John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“What are you doing?” he said. “What are these?”

I gathered the books in my arms and struggled to my feet. “For you — for you, domine praeceptor! ”

Hesitantly he lifted the Almagest from atop the pile, and, with many a suspicious backward glance in my direction, took it to the window; I thought of an old grey rat scuttling off with a crust. He held the book close to his nose and examined it intently, sniffing and crooning, and the harsh lines of his face softened, and he smiled despite himself, biting his lip, old pleased grey rat, and click! I could almost hear that lever dip.

“A handsome volume,” he murmured, “handsome indeed. And costly too, I should think. What did you say your name was, Herr. ?”

And then, I think, I did weep. I recall tears, and more groans of adoration, and I on my knees again and he shooing me off, though with less distaste than before, I fancied. Behind him the clouds broke for a moment over the Baltic, and the sun of evening suddenly shone, a minor miracle, and I remembered that it was summer after all, that I was young, and the world was before me. I left him soon after that, with an invitation to return on the morrow, and staggered in blissful delirium into the streets, where even the leaden twilight and the filth in the sewers, the mud, the red gaping faces of the peasants, could not dampen my spirits. I found lodgings at an inn below the cathedral wall, and there partook of a nauseating dinner, that I remember in detail to this day, and, to follow, had a fat and extremely dirty, curiously androgynous whore.

* * *

I was up and about early next morning. Low sun on the Frisches Haff, the earth steaming faintly, wind freshening, the narrow streets awash with light and loud with the shrill cries of hawkers — aye, and my poor head splitting from the effects of that filthy poison which they dare to call wine. At the tower the bitch Schillings greeted me with another black look, but let me in without a word. The Canon was waiting for me in the observatory, in a state of extreme agitation. I had hardly crossed the threshold before he began to babble excitedly, and came at me waving his hands, forcing me to retreat before him. It was yesterday in reverse. I tried to make sense of what he was saying, but the fumes of last night’s revels had not yet dispersed, and phlegm not blood lay sluggish in my veins, and I could grasp only a jumble of words: Kulm. . the Bishop. . Löbau. . the castle. . venite! We were leaving Frauenburg. We were going to Löbau, in Royal Prussia. Bishop Giese was his friend. He was Bishop of Kulm. We would stay with him at Löbau Castle. (What did it mean?) We were leaving that morning, that minute — now! I shambled off in a daze and collected my belongings from the inn, and, when I returned, the Canon was already in the street, struggling into a brokendown hired carriage. I think if I had not arrived just then he would have left without giving me a second thought. The Schillings stuck out her fierce head at the door, the Canon groaned faintly and shrank back against the fusty seat, and as we moved off the focaria yelled after us like a fishwife something about being gone when we returned — on hearing which, I may add, I brightened up considerably.

There is a kind of lockjaw that comes with extreme embarrassment; I fell prey to that condition as we rattled through the streets of Frauenburg that morning. I may have been young, innocent I may have been, but I could guess easily enough the reason for our haste and the manner of our departure. It was not without justification, after all, that Luther had vilified Rome for its hypocrisy and its so-called celibacy, and no doubt now Bishop Dantiscus had instituted yet another drive against indecency among his clergy, as the Catholics were forever doing in those early days of the schism, eager to display their reforming zeal to a sceptical world. Not that I cared anything for that kind of nonsense; it was not the state of affairs between Canon Nicolas and the Schillings that troubled me (it did not trouble me much, at any rate), but the spectacle of Doctor Copernicus in the street, in public, involved in a sordid domestic scene. I could not speak, I say, and turned my face away from him and gazed out with such fierce concentration at drab Ermland passing by that it might have been the wonders of the Indies I beheld. Ah, how intolerant the young are of the frailties of the old! The Canon was silent also, until we reached the plain, and then he stirred and sighed, and there was a world of weariness in his voice when he asked:

“Tell me, young man, what do they say of me at Wittenberg?”

*

That dreary Prussian plain, I remember it. Enormous clouds, rolling down from the Baltic, kept pace with us as we were borne slowly southwards, their shadows stepping hugely across the empty land. Strange silence spread for miles about us, as if everything were somehow turned away, facing off into the limitless distance, and the muted clamour of our passage — creak of axles, monotonous thudding of hoofs — could not avail against that impassive quiet, that indifference. We met not a soul on the road, if road it could be called, but once, far in the distance, a band of horsemen appeared, galloping laboriously away, soundlessly. Through the narrow slit opposite me I could see the driver’s broad back bouncing and rolling, but as the hours crawled past it ceased to be a human form, and became a stone, a pillar of dust, the wing of some great bird. We passed through deserted villages where the houses were charred shells and dust blew in the streets, and the absence of the hum of human concourse was like a hole in the air itself. Thus do we voyage in dreams. Once, when I thought the Canon was asleep, I found him instead staring at me fixedly; another time when I turned to him he smiled a cunning and inexplicably alarming smile. Confused and frightened, I looked away hurriedly, out at the countryside revolving slowly around us, but there was no comfort for me there. The plain stretched away interminably, burnished by the strange brittle sunlight, and the wind sang softly. We might have been a thousand leagues from anywhere, adrift in the sphere of the fixed stars. He was still smiling, the old sorcerer, and it seemed to me that the smile said: this is my world, do you see? there is no Anna Schillings here, no gaping peasants, no bloodied statues, no Dantiscus, only the light and the emptiness, and that mysterious music high in the air which you cannot hear but which you know is there. And for the first time then I saw him whole, no longer the image of him I had carried with me from Wittenberg, but Copernicus himself— it self — the true thing, a cold brilliant object like a diamond (not like a diamond, but I am in a hurry), now all at once vividly familiar and yet untouchable still. It is not vouchsafed to many men to know another thus, with that awful clarity; when it comes, the vision is fleeting, the experience lasts only an instant, but the knowledge gleaned thereby remains forever. We reached Löbau, and in the flurry of arrival I felt that I was indeed waking from a dream. I waited for the Canon to acknowledge all that had happened out on the plain (whatever it was!), but he did not, would not, and I was disappointed. Well, for all I know, the old devil may have put a spell on me out there. But I shall always remember that eerie journey. Yes.

*

Löbau Castle was an enormous white stone fortress on a hill, its towers and turrets looking down over wooded slopes to the huddled roofs of the town. The air up there was crisp with the smell of spruce and pine. I might almost have been back in Germany. We drew into the courtyard and were greeted by an uproar of servants and grooms and hysterical dogs. A grizzled old fellow in a leather jerkin and patched breeches came to receive us. I took him for a steward or somesuch, but I was wrong: it was Bishop Giese himself. He greeted the Canon with grave solicitude. He hardly glanced at me, until, when he offered me the ring to kiss, I shook his hand instead, and that provoked a keen look. The two of them moved away together, the Canon shuffling slowly with bowed head, the Bishop supporting him with a gentle hand under his elbow, and the Canon groaned: