György Spiró - Captivity

Uri turned furiously on him:

“But it’s all right if he takes me to be a spy for Agrippa?”

“Agrippa is just a tool, a fantasy,” jeered Tija, “whereas the Greeks are real-life threats!”

The initiation ceremony was held a good nine months after Uri’s birthday, largely because he had completely forgotten about it. He had supposed that people only observed anniversaries when things were going badly, and since Jews were accustomed to things going badly, they were insistent in sticking to them. On this occasion he wrote a letter to his father and dispatched it to Rome with a courier of Philo’s, who wanted to send several books as a solace to Silanus, the father-in-law of Caligula, in memory of Julia Claudilla (Silanus’s daughter and Caligula’s wife), who had died during childbirth, along with the baby. Silanus confirmed the receipt of the books, and it was hoped that he had forwarded Uri’s letter to Joseph.

On March 16 of the year of Emperor Tiberius’s death, the delegation took the sacrificial money to Jerusalem, along with those first two drachmas from Uri. He had earned the money from copying work, and he was proud to have become a member of the mighty community of Jewish males that encompassed half the world. Two years had passed — two years — since he himself had taken the modest holy money of Rome’s Jews to Jerusalem. How much he had longed then to meet with the delegates from Alexandria in Caesarea, and how much it had hurt him to find out that his fellow delegates had excluded him.

Now it was the Alexandrian delegation going to Jerusalem, and like every year they carried not just money but also copies of the records of births, marriages, and deaths so that they might be deposited in the safest place. Uri saw them now not so much as powerful men, but as the uninspiring appointees of the hustling, bustling, self-important craft guilds, the Kahals, who had no influence whatsoever. Andron was not a craftsman, of course, but a merchant, and he ran the Jewish archive in Alexandria, but the huge pile of money that was carried by the Alexandrian delegation now seemed like next to nothing in Uri’s eyes, accustomed now to the fact that in the alabarch’s company one heard talk of talents, not denarii and drachmas.

It occurred to him that he now looked down his nose at those delegates.

Nonetheless, the winter months while Agrippa was in jail had served as a valuable lesson: as the alabarch’s esteem declined in Jewish circles, so too did his own in the alabarch’s family. Tija made his barbed comment while Agrippa was still in captivity. They can’t wait to get rid of me, had been the galling thought on Uri’s mind at the time: my fate is tied to that of Agrippa, the “tool.” If he falls, so do I. That was a big lesson: fortune is a fickle beast, one misunderstanding is replaced by another, and I would have to go back to Rome if they kicked me out of here.

It is not a healthy development to look down at those delegates.

He had a hunch that his feasting in Alexandria was not going to last much longer, so he tried to enjoy it while he could.

In the Gymnasium there was no hint of tension, or of Lampo’s jockeying for Isidoros’s post: the teachers taught, fulminating over and over again about whatever was bugging them, with the students soaking up whatever they needed to. Uri preferred the four and a half days that he spent at the Gymnasium to the weekends at the alabarch’s palace. He finished the year in early June with distinction. Some of the examinations, such as those in rhetoric and mathematics, were held in public. Uri excelled in rhetoric, while in mathematics, he was lucky, drew theorems he was to tackle, and was able to hold his own. He regretted only that no one from the alabarch’s family was present, not even Tija, who had something else on that day.

The performance of the Greek students were celebrated by their families and friends on the grounds of the Gymnasium. Uri sat through all of Apollonos Gamma’s exams and was amazed: Gamma reeled off a magnificent oration and even proved capable of turning the geometry of sectors into tropes of rhetorical brilliance. That amazement was shared by Apollonos Gamma’s parents and siblings, who had made the trip from Memphis for the occasion. They were simple folk, and they barely understood a word of what their son and brother was saying. They invited Uri to visit them that summer in Memphis: they would show him the pyramids and promised as well to show him the statue of Cornelius Gallus, a Roman poet, orator, and politician who was made prefect of Egypt and had erected a large number of similar statues all around Egypt, all of which had since been demolished except this one. He had even had his glorious achievements inscribed on one of the pyramids; those inscriptions had not been obliterated as yet. He was informed on by his friend Largus, after which Augustus banished him from the empire and the Senate stripped him of his fortune, so in his grief Gallus took his own life. Anyway, it was a statue of this Gallus which was still standing in Memphis.

Uri thanked them kindly for the invitation. He was very sorry that Apollonos Gamma, or Apollos as his parents called him, was not going to be in Alexandria that summer because Uri knew that he would certainly not be able to get to Memphis.

As Uri watched Sotades’s exam, crossing his fingers all the while, Isidoros sat down on the grass beside him. Uri respectfully shifted farther away.

“There’s no need,” said Isidoros.

“But sir!”

Isidoros sat there with his head bowed, cold sweat streaming off him, and said nothing. Uri was unable to pay attention to the answer Sotades was giving.

“The whole thing is cursed,” Isidoros finally said.

Uri shuddered.

“Weep for me, my boy, when I’m dead and gone,” Isidoros said, clambering to his feet and leaving.

Uri sat numb. He looked for the departing figure of the gymnasiarch but all he could see among the crowd were uncertain outlines. It came to him that he had no idea if Isidoros had a family: he had seen him purely as an intellectual being, albeit his being a man.

The examinations were still in progress when people were again plunged into mourning. Emperor Caligula had fallen ill. Exams were suspended, public baths were closed, a ban was placed on all assemblies, in Greek shrines and Jewish houses of prayer everyone asked or pleaded with their own god or gods for the emperor’s recovery; the Serapeion was inundated by worshiping Greeks. Uri went in as usual to work, but the book editors advised him unenthusiastically: maybe in the autumn.

It was a change that Uri could only deeply regret because he was finally making inroads with some of the editors. Among these outwardly gray and dreary figures were some of considerable learning, with whom it was possible to become engrossed in profound discussions connected with the particular problems of his copying work, and maybe they even got to like him. They never disturbed one another as they calmly fiddled around during the prolonged copying sessions. He was fond of the quiet, dry, cool ground floor; the tall windows gave no view outside, the external world existed only in a kind of constant dream. It was a peaceful nook where he worked for money, that is true, but he was also free to vanish into it and daydream at his leisure. Time and peace were necessary to acquire new knowledge through rewriting the knowledge of the ancients, through the spirit that resided in those old texts, delighted to be awoken. Uri would ponder, while he was copying, what kinds of previously unread, unimaginable ideas might form in his brain that day, and that pleased him. The thoughts were like the tiny fish that had scudding around him as he’d waded into the sea up to his knees when they had arrived at Sicily. He did not always manage to catch them; most slipped out of his grasp and vanished without a trace. But sometimes in the morning, when he was half-awake, they would swim back past, and he would make a mental note of them. He found that more fish swam back while he was reading historical works than while he was copying mathematical books, and occasionally, as he mused briefly in his resting place, he had visions that brought together the present age and events long past. Once or twice he saw Alexandria, the whole of it spread out before him, along with its known past and its possible futures, and he would even scare himself, conjuring up an empty desert on the ground where Alexandria had once stood. It must be that Alexandria has not accepted me after all, Uri pondered, and I am seeking my revenge.