Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

“I was busy,” she answered. “The pants were a gift.”

“Doing what? From whom?”

“Working, but then I got sick for a bit.” She pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. “Jack gave me the pants.”

“Sorry to hear you were under the weather. Who’s Jack?”

“I’m recovering. Jealous?”

“Glad to hear it. You’re not hiding from the doctors today?”

“Nope. Jealous?”

“Of Jack?” I pshawed her. “So you’re getting on with them?”

“Wouldn’t go that far. Don’t want to talk about it.”

“The doctors or Jack?”

“Doctors,” she answered. “You want to talk about Jack?”

“Of course not. Your private life is private, right?”

“The relationship is complicated.”

“With Jack?”

“With doctors.” Marianne Engel drummed her fingertips on her pantdragon’s bejeweled eyes. “But Dr. Edwards seems okay, I guess.”

“Yeah. So you’re all healed from your, whatever, sickness?”

“Exhaustion, mostly.” She tilted her head to one side. “Tell me about your accident.”

“I was stoned, and I drove off a cliff.”

“He who eats fire, shits sparks.”

I indicated the little statue on the bedside table. “I like the gargoyle.”

“Not a gargoyle. It’s a grotesque.”

“You say oyster, I say erster.”

“I ain’t gonna to stop eating ersters,” Marianne Engel replied, “but that’s a grotesque. A gargoyle’s a waterspout.”

“Everyone calls these things gargoyles.”

“Everyone’s wrong.” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack and, after not lighting it, began to roll it between her thumb and forefinger. “Gargoyles throw water from the walls of cathedrals so the foundations don’t wash away. The Germans call them Wasserspeier. Do you remember that?”

“Remember what?”

“‘Water spitter.’ That’s the literal translation.”

“Why do you know so much about them?”

“Grotesques or languages?”

“Both.”

“Grotesques are what I do,” Marianne Engel answered. “Languages are a hobby.”

“What do you mean, you ‘do’ grotesques?”

“I carve.” She nodded towards the stunted monster in my hand. “I did that.”

“My psychiatrist likes it.”

“Which shrink?”

“Dr. Hnatiuk.”

“He’s better than most.”

I was slightly surprised. “You know him?”

“I know most of them.”

“Tell me about your carving.”

“I became interested while watching you do it.” Her other hand was now fidgeting with her arrowhead necklace.

“I don’t carve.”

“You did.”

“No, I never have,” I insisted. “Tell me why you like carving.”

“It’s backwards art. You end up with less than what you started with.” She paused. “It’s too bad you can’t remember carving. I still have something you did.”

“What?”

“My Morgengabe.” Marianne Engel looked at me intently, as if waiting for a nonexistent memory to enter my mind. When she saw that none was coming, she shrugged and leaned back into her chair. “Jack’s my manager.”

A professional acquaintance. Good. “Tell me about him.”

“I think I’ll keep you guessing.” She was definitely in fine spirits on this day. “How about I tell you a story?”

“About what, this time?”

“About me.”

The exact date of my birth hardly matters now, but as far as I know it was sometime in the year 1300. I never knew my birth parents, who left me in a basket at the front gate of Engelthal monastery in mid-April when I was only a few days old. Normally an abandoned child wouldn’t have been taken in and raised-Engelthal wasn’t an orphanage, after all-but as fate would have it, I was found by Sister Christina Ebner and Father Friedrich Sunder on the very evening that they’d been discussing what constituted a sign from God.

Sister Christina had entered the monastery at the age of twelve and started having visions two years after that. When she found me she was in her early twenties, and her reputation as a mystic was already secure. Father Sunder was approaching fifty, a chaplain of the area, who had entered the religious life much later than most. By this time, he’d been serving as confessor to the Engelthal nuns for about twenty years. But the most important thing to know about them was their basic natures, because if they had not been so sympathetic, everything would have turned out much differently.

There were two notes in my basket. One was in Latin and the other in German, but both read the same. A destined child, tenth-born of a good family, given as a gift to our Savior Jesus Christ and Engelthal monastery. Do with her as God pleases. It was rare at that time to find a commoner who could write one language, much less two, so I suppose the very existence of these notes supported their claim that I was from a good family.

From what I understand, Sister Christina and Father Sunder quickly decided that the appearance of a child on that evening, of all evenings, was not a coincidence, and it didn’t hurt either that Sister Christina was herself a tenth child. When they took me to the prioress, she was hesitant to stand against their combined arguments. Could the prioress ignore the possibility that my appearance at the gate had been ordained from above? When dealing with messages from the Lord, it’s always best to err on the side of caution. This was the general feeling among the sisters of the monastery, although there was one who argued strenuously against keeping me. This was Sister Gertrud, the armarius-that’s the “master scribe”-of the Engelthal scriptorium. You should remember her name, as well as the name of her assistant, Sister Agletrudis. Both would prove instrumental in my life, and usually not for the better.

Engelthal was considered one of the most important spiritual centers in Germany. You might think this would make for a forbidding childhood, but in truth it did not. The nuns treated me well, probably because I was a distraction from everyday chores. I always loved it when I made one of them smile, because as soon as they realized they were doing it, they’d make all efforts to stop. I felt as if I’d broken a rule.

I was always closest to Sister Christina and Father Sunder, who became a kind of surrogate mother and father to me, a fact that was reflected in the name that I used for Sunder. Properly, he could have been called “father” by all, but his humility was such that he always required others to call him “brother.” So to everyone else he was Brother Sunder, but to me he was always Father. He allowed it, I suppose, because I saw a side of him that no one else saw-well, except for Brother Heinrich, with whom he shared a small house near a ridge in the forest. In any case, I heard Father Sunder’s laughter when almost everyone else only saw his intensity.

All the other nuns came to the monastery after having had their childhoods elsewhere, but I spoke my first word to Father Sunder. “Gott.” God, what a glorious introduction to language. Given this, how could he possibly wear the same mask of fierce piety in front of me that he showed to everyone else? It didn’t fit his face when he was playing with an infant, and by the time he thought to put that mask on with me, it was too late. But I understood, even as a child, that he had an image to keep up, and his secret was safe with me.

Father Sunder always wore a hairshirt and berated himself constantly, calling himself a sinner-mostly for the “transgressions of his youth,” whatever they were-and praying for mercy. He believed he was “polluted” by the things he’d done before entering religious life. He didn’t often go on these rants in front of me but, when he did, Brother Heinrich would stand silently in the corner of their home and roll his eyes.