she had worn it into the room, I discovered later, to appease the nurse who had caught her sneaking in, and then promptly removed it. So she was in her street clothing: a billowy white shirt tucked into her faded jeans with a belt of small silver disks. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders, down her back. Her face was calm and her eyes were bright—green, definitely green. An embroidered dragon lived on her right pant leg.
Finally I knew that I’d been correct in guessing that Marianne Engel’s figure was pleasing. The dragon seemed to think so also, for it crawled upwards from ankle to hip, twisting around and caressing her thigh. Each scale was a colored sequin; the ruby eyes were bulbous fake jewels. The tongue twisted outwards in playful licks across her buttocks. The claws, black stitches, dug into the delicious meat of her leg. “I like your pants,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“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 gar goyle.”
“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. “Lan guages 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-bornof 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