First, I found a parchmenter I liked. I gained his respect when I showed him how he could improve the lime solution he used for soaking his animal skins. After he got over the shock that a woman could teach him anything, our relationship flourished. We entered into a contract: he’d produce paper for me each month, at discount if I ordered in bulk. Each delivery day we’d sit down to a bowl of stew and discuss how much parchment I’d need the next month. We became good friends, actually, and he grew to like my cooking almost as much as he did the business I gave him.
Next, I discovered an illustrator whose sensibilities matched my own. Negotiations with him were quite easy, because he was young and down on his luck. Each month I’d provide him with several folio pages to illuminate with miniatures. He also acted as rubricator, which meant there was one less person for me to manage. The arrangement worked out nicely for both of us; for the first time in his life, he could make a living from his artwork. He was so grateful that he kept his prices reasonable for me even when he had made his reputation and other bookmakers were clamoring to employ him.
There were other workers, mostly freelance scribes, but I won’t bore you with the details. The best thing about the business was something that I hadn’t really considered at all: suddenly, I could get my hands on books. When I was hired to produce editions of Virgil’s Æneid and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, the patron provided borrowed texts from which I could work. Later, I had romances—Wolfram’s Parzival, Hartmann’s Iwein, and Gottfried’s Tristan. In the evenings, I’d bring them to our bed and read to you. These were some of the happiest hours of our lives, because there was nothing I loved more than to have a book in my lap and your head nestled into the crook of my shoulder. I tried to teach you to read but you never had the patience for it. Besides, you said that you liked it better when I read to you anyway.
As time passed I spent more time managing the other scribes and less time copying myself, until I found that I had enough energy left in the evenings to concentrate on my translation of Dante. I had been forced to abandon it when we first came to Mainz because I didn’t have writing materials, and when I first got writing materials I didn’t have time. Now I had both, and I finally understood how Gertrud had felt about her Bible. I would fret over every single word to ensure that the translation was my masterpiece, and why should I rush? You and I had our entire lives in front of us.
Eventually your apprenticeship came to an end and you received your journeyman’s papers. Normally this would have been followed by the Wanderjahre, during which you’d travel from city to city and study under different masters, but you had no intention of going anywhere. You’d find work in Mainz, where most of the stoneworkers already knew you and were fully aware why you would choose not to travel. No one would hold it against the man who had been the oldest apprentice the city had ever known.
We had so much good fortune in our lives that we barely spoke about the one thing that wasn’t working out. Maybe we felt we had no right to complain, or maybe we just didn’t want to jinx ourselves, but we had been trying to conceive and I had not yet become pregnant. In the back of my mind, I was always worried that you might decide I was an unsuitable partner after all, so you have no idea how relieved I was when, as soon as you had your papers in your hand, you announced that you wanted to marry me.
We decided the ceremony would be small but as soon as word leaked out, everyone we knew wanted an invitation. I’d like to think it was because of our popularity, but more likely it was because everyone anticipated an extravagant wedding feast. I supplied the food, the largesse of many bribes, and soon there was a legion of helpers in our kitchen. When our place proved too tiny, preparation spilled over into neighboring houses. Our landlady supervised everything and even the Beguines offered to help, though they were terrible cooks.
My only regret was that I couldn’t invite Mother Christina, Father Sunder, and Brother Heinrich. I considered sending word to Engelthal, but I knew that they’d be compelled to decline, and I didn’t want to put them in that position. I consoled myself with the thought that they’d have been there, if it were at all possible. And your only regret was that you were unable to invite Brandeis.
You didn’t even know whether your friend was still alive. Worst of all, you could never go looking for him without betraying the fact that you had survived your burns and thus escaped the condotta, whose only rule was that no one escaped. You’d never been able to forgive yourself for the fact that Brandeis had enabled your escape, while he had to go back to the condotta. There were still times when you awoke from nightmares about the old battles.
We got lucky on the day of the wedding and the weather was just right. Stoneworkers mingled with bookmakers, Jews with Christians, and everyone, even the Beguines, ate until their stomachs were full. Almost all the guests stumbled home on drunken legs, and then there was only you and me, to spend our first night as man and wife.
When we awoke the next morning, you presented me with a small stone angel that you’d carved. This was my Morgengabe—my morning gift, a sign of the legitimacy of our marriage. The legitimacy of us. I’d always thought that it would be unimportant to me, any ritual acknowledgment of the love that I already knew to be true, but I could not stop crying tears of happiness.
You soon found steady work and the physical aspect agreed with you. Your health was consistently good and you loved working with stone. I was producing books, managing my staff, and continuing my work on Inferno. We kept talking about moving into that larger house but somehow never quite got around to it. We liked where we were, we liked our friends, and maybe something about being in the Jewish area of town suited us because we were outsiders, too. Maybe a bigger house was just a dream that we created when we needed one to keep us going. There was only one thing that could have made us happier—and then, we got that as well.
After years without success, I finally became pregnant. The single happiest moment I have ever lived is when I first told you and saw the look on your face. There was not a second of fear or doubt, there was only wonderful anticipation. You rushed out to tell all your stoneworking friends and when you returned you held me tightly, talking about the various advantages of a girl over a boy, or a boy over a girl.
It was shortly afterwards that we were in the market one day, buying vegetables, when a pack of young men started arguing with a vendor over some perceived slight. They were clad in dirty clothes and had the cocksure swagger that only youth can possess. Off to one side, an older man was watching the proceedings with the look of someone who’d seen this a hundred times, had grown tired of it, but knew nothing could be done except let the stupid scene play itself out.
I thought that I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t put a name to the face. I took you by the arm and pointed him out, asking if you recognized him. You dropped the bag of vegetables, and the blood drained from your face. When you finally spoke, you could barely get his name out.
XXIV.
On the first of November, despite waking with a hangover from the Halloween party, Marianne Engel headed immediately for the basement. Over the next two days, her last remaining half-finished statue—the terrified lion/monkey—was given legs on which it could stand. When it was completed, she lay down upon a new slab and slept for a dozen hours before throwing herself headlong into a new grotesque. All the while, I was alone upstairs with my memories of the dancing ghosts that I couldn’t have seen.
Her new goblin (a human face on the misshapen body of a bird) took seventy-four hours to complete, before she came upstairs to wash the grime off her body and gorge herself on whatever she could find in the fridge. I expected that she would, as usual, retreat to her bedroom to sleep off her fatigue, but no, she went right back downstairs to stretch herself over another block. After absorbing its stony dreams, she spent another seventy-something hours in the thrall of her fresh suitor. When she was finished, a warty toad with the screaming beak of an eagle had been uncovered.
She returned to
her bed for a proper sleep, but after ten hours Marianne Engel was back in the kitchen drinking a pot of coffee and eating a pound of bacon. (When not actively carving, she was allowed meat.) As soon as her plate was clean, she took a few steps towards the basement stairs. “Another one is calling.” When I asked how she would be able to sleep on the stone after so much coffee, she answered that it wouldn’t be necessary. “This one was already talking to me while I was working on the toad.”
Although it was only the second week of November, Marianne Engel was already starting the month’s third new grotesque. The increase in production was unsettling enough, but there was also a change in intensity: she was throwing herself into a frenzy that outdid even the most torrid of the sessions I’d already witnessed. Sweat ran down her body, leaving trails in the stone dust, and she had to open up the massive oak doors to let in the cool autumn air. She never extinguished the hundred red candles that surrounded her, and their crowns of fire responded to the wind like wheat waltzing in the field. With her tools flying around, I could not help but think of a farmer wielding his harvest scythe in a desperate effort to outrace the coming winter.
When this third statue was finished, Marianne Engel immediately embarked on the next.
The hammering had become so insistent that the air of the house seemed empty whenever she put down her tools. Sometimes it—the noise, not the rare silences—even drove me out of the house. I never went far, usually hiding behind the corner of the fortress to watch the parishioners visit St. Romanus. Father Shanahan would stand on the front steps, glad-handing them on their way out, imploring them to come back the following week. They all promised that they would, and most even did.
Shanahan seemed a sincere enough fellow, as far as priests go, although I must admit that I’m hardly an impartial observer. I’ve always felt a strange kind of fascination/revulsion towards men of the cloth: because I despise the institutions for which they stand, I want to despise them as people as well. But all too often I find that I cannot hate the man, only the robe.
I imagine the reader’s natural impulse is to assume my atheism has been cultivated from rough experience: the childhood loss of relatives, a career in pornography, my drug addiction, an accident in which I was burned to a crisp. The assumption would be incorrect.
There is no logical reason to believe in God. There are emotional reasons, certainly, but I cannot have faith that nothing is something simply because it would be reassuring. I can no more believe in God than I can believe an invisible monkey lives in my ass; however, I would believe in both if they could be scientifically proven. This is the crux of the problem for atheists: it is impossible to prove the nonexistence of a thing, and yet theists tend to put the onus on us to prove just that. “An absence of proof is not proof of absence,” they say smugly. Well, true enough. But all it would take is one giant flaming crucifix in the sky, NO MONKEY IN YOUR ASS? seen by everyone in the world at the same time, WHAT ABOUT A SNAKE IN YOUR SPINE? to convince me that God does exist.
Marianne Engel emerged to ask me to pick up some instant coffee. I thought this a strange request, given that the basement had a coffeemaker that used regular grounds, but since it was her money that kept the household running, I could hardly refuse.
As soon as I returned, she yanked the jar out of my hands, grabbed a spoon, and headed back down into her workshop. I thought about it for a few moments, telling myself that she couldn’t possibly…and then peered down from the top step to see that indeed she was.
Between drags on her cigarette she was thrusting the instant coffee into her mouth, chomping at the crystals like a baseball player working over a wad of chewing tobacco, and washing it all down with the brewed coffee in her oversized mug.
The doorbell rang.
If you are like most people, a doorbell rings and you answer it; but for me, it’s more complicated. For me, it is a test of will. What if the visitor is a Girl Scout selling cookies? What if she takes one look at me, wets her pants, and faints? How could I explain an unconscious, urine-soaked Girl Scout on my front porch? For someone who looks the way I do, that’s pretty much an invitation for the good townspeople to light their torches and chase you to the old windmill.
I decided to take my chances and face the challenge, even if it was a Girl Scout. When I opened the door, I saw a middle-aged man and woman, probably husband and wife, in good clothing. The woman pulled back as if she were Nosferatu and I the sun. (Occasionally, I find it enjoyable to cast someone else in the role of monster.) The man instinctively stepped in front of his vampiric wife and shielded her with his arm. Her lips drew up over her teeth.
“Yes?”
“I, ah—we,” the heroic man stuttered, not quite sure of what to make of me, while the woman shrank back farther and smaller. The man, steeling his nerves, blurted, “We wanted to visit the church! That’s all!” Just in case I was as stupid as I was burned, he hitched his thumb in the direction of St. Romanus. “We saw that it’s—ah, ah—closed, and then we saw this place with, you know, all the gargoyles and stuff, like that, like a church has, and—so, you know, we naturally thought that maybe this place is like, ah, ah, ah, affiliated with the church. Or something.” He paused. “Is it?”
“No.”
Marianne Engel was doing something new with her stonework: adorning each emerging statue with a number. The first was 27, the next was 26, the third was 25; she was currently working on number 24.
When I asked her about it, she said, “My Three Masters recently told me that I had only twenty-seven hearts remaining. This is the countdown.”
I waited until I saw the participants in Father Shanahan’s Thursday night Bible study class start to shuffle out. It was time to head over to St. Romanus and complain about the parishioners who mistook the fortress for some sort of Christian outreach program.
I walked up the church’s front steps, looked left and right, and went through the front door. My steps echoed, but Shanahan—standing in the middle of the pews, looking up at the windows—didn’t seem to notice. He was in deep contemplation of a stained-glass representation of Christ on the crucifix. It was strange to see someone observing such a thing at night, because there was no light to stream in and make Jesus look all shiny and superior.
He was unaware of my presence until I spoke, offering him the proverbial penny for his thoughts. My wretched voice startled him, as did my plasticked face when he turned, but he regained his composure promptly. With a quick laugh he suggested that, for once, he might even be able to offer full value on that penny.
“Strange how one can look at this every day”—he said, indicating the Christ—“and still find something new. The four arms of the cross represent the four elements of the Earth, of course, but see how Christ is pinned to it, with His arms outstretched and His feet together? It forms a triangle, and three is the number of God. The Holy Trinity. Three days of the resurrection. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. You get the idea. So four meets three, Earth meets Heaven. Which is perfect, of course, for is not Jesus the Son of both God and Man?”
He adjusted his glasses, and chuckled a bit. “You caught me in a bit of a fancy, I’m afraid. Can I help you?”
“I live next door.”
“Yes, I’ve seen you.”
“I’m an atheist.”
“Well, God believes in you,” he said. “May I offer you a cup of tea?”
He indicated his room tucked away behind the pulpit and, for some reason, I decided to follow him. Two chairs sat in front of his desk, obviously for couples who thought that a bit of the good word might help their troubled marriages. On his desk, beside a Bible, was a picture of him with his arm slung across the shoulder of another man. Next to them was a woman, quite pretty, and what appeared to be her teenaged son. The woman’s head was tilted towards her husband but her gaze was steadfastly focused upon Father Shanahan, who looked somewhat uncomfortable in his white collar. When I asked whether these were his brother and his sister-in-law, Shanahan seemed
surprised that I could place them so quickly. “Do we look that much alike, my brother and I?”
“His wife is an attractive woman,” I said.
Father Shanahan cleared his throat as he poured some water into his electric kettle. “Yes. But then again, so’s Marianne.”
“You’ve met her.”
“She knows her Bible, even better than I do, but she always declines my invitations to attend Mass. Says the problem with most Christians is that they show up at church once a week to pray that God’s will be done—and when it is, they complain.” He placed two cups on the desk, as well as a small pitcher of milk. “Can’t say that I entirely disagree with her.”
He sat down in front of me and adjusted his glasses once again, even though they were already sitting correctly. I expected he would make some small talk, so it was surprising when he said, “Is it possible to take off your mask during our conversation?”
The way he asked made it clear that he was not intimidated by the mask, but simply curious about my appearance. I explained that my rehabilitation required it to remain on at all times. He nodded understandingly, but I could see just a hint of disappointment across his features. I suggested that I could take it off for a moment, if he really wanted to see what was beneath. He nodded that he would like that, yes.
When I removed the mask, he leaned forward to take a closer look. He scratched behind his ears and moved side to side so that he could inspect me from all angles. When he was finished, I asked, “Do I look like you hoped?”
“I had no expectations. I considered studying medicine before I entered the seminary. I still have subscriptions to some journals.”