John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

The Canon grimaced and shook his head. “Nothing, I do not think. Will you go now, please?”

“ Christ! ” Andreas cried, and lifted the stick as if to strike. The Canon did not stir, and they sat thus, with the weapon trembling above them. “Tell me, damn you! Tell me what you think!”

“I think,” Canon Koppernigk said calmly, “that the world is absurd.”

Andreas lowered the stick, and nodded, smiling, it was almost a smile, almost blissful. “That is what I wanted you to say. Now I shall go.”

*

He went. Max found a hole for him to hide in. The Bishop, believing, wishing to believe, that he had left the country, let it be known that he wanted to hear no more mention of him. But such rage and pain as Andreas’s could not easily be erased. His coming had contaminated the castle, and some malign part of his presence persisted, a desolation, a blackening of the air. The Canon visited him once. He lay in darkness in a shuttered garret and would not speak, pretending to be asleep. The crown of his skull, all that was visible of him above the soiled blanket, scaly with scurf and old scabs and stuck with patches of scant hair, was horrid and heart-rending. Downstairs the innkeeper leered with ghastly knowing. He wiped his hands on his apron before taking the coins the Canon offered.

“You must give him better food. None of your slops, mind. Send to the castle for supplies if you must. Do not tell him that I spoke to you, that I gave you money.”

“O aye, your honour, mum’s the word. And I’ll do that with the prog.”

“Yes.” He looked at the cowering ingratiating fellow, and saw himself. “Yes.”

*

Church business took him with his uncle to Cracow. For once he was glad of that long weary journey. As they travelled southwards over the Prussian plain he felt the clutch of that dread phantom in the garret weaken, and at last fall away.

In Cracow he spent at Haller’s bookshop what little time the Bishop would allow him away from his secretarial duties. Haller was publishing his Latin translations from the Byzantine Greek of Simocatta’s Epistles. It was a poor dull book. The sight of the text, mysteriously, shockingly naked on the galley proofs, nauseated him. If thou wouldst obtain mastery over thy grief, wander among graves . . O! But the text was unimportant. What mattered was the dedication. He was out to woo the Bishop.

He enlisted in this delicate task the help of an old acquaintance, Laurentius Rabe, a poet and wandering scholar who had taught him briefly here at Cracow during his university days. Rabe, who affected on occasion the grandiloquent latinised name of Corvinus, was a spry old man with spindly legs and a plump chest and watery pale blue eyes. He liked to dress in black, and sported proudly still the liripipe of the graduate. He was no raven, despite the name, but resembled some small quick fastidious bird, a swallow, perhaps, or a swift. A jewel glittered at the tip of his sharp little beak.

“I would have some verses, you see,” the Canon said, “to flatter my uncle. I should be grateful to you.”

They stood together amid the crash and clatter of the caseroom at the rear of Haller’s. Rabe nodded rapidly, rubbing his chilblained fingers together like bundles of dry twigs.

“Of course, of course,” he cried, in his pinched voice. “Tell me what you require.”

“Some small thing merely, a few lines.” Canon Nicolas shrugged. “Something, say, on Aeneas and Achates, something like that, loyalty, piety, you know. The verse is no matter—”

“O.”

“—But most importantly, you must put in some mention of astronomy. I plan to produce a small work on planetary motion, a mere outline, you understand, of something much larger that I have in train. This preliminary commentariolus is a modest affair, but I fear controversy among the schoolmen, and therefore I must have the support of the Bishop, you see.” He was babbling, beset by embarrassment and nervousness. He found it unaccountably obscene to speak to others of his work. “Anyway, you know how these things go. Will you oblige me?”

Rabe was flattered, and for the moment, quite overcome, he could say nothing, and continued to nod, making faint squeaking noises under his breath. He was preparing one of his ornate speeches. The Canon had not time for that.

“Excuse me,” he said hastily, “I must speak to Haller.” The printer approached between the benches, a big stolid silent man in a leather apron, scratching his beard with a thick thumb and studying a sheet of parchment. “ Meister Haller, I wish to put in some verses with the dedication: can you do that?”

Haller frowned pensively, and then nodded.

“We can do that,” he said gravely.

Rabe was watching the Canon with a gentle, somewhat crestfallen questioning look.

“You have changed, my dear Koppernigk,” he murmured.

“What?”

“You have become a public man.”

“Have I? Perhaps so.” What can he mean? No matter. “You will do this favour for me, then? I shall pay you, of course.”

He turned his attention to the galleys, and when he looked again Rabe was gone. He had the distinct, vaguely troubling impression that the old man had somehow been folded up and put neatly but unceremoniously away: closed, as it were, like a dull book. He shook his head impatiently. He had not the time to worry over trivia

*

He had all the time in the world. There was no hurry. He knew in his heart that the Bishop would be about as much impressed with the Commentariolus on Doctor Copernicus’s planetary theory (did it not sound somehow like the name of a patent medicine put out by some quack?) as he would be with dreary Simocatta. Or he might be so impressed as to forbid publication. The times were inauspicious. In Germany the Church was under attack, while the humanists were everywhere execrated — and translating Simocatta could be, the Canon supposed, considered a humanist pursuit, however laughable the notion seemed to him. Bishop Lucas had troubles in plenty abroad without exposing himself to the accusation of laxity in his own house. One scandalous nephew was enough.

“What am I to do with him!” he roared, drumming on his forehead with his fists. “Come, you are my physician, advise me how to rid myself of this sickness that is your blasted brother.”

“He is sick, my lord,” Canon Nicolas said quietly. “We must try to be charitable.”

“Charity? Charity? Christ in Heaven, man, don’t make me spew. How can I be charitable to this. . this. . this defilement, this weeping sore? You have seen him: he is rotting, the beast is rotting on his feet! Jesus God, if they should hear of this scandal at Rome—”

“He tells me he has influence at the Vatican, my lord.”

“—Or in Königsberg! O!” He sat down suddenly, appalled. “If they hear of it in Königsberg, what will they not make of it, the Knights. Something must be done. I will be rid of him, nephew, mark it, I will be rid of him.”

They were in the library, a large high cold stone hall that in former times had been the garderobe, where now the business of the castle, and all Ermland, was conducted. The furnishings were scant, some uninviting chairs, a prie-dieu, an incongruously dainty Italian table, the vast desk at the side of which the Canon sat on a low stool with pen and slate before him. One wall was draped with a vast tapestry, out of which, as from some elaborate puzzle, the Bishop’s flat stern face in various disguises peered with watchful mien, while in the middle distance, incidentally as it were, was depicted the martyrdom of St Stephen. A seven-branched candelabrum shed a brownish underwater light. Nervous petty officials summoned here over the years had left their mark on the air, a vague mute sense of distress and guilt and failure. It was Bishop Lucas’s favourite room. He snuffed up great lungfuls of that rank air, puffed himself up on it. In these latter days he left the library only to eat and sleep. He was safe here, while outside the pestilence raged, that plague of the spirit made tangible in Andreas’s coming. They had returned from Cracow to find him entrenched at the castle, determined, with hideous cheerfulness, not to be dislodged this time. Max had made him very comfortable in his master’s tower, where he passed the time waiting for their return by reading the notes and preliminary drafts of the Canon’s secret book. . A climate of doom descended on Heilsberg.