Paolo had spent his entire life married to a woman he’d loved dearly. She’d recently died and he knew that he would follow her soon. This was why he was traveling, because he’d never seen countries outside his own and he did not want to die knowing nothing of the world. He was not afraid of death, as he’d been a good Christian and expected his final reward. He asked if he might have just one night’s rest at the monastery before continuing his journey. Sister Christina granted this, as she had the power to act on behalf of the prioress, and Paolo thanked her for her kindness. For the first time in my life, I felt important.
Paolo took a book from his bag and held it in my direction. It was obvious that he wanted me to have it. “I won’t be needing this much longer.”
Sister Christina stepped forward to decline on my behalf. “Tell him he has so little that we cannot take from him what he does have. But thank him.” I translated, and Paolo nodded his understanding. He thanked the nuns once more before heading to the bed that was made available.
Sister Christina told me that I was to meet with her and the prioress in the chapter room the following day after matins. I asked if I was in trouble for speaking up, but Sister Christina assured me that I was not.
When I arrived the next morning, the prioress was sitting at her desk, with Sister Christina behind her. Gertrud stood at the side of the room with a detached air. The prioress was a good woman but she scared me nonetheless. She was just so old, with wrinkled jowls like a hunting dog’s.
“I take it on the authority of Sister Christina that we had a revelation last night,” she growled. “Child Marianne, there is no conceivable reason for you to know the Italian language. By what method did you accomplish this feat?”
Sister Christina gave me a reassuring nod, which bolstered my courage. “When I listen to languages, I just understand,” I said. “I don’t know why everyone can’t do it.”
“You can do this with other languages, as well? Truly, it is a showing.”
“If I may speak,” Gertrud interjected. The old woman nodded. “Your judgment is sound, Prioress. As always. Still, I think it would be prudent to ask from where such an unusual ability might come. I urge that we be on our guard, as we know so little about this child’s birth. What assurance do we have that this ability comes through the Lord, and not through…some other Entity?”
I was in no position to challenge Gertrud on such a suggestion but, luckily, Sister Christina was. “Where might you suggest it comes from, Sister Gertrud?”
“It is best that such names not cross the lips, but you are well aware that there are forces against which the righteous soul must be vigilant. I am not saying that this is the case, I am simply suggesting that we would be wise to consider all possibilities.”
The prioress answered the charge. “Until we have reason to believe otherwise, we shall assume that this is indeed a revelation from God and not a trick of the Enemy.”
I could tell Gertrud wanted to say more, but stopped herself. “Yes, Prioress. Of course.”
The old woman continued. “I propose that we consider this not only a revelation but also a calling. Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? No. When such a gift is recognized, it is our duty to see that it serves God’s honor. Do you not agree, Sister Gertrud?”
“I agree that we should, every one, do what we can to serve.” Gertrud squeezed these words out of her mouth as a miser might squeeze coins from her purse.
“It gladdens me to hear you say that,” the prioress continued, “for I have decided that you will take the child into the scriptorium. It is clear that her gifts exist in the realm of language, and her training shall commence immediately.”
My heart fell heavily into my stomach. If I could have foreseen that I’d be assigned to Gertrud’s tutelage, I would never have stepped out of the corner. What the prioress thought of as my “reward” was actually the harshest of all possible punishments, and I’m certain my disgust was exceeded only by Gertrud’s. At least we were finally united in a common belief: that this was a horrible idea.
“Marianne is but a child,” Gertrud protested, “and is certainly not ready for such responsibilities. While she may have displayed some rudimentary skills, there are other traits necessary for such work. Patience, for example, and an attention to detail that a child cannot possibly possess.”
“But she will learn,” the prioress responded, “by your example.”
“I beg to discuss the matter further. I understand your thinking, but—”
The prioress cut her words short. “I am pleased that you understand. You would not want me to go against the Lord’s will, would you, Sister Gertrud?”
“Of course not, Prioress.” Gertrud had her hands behind her back, and I could hear her fingernails digging into the fabric of her robe. Sister Christina stepped forward, laid her hand on my shoulder, and asked whether—with the kind permission of the prioress—we might have a few moments alone. The prioress granted the request and exited. Gertrud also left, sucking angrily at the air and doing her best not to slam the door on her way out. She was not successful.
Sister Christina spoke. “I know you do not think much of the idea, but I do believe that Sister Gertrud is a good and holy woman, and that there is much you can learn from her. Though you cannot understand it now, your gifts are as exceptional as they are unexpected. The Lord obviously has great plans for you and I could not in good conscience allow this to go unaddressed. We must trust in this revelation and remember that the Lord allows no accidents.”
You can imagine how any child would take such an explanation, even a child raised in a monastery. How could God’s design involve training under Gertrud? I howled until my cheeks were red and tears rolled down my face. Sister Christina let me get it all out and even took my childish blows. She did, however, dodge my kicks, so I suppose there was a limit to her self-sacrifice. When I had finally drained myself of energy and crumpled to the floor, she sat down beside me.
I told her that I hated her, but we both knew it was not true. She stroked my hair and whispered to me that everything would be all right, if only I trusted in God. And then she took something out of the folds of her robe, a book that she had secreted there.
“When I went to wake Paolo this morning, I found that he had died in his sleep. He went without pain, I believe, and the look on his face was serene. But it was clear that he wanted you to have this last night, so I am fulfilling his final wish by passing it along now.”
Sister Christina handed me an Italian prayer book, the first book that I could call my own. Then she took me to the scriptorium, so that I might begin serving God’s will.
V.
How do I best present the medieval life that Marianne Engel claimed was hers, when—of course—she no more lived in the fourteenth century than I did? The challenge lies not only in her story’s inherent lack of truth, but also in the fact that I can no longer continue to write solely in my own voice: I now must consider hers. I have attempted to re-create the Engelthal story exactly as she spoke it, but if my rendering of her voice is sometimes flawed, please forgive me. I have done my best.
The tale also brought forth the question of just how crazy Marianne Engel actually was. Did she really believe she had been raised in a medieval monastery, or was she simply trying to entertain a burn patient? When I tried to get her to admit that she was making it all up, she looked at me as if I were the insane one and, since I wanted her to keep coming back, I could hardly insist she had it backwards. In the end, I decided I would let her keep telling the story until the facts tripped her up.
I was not the only one musing on the state of my visitor’s sanity. Dr. Edwards paid me a visit with the unambiguous goal of discouraging further visits from this new woman in my life. The conversation opened with a warning about the physical risks that came with Marianne Engel; as she was sneaking in when the nurses weren’t looking and was disregarding the rules about gowns for visitors, who knew what germs she might be bringing? I conceded the point
but countered that it certainly could not harm my recovery to have something—someone—to look forward to seeing.
“That may be, but you need to focus on your recovery, and not deal with…” Nan took a moment to compose a politic phrasing. “…Other issues that won’t help you get better.”
She was very quick, I suggested, to tell me what I needed.
“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve seen what extra stress can do to a patient.”
I asked whether her concern arose because my visitor was an occasional psychiatric patient at the hospital, and Nan affirmed the fact did not play in Marianne Engel’s favor. However, she was also quick to add that this would not, or could not, be used to keep Marianne Engel away; as she had been judged competent to live in society, thus she was also competent to visit a hospital. Still, I could see that Nan might use her influence to make it as difficult as possible.
“I’ll tell you what,” I proposed, “if you allow her to keep coming, I’ll work harder with Sayuri.”
“You should be doing that anyway.”
“But I’m not,” I said, “and you should take what you can get.”
Nan must have judged that she would not be getting a better deal than the one I was offering, because she accepted. However, she could not stop herself from adding, “I don’t have to like it.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You just have to leave her alone.”
It was not long after the meeting with Dr. Edwards that Connie arrived with an orderly to take me to a private room, away from the other burn patients. I asked her what was going on—surely this was a mistake. No, she assured me, I was supposed to get my own room, on Dr. Edwards’ orders, although she didn’t know why. She told me that I should just enjoy the privacy while it lasted because if it was a mistake, it would be sorted out soon enough. Rather than taking me out of the skeleton bed, they simply wheeled the whole contraption down the hall and into a smaller, but beautifully empty, room.
Empty, that is, until Sayuri arrived to demonstrate an exercise that she wanted me to start doing daily. “Dr. Edwards tells me that you are excited about working harder,” she said as she laid a board lengthwise on my bed, tilted up and away from me. This board had a groove cut into it, into which she placed a two-pound silver ball. I was to push the ball up the board until it reached the top, and then gently support it as it rolled back down to the bottom. Repeat.
I used to haul hundreds of pounds of camera equipment around bedrooms on every movie shoot, and now I was relegated to pushing a ball up a wooden plank. Worse yet, even this simple task took all my concentration. I could see my bandaged face reflected in the curved silver, and the farther away I would push the ball, the farther away my reflection would move. Sayuri commended me for each success. “Perfect!” When we were finished, she effortlessly whisked away the ball as if it was—well, as if it was a two-pound ball. This tiny Japanese woman pissed me off by being stronger than I, and then pissed me off further by bowing slightly when she left my room.
When Dr. Edwards next came to my bedside, I asked about the private room. How, I quizzed, could I possibly rate such an extravagance? It was not as though I was being rewarded for good behavior, or for the hard work that I had just started and needed to continue.
Nan was running a study that she hoped to publish, she claimed, about the effects of private versus shared rooms in the treatment of burn patients. She was hoping that my case might provide some insight into patients who are switched during the process, and it was a happy accident that a room had become available. I asked if this meant I might be switched back into the shared ward at some point, and she said that she wasn’t sure yet.
I assured her I would happily be her isolated little guinea pig for as long as she wanted, but added: “Are you sure there’s no more to the story?”
She considered, and decided to speak a further truth—one that I had already guessed: “It is all well and good that you’ll continue to accept visits from Ms. Engel, but I see no reason to subject the other patients to her as well.”
I said that I respected her concern for others, and she nodded. When it was clear that neither of us had anything more to say, she nodded a second time and promptly left the room.
Visits with Marianne Engel were more enjoyable now that it was just the two of us, with no plastic curtain necessary, and since the doctors had stopped trying to force her to wear protective gowns. In part, her regular wardrobe was accepted because I was becoming healthier and the need for gowns was not as great, but, perhaps more important, it was because the medical staff had tired of having arguments with her. Marianne Engel was a visitor of whom they didn’t altogether approve but for whose visits I had fought, so I suppose they decided that any risk was mine to take.
Now that we had more privacy, my talks with Marianne Engel grew more varied: how to cook vegetarian lasagna; what carnival games are played in Hamburg; the beautiful melancholy of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor; the settlement habits of West Coast Indians; why people sing in rock bands; the merits of Canadian literature as contrasted with Russian literature; how harsh winter climates shape personality; the history of European prostitution; why men are fascinated by the concept of “Heavyweight Champion of the World!” the conversations that might occur between a Jehovah’s Witness and an archaeologist; and how long chewing gum remains fresh in the mouth. My years of library visits served me well.
I asked about her Three Masters, and teasingly inquired whether such protectors were common for medieval nuns. She seriously answered that they were not but that, in fact, Heinrich Seuse also had Three Masters whose consent he needed to gain (with the same Latin prayer that she used) when he wished to speak.
My response was the obvious one: “Are yours and his the same?”
“No.” Seuse’s first master was St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans, who would grant permission to speak only if the time and place were proper. The second master, St. Arsenius, would allow a conversation only if it did not promote attachment to material things. The third, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, would allow Seuse to speak only if doing so would not cause him to become disturbed emotionally.
“And your masters?”
She answered that hers were Meister Eckhart, a prominent theologian who was active during the time of Sister Marianne’s youth; Mechthild von Magdeburg, the spiritual leader of the Beguines, the order that had established Engelthal; and Father Sunder, of whom she had already spoken.
When our conversation finally came around to my career in pornography, it hardly seemed like an exotic topic at all; it was just one more subject in a long conversation that seemed to include everything. Still, she was curious about the work and asked many questions that I answered as well as I could. When I finished, I asked whether it bothered her, what I had done for a career.
“Not at all,” she answered, and reminded me that even St. Augustine had lived a life of pleasure before famously imploring the Lord to “make me chaste—but not yet.”
The difference, I pointed out, was that I was not going to find religion as a result of my past. Marianne Engel shrugged noncommittally. I couldn’t tell whether she thought that I was wrong and I would find God, or if she didn’t care. But the turn in our conversation had also brought forth the subject of chastity and I asked, tentatively, whether she knew what had happened to my penis in the fire.
“I have been informed by the medical staff,” she answered, “that it was lost.”
So she knew, but what did she think? “And…?”
“And it is a pity.”
Yes, a pity, indeed. “I thought you didn’t like talking to doctors.”
“It was important enough to learn about your wounds that I couldn’t avoid it.”
That was the end of that day’s discussion about my missing penis; already more than I had intended to say.
Each time she visited, Marianne Engel was more elaborately dressed than the time before, blooming into a new woman. Her wrists jan
gled with bracelets from the world over: Aztec, Mayan, Tonka Toy, Ojibwa. She wore plastic rings on her fingers, yellow elephants named Duke Elliphant and Ellaphant Gerald. Her sneakers were covered in sequins that made me think of a fluttering school of tropical fish. When she left my room for a cigarette, she would hold out the edges of her purple dress in a curtsey. I asked what caused the change in her fashion sense and she answered that since everyone thought she was crazy, she might as well dress the part.
It was interesting: this was her first humorous comment regarding her own mental state. I thought it might be the opening I’d been waiting for, and I asked her—pointing out that she had already discussed my burns with my doctor—with what condition she had been diagnosed. She shut down the topic by stating that the doctors simply didn’t understand her particular brand of charm.
She reached into her rucksack and pulled out a small leather-bound book. She wanted to start reading it aloud to me, she said. The Inferno, by Dante. An interesting choice for the burn ward, I commented, and added that despite my love of literature, this was one classic that I had never read.
She smiled as if she knew something that I did not. She had a very strong feeling, she said, that I would find the story not only to my liking, but very familiar.
Marianne Engel was telling a story of her life that dated back to the fourteenth century. Now, if she could do this, surely the reader will excuse me for providing some information on Sayuri’s life that I did not yet have at this point of my hospital convalescence. In defense of my jump out of the timeline, I will plead that Ms. Mizumoto told me all this later in our acquaintanceship—and at least her story is true.
Sayuri was the third child, the second daughter, of Toshiaki and Ayako Mizumoto. Her birth position was most unfortunate, because it meant that as a child she was the fifth person to bathe each night. It is tradition that Japanese family members share a single tub of bathwater and, although they rinse before getting in, the water darkens with each bather. The father goes first, and then the male members from oldest to youngest. Only then will the women bathe, again from oldest to youngest. This meant that the father, the older brother, the mother, and the older sister all used the bathwater before Sayuri. Throughout her entire childhood, she was forced every night to soak in the accumulated filth of her entire family.
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