Kepler

III Dioptrice

Pausing in the midst of Weilderstadt's familiar streets, he looked about him in mild amaze. It was still here, the narrow houses, the stucco and the spires and the shingled roofs, that weathervane, all of it by some means still intact, unaware that his memory had long ago reduced it all to a waxwork model. The morning air was heavy with a mingled smell of bread and dung and smoke-that smell!-and everywhere a blurred clamour was trying and just failing to make an important announcement. The lindens in Klingelbrunner lane averted their sheepish gaze from the puddles of sticky buds they had shed during the night. Faces in the streets puzzled him, familiar, and yet impossibly youthful, until presently he realised that these were not his former schoolfellows,but their sons. There is the church, there the marketplace. Here is the house. There was bedlam when the carriage stopped, the children tussling, the baby squealing in Barbara's lap; it seemed to Kepler a manifestation of the speechless uproar in his heart. The street door was shut, the upstairs shutters fastened. Had the magic ofhis long absence worked here at least, bundled it all up and disappeared it? But the door was opening already, and his brother Heinrich appeared, with his awkward grin, stooping and bobbing in a paroxysm of shyness. They embraced, both of them speaking at once, and Kepler stepped back with a quick glance at the starched tips of his winged lace collar. Regina, a young woman now, had the protesting baby in her arms, and Barbara was trying to get at Susanna to give her a smack, and Susanna, nimbly escaping, knocked over little Friedrich, who cut his knee on the step and after a moment of open-mouthed silence suddenly howled, and a black dog trotting by on the street came over and began to bark at them all in furious encouragement. Heinrich laughed, showing a mouthful of yellow stumps, and waved them in. The old woman at the fire looked over her shoulder and went off at once, muttering, into the kitchen. Kepler pretended he had not seen her.

"Well…!" he said, smiling all around him, and patting his pockets distractedly, as if in search of the key somewhere on his person that would unlock this tangle of emotions. It was a little low dark house, sparsely furnished. There was a yellowish smell of cat, which presently was concentrated into an enormous ginger torn thrusting itself with a kind of truculent ardour against Kepler's leg. A black pot was bubbling on the fire of thorns in the open hearth. Kepler took off his hat. "Well!"

Heinrich shut the door and pressed his back to it, tongue-tied and beaming. The children were suddenly solemn. Barbara peered about her in surprise and distaste, and Kepler with a sinking heart recalled those stories he had spun her long ago about his forebear the famous Kaspar von Kepler and the family coat of arms. Regina alone was at ease, rocking the baby. Heinrich was trying to take her in without going so far as to look at her directly. Poor sad harmless Heinrich! Kepler felt an inner engine softly starting up;  God, he must not weep. He scowled, and stamped into the kitchen. The old woman his mother was doing something to a trussed capon on the table.

"Here you are," he said; "we have arrived."

"I know it. " She did not look up from her work. "I am not blind yet, nor deaf." She had not changed. She seemed to him to have been like this as far back as he could remember, little and bent and old, in a cap and a brown smock. Her eyes were of the palest blue. Three grey hairs sprouted on her chin. Her hands.

Laughable, laughable-she had only to look at him, and his velvet and fine lace and pointed boots became a jester's costume. He was dressed only as befitted the imperial mathematician, yet why else had he carried himself with jealous care on the long journey hither, like a marvellous bejewelled egg, except to impress her? And now he felt ridiculous. Sunlight was spilling through the little window behind her, and he could see the garden, the fruit bushes and the chicken run and the broken wooden seat. The past struck him again a soft glancing blow. Out there had been his refuge from the endless rows and beatings, out there he had dawdled and dreamed, lusting for the future. His mother wiped her hands on her apron. "Well come then, come!" as if it were he who had been delaying.

She glanced at Barbara with a sniff and turned her attention to the children.

"This is Susanna,"said Kepler, "and here, Friedrich. Come, say God bless to your grandma. " Frau Kepler examined them as if they were for sale. Kepler was sweating. "Susanna is seven already, and Friedrich is three or is it four, yes, four, a big boy-and," like a fairground barker, "here is our latest, the baby Ludwig! His godfather, you know, is Johann Georg Gödelmann, Saxony 's Ambassador to the court of Prague."

Regina stepped forward and displayed the infant.

"Very pale," the old woman said. "Is he sickly?"

"Of course not, of course not. You, ah, remember Regina? My… our…"

"Aye: the cabinetmaker's daughter."

And they all, even the children, looked at the young woman in silence for a moment. She smiled.

"We are on our way from Heidelberg, " said Kepler. "They are printing my book there. And before that we were in Frankfurt, for the fair, the book fair, I mean, in… in Frankfurt."

"Books, aye," Frau Kepler muttered, and sniffed again. She bent over the fire to stir the bubbling pot, and in the awkward silence everyone abruptly changed their places, making little lunges and sudden stops, setting Kepler's teeth on edge. He marvelled at how well the old woman managed it still, the art of puppetry! Heinrich sidled forward and stood beside her. As she straightened up she fastened a hand on his arm to steady herself, and Kepler noted, with a pang that surprised him, his brother's embarrassed smile of pride and protectiveness. Frau Kepler squinted at the fire. "A wonder you could come to see us, you are so busy."

Heinrich laughed. "Now ma!" He rubbed a hand vigorously through the sparse hairs on his pate, grinning apologetically. "Johann is a great man now, you know. I say, you must be a great man now," as if Kepler were deaf, "with the books and all, eh? And working for the Emperor himself!"

Barbara, sitting by the table, quietly snorted.

"O yes, " said Kepler, and turned away from his mother and her son standing side by side before him, feeling a sudden faint disgust at the spectacle of family resemblance, the little legs and hollow chests and pale pinched faces, botched prototypes of his own, if not lovely, at least completed parts. "O yes," he said, trying to smile but only wincing, "I am a great man!"

E everyone was morbidly hungry, and when the capon had been dispatched they started on the bean stew from the three-legged pot. Heinrich was sent to the baker's, and came back with a sack of loaves, and buns for the children, and a flagon of wine. He had dallied in the wine shop, and his grin was crookeder than before. He tried to make Barbara take a drink, but she shook her head, turning her face away from him. She had not spoken a word since their arrival. The baby was sprawled asleep in her lap. The old woman squatted on a stool beside the fire, picking at her bowl of stew and mumbling to herself and sometimes grinning furtively. The children had been put to sit under Regina 's supervision at the kitchen table. Kepler suddenly recalled a sunny Easter Sunday long ago, when his grandfather was still alive, one of those days that had lodged itself in his memory not because of any particular event, but because all the aimless parts of it, the brilliant light, the scratchy feel of a new coat, the sound of bells, lofty and mad, had made together an almost palpable shape, a great air sign, like a cloud or a wind or a shower of rain, that was beyond interpreting and yet rich with significance and promise. Was that… happiness? Disturbed and puzzled, he sat now sunk in thought, watching shadows move on the wine's tensed meniscus in his cup.

He had been at Maulbronn then, the last of his many schools. Chance, in the form of the impersonal patronage of the Dukes of Württemberg, had given him a fine education. At fifteen he knew Latin and Greek, and had a grasp of mathematics. The family, surprised by the changeling in their midst, said that all this learning was not good, it would ruin his health, as if his health had ever been their only concern. The truth was they saw his scholarship as somehow a betrayal of the deluded image the Keplers had of themselves then of sturdy burgher stock. That was the time of the family's finest flourishing. Grandfather Sebaldus was the mayor of Weilderstadt, and his son Harry, Kepler's father, temporarily back from his profligate wanderings, was running an inn at Ellmendingen. It was a brief heyday. The inn failed, and Harry Kepler and his family moved back to Weil, where the mayor had become entangled in the shadowy litigations which were eventually to ruin him. Before long Harry was off again, this time to the Low Countries to join the Duke of Alba's mercenaries. Johannes was never to see him again. Grandfather Sebaldus became his guardian. A red-faced fat old reprobate, he considered Johannes a fancified little get.

The house had been crowded then. His brother Heinrich was there, a clumsy inarticulate boy, and their sister Margarete, and Christoph the baby whom no one expected would live, and Sebaldus's four or five adult sons and daughters, the renegade Jesuit Sebald the younger, locked in an upstairs room and raving with the pox, Aunt Kunigund, whose loony husband was even then secretly poisoning her, and poor doomed Katharine, lover of beautiful things, now a wandering beggar. They were all of them infected with the same wild strain. And what a noise they made, packed together in that stinking little house! All his life Kepler had suffered intermittently from tinnitus, the after-echo of those years, he believed, still vibrating in his head. His bad eyesight was another souvenir, left him by the frequent boxings which every inmate of the house, even the youngest, inflicted on him when there was nothing worthier at hand to punish. Happiness?

Where in all that would happiness have found a place?

Reeling a little, with a mug of wine in his fist and wearing a moist conspiratorial smile, Heinrich came and crouched beside his brother's chair. "This is a party, eh?" he wheezed, laughing. "You should come see us more often."

Of his surviving siblings, Kepler loved only Heinrich. Margarete was a bore, like the pastor she had married, and Christoph, a master pewterer in Leonberg, had been an insufferable prig even as a child. Still, they were innocent souls: could the same be said of Heinrich? He had the look of a happy harmless beast, the runt of the litter whom the farmer's fond-hearted wife has saved from the blade. But he had been to the wars. What unimaginable spectacles of plunder and rape had those bland brown eyes witnessed in their time? From such wonder-ings Kepler's mind delicately averted itself. He had peculiar need of this Heinrich, a forty-year-old child, eager and unlovely, and always hugely amused by a world he had never quite learned how to manage.

"You've printed up a book then-a storybook, is it?"

"No, no, " said Kepler, peering into his wine. "I am no good at stories. It is a new science of the skies, which I have invented." It sounded absurd. Heinrich nodded solemnly, squaring his shoulders as he prepared to plunge into the boiling sea of his brother's brilliance. "… And all in Latin," Kepler added.

"Latin! Ha, and here am I, who can't even read in our own German."

Kepler glanced at him, searching in vain for a trace of irony in that awestruck smile. Heinrich seemed relieved, as if the Latin exonerated him.

"And now I am writing another, about lenses and spyglasses, how they may be used for looking at the stars-" and then, quietly: "-How is your health now, Heinrich?"

But Heinrich pretended he had not heard. "It's for the Emperor, is it, all these books you're writing, he pays you to write them, does he? I saw him one time, old Rudolph-" "The Emperor is nothing, " Kepler snapped, "an old woman unfit to rule." Heinrich was an epileptic. "Don't talk to me about that man!"

Heinrich looked away, nodding. Of all the ills with which he had been cursed, the falling sickness was the one he felt most sorely. Their father had tried to beat it out of him. Those scenes were among the earliest Kepler could remember, the boy stricken on the floor, the drumming heels and foam-flecked mouth, and the drunken soldier kneeling over him, raining down blows and screeching for the devil to come forth. Once he had tried to sell the child to a wandering Turk. Heinrich ran away, to Austria and Hungary, and on up to the Low Countries; he had been a street singer, a halberdier, a beggar. At last, at the age of thirty-five, he had dragged himself and his devil back here to his mother's house in Weilderstadt. "How is it, Heinrich?"

"Ah, not bad, not bad you know. The old attacks…" He smiled sheepishly, and rubbed a hand again on the bald spot on his skull. Kepler passed him his empty cup. "Let's have another fill of wine, Heinrich."

The children went out to the garden. He watched them from the kitchen window as they trailed moodily among the currant bushes and the stumps of last year's cabbages. Friedrich stumbled and fell on his face in the grass. After a moment he came up again in laborious stages, a tiny fat hand, a lick of hair with a brown leaf tangled in it, a cross mouth. How can they bear it, this helpless venturing into a giant world? Susanna stood and watched him with a complacent sneer as he struggled up. There was a streak of cruelty in her. She had Barbara's looks, that puffy prettiness, the small bright mouth and discontented eyes. The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and waded after her doggedly through the grass. A flaw in the window-pane made him a sudden swimmer, and in the eyepiece of Kepler's heart too something stretched and billowed briefly. Just when he had given up all hope of children Barbara had begun to flower with an almost unseemly abundance. He no longer had any trust, thought they would die too, like the others; the fact of their survival dazed him. Even yet he felt helpless and unwieldy before them, as if their birth had not ended the process of parturition but only transferred it to him. He was big with love.

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 to 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.

Regina came tentatively down the stairs. "You are not fighting over me, surely?" They looked at her blankly. Frau Kepler, grinning, scuttled back into the kitchen.

"What does she mean, bats' wings?" said Barbara.

"A joke," Kepler snapped, "a joke, for God's sake!"

"Bats' wings indeed. What next?"

"She's nobody's fool, " Heinrich put in stoutly, trying not to laugh.

Kepler flung himself on to a chair by the window and drummed his fingers on the table. "We'll put up at an inn tonight, " he muttered. "There is a place out toward Ellmend-ingen. And tomorrow we'll start for home. "

Barbara smiled her triumph, but had the good sense to say nothing. Kepler scowled at her. The three old women came out of the kitchen. There was a fringe of foam on the fat one's moustache. The thin one made to address the great man sunk in gloom by the window, but Frau Kepler gave her a push from the rear. "O! hee hee, your ma, sir, I think, wants to be rid of us!"

"Bah, " Frau Kepler said, and shoved her harder. They went out. "Well," the old woman said, turning to her son, "you've driven them away. Are you satisfied now?"

Kepler stared at her. "I said not a word to them."

"That's right."

"You would be better off if they did not come back, the likes ofthat."

"And what do you know about it?"

"I know them, I know their sort! You-"

"Ah, be quiet. What do you know, coming here with your nose in the air. We are not good enough for you, that's what it is."

Heinrich coughed. "Now mam. Johann is only talking to you for your own good."

Kepler considered the ceiling. "These are evil times, mother. You should be careful. "

"And so should you!"

He shrugged. When he was a boy he had nursed the happy notion of them all perishing cleanly and quickly some night, in an earthquake, say, leaving him free and unburdened. Barbara was watching him, Regina also.

"We had a burning here last Michaelmas, " said Heinrich, by way of changing the subject. "By God," slapping his knee, "the old dame fairly danced when the fire got going. Didn't she, mam?"

"Who was it?" said Kepler.

"Damned old fool it was," Frau Kepler put in quickly, glaring at Heinrich. "Gave a philtre to the pastor's daughter, no less. She deserved burning, that one. "

Kepler put a hand over his eyes. "There will be more burnings."

His mother turned on him. "Aye, there will! And not only here. What about that place where you are, that Bohemia, with all those papists, eh? I've heard they burn people by the bushel over there. You should be careful." She stumped off into the kitchen. Kepler followed her. "Coming here and preaching to me," she muttered. "What do you know? I was healing the sick when you were no bigger than that child out there, cacking in your pants. And look at you now, living in the Emperor's pocket and drawing up magic squares for him. I dabble with the world, you keep your snout turned to the sky and think you're safe. Bah! You make me sick, you."

"Mother…"

"Well?"

"I worry for you, mother, that's all."

She looked at him.

All outside was immanent with a kind of stealthy knowing-ness. He stood for a while by thefountain in the marketplace. The stone gargoyles had an air of suppressed glee, spouting fatly from pursed green lips as if it were an elaborate foolery they would abandon once he turned his back. Grandfather Sebaldus used to insist that one of these stone faces had been carved in his likeness. Kepler had always believed it. Familiarity rose up all round him like a snickering ghost. What did he know? Was it possible for life to go on, his own life, without his active participation, as the body's engine continues to work while the mind sleeps? As he walked now he tried to weigh himself, squinting suspiciously at his own dimensions, looking for the telltale bulge where all that secret life might be stored. The murky emotions called forth by Regina 's betrothal were only a part of it: what other extravagances had been contracted for, and at what cost? He felt somehow betrayed and yet not displeased, like an old banker ingeniously embezzled by a beloved son. A warm waft of bread assailed him as he passed by the baker's shop; the baker, all alone, was pummelling a gigantic wad of dough. From an upstairs window a servant girl flung out an exclamation of dirty water, barely missing Kepler. He glared up, and for a moment she goggled at him, then covered her mouth with her fingers and turned laughing to someone unseen behind her in the room, the son of the house, Harry Voliger, seventeen and prodigiously pimpled, creeping toward her with trembling hands… Kepler walked on, brooding over all those years of deceptively balanced books.

He gained the common. The evening rested here, bronzed and quietly breathing, basking like an exhausted acrobat in the afterglow of marvellous exploits of light and weather. The elm tree hung intent above its own reflection in the pond, majestically listening. The children were still here. They greeted him with sullen glances, wishing not to know him: they had been having fun. Susanna slowly ambled away with her hands clasped behind her, smiling back in a kind of blissful idiocy at a file of confused and comically worried ducklings scrambling at her heels. Friedrich tottered to the water's edge carrying a mighty rock. His shoes and stockings were soaked, and he had managed to get mud on his eyebrows. The rock struck the water with a flat smack. "Look at the crown, papa, look look!-did you see it?"

"That's the king, all right," said Heinrich. He had come to fetch the children back. "Hejumps up when you throw something in, and you can see his crown with all the diamonds on it. That right, Johann? I told him that."

"I don't want to go home," the child said, working one foot lovingly into the mud and plucking it out again with a delicious sucking sound. "I want to stay here with Uncle Heinrich and my grandma. " His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "They have a

Pig-"

The surface of the pond smoothed down its ruffled silks.

Tiny translucent flies were weaving an invisible net among the reflected branches of the elm, and skimmers dashed out from the shallows on legs so delicate they did not more than dent the surface of the water. Myriad and profligate life! Kepler sat on the grass. It had been a long day, busy with small discoveries. What was he to do about Regina? And what of his mother, dabbling still in dangerous arts? What was he to do. He remembered, as if the memory might mean something, Felix the Italian dancing with his drunken whores in a back lane on Kleinseit. The great noisome burden of things nudged him, life itself tipping his elbow. He smiled, gazing up into the branches. Was it possible, was this, was this happiness?