György Spiró - Captivity

“At this distance,” said Uri, “I can only see outlines but not your features. If you were to pass me in the street, I wouldn’t recognize you.”

“You consider that to be a virtue?”

“Most recently, yes, I do,” said Uri. “Others see well; for me to notice anything of the world, I have to think about it. That is why I like reading: I can lean on the eyes of others, with many eyes I see more.”

The head hesitated.

“With us physical sanity is at least as important as mental and spiritual sanity.”

“I don’t feel disabled,” Uri asserted, “just unusual. By being what I am. On long walks my feet and back hurt, my asshole bleeds… If I’m tense or depressed, my stomach knots up and my chest burns… In many respects I’m a coward. That’s how my God created me, but he has to have had some purpose in doing so!”

Isidoros got up. There were scrolls and tablets lying about on big shelves, and after some rummaging he pulled one out and put it down on the table.

“Start rendering it into Latin,” he said.

Uri picked up the scroll and cautiously unrolled the first written page but then let go of the parchment.

“That’s too easy,” he declared. “It’s the Odyssey , and Livy has already translated that.”

“Still, have a go.”

Uri placed the parchment scroll on the table, at quite some distance from himself, and from memory he slowly, with gusto, in a singing tone began to recite Livy’s text. The gymnasiarch impassively listened to him for a while before getting up again and searching out another scroll and putting it down on the table. Uri fell silent.

“This has not yet been translated into Latin,” the head said.

Uri unrolled the first page. This too was written in hexameters but gave neither author nor title.

“Who’s this by?” Uri asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Begin.”

Uri first read the Greek text over to himself, but then straightaway ad-libbed a translation into Latin hexameters. He got stuck a bit at times or had to jump back to make a correction, but all the same the translation proceeded smoothly and also kept to the caesuras. Isidoros listened with eyes closed.

“Not bad,” he said after a couple of minutes. “Not bad at all. How come you know how to do that sort of thing?”

“It’s precisely what I have most practice doing,” Uri acknowledged. “In Rome I got a lot of amusement out of it. I would do a lot worse with other exam questions.”

“Why amuse yourself doing that in particular? It brings in no money and it’s of no interest to anyone.”

“Because I was too scared to live,” said Uri. “I used to believe that I was a cripple; I needed a substitute.”

Isidoros remained silent. He looked at this strange creature in front of him: nothing at all handsome about him, his features were all lopsided, his Jewish nose bent, his chin small and receding, and although his build was slim there were the beginnings of a double chin, barely hidden by the scrawny reddish beard, and on top of everything, he was going bald. The very image of imperfect Jewishness exacerbated by a Germanic strain. And yet there was something winning about him: maybe those small, hazel-green eyes, from which, despite being slit-like from myopic peering, nevertheless blazed the fire of some remote, threatening depth.

“I’ll take you on,” he finally announced. “But you’ll have to be outstanding in sport too.”

“I will,” Uri promised.

“If you don’t excel in any branch of sport, I shall expel you.”

“Fair enough.”

The gymnasiarch shook his head.

“Are you sure you’re Jewish?” he queried.

“So they say,” said Uri. “My mother may have been a Syrian slave girl, perhaps, but under no circumstances Jewish… My father is Jewish, but there’s no one to say where his mother came from. Or her grandmothers. In Rome Jews, for want of women, wed the daughters of slave people; on my mother’s side I might easily be Germanic or Gallic or Illyrian — doesn’t it come to the same thing?”

“Here the Jews marry among their own kind,” said Isidoros. “They breed like rabbits, and are brazen in their pushiness.”

Uri stood up. The suspicion flashed through his mind that the head might perchance have once taken a liking to a Jewish girl, but she had rejected him: a disappointed individual was quite capable of hating an entire people corporatively as a result of such things.

“Report early tomorrow morning at the gate; you will be conducted to the dormitory, and by then I’ll have a place designated for you. You may go.”

Uri bowed and started off out of the room before turning.

“Who is the author of that piece?”

“I am.”

Uri laughed.

“Not bad!” he said. “Not bad at all!”

If Alexandria had been marvelous up till now, it was even more marvelous from now on.

Uri was pleased to see that there were no beds in the dormitory, only straw strewn sparsely on the undecorated stone-flagged floor, though that was not cold, because it was heated from below even during the summer. There were no mattresses, no sheets, no blankets — Spartan discipline allied to Asian and Roman comfort.

He was also pleased that the costly robe and elegant sandals he had on were taken away, and in their place he was clothed in coarse linen and simple, stiff-soled sandals. That was what all the students wore, as if they were soldiers in uniform. He was allowed to don own clothes when going out on leave, but not otherwise. The sack in which he had brought a few personal belongings, like a comb that he had been given by one of the prostitutes and some books that he had bought with his savings, was taken off him — he would only be given these back when he finally left the Gymnasium. He was informed that no one here had any personal property and everybody was equal. Just like the Pythagoreans or a Jewish sect, Uri thought. Could that have been where the Essenes got the idea? Meals consisted of communal breakfast, lunch and supper, and conversation was forbidden while dining. Excellent: he liked to engross himself in thought while eating, and he found it disturbing if he also had to make conversation.

He had managed to end up in an Essene community, albeit not in Judaea.

He was most pleased of all that the servants were not hovering constantly around him as in the alabarch’s house; he abhorred their officious proximity. He never asked them for anything, but they would keep a look-out for any orders and looked offended any time he managed to get rid of them. Uri had a suspicion that the servants held him in contempt for not giving them orders in the same matter-of-course way as Philo or Marcus or Tija.

Some classes were communal, some individual. Everybody’s schedule for the day was written on a tablet, and he was expected to keep to that. His own was already hanging at the entrance to one of the larger rooms, featuring a conspicuously large amount of physical training. Uri counted up the number of tablets: there were twenty-seven of them. So that meant there were that many students along with him. Not a lot. Out of them would come Alexandria’s future elite. Twenty-four Greeks and three Jews.

His name was listed simply as Gaius T.

Tija’s as Tibjul.

He looked for Apollonos’s name, but there were three of them: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, with no way of telling which was Jewish.

Things would all be very proper.

The tutors were Greek, a mixture of the elderly and middle-aged, along with a lot of young, fit men, the physical instructors. There were almost as many teachers as students. That too was fine.

Matutinal and vespertine prayers were also displayed on the week’s timetable but without any indication of who worshiped which god or gods; that was a matter for the individual to settle for himself. Statues of the divinities stood in a separate room, some of them with slightly worn heads or feet, perhaps from being caressed or kissed.