The Gargoyle (21 page)

 Marianne Engel shook her head in disagreement. 

Marianne Engel bowed once more. 

Sayuri stifled a giggle with a hand raised to her mouth. 

Sayuri looked deeply pleased that my vile behavior the day before had produced such an unexpected meeting. She excused herself from the room with a wide smile, bowing one final time towards Marianne Engel.

Marianne Engel brought her mouth close to my ear, and whispered, “I don’t want to hear about you spitting black toads at Mizumoto san ever again. Talking with the mouth of a beast won’t ease your pain. You have to keep your heart open with love, and trust me. I promise that we’re moving towards freedom but I can’t do this alone.”

She moved away from my bed, pulled a chair from the corner, and sat heavily, with the tired look of a wife disappointed in her husband’s failure. Her strange little speech drove me to voice a question that I’d long wanted to ask but had been too afraid to: “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “I want you to do absolutely nothing for me.”

“Why?” I asked. “What does that even mean?”

“Only by doing nothing will you truly be able to prove your love.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” she said. “I promise.”

With this, Marianne Engel stopped talking about things that were going to happen in the future and decided to return to telling the story of her past. I did not believe any of it—how could I?—but at least it didn’t leave me, like our conversation, feeling dumb.

G
rowing up in Engelthal, I found my most difficult challenge was to keep my voice down. I understood that silence was an integral part of our spiritual welfare, but nevertheless I received many reprimands for my “excessive exuberance.” Really, I was simply acting as a child does.

It was not only sound that was muted at Engelthal, it was everything. All aspects of our lives were outlined by the Constitutions of the Order, a document so thorough that it had a full five chapters devoted just to clothing and washing. Even our buildings could have no elegance, for fear it might taint our souls. We had to sit in the dining hall in the same order that we took our places in the choir. During the meal, readings were given so we received spiritual nourishment as well as physical. We’d listen to passages from the Bible and a lot of St. Augustine, and sometimes
The Life of St. Dominic,
the
Legenda Aurea,
or
Das St. Trudperter Hohelied.
At least the readings distracted from the food, which was flavorless—spices were prohibited and we couldn’t eat meat without special permission, given only for health reasons.

Whenever I wasn’t in the central chapel for Mass, I spent my time in the scriptorium. Gertrud made it clear from the start that she didn’t appreciate my presence. Because of her position as armarius, however, it would have been improper for her to vent her frustrations directly. For this, she had her minion Sister Agletrudis.

Agletrudis was a chubby little planet that orbited around Gertrud, the scriptorium’s largest star; her every action was calculated to please her mistress by torturing me. Her only goal in life was to take over the scriptorium when Gertrud finally died. What was I, except an obstacle upon that path?

Well before I arrived, a financial consideration had infiltrated the scriptorium. It was common practice to produce books for wealthy citizens, often in exchange for land upon their deaths. Gertrud, despite all her self-professed holiness, never took offense at the economic terms of this arrangement but disliked the sale of books for a different reason altogether: it interfered with using the scriptorium to achieve her own ends. Early in her career, Gertrud had decided that she would produce one great work upon which her legend would forever rest: a definitive German-language version of the Bible. Though she never said it aloud, I’m certain she imagined it would come to be known as
Die Gertrud Bibel.

This was the basic problem with my presence: I was a young girl—an incomplete adult—who would take precious time away from her real work. I remember Gertrud’s words when she put me under the tutelage of Agletrudis. “The prioress seems to believe this child will be able to offer something. Demonstrate for her some of the basics of the craft, preferably on the other side of the room, but she is not to touch anything. Those fat little fingers are undeserving of God’s instruments. And above all, keep her away from my Bible.”

So, in the beginning, I was only allowed to watch. You’d imagine this to be incredibly boring for a child but, as I’d spent much of my young life gathering information while sitting quietly in the corner, this was nothing new for me. I was hypnotized by the way the quills worked as an extension of the scribes’ fingers. I learned the recipe for ink and that adding vermilion or cinnabar would make it red. I watched the way the nuns used a blade to sharpen their nibs, whenever the lettering threatened to lose its definition. I knew instantly that I was in the right place.

Things that we take for granted today were extraordinary at the time. Take paper, for example. We didn’t make our own but received delivery from a local parchmenter. Then we had to ready the parchment for use. The nuns sorted it by quality and then arranged the sheets by hair and flesh sides, so the grains of the pages would match when the volume sat open on its spine, and sometimes Gertrud would instruct that the parchment should have some color added “just for a touch of drama.” A single book required the skins of several hundred animals. How could a girl not be fascinated by that?

I can criticize Gertrud for many things but not her devotion to the craft. If the work was a translation, discussions about the phrasing of a single sentence sometimes lasted for over an hour. Most nuns in that room, despite the grumblings about Gertrud’s dictatorial attitude, felt that she was completing a task God had specifically chosen her to do. The sisters never flagged, not even during the most intense periods of working on
Die Gertrud Bibel.

There were a few scribes who wondered under what authority such a grand translation was being attempted and whether the undertaking were not sacrilegious, but these sisters knew better than to question the scriptorium’s armarius—or simply feared to do it. So they didn’t complain, but focused instead on the rare pages of the Bible that received Gertrud’s approval. While everyone had input into the process, she always had the final say.