Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

“I couldn’t do that. My carving pleases God.”

“How do you know?”

She pressed the sponge harder into an area of my skin that did not want to give. “Because God gave me ears that can hear the voices in the stone.”

“How does that work, exactly?”

She stumbled over her words; for all her language skills, she could not articulate precisely what she wanted to say.

“I just empty myself. I used to be so anxious to receive God’s instructions that I couldn’t. Now I clear myself, and that’s when the gargoyles can most easily talk to me. If I’m not empty, I bring my own ideas, and they’re always wrong. It’s much easier for the gargoyles, you see, because they’ve been emptying themselves for a million years. In the rock, He entered them and informed them. Then they inform me of God’s plan for us. I have to”-she paused for a good five seconds-“I have to empty myself of potency to become as close as I can to pure act. But only God is pure act.”

I will not pretend that I understood this perfectly, but here is my best interpretation: God acted upon the “buried gargoyles” (meaning the gargoyles still encased in stone) by informing them of the shapes they should assume. The buried gargoyles acted upon Marianne Engel, instructing her how to realize these shapes. Marianne Engel then became the agent of action, chipping away the stone. In this way, she allowed the gargoyles to realize the shapes God intended for them. The now unburied gargoyles (the finished carvings) were therefore a realization of God’s instructions. They were not Marianne Engel’s creations, because she wasn’t the sculptor; God was. She was only the tool in His hand.

She kept scrubbing hard on my body the entire time that she was explaining. When she was finished, I could see the chips of my skin floating in the bathwater.

It was not long before a work crew arrived to install air conditioning and I found myself able to sleep comfortably in the belfry. I assembled a few shelves in the room-one for books, and one for the small stone grotesque and the glass lily that I’d received in the hospital. There was a desk in one corner, which I equipped with the stationery set that Gregor had given me. In another corner were the television and video player that Marianne Engel had bought for me, despite her own aversion to these too-modern items.

The scene in the basement did not repeat itself any time soon after that, and we quickly developed a routine. When I woke in the morning, she’d inject me first and scrub me second. Following this, there was a series of exercises that Sayuri had prescribed. In the afternoon I’d take a nap, and while I slept, Marianne Engel shopped for my recovery supplies or took Bougatsa for a walk. In the early evening I’d get up again and we’d play cards, or drink coffee and talk. Occasionally, if she had something to do, I’d call Gregor and we’d spend a few minutes on the phone. I found I missed the visits he had made to my hospital bedside and we usually ended our calls by promising to get together soon. It was not easy, though, because his schedule was busy and it seemed that whatever free time he had was spent with Sayuri.

At the end of most evenings, Marianne Engel would go to bed before I was ready to sleep, and I’d stay up to read Friedrich Sunder or Sister Christina.

The Gnaden-vita was fascinating even though, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, the writing included several occurrences of gender reversal. Sunder would be writing in the proper masculine sense and then-whoops!-he’d be a woman. These mistakes might have been inserted by female editors after Friedrich’s death, or by various female scriveners over the years, or even by Marianne Engel as she finally brought the work into English. (Imagine the glee in Titivillus’ eye!) However, I doubted this was actually the case, because the feminine qualities were beyond mere typographical slips: they were integral to the content.

A particularly striking example is in Father Sunder’s description of his marriage to Christ. The idea of such a union seems-to my modern mind-strange, but apparently “marriage” to Christ was common among men of Friedrich’s position. Even allowing for this, however, there can be no denying the enormously erotic nature of the bridal imagery. The marriage is consummated in an ornate bed covered with flowers, in the middle of a court, and watched by many figures from Heaven, including Mother Mary. Sunder writes that Christ embraces him and kisses him, and that they take their pleasures with each other. (You read that correctly.) When Christ is finished with Friedrich, He tells the angels to take up their instruments and play them with as much pleasure as He has just played His beloved spouse. Jesus even claims that through this consummation a multitude of souls has been freed from Purgatory, which really does suggest that it was quite a wedding night.

It crossed my mind that Marianne Engel might have included this passage in the translation simply to have a good laugh at my expense. Because-c’mon!-this episode couldn’t really have existed in Sunder’s original text, right? But in the interval I’ve checked other sources and found it to be accurate.

As interesting as that is, more notable to me is the fact that the Gnaden-vita includes no mention of a Sister Marianne who’d been dropped off as a babe at the Engelthal gates. When I pointed this out, Marianne Engel assured me that her omission from Sunder’s book would be explained before she finished telling me the story of our past lives.

“I know that you don’t like the idea of going out in public,” she said, “so let’s go now, under the cover of night.”

I resisted nominally, but was too curious about where a midnight excursion with Marianne Engel (and Bougatsa) might lead. Soon we found ourselves in her car, heading towards a beach at which I’d never bothered to stop. I wondered whether anyone else would be there and decided probably not, on a cold night in late February. But I was wrong. The sandy shoreline was speckled with small bonfires around which teenagers sat drinking beer. They were equidistant in the darkness, affording everyone a degree of anonymity. I liked this.

Marianne Engel laid out a blanket. I wanted to take off my shoes, because they were full of sand, but even in the dark I was too bashful about my missing toes. She said she wished that I could go swimming with her, or at least wade out to my knees, but she had no idea what saltwater would do to my skin. My gut feeling was that it would not be pleasant. It didn’t really matter, because as a child I had never learned to swim. “That’s a shame,” she said. “I love the water.”

I laid my head in her lap and she told me about the great wolf named Skцll that chases the sun every day, trying to eat it. It is said that at Ragnarцk, the battle at the end of the world, he will finally succeed, devouring the sun while his brother Hati eats the moon, and the stars will disappear from the sky. She told me about the terrible earthquakes that will rip the earth apart as Miрgarрsormur, the Midgard Serpent, twists his immense body in the ocean and causes towering tidal waves. All the gods will be involved in a tremendous war, and eventually fire will be flung in all directions. The world, Marianne Engel said, will burn before the charred remains sink into the sea. “At least that’s what my friend Sigurðr believes.”

She hopped up from our blanket and started stripping off her clothes. “I’m going swimming now.”

Though I usually accepted her idiosyncrasies, I was shocked by this announcement. It was obviously and immediately dangerous, and I protested that the weather was far too cold.