walked away with. I called her stupid; she laughed and replied that against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain. And really, she asked, who would look under a hospital bed on Christmas Day for a briefcase of money?
“You think I can’t afford you.” She stated it as if there were no possibility that she might be wrong. She wasn’t. When I nodded, she said, “I’m ready for my present now.”
Over the previous weeks I’d fashioned dozens of versions of the same little speech, like a high school boy plotting how to ask his favorite girl to a dance, but now that the moment was upon me, I felt only uncertainty. Timidity. Embarrassment. I wanted to be suave but, just like that high school boy, I was struck dumb. It was too late to escape, and I knew that my gifts-there were three-were too personal. Too stupid. My hours of labor had been to no avail: what prideful delusions had convinced me to make these gifts? She’d think them childish; she’d think me too forward, or not forward enough. I wished for lightning bolts to blitz my room, to pierce the bedside table where my silly little offerings were hidden in a drawer.
I had written three poems for her. The spinesnake laughed at the sheer arrogance of my efforts.
All my life, I had written poetry, but I’d never shown it to anyone. I hid my writing, and hid myself within the writing that I kept hidden-only a man unable to handle the actual world would create another one in which to hide. Sometimes when I realize that I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted, a wave of discomfort shudders down my back, as if another man were standing too close to me at the public urinals.
Sometimes I feel there is something profoundly unmanly about any writing, but poetry is the worst of all. When I was gripped by fits of cocaine paranoia, I would burn my poetry journals and watch the burning pages peel off one another in layers, the flames spitting little gray flakes into the air. As my ashen words swirled into the heavens, it pleased me to know that my inner self was once again safe: a team of the FBI’s best forensic scientists couldn’t put my emotions back together again. The beauty of keeping my truest emotions hidden in my writing was that I could incinerate them at a moment’s notice.
Speaking a woman into bed was safe, because my words disappeared with the vapor of my spoken breath; writing a poem for a woman was fashioning a weapon that she could later use to assault me. Giving away one’s writing meant that it would be out there in the universe forever, ready to come back to wreak vengeance at any moment.
So I’d blown it. It was Christmas Day, I was stuck in the skeleton bed, I owed Marianne Engel a present, and I had no backup gift. I had only the childish scrawls that blackened the pages’ white purity. My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie.
My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.
But I had no choice, so I reached into the desk drawer and-LOSER-screwed my pale imitation of courage to an imaginary sticking place. I pulled out the three single sheets of paper, closed my eyes, and held the poems in Marianne Engel’s direction, hoping they wouldn’t rot in my hands.
“Read them to me,” she said.
I protested that I couldn’t. These were poems, and my voice was a deal at the crossroads gone horribly wrong. A fiery hellhound had broken into my throat and left behind a busted guitar with rusty strings. My voice was-is-majestically unfit for poetry.
“Read them to me.”
Now it is years later. You have this book in your hands, so obviously I’ve overcome my fear about giving away written words. But the three poems I read to Marianne Engel on that Christmas Day will not be included in the pages of this story. You already have enough incriminating evidence against me.
When I finished, she crawled into my bed. “That was lovely. Thank you. Now I’ll tell you how we first met.”
XII.
After I began reading the writings of Meister Eckhart, a change came into my way of thinking. It wasn’t huge but it was enough, and I finally started to understand some of what Mother Christina had meant about losing the creatureliness of my soul in an effort to come closer to the Godhead. But I kept the book secret, because sisters like Gertrud would never even consider his more radical ideas. And while it was Eckhart who acted as the catalyst, it was someone else who accelerated my questioning. When one of our older nuns died, Gertrud assigned me her duties, which included dealing with the tradesman who supplied our parchment.
The parchmenter was rougher than the men I was used to, so it surprised me that we got along so well. The first thing he asked me to do was pray for him. He explained that the previous nun had done so, and it was my first lesson in how one hand washes the other. If I did, he’d give the monastery a discount. He admitted that he had sinned, but added with a sly smile that he “hadn’t sinned in such a way as to afford indulgences.”
He loved to talk about everything and I was impressed with his grasp of politics, but perhaps only because I didn’t realize his complaints were standard in any tavern at the end of the day. During our monthly dealings, I learned much about the Germany that existed outside the monastery walls. Pope John was engaged in a feud with Louis the Bavarian. Wars were breaking out, and local lords had taken to hiring mercenary troops known as condotta; the linguist in me recognized that the word was borrowed from the Italian. Death was being sold for profit, completely without ideology or belief, and this turned my stomach. I couldn’t understand how men could do such things, and yet the parchmenter only shrugged and assured me it was happening everywhere.
In the scriptorium, Gertrud kept us working late into the night on
It was late one night, just like any other, when one of the nuns arrived at the scriptorium and whispered of the arrival of two men, one covered in such severe burns that he looked as though “he might have battled the Enemy!” It all sounded interesting enough, but I had work to do.
The following morning, Sister Mathildis, one of the monastery’s nurses, woke me in my cell and said that my presence was requested in the infirmary, on Mother Christina’s orders. I threw on my cloak and we crossed the cloister garden together while she informed me that she and the other infirmary nuns-Sisters Elisabeth and Constantia-had been up all night treating the burn victim. Everyone was surprised he’d held on as long as he had.
Mother Christina met us at the infirmary door. Across the room, Father Sunder and the nun-nurses were attending to a man under a white sheet. An exhausted soldier, still in the ripped clothes of battle, was slumped in a corner. When he saw me, he jumped up and asked, “Can you help him?”
“Sister Marianne, this is Brandeis, who brought the burnt man to us. We have consulted all our medical texts”-Mother Christina nodded at the open books on a counter-“but there is no information sufficient for dealing with this type of injury.”
I was at a loss as to what was expected of me. “Have you considered the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Mainz? I am told it is one of the best.”
Father Sunder now came forward. “We’ve considered it, of course, but his condition is too fragile to risk the journey. Whatever is done must be done here.”
“If anyone knows the entire contents of the scriptorium, it is you,” Mother Christina said. As a political afterthought, she added, “And Sister Gertrud, of course. But she has many pressing tasks, as befits her position, so I will ask you to scour the library for any information that might be of use.”
Two things were immediately clear. First, this measure was being undertaken primarily to appease Brandeis: there was little chance that any of our books would actually contain useful information. Second, Mother Christina did not believe Gertrud would devote the necessary concentration to the search. While there was small hope that I’d find anything, small hope is better than none, and Mother Christina had apparently decided a man’s life was more important than Gertrud’s pride. Which, I admit, delighted me. But it would have been improper to
