György Spiró - Captivity

After they had amused themselves, Judas fished a piece of papyrus out from somewhere and wrote down the more important exchange rates for Uri to memorize. Uri thanked him and bundled the coins back into his loincloth.

They had laughed at him, but not all that much; they had accepted him, because he had dared to speak up.

The breakfast, supper, and lunch, which Judith also delivered to the workers, cost altogether two-fifths of a zuz per day, and the use of the room, another one-fifth per day. She took all of the money Uri had, did some lengthy calculations in her head, and gave back some of it, not a lot.

“So you have money after all!” she said, raising her index finger. “I knew it, you dark horse!”

Uri stuffed the remaining coins back into his loincloth.

Two days later unsightly, itchy red spots covered his testicles and the bases of his thighs. He and wealth did not get along well, he concluded. Early the next morning, while the others were still sleeping, he scratched a place for the coins in the ground, not far from the big holes that had been dug as a privy at the bottom of the garden. He hoped the money was not going to be made irretrievably unclean. He washed the loincloth thoroughly and hung it out on a tree branch so that it would be dry by evening. That was a mistake, because come evening the loincloth was gone. Never mind, he told himself; at least it won’t chafe my balls.

He was paid the next week’s wages in full. He had seen other workers shoving off without anyone caring, so, without asking for permission to leave work, he went that same day to the Upper City market, where he bought himself a new loincloth and a new pouch. He put the money in the pouch and tied it to his waist under his long shirt. There was a long stretch along the row of stalls selling second-hand goods; he looked around, thinking that this was probably where his tasseled blanket had ended up not so long ago. He didn’t see that particular one, but he did see others; however, he did not buy one, there being no point as it was now so warm at night. He did buy an ointment for every imaginable skin complaint; it did not come from laserpicium, because that was unknown in this part of the world, but it was not balsam either: he had smelled it. It was sold in small jars, five tresiths a jar, which was expensive, because that was five-eighths of a zuz, as he now knew, but he could allow himself the expense. He put a jar in his pouch and strolled contentedly back to the City of David.

That evening he paid for all the coming week’s meals and added what was left, which now came to a tidy sum, to the coins he had already stashed. He was delighted to have come across such a safe bank in the land of Judaea. If he ever met Simon the Magus again, he would recommend it.

Uri spent a lot of time sitting on the upper floor, gazing at the activities of Hiskiyya, the painter, while the other workers on the ground floor fretted or, in the Roman style, played games of chance, which are forbidden to Jews. Hiskiyya had by now finished with the queen’s bedroom and had begun on Izates’s room. There was no one pushing him; he just liked working. Uri asked if he might try his hand at painting one of the figures, but the painter was unwilling to let him. Uri tried arguing that if he messed anything up, Master Hiskiyya would be able to correct it easily, but the painter insisted that it was wrong to waste costly pigments. The next day Uri appeared with a piece of papyrus and some chalk, which he had bought in the nearer market in the Lower City; he asked if he might copy the figures the master had already painted. Hiskiyya permitted it, so Uri stepped up close to the wall, squatted, drew, stood up, stepped close to the wall, squatted back down, drew… He spent the rest of the day contentedly doing that.

“Well, I never!” Hiskiyya said that afternoon, wagging his head. “That’s not bad at all… Pity about your being semi-blind, because you could have made a wonderful painter…”

Uri would have been happy to go on drawing, but the Almighty again had other plans in store for him than his making progress in that craft. The next day the sheets of mosaic for which they had been waiting for weeks finally arrived.

The crates, lying in straw and themselves lined inside with straw, were lifted carefully from the big carts. There were sixteen long, bulky crates, four on each cart. The foreman jumped around nervously, watching each crate get opened. A count was made, noted by the foreman, of the marvelous square-shaped, painted, and fired tiles and the smaller bits that would have to be laid around them to make the pattern. Once that had been done, all the pieces were carefully placed back in the crates.

The foreman signed a papyrus to indicate that he had received the crates and their contents were without loss, after which the unloaded carts clattered off.

The foreman divided the workers into watches to stand guard. It would not do to leave the readily transportable and valuable tiles there as they had done with the marble blocks before they had been built into the palace; it would have taken more than a whole night to lift those. Uri would be on the first watch in the evening. He was not pleased, as it meant that they would have to go without supper that day, and in the days to come there would be little opportunity to make that up: Old Ma Judith, such a decent woman, was not going to give them more. He was glad, on the other hand, that Menachem had put him on the same watch as Judas and his brothers.

Uri was relieved when Judas sent one of the brothers off to buy supper for them all.

That evening, by the light of the oil lamps, they were eating warm griddle bread with a delicious goat’s milk cheese accompanied by wine when Menachem turned up in the company of two torchbearers. He politely wished them all a pleasant meal, then said something to the torchbearers, who picked up one of the crates and carried it out of the atrium. Uri did not understand what was going on, but Judas and his brothers went on eating, so he did too. Before long two torchbearers reappeared and carried off another crate; Menachem wished them a good evening, then he too went off. A cart could be heard creaking outside, then silence fell.

“What was that about?” Uri asked.

“He was just checking whether we were on guard,” said Judas. “It wouldn’t look good if any of the mosaics were to be stolen.”

“And so?”

“We were on guard.”

One of his brothers could not hold in his peals of laughter.

“But they carried off two crates of them!”

“Sure they did. Look, Gaius, any site you can’t steal from is a site where no building will take place.”

Uri absorbed that answer.

“But won’t those two crates be missed?” he responded.

“No,” said Judas, “because the shortage will be made up by slipping in a bit more cement along the walls to make it look like it was the design from the start. It will still look very imposing.”

Uri probed a little further, asking about where Menachem had taken the crates, and who he had sold them to.”

“It’ll be a place he’s had a long time now,” one of the brothers concluded. “Menachem is the foreman on more than one site. He’s also stolen marble and sheets of silver from here without it ever being noticed.”

Uri was beginning to grasp what sort of crimes Plotius had been accused of.

“That’s nothing,” Judas suggested. “A drop in the sea, and if one thinks about it, there’s no Jew harmed. The small palace is going up at the expense of the king of Adiabene, and it will decorate the city of Jerusalem, and those two crates will also go toward the decoration of a house in Jerusalem. The only ones who are harmed are the people of Adiabene, but so far as they are concerned it doesn’t matter what exactly their king fritters away their taxes on because he’s going to fritter them away in any case.”