György Spiró - Captivity

When he was not telling tales, Uri would peer around as he bent over, searching from the side of his eyes for the lovely young girl. Finally he spotted her. She was balancing a pitcher on her head, so she must have been assigned to water-carrying duties; she smiled at him and moved on. Uri was again bewitched by those two dense, almost contiguous eyebrows. He asked what the girl’s name was, and after some hesitation the women told him: Miriam. A daughter of Master Jehuda’s slaves, and herself a slave, like all her older sisters and brothers.

Constantly, awake and in his dreams, he saw a vision of the lovely girl before his eyes. His entire inside pulsated, became a throbbing, exasperating, blissful torment as he began to think about how he could purchase her. He made inquiries as to what the price of a slave was. In Rome the starting price was eight hundred sesterces, or roughly the price of a cow, but it might go as high as one hundred thousand for an expert at some task. The women could make nothing of prices in sesterces, but they did know that the price of an agricultural slave laborer was forty zuz.

Uri’s heart sank. Forty zuz, or 160 sesterces, was no small amount, even in Rome.

It then became clear that this was the price for an adult male slave; women cost only half that. Uri breathed a sigh of relief. He tried to calculate how many days he would have to work as a journeyman in Judaea to scrape together the twenty zuz or eighty sesterces needed to buy the lovely young girl for himself.

A good worker in Jerusalem might earn one denarius per day, he was told when he asked about — not so different from Rome, where one could make around four sesterces. For twenty days’ wages in Jerusalem it was possible to buy a woman, but in the countryside even an experienced journeyman would not make one tenth the going rate in Jerusalem. So, it would be worth getting a job as a worker in Jerusalem, if only he could find a way of somehow getting back there. For the time being, however, he had to work unpaid for his lunch of bread dipped in vinegar, which he now ate just the same as the rest. Although it still upset his stomach, the vinegar did help quench his thirst in the hellish heat, and there was not enough water for all the girls with pitchers on their heads to serve the harvesters.

Get a laboring job in Jerusalem!

The supervisor, who remained on friendly terms with Uri and missed no chance to greet him when he checked up on the reaping women, said that he too had gained work as a laborer in Jerusalem, working as a paver on the roads for one denarius per day. He’d almost had to pay more for his bread and board, so he had returned to the village. Jerusalem was an expensive city. Most of the workers had no home to go to and slept like beggars out on the streets, where they were often robbed of whatever money they had. A man could consider himself lucky if he managed to save twenty or thirty zuz in a year.

A whole year’s work to earn the money to free a slave girl? Not so impossible.

Rome vanished from his consciousness; the only thing in the world was the present — the monotonous reality of barley and wheat fields, Judaea, nothing else. Uri suspected that he was starting to lose his senses, but he did not really care. He dreamed of having a family of his own. The young girl would bear him many children while he plowed and harvested, or learned about carpentering, and to the end of his days he would live here with the girl, who would never age. It was as if it were not the days of his exile he was spending in this village, as if his exile could not come to an end, ever.

Uri lay out in the field whenever he could during the lunch break, which was not long, and gazed at the sky.

The firmament was different here, so too were the spirits with which man was surrounded; the past, present, and future were different, the religion too, than they were in Rome. Uri was overcome by different images, different stories. Enoch was a living presence here, whereas in Rome it was Plato and Ovid. Enoch did not understand Plato, nor vice versa, but both were present where they were valid. Nothing valid in the Jewish quarter of Rome pertained here, whereas the Roman Jews had no awareness of Enoch.

How could that be?

The Eternal One must have been fed up with Uri’s infantile dreams because one morning he cut his left hand on a head of grain. It was bleeding heavily and the women advised him to go home to Master Jehuda, who had an herbal infusion that quelled bleeding.

Clutching the two bleeding fingers of his left hand with his right hand, Uri trudged back home from the fields. It was a route he knew well by now. He entered the house and stood there blinking. After the blinding outside light he could hardly see anything, hearing only a grunting and high-pitched shriek. The master’s wife was the one he saw first, sitting under the window and sewing something assiduously. The sounds emanated from over by the bed. Uri stepped closer and saw his prostrate master, who was fat but had surprisingly spindly legs that stuck out naked from underneath his rolled-up shirt. On his belly, unclothed, was the lovely young girl, riding him in a seated position, her long black hair let down and cascading. The master grunted while the young girl screamed and rode, and the master’s wife sewed.

Uri was so scared he couldn’t move. The master noticed someone had come in, and as he lay there he took a sideways glance at Uri and broke into a grin.

“Pretty little creature, isn’t she? No one could claim this is a goat!” he exclaimed, giving the girl’s naked behind a hefty whack and laughing uproariously. “If I’m in need of hands to work for me, I make them myself!”

The master’s wife glanced at Uri. In her eyes was a look of profound, blank loathing that encompassed everything living and lifeless — a curse. The young girl continued to ride on the master’s belly, oblivious.

Uri turned on his heels and ran out of the house. He raced over to the poultry yard and shooed the hens from one of the coops. Wings flapping, they scattered in panic. He crawled in and, flat on his stomach, hands clutched to his head, cried tears of anger.

He had to break free.

He was a Roman citizen; no one could force him to carry out slave labor in Judaea. He had not been sentenced for anything by any court of law. Everything that had been carried out against him over these months was illegal.

He would set off in any direction and just keep on going. The main thing was to get away from here.

The thought put him in a cheerful frame of mind. Things had become boring here anyway; new adventures awaited. Whether he would manage to get back to Rome at all was subject to doubt. But then what was home? Rome was a long way away, and the nineteen years that he had been obliged to live there had not been particularly pleasant. There was a world beyond Rome and Judaea.

Two days later he went out to the fields and waited until breakfast was brought. He ate the slice of bread dunked in vinegar, drank long drafts of water from a pitcher set in front of him by an elderly woman, put down his sickle, and slowly set off. No one looked after him, assuming he had something to attend to and would be back later.

Uri walked northward. The harvest was in progress all around, and the sun was blazing hot. Uri pulled his mantle over his head and kept walking. He was headed toward Samaria, where they hated the Jews of Judaea and did not pay tithes to the Temple in Jerusalem, but he was not a Judaean Jew; he was a Roman citizen with a mind of his own.

Around midday he decided to lie down and rest. What was the point in hurrying when he didn’t even know where he was going?

Sleep overcame him under a fig tree. The foliage of fig trees throw impenetrable, thick, marvelous shadows, may the Eternal One be blessed for creating them. It was late in the afternoon when he awoke.