György Spiró - Captivity

Two fellow students at the Gymnasium appeared beside him, trying to wipe the grins off their faces. Uri did not know what to do, and was so confused that he forgot to greet them, but then they were carried farther along with the procession, so there was no need. Uri was by now trying to drop out of the crowd but was being jostled from all sides. I ought to get to the side of the street, he thought.

He was finally able to extricate himself once they passed under the arcades: the crowd flocked eastward, toward Delta, packing the entire hundred-foot width of the main thoroughfare. Warehousemen clutching cudgels and lugging stone blocks clattered by: the rocks must have come from some building site. This was no longer a joking matter. The Jews living in Delta ought to be alerted, but how?

Uri scurried after the procession, keeping close to the wall. At a crossroad, on the bridge arching above the canal, four or five men had broken from the crowd and were beating up a bearded man.

“I’m not Jewish!” the man was screaming.

They tugged up his tunic and tore off his loincloth.

“See! I’m not Jewish!”

In their disappointment, they set to him with their cudgels anyway, giving him such a sound drubbing that the man was laid out flat, blood streaming from his head. Uri ran off to the right down a street that ran southward by the canal, right into some Greeks who were arriving to join in the fun. They spotted him and slowed down menacingly.

“Carabbas is king!” Uri shouted toward them, and continued running south.

At the next corner he stopped. He was not being followed. He turned left and crossed over the canal to make his way back northward, together with the crowd of Greeks who were heading for Arsinoë Avenue.

The chariot was nowhere to be seen. There were some Jews living in Gamma as well; a carpet shop was on fire, a jeweler’s was in the process of being robbed, with boxes flying out of it, ragamuffins scrabbled about, scrambling on all fours for the gemstones that were scattered over the ground. Not one soldier or guard. Stone blocks were hurled at residences of Jews, a menorah was daubed in blue paint on the wall. One of the Greeks in that group, who wasn’t doing any painting personally, identified the houses in which Jews lived from a list on a sheet of papyrus he carried.

“The Jews are fighting back!” was heard as the crowd came to a standstill. There was much pushing and shoving as they were unable to proceed farther eastward, so part of the rabble split off and turned to head north toward the harbor.

Uri saw that it was pointless to stick with them, so he once again elbowed his way toward the south to try to disappear in the narrow alleys of Gamma.

Smaller knots of rowdies were breaking into locked Jewish shops with bulky beams of timber: the mourning decreed for Drusilla’s death was still being observed, so the owners were not to be found.

Uri turned west, intending to make his way back to the alabarch’s palace in Beta.

He saw a mob in one of the squares, visible through a cloud of smoke. There was much shouting, fists being shaken, leaping and whooping, both men and women. Uri squinted and edged closer. A huge bonfire of hastily gathered brushwood was smoking, and in the midst of it he could clearly see some writhing figures, their hands and feet tied. They were small.

“They’re not doing a very good job of suffocating, are they!” Uri heard from one side.

He stepped closer. Two women and three children, still alive, were choking in the smoke. Fresh branches were laid on the fire, there were no flames.

“Don’t do that!” burst from his lips.

“But they’re Jews!” he heard. “They were resisting!”

Someone grabbed him by an arm. Uri tore himself loose and raced off shrieking. He could hear footsteps taking up the pursuit, but they tailed off: over short distances Uri was a quick sprinter.

The alabarch’s palace was closed up. He pounded on the door was to no avail. He was watched from the other side of the street by some loitering Greeks. He pounded again. No answer. It was locked up tightly, or maybe everyone had made themselves scarce.

Uri turned around. Several of the Greeks slowly headed toward him. Uri raced off to the east but was not followed.

He had no money, nothing except the sandals, tunic, and loincloth he was wearing. August nights in Alexandria were warm, so it would be perfectly feasible to sleep out under the heavens — only where? Something else he bore was his tribal identification: his sexual organ. He should have left that at home!

Philo’s summer residence was a long way off. Anyway, it was far from certain that the guards at the city gates would allow him to leave the city.

I ought to get into the Serapeion, he thought. They know me there.

That was the trouble: they knew him.

He then realized that he had no idea what might be lurking in the mind of any Greek priest, editor, or copyist: they might offer him refuge, but it was just as possible that they would hand him over.

He made his way slowly to the southeast as if he were out taking a stroll. Day was breaking. The neighborhood was peaceful, just like in Alexandria’s old days.

He inspected the Serapeion from a distance. The main gate was open, with a couple of people entering, then more arriving either alone or in groups. They were Greeks going to offer prayers — to thank their god that they were able to batter Jews.

He spent the rest of the night in the old necropolis to the southwest of the Serapeion, outside the old city wall but inside the present one, where the graves slumbered among the well-trimmed gardens and villas of the rich. Fruit trees bowed over the garden fences above the paths, so that Uri was able to eat his fill and quench his thirst. He sucked at an orange and nibbled olives, then propped his back against a thick tree trunk to catch a nap in the seated position. He clutched a stick that he had found on the ground and stripped of its smaller branches. He tried to calm his racing heartbeat by slowly and rhythmically repeating: “I won’t die here! I won’t die here!”

He awoke with a start at dawn: a family of four were settling down near him behind a marble gravestone. It was the grave of a dog: the owner must have been very attached to it. The children were so scared they were unable to cry. Jews, no doubt, Uri supposed. He picked up a few oranges, clambered to his feet and went over to the family, offering them the fruit. The woman stared at him in terror, the man looked on warily.

“I’m Jewish too,” said Uri.

The children were trembling.

The woman was Jewish, her husband a Greek convert; they had their own house in the south of Gamma, but in the middle of the night it had been set alight by the rioters. They had managed to escape by the garden gate, the children still asleep when they had snatched them up.

“They knew who they were looking for,” said the man. “They set alight every single Jewish house, and there aren’t many in that neighborhood.”

“Sleep now,” the woman said to the children. They were still trembling.

“Where will you go next?” the man asked Uri.

“I don’t know.”

“They’ll come for us here,” said the man. “I had myself circumcised… Better that I hadn’t…”

It had to have been a deep passion. Uri mused that were he to find himself in such a position he would have to have his foreskin sewn back on. He laughed to himself.

“My son is also circumcised,” the man groaned.

By the morning another four families had moved to the cemetery — eleven children altogether, wailing, weeping, or mutely trembling. Two of the families had fled from Gamma, one from Delta (they had things to attend to at the harbor and were unable to get back home), one from Beta, where the rabble had also run riot and lit a huge bonfire, though that pyre had smoked rather than burned. On the way, they had seen a heap of charred corpses in the southeastern part of Alpha — probably a whole family. There were stray dogs sniffing around, to say nothing of cats, of course.