An Elegant Solution(62)

“What family of yours is dying? Or are they already?”

“He isn’t and he is. It’s Master Huldrych.”

“Huldrych. Yes. That’ll take a good stone. But what are you to him to be here?”

“I was sent.”

“Sent.” His eyes narrowed beneath his dusty brow. “Sent, are you? Who by?”

“Master Johann.”

He dropped his hammer and the yard rang. “I would have known,” he muttered. “And he’s paying for it?”

“He said to tell you. Will you do it?”

“He knows all well that I will. What’s it to say?”

I read the paper to him. “It lists when he died, and that he was Chair of Physics. It’s for the church wall.”

He stared at the words. “They’ll balance right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t have short lines then long lines. Those’ll split.” He pointed to spots on the paper between the words. “Plain words,” he said.

“He wasn’t a plain man.”

“He is now, plain as any of them.”

“It says what he was,” I said, “not who he was.”

“When a man dies he should die and be done with it. Not keep a hold on his place and people. Take a broom to his house and sweep it clean.” It seemed an odd philosophy for a monumentalist. Lithicus’s trade was memorializing in stone. A good portion of Basel’s past would be remembered mostly by his chiseling. “Now, any border on this? Any decorations?”

“You’re to make it whatever the current style is. And draw it first and send it to Master Johann with the cost.”

“I’ll do it. And when he says it’s right, I’ll carve it the same as it’s drawn, to the scratch. I won’t have any trouble with this one. Not like the other.”

“Which one?”

“For his brother. Jacob. He didn’t like what I did. If I’d seen what he wanted before, instead of after, I would have made what he wanted.”

I didn’t even say the word, spiral.



Master Vanitas lived on the Peter Square, which was wide and tree-filled, near Saint Peter’s church. The Square was bounded on one side by the Grace Cloister, whose original monks were no longer present in Basel. Now the cloister was part of the city Armory. On the other side of the Square was a row of comfortable houses which, not content with the trees in front of them, also had large gardens behind.

Master Vanitas held the Chair of Theology. He seemed to be an old man, but was actually only aged beyond his years. He had a sprightly, devoted wife and a cherubic young child. In fact, he was surrounded by all the vanities of life. His best known lecture was on the certainty of death.

He hadn’t many friends, and very few of his students admired him, but I did. His history was that he’d also come to Basel as a young man to study Mathematics, and he’d studied at the feet of Master Jacob.

No one else knew this. Daniel didn’t, nor Nicolaus. Vanitas was a student in the years before they returned to Basel. I had even asked Gottlieb once if he’d known how Vanitas came to his Chair, and Gottlieb had told me a few normal details but not that there was Mathematics involved, and it seemed he would have told me if he’d known. I only came to know myself because of an odd moment in a Theology lecture.

It had been in just my first or second year as a student. I was listening very attentively, not realizing how stultifying it was. In the course of a discourse on the inviolability and invisibility of heavenly truths, he’d made a statement: “It is no more possible for man to see or feel God’s law than to see a trigonometric identity.” That, of course, had roused my interest, both that his point was so intriguing, and also that he was aware that trigonometry had identities.

We had talked a few times since. He had lost interest in Mathematics because of what he called its arrogance, that it brooked only one correct answer to a question, and within its own rules. He preferred questions that couldn’t be answered, and answers that didn’t satisfy. But I’d thought deeply myself about the similarities between Mathematics and Theology, how they were both invisible, unchangeable, and seemingly unfathomable. Both ruled us, and we could struggle and challenge them, but finally, we were bound by them.

He let me in and took me through his house to his garden. His wife was at play there with their daughter, who had only lately discovered walking and the possibilities of self-locomotion. We watched her explore. A soap bubble from some neighbor house settled lightly on a blade of grass beside her and a butterfly settled as lightly beside it. A clock inside sounded solemnly. The bubble popped, the butterfly soared from it into the sky, and the child, amused and bemused, turned away. These were reminders to me of ephemeral life.