He thought of his own father. There was not much to think of: a calloused hand hitting him, a snatch of drunken song, a broken sword rusted with what was said to be the blood of a Turk. What had driven him, what impossible longings had strained and kicked in his innards? And had he loved? What, then? The stamping of feet on the march, the brassy stink of fear and expectation on the battlefield at dawn, brute warmth and delirium of the wayside inn? What? Was it possible to love mere action, the thrill of ceaseless doing? The window reassembled itself before his brooding eyes. This was the world, that garden, his children, those poppies. I am a little creature, my horizons are near. Then, like a sudden drenching of icy water, came the thought of death, with a stump of rusted sword in its grasp.
"… Well, are we?"
He jumped. "What?"
"Ah! do you ever listen. " The baby in her arms put forth a muffled exploratory wail. "Are we to lodge in this… this house? Will there be room enough?"
"A whole family, generations, lived here once…"
She stared at him. She had slept briefly, sitting by the table. Her eyes were swollen and there was a livid mark on her jaw. "Do you ever think about-" "Yes." "-these things, worry about them, do you?"
"Yes. Do I not spend every waking hour worrying and arranging and-do I not?" A lump of self-pity rose in his throat. "What more do you want?"
Tears welled in her eyes, and the baby, taking its cue, began to bawl. The door to the front room had the look of an ear bent avidly upon them. Kepler put a hand to his forehead. "Let us not fight."
The children came in from the garden, and paused, catching the pulsations in the air. The baby howled, and Barbara rocked him jerkily in a clockwork simulacrum of tenderness. Kepler turned away from her, frightening the children with his mad grin. "Well, Susan, Friedrich: how do you like your grandma's home?"
"There is a dead rat in the garden," Susanna said, and Barbara sobbed, and Kepler thought how all this had happened before somewhere.
* * *
Yes, it had all, all of it happened before. How was it he expected at each homecoming to find everything transformed? Was his self-esteem such as to let him think the events of his new life must have an effect, magical and redemptive, on the old life left behind him here in Weil? Look at him now. He had tricked himself out in imperial finery and come flouncing down upon his past, convinced that simply his elevation in rank would be enough to have caused the midden heap to sprout a riot of roses. And he had been hardly in the door before he realised that the trick had not worked, and now he could only stand and sweat, dropping rabbits and paper flowers from under his spangled cloak, a comic turn whom his glassy-eyed audience was too embarrassed to laugh at.
And yet Heinrich was impressed, and so too, according to him, was their mother. "She talks about you all the time- yes! Then she wants to know why I can't be like you. I! Well, I tell her, you know, mam, Johann is-Johann!" slapping his brother on the shoulder, wheezing, with tears in his eyes, as if it were a rare and crafty joke he had cracked. Kepler smiled gloomily, and realised that after all that was it, what burned him, that to them his achievements were something that had merely happened to him, a great and faintly ludicrous stroke of luck fallen out of the sky upon their Johann.
He climbed the narrow stairs, yawning. Had the old woman put one of her cunning potions into the wine?-or the stew, perhaps! Chuckling and yawning, and wiping his eyes, he ducked into the little back bedroom. This house had been built for the Keplers all right, everything in miniature, the low ceilings, the stools, the little bed. The floor was strewn with green rushes, and a basin of water and towels had been set out. Towels! She had not been wholly indifferent, then, to his impending visit. Afternoon sunlight was edging its way stealthily along the sill of the dingy window. Barbara was already asleep, lying on her back in the middle of the bed like a mighty effigy, a look of vague amazement on her upturned face. The baby at her side was a tiny pink fist in a bundle of swaddling. Susanna and Friedrich were crowded together in the truckle bed. Friedrich slept with his eyes not quite closed, the pupils turned up into his head and bluish moonlets showing eerily between the parted lids. Kepler leaned over him, thinking with resigned foreboding that someday surely he would be made to pay for the happiness this child had brought him. Friedrich was his favourite.
He lay for a long time suspended between sleep and waking, his hands folded on his breast. A trapped fly danced against the window pane, like a tiny machine engaged upon some monstrously intricate task, and in the distance a cow was lowing plaintively, after a calf, perhaps, that the herdsman had taken away. Strange, how comforting and homely these sounds, that yet in themselves were plangent with panic and pain. So little we feel! He sighed. Beside him the baby stirred, burbling in its sleep. The years were falling away, like loops of rope into a well. Below him there was darkness, an intimation of waters. He might have been an infant himself, now. All at once, like a statue hoving into the window of a moving carriage, Grandfather Sebaldus rose before him, younger and more vigorous than Johannes remembered having known him. There were others, a very gallery of stark still figures looking down on him. Deeper he sank. The water was warm. Then in the incarnadine darkness a great slow pulse began to beat.
* * *
Confused and wary, not knowing where he was, he strove to hold on to the dream. As a child, when he woke like this in nameless fright, he would lie motionless, his eyelids quivering, trying to convince an imaginary watcher in the room that he was not really awake, and thus sometimes, by a kind of sympathetic magic, he would succeed in slipping back unawares into the better world of sleep. The trick would not work now.
That was what he had dreamed of, his childhood. And water. Why did he dream so often of water? Barbara was no longer beside him, and the truckle bed was empty. The sun was still in the window. He rose, groaning, and splashed his face from the basin. Then he paused, leaning thus and staring at nothing. What was he doing here, in his mother's house? And yet to be elsewhere would be equally futile. He was a bag of slack flesh in a world drained of essence. He told himself it was the wine and that troubled sleep, blurring his sense of proportion, but was not convinced. Which was the more real reality, the necessary certainties of everyday, or this bleak defencelessness?
Early one summer morning when he was a boy he had watched from the kitchen a snail crawling up the window outside. The moment came back to him now, wonderfully clear, the washed sunlight in the garden, the dew, the rosebuds on the tumbledown privy, that snail. What had possessed it to climb so high, what impossible blue vision of flight reflected in the glass? The boy had trod on snails, savouring the crack and then the soft crunch, had collected them, had raced them and traded them, but never before now had he really looked at one. Pressed in a lavish embrace upon the pane, the creature gave up its frilled grey-green underparts to his gaze, while the head strained away from the glass, moving blindly from side to side, the horns weaving as if feeling out enormous forms in air. But what had held Johannes was its method of crawling. He would have expected some sort of awful convulsions, but instead there was a series of uniform small smooth waves flowing endlessly upward along its length, like a visible heartbeat. The economy, the heedless beauty of it, baffled him.
How closely after that he began to look at things, flies and fleas, ants, beetles, that daddy-longlegs feebly pawing the windowsill at twilight, its impossible threadlike limbs, the gauzy wings with fantastical maps traced on them-what were they for, these mites whose lives seemed no more than a form of clumsy dying? The world shifted and flowed: no sooner had he fixed a fragment of it than it became something else. A twig would suddenly put forth sticky malevolent wings and with a shove and a drugged leap take flight; a copper and crimson leaf lying on a dappled path would turn into a butterfly, drunken, a little mad, with two staring eyes on its wings and a body the colour of dried blood. His ailing eyesight increased the confusion. The limits of things became blurred, so that he was not sure where sentient life gave way t
o mere vegetable being. Sunflowers, with their faces pressed to the light, were they alive, and if not, what did it mean, being alive? Only the stars he knew for certain to be dead, yet it was they, in their luminous order, that gave him his most vivid sense of life.
He shook himself now like a wet dog. A huge yawn stopped him in his tracks, prising his jaws apart until their hinges crackled, and when Regina put her head into the room she found him teetering before her with mouth agape and eyes shut tight as if he were about to burst into violent song.
* * *
He peered at her through streaming tears and smiled. "Mama sent me to wake you," she said.
"Ah."
Why was it, he wondered, that her candid gaze so pleased him always; how did she manage to make it seem a signal of support and understanding? She was like a marvellous and enigmatic work of art, which he was content to stand and contemplate with a dreamy smile, careless of the artist's intentions. To try to tell her what he felt would be as superfluous as talking to a picture. Her inwardness, which had intrigued Kepler when she was a child, had evolved into a kind of quietly splendid equilibrium. She resembled her mother not at all. She was tall and very fair, with a strong narrow face. Through her, curiously, Kepler sometimes glimpsed with admiration and regret her dead father whom he had never known. She would have been pretty, if she had considered being pretty a worthwhile endeavour. At nineteen, she was a fine Latin scholar, and even knew a little mathematics; he had tutored her himself. She had read his works, though never once had she offered an opinion, nor had he ever pressed her to.
"And also," she said, stepping in and shutting the door behind her, "I wanted to speak to you."
"O yes?" he said, vaguely alarmed. A momentary awkwardness settled between them. There was nowhere to sit save the bed. They moved to the window. Below them was the garden, and beyond that a little common with an elm tree and a duck pond. The evening was bright with sunlight and drifting clouds. A man with two children by the hand walked across the common. Kepler, still not fully awake, snatched at the corner of another memory. He had sailed a paper boat once on that pond, his father had gone there with him and Heinrich on a summer evening like this, long ago… And just then, as if it had all been slyly arranged, the three figures stopped by the muddy margin there and, a lens slipping into place, he recognised Heinrich and Susanna and the boy. He laughed. "Look, see who it is, I was just remem-"
"I am going to be married," Regina said, and looked at him quickly with an intent, quizzical smile.
"Married," he said.
"Yes. His name is Philip Ehem, he comes of a distinguished Augsburg family, and is a Representative at the court of Frederick the Elector Palatine…" She paused, lifting her eyebrows in wry amusement at the noise of this grand pedigree unfurling. "I wanted to tell you, before…"
Kepler nodded. "Yes. " He felt as if he were being worked by strings. He heard faintly the children's laughter swooping like swifts across the common. There would be a scene with Barbara if they got their feet wet. It was one of her increasingly numerous obsessions, wet feet. Beyond Regina 's head a berry-black spider dangled in a far corner of the ceiling. "Ehem, you say."
"Yes. He is a Lutheran, of course."
He turned his face away. "I see." He was jealous.
* * *
how, how strange: to be shocked at himself; horrified but not surprised. Where before was only tenderness- suspiciously weighty perhaps-and sometimes a mild objectless craving, there suddenly stood now in his heart a full-grown creature, complete in every detail and even possessed of a past, blinking in the light and tugging hesitantly at the still unbroken birthcord. It had been in him all those years, growing unnoticed towards this sudden incarnation. And what was he supposed to do with it now, this unbidden goddess come skimming up on her scallop shell out of an innocent sea? But what else was there to do, save smile crookedly and scratch his head and squint at the window, pretending to be Heinrich, and say: "Well, married, yes, that's… that's…"
Regina was blushing.
"It will seem that we have come upon it suddenly, I know, " she said, "and may be we have. But I-we-have decided, and so there seems no reason to delay. " The colour deepened on her brow. "There is not, " a rapid mumble, "there is not a necessity to hurry, as she will think, and no doubt say."
"She?"
"She, yes, who will make a great commotion."
The business was already accomplished in his head, he saw it before him like a tableau done in heraldic hues, the solemn bride and her tall grim groom, a pennant flying and the sky pouring down fat beneficent rays behind the scroll announcing factum est! and below, in a draughty underworld all to himself, Kepler inconsolabilis crouched with the hoof of a hunchbacked devil treading on his neck. He turned warily from the window. Regina had been watching him eagerly, but now she dropped her gaze and considered her hands clasped before her. She was smiling, amused at herself and embarrassed, but proud too, as if she had brought off some marvellous but all the same faintly ridiculous feat.
"I wanted to ask you," she said, "if you would-"
"Yes?" and something, before he could capture it, swooped out at her on the vibrating wings of that little word. She frowned, studying him with a closer attention; had she, O my God, felt that fevered wingbeat brush her cheek?
"You do not… approve?" she said.
"I I I-"
"Because I thought that you would, I hoped that you would, and that you might speak to her for me, for us. "
"Your mother? Yes yes I will speak to her, of course," lunging past her, talking as he went, and, pausing on the stairs: "Of course, speak to her, yes, tell her… tell her what?"
She peered at him in perplexity from the doorway. "Why, that I plan to marry. "
"Ah yes. That you plan to marry. Yes."
"I think you do not approve. "
"But of course I… of course…" and he clambered backwards down the stairs, clasping in his outstretched arms an enormous glossy black ball of sorrow and guilt.
* * *
Barbara was kneeling at the fireplace changing the baby's diaper, her face puckered against the clayey stink. Ludwig below her waved his skinny legs, crowing. She glanced over her shoulder at Kepler. "I thought as much," was all she said.
"You knew? But who is the fellow?"
She sighed, sitting back on her heels. "You have met him," she said wearily. "You don't remember, of course. He was in Prague, you met him."
"Ah, I remember." He did not. "Certainly I remember." How tactful Regina was, to know he would have forgotten. "But she is so young!"
"I was sixteen when I first married. What of it?" He said nothing. "I am surprised you care."
He turned away from her angrily, and opening the kitchen door was confronted by a hag in a black cap. They stared at each other and she backed off in confusion. There was another one at the kitchen table, very fat with a moustache, a mug of beer before her. His mother was busy at the iron stove. "Katharina," the first hag warbled. The fat one studied him a moment impassively and swigged her beer. The tomcat, sitting to attention on the table near her, flicked its tail and blinked. Frau Kepler did not turn from the stove. Kepler silently withdrew, and slowly, silently, closed the door.
"Heinrich-!"
"Now they're just some old dames that come to visit her, Johann." He grinned ruefully and shoved his hands into the pockets of his breeches. "They are company for her."
"Tell me the truth, Heinrich. Is she…" Barbara had paused, leaning over the baby with a pin in her mouth; Kepler took his brother's arm and steered him to the window. "Is she still at that old business?"
"No, no. She does a bit of doctoring now and then, but that's all."
"My God."
"She doesn't want for custom, Johann. They still come, especially the women." He grinned again, and winked, letting one eyelid fall like a loose shutter. "Only the other day there was a fellow-"
"I don't-"
"-Blacksmith he was, big as an ox,
came all the way over from Leonberg, you wouldn't have thought to look at him there was anything-"
"I do not want to know, Heinrich!" He stared through the window, gnawing a thumbnail. "My God," he muttered again.
"Ah, there's nothing in it," said Heinrich. "And she's better value than your fancy physicians, I can tell you. " Resentment was making him hoarse, Kepler noted wistfully: why had such simple loyalty been denied to him? "She made up a stuff for my leg that did more for it than that army doctor ever did. "
"Your leg?"
"Aye, there's a weeping wound that I got in Hungary. It's not much."
"You must let me look at it for you. "
Heinrich glanced at him sharply. "No need for that. She takes care of it."
Their mother shuffled out of the kitchen. "Now where, " she murmured, "where did I leave that down, I wonder." She pointed her thin little nose at Barbara. "Have you seen it?"
Barbara ignored her.
"What is it, mother," Kepler said.
She smiled innocently. "Why, I had it just a moment ago, and now I have lost it, my little bag of bats' wings. "
A crackling came from the kitchen, where the two hags could be seen, shrieking and hilariously shoving each other. Even the cat might have been laughing.
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