Doctor Copernicus (18 page)

Only rarely did he travel beyond the environs of Frauenburg. He liked the town. It was old, sleepy, safe, it reminded him of his birthplace; it was enough. Once he journeyed to Torun and called
upon the Gertner household, and to Kulm to see Barbara at the convent. Neither visit was a success. Barbara and he still could not cope with each other as adults, and Katharina . . . was still
Katharina. He resolved to venture forth no more, and gently refused the invitations of his colleagues to accompany them on their frequent roistering rounds of the diocese. He had at last, so it
seemed to him, come to a dead halt. The waves of the world broke in storm and clamour far above the pool of stillness in which he floated.

*

But he was not left entirely unmolested. Ripples slithered down and stirred the filth at the bottom of his pool. He heard of the death of Rabe, poor Corvinus, on the very day
that the copy of the Simocatta translations that he had sent to Bishop Lucas was returned, unread and unremarked, from Heilsberg. Then Max appeared one evening, sheepish and sullen; Andreas, he
said, had gone back to Italy, with twelve hundred Hungarian gold florins in his belt, entrusted to him for ecclesiastical purposes by the Frauenburg Chapter.

“
What!
” The Canon stared. “What are you saying? Was he here? When was he here?”

Max shrugged. “Aye, he was here. They gave him the gold. He’s gone off. Said I could go to the devil. Your nuncle gave him monies too, to be rid of him. A bad lot, your brother, if
you’ll permit me say it, master.”

The Canon sat down. “Twelve hundred gold florins!” That was bad, but worse, far worse, was that Andreas had been in Frauenburg and no one had thought to warn him. (Warn? He turned
the word this way and that, scrutinising it.)

*

He was not to have peace, that much was clear. No matter how far he fled he would be followed. Mysterious emissaries were sent to him, cunningly disguised. The most
innocent-seeming stranger, or even someone he thought he knew, might suddenly by a look, a word, deliver the secret message:
beware.
He had rid his life of everything that could have brought
him comfort, but evidently that was not enough, renunciation was not enough. Was passivity, then, his crime? He set himself to work on behalf of the Chapter, accepting only the most servile and
distasteful of tasks. He wrote letters, collected rents, drew up reports that no one read; he rode the length and breadth of the diocese to deal with minute matters, frenziedly, like a deckhand
racing about a sinking ship vainly plugging leaks that opened again as soon as they were stanched. Now the Chapter became finally convinced that he was a lunatic. He negotiated, almost on his
knees, with sneering officials from Cracow and Königsberg. And he treated the sick. Even they sometimes to his horror revealed a treacherous knowing.

It was strange: the people had such faith in him. They sent him their sickest, their hopeless cases, leprous children, wasting brides, the old. He could do nothing, yet he continued doggedly to
advise and admonish, making passes in the air, frowning under the weight of a wholly spurious wisdom. The more outlandish his treatment, and more grotesque the ingredients of the potions he poured
down their throats, the more satisfied they seemed. Why, some even recovered! He gained quite a reputation throughout Ermland. Yet not for a moment did he doubt that he was a fake.

There was a young girl, Alicia her name, she could not have been more than fifteen, a slender delicate child. She was brought to him one day in April. The air was drenched with sun and rain,
cloudshadows skimmed the bright Baltic. She wore a green gown. The tower did not know what to do with her: such loveliness was more than those grim grey stones could cope with. Her father was an
over-dressed faintly ridiculous fat man, a fodder merchant and a member of the town council. He owned a wooden house within the walls and a vineyard in the suburbs. His people, he said, hailed from
Lower Saxony, a fact which he seemed to consider impressive. He let it be known that he could read, and also write; he carefully avoided meeting the Canon’s eye directly. The mother was a
large sad timid woman in black, with a broad pale face all puffed and wrinkled as if perpetually anticipating tears. They were both elderly. Alicia had come, they confided, a gift from God, just
when they had at last given up all hope of issue; and they looked at each other shyly, in wonder, and then at their daughter with such anguished tenderness that the Canon was forced to turn away,
the celibate’s bitterness rising in him like bile.

“Why have you come to me?”

“She is not well, Father, we think,” the merchant answered. He hesitated, and looked to his wife. She wrung her pale heavy hands, and her lips trembled. She said:

“She has a . . . a rash, Father, and there is a flux—”

“Please, do not call me Father, I am not a priest.” He had meant to be kind, to put them at their ease, but succeeded only in intimidating them further. He was himself uneasy. He
wanted to walk out quickly now and abandon this fat fodder merchant and his sorrowful wife and ailing daughter, to escape. A handful of bright rain clattered against the window. The sea sparkled.
He disliked springtime, unsettling season. With a thumb and finger under her chin he lifted the child’s face and studied it silently for a moment. A faint blush spread upwards from her
slender inviolate throat. She was afraid of him also. Or was she? It seemed to him that he detected fleetingly in those exquisite velvety dark eyes a cold and calculating sardonic look, piercing
and familiar. He stepped away from her, frowning.

“Come,” he said. The mother moaned faintly in distress and made as if to touch her daughter. Alicia did not look at her. “Come, child, do not be afraid.”

He led her up the narrow stairs to his observatory. (The sick were suitably cowed by the astrolabe and quadrant and all those dusty tomes.) Today however it was not the patient who was the most
apprehensive, but the physician. The girl’s strange closed silence was disturbing. She seemed to be turned inward somehow, away from the world, as if she were the carrier of a secret that
made her inner self wholly sufficient, as if she were the initiate of a cult.

“Where have you this rash, child?”

Still she said nothing, but stood a moment apparently debating within herself, then leaned down quickly and lifted up the hem of her skirts. He was not surprised; he was appalled, even
frightened, yes, but not surprised. A carrier she was, certainly. Now he knew the cult into which she had been initiated. How strange: the sun was on the Baltic, the lindens were in bud, and water
and air and earth trembled with the complicity of the awakening season’s fire, and yet this young girl was infected. Once again he was struck by the failure of things and times to connect.
The world was there, Alicia was here, and between the two the chasm yawned. She was watching him out of those blank exquisite eyes without fear or shame, but with a kind of curiosity. There,
between seraphic face and that dreadful flower blossoming in secret inside her young girl’s frail thighs, was yet another failure of connection.

“What man have you been with?” he asked.

She let fall the hem of her gown and with prim little swooping movements smoothed the wrinkles carefully out of the green silk.

“No man,” she said. “I have been with no man, Father.”

“Odysseus then,” the Canon murmured, and was vaguely shocked at himself for making a joke at such a time. He could think of nothing else to say. He took her hand and felt her
heart-breaking frailty. “Ah child, child.” There was nothing to be said, nor done. The sense of his failure struck him like a hammerblow.

The parents stood as he had left them, poised, like ships becalmed, waiting for wonders. They had only to look at him and they knew. They had known already, in their hearts. The silence was
frightful. The Canon said: “I suggest—” but the merchant and his wife both began to speak at once, and then stopped in confusion. The mother was weeping effortlessly.

“There is a young man, Father,” she said. “He wishes to marry our Alicia.” Her face suddenly crumpled, and she wailed: “O he is a fine boy, Father!”

“We—” the merchant began, puffing up his chest, but he could not go on, and looked about the room, baffled and lost, as if searching for some solid support that he knew was not
to be found, not here nor anywhere. “
We!
—”

“My sister is Abbess of the Cistercian Convent at Kulm,” the Canon said quickly. “I can arrange for your daughter to go there. She need not take the vow, of course, unless you
wish it. But the nuns will care for her, and perhaps—” Stop! Do not! “—Perhaps in time, when she is cured . . . when she . . . perhaps this young man . . . Ach!” He
could bear this no longer. They knew, they all knew: the child’s groin was crawling with crabs, she was poxed, she would never marry, would probably not live to be twenty, they knew that! Why
then this charade? He advanced on them, and they retreated before him as if buffeted by the wind of his dismay and rage. The girl did not even glance at him. He wanted to shake her, or clasp her in
his arms, to throttle her, save her, he did not know what he wanted, and he did nothing. When the door was opened a solid block of sunlight fell upon them, and all hesitated a moment, dazzled, and
then mother and daughter turned away into the street. The merchant suddenly stamped his foot.

“It is witchcraft,” he gasped, “I know it!”

“No,” the Canon said. “There is no witchery here. Go now and comfort your wife and child. I shall write today to Kulm.”

But the merchant was not listening. He nodded distractedly, mechanically, like a large forlorn doll.

“The blame must fall somewhere,” he muttered, and for the first time looked directly at the Canon. “It must fall somewhere!”

Yes, yes: somewhere.

*

The ripples increased in intensity, became waves. Rumours reached him that he was being talked of at Rome as the originator of a new cosmology. Julius II himself, it was said,
had expressed an interest. The blame must fall somewhere: he heard again that voice on the stairs shrieking of revenge. An unassuageable constriction of fear and panic afflicted him. Yet there was
nowhere further that he could flee to. Lateral drift was all that remained.

Suddenly one day God abandoned him. Or perhaps it had happened long before, and he was only realising it now. The crisis came unbidden, for he had never questioned his faith, and he felt like
the bystander, stopped idly to watch a brawl, who is suddenly struck down by a terrible stray blow. And yet it could not really be called a crisis. There was no great tumult of the soul, no pain.
The thing was distinguished by a lack of feeling, a numbness. And it was strange: his faith in the Church did not waver, only his faith in God. The Mass, transubstantiation, the forgiveness of sin,
the virgin birth, the vivid truth of all
that
he did not for a moment doubt, but behind it, behind the ritual, there was for him now only a silent white void that was everywhere and
everything and eternal.

He confessed to the Precentor, Canon von Lossainen, but more out of curiosity than remorse. The Precentor, an ailing unhappy old man, sighed and said:

“Perhaps, Nicolas, the outward forms are all that any of us can believe in. Are you not being too hard on yourself?”

“No, no; I do not think it is possible to be too hard on oneself.”

“You may be right. Should I give you absolution? I hardly know.”

“Despair is a great sin.”

“Despair? Ah.”

*

He ceased to believe also in his book. For a while, in Cracow, in Italy, he had succeeded in convincing himself that (what was it?) the physical world was amenable to physical
investigation, that the principal thing could be deduced, that the thing itself could be said. That faith too had collapsed. The book by now had gone through two complete revisions, rewritings
really, but instead of coming nearer to essentials it was, he knew, flying off in a wild eccentric orbit into emptiness; instead of approaching the word, the crucial Word, it was careering headlong
into a loquacious silence. He had believed it possible to say the truth; now he saw that all that could be said was the saying. His book was not about the world, but about itself. More than once he
snatched up this hideous ingrown thing and rushed with it to the fire, but he had not the strength to perform that ultimate act.

Then at last there came, mysteriously, a ghastly release.

It was a sulphurous windy evening in March when Katharina’s steward arrived to summon him to Torun, where his uncle the Bishop was lying ill. He rode all night through storm and rain into
a sombre yellowish dawn that was more like twilight. At Marienburg a watery sun broke briefly through the gloom. The Vistula was sullen. By nightfall he had reached Torun, exhausted, and almost
delirious from want of sleep. Katharina was solicitious, and that told him, if nothing else would, that the situation was serious.

Bishop Lucas had been to Cracow for the wedding of King Sigismund. On the journey home he had fallen violently ill, and being then closer to Torun than Heilsberg had elected to be taken to the
house of his niece. He lay now writhing in a grey sweat in the room, in the very bed where Canon Nicolas had been born and probably conceived. And indeed the Bishop, mewling in pain and mortal
fright, seemed himself a great gross infant labouring toward an agonised delivery. He was torn by terrible fluxions, that felt, he said, as if he were shitting his guts: he was. The room was lit by
a single candle, but a greater ghastly light seemed shed by his rage and pain. The Canon hung back in the shadows for a long time, watching the little changing tableau being enacted about the bed.
Priests and nurses came and went silently. A physician with a grey beard shook his head. Katharina put a cross into her uncle’s hands, but he fumbled and let it fall. Gertner picked his
nails.

“
Nicolas!
”

“Yes, uncle, I am here.”

The stricken eyes sought his vainly, a shaking hand took him fiercely by the wrist. “They have poisoned me, Nicolas. Their spies were at the palace, everywhere. O Jesus curse them!
O!”