Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen by Mary Sharratt Read Free Book Online

me stuffing myself sickened her. Too ravenous to bother about Jutta, I devoured every last morsel, even the doughy trencher that, at home in Bermersheim, we would have thrown to the hounds or given to hungry beggars. When my own food was finished, I looked around the empty room with the curtain drawn shut over the doorway before I launched myself at Jutta’s portion, eating as much as I could cram inside myself. If this was going to be my only meal of the day, I wanted my belly good and full. At last, I hid the leftover apples, cheese and the trencher bread beneath the blanket the monks had given me. Placing the empty wine beakers back into the revolving hatch, I turned it so they faced the outside again, thereby concealing my crime.
    I found her in the courtyard, pacing in the shadows, her hands rubbing each other as though she were trying to wash away some invisible stain. Her bare feet were blue against the stone. From the tang in the air, I guessed it would freeze that night.
    “Come back inside.” I tried to take her hand, but she shrugged me off.
    “Leave me, child.” Her eyes were worlds away.
    Jutta only came in at Vespers, when it was too dark to sew or do any useful work. Her veil covering her shorn head, her hands knit over her stomach, she huddled on her pallet until Compline, the last devotions of the day.
     
    Afterward we lay on our pallets to sleep.
    “Don’t undress,” Jutta said, as I prepared to pull the hair shirt over my head. “The Rule of Saint Benedict says we must sleep clothed.”
    Crawling under my blanket, I waited until Jutta blew out the taper. Then I silently wriggled out of the sackcloth and shoved the thing to the foot of my bed. My hands rubbed my naked skin, now covered in an angry rash. I wanted to scratch myself until I bled. But most of all, I was still hungry, hungrier than I ever imagined I could be.
    Biding my time until I thought Jutta must surely be asleep, I found the food in its hiding place and nibbled the cheese and trencher dough as quietly as I could, but when I bit into the apple, I gave myself away.
    Jutta whipped the blanket off me and snatched the fruit from my hand. She had drawn back the curtain so that the shivery moonlight revealed everything—my gluttony and my nakedness.
    “Horrible child! Do you think you can hide your wickedness from me? I could smell that cheese a league away.”
    Jutta crammed the bitten apple into her own maw, then spat it out, sobbing, and began to beat herself, falling to her knees with such a crack that I thought she had smashed her bones against the stone floor.
    Clutching the blanket to my chest, I could only stare in terror, my tears stinging my face. So passed my first day of monastic life.
     
    We are sealed in a tomb. We are no longer alive.
Yet somehow life went on, though the two of us remained hidden away like the women in the glittering harems of the East that Rorich had told me about, except the only things that glittered here were Jutta’s tears as she flailed her soft white flesh with her knotted rope with its seven spiked tails for the Seven Deadly Sins. She whipped herself until the blood ran.
    The Hours of the Divine Office ruled our days and nights. In the pitch black, the bells summoned us to the screen for the Night Vigil of Matins, during which we sang the psalms for what seemed an eternity. The words of Psalm 129, sung every Wednesday at Vespers, burned themselves into my soul:
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine.
Out of the depths I cry out to you, O Lord
.
I’ve been cast down a pit and will never rise again.
    Though Jutta didn’t expect me to flagellate myself as she did, my hair shirt did it for me, nettling my back and chest until my skin bled and wept of its own accord. I thought I would never again know what it was not to hurt or ache or suffer cold and hunger.
God, take me. Just let me die.
Real death had to be better than this never-ending pretend death.
    Jutta said the flesh was a thing to be