John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

Sometimes, however, he was sufficiently clear in his thinking to be surprised and even fascinated by his own equanimity in the face of death. That moment was now at hand the terror of which had been with him always on his journey hither, present in every landscape, no matter how bright and various the scenes, like an unmoving shadow, and yet now he was not afraid: he felt only vague melancholy and regret, and a certain anxiety lest he should miss this last and surely most distinguished experience the world would aflbrd him. He was convinced that he would be granted an insight, a vision, of profound significance, before the end. Was this why he was calm and unafraid, because this mysterious something toward which he was eagerly advancing hid from his gaze death’s true countenance? And was this the explanation for the prolonging of his agony, because it was not the death agony at all, but a manner of purification, a ritual suffering to be endured before his initiation into transcendent knowledge? Although he was gone too far now to expect that he might put to living use whatever lesson he was to learn, the profundity of the experience, he believed, would not be thus diminished. Was redemption still possible, then, even in this extremity?

Searching for an answer to this extraordinary question, his fevered understanding scavenged like a ragpicker among the detritus of his life, rummaging fitfully through the disconnected bits and scraps that were left. He could find no sense of significant meaning anywhere. Sometimes, however, he sank into a calm deep dreaming wherein he wandered at peace through the fields and palaces of memory. The past was still wonderfully intact there. Amid scenes of childhood and youth he marvelled at the wealth of detail that had stayed with him through all the years, stored away like winter fruit. He visited the old house in St Anne’s Lane, and walked again in quiet rapture through the streets and alleyways of the town. Here was St John’s, the school gate, the boys playing in the dust. A soft golden radiance held sway everywhere, a stylised sunlight. Tenderness and longing pierced him to the core. Had he ever in reality left Torun? Perhaps that was where his real, his essential self had remained, waiting patiently for him to return, as now, and claim his true estate. And here is the linden tree, in full leaf, steadfast and lovely, the very image of summer and silence, of happiness.

But always he returned from these backward journeys weary and dispirited, with no answers. Despair blossomed in him then, a rank hideous flower. Numbed by an overdose of grog, by an unexpectedly successful blending of herbs, or by simple weariness, he withdrew altogether from the realm of life, and lay, a shapeless piece of flesh and sweat and phlegm, in the most primitive, rudimentary state of being, a dull barely-breathing almost-death. Those periods were the worst of all.

At other times the past came to his present, in the form of little creatures, gaudy homunculi who marched into the sickroom and strutted up and down beside his couch, berating him for the injuries he had done them, or perched at his shoulder and chattered, explaining, justifying, denouncing. They were at once comic and sad. Canon Wodka came, and Professor Brudzewski, Novara and the Italians, even Uncle Lucas, pompous as ever, even the King of Poland, tipsy, with his crown awry. At first he knew them to be hallucinations, but then he realised that the matter was deeper than that: they were real enough, as real as anything can be that is not oneself, that is of the outside, for had he not always believed that others are not known but invented, that the world consists solely of oneself while all else is phantom, necessarily? Therefore they had a right to berate him, for who, if not he, was to blame for what they were, poor frail vainglorious creatures, tenants of his mind, whom he had invented, whom he was taking with him into death? They were having their last say, before the end. Girolamo alone of them was silent. He stood back in the shadows some way from the couch, with that inimitable mixture of detachment and fondness, one eyebrow raised in amiable mockery, smiling. Ah yes, Girolamo, you knew me — not so well as did that other, it’s true, but you did know me — and I could not bear to be known thus.

*

Where?

He had drifted down into a dreadful dark where all was silent and utterly still. He was frightened. He waited. After a long time, what seemed a long time, he saw at an immense distance a minute something in the darkness, it could not be called light, it was barely more than nothing, the absolute minimum imaginable, and he heard afar, faintly, O, faintly, a tiny shrieking, a grain of sound that was hardly anything in itself, that served only to define the infinite silence surrounding it. And then, it was strange, it was as if time had split somehow in two, as if the now and the not yet were both occurring at once, for he was conscious of watching something approaching through the dark distance while yet it had arrived, a huge steely shining bird it was, soaring on motionless outstretched great wings, terrible, O, terrible beyond words, and yet magnificent, carrying in its fearsome beak a fragment of blinding fire, and he tried to cry out, to utter the word, but in vain, for down the long arc of its flight the creature wheeled, already upon him even as it came, and branded the burning seal upon his brow.

Word!

O word!

Thou word that I lack!

And then he was once again upon that darkling shore, with the sea at his back and before him the at once mysterious and familiar land. There too was the cruel god, leading him away from the sea to where the others awaited him, the many others, the all. He could see nothing, yet he knew these things, knew also that the land into which he was descending now was at once all the lands he had known in his life, all! all the towns and the cities, the plains and woods, Prussia and Poland and Italy, Torun, Cracow, Padua and Bologna and Ferrara. And the god also, turning upon him full his great glazed stone face, was many in one, was Caspar Sturm, was Novara and Brudzewski, was Girolamo, was more, was his father and his mother, and their mothers and fathers, was the uncountable millions, and was also that other, that ineluctable other. The god spoke:

Here now is that which you sought, that thing which is itself and no other. Do you acknowledge it?

No, no, it was not so! There was only darkness and disorder here, and a great clamour of countless voices crying out in laughter and pain and execration; he would know nothing of this vileness and chaos.

Let me die!

But the god answered him:

Not yet.

Swiftly then he felt himself borne upwards, aching upwards into the world, and here was his cell, and dawnlight on the great arc of the Baltic, and it was Maytime. He was in pain, and his limbs were dead, but for the first time in many weeks his mind was wonderfully clear. This clarity, however, was uncanny, unlike anything experienced before; he did not trust it. All round about him a vast chill stillness reigned, as if he were poised at an immense height, in an infinity of air. Could it be he had been elevated thus only in order that he might witness desolations? For he wanted no more of that, the struggle and the anguish. Was this true despair at last? If so, it was a singularly undistinguished thing.

He slept for a little while, but was woken again by Anna when she came up with the basin and the razor to shave him. Could she not leave him in peace, even for a moment! But then he chided himself for his ingratitude. She had shown him great kindness during the long weeks of his illness. The shaving, the feeding, the wiping and the washing, these were her necessary rituals that held at bay the knowledge that soon now she would be left alone. He watched her as she bustled about the couch, setting up the basin, honing the razor, painting the lather upon his sunken jaws, all the while murmuring softly to herself, a tall, too-heavy, whey-faced woman in dusty black. Lately she had begun to yell at him, this unmoving grey effigy, as she would at a deaf mute, or an infant, not in anger or even impatience, but with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, as if she believed she were summoning him back by this means from the dark brink. Her manner irritated him beyond endurance, especially in the mornings, and he mouthed angry noises, and sometimes even tried to smack at her in impotent rage. Today, however, he was calm, and even managed a lop-sided smile, although she did not seem to recognise it as such, for she only peered at him apprehensively and asked if he were in pain. Poor Anna. He stared at her in wonderment. How she had aged! From the ripe well-made woman who had arrived at his tower twenty years before, she had without his noticing become a tremulous, agitated, faintly silly matron. Had he really had such scant regard for her that he had not even attended the commonplace phenomenon of her aging? She had been his housekeeper, and, on three occasions, more than that, three strange, now wholly unreal encounters into which he had been led by desperation and unbearable self-knowledge and surrender; she had thrice, then, been more, but not much more, certainly not enough to justify Dantiscus’s crass relentless hounding. Now, however, he wondered if perhaps those three nights were due a greater significance than he had been willing to grant. Perhaps, for her, they had been enough to keep her with him. For she could have left him. Her children were grown now. Heinrich, her son, had lately come out of the time of his apprenticeship in the cathedral bakery, and Carla was in service in the household of a burgher of the town. They would have supported her, if she had left him. She had chosen to remain. She had endured. Was this what she signified, what she meant? He recalled green days of hers, storms in spring and autumn moods, grievings in wintertime. He should have shown her more regard, then. Now it was too late.