by Sheri Holman
“I like to think she chose me.”
And we have been happily joined now for twenty years, since I first pledged myself to the Dominicans on the anniversary of her martyrdom when I was eighteen years old. Every November twenty-fifth I retire from the world and relive her suffering. I see again her courageous refusal to sacrifice before the pagan gods, her defeat of their Fifty Philosophers sent to break her faith in Christ. I weep for her torture at the hands of Emperor Maxentius, when he bound her to that diabolical wheel and tore her flesh with hooks. How I rejoice when the Emperor orders her head struck off by the sword, only to witness milk flow instead of blood! How I triumph as the Emperor is forced to stand by and watch the angels translate her broken body to the top of holy Mount Sinai! Katherine of Alexandria, the philosopher saint, is the patroness of young girls, scholars, and priests. I try not to take too much pride in her popularity.
“Felix.” Lord Tucher bends over me, wagging a dusty green wine bottle before my face. “I bought an extra for you.”
“Thank you, my lord. Might we see her hand now?”
“Friar!” Ursus cries. “You promised to help me look!”
“We are seeking and not finding, Ursus.”
“Brother Franciscan,” Lord Tucher calls. “We’re ready.”
The monk invites us back into the tight, musty sacristy. In my lifetime, I have venerated her foot in Rouen, her spine in Cologne, and now her hand in Crete. The most precious of relics, Katherine’s holy head, lies where angels set her down, twelve hundred years ago, in her monastery atop Mount Sinai.
The Franciscan unlocks the sacristy closet and slowly draws from its shadows a silver box marvelously fashioned after a woman’s hand. Polished rubies form the hand’s fingernails, while inside the palm veins of pure lapis lazuli trace a deep lifeline, headline, and heartline. It is the left hand! The hand upon which, if we were earthly spouses, she would wear my wedding band.
The hand of Saint Katherine is a very important relic, being the blessed appendage she places upon our Lord’s knee to beg favors for men. Her sainted hand holds a cool cloth against the foreheads of those with fevers, whether we suffer the physical pain of illness or the emotional distemper that accompanies too great a love. Katherine, schooled as she was in the seven Liberal Arts, with a voice so melodious it converted fifty pagan philosophers to Christ, must certainly be called upon to read aloud in Heaven. This hand, then, holds the book when she reads sweetly to God and the Holy Family.
“By the grace of God,” the monk intones, throwing open the reliquary, “the hand of Katherina Martyr.”
Where is it?
A cushion of blue velvet. A whiff of myrrh. No bones, no shaving of knuckle, no thumb print. Where is my wife’s hand?
“There’s nothing there, Friar,” Ursus whimpers.
The Franciscan sharply shakes the box. His mouth works but no words follow. Ursus’s bottom lip begins to tremble.
“Thief!” The monk shouts, sweeping up his robes and running from the church. “Thief!”
My beloved? My wife?
She knew I was coming and she allowed herself to be stolen.
An Apology
Brothers, you made me promise, that gray farewell day in Ulm, that in the event God should grant me safe passage across the sea, I would write down all that happened to me on pilgrimage, the good and the bad, the bitter and the sweet, by design or by accident, and thus make you my constant companions. Up until today, I have strictly honored that vow, recording the distances between places, the holy sites of Venice, how I found the food in Dalmatia, and much more that goes into the making of a travel book of pilgrimage. I turn to you now in my hour of need and beg you forgive me if, under the circumstances, I should transgress the realm of expected narration and turn this account, as emotional people tend to do, into some personal cogitation of my own.
Be assured. I am not upset.
I know a saint navigates the world in two ways: via translation, as Katherine was angelically translated from the forum in Alexandria to blessed Mount Sinai; or furta sacra—that is, by holy theft, a translation by man. If we believe the saints have power over their own locomotion, we can only reason that Katherine no longer wished to remain on Crete. Had she chosen to stay, her hand certainly would have leapt up, gripped tight the windpipe of her would-be abductor, and strangled the blasphemous miscreant dead.
My friend Archdeacon John Lazinus hovers over us, speeding our returning party up the gangplank.
“Hurry, Felix. They’ll leave you behind!”
Contarini’s ship has been spotted. On deck, sailors frantically hoist the mainsail and trinketum. Galley slaves, three to a bench, grasp their oars and pull; crewmen drag up the great iron anchors on either side of the prow. A word of warning, brothers: You might think, in times of bustle and haste, the sailors would welcome help or direction from the pilgrims, but in fact this is displeasing to them.
“Father John, you’ll never guess what!” Ursus dodges the rigging and the swinging rope. “Someone stole a piece of our friar’s wife.”
“Felix, is this true?”
John’s brown eyes are kind and concerned, like your eyes, Abbot Fuchs, when one of the brothers comes secretly to you in the night and lays his head in your lap. I don’t want to take this turn of events personally, but I suddenly find it difficult to speak.
“I’ll put the wine away,” I whisper.
Seven ladderlike steps lead downstairs to the fetid, cavernous pilgrims’ deck. All along the floor, in even rectangles, we chalk off our berths, side by side, with the ship’s curving wall as our headboard and our trunks, placed toward the ship’s center, serving as footboards. Only the Homesick stay belowdeck out of choice, and it depresses me even more to move among them. They love the dark, rotting wood that blocks this foreign sun and magnifies what few familiar Western smells remain: smoke and European piss, beer sweat, pine pitch. When the rest of us roll up our mattresses in the morning and suspend them from the rafters, the Homesick turn over and imagine their wives’ hair on the pillow next to them, or the smell of their pet roosters’ feathers on the windowsill, or the sound only their dog makes when his paws skid in frosty winter horse manure. They tell each other long detailed stories about their backyard cabbage gardens and their children’s agues, but rarely listen to anyone’s but their own.
I follow the aisle of luggage far back to my berth, where another smaller hatch opens onto the ship’s belly. This third hold, filled completely with sand, is where pilgrims bury their perishables: meat, cheese, eggs. I push the bottles deep into the chilled sand and fasten the hatch.
“Felix, are you sad?”
Truly, God sent good John Lazinus to ease the pain of separation from you, Abbot Fuchs. He has been a comfort to me since we first met, at Zu der Fleuten in Venice, when the German innkeeper’s black dog, who loved only Germans and loathed with an instinctual passion all Italians and Italian dogs, indeed, all Spaniards, Dutch, French, and all other races, and all their dogs—allowed Hungarian John Lazinus to teach it to dance for ham. My spirits can’t help but rise, seeing my gentle friend come toward me across the field of the Homesick.
“What kind of criminal shoves the hand of a saint into his sweaty pocket?” I ask as he nears. “I keep seeing her delicate fingers spilled across some cheap inn’s bedside table or peeking from an overstuffed saddlebag, tangled with twine and old raisins. Who would do it?”
“Relics are only stolen for love or profit.” My friend sighs.
“I love her! If she wanted to move, couldn’t she have waited another hour? Wouldn’t she have liked to come to Ulm?”
“Felix,” John chides. “Tell me you don’t believe she waited until just before you arrived to grow restless. That Franciscan may not have checked the sacristy in months. She might have been taken weeks ago.”
“We met a strange man at the convent,” I tell John. “He was acting suspiciously, and when I spoke of God willing us to Sinai, he suggested God’s will might
not be enough.”
“Since we’ve boarded this ship,” John says, “I’ve heard only warnings against that desert. We are seeing Jerusalem, Felix. Is achieving Sinai really so essential?”
How can I answer a question that has been put to me a hundred different ways all my life? How can I explain without scandalizing you, my brothers, without appearing light-minded and impatient with the quiet of the cloister, or guilty of the sin of idle curiosity, or moved by the Devil?
“When I was a boy,” I tell John, “a traveling Greek monk came through Basle, where I served my novitiate, wearing the dust of the East like a glamour. Where our habits were fine wool and silk, his was desert homespun. Where our cheeks were smooth and soft like women’s, his errupted into a long, wiry beard like a prophet’s. He told my abbot he had walked overland from the Sinai desert, that he was a young man when he left and now he shuffled like a grandfather. Under his arm, he carried a small carpet tied at both ends with rope, and he asked my abbot’s permission to solicit funds with what was inside it.”
John’s serious face makes me blush at the foolishness of my story and fall silent. It was a humid day in Basle when the monk came through. The entire monastery crowded around the altar, but I pushed between the sweating bodies to be closest. With swift, practiced movements, the monk arranged four finger joints to spell K.M., for Katherina Martyr, and placed at the four cardinal points around them an eyelid, a toe, a vial of milk, and a piece of silk dipped in her oil. Back in the Age of Miracles, her bones used to produce enough oil for the monks to burn their lamps year round; but by the time I was a boy, oil had to be coaxed from the bones by briskly rubbing them with silk.
“Felix is in love,” someone whispered behind me. But how could I not be? On our prie-dieu, Katherine stood with sword and wheel on the right hand of Mary. In our ambulatory, she smiled down from her fluted pillar on the way to our library. As one of the Fourteen Heavenly Helpers she was chiseled onto the ceiling that to my mind touched the Celestial City. Katherine was everywhere, the most popular girl in town, the scholar, the philosopher, the king’s daughter, the East—and suddenly here she was in front of me, pieces of a corporeal, human woman. I wanted to kiss that monk for bringing her to us; he had reversed the route of pilgrimage for a boy too young to leave his abbey. He brought me my first holy lust.
“If, in pieces, Katherine could find her way to me,” I say aloud, “I, as a whole man, can certainly find my way back to her.”
“And Lord Tucher has agreed to take you there?” John asks.
“He swore on his own life.”
My friend winces and gingerly reaches into his mouth.
“How is your tormentor?” I ask. John’s toothy, open smile has been troubled by a rebel molar rotting in his jaw.
“I’ll get Conrad to pull it tomorrow.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” He smiles.
“Is this where the dead man slept?”
John and I look up, startled, to see a man approach, hidden inside a heavy cloak of the Homesick. They hang upon his arms, wrestle with his trunk; one wipes a small flow of blood from the man’s swollen lip with a handkerchief.
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Fell down the steps,” one whispers.
The man throws them off and faces me. “This was his spot, wasn’t it? The drowned man’s spot?”
I turn to John. I think I saw this man in Candia, shrinking back from the pale white sausage fingers of Schmidhans’s sluicing corpse. He speaks the maritime merchant lingua franca with a nasal accent. Once the Homesick fall away, his long black robe and drawstring cap reveal him further as a tradesman.
“But soon we will land in Jerusalem, yes?” he asks hopefully. “Then on to Sinai?”
“My party certainly will be continuing our pilgrimage,” I tell him. “I can’t vouch for anyone else. There have been rumors.”
“What sort of rumors?” He fingers his bonnet string into his mouth and nervously chews it.
“The captain spreads them,” I say. “If we don’t sail back with him—if we cross the desert to Sinai instead—he loses half his fare.”
John gently unties the mattress the merchant has strapped across his back and drops it over the fat-fisted chalk scrawl, G. Schmdhns. Without a word, the merchant sits down, picking worriedly at one wiry overgrown eyebrow.
“I would never cross the desert.” A Homesick shakes his head. “Satyrs and Fauns live there.”
“The sea is bad enough, with its sharks and Troyp,” adds another.
I kneel beside the merchant, who grows more pale by the minute.
“Don’t listen to them.” I throw my arm about his shoulder, knowing, myself, the irrational fears that accompany any new voyage. “You’ll survive.”
The merchant’s face is close to mine, clammy and green. He lets his cap string drop from his mouth.
“None of it matters.” He sighs, collecting himself at last. “If I am to ride in the drowned man’s spot, I am already dead.”
What a Pilgrim Should Be on His Guard Against While on a Journey at Sea
“John, wake up.” I push my friend, and he rolls over onto his stomach.
Katherine came to me in a dream. She swam frantically behind the ship, her wet hair matted to her cheek. Husband! she cried, treading water. Between her teeth she held a wedding ring. Then she stretched out her left hand, imploringly. It was a bloody stump.
“John? Are you awake?”
How can he sleep, oblivious to the pitching boat and groaning boards, the burning lanterns that keep night from ever truly falling here? A rat gallops between us with a mouse locked between its jaws.
I have barely closed my eyes all night. The Greek merchant, Constantine Kallistos as he identified himself, kept me up for hours with his womanly puking and odiferous unfamiliarity. Schmidhans reeked of stale beer and mutton, but it was a German reek, suspended in the national fat like ambergris. This man smells like I don’t know what. Octopus? Vinegar? There’s a sharp aroma that clings to him as if he’s rolled in a field of onions.
O my brothers, how unquiet is the sleep of pilgrims aboard ship! As if sour, recycled smells weren’t bad enough, I have witnessed whole parties of pilgrims fall upon one another with swords in a dispute over whose mattress is overlapping whose chalk line. I have seen men hurl full chamber pots at burning lanterns to extinguish them. I have heard noble knights cry like little children and call out for their mothers, only to blush in the morning at their comrades’ merciless ribbing. Fleas and lice breed in our sweat; rats and mice fall onto our faces from the beams above. For a monk used to the privacy of his own cell, nighttime aboard ship is a new circle of Hell.
“John.” I push him a little harder this time. “Shall we go up on deck for some fresh air?”
My friend covers his head with his pillow.
“That’s a yes? You’d like to come?”
Nothing.
“I’ll meet you up there, then.”
While I pick my way upstairs, let me give you some advice, brothers, on what a pilgrim should guard against while moving about at sea.
First: Let the pilgrim go up and down these steep ladderlike steps with due deliberation. Twice I have made haste, and both times I have fallen, so that it is a wonder I was not dashed to pieces.
Second: Let him beware of carrying a light on deck at night, no matter how convenient it would make things, for the galley slaves dislike this strangely, being by nature superstitious, credulous creatures, and will not endure it.
Third: Endeavor not to wake these same wretched creatures, who burrow their lousy heads into their neighbors’ bellies and squirm for position on their narrow wood benches, for they are also a quarrelsome, untrustworthy, easily angered lot, culled mostly from the captured peoples of Eastern Europe: Albania, Sclavonia, Macedonia. Among the slaves you will also find Bashi Bazouks, Christian apostates who fought for the Turks; Jews, Saracens, Schismatic Greeks, and Sodomites. You will never, though
, meet a German galley slave, because no German could withstand such misery.
Fourth: Let the pilgrim not trust any ropes without pulling on them first to make sure they will not bring a pulley or a sail crashing down upon his head.
Fifth and last: As a pilgrim carefully climbs from one cross bench to another, let him grasp the tension lines and carefully ease himself out onto one of the horns of the ship, which is a comfortable spot to sit and think, always making sure he sits not in pitch, which substance covers almost every inch of the ship, and which would be easier to spot if a pilgrim were allowed what is forbidden in Article the Second.
I settle myself on the ship’s prow, where I am wont to sit during the day, and lean my back against the damp rigging. Even alone, brothers, you are not alone at sea. The Ocean is crowded with creatures: large, round fishes shaped like winnowing fans, some with heads like dogs and floppy long ears, dolphins, mer-people, Scyllas and Charybdises that suck ships down. At night, a monster called the Troyp circles and with his long sharp beak pierces the sides of ships. Should you ever encounter a Troyp, lean as far over the side as you dare, fix it with a fearless stare, and on no accounts look away. If you grow frightened of the Troyp’s hypnotic eyes and falter, he will rise up and devour you straightaway.
How Katherine haunted me tonight! I can still see the swift panic in her salt-reddened eyes, still smell her blood where it bloomed in our ship’s wake. I am not a fanatic, brothers, nor am I a star-eyed prophet claiming visions from beyond. The infrequent glimpses I’m allowed of Katherine are perhaps no more than clothes I give to air, and yet only one other time have I felt her this strongly.
The night before I left on pilgrimage, brothers, a strange dread overtook me. As I lay awake in my familiar room, keenly aware of my packed trunk in the corner, my pocket processional upon it, and my clean pilgrim’s costume on a nail by the door, all the eagerness I felt for touring Jerusalem and Sinai, which heretofore had been my greatest desire, suddenly drained away and was replaced by an intense loathing for travel. Those of you who had counseled me against going appeared as my truest friends, and those who encouraged me seemed to me enemies of my life. A trembling fear of the sea possessed me, and I conceived so many objections to pilgrimage that, had I not been ashamed, I would have run straight to Abbot Fuchs and begged to stay in Ulm. But then the miracle. As I lay in bed, one cowardly foot skimming the floor, a voice cut through my turmoil, pitched in the low, severe tones of a injured spouse.