retractorless mouth and my face tensed in wonderful anticipation as I neared orgasm.
I had to turn the video off: it sickened me to see the princely boy I’d been, compared with the wretched thing that I’d become. It sickened me to see, forever captured on film, the sweat on my smooth skin. I, who can no longer perspire. Is this how Fred Astaire felt as an old man unable to dance? Footage of one’s athletic youth is a kind of tyranny in old age; such footage has doomed Fred Astaire and me.
When I hit the eject button, the tape came whirring from the machine like a tongue sticking out at me. I took it down to the fireplace in the living room, where I placed it on a pile of torn newspaper. Taking a match to it, I watched the flames jump up to engulf the cassette.
That was the last time I ever looked at one of my old films.
Sayuri was coming once or twice a week, always smiling as she put me through my increasingly difficult paces. The results could not be denied: my body was starting to uncurl its contracted muscles, my back beginning to change from a question mark to an exclamation point. An emphasis of the therapy was on fighting my body’s desire to move along the path of least resistance by using the strongest muscles instead of the correct ones. Sayuri concentrated on getting me to move with the proper technique and walked alongside me with a hand on each side of my torso, forcing me to keep my head up. She corrected the swing of my arms, enabling my balance to improve, and was constantly reminding me to put equal weight on both feet. This was especially difficult going up and down stairs.
Kinetic basics mastered, we set out on walks of greater speed and longer distance. Bougatsa demanded to come along as well, running around in yapping circles. Sayuri threw a ball for him to chase, but this was mainly to get him out of the way so she could pay proper attention to me. When we returned home, we used the exercise equipment Marianne Engel had bought for me. There was a weight bench, a Nautilus machine, and a stationary bike for conditioning. Sayuri took it upon herself to incorporate each into my rehabilitation.
She always checked my garments during her visits, and occasionally found something that needed modification. As the scars on my face healed under the constant pressure, the mask needed to be adjusted. Sayuri would sand it down accordingly, and a few times even took it to the hospital to be reshaped. Once, the mask came back having been altered incorrectly; when I pointed this out to Sayuri, she muttered to herself in Japanese:
I cut her off. “-that even experts make mistakes. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
When she asked where, I told her she should ask her boyfriend. I must say, I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who could turn such an adorable shade of red as Sayuri.
One aspect of the medieval story had been bothering me more than any other: the claim that Gertrud was producing a German version of the Bible. This was, remember, a full two centuries before Martin Luther began work on his famous translation. The Church vehemently disapproved of Luther’s work, so how could they have sanctioned Sister Gertrud?
I approached the problem as I always did, and the first surprise of my research was the discovery that by the time
The earliest Germanic version of the Bible was a Gothic translation by Ulfilas in the fourth century, which predated the Latin Vulgate by decades. A remarkable man, Ulfilas needed to devise an entire alphabet to write his text and thus created much of contemporary German Christian vocabulary. Only one partial handwritten copy of this Bible, known as the Codex Argenteus or Silver Bible, still exists, at the University Library of Uppsala. After that there is a ninth-century manuscript from Fulda, which contains Old High German translations of the first four books of the New Testament, and a suggestion of a fuller, but unsanctioned, biblical translation from about 1260. Some passages from the Bible, such as the Lord’s Prayer, had long existed in German, but there is no compelling evidence that anyone had put together an entire German Bible at the time Gertrud was reputedly working on it- although it is said that shortly afterwards, in 1350, a complete New Testament surfaced in Augsburg.
So far, so good: it would seem the time was right at the start of the fourteenth century for someone to tackle the whole project, so why not Sister Gertrud of Engelthal?
There are plenty of reasons, actually, but perhaps none more compelling than Gertrud’s own intense piety- or at least, her attempts to appear pious. She would not have wanted to proceed in any manner that might be construed as sacrilegious, and few things were more heretical than producing an unsanctioned translation of the Bible. Before embarking on such an extraordinary task Gertrud would have needed permission from a higher authority, and such consent would have been nearly impossible to secure. But that is the crux of the matter-“nearly impossible” is not the same as “impossible.”
Engelthal’s prioress was an elderly woman; could senility have led her to permit a translation that any able-minded administrator would have rejected? Stranger things have been known to happen. However, this assumes that Gertrud’s permission came from within the Engelthal monastery, which is not necessarily the case. Perhaps she had stepped outside the gates to find a church official with his, or her, own agenda; one needs to remember that the Church was notoriously a web of conflicting backroom politics. Conceivably a superior might have authorized Gertrud’s work as a part of a larger scheme, and Gertrud might have been happy to overlook her position as a pawn so long as she was allowed her project. It would have been a most dubious arrangement, but it is always easier to skirt the rules when encouraged to do so by a higher-up.
This is all conjecture, of course. Why Gertrud thought she could progress with the project is a question with no clear answer, but I can forward another possibility: perhaps I have underestimated her desire to be remembered. Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver, and the idea of leaving behind an everlasting legacy can spur even the most cautious person to proceed recklessly. Possibly she convinced herself that she was doing nothing wrong even if she lacked full consent. She was working from the Latin Vulgate, after all, and her unwavering belief in the excellence of her translation may well have pushed her to gamble that, in the end, her Bible would be too good to warrant punishment. One can imagine her rationalizing that
When I finally asked Marianne Engel on whose authority
“I was so young I never thought to ask, and Gertrud never said. But she was always very secretive about it and none of the nuns were allowed to talk about the work outside of the scriptorium.”
“Wouldn’t they have rebelled,” I asked, “if they believed it wrong?”
“Perhaps they might have to answer in Heaven for what they had done,” she said, “but I think they were more scared of Gertrud and Agletrudis here on earth.”
Marianne Engel seemed quite pleased that I was so carefully considering these aspects of the story she had been telling, and it prompted her to ask whether I would like to hear more.
“Of course,” said I.
XIX.
Behind me lay the only life I had ever known, and ahead of me stretched a life I could
