Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “Domine praeceptor!”

  Startled, he backed away from me, mumbling under his breath and trying not to see me, but I hobbled after him, still on one knee, until a corner of the table nudged him in the rear and he jumped in fright and halted. The instruments on the table, quivering from the collision, set up a tiny racket of chiming and chattering that seemed in the sudden silence to express exactly the old man’s panic and confusion. You see?

  You see? How can I be expected to be grave?

  “Who are you?” he demanded petulantly, and did not bother to listen when I told him my name a second time. “You are not from the Bishop, are you?” He watched me carefully.

  “No, Meister, I know no Bishop, nor king nor prince; I am ruled only by the greatest of lords, which is science.”

  “Yes yes, well, get up, will you, get up.”

  I rose, and rising suddenly remembered the words of my speech, which I delivered, in one breath, at high speed. Very flowery. Sat verbum.

  Throughout that meeting we moved in circles about the room in a slow stealthy chase, he leading, keeping well out of my reach for fear I might attempt a sudden assault, and I following hard upon his heels uttering shrill cries of adoration and entreaty, throwing my arms about and tripping over the furniture in my excitement. We communicated (communicated!) in a kind of macaronic jabber, for whereas I found German most natural, the Canon was wont to lapse into Latin, and no sooner did I join him than we found ourselves stumbling into the vernacular again. O, it was great fun, truly. He was singularly unimpressed by my academic pedigree; his face took on a look of frank horror when it dawned upon him that I was a Lutheran—holy God, one of them! What would the Bishop say? But hold hard, Rheticus, hold hard now, you must be fair to him. Yes, I must be fair to him. I cannot in fairness blame a timorous cleric, who desired above all not to be noticed, for his dread at the arrival in his tower fortress of a firebrand from Protestant Wittenberg. Three months previous to my coming, the Bishop, Dantiscus the sleek, had issued an edict ordering all Lutherans out of Ermland on pain of dispossession or even death, and shortly thereafter he was to issue another, calling for all heretical—meaning Lutheran, natürlich—books and pamphlets to be burned in public. A nice gentleman, Dantiscus the bookburner: I shall have some more to say of him presently.

  (In fairness to myself, I must add that Wittenberg considered Copernicus at best a madman, at worst the Antichrist. Luther himself, in one of those famous after-dinner harangues, amid the belches and the farts, had sneered at the notion of a heliocentric universe, thus displaying once again his unfailing discernment; so also had Melanchton mocked the theory—even Melanchton, my first patron! Therefore you see that the Meister was less than popular where I came from, and I was granted leave of absence to visit him only because of who and what I was, and not because the Wittenberg authorities approved of the Ermlander’s theories. I wanted to make that point clear, for the sake of accuracy.)

  So, as I have said, he was not impressed et cetera—indeed, so unimpressed was he, that he seemed not even fully aware of my presence, for he kept on as it were sliding away from me, as though avoiding a distasteful memory, picking at his robe with agitated fingers and grimacing to himself. He was not thinking of me, but of the consequences of me, so to speak (What will the Bishop say!). I was profoundly disappointed, or rather, I was aware that something profoundly disappointing was occurring, for I myself, the essential I, was hardly there. That is not very clear. No matter. Doctor Copernicus, who before had represented for me the very spirit incarnate of the New Age, was now revealed as a cautious cold old brute obsessed with appearances and the security of his prebend. Is it possible to be disconcerted to the point of tears?

  And yet there was something that told me all was not lost, that my pilgrimage might not have been in vain: it was a faint uncertainty in his look, a tiny tension, as if there were, deep within him, a lever longing to be pressed. I had brought gifts with me, fine printed editions of Ptolemy and Euclid, Regiomontanus and others, O, there must have been a dozen volumes in all, which I had had rebound (at a cost I do not care even now to recall), with his initials and a pretty monogram stamped in gold on the spines. These books I had cunningly dispersed throughout my luggage for fear of brigands, so that now when I remembered them and fell upon my bags in a final frantic burst of hope, they fell, diamonds amid ashes, out of a storm of shirts and shoes and soiled linen, and There! I cried, and There! near to tears, challenging him to find it in his cold heart to reject this ultimate token ofhomage.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “What are these?”

  I gathered the books in my arms and struggled to my feet. “For you—for you, domine praeceptor!”

  Hesitantly he lifted the Almagest from atop the pile, and, with many a suspicious backward glance in my direction, took it to the window; I thought of an old grey rat scuttling off with a crust. He held the book close to his nose and examined it intently, sniffing and crooning, and the harsh lines of his face softened, and he smiled despite himself, biting his lip, old pleased grey rat, and click! I could almost hear that lever dip.

  “A handsome volume,” he murmured, “handsome indeed. And costly too, I should think. What did you say your name was, Herr . . ?”

  And then, I think, I did weep. I recall tears, and more groans of adoration, and I on my knees again and he shooing me off, though with less distaste than before, I fancied. Behind him the clouds broke for a moment over the Baltic, and the sun of evening suddenly shone, a minor miracle, and I remembered that it was summer after all, that I was young, and the world was before me. I left him soon after that, with an invitation to return on the morrow, and staggered in blissful delirium into the streets, where even the leaden twilight and the filth in the sewers, the mud, the red gaping faces of the peasants, could not dampen my spirits. I found lodgings at an inn below the cathedral wall, and there partook of a nauseating dinner, that I remember in detail to this day, and, to follow, had a fat and extremely dirty, curiously androgynous whore.

  * * *

  I was up and about early next morning. Low sun on the Frisches Haff, the earth steaming faintly, wind freshening, the narrow streets awash with light and loud with the shrill cries of hawkers—aye, and my poor head splitting from the effects of that filthy poison which they dare to call wine. At the tower the bitch Schillings greeted me with another black look, but let me in without a word. The Canon was waiting for me in the observatory, in a state of extreme agitation. I had hardly crossed the threshold before he began to babble excitedly, and came at me waving his hands, forcing me to retreat before him. It was yesterday in reverse. I tried to make sense of what he was saying, but the fumes of last night’s revels had not yet dispersed, and phlegm not blood lay sluggish in my veins, and I could grasp only a jumble of words: Kulm… the Bishop … Löbau… the castle… venite! We were leaving Frauenburg. We were going to Löbau, in Royal Prussia. Bishop Giese was his friend. He was Bishop of Kulm. We would stay with him at Löbau Castle. (What did it mean?) We were leaving that morning, that minute—now! I shambled off in a daze and collected my belongings from the inn, and, when I returned, the Canon was already in the street, struggling into a brokendown hired carriage. I think if I had not arrived just then he would have left without giving me a second thought. The Schillings stuck out her fierce head at the door, the Canon groaned faintly and shrank back against the fusty seat, and as we moved off the focaria yelled after us like a fishwife something about being gone when we returned—on hearing which, I may add, I brightened up considerably.

  There is a kind of lockjaw that comes with extreme embarrassment; I fell prey to that condition as we rattled through the streets of Frauenburg that morning. I may have been young, innocent I may have been, but I could guess easily enough the reason for our haste and the manner of our departure. It was not without justification, after all, that Luther had vilified Rome for its hypocrisy and its so-called celibacy, and no doubt now Bishop Dantiscus had instituted yet an
other drive against indecency among his clergy, as the Catholics were forever doing in those early days of the schism, eager to display their reforming zeal to a sceptical world. Not that I cared anything for that kind of nonsense; it was not the state of affairs between Canon Nicolas and the Schillings that troubled me (it did not trouble me much, at any rate), but the spectacle of Doctor Copernicus in the street, in public, involved in a sordid domestic scene. I could not speak, I say, and turned my face away from him and gazed out with such fierce concentration at drab Ermland passing by that it might have been the wonders of the Indies I beheld. Ah, how intolerant the young are of the frailties of the old! The Canon was silent also, until we reached the plain, and then he stirred and sighed, and there was a world of weariness in his voice when he asked:

  “Tell me, young man, what do they say of me at Wittenberg?”

  *

  That dreary Prussian plain, I remember it. Enormous clouds, rolling down from the Baltic, kept pace with us as we were borne slowly southwards, their shadows stepping hugely across the empty land. Strange silence spread for miles about us, as if everything were somehow turned away, facing off into the limitless distance, and the muted clamour of our passage—creak of axles, monotonous thudding of hoofs—could not avail against that impassive quiet, that indifference. We met not a soul on the road, if road it could be called, but once, far in the distance, a band of horsemen appeared, galloping laboriously away, soundlessly. Through the narrow slit opposite me I could see the driver’s broad back bouncing and rolling, but as the hours crawled past it ceased to be a human form, and became a stone, a pillar of dust, the wing of some great bird. We passed through deserted villages where the houses were charred shells and dust blew in the streets, and the absence of the hum of human concourse was like a hole in the air itself. Thus do we voyage in dreams. Once, when I thought the Canon was asleep, I found him instead staring at me fixedly; another time when I turned to him he smiled a cunning and inexplicably alarming smile. Confused and frightened, I looked away hurriedly, out at the countryside revolving slowly around us, but there was no comfort for me there. The plain stretched away interminably, burnished by the strange brittle sunlight, and the wind sang softly. We might have been a thousand leagues from anywhere, adrift in the sphere of the fixed stars. He was still smiling, the old sorcerer, and it seemed to me that the smile said: this is my world, do you see? there is no Anna Schillings here, no gaping peasants, no bloodied statues, no Dantiscus, only the light and the emptiness, and that mysterious music high in the air which you cannot hear but which you know is there. And for the first time then I saw him whole, no longer the image of him I had carried with me from Wittenberg, but Copernicus himself—itself—the true thing, a cold brilliant object like a diamond (not like a diamond, but I am in a hurry), now all at once vividly familiar and yet untouchable still. It is not vouchsafed to many men to know another thus, with that awful clarity; when it comes, the vision is fleeting, the experience lasts only an instant, but the knowledge gleaned thereby remains forever. We reached Löbau, and in the flurry of arrival I felt that I was indeed waking from a dream. I waited for the Canon to acknowledge all that had happened out on the plain (whatever it was!), but he did not, would not, and I was disappointed. Well, for all I know, the old devil may have put a spell on me out there. But I shall always remember that eerie journey. Yes, and turrets looking down over wooded slopes to the huddled roofs of the town. The air up there was crisp with the smell of spruce and pine. I might almost have been back in Germany. We drew into the courtyard and were greeted by an uproar of servants and grooms and hysterical dogs. A grizzled old fellow in a leather jerkin and patched breeches came to receive us. I took him for a steward or somesuch, but I was wrong: it was Bishop Giese himself. He greeted the Canon with grave solicitude. He hardly glanced at me, until, when he offered me the ring to kiss, I shook his hand instead, and that provoked a keen look. The two of them moved away together, the Canon shuffling slowly with bowed head, the Bishop supporting him with a gentle hand under his elbow, and the Canon groaned:

  “Ah, Tiedemann, troubles, troubles…”

  I was left to fend for myself, of course, as usual, until one of the serving lads took pity on me. He bounced up under my nose with a saucy grin smeared on his face, Raphael he was called, hardly more than a child, a pretty fellow with an arse on him like a peach, O, I knew what he was about!—Raphaël, indeed: some angel. But I followed him willingly enough, and not without gratitude. As he scampered along before me, babbling and leering in his childish way, it occurred to me that I should have a chat with him in private, before I left, about the joys of matrimony and so on, and warn him of the tribulations in store for him if he continued to lean in the direction he so obviously leaned, at such a tender age. Had I only known what tribulations were in store for me on his account!

  *

  And so began our strange sojourn at Löbau. Throughout that long summer we remained there. The magical spell, the first touch of which I had felt out on the empty Prussian plain, settled over all that white castle on its peak, where we, as in an enchanted sleep, wandered amidst the luminous order and music of the planets, dreaming miraculous dreams. Luther had scoffed at Copernicus, calling him the fool who wants to turn the whole science of astronomy upside down, but Luther should have kept to theology, for in the sweat of his worst nightmare he could not have imagined what we would do during those months at Löbau. We turned the whole universe upon its head. We, I say we, for without me he would have kept silent even into the silence of the grave.

  He had intended to destroy his book: how many of you knew that? How very skilfully I am telling this tale.

  *

  Bishop Giese. Bishop Giese was not quite the crusty old pedant I had expected. He was no gay dog, to be sure, but he was not without a certain … how shall I say, a certain sense of irony—better call it that than humour, for none of those northerners knows how to laugh. In his attitude toward the Canon, a blend of awe and solicitude and an occasional, helpless exasperation that yet was never less than amiable, he revealed a loyal and gentle nature. He was something of an astronomer, and possessed a bronze armillary sphere for observing equinoxes, and a mighty gnomon from England, which I envied. However, it was with an enthusiasm plainly forced that he displayed these and other instruments, and I suspect he kept them chiefly as evidence of the sincerity of his interest in the Canon’s work. He was nearing sixty at the time of which I speak, had been a canon of the Frauenburg Chapter, and was destined one day to take Dantiscus’s place in the Bishopric of Ermland. Of middle height, not stout but not gaunt either, he was one of those middling men who are the unacknowledged proprietors of the world. He was decent, unassuming, diligent—in short, a good man. I loathed him, I still do. He suffered from the ague, which he had contracted in the course of his duties somewhere in the wilds of that enormous bog which is Prussia; Canon Nicolas, playing at medicine (as I do now!), had for some time been treating him for the affliction, hence, officially at least, our presence at Löbau. But it was not on the Bishop alone that the Canon’s skill was to be lavished …

  On the evening of our arrival, after I had lain down briefly to sleep, I awoke drenched in sweat and prey to a nameless panic. My teeth chattered. I rose and for a long time wandered fitfully about the castle, wringing my hands and moaning, lost and frightened in those unfamiliar stone corridors and silent galleries. I knew, but would not acknowledge it, what this mood of mounting urgency and alarm presaged. All my life I have been subject to prolonged bouts of melancholia, which at their most severe bring with them fainting fits and crippling pains, even temporary blindness sometimes, and a host of other lesser demons to plague me. But worst of all is the heartache, the accidie. More than once I have near died of it, and hard to bear indeed would be the fear that at the last the ghost might abandon me in the midst of that drear dark, but, thankfully, my stars have laid in store for me an easier, finer end. The attack that came on that evening was one of the stranges
t that I have ever known, and was to endure, muted but always there, throughout my stay at Lobau. I have spoken already of enchantment: was it perhaps no more than the effect of viewing the events of that summer through the membrane of melancholy?

  Dinner at the castle was always a wearisome and repellent ritual, but on that first evening it was torment. The company gathered and disposed itself hierarchically in a vast hall, whose stained-glass windows trapped the late sunlight in its muddy tints and checked its rude advance into the pious gloom so beloved of popish churchmen. Amid the appalling racket of bells and music and so forth the Bishop entered, in full regalia, and took his place at the head of the highest table. Slatterns with red hands and filthy heels bore in huge trays of pork and baskets of black Prussian bread and jars of wine, and then the uproar began in earnest as the doltish priests and leering clerks stuck their snouts into the prog, gulping and snorting and belching, flinging abuse and gnawed bones at each other, filling the smoky air with shrieks of wild laughter. A bout of fisticuffs broke out at one of the lower tables. In the face of it all, the Bishop, enthroned on my left, maintained a placid mien—and why not? By the standards of the Roman Church his dining-room was a model of polite behaviour. Yes, to him, to them all, everything was just splendid, and I alone could see the ape squatting in our midst and hear his howls. Even if they had seen him, they would have taken him for a messenger from God, an archangel with steaming armpits and blue-black ballocks, and sure enough, after a few prayers directed by the company toward the ceiling, the poor brute would have been pointing a seraphic finger upward in a new annunciation (the Word made Pork!). Thus does Rome transform into ritual the horrors of the world, in order to sustain the fictions. I hate them all, Giese with his mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, Dantiscus and his bastards, but most of all of them I hate—ah but bide, Rheticus, bide! The Bishop was speaking to me, some polite rubbish as usual, but the bread was turning to clay in my mouth, and the plate of meat before me had the look of an haruspex’s bowl of entrails, signifying doom. I could no longer bear to remain in that hall. I rose with a snarl, and fled.