György Spiró - Captivity

“What became of the nose?” Uri asked.

“Maybe it took on a new, self-sufficient life,” Sotades suggested, “and it is roaming about here, down by the harbor.”

By then, there were thousands upon thousands roaming about drunkenly down by the harbor, so a nose would hardly have been conspicuous among them. There were also children forlornly wandering around, they worked as porters and stevedores and were also the worse for drink. Uri pitied these ten- and twelve-year-olds: it was they who carried most of the bales of cargo on their scrawny shoulders and necks because they only had to be paid one quarter what an adult would get. There were a lot of them, more than all the donkeys, asses, and adult porters put together. Sotades disapproved of Uri’s compassion: the young boys were happy because they were providing for the whole family and because of that they would not be beaten at home.

The Egyptian New Year came to an end that morning. Uri slept the rest of that day because around daybreak he had downed too much honeyed wine at the harbor.

Apart from Lysias’s tavern the students also dropped in on a fair number of other places, these enchanting few days of freedom being the best part of the whole school year: they could drink with the catamites, whores, and dockers without ever coming under threat of knife attacks, though they had no trouble spilling one another’s guts if they had a difference of opinion on some matter, large or small. In such taverns the students could drink for free, or at least they were never asked for any money, though they were expected to assist with the unloading of the ships at dawn. Whenever possible, Uri would carry the smaller loads, fearing that his back would give out under a bale, and he found it odd that the dockers, who were in such familiar surroundings in the harbor, treated them so politely, even him, although they knew — naturally, they knew full well — that he was Jewish. The Greek students joked with the same condescension with plebs, freedmen, and slaves alike, and they would politely laugh back at being honored. There was no need to ask why: the wealth and power of the families of the Greek students was so exceedingly great that any insult to one of their scions that might be committed would be paid back with interest. For that reason Uri did not relish the dawn unloading work, but he could not wriggle out of it: he labored purely to be considered of equal rank despite his Jewishness, and if he had not done the dock work he would have fallen out of favor with his Greek schoolmates and become a butt of their crude jokes.

There were a lot of Jews from Palestine working as laders of the ships alongside the Greeks and Egyptians, and they could be identified from the fact that several times a day they would pray bowing to the east, having dipped their feet in the sea and sprinkled some water on themselves, as well as the fact that they said their prayer in the Aramaic tongue: maran ‘atha, maran ‘atha , The Lord cometh, they would chant in chorus. They had been driven westward by the land crisis in Judaea: high-priestly families had bought up the land of firstborn sons, leaving them with nothing. They held out hopes of making a fortune in Alexandria, the richest of all Jewish cities. In recent times, in deference to them (since they too, wretches though they might be, were Jewish), speakers in the Basilica had been mixing a few words of Aramaic into the Greek texts. They were particularly loathed by the Egyptian stevedores because they were willing to take on the work at cheaper rates, but they slept in the streets just the same as Greeks and Egyptians, and they too were quick to resort to knives as weapons.

At the beginning of September, Sotades had a visit from his family. They stayed in Alpha district, and Sotades introduced to them Uri as well as two Greek friends. Uri was astonished when he saw Sotades’s younger sister: he would never even have imagined a girl could be that pretty. She was tall, slim, with long legs, erect in carriage, with blue eyes and wavy, flowing, waist-length blonde hair: no make-up was used on her eyebrows, eyelids, or lips — none of the cosmetics with which Egyptian women, just as much as the Romans, loved to paint themselves. Every single thing about her was gorgeous, but taken together the overall effect was breathtaking. It was startling to see this Germanic beauty alongside her thickset, brown-haired brother. Sotades’s Greek friends were also struck dumb, and the girl blushed before quickly retiring to ease the stupefaction. The whole business was embarrassing for Sotades as he had been given no advance warning that his sister would also be coming to Alexandria, and it seemed to Uri that his friend was not a great fan of the lovely girl.

After the family had departed, Uri asked him again why the Greeks of Egypt did not like the Jews of Alexandria.

“There are too many of you,” Sotades declared melancholically. “At least as many as the Latini, but there are a lot of you even in Persia, and through them you snatch up all the trade with China and India from right under our noses.”

“No other quarrels?” Uri asked.

Sotades shrugged his shoulders:

“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s of no consequence how many gods a person is supposed to venerate.”

After a brief pause for reflection, he added:

“It might be better, perhaps, if you were very different from us, but in fact you’re just the same. That’s the trouble.”

The statement floored Uri, and he spent a lot of time thinking over what it might mean. He couldn’t rid his mind of the figure of Sotades’s sister — even trying to summon up the small, swarthy girl whom he would once have gladly purchased in Judaea. He then hurried quickly to one of the baths so that his body at least might be relieved. He fantasized that one day he would come into a fortune and ask for the girl’s hand in marriage; that would make Sotades and his family sit up. The girl would decide unexpectedly to convert to Judaism for his sake, and the service would be held in the Basilica. Uri laughed at himself, and especially the question of why he could not just turn around and become Greek. Maybe just because it wasn’t customary. Greek women, even Greek men, would marry into rich Jewish families, but it rarely happened the other way around.

Only a few days were left until the return to teaching when Hedylos, one of their classmates, rented out the biggest restaurant on the market square, the Elephant.

The market square was known to one and all as the Agora, although officially it was called the Forum Augusti, and was located on the boundary between Beta and Gamma districts. The Elephant was celebrated for the fact that the uneven, rutted ground of its garden, with walls on three sides, was filled with rickety benches and shaky tables; the tableware was junk, the knives and spoons crooked and blunt, but in the basement they brewed the best beer in Alexandria. The penetrating odor of barley and hops had pervaded the deepest recesses of the market square. On the side where a fourth wall would stand, a canal lapped past the Elephant, somewhere to puke or piss. It was an infernal place, and as it happened extremely fashionable in the circles of the wealthy: to rent — for twenty-some students and one and a half-dozen teachers — for a whole evening a place which normally catered to least five hundred people must have cost a small fortune. Hedylos was not outstanding in his studies, and his family was not known to be especially wealthy, so Uri did not quite understand how his fellow student had so much money to play with.

“He became a Persian,” Sotades said disparagingly, though he went to the banquet at the Elephant all the same.”

He explained that in Alexandria a person “became Persian” by borrowing money with a letter of credit in which a clause was inserted to say that he had become a Persian subject. A creditor could not recover loan capital, or the interest on it, from an Alexandrian citizen, especially not if the debtor withdrew to some sanctuary or other (which might even be a Jewish house of prayer), because the right of asylum applied to any shrine and any fugitive. Not in the case of a “Persian,” however. A “Persian” debtor would seek sanctuary in vain: he would be handed over. No genuine Persian citizen had lived in Alexandria for centuries; they had all assimilated and become Greeks, but it had never been forgotten that in days of old Persia had attacked Egypt, demolishing and desecrating their shrines. Thus, anyone who endorsed a letter of credit by saying that he had become a Persian was exposed to having the loan recovered at any time and by any means — a customary law that was observed by all Alexandrians, including the judiciary, though it was not set down in writing anywhere.