György Spiró - Captivity

The Arab tribes were a different matter. Presumably, the Jews of Antioch and Alexandria had contact with these non-Jewish tribes, but the Greeks of Antioch and Alexandria would also have a cut of the business, by virtue of the fierce Greco-Judaic commercial rivalry. So what if it was somehow possible to become a link in the non-Jewish chain? How else than with money?

That was Joseph’s other big idea after the unbreakable glass vase of painful memory. He methodically haunted the premises of Greek, Syrian, Abyssinian, and Arab traders in Rome, strolling with his son over the bridge and wandering with him around the city, because it was not so easy to track anyone down given that streets had no names and houses were not numbered.

Joseph would offer immediate cash in return for a negligible and, initially, almost certainly loss-making stake in the silk business. Some, having a sound capital base, rejected the idea out of hand, but some were takers because they happened to be short on money, or maybe they were inherently greedy. There were any number of strange homes that Uri visited with his father, coming across peculiar modes of life and odd customs, and that was when the conviction grew in him that it paid to speak with everyone in his own tongue. Uri knew only Aramaic and Greek at that time, like his father, though it would not have hurt to know Arabic and Egyptian as well. A deal would be done not just for profit — Uri appreciated that even as a child — but at least as much, if not more, for the fun of it and for the sake of camaraderie.

In the course of those visits he became acquainted with the use of an abacus, those frames with several rows above each other in which would be placed pebbles; by sliding them one could make incredibly swift calculations. Uri was quicker than his father to arrive at the principle by which it worked, with the lowest row being used for single units, the next for tens, the one above that for hundreds, and so on, and this made it possible to add, subtract, multiply, and divide very speedily, without looking. Being based on the decimal system, the abacus represented local values, though that was not quite how it was put at the time. Back home Uri traced his own abacus on the ground; pebbles and twigs could always be found, and he was proud that sometimes his father, when he got tired of calculating, would trudge out into the yard and ask him to work some calculation or other. The Jews incidentally would also use letters of the Greek alphabet for making calculations, with alpha as one, beta as two, gamma as three, delta as four, and so on, so it was far from easy to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, squaring or extracting the square root with the long strings of letters this involved. Uri wanted to explain the exceedingly simple principle on which the device worked to the other children and their teacher, but they did not so much as listen: the abacus was not a Jewish custom.

His father would negotiate anxiously, doggedly, with determination, his counterparts chattering in leisurely fashion, relishing the chance to talk, whether they were inclined to reach agreement or not. They would willingly pass time with idle gossip, dismissing the serious details of a business deal with a flamboyant sweep of the hand, regaling Joseph and his son countless items of Roman tittle-tattle with quiet snickering, a gleeful giggling, or glorious guffawing, slapping their knee, marveling at life’s oddities. They would be plied with food and drink, which his father would usually decline but they would insist Uri had to drink; as a child it was not unusual for him to stagger drunkenly out of the tenements, private palaces, and shacks.

In the end it cost Joseph close to one hundred thousand sesterces to get into the silk business.

That was a staggeringly large sum of money if one considers that the annual income for a prefect running a province would be just two and a half times that, or that with a fortune of four times that a person could procure a knighthood. The one hundred thousand sesterces was not Joseph’s own money, as he never had a significant amount of working capital, the family scraping by on a few coppers and the sportula before Uri got the tessera. Part of the money was loaned at forty-percent interest by Roman-Jewish bankers (usurious rates like that were strictly forbidden, of course, under both Roman and Jewish law), and partly obtained from Gaius Lucius at an annual interest of no more than ten percent, which was two percent less than the official Roman bank rate.

Joseph lost weight, the furrows around his eyes sank and turned blue, he did not sleep for nights on end, just paced around in the yard and prayed to the Lord that the winds would favor him and his ships not sink (the ships themselves were insured, it was true, the shipping companies being rich, but in general the cargoes were not, with the merchants taking the risk), and he also prayed that the Arabs and the Egyptians and Greeks of Alexandria, the whole treacherous bunch, would stick to their agreements, to say nothing of those far-off tribes, their very names unknown to him, who would transport the goods along the sides of great mountains and desert country somewhere in Tibet, between China and India, and also that the Jewish mafia would not pay him any mind and spare him the curses of the Jewish Elders of Rome. There were attempts to do so, it later turned out, but because a fair number of the Jewish Elders of Rome had close links with Jewish bankers, indeed more than a few were themselves bankers, it was not in their interests to ruin Joseph, so they smoothed things over in anticipation of that forty-percent interest.

When the loan was due, Joseph did not have enough money to pay off both the Jews and the equestrian. He asked Gaius Lucius for a period of grace and a loan of a further thirty-thousand sesterces, which was granted, and from that and his earnings he paid off the Jewish banks, and it was only at the end of the third year that he was able to pay back his outstanding debt to Gaius Lucius. Until then, all he did was suffer and worry. He could not breathe easily for a single day, for the moment that the Jewish bankers pocketed the loan he had paid back, along with the interest, Joseph’s temporary protection came to an end and the Jewish silk mafia instantly leeched him. They demanded a cut of the trade, even though Joseph had already made a deal with the Arabs. He asked them too for a grace period, and after admitting the debt to Gaius Lucius, he was thereafter obliged to pay the Jews fifteen percent on every consignment, which meant that he barely made anything on the silk. Nobody believed him, of course; they thought he was rolling in it and was only so thrifty in the way he lived with his own family to hoodwink others. Admittedly, from that point on they did not pester him any longer, indeed there were even cases where his extortive co-religionists would take care of things when a particular shipment was held up.

Joseph struggled for years until he hit on a third route and had the silk delivered secretly from Parthia via Greece and Dalmatia, over dry land the whole way to avoid shipwrecks and even letting the proverbially unreliable Illyrians in on the business. Doing deals with the Illyrians was at least as calamitous as the worst storm at sea, but if a few shipments yearly by some miracle made it through, then it was worth it. The adolescent Uri was also let in on the plan, being sworn to secrecy, because he was taking a big risk if the news ever reached the ears of the Elders or the other Jewish merchants. The trade must have worked, to some extent, because from then on Joseph slept much more soundly at night.

It occurred to Joseph around that time that what should be imported from China was not the silk itself, but the plant from which those incredibly gossamer fibers were made. He started to poke around, but the Arab and Greek merchants simply laughed at him; he was not the first to come up with the idea, but the Chinese guarded the secret of the plant so closely that no one had yet managed to see it, and anyone who tried to get too close was killed for their trouble. There was a tale that a mad Syrian merchant from Antioch had tried to make silk from the threads of spiders, but he had not succeeded and in utter misery he had slashed his wrists; he left two million drachmas for his fatherless children. Multiplied by four that gives how many sesterces? Eight million! Even in talenta that was a staggering amount of 333⅓.