John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

Gaiety took him like a falling sickness, and sent him whinnying mad through the house with his long limbs wildly spinning. These frantic fits of glee were rare and brief, and ended abruptly with the sound of something shattering, a toy, a tile, a windowpane. The other children cowered then, as the silence fluttered down.

He chose for friends the roughest brutes of boys St John’s could offer. They gathered outside the school gates each afternoon for fights and farting contests and other fun. Nicolas dreaded that bored malicious crowd. Nepomuk Müller snatched his cap and pranced away, brandishing the prize aloft.

“Here, Nepomuk, chuck it here!”

“Me,Müller,me!”

The dark disc sailed here and there in the bitter sunlight, sustained in flight it seemed by the wild cries rising around it. A familiar gloom invaded Nicolas’s soul. If only he could be angry! Red rage would have flung him into the game, where even the part of victim would have been preferable to this contemptuous detachment. He waited morose and silent outside the ring of howling boys, drawing patterns on the ground with the toe of his shoe.

The cap came by Andreas and he reached up and plucked it out of the air, but instead of sending it on its way again instanter he paused, seeking as always some means of investing the game with a touch of grace. The others groaned.

“O come on, Andy, throw it!”

He turned to Nicolas and smiled his smile, and began to measure up the distance separating them, making feints like a rings player, taking careful aim.

“Watch me land it on his noggin.”

But catching Nicolas’s eye he hesitated again, and frowned, and then with a surly defiant glance over his shoulder at the others he stepped forward and offered the cap to his brother. “Here,” he murmured, “take it.” But Nicolas looked away. He could cope with cruelty, which was predictable. Andreas’s face darkened. “Take your damned cap, you little snot!”

They straggled homeward, wrapped in a throbbing silence. Nicolas, sighing and sweating, raged inwardly in fierce impotence against Andreas, who was so impressively grown-up in so many ways, and yet could be so childish sometimes. That with the cap had been silly. You must not expect me to understand you, even though I do! He did not quite know what that meant, but he thought it might mean that the business of the cap had not really been silly at all. O, it was hopeless! There were times such as this when the muddle of his feelings for Andreas took on the alarming aspect of hatred.

They were no longer heading homeward. Nicolas halted.

“Where are we going?”

“Never mind.”

But he knew well where they were going. Their father had forbidden them to venture by themselves beyond the walls. Out there was the New Town, a maze of hovels and steaming alleys rife with the thick green stench of humankind. That was the world of the poor, the lepers and the Jews, the renegades. Nicolas feared that world. His flesh crawled at the thought of it. When he was dragged there by Andreas, who revelled in the low life, the hideousness rolled over him in choking slimy waves, and he seemed to drown. “Where are we going? We are not to go down there! You know we are not supposed to go down there. Andreas.”

But Andreas did not answer, and went on alone down the hill, whistling, toward the gate and the drawbridge, and gradually the distance made of him a crawling crablike thing. Nicolas, abandoned, began discreetly to cry.

*

The room was poised, weirdly still. A fly buzzed and boomed tinily against the diamond panes of the window. On the floor a dropped book was surreptitiously shutting itself page by page, slowly. The beady eager eye of a mirror set in a gilt sunburst on the far wall contained another room in miniature, and another doorway in which there floated a small pale frightened face gaping aghast at the image of that stricken creature swimming like an eyelash come detached on the rim of the glass. Look! On tiptoe teetering by the window he hung, suspended from invisible struts, an impossibly huge stark black puppet, clawing at his breast, his swollen face clenched in terrible hurt.

And here comes a chopper

To chop off his

head

He dropped, slack bag-of-bones, and with him the whole room seemed to collapse.

“Children, your father is dead, of his heart.”

*

The reverberations of that collapse persisted, muted but palpable, and the house, bruised and raw from the shedding of tears, seemed to throb hugely in pain. Grief was the shape of a squat grey rodent lodged in the heart.

The more fiercely this grief-rat struggled the clearer became Nicolas’s thinking, as if his mind, horrified by that squirming thing down there, were scrambling higher and higher away from it into rarer and rarer heights of chill bright air. His mother’s death had puzzled him, yet he had looked upon it as an accident, in dimensions out of all proportion to the small flaw in the machine that had caused it. This death was different. The machine seemed damaged now beyond repair. Life, he saw, had gone horribly awry, and nothing they had told him could explain it, none of the names they had taught him could name the cause. Even Barbara’s God withdrew, in a shocked silence.

*

Uncle Lucas, Canon Waczelrodt, travelled post-haste from Frauenburg in Ermland when the news reached him of his brother-in-law’s death. The affairs of the Chapter of Canons at Frauenburg Cathedral were as usual in disarray, and it was not a good time to be absent for a man with his eye on the bishopric. Canon Lucas was extremely annoyed — but then, his life was a constant state of vast profound annoyance. The ravages wrought by the unending war between his wilfulness and a recalcitrant world were written in nerveknots on the grey map of his face, and his little eyes, cold and still above the nose thick as a hammerhead, were those of the lean sentinel that crouched within the fleshy carapace of his bulk. He did not like things as they were, but luckily for things he had not yet decided finally how they should be. It was said that he had never in his life been known to laugh.

His coming was the boom of a bronze gong marking the entry of a new order into the children’s lives.

He strode about the house sniffing after discrepancies, with the four of them trotting in his wake like a flock of frightened mice, twittering. Nicolas was mesmerised by this hard, fascinatingly ugly, overbearing manager of men. His cloak, flying out behind him, sliced the air ruthlessly, as once Nicolas had seen him on the magistrate’s bench in the Town Hall slicing to shreds the arguments of whining plaintiffs. In the strange, incomprehensible and sometimes cruel world of adults, Uncle Lucas was the most adult of all.

“Your father in his will has delivered you his children into my care. It is not a responsibility that I welcome, yet it is my duty to fulfil his wishes. I shall speak to each of you in turn. You will wait here.”

He swept into the study and shut the door behind him. The children sat on a bench in the sanded hall outside, picking at their fingernails and sighing. Barbara began quietly to weep. Andreas tapped his feet on the floor in time to the rhythm of his worried thoughts. Sweat sprang out on Nicolas’s skin, as always when he was upset. Katharina nudged him.

“You will be sent away, do you know that?” she whispered. “O yes, far far away, to a place where you will not have Barbara to protect you. Far, far away.”

She smiled. He pressed his lips tightly together. He would not cry for her.

The time went slowly. They listened intently to the tiny sounds within, the rustle of papers, squeak of a pen, and once a loud grunt, of astonishment, so it sounded. Andreas announced that he was not going to sit here any longer doing nothing, and stood up, but then sat down again immediately when the door flew open and Uncle Lucas came out. He looked at them with a frown, as if wondering where it was that he had seen them before, then shook his head and withdrew again. The flurry of air he had left behind him in the hall subsided.