György Spiró - Captivity

“Good, but it doesn’t pay as much as in Italia.”

“How did you become a master?”

Joseph gave it some thought.

“I don’t rightly know,” he said. “It sort of happened that way. People seemed to trust in me.”

“Did you do any healing?”

“I’m not a magus,” said Joseph. “I have too little faith to heal people.”

Uri waited to see if the pleasant but serious man was going to ask him a thing or two, but he didn’t. Either I’m of no interest to him, Uri mused, or he already knows too much about me. He hesitated to bring up the matter of Agrippa and confess that it was out of error that he had been seen as some sort of messenger. He made up his mind that if Joseph asked, he would be frank, but he would not bring it up himself. Joseph did not ask him, however.

Once they had finished the wine, Joseph said, “I’m trying to persuade them that it would be better if you had some work. Feel free to wander around the city, but don’t leave because you’ll only have to pay a toll to get back in.”

“I won’t leave,” said Uri, and laughed. “Anyway, I have no money.”

“Do you want some?”

“No, thank you.”

“As a loan — to be repaid when you start earning money.”

“No, thank you, all the same. I can manage fine without — assuming, that is, that I can have meals here.”

“You eat as much as you want here. Just speak to Solomon, the servant. You’ll have to yell, though, because he’s hard of hearing.”

“And my eyesight is poor,” said Uri. “He’s old, I’m young — we complement each other.”

Joseph bade him a good night and went into the house. Uri sat out in the garden for a while, waiting until the neighbors climbed down from their roofs.

What business does Joseph have with knowing that my eyesight is bad? Why did I tell him? To show that I’m no longer ashamed?

Uri got up early the next morning and went into the City. He was surprised at how small it was.

Jerusalem was living its normal everyday life, not swarming with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. A seaside town in Italia would be much the same with the passing of summer: sleepy, unhurried, dead.

The Roman mercenaries were not patrolling atop the colonnades but were standing about chatting in front of Herod’s palace, the palace of the Hasmoneans and the Antonia Fortress. The market in the Upper City was full of stalls where sleepy vendors sold doves and every manner of jug, household article, and soil in small vessels: the holy soil of Judaea for pilgrims from distant lands, who, even when there were no holidays would still crop up from time to time. Few moneychangers were serving; they had mostly withdrawn under the arcades, where they blathered with the soldiers. Uri was mobbed by beggars and had a hard time getting rid of them. It did him no good saying he didn’t have anything to give them because they simply didn’t believe him, leaving Uri no alternative but to make a run for it. Nowhere, though, did he come across the legless beggar who raced around on his hands.

He found it odd that he was quite free to enter Temple Square. The bored Jewish police idled under the colonnades and paid no attention to the altar, where the duty priest made the burned offerings. Inscribed in Greek and Latin on the superb Corinthian brass gates separating Temple Square from the Women’s Court was the warning that entry was forbidden for non-Jews. Through the Temple gates Uri could see no more of the interior than he had the first time, in fact less, because he was not allowed to step over the marble railing. He might have done so when the guards were not looking, for the minute of so that it would take until they noticed, but it never so much as entered his mind to do that.

Although he remembered an even bigger edifice, the Temple was still enormous. It was completely surrounded by scaffolding, but he saw hardly anyone at work; the few workers were just tinkering around. Levites were again lounging around the altar, carrying blocks of wood, or washing their hands in the golden bowl. They took exsanguinated, boned pieces of meat from the slaughterer’s bench to the altar, sprinkled blood around, and sprayed the flesh with oil.

Uri stood on the south side of the altar. Three months before he had stood in the shadow of the wall, but now the sun shone on his head. It was later in the day and almost midsummer. The harvest was in full swing in Judaea. The paving burned the bare soles of his feet.

Not so long ago he had stood here as a suspect, and he had been made to walk seven times around the altar. Now he was again standing there, but at his own liberty.

There was no sign anywhere that in this holy place it was customary to force accused individuals to circle around the altar.

It was quiet and no one was pestering him. It was almost as if the two episodes of standing around had not happened in the same world. Maybe the episode three months ago was not even congruent with itself. Uri was certainly not the same person who had set off from Rome five months ago.

There were a few pilgrims, a couple of women accompanied by a group of men, standing atop the gate and piously watching the incineration, but most were either hanging around and chatting on the shaded, northerly side of the Temple or listening under similarly shaded arcades to the orations of prophets with bushy beards and blazing eyes. The lazy guards gave scant heed to the preaching and didn’t give the impression of wishing to censor the words of the ardent orators. That was a wise practice, Uri acknowledged; if anything could be aired, then nothing had any weight. Still, it was curious that incitement was allowed in the immediate proximity of the Temple, the very center of the Judaic faith. Uri listened to the preachers, and it was not too much to say that the word incitement was unfitting; the lamentations of Jeremiah could be heard from the lips of speakers with impassioned eyes the whole day long.

One was tenacious in his hate-filled ranting about doom, disaster, and punishment of evil, but his incandescent, repetitive, and unimaginative words, like those of the rest, were lost in the prattling of his audience and the pandemonium of the other preachers. Uri was curious as to how long the speaker would be able to keep up the tedious tide. He got hoarse by noon, but he was no hoarser by the evening; he just kept on and on and incessantly on. Uri recognized the accomplishment, but he was alone. The preacher did indeed glance at him from time to time, but he did not notice that Uri spent the whole afternoon listening to him; it was not people to whom he wished to communicate something, but the Lord.

Also idling in Temple Square were individuals of scholarly air who expounded quietly and at length, backing up their statements with arguments. They explained the law to those standing around, many of them young men. Uri was surprised at how many men of leisure were loitering about, despite it being the time of day when most people should have been working. They would have been better plowing or plucking grapes! He then came to his senses and was amused by his own neophyte peasant consciousness.

There was a surplus of priests in Jerusalem. They were easily differentiated from everyone else by the white robes and the fact that they haughtily held their noses high. There cannot have been any fewer Levites either; indeed, there had to be even more of them if only a tenth of the tithe they received went to the priests, but they had no distinguishing dress. At first Uri shuddered at the very sight of priests’ robes, just as he had in Rome, where priests were rarely to be seen, but here there were so many priestly garments that Uri’s shuddering quickly abated.

What might be going on in his head, I wonder, Uri had pondered whenever he saw a priest. The priests in Rome were menacing to look at, and Uri expected to be struck dead any time he glimpsed one. A priest’s robes also seemed to Uri to be part of the Creator’s robes, and to touch them would be fatal. He would never dare speak to them, ever. He had thought that priests were in direct contact with the Lord Almighty and might address him any time they chose and get an instant answer. But with there being as many priests as there were here in Jerusalem, the Creator could not possibly speak to each and every one at the same time. What was going on in their heads must be more interesting than that.