John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Please sit,” Canon Koppernigk said, with a wintry smile. “There is something I can do for you?”

Giese laughed nervously. He was the younger of the two by some seven years only, yet his manner in Canon Koppernigk’s presence was that of a timid but eager bright schoolboy. With desperate nonchalance he said:

“Just passing, you know, and I thought I might call in to. .”

“Yes.”

Giese’s discomfited eye slid off and wandered about the cell. It was low and white, white everywhere: even the beams of the ceiling were white. On the wall behind the desk at which the Doctor sat was fixed an hourglass in a frame, his wide-brimmed hat hanging on a hook, and a wooden stand holding a few medical implements. Set in a deep embrasure, a small window with panes of bottled glass gave on to the Frisches Haff and the great arc of the Baltic beyond. The rickety door leading on to the wall was open, and out there could be seen the upright sundial and the triquetrum, a rudimentary crossbow affair over five ells tall for measuring celestial angles, a curiously distraught-looking thing standing with its frozen arms flung skywards. Was it with the aid of these poor pieces only, Giese wondered, that the Doctor had formulated his wonderful theory? A gull alighted on the windowsill, and for a moment he gazed thoughtfully at the bird’s pale eye magnified in the bottled glass. (Magnified? — but no, no, a foolish notion. .)

“I too have some interest in astronomy, you know, Doctor,” he said. “Of course, I am merely a dabbler, you understand. But I think I know enough to recognise greatness when I encounter it, as I have done, lately.” And he leered. Canon Koppernigk’s stony expression did not alter. He was really a peculiar cold closed person, difficult to touch. Giese sighed. “Well, in fact, Doctor, there is a matter on which I wished to speak to you. The subject is, how shall I say, a delicate one, painful even. Perhaps you know what I am referring to? No?” He began to fidget. He was seated on a low hard chair before the Doctor’s desk. It was on occasions such as this that he heartily regretted having accepted the position of Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter, which had fallen to him on Canon von Lossainen’s accession to the bishopric following the death of Lucas Waczelrodt: he was not cut out for this kind of thing, really. “It is your brother, you see,” he said carefully. “Canon Andreas.”

“O?”

“I know that it must be a painful subject for you, Doctor, and indeed that is why I have come to you personally, not only as Precentor, but as, I hope, a friend.” He paused. Canon Koppernigk raised one eyebrow enquiringly, but said nothing. “The Bishop, you see, and indeed the Chapter, all feel that, well, that your brother’s presence, in his lamentable condition, is not. . that is to say—”

“Presence?” said the Doctor. “But my brother is in Italy.”

Giese stared. “O but no, Doctor, no; I assumed that you — have you not been told? He is here, in Frauenburg. He has been here for some days now. I assumed he would have called on you. He is not — he is not well, you know.”

*

He was not well: he was a walking horror. In the years since the Canon had seen him last he had surrendered his own form to that of his disease, so that he was no longer a man but a memento mori only, a shrivelled twisted hunchbacked thing on whose ruined face was fixed a death’s-head grin. All this the Canon learned at second hand, for his brother kept away from him, not out of tact, of course, but because he found it amusing to haunt him from a distance, by proxy as it were, knowing how much more painful it would be that others should carry word of his disgraceful doings into the fastness of the Canon’s austere white tower. He lodged at a kip down in the stews (where else would have him?), but flaunted his frightful form by day in the environs of the cathedral, where he terrified the town’s children and their mothers alike; and once even, one Sunday morning, he came lurching up the central aisle during High Mass and knelt in elaborate genuflexion at the altar rails, behind which poor ailing Bishop von Lossainen sat in horror-stricken immobility on his purple throne.

It was not long, of course, until there began to be talk of black magic, of vampirism and werewolves. Crosses appeared on the doors of the town. A young girl, it was said, had been found in the hills with her throat torn open. By night a black-cloaked demon haunted the streets, and howling and eerie laughter was heard in the darkness. Toto the idiot, who had the gift of second sight, was said to have seen a huge bird with the pinched violet face of a man fly low over the roofs on All Souls’ Eve, shrieking. Hysteria spread through Frauenburg like the pest, and throughout that sombre smoky autumn small groups of grim-faced men gathered at twilight on street corners and muttered darkly, and mothers called their children home early from play. The Jews outside the walls began discreetly to fortify their houses, fearing a pogrom. Things could not continue thus.

The first snow of winter was falling when the canons met in the conference hall of the chapterhouse, determined finally to resolve the situation. They had already decided privately on a course of action, but a general convocation was necessary to put an official seal upon it. The meeting had a further purpose: Canon Koppernigk had so far remained entirely aloof from the problem, as if his brother were no concern of his, and the Chapter, outraged at his silence and apparent indifference, was determined that he should be made to bear his share of responsibility. Indeed, feeling among the canons ran so high that they were no longer quite clear in their minds as to which of the brothers deserved the harsher treatment, and some were even in favour of banishing both and thus having done with that troublesome tribe for good and ever.

The Canon arrived late at the chapterhouse, wrapped up against the cold and with his wide-brimmed hat pulled low. A thin forbidding figure in black, he moved slowly down the hall and took his place at the table, removed his hat, his gloves, and having crossed himself in silence folded his hands before him and lifted his eyes to the bruisedark sky looming in the high windows. His colleagues, who had fallen silent as he entered, now stirred themselves and glanced morosely about the table, dissatisfied and obscurely disappointed; they had somehow expected something of him today, something dramatic and untoward, a yell of defiance or a grovelling plea for leniency, even threats perhaps, or a curse, but not this, this nothingness —why, he was hardly here at all!

Giese at the head of the table coughed, and, continuing the address that Canon Nicolas’s coming had interrupted, said:

“The situation then, gentlemen, is delicate. The Bishop demands that we take action, and now even the people press for the afflicted Canon’s, ah, departure. However, I would counsel against too hasty or too severe a solution. We must not exaggerate the gravity of this affair. The Bishop himself, as we know, is not well, and therefore may not be expected perhaps to take a perfectly reasoned view on these matters—”

“ Is he saying that von Lossainen has the pox ?” someone enquired in a loud whisper, and there was a subdued rumble of laughter.

“—The people, of course,” Giese continued stoutly, “the people as ever are given to superstitious and hysterical talk, and should be ignored. We must recognise, gentlemen, that our brother, Canon Andreas, is mortally afflicted, but that he has not willed this terrible curse upon himself. We must, in short, try to be charitable. Now—” While before he had simply not looked at Canon Koppernigk, now he began elaborately and with tight-lipped sternness not to look at him, and fidgeted nervously with the sheaf of papers before him on the table. “—I have canvassed opinion generally among you, and certain proposals have emerged which are, in my opinion, somewhat extreme. However, these proposals are. . the proposals. . ah. .” Now he looked at the Canon, and blanched, and could not go on. There was silence, and then the Danziger Canon Heinrich Snellenburg, a big swarthy truculent man, snorted angrily down his nostrils and declared: