John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

One that would speak with you, Canon .

No! No! Keep him hence! But he will not be denied. He drags himself into the corner where night’s gloom still clings, and there he hangs, watching. At times he laughs softly, at others lets fall a sob. His face is hidden in his cloak, all save the eyes, but I recognise him well enough, how would I not? He is the ineffable thing. He is ineluctable. He is the world’s worst. Let me be, can’t you!

*

Canon Koppernigk arrived at Heilsberg as night came on, bone-weary, wracked by fever, a black bundle slumped in the saddle of the starved nag that someone somewhere along the way had tricked him into buying. He had set out from Torun that morning, and travelled without pause all day, fearful of facing, prostrate in a rat-infested inn, the gross fancies conjured up by this sickness boiling in his blood. Now he could hardly understand that the journey was over, hardly knew where he was. It seemed to him that, borne thither on the surge and sway of waters, he had run aground on a strange dark shore. There were stars already, but no moon, and torches smoking high up on the walls. Off to the left a fire burned, tended by still figures, some squatting wrapt in cloaks and others with halberds leaning at watch. The river sucked and slopped, talking to itself as it ran. All this appeared disjointed and unreal. It was as if in his sickness he could apprehend only the weird underside of things, while the real, the significant world was beyond his fevered understanding. A rat, caught in a chance reflection of firelight from the river, scuttled up the slimed steps below the wall and vanished.

He was shaken roughly, and heard himself, as from a great distance, groan. Maximilian, his manservant, gnawing an onion, scowled up at him, mumbling.

“What? What do you say?” The servant only shrugged, and gestured toward the gate. A peasant’s cart with a broken axle straddled the drawbridge. In the half-light it had the look of a huge malign frog. “Go on, go on,” the Canon said. “There is room enough.”

But they were forced to pass perilously close to the edge. He peered down at the glittering black water, and felt dizzy. How fast it runs! The carter was belabouring with a stick in mute fury the impassive mule standing trapped between the shafts. Max blessed the fellow gravely, and sniggered. From this hole in the gate-tower a sentry shambled sleepily forth.

“State your business, strangers.”

Max, the good German, waxed immediately indignant, to be addressed thus loutishly in the outlandish jabber of a native Prussian, a barbarian, beneath contempt. Imperiously he announced: “Doctor Copernicus!” and made to march on. The Prussian poked him perfunctorily in the belly with his blunt lance.

“Nicolas Koppernigk,” the Canon said hastily, “liegeman to our Lord Bishop. Let us pass now, please, good fellow, and you shall have a penny.” Max looked up at him, and he perceived, not for the first time and yet with wonder still, the peculiar mixture of love and loathing his servant bore for him.

In the deserted courtyard his horse’s hoofs rang frostily and clear upon the flagstones. The hounds began to bay. He lifted his throbbing eyes to the pillared arches of the galleries, to the lowering mass of the castle keep faintly slimed with starlight, and thought how like a prison the place appeared. Heilsberg was intended to be his home now; not even Prussia itself was that, any longer.

“Max.”

“ Ja, ja ,” the servant growled, stamping off. “I know — the Bishop must not be disturbed. I know!”

Then there were lights, and voices close by in the darkness, and a decrepit half-blind old woman came and led him inside, scolding him, not unkindly, as though he were an errant child. He had not been expected until the morrow. A fire of birchwood burned on the hearth in the great main hall, where a pallet had been laid for him. He was glad to be spared the stairs, for his limbs were liquid. The fever was mounting again, and he trembled violently. He lay down at once and pulled his cloak tight about him. Max and the old woman began to bicker. Max was jealous of her authority.

“Master, she says your nuncle must be summoned, with you sick and arriving unexpected.”

“No no,” the Canon groaned, “please, no.” And, in a whisper, with a graveyard laugh: “O keep him hence!”

The old woman babbled on, but he closed his eyes and she went away at last, grumbling. Max squatted beside him and began to whistle softly through his teeth.

“Max — Max I am ill.”

“Aye. I seen it coming. And I warned you. Didn’t I say we should have stopped at Allenstein for the night? But you would none of it, and now you’re sicker than a dog.”

“Yes yes, you were right.” Max was a good cure for self-pity. “You were quite right.” He could not sleep. Even his hair seemed to pulse with pain. The sickness was a keepsake of Italy; he smiled wryly at the thought. Long shadows pranced like crazed things upon the walls. A dog came to sniff at him, its snout fastidiously twitching, but Max growled, and the creature pricked up its ears and loped away. Canon Koppernigk gazed into the fire. The flames sang a little song whose melody was just beyond grasping. “Max?”

“Aye.”

Still there: a lean bundle of bones and sinew crouched in the firelight, staring narrowly at nothing. The hound returned and settled down unmolested beside them, licked its loins with relish, slept. The Canon touched the soiled coarse fur with his fingertips. Suddenly he was comforted by common things, the fire’s heat, this flea-bitten dog, Max’s bitter regard, and beyond these the campfire too, and the watchers about it, the peasant’s cart, the poor fastidious mule, even that rat on the steps: enduring things, brutish and bloody and warm, out of which, however dark and alien the shore, the essential self assembles a makeshift home.

Later that night Bishop Lucas came and looked at him, and shook his great head gloomily. “A fine physician I have appointed!”

*

That title meant little. He was no true medic. He had not sufficient faith in the art of healing, nor in himself as a healer. At Padua they had taught him to cut up corpses very prettily, but that would have made him a better butcher than physician. Yet he had accepted the post without protest. On returning from Italy he had gone straight to Frauenburg, thinking to take up his duties as a canon of the Chapter; but he was not ready yet for that life, Italy was too much in his blood, and having secured with ease yet another, this time indefinite, leave of absence he had drifted to Torun. Katharina and her husband after protracted negotiations had bought from the Bishop the old house in St Anne’s Lane, and had moved there from Cracow. He should have known better than to go to them, of course. The company of his shrewish sister and her blustering mate irked him; they for their part made him less than welcome. He had engaged Max more as an ally than a servant, for he was a match indeed for that ill-tempered sullen household.

Then word came from the Bishop: Canon Nicolas was summoned at once to Heilsberg as physician-in-residence at the castle, that he might thus, however inadequately, repay the expense of his years of Italian studies.

He liked the job well enough. Medicine was a means of concealment, whereby he might come at his true concerns obliquely and by stealth: to unsuspecting eyes there was not much difference between a star table and an apothecary’s prescription, a geometrical calculation and a horoscope. But although he was free to work, he felt that he was trapped at Heilsberg, trapped and squirming, a grey old rat. He was thirty-three; his teeth were going. Once life had been an intense bright dream awaiting him elsewhere, beyond the disappointment of ordinary days, but now when he looked to that place once occupied by that gorgeous golden bowl of possibilities he saw only a blurred dark something with damaged limbs swimming toward him. It was not death, but something far less distinguished. It was, he supposed, failure. Each day it came a little nearer, and each day he made its coming a little easier, for was not his work — that is, his true work, his astronomy — a process of progressive failing? He moved forward doggedly, line by painful line, calculation by defective calculation, watching in mute suspended panic his blundering pen pollute and maim those concepts that, unexpressed, had throbbed with limpid purity and beauty. It was barbarism on a grand scale. Mathematical edifices of heart-rending frailty and delicacy were shattered at a stroke. He had thought that the working out of his theory would be nothing, mere hackwork: well, that was somewhat true, for there was hacking indeed, bloody butchery. He crouched at his desk by the light of a guttering candle, and suffered: it was a kind of slow internal bleeding. Only vaguely did he understand the nature of his plight. It was not that the theory itself was faulty, but somehow it was being contaminated in the working out. There seemed to be lacking some essential connection. The universe of dancing planets was out there, and he was here, and between the two spheres mere words and figures on paper could not mediate. Someone had once said something similar: who was that, or when? What matter! He dipped his pen in ink. He bled.