John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

The parents stood as he had left them, poised, like ships becalmed, waiting for wonders. They had only to look at him and they knew. They had known already, in their hearts. The silence was frightful. The Canon said: “I suggest—” but the merchant and his wife both began to speak at once, and then stopped in confusion. The mother was weeping effortlessly.

“There is a young man, Father,” she said. “He wishes to marry our Alicia.” Her face suddenly crumpled, and she wailed: “O he is a fine boy, Father!”

“We—” the merchant began, puffing up his chest, but he could not go on, and looked about the room, baffled and lost, as if searching for some solid support that he knew was not to be found, not here nor anywhere. “ We! —”

“My sister is Abbess of the Cistercian Convent at Kulm,” the Canon said quickly. “I can arrange for your daughter to go there. She need not take the vow, of course, unless you wish it. But the nuns will care for her, and perhaps—” Stop! Do not! “—Perhaps in time, when she is cured. . when she. . perhaps this young man. . Ach!” He could bear this no longer. They knew, they all knew: the child’s groin was crawling with crabs, she was poxed, she would never marry, would probably not live to be twenty, they knew that! Why then this charade? He advanced on them, and they retreated before him as if buffeted by the wind of his dismay and rage. The girl did not even glance at him. He wanted to shake her, or clasp her in his arms, to throttle her, save her, he did not know what he wanted, and he did nothing. When the door was opened a solid block of sunlight fell upon them, and all hesitated a moment, dazzled, and then mother and daughter turned away into the street. The merchant suddenly stamped his foot.

“It is witchcraft,” he gasped, “I know it!”

“No,” the Canon said. “There is no witchery here. Go now and comfort your wife and child. I shall write today to Kulm.”

But the merchant was not listening. He nodded distractedly, mechanically, like a large forlorn doll.

“The blame must fall somewhere,” he muttered, and for the first time looked directly at the Canon. “It must fall somewhere!”

Yes, yes: somewhere.

*

The ripples increased in intensity, became waves. Rumours reached him that he was being talked of at Rome as the originator of a new cosmology. Julius II himself, it was said, had expressed an interest. The blame must fall somewhere: he heard again that voice on the stairs shrieking of revenge. An unassuageable constriction of fear and panic afflicted him. Yet there was nowhere further that he could flee to. Lateral drift was all that remained.

Suddenly one day God abandoned him. Or perhaps it had happened long before, and he was only realising it now. The crisis came unbidden, for he had never questioned his faith, and he felt like the bystander, stopped idly to watch a brawl, who is suddenly struck down by a terrible stray blow. And yet it could not really be called a crisis. There was no great tumult of the soul, no pain. The thing was distinguished by a lack of feeling, a numbness. And it was strange: his faith in the Church did not waver, only his faith in God. The Mass, transubstantiation, the forgiveness of sin, the virgin birth, the vivid truth of all that he did not for a moment doubt, but behind it, behind the ritual, there was for him now only a silent white void that was everywhere and everything and eternal.

He confessed to the Precentor, Canon von Lossainen, but more out of curiosity than remorse. The Precentor, an ailing unhappy old man, sighed and said:

“Perhaps, Nicolas, the outward forms are all that any of us can believe in. Are you not being too hard on yourself?”

“No, no; I do not think it is possible to be too hard on oneself.”

“You may be right. Should I give you absolution? I hardly know.”

“Despair is a great sin.”

“Despair? Ah.”

*

He ceased to believe also in his book. For a while, in Cracow, in Italy, he had succeeded in convincing himself that (what was it?) the physical world was amenable to physical investigation, that the principal thing could be deduced, that the thing itself could be said. That faith too had collapsed. The book by now had gone through two complete revisions, rewritings really, but instead of coming nearer to essentials it was, he knew, flying off in a wild eccentric orbit into emptiness; instead of approaching the word, the crucial Word, it was careering headlong into a loquacious silence. He had believed it possible to say the truth; now he saw that all that could be said was the saying. His book was not about the world, but about itself. More than once he snatched up this hideous ingrown thing and rushed with it to the fire, but he had not the strength to perform that ultimate act.

Then at last there came, mysteriously, a ghastly release.

It was a sulphurous windy evening in March when Katharina’s steward arrived to summon him to Torun, where his uncle the Bishop was lying ill. He rode all night through storm and rain into a sombre yellowish dawn that was more like twilight. At Marienburg a watery sun broke briefly through the gloom. The Vistula was sullen. By nightfall he had reached Torun, exhausted, and almost delirious from want of sleep. Katharina was solicitious, and that told him, if nothing else would, that the situation was serious.

Bishop Lucas had been to Cracow for the wedding of King Sigismund. On the journey home he had fallen violently ill, and being then closer to Torun than Heilsberg had elected to be taken to the house of his niece. He lay now writhing in a grey sweat in the room, in the very bed where Canon Nicolas had been born and probably conceived. And indeed the Bishop, mewling in pain and mortal fright, seemed himself a great gross infant labouring toward an agonised delivery. He was torn by terrible fluxions, that felt, he said, as if he were shitting his guts: he was. The room was lit by a single candle, but a greater ghastly light seemed shed by his rage and pain. The Canon hung back in the shadows for a long time, watching the little changing tableau being enacted about the bed. Priests and nurses came and went silently. A physician with a grey beard shook his head. Katharina put a cross into her uncle’s hands, but he fumbled and let it fall. Gertner picked his nails.

“ Nicolas! ”

“Yes, uncle, I am here.”

The stricken eyes sought his vainly, a shaking hand took him fiercely by the wrist. “They have poisoned me, Nicolas. Their spies were at the palace, everywhere. O Jesus curse them! O!”

“He is raving now,” Katharina said. “We can do nothing.”

The Canon paced about the dark house. It was changed beyond all recognition. It looked the same as it had always done, yet everything that he rapped upon with his questioning presence gave back only a dull sullen silence, as if the living soft centre of things had gone dead, had petrified. The deathwatch had conferred a lawless dispensation, and weird scenes of licence met him everywhere. In the little room that as a child he had shared with Andreas a pair of hounds, a bitch and her mate, reared up from the bed and snarled at him, baring their phosphorescent fangs in the darkness. Under a disordered table in the dining-hall he found his servant Max, and Toad, the Bishop’s jester, drunk and asleep, wrapped in a grotesque embrace, each with a hand thrust into the other’s lap. A stench like the stench of stagnant waters hung on the stairs. There was laughter in the servants’ quarters and the sounds of stealthy merrymaking. His own fingers when he lifted them to his face smelled of rot. He sat down by a dead fire in the solar and fell into a kind of trance between sleep and waking peopled by blurred phantoms.

In the dead hour before dawn he was summoned to the sickroom. There was in the globe of light about the bed that sense of suspended animation, of a finger lifted to lips, preparatory to the entrance of the black prince. Only the dying man himself seemed unaware that the moment was at hand. He hardly stirred at all now, and yet he appeared to be frantically busy. Life had shrunk to a swiftly spinning point within him, the last flywheel turning still as the engine approached its final collapse. The Canon was prey to an unshakeable feeling of incongruousness, of being inappropriately dressed, of being, somehow, all wrong. Suddenly the Bishop’s eyes flew open and stared upward with an expression of astonishment, and in a strong clear voice he cried: “No!” and all in the sickroom went utterly still and silent, as if fearing, like children in a hiding game, that to make a sound would mean being called forth to face some dreadful forfeit. “No! Keep him hence!” But the dark visitor would not be denied, and, battered and shapeless, an already indistinct pummelled soiled sack of pain and bafflement, Bishop Lucas Waczelrodt blundered into the darkness under the outstretched black wing of that enfolding cloak. The priest anointed his forehead with holy chrism. Katharina sobbed. Gertner looked up, frowning. The Canon turned away.