Kepler

by John Banville

  In the spring the Lutheran peasantry revolted, sick of being harried, of being hungry, sick most of all of their arrogant Emperor. They swept across Upper Austria, delirious with success, unable to believe their own strength. By early summer they were at the walls of Linz. The siege lasted for two months. The city had been ill-prepared, and was quickly reduced to horse meat and nettle soup. Kepler's house was on the wall, and from his workroom he could look down across the moats and the suburbs where the fiercest fighting took place. How small the protagonists looked from up here, and yet how vivid their blood and their spilled guts. The smell of death bathed him about as he worked. A detachment of troops was quartered in his house. Some among them he recognised from the printing house. He had thought his children would be terrified, but they seemed to regard it all as a glorious game. One morning, in the midst of a bitter skirmish, they came to tell him that there was a dead soldier in his bed.

  "Dead, you say? No, no, he is wounded merely; your mama put him there to rest. "

  Cordula shook her head. Such a serious little girl! "He is dead, " she said firmly. "There is a fly in his mouth. "

  Towards the end of June the peasant forces breached the wall one night and set fire to a section of streets before being repulsed. Plank's shop was destroyed, and with it all the sheets of the Tables so far printed. Kepler decided it was time to move. By October, the siege long since lifted and the peasants crushed, he had packed up everything that he owned and was on his way to Ulm, excommunicate and penniless, never to return.

  In Ulm for a while he was almost happy. He had left Susanna and the children in Regensburg, and, alone once more after so many years, he felt as if time had magically fallen away and he was back in Graz, or Tübingen even, when life had not properly begun, and the future was limitless. The city physician Gregor Horst, an acquaintance from his Prague days, leased him a little house in Raben Alley. He found a printer one Jonas Saur. The work went well at first. He still imagined that the Tables would make his fortune. He spent his days in the printing house. On Saturday nights he and Gregor Horst would get quietly drunk together and argue astronomy and politics into the small hours.

  But he could not be at rest for long. The old torment was rising once more in his heart. Saur the printer lived up to his name, and there were quarrels. Yet again Kepler turned his hopes toward Tübingen and Michael Mästlin; could Gruppenbach, who had printed the Mysterium, finish off for him the Tables? He wrote to Mästlin, and getting no reply he set out for Tübingen on foot. But it was February, the weather was bad, and after two days he found himself halted at a crossroads in the midst of turnip fields, exhausted and in despair, but not so far gone that he could not see, with wry amusement, how all his life was summed up in this picture of himself, a little man, wet and weary, dithering at a fork in the road. He turned back. The town council at Esslingen presented him with a horse, got from the town's home for the infirm. The beast bore him bravely enough to Ulm and then died under him. Again he saw the aptness of it, this triumphal entry, on a broken-down jade, into a city that hardly knew him. He made his peace with Jonas Saur, and at last, after twenty years, the Tables were hauled to completion.

  Two kinsmen of Tycho Brahe called on him one day at his lodgings in Raben Alley, Holger Rosenkrands the statesman's son and the Norwegian Axel Gyldenstjern. They were on their way to England. Kepler considered. Wotton, King James's ambassador to Prague, had urged him once to come to England. Rosenkrands and Gyldenstjern would be happy to take him with them. Something held him back. How could he leave his homelands, however bad the convulsions of war? There was nothing for him but to go to Prague. He had the Tables at least to offer the Emperor. It was not likely it would be enough. His time was past. Even Rudolph in his latter days had grown bored with his mathematician. But he must go somewhere, do something, and so he took himself aboard a barge bound for the capital, where, unknown to both of them, Wallenstein awaited him.

  * * *

  Now, baking his chilblains at Hillebrand Billig's fire, he brooded on his time in Sagan. It had been at least a refuge, where for a while he had held still, the restlessness of his heart feeding vicariously on his new master's doings. Wallenstein's world was all noise and event, a ceaseless coming and going to the accompaniment of distant cannonades and hoofbeats at midnight: as if he too were in flight from an inexorable demon of his own. Yet Kepler had never known a man who so fitted the shape and size of his allotted space. What emptiness could there be in him, that a stalking devil would seek for a home?

  Billig was laboriously doing the tavern accounts at the kitchen table, licking his pencil and sighing. Frau Billig sat near him, darning her children's stockings. They might have been done by Dürer. A draught from the window shook the candlelight. There was the sound of the wind and the rain, the muffled roars of the Saturday night revellers in the tavern, the crackling of the fire, the old dog's snores, but beneath all a deep silence reigned, secret and inviolable, perhaps the silence of the earth itself. Why, dear Christ, did I leave home to come on this mad venture?

  At first he had been wary of Wallenstein. He feared being bought for a plaything, for the general's obsession with astrology was famous. Kepler was too old and too tired to take up again that game of guesswork and dissimulation. For months he had held back, worrying at the terms Wallenstein was offering him, wanting to know what would be required of him in return. Conversation, said Wallenstein, smiling, your company, the benefit of your learning. The Emperor, with ill-concealed enthusiasm, urged him to accept the offered post, and took the opportunity to transfer on to Wallenstein the crown's considerable debt to its mathematician. Wallenstein made no protest; his blandness caused Kepler's heart to sink. Also the astronomer would be granted an annual stipend o: 1,000 florins from the Sagan coffers, a house at Gitschin where the general had his palace, and the use of a printing press with sufficient paper for whatever books he might wish to publish, all this without condition or hindrance. Kepler dared to hope. Could it be, at last, could it be..?

  It could not. Wallenstein indeed believed he had purchased a tame astrologer. In time, after many clashes, they had come to an arrangement whereby Kepler supplied the data out of which more willing wizards would work up the horoscopes anc calendars. For the rest he was free to do as he wished. He saw no sign of the imperial debt being settled, nor of the printing works and the paper that had been promised. Things might have been worse. There was the house at least, and now and then he was even paid a little of his salary on account. If he was not happy, neither was he in despair. Hitzler's word came back to him: tepid. Sagan was a barbaric place, its people peculiar and cold, their dialect incomprehensible. There were few diversions. Once he travelled down to Tübingen and spent a gloriously tipsy month with old Mästlin, deaf and doddering now but merry withal. And one day Susanna came to him, with a look of mingled amusement and surprise, to announce that she was pregnant.

  "By God," he said, "I am not so old then as I thought, eh?" "You are not old at all, my dear, dear Kepler." She kissed him, and they laughed, and then were silent for a moment, a little awkward, almost embarrassed, sharing an old complicity. What a happy day that had been, perhaps the best out of all the days of that amused and respectful, ill-matched and splendid marriage.

  Wallenstein lost interest in him, even his conversation. Summonses to the palace grew rare, and then ceased altogether, and Kepler's patron became a stylised and intermittent presence glimpsed now and then in the distance, beyond a prospect of trees, or down the long slope of a hill on a sunlit evening, cantering among his aides, a stiff, rhythmically nodding figure, like a sacred effigy borne in brief procession on a feast-day. And then, as if indeed some mundane deity's memory had been jogged, workmen with a cart trundled up one day and dumped at Kepler's door a great lump of machinery. It was the printing press.

  Now he could work again. There was money to be made from almanacs and navigational calendars. But he was ill that winter, his stomach was bad and he suffered much from
gravel and the gout. His years were weighing heavily on him. He needed a helper. In a little book sent him from Strasburg he found on the dedication page a public letter addressed to him by the author, Jakob Bartsch, offering his humble services to the imperial astronomer. Kepler was flattered, and wrote inviting the disciple to come to Sagan. Bartsch was a mixed blessing. He was young and eager, and wearied Kepler with his impossible enthusiasms. Kepler grew fond of him, all the same, and would have had fewer misgivings at his marrying into the family if Susanna, his daughter and Bartsch's bride, had not had so much of the Müller strain in her.

  The young man willingly took over the drudgery of the almanacs, and Kepler was free to return to a cherished project, his dream of a journey to the moon. The larger part of that last year in Sagan he devoted to the Somnium. None of his books had given him such peculiar pleasure as this one. It was as if some old strain of longing and love were at last being freed. The story of the boy Duracotus, and his mother Fiolxhilda the witch, and the strange sad stunted creatures of the moon, filled him with quiet inner laughter, at himself, at his science, at the mild foolishness of everything.

  "You will stay the night, then, Doctor?"

  Frau Billig was watching him, her needle poised.

  "Yes," he said, "certainly; and thank you."

  Hillebrand Billig lifted his troubled head from his accounts and laughed ruefully. "Maybe you will help me with these figures, for I cannot manage them!"

  "Aye, gladly."

  They want to know what really has brought me here,  yes they do. But then, so do I.

  When he finished the Somnium there had been another crisis, as he had known there would be. What was it, this wanton urge to destroy the work of his intellect and rush out on crazy voyages into the real world? It had seemed to him in Sagan that he was haunted, not by a ghost but something like a memory so vivid that at times it seemed about to conjure itself into a physical presence. It was as if he had mislaid some precious small thing, and forgotten about it, and yet was tormented by the loss. Suddenly now he recalled Tycho Brahe standing barefoot outside his room while a rainswept dawn broke over the Hrad-cany, that forlorn and baffled look on his face, a dying man searching too late for the life that he had missed, that his work had robbed him of. Kepler shivered. Was it that same look the Billigs saw now, on his face?

  Susanna had stared at him in disbelief. He would not meet her eye. "But why, why?" she said. "What is to be gained?"

  "I must go. " There were the bonds to be seen to in Linz. Wallenstein was in disgrace, had been dismissed. The Emperor was sitting with the Diet in Regensburg, ensuring the succession of his son. "He owes me moneys, there is business to be finished, I must go."

  "My dear," Susanna said, trying if a joke would work, "if you go, I will expect to see the Last Judgment sooner than your return. " But neither one smiled, and she let fall her hand from his.

  He travelled south into wild winter weather. He took no notice of the elements. He was prepared to go on to Prague if necessary, to Tübingen-to Weilderstadt! But Regensburg was far enough. I know he will meet me here, I'll recognise him by the rosy cross on his breast, and his lady with him. Are you there? If I walk to the window now shall I see you, out there in the rain and the dark, all of you, queen and dauntless knight, and death, and the devil…?

  "Doctor, Doctor you must go to bed now, and rest, you are ill."

  "What?"

  "You are shaking…"

  111? Was he? His blood sizzled, and his heart was a muffled thunder in his breast. He almost laughed: it would be just like him, convinced all his life that death was imminent and then to die in happy ignorance. But no. "I must have been asleep. " He struggled upright in his chair, coughing, and spread unquiet hands to the fire. Show them, show them all, I'll never die. For it was not death he had come here to meet, but something altogether other. Turn up a flat stone and there it is, myriad and profligate! "Such a dream I had, Billig, such a dream. Es war doch so schön."

  What was it the Jew said? Everything is told us, but nothing explained. Yes. We must take it all on trust. That's the secret. How simple! He smiled. It was not a mere book that was thus thrown away, but the foundation of a life's work. It seemed not to matter.

  "Ah my friend, such dreams…"

  The rain beat upon the world without. Anna Billig came and filled his cup with punch. He thanked her. Never die, never die.

  NOTE

  The standard biographies are Kepler, by Max Caspar, translated and edited by C. Doris Hellman (London, 1959), and Tycho Brake, by J.L.E. Dreyer (Edinburgh, 1890). I must also mention, once again, my indebtedness to, and admiration for, Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers (London, 1959). Another work which provided me also with valuable insights into early 17th-century life and thought is The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, by Frances A. Yates (London, 1972).

  For their help and encouragement, I wish to thank especially Don Sherman and Ruth Dunham, and my wife, Janet.

  Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg on November the 15th, 1630.

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