SHE HACKS OFF the hair Abba touched. A tonsure, all the better for its repellent roughness. She replaces her old cloth bindings with stiff strips of raw linen, adds two extra shifts over the top as well as a cowl and hood for when she must leave the hut. At night, she sleeps as at Fulda, fully dressed save for her sandals.
Her daily serve of goat cheese—sticky and rich as would be expected coming from those vigorous and wanton animals—is surrendered to the common stores and she lets it be known she will not accept offerings of fish, meat or fruit from visitors. A portion of bread and a little salt and water sustained St Antony in the desert and will be more than enough to sustain her here, in her cool and comfortable house in the valley.
Taking only one small meal a day allows her to easily resume the work and prayer routine of Fulda. Although there are no bells to mark time and a sun that moves as though it is a fat and lazy relation of the one she knew back home, the rhythms of the Benedictine day are deep within her bones, sing each change of hour in her blood.
Abba comes not weekly but daily in the hour before the evening meal. She kneels with him beneath the stone pine and they pray together, only ending their devotions when the first visitors arrive. Abba never stays for the feast, but always asks the next day how each of the men is faring. He mentions them by name and it is a sharp stick in her side that the only man he must ask after every day is Brother Antony.
After a month the wisdom of the desert saints is affirmed as her body becomes as it must be: the site of necessary tasks and nothing more. Even these things require less effort as time passes and her body produces less waste, her breasts shrink, her monthly bleed stops.
She hears her visitors talking among themselves, noting that Brother John grows paler, thinner, that his beardless cheeks sink under those sharp northern cheekbones. They must watch he does not become so pious that he will leave them for the life of a true ascetic.
Abba comes less often, though he somehow always knows who has visited and for how long they stayed. When he asks after Brother Antony now she barely notices. He is one among many she is blessed to give sustenance at her table.
The more serious and withdrawn she becomes, the more adoring the attention she receives. Everyone know ascetics are closer to God.
It is amusing, though she has no heart for laughter these days. Her mind soars higher the more she unbinds it from her flesh, and the more she does this, the more the clever and holy men of Athens burn for her.
It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. Her mind is God’s tool and she will never again keep Him from wielding it fully.
Abba comes early one morning in the company of another man, a book dealer from Alexandria. The dealer wants a translation of a recently discovered text from one of the desert fathers and as many copies as she can make of the original and the translation by spring. ‘When I return,’ he says, ‘I will bring enough gold for you to buy this valley. Perhaps the whole city.’
She has no need for wealth, gives most of her earnings to Abba to spend on the community as he likes. A little she keeps in a pouch beneath her mattress in case of earthquake, plague, war. Revelation.
It is not the promise of gold, then, that keeps her riveted to her desk long past the hour when the locals are accustomed to seeing their beloved Brother John climb the mountain. Not anticipation of riches that leads her to come late to her own feasts and retire early, leaving her visitors to yearn loudly outside of her hut, equally admiring and resentful of the spiritual commitment of their previously convivial brother.
It is—ah, Randulf would not be surprised—the text itself. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a work by St John of Sinai, a father she has never known.
God belongs to all (she reads and feels and knows) just as the diffusion of light, the sight of the sun, and the changes of the weather are for all alike; there is no respect of persons with God.
Her mind is, indeed, as he describes: A greedy kitchen dog addicted to barking and can only be brought to heel through great toil.
She must, of course, renounce all things, despise all things, deride all things. Must become as a babe who has no appetite, no stomach, no body on fire.
She reads the Ladder through once, then again and again. She copies a chapter at a time onto newly scraped parchment. Will not move on to the next until she has embodied each.
To live on bread and water she has already mastered. To stay on her feet all night takes a month of practice. Telling Antony he must only visit if he, too, commits to the ladder is easy. Sending him away when he arrives round-eyed and apple-scented, urging her to walk with him to the vineyards or sit a while beneath the pine, these things are more difficult than mortification of her stomach, of going without sleep for nights on end. Finally she tells him he must not come at all and he falls to his knees, clings to the hem of her robe.
‘I cannot be without you,’ he says, and merely the drag of his fingers on her clothing awakes sensations she was certain she had starved to death.
‘St John instructs us that when the fruit is not present we have no desire to eat it.’
He looks up at her, his face glistening with tears. ‘You do desire me then? It is not my imaginings?’
‘It is a metaphor, Brother Antony. I seek detachment from all things and it is simpler when—’
‘I am not a thing. I am your friend.’
‘A monk has no friends save the angels.’
She shakes him from her robe, closes her door and ears. Still that night the dream demons come and make metaphor literal. Antony eats of her fruit until his chin drips with its juice. She wakes as her own deceitful hands bring her body to the place it has not reached since Marseille. She shudders and cries with relief then despair.
At any point on the ladder, a man may fall. There is no restoration to the last point reached. He must start over and so she does: nights on her feet, salt and bread, a very little water. Mortification of flesh until it forgets there is any other way of being.
Antony surprises her as she tends the chickens. He has prayed on it for forty days and is clearer than ever that God wants the two of them to be in communion. He is an egg tapestried with cracks. She could break him open with a touch.
She walks away without speaking. He seizes her arm and she turns and strikes him hard enough to force him back, then continues on her way. He trails her to the hut, weeping. Stays weeping for hours outside of her closed door.
Do not cease to picture the dark abyss and the unsympathetic inexorable Judge, the bottomless pit of subterranean flame, the narrow descents to the awful underground chambers.
It is easy to picture and in doing so to feel, as one must, great terror. She keeps her eyes closed so as to better imagine that endless plummet.
No. Not endless, the plummet, though when you reach the bottom you wish it were.
Skin and hair burn fast and the smell is that of the farmyard after a heifer has dropped in birthing.
The fat is loud, spits as though in a pan; the muscles twist and pop. You curse the strength and thickness of your bones as they feed the relentless flames. Still more hardy are the lungs, the throat, the tongue. Built sturdy to allow your screams to give warning to those above still able to hear.
‘Brother John, it is only that we worry,’ Abba calls from outside her hut. ‘You scream so that even the brothers on the hill are alarmed. I would pray with you, brother. I ask only for this.’
The motherless girl howls with a wanting so vicious it may split her like a boar.
The hungry child insists God will forgive her for accepting comfort from these well-intentioned but soft and self-deceiving men.
But you cannot stone the dogs of sensuality with bread and so the door remains barred and her suffering goes on and it is a blessing to have it hurt as this is the only way to incorruptible chastity.
It is impossible to spend a day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our life.
It is impossible to spend a day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our life.
It is impossible to spend a day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our life.
It is impossible to spend a day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our life.
It is impossible to spend a day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our life.
Abba calls for Brother John to come out and the monk writes, It is not time to bring the spades, and pushes the scrap of parchment beneath the door, and after a moment Abba says, ‘Thanks and glory to God and to Saint Anastasia for her intercession. I will leave our beloved seeker in Your hands.’
Men come and they call to Brother John and there is no answer, for there is nobody of that name here. Only God and the saints know the name of this monk. Only God and the saints will be heard and answered.