Of course not. They were professionals and I knew that I didn’t have it in me to kill anyone, not even Kuonrat.
It took a number of soldiers to hold you down, but Brandeis was so weak it took two soldiers to hold him up. When they released him, he slumped onto his knees while Kuonrat demanded, “What do you have to say?”
The harsh storm winds blew directly towards me, past them, and carried their words to my vantage place. Whether it was good luck or ill fortune that I was able to hear every word, I am unsure, but in the moment I was thankful that I did not have to sneak closer.
Brandeis assumed the posture of a miserable sinner asking for forgiveness and the wind carried his words to me. “I deserve any death you choose. Make it as horrible as you desire, as horrible as you can. Use me as the example that I should be. I renounce my decision to run away from the condotta. I was like a frightened child. I request only that you punish me, and me alone.”
“It is always interesting to listen to the bargains of those who have nothing to offer,” Kuonrat said to many laughs.
Brandeis refused to let this laughter interfere with his final actions on this earth. His executioner was standing in front of him but never once did Brandeis beg for his own life. No, he used his final moments to plead, passionately, that the life of his best friend be spared.
Brandeis pointed out that when he left the condotta, it was entirely his own misguided decision—but when you left, it was not your decision at all. It was the Lord’s will that you were struck down in combat, but not killed. It was the Lord’s will that the battle had occurred so close to Engelthal and that you were delivered there. It was the Lord’s will that you were able to heal from injuries that should have taken your life. There could be no greater proof that God wanted you alive, Brandeis argued, than the fact that you still were.
Brandeis gestured in your direction. “This life is the Lord’s will, so forgo his punishment and double mine. I know that you are a wise and just leader, Kuonrat, and I know that you would not want to defy God.”
It was a smart tactic to keep repeating that your survival was the Lord’s will. If anything could stay your execution, it would be Kuonrat’s belief that killing you would violate God’s intentions. It was clear that he had no regard for man, but perhaps God was a different story.
The storm hurled a great burst of snow across the landscape. Brandeis instinctively turned his head to shield his eyes and I saw a swift bolt of silver, as if an extension of Kuonrat’s arm. A red surge sprayed across the ground and Brandeis’ head flew for a few feet before gravity brought it down.
Kuonrat wiped his sword clean, the steel still steaming with the heat of the blood. “The Lord’s will does not matter. Only mine does.”
He turned and said, with a laugh into your shocked face, that he had something much better for you. Something not nearly so painless or so mercifully quick. After all, your disappearance had continued for much longer than that of Brandeis.
Kuonrat gathered his mercenaries and gave out their tasks. One third of the men were to scour the woods for deadwood and twigs. Another third was sent into Heinrich’s house to secure any items of value—food, money, clothing—that the troop could use or barter. The remaining soldiers were ordered to prepare you.
The soldiers pulled you past Brandeis’ body. The blood leaked from his neck, still, adding to the large red blot in the snow. The mercenaries pushed you up against Heinrich’s cottage, your back to the wall. They kicked at your ankles until your legs were spread wide, and pulled out your arms until they were stretched across the face of the building. When you showed resistance, they beat you and spat in your face and laughed as if this were some great joke.
A soldier, bigger than the others, walked towards you carrying an ax. My heart caught in my throat, because I was certain that he was coming to dismember you. But this was not the case. The other soldiers, the ones holding out your arms, unpeeled your fingers from your clenched fists until your palms were open and exposed. One of the soldiers held something against your right hand. The larger soldier turned the ax backwards, and I realized that the object was a nail. He used the blunt side of the ax like a hammer to drive the nail through the flesh of your palm. Even as far away as I was, I could hear the bones in your hand cracking like the neck of a chicken being broken. You howled and you jerked at your hand, trying to pry it away from the wall, but it was held fast. They did your left hand next, another nail through the open palm, another splatter of blood across the wall. Your shoulders wrenched futilely and all the veins in your neck looked as though they were about to explode.
Next the soldiers tried taking hold of your legs, but you were kicking wildly because you were in such pain. So the axman brought the sharp side of the ax head forward and swung it hard right above your knee where the ligaments meet the bone. Your thigh contracted but your shin hung useless, dangling as if connected to your body by half-cut twine. The soldiers laughed more at this, another great joke, and your hands continued to leak blood down the wall.
They grabbed you by the ankles, and it was ridiculously easy now, driving nails through your feet so that you were skewered to the wall about ten inches above the snow line. The sound of the bones breaking in your feet, so thin those bones, was so awful and the blood, there was so much blood everywhere. You looked like you were levitating, hanging from your hands; you looked like a ghost already, floating against the backdrop of the house. They wanted your weight to hang, because that would be all the more painful. They loved the way that the nails in your hands couldn’t really support you, and they loved driving new nails into your forearms so you wouldn’t fall right off the wall. The blood was draining out of your body and Brandeis lay headless on red snow, the stain now larger, now redder, and steam, steam rising. I got the crossbow from my horse, and I took a step towards the horror, wanting to run down the hill to you, and then pulled back by the umbilical cord of our unborn child, I realized there was nothing I could do. The crossbow hung in my hand, so useless at my side, my heart beating so loudly that I was certain the mercenaries would be able to hear it above the storm. There were also cries coming from me that I couldn’t control but a part of me didn’t care and a part of me even wanted to be caught, to die, because what good was my life now? But they didn’t hear me, the wind still carrying my sounds away, and they were too busy laughing, laughing in time with the dripping of your blood, and I couldn’t do anything about it without ending the life of our child.
Now the mercenaries who’d been sent for wood were returning and Kuonrat pointed to the space under your feet. They piled the wood halfway up your legs. And I knew what was coming next. The wind and the whipping of the snow made it difficult to light the fire, but the mercenaries were used to living in the wild, so they knew how to hunch their bodies into windbreaks. Soon enough, a spark caught and the twigs started to smolder and there was smoke and I could hear the popping sap as the fire caught, and it reminded me of your breaking hands and feet. Little flames were approaching your toes but you couldn’t lift them out of the way, and they were nailed to the wall anyway. And then Kuonrat instructed his archers to take up their bows and to light their arrows in the flames and the archers did it, and when the tips were on fire, they lined up in a semicircle and they angled in on you. Kuonrat told them they were not to kill you but they were to shoot the arrows as close to your body as possible, that was the game, the goal was to light the wall on fire and slowly burn you from all sides rather than just from the bottom up. But then Kuonrat had a better idea and changed his instructions and told the archers that they could hit your body, just not in any spot that would be fatal—piercing your arms and legs was fine, but piercing your head or chest was not—and he had such glee in his voice, such utter pride in his brilliance, and the archers lifted their bows and started calling out body parts—“Left hand!” “Right foot!” “Upper thigh!”—and they were good shots, they usually got the places they called. When an arrow hit its mark, everyone cheered, an
d if an arrow missed everyone jeered, like it was a carnival game, and the flames under you were growing larger, new flames were bursting out all around your body, igniting with every arrow.
Over the laughs and happy shouts of the mercenaries, Kuonrat called out his final goodbye to you, “Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.”
And then I knew what I had to do.
I reached into my coat and found my necklace. I clenched my hand around the arrowhead that Father Sunder had blessed, and I prayed for strength.
I lifted the crossbow. I tried to remember the lesson that you’d given. It’s all in the breathing, you had said, you steady the instrument by slowing your breathing. In, out, steady, in, out, aim. I checked once more that the arrow was properly loaded. I knew I would have only one shot, the first shot of my life and the last. It’s all about the breathing. Trust the arrow. Calm.
I asked the Lord to deliver the arrow straight and true, directly to your heart, through the snowstorm and the condotta.
XXVIII.
Between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Marianne Engel stopped carving. There was only one afternoon in late January when she went into the basement to complete the gargoyle that had been left unfinished when she passed out and was admitted to the hospital. When this little task was put away, quickly and without any drama, she returned to focusing on her recovery—and back to preparing meals.
Since I had been released from the hospital, only once had she brought forth an extravagant feast: Japanese food, on the night of Sei’s story. But every third or fourth day during this period, she would go shopping before disappearing into her kitchen for hours. Each time she emerged, she came with a spread of delicacies from another region of the world.
Among the more notable meals was Senegalese, a rare culinary step outside Asia or Europe. For appetizers we had black-eyed pea fritters and fried plantains, followed by a sweet milk-rice soup called sombi. The main dishes: Yassa poulet, chicken marinated overnight and then simmered with onions in lemony garlic-mustard sauce; ceebu jen, fish in tomato sauce with vegetables on rice, the national dish of Senegal; mafé, a meat dish in peanut sauce that can be made with chicken, lamb, or beef—so, of course, she made all three versions; and a seafood stew with shrimp, perch, and unripe bananas. For dessert, she served Cinq Centimes, the “five-cent” peanut cookies popular in marketplaces, and ngalax, sweetened porridge made from millet couscous. Throughout the meal we sipped on mango, bissap, and monkey bread fruit juices, before ending with tea. And as much as I enjoyed the feasts Marianne Engel was preparing, the greatest benefit was that her tattooed angel wings were starting to plump out again because of the calories.
Things appeared to be good for everyone, in this century at least: there was Marianne Engel’s returning health; Sayuri talked about the great success of her trip to meet Gregor’s parents; and Gregor confided over coffee that he was more or less certain that Sayuri liked him. Even Bougatsa was pleased, as he was able to go for daily walks with his mistress again.
Often at midnight, Marianne Engel and I would take trips to the ocean. Despite the hour and the biting cold there were usually a few teenagers on the shore, drinking beer and making out. She would light bonfires, tending them as they sent ashes into the sky, and feed me from the picnic baskets that she always prepared, often with leftovers from the previous day’s international buffet. She lit the fires in an effort to lessen my fear of them; she said I needed to come to some sort of understanding with the elemental forces of the universe. They weren’t going away, after all.
I could not look at the fires without emotion, but surprisingly I thought less about my own fate in the car than I did about my fourteenth-century counterpart in the flames, nailed to the wall. I begged Marianne Engel to continue the story but she urged patience, citing more nonsense about single days in the vastness of eternity. Instead, she told me other stories that I knew were not true, creation and Armageddon myths, but I didn’t care. If she believed them, that was enough.
Then she would look out over the ocean, stretch her legs in its direction, and lament the fact that it was not yet warm enough to go swimming. “Oh, well,” she’d say, “I suppose the spring is coming soon enough….”
My pressure garments came off in early February and it was like emerging from a slough in which I had been swimming for nearly a year. My mask and dental retractor were also removed and my face was finally returned to me, albeit unrecognizable as the one I had before.
I experienced the panicked exhilaration that comes with starting anew. It’s not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phantom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may “get the girl”—but usually only with a pickax.
I hesitated to claim possession of my face, but this was also why I had to: if I didn’t, it seemed inevitable that my face would take possession of me. The cliché goes that at twenty a person has the face that God gave him, but at forty he has the face he has earned. But if the face and the soul are intertwined so that the face can reflect the soul, surely it follows that the soul can also reflect the face. As Nietzsche wrote: “The criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo (a monster in face, and a monster in soul).”
But Nietzsche was wrong. I was born beautiful and lived beautiful for thirty-plus years, and during all that time I never once allowed my soul to know love. My unblemished skin was numb armor used to attract women with its shininess, while repelling any true emotion and protecting the wearer. The most erotic of actions were merely technical: sex was mechanics; conquest a hobby; my body constantly used, but rarely enjoyed. In short, I was born with all the advantages that a monster never had, and I chose to disregard them all.
Now my armor had melted away and been replaced with a raw wound. The line of beauty that I had used to separate myself from people was gone, replaced by a new barrier—ugliness—that kept people away from me, whether I liked it or not. One might expect the result to be the same, but that was not entirely true. While I was now surrounded by far fewer people than before, they were far better people. When my former acquaintances took a quick glance at me in the burn ward before turning around to walk out, they left the door open for Marianne Engel, Nan Edwards, Gregor Hnatiuk, and Sayuri Mizumoto.
What an unexpected reversal of fate: only after my skin was burned away did I finally become able to feel. Only after I was born into physical repulsiveness did I come to glimpse the possibilities of the heart: I accepted this atrocious face and abominable body because they were forcing me to overcome the limitations of who I am, while my previous body allowed me to hide them.
I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was. Or so I tell myself; and for now, that is enough.
Marianne Engel entered my room on February 13, midnight, and took me by the hand. She led me down the stairs and out the back door. Snow was falling, making it look as if the stony monsters littering the backyard were wearing white hoods.
She pulled open a gate that allowed us to enter the cemetery behind St. Romanus. Gravestones popped out of the snowdrifts like gray tongues and we tiptoed past them to the center of the cemetery, where she had already laid out a horsehide blanket. Above us, the moon was a magnificent blister in the midst of a gooseflesh of stars. Marianne Engel tried lighting candles but the wind kept blowing her matches out, and she laughed at this. She pulled her coat tighter around her body. I hated the cold but I liked being near her.
“I’ve brought you here to tell you something,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m going to die soon.”
No, you’re not. “Why would you say that?”
“I’ve only got sixteen hearts left.”
“You’re going to live until you’re an old woman,” I assured her. With me.
“I’m already old.” She
smiled, wearily. “I hope this time, death takes.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die.” You’re not going to die.
She put her hand on my cheek. “My last heart has always been for you, so I need you to prepare.”
I was going to tell her that she was talking nonsense, but she moved her finger over my lips. When I tried to speak anyway, she kissed me on my thin lips and all my words were pushed back into my mouth.
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered, “but I need to lose the shackles of this multitude of hearts.”
“It’s just—you have this medical condition.” I wondered to what degree I felt such tenderness towards her because of her schizophrenia, and to what degree despite it. “I know you don’t want to believe it, but it’s true….”
“How little you believe, and how very much it takes to make you believe,” she said. “But you will. Now let’s go inside.”
The way she stated that we should go inside with such finality, such certainty, made me fear the worst. “Why?”
“Because it’s freezing out here,” she said, and my relief must have been visible. “Don’t worry, I’m not ready to die tonight. We still have things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Like getting you off the drugs.” NOT LIKELY. She said, “Do you really think I don’t know you’ve been buying extra morphine?”
That morning, Valentine’s Day, when I woke, I looked into the small wooden box that held my morphine stash to find it empty. I staggered into Marianne Engel’s bedroom, where her body lay unmoving. I shook her by the shoulders and when she opened her eyes a little, I asked where my kit was.