The Rate of Encounter

by Christian Doppler, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The German paid in svanziche, two of them each morning, counted into Bortolo's palm by the wife. She had to be told the word for everything. She did not know the word for the oar, or for the forcola, or for the little black boat itself, which was a sandolo and not a gondola, and she said gondola every time and Bortolo let her.

The German was not a German. He was from Salzburg, which the wife said was in Austria, and Bortolo's mother said that made it worse. It was his mother who had found the work, through the woman who did the linen for the rooms on the Riva, and it was his mother who said, the night before the first morning, that a sick tedesco paid better than a well one and that Bortolo was to keep his mouth closed about the year Forty-nine. The Austrians had shelled the city that summer, and then the cholera came. His father had been buried in the cholera time with eleven others in the one trench. Bortolo had been ten. Now he was fourteen, and he could feather an oar so the blade went back over the water without a drop, and he sang second treble at the Frari when the regular boy had a cold.

On the first morning the professor came down the steps of the Riva with a blanket over his knees already, as if he had slept in it, and a pocket watch in his left hand, open. He was a narrow man with a big forehead. His cheeks had two red coins on them. He sat in the middle of the sandolo where Bortolo put him, and looked at the water.

"Out," he said in Italian. "Toward the island. Slowly."

Bortolo rowed toward San Giorgio. There was a breeze from the south-east and a short chop running in from the Lido, not much, the small grey ridges the lagoon makes in February that slap and do not break. The professor leaned over the side. Bortolo thought he was going to be sick and got ready to turn the boat so it would go over the side and not into it. The professor was not sick. He was listening to the bow.

Tac. Tac. Tac. The water came against the planks under his feet.

"Now turn," said the professor. "Go with them. The same stroke. The same, mind."

Bortolo turned the sandolo and rowed back toward the Riva with the waves behind him. Tac. A long wait. Tac.

The professor shut the watch and wrote in a little book with a pencil that he had to lick. Then he opened the watch and said, "Again."

They did it eleven times. On the eleventh Bortolo's shoulders were burning and the professor was coughing into a handkerchief the wife had folded into a square, and when he was finished he looked at what was in it and put it away without folding it. He showed Bortolo the little book. There were two columns of numbers. The ones on the left were bigger.

"Going against," the professor said, tapping the left. "Going with." The right. "You see?"

"Sior professor," said Bortolo, "any child knows that."

The professor looked at him for a long time. Then he laughed, which made him cough again, and when the cough was done he was still smiling.

"Yes," he said. "Any child. Five gentlemen in Prague did not, but any child."

---

He wanted to be rowed every morning that the weather allowed. The wife came down with him and stood on the Riva with her hands in a muff and watched them go out, and she was still there when they came back, as far as Bortolo could tell in the same place. Some mornings the professor did not come at all, and then the wife came down alone and paid him one svanzica for nothing, and said, "Domani," and went back up.

Bortolo did not understand what the counting was for. On the third morning he asked.

The professor had been looking at the sky, which was white. "There is a man called Bradley," he said. "An Englishman. Dead a long time. He looked at the stars through a tube a very long time, more than a year, the same star, and he saw that it moved. A little. Back and forth. In a year."

"The stars move," said Bortolo. "They go round."

"Not like that. This was a small thing. As if you are standing in the rain with a pole and the rain falls straight down, but you walk, so you must lean the pole forward to keep it dry inside." He made the angle with his hand. "The earth walks. So the light comes in a little leaning. So the star is a little in the wrong place. That is Bradley."

Bortolo rowed. He did not see what it had to do with the waves.

"I thought," said the professor, "if the earth moving changes where the light seems to come from, it must change something else. The light comes in waves. Like these. If you go toward them, you meet more of them in a minute. If you go away, fewer. That you know. Any child." He turned the watch over in his hand. "And the eye counts. The ear counts. That is what a colour is, or a note: how many come in a second. So if a star is coming toward us very fast, its light comes in more often, and it looks bluer. If it goes away, redder."

"And are they?" said Bortolo. "Blue and red?"

The professor did not answer at once. A barge went past them loaded with firewood, low in the water, and its wake came across and lifted the sandolo and set it down, and the professor held the gunwale.

"There are stars that go in pairs," he said, "round and round each other. Some of them are coloured. One yellow, one blue. I said that was why. One coming, one going."

"Then it is right."

"No," said the professor. "It is not why. The stars are mostly white. White is all the colours together, so if you push it a little toward blue, you lose some blue off the end and gain some red at the other, and it is still white. And they are too slow. Even very fast for a star is too slow, against light." He put the watch away. "That was my mistake. I made it in a big paper with a long title. I stood up and read it, and five gentlemen listened, and the chairman was my friend. There were not many more people in the room than there are in this boat."

"Then what is right?"

"The waves," said the professor, and pointed at them. "The boat. That is right."

---

There was a Dutchman, he told Bortolo another morning. The Dutchman had not believed it. He had put men with horns on a railway carriage, on the line out of Utrecht, and had the engine pull them up and down past other men standing on the bank who had good ears, and the horn players played one note and held it. The first time it had hailed. The second time, in summer, the men on the bank wrote down what they heard: when the carriage came at them the note was higher, by half a tone, and when it went away it was lower.

"Half a tone," said Bortolo. He sang it, the two notes, a little apart.

The professor looked at him with the same long look as the first day.

"Do that again."

Bortolo did it again.

"You hear that? The difference?"

"It is half a tone," said Bortolo. "It is a big difference. Everyone hears that."

"Everyone does not hear that." The professor took out the little book. "I could not have told you that was half a tone. I would have told you it was two notes."

That afternoon he did not come down. The next morning he came down with a sheet of paper folded in four, and the wife came behind him with a small pair of opera glasses on a ribbon, and she gave them to Bortolo, and said something in German to her husband that was not friendly.

"She says I am going to kill myself in your boat," the professor said, sitting down. "She says it in front of you because she thinks you do not understand."

"I understand," said Bortolo.

"Yes, I thought so." He unfolded the paper. There was a drawing on it of the basin, very good, the Riva and the Dogana and San Giorgio, and a line ruled across the water. "My Dutchman moved the horns. In my first paper I moved the stars. The source of the waves, you understand: the thing that makes the note. Later I saw I had left something out. It is the same whether the bell comes to you or you go to the bell. Nearly the same. I put that in afterwards, in another paper. Nobody has tried it on water. So: the bell will stay still. We will move."

"Which bell?"

"San Giorgio," said the professor. "At noon. The Angelus. You will row from here" — he put his finger on one end of the ruled line — "toward it, as fast as you can, while it rings. Then turn, and row away, as fast as you can. And I will listen. And you will listen, because your ears are better than mine. And then you will not tell me what you heard until I ask."

Bortolo looked at the drawing. "How much higher will it be?"

The professor's face did something, a kind of wince that was not the cough.

"Not much," he said.

---

He had worked it out on the back of the drawing, and the next day, waiting in the middle of the basin for noon with the sandolo turning slowly on the tide, he showed Bortolo the sum, because Bortolo asked.

"Sound goes, in air, about one thousand and fifty feet in a second. Vienna feet. Your foot is a different foot, never mind. You row, when you row hard, perhaps five feet in a second. Perhaps six. So you go toward the bell at five, and the sound comes toward you at one thousand and fifty, and you meet the waves of the sound a little faster than if you sat still. How much faster? Five in one thousand and fifty. One part in two hundred."

"Is that a lot?"

"Half a tone," said the professor, "is about six parts in a hundred. One in two hundred is—" he wrote — "a twelfth of half a tone. Coming. Another twelfth, going. Between them, a sixth."

"A sixth of half a tone."

"Yes."

Bortolo had no idea whether he could hear a sixth of half a tone. Old Maestro Bertoja at the Frari could hear a boy go flat by much less than a semitone and would stop the whole choir and look at the boy over his spectacles without saying anything, and the boy would go red, but what Bertoja heard and how much it was had never been put into numbers.

"Then why do it?" he said.

The professor looked toward San Giorgio. The white façade in the white light. Gulls on the steps.

"I do not know if it is enough," he said. "I know the boat meets the waves more often. That is not in doubt. That is—" he touched the gunwale, then the water over it with two fingers — "that is like this. It does not need me to hear it. But I would like to hear it."

The bell began.

San Giorgio's bell was deep, deeper than the Frari's, and it came across the water flat and a little late, after the stroke of the clapper was already finished in the tower. Bortolo leaned onto the oar and drove the sandolo up the professor's line. He did not feather. He pulled until the forcola creaked and the stern sat down in the water and the bow lifted, and the bell came at them, dong, and dong, and the professor sat with his eyes shut and his hands flat on his knees and his mouth a little open.

"Turn!"

Bortolo swung her. It took four strokes, too long, and the bell went on, and then he was rowing away, the island behind his back, the sandolo running down the chop now so the bow did not slap at all but whispered, and the bell came after them, dong, dong, and stopped.

The gulls on the steps had not moved.

The professor opened his eyes. He was breathing as hard as if he had rowed.

"Well," he said, and stopped, and coughed, and went on. "Well, I heard a bell."

Bortolo waited.

"I heard it go on and on. I heard it louder, then not so loud. That, everybody hears. I could not tell you it changed." He looked at his hands. "I have a fever, I think. The ears go." He turned. "Now. Ask yourself, before I ask you. Do not tell me what you think I want."

"It was higher coming," said Bortolo.

"You are sure."

"No," said Bortolo. "It was higher. I am not sure."

The professor nodded slowly, as if that was the right answer, which Bortolo had not expected.

"Once is nothing," he said. "Once is a story you tell in a café. Tomorrow we do it again, and you will not know which way we are going."

---

The next day the professor tied a scarf over Bortolo's eyes.

"I cannot row blind, sior professor."

"You will not row. Today I row."

He could not row. He knew how — he said there were boats on the Salzach when he was a boy — but he had no breath, and the oar was too long for him and the sandolo went in circles, and after a minute he sat down on the thwart and laughed, and the laugh went into a cough that went on for a long time. Bortolo took the scarf off without being told. The professor's handkerchief had blood in it, more than before, a big brown stain shaped like a sole.

They rowed back to the Riva. The wife was there. She did not say anything to her husband. She took his arm on the steps and then she turned round and looked down at Bortolo in the sandolo, and he thought she was going to tell him not to come any more.

"Domani," she said.

---

In the end it was the wife who rowed.

She came down the next noon in a dark wool dress with her sleeves pinned up past the elbow and a pair of men's leather gloves on, and she stood in the stern of the sandolo where Bortolo usually stood, and Bortolo sat in the bow with the scarf over his eyes and his back to San Giorgio, and the professor sat in the middle with the watch and the little book. She did not row well. She rowed like someone who had been shown how the evening before, in a room, with a broom handle. But she rowed hard. Bortolo could feel it through the planks, the push and the pause and the push.

"She will row toward it and then away, or away and then toward," the professor said. "She will choose. I will not know either. She will write it down and give it to me afterwards. When she turns, you will tell me only higher or lower. If you cannot tell, say so. Saying so is also an observation."

Bortolo did not know how saying nothing could be an observation, and did not ask.

The bell rang.

He did not try to listen to the bell at first. He listened to the boat. Tac. Tac. Tac. Close together — against the chop, then. But the wind could have gone round; he could not see the water. He made himself stop listening to the bow. He listened to the bell. It was the same deep note as before, and under it, the way there always is under a big bell, another note, the hum, the one that goes on after.

There was nothing to hold it against. That was the trouble. In the choir you held your note against Bertoja's organ, or against the boy next to you. Here there was only the bell against itself.

Then the wife turned the boat — he felt it, the long slide sideways, the shift of weight — and she was rowing the other way, and the slapping at the bow went quiet, and the bell went on behind them, and now there was something to hold it against, because he had the first one still in his head, the way you keep a note in your head through a rest.

"Lower," said Bortolo. "Now. Lower than before."

"Before it was higher?"

"Yes."

"Again," said the professor.

They did it four times that day, until the Angelus was finished and there was nothing more to ring. Then they did it the next day at noon, and the day after that, and on the fourth day there was fog, and the wife rowed into the fog with the scarf over Bortolo's eyes and none of them could see San Giorgio at all, and the bell came out of the white like something that had been put there that moment.

Each time Bortolo said higher or lower or I don't know. Each time the professor wrote it down, and each time the wife wrote down which way she had been rowing, on a separate slip of paper, folded, which she gave to her husband only when they reached the Riva steps.

On the last day, the professor sat on the bottom step of the Riva with the slips in his lap and the little book open on top of them and did not get up for a long time, and the wife stood behind him with her gloves in one hand.

"Twenty-two," the professor said at last. "Twenty-two trials. Seven you did not know. Fifteen you said. Of the fifteen, twelve right."

"Is that good?"

"I do not know," said the professor. He looked up at Bortolo, and his face had gone very thin in a week, and the red coins on his cheeks were brighter. "It is better than a coin. Not so much better I could stand up in front of five gentlemen with it. A man with a better ear than yours — a man who tunes organs — perhaps. A faster boat — a steamer, now, the Trieste steamer, that goes perhaps fifteen feet in a second — then it would be half of half a tone, and anyone would hear it." He shut the book. "It does not matter. You understand? It does not matter if we hear it. The boat meets the waves more often. That was true before you said higher. It will be true when nobody here remembers it."

"Then why—" said Bortolo, and stopped, because he had asked that before.

The professor stood up, slowly, with the wife's hand under his arm.

"Because I was wrong about my stars," he said, "and I wanted to be right about something with my own ears. That is not science. That is vanity. Write it down, Mathilde." He said something in German and she did not laugh. To Bortolo: "Domani. If I can."

---

He did not come down again.

The wife came down twice more and paid Bortolo his svanzica for nothing, and the second time she gave him three, and the little drawing of the basin with the ruled line on it and the sum on the back, which Bortolo could read now, nearly. Then for a week no one came, and then the woman who did the linen told his mother that the tedesco professor was dead, on the seventeenth, of the lungs, and was to go to San Michele.

The funeral gondola belonged to the undertakers and was rowed by two of their own men in black. Bortolo followed it in the sandolo, a long way back, because nobody had told him not to, as far as the cemetery island, and he did not land. He held the sandolo off the wall with the oar and watched them carry the box up under the cypresses. There were not many people. He counted. The wife, and a priest, and a man in an Austrian uniform who stood a little apart, and two others in black coats. Five.

Then he turned for home.

The wind had gone round in the night and was coming from the city now, off the Fondamente Nove, straight into his face, and the chop was running out toward the lagoon to meet him. The bow began to slap. Tac. Tac. Tac. He was tired and the sandolo was heavy and his shoulders hurt, and he thought about letting her drift round and going home the long way, with the waves behind him, quiet.

From somewhere in the city, the Madonna dell'Orto or the Gesuiti, he could not tell which, a bell began to ring for noon.

Bortolo put his back into the oar and drove the bow into the waves, toward it, and listened.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Christiānō Dopplerō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Christian Doppler, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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