The following day, a very small Asian woman, who upon first glance looked more like a doll than a real person, entered my room.
Please don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m attempting to further the stereotype that all Asian women resemble china dolls. That’s not the kind of doll I have in mind. This woman had a broad face, a flat nose, and a most amazing smile. (I’ve always hated people who can smile widely without looking stupid.) Her cheeks were like ripe apples, which, when taken with the striped shirt and denim overalls under her gown, created an overall effect of an Oriental Raggedy Ann.
“Hi! My name is Sayuri Mizumoto. I’m pleased to meet you.” She thrust her hand into mine for a hearty shake. And while I might not write that every time she spoke, she did so with a large grin, please take it as a given from this point forward.
“What kind of name is Sayuri?”
“A beautiful one,” she answered with a touch of Australian in her accent. “Now sit up.”
I asked why she expected me to do what she told me.
“Because I’m your new physical therapist and now you’re going to sit up.”
“You don’t even know—”
“I’ve spoken with Dr. Edwards, and you can do it!” There was a strange combination of cheer and proclamation in the way that she told me I could do it! She placed her hands underneath my back and widened her stance to help me. She warned me that I would probably feel a little dizzy when the blood rushed to my head, and I protested that I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea.
“Sure it is,” she cheered. “Three, two, one, go!”
Up I went; she was pretty strong for a doll. For a moment I was fine, her hands steadying me. Then the vertigo hit and the room began to turn in strange circles. Sayuri moved a hand to the back of my neck to keep my head from lolling around. “You’re doing great! Steady.”
When she lowered me back down, she commented, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It was fucking awful.”
“Shock!” She lifted her hand to her open mouth in mock horror. “You really are like they said. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that the mouth is the front gate of all misfortune?”
When I opened my eyes after an afternoon nap, Marianne Engel was standing above me, the curtains shut. On my bedside chair hung one of the visitor’s gowns; she had worn it into the room, I discovered later, to appease the nurse who had caught her sneaking in, and then promptly removed it. So she was in her street clothing: a billowy white shirt tucked into her faded jeans with a belt of small silver disks. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders, down her back. Her face was calm and her eyes were bright—green, definitely green. An embroidered dragon lived on her right pant leg.
Finally I knew that I’d been correct in guessing that Marianne Engel’s figure was pleasing. The dragon seemed to think so also, for it crawled upwards from ankle to hip, twisting around and caressing her thigh. Each scale was a colored sequin; the ruby eyes were bulbous fake jewels. The tongue twisted outwards in playful licks across her buttocks. The claws, black stitches, dug into the delicious meat of her leg. “I like your pants,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“I was busy,” she answered. “The pants were a gift.”
“Doing what? From whom?”
“Working, but then I got sick for a bit.” She pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. “Jack gave me the pants.”
“Sorry to hear you were under the weather. Who’s Jack?”
“I’m recovering. Jealous?”
“Glad to hear it. You’re not hiding from the doctors today?”
“Nope. Jealous?”
“Of Jack?” I pshawed her. “So you’re getting on with them?”
“Wouldn’t go that far. Don’t want to talk about it.”
“The doctors or Jack?”
“Doctors,” she answered. “You want to talk about Jack?”
“Of course not. Your private life is private, right?”
“The relationship is complicated.”
“With Jack?”
“With doctors.” Marianne Engel drummed her fingertips on her pantdragon’s bejeweled eyes. “But Dr. Edwards seems okay, I guess.”
“Yeah. So you’re all healed from your, whatever, sickness?”
“Exhaustion, mostly.” She tilted her head to one side. “Tell me about your accident.”
“I was stoned, and I drove off a cliff.”
“He who eats fire, shits sparks.”
I indicated the little statue on the bedside table. “I like the gargoyle.”
“Not a gargoyle. It’s a grotesque.”
“You say oyster, I say erster.”
“I ain’t gonna to stop eating ersters,” Marianne Engel replied, “but that’s a grotesque. A gargoyle’s a waterspout.”
“Everyone calls these things gargoyles.”
“Everyone’s wrong.” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack and, after not lighting it, began to roll it between her thumb and forefinger. “Gargoyles throw water from the walls of cathedrals so the foundations don’t wash away. The Germans call them Wasserspeier. Do you remember that?”
“Remember what?”
“‘Water spitter.’ That’s the literal translation.”
“Why do you know so much about them?”
“Grotesques or languages?”
“Both.”
“Grotesques are what I do,” Marianne Engel answered. “Languages are a hobby.”
“What do you mean, you ‘do’ grotesques?”
“I carve.” She nodded towards the stunted monster in my hand. “I did that.”
“My psychiatrist likes it.”
“Which shrink?”
“Dr. Hnatiuk.”
“He’s better than most.”
I was slightly surprised. “You know him?”
“I know most of them.”
“Tell me about your carving.”
“I became interested while watching you do it.” Her other hand was now fidgeting with her arrowhead necklace.
“I don’t carve.”
“You did.”
“No, I never have,” I insisted. “Tell me why you like carving.”
“It’s backwards art. You end up with less than what you started with.” She paused. “It’s too bad you can’t remember carving. I still have something you did.”
“What?”
“My Morgengabe.” Marianne Engel looked at me intently, as if waiting for a nonexistent memory to enter my mind. When she saw that none was coming, she shrugged and leaned back into her chair. “Jack’s my manager.”
A professional acquaintance. Good. “Tell me about him.”
“I think I’ll keep you guessing.” She was definitely in fine spirits on this day. “How about I tell you a story?”
“About what, this time?”
“About me.”
IV.
The exact date of my birth hardly matters now, but as far as I know it was sometime in the year 1300. I never knew my birth parents, who left me in a basket at the front gate of Engelthal monastery in mid-April when I was only a few days old. Normally an abandoned child wouldn’t have been taken in and raised—Engelthal wasn’t an orphanage, after all—but as fate would have it, I was found by Sister Christina Ebner and Father Friedrich Sunder on the very evening that they’d been discussing what constituted a sign from God.
Sister Christina had entered the monastery at the age of twelve and started having visions two years after that. When she found me she was in her early twenties, and her reputation as a mystic was already secure. Father Sunder was approaching fifty, a chaplain of the area, who had entered the religious life much later than most. By this time, he’d been serving as confessor to the Engelthal nuns for about twenty years. But the most important thing to know about them was their basic natures, because if they had not been so sympathetic, everything would have turned out much differently.
There were two notes in my basket. One was in Latin and the other in Germa
n, but both read the same. 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. It was rare at that time to find a commoner who could write one language, much less two, so I suppose the very existence of these notes supported their claim that I was from a good family.
From what I understand, Sister Christina and Father Sunder quickly decided that the appearance of a child on that evening, of all evenings, was not a coincidence, and it didn’t hurt either that Sister Christina was herself a tenth child. When they took me to the prioress, she was hesitant to stand against their combined arguments. Could the prioress ignore the possibility that my appearance at the gate had been ordained from above? When dealing with messages from the Lord, it’s always best to err on the side of caution. This was the general feeling among the sisters of the monastery, although there was one who argued strenuously against keeping me. This was Sister Gertrud, the armarius—that’s the “master scribe”—of the Engelthal scriptorium. You should remember her name, as well as the name of her assistant, Sister Agletrudis. Both would prove instrumental in my life, and usually not for the better.
Engelthal was considered one of the most important spiritual centers in Germany. You might think this would make for a forbidding childhood, but in truth it did not. The nuns treated me well, probably because I was a distraction from everyday chores. I always loved it when I made one of them smile, because as soon as they realized they were doing it, they’d make all efforts to stop. I felt as if I’d broken a rule.
I was always closest to Sister Christina and Father Sunder, who became a kind of surrogate mother and father to me, a fact that was reflected in the name that I used for Sunder. Properly, he could have been called “father” by all, but his humility was such that he always required others to call him “brother.” So to everyone else he was Brother Sunder, but to me he was always Father. He allowed it, I suppose, because I saw a side of him that no one else saw—well, except for Brother Heinrich, with whom he shared a small house near a ridge in the forest. In any case, I heard Father Sunder’s laughter when almost everyone else only saw his intensity.
All the other nuns came to the monastery after having had their childhoods elsewhere, but I spoke my first word to Father Sunder. “Gott.” God, what a glorious introduction to language. Given this, how could he possibly wear the same mask of fierce piety in front of me that he showed to everyone else? It didn’t fit his face when he was playing with an infant, and by the time he thought to put that mask on with me, it was too late. But I understood, even as a child, that he had an image to keep up, and his secret was safe with me.
Father Sunder always wore a hairshirt and berated himself constantly, calling himself a sinner—mostly for the “transgressions of his youth,” whatever they were—and praying for mercy. He believed he was “polluted” by the things he’d done before entering religious life. He didn’t often go on these rants in front of me but, when he did, Brother Heinrich would stand silently in the corner of their home and roll his eyes.
Though he condemned himself, Father Sunder never hesitated in forgiving others. And he had this voice, the sweetest voice that you could possibly imagine. When he spoke, you couldn’t help but feel that not only did he love you but that God did too.
Sister Christina—I don’t even know where to begin. She was an astonishing woman. She had been born on Good Friday, which was the first sign of the blessedness that was to come in her life. People said that of all God’s representatives on earth, she was among the fifteen most blessed. As a little girl, I never once doubted it was true, and it was only much later in life that I asked myself how such a thing could be measured. Sister Christina’s visions and literary talents brought fame to the monastery. She was always writing, and would go on to produce two masterpieces—Revelations and The Sister-Book of Engelthal, a history of the important nuns who had come before us. Her work inspired others in the monastery to also write. For example, Gertrud of the scriptorium wrote The Life of Sister Gertrud of Engelthal with the help of Brother Heinrich and Brother Cunrat but, to tell the truth, I always felt this book was little more than an effort to increase her own legend.
Gertrud had a strange habit of incessantly sucking at the air. It was impossible not to notice and equally impossible not to hate. It was said that her mother had given birth to eight boys before her, all painful deliveries, but that Gertrud’s birth was effortless. You might wonder what that has to do with anything, but from the beginning it equated Gertrud with the Christ child because His birth was also reputed to have been painless—a delivery as immaculate as the conception. People said that baby Gertrud never suckled at her mother’s breast; she just preferred to slurp away at the air as if extracting divine sweetness directly from it. I always suspected she kept sucking at the air throughout her life simply so that no one would forget the story.
Of all the books that came from this period of inspiration, the one that I love most is The Gnaden-vita of Friedrich Sunder. Well, I love it but I don’t love what was done to it. After Father Sunder’s death it was sanitized and, among other things, all references to me were removed. Not that my vanity is offended, but I was—I am—offended by the destruction of his intent.
Anyway, these were the people around me when I was a child. The one time that I asked Sister Christina when I’d be allowed to live in the outside world, she said I never would—but that this was not a problem to be lamented, it was a gift to be celebrated. God had been generous to reveal His plan for me from my very birth, placing me immediately into Engelthal. None of the other nuns, even Christina herself, had been allowed to spend their entire lives in the glory of God’s service. “What a lucky little girl you are,” she said, signaling the end of the conversation.
It was widely expected that when I grew into a woman I’d also take up the pen. This expectation only grew when I began to speak at an extremely early age and took to Latin as easily as my mother tongue. Obviously I can’t remember, but they say that I barely bothered with individual words before I started speaking in complete sentences. In those days, you must understand, children were basically thought to be inadequate adults. A child’s nature was not something that could be developed, because character was set at birth; childhood was a period of revelation, not development, so when my language abilities appeared they were thought to have always existed, placed there by God, waiting to be made known.
I loved the visitors who came to Engelthal. Locals came for medical treatment in our infirmary, and it was only proper that we accept them. Not only from a standpoint of mercy, but also as a political necessity. The monastery was expanding rapidly as nobles donated surrounding lands, and we inherited the tenants as well. There were other visitors, too, traveling priests who wanted to see what it was about Engelthal that produced such exceptional visions in the nuns or who, more practically, just desired shelter for the night. I was just as interested in a sick farmer as in a nobleman, because each brought stories about the world outside.
Sister Christina indulged me when these visitors came. I’d sit quietly in the corner of the room, concentrating intensely upon the conversation, perfecting the art of being overlooked. Gertrud disapproved, of course, and would look down her long thin nose at me. She was already losing her eyesight, and it was a chore for her to keep her disdain in focus.
Gertrud saw these visitors as intruders on her real work because, as armarius, it fell within her duties to translate occasionally. She wasn’t particularly skilled at it—her French and Italian were sketchy at best—but her position required it. Most of our visitors could speak in Latin or German, but I liked the ones best who brought exotic tongues. It was during these conversations that I sharpened my listening. The challenge was not only to understand the foreign words but also to grasp the foreign concepts. For example, I knew that Pope Clement had moved the papacy to Avignon—but why? And where was that? And what was it like? One night, I overheard my first argument. A fo
reign guest dared to question the righteousness of the late Pope Boniface and Gertrud jumped staunchly to the defense of His Holiness. For a little girl, it was shocking stuff.
I remember distinctly the evening that my talent was revealed. A foreign visitor was among us and Gertrud, as usual, was struggling with the translation. I could never understand what the problem was, because I could grasp everything that was said. It didn’t matter which language it was, I simply understood. On this evening the visitor was Italian, an old, poor, unwashed man. Anyone could see that he was not long for this world, and he was trying so desperately to make his situation understood. Gertrud threw up her arms in disgust and proclaimed that his accent was too vulgar to decipher.
Maybe it was because the old man looked so very frail, or maybe it was because of the rattle in his chest. Maybe it was because he thanked the nuns between every spoonful of his porridge, uttering not a single bad word despite the fact that no one could understand him. Or maybe it was because I felt that if someone didn’t talk with him that very night, it was possible that no one ever would again. Whatever the reason, I broke my code of silence and stepped out of the corner. In the Italian of his dialect, I asked, “What’s your name?”
He looked up over his spoon with such joy on his face. “Paolo,” he answered, then asked how I knew his Italian. I didn’t know how or why, I said, I just did. I told him that I listened to foreigners and after they left I’d have conversations in their languages, in my mind, before going to sleep. He thought this was wonderful. When I asked where he was from, he answered that he’d lived much of his life in Firenze but that he’d been born in the far south in an area notorious for its coarse vernacular. His own accent, he explained, was an awful mix of the two places. He laughed when he said this, and the laugh shocked Sister Christina out of her astonishment. She started feeding me questions, which I suppose was as much to test my translation skills as to uncover information. Through me, the old man’s story was told.
Paolo had spent his entire life married to a woman he’d loved dearly. She’d recently died and he knew that he would follow her soon. This was why he was traveling, because he’d never seen countries outside his own and he did not want to die knowing nothing of the world. He was not afraid of death, as he’d been a good Christian and expected his final reward. He asked if he might have just one night’s rest at the monastery before continuing his journey. Sister Christina granted this, as she had the power to act on behalf of the prioress, and Paolo thanked her for her kindness. For the first time in my life, I felt important.