An Elegant Solution

An Elegant Solution



Paul Robertson



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.