Svanhildr and Einarr also considered placing the arrowhead necklace into the grave, but ultimately decided against it. It would go to Friðleifr, a talisman to protect the child as he grew into a man.
Einarr filled in the grave by himself. Bragi and Svanhildr, the baby clutched tightly to her bosom, stayed with him as he worked through the night. Just as the sun was rising, the last shovelful was put into place and Einarr slumped exhausted, to look out over the ocean at the sun rising like the condemning eye of Óðinn. The boy Bragi had fallen asleep and Einarr, unable to keep the awful truth to himself any longer, confessed to Svanhildr how the fight had started.
When he was finished, Svanhildr touched her husband for the first time since the longhouse was burning. She couldn’t offer any words of forgiveness, but she took his hand into her own.
“I don’t know why I did it,” said Einarr, tears running down his face. “I loved him.”
They sat not speaking for a long time, Einarr weeping, until finally Svanhildr spoke. “Friðleifr is a good name,” she said, “but perhaps not so good as Sigurðr.”
Einarr squeezed her fingers and nodded, and then broke into new sobs.
“It is proper that we never forget,” said Svanhildr, looking down on the sleeping face of the rescued baby at her breast. “From this day forward, this child will carry our friend’s name.”
XXII.
Keeping a low profile is not easy for a burn survivor at the best of times, but it becomes exponentially harder when he is in a fabric store with a wild-haired woman holding up swaths of white cloth against his chest, measuring out the proper amount for his angel’s robes.
When it came time to pay, I stepped between Marianne Engel and the cashier, thrusting forward my credit card. Funny the sense of independence it inspired, given that payment would ultimately come from one of her accounts anyway. Still, I could live with the illusion.
After we had procured all our costume-making supplies, we ran a rather strange errand to a local bank. Marianne Engel wanted to add my name to the access list for her safety deposit box, and the bank needed a signature sample to complete the request. When I asked her why she wanted it done, she answered simply that it was good to be prepared, for God only knew what the future might bring. I asked whether she was going to give me a key for the safety deposit box. No, she answered, not yet. Who else was on the list? No one.
We went to a coffee shop to drink lattes with no foam, sitting on an outside deck while Marianne Engel educated me on the Icelandic version of Hel. Apparently it is a place not of fire but of ice: while English speakers say that it’s “hot as Hell,” Icelanders say helkuldi, “cold as Hell.” This makes sense: having spent their entire lives hammered down by the frigid climate, how could they fear anything more than an eternal version of the same thing? For the burnt man, might I add, it is particularly attractive that the notion subverts the Judeo-Christian idea that the means of eternal torment must be fire.
That Hell is tailored to the individual is hardly a new idea. It is, in fact, one of the greatest artistic triumphs in Dante’s Inferno: the punishment for every sinner fits his sin. The Souls of the Carnal, who in life were swept away by the gusting fits of their passion, are in death doomed to be carried on the winds of a never-ending tempest. The Souls of the Simoniacs, who in life offended God by abusing the privileges of their holy offices, are doomed to burn upside down in fiery baptismal fonts. The Souls of the Flatterers spend eternity buried in excrement, a reminder of the shit they spoke on Earth.
It made me wonder what my version of Hell—if I believed in such a thing, that is—would be like. Would I be doomed to burn forever, trapped inside my car? Or would Hell be a never-ending stint on the débridement table? Or would it be the discovery that when I was finally able to love, it was already too late?
As I contemplated this, I spotted one of my secret fraternity coming down the street. It was a strange feeling, the first time that I’d seen another burn survivor in public, and one whom I knew, no less: Lance Whitmore, the man who’d given the inspirational talk at the hospital. He came directly to us and asked whether we’d met before. I couldn’t blame him for not recognizing me, because not only had the contours of my face changed while healing, they were also hidden behind my plastic mask.
“It’s nice to see one of us out in the daylight,” he said. “It’s not that we’re ghosts, exactly, but we do a pretty good job of not being seen.”
We made small talk for perhaps ten minutes and it never seemed to bother Lance that we drew curious stares from nearly everyone who walked past us. I don’t doubt that he noticed, but I admired the way he could pretend he didn’t.
I was in a white robe and my wings were made of stockings stretched over coat hangers, trimmed with silver tinsel. Marianne Engel adjusted my halo (pipe cleaners, painted gold) before rolling up my angelic sleeve to administer a shot of morphine, which flowed through me like the slightly curdled milk of human kindness. Bougatsa ran around nipping at our heels, and I wondered how the brain of a dog might process such a scene.
She was also dressed in a robe—or, more accurately, a dress that hung and bunched so loosely that it looked like a robe. Her hair was somehow even wilder than usual, despite being tied with a band that encircled her temples and came together in a knot on her forehead. A wide tail of fabric escaped her curls and cascaded down her back. She gathered this excess material into the crook of her elbow, letting it drape over her forearm as a waiter might hold a napkin. In her other hand she held an old-fashioned lantern, without oil, and around her left ankle—the one with the rosary tattoo—was a circle of leaves. She explained that it was to represent the laurel crown that should be on the ground at her feet, because a real one would impede her movement around the dance floor. I asked her who she was.
“One of the Foolish Virgins,” she answered.
The party was at the oldest, most expensive hotel in town. A doorman with top hat opened the taxi door and took Marianne Engel by the hand. He bowed deeply, before looking at me quizzically as if trying to understand how my burn makeup could be so convincing. “Are you to be Lucifer, sir?”
“Excuse me?”
“The only fallen angel I know, sir.” He bowed curtly. “Well done. Might I add the voice is an excellent touch?”
As we entered the lobby, Marianne Engel took my arm. The lights were low, and dark streamers fell from the ceiling. Spider webs clung to the room corners and dozens of black cats patrolled the place. (I wondered where they got so many; did they raid an animal shelter?) Guests were gathering in the main ballroom. There were half a dozen skeletons moving about, jangling their painted white bones on black leotards. Marie Antoinette, with powdered wig and plunging décolleté, was talking to Lady Godiva, whose long blond hair fell over a flesh bodysuit. A Canadian Mountie was having a whiskey with Al Capone. A woman dressed as a giant queen carrot, waving a vegetable scepter, stood beside her boyfriend the rabbit. A drunken Albert Einstein was arguing with a sober Jim Morrison and, in a far corner, two devils were comparing tails. A waiter glided by with a silver tray and Marianne Engel deftly plucked a martini glass, taking a gulp before kissing me on my maskcheek.
We found a table covered with a bloodred tablecloth, on which a candle stuck out of a collection of glass eyeballs. We sat together: on Marianne Engel’s outer side was a man dressed as a rubber duck and on my outer side was a sexy policewoman.
It did not take long before I understood that Halloween would now be my favorite holiday. When the policewoman complimented my costume, I made up a story about how “in real life” I was an English teacher at a local high school. After Marianne Engel downed her third martini—interesting, in that she rarely drank alcohol—she dragged me onto the floor. She knew that I was secretly dying to dance with her; I wasn’t exercising so diligently with Sayuri so I could spend my life as a wallflower.
The band struck up a waltz, and Marianne Engel drew herself to her full height and gathered me in her stonecutter?
??s arms. She looked intently into my eyes and, for just a moment, I felt as if the sea were rushing up to meet me. I don’t know how long we stood motionless before she launched us into the lilt of the music. I needed only to follow; she seemed to have an intuitive sense about the strength of my body. Never once did I worry about pushing my weaker knee beyond its limits as we spun in wonderful circles among the Romeos and the Juliets, near the Esmeraldas and Quasimodi, past the Umas and Travoltas. Marianne Engel’s eyes were directly upon mine, at all times, and the other dancers in the room faded into a spin of unimportant background colors.
This went on, I don’t know how long, and it would have continued longer if my gaze had not caught, out of the corner of my eye, a most interesting couple. At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks and I told myself that they could not really be there. They disappeared when Marianne Engel spun me in a half circle, and I fully expected they would be gone on the next turn. But they weren’t.
I couldn’t deny it this time: there was a Japanese woman in religious robes whose shaved head contrasted sharply with the red hair of the Viking with whom she was dancing. She was so graceful and he was so lumbering that it was like watching a sparrow ride on a bull’s horns. Her mouth was held resolutely shut as his scabbard clanged awkwardly against her hip and when she readjusted her arm for a better position on his waist, some dirt fell from the folds of her sleeve.
Marianne Engel swung me around again and by the time we swiveled back to our original position, the couple was gone. “Did you see them?”
“See who?” she asked.
Just then, I saw a different couple. This time the woman was wearing Victorian clothing but it was practical, like something that would be worn not for dancing but for farming. It was not an outfit that would normally rate a second look at a costume party—except that it was drenched: water dripped from it onto the floor, pooling beneath her. The man looked jovial despite the wetness of this woman in his arms, not seeming to mind in the least. He wore a leather smock and had big arms and a bigger gut. She was smiling politely as he talked, but kept glancing over his shoulder as if looking for someone else. We were just close enough that I could tell that he was speaking in Italian and that she was answering in English. “Tom? I don’t know….”
Marianne Engel tried to spin me again, but I pulled free. My eyes left the couple for only a moment but that was long enough for them to disappear. I looked wildly around the crowd for any trace of them, but there was nothing.
I returned to the area where the Victorian woman’s dress had been dripping. But the floor was dry. I searched the floor for the dirt that had fallen from the Japanese woman’s sleeve. But the floor was clean. I was on my knees, sweeping my hands over the floor, and the other dancers parted around me as if I were mad. I crawled around, searching for anything but finding nothing. Marianne Engel leaned down to whisper in my ear. “What are you looking for?”
“You saw them. Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The ghosts!”
“Oh. Ghosts.” She giggled. “You can’t fixate on them, you know. It’s like trying to catch slippery eels by the tail. Just when you think you’ve got them, they get away from you.”
We stayed for another few hours, but I spent all my time looking for phantoms. I knew that I had seen an impossible thing: it was not a trick of my mind. I had seen them. YOU’RE AS CRAZY AS SHE IS. Fuck you, snake. I’m going to douse you with so much morphine it’ll make you want to shed your skin early.
When we arrived home, Marianne Engel served tea in an effort to calm me. When that didn’t work, she decided to continue telling me our story. Perhaps knowing whether or not we got married, she said, would make me feel better.
XXIII.
Before you said that you might someday ask me to marry you, I never seriously considered that it might happen. I admit I’d had some fleeting fantasies about it, but I’d already broken one set of lifetime vows and I wasn’t sure that I wanted another. Part of me was afraid that I’d betray you just as I’d betrayed Mother Christina, so when you didn’t mention marriage again I assumed that you had been talking idly, the way men do when they’re feeling romantic. In truth, it didn’t even bother me, because my life was already so much more than I had ever dreamed it could be. I was doing work for the Beguines, making improvements in every aspect of their bookmaking, and it was not long before the fact that I’d trained in the Engelthal scriptorium leaked out to certain prosperous citizens.
One thing never changes. The rich want to show off what they have and other people don’t. In those days, what could have been better than books? One could exhibit not only wealth, but also uncommon intelligence and taste. Still, I was caught completely unawares when a noblewoman approached me with an offer of a commission, if I would produce a manuscript of Rudolf’s Der gute Gerhard for her husband’s birthday. I turned her down, thinking it would insult you if I appeared to feel it necessary to contribute to the household income. But there is another thing that never changes about the rich: they think the poor always have a price. As it turns out, they’re right. The noblewoman named a figure that exceeded what you were making in a year. I started to refuse again, but…well, we needed that money, so I asked for some time to think about it.
I didn’t know how to broach the subject. We’d both agreed that your apprenticeship was for the best in the long term, but your salary was so small that you weren’t even bringing home enough to cover our basic expenses. The couple who rented to us were aware of our situation and, even though they weren’t rich themselves, kindly offered to defer a portion of the rent. This was the only thing that allowed us to keep going, but it made you feel that you were failing them as well as me.
For days I walked around our lodgings, starting to speak sentences that I never finished. You kept asking what was wrong, and I kept saying “Nothing.” Finally, when you couldn’t stand it anymore, you made me tell you what was on my mind. This was really just a trick on my part—buffering my own responsibility by making you force the confession out of me. I said that I wanted to start working with books again and told you about the noblewoman’s offer. I made it sound like you’d be doing me a favor if you allowed me to take the commission.
You took it better than I’d expected, agreeing that if it made me happy then I should do it. Your way of making peace with it, although this was never spoken aloud, was that I could take the job as long as we both pretended that it was mostly a hobby. But it was not lost on either of us the way your eyelids peeled open in amazement when I told you how much money I’d been offered.
The noblewoman immediately provided a small advance. Small for her, huge for us. It took a few days before I could work up the courage to spend any of it, knowing that as soon as I did, I’d be well and truly committed. When I passed that first coin to a parchment seller, it was almost a feeling of relief, and I set to work.
I completed that first book and the noblewoman seemed pleased with it. I’m not sure if she recommended me to her friends or if they sought me out through other channels, but it didn’t really matter. They found me, somehow.
There was a serious lack of qualified bookmakers in Mainz and because I came from Engelthal, I had a certain cachet. No one believes that his own town can produce true artists, but most people accept it as fact that in other places they fall off the trees like ripe fruit. More important, though, everyone acknowledged that the most desirable manuscripts came from religious scriptoria, so if a noblewoman couldn’t get her book produced in an actual monastery, I was the next best thing. She could take special pleasure in proclaiming that she owned a manuscript created by an Engelthal nun—never quite mentioning, of course, that the nun was no longer actually in the order.
It wasn’t long before I had more offers than time, and that’s when the bribery started. When I mentioned in passing how much I liked to cook, a noblewoman immediately said that she would give me a selection of choice meats if
I pushed her commission to the top of my pile. I accepted and soon discovered how quickly gossip travels through the upper circles. Straightaway I was offered all manner of delicacies and, before I knew it, oats and barley had replaced millet in our diet. We were given whichever fruits were in season—cherries, plums, apples, pears, and sloes—and luxury items like cloves and ginger, mustard and fennel, sugar and almonds. You have no idea what these things meant. Whenever I was not translating or copying I was trying out new recipes; I felt I was making up for all the food we’d never eaten. The landlady helped me because it was a rare treat for her to use spices as well, and I had to laugh about the fact that I was becoming a culinary sinner. After all, had not Dante placed a Sienese nobleman into Hell for discovering the “costly uses of the clove”?
Before long we were living like God in France. I kept the door open with a pot of stew constantly bubbling and soon we were the most popular couple in the neighborhood. Even my Beguine friends dropped in, although they always feigned disdain for the elaborateness of the food. I would remind them that they’d pledged themselves to charity and it wasn’t very charitable to hurt my feelings. They’d pretend they were doing me a favor by eating, and I came to learn that even Beguines were gossips over a full plate.
The Jewish women also dropped in and I was amazed to learn how many of them were involved in business affairs, especially if the husband had died and the wife took over the family trade. To be quite honest, it inspired me. When I became too busy to accept new manuscript commissions, it was one of these women who first suggested that I should hire workers and go into business.
By this point, your bruised pride had been soothed by the money. You told me I could do as I pleased, so I decided to expand my activities. Why not? In the scriptorium, I had learned how several people worked together to produce a book, so I had experience in dealing with tradesmen and an understanding of every aspect of production. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I could do it.