John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

He learned with ease, perhaps too easily. The masters resented him, who swallowed down their hard-won knowledge in swift effortless draughts. It was as if they were not really teaching him, but were merely confirming what he knew already. Dimly he saw how deeply he thus insulted them, and so he feigned dull-wittedness. He watched certain of his classmates, and learned from them, to whom it came quite naturally, the knack of letting his lower lip hang and his eyes glaze over when some complexity held up the progress of a lesson; and sure enough the masters softened toward him, and at length to his relief began to ignore him.

But there were some not so easily fooled.

*

Caspar Sturm was a Canon of the Chapter of Włocławek Cathedral, to which the school was attached. He taught the trivium of logic and grammar and Latin rhetoric. Tall and lean, hard, dark, death-laden, he stalked through the school like a wolf, always alone, always seemingly searching. He was famous in the town for his women and his solitary drinking bouts. He feared neither God nor the Bishop, and hated many things. Some said he had killed a man once long ago, and had entered the Church to atone for his sin: that was why he had not taken Holy Orders. There were other stories too, that he was the King of Poland’s bastard, that he had gambled away an immense fortune, that he slept in sheets of scarlet silk. Nicolas believed it all.

The school feared Canon Sturm and his moods. Some days his classes were the quietest in the hall, when the boys sat mute and meek, transfixed by his icy stare and the hypnotic rhythm of his voice; at other times he held riotous assembly, stamping about and waving his arms, roaring, laughing, leaping among the benches to slash with the whip he always carried at the fleeing shoulders of a miscreant. His fellow teachers eyed him with distaste as he pranced and yelled, but they said nothing, even when his antics threatened to turn their classes too into bedlam. Their forbearance was an acknowledgment of his wayward brilliance — or it might have been only that they too, like the boys, were afraid of him.

He chose his favourites from among the dullards of the school, hulking fellows bulging with brawn and boils who sprawled at their desks and grinned and guffawed, basking in the assurance of his patronage. He looked on them with a kind of warm contempt. They amused him. He cuffed and pummelled them merrily, and with cruel shafts of wit exposed their irredeemable ignorance, making them squirm before the class in stuttering sullen shame; yet still they loved him, and were fiercely loyal.

On Nicolas he turned a keen and quizzical eye. The boy blushed and bowed his head, embarrassed. There was something indecent in the way Caspar Sturm looked at him, gently but firmly lifting aside the mask and delving into the soft palpitating core of his soul. Nicolas clenched his fists, and a drop of sweat trickled down his breastbone. You must not understand me! The master rarely addressed him directly, and when he did there settled around them a private silence fraught with cloying unspeakable intimacies that neither would think of attempting to speak, and Canon Sturm stepped back and nodded curtly, as if he had satisfied himself once again of the validity of a conclusion previously reached.

“And here is Andreas, elder scion of the house of Koppernigk! Come, dolt, what can you tell us now of Tullius’s rules for the art of memory, eh?”

*

He learned with ease, perhaps too easily: his studies bored him. Only now and then, in the grave cold music of mathematics, in the stately march of a Latin line, in logic’s hard bright lucid, faintly frightening certainties, did he dimly perceive the contours of some glistening ravishing thing assembling itself out of blocks of glassy air in a clear blue unearthly sky, and then there thrummed within him a coppery chord of perfect bliss.

“Herr Sturm Herr Sturm!” the class cried, “a conundrum, Herr Sturm!”

“What! Are we here to learn or to play games?”

“Ach, Herr Sturm!”

“Very well, very well. Regard:”

In a room there are 3 men, A & B who are blindfold, & C who is blind. On a table in this room there are 3 black hats & 2 white hats, 5 hats in all. A 4th man enters: call him D. He, D, places a hat on each of the heads of A & B & C, and the 2 remaining hats he hides. Now D removes the blindfold from A, who thus can see the hats that B & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the 2 hats that are hidden. D asks A if he can say what colour is the hat that he, A, is wearing? A ponders, and answers:

“No.”

Now D removes the blindfold from B, who thus can see the hats that A & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the two hats that are hidden. D asks B if he can say what colour is the hat that he, B, is wearing? B ponders, hesitates, and answers:

“No.”

Now: D cannot remove the blindfold from C, who does not wear a blindfold, and can see no hats at all, not white nor black, not worn nor hidden, for C, as said, is blind. D asks C if he can say what colour is the hat that he, C, is wearing? C ponders, smiles, and answers:

“Yes!”

“—Well, gentlemen,” said Canon Sturm, “what is the colour of the blind man’s hat, and how does he know it?”

The glass blocks sailed in silence through the bright air, and locked.

Done!

Harmonia.

“Well, young Koppernigk? You have solved it?”

Startled, Nicolas ducked his head and began scribbling feverishly on his slate. He was hot all over, and sweating, aghast to think that his face might have betrayed him, but despite all that he was ridiculously pleased with himself, and had to concentrate very hard on the thought of death in order to keep from grinning.

“Come, man,” the Canon muttered. “Have you got it?”

“Not yet, sir, I am working on it sir.”

“Ah. You are working on it.”

And Caspar Sturm stepped back, and nodded curtly.

*

And then there was Canon Wodka. Nicolas walked with him by the river. It was the Vistula, the same that washed in vain the ineradicable mire of Torun — that is, the name was the same, but the name meant nothing. Here the river was young, as it were, a bright swift stream, while there it was old and weary. Yet it was at once here and there, young and old at once, and its youth and age were separated not by years but leagues. He murmured aloud the river’s name and heard in that word suddenly the concepts of space and time fractured.

Canon Wodka laughed. “You have a clerkly conscience, Nicolas.” It was true: what the world took for granted he found a source of doubt and fear. He would not have had it otherwise. The Canon’s smile faltered, and he glanced at the boy timidly, tenderly, out of troubled eyes. “Beware these enigmas, my young friend. They exercise the mind, but they cannot teach us how to live.”

Canon Wodka was an old man of thirty. He was startlingly ugly, a squat fat waddling creature with a globular head and pockmarked face and tiny wet red mouth. His hands were extraordinary things, brown and withered like the claws of a bat. Only his eyes, disconsolate and bright, revealed the sad maimed soul within. To the school he was a figure of rare fun, and Canon Sturm’s boys loved to follow him at a lurch down the corridors, mocking his preposterous gait. Even his name, so perfectly inapt, conspired to make a clown of him, a role to which he seemed to have resigned himself, for it was in irony that he had taken the name Abstemius, and when thus addressed would sometimes cross his eyes and let his great head loll about in a travesty of drunkenness. Nicolas suspected that the Canon, despite his admonition, derived from the intricacies of pure playful thought the only consolation afforded by a life that he had never quite learned how to live.