Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “My sister is Abbess of the Cistercian Convent at Kulm,” the Canon said quickly. “I can arrange for your daughter to go there. She need not take the vow, of course, unless you wish it. But the nuns will care for her, and perhaps—” Stop! Do not! “—Perhaps in time, when she is cured… when she… perhaps this young man … Ach!” He could bear this no longer. They knew, they all knew: the child’s groin was crawling with crabs, she was poxed, she would never marry, would probably not live to be twenty, they knew that! Why then this charade? He advanced on them, and they retreated before him as if buffeted by the wind of his dismay and rage. The girl did not even glance at him. He wanted to shake her, or clasp her in his arms, to throttle her, save her, he did not know what he wanted, and he did nothing. When the door was opened a solid block of sunlight fell upon them, and all hesitated a moment, dazzled, and then mother and daughter turned away into the street. The merchant suddenly stamped his foot.

  “It is witchcraft,” he gasped, “I know it!”

  “No,” the Canon said. “There is no witchery here. Go now and comfort your wife and child. I shall write today to Kulm.”

  But the merchant was not listening. He nodded distractedly, mechanically, like a large forlorn doll.

  “The blame must fall somewhere,” he muttered, and for the first time looked directly at the Canon. “It must fall somewhere!”

  Yes, yes: somewhere.

  *

  The ripples increased in intensity, became waves. Rumours reached him that he was being talked of at Rome as the originator of a new cosmology. Julius II himself, it was said, had expressed an interest. The blame must fall somewhere: he heard again that voice on the stairs shrieking of revenge. An unassuageable constriction of fear and panic afflicted him. Yet there was nowhere further that he could flee to. Lateral drift was all that remained.

  Suddenly one day God abandoned him. Or perhaps it had happened long before, and he was only realising it now. The crisis came unbidden, for he had never questioned his faith, and he felt like the bystander, stopped idly to watch a brawl, who is suddenly struck down by a terrible stray blow. And yet it could not really be called a crisis. There was no great tumult of the soul, no pain. The thing was distinguished by a lack of feeling, a numbness. And it was strange: his faith in the Church did not waver, only his faith in God. The Mass, transubstantiation, the forgiveness of sin, the virgin birth, the vivid truth of all that he did not for a moment doubt, but behind it, behind the ritual, there was for him now only a silent white void that was everywhere and everything and eternal.

  He confessed to the Precentor, Canon von Lossainen, but more out of curiosity than remorse. The Precentor, an ailing unhappy old man, sighed and said:

  “Perhaps, Nicolas, the outward forms are all that any of us can believe in. Are you not being too hard on yourself?”

  “No, no; I do not think it is possible to be too hard on oneself.”

  “You may be right. Should I give you absolution? I hardly know.”

  “Despair is a great sin.”

  “Despair? Ah.”

  *

  He ceased to believe also in his book. For a while, in Cracow, in Italy, he had succeeded in convincing himself that (what was it?) the physical world was amenable to physical investigation, that the principal thing could be deduced, that the thing itself could be said. That faith too had collapsed. The book by now had gone through two complete revisions, rewritings really, but instead of coming nearer to essentials it was, he knew, flying off in a wild eccentric orbit into emptiness; instead of approaching the word, the crucial Word, it was careering headlong into a loquacious silence. He had believed it possible to say the truth; now he saw that all that could be said was the saying. His book was not about the world, but about itself. More than once he snatched up this hideous ingrown thing and rushed with it to the fire, but he had not the strength to perform that ultimate act.

  Then at last there came, mysteriously, a ghastly release.

  It was a sulphurous windy evening in March when Katharina’s steward arrived to summon him to Torun, where his uncle the Bishop was lying ill. He rode all night through storm and rain into a sombre yellowish dawn that was more like twilight. At Marienburg a watery sun broke briefly through the gloom. The Vistula was sullen. By nightfall he had reached Torun, exhausted, and almost delirious from want of sleep. Katharina was solicitious, and that told him, if nothing else would, that the situation was serious.

  Bishop Lucas had been to Cracow for the wedding of King Sigis-mund. On the journey home he had fallen violently ill, and being then closer to Torun than Heilsberg had elected to be taken to the house of his niece. He lay now writhing in a grey sweat in the room, in the very bed where Canon Nicolas had been born and probably conceived. And indeed the Bishop, mewling in pain and mortal fright, seemed himself a great gross infant labouring toward an agonised delivery. He was torn by terrible fluxions, that felt, he said, as if he were shitting his guts: he was. The room was lit by a single candle, but a greater ghastly light seemed shed by his rage and pain. The Canon hung back in the shadows for a long time, watching the little changing tableau being enacted about the bed. Priests and nurses came and went silently. A physician with a grey beard shook his head. Katharina put a cross into her uncle’s hands, but he fumbled and let it fall. Gertner picked his nails.

  “Nicolas!”

  “Yes, uncle, I am here.”

  The stricken eyes sought his vainly, a shaking hand took him fiercely by the wrist. “They have poisoned me, Nicolas. Their spies were at the palace, everywhere. O Jesus curse them! O!”

  “He is raving now,” Katharina said. “We can do nothing.”

  The Canon paced about the dark house. It was changed beyond all recognition. It looked the same as it had always done, yet everything that he rapped upon with his questioning presence gave back only a dull sullen silence, as if the living soft centre of things had gone dead, had petrified. The deathwatch had conferred a lawless dispensation, and weird scenes of licence met him everywhere. In the little room that as a child he had shared with Andreas a pair of hounds, a bitch and her mate, reared up from the bed and snarled at him, baring their phosphorescent fangs in the darkness. Under a disordered table in the dining-hall he found his servant Max, and Toad, the Bishop’s jester, drunk and asleep, wrapped in a grotesque embrace, each with a hand thrust into the other’s lap. A stench like the stench of stagnant waters hung on the stairs. There was laughter in the servants’ quarters and the sounds of stealthy merrymaking. His own fingers when he lifted them to his face smelled of rot. He sat down by a dead fire in the solar and fell into a kind of trance between sleep and waking peopled by blurred phantoms.

  In the dead hour before dawn he was summoned to the sickroom. There was in the globe of light about the bed that sense of suspended animation, of a finger lifted to lips, preparatory to the entrance of the black prince. Only the dying man himself seemed unaware that the moment was at hand. He hardly stirred at all now, and yet he appeared to be frantically busy. Life had shrunk to a swiftly spinning point within him, the last flywheel turning still as the engine approached its final collapse. The Canon was prey to an unshakeable feeling of incon-gruousness, of being inappropriately dressed, of being, somehow, all wrong. Suddenly the Bishop’s eyes flew open and stared upward with an expression of astonishment, and in a strong clear voice he cried: “No!” and all in the sickroom went utterly still and silent, as if fearing, like children in a hiding game, that to make a sound would mean being called forth to face some dreadful forfeit. “No! Keep him hence!” But the dark visitor would not be denied, and, battered and shapeless, an already indistinct pummelled soiled sack of pain and bafflement, Bishop Lucas Waczelrodt blundered into the darkness under the outstretched black wing of that enfolding cloak. The priest anointed his forehead with holy chrism. Katharina sobbed. Gertner looked up, frowning. The Canon turned away.

  “Send at once to Heilsberg, tell them their Bishop is dead.”

  The bell
s spoke.

  *

  Revolted by the pall of fake mourning put on by the house, Canon Nicolas slipped out by the servants’ passageway into the garden. The morning, sparkling with sun and frost, seemed made of finely wrought glass. The garden had been let go to ruin, and it was with difficulty that memory cleared away the weeds and rubbish and restored it to what it had been once. Here were the fruit bushes, the little paved path, the sundial—yes, yes, he remembered. As a child he had played here happily, soothed and reassured by the familiarity of the ramshackle: weathered posts, smouldering bonfires, unaccountably amiable backs of houses, the gaiety of cabbages. And when he was older, how many mornings such as this had he stood here in chill brittle sunlight, rapt and trembling at the thought of the infinite possibilities of the future, dreaming of mysterious pale young women in green gowns walking through dewy grass under great trees. He passed through a gap in the tumbledown paling into the narrow lane that ran behind the gardens. Brambles sprouted here at the base of a high white wall. A faint, sweetish, not altogether unpleasant tang of nightsoil laced the air. An old woman in a black cloak with a basket of eggs on her arm passed him by, bidding him Gruss Gott out of a toothless mouth. An extraordinary stealthy stillness reigned, as if an event of great significance were waiting for him to be gone so that it could occur in perfect solitude. The night, the candles and the murmuring, the wracked creature dying on the bed, all that was immensely far away now, unreal. Yet it had been as much a part of the world as this sunlight and stillness, those pencil-lines of blue smoke rising unruffled into the paler blue: was all this also unreal, then? He turned, and stood for a long time gazing toward the linden tree. It was to be cut down, so Gertner had said. It was old, and in danger of falling. The Canon nodded once, smiling a little, and walked back slowly through the resurrected garden to the house.

  * * *

  He could not in honesty mourn his uncle’s death. There was guilt, of course, regret at the thought of opportunities lost (perhaps I wronged him?), but these were not true feelings, only empty rituals, purification rites, as it were, performed in order that the ghost might be laid; for death, he now realised, produces a sudden nothingness in the world, a hole in the fabric of the world, with which the survivors must learn to live, and whether the lost one be loved or hated makes no difference, that learning still is difficult. He was haunted for a long time by a kind of ferocious implacable absence stamped unmistakably with the Bishop’s seal.

  Then, inevitably, came the feeling of relief. Cautiously he tested the bars of his cage and found them not so rigid as they had been before. He even began to look a little more kindly on his work, telling himself that after all what he considered a poor flawed thing the world would surely think a wonder. He completed the Commentariolus, and, at once appalled and excited by his own daring, had copies made of it by a scribe in the town which he quietly distributed among the few scholars he considered sympathetic and discreet. Then, with teeth gritted, he awaited the explosion that would surely be set off by the seven axioms which together formed the basis of the theory of a sun-centred universe. He feared ridicule, refutations, abuse; most of all he feared involvement. He would be dragged out, kicking and howling, into the market place, he would be stood on a platform like a fairground exhibit and invited to expound proofs. It was ridiculous, horrible, not to be borne! Again he began to wonder if he would be well advised to destroy his work and thus have done with the whole business. But his book was all he had left—how could he burn it? Yet if they should come, sneering and snarling and bellowing for proof, smash down his door and snatch the manuscript from his hands, dear God, what then?

  It was not the academics that he feared most (he felt he knew how to handle them), but the people, the poor ordinary deluded people ever on the lookout for the sign, the message, the word that would herald the imminent coming of the millennium and all that it entailed: liberty, happiness, redemption. They would seize upon his work, or a mangled version of it more like, with awful fervour, beside themselves in their eagerness to believe that what he was offering them was an explanation of the world and their lives in it. And when sooner or later it dawned upon them that they had been betrayed yet again, that here was no simple comprehensive picture of reality, no new instauration, then they would turn on him. But even that was not the point. O true, he had no wish to be reviled, but far more important than that was his wish not to mislead the people. They must be made to understand that by banishing Earth and man along with it from the centre of the universe, he was passing no judgments, expounding no philosophy, but merely stating what is the case. The game of which he was master could exercise the mind, but it would not teach them how to live.

  He need not have worried. There was no explosion, no one came. There was not even a tapping at his door. The world overlooked him. It was just as well. He was relieved. He had given them the Commentariolus, the preface as it were, and they had taken no notice. Now he could finish writing his book in peace, unmolested by idiots. For surely they were all idiots, if they could ignore the challenge he had thrown down at their feet, idiots and cowards, that they would not see the breathtaking splendour and daring of his concepts—he would show them, yes, yes! And sullenly, consumed by disappointment and frustration, he sat down to his desk, to show them. The great spheres wheeled in a crystal firmament in his head, and when (rarely, rarely!) he looked into the night sky, he was troubled by a vague sense of recognition that puzzled him until he remembered that it was that sky, those cold white specks of light, that had given form to his mind’s world. Then the familiar feeling of dislocation assailed him as he strove in vain to discern a connection between the actual and the imagined. Inevitably, inexplicably, Andreas’s ravaged face swam into view, slyly smiling—Constellation of Syphilis!—blotting out all else.

  *

  “One that would speak with you, Canon.”

  Canon Koppernigk looked up frowning and shook his head vehemently in silent refusal. He did not wish to be disturbed. Max only shrugged, and with a brief sardonic bow withdrew. Even before his visitor appeared the Canon knew from that inimitable respectful light step on the stairs who it was. He sighed, and put away carefully into a drawer the page of manuscript on which he had been working.

  “My dear Doctor, forgive me, I hope I do not disturb you?” Canon Tiedemann Giese was a good-humoured, somewhat stout, curiously babyish fresh-faced man of thirty. He had a large flaxen head, an incongruously stern hooked nose, squarish useless hands, and wide innocent eyes that managed to bestow a unique tender concern on even the least thing that they encountered. Although he came of an aristocratic line, he disapproved of the opulent lives led by his colleagues in the Chapter, a disapproval that he expressed—or paraded, as some said—by dressing always in the common style in smocks and breeches and stout sensible riding boots. His academic achievements were impressive, yet he was careful to wear his learning lightly. By some means he had got hold of a copy of the Commentariolus, and although he had never mentioned that work directly, he let it be known, by certain sly remarks and meaningful looks that made Canon Koppernigk flinch, that he had been won over entirely to the heliocentric doctrine. Canon Giese was one of the world’s innate enthusiasts.

  “Please sit,” Canon Koppernigk said, with a wintry smile. “There is something I can do for you?”

  Giese laughed nervously. He was the younger of the two by some seven years only, yet his manner in Canon Koppemigk’s presence was that of a timid but eager bright schoolboy. With desperate nonchalance he said:

  “Just passing, you know, and I thought I might call in to …”

  “Yes.”

  Giese’s discomfited eye slid off and wandered about the cell. It was low and white, white everywhere: even the beams of the ceiling were white. On the wall behind the desk at which the Doctor sat was fixed an hourglass in a frame, his wide-brimmed hat hanging on a hook, and a wooden stand holding a few medical implements. Set in a deep embrasure, a small window with panes of bottled g
lass gave on to the Frisches Haff and the great arc of the Baltic beyond. The rickety door leading on to the wall was open, and out there could be seen the upright sundial and the triquetrum, a rudimentary crossbow affair over five ells tall for measuring celestial angles, a curiously distraught-looking thing standing with its frozen arms flung skywards. Was it with the aid of these poor pieces only, Giese wondered, that the Doctor had formulated his wonderful theory? A gull alighted on the windowsill, and for a moment he gazed thoughtfully at the bird’s pale eye magnified in the bottled glass. (Magnified?—but no, no, a foolish notion …)

  “I too have some interest in astronomy, you know, Doctor,” he said. “Of course, I am merely a dabbler, you understand. But I think I know enough to recognise greatness when I encounter it, as I have done, lately.” And he leered. Canon Koppernigk’s stony expression did not alter. He was really a peculiar cold closed person, difficult to touch. Giese sighed. “Well, in fact, Doctor, there is a matter on which I wished to speak to you. The subject is, how shall I say, a delicate one, painful even. Perhaps you know what I am referring to? No?” He began to fidget. He was seated on a low hard chair before the Doctor’s desk. It was on occasions such as this that he heartily regretted having accepted the position of Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter, which had fallen to him on Canon von Lossainen’s accession to the bishopric following the death of Lucas Waczelrodt: he was not cut out for this kind of thing, really. “It is your brother, you see,” he said carefully. “Canon Andreas.”

  “O?”

  “I know that it must be a painful subject for you, Doctor, and indeed that is why I have come to you personally, not only as Precentor, but as, I hope, a friend.” He paused. Canon Koppernigk raised one eyebrow enquiringly, but said nothing. “The Bishop, you see, and indeed the Chapter, all feel that, well, that your brother’s presence, in his lamentable condition, is not … that is to say—”