A Stolen Tongue (10 page)

But Abdullah wants to talk of Germany.

“Yes, it's still black with forests,” I tell him. “And gray-capped mushrooms grow through nets of running cedar. It rained every day of my pilgrimage, until we crossed into Italy.”

“Is the beer still thick and brown?”

“With malt-flecked clouds on top.”

“And the wurst?”

“Dear God, the wurst!”

“Watch the pig, Abdullah,” Ser Niccolo warns. “Dwell not on the filthy pig!”

“A man who speaks perfect German mustn't joke about the wurst,” I chide him, feeling the wine hot in my cheeks when I lean in for more. “Where did you learn this perfect German?”

“Ser Niccolo is a translator,” Abdullah says. “He speaks all the languages of the world.”

“I etymologize a bit myself”—I laugh—“but I won't translate. There are too many vernacular ideas that just won't fit any other language. The world is too full of stray words.”

“Ah, there you've found the seat of the translator's power, Friar.” Niccolo slaps my back with the same pride as my abbot in Basle when at seven I completed my first catechism. “It is where we have more sway than kings or bishops. It serves translators to keep mankind ignorant; the reader must trust us to think for him.”

“What if we prefer to think for ourselves?”

“Then you must do as I did and learn a hundred different languages. If not, you'll always be dependent on a complete stranger's version of the truth.”

“I've always thought of translators as servants,” I say, emboldened by the drink. “They are slaves to genius, are they not?”

Ser Niccolo smiles, noticing the little copy of Saint Jerome's
On the Distances of Places
that peeps from my pocket. He plucks out the book and flips through it.

“Many would have it so. But let me give you an analogy: Take Abdullah, here.”

He holds Jerome in one hand and places the other on the Mameluke's swollen neck. I see Abdullah wince.

“He is a slave, the servant to an illegitimate son of the Sultan. Yet if he had the genius to obliterate his enemies, he, a wretched, amoral apostate, could easily find himself ruler of the East, the most potent political and religious figure alive.

“Do you not think Saint Jerome was aware of this when he sat down to wrest the Bible from Hebrew? He knew only a handful of Romans understood that arcane Jewish language, and thus the rest of us would be utterly dependent on his Latin translation of God's Word. If the Jews were wiped out tomorrow, as many European rulers would have it, and the Hebrew language were obliterated, who would then speak for God? Only the master translator, Saint Jerome. So, I ask you, Friar Felix, who really serves in this world? Who really rules?”

John looks decidedly uncomfortable with the conversation. Abdullah shifts on his bench.

“If we're to have philosophy,” the Mameluke says, “we need another bottle of wine.”

“I'll get it,” John volunteers.

“I'll come with you.” The Mameluke follows, throwing his arm familiarly around my friend's stiff shoulders. They head into the shadows of the kitchen and ladies' cabin.

Behind us, the Saint John's festivities are beginning. A horn tosses its vibrato across the lanterns like fat into fire. A galley slave raises his voice in song.

“Are you a scholar or a diplomat?” I ask, suddenly aware of his eyes on mine.

“You have to be a little of both in my profession.” He studies me as if gauging how interested I truly am in his response. “If you are introducing one language to another, you must first cajole them, get them to touch hands; it's too easy to treat translation as a rape—to usurp the meaning of the weaker language and force it into the characters of the stronger. Translation must be a seduction, Friar, with all the slow persuasions of a willing kidnap.

“I've learned all known languages but one.” Ser Niccolo turns away from me and stares deep into the ship's shadows. “I've not yet mastered the vocabulary of madness.”

Suddenly I know where I've seen him before.

“You're the gentleman from Candia! You were looking for a runaway woman!”

He studies me narrowly. “My sister, yes. Now I remember you,” he says. “You were with a young boy.”

“We found her,” I cry. “She was on our ship!”

“Where is she?” His eyes follow mine to the ladies' cabin, where I still expect to see her emerge, wet and guilty. Does her brother suspect her too?

“She is gone,” I tell him regretfully. “She ran off from Rhodes.”

“Was she well? Did she appear troubled?”

Brothers, what should I do? Should I address the drowning? Should I confide my suspicions?

“You needn't say.” The translator sighs. “I can see from your face she is still unwell. Please, Friar,” he begs, gripping my knee urgently, “if she should return—keep her for me. You have no idea what she might do.”

I do know. But dare I say?

A pilgrim strikes a tabor. Someone squeezes a bladder pipe. Ser Niccolo releases me, looks about him in despair. All around, the pilgrims pick up the drum's tempo, stomp their feet, clapping gaily along. Before tonight, I had never beheld the practice of clapping the hands for joy; I knew it only from the Forty-seventh Psalm: “O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.” I would never have imagined that the sound of many men's clapping could kindle such emotion in my breast. Sensing my confusion, Niccolo slides behind me, snakes his arms through my arms, takes my hands in his, brings the four together. John comes back with another bottle of malvoisie, but I can no longer feel my legs, my hands under the stranger's hands. Before I know what's happening, Ser Niccolo grabs me by the waist and swings me up and around, wildly, until the individual lanterns on their strings above resolve into a single heavenly wheel of fire. Like a frenzied Israelite,
I put my hands together and feel the vibration ring deep in my chest, shoot out through my elbows. Ser Niccolo laughs at my amazement; before I know what he's about, he slaps me with a sloppy, winey kiss of peace—full on my laugh-stretched lips.

“True translators know there is no language without persuasion, no persuasion without seduction,” he shouts in Latin, Italian, German, in love with my shock and the language of stinging palms. His hands are on my body, but his eyes are out there in the night, shooting sparks into dark corners, looking, still looking. On the landing by the ladies' cabin, I see his friend, the Mameluke, wave.

I barely remember John pulling me away, his mouth on my ear—“Felix, we don't even know this man”—or their departure, as abrupt and unexpected as their arrival. I can't tell you if the tears on my cheeks, as I stand abandoned in the middle of the ship, dizzy and hot, afraid to move for fear of falling, are from shame or loss or laughter.

I only know today is the longest day of the year, and night has suddenly fallen.

“It's that merchant.” Ursus's voice is like a nail in my skull. “He won't get out of bed.”

A bad wind hit us just outside the Cyprus harbor. The stomach sea churns, belching fish that panic midair and plunge back down its gullet. In vain, the sailors tack, the oarsmen row, inching us laterally along. We're all seasick from last night's festival.

“Let him rest, Ursus. He'll be fine.”

“I don't think so, Friar. He says he's dying. He called for a confessor.”

“Why don't you run along and fetch Archdeacon John for him?”

“Archdeacon John suggested I run along and fetch you.”

What choice do I have? I shade my eyes with my book and walk unsteadily to the stairs. Like a fart in the chapel, Ursus follows.

“The merchant might prefer to be alone with his private thoughts, son.”

Near the prow of the ship, the Betrayer Tucher sits at Emelia Priuli's side while she throws dice with some Frenchmen.

“Run along and remind your father there is less at sea to distract God's attention away from our sinning selves.”

It takes a few minutes for me to adjust to the woody darkness and fetid stench below. Wine sweat, when it pushes through the pores of several hundred hung-over pilgrims, mingling with the aroma of filthy feet and unwashed hair, is more likely to rouse a
man than the loudest cock crow. Constantine must be extraordinarily ill to have remained in bed.

I know you are wondering, brothers, why I have not brought with me the Sacrament of Eucharist for a man who is supposedly dying. And yet, my brothers, this is a privation you cannot imagine until you have actually set sail, until the first storm hits and pilgrims wail and cry out for the body of Christ to comfort them. Then, frightened and seasick, you would run to the captain, only to be told, “No, Friar, the Church does not allow Christ's body to be carried on ship.” What? You would rail against Holy Mother Church! Could she so abandon her needy children? But you would be wrong to accuse her, brothers. With contemplation and reflection you would realize the Eucharist might not be celebrated on board ship for five good reasons: First, because the Host is made of bread and cannot be well preserved at sea; after three days it becomes watery and moldy and melts away into liquid paste. Second, because the Host must be kept beside a burning light; and, as I said earlier, through sailor's superstition no lights are allowed to burn on deck. Third, because of want of due reverence; during a storm, sailors must run around to secure the ship, and all would be overturned, priest, sacrament, and altar together. The fourth reason the Eucharist may not be kept aboard ship is because of the folly of bad Christians: Imagine, my brothers, that a storm should blow up; were the consecrated Host on board, how easy it would be for the pilgrims to turn to the Host and say, “If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us!” Fifth and last, the Host may not be kept on board because of the ease with which men vomit there; should a storm arise immediately after a priest had celebrated mass, he would, by force of nature, be compelled to vomit forth the Body of Christ, which thing, as some among us know, is horrible to behold.

Because of these five reasons, dying men aboard ships are denied the last consolation of the Church. If Constantine is as ill as he believes himself to be, I can do little more for him than trace a dry cross on his forehead and hear his confession.

When I reach his pallet, I'm shocked at how greatly his wife's absence of only forty-eight hours has changed him. His dirty fingernails
rest beside clouded, bloodshot eyes. Next to him, a shallow ceramic chamber pot sloshes with thin green vomit. I almost gag at the smell.

“Constantine?” I kneel beside him, breathing through my mouth. “You must give over this grief.”

“Felix? Is that you?” He's looking right at me. “Are we on the Ocean?”

“Yes, Constantine,” I tell him. “We're in the boat.”

“Felix? If my body is thrown to the fishes after I die, can God still resurrect me?”

What errors men entertain! I smile indulgently.

“Saint Augustine tells us that if a man is starving and, to save himself, eats another man, even if the eaten man is absorbed into the starving man's flesh, God knows to whom the body belongs. Should fish eat you, Constantine, God can extract your essence from the bubbles they exhale. They will only have borrowed your body for a time.”

“Still,” he moans, “don't let the fish borrow me. I don't want anything to make use of my body. Do you promise, Felix? Do you promise on Saint Katherine's life?”

“You're not going to die, Constantine. You are simply melancholy.”

“Promise me. On Katherine's life.”

His lips are white and cheesy from lack of water. Truly, he does look very ill.

“I promise,” I say at last.

“I need to make a confession, Friar, and there are no priests of my faith on board.”

Like an infant, he wills his eyes to focus. For the first time I know he really sees me.

“What do you want to say, Constantine?”

“I was the first one, you see. I was the first to understand what her saint wanted.”

“Constantine.” I brush the merchant's hair from his sweaty forehead. “I'm afraid you're making very little sense today.”

“Up until I came, Katherine only asked for icons; she only needed to see herself to know she existed. I began the whole awful thing, Friar. I brought Arsinoë the first bone.”

“Constantine, what are you saying?”

“At first Arsinoë was horrified, but her brother took the rib and thanked me. He said Katherine had at last found a way to come to his sister.”

My hand falls away from his hair. Has the merchant lost his mind? Does he honestly expect me to believe Saint Katherine would make a pilgrimage to a mere girl?

“When other people found out Katherine wanted to come to her Tongue, they began to bring bones as well. Some were purchased; some, I know, were stolen. They were so desperate, Felix. I knew they wouldn't stop until they'd brought Arsinoë her entire saint.”

I shudder at the image. A whole town lined up at the door, each neighbor holding a femur or a rib. I see a little girl with an elbow, a dog with a foot in its mouth.

“Constantine, if this horrible thing is true, as her husband why didn't you put a stop to it?”

“I have a horrible lie to confess, Friar.”

Our galley hits a swell and Constantine's chamber pot sloshes onto his mattress.

“The woman Arsinoë is not my wife.”

“Friar! Come quick!” Ursus calls from far away.

“What do you mean not your wife? Why is she with you?”

“She came to my shop five days ago. I know she had the bones with her.”

Ursus pounds down the steps, his boots echoing through the hollow belly of the ship. Constantine rolls back on his side.

“What is it, Ursus?” I ask sharply.

“You'll never believe!” He yanks my robes, nearly pulling me off my feet.