John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

He believed in action, in the absolute necessity for action. Yet action horrified him, tending as it did inevitably to become violence. Nothing was stable: politics became war, law became slavery, life itself became death, sooner or later. Always the ritual collapsed in the face of the hideousness. The real world would not be gainsaid, being the true realm of action, but he must gainsay it, or despair. That was his problem.

*

Amongst the things he wished to forget from Cracow was his encounter with Professor Adalbert Brudzewski, the mathematician and astronomer. The memory of that mad mangled afternoon, however, was the ghost of a persistent giant with huge hairy paws that for years came at him again and again, laughing and bellowing, out of a crimson miasma of embarrassment and shame. It would not have been so bad if only Andreas had not been there to witness his humiliation. By rights he should not have been there: he had shown no interest whatever in Brudzewski or his classes until, after weeks of wheedling and grovelling, Nicolas had at last won a grudging invitation to the Professor’s house — to his house ! — and then he had announced in that languid way of his that he would go along too, since he had nothing better to do that day. Yet Nicolas made no protest, only shrugged, and frowned distractedly to show how little he cared in the matter, while in his imagination a marvellously haughty version of himself turned and told his brother briefly but with excoriating accuracy what a despicable hound he was.

*

Professor Brudzewski’s classes were rigorous and very exclusive, and were, as the Professor himself was fond of pointing out, one of the main bases on which the university’s impeccable reputation rested. Although he was of course a Ptolemeian, his recent cautious but by no means hostile commentary on Peurbach’s planetary theory had raised some eyebrows among his fellow academics — brows which, however, he immediately caused to knit again into their wonted, lamentably low state by means of a few good thumps in defence of Ptolemaic dogma, delivered with malicious relish to the more prominent temples of suspect scholarship. The Peurbachs of the present day might come and go, but Ptolemy was unassailable on his peak, and Professor Brudzewski was there to say so, as often and as strenuously as he deemed it necessary so to do.

Nicolas had read everything the Professor had ever written on the Ptolemaic theory. Out of all those weary hours of wading through the dry sands of a sealed mind there had been distilled one tiny precious drop of pearly doubt. He could no longer remember where or when he had found the flaw, along what starry trajectory, on which rung of those steadily ascending ladders of tabular calculation, but once detected it had brought the entire edifice of a life’s work crashing down with slow dreamlike inevitability. Professor Brudzewski knew that Ptolemy was gravely wrong. He could not of course admit it, even to himself; his investment was too great for that. This failure of nerve explained to Nicolas how it was that a mathematician of the first rank could stoop into deceit in order, in Aristotle’s words, to save the phenomena , that is, to devise a theory grounded firmly in the old reactionary dogmas that yet would account for the observed motions of the planets. There were cases, such as the wildly eccentric orbit of Mars, that the general Ptolemaic theory could not account for, but faced with these problems the Professor, like his Alexandrian magister before him, leant all the weight of his prodigious skill upon the formulae until they buckled into conformity.

At first Nicolas was ashamed on the Professor’s behalf. Then the shame gave way to compassion, and he began to regard the misfortunate old fellow with a rueful, almost paternal tenderness. He would help him! Yes, he would become a pupil, and in the classroom take him gently in hand and show him how he might admit his folly and thereby make amends for the years of stubborness and wilful blindness. And there would be another but very different book, perhaps the old man’s last, the crowning glory of his life, Tractatus contra Ptolemaeus , with a brief acknowledgment to the student — so young! so brilliant! — whose devastating arguments had been the thunderbolt that had struck down the author on his blithe blind way to Damascus. O yes. And though the text itself be forgotten, as surely it would be, generations of cosmologists as yet unborn would speak of the book with reverence as marking the first public appearance — so characteristically modest! — of one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Nicolas trembled, drunk on these mad visions of glory. Andreas glanced at him and smirked.

“You are sweating, brother, I can smell you from here.”

“I do not have your calm, Andreas. I worry. I very much want to hear him lecture.”

“Why? This stargazing and so forth, what good is it?”

Nicolas was shocked. What good? — the only certain good! But he could not say that, and contented himself with a smile of secret knowing. They passed under the spires of St Mary’s Church. Spring had come to Cracow, and the city today seemed somehow airborne, an intricate aetherial thing of rods and glass flying in sunlight through pale blue space. Andreas began to whistle. How handsome he was, after all, how dashing, in his velvet tunic and plumed cap, with his sword in its ornate scabbard swinging at his side. He had carried intact into manhood the frail heart-breaking beauty of his youth. Nicolas touched him tenderly on the arm.

“I am interested in these things, you see,” he said, “that is all.”

He had done his brother no wrong that he could think of, yet he seemed to be apologising; it was a familiar phenomenon.

“You are interested — of course you are,” Andreas answered. “But I imagine you are not entirely unmindful either that our dear uncle is watching our progress closely, eh?”

Nicolas nodded gloomily. “So: you think I am trying by being zealous to outflank you in his favour.”

“What else should I think? You did not want me to come with you today.”

“You were not invited!”

“Pah. You must understand, brother, that I know you, I know how you plot and scheme behind my back. I do not hate you for it, no — I only despise you.”

“Andreas.”

But Andreas had begun to whistle again, merrily.

*

Professor Brudzewski lived in a big old house in the shadow of St Mary’s. The brothers were shown into the hall and left to wait, ringed round by oppressive pillars of silence stretching up past the gallery to the high ceiling with its faded frescos. They looked about them blandly, as if to impress on someone watching them the innocence of their intentions, only to discover with a start that they were indeed being watched by a dim figure behind the screens to the left. They turned away hurriedly, and heard at their backs a soft mad laugh and footsteps retreating.

They waited for a long time, apparently forgotten, while the hall came gradually to weird life around them. At first it was a matter of doors flying open to admit disembodied voices that shredded the silence, before closing again slowly with a distinct but inexplicable air of menace. Then, when they had wearied of assuming an expectant smile at each unfinished entrance, the voices began to be followed through the doorways by their owners, an oddly distracted, anonymous assortment of persons who did not stay, however, but merely passed through in small tight groups of two or three, murmuring, on their absorbed way elsewhere. These enigmatic pilgrims were to cross Nicolas’s path throughout that day without ever giving up the secret of their mysterious doings.

The steward returned at last, a soft fat pale pear-shaped creature with a tiny voice and paddle feet and an immaculately bald white skull. He crooked a dainty finger at the brothers and led them into an adjoining room full of sudden sunlight from a high window. Briefly they glimpsed, as they entered by one door, a smiling girl in a green gown going out by another, leaving behind her trembling on the bright air an image of blurred beauty. Professor Brudzewski peered at them dubiously and said: