Kepler

by John Banville

  Kepler

  John Banville

  In a brilliant illumination of the Renaissance mind, acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville re-creates the life of Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Wars, witchcraft, and disease rage throughout Europe. For this court mathematician, vexed by domestic strife, appalled by the religious upheavals that have driven him from exile to exile, and vulnerable to the whims of his eccentric patrons, astronomy is a quest for some form of divine order. For all the mathematical precision of his exploration, though, it is a seemingly elusive quest until he makes one glorious and profound discovery.

  Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in south Germany, was one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The author of this book uses this history as a background to his novel, writing a work of historical fiction that is rooted in poverty, squalor and the tyrannical power of emperors.

  John Banville

  Kepler

  Revolutions Trilogy, Book 2

  Preise dem Engel die Welt…

  R.M. Rilke Duino Elegies

  I Mysterium Cosmographicum

  Johannes Kepler, asleep in his ruff, has dreamed the solution to the cosmic mystery. He holds it cupped in his mind as in his hands he would a precious something of unearthly frailty and splendour.  do not wake! But he will. Mistress Barbara, with a grain of grim satisfaction, shook him by his ill-shod foot, and at once the fabulous egg burst, leaving only a bit of glair and a few coordinates of broken shell.

  And 0.00429.

  He was cramped and cold, with a vile gum of sleep in his mouth. Opening an eye he spied his wife reaching for his dangling foot again, and dealt her a tiny kick to the knuckles. She looked at him, and under that fat flushed look he winced and made elaborate business with the brim of his borrowed hat. The child Regina, his stepdaughter, primly perched beside her mother, took in this little skirmish with her accustomed mild gaze. Young Tyge Brahe appeared then, leaning down from on high into the carriage window, a pale moist melanochroid, lean of limb, limp of paw, with a sly eye.

  "We are arrived, sir," he said, smirking. That sir. Kepler, wiping his mouth discreetly on his sleeve, alighted on quaking legs from the carriage.

  "Ah."

  The castle of Benatek confronted him, grand and impassive in the sunlit February air, more vast even than the black bulk of woe that had lowered over him all the way from Graz. A bubble of gloom rose and broke in the mud of his fuddled wits.

  Mästlin, even Mästlin had failed him: why expect more of Tycho the Dane? His vision swam as the tears welled. He was not yet thirty; he felt far older than that. But then, knuckling his eyes, he turned in time to witness the Junker Tengnagel, caparisoned blond brute, fall arse over tip off his rearing horse into the rutted slush of the road, and he marvelled again at the inexhaustible bounty of the world, that has always a little consolation to offer.

  It was a further comfort that the grand serenity of Benatek was no more than a stony exterior: inside the gates, that gave into a cobbled courtyard, the quintet of travellers arrived in the midst of bedlam. Planks clattered, bricks crashed, masons whistled. An overburdened pack mule, ears back and muzzle turned inside out, brayed and brayed. Tyge waved a hand and said: "The new Uraniborg! "and laughed, and, as they stooped under a sagging granite lintel, a surge of excitement, tinged with the aftertaste of his dream, rose like warm gorge in Kepler's throat. Perhaps after all he had done right in coming to Bohemia? He might do great work here, at Brahe's castle, swaddled in the folds of a personality larger far and madder than his own.

  They entered a second, smaller courtyard. There were no workings here. Patches of rust-stained snow clung in crevices and on window ledges. A beam of sunlight leaned against a tawny wall. All was calm, or was until, like a thing dropped into a still pool, a figure appeared from under the shadow of an arch, a dwarf it was, with enormous hands and head and little legs and a humped back. He smiled, essaying a curtsy as they went past. Frau Barbara took Regina 's hand.

  "God save you, gentles," the dwarf piped, in his miniature voice, and was ignored.

  Through a studded door they entered a hall with an open fire. Figures moved to and fro in the reddish gloom. Kepler hung back, his wife behind him panting softly in his ear. They peered. Could it be they had been led into the servants' quarters? At a table by the fire sat a swarth man with a moustache, hugely eating. Kepler's heart thumped. He had heard tell of Tycho Brahe's eccentricities, and doubtless it was one of them to dine down here, and doubtless this was he, the great man at last. It was not. The fellow looked up and said to Tycho's son: "Eh! you are returned." He was Italian. "How are things in Prague?"

  "Chapped," young Tyge said, shrugging, "chapped, I would think."

  The Italian frowned, and then: "Ah, I have you, I have you. Ha."

  Kepler began to fidget. Surely there should have been some better reception than this. Was he being deliberately slighted, or was it just the way of aristocrats? And should he assert his presence? That might be a gross failure of tact. But Barbara would begin to nag him in a moment. Then something brushed against him and he twitched in fright. The dwarf had come quietly in, and planted himself now before the astronomer and examined with calm attention the troubled white face and myopic gaze, the frayed breeches, crumpled ruff, the hands clutching the plumed hat. "Sir Mathematicus, I venture," and bowed. "Welcome, welcome indeed, " as if he were lord of the house.

  "This," said young Brahe, "is Jeppe, my father's fool. It is a manner of sacred beast, I warn you, and can foretell the future."

  The dwarf smiled, shaking his great smooth head. "Tut, master, I am but a poor maimed man, a nothing. But you are tardy. This long week past we have looked for you and your…" darting a glance at Kepler's wife "…baggage. Your dad is fretting."

  Tyge frowned. "Remember, you," he said, "shit-eating toad, one day I will inherit you. "

  Jeppe glanced after Tengnagel, who had strode straight, glowering, to the fire. "What ails our broody friend?"

  "A fall from his mount," Tyge said, and suddenly giggled.

  "Yes? The trollops were so lively then, in town?"

  Mistress Barbara bridled. Such talk, and in the child's hearing! She had been for some time silently totting up against Benatek a score of particulars that totalled now a general affront. "Johannes," she began, three semitones in ominous ascent, but just then the Italian rose and tapped a finger lightly on young Tyge's breastbone. "Tell him," he said, "your father, I regret this thing. He's angry still, and will not see me, and I can wait no more. It was no fault of mine: the beast was drunk! So you tell him, yes? Now farewell. " He went quickly out, flinging the wing of his heavy cloak across his shoulder and clamping his hat on his head. Kepler looked after him. "Johannes." Tyge had wandered off. Tengnagel brooded. "Come," said the dwarf, and showed again, like something swiftly shown before being palmed, his thin sly smile. He led them up dank flights of stairs, along endless stone corridors. The castle resounded with shouts, snatches of wild singing, a banging of doors. The guest rooms were cavernous and sparsely furnished. Barbara wrinkled her nose at the smell of damp. The baggage had not been brought up. Jeppe leaned in a doorway with his arms folded, watching. Kepler retreated to the mullioned window and on tiptoe peered down upon the courtyard and the workmen and a cloaked horseman cantering toward the gates. Despite misgivings he had in his heart expected something large and lavish of Benatek, gold rooms and spontaneous applause, the attention of magnificent serious people, light and space and ease: not this grey, these deformities, the clamour and confusion of other lives, this familiar- familiar!-disorder.

  Was Tycho Brahe himself not large, was he not lavish? When at noon the summons came, Kepler, who had fallen asleep again, stumble
d down through the castle to find a fat bald man ranting about, of all things, his tame elk. They entered a high hall, and sat, and the Dane was suddenly silent, staring at his guest. And then Kepler, instead of lifting his spirit sufficiently up to meet this eminence, launched into an account of his troubles. The whining note even he could hear in his voice annoyed him, but he could not suppress it. There was cause for whining, after all. The Dane of course, Kepler gloomily supposed, knew nothing of money worries and all that, these squalid matters. His vast assurance was informed by centuries of patrician breeding. Even this room, high and light with a fine old ceiling, bespoke a stolid grandeur. Surely here disorder would not dare show its leering face. Tycho, with his silence and his stare, his gleaming dome of skull and metal nose, seemed more than human, seemed a great weighty engine whose imperceptible workings were holding firmly in their courses all the disparate doings of the castle and its myriad lives.

  "… And although in Graz," Kepler was saying, "I had many persons of influence on my side, even the Jesuits, yes, it was to no avail, the authorities continued to hound me without mercy, and would have me renounce my faith. You will not believe it, sir, I was forced to pay a fine of ten florins for the privilege, the privilege, mark you, of burying my poor children by the Lutheran rite."

  Tycho stirred and dealt his moustaches a downward thrust of forefinger and thumb. Kepler with plaintive gaze stooped lower in his chair, as if the yoke of that finger and thumb had descended upon his thin neck.

  "What is your philosophy, sir?" the Dane asked.

  Italian oranges throbbed in a pewter bowl on the table between them. Kepler had not seen oranges before. Blazoned, big with ripeness, they were uncanny in their tense inexorable thereness.

  "I hold the world to be a manifestation of the possibility of order," he said. Was this another fragment out of that morning's dream? Tycho Brahe was looking at him again, stonily. "That is," Kepler hastened, "I espouse the natural philosophy." He wished he had dressed differently. The ruff especially he regretted. He had intended it to make an impression, but it was too tight. His borrowed hat languished on the floor at his feet, another brave but ill-judged flourish, with a dent in the crown where he had inadvertently stepped on it. Tycho, considering a far corner of the ceiling, said:

  "When I came first to Bohemia, the Emperor lodged us in Prague at the house of the late Vice Chancellor Curtius, where the infernal ringing of bells from the Capuchin monastery nearby was a torment night and day. " He shrugged. "One has always to contend with disturbance."

  Kepler nodded gravely. Bells, yes: bells indeed would seriously disturb the concentration, though not half so seriously, he fancied, as the cries of one's children dying in agony. They had, he and this Dane, much to learn about each other. He glanced around with a smile, admiring and envious. "But here, of course…?" The wall by which they sat was almost all a vast arched window of many leaded panes, that gave on to a prospect of vines and pasture lands rolling away into a blue pellucid distance. Winter sunlight blazed upon the Iser.

  "The Emperor refers to Benatek as a castle," Tycho Brahe said, "but it is hardly that. I am making extensive alterations and enlargements; I intend that here will be my Bohemian Uraniborg. One is frustrated though at every turn. His majesty is sympathetic, but he cannot attend in person to every detail. The manager of the crown estates hereabouts, with whom I must chiefly deal, is not so well disposed towards me as I would wish. Mühlstein he is called, Kaspar von Mühlstein…" darkly measuring the name as a hangman would a neck. "I think he is a Jew."

  A noontide bell clanged without, and the Dane-wanted his breakfast. A servant brought in hot bread wrapped in napkins, and a jug from which he filled their cups with a steaming blackish stuff. Kepler peered at it and Tycho said: "You do not know this brew? It comes from Araby. I find it sharpens the brain wonderfully." It was casually said, but Kepler knew he was meant to be impressed. He drank, and smacked his lips appreciatively, and Tycho for the first time smiled. "You must forgive me, Herr Kepler, that I did not come myself to greet you on your arrival in Bohemia. As I mentioned in my letter, I seldom go to Prague, unless it is to call upon the Emperor; and besides, the opposition at this time of Mars and Jupiter, as you will appreciate, encouraged me not to interrupt my work. However, I trust you will understand that I receive you now less as a guest than as a friend and colleague. "

  This little speech, despite its seeming warmth, left them both obscurely dissatisfied. Tycho, about to proceed, instead looked sulkily away, to the window and the winter day outside. The servant knelt before the tiled stove feeding pine logs to the flames. The fellow had a cropped head and meaty hands, and raw red feet stuck into wooden clogs. Kepler sighed. He was, he realised, hopelessly of that class which notices the state of servants' feet. He drank more of the Arabian brew. It did clear the head, but it seemed also, alarmingly, to be giving him the shakes. He feared his fever was coming on again. It had dogged him now for six months and more, and led him, in grey dawn hours, to believe he was consumptive. Still, he appeared to be putting on fat: this cursed ruff was choking him.

  Tycho Brahe turned back and, looking at him hard, asked: "You work the metals?"

  "Metals…?" faintly. The Dane had produced a small lacquered ointment box, and was applying a dab of aromatic salve to the flesh surrounding the false bridge of silver and gold alloy set into his damaged nose, where as a young man he had been disfigured in a duel. Kepler stared. Was he to be asked perhaps to fashion a new and finer organ to adorn the Dane's great face? He was relieved when Tycho, with a trace of irritation, said:

  "I mean the alembic and so forth. You claimed to be a natural philosopher, did you not?" He had an unsettling way of ranging back and forth in his talk, as if the subjects were marked on the counters of a game which he was idly playing in his head.

  "No no, alchemy is not, I am not-"

  "But you make horoscopes."

  "Yes, that is, when I-"

  "For payment?"

  "Well, yes. "He had begun to stammer. He felt he was being forced to confess to an essential meanness of spirit. Shaken, he gathered himself for a counter-move, but Tycho abruptly shifted the direction of play again.

  "Your writings are of great interest. I have read your Mysterium cosmographicum with attention. I did not agree with the method, of course, but the conclusions reached I found… significant."

  Kepler swallowed. "You are too kind."

  "The flaw, I would suggest, is that you have based your theories upon the Copernican system."

  Instead of on yours, that is. Well, at least they were touching on the real matter now. Kepler, his fists clenched in his lap to stop them trembling, sought feverishly for the best means of proceeding at once to the essential question. He found himself, to his annoyance, hesitating. He did not trust Tycho Brahe. The man was altogether too still and circumspect, like a species of large lazy predator hunting motionless from the sprung trap of his lair. (Yet he was, in his way, a great astronomer. That was reassuring. Kepler believed in the brotherhood of science.) And besides, what was the essential question? He was seeking more than mere accommodation for himself and his family at Benatek. Life to him was a kind of miraculous being in itself, almost a living organism, of wonderful complexity and grace, but racked by a chronic wasting fever; he wished from Benatek and its master the granting of a perfect order and peace in which he might learn to contain his life, to still its fevered thrashings and set it to dancing the grave dance. Now, as he brooded in quiet dismay on these confusions, the moment eluded him. Tycho, pushing away the picked bones of his breakfast, began to rise. "Shall we see you at dinner, Herr Kepler?"

  "But!…" The astronomer was scrabbling for his hat under the table.

  "You will meet some other of my assistants then, and we can discuss a redistribution of tasks, now that we are one more. I had thought of setting you the lunar orbit. However, we must first consult my man Christian Longberg, who, as you will of course understand, has a say in these matter
s." They made a slow exit from the room. Tycho did not so much walk as sail, a stately ship. Kepler, pale, twisted the hat-brim in his trembling fingers. This was all mad. Friend and colleague indeed! He was being treated as if he were a raw apprentice. In the corridor Tycho Brahe bade him an absentminded farewell and cruised away. Frau Barbara was waiting for him in their rooms. She had an air always of seeming cruelly neglected, by his presence no less than by his absence. Sorrowing and expectant, she asked: "Well?"

  Kepler selected a look of smiling abstraction and tested it gingerly. "Hmm?"

  "Well," his wife insisted, "what happened?"

  "O, we had breakfast. See, I brought you something," and produced from its hiding place in the crown of his hat, with a conjuror's flourish, an orange. "And I had coffee!"

  Regina, who had been leaning out at the open window, turned now and advanced upon her stepfather with a faint smile. Under her candid gaze he felt always a little shy.

  "There is a dead deer in the courtyard, " she said. "If you lean out far you can see it, on a cart. It's very big. "

  "That is an elk, " said Kepler gently. "It's called an elk. It got drunk, you know, and fell downstairs when…"

  Their baggage had come up, and Barbara had been unpacking, and now with the glowing fruit cupped in her hands she sat down suddenly amidst the strewn wreckage of their belongings and began to weep. Kepler and the child stared at her.

  "You settled nothing!" she wailed. "You didn't even try."

  * * *

   familiar indeed: disorder had been the condition of his life from the beginning. If he managed, briefly, a little inward calm, then the world without was sure to turn on him. That was how it had been in Graz, at the end. And yet that final year, before he was forced to flee to Tycho Brahe in Bohemia, had begun so well. The Archduke had tired for the moment of hounding the Lutherans, Barbara was pregnant again, and, with the Stiftsschule closed, there was ample time for his private studies. He had even softened toward the house on Stempfergasse, which at first had filled him with a deep dislike the origins of which he did not care to investigate. It was the last year of the century, and there was the relieved sense that some old foul thing was finally, having wrought much mischief, dying.