The Gargoyle

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