Doctor Copernicus (27 page)

*

Löbau Castle was an enormous white stone fortress on a hill, its towers and turrets looking down over wooded slopes to the huddled roofs of the town. The air up there was
crisp with the smell of spruce and pine. I might almost have been back in Germany. We drew into the courtyard and were greeted by an uproar of servants and grooms and hysterical dogs. A grizzled
old fellow in a leather jerkin and patched breeches came to receive us. I took him for a steward or somesuch, but I was wrong: it was Bishop Giese himself. He greeted the Canon with grave
solicitude. He hardly glanced at me, until, when he offered me the ring to kiss, I shook his hand instead, and that provoked a keen look. The two of them moved away together, the Canon shuffling
slowly with bowed head, the Bishop supporting him with a gentle hand under his elbow, and the Canon groaned:

“Ah, Tiedemann, troubles, troubles . . .”

I was left to fend for myself, of course, as usual, until one of the serving lads took pity on me. He bounced up under my nose with a saucy grin smeared on his face, Raphaël he was called,
hardly more than a child, a pretty fellow with an arse on him like a peach, O, I knew what he was about!—Raphaël, indeed: some angel. But I followed him willingly enough, and not without
gratitude. As he scampered along before me, babbling and leering in his childish way, it occurred to me that I should have a chat with him in private, before I left, about the joys of matrimony and
so on, and warn him of the tribulations in store for him if he continued to lean in the direction he so obviously leaned, at such a tender age. Had I only known what tribulations were in store for
me
on his account!

*

And so began our strange sojourn at Löbau. Throughout that long summer we remained there. The magical spell, the first touch of which I had felt out on the empty Prussian
plain, settled over all that white castle on its peak, where we, as in an enchanted sleep, wandered amidst the luminous order and music of the planets, dreaming miraculous dreams. Luther had
scoffed at Copernicus, calling him
the fool who wants to turn the whole science of astronomy upside down
, but Luther should have kept to theology, for in the sweat of his worst nightmare he
could not have imagined what we would do during those months at Löbau. We turned the whole universe upon its head.
We
, I say
we
, for without me he would have kept silent even
into the silence of the grave. He had intended to destroy his book: how many of you knew
that?

How very skilfully I am telling this tale.

*

Bishop Giese. Bishop Giese was not quite the crusty old pedant I had expected. He was no gay dog, to be sure, but he was not without a certain . . . how shall I say, a certain
sense of irony—better call it that than humour, for none of those northerners knows how to laugh. In his attitude toward the Canon, a blend of awe and solicitude and an occasional, helpless
exasperation that yet was never less than amiable, he revealed a loyal and gentle nature. He was something of an astronomer, and possessed a bronze armillary sphere for observing equinoxes, and a
mighty gnomon from England, which I envied. However, it was with an enthusiasm plainly forced that he displayed these and other instruments, and I suspect he kept them chiefly as evidence of the
sincerity of his interest in the Canon’s work. He was nearing sixty at the time of which I speak, had been a canon of the Frauenburg Chapter, and was destined one day to take
Dantiscus’s place in the Bishopric of Ermland. Of middle height, not stout but not gaunt either, he was one of those middling men who are the unacknowledged proprietors of the world. He was
decent, unassuming, diligent—in short, a
good man.
I loathed him, I still do. He suffered from the ague, which he had contracted in the course of his duties somewhere in the wilds of
that enormous bog which is Prussia; Canon Nicolas, playing at medicine (as I do now!), had for some time been treating him for the affliction, hence, officially at least, our presence at
Löbau. But it was not on the Bishop alone that the Canon’s skill was to be lavished . . .

On the evening of our arrival, after I had lain down briefly to sleep, I awoke drenched in sweat and prey to a nameless panic. My teeth chattered. I rose and for a long time wandered fitfully
about the castle, wringing my hands and moaning, lost and frightened in those unfamiliar stone corridors and silent galleries. I knew, but would not acknowledge it, what this mood of mounting
urgency and alarm presaged. All my life I have been subject to prolonged bouts of melancholia, which at their most severe bring with them fainting fits and crippling pains, even temporary blindness
sometimes, and a host of other lesser demons to plague me. But worst of all is the heartache, the
accidie.
More than once I have near died of it, and hard to bear indeed would be the fear
that at the last the ghost might abandon me in the midst of that drear dark, but, thankfully, my stars have laid in store for me an easier, finer end. The attack that came on that evening was one
of the strangest that I have ever known, and was to endure, muted but always there, throughout my stay at Löbau. I have spoken already of enchantment: was it perhaps no more than the effect of
viewing the events of that summer through the membrane of melancholy?

Dinner at the castle was always a wearisome and repellent ritual, but on that first evening it was torment. The company gathered and disposed itself hierarchically in a vast hall, whose
stained-glass windows trapped the late sunlight in its muddy tints and checked its rude advance into the pious gloom so beloved of popish churchmen. Amid the appalling racket of bells and music and
so forth the Bishop entered, in full regalia, and took his place at the head of the highest table. Slatterns with red hands and filthy heels bore in huge trays of pork and baskets of black Prussian
bread and jars of wine, and then the uproar began in earnest as the doltish priests and leering clerks stuck their snouts into the prog, gulping and snorting and belching, flinging abuse and gnawed
bones at each other, filling the smoky air with shrieks of wild laughter. A bout of fisticuffs broke out at one of the lower tables. In the face of it all, the Bishop, enthroned on my left,
maintained a placid mien—and why not? By the standards of the Roman Church his dining-room was a model of polite behaviour. Yes, to him, to them all, everything was just splendid, and I alone
could see the ape squatting in our midst and hear his howls. Even if they had seen him, they would have taken him for a messenger from God, an archangel with steaming armpits and blue-black
ballocks, and sure enough, after a few prayers directed by the company toward the ceiling, the poor brute would have been pointing a seraphic finger upward in a new annunciation (the Word made
Pork!). Thus does Rome transform into ritual the horrors of the world, in order to sustain the fictions. I hate them all, Giese with his mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, Dantiscus and his bastards, but
most of all of them I hate—ah but bide, Rheticus, bide! The Bishop was speaking to me, some polite rubbish as usual, but the bread was turning to clay in my mouth, and the plate of meat
before me had the look of an haruspex’s bowl of entrails, signifying doom. I could no longer bear to remain in that hall. I rose with a snarl, and fled.

Soulsick and weary, I lay awake for hours by the window of the rathole I had been allotted as a room. Out on the plain faint lights flickered. The sky was eerily aglow. In those northern summers
true darkness never falls, and throughout the white nights a pallid twilight endures from dusk to dawn. I longed for kindly death. My eyes ached, my arsehole was clenched, my hands stank of wax and
ashes. Here in this barbarous clime was no place for me. Tears filled my eyes, and flowed in torrents down my cheeks. All of my life seemed in that moment inexplicably transfigured, a blackened and
useless thing, and there was no comfort for me anywhere. I held my face in my hands as if it were some poor, wounded, suffering creature, and bawled like a baby.

There came a tapping, which I heard without hearing, thinking it was the wind, or a deathwatch beetle at work, but then the door opened a little way and the Canon cautiously put in his head and
peered about. He wore the same robe that he had travelled in, a shapeless black thing, but on his head now there was perched an indescribably comic nightcap with a tassle. In his trembling hand he
carried a lamp, the quaking light of which sent shadows leaping up the walls like demented ghosts. He seemed surprised, and even a little dismayed, to find me awake. I suspect he had come to spy on
me. He mumbled an apology and began to withdraw, but then hesitated, remembering, I suppose, that I was not after all an article of furniture, and that a living creature wide awake and weeping
might think himself entitled to an explanation as to why an elderly gentleman in a funny cap should be peering into his room at dead of night. With an impatient little sigh he shuffled in and
closed the door behind him, put down the lamp with exaggerated deliberation, and then, carefully averting his gaze from my tears, he spoke thus:

“Herr von Lauchen, Bishop Giese tells me you are ill, or so he thought, when you fled his table so precipitately; and therefore I have come in order to ask if I might be of some
assistance. The nature of your ailment is quite plain: Saturn, malign star, rules your existence, filled, as it has been, I’m sure, with gainful study, abstract thought, and deep reflection,
which feed the hungry mind, but sap the will, and lead to melancholy and dejection. Nothing will avail you, sir, until, as Ficino recommends, you entrust yourself into the care of the Three Graces,
and cleave to things under their rule. First, remember, even a single yellow crocus blossom, Jupiter’s golden flower, may bring relief; also, the light of Sol, of course, is good, and green
fields at dawn—or anything, in fact, that’s coloured green, the shade of Venus. Do this,
meinherr
, shun all things saturnine, surround yourself instead with influences conducive
to health and joy and spirits fine, and illness never more shall your defences breach. Ahem . . . The Bishop seated you by his side at table: an honour, sir, extended only to the very few. To rise
in haste, as you did, is a slur. Perhaps at Wittenberg you have adopted Father Luther’s table manners, and hence the reason why you so disrupted the Bishop’s table. But please
understand that here in Prussia we do things differently.
Vale.
—The dawn comes on apace, I see.”

He waited, with head inclined, as though he fancied that his voice, of its own volition as it were, might wish to add something further; but no, he was quite done, and taking up his lamp he
prepared to depart. I said:

“I shall be leaving today.”

He stopped short in the doorway and peered at me over his shoulder. “You are leaving us, Herr von Lauchen, already?”

“Yes,
Meister
, for Wittenberg; for home.”

“O.”

He pondered this unexpected development, sinking into himself like a puzzled old snail into its carapace, and then, mumbling, he wandered away in an introspective trance, with those ghostly
shadows prancing about him. Fool that I was, I should have packed my bags and fled there and then, while all the castle was abed, and left him to publish his book or not, burn it, wipe himself with
it, whatever he wished. I even imagined my going, and wept again, with compassion for that stern sad figure which was myself, striding away into a chill sombre dawn. I had come to him in a prentice
tunic, humbly: I, Rheticus, doctor of mathematics and astronomy at the great school of Wittenberg, and he had dodged me, ignored me, preached at me as if I were an errant choirboy. I should have
gone! But I did not go. I crawled instead under the blankets and nursed my poor forlorn heart to sleep.

*     *     *

I
can see it now, of course, how cunning they were, the two of them, Giese and the Canon, cunning old conspirators; but I could not see it then. I
woke late in the morning to find Raphaël beside me, with honey and hot bread and a jug of spiced wine. The food was welcome, but the mere presence of the lithesome lad would have been
sufficient, for it broke a fast far crueller than belly-hunger—I mean the fasting from the company of youth and rosy cheeks and laughing eyes, which I had been forced to observe since leaving
Wittenberg and coming among these greybeards. We spent a pleasant while together, and he, the shy one, twisted his fingers and shifted from foot to foot, chattering on in a vain effort to stem his
blushes. At length I gave him a coin and sent him skipping on his way, and although the old gloom returned once he was gone, it was not half so leaden as before. Too late I remembered that sober
talk I had determined to have with him; the matter would have to be dealt with. An establishment of clerics, all men—and Catholics at that!—was a perilous place for a boy of his . . .
his youth and beauty. (I was about to say innocence, but in honesty I must not, even though I know that thereby I banish the word from the language, for if it is denied to him then it has no
meaning anymore. I speak in riddles. They shall be solved. My poor Raphaël! they destroyed us both.)

*

I rose and went in search of the Canon, and was directed to the
arboretum
, a name which conjured up a pleasant image of fruit trees in flower, dappled green shade, and
little leafy paths where astronomers might stroll, discussing the universe. What I found was a crooked field fastened to a hill behind the castle, with a few stunted bushes and a cabbage
patch—and, need I say, no sign of the Canon. As I stamped away, sick of being sent on false chases, a figure rose up among the cabbages and hailed me. Today Bishop Giese was rigged out again
in his peasant costume. The sight of those breeches and that jerkin irritated me greatly. Do these damn Catholics, I wondered, never do else but dress up and pose? His hands were crusted with clay,
and when he drew near I caught a strong whiff of horse manure. He was in a hearty mood. I suppose it went with the outfit. He said: