The Gargoyle

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The hospital held Marianne Engel for four nights. Her head was stitched closed, and an IV pumped her arm with electrolyte solution to combat the dehydration. Luckily, she was too exhausted to work up much anger over the fact that I had put her under the care of the enemy doctors. I left her side only to go home to get some sleep. I let Bougatsa share my bed, even though Nan would have had a fit about the irritation that dog hair can cause burned skin. YOU CAN’T EVEN LOOK AFTER YOURSELF. In the mornings, I immediately returned to the hospital. HOW CAN YOU LOOK AFTER HER?

Marianne Engel was released on Christmas Eve. Honestly, the doctors should have held her longer, but they discharged her in consideration of the date. When we got home, she wanted to eat marzipan and nothing else, but I persuaded her to eat some mandarin oranges as well. I hauled my television and video player from the belfry into her bedroom and we watched It’s a Wonderful Life, because that’s what normal people do on Christmas Eve. After it ended, she insisted that I stay in her bed, because she wanted to wake into Christmas Day with me at her side.

I lay in that bed with my thick pressure suit pressed up against her thin nakedness, aware that I should have been enjoying our closeness. But I wasn’t; I was contemplating why her body affected me as powerfully as it did. I had spent much of my adult life in the company of naked women-it had been my job during the day, and my hobby at night-but with Marianne Engel it had always seemed different. It was different.

There are many possible explanations for my discomfort. Perhaps her body had a greater effect than that of other women because I actually cared for her. Perhaps it was because for the first time in my life, as a result of my penectomy, I could not dismiss the woman’s body by conquering it. Perhaps my feeling was simply pheromonal. All these theories are plausible, and to some extent perhaps all are valid, but on that Christmas Eve, lying beside her unable to sleep, I worked it through. The principal reason, I believe, that her body so thrilled mine was this: her body affected me as if it were not only human, but also as something that approached memory and ghost.

The first time that I had seen her body, fully, was in the burn ward when she had undressed to show her tattoos. The sight made me aroused and bashful, and when I ran my fingertips over the plumage of her angel wings her body trembled and, in return, trembled my heart. At the time, I did not understand why I felt the way I did, but in the many months that had passed, I had grown into the realization that it was because my fingers felt not as if they were visiting her body for the first time but as if they were returning to a familiar location. I did not understand this until I saw how, when Marianne Engel gave me my first bath in the fortress, she had reached out to touch my body as if it was hers to touch. She moved her arm just as I had reached towards her winged back that first time. It was as if the other’s flesh was already owned, and the reaching hand belonged to a master who had been long absent and was now returned. When I had touched her that first time, it did not feel like the first time I had touched her.

Now, in the bed next to her on this Christmas Eve, her body retained that effect upon me. When I lay beside her, it was as if I were meant to be there, as if my body had rested against hers thousands of times before. So it felt as if I were lying not next to a person, but next to the memory of a person, while at the same time that memory was undergoing a transformation into something even less material. Her body was all too human in its ravagedness, but it also struck me as an entity becoming ghost, as if in her thinness she were slipping into something less than solid. I ran my fingers across her bumpy ribs and traced the gaunt hill of the pelvic bone that overlooked her stomach. Her body, whose flesh and memory had always confused and excited, still felt as if it belonged to me but also as if it were disappearing. It was not only that she was losing substance as she worked, it was as if she were working to lose substance; as if it were not only the gargoyles that were backwards art, but also the artist herself, progressing to a state in which they were both less and more than the material from which they started.

So this is how her body-flesh, memory, and ghost-disarmed me.

I woke, after I finally fell into a short and fitful sleep, before she did. I brought her eggs on a tray, and worked up the courage to give her that year’s gift. Again it was writing, as I apparently had not learned my lesson from the previous year’s poems. I had written from memory the stories she’d told me about her four ghostly friends-“The Good Ironworker,” “The Woman on the Cliff,” “The Glassblower’s Apprentice,” and “Sigurðr’s Gift”-and bound them between covers. On the front was the title The Lovers’ Tales, as told by Marianne Engel.

“It’s the perfect gift. Not only for me, but also for Sigurðr. For a Viking, the worst Hell is to be forgotten.” She took my hand in hers and apologized. Her intense carving over the previous weeks had taken her over completely and, as a result, she had neglected to get me a proper gift.

“But,” she suggested, “how about I explain what Sister Constantia meant when she said I had desecrated the scriptorium?”

XXVII.

Dawn was breaking when Agletrudis appeared at Engelthal’s gate, wearing a smile so thick with Schadenfreude that it seemed impossible it could fit on a nun’s face. She nodded in your direction, where you were still propped up on the horse with Brandeis’ bloodied body, and said, “I see you’ve brought your lover.”

I couldn’t betray my anger if we were to have any chance of being taken in. I needed to appeal to her better instincts; she was, after all, dedicated to a life in God. “We require sanctuary. Without your help we will die.”

“Ah,” Agletrudis said, nodding and clasping her hands behind her back. “So your adventurous spirit has found what it was looking for. Perhaps even more.” Like Sister Constantia before her, Agletrudis surveyed the bulge of my stomach.

I steadied my voice. “You can imagine that it was not easy for us-for me-to come here.” My hands were also behind my back, but because I didn’t want Agletrudis to see that they were curled into fists. “There’s nowhere else for us to go.”

Agletrudis tried to produce a sympathetic look, but her smile only grew more ugly. “This puts us in a most interesting situation. Our mission is one of mercy, and we are taught to find forgiveness for every sinner. And yet, the difficulty lies in the fact that most of the sisters place you in a category beyond the merely sinful.”

This struck me as a vast overreaction to the fact that I’d left Engelthal. “When I left, it was never my intention to disrespect the monastery or the Lord.”

“Or Mother Christina, I’m certain.” Agletrudis had not lost her ability to strike in the tenderest spot. “Had you simply disappeared, it’s unlikely anyone would object to extending help now. But because of your actions on that night, poor Sister Gertrud died of a broken heart.”

Gertrud would not have cared one bit about my leaving, except for the fact that my absence would have slowed down work on her Bible. “What are you talking about?”

“There is no use denying it, Sis-Oh, excuse me. Marianne. Do you not remember that I saw you that night exiting the scriptorium? I remember it, and I also remember how the next morning, poor Sister Gertrud found her work all in ashes. Every chapter, every verse.” Agletrudis paused with a dramatic sigh. “How could you torch her Bible?”

It was the sigh that explained everything. She had burned Die Gertrud Bibel the night I left, and she had blamed it on me. And so, I’d become known as the sister who destroyed Gertrud’s life’s work, the nun who reduced the Word of God to dust and ran off to live as a killer’s mistress.

Agletrudis’ eyes positively glowed. “Mother Christina has ordered that your name be expunged from all the chronicles, and now that Father Sunder has passed-I trust you know that he, too, has died?-we are removing your name from his writings as well.”

I’d always considered Agletrudis to be little more than a lackey to Gertrud, an inferior in the ways of