Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  *

  The sickness had come upon him stealthily. At first it had been no more than a faint dizziness at times, a step missed, a stumbling on the stairs. Then the megrims began, like claps of thunder trapped inside his skull, and for hours he was forced to lie prostrate in his shuttered cell with vinegar poultices pressed to his brow, as cascades of splintered multicoloured glass formed jagged images of agony behind his eyes. Still he persisted in denying what the physician in him knew beyond doubt to be the case, that the end had come. An attack of ague, nothing more, he told himself; I am seventy, it is to be expected. Then that morning, in the first week of April, as he had made to rise from his couch at dawn, his entire right side had pained him suddenly, terribly, as if a bag of shot, or pellets of hot quicksilver, had been emptied from his skull into his heart and pumped out from thence to clatter down the arteries of his arm, through the ribcage, into his leg. Moaning, he laid himself down again tenderly on the couch, with great solicitude, as a mother laying her child into its cradle. A spider in the dim dawnlight swarmed laboriously across the trampoline of its web strung between the ceiling beams. From without came the burgeoning clatter and crack of a horse and rider approaching. Poised on the rack of his pain he waited, calmly, almost in eagerness, for the advent of the black catastrophe. But the horseman did not stop, passed under the window, and then he understood, without surprise, but in something like disappointment, that he was not to be let go before suffering a final jest, and, instead of death, sleep, the ultimate banality, bundled him unceremoniously under its wing and bore him swiftly away.

  *

  It was sleep, yes, and yet more than that, an impassioned hearkening, a pausing upon a deserted shore at twilight, a last looking backward at the soon to be forsaken land, yes, yes: he was waiting yet. For what? He did not know. Mute and expectant, he peered anxiously into the sombre distance. They were all there, unseen yet palpable, all his discarded dead. A pang of longing pierced his heart. But why were they behind him? why not before? was he not on his way now at last to join that silent throng? And why did he tarry here, on this desolate brink? A brumous yellowy sky full of wreckage sank slowly afar, and the darkness welled up around him. Then he spied the figure approaching, the massive shoulders and great dark burnished face like polished stone, the wide-set eyes, the cruel mad mouth.

  Who are you? he cried, striving in vain to lift his hands and fend off the apparition.

  I am he whom you seek.

  Tell me who you are!

  As my own father I am already dead, as my own mother I still live, and grow old. I come to take you on a journey. You have much to learn, and so little time.

  What? what would you teach me?

  How to die.

  Ah… Then you are Brother Death?

  No. He is not yet. I am the one that goes before. I am, you may say, the god of revels and oblivion. I make men mad. You are in my realm now, for a little while. Come with me. Here begins the descent into Hell. Come.

  And so speaking the god turned and started back toward the dark land.

  Come!

  And the dying man looked before him again, to the invisible ineluctable sea, wanting to go on, unable to go on, turning already, even against his will, turning back toward the waiting throng.

  Come . . .

  And as a soldier turns unwillingly away from a heart-rending vision of home and love only to meet full in the face the fatal shot, he turned and at once the great sphere of searing fire burst in his brain, and he awoke.

  The pain was in his right side, although he seemed to know that rather than feel it, for that side was paralysed from ear to heel. Tentatively, with eyes averted, not wishing really to know, he sent out a few simple commands to arm and flank and hip, but to no avail, for the channels of communication were broken. It was as if half of him had come detached, and lay beside him now, a felled grey brute, sullen, unmoving and dangerous. Dangerous, yes: he must be wary of provoking this beast, or it would surely lift one mighty padded paw of pain and smash him. Bright April light shone in the window. He could see the Baltic, steel-blue and calm, bearing landward a ship with a black sail. Was it too much to expect that this burdensome clarity, this awareness, might have been taken from him, was it too much to expect at least that much respite? Below, Anna Schillings was stirring, setting in motion the creaky mechanism of another day. Despite the pain, he felt now most acutely a sense of anxiety and scruple, and, weirdly, a devastating embarrassment. He had not known just such a smarting dismay since childhood, when, marked out by some act or other of mischief, a dish broken, a lie told, he had stood cowering, all boltholes barred against him, in the path of the awful unavoidable engine of retribution. To be found out! It was absurd. Anna would come in a moment, with the gruel and the mulled wine, and he would be found out. Cautiously he tested his face to find if it would smile, and then, despite himself, he began quietly to blubber; it was a tiny luxury, and it made him feel better, after all.

  By the time she came sighing up the stairs he had stanched his tears, but of course she sensed disaster at once. It was the stink of his shame, the stink of the child who has wet his breeches, of the maimed animal throbbing in a lair of leaves, that betrayed him. Slowly, with her face turned resolutely away, she set down on the floor beside his couch the steaming pewter mug of wine and the bowl of gruel.

  “You are not risen yet, Canon?”

  “It’s nothing, Anna, you must not trouble yourself. I am ill.” He found it difficult to speak, the blurred words were a kind of soft stone in his mouth. “Inform the Chapter, please, and ask Canon Giese to come.” No no, no, Giese was no longer here, but in Löbau; he must take care, she would think him in a worse way than he was if he continued raving thus. She stood motionless, with her head bowed and hands folded before her, still turned somewhat away, unwilling or unable to look full upon the calamity that had alighted in her life. She had the injured baffled look of one who has been grievously and unaccountably slighted, but above all she appeared puzzled, and entirely at a loss to know how to behave. He could sympathise, he knew the feeling: there is no place for death in the intricate workings of ordinary days. He wished he could think of something to say that would make this new disordered state of affairs seem reasonable.

  “I am dying, Anna.”

  He at once regretted saying it, of course. She began quietly to weep, with a reserve, a sort of circumspection, that touched him far more deeply than the expected wild waitings could have done. She went away, sniffling, and returned presently with water to wash him, and a pot for his relief. Deftly she ministered to him, speaking not a word. He admired her competence, her resilience; an admirable woman, really. Something of the old, almost forgotten fondness stirre in him. “Arna? . .” Still she said nothing. She had learned from him, perhaps, to distrust words, and was content to allow these tangible ministrations to express all that could not be said. Sadly and in some wonder he gazed at her. What did she signify, what did she mean? For the first time it struck him as odd that they had never in all the years learned to call each other thou.

  Day by day the sickness waxed and waned, pummelling him, flinging him down into vast darknesses only to haul him up again into agonising light, shaking him until he seemed to hear his bones rattling, binding up his bowels tonight and on the morrow throwing open the floodgates of his orifices, leaving him to lie for hours, nauseated and helpless, in the stench of his own messes. Bright shimmering patterns of pain rippled through him, as if the sickness, like a gloating clothier, were unfurling for a finicking taste a series of progressively more subtle and exquisite rolls of silken torture. Always, unthinkingly, he had assumed that his would be a dry death, a swift clean shrivelling up, but here were fevers that lasted for days, wringing a ceaseless ooze of sweat from his burning flesh, robbing him of that precious clarity of mind that at first had seemed such a burden.

  Sometimes, however, he was sufficiently clear in his thinking to be surprised and even fascinated by his own equanimity in
the face of death. That moment was now at hand the terror of which had been with him always on his journey hither, present in every landscape, no matter how bright and various the scenes, like an unmoving shadow, and yet now he was not afraid: he felt only vague melancholy and regret, and a certain anxiety lest he should miss this last and surely most distinguished experience the world would afford him. He was convinced that he would be granted an insight, a vision, of profound significance, before the end. Was this why he was calm and unafraid, because this mysterious something toward which he was eagerly advancing hid from his gaze death’s true countenance? And was this the explanation for the prolonging of his agony, because it was not the death agony at all, but a manner of purification, a ritual suffering to be endured before his initiation into transcendent knowledge? Although he was gone too far now to expect that he might put to living use what ever lesson he was to learn, the profundity of the experience, he believed, would not be thus diminished. Was redemption still possible, then, even in this extremity?

  Searching for an answer to this extraordinary question, his fevered understanding scavenged like a ragpicker among the detritus of his life, rummaging fitfully through the disconnected bits and scraps that were left. He could find no sense of significant meaning anywhere. Sometimes, however, he sank into a calm deep dreaming wherein he wandered at peace through the fields and palaces of memory. The past was still wonderfully intact there. Amid scenes of childhood and youth he marvelled at the wealth of detail that had stayed with him through all the years, stored away like winter fruit. He visited the old house in St Anne’s Lane, and walked again in quiet rapture through the streets and alleyways of the town. Here was St John’s, the school gate, the boys playing in the dust. A soft golden radiance held sway everywhere, a stylised sunlight. Tenderness and longing pierced him to the core. Had he ever in reality left Torun? Perhaps that was where his real, his essential self had remained, waiting patiently for him to return, as now, and claim his true estate. And here is the linden tree, in full leaf, steadfast and lovely, the very image of summer and silence, of happiness.

  But always he returned from these backward journeys weary and dispirited, with no answers. Despair blossomed in him then, a rank hideous flower. Numbed by an overdose of grog, by an unexpectedly successful blending of herbs, or by simple weariness, he withdrew altogether from the realm of life, and lay, a shapeless piece of flesh and sweat and phlegm, in the most primitive, rudimentary state of being, a dull barely-breathing almost-death. Those periods were the worst of all.

  At other times the past came to his present, in the form of little creatures, gaudy homunculi who marched into the sickroom and strutted up and down beside his couch, berating him for the injuries he had done them, or perched at his shoulder and chattered, explaining, justifying, denouncing. They were at once comic and sad. Canon Wodka came, and Professor Brudzewski, Novara and the Italians, even Uncle Lucas, pompous as ever, even the King of Poland, tipsy, with his crown awry. At first he knew them to be hallucinations, but then he realised that the matter was deeper than that: they were real enough, as real as anything can be that is not oneself, that is of the outside, for had he not always believed that others are not known but invented, that the world consists solely of oneself while all else is phantom, necessarily? Therefore they had a right to berate him, for who, if not he, was to blame for what they were, poor frail vainglorious creatures, tenants of his mind, whom he had invented, whom he was taking with him into death? They were having their last say, before the end. Girolamo alone of them was silent. He stood back in the shadows some way from the couch, with that inimitable mixture of detachment and fondness, one eyebrow raised in amiable mockery, smiling. Ah yes, Girolamo, you knew me— not so well as did that other, it’s true, but you did know me—and I could not bear to be known thus.

  *

  Where?

  He had drifted down into a dreadful dark where all was silent and utterly still. He was frightened. He waited. After a long time, what seemed a long time, he saw at an immense distance a minute something in the darkness, it could not be called light, it was barely more than nothing, the absolute minimum imaginable, and he heard afar, faintly, O, faintly, a tiny shrieking, a grain of sound that was hardly anything in itself, that served only to define the infinite silence surrounding it. And then, it was strange, it was as if time had split somehow in two, as if the now and the not yet were both occurring at once, for he was conscious of watching something approaching through the dark distance while yet it had arrived, a huge steely shining bird it was, soaring on motionless outstretched great wings, terrible, O, terrible beyond words, and yet magnificent, carrying in its fearsome beak a fragment of blinding fire, and he tried to cry out, to utter the word, but in vain, for down the long arc of its flight the creature wheeled, already upon him even as it came, and branded the burning seal upon his brow.

  Word!

  O word!

  Thou word that I lack!

  And then he was once again upon that darkling shore, with the sea at his back and before him the at once mysterious and familiar land. There too was the cruel god, leading him away from the sea to where the others awaited him, the many others, the all. He could see nothing, yet he knew these things, knew also that the land into which he was descending now was at once all the lands he had known in his life, all! all the towns and the cities, the plains and woods, Prussia and Poland and Italy, Torun, Cracow, Padua and Bologna and Ferrara. And the god also, turning upon him full his great glazed stone face, was many in one, was Caspar Sturm, was Novara and Brudzewski, was Girolamo, was more, was his father and his mother, and their mothers and fathers, was the uncountable millions, and was also that other, that ineluctable other. The god spoke:

  Here now is that which you sought, that thing which is itself and no other. Do you acknowledge it?

  No, no, it was not so! There was only darkness and disorder here, and a great clamour of countless voices crying out in laughter and pain and execration; he would know nothing of this vileness and chaos.

  Let me die!

  But the god answered him:

  Not yet.

  Swiftly then he felt himself borne upwards, aching upwards into the world, and here was his cell, and dawnlight on the great arc of the Baltic, and it was Maytime. He was in pain, and his limbs were dead, but for the first time in many weeks his mind was wonderfully clear. This clarity, however, was uncanny, unlike anything experienced before; he did not trust it. All round about him a vast chill stillness reigned, as if he were poised at an immense height, in an infinity of air. Could it be he had been elevated thus only in order that he might witness desolations? For he wanted no more of that, the struggle and the anguish. Was this true despair at last? If so, it was a singularly undistinguished thing.

  He slept for a little while, but was woken again by Anna when she came up with the basin and the razor to shave him. Could she not leave him in peace, even for a moment! But then he chided himself for his ingratitude. She had shown him great kindness during the long weeks of his illness. The shaving, the feeding, the wiping and the washing, these were her necessary rituals that held at bay the knowledge that soon now she would be left alone. He watched her as she bustled about the couch, setting up the basin, honing the razor, painting the lather upon his sunken jaws, all the while murmuring softly to herself, a tall, too-heavy, whey-faced woman in dusty black. Lately she had begun to yell at him, this unmoving grey effigy, as she would at a deaf mute, or an infant, not in anger or even impatience, but with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, as if she believed she were summoning him back by this means from the dark brink. Her manner irritated him beyond endurance, especially in the mornings, and he mouthed angry noises, and sometimes even tried to smack at her in impotent rage. Today, however, he was calm, and even managed a lop-sided smile, although she did not seem to recognise it as such, for she only peered at him apprehensively and asked if he were in pain. Poor Anna. He stared at her in wonderment. How she had aged! From the ri
pe well-made woman who had arrived at his tower twenty years before, she had without his noticing become a tremulous, agitated, faintly silly matron. Had he really had such scant regard for her that he had not even attended the commonplace phenomenon of her aging? She had been his housekeeper, and, on three occasions, more than that, three strange, now wholly unreal encounters into which he had been led by desperation and unbearable self-knowledge and surrender; she had thrice, then, been more, but not much more, certainly not enough to justify Dantiscus’s crass relentless hounding. Now, however, he wondered if perhaps those three nights were due a greater significance than he had been willing to grant. Perhaps, for her, they had been enough to keep her with him. For she could have left him. Her children were grown now. Heinrich, her son, had lately come out of the time of his apprenticeship in the cathedral bakery, and Carla was in service in the household of a burgher of the town. They would have supported her, if she had left him. She had chosen to remain. She had endured. Was this what she signified, what she meant? He recalled green days of hers, storms in spring and autumn moods, grievings in wintertime. He should have shown her more regard, then. Now it was too late.