Kepler Read Free Page A

father-in-law, Jobst Müller. It marked in his memory, he was not sure why, the beginning of that critical period which was to end, nine months later, with his expulsion from Graz.
    The spring had been bad that year, with rain and gales all through April. At the beginning of May there came an ugly calm. For days the sky was a dome of queer pale cloud, at night there was fog. Nothing stirred. It was as if the very air had congealed. The streets stank. Kepler feared this vampire weather, which affected the delicate balance of his constitution, making his brain ache and his veins to swell alarmingly. In Hungary, it was said, bloody stains were everywhere appearing on doors and walls and even in the fields. Here in Graz, an old woman, discovered one morning pissing behind the Jesuit church not far from the Stempfergasse, was stoned for a witch. Barbara, who was seven months gone, grew fretful. The time was ripe for an outbreak of plague. And it was, to Kepler, a kind of pestilence, when Jobst Müller came up from Gössendorf to stay three days.
    He was a cheerless man, proud of his mill and his moneys and his Mühleck estate. Like Barbara, he too had social aspirations, he claimed noble birth and signed himself
zu Gössendorf.
Also like Barbara, though not so spectacularly as she, he was a user-up of spouses-his second wife was ailing. He accumulated wealth with a passion lacking elsewhere in his life. His daughter he looked on as a material possession, so it seemed, filched from him by the upstart Kepler.
    But the visit at least served to cheer Barbara somewhat. She was glad to have an ally. Not that she ever, in Kepler's presence, complained openly about him. Silent suffering was her tactic. Kepler spent most of the three days of the visitation locked in his room. Regina kept him company. She too bore little love for Grandfather Müller. She was nine then, though small for her age, pale, with ash-blonde hair, that seemed always streaked with damp, pulled flat upon her narrow head. She was not pretty, she was too pinched and pale, but she had character. There was in her an air of completeness, of being, for herself, a precise sufficiency; Barbara was a little afraid of her. She sat in his workroom on a high stool, a toy forgotten in her lap, gazing at things-charts, chairs, the ragged garden, even at Kepler sometimes, when he coughed, or shuffled his feet, or let fall one of his involuntary little moans. Theirs was a strange sharing, but of what, he was not sure. He was the third father she had known in her short life, and she was waiting, he supposed, to see if he would prove more lasting than the previous two. Was that what they shared, then, a something held in store, for the future?
    During these days she had more cause than usual to attend him. He was greatly agitated. He could not work, knowing that his wife and her father, that pair, were somewhere in the house, guzzling his breakfast wine and shaking their heads over his shortcomings. So he sat clenched at his jumbled desk, moaning and muttering, and scribbling wild calculations that were not so much mathematics as a kind of code expressing, in their violent irrationality, his otherwise mute fury and frustration.
    It could not go on like that.
    "We must have a talk, Johannes." Jobst Müller let spread like a kind of sickly custard over his face one of his rare smiles. It was seldom he addressed his son-in-law by name. Kepler tried to edge away from him.
    "I-I am very busy. "
    That was the wrong thing to say. How could he be busy, with the school shut down? His astronomy was, to them, mere play, a mark of his base irresponsibility. Jobst Müller's smile grew sad. He was today without the wide-brimmed conical hat which he sported most times indoors and out, and he looked as if a part of his head were missing. He had lank grey hair and a bluish chin. He was something of a dandy, despite his years, and went in for velvet waistcoats and lace collars and blue knee-ribbons.