John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

*

Now, where was I? Ah, I have left poor Canon Nicolas petrified all night before his lectern and his bible, posing for his portrait. He was in sixty-sixth year, an old man whose robes, cut for a younger, stouter self, hung about him in sombre folds like a kind of silt deposited by time. His face — teeth gone in the slack mouth, skin stretched tight on the high northern cheekbones — had already taken on that blurred, faded quality that is the first bloom of death. Thus must my own face appear now to others. Ah. . He wore no beard, but the morning blade, trembling in an unsteady grip, had left unreaped on his chin and in the deep cleft above the upper lip a few stray grizzled hairs. A velvet cap sat upon his skull like a poultice. This, surely, was not that Doctor Copernicus, that great man, whom I had come to Frauenburg to find! The eyes, however, intense and infinitely clever, and filled with what I can only call an exalted cunning, identified him as the one I sought.

Nor was his observatory what I had thought it would be. I had expected something old-fashioned, it’s true, a cosy little lair full of scholarly clutter, books and manuscripts, parchments crawling with complex calculations, all this draped in the obligatory membrane of vivid dust. Also, unaccountably, I had expected warmth, thick yellow warmth, like a species of inspirational cheese, in which would be embedded in his mellow old age the master, a jolly old fellow, absent-minded and unworldly, but sharp, sharp, putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece preparatory to unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world. The room I was in, however, was straight out of the last century, if not the one before, and more like an alchemist’s cell than the workroom of a great modern scientist. The white walls were bare as bone, the beamed ceiling too. I saw no more than a handful of books. The instruments on the table had the self-conscious look of things that have been brought out for display. The window let in a hard merciless light. And the cold! Science here was not the cheerful, confident quest for certainties that I knew, but the old huggermugger of spells and talismans and secret signs. A leering death’s-head and a clutch of dried batwings would not have surprised me. The air reeked of the chill sweat of guilt.

I did not take in all this detail at once — although it was all registered in my sense of shock — for at first I was distracted by waiting for him to offer some excuse, or at least explanation, regarding our prior meeting. When I realised, to my surprise and puzzlement (remember, I did not know him yet as I was to come to know him later), that he had no intention of doing so, I knew there was nothing for it but to play, as best I could, the part of the simpering idiot that obviously he considered me to be. In the circumstances, then, something dramatic was required. I crossed the room, I bounded across the room, and with my face lifted in doglike veneration I genuflected before him, crying:

“ Domine praeceptor! ”

Startled, he backed away from me, mumbling under his breath and trying not to see me, but I hobbled after him, still on one knee, until a corner of the table nudged him in the rear and he jumped in fright and halted. The instruments on the table, quivering from the collision, set up a tiny racket of chiming and chattering that seemed in the sudden silence to express exactly the old man’s panic and confusion. You see? You see? How can I be expected to be grave?

“Who are you?” he demanded petulantly, and did not bother to listen when I told him my name a second time. “You are not from the Bishop, are you?” He watched me carefully.

“No, Meister , I know no Bishop, nor king nor prince; I am ruled only by the greatest of lords, which is science.”

“Yes yes, well, get up, will you, get up.”

I rose, and rising suddenly remembered the words of my speech, which I delivered, in one breath, at high speed. Very flowery. Sat verbum.

Throughout that meeting we moved in circles about the room in a slow stealthy chase, he leading, keeping well out of my reach for fear I might attempt a sudden assault, and I following hard upon his heels uttering shrill cries of adoration and entreaty, throwing my arms about and tripping over the furniture in my excitement. We communicated (communicated!) in a kind of macaronic jabber, for whereas I found German most natural, the Canon was wont to lapse into Latin, and no sooner did I join him than we found ourselves stumbling into the vernacular again. O, it was great fun, truly. He was singularly unimpressed by my academic pedigree; his face took on a look of frank horror when it dawned upon him that I was a Lutheran — holy God, one of them! What would the Bishop say? But hold hard, Rheticus, hold hard now, you must be fair to him. Yes, I must be fair to him. I cannot in fairness blame a timorous cleric, who desired above all not to be noticed , for his dread at the arrival in his tower fortress of a firebrand from Protestant Wittenberg. Three months previous to my coming, the Bishop, Dantiscus the sleek, had issued an edict ordering all Lutherans out of Ermland on pain of dispossession or even death, and shortly thereafter he was to issue another, calling for all heretical — meaning Lutheran, natürlich —books and pamphlets to be burned in public. A nice gentleman, Dantiscus the bookburner: I shall have some more to say of him presently.

(In fairness to myself , I must add that Wittenberg considered Copernicus at best a madman, at worst the Antichrist. Luther himself, in one of those famous after-dinner harangues, amid the belches and the farts, had sneered at the notion of a heliocentric universe, thus displaying once again his unfailing discernment; so also had Melanchton mocked the theory — even Melanchton, my first patron! Therefore you see that the Meister was less than popular where I came from, and I was granted leave of absence to visit him only because of who and what I was, and not because the Wittenberg authorities approved of the Ermlander’s theories. I wanted to make that point clear, for the sake of accuracy.)

So, as I have said, he was not impressed et cetera — indeed, so unimpressed was he, that he seemed not even fully aware of my presence, for he kept on as it were sliding away from me, as though avoiding a distasteful memory, picking at his robe with agitated fingers and grimacing to himself. He was not thinking of me, but of the consequences of me, so to speak ( What will the Bishop say! ). I was profoundly disappointed, or rather, I was aware that something profoundly disappointing was occurring, for I myself, the essential I, was hardly there. That is not very clear. No matter. Doctor Copernicus, who before had represented for me the very spirit incarnate of the New Age, was now revealed as a cautious cold old brute obsessed with appearances and the security of his prebend. Is it possible to be disconcerted to the point of tears?

And yet there was something that told me all was not lost, that my pilgrimage might not have been in vain: it was a faint uncertainty in his look, a tiny tension, as if there were, deep within him, a lever longing to be pressed. I had brought gifts with me, fine printed editions of Ptolemy and Euclid, Regiomontanus and others, O, there must have been a dozen volumes in all, which I had had rebound (at a cost I do not care even now to recall), with his initials and a pretty monogram stamped in gold on the spines. These books I had cunningly dispersed throughout my luggage for fear of brigands, so that now when I remembered them and fell upon my bags in a final frantic burst of hope, they fell, diamonds amid ashes, out of a storm of shirts and shoes and soiled linen, and There! I cried, and There! near to tears, challenging him to find it in his cold heart to reject this ultimate token of homage.