An Elegant Solution(77)

“A hand brought that pan down on his head,” he said, finally. “A hand in my father’s house.”

“And a hand put Knipper in the trunk,” I said. “And took out Master Jacob’s papers that had been in it.”

“There could have been space for Knipper and the papers both. They could have gone to Strasbourg together. Or the papers might have been taken out years ago. You’d want those papers, wouldn’t you, Leonhard?”

“I would. And they were in the trunk.”

“You know they were?”

“I do, though I didn’t see them. Had you ever seen them?”

“No. Gottlieb had.”

“Nicolaus,” I said, “who killed Knipper? Who came into the kitchen?”

“You came into the kitchen,” Nicolaus said.

“I did no harm to Knipper.” And at that we parted.



Sometimes I doubted my own memory.

Once I saw a meteor. I had been walking back to Basel from an evening with my parents in Riehen. The sky was clear, with no moon and many stars, and it was very quiet. It was in the winter. I’d been thinking of how, if some action occurred, it would be by sight that we knew where; but it was more often by hearing that we would know that it had occurred at all. I considered the Cartesian implication that only by sensing did we know what was true. But something noteworthy could have been happening just behind me, and if it made no sound, I might never have known of it.

This had startled my imagination and I’d turned abruptly and looked back. At that instant, that very, elegant, instant, a meteor had cut the sky. It wasn’t just a thin line of white, what we often called “shooting stars.” It was a true sphere and engulfed in flame, and I saw it fragment, and all its splinters keep their line through the night. It was so quick that I couldn’t even spin my head fast enough to follow it, and by the time I did, it was gone. And it was silent; if I hadn’t turned, I would never have known that it was there above me. And it was very noteworthy.

But it was gone. I didn’t know what meteors were, and where that one ended, or if it endured at all. The only truth I had of it was my memory. And as I’d returned to my trudge to Basel that night, I’d begun to doubt. I had only turned in reflex, at my own imagination, so that it might have been only more imagination that saw the meteor. And always later, I still wondered. What was real, what was visible, what was true about a memory? If Monsieur Descartes only believed to be true what he sensed himself, was my meteor true once I no longer saw it? Was memory a sense?

So, after my talk with Nicolaus, I walked the short path home, saw no meteors, and I tried to remember, in truth, what I had seen and done that evening in Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen. I had entered; I had talked with Knipper; I had seen the trunk; I had left. Did I do anything else? Did I really do what I thought I had?

And had there been a label on the trunk? Yes. It was in my memory that there had been, pasted on a side, too plain to be noticed. And it had not been still there when the trunk had returned to Basel.



Even early as I was to fetch water Friday morning, there was life and motion in the Barefoot Square. The sun was up, though newly, and most houses were awake and awork, as this was Basel. I greeted Old Gustavus at the door to his Inn, watching the Square as a general his battlefield. And as I put my buckets under the water stream I heard a bell toll. It was sharp and very clean, to split the air as lightning splits the sky. I was impelled to look for the source. I’d never heard that bell before. Then it rang again. But it wasn’t a ring, it was so pure and pointed. It was a cry, a sigh, an exultation, and a song. Something very great and mysterious was speaking.

I found it. The bell was the stone gate in the Wall, and the hammer was a chisel. It was Lithicus, high on his scaffold.

The Wall was rooted deep into the city, in time, and in understanding of what the city even was. It was the city, this inner Wall. So the bell was Basel and that was why its ringing pierced so deep to anyone who heard it.

“What is it you’re doing there, anyway?” I asked.

Lithicus put down his hammer and decided to answer. “The Wall’s old and gate’s old, and the stone they’re made of is old, too.”

“As old as all stone,” I said.

“But there’s stones loose in the arch, and that’s new.”

“It was just the shield on the capstone that was broken.”

“The cracks go deeper. Deep into the gate. You can’t see from down there, but the whole arch is breaking.”

And perhaps the cracks in Basel were deeper, too. “What do you do for that?”

“Mortar them back in.”