John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“We shall surrender, I suppose,” he said.

“For God’s sake—!”

“Herr Provost—!”

But Canon Koppernigk seemed strangely detached from these urgent matters. He stood up from the table slowly and walked away with a look of infinite weary sadness. At the door, however, he halted, and turning to Snellenburg said:

“By the way, Canon, you owe me a hundred marks.”

“ What? ”

“Some years ago I loaned you a hundred marks — you have not forgotten, I trust? I mention it only because I thought that, if we are all to be destroyed in the morning, we should make haste to set our affairs in order, pay off old scores — I mean debts — and so forth. But do not let it trouble you, please. Captain, good night, I must sleep now.”

*

The Knights did not attack, but instead marched south-west and razed the town of Neumark. Two thousand three hundred and forty-one souls perished in that onslaught. In the first days of the new year Land Provost Koppernigk sat in what remained of Neumark’s town hall, recording in his ledger, in his small precise hand, the names of the dead. It was his duty. An icy wind through a shattered casement at his back brought with it a sharp tang of smoke from the smouldering wreckage of the town. He was cold; he had never known such cold.

* * *

Frau Anna Schillings had that kind of beauty which seems to find relief in poor dress; a tall, fine-boned woman with delicate wrists and the high cheekbones typical of a Danziger, she appeared most at ease, and at her most handsome, in a plain grey gown with a laced bodice, and, perhaps, a scrap of French lace at the throat. Not for her the frills and flounces, the jewelled slippers and horned capuchons of the day. This attribute, this essential modesty of figure as well as of spirit, was now more than ever apparent, when circumstances had reduced a once lavish wardrobe to just one such gown as we have described. And it was in this very gown, with a dark cape wrapped about her shoulders against the cold, and her raven-black hair hidden under an old scarf, that she arrived in Frauenburg with her two poor mites, Heinrich and little Carla, at the beginning of that fateful year (how fateful it was to be she could not guess!), 1524.

As the physical woman prospered in misfortune, so too the spiritual found enhancement in adversity. Not for Frau Schillings the tears and tantrums with which troubles are most commonly greeted by the weaker sex. It is life, and one must make the best of it: such was her motto. This stoical fortitude had not always been easy to maintain: her dear Papa’s early death had awakened her rudely from the happy dreaming of early girlhood; then there had been Mama’s illness in the head. Nor was marriage the escape into security and happiness that she had imagined it would be. Georg. . poor, irresponsible Georg! She could not, even now, after he had gone off with those ruffians and left her and the little ones to fend for themselves as best they might — even now she could not find it in her heart to hate him for his wanton ways. There was this to be said for him, that he had never struck her, as some husbands were only too prone to do; or at least he had never beaten her, not badly, at any rate. Yes, she said, with that gentle smile that all who knew her knew so well, yes, there are many worse than my Georg in the world! And how dashing and gay he could be, and even, yes, how loving, when he was sober. Well, he was gone now, most likely for good and ever, and she must not brood upon the past; she must make a new life for herself, and for the children.

War is a thing invented by men, and yet perhaps it is the women who suffer most in times of strife among nations. Frau Schillings had lost almost everything in the dreadful war that was supposed to have ended — her home, her happiness, even her husband. Georg was a tailor, a real craftsman, with a good sound trade among the better Danzig families. Everything had been splendid: they had nice rooms above the shop, and money enough to satisfy their modest needs, and then the babies had come, first Heinrich and, not long after, little Carla — O yes, it was, it was, splendid! But then the war broke out, and Georg got that mad notion into his head that there was a fortune to be made in tailoring for the mercenaries. She had to admit, of course, that he might be right, but it was not long before he began to talk wildly of the need to follow the trade , as he put it, meaning, as she realised with dismay, that they should become some kind of camp-followers, trailing along in the wake of that dreadful gang of ragamuffins that the Prussians called an army. Well she would have none of that, no indeed! She was a spirited woman, and there was more than one clash between herself and Georg on the matter; but although she was spirited, she was also a woman, and Georg, of course, had his way in the end. He shut up shop, procured a wagon and a pair of horses, and before she knew it they were all four of them on the road.

It was a disaster, naturally. Georg, poor dreamer that he was, had imagined war as a kind of stately dance in which two gorgeously (and expensively!) caparisoned armies made ritual feints at each other on crisp mornings before breakfast. The reality — grotesque, absurd, and hideously cruel — was a terrible shock. His visions of brocaded and beribboned uniforms faded rapidly. He spent his days patching breeches and bloodstained tunics. He even took to cobbling — he, a master tailor! — for the few pennies that were in it. He grew ever more morose, and began drinking again, despite all his promises. He struck Carla once, and frequently shook poor Heinrich, who was not strong, until his teeth rattled. It could not continue thus, and one morning (it was the birthday of the Prince of Peace) Frau Schillings awoke in the filthy hovel of an inn where they had lodged for the night to find that her husband had fled, taking with him the wagon and the horses, the purse with their few remaining marks, and even hers and the children’s clothes — everything! The innkeeper, a venal rough brute, told her that Georg had gone off with a band a deserters led by one Krock, or Krack, some awful brutish name like that, and would she be so good now as to pay him what was owed for herself and the brats? She had no money? Well then, she would have to think of a way of paying him in kind then, wouldn’t she? It is a measure of the woman’s — we do not hesitate to say it — of the woman’s saintliness that at first she did not understand what the beastly fellow was suggesting; and when he had told her precisely what he meant, she gave vent to a low scream and burst immediately into tears. Never!

As she lay upon that bed of shame, for she was forced in the end to allow that animal to have his evil way with her, she reflected bitterly that all this misfortune that had befallen her was due not to Georg’s frailty, not really, but to a silly dispute between the King of Poland and that dreadful Albrecht person. How she despised them, princes and politicians, despised them all! And was she not perhaps justified? Are not our leaders sometimes open to accusations of irresponsibility on a scale far greater than ever the poor Georg Schillingses of this world may aspire to? And you may not say that this contempt was merely the bitter reaction of an empty-headed woman searching blindly for some symbol of the world of men which she might blame for wrongs partly wrought by her own lack of character, for Anna Schillings had been educated (her father had wanted a son), she could read and write, she knew something of the world of books, and could hold her own in logical debate with any man of her class. O yes, Anna Schillings had opinions of her own, and firm ones at that.

Those weeks following Georg’s departure constituted the worst time that she was ever to know. How she survived that awful period we shall not describe; we draw a veil over that subject, and shall confine ourselves to saying that in those weeks she learned that there are abroad far greater and crueller scoundrels than that concupiscent innkeeper we have spoken of already.