She fixed me with morphine that was sweeter than the desert’s first rainfall, and the snake slithered silently into her hole. I assumed I would sleep through until the next morning, but it didn’t work out that way. It was February and not yet warm outside, but for some reason it seemed ridiculously hot inside. Perhaps the effect was partially psychological, from the stress of sleeping in a new place for the first time in ten months.
My unbreathing skin revolted in the feverish night and I dreamed of concentration camps, of human ovens, of people with matchstick bodies. Their hunger was transforming them into something too thin to be human. Their eyes bulged and accused; they were hunting me with their stares. Someone said in German, “Alles brennt, wenn die Flamme nur heiß genug ist. Die Welt ist nichts als ein Schmelztiegel.” Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible. It was the same phrase I’d heard in my hospital nightmare about the skeleton bed going up in a shrouded flame.
I awoke suddenly upright in my thin sheets, wishing I could sweat. I heard the snake chanting the word HOLOCAUST. HOLOCAUST. HOLOCAUST. HOLOCAUST. The word, I am told, literally means “burning everything.” The belfry was cooking me; Dr. Edwards had been correct, we needed air conditioning. I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. There could be no denying that the snake was persistent; it was like having a Jehovah’s Witness living in my spine. I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
I looked at Friedrich Sunder’s Gnaden-vita (which means “Mercy-life”) on my bedside table. I decided that I didn’t have it in me to do any reading, especially not something that challenging. I got up on uncooperative legs and, with a little persuasion, was able to point them in the direction of the master bedroom, from which—to my surprise—Marianne Engel was absent. I listened to the house. From below, I heard faint strains of classical music that I didn’t recognize but that, for some reason, made me think about field workers. I struggled down both flights of stairs, from belfry to main floor, then from main floor to basement workshop.
There were a hundred candles, a hundred dots of fire in the room. I did not like this. Rivers of lush red wax flowed down iron candleholders; little splashes blotted the stone floor like an upside-down canopy of ruby stars. I could make out the grand oak doors on one side of the room and a considerable wooden workbench on the other. Tools on hooks lined the wall, and a coffeemaker sat on a shelf next to the stereo that was playing the music. A push broom leaned against the wall near a pile of carelessly swept stone fragments. But these were the unimportant details.
Everywhere there were incomplete monsters. It was generally the bottom halves of the grotesques that remained unfinished, as if the hobgoblin mafia had given them the proverbial cement shoes. A half sea-savage was using her webbed hands to claw out of a granite ocean. The upper body of a terrified monkey burst out of a lion whose legs were not yet carved. A bird’s head sat on the shoulders of a human, but everything below the chest was untouched marble. The shimmer of the candlelight only amplified the beasts’ already exaggerated features.
The workshop was a symphony of unwholeness, with grotesques caught between existence and nonexistence. It was difficult to tell whether they were ecstatic or melancholic, fearful or fearless, soulful or soulless; perhaps they themselves didn’t know yet. There wasn’t even enough light to decide whether they were beautiful or disgusting. And in the midst of these rough gargoyles, Marianne Engel was sleeping upon a huge slab of stone, undressed except for the necklace whose arrowhead, resting in the valley of her breasts, moved slightly up and down with the rhythm of her breath. She was at home here, the nude one danced upon by the shadows and light, her hair twisted around her body like wings woven from black rope. She clung to her rock like moss waiting to absorb the rain, and I couldn’t remove my eyes from her glorious body. I didn’t want to stare; I just couldn’t force myself to stop.
I was aware that I was invading something intensely personal; something about the scene was more vulnerable than her nudity. I felt as if I were interrupting a private conversation, and I knew I should leave immediately.
I climbed back up to the main floor and decided to sleep in the study because it was cooler than the belfry. I placed towels on the leather couch because I still shed skin, and lay down. I administered another generous shot of morphine, because one man’s poison is another man’s warm milk. There were no more dreams of holocausts that night.
I awoke to find Marianne Engel, wearing a white robe, standing over me. We talked for a few minutes before she bundled me off to the washroom, where a bath had already been drawn with the proper chemicals added and a thermometer hung over the tub’s edge. “Take off your clothes.”
I had managed to avoid bathing practice with her at the hospital through a combination of luck and deceit, but my luck had run out. My benefactor was now demanding to see my exposed body, so I played the only card left in my deck: I told her that my nakedness in front of her would make me feel self-conscious, and asked whether she could understand that. She told me she could, but it didn’t change the fact that I needed to be washed. I told her that she needed to respect my privacy. She laughed and told me about an especially vivid dream she’d had the night before in which I’d stood in the middle of her workshop, looking upon her nude body.
I could hardly talk my way out of that. The best I could do was cut a new deal: I agreed to allow her to bathe me if she’d fix me with more dope first. Compromise accepted. Soon I stood unclothed, looking as if I were made out of rubber that hadn’t set properly in the mold, while she searched my abominable body for an appropriate morphine-hungry vein.
THIS IS WHERE SHE SEES YOU FOR YOUR LACK.
Her hand rested on my hip and my left arm was presented for the drugs, but my right arm hung strategically in front of my groin.
She prepared the needle, placed the tip where it might enter, and asked, “Is this a good place?” SHE CAN ENTER YOU . . . I nodded. The needle penetrated and I wasn’t even thinking about the morphine that was coming; I was only thinking . . . BUT YOU CAN’T ENTER HER that I had to make sure I did not move my right arm.
“Into the tub,” she said. But I was unable to climb into it without moving my right arm. So I just stood there, concealing the blank space between my hips.
“I will help you wash each day,” she said gently. “It’ll be difficult to keep hiding it.”
There is nothing to hide, I thought.
“I already know it is missing.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You think I will be repulsed,” continued Marianne Engel, “or my feelings will change.”
Finally I spoke. “Yes.”
“You are mistaken.”
I dropped my arm as if challenging her, as if I expected her reaction to prove her words wrong. I wanted her to recoil at the closed scar where one could imagine that my body had been cut open, the penis pushed in, and the slit sewn shut. I wanted her to recoil at the sight of my lonely scrotum, which looked for all the world like a tumbleweed on the abandoned street of a ghost town.
But she did not pull back; instead, she kneeled in front of my naked body, and leaned in. Her head even with my groin, she narrowed her eyes and studied the faint scratch-lines of stitches, long since pulled out, that closed up the place where my penis had been. She lifted her hand and pulled it back, but not in revulsion: she seemed to be acting on the instinct that my body was hers to touch before realizing that it was not, not in this century at least. So she looked up at me and requested permission.
I cleared my throat, once, twice, and then nodded weakly.
Marianne Engel reached out again, and this time her fingertips grazed my crinkled wasteland. I could not feel the touch at all, because the scarring was too dense, too complete; I only knew her fingertips were upon me because I could see them there.
“Stop now,” I said.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.” Third clearing of my throat. “Haven’t you seen
enough?”
SHE’S SEEN NOTHING.
She removed her fingers and stood. She looked directly into my eyes with hers, green this day, and they worked the way they sometimes did, unsettling me. “I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“You do,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“Do you really believe,” she asked, “that I ever loved you because of your body?”
“I don’t…” Fourth, fifth; damn my throat. “I guess not.” And to show that I meant it, I climbed into the bath without any more argument.
The tub was a massive thing with lion’s paws for feet, and soon Marianne Engel was scrubbing away the dead outer layers of my skin. It was a painful process, so she distracted me—and demonstrated she was ready to move on in our conversation—by asking why I’d had so much trouble sleeping. I explained that the heat was a bit much, causing bad dreams. Then I asked why she’d been stretched out on the stone. “Instructions?”
“I thought a grotesque was ready,” she admitted, “but I was wrong.”
“You once told me that you carve as fast as you can to get the grotesque out of the stone, but the basement is full of half-finished work.”
“Sometimes we get halfway through the process before they realize that they aren’t ready. So we pause for a little while.” She cupped some water into her hands and showered my head. “When I get the call again, I’ll finish them.”
“What if,” I asked, “you were to refuse to carve when they called?”
“I couldn’t do that. My carving pleases God.”
“How do you know?”
She pressed the sponge harder into an area of my skin that did not want to give. “Because God gave me ears that can hear the voices in the stone.”
“How does that work, exactly?”
She stumbled over her words; for all her language skills, she could not articulate precisely what she wanted to say.
“I just empty myself. I used to be so anxious to receive God’s instructions that I couldn’t. Now I clear myself, and that’s when the gargoyles can most easily talk to me. If I’m not empty, I bring my own ideas, and they’re always wrong. It’s much easier for the gargoyles, you see, because they’ve been emptying themselves for a million years. In the rock, He entered them and informed them. Then they inform me of God’s plan for us. I have to”—she paused for a good five seconds—“I have to empty myself of potency to become as close as I can to pure act. But only God is pure act.”
I will not pretend that I understood this perfectly, but here is my best interpretation: God acted upon the “buried gargoyles” (meaning the gargoyles still encased in stone) by informing them of the shapes they should assume. The buried gargoyles acted upon Marianne Engel, instructing her how to realize these shapes. Marianne Engel then became the agent of action, chipping away the stone. In this way, she allowed the gargoyles to realize the shapes God intended for them. The now unburied gargoyles (the finished carvings) were therefore a realization of God’s instructions. They were not Marianne Engel’s creations, because she wasn’t the sculptor; God was. She was only the tool in His hand.
She kept scrubbing hard on my body the entire time that she was explaining. When she was finished, I could see the chips of my skin floating in the bathwater.
It was not long before a work crew arrived to install air conditioning and I found myself able to sleep comfortably in the belfry. I assembled a few shelves in the room—one for books, and one for the small stone grotesque and the glass lily that I’d received in the hospital. There was a desk in one corner, which I equipped with the stationery set that Gregor had given me. In another corner were the television and video player that Marianne Engel had bought for me, despite her own aversion to these too-modern items.
The scene in the basement did not repeat itself any time soon after that, and we quickly developed a routine. When I woke in the morning, she’d inject me first and scrub me second. Following this, there was a series of exercises that Sayuri had prescribed. In the afternoon I’d take a nap, and while I slept, Marianne Engel shopped for my recovery supplies or took Bougatsa for a walk. In the early evening I’d get up again and we’d play cards, or drink coffee and talk. Occasionally, if she had something to do, I’d call Gregor and we’d spend a few minutes on the phone. I found I missed the visits he had made to my hospital bedside and we usually ended our calls by promising to get together soon. It was not easy, though, because his schedule was busy and it seemed that whatever free time he had was spent with Sayuri.
At the end of most evenings, Marianne Engel would go to bed before I was ready to sleep, and I’d stay up to read Friedrich Sunder or Sister Christina.
The Gnaden-vita was fascinating even though, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, the writing included several occurrences of gender reversal. Sunder would be writing in the proper masculine sense and then—whoops!—he’d be a woman. These mistakes might have been inserted by female editors after Friedrich’s death, or by various female scriveners over the years, or even by Marianne Engel as she finally brought the work into English. (Imagine the glee in Titivillus’ eye!) However, I doubted this was actually the case, because the feminine qualities were beyond mere typographical slips: they were integral to the content.
A particularly striking example is in Father Sunder’s description of his marriage to Christ. The idea of such a union seems—to my modern mind—strange, but apparently “marriage” to Christ was common among men of Friedrich’s position. Even allowing for this, however, there can be no denying the enormously erotic nature of the bridal imagery. The marriage is consummated in an ornate bed covered with flowers, in the middle of a court, and watched by many figures from Heaven, including Mother Mary. Sunder writes that Christ embraces him and kisses him, and that they take their pleasures with each other. (You read that correctly.) When Christ is finished with Friedrich, He tells the angels to take up their instruments and play them with as much pleasure as He has just played His beloved spouse. Jesus even claims that through this consummation a multitude of souls has been freed from Purgatory, which really does suggest that it was quite a wedding night.
It crossed my mind that Marianne Engel might have included this passage in the translation simply to have a good laugh at my expense. Because—c’mon!—this episode couldn’t really have existed in Sunder’s original text, right? But in the interval I’ve checked other sources and found it to be accurate.
As interesting as that is, more notable to me is the fact that the Gnaden-vita includes no mention of a Sister Marianne who’d been dropped off as a babe at the Engelthal gates. When I pointed this out, Marianne Engel assured me that her omission from Sunder’s book would be explained before she finished telling me the story of our past lives.
“I know that you don’t like the idea of going out in public,” she said, “so let’s go now, under the cover of night.”
I resisted nominally, but was too curious about where a midnight excursion with Marianne Engel (and Bougatsa) might lead. Soon we found ourselves in her car, heading towards a beach at which I’d never bothered to stop. I wondered whether anyone else would be there and decided probably not, on a cold night in late February. But I was wrong. The sandy shoreline was speckled with small bonfires around which teenagers sat drinking beer. They were equidistant in the darkness, affording everyone a degree of anonymity. I liked this.
Marianne Engel laid out a blanket. I wanted to take off my shoes, because they were full of sand, but even in the dark I was too bashful about my missing toes. She said she wished that I could go swimming with her, or at least wade out to my knees, but she had no idea what saltwater would do to my skin. My gut feeling was that it would not be pleasant. It didn’t really matter, because as a child I had never learned to swim. “That’s a shame,” she said. “I love the water.”
I laid my head in her lap and she told me about the great wolf named Sköll that chases the sun every day, trying to eat it. It is said that at Ragnarök, the battle at t
he end of the world, he will finally succeed, devouring the sun while his brother Hati eats the moon, and the stars will disappear from the sky. She told me about the terrible earthquakes that will rip the earth apart as Miðgarðsormur, the Midgard Serpent, twists his immense body in the ocean and causes towering tidal waves. All the gods will be involved in a tremendous war, and eventually fire will be flung in all directions. The world, Marianne Engel said, will burn before the charred remains sink into the sea. “At least that’s what my friend Sigurðr believes.”
She hopped up from our blanket and started stripping off her clothes. “I’m going swimming now.”
Though I usually accepted her idiosyncrasies, I was shocked by this announcement. It was obviously and immediately dangerous, and I protested that the weather was far too cold.
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “People do it all the time, you know, in polar bear plunges.”
I had heard of such events—people jumping into the freezing ocean for a few minutes, usually for charity—and knew they were closely monitored by dozens of volunteers, not to mention doctors. Any one of a hundred participants could help to pull out a swimmer in trouble, but here, she would be alone.
“I love that you’re so worried about me,” she said, “but I’ve done it plenty of times before.”
“Yeah?” I challenged. “When? Where?”
“Finland. Often.”
Finland. “That doesn’t make it a good idea today.” We weren’t in Finland.
“You’re sweet. I’ll only stay in for a few minutes, and I won’t swim past where my feet can touch bottom.” Her clothes were now off, heaped in a pile on the beach, and I asked her one more time not to do it. “Only a few minutes. Not in deep water.”