György Spiró - Captivity

The ashlars were marble-lined both inside and out, the basin in the center of the atrium on the ground floor was marble, the staircase marble, the columns marble. On the upper story the larger blocks of stone and the smaller stones that were fit in between them were plastered over. There was a man working in one of the rooms, painting colored birds next to one another on the wall opposite the window. Uri entered to take a closer look. Pots of paint were lined up on the floor, which had not been paved yet. The painter stepped aside so that Uri might admire his work. Extraordinary, man-sized birds bedecked in vibrant colors lined the wall, one next to the other, and they all had something cloddish, oafish, hilariously human in their features. Uri stepped up close to the wall, his nose almost brushing the half-finished, still wet paint.

“Do birds like this exist anywhere?” he inquired.

“Not on your life!” replied the painter self-assuredly. “I make them up!”

The whole wall had a blue and green base with capriciously intertwined plant tendrils, runners, and branches. The enormous birds were fit in at the front of those.

“It’s marvelous,” said Uri sincerely.

The painter nodded.

“This is the queen’s bedroom,” he gestured around him.

“Isn’t she going to be frightened by these creatures?” Uri asked.

“Not on your life!” said the painter. “I also paint monsters, but these birds are friendly.”

Uri asked how many rooms the master would be painting and what sort of figures they would have. Well, there was the queen’s bedroom and then there would be three guest rooms. He had been given a free reign in the designs; all they had requested was that he shouldn’t paint any improper scenes.

“Mind you, I’m an expert at those, too,” he declared. “In Antioch I painted three bordellos from top to bottom. They were very pleased with the result and even gave me a letter of recommendation!”

Uri sniffed the paintings, which had a strange odor. The painter explained what each pigment was made of and where it came from. The purple dye came from Tyre, where the most highly prized mollusks were bred. They also produced many good dyes in other colors, but for some reason the painters from Sidon were the best. Generally speaking, Phoenician painters, stargazers, and land surveyors were highly talented, the master said enthusiastically. He had trained as a surveyor himself and had even visited Tyre, but he had grown tired of computations; they gave him headaches.

When the painter asked what he did, Uri explained that he was a cabinetmaker and had started work that morning.

“There isn’t much need for cabinetmaking work,” said the painter. “The furniture will be coming from Alexandria.”

“One piece or another is bound to get damaged in transit,” Uri offered hopefully.

“That may well be possible.”

Uri asked if Queen Helena would have to remove all the fine birds from the wall when she became Jewish, or would it be enough to hide them under a curtain, but the painter did not get what he was driving at.

“It’s the portrayal of living creatures,” said Uri. “That’s not allowed for us Jews…”

“That’s long dead and buried!” the painter exclaimed, breaking into a laugh. “Rich Jews the world over have been filling their houses with pictures of animals and people since I don’t know when! Jewish sarcophaguses are decorated with naked Greek gods. I carved two myself when I was in Antioch, one of Apollo, the other of Dionysus, for good, upstanding Jews who kept to the letter of the law. I wouldn’t be a painter if there were no customers for the work, would I?”

This pleasant man was the only one working; the other workers were lolling about or sauntering in the shade of the cool, half-ready palace.

Uri took a seat among them and introduced himself. They grunted by way of a greeting and resumed their small talk.

At midday water and griddle bread were brought out, with a helping for Uri as well.

Nothing happened after lunch either. A couple of workers dozed off, while others went out into the yard and sat down in the shade, where they scribbled figures in the dust. Uri asked them what they were up to.

“As you can see, we’re laying down some floors,” said a portly, elderly man, and guffawed.

“We’re waiting for the mosaic tiles. They’re said to be in Caesarea.”

Uri said he hoped it would not be long before he got to grips with learning that craft, because he had spent a day learning how to rest. The portly man laughed.

He was called Judas, and he had three younger brothers among the workers. They too seemed intelligent.

Uri introduced himself, saying that he had come from Rome. Judas asked him how well workers got paid over there. Uri had only the daily wages of dockers to go on; skilled workers no doubt earned a lot more. There were no docks in Jerusalem, so that was of no interest to them. They asked him how much he could earn as a cabinetmaker. Uri had to confess that he had picked up cabinetmaking since he had been in Judaea, so he didn’t know about it in Rome.

“Whereabouts in Judaea?”

Uri told them about Beth Zechariah and Master Jehuda. Judas and his brothers had never been in that part of the world, though they too were villagers by background and had a thing or two they could relate.

They were peasants, six boys and three girls. Judas was the firstborn, but only in the sense that priests use since their mother had been pregnant when their father was wed to her. He was the sort of firstborn for whom the priests would be paid five Tyrian shekels, but he was not permitted to inherit property on that account, in other words, he wasn’t entitled to a double share. A boy like that was considered illegitimate even if the man who had sired him married his mother; a man is a different person as a bachelor than after he has taken a woman as his wife. None of that had mattered as long as their father was alive; they lived and got by working on the land. But their father died after he spiked his foot on a nail. His leg and abdomen had swollen up, and he choked to death, hard as they had prayed for him. Then it had been necessary to split the wealth into seven and a half equal portions (daughters were only due half shares). Those seven and a half equal portions — fifteen portions out of which each of the daughters had gotten one and each son, two — were not enough for anyone’s livelihood. In any case, it was prohibited to split land into such tiny portions. They had bickered for a long time until they, four of the brothers, had grown tired and left the village, leasing the land for free to the other two brothers and the three sisters, having made a declaration to that effect to the village’s master and two witnesses. When two of the girls had gotten married it had been possible for them to take a dowry. The two boys who stayed behind were now grubbing the land, with their mother and remaining sister cooking for them. They would stay, because that sister was a bit weak in the head and no one would wed her. Things may be tight, but they managed to make a living.

The four elder brothers had learned the carpentry trade and been squeaking by in Jerusalem for ten years now. They had no house, nothing at all, but they thought themselves lucky not to have starved to death. They had worked on putting up the Temple, private houses, and warehouses beyond the city walls, but there were not so many jobs now. It was a good thing that this palace was being put up, and there were rumors that Izates, the princeling from Adiabene, would eventually have his own separate palace; maybe they could get jobs on that.

Uri then asked if, by any chance, they had worked with a Roman by the name of Plotius, because he too was a joiner.