Doctor Copernicus (2 page)

His father too was nervous of the river and the teeming wharves, and hurried along in silence now, with his head bent and shoulders hunched, seeking shelter. The house of Koppernigk & Sons
stood back from the quayside and contemplated with obvious satisfaction the frantic hither and thithering of trade below its windows; under that stony gaze even the unruly Vistula lay down meekly
and flowed away. In the dusty offices, the cool dim caverns of the warehouses, the boy watched, fascinated and appalled, his father put on once more the grimacing mask of the man of consequence,
and a familiar mingling of contempt and pity began to ache again within him.

Yet secretly he delighted in these visits. An obscure hunger fed its fill here in this tight assured little world. He wandered dreamily through the warren of pokey offices, breathing the crumbly
odours of dust and ink, spying on inky dusty grey old men crouched with their quills over enormous ledgers. Great quivering blades of sunlight smote the air, the clamour of the quayside stormed the
windows, but nothing could shake the stout twin pillars of debit and credit on which the house was balanced. Here was harmony. In the furry honeybrown gloom of the warehouses his senses reeled,
assailed by smells and colours and textures, of brandy and vodka snoozing in casks, of wax and pitch, and tight-packed tuns of herring, of timber and corn and an orient of spices. Burnished sheets
of copper glowed with a soft dark flame in their tattered wraps of sacking and old ropes, and happiness seemed a copper-coloured word.

It was from this metal that the family had its name, his father said, and not from the Polish
coper
, meaning horseradish, as some were spiteful enough to suggest. Horseradish indeed!
Never forget, ours is a distinguished line, merchants and magistrates and ministers of Holy Church—patricians all! Yes, Papa.

*

The Koppernigks had originated in Upper Silesia, from whence in 1396 one Niklas Koppernigk, a stonemason by trade, had moved to Cracow and taken Polish citizenship. His son,
Johannes, was the founder of the merchant house that in the late 1450s young Nicolas’s father was to transfer to Torun in Royal Prussia. There, among the old German settler families, the
Koppernigks laboured long and diligently to rid themselves of Poland and all things Polish. They were not entirely successful; the children’s German was still tainted with a southern
something, a faint afterglow of boiled cabbage as it were, that had troubled their mother greatly during her brief unhappy life. She was a Waczelrodt. The Waczelrodts it is true were Silesians just
like the Koppernigks, having their name from the village of Weizenrodau near Schweidnitz, but apart from that they were something quite different from the Koppernigks: no stonemasons there, indeed
no. There had been Waczelrodts among the aldermen and councillors of Münsterburg in the thirteenth century, and, a little later, of Breslau. Towards the end of the last century they had
arrived in Torun, where they had soon become influential, and were among the governors of the Old City. Nicolas’s maternal grandfather had been a wealthy man, with property in the town and
also a number of large estates at Kulm. The Waczelrodts were connected by marriage with the Peckaus of Magdeburg and the von Allens of Torun. They had also, of course, married into the Koppernigks,
late of Cracow, but that was hardly a connection that one would wish to boast of, as Nicolas’s Aunt Christina Waczelrodt, a very grand and formidable lady, had often pointed out.

“Remember,” his mother told him, “you are as much a Waczelrodt as a Koppernigk. Your uncle will be Bishop one day. Remember!”

*

Father and son returned weary and disgruntled from their outings, and parted quickly, with faces averted, the father to nurse in solitude his disappointment and unaccountable
sense of shame, the son to endure the torment of Andreas’s baiting.

“And how was business today, brother, eh?”

Andreas was the rightful heir, being the elder son. The notion elicited from his father one of his rare brief barks of laughter. “That wastrel? Ho no. Let him go for the Church, where his
Uncle Lucas can find a fat prebend for him.” And Andreas gnawed his knuckles, and slunk away.

Andreas hated his brother. His hatred was like a kind of anguish, and Nicolas sometimes fancied he could hear it, a high-pitched excruciating whine.

“The Turk is coming, little brother, he has invaded the south.” Nicolas turned pale. Andreas smirked. “O yes, it is true, you know, believe me. Are you afraid? Nothing will
stop the Turk. He impales his prisoners, they say. A big sharp stake right up your bum—like
that!
Ha!”

They walked to school and home again together. Andreas chose to be elaborately indifferent to Nicolas’s meek presence beside him, and whistled through his teeth, and considered the sky,
slowed up his pace abruptly to scrutinise some fascinating thing floating in a sewer or quickened it to lurch in mockery behind an unsuspecting cripple, so that, try as he might to anticipate these
sudden checks and advances, Nicolas was forced to dance, smiling a puppet’s foolish fixed smile, on the end of his capricious master’s invisible leash. And the harder he tried to efface
himself the fiercer became Andreas’s scorn.

“You, creepy—do not creep behind me always!”

Andreas was handsomely made, very tall and slender, dark, fastidious, cold. Running or walking he moved with languorous negligent grace, but it was in repose that he appeared most lovely,
standing by a window lost in a blue dream, with his pale thin face lifted up to the light like a perfect vase, or a shell out of the sea, some exquisite fragile thing. He had a way when addressed
directly of frowning quickly and turning his head away; then, poised thus, he seemed shaped in his beauty by the action of an ineradicable distress within him. In the smelly classrooms and the
corridors of St John’s School he floundered, a vulnerable aetherial creature brought low in an alien element, and the masters roared in his face and beat him, their stolid souls enraged by
this enigma, who learned nothing, and trailed home to endure in silence, with his face turned away, the abuse of a disappointed father.

Gaiety took him like a falling sickness, and sent him whinnying mad through the house with his long limbs wildly spinning. These frantic fits of glee were rare and brief, and ended abruptly with
the sound of something shattering, a toy, a tile, a windowpane. The other children cowered then, as the silence fluttered down.

He chose for friends the roughest brutes of boys St John’s could offer. They gathered outside the school gates each afternoon for fights and farting contests and other fun. Nicolas dreaded
that bored malicious crowd. Nepomuk Müller snatched his cap and pranced away, brandishing the prize aloft.

“Here, Nepomuk, chuck it here!”

“Me,Müller,me!”

The dark disc sailed here and there in the bitter sunlight, sustained in flight it seemed by the wild cries rising around it. A familiar gloom invaded Nicolas’s soul. If only he could be
angry! Red rage would have flung him into the game, where even the part of victim would have been preferable to this contemptuous detachment. He waited morose and silent outside the ring of howling
boys, drawing patterns on the ground with the toe of his shoe.

The cap came by Andreas and he reached up and plucked it out of the air, but instead of sending it on its way again instanter he paused, seeking as always some means of investing the game with a
touch of grace. The others groaned.

“O come on, Andy, throw it!”

He turned to Nicolas and smiled his smile, and began to measure up the distance separating them, making feints like a rings player, taking careful aim.

“Watch me land it on his noggin.”

But catching Nicolas’s eye he hesitated again, and frowned, and then with a surly defiant glance over his shoulder at the others he stepped forward and offered the cap to his brother.
“Here,” he murmured, “take it.” But Nicolas looked away. He could cope with cruelty, which was predictable. Andreas’s face darkened. “Take your damned cap, you
little snot!”

They straggled homeward, wrapped in a throbbing silence. Nicolas, sighing and sweating, raged inwardly in fierce impotence against Andreas, who was so impressively grown-up in so many ways, and
yet could be so childish sometimes. That with the cap had been silly.
You must not expect me to understand you, even though I do!
He did not quite know what that meant, but he thought it
might mean that the business of the cap had not really been silly at all. O, it was hopeless! There were times such as this when the muddle of his feelings for Andreas took on the alarming aspect
of hatred.

They were no longer heading homeward. Nicolas halted.

“Where are we going?”

“Never mind.”

But he knew well where they were going. Their father had forbidden them to venture by themselves beyond the walls. Out there was the New Town, a maze of hovels and steaming alleys rife with the
thick green stench of humankind. That was the world of the poor, the lepers and the Jews, the renegades. Nicolas feared that world. His flesh crawled at the thought of it. When he was dragged there
by Andreas, who revelled in the low life, the hideousness rolled over him in choking slimy waves, and he seemed to drown. “Where are we going? We are not to go down there! You know we are not
supposed to go down there. Andreas.”

But Andreas did not answer, and went on alone down the hill, whistling, toward the gate and the drawbridge, and gradually the distance made of him a crawling crablike thing. Nicolas, abandoned,
began discreetly to cry.

*

The room was poised, weirdly still. A fly buzzed and boomed tinily against the diamond panes of the window. On the floor a dropped book was surreptitiously shutting itself page
by page, slowly. The beady eager eye of a mirror set in a gilt sunburst on the far wall contained another room in miniature, and another doorway in which there floated a small pale frightened face
gaping aghast at the image of that stricken creature swimming like an eyelash come detached on the rim of the glass. Look! On tiptoe teetering by the window he hung, suspended from invisible
struts, an impossibly huge stark black puppet, clawing at his breast, his swollen face clenched in terrible hurt.

He dropped, slack bag-of-bones, and with him the whole room seemed to collapse.

“Children, your father is dead, of his heart.”

*

The reverberations of that collapse persisted, muted but palpable, and the house, bruised and raw from the shedding of tears, seemed to throb hugely in pain. Grief was the
shape of a squat grey rodent lodged in the heart.

The more fiercely this grief-rat struggled the clearer became Nicolas’s thinking, as if his mind, horrified by that squirming thing down there, were scrambling higher and higher away from
it into rarer and rarer heights of chill bright air. His mother’s death had puzzled him, yet he had looked upon it as an accident, in dimensions out of all proportion to the small flaw in the
machine that had caused it. This death was different. The machine seemed damaged now beyond repair. Life, he saw, had gone horribly awry, and nothing they had told him could explain it, none of the
names they had taught him could name the cause. Even Barbara’s God withdrew, in a shocked silence.

*

Uncle Lucas, Canon Waczelrodt, travelled post-haste from Frauenburg in Ermland when the news reached him of his brother-in-law’s death. The affairs of the Chapter of
Canons at Frauenburg Cathedral were as usual in disarray, and it was not a good time to be absent for a man with his eye on the bishopric. Canon Lucas was extremely annoyed—but then, his life
was a constant state of vast profound annoyance. The ravages wrought by the unending war between his wilfulness and a recalcitrant world were written in nerveknots on the grey map of his face, and
his little eyes, cold and still above the nose thick as a hammerhead, were those of the lean sentinel that crouched within the fleshy carapace of his bulk. He did not like things as they were, but
luckily for things he had not yet decided finally how they should be. It was said that he had never in his life been known to laugh.

His coming was the boom of a bronze gong marking the entry of a new order into the children’s lives.

He strode about the house sniffing after discrepancies, with the four of them trotting in his wake like a flock of frightened mice, twittering. Nicolas was mesmerised by this hard, fascinatingly
ugly, overbearing manager of men. His cloak, flying out behind him, sliced the air ruthlessly, as once Nicolas had seen him on the magistrate’s bench in the Town Hall slicing to shreds the
arguments of whining plaintiffs. In the strange, incomprehensible and sometimes cruel world of adults, Uncle Lucas was the most adult of all.

“Your father in his will has delivered you his children into my care. It is not a responsibility that I welcome, yet it is my duty to fulfil his wishes. I shall speak to each of you in
turn. You will wait here.”

He swept into the study and shut the door behind him. The children sat on a bench in the sanded hall outside, picking at their fingernails and sighing. Barbara began quietly to weep. Andreas
tapped his feet on the floor in time to the rhythm of his worried thoughts. Sweat sprang out on Nicolas’s skin, as always when he was upset. Katharina nudged him.

“You will be sent away, do you know that?” she whispered. “O yes, far far away, to a place where you will not have Barbara to protect you. Far, far away.”

She smiled. He pressed his lips tightly together. He would not cry for her.

The time went slowly. They listened intently to the tiny sounds within, the rustle of papers, squeak of a pen, and once a loud grunt, of astonishment, so it sounded. Andreas announced that he
was not going to sit here any longer doing nothing, and stood up, but then sat down again immediately when the door flew open and Uncle Lucas came out. He looked at them with a frown, as if
wondering where it was that he had seen them before, then shook his head and withdrew again. The flurry of air he had left behind him in the hall subsided.