For as long as I could remember, Father Sunder had railed on about his regrets for the sins of his youth, and now he was advising me to flee the monastery to enter that same sinful world? It was the last thing that I ever would have expected so I whispered, too low for you to hear, “Why?”
“I was with Mother Christina the night you were found at the gates,” Father Sunder answered in a return whisper, “and I argued that your appearance was a sign from God. I believed then that the Lord had special plans for you, and I still do. But I am no longer convinced these plans are meant to be fulfilled at Engelthal.”
It was not enough, and I needed him to explain further.
“When this man arrived, again I was present for the event. I saw his condition, and he should have died—yet he did not. None can doubt you are the reason. I cannot help but think your journey with him is not finished, and that it is a journey upon which the Lord smiles.”
“But to leave my vows is a sin.”
“I do not believe,” whispered Father Sunder, “in any God that considers love to be a sin.”
Those words were exactly the permission I needed, and I didn’t even have the words to thank him. I just threw my arms around him and squeezed, so tightly that he had to plead with me to loosen my grip.
I returned to my cell and gathered my few possessions. A couple of robes, my best footwear, and Paolo’s prayer book: I had nothing else worth taking. It was raining as I started back towards Father Sunder’s, through the garden. As was the custom for every nun walking along the cloister path, I recited the Miserere for the souls of the dead nuns buried below, but my thoughts of the future had me trembling with fear and anticipation. The rain was good, I thought, as if it had been sent to cleanse the monastery from me.
“You appear to have a bag packed, Sister Marianne.” It was the voice of Agletrudis. “Have you at least said goodbye to your champion, the prioress?”
It was an immaculate swipe. It didn’t matter to me what Agletrudis or Gertrud might think, but deep in my heart I felt that I was betraying Mother Christina. But what could I have said to her? I wouldn’t have known how to deal with the hurt in her eyes. She had always believed in me, even when I had not, and she would never have anticipated my disloyalty.
I walked away from Agletrudis without answering, and she called out after me. “Don’t worry about Mother Christina. I’ll ensure that she never forgets you.”
I almost turned around to ask what she meant, but what good would that have done? So I kept walking. I knew that Agletrudis would not raise the alarm on my departure. It was in her best interests to let me go quietly and reassume her position as armarius-in-waiting.
By the time I reached Father Sunder’s house, I had banished Gertrud and Agletrudis from my mind. The face of Mother Christina, however, still lingered. Brother Heinrich packed some food and even though Father Sunder was nearing seventy, he insisted on walking part of the way with us. I protested because of the rain, but he simply pulled on his pluviale and came anyway.
As we walked, Father Sunder in the middle, my thoughts were not upon what lay ahead but what I was leaving behind. Despite Father Sunder’s kind words, there could be no arguing against the simple and damning fact that it was a sin for me to break my holy covenant. I tried to rationalize it and, after great effort, even devised an argument that had some semblance of sense.
Of all the Engelthal nuns, I was the only one who had not made the decision to enter the life. Even if they arrived as young girls, they had known a life outside the monastery walls; they had lived in the secular world and knew what they were forfeiting when they entered the sisterhood. I had never had that opportunity. So if I left Engelthal with you and came back later, the religious life would be worth more. Finally, it would be my choice rather than that of the parents who abandoned me at the gate: to learn if my destiny lay within the monastery, I had to leave it.
After we had walked about a league, I could tell you were becoming fatigued. It was understandable, as your injuries were considerable and you’d had only limited activity since your accident, but you were determined to show as little weakness as possible—whether to convince yourself that you would be fine or to convince me, I was unsure. It was Father Sunder who had to stop first, however, too tired to continue because of his advanced years. He grasped your arm and warned you to love me well, and then he pulled me to the side so that we could speak a moment in private.
He brought out a necklace that he had been carrying inside his pluviale, and pressed it into my hands. Its pendant was the arrowhead that had been removed from the copy of Inferno, and he said, “I have done what you asked, Sister Marianne, and blessed it.”
I started to thank him but he held up his hand. “I have something else for you.” He reached into his pluviale again and pulled out some papers. “Mother Christina is neither blind nor stupid. She didn’t think you’d actually leave, but she saw the possibility. She asked me to hold on to these, just in case.”
He handed me the two notes that my parents had left in my basket at the gates. There, in Latin and German, were the words that had come to Engelthal with me. A destined child, tenth-born of a good family, given as a gift to our Savior Jesus Christ and Engelthal monastery. Do with her as God pleases.
Only then did I break into the tears that I’d been fighting since I’d made my decision. In a fit of doubt, I asked Father Sunder if he truly believed I was making the correct choice.
“Marianne, my dearest child,” he said, “I believe that if you do not listen to your heart in this matter, you will regret it forever.”
XVI.
Given an afternoon of solitude while Marianne Engel was shopping for groceries, I decided to spend it with the Gnaden-vita. I was in the kitchen reading when I heard someone enter through the fortress’ front door, with footsteps that approximated those of a mother rhinoceros looking for its young.
“Marianne?” A woman’s voice fired off the syllables like a gun emptying three shells. When she appeared in the frame of the kitchen door, she pulled back noticeably at my appearance. “You’re him? Sweet Jesus! This is worse than I thought.”
Short, but Napoleon short; the kind of short that’s always pulling itself up by its bootstraps in an attempt to look taller. Fat, but water balloon fat; with flesh not flabby, but round like it’s looking for a place to explode. Age, fifties? Hard to tell, but probably. She didn’t have wrinkles; her face was too spherical. Cropped hair, too much rouge on her cheeks; a dark business suit with a white, broad-lapelled shirt poking out; well-polished shoes; hands on her hips. Her eyes were confrontational, as if she were daring me to pop her one on the chin. She said, “You’re a helluva mess.”
“Who are you?”
“Jack,” she answered. I was finally in the presence of the man I’d feared, only to find that she was a woman. But barely: Jack Meredith was more like the cartoon of a woman who wished that she were a man.
“Marianne’s agent, right?”
“You’re never gonna see one red cent of her money.” She one-handedly helped herself to a cup of coffee, while the other hand never stopped jabbing a finger at me. “She say you could live here?” Apparently Jack knew the answer, because she didn’t give me time to answer. “How’s she going to look after you? Tell me that, huh?”
“I don’t need her to look after me,” I said, “and I don’t care about her money.”
“What is it then? Sex?” She spat out the word with enough disdain to suggest that she thought sex was nothing more than an ugly argument between two opposing bodies.
“I have no penis.”
“Well, thank God for that.” She burned her lip with her first sip of coffee. “Lord love a duck!”
She grabbed a handful of tissues to wipe away the spill on her chin, as she eyed me with a combination of contempt and curiosity. “What happened to you, anyway?”
“I was burned.”
“Well, I can see that, you think I’m stupid?” She wadded up the
tissues and lobbed them towards the garbage can. She missed and, angry with herself for missing, took the few necessary steps to pick the tissue ball up and drop it in. “Burned, huh? That’s a damn shame.”
“Do you always just walk into this house?”
“I’ve been walking into this house since you were sneaking drinks at the high school dance,” Jack barked, “and I don’t much like you being here. You got a cigarette?”
“Don’t smoke.”
She headed towards a pack that Marianne Engel had left on the counter. “Probably a good idea in your condition.”
“So you’re Marianne’s agent?” I never got an answer the first time.
“That and more, buddy boy, so watch your step.” Jack inhaled deeply and now jabbed the cigarette towards me in a most accusatory manner. “This whatchamacallit, your living here, it’s a horrible fucking idea. I’m going to talk her out of it, you little monster.”
Perhaps you can guess that I liked Jack Meredith plenty. For one thing, she was the only person who spoke loudly enough that I never had to ask her to repeat herself. But more than that, I was taken with the general outsizeness of her personality: she was like an anthropomorphized butterball turkey, cast as the lead character in a Raymond Chandler novel. However, what I appreciated most was that she entirely dispensed with burn patient sympathy. We spent a few moments staring at each other over the table. She rolled her cigarette between her thumb and forefinger and squinted her eyes, real tough-like, before saying: “Whaddaya think you’re looking at, Crispy Critter?”
A few days later, Marianne Engel and I were sitting on the back porch waiting for a delivery of new slabs of stone, and she told me that she’d instructed Jack to set up a credit card for me. When I said I couldn’t imagine Jack being very happy about that, Marianne Engel said, “She’ll do as she’s told. Jack’s all bark, no bite.”
I KNOW WHAT WE CAN DO WITH A CREDIT CARD.
Our conversation wandered around a bit, before I asked a question that I had from the last part of our story: I wanted to know what a pluviale was. Marianne Engel explained that it was a type of raincoat that priests used to wear, decorated with scenes from the New Testament. I asked whether Father Sunder’s pluviale had an image on it. She confirmed that it did. “And I’ll tell you what it was,” she said with a playful pause, “later in our story.”
When the truck arrived, she clapped her hands like a child at the carnival and sprinted to her basement doors to insert a heavy key into the great lock. She laid down iron rollers that allowed the blocks of stone to slide into the house. Seeing the stones disappear into the opening made me think of a hungry parishioner receiving communion. She stood off to the side, imploring the deliverymen to be gentle with her friends. The deliverymen looked at her as if she was crazy but continued their work. As soon as they were gone, she took off all her clothes and lit candles. After putting on a recording of Gregorian chants, she stretched herself out over one of the new slabs and fell into a deep slumber that lasted until the next morning.
She came into my bedroom with a huge smile and proclaimed that she had received wonderful directions, but that she would wait until after my bath to begin her work. As she scrubbed me, I could tell she didn’t want to be doing it—her fingers wanted stone, not flesh—but that she felt it was her duty. The moment she was finished with me, she raced to the basement. I sat in the living room on the middle floor of the house, trying to read, but was too distracted by the rhythm of her chisels. I moved up to the belfry to occupy myself with other things—videos, reading, teasing Bougatsa with a towel on a string—but after a few hours, my curiosity grew too great. I cracked the door to the basement and crept a few steps down the stairway to spy on Marianne Engel.
I needn’t have worried that she’d find my presence intrusive, for she was working so intently that she didn’t seem to notice me at all. To my surprise, she was carving in the nude; it was somewhat unsettling to see her working so swiftly with sharp metal tools. The instruments flew around furiously but her hands looked sure, and I sat hypnotized by the dance of metal, stone, and flesh.
To say that Marianne Engel “carved” is not enough: it was so much more than that. She caressed the stone until the stone could no longer stand it and gave up the grotesque inside. She coaxed the gargoyles out of their stony caverns. She loved them out of the stone.
Over the many hours that she didn’t notice me, I became amazed by her stamina. She was still working when I went to sleep, and continued through the night. She went all the next day as well, and into the night again. In total, she labored for over seventy hours, drinking gallons of coffee, smoking hundreds of cigarettes. This was just how she had claimed to work—carving nonstop for days at a time—but I’d never quite believed her. I assumed it was a boastful exaggeration of her artistic discipline. But it wasn’t. Skeptics might think that she waited for me to go to sleep before she herself took a nap, but her hammering kept waking me up. On the first morning, she did haul herself away from her work long enough to clean me, but I could see—could feel—that it was done grudgingly. There was an anxiousness in her eyes, a barely contained frenzy, as she raced the sponge over my skin.
Around the sixty-hour mark, she asked me to order two large vegetarian pizzas. Normally, she had no objection to eating meat, but I soon learned that when she was in her carving like this, she manically refused to do so. “No meat! No animals!” When I brought down the pizzas, she went to three corners of the room to ask her Three Masters for permission—“Jube, Domine benedicere”—and did not eat until they gave their consent. She sat haltingly unstill in the middle of the stone fragments and ate like a beast, barely seeming to notice that I was there. A cheese strand dangled from her mouth to the edge of her left nipple, and I wanted to rappel it like a mozzarella commando to storm her lovely breasts. The candlelight captured the chalky sheen of her body, and lines of sweat created tributaries through the stone dust that coated her angel wings. The combination of her tattoos and her ecstatic bearing made her seem part Hildegard von Bingen, part yakuza.
Over the hours, her stereo passed through the works of Carl Orff; Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique; Beethoven’s nine symphonies; Poe (the singer, not the writer); the first album by Milla Jovovich; the entire catalogue of The Doors; the recordings of Robert Johnson; Cheap Thrills, by Big Brother and the Holding Company (four times in a row); and a variety of Bessie Smith, Howlin’ Wolf, and Son House. As the hours progressed, the music grew ever louder and her choice of singing voices more guttural. Even with my bad ears, by the end I had to retreat with earplugs to my belfry.
When she finished, she could barely stand. The completed monster was a human head with horns, atop a kneeling dragon’s body, and she kissed its stony lips before crawling up the stairs to collapse into her bed, still covered in dust and sweat.
“Well, obviously manic depression is common among artists,” Gregor said across the table, as he poured a shot of the bourbon that he had brought for us to drink. The sun was going down and we were sitting on the back porch; Marianne Engel was still sleeping off her efforts. After reaffirming that he could not address any specifics of her previous treatments, Gregor said that he’d be happy to answer general questions.
“After reading all those books,” I said, “I decided that her symptoms were more consistent with schizophrenia than with manic depression.”
“Well, maybe. Could be both,” Gregor answered, “or neither. I don’t know. Maybe it’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. Did she ever say why she has to do so much carving all at one time?”
“She thinks she’s following instructions from God. She thinks she’s giving out the extra hearts she has in her chest.”
“Well, that’s weird.” Gregor took a sip. “Hey, this stuff is good. It beats me what’s wrong with Marianne.”
“Aren’t you supposed to know about these things?”
Gregor shrugged. “What I don’t know could fill a warehouse. Is she taking her medicine?”
>
“No. She hates pills even more than she hates doctors. No offense.”
I asked if she could be forced, by some sort of legal order, to take her meds. Gregor explained that only a guardian could take that step. I suggested Jack, who I had recently learned was Marianne Engel’s conservator as well as her manager, but Gregor explained that a conservator only has jurisdiction over a patient’s property, not her personal decisions. No one can force a patient into a hospital except a judge, Gregor said, and then only for a few days. I interjected that I didn’t want Marianne Engel committed; I simply wanted her to take her drugs. Gregor said that all I could do was ask nicely. Then he asked me if we could stop talking about her condition; while he felt he hadn’t gone over any line of doctor-patient confidentiality yet, he was worried he was getting dangerously close.
We left the topic at that. I asked him about Sayuri and he told me that they were seeing more of each other. Had a date that night, actually. Then he chastised me for always wanting to talk about his love life, while never giving up any details of my own. I laughed it off—What love life?—but he threw it right back at me. “You’re not fooling anyone.”
There was a pause in the conversation, but it was a good pause. Gregor took another sip of bourbon and we looked out into the sunset together. “Nice night,” he said.
“She touched me,” I blurted.
This caught Gregor off his guard. “What do you mean?”
“The first time she bathed me and saw…my groin”—Gregor knew, through his position at the hospital, about my amputation—“she inspected it. Ran her fingers over the scars.”
“What did she say?”
“That the condition of my body is not relevant to her.”
“Did you believe her?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I swirled the bourbon in my glass. “Of course it matters. It’s gone.”