by Sheri Holman
For a second I am tempted to employ the Turks’ strategy against Rhodes and hurl the maggot-eaten, stinkbomb body of Ursus Tucher into their crowd. The horror of corruption transcends all language barriers, brothers, and that would be payment enough for their betrayal, their comfortless desert, their white-green worm water. We have no money to pay them, no treats to bribe their children. We cannot have traveled so far and endured so much to be halted for lack of a rucksack full of biscuit.
Instead, I swing my patron’s son over my shoulder like an eloping suitor and push against the crowd. A hundred lions fought over my carcass in my dreams last night, so tell me what I have to fear from these these conscienceless, masticating, unclean lower beasts? My valiant charge takes me no farther than ten paces before a hundred spears are aimed at me, one point landing like a delicate butterfly upon my neck. Elphahallo pulls at me to come away. There are other ways, he says, but I don’t care.
“Let me pass,” I order the uncomprehending savages. “I command you.”
And just when I believed no wonders remained in the East, my brothers, these violent Arabs turn aside. In fact they more than turn, they run away from me, back to the monastery gate.
“Aeysh! Aeysh!”
The nomads shove me to the ground in their hurry to reach the palm-frond basket that slowly descends from the monastery’s gatehouse. They raise their hands to it, as if in worship, and leap for it when it drops not quickly enough. Their children, brothers, squeeze between the adults’ legs and reach the basket first, emerging in triumph with, of all things, round white loaves, each one stamped with the image of the virgin martyr Saint Katherine. The young boy before me hungrily rips Katherine’s head from her impressed body, leaving the decapitated saint idly holding a cross and a palm branch, floating on a stack of books. These wretched nomads are not here for plunder, I suddenly understand. They are here for bread.
“Felix! Where are you going?” I hear John’s voice through the mob but pay it no mind. I have spied my one chance to enter the monastery, and I run with Ursus, brothers, straight for the basket. Flinging the remaining Katherine loaves at the crowd, I dive in, cover myself with Ursus’s putrid body, and yank on the rope. To my amazement, the supple basket jerkily ascends, leaving the Arab feeding frenzy far below.
“Who are you?” An angry monk asks in Latin, when I step out of the basket into their spare wooden gatehouse. Behind him, three more Greek monks rest against the wheel winch they turned to raise me. All four wear faded black habits, patched many times over and held onto their bodies by hanks of rope. Their uncut gray hair has been tied back into ponytails in the fashion of Eastern Christians, and their long beards, like the wandering monk who first brought Saint Katherine’s relics to a young boy in Basle, grow wild and wiry from their cheeks.
“My name is Friar Felix Fabri of the Preaching Brothers in Ulm,” I say. “My party has no toll to pay those Arabs; we were robbed in the desert.”
The monk who speaks Latin eyes Ursus suspiciously, his nose crinkling in distaste.
“I’m afraid we cannot help you. Only eight of us are left at the monastery, and we barely have time to even say our prayers, much less look after you. The Bedouin have us too busy baking bread.”
He nods at the body I am still holding.
“You should have buried him in the desert,” he says.
“I want him on holy ground.”
“Our cemetery is out behind the Bedouin, but even if you reach it, the earth is so hard we only have five graves. When a sixth monk dies, we dig up the bones of the first and stack them in the ossuary. There is no place for this boy.”
I lean my head against the daub wall. It could not have come to this, brothers, that the very heart of the desert is hardened against us. Below, I hear the Arabs screaming aeysh, aeysh! What does that word mean?
“It is their word for bread,” the monk answers, before I even ask. “It means life.”
Nothing is as I expected it, brothers: not this besieged monastery, not this graveless earth, certainly not these Eastern monks, who care no more that we have come weeks across the desert than if we had ducked into Ulm from Wiesensteig. I cradle my unburied boy and try to imagine where we might put him.
“May I have some water, please?” I ask at last.
The monk reluctantly leads me down an exposed, banisterless wooden staircase into the complex proper. The walls of the monastery have been razed in places to the height of a man’s head, and I can see from here that the right bartizan has completely collapsed. How can eight monks hold off a hoard of Arabs when their defenses are little better than a child’s fort? Do they really think this munitions of bread will protect them? The monk leads me around a corner to a stone well.
“Cross yourself, brother,” the monk says. “This is where Moses drew water for Jethro’s sheep.”
Absently, I kiss the stones, not even bothering to ask if indulgences are attached to this spot. For the first time in the Holy Land, I can appreciate a place for its present over its past: Yes, our Lawgiver drew from this well, but it matters more to me that the water inside it, now, is ice cold and pure. I drink gratefully, brothers, cleaning the desert from my mouth. With heavy tears in my eyes, I pour a handful of clean water over my patron’s son’s mangled face. I will find a place for you to rest, Ursus.
“I must return to the kitchen,” the monk tells me, “but I will be back.”
Across from the well, two immense wooden doors, the sturdiest features I have seen in the complex so far, stand ajar. They frame the entrance to a small granite lead-roofed church.
“Don’t touch anything,” he warns.
Carved partridges flock along the door lintel, flanked by stylized lions, winged cherubim, and vines. The early Christians favored animals over people, brothers, in their sacred art. How far away they were from this new Age of Man, which desires to put its own face on every post and pillar! In the old days, a saint’s very manhood was disguised; of the Evangelists, Saint Mark became the lion, Saint Luke the ox, Saint John took on the mien of the noble eagle. Saint Matthew alone retained his human form but even then was granted cherubim wings, so one might not mistake him for the common flesh. The ancients understood the more we searched out ourselves in God, the more easily we would get the two confused. Do our modern painters not dress up saints as wealthy ladies of the court and set the apostles down in colonnaded dining halls for their final supper? Is the desert of Saint Jerome not painted as a pleasant glade in Tuscany, stocked like a duke’s preserve with stags and curious ostriches? It is no wonder, brothers, that foolish pilgrims have no idea what real saints suffered until they come to the testing ground of this cruel East. We have grown too used to keeping company with our saints as ourselves.
I carry Ursus Tucher though these massive doors and into the cloister. Upon the ceiling, painted white against the deep carnelian paneling, Katherine wheels alternate with bony fish and pelicans. Twelve hollow pillars support the ceiling, representing the twelve months of the Christian calendar, and inside each pillar the monks of Saint Katherine keep the relics of any saint who, according to his legend, died during that month. You may reach into the little doors cut into each column and rummage around in martyr’s bones, brothers, for they store them haphazardly inside, careful only not to mix up saints from different months. Nailed to each pillar, an icon representing all the saints, martyrs, confessors, and abbots of January, February, March, and so on lets the unlearned know which of the blessed repose inside which column. Truly, brothers, these icons are a marvel of overcrowding; tight clusters of saints, wedged shoulder to shoulder, three and four deep, are all painted together. Some saints look stern, some joyful; some roll their eyes in fits of agony. Some hold crosses; some read books; some stand with lions or allow birds to perch upon their shoulders. Do they bicker when this church is empty, I wonder? Do they jostle and push to the front, or is the secret to Heaven that each saint has found his place and is comfortable there? I carry Ursus to the November pill
ar to search out Saint Katherine, but she is not present. These icons were painted while Katherine slept in oil, unknown to the Christian world.
Ursus and I walk down the right-side aisle, equally crammed with altars. Cosmas and Damian, Anne and Joachim, Antipas, Marina. Saint Marina lived her life as a nameless monk in the desert. Only when they washed her limbs for burial was she discovered a woman. I pause at none of these shrines but walk to where I know she must be, under the archway to the right of the front chancel. I hesitate on the step. A single olive-oil lamp casts red light over the Byzantine capitals and granite slabs mortared with broken rock that make up her pedestal. When they brought her down from the mountain, they laid her once more upon stone.
Slowly, brothers, I approach Saint Katherine’s tomb.
“Katherine, virgin of Alexandria, erstwhile wife, saint.” I begin my prayer self-consciously in this quiet room. “Forgive me my constant incomprehension, for I am but a foolish priest. For twenty years I dreamed a spouse, a gentle virgin to share my life. If I could have any wife in Heaven or Earth, I wanted it to be you. When I learned you gave yourself freely to John and Arsinoë, I sadly put on my cuckold’s horns, wept bitter tears for the dying of this dream—but then suddenly my life was given back: You spoke to me through the Tongue. I learned you were a captive, held hostage, your body folded inside a box. I vowed to take up the sword for you, my true wed wife, and lay down my life to regain you for the world.
“Now, with the passing of this boy, I know, Katherine, you are not the saint I dreamed you were. You have shown yourself nothing but a cold, remote princess who has forgotten her human life. You have ruthlessly demanded Constantine and Emelia and Lord Tucher, and now this child, when all your tormentor Maxentius requested of you was a handful of incense upon an altar.
“Was Arsinoë correct? Are you lost without the images of your own destruction? Does Heaven truly forget its earthly struggles, the further it moves from Art? You were tortured, Katherine, but you forget the feel of the wheel tearing at your muscles. You were humiliated, and yet you cheerfully subject your servants to far worse shame. Is it that without the picture of your degradation always before you, you turn loose the memory? Have you forgotten what it means to die?
“Take this child, Katherine. I had meant to come to Sinai and fulfill our marriage vows. I wanted to adore you and praise you and shower you with wedding gifts. What words of love can I now pronounce that don’t taste of ashes in my mouth?”
I lay the pale, liquefying body of Ursus Tucher upon her tomb.
“Take him,” I pray. “You have taken everything else.”
“Don’t waste your time, Felix.” A voice comes quietly from the shadows. “Martyrs understand only two things: Love and Death.”
I don’t even turn around. The Dominican monk Arsinoë joins me at Katherine’s coffin. With full eyes, she looks down on my patron’s son. Gently, she wipes away the well water still clinging to his lashes.
“A saint’s love is in Heaven, but her death is on Earth,” says the Tongue. “When she loses touch with that death, Felix, she is no more use to men.”
I don’t have the strength to speak to this woman, brothers. She is even thinner than when I last saw her, and her sharp bruised camel-pad wrists drop limply to her sides. Once again, she wears the heavy feed bag of bones around her neck.
“Have you seen her yet?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Would you like to?”
I have no answer to that question.
“The monks are so rushed, they did not securely refasten the lock when they showed me her relics,” Arsinoë says. “I can open the tomb for us.”
I look down upon Ursus’s body, finally at rest. His febrile ulcers disappear in the red lamplight, creating the happy illusion of health. My boy must be moved, once again.
“Forgive me,” I whisper, hugging his body close, breathing in its corruptibility. In the end, brothers, I am a weak man. I have to see.
I fold Ursus awkwardly in the corner while Arsinoë pushes back the heavy marble lid, incrementally exposing Katherine’s oily parchment-colored bones. Scattered about them, brothers, on her mattress of vermilion silk, gold florins, rings, and rosaries all attest to the piety of centuries of pilgrims. So much of the saint has been carried away that her remains at Sinai comprise only one leg, her pelvis, four ribs, a forearm, her right hand, and that which Arsinoë slowly reveals, the orb we have lost everything to gain: Katherine’s holy head.
The head’s leathery brown skin is stretched taut over high cheekbones, and its mouth curves in a tight smile. Both eyelids are gone, brothers; one, I know, was in the possession of the traveling Greek monk of my boyhood, lost, certainly, many years ago in Europe. The hard-won golden crown of martyrdom levitates above her hairless head, to remind us our riches are found in Heaven, not on Earth. This is the skull we have put a thousand faces on; that we have painted blushing on canvas and sternly amber on wood. This, brothers, is the face we have hacked into stone, stitched onto altar cloths. What do I see of my former bride in the blank structure beneath? What skin have I brought with me across the desert that makes her look like anything other than a monster? It does not matter. All other images of Katherine are forgotten. For once, brothers, I gaze into the face of Truth.
“It is so easy to take from here,” Arsinoë whispers. “The monks are so distracted.”
“Why haven’t you, then?”
She shrugs, plants a kiss on Katherine’s forehead. “Maybe I was waiting for you?”
I can play this game no longer, brothers.
“Tell me,” I ask, almost beyond caring, “why have you and this saint destroyed my life?”
“We did not mean to involve you,” she replies. “Katherine is tired. She wanted to come home.”
“But not to the monastery,” I say. “You wear her bones about your neck, but you make no move to add them to her casket.”
“Not to the monastery,” Arsinoë whispers.
“Where is home?” I ask.
“Oblivion.” She says it so softly I can barely hear. “She is done with the world. She desires now only Heaven.”
“She is done with the world, Arsinoë? Or are you?”
“What is the difference?” she asks.
I walk around the stone coffin until I am even with her.
“I can not let you do this.” I take the poor, exhausted woman in my arms, wincing as the sharp bag of bones digs into my chest. “We have had enough death for one pilgrimage.”
“But we have no choice, Friar,” Arsinoë cries, and spins away. “Death and Life are in the power of the Tongue.”
I do not see it coming, brothers, the coffin lid. I hear it slide like a heavy boat over rocks, but I do not realize what it means until it slams into my solar plexus. Wind. My spine crushed against the wall.
“Only when Katherine is gone can I be free,” she sobs. “Her voice in my head is the only thing that pins me to this wretched body.”
Helplessly, I watch Arsinoë stuff her feed bag full with Katherine’s hand, her shin, ribs, a leg. Please, I pray, if you must take everything else, just leave that one relic. At least leave the world a face upon which to reimagine her. But my prayer falls unheard. Arsinoë reaches in and lifts it out with both hands, careful not to jar her golden crown: the precious skull of Katherine of Alexandria, Virgin Martyr.
“I waited so you might witness her desire to be taken,” Arsinoë says. “She does not rise up to smite me. She does not struggle. See and know, Felix. It is Katherine’s will that we disappear.”
My arms are trapped; with my chest I try to push the marble lid away from my crushed ribs. I can’t breathe.
“Kiss her before I go, Felix. I owe you that much.”
I turn my head, but she follows me with it, pinning my cheek to the wall with the sweating head’s flat cheek.
I dreamed a thousand nights of her kisses. I never wanted this.
Arsinoë rolls the skull until its gap-too
th smile is even with my mouth, then presses it hard against my lips. I am suffocating under olives and myrrh. Every stolen kiss from my novitiate visits me, tasting of goat’s milk and growing boys, the same feeling of asphyxiation. I am falling into my own spine, O my brothers.
And then there is a set of thin, trembling lips against mine, and Arsinoë is kissing me like parchment. My streaming eyes meet her own, and she is crying too.
“Please,” I beg. “I have lost everything.”
“Now you begin to understand the martyr’s life,” she whispers.
Hands
I wake to cool hands under my robes, rudely pushing aside my testicles on their way to feeling up my armpits. One monk pushes the coffin lid aside; two more argue in Greek while they grope. If only I could draw a real breath, I would laugh at how painfully it tickles, or maybe I would scream at them to stop.
I wake a second time, and one of the monks is prodding me with his shoe, warily, as if I were a wounded wild badger on the side of the road, almost but not quite dead. I open my eyes and he shouts at me, then shouts at his companion, the monk who let me in, who shouts at me in Latin.
“What have you done with her?”
I close my eyes again.
The third time I wake, I am blind.
They have left me in total darkness, brothers, here on a cold stone floor, in a room that smells vaguely of mold and sandalwood. When I roll over, my ribs separate, and the most excruciating pain shoots across my back and into my neck. Once, as a boy, a horse kicked me in the chest, and I felt like this, as if any sudden movement would unsnarl this architecture of bones and leave me a collapsed white heap on the ground.
“Hello!” I call weakly, unable to get enough air in my lungs to yell. “Where am I?”
To my left, along the floor, I spy a faint line of midnight blue, barely a shade lighter than the interior pitch. Slowly, brothers, I roll onto my knees and painfully crawl to that line. Most definitely, a breeze circulates around it, and if I pat my way higher up, I begin to recognize splintery wood, two hinges, a cold metal ring. With all my might, I pull on this ring, brothers, but nothing happens. I am locked in.
