John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

*

Before I leave this part of my tale, there is something more I must mention. To this day I am uncertain whether or not what I am about to relate did in reality take place. On the following day, when I was well out on my flight from Heilsberg, and was wondering, in great trepidation, if Dantiscus, finding me gone without a word, might think to send after me, and drag me back to another round of drinking and carousing, suddenly, like some great thing swooping down on me out of a sky that a moment before had been empty, there came into my head the memory, I call it a memory, for convenience, of having seen Raphaël yesterday at the castle — Raphaël, that laughing lad from Löbau! He had been in the courtyard, surrounded by that lemon-coloured sunlight and the hither and thithering figures, mounted on a black horse. How clearly I remembered him! — or imagined that I did. He had grown a little since last I had seen him, for he was at that age when boys shoot up like saplings, and was very elegantly got up in cap and boots and cape, quite the little gentleman, but Raphaël for all that, unmistakably, I would have known him anywhere, at any age. I see it still, that scene, the sunlight, and the rippling of the horse’s glossy blue-black flanks, the groom’s hand upon the bridle, and the slim, capped and crimson-caped, booted, beautiful boy, that scene, I see it, and wonder that such a frail tender thing survived so long, to bring me comfort now, and make me young again, here in this horrid place. Raphaël. I write down the name, slowly, say it softly aloud, and hear aetherial echoes of seraphs singing. Raphaël. I have tears still. Why was he there, so far from home? The answer, of course, was simple, viz. the boy had brought my book from Löbau. Yet was there not more to it than that? I called his name, too late, for he was already at the gate, on his way home, and Dantiscus, taking me by the arm, said: friend, you should be careful , and gave me a strange look. What did he mean? Or did he speak, really? Did I imagine it, all of it? Was it a dream, which I am dreaming still? If that is so, if it was but a delusion spawned by a mind sodden with drink, then I say the imagining was prophetic, in a way, as I shall demonstrate, in its place.

* * *

I returned home then to Wittenberg, only to find to my dismay that it was no longer home. How to explain this strange sensation? You know it well, I’m sure. The university, my friends and teachers, my rooms, my books, all were just as when I had left them, and yet all were changed. It was as if some subtle blight had contaminated everything I knew, the heart of everything, the essential centre, while the surface remained sound. It took me some time to understand that it was not Wittenberg that was blighted, but myself. The wizard of Frauenburg had put his spell on me, and one thing, one only thing, I knew, would set me free of that enchantment. After my ignominious flight from Heilsberg, all interest in Copernicus’s work had mysteriously abandoned me, despite the lie I had told Dantiscus regarding the imaginary triumph I had scored at Löbau; for I had now no intention of continuing my campaign to force Copernicus to publish. I say that interest in his work abandoned me, and not vice versa, for thus it happened. I had no hand in it: simply, all notion of returning to Frauenburg, and joining battle with him again, all that just departed, and was as though it had never been. Had some secret sense within me perceived the peril that awaited me in Prussia? If so, that warning sense was not strong enough, for I was hardly back in Wittenberg before I found myself in correspondence with Petreius the printer. O, I was vague, and wrote that he must understand that there was no question now of publishing the main work; but I was, I said, preparing a Narratio secunda (which I was not), and since it would contain many diagrams and tables and suchlike taken direct from De revolutionibus , it was necessary that I should know what his block-cutters and type-setters were capable of in the matter of detail et cetera. However, despite all my caution and circumlocutions, Petreius, with unintentional and uncanny good aim, ignored entirely all mention of a second Narratio , and replied huffily that, as I should know, his craftsmen were second to none where scientific works were concerned, and he would gladly and with confidence contract to put between boards Copernicus’s great treatise, of which he had heard so many reports.

Although this pompous letter angered and disturbed me, I soon came to regard it as an omen, and began again to toy with the idea of returning to Frauenburg. Not, you understand, that I was ready to go rushing off northwards once more, with cap in hand, and panting with enthusiasm, to make a fool of myself as I had done before, O no; this time if I journeyed it would be for my own purposes that I would do so, to find my lost self, as it were, and rid myself of this spell, so as to come home to my beloved Wittenberg again, and find it whole, and be at peace. Therefore, as soon as I was free, I set out with a stout heart, by post-carriage, on horseback, sometimes on foot, and arrived at Frauenburg at summer’s end, 1540, and was relieved to find Copernicus not yet dead, and still in possession, more or less, of his faculties. He greeted me with a characteristic display of enthusiasm, viz. a start, an owlish stare, and then a hangman’s handshake. The Schillings was still with him, and Dantiscus, need I say it, was still howling for her to be gone. For a long time now he had been using Giese to transmit his threats. Sculteti, Copernicus’s ally in the affair of the focariae , whom Dantiscus had mentioned, had it seemed been expelled by the Chapter, and had flown to Italy. This departure, along with Dantiscus’s increasingly menacing behaviour, had forced Copernicus to make a last desperate effort to get rid of her, but in vain. There had been a furious argument (smashed crockery, screams, pisspots flying through windows and striking passers-by: the usual, I suppose), which had ended with the Mädchen packing up her belongings and sending them off, at great expense (the Canon’s), to Danzig, where some remnant of her tribe kept an inn, or a bawdyhouse, I forget which. However, it seems she considered this so to speak symbolic departure a sufficiently stern rebuke to Copernicus for his ill nature, and in reality had no intention of following after her chattels, which in due time returned, like some awful ineluctable curse. So we settled down, the three of us, in our tower, where life was barely, just barely, tolerable. I kept out of the way of the Schillings, not for fear of her, but for fear of throttling her; between the two of us the old man cowered, mumbling and sighing and trying his best to die. Soon, I could see, he would succeed in doing that. Death was slinking up behind him, with its black sack at the ready. I would have to work quickly, if I were to snatch his book from him before he took it with him into that suffocating darkness. Yet, if his body was weakening, his mind was still capable of withholding, in an iron grip, that for which I had come: the decision to publish.

*

I stayed with him for more than a year, tormented by boredom and frustration, and an unrelenting irritation at the impossible old fool and his ways. He agreed that I might make a copy of the manuscript, and that at least was some occupation; the work might even have calmed my restless spirit, had he not insisted on reminding me every day that I must not imagine, merely because he had relented thus far, that he would go farther, and allow me to take this copy to Petreius. So that there was little more for me in this scribbling than aching knuckles, and the occasional, malicious pleasure of correcting his slips (I crossed out that nonsensical line in which he speculated on the possibility of elliptical orbits— elliptical orbits , for God’s sake!). Various other small tasks which I performed, to relieve the tedium, included the completion of a map of Prussia, which the old man, in collaboration with the disgraced Sculteti, had begun at the request of the previous Bishop of Ermland. This, along with some other trivial things, I sent off to Albrecht, Duke of Prussia, who rewarded me with the princely sum of one ducat. So much for aristocratic patronage! However, it was not for money I had approached this Lutheran Duke, but rather in the hope that he might use on my behalf his considerable influence among German churchmen and nobles, who I feared might make trouble should I win Copernicus’s consent, and appear in their midst with a manuscript full of dangerous theories clutched under my arm. The Duke, I found, was more generous with paper and ink than he had been with his ducats; he sent letters to Johann Friedrich, Elector of Saxony, and also to the University of Wittenberg, mentioning how impressed he had been with the Narratio prima ( clever old Giese!), and urging that I should be allowed to publish what he called this admirable book on astronomy , meaning De revolutionibus. There was some confusion, of course; there always is. Albrecht, like Petreius, apparently had found it inconceivable that I should be so eager to publish the work of another, and therefore he assumed that I was attempting some crafty ruse whereby I hoped to put out my own theories in disguise; did I think to fool the Duke of Prussia? thought haughty Albrecht, and put down in his letters what to him was obvious: that the work was all my own. The cretin. I had no end of trouble disentangling that mess, while at the same time keeping these manoeuvres hidden from the Canon, who was wont to spit at the mention of the name of Grand Master Albrecht, as he insisted on calling him.