Theodora

by Stella Duffy

  She was not wearing the costume the audience were hoping for and there were a few groans, a murmur of disappointment; one of the Greens called out ‘Shame!’ Others who knew, or thought they did, shushed them and whispered to wait, just wait. Theodora smiled and with a tiny move that shimmered through her body – hip-wiggle, shoulder-lift, breast-push – she shrugged off her outer gown to reveal a short, old-fashioned Greek dress more appropriate for the classical repertoire than for her usual material. As the cloak fell to the ground, she slowly lowered herself to follow it, speaking so quietly she forced the crowd to hush, and as they did so they realised that she was giving one of the old, famous speeches. Theodora was Leda, lying in bed on her wedding night, waiting for her Spartan king to attend her. The crowd listened, uncertain. Theodora was acting. Nicely, prettily, quite well, no one could fault her enunciation, her vocal technique, but this wasn’t what they wanted from their Theodora. They were a crowd of eager men, they wanted what they were used to. She kept on. An old speech, one most of the crowd had grown up hearing, had seen performed by several famous actresses from the old days, it was traditional acting, the real thing. Theodora continued until there was an attentive, if slightly sulky, silence. And then, having forced them to wait, made them listen, she generously gave her people what they wanted.

  One by one the dancers returned. Now they were dressed as the handmaidens of Leda. Regular theatre-goers had seen this scene dozens of times. As the dancers mimed brushing their mistress’s hair, readying Leda for her husband, the audience were confused: more straight acting, more traditional theatre. But when Theodora lay back on the cushions the dancers had piled high behind her, the short robe she was wearing fell apart, revealing that she was almost naked beneath. The crowd let out a gasp that became a sigh of collective relief and obvious enthusiasm and the show proper – the show they had been hoping for – began. Each of the dancers reached into the cleavage of her own, equally brief, classical dress, pulled out a small gilt bag and began sprinkling grain over Theodora’s torso and legs. Several young men on the front benches offered to come and help.

  When her lower body was covered in little mounds of grain, she called off-stage, ‘Come husband, come master, come King!’ One of the oldest actors in the company waddled on, looking even fatter and more lecherous than usual, and a laugh ran through the crowd. This was more like it, the much-loved Petrus of Galatia as Spartan King. The moment his plump and wrinkled fingers touched the edge of Theodora’s spread cloak, the dancers, now reformed as Chorus, began to whisper the arrival of the god, Zeus himself, and then the actor sat back, opening his own robe and allowing half a dozen geese to jump out on to the stage. The geese, having been starved for a day prior to the show, began, quite naturally, to peck at the trail of grain laid across Theodora’s body. Chorus and old actor stepped back and with each peck Theodora screamed Zeus! and oh god! and more, please more! writhing and undulating on the stage. The audience were delighted – the elegant and ferocious god-as-swan of myth reduced to six fat geese, the virginal Leda a rapacious tart, and the Chorus intoning the many names of the great god Zeus exactly as they would have done in a serious theatrical production while Theodora provided a counterpoint of wriggling orgasmic squeals. Ten minutes later she left the stage after the third round of raucous applause, pausing as she went to allow half a dozen of her most eager fans to prostrate themselves, granting them one by one the great privilege of kissing the soft arch of Theodora’s daintily proffered left foot.

  Much later that evening, to the continued applause of her delighted co-workers, sweet wine and honey-grilled figs protecting her hard-worked vocal cords, Theodora adopted the voice and pained expression of one of the City’s most notoriously hard-line bishops, intoning in his strong Thracian accent, ‘The girl’s a slut, it’s true, but it’s the old gods she mocks, not the Christ. I’ll say this much for her – she’s no pagan.’

  Seven

  Theodora, seventeen years old, toast of the Kynegion, beloved comic of the theatres, star of the Hippodrome, was not prepared for the pain she felt when her little sister Anastasia died. She and Comito clung to each other sobbing, holding their dazed mother between them. They stood the requisite distance behind the men at the funeral, praying to the Christ and His mother for succour, for understanding. Praying too, silently, to the other god, the one they had learned of from that impossibly ancient woman, Hypatia’s grandmother who’d lived with them when they were very little girls. Theodora’s earliest memories were of her grandmother’s frail body hunched over the fire, mixing herbs for teas and poultices for their father’s animal scratches, offering remedies in her strong Syrian accent, and whispering of the seasons and the moon and her own family’s prayers from a time before the Christ was King: the prayers which still permeated everyday life in the City, which popped up unannounced in the thoughts and wishes of the people; prayers to the now-defunct gods whose statues remained above the town walkways, whose chants and charms filtered down through the drunken songs of old men and the whispers of even older women, praying for help and hope and understanding, from wherever it might come.

  Anastasia had never risen as high in the ranks as Comito or Theodora, though some of her sisters’ gloss had rubbed off on her. None of Hypatia’s three older girls had to take on the worst of the work: that was left to the lesser-skilled dancers and the poorer singers of the chorus. They still, though, traded in their own flesh. It was part of the job, as were the unplanned pregnancies that came with the work. Generally the actresses, well aware of their bodies as both on- and off-stage tools of the trade, dealt with the problem early enough; they were lucky that the wardrobe mistress was also highly skilled in herbal medicines, she knew her girls and usually knew what to do for them. Occasionally though, there were mistakes. Comito realised too late that her bleeding was missing and, though the old women tried every method they knew, the little thing stuck fast and grew faster. Eventually she gave birth to a girl, taking two months off work, fed the child backstage, and carried on. It was not unusual and, wonderfully, Comito found she even began to enjoy the company of her daughter as Indaro grew older.

  Theodora’s child was also the result of a failed abortion. Theodora was fourteen when she gave birth to Ana, not that plenty of other more respectable women weren’t mothers by that age, but there were far too many years ahead in which to work and earn to waste time bringing up a child or spending good cash on a nurse. Unlike Comito, Theodora was no natural mother, she took the child home and left her there. Hypatia and Basianus were already reliant on the income from their most successful daughter to take care of the young step-family; Theodora thought it was time they did her a favour in return. Though she was careful to caution Basianus that if she ever heard he’d used the whip on Ana the way he had done with her, she’d make sure he paid – and it would cost him more than his livelihood. Basianus, bitter at his lack of success in the job his wife had begged for him, was all too aware that Theodora held far more influence in the Hippodrome than he did, and so, if he was not a kind foster father to her child, he was at least a careful one.

  Things were much harder for Anastasia. As Theodora said, their little sister was simply too sweet. Too sweet to work half a dozen men a week and take their money willingly, using it to further herself, to lift herself out of the brothel that was their backstage life and into a nice little apartment with a sea view and just one or two regular suitors. Instead she’d fallen in love with a pallid Lycian boy from the stables, keeping them both poor by turning down offers so often that in the end the offers ceased to come and she and the stable boy lived on what little they could earn from legitimate work. Even then she’d been too sweet to say no to sex at her fertile time, too gentle – or too damn coy, Theodora thought – to push the horse-boy away, to offer something else instead, anything else instead, to make sure her womb stayed empty. Later still, Anastasia had been too soft to deal with the pregnancy immediately, no matter that both Comito and Theodora assured her the herbs wo
uld be easy, the three days of discomfort now so much simpler than an invasive abortion later. When the belly finally began to show, despite her wearing tighter bindings and eating still less food, Anastasia, now unable to work on stage, agreed something must be done.

  They took her to the Cappadocian surgeon, paying well over the odds for the privilege of even entering his home, but catching sight of his knife and the skewer, Anastasia ran crying from the room. The man demanded half his fee anyway, offering to take a blow job from the famous Theodora if they didn’t think he was worth the coin. She threw the money in his face with her spittle. Finally, Anastasia had been too gentle and far too tired when, after four days of labour, her own mother had begged her to allow them to kill the baby, the one that was ripping apart her daughter’s too-small frame. Anastasia died and the baby boy did too. Theodora cursed the baby as she’d heard the old street whores do, damning him to Hades and to hell and the netherworld, all three in one furious ecumenical breath. When damning the dead baby made no difference to her tears, she turned, as she always did, back to work. To the succour of applause, the balm of the crowd, the drunken embraces of her friends backstage.

  Late in the evening, two days after the funeral, their hysterical audience that afternoon none the wiser, no sign of grief on either sister’s face or in her performance, Theodora sat with Comito and their friends, Anastasia was remembered and remembered until the dead young woman in the ground had her own monument of words. Each of the dancers and actresses knew it could so easily have been any one of them. Sophia knew for certain it would have been her, but for every abortion, every procured miscarriage, every single termination of all her own pregnancies. No small number in a woman sold into the theatre and its concomitant whoring by her disappointed parents at the age of four. That Sophia had proved good at theatre work was pure luck. That she had learned early what dangers there were for her in sex and procreation was down to watching another dwarf performer racked in vain by the full-size child she’d birthed backstage. Dead with the cord round its neck and the mother never able to work again either. Experiences that made Sophia keener always to pimp than to whore. That night she gave in to Theodora’s demands for a job, gave in even though she had said half a dozen times it would have been better for the actress to go home and sleep away the last two days of abandon and pain. Theodora was having none of it and finally Sophia relented.

  ‘But only one tonight, yes?’

  ‘One, two, half a dozen, I don’t care. Just give me their money.’ Theodora was more drunk than Sophia had seen her before, and yet not a single word was slurred. ‘I want to work this pain out of my body. I don’t care how I do it and I don’t care how many. But I can’t sleep, and I can’t lie alone.’

  ‘Lie with me.’

  Theodora smiled. ‘Little One, I’d take you any day …’

  ‘I wasn’t offering sex.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I only make love to women who are awake,’ Sophia replied.

  ‘I’m not sleeping.’

  ‘Yes you are. Grief is like sleep.’

  ‘Not enough like sleep.’

  ‘You’ll wake from it, but it takes time.’

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ Theodora answered, shaking her head. ‘I need to feel better now. So if you won’t fuck me into oblivion, bring me some men who will. And make sure they have full purses.’

  She’d spoken louder then, louder than she’d intended, too many years of theatrical training making their presence felt, and two soldiers leaning against a bench on the far wall looked up.

  One nudged the other and they stood up together, the first saying, ‘We’ll take her.’

  The second added, ‘If you can take two men of the Greens?’

  Theodora turned from Sophia, very slowly, and carefully looked them both up and down. Neither older than twenty-five, they had country accents. One was short and round, his hairline receding already, the other a reedy half-man, half-boy, still trying to encourage whiskers with a daily face-scraping shave. She sighed, and then, as elegantly as she had ever performed a gesture on stage, she reached out a hand to each man’s groin, weighing them up for a moment, before she spoke in her most elegant classical Greek accent: ‘How about I pierce both my nipples? You could fuck one each and then I might feel something.’ Then, both hands still holding tight to the terrified soldiers, she walked backwards pulling them out of the bar to Sophia’s rented room two houses away, calling over their shoulders as she went, ‘Collect their money in twenty minutes Little One, this won’t take long.’

  Sophia shook her head and picked up her bag to follow Theodora and make sure she was safe; several of their friends raised drinks to toast their stage star. Most of the patrons in this theatre bar were used to these scenes, but one was horrified. He didn’t enjoy theatre at the best of times, had only come along today because his friend had asked him, and now he’d seen the woman Theodora – who he thought had been perfectly adequate on stage, certainly overrated given her fame – offering her body for money.

  The friend he spoke to, an ardent fan of Theodora’s stage work, and one who’d been hoping for just such an opportunity this evening, wasn’t really listening, as he gathered his cloak to follow his lust. ‘Procopius, mate, stop being a cunt and give us a few coins, will you?’

  ‘You can’t be serious. Didn’t you just hear her? Asking for further orifices to better be pleasured?’

  ‘To be fair, it was a joke, she was only saying those blokes had small dicks. And we know you do too, so don’t let your jealousy make you rude. Give us your purse and I’ll go and help the girl out. Clearly she’s had a hard day, after that pair she’ll need someone she can actually feel.’

  With that, he grabbed his friend’s purse from the table, leaving just enough to pay their drinks bill, and ran out calling for Sophia, wondering how much it cost to get between the legs of the fêted star, the fated whore.

  Too few hours had passed when Theodora wrenched herself awake, mildly surprised she’d ended up in her own bed. She reached for a cup of wine, but before she’d even brought it to her lips, her stomach had changed her mind for her, and she threw it down, not caring about the sticky mess it made of the floor; instead she drank water straight from the jug. She tried to walk to her door, gave up, sank back down on the bed, head aching and body bruised from men she’d taken the night before. She listened to the sounds from the street, children yelling and men shouting, Greens and Blues vying with louder and nastier insults. Today was a race day, they were starting early. Two narrow alleys away women were shopping in the cheapest market, in courtyards behind broken-down tenements grandmothers were already preparing meals for families, lucky children were in school, and those less fortunate were working or training as she had been not so long ago. Down at the wharves fishermen were unloading the early morning’s catch, ferries crossed the Golden Horn, while at the various City gates strangers piled in as they did every day, citizens of the Empire from so far away they had never heard a word of Greek in their lives, Goth and Vandal and Herule mercenaries hoping the newly anointed Emperor Justin might find a use for their skills where the old August had been content to keep his armies small and the treasury full.

  Life everywhere continued. Theodora understood this, though her dreaming in the drunken night had been so violent, so charged with blood, she could not but feel a little surprised to wake and find the City so alive. She tried to stand again and this time it was a little easier. Her head clearer, she took a cloth and began to wash the night from her body.

  Looking at the bruises on her thighs, licking the swollen lip where one man had kissed her too forcefully, and then later, much later, another had bitten her, she sighed. Menander was right, she never knew when to stop. The night of excess had not lessened her grief, she had not honestly thought it could, but she had hoped for a few hours’ release from the vision of her little sister, still covered in her own and the baby’s blood, dead on the bedroom floor of her mother’s apartment.
And there had been some small respite, in the moment between drunken sleep and dream, the brief moment when exhaustion and wine claimed her mind, before her dreaming let in the ghastly picture of her dead and bloody father and her dead and bloody sister, and then others too, bodies she did not recognise, among some she did, the first man she’d fucked for money, the last she’d taken in the night, friends of theirs from the company and total strangers she knew only as people who sometimes went to the same shops in the Mese. All dead, all bloody. The Hippodrome ground full of them, body after body, piled upon each other, benches layered with death, the smell of blood and pain and above it all, the rasping, throat-burning cries from thousands of wailing mothers, circling the City like hungry gulls.

  Washed and dressed, her face unpainted, she left her own little flat and turned out into the street. To the left was her mother’s apartment, where she knew the older woman would be having a hard day, Theodora’s daughter Ana and the three little step-siblings didn’t understand why Hypatia kept crying, Basianus didn’t much care, just wanted them all to shut up so he could have a little peace at home, there was certainly no peace in his work. Several narrow streets away was Comito’s much more elegant home, where Theodora would be welcomed, if not by Comito who hated to miss her rehearsals, then by her sister’s new maid, who had too little to do with only Indaro to watch and was always looking for someone to look after. The last thing Theodora wanted now was to be looked after: any gesture of kindness would have her in tears again, and her face hurt too much for more tears. Her eyelids and cheeks were dry from the salt and her jaw ached from being wedged open with wailing. Beyond Comito’s elegant little apartment in the quiet back street was her real world. The crowds around the Bull Square and the Mese, Greens and Blues charging into the Hippodrome, a whole city crammed between the Theodosian Wall and the lighthouse on the far side of the Imperial Palace gardens. Actors and dancers hurrying late to rehearsal or performance, men strolling in and out of the Baths of Zeuxippus, Blue and Green youths trying to foment rebellion, recreate the riots they had so enjoyed a few years earlier, market traders screaming their great deals, builders hard at work on yet another wing of this new church or that, fishermen, sailors, soldiers, beggars, priests, nuns, whores, citizens and barbarians. It was her only world and she was sick of it.