Byzantium interests Tony. A lot of people died unpleasantly there, most of them for trivial reasons; you could be torn in pieces for dressing wrong, you could be disembowelled for smirking. Twenty-nine Byzantine emperors were assassinated by their rivals. Blinding was a favourite method; that, and jointby-joint dismemberment, and slow starvation.
If the professor hadn’t been so squeamish Tony would have chosen to write about the assassination of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus Phocas by his beautiful wife, the empress Theophano. Theophano started life as a concubine and worked her way to the top: When her autocratic husband became too old and ugly for her she had him killed. Not only that, she helped to do it. On December 1, 969, she persuaded him to leave his bedroom door unlocked, promising sexual favours, no doubt, and in the middle of the night she entered his room with her younger, better-looking lover, John Tsimisces—who would later have her imprisoned in a convent—and a band of mercenaries. They woke Nicephorus up—he was sleeping on a panther skin, a nice touch—and then John Tsimisces split his head open with a sword. John was laughing.
How do we know that? thinks Tony. Who was there to record it? Was Theophano laughing, as well? She speculates about why they woke him up. It was a sadistic touch; or perhaps it was revenge. By all accounts Nicephorus was a tyrant: proud, capricious, cruel. She pictures Theophano on her way to the assassination, with a purple silk mantle thrown over her shoulders and gold sandals. Her dark hair swirls around her head; her pale face shines in the torchlight. She walks first, and quickly, because the most important element in any act of treachery is surprise. Behind her come the men with swords.
Theophano is smiling, but Tony doesn’t see it as a sinister smile. Instead it’s gleeful: the smile of a child about to put its hands over someone’s eyes from behind. Guess who?
There’s an element of sheer mischief in history, thinks Tony. Perverse joy. Outrageousness for its own sake. What is an ambush, really, but a kind of military practical joke? Hiding yourself, then jumping out and yelling Surprise! But none of the historians ever mentions it, this quality of giddy hide-and-seek. They want the past to be serious. Dead serious. She muses over the phrase: if dead is serious, is alive then frivolous? So the phrasemakers would have it.
Maybe Theophano woke up Nicephorus because she wanted him to appreciate her cleverness before he died. She wanted him to see how duplicitous she was, and how mistaken he had been about her. She wanted him to get the joke.
Both of the papers are up to Tony’s usual standard; if anything, the silk monopoly one is better. But Zenia’s gets an A and Tony’s a mere A minus. Zenia’s reputation for brilliance has affected even Professor Welch, it seems. Or perhaps it’s the way she looks. Does Tony mind? Not particularly. But she notices.
She also feels remorseful. Up until now she has always paid the strictest attention to academic decorum. She never borrows other people’s notes, although she lends them; her footnotes are impeccable; and she is well aware that writing a term paper for someone else is cheating. But it isn’t as if there’s any benefit to herself. Her motives are of the best: how could she turn away her friend? How could she condemn Zenia to a life of sexual bondage? It isn’t in her. Nevertheless, her conscience troubles her, so maybe it’s justice that she’s received a mere A minus. If this is the only punishment in store for her she’ll have gotten off lightly.
Tony composed her two term papers in March, when the snow was melting and the sun was warming up, and the snowdrops were appearing through the mud and old newspapers aftd decaying leaves on front lawns, and people were becoming restive inside their winter coats. Zenia was becoming restive too. She and Tony no longer spent their evenings drinking coffee at Christie’s Coffee Shop on Queen East; they no longer talked intensely, far into what Tony considered the night. Partly Tony didn’t have the time, because the final exams were coming up and her own brilliance was something she had to work at. But also it was as if Zenia had learned all she needed to know about Tony.
The reverse was far from true: Tony was still curious, still fascinated, still avid for detail; but when Tony asked questions, Zenia’s answers—although goodnatured enough—were short, and her eyes wandered elsewhere. She had the same affable but absent-minded attitude towards West now, too. Although she still touched him whenever he came into the room, although she still doled out little flatteries, little praises, she wasn’t concentrating on him. She was thinking about something else.
On a Friday in early April, Zenia climbs in through Tony’s bedroom window in the middle of the night. Tony doesn’t see her do it, because she’s asleep; but suddenly her eyes open and she sits up straight in her bed, and there’s a woman standing in the darkness of the room, her head outlined against the yellowygrey oblong of the window. In the instant of waking Tony thinks it’s her mother. Anthea could not be disposed of so easily, it appears: compressed into a cylinder, tossed into the lake, forgotten. She’s come back to exact retribution, but for what? Or maybe she has returned, far too late, to collect Tony and take her away at last, to the bottom of the deep blue sea, where Tony has no desire to go, and what would she look like if Tony were to turn on the light? Herself, or a bloated watercolour? ‘
Tony goes cold all over. Where are my clothes? Anthea is about to say, out of the middle of her faceless face. She means her-body, the one that’s been burned up, the one that’s been drowned. What can Tony reply? I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
All this is wordless. What Tony experiences is a complex wave of recognition and dread, shock and the lack of it: the package that comes intact whenever unvoiced wishes come true. She is too paralyzed to scream. She gasps, and puts both hands over her mouth.
“Hi,” says Zenia quietly. “It’s me:”
There’s a pause while Tony recovers herself a little. “How did you get in?” she asks, when her heart is again inaudible.
“The window,” says Zenia. “I climbed up the fire escape:”
“But it’s too high,” says Tony. Zenia is tall, but not tall enough to reach the bottom platform. Is West down there, did he give her a boost? Tony moves to switch on her bedside fight, then thinks better of it. She isn’t supposed to have anyone in her room at this time of night, and dons and busybodies prowl the corridors, on the sniff for cigarette smoke and contraband sex.
“I went up that tree and swung over from the branch,” says Zenia. “Any lunatic could do it. You should really get some sort of a lock on your window” She sits down, cross-legged, on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” says Tony. There has to be something: even Zenia wouldn’t just climb in through somebody’s window in the middle of the night on a passing whim.
“I couldn’t sleep,” says Zenia. They are both almost whispering. “I needed to talk to you. I’m feeling so bad about poor Professor Welch.”
“What?” says Tony. She doesn’t understand.
“About how we cheated on him. I think we should confess. It was forgery, after all,” says Zenia pensively. She’s talking about the term paper, on which Tony spent so much time and generous care. There was nothing dishonest about the paper itself just about the name on it, which was Zenia’s.
Now Zenia wants to tell, and there goes Tony’s life. Many large though shadowy possibilities loom ahead for Zenia—journalism, high finance, even politics have all been mentioned—but university professor has never been among them; whereas for Tony it’s the only thing. It’s her vocation; without it she’ll be useless as an amputated hand. What else can she do? Where else can her pedlar’s pack of knowledge, the doodads and odd fragments and frippery she accumulates like lint, be exchanged for an honest living? Honest: that’s the key. Stripped of her intellectual honesty, her reputation, her integrity, she’ll be exiled. And Zenia is in a position to strip her.