1
The Ash Gate

Of dust is man made, and to dust man returns. So I sat, watching for the dust of men returning.

I was on a hillside above Basel. My Master Johann had me on an errand to watch for the return of his sons from Italy. It was late on a spring day; the sky was exactly blue, cut at the edge of the world by sharp white mountains. The fields were perfect green, engraved by the Rhine. And finally, around the side of my hill was an airy indistinctness. Dust.

That was my signal, but I waited to be sure: that it was dust raised by the coach from Bern. Once I saw the coach, drawn by four horses, I ran down the hill toward the city; I loved to run. I was first by minutes to the gate at the city Wall. The coach wouldn’t stop there. It was bound for an inn and stable inside.

I waited there anyway. The gate was the Ash Gate and was only passed with burning. Ashes were the symbol of renunciation; the passage of any gate was renouncing one side to enter the other. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, the coach came into view.

The road passed over the moat on a causeway and through an arch beneath a high, narrow stronghold. The coachman had his horses at a fast pace. I knew the man; he’d been driving the route for centuries. He waved to me. Then his coach, like an arrow on the straight road, shot over the bridge and pierced the gate. I followed through it.

Immediately inside, the Ash Street was hedged with houses, in unyielding and uninterrupted lines. Always in Basel the doors would be closed and the windows curtained. That afternoon the street was empty and the coach hardly slowed. I was just as quick and kept with it. The street soon ended in another moat and Wall and gate. This was the inner Wall and the old city, and a short distance inside was the coach’s destination and destiny. I reached the tavern as it did.

There was a large public market square here, one of the few open spaces in Basel where its people would be found outside their homes. The inn waited on one side, and across from it stood the blunt face of an ancient church, the largest in Basel, even bulkier than the cathedral. The tavern was the Boot and Thorn; its opposite was called the Barefoot Church.

The coach halted. Knipper, the coachman, dropped nimbly from his box to the cobblestones as a lout from the inn was already scrambling upward toward the luggage. From the Beginning, Knipper had driven that coach. He brought Erasmus to Basel and Oecolampadius and the Reformation; he brought Holbein and Paracelsus and the Renaissance. Knipper took Charlemagne through to Rome, Caesar conquering the Gauls crossed the Alps with Knipper, and Hannibal crossed the other way with his elephants in the luggage rack; and Knipper’s horses, I knew, were named by Adam.

“I know who you’re for!” he bellowed to me. He was a boisterous and cantankerous man, quick to answer, agile, and a dead shot with his pistols. A coach driver had to be all those. “They’re in there safe and sound!” His hair was short and all white, though it would shine like silver in the sun, and he had no beard.

“Their father’s wanting them,” I said.

“As I value my life, I won’t keep that man waiting,” Knipper answered in a suddenly low voice, and then back louder, “So let’s get them out!” He gave the handle a twist and the door a wrench, and opened it onto a black cave. From that shadow the passengers emerged.

The first was a tiny old woman who descended the step with her bonnet bobbing like a pecking bird; the next was a wide man who swayed on his small feet like a swinging sack of wool. I let them both pass.

Then a shoe buckle, and shoe, and stockinged leg, were planted on the step, and a three-cornered hat and white wig bowed low beneath the low door, and I knew I had my man. The whole accordion unfolded.

“Daniel!” I said. I hadn’t seen him in the two years since he’d fled. He was dressed beyond sere Basel’s tastes in a wine silk coat and ruffled collar. Italy and aging had done their work on him.

“Leonhard!” he answered, and I knew from his smile that his cheerfulness was unchanged. He shook my hand vigorously. “Well met!” He’d hardly put himself on solid ground when another hat and another wig followed. But his brother Nicolaus was a very different fish.

Brothers contrast as bells do: near the same and discordant the more alike they are. Daniel and Nicolaus both had their father’s large, brooding eyes in their mother’s long and narrow face. Daniel achieved this well, fixing the world with the stare of a philosophic hawk; in Nicolaus the effect was perplexing, something like a furious sheep. At the age of thirty, Nicolaus had the gentle rounding of affluence, more than the still sticklike Daniel and taller. Daniel was just twenty-five, seven years my senior.

In temperament, the common inheritance from their father was their eternal curiosity and from their mother, a piercing perception. But two other traits from their parents were odd crossed. Daniel thrived on conversation, having his mother’s love of talking and his father’s care at hearing. Nicolaus had the reverse: his father’s dislike of speaking and his mother’s disdain for listening. The parents had been compatible. The brothers, a torture to each other. They still had a strong fraternal fondness, though: a common enemy had made them allies.

“Blasted long ride,” Nicolaus said.

But Daniel was shaking my hand eagerly. “How have you weathered these two years?”

“Very well,” I answered.

“And the Brute?” he asked, and I knew his aversion to his father was also unchanged. Master Johann was the most opposite among mankind of an unthinking animal, and Daniel among mankind most knew that.

“As well as ever.”

“I feared as much! But he won’t live forever, will he? He’ll have to die sometime.”

“We all will,” Nicolaus said. “But who’ll carry the baggage?”

“That’s the lot of the living, to carry what’s left behind by the dead,” Daniel said.

Yet Nicolaus, who was lean with words, would use one sentence to say more than one thing. He’d meant the luggage from the coach. “The boy’s hired to bring it to the house,” I said, “and the driver, too.” Knipper himself was already unloading the first bags, and Willi, the hulking tavern lout, was bringing out a cart. “We’re to go on right away.”

“We’re to go right away? Then I’ll stop right away. Join me in the Boot and Thorn for a cup, Leonhard.”

“Not I.”

The innkeeper had come out to watch us, and he and the coachman had whispered words. That man was earth and fire to Knipper’s wind and fire, and I’d seen many sparks between them. Then Knipper took the first bags into his hands.

“Perhaps in the church for a kneel, then?” Daniel said to me. “That’s what you’d rather.”

“I’d rather get you to the Master’s house.”

“And be at it,” Nicolaus growled.

The first street toward Master Johann’s house from the Square was the Contention Alley, and it was well named for what it was leading us to. I had a quick sight of Knipper turning the corner ahead of us, while the brothers were looking back at Willi tugging heavy trunks onto the cart. Then we were off, and the march to Master Johann’s house was short and sharp.

In the minute of walking, I asked Daniel about Italy. It was really to hear about himself, and my ears were quickly filled. Daniel had been my close friend in the first lonely years I was in Basel away from my own parents. He and his brothers had been brothers to me, and Daniel the most. I’d grieved when he left. I’d grieved for why he’d had to leave. I’d worried he would never return.

Nicolaus was silent, of course. He hadn’t lived in Basel in the years I’d been here, but for the last two that Daniel had been away, Nicolaus had lived in Bern and been a frequent visitor to his father’s house. When I did get him to talk, he was worth listening to, and had been kind to me in his own way.

Two quick streets brought us to the second of Basel’s open spaces. The bare Munster Square was much different from the market square of Bare Feet. The brick Munster, Basel’s cathedral, was more daunting than the old white church, taller, and sharper. The plaza was less square than rectangular and too holy for the sellers and moneychangers. Its houses were larger and fewer, and the largest and fewest was my Master’s. Daniel must have had painful memories to see it. But as we came into that square, and in sight of that house, I knew Nicolaus, and even Daniel, felt that delight, universal to men, of homecoming. I knew it well from the occasions I saw my own father’s house.

I considered the house of Master Johann to have been at least as much as it should. It was close by the University, three dun stories high and seven dark blue shuttered windows across, with a high pitched roof snarled by the gabled windows of two more stories within it.

The doors of Basel were not entries but sentries. Even the grand entranceways of the town hall and the churches were kept closed to intimidate. My Master’s door was imposing, cut wide but a bit short. He entered it as a perfect fit. His sons, who were taller, bowed to pass. I commonly entered through the back alley and kitchen door where I could hold my head high.

It was always blindingly dim inside that door. The hall was dark wood plank floor, darker paneled walls, and darkest beamed ceiling, which all sponged the air clean of light. We stood in the saturating murk, the sons and I, and their homecoming delight was de-lit. As for me, I found it comforting. There was other sight than by light.

“Blasted dark in here,” Nicolaus said. Yet some ray of our presence had penetrated beyond the hall and above us there was motion. Starting in some far off corner but descending the stairs rapidly, the faint rattle became a jangle, then a clatter, and a glow came bobbing around the corner of the steps; and then appeared to us like a spinning clockwork the lady of the house, the Mistress Dorothea. Her black dress and white apron and bonnet blurred in the dusk and from her constant motion. Her candle, in hand at the length of one long arm, was an errant planet far from its sun. The other arm unfurled. “My babies!” she said. They braced themselves and were embraced. Nicolaus deftly took the flaming candle as it orbited by and the arms wrapped themselves around.

There would be no escape until she released them, and she did not. They were showered instead by thunderstorms of words in all the languages of motherhood. They bore the soaking willingly and inevitably. No one could be offended by Mistress Dorothea, though one would be overwhelmed. She finally reached “Come, come, come,” in her flow and her arms still around the two captives, and with irresistible force, impelled them toward the sitting parlor adjacent to the front hall. I stayed behind rather than intrude on their intimate moment, and I was not alone.

The light was gone from the steps but a shadow remained: a boy, or young man, standing where the stairs turned their corner. He had wide open eyes and a mouth closed as if it would never speak, and straight fair hair, and he was still not quite grown to the height of his brothers. This was Little Johann, the third brother of the three, fifteen years old and named for his father.

“They’re both well,” I said to him. “Daniel even looks Italian in his silk coat.”

He did speak. “Did he tell you how long he’ll stay?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“He hasn’t told us yet. There’re letters for him. From Paris and Russia.”

“Russia?”

“I saw them on Poppa’s desk.”

“Is Master Johann coming down?”

“When everyone’s had to wait long enough.”

I still hesitated. There was no reason for me to remain, but I had a curiosity to watch the Master greet his sons. For all the time I spent in that house, I’d rarely sight him. I pictured him ponderously descending, pompous, portentous and proud. Just then, behind me, the front door opened.

To compare what I’d just envisioned with what I now beheld: If my Master was a fresh, firm pumpkin, this was its collapsed, dried-out rind, similar in appearance but with all the energy drained. We comprehended Cousin Gottlieb.

Gottlieb had grown up in Master Johann’s household and was nearly another brother, even having travelled with the family to Holland when Master Johann had held a position there twenty years before. Now at thirty-eight he had his own household. He was actually named Nicolaus for his paternal grandfather, as are many of his relatives, but had forever been called Gottlieb to avoid confusion.

Gottlieb was an arid man. I bowed politely: I would not usually engage him in conversation for fear of desiccation. Mistress Dorothea drenched a listener and Cousin Gottlieb dried him out, yet I’ve been fond of him as I am of all the family. It’s an odd taste, but well founded, for they’re all worth knowing.

“They dared come back, did they?” Gottlieb in his sharp, rasping voice.

“They’re in there,” Little Johann answered.

“I’d like to know why. And Uncle Johann?”

“I hear him coming.”

I had as well, and I knew it was time to be gone. There was more of the family in Basel, far more, but these were my Master’s closest. Gottlieb was the prime cause for Daniel’s departure two years before, though the composite cause was Master Johann himself. The tinder in that parlor was stacked high awaiting the fatherly torch. Rather than walk boldly out the front door, I took the corridor to the kitchen and the back.

In the kitchen was a remarkable sight. It was Knipper, the coach driver.

In normal times I’d nod and wave to Knipper and keep my distance. He was explosive. But here he looked dangerous as a wet kitten. “Oh, you,” he said, seeing me, and mournfully. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

“Sure I will,” I said.

“It’s that.” I’d certainly seen that as quick as I’d seen him. That was a black trunk, big as a man, weighing down the stone floor. “That goose Willi brought it from the coach and it’s not theirs. I should have stayed to be sure he only had the right ones. This one’s not meant for here.”

“Should we carry it back?” I asked.

“It’s too heavy.” Coach drivers were made of old oak roots; I’d never seen one wilted like this. He didn’t look able to carry a feather. “But I can’t leave it and have the Master or his sons see I’ve made fool with the luggage.” The dilemma had poor Knipper pickled. “Run back to the inn and fetch that knave and send him here and his cart.”

“I’ll go,” I said, and it was even better reason to miss Master Johann’s grand entrance. I could ask the next morning if there’d been warm greetings or hot words. Knipper nearly thanked me to death, he was so relieved.

I left Knipper there, with Master Johann’s family, and quick tracked back to the inn. The innkeeper pointed me to the stables without a word when I told him what Knipper was wanting Willi for. The tavern-boy was there, hammering some horseshoes into shape, and I rousted him. I asked if he wanted my help, but he didn’t. He was ox strong. That was as well, as by that time the firewood in my Master’s house was aflame, or already ashes. Ashes to ashes. I was ready to be home, glad to have seen Daniel and Nicolaus, and hungry for supper.

It was only a few steps from the Boot and Thorn, and the Barefoot Square, to my own home. I lived with my mother’s mother. She had a tidy house very near Saint Leonhard’s church, where she was revered. Her husband was pastor there until his death. My father was also, until he left for the village of Riehen soon after my birth. It was hoped that I would follow them to the pulpit, and I would never have regretted if I had. But for good or ill, I’ve had an even deeper love. So I was here in Grandmother’s care. Riehen was only five miles from Basel, but too far to travel daily, so for these last five years this house has become my home. I have left my father’s house to walk among men, placed by him in my grandmother’s and Master Johann’s care.

At supper, after I told Grandmother my day and all the doings at my Master’s house, she gave me a warning. “A family should be for peace, Leonhard. There’s trouble enough outside the door. Keep a watch on yourself for all you have to do with them.”

“They’ve always been this way,” I said.

“Every kettle only holds its own measure and no more. Someday they’ll reach that and overflow.”

And then late, as I laid my head on my pillow, thinking about the day and my Master’s family, I could hear an overflowing. Not a kettle, but a river. Not the Rhine, but something else, something rising and disturbed. I heard it murmuring, and felt its pull, and was pulled by it to sleep.

That had been Thursday. The next morning, Friday, I was out early to fetch water. There were three fountains equally near and I chose the one in the Barefoot Square so I might see Knipper before he was off to Freiburg. The coach was in front of the inn and the passengers were impatient beside it and the horses restless in their harnesses, but the whole was Knipper-less. I was careful to fill the buckets only to their measure and not overflow them; and there was still no driver. I set the buckets on the paving stones, not too close to the horses’ edgy hooves, and asked. I had an earful back. “Where is he? I’d like to know where is he! I’m told to be up at dawn and the driver’s still sleeping!”

I was sure he’d soon be by. Knipper kept a schedule as ancient and immutable as the planets: Thursday from Bern to Basel, Friday Basel to Freiburg, and Saturday Freiburg to Strasbourg. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday he turned his horses back. Inns in the four cities owned his coach and paid him to drive it and deliver his passengers to their front doors. He linked Basel to the French, German, and Swiss lands that surround it. Basel was properly a part of Switzerland, but to its own people it has been a land separate to itself.

The keeper of the Boot and Thorn was Old Gustavus, and he would be closest of anybody to knowing anything of Knipper. He was standing at the door smoldering. He came out to look close at the coach to see, I thought, that it really had no Knipper. Of course I was as curious as all the rest, but it was time for me to be on to more chores and I turned away from the inn. Right at my elbow I found Daniel.

“What’s the rumpus?” he said.

“Knipper’s been lost.”

“Knipper? Oh, the driver? Then where is he?”

“Lost means not knowing where he is.”

“Well, it’s you I want anyway, and you’re found.”

“I’ll be to your kitchen in an hour,” I said.

Daniel had put his hand on my shoulder in pity. “You still labor for him, Leonhard? It’s brutes that labor, and not you for the Brute.”

“But I do and I’m glad to. What are you wanting with me? And did you have peaceable words with him last night?”

“Words, not peace. Supper was tolerable though. But you were lost before I could talk to you, and I want your help with an idea I’ve been hatching.”

“If it’s your idea, then it’s cracked.”

“There’ll be cracking.” Daniel’s other hand took hold of my other shoulder, and we were face to face between his arms. “It’s why I came back to Basel,” he said, and there was a hard passion behind his soft smile. “It’s to do with Uncle Jacob.”

Uncle Jacob: that was a scorpion’s egg he was hatching. I’d heard very little about my Master’s oldest brother, and he was very firmly not discussed in my Master’s house. “What about him?”

“He’s dead.”

I knew that. “I’ve seen his epitaph.”

“But why is he dead?”

I had thought much about mortality and so answered, “For his sins.” I didn’t mean it uniquely to old Jacob, as he died before I was born and I never met him, but I had always been firm on this point. And Daniel would benefit from a reminder. “And for a fever, too, most likely, and with every hope for resurrection. Your father is the youngest of ten children, and he’s nearly sixty. You should expect to have dead uncles. And you know Master Johann is touchy on Jacob.”

“Because he has reason to be, and that’s why I’m back in Basel, Leonhard. I’m going to look into Uncle Jacob, and the more Brutus doesn’t like it, the more I will.”

“I won’t be part of it.”

“Sure you will. I need your help.”

“I won’t have time this morning.”

“Tonight?”

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “After my lesson.”

“That’ll do. If you can still talk or think after that bruising you go through.” He nodded toward the Boot. “I’ll be at the inn tomorrow night.” And today’s night, I was sure, and many another. I took my leave and my buckets.

Away from the Barefoot Square, I came into the Wages Street. Paving stones and packed soils carried Basel’s traffic, its wheels and shoes; houses, churches, and structures constrained it. I would often stand at a corner or in a doorway and watch the motion. I would see the good citizens and their horses and carts. I watched University scholars with books under their arms. I saw grand merchants and councilors, the Day Watch and the Night Watch. And I would also see Reformers in vast robes contending for their faith. In the open squares I saw Romans with swords and barbarians with pikes, and marching through the gates I saw knights in chain mail with Crusader crosses on their shoulders. In narrow alleys I saw long corteges, cart after cart on misty mornings, filled by the plague’s harvest. In the church cloisters I saw monks chanting and druids moaning, and Irish friars storytelling, returning the faith of the Roman city to the city of Goths and Vandals. And in archways I would see angels, and in stairways, saints, and in shadows, shadows. It had always been that I would see invisible things.

Then I was to the Hay Street and my grandmother’s house. Even on the most clouded days the sun always shone on her door. There had always been an anchor that held her firm, and none of the ages in the street outside would ever shake her.

So I brought in my water and took in as much of her calm as I could hold, and readied myself for the rest of the day.

Next in the mornings, Monday through Friday, after my chores at home I would present myself at Master Johann’s back door. Mistress Dorothea would scoop me into the kitchen. The Mistress was the wife of a very great man besides being the sister of the present Chief Magistrate and the daughter of a previous, but she was no idlewoman; no one in Basel, no matter how great, didn’t work. A wealthy family would hire labor, though, and this Mistress did. She had a girl, a seamstress’s daughter, who helped her with washing and cooking. I did the heavy work. I would stoke the fire and empty the grate and chop wood and fetch water, and most days there would be a floorboard to hammer back or a pot to undent; I’ve been apprentice carpenter and tinker and smith and cooper. It was mostly the same that I did for my grandmother, but for a grander house and household. I would never see Master Johann these mornings. I would see the others of the family, and it was in years past that in these hours I met the sons and made my friendship with Daniel.

The seamstress’s daughter was fourteen years old, a good laundress and passable cook, but she was flawed: she chattered continually. Worse, she and the Mistress together were deafening. The clatter and slap of dishes and ironing and kneading and all else would be bearable; the gossip and pure inanity that congested the air were not, but I bore them anyway. The ridicule I endured from my friends was as hard: working with women made me a laughingstock with them.

And I wasn’t paid a copper for any of it! Every morning but Saturday and Sunday I did this. I stopped my ears against Babel, I submitted to the common labor lot of man, passed from Adam to Noah to Greece to Rome to my Mistress’s kitchen, and I toiled. Yet, yet, like Jacob’s for Rachel, my labor seemed fleeting, for my wages were worth so much more than anything I could have been paid in money. Though Daniel scoffed, he knew well what great value I received for my chopping.

That Friday morning I saw no more of Daniel or any of Nicolaus. Little Johann was waiting alone for me in the kitchen, kneading a ball of dough. I didn’t think he talked to anyone else. He’d never liked work, though he did his share. Breadmaking was an odd hobby for him. “You should have seen us last night,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have. Who was glad for the homecoming? I know the Mistress was.”

“Poppa said he was, even despite Daniel’s ungrateful pernicious heart. Daniel said he was glad, too, to see every familiar stone in the city and even the one where Poppa’s heart should be, and Nicolaus told the two they weren’t father and son but plain squabbler children, and Gottlieb said he would like very much to know why Daniel had come back at all.”

“Did Daniel say why he had?”

“He said it was because he’d missed Gottlieb so dearly. Then I went to my room.”

“Does it vex the Mistress?”

“She frets and worries, and she doesn’t believe they mean what they say.”

“Do they, Johann?” I asked. In truth, he’d know better than they did.

“Not all.”

“And you?”

He was pounding and shoving his dough. “I’m angry that they’re all angry. I want Daniel to go back to Italy.”

“He said supper was tolerable.”

“No one talked but Mama. If the rest just stay quiet I don’t mind them.” I felt badly for him and for his ball of flour. Then the Mistress and her maid joined us and no other talk was possible. When I left her kitchen, the streets were silent as midnight in comparison.

My labor ended for the morning, it was time for solemn seriousness. I ran back home. For me, the path between my grandmother’s house and my Master’s was well worn. I ate my quick lunch of bread and cheese and went to my room for my stark transformation.

I removed myself from the rough brown garments I preferred and pulled on white shirt and black breeches, then white stockings and black waistcoat, then black and buckle shoes and black justacorps coat.

I had an extra head in my room. A white wood ball on a short stand, it considered life from the top of my dresser. It did this without sight or hearing, which surely improved its ruminations. It wore a white wig and black hat. Each day would I borrow these, transferring them between heads, from the one on my dresser to the one on my shoulders. If any of that wooden block’s thoughts transferred also, I was the better for them. The hat wasn’t tricorne, which was for men of gravity, but had a wide brim turned up on each side.

All in black and white I was a changed man. I stepped more steadily. I didn’t run, or not much. I seemed thoughtful. But despite my best effort, in essence, I would remain myself. Yet observers noticed only appearance, not essence, and so for the next few hours I appeared a peer to my peers.

Later in the afternoon I made my de-conversion. I moved my wig from one block of wood back to the other and hung and folded my blacks and whites. A world where everything was only one or the other would be preferable in many ways, but we lived in a world of browns.

Finally at dinner I told my grandmother that I would be at the tavern Saturday evening. “It’s Daniel. He wants my help.”

“Help to make trouble?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know what, so I’ll go to find out.”

“A wise man runs from strife. I have a worry, Leonhard, of what will happen with all that family back in the city.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” I said. “I have a hope, Grandmother, for what could happen.”

I’d refused Daniel for that Friday evening because I had work to do, work that had to be finished before Saturday afternoon. I planted myself in my room, rooted to my chair, and soon sprouted leaves all over my desk: large leaves of white paper, which the birds of the field roosted in. One particular bird, a goose feather in my hand, was making its nest of inky black scribbles.

Saturdays for me began very early. I’d be out for water and breakfasted by sunrise. I had kept this schedule even in the summer when the sun was also an early riser. I’d quickly finish all my other chores. Grandmother was as strict a taskmistress for me as she was for herself, and only when she was satisfied might I go on to the list of tasks from my other masters that must not be incomplete come Monday. Some weeks I was thorough enough with my time that the list was empty; but if not, I’d fly through it. If I’d been industrious and swift, it was still well before noon. I wouldn’t take time for lunch, and a full stomach would muddle me anyway. Instead, I’d settle at my desk and clear my brain to prepare. Saturday was my Sabbath of hardest labor, my rest from idle life.

First, and crucial, I would take down a book.

Leibniz and Newton waited at opposite ends of my shelf, and Descartes in the center, and Fermat and Pascal, MacLaurin and Taylor, de Moivre and L’Hopital, Hooke and Boyle, and many others between. I would have planned this choice through the week and reached the decision in the last waking minutes of the Friday night before, in the dark of my bed.

Then, with that book on my desk, I would take out my folio of notes and thoughts from years of Saturdays past. I would set paper and ink and quill beside them all. And finally I would read.

I would pour myself into it and I would pour it in to me. I’d think on every word and every equation, of what it means, and what it means more, and what it finally means, and what it means past that, and why, and why, and why. I only read with a pen in my hand. I’d write to myself but I could never write enough. And always I would push on.

If there had been a shadow on all this, that this was devotion stolen from my devotion to God, it was always beyond me to stop. What else could I do? The hours passed and the book’s pages turned slowly while my own piles of paper grew. I lost my senses, and the world I sensed with them. I lived in an invisible world of logic and theorem more evident to me than ink and paper, more rigid and immutable than the desk and hard chair I’d been sitting on, purer than air, more part of me than my own hands, and unmatched in perfection among all other created things.

But then my cock would crow.

I’ve taught myself to hear the clock in Saint Leonhard toll three. When it did, I’d blink and firmly close my book: If I didn’t immediately I might not until the bell tolls that three again, which would be far into Sunday morning! But I was never dismayed, because even this pure time would have been only a preamble.

Then I’d dress myself in my student finery, buckles to wig, and on this day when no other student in Basel cared much how they look, I cared most. Grandmother would inspect and correct me, and I’d tuck my folio under my arm and set out. I have done this every Saturday for five years, and always with trepidation and anticipation together.

This Saturday, at the very instant of three thirty, I pulled the bell on the grand doorway in the Munster Square. It was opened by silent Mistress Dorothea, who saw me all other times in peasant brown at her back door with so many words. Now I was to receive the wages I’d earned by my labors of the week. She solemnly ushered me into the dark hall and escorted me up the stairs to a hallway that was smaller but the same dark, and knocked on a door, so firmly closed that it seemed a wall of stone.

I still remembered the first time, when I was thirteen and trembling in my shoes, that she knocked and how nearly I fled at the stony voice that in answer commanded, “Come in.” Now it thrilled me, though I still took stock one last time whether I was completely ready. The Mistress opened the door.

The room was as dark as the whole house, but a single bright candle burned on the table, which with its two chairs was the only furniture. In one chair was Master Johann, and the other chair was empty. It was for me. For two hours I would sit alone under his instruction, and he was the greatest Mathematician in the world.

My Master was a man of substance, not to be trifled with, celebrated across the continent, distinguished in every manner, Basel’s first citizen, impressive and remarkable. His eyes, reflected in his sons, were heavy and brooding and pierced like spears. He did not speak often and his mouth and jaw were hard in his wide face. He wore an old wig in our meetings and his forehead was very high. He was short and broad compared to others, especially his sons. His hands were somewhat thick with short fingers yet he had a beautiful script, the equal of any scribe. This physical skill was surprising for a man whose abilities and efforts were mostly centered inside his head. And in his opinion, the whole world was centered about his head. He has lacked any vestige of modesty, sympathy, generosity, leniency or, sadly, paternity.

Master Johann was the Professor of Mathematics at the University in Basel. He’d had his Chair for twenty years. He was the second man to hold that Chair. Before him was the Chair’s founder, his brother Jacob.

During the two hours that he taught me, I was like Little Johann’s ball of dough: pounded and stretched and rolled, and finally brought out thoroughly baked, in need of cooling. My head was full and my stomach empty and I then would stumble, top-heavy, home. I had so much to think about. The papers in my folio, to be read slowly and thoroughly, would give me hours more of thought. They were like a river to be poured down a rabbit hole.

I’d be ravenous when I arrived home, and I wouldn’t even change out of my black and white. My strict grandmother allowed herself one weekly moment of sympathy: she’d have a table full for me and I’d wolf it and tell her what I’d learned. For my sake she had made herself interested in Mathematics. My final challenge of the very challenging day was to distill two dense gold hours with Master Johann into twenty simple crystal minutes with Grandmother. If I could do that, then I had mastered my lesson.