György Spiró - Captivity

Around them, no end of deep- and shallow-draught boats — monoreme galleys, biremes, and triremes — waited to dock, bobbed gracefully or ponderously, almost perilously close to one another, surrounded by barges and rafts, the diminutive craft of pilots and scullers. On the docks, all crammed with boats, goods were loaded and offloaded amidst the endless bustle of crowds, pack camels, mules, handcarts, carriages.

“Most High Eternal One!”

As if he were a native Alexandrian citizen, the Judaean captain proudly pointed out the landmarks: “The palace of Cleopatra is to the right, easily recognized by the two tall obelisks of Cleopatra’s Needles. Cleopatra VII had started work on the building next to it, but it was completed as the Sebasteion a temple of Caesar Augustus. And that unfinished, yawning edifice was to become the temple of Arsinoë, with a roof made from lodestone so that an iron statute of Isis-Arsinoë should hover in the air above it. That was the plan at least, but the magnet turned out not to be powerful enough and the statue was stored somewhere in the palace, waiting for an engineer to work out a solution. That building with the elongated, transparent roof is the Emporion, the largest customs and excise office in the Greek world, where anything produced, grown, or manufactured by peoples around the Great Sea can be purchased cheaply. To the left of that are baths, then farther on, toward the sea and farther to the right, left of that north-pointing horseshoe of a stadium and past the line of hills, is the royal palace, and past the outer palace you can pick out the roof of the Mouseion, or Musaeum, in one wing of which is the old Great Library. That tall building beyond to the right is the Serapeion, or Serapeum, the temple of Serapis, on a hill in the town of Rhakotis. Atop the hill with corkscrew paths around it, that’s the Paneion, the temple of Pan, in the middle of the Gymnasium gardens. It is worth making the trip to the top — you’ll get a marvelous panoramic view of the whole of the city. Next to that — a little to the left, though you can’t see it from here — is the Square Stoa, with an observatory at the top; that’s not far from the Greek market, officially the Forum Augusti, though no one ever calls it anything but the marketplace.”

With the assistance of the pilot (with whom the captain turned out to acquainted — perhaps part of the reason why they were able to jump ahead of many ships that had been anchored outside the harbor for days on end) they maneuvered their way into the old harbor from the north, and Uri — who never once took the gemstone from his eye — felt that this spectacle was worth all the painful, tiring and humiliating adventures that he had gone through.

“This is my sort of town,” he said to the captain before stepping ashore.

The captain laughed:

“It’s everyone’s sort of town.”

On shore stood a knot of cantankerous excisemen; the captain cheerily waved at one of them and headed over.

“He came with me,” said the captain, pointing to Uri. “Let him through.”

“He has to pay the excise,” said the exciseman severely.

“Give it a rest,” said the captain. “I’ve brought your wife a nice muslin shawl: light as a feather with mauve and blue nymphs on it. With that wrapped around her waist, you can be sure you’ll at last get a hard-on.”

The exciseman looked around.

“Well, all right!” he said. “You know where, this afternoon. But not a word to the wife!”

Uri got off scot-free.

He gratefully took leave of the captain, noting that the Greeks in Caesarea had hardly been any pleasanter. The captain guffawed:

“He wasn’t a Greek but a Jew like me and you.”

The second authority, the border patrol, Uri did not manage to evade. The captain had warned him of this right at the start of the voyage: anyone who wanted to spend more than twenty days in Alexandria had to make an application on arrival, then go back to the harbor five days later to get the permit; until then one would be given a temporary residence permit. The captain had also said that the office, which had been operating now for two hundred years, had spent each of those two hundred years carefully but begrudgingly giving out permits, lest the city be overrun by even larger numbers of peasants. As a result, the permit might not be ready even after five days — at best one might get a renewed five-day temporary residence permit. It would do no harm, then, to find in the city a sponsor whom the authorities respected and at whose request they would issue a residence permit for a more prolonged period; although it was possible to lie low there for a month or two (it being a big city with a million or so inhabitants), anyone caught without a permanent residence permit would be expelled, but not before being beaten and stripped of everything of value as if they were stolen goods.

“Find yourself a sponsor” was the captain’s prudent advice. He embraced Uri and went off on his own business toward the docks.

Uri found himself at the end of a long line supervised by a group of listlessly sweating soldiers, among callous-handed, shabbily dressed Egyptian and Greek workers who had returned to pick up permits — not, as became clear from their conversations, for the first time. Elderly people and children jostled and yelled (the young children howling), and the sun was scorching and uncomfortable. The Egyptians also spoke Greek, though at times they would use incomprehensible words; quite possibly they had come from nearby villages in search of work as dockers. They looked askance at Uri, since he was on his own. A few poor Jews from Palestine, just as shabbily dressed, spoke Aramaic, but Uri did not enter into conversation with them.

It took a long time for Uri to get to an official, by which time he was hungry and thirsty.

The official in the alcove before which applicants had to pass mopped his perspiring, bald pate.

“We’re done for this morning,” announced the official. “I’m off for lunch.”

“No you are not!” exclaimed Uri, slapping down a drachma on the counter.

“Well, all right,” said the official, shaking his head in disgruntlement and breathing heavily. “Why are there so many of you today?”

Once Gaius Theodorus had declared himself to be a Roman citizen, he issued a small piece of papyrus granting a five-day temporary residence permit; his name was written in Greek lettering in the empty space.

“Come back in five days,” the official said in friendly fashion.

“And what if it’s not ready then?”

“There are too many of you,” said the official. “That’s not our fault.”

Uri stood on the shore. There was a great coming and going; people of many races and nationalities were prowling around, bustling about, or strolling over the paving of marble mosaics in the Roman style. There was no way of telling who among them might be Greek, Jewish, Macedonian, Egyptian, or whatever: Jewish-looking faces passed by, though they wore no beards; there were also blond, bearded, curly-haired Greeks, some in richly ornamented tunics, others in nondescript garb, a few even in white, though they did not look like priests. A few extremely attractive brown-skinned women, maybe Indian, accosted him with invitations to lunch with them, but Uri shook his head to decline: he did not feel free to accept, though he had a sense that he would soon lose his virginity, Alexandria being a superb place for that purpose, as for every other — that he did not just feel but knew for sure.

Here even middling buildings were taller than the tallest tenement blocks in Rome, or even the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, and they were built close next together; plots of land must be expensive. Uri comprehended right away the city’s matchless planning: the Ptolemies had established parallel streets, so the city consisted of a grid, the whole being planned out in advance but so generously that the huge jumble of buildings of various styles from various ages made the otherwise rigid network lively, rich, and homely. Uri was surprised that he did not feel that the gigantic buildings were about to topple over him and crush him, but he soon worked it out as he strolled eastward along the harbor: it was because of the sheer multitude of people teeming at the foot of the buildings. A person does not look up if he can behold all of this colorful, captivating life at eye level. Taverns, guesthouses, state edifices and tenements — the chaotic stuff of life. Rome would never be like this.