Doctor Copernicus (3 page)

At last the summons came. Andreas went in first, pausing at the doorway to wipe his damp hands on his tunic and fix on his face an ingratiating leer. In a little while he came out again,
scowling, and jerked his thumb at Nicolas.

“You next.”

“But what did he say to you?”

“Nothing. We are to be sent away.”

O!

Nicolas went in. The door snapped shut behind him like a mouth. Uncle Lucas was sitting at the big desk by the window with the family papers spread before him. He reminded Nicolas of a huge
implacable frog. A panel of the high window stood open on a summer evening full of white clouds and dusty golden light.

“Sit, child.”

The desk was raised upon a dais, and when he sat on the low stool before it he could see only his uncle’s head and shoulders looming above him like a bust of hard grey grainy stone. He was
frightened, and his knees would not stay still. The voice addressing him was a hollow booming noise directed less at him than at an idea in Uncle Lucas’s mind called vaguely Child, or Nephew,
or Responsibility, and Nicolas could distinguish only the meaning of the words and not the sense of what was being said. His life was being calmly wrenched apart at the joints and reassembled
unrecognisably in his uncle’s hands. He gazed intently upward through the window, and a part of him detached itself and floated free, out into the blue and golden air.
Włocławek.
It was the sound of some living thing being torn asunder . . .

The interview was at an end, yet Nicolas still sat with his hands gripping his knees, quaking but determined. Uncle Lucas looked up darkly from the desk. “Well?”

“Please sir, I am to be a merchant, like my father.”

“What do you say, boy? Speak up.”

“Papa said that one day I should own the offices and the warehouses and all the ships and Andreas would go for the Church because you would find a place for him but I would stay here in
Torun to tend the business, Papa said. You see,” faintly, “I do not think I really want to go away.”

Uncle Lucas blinked. “What age are you, child?”

“Ten years, sir.”

“You must finish your schooling.”

“But I am at St John’s.”

“Yes yes, but you will leave St John’s! Have you not listened? You will go to the Cathedral School at Włocławek, you and your brother both, and after that to the University
of Cracow, where you will study canon law. Then you will enter the Church. I do not ask you to understand, only to obey.”

“But I want to stay here, please sir, with respect.”

There was a silence. Uncle Lucas gazed at the boy without expression, and then the great head turned, like part of an immense engine turning, to the window. He sighed.

“Your father’s business has failed. Torun has failed. The trade has gone to Danzig. He timed his death well. These papers, these so-called accounts: I am appalled. It is a disgrace,
such incompetence. The Waczelrodts made him, and this is how he repays us. The house will be retained, and there will be some small annuities, but the rest must be sold off. I have said, child,
that I do not expect you to understand, only to obey. Now you may go.”

Katharina was waiting for him in the hall. “I told you: far far away.”

*

The evening waned. He would not, could not weep, and his face, aching for tears, pained him. Anna the cook fed him sugar cakes and hot milk in the kitchen. He sat under the
table. That was his favourite place. The last of the day’s sunlight shone through the window on copper pots and polished tiles. Outside, the spires of Torun dreamed in summer and silence.
Everywhere he looked was inexpressible melancholy. Anna leaned down and peered at him in his lair.

“Aye, master, you’ll be a good boy now, eh?”

She grinned, baring yellowed stumps of teeth, and nodded and nodded. The sun withdrew stealthily, and a cloud the colour of a bruise loomed in the window.

“What is canon law, Anna, do you know?”

Barbara was to be sent to the Cistercian Convent at Kulm. He thought of his mother. The future was a foreign country; he did not want to go there.

“
Ach ja
, you be a good boy,
du, Knabe.
”

*

The wind blew on the day that he left, and everything waved and waved. The linden tree waved. Goodbye!

*     *     *

D
earest Sister:

I am sorry that I did not write to you before. Are you happy at the Convent? I am not happy here. I am not very unhappy. I miss you & Katharina & our house. The Masters here are very
Cross. I have learned Latin very well & can speak it very well. We learn Geometry also which I like very much. There is one who is named Wodka but he calls himself Abstemius. We think that is
very funny. There is another by name Caspar Sturm. He teaches Latin & other things. Does Andreas write to you? I do not see him very often: he goes with older fellows. I am very Lonely. It is
snowing here now & very Cold. Uncle Lucas came to visit us. He did not remember my name. He tested me in Latin & gave me a Florin. He did not give Andreas a Florin. The Masters were afraid
of him. They say he is to be the Bishop soon in Ermland. He did not say anything to me of that matter. I must go to Vespers now. I like Music: do you? I say Prayers for you & for everyone. We
are going home for Christmas-tide: I mean to Torun. I hope that you are well. I hope that you will write to me soon & then I will write to you again.

Your Loving Brother:

Nic: Koppernigk

*

He was not very unhappy. He was waiting. Everything familiar had been taken away from him, and all here was strange. The school was a whirling wheel of noise and violence at
the still centre of which he cowered, dizzy and frightened, wondering at the poise of those swaggering fellows with their rocky knuckles and terrible teeth, who knew all the rules, and never
stumbled, and ignored him so completely. And even when the wheel slowed down, and he ventured out to the very rim, still he felt that he was living only half his life here at Włocławek,
and that the other, better half was elsewhere, mysteriously. How otherwise to explain the small dull ache within him always, the ache that a severed limb leaves throbbing like an imprint of itself
upon the emptiness dangling from the stump? In the cold and the dark at five in the mornings he rose in the mewling dormitory, aware that somewhere a part of him was turning languidly into a deeper
lovelier sleep than his hard pallet would ever allow. Throughout his days that other self crossed his path again and again, always in sunlight, always smiling, taunting him with the beauty and
grace of a phantom existence. So he waited, and endured as patiently as he could the mean years, believing that someday his sundered selves must meet in some far finer place, of which at moments he
was afforded intimations, in green April weather, in the enormous wreckage of clouds, or in the aetherial splendours of High Mass.

He found curiously consoling the rigours of discipline and study. They sustained him in those times when the mind went dead, after he had been trounced by the band of bullies that were
Andreas’s friends, or flogged for a minor misdemeanor, or when memories of home made him weep inside.

Lessons commenced at seven in the Great Hall after matins. At that grey hour nothing was real except discomfort, and there was neither sleep nor waking but a state very like hallucination
between the two. The clatter and crack of boots on floorboards were the precise sounds that in the imagination chilled bones were making in their stiff sockets. Slowly the hours passed, sleep
withdrew, and the morning settled down to endure itself until noon, when there was dinner in the refectory and then what they called play for an hour. The afternoons were awful. Time slackened to a
standstill as the orbit of the day yawned out into emptiness in a long, slow, eccentric arc. The raucous babble of a dozen classes ranged about the room clashed in the stale thickening air, and the
masters bellowed through the din in mounting desperation, and by evening the school, creeping befuddled toward sleep, knew that another such day was not to be borne. But day followed day with
deathly inevitability, into weeks distinguished one from the next only by the dead caesura of the sabbath.

He learned with ease, perhaps too easily. The masters resented him, who swallowed down their hard-won knowledge in swift effortless draughts. It was as if they were not really teaching him, but
were merely confirming what he knew already. Dimly he saw how deeply he thus insulted them, and so he feigned dull-wittedness. He watched certain of his classmates, and learned from them, to whom
it came quite naturally, the knack of letting his lower lip hang and his eyes glaze over when some complexity held up the progress of a lesson; and sure enough the masters softened toward him, and
at length to his relief began to ignore him.

But there were some not so easily fooled.

*

Caspar Sturm was a Canon of the Chapter of Włocławek Cathedral, to which the school was attached. He taught the
trivium
of logic and grammar and Latin
rhetoric. Tall and lean, hard, dark, death-laden, he stalked through the school like a wolf, always alone, always seemingly searching. He was famous in the town for his women and his solitary
drinking bouts. He feared neither God nor the Bishop, and hated many things. Some said he had killed a man once long ago, and had entered the Church to atone for his sin: that was why he had not
taken Holy Orders. There were other stories too, that he was the King of Poland’s bastard, that he had gambled away an immense fortune, that he slept in sheets of scarlet silk. Nicolas
believed it all.

The school feared Canon Sturm and his moods. Some days his classes were the quietest in the hall, when the boys sat mute and meek, transfixed by his icy stare and the hypnotic rhythm of his
voice; at other times he held riotous assembly, stamping about and waving his arms, roaring, laughing, leaping among the benches to slash with the whip he always carried at the fleeing shoulders of
a miscreant. His fellow teachers eyed him with distaste as he pranced and yelled, but they said nothing, even when his antics threatened to turn their classes too into bedlam. Their forbearance was
an acknowledgment of his wayward brilliance—or it might have been only that they too, like the boys, were afraid of him.

He chose his favourites from among the dullards of the school, hulking fellows bulging with brawn and boils who sprawled at their desks and grinned and guffawed, basking in the assurance of his
patronage. He looked on them with a kind of warm contempt. They amused him. He cuffed and pummelled them merrily, and with cruel shafts of wit exposed their irredeemable ignorance, making them
squirm before the class in stuttering sullen shame; yet still they loved him, and were fiercely loyal.

On Nicolas he turned a keen and quizzical eye. The boy blushed and bowed his head, embarrassed. There was something indecent in the way Caspar Sturm looked at him, gently but firmly lifting
aside the mask and delving into the soft palpitating core of his soul. Nicolas clenched his fists, and a drop of sweat trickled down his breastbone.
You must not understand me!
The master
rarely addressed him directly, and when he did there settled around them a private silence fraught with cloying unspeakable intimacies that neither would think of attempting to speak, and Canon
Sturm stepped back and nodded curtly, as if he had satisfied himself once again of the validity of a conclusion previously reached.

“And here is Andreas, elder scion of the house of Koppernigk! Come, dolt, what can you tell us now of Tullius’s rules for the art of memory, eh?”

*

He learned with ease, perhaps too easily: his studies bored him. Only now and then, in the grave cold music of mathematics, in the stately march of a Latin line, in
logic’s hard bright lucid, faintly frightening certainties, did he dimly perceive the contours of some glistening ravishing thing assembling itself out of blocks of glassy air in a clear blue
unearthly sky, and then there thrummed within him a coppery chord of perfect bliss.

“Herr Sturm Herr Sturm!” the class cried, “a conundrum, Herr Sturm!”

“What! Are we here to learn or to play games?”

“Ach, Herr Sturm!”

“Very well, very well. Regard:”

In a room there are 3 men, A & B who are blindfold, & C who is blind. On a table in this room there are 3 black hats & 2 white hats, 5 hats in all. A 4th man enters: call him D. He,
D, places a hat on each of the heads of A & B & C, and the 2 remaining hats he hides. Now D removes the blindfold from A, who thus can see the hats that B & C are wearing, but not the
hat that he himself wears, nor the 2 hats that are hidden. D asks A if he can say what colour is the hat that he, A, is wearing? A ponders, and answers:

“No.”

Now D removes the blindfold from B, who thus can see the hats that A & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the two hats that are hidden. D asks B if he can say what
colour is the hat that he, B, is wearing? B ponders, hesitates, and answers:

“No.”

Now: D cannot remove the blindfold from C, who does not wear a blindfold, and can see no hats at all, not white nor black, not worn nor hidden, for C, as said, is blind. D asks C if he can say
what colour is the hat that he, C, is wearing? C ponders, smiles, and answers:

“Yes!”

“—Well, gentlemen,” said Canon Sturm, “what is the colour of the blind man’s hat, and how does he know it?”

The glass blocks sailed in silence through the bright air, and locked.

Done!

Harmonia.

“Well, young Koppernigk? You have solved it?”

Startled, Nicolas ducked his head and began scribbling feverishly on his slate. He was hot all over, and sweating, aghast to think that his face might have betrayed him, but despite all that he
was ridiculously pleased with himself, and had to concentrate very hard on the thought of death in order to keep from grinning.

“Come, man,” the Canon muttered. “Have you got it?”

“Not yet, sir, I am working on it sir.”

“Ah. You are working on it.”