John Banville - Kepler

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.