[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus Read online

  ex Heilsberg, 13 March, 1540

  + Johannes Dantiscus

  Bishop of Ermland

  *

  Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Ermland: Heilsberg

  Reverendissime in Christo Pater et Domine Clementissime! I have received Your Rev. Lordship’s letter. I understand well enough Your Lordship’s grace & good will toward me: which he has condescended to extend not only to me, but to other men of great excellence. It is, I believe, certainly to be attributed not to my merits, but to the well-known goodness of Your Rev. Lordship. Would that some time I should be able to deserve these things. I certainly rejoice, more than can be said, to have found such a Lord & Patron.

  I have done what I neither would nor could have left undone, whereby I hope to have given satisfaction to Your Rev. Lordship’s warning.

  ex Frauenburg, 3 July, 1540

  Your Rev. Lordship’s most devoted

  Nicolas Copernicus

  *

  Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Kulm: Löbau

  My dear Tiedemann: Scuiteti has been expelled from the Chapter, & banished by Royal Edict. He will go to Rome, I think, as do all outcasts. His focaria, the Hesse woman, has disappeared. What a lot of trouble she caused! It occurs to me that our Frauenburg is aptly named. I have issued yet another edict of my own against Frau Schillings, but she refuses to go. I am touched, truly, by her devotion to a sick old man, & have not the heart to make her understand that it would be altogether best if she were to go. Anyway, where would she go to? So I await, without great interest, Dantiscus’s next move. Do I seem calm? I am not. I am afraid, Tiedemann, afraid of what the world will think to do to me that it has not done already: the filthy world that will not let me be, that comes after me always, a black monster, dragging its damaged wings in its wake. Ah, Tiedemann . . .

  ex Frauenburg, 31 December, 1540

  *

  Waterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bared tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, creeps under the window, grinning. In the shadow of the tower he squats, wrapt in a black cloak, waiting for dawn. Comes the knocking, the pinched voice, the sly light step on the stair, and how is it that I alone can hear the water . . ?

  III

  Cantus Mundi

  I, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, called Rheticus, will now set down the true account of how Copernicus came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe. There are not many who will admit that if I had not gone to him, the old fool would never have dared to publish. When I arrived in Frauenburg I was little more than a boy (a boy of genius, to be sure!), yet he recognised my brilliance, that was why he listened to me, yes. Princes of Church and State had in vain urged him to speak, but my arguments he heeded. To you, now, he is Copernicus, a titan, remote and unknowable, but to me he was simply Canon Nicolas, preceptor and, yes! friend. They say I am mad. Let them. What do I care for a jealous world’s contumely? They drove me out, denied me my fame and honoured name, banished me here to rot in this Godforgotten corner of Hungary that they call Cassovia—yet what of it? lam at peace at last, after all the furious years. An old man now, yes, a forlorn and weary wanderer come to the end of the journey, I am past caring. But I don’t forgive them! No! The devil shit on the lot of you.

  *

  My patron, the Count, is a noble gentleman. Cultured, urbane, brilliant, generous to a fault, he reminds me in many ways of myself when I was younger. We speak the same language—I mean of course the language of gentlemen, for in Latin it’s true he is a little . . . rusty. Not like Koppernigk, whose schoolman’s Latin was impeccable, while for the rest, well, his people were, after all, in trade. The Count saw in me one of his own kind, and welcomed me into the castle here (as house physician) when the others chose to forget me and the great work I have done. He dismisses with characteristic hauteur the vile slanders they fling at me, and laughs when they whisper to him behind their hands that I am mad. The Count, unfortunately, is mad, a little. It comes from the mother’s side, I think: bad blood there without a doubt. Yes, I must exercise more caution, for he is capricious. Be less arrogant in his presence, grovel now and then, yes yes. Still, he needs me, we both know that. What, I ask, without me, would he do for the conversation, the intellectual stimulation, which save him from going altogether out of his mind? This country is populated with swineherds and witches and cretinous priests. I was a new star in his sparse firmament. Anyway, why should I worry?—the world is full of Counts, but there is only one Doctor Rheticus. It is not, the world, I mean, full of Counts, so go easy. What was I . . ? Copernicus, of course. Forty years ago—forty years!—I came to him.

  Frauenburg: that hole. It clings to the Baltic coast up there at the outermost edge of the earth, and someday please God it will drop off, like a scab. My heart sank when first I beheld that grey fortress wall. It was 1539, summer supposedly, although the rain poured down, and there was a chill white wind off the sea. I remember the houses, like clenched fists, bristling within the gates. Clenched is the word: that was Frauenburg, clenched on its own ignorance and bitterness and Catholicism. Was it for this I had abandoned Wittenberg, the university, my friends and confraters? Not that Wittenberg was all that much better, mind you, but the meanness was different; in the corridors of the university they were still jabbering about freedom and change and redemption, parroting the Reformer’s raucous squawks, but behind all that fine talk there lurked the old terror, the despair, of those who know full well and will not admit it that the world is rotten, irredeemable. In those days I believed (or had myself convinced that I did) that we were on the threshold of the New Age, and I took part with gusto in the game, and jabbered with the best of them. How could I do otherwise? At twenty-two I held the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the great University of Wittenberg. When the world favours you so early and so generously, you feel it your duty to support its pathetic fictions. I am inside the gates of Frauenburg.

  *

  Once inside the gates of Frauenburg, then, I went straightway to the cathedral, dragging my bags and books behind me through the sodden streets. From the cathedral I was directed to the chapterhouse, where I encountered no little difficulty in gaining entry, for they speak a barbaric dialect up there, and furthermore the doorkeeper was deaf. At length the fellow abandoned all attempt to decode my immaculate German, and grudgingly let me into a cavernous dark room where bloodstained idols, their Virgin and so forth, peered eerily out of niches in the walls. Presently there came a sort of scrabbling at the door, and an aged cleric entered crabwise, regarding me suspiciously out of the corner of a watery eye. I must have seemed a strange apparition there in the gloom, grinning like a gargoyle and dripping rain on his polished floor. He advanced apprehensively, keeping firmly between us the big oak table that stood in the middle of the room. His gaze was uncannily like that of the statues behind him: guarded, suspicious, hostile even, but ultimately indifferent. When I mentioned the name of Copernicus I thought he would take to his heels (was the astronomer then a leper even among his colleagues?), but he concealed his consternation as best he could, and merely smiled, if that twitch could be called a smile, and directed me to—where?—the cathedral. I held my temper. He frowned. I had been to the cathedral already? Ah, then he was afraid he could not help me. I asked if I might wait, in the hope that he whom I sought might in time return here. O! well, yes, yes of course, but now that he thought of it, I might perhaps enquire at the house of Canon Suchandsuch, at the other end of the town, for at this hour the Herr Doctor was often to be found there. And I was bustled out into the streets again.

  Do you know what it is like up there in the grey north? Now I have nothing against rain—indeed, I think of it as a bright link between air and angels a
nd us poor earthbound creatures—but up there it falls like the falling of dusk, darkening the world, and in that wet gloom all seems stale and flat, and the spirit aches. Even in spring there is no glorious drenching, as there is elsewhere, when April showers sweep through the air like showers of light, but only the same dull thin drip drip drip, a drizzle of tangible accidie, hour after hour. Yet that day I marched along regardless through those mean streets, my feet in the mire and my head swathed in a golden mist, ah yes, it has been ever thus with me: when I set my mind on something, then all else disappears, and today I could see one thing only, the historic confrontation (for already I pictured our meeting set like a jewel in the great glittering wheel of history) between von Lauchen of Rhaetia and Doctor Copernicus of Torun. But the Herr Doctor was proving damnably elusive. At the house of Canon Suchandsuch (the name was Snellenburg, I remember it now), the dolt of a steward or whatever he was just looked at me peculiarly and shook his thick head slowly from side to side, as if he felt he was dealing with a large lunatic child.

  I ferreted him out in the end, never mind how. I’ve said enough to demonstrate the lengths he would go to in order to protect himself from the world. He lived in a tower on the cathedral wall, a bleak forbidding eyrie where he perched like an old ill-tempered bird, beak and talons at the ready. I had my foot in the door before the housekeeper, Anna Schillings, his focaria, that bitch (more of her later) could slam it in my face—and I swear to God that if she had, I would have burst it in, brass studs, hinges, locks and all, with my head, for I was desperate. I dealt her a smile bristling with fangs, and she backed off and disappeared up the narrow stairs, at the head of which she presently reappeared and beckoned to me, and up there in the half dark (it’s evening now) before a low arched door she abandoned me with a terrible look. I waited. The door with a squeak opened a little way. A face, which to my astonishment I recognised, peered around it cautiously, and was immediately withdrawn. There were some furtive scuffling sounds within. I knocked, not knowing what else to do. A voice bade me come in. I obeyed.

  *

  At my first, I mean my second—third, really—well, my first as it were official sight of him, I was surprised to find him smaller than I had anticipated, but I suppose I expected him to be a giant. He stood at a lectern with his hands on the open pages of a bible, I think it was a bible. Astronomical instruments were laid out on a table near him, and through the open window at his back could be seen the Baltic and the great light dome of the evening sky (rain stopped, cloud lifting, the usual). His expression was one of polite enquiry, mild surprise. I forgot the speech I had prepared. I imagine my mouth hung open. It was the same old man that had met me at the chapter-house, that is, he was Copernicus, I mean they were one and the same—yes yes! the same, and here he was, gazing at me with that lugubrious glazed stare, pretending he had never set eyes on me before now. Ach, it depresses me still. Did he imagine I would not recognise him in this ridiculous pose, this stylised portrait of a scientist in his cell? He did not care! If his carefully composed expression was not free of a faint trace of unease, that uneasiness sprang from concern for the polish of his performance and not from any regard for me, nor from shame that his contemptible trick had been discovered. He might have been masquerading before a mirror. Copernicus did not believe in truth. He had no faith in truth. You are surprised? Listen—

  O but really, all this is unworthy of me, of the subject. Two of the greatest minds of the age (one, at least, was great, is great) met that day, and I describe the momentous occasion as if it were a carnival farce. It is all gone wrong. The rain, the difficulty of finding him, that absurd pose, I did not intend to mention any of this trivia. Why is it not possible to speak of things calmly and accurately? My head aches. I could never achieve the classic style; one must have a grave turn of mind for that, a sense of the solemn pageantry of life, an absolutely unshakeable faith in the notion of order. Order! Ha! I must pause here, it is too late, too dark, to continue. The wolves are howling in the mountains. After such splendours, my God, how have I ended up in this wilderness? My head!

  *

  Now, where was I? Ah, I have left poor Canon Nicolas petrified all night before his lectern and his bible, posing for his portrait. He was in sixty-sixth year, an old man whose robes, cut for a younger, stouter self, hung about him in sombre folds like a kind of silt deposited by time. His face—teeth gone in the slack mouth, skin stretched tight on the high northern cheekbones—had already taken on that blurred, faded quality that is the first bloom of death. Thus must my own face appear now to others. Ah . . . He wore no beard, but the morning blade, trembling in an unsteady grip, had left unreaped on his chin and in the deep cleft above the upper lip a few stray grizzled hairs. A velvet cap sat upon his skull like a poultice. This, surely, was not that Doctor Copernicus, that great man, whom I had come to Frauenburg to find! The eyes, however, intense and infinitely clever, and filled with what I can only call an exalted cunning, identified him as the one I sought.

  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.