by Stella Duffy
‘But there can be love … between people?’
It was the first time she had spoken since she arrived, other than to give her name, and the first time she had heard a question asked aloud. She didn’t know if she was transgressing some hidden rule, but she did know she wanted an answer.
Severus had one; he was speaking in Greek now. ‘There can be a kind of love between people, but it cannot be what you have thought was love until now. You cannot be ruled or taken over by love – when you are, it is intoxication, not love. You are human and therefore you love to be intoxicated. We, very many of us, have loved intoxication.’ Several of the older men sitting in the evening dark laughed with him. ‘The only true love is for the Christ. In that love you must give everything, break down your spirit until it is only willing, only ceding, only giving. You, and all too many of the others here –’ He turned then and looked to one young man close behind him, waiting until the young man lifted his eyes and nodded – ‘have given too much of yourselves to each other and not enough to God. You cannot ever give enough to God, put a limit on your idea of enough – you must give it all. Then, if you are fortunate, perhaps God will keep you free of human love. Allowing you more time for His love.’
Theodora pushed her luck. ‘But what if God intends you to love another person?’
Severus smiled through the darkness, his stained teeth shining in the firelight. ‘I believe it does happen.’ Again she heard the disparate chuckles from others in the darkness. ‘If He intends you for an ordinary life, then so be it. Until then, there is time to give all.’
Then Severus began to chant all the words for love, all the words Theodora knew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, Coptic, and many other words she did not know for sure but understood from the effect they had on the others that they, too, must mean love. He kept repeating until he found a rhythm and something like a tune and then, slowly, quietly, others began to join. There was no leader and no followers, just the hundred or more of them, sitting on the cold sand and singing into the dark, changing with the people but not changed by any one of them, it was the work of many and the rule of none. Eventually the sounds became a chant, then song, then – for some, for others, finally for Theodora – a dance. It went on for almost an hour, stopping as quickly as it had begun when Severus announced the silence was upon them. Each one immediately retrieved his or her blanket or robe and made their way to their own little hillock or tent or cave where they slept. Theodora felt herself walking close to Severus as she made her own way back and the old man reached out a hand. He did not touch her, not quite, but she felt his blessing and fell asleep smiling. It was insane, living here, among these crazy mystics, these terrifying holy people and, Theodora realised, it was funny. It made her happy.
Now in her cave, recalling that early night in the desert, recalling the holy man’s words, Isis had a new message for her. Theodora waited, sipping the water she knew she had to keep drinking – no matter that she did not want it, no matter that the more she denied herself, the greater the clarity of the visions and voices. Severus’ voice receded, the whisper of the wind outside the cave grew still until all she could hear was the shushing of her own blood through her veins, in and out of her slow-beating heart. She heard Isis say that that the emerald was hers to keep. Theodora was not yet used to trusting the voices thrown up by days of solitude and fasting, she didn’t know if it was real or merely her own desire to hold on to the stone that made her believe what she heard, but she chose to believe the voice, and was pleased with her choice.
Twenty
Theodora slept well that night, her stomach full from the small chunk of bread she had taken three hours to eat, her veins flowing well with rehydrated blood. She woke happy too, the deep green of the emerald catching morning light when she went outside to give thanks for the beginning of her fourth ten-day period. Grateful and already just a little sad that she would have to leave the bliss of this solitude, return to the community.
For three days she followed a simple pattern, drinking little, eating less, and sleeping most of the time. Timothy and Severus both came back to her in the dream, their sermons making more sense here, far from anyone else’s interpretations. In particular she felt she finally understood why they rejected the accepted Chalcedonian orthodoxy of the City and of Rome. Here, in the desert, it made perfect sense that the Christ should be man, yes, but also, and more importantly, purely divine. It made sense too, as Severus maintained, that it suited the Patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople to believe in a dual-natured Christ: believing Him both human and divine allowed them to walk their own tightrope between the humanity of the Empire and the divinity of the Church. They had need of a dual Christ just as their Church that preached His poverty had need of the Empire’s coin. Here, in the desert, there was no need for church or temple and no need for the funds to build them. No need then, to force the Christ into two natures.
Menander’s teachings too, and her father’s, also made appearances in her visions, with injunctions to hold her leg line, to curtsy nicely for the Senator, and never to go near an eating giraffe. In her sleep she heard the tunes her mother’s mother had sung to hide the sound of Hypatia’s birthing cries when Anastasia was born. Her grandmother’s songs were in Hebrew mixed with a little Aramaic, words that Theodora seemed to understand in the sleep-trance of her cave. She was just seven when the old woman died and she lost the closest thing she felt to a maternal connection; Hypatia had been far too busy trying to keep her family together to give much attention to the minor matter of mothering. Not that the old lady had been gentle either, but she had sung well and occasionally, when she was in a good mood, Theodora had found her way to the grandmother’s lap and rested there.
She used the quiet days of this last week to reaffirm her commitment both to her newly acknowledged faith, and to the branch of that faith espoused by her teachers. As in the desert below, there was no blinding light that persuaded her of the true path, it was instead the confirmation of a gradual conversion that had been growing in her for the past nine months. Timothy and Severus’ teachings made sense to her, and Theodora of the Hippodrome, of the brothel, could never have achieved so much if she had not been practical as well as wild. She acknowledged she was their disciple in belief as well as deed.
Theodora had been warned that while there would be pleasant times in the forty-day fast, the greatest pain was likely to come out of her moments of ease. As a well-trained performer she chose to enjoy these quiet days: if suffering was inevitable, then she would rest through the easy moments while she had them. Just as there were always wonderful audiences, for whom she could do no wrong, so too there were always dreadful shows, when sure-fire gags were mistimed, perfect choruses lost their place, and the liquid gold in even the finest singer’s throat was replaced by an ugly frog. She would not negate warmth and ease merely because unhappiness would inevitably follow.
On the thirty-fifth day Theodora woke with a searing pain that wrenched its way up from her deepest gut, through her stomach, and had her vomiting bile within an hour, and every hour following. There was a brief respite in the middle of the night when she forced herself to drink water in burning sips, knowing that the cramping pains had not yet left, that it would be worse if she were truly dehydrated. Theodora understood cramp and muscle spasm, understood how much her body, every body, relied on water. She gave in to the pain and it filled her up.
In lucid moments she realised that the pain was quite specific, in her lower abdomen, not entirely dissimilar to giving birth, something she might perhaps ride through – if there had been a rope to hang on to she would have reached for it, allowed herself to be pulled up and out of the sea of suffering, but there was no rope, and then the lucid moments became less, and the pain took in her whole flesh, her bones, her marrow. At times she felt as if it came not from inside out, but from the outside in, her skin was burning, her hair strands of fine glass with which to whip her face and neck and shoulders. She listene
d to herself bellowing on a surge of agony, and then subsiding again to a whimper. She had heard those noises before, heard herself make those noises before.
Had heard them the first time Menander had truly beaten her, after she’d fallen under his spell, after she loved him, and that had been so much more painful than all the other times he’d hit her before she realised she also wanted him to hold her. The pathetic whimper from her own mouth that proved she would rather be hit by Menander than have him ignore her, that his attention was her drug, and if she could not attain it with her skill, she would reach for it in any other way possible. She had heard this suffering from another mouth too, the ghostly whimper of the first man who had raped her, begging forgiveness afterwards, pushing her away and pulling her to him at the same time. These were the moans of her mother over her father’s coffin and the moans of her mother in her stepfather’s bed and the moans of both sisters over their dead sister’s body. They were Chrysomallo’s tears when Theodora confronted her friend, and they were Theodora’s tears when Sophia turned away. They were her own baby’s screams when she was given over to anyone who’d take the brat off Theodora’s hands and allow her to get back to work, the tears of a little girl who understood she could not hold her mother’s interest for more than a few minutes at a time. There was a job to do, a fee to earn, rent and servants and families to pay for, work to be done, always so much work to be done – almost as much work as it would have been to hold eye contact with her own child for a moment longer.
Thirty-nine days into her fast, in bone-cracking pain, Theodora stared through desert-dry eyes at the convulsions of her narrow frame and, in a moment of pure revelation, understood that her own pain was no different to the pain she had caused others. Nor was it any different to pain others had caused her. It was all one. All pain was one pain, all suffering was one suffering, and she was in the middle of it all, right now. She smiled in wonder at the understanding that joined each single sorrow into one vast agony. She smiled too, trying to bow her head in gratitude to the people and events that had led her here, in thankfulness to Severus and to Timothy. She could not bow, her body was held too stiff by her cramped muscles, but the intention was there. And even in all this suffering, there was relief that she had finally experienced this revelation so close to the time they would come for her. For the past thirty-eight days her unacknowledged fear had been that she alone, of all those who followed Severus, was too wicked to experience the truths she had been assured would eventually come. Then, the worst of that particular spasm over, she looked down again at her body and saw she lay in a pool of her own thin blood, and that the pool was spreading rapidly, so rapidly, out and away from her, liquid life pouring away. And then the world was black and she thought no more.
Later, when it was over, when they had found her and brought her back to the community, when those skilled in medicine had worked on her, Severus explained what had happened. One of those he allowed to tend her was a Persian doctor, no matter that the Sassanid was not a believer, no matter either that the Church still disapproved of surgery, or that the man admitted he had only a little skill with the knife anyway. Severus felt a heavy duty of care to the young woman: he had sent her out to the cave, had allowed her into their method of the fast. Of course he had lost followers before – when people found him, they were often at the lowest point of their lives. He could never guarantee every one would make it, either physically or spiritually, but he wanted them to, he prayed they would. He gave permission for the doctor to work with several of the women and left them to it. Left them to his prayer.
Now he leaned over her in the low bed and explained in stilted Greek what the doctor had told him in Persian.
‘You will have no more children, the damage was too great.’
‘He is sure?’
‘We are none of us God, no one can ever be sure. But the doctor insists that in removing the growth too much damage was done for another child to grow.’
‘He did remove it, though?’
‘He did what he could.’
‘I see.’
‘No, you assume,’ he answered, understanding she was already thinking ahead. ‘You cannot know what else will come from this.’
‘I watched my grandmother with a growth. She took a long time to die.’
Severus looked up at the livid sky above the tent where they had kept Theodora for the past two weeks; there would be a storm soon. ‘What do you know, Theodora, right now?’
She answered, hearing the lesson in his voice, hearing, too, his warning; she might have been tired and unwell, and the older man a living saint, but she also knew to beware his anger. ‘I know I am here, and I am alive, Father.’
He nodded. ‘Better.’
‘And I know that you have said I will not –’ she corrected herself before he could – ‘may not have more children.’
‘Good. You have a daughter already?’
‘In the City.’
‘Then perhaps you can be a kinder mother to your grand-children. If you choose.’
Theodora smiled and shook her head. ‘I have not had much luck with the choices I’ve made until this point.’
‘You know more now.’
Theodora thought about what she had learned of herself in the cave. ‘I know myself better.’
‘What else do any of us have? The Christ showed us His divinity so that we could realise the necessity of understanding ourselves as men and reaching for the divine.’
Theodora lifted herself on the bed, the pain in her lower abdomen making her wince, and was more surprised when Severus reached a hand to help her. It was the first time he had touched her since she arrived in the community. She flinched away and then laughed at herself, forcing her arm to relax under the touch of his rough fingers. His touch was a blessing, but it was something else as well, she couldn’t quite work it out, reaching through the fog of exhaustion and pain for the answer, and then she understood. ‘Oh. Grandmother to my daughter’s children. In the City. I can’t stay here?’
Severus kept his hand lightly on her arm. ‘You didn’t come here intending to stay, did you?’
‘The reasons I came have changed.’
‘Of course. The reasons I stay, or the causes I travel for, they also change from one day, one moment to the next. What matters is I trust my actions are guided by God’s will rather than my own. You must get well first, but then we want you to go to Antioch and, eventually, back to the City. There is work you can do for the Church there, as well as for your fellow believers.’
‘The Church doesn’t care what I think. If they won’t listen to you and Timothy how can I make a difference?’
‘You’ve had your visions, Theodora, and so have I. You have a great deal to do with your life, work that Timothy and I hoped you would be fit for, after your time here. You will leave us in a far better state to complete that work.’
‘For now,’ he added, answering her unspoken question, ‘you know all that you need to.’
He stood to leave, his calloused hand scraping across the sun-burnt skin of her arm, a gesture somewhere between blessing and the simple touch of a friend who is concerned for another’s health and well-being. She felt his hand on her arm long after he had gone. He motioned to one of the women to come and sit with her, and just before he walked out again into the blinding sun he spoke, quietly, so the approaching woman wouldn’t hear: ‘The emerald, they took it when you were ill, for safekeeping. I have it now. But it is yours.’
*
Three months later, when she was well enough to travel, Theodora knelt for his blessing before leaving with a small group who were also being sent on, and Severus gave her the stone. It was warm from his hand and it stayed warm as she walked away.
Twenty-One
Theodora was spared another mammoth land journey by Timothy’s kind provision of a ship to transport his own faithful from Alexandria to Antioch. Some of the half-dozen with her were disappointed, they had been looking forward to the t
raditional route across the Nile Delta, following the coastline north to Syria through Palestine, stopping off at the sacred sites of the Christ and His disciples’ lives. But there was no complaint; years in the desert had taught them the value of immediate acquiescence, though it was true one of the younger women cried herself to sleep at the thought of not seeing the site of the resurrection. Theodora was surprised to find her own pace quicken and her heart rise as the morning of their fourth day walking north revealed buildings on the horizon, early light picking out the library of Alexandria, the medical school, the law school beyond. The newly purified Theodora was no keener on sin than the rest of her group, and so she was surprised, and a little concerned, to realise it was joy rather than fear she felt as they entered the city walls.
Each of the travellers was granted a few moments alone with Timothy and she asked him about it then.
‘Theodora, I live in this city and often travel to others, the Christ journeyed to Jerusalem, even Severus leaves the desert sometimes. As a faithful minority, we need to keep our cause in the forefront of public discussion. It is easier to do that in a metropolis than in the wilderness.’
‘I’m not saying it’s easy, the ascetic life, but it was …’
‘Simpler?’
‘Clearer, there was more focus. I didn’t think I’d feel excited to be here. But I do. I mean … it’s so …’ Theodora was struggling with words that failed to flow, to come at all.
Timothy smiled at her, kneeling before him. ‘Severus and his people didn’t bring you back from near-death to become a different woman. We wanted you because we knew you would do well for us, because we need who you are. Theodora, you have great things ahead of you.’
A presumably barren ex-dancer, who’d slept with far too many men, not all of them for money, but not many for free, who had found a new life as an anti-Chalcedonian believer at a time when there were even more attacks on that group than before, and who now couldn’t make up her mind if she was hungry for the City or terrified of that hunger, didn’t seem to have a lot going for her in terms of greatness as far as she could see. Even those who accepted her new-found faith would still find it a little hard to accept this ex-prostitute as the envoy of a living saint.
