John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Ah!”

He had a long yellowish face with a little pointed grey beard clenched under the lower lip like a fang. His back was so grievously bent that his loose black robe, fastened tight at the throat, hung down to the floor curtainwise. Through a vent at the side was thrust a gnarled claw in which there was fixed, as a peg into a socket, the stout black stick that alone it seemed prevented him from collapsing in a little heap of dust and drapery and dry bones. This seeming frailty was deceptive: he was a quick-tempered cold old body who disliked the world, and tolerated it at best, or, when it made so bold as to accost him face to face, lashed out at it with high-pitched furious loathing.

There was a silence; it was plainly apparent that he had no idea who his guests were, and hardly cared. Nicolas felt his smile curdle into a sickly smirk. He could think of nothing to say. Andreas, clutching the hilt of his sword — which both brothers at once, wincing, suddenly remembered he was forbidden by college rules to wear in public — stepped forward with a clank.

“ Magister ! this is my brother, Nicolas Koppernigk, whom you know, of course; I am Andreas of that name. We come in humility to this veritable Olympus. Ha ha. Our uncle, Doctor Lucas Waczelrodt, Bishop of Ermland, sends greetings.”

“Yes yes, quite so,” the Professor muttered. “Quite so.” He had not been listening. He looked past them with a frown to the doorway where three gentlemen had entered quietly, and stood now in a huddle, whispering. One was tall and thin, another short and fat, and the third, whose back was turned, was a middling sort with warts. They had a look about them of conspirators. Professor Brudzewski began to make a whirring noise under his breath. Abruptly he excused himself, set off rapidly crabwise for the door through which the green girl had gone, mumbled something that the brothers did not catch, and vanished. The conspirators hesitated, exchanging looks and hopping agitatedly from foot to foot, and then all together in a rush plunged after him, almost knocking over in their haste the steward returning with two incongruously jolly foaming mugs of beer, which he tenderly bestowed upon the guests in silence, with a mournful smile. Cloudshadow swooped into the room like a great dark bird.

After that for a long time the brothers drifted slowly about the house, somewhat dazed, jostled by flotsam. A strange distraught little man in cloak and hose with an absurd feather in his hat waylaid them in a corridor and launched without preamble into a bitter invective against the incompetence of the Chaldean cosmographers, who he seemed to feel had injured him personally in some mysterious way. Andreas slipped off, leaving Nicolas to stand alone, smiling and nodding helplessly, under a fine spray of spittle. At last the little man wound down, and, panting, departed, nodding furious approval of his own arguments. Nicolas turned, and turning caught at the edge of a canted mirror blazing with reflected sunlight a glimpse of green, that smile again, that girl! and all at once he knew her to be an emblem of light and elusive loveliness, a talisman whose image he might hold up against the malignant chaos of this ramshackle afternoon.

He hurried down the corridor, following the mirror’s burning gaze, and turned a corner to find no girl, only the black stooped figure of the Professor tapping his way toward him.

“Ah, you!” the old man said peevishly. “Where have you been?” He frowned. “Were there not two of you? Well, no matter.”

Nicolas launched forth at once upon the speech that for days he had been preparing. He stammered and sweated, beside himself in his eagerness to impress. Pythagoras! Plato! Nicolas Cusanus! The names of the glorious dead rolled out of his mouth and crashed together in the narrow corridor like great solid stone spheres. He hardly knew what he was saying. He felt that he had become entangled in the works of some dreadful yet farcical, inexorable engine. Herakleides! Aristotle! Regiomontanus! Bang! Crash! Clank! The Professor watched him carefully, as if studying a novel and possibly snappish species of rodent.

“Ptolemy, young man — you make no mention of Ptolemy, who has after all, as is well known, resolved for us the mysteries of the universe.”

“Yes but but but magister , if I may say, is it not true, has it not been suggested, that there are certain, how shall I say, certain dispositions of the phenomena that nothing in Ptolemy will explain?”

The Professor smiled a wan and wintry smile, and tapped on the oaken tiles with his stick as if searching for a flaw in the floor.

“And what,” he murmured, “might these inexplicable phenomena be?”

“O but I do not say that there are such mysteries, no no,” Nicolas answered hastily. “I am asking rather.”

This would not do, this faint-heartedness, it would not do at all. What was required now was a clear and fearless exposition of his views. But what were his views? And could they be spoken? It was one thing to know that Ptolemy had erred, and that planetary science since his time had been a vast conspiracy aimed at saving the phenomena, but it was quite another to put that knowledge into words, especially in the presence of a prime conspirator.

The orbit of the afternoon had brought him back to his starting point in the hall. He was confused, and growing desperate. Things were not at all as he had imagined they would be. The little man with the feather in his cap, scourge of the Chaldeans, passed them by with a fierce look.

He could only say what was not, and not what was; he could only say: this is false, and that is false, ergo that other must be true of which as yet I can discern only the blurred outline.

“It seems to me, magister , that we must revise our notions of the nature of things. For thirteen hundred years astronomers have been content to follow Ptolemy without question, like credulous women , as Regiomontanus says, but in all that time they have not been able to discern or deduce the principal thing, namely the shape of the universe and the unchanging symmetry of its parts.”

The Professor said: “Hum!” and flung open the door on the sunlit room and the high window. This time there was alas no green girl, only the ubiquitous trio of conspirators, each with a hand on another’s shoulder— Soft! See who comes ! — watching. The Professor advanced, shaking his head.

“I fail to understand you,” he growled. “The principal thing, you claim, is to, what was it? to discern the shape of the universe and its parts. I do not understand that. How is it to be done? We are here and the universe, so to speak, is there, and between the two there is no sensible connection, surely?”

The room was high and wide, with rough white walls above half panelling, a ceiling with arched black beams and a checkered stone floor. There was a table and four severe chairs, and on the table a burnished copper bowl brimming with rose petals. A plaster relief on one wall depicted three naked women joined hand to shoulder in a sinuous circular dance of giving, receiving and returning. Below them on the floor a pearwood chest stood smugly shut, opposite an antique hourglass-shaped iron stove with a brass canopy. The conspirators began imperceptibly to advance. The window’s stippled diamond panes gave on to a little courtyard and a stunted cherry tree in bloom. Suddenly Nicolas was appalled by the blank anonymity of surfaces, the sullen, somehow resentful secretiveness of unfamiliar things whose contours have been rubbed and shaped by the action of unknown lives. Doubtless for others this room was strung with a shimmering web of exquisitely exact significances, perhaps it was so even for these three peculiar persons edging stealthily forward; but not for Nicolas. He thought: what can we know that is not of ourselves?