György Spiró - Captivity

“Tryphon’s son is going to make a mark,” Apollos said. “He was leading the protest against the alabarch.”

“Demetrius?” asked Uri. “How do you mean?”

“He was shouting loudly,” said Apollos. “He must want something badly.”

The corpses were exhumed from the temporary burial ground and were reinterred with much fuss in the eastern cemetery outside the city wall, with the alabarch in attendance, along with his family, and leading the prayers.

God, for His part, again reminded Jews and Greeks alike that the Jews were His chosen people and of His love for them as well as the validity of their Covenant, because that very day, in the middle of October, as a bound Flaccus was taken on board a ship which was setting off for Rome, the winter winds were unleashed, earlier than ever before, which even the Greeks took to be a heavenly portent.

Uri was also standing in the crowd and watched the erstwhile prefect as he was shoved up the gangplank. Flaccus lurched along like a crushed man, his gaze fixed as if he were no longer among the living. His belongings were taken on board after him in twenty-six large crates, crammed with precious, beautiful gemstones, busts and furniture, according to people who were reliably informed. That will all go to the emperor, wise heads surmised; none of it will be given to Rome. At the head of a squad standing on the shore, looking very bored, was a squat figure of unprepossessing external appearance: that’s Bassus, said some, the one who saved the Jews. Uri screwed his eyes up to get a better look: Bassus was balding and looked scruffy. The lanky guy on the horse — that’s Castus, Flaccus’s favorite centurion, the one who led the detachments that took over the guard of the Sector. He’s one of those covered by the amnesty, the shit.

By the middle of October Uri had recuperated sufficiently to go back to the Gymnasium.

His teeth were wobbly but were gradually filling the space left by the two incisors which had fallen out, and his gums had stopped bleeding; his stomach no longer troubled him, having righted itself during the period of starvation.

Abdaraxus received him ruefully. Sadly, Uri had missed a lot of the lessons while he was ill and he was hardly going to be able to make up for it in the current academic year; he was advised that it would be best just to take off the remainder of the year and restart his studies in Germanicus. The gymnasiarch wished him good luck. Uri nodded.

He waited outside the classroom for the mathematics master, Demetrius. The students recoiled at the sight of Uri, who greeted them amiably; then they walked off as quickly as they could.

“I found a solution, sir, to the sum of the angles of a spherical triangle!”

Demetrius paled and whispered:

“Oh, dear!”

“Only I lost track,” said Uri. “I had no writing implements in the Sector, so I was unable to get it down in writing and forgot it, and now I can’t recall it.”

Relieved, Demetrius groaned out again:

“Oh, dear!”

“I was eating smoked fish at the time, and ate smoked fish again yesterday in the hope that it would come back to me, but it didn’t. But I’m sure now that there is a proof,” Uri said as he departed.

He waited for Apollos and they wound their way up to the top of the Paneion.

“God sees, provided He is looking,” Apollos declared. “If He’s not looking, He pays no attention to the sacrificial offerings. The incineration of animals and produce at the Temple in Jerusalem should be given up. Judaism should be given up.”

Uri rocked pensively on his heels.

“Why do we imagine that we are the only chosen people?” Apollos posed the question. “Our forebears misunderstood something: Moses misheard what the Lord said to him. The Ten Commandments are valid, but nothing apart from that. I am certain that the Lord said that mankind as such was his chosen people, not one people or another; it’s wrong that we misappropriated that status for ourselves two thousand years ago. That is why we are so despised, not on account of our monotheism, because others have that kind of thing. We ought to stand out in front of all the heathens and at last announce collectively and ceremoniously that the past two thousand years were a mistake on our part. A dead-end street. Blowing something out of all proportion; a juvenile jape of a scattered slave people. Stuff and nonsense. We are nowadays no longer so small in numbers as we were then, when the Lord sent us a message to keep us going: there are as many of us as there are Latini. We ought to give up this obsolete superstition.”

Uri was still rocking back and forth on his heels.

“I’m going back to Rome,” he came out with it. “I’ve had enough of this.”

Apollos bit his lips.

“I’ll miss you,” he said eventually. “Who am I going to fool around with now?”

“There’ll be no more fooling around,” Uri averred. “A period of frightful gravity is coming, cheerless, humorless, humdrum… Wars of religions, not empires…”

“Those will come to Rome as well,” said Apollos.

“I don’t think so,” said Uri. “The Jewish population there is tiny, it’s neither here nor there, it’s left to its own devices; the place is swarming with many other, more important peoples. Here, on the other hand, horrors are on the way. Alexandria is a model: it will become fashionable wherever a significant Jewish minority is living, be it in Africa or Asia, anywhere, it is going to be expedited in just the same way. Not so sloppily, slackly, idiotically: for one thing, a Sector will be made with rock-solid walls, properly planned, built for the purpose, not in the hasty, hare-brained way it was here, and only when it’s ready will they cram in the Jews. And they will not be released.”

“I’m saying the same,” Apollos snorted huffily. “Exactly that! If Jews renounce the precept of their being a chosen people, holding on to everything else, then there’ll be no reason to massacre them!”

“That won’t happen,” said Uri. “Every blow will only strengthen the belief in their being chosen. A father only thrashes his own son; he doesn’t thrash another man’s son. My own father turned his back on me when it became clear that my eyesight was bad; he wasn’t aggrieved by poor eyesight in another man’s son.”

“Then an agreement needs to be reached with the Greeks that they too belong to the chosen people!”

“They do without it,”

“But they don’t!” Apollos cried out. “They can’t stand it either! Any one of them who has any soul can’t stand it! That was how I managed to survive! Are you suggesting that I should show no gratitude? I was given shelter, food, and drink, yet before that I hadn’t even been on particularly good terms with Pamphilus, and they never tired of apologizing, with pangs of conscience begging me — me! the one who they had given shelter to — to pardon them for all the crimes that they had not themselves committed! Shouldn’t I, the Jew, accept them as chosen people? Why not? Who forbids it?”

They were the only two who were shivering in the cold at the top of the Paneion. There were no tourists to bother them since Bassus had closed the harbor to tourist traffic, and neither Greek nor Jewish delegations were permitted to set off for Rome.

Philo acquired a new favorite, a young man by the name of Delphinus. He was introduced by Hippolytus, the young astronomer, who had since turned into a successful astrologer. Delphinus was a sleepy-looking, blue-eyed, girlish young man of about fourteen, all the rest of whose family had been butchered, with the boy only escaping because he had run out to the island of Pharos and had weathered the events in the cellars of the abandoned Jewish observatory among the centuries-old astronomical records; the records had been eaten up by mice, he, like a cat, ate the mice. The boy as a whole had a cat-like look about him, and displayed a certain artlessness in the immature sensuality with which he disported himself in front of the senile Philo.