"Anna Maria we have called the baby," he said, and Anna Billig consented to smile. "A pretty name, I think."
Seven children Susanna had borne him. The first three had died in infancy. He wondered then if he had married another Barbara Müller née Müller. She saw him think it, watching him with that sad, apprehensive gaze. Yet he suspected, and was filled with wonder at the notion, that she was not hurt by it, but only concerned for him and his loss, his sense of betrayal.
She asked so little! She had brought him happiness. And now he had abandoned her. "Yes," he said, "a pretty name."
He closed his eyes. Waves of wind washed against the house, and beyond the noise of the rain he fancied he could hear the river. The fire warmed him. Trapped gas piped a tiny tune deep in his gut. This brute comfort made him think again of his childhood. Why? There had been precious few log fires and mugs of punch in old Sebaldus's house. But he carried within him a vision of lost peace and order, a sphere of harmony which had never been, yet to which the idea of childhood seemed an approximation. He belched, and laughed silently at the spectacle of himself, a sodden old dolt dozing in his boots, maundering over the lost years. He should fall asleep, with blubber mouth agape and dribbling, that would complete the picture. But that other roaring fire up his backside kept him awake. The dog yelped, dreaming of rats.
"Well, Billig, you tell me the electoral congress is finished its business?"
"Aye, it has. The princes have left already." "And about time for them to finish, they have had six months at it. Has the young rake's succession been assured?" "They do say so, Doctor. "
"I must be quick then, eh, if I am to have satisfaction of his father?"
The Billigs laughed with him, but weakly. His heartiness, he saw, did not fool them. They were itching to know the real reason why he had fled home and family to come on this lunatic venture. He would have liked to know, himself. Satisfaction, was that what he was after? The promise of 4,000 florins was still in his bag, with the seal unbroken. This time most likely he would receive another, equally useless piece of parchment to keep it company. Three emperors he had known, poor Rudolph, the usurper Matthias his brother, and now the wheel of his misfortune had come full circle and his old enemy Ferdinand of Styria, scourge of the Lutherans, wore the crown. Kepler would never have gone near him, were it not for that unsettled debt. It was ten months to the day since he had last accosted him.
* * *
Old it had been that morning, the sky like a bruised gland and a taste of metal in the air, and everything holding its breath under an astonishment of fallen snow. Soiled white boulders of ice lolled on the river. In the dark before dawn he had lain awake, listening in fright to the floes breaking before the bow, the squeaking and the groans and the sudden flurries of cracks like distant musket-fire. They docked at first light. The quayside was deserted save for a mongrel with a swollen belly chasing the slithering hawser. The bargemaster scowled at Kepler, his oniony breath defeating even the stink seeping up from the cargo of pelts in the hold. " Prague," he said, with a contemptuous wave, as if he had that moment manufactured the silent city rising behind him in the freezing mist. Kepler had haggled over the fare.
He had come from Ulm with the first printed copies of the Tabulae Rudolphinae. On the way that time also he had paused at Regensburg, where Susanna was lodging at the Billigs'. It was Christmas, and he had not seen her and the children for almost a year, yet he could not be idle. The Jesuits at Dillengen had shown him letters from their priests in China, asking for news of the latest astronomical discoveries, and now he set himself at once to composing a little treatise for the missionaries' use. The children hardly remembered him. He would stop, feeling their eyes on his back as he worked, but when he turned they would scurry off, whispering in alarrr, to the safety of Anna Billig's kitchen.
He had wanted to continue on again alone, but Susanna would not have it. She was not impressed by his talk of snowstorms, the frozen river. Her vehemence startled him. "I do not care if you are walking to Prague: we shall walk with you. "
"But…"
"But no, " she said, and again, more softly this time: "But no, Kepler dear," and smiled. She was thinking, he supposed, that it was not good for him to be so much alone.
"How kind you are, " he mumbled, "how kind. " Always he believed without question that others were better than he, more thoughtful, more honourable, a state of affairs for which the standing apology that was his life could not make up. His love for Susanna was a kind of inarticulate anguish choking his heart, yet it was not enough, not enough, like everything else that he did and was. Eyes awash, he took her hands in his, and, not trusting himself to speak further, nodded his soggy gratitude.
They lodged in Prague at The Whale by the bridge. The children were too cold to cry. The wharfinger's men rolled his precious barrel of books up from the quay, through the snow and the filth. Fortunately he had packed it with wadding and lined the staves with oilskin. The Tables were a handsome folio volume. Twenty years, on and off, he had devoted to that work! It contained the most of him, he knew, though not the best. His finest flights were in the World Harmony and the Astronomia nova, even the Mysterium, his first. He knew he had wasted too much time on the Tables. A year, two at the most, would have done it, when the Dane was dead and he had the observations, if he had concentrated. It might have made his fortune. Now, with everybody too busy at each other's throats to bother with such works, he would be lucky to recoup the cost of printing. Some there were who were interested still- but what did he care for converting the Chinee, and to popery at that? Sailors, though, would bless his name, explorers and adventurers. He had always liked the notion of those hardy seafarers poring over the charts and diagrams of the Tabulae, their piercing eyes scanning the bleached pages. It was they, not the astronomers, who made his books live. And for a moment his mind would range out over immensities, feel the blast of sun and salt wind, hear the gales howl in the rigging: he, who had not ever even seen the ocean!
He was not prepared for Prague, the new spirit that seemed abroad in the city. The court had returned from its Viennese seat for the coronation of Ferdinand's son as King of Bohemia; at first Kepler was charmed, imagining that the age of Rudolph had returned with it. He had been afraid, coming here, and not only of the ice on the river. The war was going well for the Catholic parties, and Kepler remembered how, thirty years before, Ferdinand had hounded the Protestant heretics out of Styria. At the palace everything was bustle and an almost gay confusion, where he had expected stillness and stealth. And the clothes! The yellow capes and scarlet stockings, the brocades and the frogging and the purple ribbons; he had never seen such stuffs, even in Rudolph's time. He might have been among a spawn of Frenchmen. But it was in the clothes that he quickly saw how wrong he had been. There was no new spirit, it was all show, a frantic paying of homage not to greatness but to mere might. These reds and purples were the bloody badge of the counter-reformation. And Ferdinand had not changed at all.
If Rudolph had reminded Kepler, especially toward the end, of someone's mother come to her dotage, Ferdinand his cousin had the look of a dissatisfied wife. Pallid and paunchy, with delicate legs, he held himself off from the astronomer with a tensed preoccupied air, as if waiting for his taster to arrive and take a nibble before risking a closer approach. He was given to long unnerving silences, a trick inherited from his predecessors, dark pools in the depths of which swam the indistinct forms of suspicion and accusation. The eyes stared out like weary sentinels guarding that preposterous fat nose, their gaze blurred and pale, and Kepler felt not pierced but, rather, palped. He wondered idly if the imperial surliness might be due to a windy gut, for Ferdinand kept bringing up soft little belches, which he caught in his fingertips like a conjuror palming illusory baubles.
He managed the sickly shadow of a smile when Kepler arrived in his presence. The Tables pleased him: he had pretensions to learning. He summoned a secretary, and with a flourish dictated an order for 4,0
00 florins in acknowledgment of the astronomer's labours and to cover the expense of printing, even adding a memorandum to the effect that 7,817 florins were still owed. Kepler shifted from one foot to another, mumbling and simpering. Imperial magnanimity was always an ominous sign. Ferdinand dismissed him with a not unfriendly wave, but still he tarried.
"Your majesty," he said, "has been most kind, most generous. There is not only the matter of this ample grant. It betokens a noble spirit indeed, that he has maintained me in my position as mathematicus, though I profess a creed which is anathema in his realm. "
Ferdinand, startled and faintly alarmed, turned a poached eye on him. The title of imperial mathematician, which Kepler continued to hold since Rudolph's time, was by now no more than formal, but, in the midst of a confessional war, he meant to keep it. "Yes, yes," the Emperor said vaguely. "Well…" A pause. The secretary watched Kepler with brazen amusement, biting the tip of his pen. Kepler was wondering if he had made a tactical mistake. That was the kind of petitioning, oblique and well sugared with flattery, that Rudolph had expected: but this was Ferdinand. "Your religion, " the Emperor said, "yes, it is, ah, an embarrassment. We understood that you were leaning toward conversion?" Kepler sighed; that old lie. He said nothing. Ferdinand's plump lower lip crept up to nibble a strand of his moustache. "Well, it is no great matter. Every man is entitled to profess as he… as he…" He caught Kepler's eager, harried gaze, and could not bring himself to finish it. The secretary coughed, and they both turned and looked at him, and Kepler was gratified to see how quickly he wiped the smirk off his foxy face. "But, no, it is no matter, " the Emperor said, lifting a bejewelled hand. "The war, of course, makes difficulties. The army, and the people, look to us for guidance and example, and we must be… careful. You understand."
"Yes, of course, your majesty." He understood. There would be no place for him at Ferdinand's court. He felt, suddenly, immensely old and tired. A door at the far end of the hall opened, and a figure entered and came toward them, hands clasped behind him and head bent, considering his brilliant black hip-boots pacing the checkered marble. Ferdinand eyed him with something like distaste. "You are still here, " he said, as if it were an ignoble trick that had been played on him. "Doctor Kepler, General von Wallenstein, our chief commander."
The general bowed. "I think I know you, sir," he said. Kepler looked at him blankly.
"He thinks he knows you, " said Ferdinand; the idea amused him.
"I think, yes, I think we have had some contact, " the general said. "A long time ago-twenty years ago, in fact-I sent by devious routes a request to a certain stargazer in Graz, whose reputation I knew, to draw up a horoscope for me. The result was impressive: a full and uncannily accurate account of my character and doings. It was the more impressive, in that I had warned my agents not to divulge my name."
Tall windows on the left showed them a view down the Hradcany to the snowbound city. Kepler had stood once at just this spot, before this very view, with the Emperor Rudolph, discussing the plan for the Tabulae Rudolphinae. How slyly things rearrange themselves! Stargazer. He remembered. "Well, sir," he said, smiling tentatively, "it was not hard to find, you know, so eminent a name."
"Ah. Then you knew it was I." He shook his head, disappointed. "Even so, you did wonderfully well."
The Emperor grunted and turned morosely aside, abandoning them to each other with the air of a small boy whose ball has been taken from him by a bully. The toy had been not much prized, anyway.
"Come, " said the general, and put a hand on Kepler's arm, "we must have a talk. "
Thus began what was to be a brief and turbulent connection. Kepler admired the neatness of the thing: he had come here to seek an Emperor's patronage, and was given instead a general. He was not ungrateful to the arranging fates. He was in need of refuge. A year ago he had said his bitter last farewell to Linz.
* * *
Not that Linz had been the worst of places. True, that town had been his despair for fourteen years, he had thought he would feel nothing but relief at leaving. Yet when the day came, a sliver of doubt got under the quick of his expectations. After all, he had his patrons there, the Starhembergs and the Tschernembls. He had friends too, Jakob Wincklemann the lens grinder, for instance. In that old obscurantist's house by the river he had spent many a merry night drinking and dreaming. And Linz had given him Susanna. It pained him that he, the imperial mathematician, should be reduced again to teaching sums to brats and the blockhead sons of merchants at a district school, yet even in that there was something, an eerie sense of being given a second chance at life, as if it were Graz and the Stiftsschule all over again.
Upper Austria was a haven for religious exiles from the west. Linz was almost a Württemberg colony. Schwarz the jurist was there, and Baltasar Gurald the district secretary, Württembergers both. Even Oberdorfer the physician turned up briefly, a corpulent and troubled ghost, with his stick and his pale eye and poisonous breath, looking not a day older than when, twenty years before, he had officiated at the deaths of Kepler's children. To show that he held no grudge, Kepler invited the doctor to stand as sponsor at the christening of Fridmar, his second surviving child by Susanna. Oberdorfer embraced his friend with tears in his eyes, gasping out his appreciation, and Kepler thought what a spectacle they must be, this old fraud, and the grizzled papa, clasped in each other's arms and blubbering beside the baby's cot.
But then also there was Daniel Hitzler. He was the chief pastor in Linz. Younger than Kepler, he had been through the same Württemberg schools; along the way he had picked up the threads of the scandalous reputation left behind by his turbulent predecessor. Kepler was flattered, for Hitzler seemed to think him a very dangerous fellow. The pastor was a cold stick, who cultivated the air of a grand inquisitor. Little signs, however, gave him away. That black cloak was too black, the beard too pointedly pointed. Kepler had used to laugh at him a little, but liked him all the same, and felt no rancour toward him, which was curious, for Hitzler was the one who had had him excommunicated.
Kepler had known all along that it would come to this. In the matter of faith he was stubborn. He could not fully agree with any party, Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist, and so was taken for an enemy by all three. Yet he saw himself at one with all Christians, whatever they might be called, by the Christian bond of love. He looked at the war with which God was rewarding a quarrelling Germany, and knew he was in the right. He followed the Augsburg Confession, and would not sign the Formula of Concord, which he disdained as a piece of politicking, a formula of words merely, and nothing to do with faith.
Effects and consequences obsessed him. Was there a link between his inner struggles and the general confessional crisis? Could it be his private agonisings in some way provoked the big black giant that was stalking Europe? His reputation as a crypto-Calvinist had denied him a post at Tübingen, his Lutheranism had forced him out of Graz to Prague, from Prague to Linz, and soon those dreadful footfalls would be shaking the walls of Wallenstein's palace in Sagan, his last refuge. Through the winter of 1619, from his look-out in Linz, he had followed the Calvinist Frederick Palatine's doomed attempt to wrest the crown of Bohemia from the Hapsburgs. He shivered at the thought of his own connections, however tenuous, with that disaster. Had he helped to direct the giant's gimlet gaze, by allowing Regina to marry in the Palatinate, by dedicating the Harmonice mundi to James of England, father-in-law to the Winter King Frederick? It was as in a dream, where it slowly dawns that you are the one who has committed the crime. He knew that these were grossly solipsistic conceits, and yet…
Hitzler would not admit him to Communion unless he would agree to ratify the Formula of Concord. Kepler was outraged. "Do you require this condition of every Communicant?"
Hitzler stared at him out of an aquatic eye, perhaps wondering if he were wading into depths wherein he might be drowned by this excitable heretic. "I require it of u, sir. "
"If I were a swineherd, or a prince of the blood,
would you require it?"
"You have denied the omnipresence of the body of Christ and admitted that you agree with the Calvinists."
"There are some things, some things, mark you, on which I do not disagree with them. I reject the barbarous doctrine of predestination."
"You are set apart by your action in designating the Communion as a sign for that creed which was set down in the Formula of Concord, while at the same time contradicting this sign and defending its opposite." Hitzler fancied himself an orator. Kepler gagged.
"Pah! My argument, sir priest, is only that the preachers are become too haughty and do not abide by the old simplicity. Read the Church Fathers! The burden of antiquity shall be my justification."
"You are neither hot nor cold, Doctor, but tepid. " It went on for years. They met in Kepler's house, in Hitzler's, arguing into the night. They strolled by the river, Hitzler grave in his black cloak and Kepler waving his arms about and shouting, enjoying themselves despite all, and in a way playing with each other. When the Church representatives of Linz moved to dismiss Kepler from his post at the district school, and he was saved only by the influence of the barons, who approved his stand, Hitzler made no effort to help him, though he was a school inspector. The play ended there. What angered Kepler most was the hypocrisy. When he went out of the city, to the villages around, he was not refused Communion. There he found kind and simple priests, too busy curing the sick or delivering their neighbours' calves to bother with the doctrinal niceties of the Hitzlers. Kepler appealed his case to the Stuttgart Consistory. They sided against him. His last hope was to go in person to Tübingen and seek support from Matthias Hafenref-fer, Chancellor of the university.
Michael Mästlin was greatly aged since Kepler had last seen him. He had a distracted air, as if his attention were all the time being called away to something more pressing elsewhere. As Kepler recounted his latest woes the old man would now and then bestir himself, furtively apologetic, striving to concentrate. He shook his head and sighed. "Such difficulties you bring upon yourself! You are no longer a student, arguing in the taverns and shouting rebellion. Thirty years ago Iheard this talk from you, and nothing has changed. "
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