John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

I found Copernicus and Giese in the great hall of the castle, seated in silence in tall carved chairs on either side of the enormous hearth, on which, despite the mildness of the evening, stacked logs were blazing fiercely. The windows, set high up in the walls, let in but little of the evening’s radiance, and in the gloom the robes of the two still figures seemed to flow and merge into the elaborate flutings of the thrones on which they sat, so that to my bruised perception they appeared limbless, a pair of severed heads, ghastly in the fire’s crimson glow. Copernicus had put himself as close to the blaze as he could manage without risking combustion, but still he looked cold. As I entered the arc of flickering firelight, I found that he was watching me. I was weary, and incapable of subtlety, and once again I ignored my own injunction to go carefully. I held up the manuscript and said:

“I have read it, and find it is all I had expected it would be, more than I had hoped; will you allow me to take it to Nuremberg, to Petreius the printer?”

He did not answer immediately. The silence stretched out around us until it seemed to creak. At length he said:

“That is a question which we cannot discuss, yet.”

At that, as though he had been given a signal, the Bishop stirred himself and put an end to the discussion (discussion!). Had I eaten? Why then, I must! He would have Raphaël bring me supper in my room, for I should retire, it was late, I was ill and in need of rest. And, like a sleepy child, I allowed myself to be led away, too tired to protest, clutching the manuscript, baba’s favourite toy, to my breast. I looked back at Copernicus, and the severed head smiled and nodded, as if to say: sleep, little one, sleep now. My room looked somehow different, but I could not say in what way, until next morning when I noticed the desk, amply stocked with writing implements and paper, which they installed without my knowing. O the cunning!

*

A thought, which I find startling, has occurred to me, viz. that I was happy at Löbau Castle, perhaps happier than I had ever been before, or would be again. Is it true? Happiness. Happiness. I write down the word, I stare at it, but it means nothing. Happiness; how strange. When the world, which is populated for the most part by fools and hypocrites, talks of being happy, really it is talking about no more than the gratification of hunger — hunger for love, or revenge, money, suchlike — but that cannot be what I mean. I have never loved anyone, and if I had money I would not know what to do with it. Revenge, of course, is another matter; but it will not make me happy. At Löbau, certainly, I knew nothing of revenge, did not even suspect that one day I would desire it. What am I talking about? I cannot understand myself, these ravings. Yet the thought will not go away. I was happy that summer at Löbau. It is like a kind of message, sent to me from I do not know where; a cipher. Well then, let me see if I can discover what it was that made me happy, and then maybe I shall understand what this happiness meant.

*

Quickly the days acquired a rhythm. In the mornings I was awakened by the sombre tolling of the castle bell, signifying that in the chapel the Bishop was celebrating Mass. The thought of that strange secret ritual of blood and sacrifice being enacted close at hand in the dim light of dawn was at once comical and grotesque, and yet mysteriously consoling. After Mass came Raphaël, sleepy-eyed but unfailingly gay, to feed and barber me. He was such a pleasant creature, and was happy to chatter or keep silent as my mood demanded. Even his silence was merry. I tried repeatedly to elicit from him a precise description of his duties in the Bishop’s household, for it was apparent that he held a privileged position, but his answers were always vague. It occurred to me that he might be old Giese’s bastard. (Perhaps he was? I hope not.) Sometimes I had him accompany me when I went forth to take the air in the woods below the walls, but after that he was banished from my side and warned not to appear again with his distracting ways till evening, for I had work to do.

The astronomer who studies the motions of the stars is surely like a blind man, who, with only the staff of mathematics to guide him, must make a great, endless, hazardous journey that winds through innumerable desolate places. What will be the result? Proceeding anxiously for a while, and groping his way with his staff, he will at some time, leaning upon it, cry out in despair to Heaven, Earth and all the gods to aid him in his anguish. Thus, day after day, for ten weeks, beset by illness and, worse, uncertainty regarding the purpose of my labours, I struggled with the intricacies of Copernicus’s theory of the movements of the planets. This second reading of the manuscript was very different from the first deceptive glance, when, entranced by music, I went straight to the heart of the work, and cheerfully ignored the details. Ah, the details! Crouched at my desk, with my head in my hands, I did furious battle with them, moaning and muttering, weeping, laughing sometimes even, uncontrollably. I remember in particular the trouble caused me by the orbit of Mars, the warlord. That planet is a cunt! It nearly drove me insane. One day, despairing of ever comprehending the mystery of its orbit, I rose and dashed in frantic circles about the room, crashing my head against the walls. At length, when I had knocked myself near senseless, I sank to the floor with laughter booming in my ears, and a mocking voice — I swear it came from the fourth sphere itself! — roared at me: Good, Rheticus, very good! You have found what you sought, for just as you have whirled about this room, just so does Mars whirl in the heavens!

As if all this were not enough, I spent the evenings, when I should have been resting, locked in endless circular arguments with Copernicus, trying to persuade him to publish. These battles took place after dinner in the great hall, where a third carved throne had been provided for me before the fire. I say battles, but assaults would be a better word, for while I attacked, Copernicus merely cowered behind the ramparts of a stony silence, apparently untouchable. A remote grey figure, he sat huddled in the folds of his robe, staring before him, his jaw clenched tight as a gintrap. No matter how hot the fire, he was always cold. It was as if he generated coldness out of some frozen waste within him. Only when my pleading reached its fiercest intensity, when, beside myself with messianic fervour, I leaped to my feet and roared frantic exhortations at him, waving my arms, only then did his stolid defences show a trace of weakness. His head began to jerk from side to side, in a clockwork frenzy of refusal, while that ghastly grin spread wider and wider, and the sweat stood out on his brow, and, like a girl teasing herself with thoughts of rape, he peered down into the depths of the abyss into which I was inviting him to leap, hugging himself in horrified, panic-stricken glee. Sometimes, even, he was pressed so far that he spoke, but only in order to throw an obstacle in the path of my merciless advance, and then he was always careful to seize on some minor point of my argument, steering well clear of the main issue. Thus, when I put it to him that he had a duty to publish, if only to demonstrate the errors in Ptolemy, he shook a trembling finger at me and cried:

“We must follow the methods of the ancients! Anyone who thinks they are not to be trusted will squat forever in the wilderness outside the locked gates of our science, dreaming the dreams of the deranged about the motions of the spheres — and he will get what he deserves for thinking he can support his own ravings by slandering the ancients!”

Giese, for his part, liked to think of himself as the wise old mediator in these one-sided debates, and waded in now and again with some inane remark, which obviously he considered immensely learned and persuasive, and to which Copernicus and I attended in a painful polite silence, before continuing on as if the old clown had never opened his mouth. But he was happy enough, so long as he was allowed to say his piece, for, like all his breed, he saw no difference between words and actions, and felt that when something was said it was as good as done. He was not the only spectator on the battlefield. As the weeks went by, word spread through the castle, and even to the town and beyond, that free entertainment was being laid on each evening in the great hall, and soon we began to draw an audience of clerics and castle officials, fat burghers from the town, travelling charlatans on diplomatic missions to the See of Kulm, and God knows what all. Even the servants came creeping in to hear this wild man from Wittenberg perform. At first it disturbed me to have that faceless, softly breathing mass shifting and tittering behind me in the gloom, but I grew accustomed to it, in time. In fact, I began to enjoy myself. In the magic circle of the firelight, immured in the impregnable fortress high above the plain, I felt that I had been lifted out of the world of ordinary men into some rarefied aetherial sphere, where nothing that was soiled could touch me, where I touched nothing soiled. Outside it was summer, the peasants were working in the fields, emperors were waging wars, but here there was none of that, all that, blood and toil, things growing, slaughter and glory, bucolic pleasures, men dying — in short, life, no, none of that. For we were angels, playing an endless, celestial game. And I was happy.