John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

At last the summons came. Andreas went in first, pausing at the doorway to wipe his damp hands on his tunic and fix on his face an ingratiating leer. In a little while he came out again, scowling, and jerked his thumb at Nicolas.

“You next.”

“But what did he say to you?”

“Nothing. We are to be sent away.”

O!

Nicolas went in. The door snapped shut behind him like a mouth. Uncle Lucas was sitting at the big desk by the window with the family papers spread before him. He reminded Nicolas of a huge implacable frog. A panel of the high window stood open on a summer evening full of white clouds and dusty golden light.

“Sit, child.”

The desk was raised upon a dais, and when he sat on the low stool before it he could see only his uncle’s head and shoulders looming above him like a bust of hard grey grainy stone. He was frightened, and his knees would not stay still. The voice addressing him was a hollow booming noise directed less at him than at an idea in Uncle Lucas’s mind called vaguely Child, or Nephew, or Responsibility, and Nicolas could distinguish only the meaning of the words and not the sense of what was being said. His life was being calmly wrenched apart at the joints and reassembled unrecognisably in his uncle’s hands. He gazed intently upward through the window, and a part of him detached itself and floated free, out into the blue and golden air. Włocławek. It was the sound of some living thing being torn asunder. .

The interview was at an end, yet Nicolas still sat with his hands gripping his knees, quaking but determined. Uncle Lucas looked up darkly from the desk. “Well?”

“Please sir, I am to be a merchant, like my father.”

“What do you say, boy? Speak up.”

“Papa said that one day I should own the offices and the warehouses and all the ships and Andreas would go for the Church because you would find a place for him but I would stay here in Torun to tend the business, Papa said. You see,” faintly, “I do not think I really want to go away.”

Uncle Lucas blinked. “What age are you, child?”

“Ten years, sir.”

“You must finish your schooling.”

“But I am at St John’s.”

“Yes yes, but you will leave St John’s! Have you not listened? You will go to the Cathedral School at Włocławek, you and your brother both, and after that to the University of Cracow, where you will study canon law. Then you will enter the Church. I do not ask you to understand, only to obey.”

“But I want to stay here, please sir, with respect.”

There was a silence. Uncle Lucas gazed at the boy without expression, and then the great head turned, like part of an immense engine turning, to the window. He sighed.

“Your father’s business has failed. Torun has failed. The trade has gone to Danzig. He timed his death well. These papers, these so-called accounts: I am appalled. It is a disgrace, such incompetence. The Waczelrodts made him, and this is how he repays us. The house will be retained, and there will be some small annuities, but the rest must be sold off. I have said, child, that I do not expect you to understand, only to obey. Now you may go.”

Katharina was waiting for him in the hall. “I told you: far far away.”

*

The evening waned. He would not, could not weep, and his face, aching for tears, pained him. Anna the cook fed him sugar cakes and hot milk in the kitchen. He sat under the table. That was his favourite place. The last of the day’s sunlight shone through the window on copper pots and polished tiles. Outside, the spires of Torun dreamed in summer and silence. Everywhere he looked was inexpressible melancholy. Anna leaned down and peered at him in his lair.

“Aye, master, you’ll be a good boy now, eh?”

She grinned, baring yellowed stumps of teeth, and nodded and nodded. The sun withdrew stealthily, and a cloud the colour of a bruise loomed in the window.

“What is canon law, Anna, do you know?”

Barbara was to be sent to the Cistercian Convent at Kulm. He thought of his mother. The future was a foreign country; he did not want to go there.

“ Ach ja , you be a good boy, du, Knabe. ”

*

The wind blew on the day that he left, and everything waved and waved. The linden tree waved. Goodbye!

* * *

Dearest Sister:

I am sorry that I did not write to you before. Are you happy at the Convent? I am not happy here. I am not very unhappy. I miss you & Katharina & our house. The Masters here are very Cross. I have learned Latin very well & can speak it very well. We learn Geometry also which I like very much. There is one who is named Wodka but he calls himself Abstemius. We think that is very funny. There is another by name Caspar Sturm. He teaches Latin & other things. Does Andreas write to you? I do not see him very often: he goes with older fellows. I am very Lonely. It is snowing here now & very Cold. Uncle Lucas came to visit us. He did not remember my name. He tested me in Latin & gave me a Florin. He did not give Andreas a Florin. The Masters were afraid of him. They say he is to be the Bishop soon in Ermland. He did not say anything to me of that matter. I must go to Vespers now. I like Music: do you? I say Prayers for you & for everyone. We are going home for Christmas-tide: I mean to Torun. I hope that you are well. I hope that you will write to me soon & then I will write to you again.

Your Loving Brother:

Nic: Koppernigk

*

He was not very unhappy. He was waiting. Everything familiar had been taken away from him, and all here was strange. The school was a whirling wheel of noise and violence at the still centre of which he cowered, dizzy and frightened, wondering at the poise of those swaggering fellows with their rocky knuckles and terrible teeth, who knew all the rules, and never stumbled, and ignored him so completely. And even when the wheel slowed down, and he ventured out to the very rim, still he felt that he was living only half his life here at Włocławek, and that the other, better half was elsewhere, mysteriously. How otherwise to explain the small dull ache within him always, the ache that a severed limb leaves throbbing like an imprint of itself upon the emptiness dangling from the stump? In the cold and the dark at five in the mornings he rose in the mewling dormitory, aware that somewhere a part of him was turning languidly into a deeper lovelier sleep than his hard pallet would ever allow. Throughout his days that other self crossed his path again and again, always in sunlight, always smiling, taunting him with the beauty and grace of a phantom existence. So he waited, and endured as patiently as he could the mean years, believing that someday his sundered selves must meet in some far finer place, of which at moments he was afforded intimations, in green April weather, in the enormous wreckage of clouds, or in the aetherial splendours of High Mass.

He found curiously consoling the rigours of discipline and study. They sustained him in those times when the mind went dead, after he had been trounced by the band of bullies that were Andreas’s friends, or flogged for a minor misdemeanor, or when memories of home made him weep inside.

Lessons commenced at seven in the Great Hall after matins. At that grey hour nothing was real except discomfort, and there was neither sleep nor waking but a state very like hallucination between the two. The clatter and crack of boots on floorboards were the precise sounds that in the imagination chilled bones were making in their stiff sockets. Slowly the hours passed, sleep withdrew, and the morning settled down to endure itself until noon, when there was dinner in the refectory and then what they called play for an hour. The afternoons were awful. Time slackened to a standstill as the orbit of the day yawned out into emptiness in a long, slow, eccentric arc. The raucous babble of a dozen classes ranged about the room clashed in the stale thickening air, and the masters bellowed through the din in mounting desperation, and by evening the school, creeping befuddled toward sleep, knew that another such day was not to be borne. But day followed day with deathly inevitability, into weeks distinguished one from the next only by the dead caesura of the sabbath.