[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  He believed in action, in the absolute necessity for action. Yet action horrified him, tending as it did inevitably to become violence. Nothing was stable: politics became war, law became slavery, life itself became death, sooner or later. Always the ritual collapsed in the face of the hideousness. The real world would not be gainsaid, being the true realm of action, but he must gainsay it, or despair. That was his problem.

  *

  Amongst the things he wished to forget from Cracow was his encounter with Professor Adalbert Brudzewski, the mathematician and astronomer. The memory of that mad mangled afternoon, however, was the ghost of a persistent giant with huge hairy paws that for years came at him again and again, laughing and bellowing, out of a crimson miasma of embarrassment and shame. It would not have been so bad if only Andreas had not been there to witness his humiliation. By rights he should not have been there: he had shown no interest whatever in Brudzewski or his classes until, after weeks of wheedling and grovelling, Nicolas had at last won a grudging invitation to the Professor’s house—to his house!—and then he had announced in that languid way of his that he would go along too, since he had nothing better to do that day. Yet Nicolas made no protest, only shrugged, and frowned distractedly to show how little he cared in the matter, while in his imagination a marvellously haughty version of himself turned and told his brother briefly but with excoriating accuracy what a despicable hound he was.

  *

  Professor Brudzewski’s classes were rigorous and very exclusive, and were, as the Professor himself was fond of pointing out, one of the main bases on which the university’s impeccable reputation rested. Although he was of course a Ptolemeian, his recent cautious but by no means hostile commentary on Peurbach’s planetary theory had raised some eyebrows among his fellow academics—brows which, however, he immediately caused to knit again into their wonted, lamentably low state by means of a few good thumps in defence of Ptolemaic dogma, delivered with malicious relish to the more prominent temples of suspect scholarship. The Peurbachs of the present day might come and go, but Ptolemy was unassailable on his peak, and Professor Brudzewski was there to say so, as often and as strenuously as he deemed it necessary so to do.

  Nicolas had read everything the Professor had ever written on the Ptolemaic theory. Out of all those weary hours of wading through the dry sands of a sealed mind there had been distilled one tiny precious drop of pearly doubt. He could no longer remember where or when he had found the flaw, along what starry trajectory, on which rung of those steadily ascending ladders of tabular calculation, but once detected it had brought the entire edifice of a life’s work crashing down with slow dreamlike inevitability. Professor Brudzewski knew that Ptolemy was gravely wrong. He could not of course admit it, even to himself; his investment was too great for that. This failure of nerve explained to Nicolas how it was that a mathematician of the first rank could stoop into deceit in order, in Aristotle’s words, to save the phenomena, that is, to devise a theory grounded firmly in the old reactionary dogmas that yet would account for the observed motions of the planets. There were cases, such as the wildly eccentric orbit of Mars, that the general Ptolemaic theory could not account for, but faced with these problems the Professor, like his Alexandrian magister before him, leant all the weight of his prodigious skill upon the formulae until they buckled into conformity.

  At first Nicolas was ashamed on the Professor’s behalf. Then the shame gave way to compassion, and he began to regard the misfortunate old fellow with a rueful, almost paternal tenderness. He would help him! Yes, he would become a pupil, and in the classroom take him gently in hand and show him how he might admit his folly and thereby make amends for the years of stubborness and wilful blindness. And there would be another but very different book, perhaps the old man’s last, the crowning glory of his life, Tractatus contra Ptolemaeus, with a brief acknowledgment to the student—so young! so brilliant!—whose devastating arguments had been the thunderbolt that had struck down the author on his blithe blind way to Damascus. O yes. And though the text itself be forgotten, as surely it would be, generations of cosmologists as yet unborn would speak of the book with reverence as marking the first public appearance—so characteristically modest!—of one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Nicolas trembled, drunk on these mad visions of glory. Andreas glanced at him and smirked.

  “You are sweating, brother, I can smell you from here.”

  “I do not have your calm, Andreas. I worry. I very much want to hear him lecture.”

  “Why? This stargazing and so forth, what good is it?”

  Nicolas was shocked. What good?—the only certain good! But he could not say that, and contented himself with a smile of secret knowing. They passed under the spires of St Mary’s Church. Spring had come to Cracow, and the city today seemed somehow airborne, an intricate aetherial thing of rods and glass flying in sunlight through pale blue space. Andreas began to whistle. How handsome he was, after all, how dashing, in his velvet tunic and plumed cap, with his sword in its ornate scabbard swinging at his side. He had carried intact into manhood the frail heart-breaking beauty of his youth. Nicolas touched him tenderly on the arm.

  “I am interested in these things, you see,” he said, “that is all.”

  He had done his brother no wrong that he could think of, yet he seemed to be apologising; it was a familiar phenomenon.

  “You are interested—of course you are,” Andreas answered. “But I imagine you are not entirely unmindful either that our dear uncle is watching our progress closely, eh?”

  Nicolas nodded gloomily. “So: you think I am trying by being zealous to outflank you in his favour.”

  “What else should I think? You did not want me to come with you today.”

  “You were not invited!”

  “Pah. You must understand, brother, that I know you, I know how you plot and scheme behind my back. I do not hate you for it, no—I only despise you.”

  “Andreas.”

  But Andreas had begun to whistle again, merrily.

  *

  Professor Brudzewski lived in a big old house in the shadow of St Mary’s. The brothers were shown into the hall and left to wait, ringed round by oppressive pillars of silence stretching up past the gallery to the high ceiling with its faded frescos. They looked about them blandly, as if to impress on someone watching them the innocence of their intentions, only to discover with a start that they were indeed being watched by a dim figure behind the screens to the left. They turned away hurriedly, and heard at their backs a soft mad laugh and footsteps retreating.

  They waited for a long time, apparently forgotten, while the hall came gradually to weird life around them. At first it was a matter of doors flying open to admit disembodied voices that shredded the silence, before closing again slowly with a distinct but inexplicable air of menace. Then, when they had wearied of assuming an expectant smile at each unfinished entrance, the voices began to be followed through the doorways by their owners, an oddly distracted, anonymous assortment of persons who did not stay, however, but merely passed through in small tight groups of two or three, murmuring, on their absorbed way elsewhere. These enigmatic pilgrims were to cross Nicolas’s path throughout that day without ever giving up the secret of their mysterious doings.

  The steward returned at last, a soft fat pale pear-shaped creature with a tiny voice and paddle feet and an immaculately bald white skull. He crooked a dainty finger at the brothers and led them into an adjoining room full of sudden sunlight from a high window. Briefly they glimpsed, as they entered by one door, a smiling girl in a green gown going out by another, leaving behind her trembling on the bright air an image of blurred beauty. Professor Brudzewski peered at them dubiously and said:

  “Ah!”

  He had a long yellowish face with a little pointed grey beard clenched under the lower lip like a fang. His back was so grievously bent that his loose black robe, fastened tight at the throat, hung down to the floor curtainwise. Through a vent
at the side was thrust a gnarled claw in which there was fixed, as a peg into a socket, the stout black stick that alone it seemed prevented him from collapsing in a little heap of dust and drapery and dry bones. This seeming frailty was deceptive: he was a quick-tempered cold old body who disliked the world, and tolerated it at best, or, when it made so bold as to accost him face to face, lashed out at it with high-pitched furious loathing.

  There was a silence; it was plainly apparent that he had no idea who his guests were, and hardly cared. Nicolas felt his smile curdle into a sickly smirk. He could think of nothing to say. Andreas, clutching the hilt of his sword—which both brothers at once, wincing, suddenly remembered he was forbidden by college rules to wear in public—stepped forward with a clank.

  “Magister! this is my brother, Nicolas Koppernigk, whom you know, of course; I am Andreas of that name. We come in humility to this veritable Olympus. Ha ha. Our uncle, Doctor Lucas Waczelrodt, Bishop of Ermland, sends greetings.”

  “Yes yes, quite so,” the Professor muttered. “Quite so.” He had not been listening. He looked past them with a frown to the doorway where three gentlemen had entered quietly, and stood now in a huddle, whispering. One was tall and thin, another short and fat, and the third, whose back was turned, was a middling sort with warts. They had a look about them of conspirators. Professor Brudzewski began to make a whirring noise under his breath. Abruptly he excused himself, set off rapidly crabwise for the door through which the green girl had gone, mumbled something that the brothers did not catch, and vanished. The conspirators hesitated, exchanging looks and hopping agitatedly from foot to foot, and then all together in a rush plunged after him, almost knocking over in their haste the steward returning with two incongruously jolly foaming mugs of beer, which he tenderly bestowed upon the guests in silence, with a mournful smile. Cloudshadow swooped into the room like a great dark bird.

  After that for a long time the brothers drifted slowly about the house, somewhat dazed, jostled by flotsam. A strange distraught little man in cloak and hose with an absurd feather in his hat waylaid them in a corridor and launched without preamble into a bitter invective against the incompetence of the Chaldean cosmographers, who he seemed to feel had injured him personally in some mysterious way. Andreas slipped off, leaving Nicolas to stand alone, smiling and nodding helplessly, under a fine spray of spittle. At last the little man wound down, and, panting, departed, nodding furious approval of his own arguments. Nicolas turned, and turning caught at the edge of a canted mirror blazing with reflected sunlight a glimpse of green, that smile again, that girl! and all at once he knew her to be an emblem of light and elusive loveliness, a talisman whose image he might hold up against the malignant chaos of this ramshackle afternoon.

  He hurried down the corridor, following the mirror’s burning gaze, and turned a corner to find no girl, only the black stooped figure of the Professor tapping his way toward him.

  “Ah, you!” the old man said peevishly. “Where have you been?” He frowned. “Were there not two of you? Well, no matter.”

  Nicolas launched forth at once upon the speech that for days he had been preparing. He stammered and sweated, beside himself in his eagerness to impress. Pythagoras! Plato! Nicolas Cusanus! The names of the glorious dead rolled out of his mouth and crashed together in the narrow corridor like great solid stone spheres. He hardly knew what he was saying. He felt that he had become entangled in the works of some dreadful yet farcical, inexorable engine. Herakleides! Aristotle! Regiomontanus! Bang! Crash! Clank! The Professor watched him carefully, as if studying a novel and possibly snappish species of rodent.

  “Ptolemy, young man—you make no mention of Ptolemy, who has after all, as is well known, resolved for us the mysteries of the universe.”

  “Yes but but but magister, if I may say, is it not true, has it not been suggested, that there are certain, how shall I say, certain dispositions of the phenomena that nothing in Ptolemy will explain?”

  The Professor smiled a wan and wintry smile, and tapped on the oaken tiles with his stick as if searching for a flaw in the floor.

  “And what,” he murmured, “might these inexplicable phenomena be?”

  “O but I do not say that there are such mysteries, no no,” Nicolas answered hastily. “I am asking rather.”

  This would not do, this faint-heartedness, it would not do at all. What was required now was a clear and fearless exposition of his views. But what were his views? And could they be spoken? It was one thing to know that Ptolemy had erred, and that planetary science since his time had been a vast conspiracy aimed at saving the phenomena, but it was quite another to put that knowledge into words, especially in the presence of a prime conspirator.

  The orbit of the afternoon had brought him back to his starting point in the hall. He was confused, and growing desperate. Things were not at all as he had imagined they would be. The little man with the feather in his cap, scourge of the Chaldeans, passed them by with a fierce look.

  He could only say what was not, and not what was; he could only say: this is false, and that is false, ergo that other must be true of which as yet I can discern only the blurred outline.

  “It seems to me, magister, that we must revise our notions of the nature of things. For thirteen hundred years astronomers have been content to follow Ptolemy without question, like credulous women, as Regiomontanus says, but in all that time they have not been able to discern or deduce the principal thing, namely the shape of the universe and the unchanging symmetry of its parts.”

  The Professor said: “Hum!” and flung open the door on the sunlit room and the high window. This time there was alas no green girl, only the ubiquitous trio of conspirators, each with a hand on another’s shoulder—Soft! See who comes!—watching. The Professor advanced, shaking his head.

  “I fail to understand you,” he growled. “The principal thing, you claim, is to, what was it? to discern the shape of the universe and its parts. I do not understand that. How is it to be done? We are here and the universe, so to speak, is there, and between the two there is no sensible connection, surely?”

  The room was high and wide, with rough white walls above half panelling, a ceiling with arched black beams and a checkered stone floor. There was a table and four severe chairs, and on the table a burnished copper bowl brimming with rose petals. A plaster relief on one wall depicted three naked women joined hand to shoulder in a sinuous circular dance of giving, receiving and returning. Below them on the floor a pearwood chest stood smugly shut, opposite an antique hourglass-shaped iron stove with a brass canopy. The conspirators began imperceptibly to advance. The window’s stippled diamond panes gave on to a little courtyard and a stunted cherry tree in bloom. Suddenly Nicolas was appalled by the blank anonymity of surfaces, the sullen, somehow resentful secretiveness of unfamiliar things whose contours have been rubbed and shaped by the action of unknown lives. Doubtless for others this room was strung with a shimmering web of exquisitely exact significances, perhaps it was so even for these three peculiar persons edging stealthily forward; but not for Nicolas. He thought: what can we know that is not of ourselves?

  “Paracelsus says,” he said, “that in the scale of things man occupies the centre, that he is the measure of all things, being the point of equilibrium between that which is great and that which is small.”

  Professor Brudzewski was staring at him.

  “Paracelsus? Who is this? He is mad, surely. God is the measure of all things, and only God can comprehend the world. What you seem to suggest, young man, with your principal thing, smacks of blasphemy therefore.”

  “Blablablasphemy?” Nicolas bleated. “Surely not. Did you yourself not say that in Ptolemy we find the solution to the mysteries of the universe?”

  “That was a manner of speaking, no more.”

  The door behind them opened and Andreas entered softly. Nicolas squirmed, drenched with sweat. The conspirators, without seeming to move, were yet bearing down upon him inexorably. He felt
a dismayed sense of doom, like one who hears the ice shattering behind him as he careers with slow, mad inevitability out into the frozen lake.

  “But magister, you said—!”

  “Yes yes yes yes, quite—I know what I said.” The old man glared at the floor, and gave it a whack with his stick—take that, you! “Listen to me: you are confusing astronomy with philosophy, or rather that which is called philosophy today, by that Dutchman, and the Italians and their like. You are asking our science to perform tasks which it is incapable of performing. Astronomy does not describe the universe as it is, but only as we observe it. That theory is correct, therefore, which accounts for our observations. Ptolemy’s theory is perfectly, almost perfectly valid insofar as pure astronomy is concerned, because it saves the phenomena. This is all that is asked of it, and all that can be asked, in reason. It does not discern your principal thing, for that is not to be discerned, and the astronomer who claims otherwise will be hissed off the stage!”

  “Are we to be content then,” Nicolas cried, “are we to be content with mere abstractions? Columbus has proved that Ptolemy was mistaken as to the dimensions of the Earth; shall we ignore Columbus?”

  “An ignorant sailor, and a Spaniard. Pah!”

  “He has proved it, sir—!” He lifted a hand to his burning brow; calm, he must keep calm. The room seemed full of turbulence and uproar, but it was only the tumult within him dinning in his ears. Those three were still advancing steadily, and Andreas was at his back doing he did not wish to imagine what. The Professor swung himself on his stick in a furious circle around the table, so stooped now that it appeared he might soon, like some fabulous serpent, clamp his teeth upon his own nether regions and begin to devour himself in his rage. Nicolas, gobbling and clucking excitedly, pursued him at a hesitant hop.