John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

Nevertheless once a week they sallied forth from the big house in St Anne’s Lane to display to the town the impregnable eternal edifice that is the merchant and his heir. The boy performed his part as best he could, and gravely paced the narrow streets with his hands clasped behind his back, while his insides writhed in an agony of shame and self-consciousness. His father, sabled, black-hatted, wagging an ornate cane, was a grotesque caricature of the vigorous bluff businessman he imagined himself to be. The garrulous greetings— Grüss Gott, meinherr! fine day! how’s trade? — that he bestowed on friend and stranger alike in a booming public voice, fell clumsily about the streets, a horrible hollow crashing. When he paused to speak to an acquaintance, his sententiousness and grating joviality made the boy suck his teeth and grind one heel slowly, slowly, into the ground.

“And this is Nicolas, he is my youngest, but he has a nose already for the business, have you not, hey, what do you say, young scamp?”

He said nothing, only smiled weakly and turned away, seeking the consolation of poplars, and the great bundles of steely light above the river, and brass clouds in a high blue sky.

They made their way along the wharf, where Nicolas’s fearful soul ventured out of hiding, enticed by the uproar of men and ships, so different from the inane babbling back there in the streets. Here was not a world of mere words but of glorious clamour and chaos, the big black barrels rumbling and thudding, winch ropes humming, the barefoot loaders singing and swearing as they trotted back and forth under their burdens across the thrumming gangplanks. The boy was entranced, prey to terror and an awful glee, discerning in all this haste and hugeness the prospect of some dazzling, irresistible annihilation.

His father too was nervous of the river and the teeming wharves, and hurried along in silence now, with his head bent and shoulders hunched, seeking shelter. The house of Koppernigk & Sons stood back from the quayside and contemplated with obvious satisfaction the frantic hither and thithering of trade below its windows; under that stony gaze even the unruly Vistula lay down meekly and flowed away. In the dusty offices, the cool dim caverns of the warehouses, the boy watched, fascinated and appalled, his father put on once more the grimacing mask of the man of consequence, and a familiar mingling of contempt and pity began to ache again within him.

Yet secretly he delighted in these visits. An obscure hunger fed its fill here in this tight assured little world. He wandered dreamily through the warren of pokey offices, breathing the crumbly odours of dust and ink, spying on inky dusty grey old men crouched with their quills over enormous ledgers. Great quivering blades of sunlight smote the air, the clamour of the quayside stormed the windows, but nothing could shake the stout twin pillars of debit and credit on which the house was balanced. Here was harmony. In the furry honeybrown gloom of the warehouses his senses reeled, assailed by smells and colours and textures, of brandy and vodka snoozing in casks, of wax and pitch, and tight-packed tuns of herring, of timber and corn and an orient of spices. Burnished sheets of copper glowed with a soft dark flame in their tattered wraps of sacking and old ropes, and happiness seemed a copper-coloured word.

It was from this metal that the family had its name, his father said, and not from the Polish coper , meaning horseradish, as some were spiteful enough to suggest. Horseradish indeed! Never forget, ours is a distinguished line, merchants and magistrates and ministers of Holy Church — patricians all! Yes, Papa.

*

The Koppernigks had originated in Upper Silesia, from whence in 1396 one Niklas Koppernigk, a stonemason by trade, had moved to Cracow and taken Polish citizenship. His son, Johannes, was the founder of the merchant house that in the late 1450s young Nicolas’s father was to transfer to Torun in Royal Prussia. There, among the old German settler families, the Koppernigks laboured long and diligently to rid themselves of Poland and all things Polish. They were not entirely successful; the children’s German was still tainted with a southern something, a faint afterglow of boiled cabbage as it were, that had troubled their mother greatly during her brief unhappy life. She was a Waczelrodt. The Waczelrodts it is true were Silesians just like the Koppernigks, having their name from the village of Weizenrodau near Schweidnitz, but apart from that they were something quite different from the Koppernigks: no stonemasons there, indeed no. There had been Waczelrodts among the aldermen and councillors of Münsterburg in the thirteenth century, and, a little later, of Breslau. Towards the end of the last century they had arrived in Torun, where they had soon become influential, and were among the governors of the Old City. Nicolas’s maternal grandfather had been a wealthy man, with property in the town and also a number of large estates at Kulm. The Waczelrodts were connected by marriage with the Peckaus of Magdeburg and the von Allens of Torun. They had also, of course, married into the Koppernigks, late of Cracow, but that was hardly a connection that one would wish to boast of, as Nicolas’s Aunt Christina Waczelrodt, a very grand and formidable lady, had often pointed out.

“Remember,” his mother told him, “you are as much a Waczelrodt as a Koppernigk. Your uncle will be Bishop one day. Remember!”

*

Father and son returned weary and disgruntled from their outings, and parted quickly, with faces averted, the father to nurse in solitude his disappointment and unaccountable sense of shame, the son to endure the torment of Andreas’s baiting.

“And how was business today, brother, eh?”

Andreas was the rightful heir, being the elder son. The notion elicited from his father one of his rare brief barks of laughter. “That wastrel? Ho no. Let him go for the Church, where his Uncle Lucas can find a fat prebend for him.” And Andreas gnawed his knuckles, and slunk away.

Andreas hated his brother. His hatred was like a kind of anguish, and Nicolas sometimes fancied he could hear it, a high-pitched excruciating whine.

“The Turk is coming, little brother, he has invaded the south.” Nicolas turned pale. Andreas smirked. “O yes, it is true, you know, believe me. Are you afraid? Nothing will stop the Turk. He impales his prisoners, they say. A big sharp stake right up your bum — like that! Ha!”

They walked to school and home again together. Andreas chose to be elaborately indifferent to Nicolas’s meek presence beside him, and whistled through his teeth, and considered the sky, slowed up his pace abruptly to scrutinise some fascinating thing floating in a sewer or quickened it to lurch in mockery behind an unsuspecting cripple, so that, try as he might to anticipate these sudden checks and advances, Nicolas was forced to dance, smiling a puppet’s foolish fixed smile, on the end of his capricious master’s invisible leash. And the harder he tried to efface himself the fiercer became Andreas’s scorn.

“You, creepy — do not creep behind me always!”

Andreas was handsomely made, very tall and slender, dark, fastidious, cold. Running or walking he moved with languorous negligent grace, but it was in repose that he appeared most lovely, standing by a window lost in a blue dream, with his pale thin face lifted up to the light like a perfect vase, or a shell out of the sea, some exquisite fragile thing. He had a way when addressed directly of frowning quickly and turning his head away; then, poised thus, he seemed shaped in his beauty by the action of an ineradicable distress within him. In the smelly classrooms and the corridors of St John’s School he floundered, a vulnerable aetherial creature brought low in an alien element, and the masters roared in his face and beat him, their stolid souls enraged by this enigma, who learned nothing, and trailed home to endure in silence, with his face turned away, the abuse of a disappointed father.