Theodora

by Stella Duffy

  ‘I think I’m finished with that now.’

  The young man frowned, peering at her through the last light. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It would be wrong. You should not give up.’

  ‘You know nothing of me. I’m off to the desert, if they’ll have me, and I’ll be glad to be left alone.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll ever leave you alone, will they?’

  ‘I’ve given plenty.’

  He nodded, agreeing, ‘Of course, but there’s always more. Well,’ he stopped, aware of the impropriety of sitting alone in the dark with this woman, this girl, probably several years younger than he was, but so much more a woman than he was a man. He was glad she could not see him blushing. ‘I should go. If I can’t see him today then I’ve missed the chance, I have a place on a ship leaving in the morning. It’s been nice to talk to you.’

  He filled his worn pilgrim’s flask with fresh water from the fountain, bowed, and walked back out to the busy street, leaving her alone with the sound of the repeating water and the monks chanting beyond the thick wall.

  *

  ‘Theodora? I’m sorry, you’ve been waiting all day, haven’t you?’

  She’d been asleep for an hour, was dizzy with wrenching herself from it, and aching with the bite of the stone she’d fallen asleep on. The man who spoke had a dozen just-lit candles behind, glowing from each of the sconces in the courtyard wall. Their warm light was shining through his prominent ears, illuminating nothing more than the crest of his bald pate and the sad few hairs remaining, hairs he didn’t even have the City nous to shave away. He leaned over her and she could see that his cloak was stained with ink; his hands too, she noticed as he extended them to her, shockingly touching her himself, were not only inked but nail-bitten as well. But his voice was perfect. The Patriarch spoke her name again and Theodora was on her feet and then her knees. He gave her the blessing and helped her up, asked about her journey and her route, about the young craftsman who’d been and gone that afternoon, and then about her new choice, the reason his brother’s friend Ireni had sent her here. And though he was speaking so quietly she had to strain to listen, and though his accent seemed stronger the more he talked, Theodora heard every word as if it were a sermon and she his convert. They walked through dark corridors and long, low-lit chambers as far as the door to his office where he handed her over to one of the nuns who kept the other side of the house. She knelt and accepted another blessing before he closed the door on them. She was his convert.

  The nun showed her to a tiny room. The bed – three boards, an old mattress, and a single blanket – was clearly designed for penitents. As was the morning wake-up call, well before dawn, time enough to rise, wash, dress in silence, and be waiting in the Patriarch’s own chapel ten minutes later. Timothy himself would not arrive to say the mass until dawn, but it was thought useful for the penitents to have time to reflect before the Patriarch arrived. The service would follow, then more prayer and finally, a basic breakfast. Her guide suggested drinking plenty of water before sleep, and very little on rising: that way she would be less likely to faint in chapel – the Patriarch hated a fuss of any kind – nor would she feel the need to be excused for a moment. Which anyway, would not be allowed.

  Theodora shrugged. She too found it irritating when members of the audience left their seats for a piss just at the moment when the actors required all attention on them, it was perfectly fair that the Patriarch of Alexandria also demanded his audience’s full attention. As for the water, she had trained under Menander. Theodora had performed while both aching from dehydration and with a bladder about to burst, and never once disgraced herself. She might be a little out of practice, but she didn’t think it would take long to get back into the pattern of ignoring her body’s needs. She started to say as much to the older woman and was stopped before she’d finished the word ‘when’.

  ‘We do not care about your life before now. It is irrelevant.’

  ‘I was just—’

  The nun held up her hand. ‘We do not care.’

  Each word was spoken with quiet deliberation. Menander would have emphasised each one with a whack of his cane, Hecebolus with a jabbing finger in her collarbone, or a kiss. Fine, she’d act the perfect student, ready, willing and ever yielding, put on the show they clearly wanted this one more time if she had to. Eyes on the prize of getting home, paid and cared for, without having to fuck or feign love in return, Theodora offered her meekest smile and curtsied her acquiescence.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Good,’ the nun replied. ‘And a word of advice. Don’t think that you and your work are not known here. The Patriarch and his fellow teachers understand well what they are about, they have seen – and uncovered – more false promises than you have ever made, more false yielding as well. You’d do well to practise giving in, you might even come to mean it in time.’

  She closed the door to Theodora’s tiny room, taking the candle with her and leaving pitch darkness behind. Theodora spat out a silent oath to the receding back of the skinny old bitch and lay down on the hard mattress, wondering what the fuck she’d let herself in for.

  She didn’t have long to wait. Five hours later she was up and dressed in the same plain black cotton dress Ireni had given her to arrive in, on her knees and offering up her sins. As she was seven hours later. And eight. And nine. There was a brief, and equally silent, break for thin soup and solid bread, then more prayer, more lectures. Lectures from the woman who’d showed her to her room last night, from other penitents who’d been this way and were now considered saved enough to share their stories, and one very long speech from the Patriarch’s brother Arsenio, the priest Ireni had considered kind but boring. She wasn’t wrong. Theodora passed the time wondering how it was that, with two brothers, equally physically unattractive, one could have such charisma and the other be this dullard of a man. She figured his mother must have been sleeping around, and then wondered if perhaps it wasn’t the Patriarch who was the family bastard, that somewhere out there was a beautiful man with a beautiful voice and it was the mother who had the dog-ugly face. It wasn’t the best use of her time when she was meant to be considering her own sins, but she passed an enjoyable half-hour remembering all the good-looking men she had known, imagining them in the throes of orgasm crying out in the Patriarch’s beautiful voice.

  Another break and another bowl of soup, still more silence, then a further hour on her knees. Theodora began questioning her sanity, wondering how she could possibly have thought that this might be an easier way home than screwing her way across the sea. She was well used to physical privation, but boredom was an entirely different matter. And then, out of the long grey day, the Patriarch himself came into the room and began talking to them, touching one on the shoulder as he passed, taking another’s outstretched hand, asking this one and that how they were, bestowing blessings as he went. She watched the short, ungainly middle-aged man work the room. Theodora had seen great charm at work before, in senators, leading actors, extraordinary musicians. Her mother maintained the girls’ father had some of this quality, certainly with his animals, if not always with people, an ability to make them pay attention, not by any action or word in particular, merely because he expected it. She had never before seen this power in a man so seemingly ordinary and yet, from his manner, and from the way she was surprised to find herself feeling, not ordinary at all.

  She tried to work it out. They sat in a room of a hundred or more, roughly lit by high windows that gave the tiniest glimpse of sky outside, all black-robed penitents, and in he came, wandering among them, this richly garbed patriarch. So there was costume. There was also status, of course, their roof was his, their food and drink were his, they stayed in the house on his sufferance – it was already clear that everyone here had their own reasons for turning away from the world, it made perfect sense that no one should want to upset the man who held the keys. And then there were
those, Theodora assumed, who truly did believe, who were not just running away from love or loss or bankruptcy or any of the other usual cares of the world, who sincerely believed that Timothy, with his famed sermons and his intellectual grasp of divine truths, as well as his beliefs in direct contrast with so many other Church leaders, was closer to God than anyone else on the earth. Even those he didn’t speak to, when he stood some distance from them, still seemed moved by his presence.

  As he came closer she found that she was again, as yesterday, straining to hear his voice, hungry for his words, and hungrier that he might see her. Used to being adored, to hearing her name chanted by thousands, Theodora wanted Timothy to see her, Timothy to speak to her. She sat straighter as he approached, raised her chin, ensuring the planes of her angled face were as clear as she would like, as Menander would have liked, making the most of this sparse light. She parted her lips just a little, breathed in to be ready to answer whatever he asked, knowing that a ready breath always made the speaker sound more sure, more engaged. She sat with her hands plainly open in her lap. Waiting. The Patriarch walked straight by. Theodora gasped silently, sitting first in her bitter disappointment, then a hot anger, then regret. Five minutes later she shook her head and laughed at herself, silently congratulating the ungainly red-robed man as he walked away and out of the room, leaving them all desperate for more. Timothy was very good.

  After another week of the same she was starting to lose patience. No one had said a word about sending her on to Antioch, there was no sign that this house was anything other than a silent prison. She’d been good, quieter than she’d thought humanly possible, and though she’d come very close once or twice, she hadn’t yet spat in Livia’s face, the thin old nun from the night of her arrival, who seemed to have been appointed her personal invigilator and managed to pick on Theodora’s every action from morning to night.

  At the end of the eighth evening, in the one hour allotted for the privilege of conversation, she made her way to the table where Livia sat with three other, equally thin, older women.

  ‘Livia, may I speak with you alone?’

  It was one of the other women who answered, ‘There is no privacy for penitents. That is one of the privileges you have given up.’

  Theodora curtsied. ‘Of course.’

  She then very deliberately turned her back on the first speaker and addressed Livia alone. Speaking in front of the group but leaving them in no doubt to whom she was speaking. She should probably have tried to get the other women on side, but they were annoying her too much, she wanted them to know she could grab status back too, whether or not they would allow her to use it.

  ‘Livia, when I came here I understood it was to become part of a group of penitents who were to travel on to Antioch.’

  The hands of the women sewing stilled a little, the tables nearby became quieter than they already were.

  Theodora waited. And waited. More status games. Fine, she was well skilled at this, she could wait longer than these dry old bitches.

  Eventually Livia’s needle stopped its rhythmic picking of threads and she looked up from the cloth she held in her dark-veined hands. ‘I don’t believe there are any plans to send you there.’ Livia stressed the word you, and one of the other women sitting at the table tittered – until Livia silenced her with a glare. ‘No, I do not believe Antioch is part of the plan for you. Perhaps the Patriarch will tell you later today.’

  ‘The Patriarch hasn’t said a word to me since I arrived, he’s completely ignored me, he walks right by me every night.’

  ‘Then perhaps this night will be different,’ Livia raised her eyes from her sewing and looked directly at Theodora. ‘Or not.’

  It was such a little phrase, and lightly spoken. But it was far too much for Theodora, who released her iron grip on her composure and, kicking herself even as she did it yet still not able to stop herself, leaned down and hissed into the older woman’s face, ‘Fine, then I’m out of here. I’ve spent over a week in the company of you dried-up old cunts and not one of you has deigned to offer me the time of day, the Patriarch hasn’t given me a second glance. I can get back to the City without you, I don’t need your arsing charity.’

  Livia went back to her calm stitching. ‘You can’t leave.’

  ‘Look, I was just using you to get home. I figured I could travel on your charity instead of always on my own back. But it doesn’t matter, I’ll get home by myself. I know you all believe, and have been touched by God or the Patriarch as God’s messenger or whatever it is you think he is, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m wasting your time and mine and I might as well go back to my original plan – at least it won’t be as dull as this.’

  ‘You can’t leave.’

  ‘This isn’t a prison, I can do what I want.’

  Livia continued to sew. ‘That’s true, but the Governor of the Pentapolis sent his men to find you, they came to the house two nights ago. They’re here, in Alexandria, and they know you are here too. As a true penitent you have sanctuary in this house: if you leave, you do not.’ A bell began to sound in the distance, precursor of the final toll that indicated the great silence until the next morning. ‘So, Theodora, you might want to rethink your stance on why you’re here. If you are not a true penitent then we have no reason to keep you. You might be prepared to lie in order to get somewhere; we have nowhere else we want to go – and no need, therefore, to lie on your behalf.’

  The last bell sounded and Livia slowly walked away, followed by her fellow nuns and the other penitents, each one as quiet and calm as if they had just spent their usual hour in gentle handiwork and had not been listening, enthralled. The part of Theodora that wasn’t horrified by what she’d just heard was impressed, they were as good a chorus as any she’d seen on the City stage. The other part of her felt sick. Hecebolus had sent his men more than twenty days’ journey to find her. Even if she gave back the candlestick, he could still charge her with theft, she’d have nothing with which to buy herself out of prison, and no one here in Egypt to care. Suddenly, boring looked very attractive.

  Eighteen

  It was three in the morning when Timothy called for her. Theodora had only been asleep a short while herself; the Patriarch had apparently not slept at all. His desk was covered in paperwork, several fresh candles had recently been lit, and he was hard at work making notes when she was shown into his office. She entered the room and immediately knelt as Livia had indicated, miming the instruction rather than break the rule of silence, even for the Patriarch in the middle of the night. Theodora knelt for almost forty minutes in the centre of the room before Timothy looked up.

  He leaned forward over his desk, spilling a few papers on the floor as he did so and stared, frowning. ‘Don’t your knees hurt?’

  She looked up, uncertain whether or not to speak. If this were Menander asking she’d expect him to slap her for not answering immediately, and then perhaps beat her as well, for countermanding the earlier order of silence. She said nothing.

  Timothy spoke louder. ‘Your knees – do they hurt? Isn’t it uncomfortable there, kneeling?’

  ‘A little, Father.’

  ‘Would you like to sit?’

  ‘I have been told that would be inappropriate, Father. As is … this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The silence?’

  He checked the level on an hour-candle close by. ‘Oh yes. Livia’s a stickler for the rule, isn’t she?’

  ‘She is very … certain.’

  The Patriarch smiled and indicated the chair near his desk. She sat, doing her best to hide the physical relief of getting up from the mosaic floor, sharp dents in her knees and calves from the tile edges.

  The odd-looking man watched her rise and walk to the chair, then sit carefully. ‘Most people complain of the austerities here, at least initially. I suppose, in your training, you encountered similar physical hardships?’

  ‘I was taught by a man who made Livia’s penalties seem like prom
ises.’

  ‘Really?’

  Theodora shrugged openly now. ‘I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to sleep longer, to eat more, that silence isn’t a hardship at times, but I’m used to subduing the needs of my own body.’

  ‘In order to provide for the needs of others?’

  It was a sharp question, and the candlelight, bright and warm on Theodora but leaving the Patriarch in shade, was working all in his favour. For a moment it occurred to Theodora he might have been asking for her body, he would not be the first high-ranking clergyman to do so. Then she realised he was asking for confession. She felt oddly shy as she wondered how to answer him. There was no good reason for the man to unnerve her in this way, there was nothing she found attractive about him physically, and yet, again, there was something that made her hesitate.

  Timothy was not used to waiting, and certainly not used to waiting for a woman. ‘I asked a question.’

  ‘I have subdued my body for the needs of others, as a performer and for money.’

  ‘And for your own pleasure?’ He was leaning forward now, the candles behind him back-lighting his pate, cutting frown lines deeper into his wide forehead.

  Theodora didn’t want to lie, nor did she think it would help: this man was her only chance of safety, she had nothing to lose now. ‘Yes, I have had a great deal of pleasure from my own body and that of very many others.’

  He sat back. ‘Good. I’d hate you not to understand what it is we’re asking you to give up.’

  He began to speak. About how they’d known who she was almost from the first day she was with them, that it took the perceptive Livia no time at all to see through Theodora’s dissembling protest of penitence, and how – contrary, he was sure, to Theodora’s expectations – it was also Livia who had spoken for her, Livia who insisted there was a truly penitent heart beneath the pride, that Theodora was clearly a soul begging to be saved, she just didn’t know it yet.