Back in the belfry, I slid the movie into the player. There was the warm blue glow of the television screen followed by the logo of my old production company. The plot, as in most pornos, left something to be desired; even to me—writer, actor, director, and producer—it was muddled. The film opens with a woman, Annie, who’s getting a medical check-up. When she has difficulty putting on her hospital gown, she asks the nurse for help and, as so often happens, hot lesbian sex ensues. The doctor (me) happens upon these shenanigans and, with nary a worry about ethics violations or venereal diseases, decides the proper treatment for Annie is unprotected anal sex.
I thought of the day of the shoot. The catering came from Sun Lee’s Chinese Take-Out, just down the street, and the delivery arrived late. Boyce Burgess worked the camera and Irdman Dickson did the sound and, despite the fact that we were shooting at one in the afternoon, Irdman was plastered. As the director, I would’ve reprimanded him if I had not been blasted on cocaine. In fact, if you carefully scrutinize the film, you can see a small gold spoon on my necklace bouncing out of my doctor’s coat as I rear-end Annie over the examining table. Because of Irdman’s drunkenness, the sound was particularly bad and, in some places, is completely unintelligible. Occasionally a line is audible: something about taking Annie’s temperature with “my big fat thermometer.” It’s probably for the best that most of the dialogue was lost.
This opening scene is, regrettably, the cleverest part of the film. From this point forward, the story becomes exponentially more ludicrous. One of my lovers is a psychiatrist, who continually prattles about my hostility towards women as I spank her. Meanwhile, Annie becomes a hypochondriac/nymphomaniac who believes that her allergy to cats is best treated with liberal doses of penis.
All this would seem laughable if not for the way I looked. My hair bounced with each thrust of my pelvis, and my skin shone beautifully as sweat crept down my neck onto my chest. The muscles of my arms flexed as I spanked my silly-stern mistress, letting her out and reeling her back in. My smile strained the corners of my 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: “Saru mo ki kara ochiru.” When I asked what that meant, she answered, “‘Even monkeys fall from trees.’ It means—”
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 Die Luther Bibel appeared, there already existed numerous other German biblical translations; Luther’s was simply the first written with the language of the common man in mind. Previous versions had been literal translations rendered in obsolete idioms and were, for all intents and purposes, understandable only to readers who could also read the source Latin.
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 Die Gertrud Bibel’s very existence would excuse its secret genesis and, as the work was being completed towards the end of her life, perhaps she was simply willing to take the risk. What could the authorities do to an old woman who believed that her place in Heaven was already reserved?
When I finally asked Marianne Engel on whose authority Die Gertrud Bibel was being produced, I was hoping to get either a definitive answer or a clear contradiction that would disprove the story once and for all. But her answer was neither.
“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 not even imagine. As we walked, I looked over my shoulder to see Father Sunder’s figure disappear into the night. He’d been in my life since my first memories, and now he was gone. Only then did I realize that neither you nor I had any idea where we were going.
You led the way, pretending that you knew what you were doing, putting distance between us and Engelthal. I doubt you were worried about a posse of nuns chasing us down; you were probably more concerned that I’d lose my nerve and turn back. So you kept moving forward, despite the fact you were still suffering from your burns, and I had to struggle to keep up. My feet slid in the mud but I was determined to show that I could keep any pace that you set. I suppose it was important to me because I didn’t know if it was true.
I could see that your battles had taught you to forget the physical body and push forward on willpower alone. I had assisted in your recovery, I knew this effort was far beyond anything you’d attempted since being brought to Engelthal, and I was amazed by your endurance—until, all at once, it failed utterly.
Your feet slipped in the mud and you went down awkwardly. You tried to jump up immediately, but it did not work: as soon as you were upright, you lost your balance again. This time, while falling, you put out your arms to brace yourself, but the contracted skin across your chest caused you to cry out in pain. You withdrew your arms instinctively and dropped face first into the mud.
I reached out to assist you and your first instinct was to push me away. Then, perhaps realizing that we needed to work together if we were to proceed, you allowed me to help you upright. You said, trying at a joke, “I think the devil pushed me down.”
After a few moments, you had recovered enough that we could move together under a tree. There we sat, covered in mud, as the rain continued to fall. We huddled together for heat and it was the closest I had ever been to another body, a male body no less, but it was nothing like I had imagined. I knew this moment would eventually arrive and I had expected it to be thrilling and terrifying, but I only felt anxious fear that I had made the wrong decision in leaving Engelthal.
This was the start of our life together: in freezing rain, unable to move forward, waiting for the morning to arrive and perhaps—perhaps—bring some warmth with the sun. Maybe, I thought, this was the sign for me to turn back. I might arrive before anyone even knew I was missing, and I could feign illness in my cell. In a day or two, I could resume my duties, and life would be as it always had been.
But no. Agletrudis would not allow my actions to go unreported, and I could not leave a sick man at the side of the road, especially a man for whom I felt such great responsibility. Still, I could not help but think about the calmness of the monastery and my place there. I was at home in the scriptorium, among the books. But under a tree, in a storm, with a man I barely knew but upon whom I had pinned my future: how could that be the direction of my life?
And there was nothing to do but wait out the night.
When the morning broke into a dull gray, the rain slowed but did not stop. We started moving again, but all your pretense of vigor was gone. Each attempted step was a trial, and each completed step was a small triumph. I was at your side for each of these little victories, my arm wrapped around you, worried that if you fell again you would not get up.
Then came our first bit of luck, in the guise of a farmer’s cart. The horse clopped up to us, and you waved for the man to stop. You asked where he was headed—the answer was Nürnberg, to market—but when you requested a ride, the farmer denied us. No room with the pigs, he said, pointing out the cargo with which his cart was loaded.
“How much for two of the animals?” you asked.
The farmer named his price and you drew out the coins necessary, handed them over, and slowly climbed up into the cart. You tried to lift out one of the pigs but found you were not quite able, so you beckoned me and our combined strength was enough. As soon as the pig’s hooves hit the ground, it ran squealing into the forest, and then we unloaded a second animal to the same result. You turned to the bewildered driver and said, “Now you have room for us.”
The farmer begrudgingly admitted that he supposed he did. I could tell he was not happy about having human companions, but he must have known you would not allow him to drive off without us. Since he already had the money, consenting was easier than arguing.
The pigs jostled for position the entire ride, curiously bumping into us, carrying out inspections with their snouts. At first I tried to shoo them away, but the effort was doomed by the fact they had nowhere to go. If I managed to force one to move, another immediately slid into its place. They squealed incessantly but the sound was inconsequential compared with the smell, and by the time we finally arrived at the outskirts of Nürnberg, I was certain that God had resorted to sending His messages through pig excrement.
The farmer dropped us at an inn, where I might speculate he had a personal dislike of the keeper. We were certainly a strange sight, and smell, as we tried to negotiate a room. The keeper was hesitant to take us in, having no idea what to make of a burned man and a nun who traveled with livestock, and intended to share a room. But you slipped him extra coins and I offered to say a few words of blessing for him, assuring him that despite my appearance God would hear my prayers all the same. Reluctantly he found us a room at the very back, far removed from his own lodgings, and we were only allowed that if we would first wash ourselves in a nearby stream, clothes and all.
There was only one bed in the room and this emphasized what I’d been trying desperately not to think about. There’d obviously been something sexual between us through all our conversations at Engelthal. I knew I was not running off to live as your sister, but I had no idea about the ways of men and women. The look on my face must have been obvious. You walked to the middle of the room and laid down some cloth, saying that you were used to sleeping on the ground from your mercenary days. You did not look upon me as I climbed out of my wet habit and into the bed, and I will always remember that kindness.
Despite how tired I was, I still could not sleep
. Perhaps you heard the way my leg was jittering, or maybe it was that my breathing did not relax. Whatever the clue, after a few minutes you spoke again. “Marianne?”
I was almost afraid to answer, but I did. “Yes.”
“It has not been a very good start, but it is a start nonetheless,” you said. “I promise that it will get better. For tonight, just sleep and know that you are safe.”
Those words reassured me in a way that you cannot imagine, and in return I did the one thing that I could do. I handed over the arrowhead necklace—lacking even the courage to slide it over your neck myself—and said that Father Sunder had blessed it for your protection.
“Then I shall wear it always, and proudly,” you said, “and I thank you.”
We slept until early the next morning, and decided to stay one more night to recover before setting out again. We still needed to set our destination and even this scared me, because we had the freedom to choose what would happen next in our lives. Choice was something you had not had since entering the condotta, and it was something that I had never known.
The innkeeper prepared dinner for us and I was stunned that food could be so tasty. Remember, the nuns always thought their humility was measured by the blandness of their cooking. You and I talked while we ate. We both wanted to go to a place of some size, to blend into the crowd as much as we could, for obvious reasons. The two large cities in the region were Nürnberg, on whose edge the inn sat, and Mainz. There was a great deal of construction occurring in Mainz, mostly on new churches, so that was an advantage. Your only training other than archery had been in stonework, so this was what you’d attempt for a living. It wouldn’t be easy, as you’d been out of the craft for over a decade and were still recovering from your burns, but we lacked any better options. You had some money from your mercenary days and Brother Heinrich had forced some coins into my palm before we left, so we could hold out for a while.
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