Doctor Copernicus (19 page)

“He is raving now,” Katharina said. “We can do nothing.”

The Canon paced about the dark house. It was changed beyond all recognition. It looked the same as it had always done, yet everything that he rapped upon with his questioning presence gave back
only a dull sullen silence, as if the living soft centre of things had gone dead, had petrified. The deathwatch had conferred a lawless dispensation, and weird scenes of licence met him everywhere.
In the little room that as a child he had shared with Andreas a pair of hounds, a bitch and her mate, reared up from the bed and snarled at him, baring their phosphorescent fangs in the darkness.
Under a disordered table in the dining-hall he found his servant Max, and Toad, the Bishop’s jester, drunk and asleep, wrapped in a grotesque embrace, each with a hand thrust into the
other’s lap. A stench like the stench of stagnant waters hung on the stairs. There was laughter in the servants’ quarters and the sounds of stealthy merrymaking. His own fingers when he
lifted them to his face smelled of rot. He sat down by a dead fire in the solar and fell into a kind of trance between sleep and waking peopled by blurred phantoms.

In the dead hour before dawn he was summoned to the sickroom. There was in the globe of light about the bed that sense of suspended animation, of a finger lifted to lips, preparatory to the
entrance of the black prince. Only the dying man himself seemed unaware that the moment was at hand. He hardly stirred at all now, and yet he appeared to be frantically busy. Life had shrunk to a
swiftly spinning point within him, the last flywheel turning still as the engine approached its final collapse. The Canon was prey to an unshakeable feeling of incongruousness, of being
inappropriately dressed, of being, somehow, all wrong. Suddenly the Bishop’s eyes flew open and stared upward with an expression of astonishment, and in a strong clear voice he cried:
“No!” and all in the sickroom went utterly still and silent, as if fearing, like children in a hiding game, that to make a sound would mean being called forth to face some dreadful
forfeit. “No! Keep him hence!” But the dark visitor would not be denied, and, battered and shapeless, an already indistinct pummelled soiled sack of pain and bafflement, Bishop Lucas
Waczelrodt blundered into the darkness under the outstretched black wing of that enfolding cloak. The priest anointed his forehead with holy chrism. Katharina sobbed. Gertner looked up, frowning.
The Canon turned away.

“Send at once to Heilsberg, tell them their Bishop is dead.”

The bells spoke.

*

Revolted by the pall of fake mourning put on by the house, Canon Nicolas slipped out by the servants’ passageway into the garden. The morning, sparkling with sun and
frost, seemed made of finely wrought glass. The garden had been let go to ruin, and it was with difficulty that memory cleared away the weeds and rubbish and restored it to what it had been once.
Here were the fruit bushes, the little paved path, the sundial—yes, yes, he remembered. As a child he had played here happily, soothed and reassured by the familiarity of the ramshackle:
weathered posts, smouldering bonfires, unaccountably amiable backs of houses, the gaiety of cabbages. And when he was older, how many mornings such as this had he stood here in chill brittle
sunlight, rapt and trembling at the thought of the infinite possibilities of the future, dreaming of mysterious pale young women in green gowns walking through dewy grass under great trees. He
passed through a gap in the tumbledown paling into the narrow lane that ran behind the gardens. Brambles sprouted here at the base of a high white wall. A faint, sweetish, not altogether unpleasant
tang of nightsoil laced the air. An old woman in a black cloak with a basket of eggs on her arm passed him by, bidding him
Grüss Gott
out of a toothless mouth. An extraordinary stealthy
stillness reigned, as if an event of great significance were waiting for him to be gone so that it could occur in perfect solitude. The night, the candles and the murmuring, the wracked creature
dying on the bed, all that was immensely far away now, unreal. Yet it had been as much a part of the world as this sunlight and stillness, those pencil-lines of blue smoke rising unruffled into the
paler blue: was all this also unreal, then? He turned, and stood for a long time gazing toward the linden tree. It was to be cut down, so Gertner had said. It was old, and in danger of falling. The
Canon nodded once, smiling a little, and walked back slowly through the resurrected garden to the house.

*     *     *

H
e could not in honesty mourn his uncle’s death. There was guilt, of course, regret at the thought of opportunities lost (perhaps I wronged
him?), but these were not true feelings, only empty rituals, purification rites, as it were, performed in order that the ghost might be laid; for death, he now realised, produces a sudden
nothingness in the world, a hole in the fabric of the world, with which the survivors must learn to live, and whether the lost one be loved or hated makes no difference, that learning still is
difficult. He was haunted for a long time by a kind of ferocious implacable absence stamped unmistakably with the Bishop’s seal.

Then, inevitably, came the feeling of relief. Cautiously he tested the bars of his cage and found them not so rigid as they had been before. He even began to look a little more kindly on his
work, telling himself that after all what he considered a poor flawed thing the world would surely think a wonder. He completed the
Commentariolus
, and, at once appalled and excited by his
own daring, had copies made of it by a scribe in the town which he quietly distributed among the few scholars he considered sympathetic and discreet. Then, with teeth gritted, he awaited the
explosion that would surely be set off by the seven axioms which together formed the basis of the theory of a sun-centred universe. He feared ridicule, refutations, abuse; most of all he feared
involvement. He would be dragged out, kicking and howling, into the market place, he would be stood on a platform like a fairground exhibit and invited to expound proofs. It was ridiculous,
horrible, not to be borne! Again he began to wonder if he would be well advised to destroy his work and thus have done with the whole business. But his book was all he had left—how could he
burn it? Yet if they should come, sneering and snarling and bellowing for proof, smash down his door and snatch the manuscript from his hands, dear God, what then?

It was not the academics that he feared most (he felt he knew how to handle them), but the people, the poor ordinary deluded people ever on the lookout for the sign, the message, the word that
would herald the imminent coming of the millennium and all that it entailed: liberty, happiness, redemption. They would seize upon his work, or a mangled version of it more like, with awful
fervour, beside themselves in their eagerness to believe that what he was offering them was an explanation of the world and their lives in it. And when sooner or later it dawned upon them that they
had been betrayed yet again, that here was no simple comprehensive picture of reality, no new instauration, then they would turn on him. But even that was not the point. O true, he had no wish to
be reviled, but far more important than that was his wish not to mislead the people. They must be made to understand that by banishing Earth and man along with it from the centre of the universe,
he was passing no judgments, expounding no philosophy, but merely stating what is the case. The game of which he was master could exercise the mind, but it would not teach them how to live.

He need not have worried. There was no explosion, no one came. There was not even a tapping at his door. The world overlooked him. It was just as well. He was relieved. He had given them the
Commentariolus
, the preface as it were, and they had taken no notice. Now he could finish writing his book in peace, unmolested by idiots. For surely they were all idiots, if they could
ignore the challenge he had thrown down at their feet, idiots and cowards, that they would not see the breathtaking splendour and daring of his concepts—he would show them, yes, yes! And
sullenly, consumed by disappointment and frustration, he sat down to his desk, to show them. The great spheres wheeled in a crystal firmament in his head, and when (rarely, rarely!) he looked into
the night sky, he was troubled by a vague sense of recognition that puzzled him until he remembered that it was that sky, those cold white specks of light, that had given form to his mind’s
world. Then the familiar feeling of dislocation assailed him as he strove in vain to discern a connection between the actual and the imagined. Inevitably, inexplicably, Andreas’s ravaged face
swam into view, slyly smiling—Constellation of Syphilis!—blotting out all else.

*

“One that would speak with you, Canon.”

Canon Koppernigk looked up frowning and shook his head vehemently in silent refusal. He did not wish to be disturbed. Max only shrugged, and with a brief sardonic bow withdrew. Even before his
visitor appeared the Canon knew from that inimitable respectful light step on the stairs who it was. He sighed, and put away carefully into a drawer the page of manuscript on which he had been
working.

“My dear Doctor, forgive me, I hope I do not disturb you?” Canon Tiedemann Giese was a good-humoured, somewhat stout, curiously babyish fresh-faced man of thirty. He had a large
flaxen head, an incongruously stern hooked nose, squarish useless hands, and wide innocent eyes that managed to bestow a unique tender concern on even the least thing that they encountered.
Although he came of an aristocratic line, he disapproved of the opulent lives led by his colleagues, in the Chapter, a disapproval that he expressed—or paraded, as some said—by dressing
always in the common style in smocks and breeches and stout sensible riding boots. His academic achievements were impressive, yet he was careful to wear his learning lightly. By some means he had
got hold of a copy of the
Commentariolus
, and although he had never mentioned that work directly, he let it be known, by certain sly remarks and meaningful looks that made Canon Koppernigk
flinch, that he had been won over entirely to the heliocentric doctrine. Canon Giese was one of the world’s innate enthusiasts.

“Please sit,” Canon Koppernigk said, with a wintry smile. “There is something I can do for you?”

Giese laughed nervously. He was the younger of the two by some seven years only, yet his manner in Canon Koppernigk’s presence was that of a timid but eager bright schoolboy. With
desperate nonchalance he said:

“Just passing, you know, and I thought I might call in to . . .”

“Yes.”

Giese’s discomfited eye slid off and wandered about the cell. It was low and white, white everywhere: even the beams of the ceiling were white. On the wall behind the desk at which the
Doctor sat was fixed an hourglass in a frame, his wide-brimmed hat hanging on a hook, and a wooden stand holding a few medical implements. Set in a deep embrasure, a small window with panes of
bottled glass gave on to the Frisches Haff and the great arc of the Baltic beyond. The rickety door leading on to the wall was open, and out there could be seen the upright sundial and the
triquetrum, a rudimentary crossbow affair over five ells tall for measuring celestial angles, a curiously distraught-looking thing standing with its frozen arms flung skywards. Was it with the aid
of these poor pieces only, Giese wondered, that the Doctor had formulated his wonderful theory? A gull alighted on the windowsill, and for a moment he gazed thoughtfully at the bird’s pale
eye magnified in the bottled glass. (Magnified?—but no, no, a foolish notion . . .)

“I too have some interest in astronomy, you know, Doctor,” he said. “Of course, I am merely a dabbler, you understand. But I think I know enough to recognise greatness when I
encounter it, as I have done, lately.” And he leered. Canon Koppernigk’s stony expression did not alter. He was really a peculiar cold closed person, difficult to touch. Giese sighed.
“Well, in fact, Doctor, there
is
a matter on which I wished to speak to you. The subject is, how shall I say, a delicate one, painful even. Perhaps you know what I am referring to?
No?” He began to fidget. He was seated on a low hard chair before the Doctor’s desk. It was on occasions such as this that he heartily regretted having accepted the position of
Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter, which had fallen to him on Canon von Lossainen’s accession to the bishopric following the death of Lucas Waczelrodt: he was not cut out for this kind of
thing, really. “It is your brother, you see,” he said carefully. “Canon Andreas.”

“O?”

“I know that it must be a painful subject for you, Doctor, and indeed that is why I have come to you personally, not only as Precentor, but as, I hope, a friend.” He paused. Canon
Koppernigk raised one eyebrow enquiringly, but said nothing. “The Bishop, you see, and indeed the Chapter, all feel that, well, that your brother’s presence, in his lamentable
condition, is not . . . that is to say—”

“Presence?” said the Doctor. “But my brother is in Italy.”

Giese stared. “O but no, Doctor, no; I assumed that you—have you not been told? He is here, in Frauenburg. He has been here for some days now. I assumed he would have called on you.
He is not—he is not well, you know.”

*

He was not well: he was a walking horror. In the years since the Canon had seen him last he had surrendered his own form to that of his disease, so that he was no longer a man
but a
memento mori
only, a shrivelled twisted hunchbacked thing on whose ruined face was fixed a death’s-head grin. All this the Canon learned at second hand, for his brother kept away
from him, not out of tact, of course, but because he found it amusing to haunt him from a distance, by proxy as it were, knowing how much more painful it would be that others should carry word of
his disgraceful doings into the fastness of the Canon’s austere white tower. He lodged at a kip down in the stews (where else would have him?), but flaunted his frightful form by day in the
environs of the cathedral, where he terrified the town’s children and their mothers alike; and once even, one Sunday morning, he came lurching up the central aisle during High Mass and knelt
in elaborate genuflexion at the altar rails, behind which poor ailing Bishop von Lossainen sat in horror-stricken immobility on his purple throne.