Doctor Copernicus (26 page)

Nor was his observatory what I had thought it would be. I had expected something old-fashioned, it’s true, a cosy little lair full of scholarly clutter, books and manuscripts, parchments
crawling with complex calculations, all this draped in the obligatory membrane of vivid dust. Also, unaccountably, I had expected warmth, thick yellow warmth, like a species of inspirational
cheese, in which would be embedded in his mellow old age the master, a jolly old fellow, absent-minded and unworldly, but sharp, sharp, putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece preparatory
to unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world. The room I was in, however, was straight out of the last century, if not the one before, and more like an alchemist’s cell than the workroom of a
great modern scientist. The white walls were bare as bone, the beamed ceiling too. I saw no more than a handful of books. The instruments on the table had the self-conscious look of things that
have been brought out for display. The window let in a hard merciless light. And the cold! Science here was not the cheerful, confident quest for certainties that
I
knew, but the old
huggermugger of spells and talismans and secret signs. A leering death’s-head and a clutch of dried batwings would not have surprised me. The air reeked of the chill sweat of guilt.

I did not take in all this detail at once—although it was all registered in my sense of shock—for at first I was distracted by waiting for him to offer some excuse, or at least
explanation, regarding our prior meeting. When I realised, to my surprise and puzzlement (remember, I did not know him yet as I was to come to know him later), that he had no intention of doing so,
I knew there was nothing for it but to play, as best I could, the part of the simpering idiot that obviously he considered me to be. In the circumstances, then, something dramatic was required. I
crossed the room, I
bounded
across the room, and with my face lifted in doglike veneration I genuflected before him, crying:

“
Domine praeceptor!
”

Startled, he backed away from me, mumbling under his breath and trying not to see me, but I hobbled after him, still on one knee, until a corner of the table nudged him in the rear and he jumped
in fright and halted. The instruments on the table, quivering from the collision, set up a tiny racket of chiming and chattering that seemed in the sudden silence to express exactly the old
man’s panic and confusion. You see? You see? How can I be expected to be grave?

“Who are you?” he demanded petulantly, and did not bother to listen when I told him my name a second time. “You are not from the Bishop, are you?” He watched me
carefully.

“No,
Meister
, I know no Bishop, nor king nor prince; I am ruled only by the greatest of lords, which is science.”

“Yes yes, well, get up, will you, get up.”

I rose, and rising suddenly remembered the words of my speech, which I delivered, in one breath, at high speed. Very flowery.
Sat verbum.

Throughout that meeting we moved in circles about the room in a slow stealthy chase, he leading, keeping well out of my reach for fear I might attempt a sudden assault, and I following hard upon
his heels uttering shrill cries of adoration and entreaty, throwing my arms about and tripping over the furniture in my excitement. We communicated (communicated!) in a kind of macaronic jabber,
for whereas I found German most natural, the Canon was wont to lapse into Latin, and no sooner did I join him than we found ourselves stumbling into the vernacular again. O, it was great fun,
truly. He was singularly unimpressed by my academic pedigree; his face took on a look of frank horror when it dawned upon him that I was a Lutheran—holy God, one of
them!
What would
the Bishop say? But hold hard, Rheticus, hold hard now, you must be fair to him. Yes, I must be fair to him. I cannot in fairness blame a timorous cleric, who desired above all
not to be
noticed
, for his dread at the arrival in his tower fortress of a firebrand from Protestant Wittenberg. Three months previous to my coming, the Bishop, Dantiscus the sleek, had issued an edict
ordering all Lutherans out of Ermland on pain of dispossession or even death, and shortly thereafter he was to issue another, calling for all heretical—meaning Lutheran,
natürlich
—books and pamphlets to be burned in public. A nice gentleman, Dantiscus the bookburner: I shall have some more to say of him presently.

(In fairness to
myself
, I must add that Wittenberg considered Copernicus at best a madman, at worst the Antichrist. Luther himself, in one of those famous after-dinner harangues, amid the
belches and the farts, had sneered at the notion of a heliocentric universe, thus displaying once again his unfailing discernment; so also had Melanchton mocked the theory—even Melanchton, my
first patron! Therefore you see that the
Meister
was less than popular where I came from, and I was granted leave of absence to visit him only because of who and what I was, and not because
the Wittenberg authorities approved of the Ermlander’s theories. I wanted to make that point clear, for the sake of accuracy.)

So, as I have said, he was not impressed et cetera—indeed, so unimpressed was he, that he seemed not even fully aware of my presence, for he kept on as it were sliding away from me, as
though avoiding a distasteful memory, picking at his robe with agitated fingers and grimacing to himself. He was not thinking of me, but of the
consequences
of me, so to speak (
What will
the Bishop say!
). I was profoundly disappointed, or rather, I was aware that something profoundly disappointing was occurring, for I myself, the essential I, was hardly there. That is not very
clear. No matter. Doctor Copernicus, who before had represented for me the very spirit incarnate of the New Age, was now revealed as a cautious cold old brute obsessed with appearances and the
security of his prebend. Is it possible to be disconcerted to the point of tears?

And yet there was something that told me all was not lost, that my pilgrimage might not have been in vain: it was a faint uncertainty in his look, a tiny tension, as if there were, deep within
him, a lever longing to be pressed. I had brought gifts with me, fine printed editions of Ptolemy and Euclid, Regiomontanus and others, O, there must have been a dozen volumes in all, which I had
had rebound (at a cost I do not care even now to recall), with his initials and a pretty monogram stamped in gold on the spines. These books I had cunningly dispersed throughout my luggage for fear
of brigands, so that now when I remembered them and fell upon my bags in a final frantic burst of hope, they fell, diamonds amid ashes, out of a storm of shirts and shoes and soiled linen, and
There!
I cried, and
There!
near to tears, challenging him to find it in his cold heart to reject this ultimate token of homage.

“What are you doing?” he said. “What are these?”

I gathered the books in my arms and struggled to my feet. “For you—for you,
domine praeceptor!
”

Hesitantly he lifted the
Almagest
from atop the pile, and, with many a suspicious backward glance in my direction, took it to the window; I thought of an old grey rat scuttling off with a
crust. He held the book close to his nose and examined it intently, sniffing and crooning, and the harsh lines of his face softened, and he smiled despite himself, biting his lip, old
pleased
grey rat, and click! I could almost hear that lever dip.

“A handsome volume,” he murmured, “handsome indeed. And costly too, I should think. What did you say your name was, Herr . . ?”

And then, I think, I did weep. I recall tears, and more groans of adoration, and I on my knees again and he shooing me off, though with less distaste than before, I fancied. Behind him the
clouds broke for a moment over the Baltic, and the sun of evening suddenly shone, a minor miracle, and I remembered that it was summer after all, that I was young, and the world was before me. I
left him soon after that, with an invitation to return on the morrow, and staggered in blissful delirium into the streets, where even the leaden twilight and the filth in the sewers, the mud, the
red gaping faces of the peasants, could not dampen my spirits. I found lodgings at an inn below the cathedral wall, and there partook of a nauseating dinner, that I remember in detail to this day,
and, to follow, had a fat and extremely dirty, curiously androgynous whore.

*     *     *

I
was up and about early next morning. Low sun on the Frisches Haff, the earth steaming faintly, wind freshening, the narrow streets awash with
light and loud with the shrill cries of hawkers—aye, and my poor head splitting from the effects of that filthy poison which they dare to call wine. At the tower the bitch Schillings greeted
me with another black look, but let me in without a word. The Canon was waiting for me in the observatory, in a state of extreme agitation. I had hardly crossed the threshold before he began to
babble excitedly, and came at me waving his hands, forcing me to retreat before him. It was yesterday in reverse. I tried to make sense of what he was saying, but the fumes of last night’s
revels had not yet dispersed, and phlegm not blood lay sluggish in my veins, and I could grasp only a jumble of words: Kulm . . . the Bishop . . . Löbau . . . the castle . . .
venite!
We were leaving Frauenburg. We were going to Löbau, in Royal Prussia. Bishop Giese was his friend. He was Bishop of Kulm. We would stay with him at Löbau Castle. (What did it mean?) We
were leaving that morning, that minute—now! I shambled off in a daze and collected my belongings from the inn, and, when I returned, the Canon was already in the street, struggling into a
brokendown hired carriage. I think if I had not arrived just then he would have left without giving me a second thought. The Schillings stuck out her fierce head at the door, the Canon groaned
faintly and shrank back against the fusty seat, and as we moved off the
focaria
yelled after us like a fishwife something about being gone when we returned—on hearing which, I may add,
I brightened up considerably.

There is a kind of lockjaw that comes with extreme embarrassment; I fell prey to that condition as we rattled through the streets of Frauenburg that morning. I may have been young, innocent I
may have been, but I could guess easily enough the reason for our haste and the manner of our departure. It was not without justification, after all, that Luther had vilified Rome for its hypocrisy
and its so-called celibacy, and no doubt now Bishop Dantiscus had instituted yet another drive against indecency among his clergy, as the Catholics were forever doing in those early days of the
schism, eager to display their reforming zeal to a sceptical world. Not that I cared anything for that kind of nonsense; it was not the state of affairs between Canon Nicolas and the Schillings
that troubled me (it did not trouble me much, at any rate), but the spectacle of Doctor Copernicus in the street, in public, involved in a sordid domestic scene. I could not speak, I say, and
turned my face away from him and gazed out with such fierce concentration at drab Ermland passing by that it might have been the wonders of the Indies I beheld. Ah, how intolerant the young are of
the frailties of the old! The Canon was silent also, until we reached the plain, and then he stirred and sighed, and there was a world of weariness in his voice when he asked:

“Tell me, young man, what do they say of me at Wittenberg?”

*

That dreary Prussian plain, I remember it. Enormous clouds, rolling down from the Baltic, kept pace with us as we were borne slowly southwards, their shadows stepping hugely
across the empty land. Strange silence spread for miles about us, as if everything were somehow turned away, facing off into the limitless distance, and the muted clamour of our passage—creak
of axles, monotonous thudding of hoofs—could not avail against that impassive quiet, that indifference. We met not a soul on the road, if road it could be called, but once, far in the
distance, a band of horsemen appeared, galloping laboriously away, soundlessly. Through the narrow slit opposite me I could see the driver’s broad back bouncing and rolling, but as the hours
crawled past it ceased to be a human form, and became a stone, a pillar of dust, the wing of some great bird. We passed through deserted villages where the houses were charred shells and dust blew
in the streets, and the absence of the hum of human concourse was like a hole in the air itself. Thus do we voyage in dreams. Once, when I thought the Canon was asleep, I found him instead staring
at me fixedly; another time when I turned to him he smiled a cunning and inexplicably alarming smile. Confused and frightened, I looked away hurriedly, out at the countryside revolving slowly
around us, but there was no comfort for me there. The plain stretched away interminably, burnished by the strange brittle sunlight, and the wind sang softly. We might have been a thousand leagues
from anywhere, adrift in the sphere of the fixed stars. He was still smiling, the old sorcerer, and it seemed to me that the smile said: this is my world, do you see? there is no Anna Schillings
here, no gaping peasants, no bloodied statues, no Dantiscus, only the light and the emptiness, and that mysterious music high in the air which you cannot hear but which you know is there. And for
the first time then I saw him whole, no longer the image of him I had carried with me from Wittenberg, but Copernicus himself—
it
self—the true thing, a cold brilliant object like
a diamond (not like a diamond, but I am in a hurry), now all at once vividly familiar and yet untouchable still. It is not vouchsafed to many men to know another thus, with that awful clarity; when
it comes, the vision is fleeting, the experience lasts only an instant, but the knowledge gleaned thereby remains forever. We reached Löbau, and in the flurry of arrival I felt that I was
indeed waking from a dream. I waited for the Canon to acknowledge all that had happened out on the plain (whatever it was!), but he did not, would not, and I was disappointed. Well, for all I know,
the old devil may have put a spell on me out there. But I shall always remember that eerie journey. Yes.