György Spiró - Captivity

I’ll be a cabinetmaker, he decided.

Two days later Uri snuck into Master Jehuda’s house. He did not find Miriam or the master’s wife there. Master Jehuda was sitting hunched over a scroll, his forehead supported by both hands, and seemed mightily care-laden. He looked up.

“I have to anathematize someone!” he declared unhappily. “Dreadful!”

Uri nodded, then announced that he wanted to learn carpentering given that he happened to live in the workshop.

“So learn it,” said Master Jehuda irately, as Uri was showing him no sign of sympathy.

So Uri let the assistants know that on Master Jehuda’s orders he would become a cabinetmaker, and they should show him all the tricks of the trade.

The assistants were less than pleased; it was a good craft, and the three of them were the only ones who plied it within a radius of a day and a half’s walking distance, and now they had to instruct a competitor. However, they did not have the nerve to take a stand against Master Jehuda.

They told him to take a seat in the workshop and watch.

They spent the whole day smoothing down planks of wood. Uri became bored and requested to be allowed to do something himself. They told him there was a spare plane that needed to be sharpened. Uri spent the rest of the time using a piece of hard stone with a milled surface to rub the metal surface. It did not wear away easily, and there was no pleasure in doing it.

The next day the work was no different, and Uri got angry. He noted where there were lamps in the workshop, stole back that night, and by the light of two lamps he took a chair apart to find out how it was assembled. He was unable to put it together again because a joint broke. When the assistants kicked up a fuss about it the next day, Uri cheekily endured it, simply shrugging his shoulders. The chief assistant raced off to make a complaint to Master Jehuda, but he was unwilling to take the twenty paces to the workshop and instead just sent the message that Uri should be instructed in everything if that is what he wanted.

Barely one month later, by the middle of Tammuz, by his own efforts he had produced a nice little table. It did not rock however much it was pushed about, its top was shiny and smooth, and the grain stood out beautifully. No glue or packing material had been used in the joints but it still did not wobble. They told him what it was, one of the better kinds of wood, but Uri did not catch the name. He rubbed his wrists; they had given him the hardest wood just to make him struggle.

“This is my sort of work,” he stated happily.

He had to bend down close to the wood to work it, and his close-up vision was brilliant, even better than that of the others. He even noticed tiny fibers in the wood. The Everlasting Lord created me to be a carpenter, he concluded, and he reproached his Creator for not making him aware of this much earlier.

The assistants told him that he might want to give inlay work a try.

Uri did not know what that was. Making sketches with a twig in the dust, they explained that particularly expensive tabletops had parts chiseled away into which the master would set minute strips of other woods in marvelously multicolored designs. They could not show him any examples; tables of that kind were not found in the provinces, only at the homes of the rich in Jerusalem. But there were some tabletops on which fantastic birds and plants were to be seen, all put together from strips of wood and staggeringly expensive.

From discarded bits of wood, Uri cut up strips to be inlaid, paring and shaping them to fit together, concocting attractive patterns the like of which, so the assistants said, no one had done before. Uri could see that this was something he was cut out for.

He enjoyed working with wood, inhaling its fragrance, gazing at the contours of a cut-off butt’s edge, taking a long, hard look at the concentric circles of a knot or gnarl. He enjoyed shaping wood with a sharp blade, brushing away the sawdust. He enjoyed these things so much so that he did not really need to think of anything else, not even why he happened to be precisely where he was. When they showed him, with the aid of the sort of wheel potters use, that it was also possible to mold wood in a similar fashion as clay, using the legs to push a treadle and drive a wheel so that an affixed piece of wood was spun around while a blade, pressed steadily onto the wood, cut shavings off it, Uri felt as overjoyed as the Creator may have felt in forming man from clay.

If only my father knew how this trip to Jerusalem had put a craft in my hands! He’ll know someday, and he will be astonished and delighted that his son’s poor eyesight is good for something in spite of everything.

“Gizbarim! Gizbarim! Gizbarim!”

That was the cry to which Uri awoke at daybreak one day. He clambered out of the barn. It was still dawn, but people were hurrying out to the fields, women and children included. Uri peered; he could not see the faces but there were so many of them all of a sudden that he had the feeling he had not yet encountered most of them before, small though the village was. Could they be from nearby villages? Had they known beforehand that something was brewing?

One of the assistants who had popped into the barn informed Uri that the train of carts had arrived to take the First Fruits and the First Ripe Fruits to Jerusalem (not the Tithe, which was collected separately and was not being taken now).

“How do you know?”

“They sent a message.”

“Did some delegate come?”

“The message was sent by fire signals. This year they’re late; they usually come a couple of weeks before Shavuot, but due to the drought, everything has been burning up and the animals are scraggly. They waited in the hope that it would rain.”

“When do they normally collect it otherwise?”

“Like I said, a couple of weeks before Shavuot, but the villages out here usually only get a message and then take it into the City themselves. They only come to take it from a lot farther away. They don’t collect it from the Transjordan; it is brought voluntarily. There is another gathering in a fortnight or so, before Sukkot…”

The excited assistant ran out of the barn, clean feast-day sandals on his feet.

Uri washed quickly in the yard. It hadn’t rained for weeks, and the water was at hand in a pitcher, brought by women from a remote well. He said his prayers, bolted down a slice of dry bread, and hurried after the others.

People were standing in a long chain at the outskirts of the village, so Uri joined them. Girls were carrying pitchers around and splashing water onto people’s hands, which they then rubbed together. Uri received a drop and he scrubbed too. He had never seen the people of the village washing their hands before eating or prayers, that being customary only in the Diaspora. The girls had their hair pinned up, and their freshly laundered dresses clung damply to their bodies, rousing Uri’s desires. The menfolk were carrying sacks, barrels, and clay pots, with Master Jehuda scurrying excitedly among them. It must be something major brewing if he had gotten up at dawn. Master Jehuda was fussing about the cleanness of earthenware bowls, wiping the dew off them with a white linen cloth.

When he spotted Uri, he explained: “Moisture attracts flies! The uncleanness of mosquitoes will pass, but not that left by flies!” He scurried on, now crying out that lentils would be brought.

Was it lentils they would be eating today? Was that the festive fodder? Lentils had never once been served since Uri had been in the village. It was explained to him that the lentils were used to gauge the purity of grain; dirt smaller than a lentil was acceptable, but anything bigger would make a whole sack of flour unclean, and priests could not eat it. He was reassured that the presence of a lentil was purely symbolic, as there was no chance of a piece of a lentil-sized flyspeck remaining in grain; they took great care of that.