shook Basel. All the accounts spoke of terrible devastation, and greater in Basel than any other city, though it was felt from London to Berlin to Rome. It was a great woe, and so soon after the plague. Houses were broken to rubble, the Walls were damaged, and every church in the city fell. All but one. The Barefoot Church had a deep foundation. Besides, it was held from above.

  This Barefoot Church stood then, and stood now, like Daniel’s hourglass. I walked back to the door to look out on the Barefoot Square, and it surely was pitching and rolling like a sea, and the people in the Square oblivious to their motion. I took a step out and felt the momentary dislocation, as stepping from a dock to a boat. Then all seemed still and normal. But I knew it wasn’t; the Square was still spinning, and I was just spinning with it. If somehow the church was to be found one morning in a different part of the city, I would be sure that Basel had moved, not the church. As I stared at its solid, still, white walls, I felt again the movement beneath my feet.

  I had a book in my pocket. I was surprised to find it there, and then I remembered: It was Boccaccio, the volume I’d borrowed from Master Desiderius, put there the last time I’d worn my coat. Boccaccio wrote in Italy in the time of the plague:

  How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfasted with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ship’s hold and covered with a little earth.

  The plague has returned many times since the first terrible appearance. The last outbreak in Basel had been only thirty years ago, though there had been single deaths more recently. The latest great outbreak in Europe was Marseilles just five years ago. The news had been that a hundred thousand died. More than war and siege, Black Death was the greatest fear of Europe’s cities. The most severe laws applied to it to prevent its spread. Even the clothing and bed-clothing of a victim must be burned; there have been reports of how even a tatter of a sheet could start a contagion, and even years after its owner had died.