Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  He chose his favourites from among the dullards of the school, hulking fellows bulging with brawn and boils who sprawled at their desks and grinned and guffawed, basking in the assurance of his patronage. He looked on them with a kind of warm contempt. They amused him. He cuffed and pummelled them merrily, and with cruel shafts of wit exposed their irredeemable ignorance, making them squirm before the class in stuttering sullen shame; yet still they loved him, and were fiercely loyal.

  On Nicolas he turned a keen and quizzical eye. The boy blushed and bowed his head, embarrassed. There was something indecent in the way Caspar Sturm looked at him, gently but firmly lifting aside the mask and delving into the soft palpitating core of his soul. Nicolas clenched his fists, and a drop of sweat trickled down his breastbone. You must not understand me! The master rarely addressed him directly, and when he did there settled around them a private silence fraught with cloying unspeakable intimacies that neither would think of attempting to speak, and Canon Sturm stepped back and nodded curtly, as if he had satisfied himself once again of the validity of a conclusion previously reached.

  “And here is Andreas, elder scion of the house of Koppernigk! Come, dolt, what can you tell us now of Tullius’s rules for the art of memory, eh?”

  He learned with ease, perhaps too easily: his studies bored him. Only now and then, in the grave cold music of mathematics, in the stately march of a Latin line, in logic’s hard bright lucid, faintly frightening certainties, did he dimly perceive the contours of some glistening ravishing thing assembling itself out of blocks of glassy air in a clear blue unearthly sky, and then there thrummed within him a coppery chord of perfect bliss.

  “Herr Sturm Herr Sturm!” the class cried, “a conundrum, Herr Sturm!”

  “What! Are we here to learn or to play games?”

  “Ach, Herr Sturm!”

  “Very well, very well. Regard:”

  In a room there are 3 men, A & B who are blindfold, & C who is blind. On a table in this room there are 3 black hats & 2 white hats, 5 hats in all. A 4th man enters: call him D. He, D, places a hat on each of the heads of A & B & C, and the 2 remaining hats he hides. Now D removes the blindfold from A, who thus can see the hats that B & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the 2 hats that are hidden. D asks A if he can say what colour is the hat that he, A, is wearing? A ponders, and answers:

  “No.”

  Now D removes the blindfold from B, who thus can see the hats that A & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the two hats that are hidden. D asks A if he can say what colour is the hat that he, B, is wearing? D ponders, hesitates, and answers:

  “No.”

  Now: D cannot remove the blindfold from C, who does not wear a blindfold, and can see no hats at all, not white nor black, not worn nor hidden, for C, as said, is blind. D asks A if he can say what colour is the hat that he, C, is wearing? A ponders, smiles, and answers:

  “Yes!”

  “—Well, gentlemen,” said Canon Sturm, “what is the colour of the blind man’s hat, and how does he know it?”

  The glass blocks sailed in silence through the bright air, and locked.

  Done!

  Harmonia.

  “Well, young Koppernigk? You have solved it?”

  Startled, Nicolas ducked his head and began scribbling feverishly on his slate. He was hot all over, and sweating, aghast to think that his face might have betrayed him, but despite all that he was ridiculously pleased with himself, and had to concentrate very hard on the thought of death in order to keep from grinning.

  “Come, man,” the Canon muttered. “Have you got it?”

  “Not yet, sir, I am working on it sir.”

  “Ah. You are working on it.”

  And Caspar Sturm stepped back, and nodded curtly.

  *

  And then there was Canon Wodka. Nicolas walked with him by the river. It was the Vistula, the same that washed in vain the ineradicable mire of Torun—that is, the name was the same, but the name meant nothing. Here the river was young, as it were, a bright swift stream, while there it was old and weary. Yet it was at once here and there, young and old at once, and its youth and age were separated not by years but leagues. He murmured aloud the river’s name and heard in that word suddenly the concepts of space and time fractured.

  Canon Wodka laughed. “You have a clerkly conscience, Nicolas.” It was true: what the world took for granted he found a source of doubt and fear. He would not have had it otherwise. The Canon’s smile faltered, and he glanced at the boy timidly, tenderly, out of troubled eyes. “Beware these enigmas, my young friend. They exercise the mind, but they cannot teach us how to live.”

  Canon Wodka was an old man of thirty. He was startlingly ugly, a squat fat waddling creature with a globular head and pockmarked face and tiny wet red mouth. His hands were extraordinary things, brown and withered like the claws of a bat. Only his eyes, disconsolate and bright, revealed the sad maimed soul within. To the school he was a figure of rare fun, and Canon Sturm’s boys loved to follow him at a lurch down the corridors, mocking his preposterous gait. Even his name, so perfectly inapt, conspired to make a clown of him, a role to which he seemed to have resigned himself, for it was in irony that he had taken the name Abstemius, and when thus addressed would sometimes cross his eyes and let his great head loll about in a travesty of drunkenness. Nicolas suspected that the Canon, despite his admonition, derived from the intricacies of pure playful thought the only consolation afforded by a life that he had never quite learned how to live.

  He taught the quadrivium of arithmetic and geometry, astronomy and music theory. He was a very bad teacher. His was not the disciplined mind that his subjects required. It was too excitable. In the midst of a trigonometrical exposition he would go scampering off after Zeno’s arrow, which will never traverse the 100 ells that separate the target from the bow because first it must fly 50 ells, and before that 25, and before that 121/2, and so on to infinity, where it comes to a disgruntled kind of halt. But the farther that the arrow did not go the nearer Nicolas drew to this poor fat laughable master. They became friends, cautiously, timidly, with many checks and starts, unwilling to believe in their good fortune, but friends they did become, and even when one day in the airy silence of the organ loft in the cathedral Canon Wodka put one of his little withered claws on Nicolas’s leg, the boy stared steadily off into the gloom under the vaulted ceiling and began to talk very rapidly about nothing, as if nothing at all were happening.

  In their walks by the river the Canon sketched the long confused history of cosmology. At first he was reluctant to implant new ideas in a young mind that he considered too much concerned already with abstractions, but then the wonder of the subject possessed him and he was whirled away into stammering starry heights. He spoke of the oyster universe of the Egyptians in which the Earth floated on a bowl of bitter waters beneath a shell of glair, of the singing spheres of the Greeks, Pythagoras and Herakleides, of the Church Fathers whose Earth was a temple walled with air, and then of the Gnostic heresiarchs and their contention that the world was the work of fallen angels. Last of all he explained Claudius Ptolemy’s theory of the heavens, formulated in Alexandria thirteen centuries before and still held by all men to be valid, by which the Earth stands immobile at the centre of all, encircled eternally in grave majestic dance by the Sun and the lesser planets. There were so many names, so many notions, and Nicolas’s head began to whirl. Canon Wodka glanced at him nervously and put his finger to his own lips to silence himself, and presently began to speak earnestly, like one doing penance, of the glory of God and the unchallengeable dogma of Mother Church, and of the joys of orthodoxy.

  But Nicolas hardly listened to all that. He knew nothing yet of scruples such as those besetting his friend. The firmament sang to him like a siren. Out there was unlike here, utterly. Nothing that he knew on earth could match the pristine purity he imagined in the heavens, and when he looked up into the limitless blue he saw b
eyond the uncertainty and the terror an intoxicating, marvellous grave gaiety.

  Together they made a sundial on the south wall of the cathedral. When they had finished they stood and admired in silence this beautiful simple thing. The shadow crept imperceptibly across the dial as the day waned, and Nicolas shivered to think that they had bent the enormous workings of the universe to the performance of this minute and insignificant task.

  “The world,” he said, “is all an engine, then, after all, no more than that?”

  Canon Wodka smiled. “Plato in the Timaeus says that the universe is a kind of animal, eternal and perfect, whose life is lived entirely within itself, created by God in the form of a globe, which is the most pleasing in its perfection and most like itself of all figures. Aristotle postulated as an explanation of planetary motion a mechanism of fifty-five crystalline spheres, each one touching and driving another and all driven by the primary motion of the sphere of the fixed stars. Pythagoras likened the world to a vast lyre whose strings as it were are the orbits of the planets, which in their intervals sing beyond human hearing a perfect harmonic scale. And all this, this crystalline eternal sing ing being, this you call an engine?”

  “I meant no disrespect. Only I am seeking a means of understanding, and belief.” He hesitated, smiling a little sheepishly at the lofty sound of that. “Herr Wodka—Herr Wodka, what do you believe?”

  The Canon opened wide his empty arms.

  “I believe that the world is here,” he said, “that it exists, and that it is inexplicable. All these great men that we have spoken of, did they believe that what they proposed exists in reality? Did Ptolemy believe in the strange image of wheels within wheels that he postulated as a true picture of planetary motion? Do we believe in it, even though we say that it is true? For you see, when we are dealing with these matters, truth becomes an ambiguous concept. In our own day Nicolas Cusanus has said that the universe is an infinite sphere whose centre is nowhere. Now this is a contradictio in adjecto, since the notions of sphere and infinity cannot sensibly be put together; yet how much more strange is the Cusan’s universe than those of Ptolemy or Aristotle? Well, I leave the question to you.” He smiled again, ruefully. “I think it will give you much heartache.” And later, as they walked across the cathedral close at dusk, the Canon halted, suddenly struck, and touched the boy lightly in excitement with a trembling hand. “Consider this, child, listen: all theories are but names, but the world itself is a thing.”

  In the light of evening, the gathering gloom, it was as if a sibyl had spoken.

  *

  On Saturdays in the fields outside the walls of the town Caspar Sturm instructed the school in the princely art of falconry. The hawks, terrible and lovely, filled the sunny air with the clamour of tiny deaths. Nicolas looked on in a mixture of horror and elation. Such icy rage, such intentness frightened him, yet thrilled him too. The birds shot into the kill like bolts from a bow, driven it seemed by a seeled steely anguish that nothing would assuage. Compared with their vivid presence all else was vague and insubstantial. They were absolutes. Only Canon Sturm could match their bleak ferocity. At rest they stood as still as stone and watched him with a fixed tormented gaze; even in flight their haste and brutal economy seemed bent to one end only, to return with all possible speed to that wrist, those silken jesses, those eyes. And their master, object of such terror and love, grew leaner, harder, darker, became something other than he was. Nicolas watched him watching his creatures and was stirred, obscurely, shamefully.

  “Up sir! Up!” A heron shrieked and fell out of the air. “Up!” Monstrous hawklike creatures were flying on invisible struts and wires across a livid sky, and there was a great tumult far off, screams and roars, and howls of agony or of laughter, that came to him from that immense distance as a faint terrible twittering. Even when he woke and lay terror-stricken in a stew of sweat the dream would not end. It was as if he had tumbled headlong into some beastly black region of the firmament. He pulled at that blindly rearing lever between his legs, pulled at it and pulled, pulling himself back into the world. Dimly he sensed someone near him, a dark figure in the darkness, but he could not care, it was too late to stop, and he shut his eyes tight. The hawks bore down upon him, he could see their great black gleaming wings, their withered claws and metallic talons, their cruel beaks agape and shrieking without sound, and under that awful onslaught his self shrank together into a tiny throbbing point. For an instant everything stopped, and all was poised on the edge of darkness and a kind of exquisite dying, and then he arched his back like a bow and spattered the sheets with his seed.

  He sank down and down, far, far down, and sighed. The beasts were all banished, and his inner sky was empty now and of a clear immaculate blue, and despite the guilt and the grime and the smell like the smell of blood and milk and decayed flowers, he felt afar a faint mysterious chiming that was at once everywhere and nowhere, that was a kind of infinite music.

  He opened his eyes. In moonlight Andreas’s pale thin unforgiving face floated above him, darkly grinning.

  *

  Now he became an insubstantial thing, a web of air rippling in red winds. He felt that he had been flayed of a vital protective skin. His surfaces ached, flesh, nails, hair, the very filaments of his eyes, yearning for what he could not name nor even properly imagine. At Mass he spied down from the choir loft on the women of the town kneeling in the congregation below him. They were hopelessly corporeal creatures. Even the youngest and daintiest of them in no way matched the shimmering singing spirits that flew at him out of the darkness of his frantic nights. Nor was there any comfort to be had from the snivelling smelly little boys that came trailing their blankets through the dormitory, offering themselves in return for the consolation of a shared bed. What he sought was something other than ordinary flesh, was something made of light and air and marvellous grave gaiety.

  Snow fell, and soothed the raw wound he has opened with his own hands. For three days it stormed in eerie silence, and then, on the fourth, dawn found the world transformed. It was in the absence of things that the change lay; the snow itself was hardly a presence, was rather a nothing where before there had been something, a pavement, a headstone, a green field, and the eye, lost in that white emptiness, was led irresistibly to the horizon that seemed immeasurably farther off now than it had ever been before.

  Nicolas carried his numbed and lightened spirit up the winding stairs of the tower where Canon Wodka had his observatory, a little circular cell with a single window that opened out like a trapdoor on the sky. All tended upward here, so that the tower itself seemed on the point of flight. He climbed the seven wooden steps to the viewing platform, and as his head emerged into the stinging air he felt for a moment that he might indeed continue upward effortlessly, up and up, and he grew dizzy. The sky was a dome of palest glass, and the sun sparkled on the snow, and everywhere was a purity and brilliance almost beyond bearing. Through the far clear silence above the snowy fields and the roofs of the town he heard the bark of a fox, a somehow perfect sound that pierced the stillness like a gleaming needle. A flood of foolish happiness filled his heart. All would be well, O, all would be well! The infinite possibilities of the future awaited him. That was what the snow meant, what the fox said. His young soul swooned, and slowly, O, slowly, he seemed to fall upward, into the blue.

  * * *

  In his fourth year at the University of Cracow he was ordered by Uncle Lucas to return at once to Torun: the Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter was dying, and Uncle Lucas, now Bishop of the diocese, was bent on securing the post for his youngest nephew. Nicolas made the long journey northwards alone through a tawny sad September. He was twenty-two. He carried little away with him from the Polish capital. Memories still haunted him of certain spring days in the city when the wind sang in the spires and washes of sunlight swept through the streets, and the heart, strangely troubled by clouds and birds and the voices of children, became lost and confused in surroundings that yest
erday had seemed irreproachably familiar.

  Andreas and he had lodged with Katharina and her husband, Gertner the merchant. Nicolas disliked that smug stolid household. Womanhood and early marriage had not changed his sister much. She was still, behind the mask of the young matron, a feline calculating child, cruel and greedy, tormented by an implacable discontent. Nicolas suspected her of adultery. She and Andreas fought as fiercely as ever they had done as children, but there was palpable between them now a new accord, forged by the sharing of secrets concealed from husband and brother alike. They united too in baiting Nicolas. His anxieties amused them, his shabbiness, his studiousness, his risible sobriety—amused them, yes, but disturbed them too, obscurely. He suffered their jibes in silence, smiling meekly, and saw, not without a certain satisfaction of which he tried but failed to feel ashamed, that indifference was the weapon that wounded them most sorely.

  *

  True, he had learned a great deal in Poland. After four years his head was packed with great granite blocks of knowledge; but knowledge was not perception. His mind, already venturing apprehensively along certain perilous and hitherto untrodden paths, required a lightness and delicacy of atmosphere, a sense of air and space, that was not to be had at Cracow. It was significant, he realised later, that the college on first sight had reminded him of nothing so much as a fortress, for it was, despite its pretensions, the main link in the defences thrown up by scholasticism against the tide of new ideas sweeping in from Italy, from England, and from Rotterdam. In his first year there he witnessed pitched bloody battles in the streets between Hungarian scholastics and German humanists. Although these student brawls seemed to him senseless and even comical, he could not help but see, in the meeting under the lowering mass of Wawel Rock of flaxen-haired northerners and the Magyars with their sullen brows and muddy complexions, something made tangible of that war of minds being waged across the continent.