Kepler

by John Banville

  "Yes?" Johannes said faintly, turning away from the other's aquatic eye, and then heard himself add: "She is somewhat fat, all the same."

  Dr Oberdorfer winced, and then, grinning bravely, with elephantine roguishness he said:

  "Plump, rather, Master Kepler, plump. And the winters are cold, eh? Ha. Ha ha."

  And he took the young man firmly by the elbow and steered him up the stairs, into an alcove, where there waited a sleek, grim dandified man who looked Johannes up and down without enthusiasm and said: "My dear sir, " as if he had, Jobst Müller, been rehearsing it.

  So began the long, involved and sordid business of his wiving. From the start he feared the prospect of the plump young widow. Women were a foreign country, he did not speak the language. One night four years previously, on a visit to Weilderstadt, flushed with ale and wanting to reassert himself after losing heavily at cards, he had consorted with a scrawny girl, a virgin, so he was assured. That was his sole experience of love. Afterwards the drab had laughed, and tested between her little yellow teeth the coin he had given her. Yet beyond the act itself, that frantic froglike swim to the cataract's edge, he had found something touching in her skinny flanks and her frail chest, that rank rose under its furred cap of bone. She had been smaller than he; not so Frau Müller. No, no, he was not enthusiastic. Was he not happy as he was? Happier at least than he suspected he would be with a wife. Later, when the marrige had come to grief, he blamed a large part of the disaster on the unseemly bartering that had sold him into it.

  He discovered how small a place was Graz: everyone he knew seemed to have a hand in the turbulent making of this match. Sometimes he fancied he could detect a prurient leer on the face of the town itself. Dr Oberdorfer was the chief negotiator, assisted by Heinrich Osius, a former professor of the Stiftsschule. In September these two worthies went together down to Mühleck to hear jobst Müller's terms. The miller opened the bidding coyly, declaring himself not at all eager to see his daughter wed again. This Kepler was a poor specimen, with small means and an unpromising future. And what of his birth? Was he not the son of a profligate soldier? Dr Oberdorfer countered with a speech in praise of the young man's industry and prodigious learning. Duke Frederick of Württemberg, no less, was his patron. Then Osius, who had been brought for the benefit of his bluntness, mentioned Mistress Barbara's state: so young, and twice a widow! Jobst Müller frowned, his jaw twitching. He was growing weary of that refrain.

  The negotiators returned confident to Graz. Then an unexpected and serious obstacle arose, when Stefan Speidel the district secretary, Kepler's friend, declared himself opposed to the match. He knew the lady, and thought she should be better provided for. Besides, as he admitted in confidence to Kepler, he wished her to marry an acquaintance of his at court, a man of rising influence. He apologised, waving a hand; you will understand, of course, Johannes? Johannes found it hard to conceal his relief. "Well yes, Stefan, certainly, I understand, if it is a matter of your conscience, and court affairs,  completely, completely!"

  The printing of the Mysterium progressed. Mästlin had secured the blessing of the Tübingen college senate for the work, and was supervising the setting at Gruppenbach the printers. He reported faithfully the completion of each chapter, grumbling over the expense in cash and energy. Kepler wrote him back a cheerful note pointing out that attendance at this birth would, after all, ensure the midwife's immortal fame.

  Kepler was himself busy. The school authorities, incensed by his six-month absence at the Württemberg court, had followed their inspectors' advice and set him arithmetic and rhetoric classes in the upper school. These were a torment. Rector Papius, despite his half-hearted threats, had held off from increasing the young master's duties-but Papius had been summoned to the chair of medicine at Tübingen. His successor, Johannes Regius, was a stern lean Calvinist. He and Kepler were enemies from the first. Regius considered the young man disrespectful and ill-bred, and in need of taming: the pup should marry. Jobst Müller, with the sudden smack of a card player claiming a trump, agreed, for Speidel's scheme had come to nothing, and the miller of Mühleck still had a daughter onhis hands. Kepler's heart sank. In February of 1597 the betrothal was signed, and on a windy day at the end of April, sub calamitoso caelo, Mistress Barbara Müller put off her widow's weeds and was married for the third and last time in her short life. Kepler was then aged twenty-five years, seven months and… but he had not the heart to compute the figures, nor the courage, considering the calamitous disposition of the stars.

  The wedding feast took place, after a brief ceremony in the collegiate church, at Barbara's inherited house on the Stempfergasse. Jobst Müller, when the deal was closed and he could afford again the luxury of contempt, had declared that he would not see celebrated in his own home, before his tenants and his servants, this affront to his family's name. He had settled on Kepler a sum of cash, as well as the yield of a vineyard and an allowance for the child Regina 's upbringing. Was not that enough? He sat in silence throughout the morning, scowling under the brim of his hat, morosely drunk on his own Mühleck wine. Kepler, seeing him in a sulk, squeezed a drop of bitter satisfaction from the day by calling on him repeatedly to propose a toast, to make a speech, throwing an arm about his shoulders and urging him to sing up, sing up, sir, a rousing chorus of some good old Gössendorf ballad.

  Baiting his father-in-law was a way of avoiding his bride. They had hardly spoken, had hardly met, during the long months of negotiation, and today when by chance they found themselves confronting each other they were paralysed by embarrassment. She looked, he gloomily observed, radiant, that seemed the appropriate word. She was pretty, in a vacant way. She twittered. Yet when amid a chiming of uplifted glasses he pressed his palms awkwardly to her damp trembling back and kissed her for the benefit of the company, he suddenly found himself holding something unexpectedly vivid and exotic, a creature of another species, and, catching her warm spicy smell, he was excited. He began to swill in earnest then, and was soon deliriously drunk. But even that was not enough to stifle his fright.

  Yet in the weeks and months that followed he was almost happy. In May the first copies of the Mysterium arrived from Tübingen. The slim volume pleased him enormously. His pleasure was a little tainted however by a small obscure shame, as if he had committed an indiscretion the awfulness of which had not yet been noticed by an inattentive public. This was the first blush of that patronising attitude to the book, which in later years was to make it seem the production of a heedless but inspired child that he but vaguely remembered having been. He distributed copies among selected astronomers and scholars, and a few influential Styrians that he knew, all of whom, to his indignation and dismay, proved less than deafening in their shouts of surprise and praise.

  The number of volumes he had contracted to buy under the printer's terms cost him thirty-three florins. Before his marriage he could not have afforded it, but now, it seemed, he was rich. Besides the sum Jobst Müller had settled on him, his salary had been increased by fifty florins annually. That, however, was a trifle compared with his wife's fortune. He was never to succeed in her lifetime in finding out how much exactly she had inherited, but it was greater even than the most eager of matchmakers had imagined. Regina had a sum of ten thousand from her late father, Wolf Lorenz the cabinetmaker, Barbara's first casualty. If the child had that much, how much more must her mother have got? Kepler rubbed his hands, elated, and shocked at himself too.

  There was another form of wealth, more palpable than cash and as quickly squandered, which was a kind of burgeoning fortune of the senses. Barbara, for all her twittering silliness, was flesh, a corporeal world, wherein he touched and found startlingly real, something that was wholly other and yet recognisable. He flared under her light, her smell, the faintly salt taste of her skin. It took time. Their first encounters were a failure. On the wedding night, in the vast four-poster in the bedroom overlooking Stempfergasse, they collided in the dark with a crunch. He felt as if he were g
rappling with a heavy hot corpse. She fell all over him, panting, got an elbow somehow into his chest and knocked the wind out of him, while the bed creaked and groaned like the ghost voice of its former tenant, poor dead Marx Müller, lamenting. When the union was consummated at last, she turned away and immediately fell asleep, her snores a raucous and monotonously repeated protest. It was not until many months later, when the summer was over and cold winds were blowing down from the Alps, that they at last found each other, briefly.

  He remembered the evening. It was September, the trees were already beginning to turn. He had stood up from a good day's work and walked into their bedroom. Barbara was bathing in a tub before a fire of sea-coals, dreamily soaping an extended pink leg. He turned away hastily, but she looked up and smiled at him, dazed with heat. A narrow shaft of late sunlight, worn to the colour of old brass, lay aslant the bed. Ouf! she said, and rose in a cascade of suds and slithering water. It was the first time he had seen her entirely naked. Her head sat oddly upon this unfamiliar bare body. Aglow and faintly steaming she displayed herself, big-bummed, her stout legs braced as if to leap, a strongman's shovel-shaped beard glistening in her lap. Her breasts stared, wall-eyed and startled, the dark tips pursed. He advanced on her, his clothes falling away like flakes of shell. She rose on tiptoe to peer past him down into the street, biting her lip and laughing softly. "Someone will see us, Johannes. " Her shoulder-blades left a damp print of wings upon the sheet. The brazen sword of sunlight smote them.

  It was at once too much and not enough. They had surrendered their most intimate textures to a mere conspiracy of the flesh. It took him a long time to understand it; Barbara never did. They had so little in common. She might have tried to understand something of his work, but it was beyond her, for which she hated it. He could have tried also, could have asked her about the past, about Wolf Lorenz the wealthy tradesman, about the rumours that Marx Müller the district paymaster had embezzled state funds, but from the start these were a forbidden topic, jealously guarded by the sentinels of the dead. And so, two intimate strangers lashed together by bonds not of their making, they began to hate each other, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Kepler turned, hesitantly, shyly, to Regina, offering her all the surplus left over from his marriage, for she represented, frozen in prototype, that very stage of knowing and regard which he had managed to miss in her mother. And Barbara, seeing everything and understanding nothing, grew fitful and began to complain, and sometimes beat the child. She demanded more and more of Kepler's time, engaged him in frantic incoherent conversations, was subject to sudden storms of weeping. One night he found her crouched in the kitchen, gorging herself on pickled fish. The following morning she fainted in his arms, nearly knocking him down. She was pregnant.

  She fulfilled her term as she did everything, lavishly, with many alarms and copious tears. She became eerily beautiful, for all her bulk. It was as if she had been designed for just this state, ancient and elemental; with that great belly, those pendant breasts, she achieved a kind of ideal harmony. Kepler began to avoid her: she frightened him now more than ever. He spent the days locked in his study, tinkering with work, writing letters, going over yet again his hopelessly unbalanced accounts, lifting his head now and then to listen for the heavy tread of the goddess.

  She went early into labour, blundered into it one morning with shrill cries. The waves of her pain crashed through the house, wave upon wave. Dr Oberdorfer arrived, puffing and mumbling, and heaved himself up the stairs on his black stick like a weary oarsman plying a foundering craft. It struck Kepler that the man was embarrassed, as if he had caught indulging in some base frolic this couple whose troubled destinies he had helped to entangle. Her labour lasted for two days. The rain of February fell, clouding the world without, so that there was only this house throbbing around its core of pain. Kepler trotted up and down in a fever of excitement and dismay, wringing his hands. The child was born at noon, a boy. A great blossom of heedless happiness opened up in Kepler's heart. He held the softly pulsing mite in his hands and understood that he was multiplied. "We shall call him Heinrich," he said, "after my brother-but you will be a better, a finer Heinrich, won't you, yes." Barbara, pale in her bloodied bed, stared at him emptily through a film of pain.

  He drew up a horoscope. It promised all possible good, after a few adjustments. The child would be nimble and bright, apt in mathematical and mechanical skills, imaginative, diligent, charming, O, charming! For sixty days Kepler's happiness endured, then the house was pierced again by screams, miniature echoes of Barbara's lusty howls, and Oberdorfer again sculled himself up the stairs and Kepler snatched the infant in his arms and commanded it not, not to die! He turned on Barbara, she had known, all that pain had told her all was wrong, yet she had said nothing, not a word to warn him, spiteful bitch! The doctor clicked his tongue, for shame, sir, for shame. Kepler rounded on him. And you… you…! In tears, his vision splintering, he turned away, clasping the creature to him, and felt it twitch, and cough, and suddenly, as if starting in amazement, die: his son. The damp hot head lolled in his hand. What pitiless player had tossed him this tender ball of woe? He was to know other losses, but never again quite like this, like a part of himself crawling blind and mewling into death.

  * * *

  Now his days darkened. The child's fall had torn a hole in the fabric of things, and through this tiny rent the blackness seeped. Barbara would not be consoled. She took to hiding in shuttered rooms, in cubbyholes, even under the bedclothes, nibbling in private her bit of anguish, making not a sound except for now and then a faint dry sobbing, like the scratching of claws, that made Kepler's hair stand on end. He let her be, crouching in his own hiding, watching for what would come next. The game, which they had not realised was a game, had ended; suddenly life was taking them seriously. He remembered the first real beating he had got as a child, his mother a gigantic stranger red with rage, her fists, the startling vividness of pain, the world abruptly shifting into a new version of reality. Yes, and this was worse, he was an adult now, and the game was up.

  The year turned, and winter ended. Spring would not this year fool him with false hopes. Something was being surreptitiously arranged, he could sense it, the storm assembling its ingredients from breezes and little clouds and the thrush's song. In April the young Archduke Ferdinand, ruler of all Austria, made a pilgrimage to Italy where at the shrine of Loreto, in a rapture of piety, he swore to suppress the heresy of Protestantism in his realm. The Lutheran province of Styria trembled. All summer there were threats and alarms. Troops were mobilised. By the end of September the churches and the schools had been shut down. At last the edict, long expected, was issued: Lutheran clergy and teachers must quit Austria within a week or face inquisition and possible death.

  Jobst Müller hurried up from Mühleck. He had gone over to the Catholics, and expected his son-in-law to follow him without delay. Kepler snorted. I shall do nothing of the kind, sir; mine is the reformed Church, I recognise no other, and stopped himself from adding: Here I stand! which would have been to overdo it. And anyway, he was not so brave as his bold words would have it. The prospect of exile terrified him. Where would he go? To Tübingen? To his mother's house in Weilderstadt? Barbara with unwonted vehemence had declared she would not leave Graz. He would lose Regina then also; he would lose everything. No, no, it was unthinkable. Yet it was being thought: his bag was packed, Speidel's mare was borrowed. He would go to Mästlin in Tübingen, welcome or not. Farewell! Barbara's kiss, juicy with grief, landed in his ear. She pressed into his trembling hands little packets of florins and food and clean linen. Regina tentatively came to him, and, her face buried in his cloak, whispered something which he did not catch, which she would not repeat, which was to be forever, forever, a small gold link missing from his life. Floundering in a wash of tears he stumbled back and forth between house and horse, not quite knowing how, finally, to go, beating his pockets in search of a handkerchief to stanch his streaming nose an
d uttering faint phlegmy cries of distress. At last, dumped like a wet sack in the saddle, he was borne out of the city into a tactlessly glorious gold and blue October afternoon.

  He rode north along the valley of the Mur, eyeing apprehensively the glittering snowcapped crags of the Alps looming higher the nearer he approached. The roads were busy. He fell in with another traveller, whose name was Wincklemann. He was a Jew, a lens-grinder by trade, and a citizen of Linz: a sallow wedge of face, a bit of beard and a dark ironic eye. When they came down into Linz it was raining, the Danube pock-marked steel, and Kepler was sick. The Jew, taking pity on this mournful wayfarer with his cough and his quiver and his blue fingernails, invited Kepler to come home with him and rest a day or two before turning westward for Tübingen.

  The Jew's house was in a narrow street near the river. Wincklemann showed his guest the workshop, a long low room with a furnace at the back tended by a fat boy. The floor and the workbenches were a disorder of broken moulds and spilt sand and wads of oily rag, all blurred under a bluish film of grinding flour. Dropped tears of glass glittered in the gloom about their feet. A low window, giving on to damp cobbles and timbered gables and a glimpse of wharf, let in a grainy whitish light that seemed itself a process of the work conducted here. Kepler squinted at a shelf of books: Nostradamus, Paracelsus, the Magia naturalis. Wincklemann watched him, and smiling held aloft in a leaf-brown hand a gobbet of clouded crystal.

  "Here is transmutation," he said, "a comprehensible magic."