“Help you do what?”
“Find the dragon.”
Olearius pretended he had to think. Yet it wasn’t a difficult decision. He was no longer young, he had no children, and his wife was dead. He visited her grave every day, and it still happened that he would wake up and begin to weep, so much did he miss her and so heavily did the loneliness weigh on him. Nothing held him here. If, then, the most significant scholar in the world was inviting him on a shared adventure, there was not much to mull over. He drew a breath to reply.
But Kircher beat him to it. He rose and brushed dust off his cowl. “Very well, then we will set off tomorrow morning.”
“I would like to bring my assistant along,” Olearius said, slightly annoyed. “Magister Fleming is knowledgeable and helpful.”
“Yes, excellent,” said Kircher, evidently already thinking about something else. “Tomorrow morning, then, that’s good, we can manage that. Can you take me to the duke now?”
“He is not receiving visitors at the moment.”
“Don’t worry. When he learns who I am, he will consider himself fortunate.”
—
Four coaches rumbled through the countryside. It was cold, morning haze rose pale from the meadows. The rearmost coach was filled from top to bottom with books that Kircher had acquired recently in Hamburg; in the next sat three secretaries copying manuscripts as well as they could in motion; in the next two secretaries were sleeping; and in the front coach Athanasius Kircher, Adam Olearius, and Magister Fleming, Olearius’s traveling companion of many years, were carrying on a conversation that a further secretary, quill and paper on his knees to take it down, was following attentively.
“But what do we do if we find it?” asked Olearius.
“The dragon?” asked Kircher.
For a moment Olearius forgot his reverence and thought: I can’t stand him any longer. “Yes,” he then said. “The dragon.”
Instead of answering, Kircher turned to Magister Fleming. “Do I understand correctly that you are a musician?”
“I am a doctor. Above all, I write poems. And I studied music in Leipzig.”
“Latin poems or French?”
“German.”
“German? Whatever for?”
“What do we do if we find it?” Olearius repeated.
“The dragon?” asked Kircher, and now Olearius would have liked nothing more than to slap his face.
“Yes,” said Olearius. “The dragon!”
“We will soothe it with music. I may presume that the gentlemen have studied my book Musurgia universalis?”
“Musica?” asked Olearius.
“Musurgia.”
“Why not Musica?”
Kircher frowned at Olearius.
“Naturally,” said Fleming. “Everything I know about harmony I learned from your book.”
“I hear that often. Almost all musicians say that. It is an important work. Not my most important, but indisputably important all the same. Several princes want to have a water organ constructed according to my design. And in Braunschweig there are plans to build my cat piano. It astounds me a little. Really I presented the idea mainly as an intellectual game, and I doubt that the results will please the ear.”
“What is a cat piano?” asked Olearius.
“You haven’t read it, then?”
“My memory. I’m no longer so young. Since our arduous journey it does not always obey me.”
“God knows,” said Fleming. “Do you remember what it was like when the wolves surrounded us in Riga?”
“A piano that produces sounds by torturing animals,” said Kircher. “One strikes a note, and instead of a hammer hitting a string, well-dosed pain is inflicted on a small animal—I propose cats, but it would work with voles too, dogs would be too big, crickets too small—so that the animal makes a noise. When one releases the key, the pain stops too, the animal falls silent. By arranging the animals according to their pitches, the most extraordinary music can be produced.”
For a little while it was quiet. Olearius looked into Kircher’s face. Fleming chewed on his lower lip.
“Why, then, do you write your poems in German?” Kircher finally asked.
“I know, it sounds strange,” said Fleming, who had been waiting for this question. “But it can be done! Our language is only just being born. Here we sit, three men from the same country, and we’re speaking Latin. Why? Now German may still be awkward, a boiling brew, a creature still in the midst of development, but one day it will be grown up.”
“Back to the dragon,” Olearius said, to change the subject. He had experienced it often: Once Fleming got on his hobbyhorse, no one else would have a chance to speak for a long time. And it always ended with Fleming, red-faced, reciting poems. They were not bad at all, his poems, they had melody and power. But who wanted to hear poems without warning, and in German to boot?
“Our language is still a confusion of dialects,” said Fleming. “If one is faltering in a sentence, one avails oneself of the appropriate word from Latin or Italian or even French, and one somehow bends the sentences into shape in Latin fashion. But this will change! One must nurture a language, one must help it thrive! And to help it, that means: write poetry.” Fleming’s cheeks had turned red, his mustache was bristling slightly, his eyes were staring. “He who begins a sentence in German should force himself to finish it in German!”
“Isn’t it against God’s will to inflict pain on animals?” asked Olearius.
“Why?” Kircher furrowed his brow. “There’s no difference between God’s animals and God’s things. Animals are finely assembled machines that consist of even more finely assembled machines. Whether I elicit a sound from a column of water or from a kitten, what’s the difference? You surely wouldn’t claim that animals have immortal souls—what a teeming mass that would be in Paradise. One wouldn’t be able to turn around without stepping on a worm!”
“I was a choirboy in Leipzig,” said Fleming. “Every morning at five we stood in the Saint Thomas Church and had to sing. Each voice was supposed to follow its own melodic punctus, and whoever sang out of tune got the switch. It was hard, but one morning, I remember, I understood for the first time what music is. And when later I learned the art of counterpoint, I understood what language is. And how one writes poetry in it—namely, by letting it prevail. Being and seeing, breath and death. The German rhyme: a question and an answer. Pain, rain, and again. Rhyme is no accident of sounds. It exists where ideas fit together.”
“It’s good that you are well acquainted with music,” said Kircher. “I have sheet music for melodies with which a dragon’s blood can be cooled and a dragon’s spirit calmed. Can you play the horn?”
“Not well.”
“Violin?”
“Passably. Where did you get these melodies?”
“I have composed them in accordance with the strictest science. Don’t worry, you won’t need to fiddle anything for the dragon, we will find musicians for that. For reasons of rank alone, it would be unseemly if one of us played the instruments.”
Olearius closed his eyes. For a moment he saw in his head a lizard rising from the field, its head as high as a tower against the sky: this, then, could be the end of me, he thought, after all the dangers I have survived.
“With all due respect to your zeal, young man,” said Kircher, “German has no future. First of all, because it’s an ugly language, viscous and unclean, an idiom for unlearned people who don’t bathe. Secondly, there is no time at all left for such a prolonged period of development. In seventy-six years the Iron Age will end, fire will come over the world, and our Lord will return in glory. One need not be a great astrologer to foresee it. Simple mathematics suffices.”