György Spiró - Captivity

Uri did not interrupt him to mention that an individual by the name of Moses had done just that some time ago.

Well, anyway, the emperor and his entire retinue had remained on the bridge for the whole night, with illumination being provided from the hills that ringed that semicircle of the bay (which if you care to look is like the waning moon), so it was almost as light as day; there was much merrymaking on the skiffs, the emperor also reveling in the bridge, though sad to say not at this inn because a drinking place in the form of a victory arch was built for him in the middle of the bridge, he’d done his celebrating there, he’d even delivered a speech from its roof, with people holding onto him so he didn’t get dizzy and fall over. He supposedly mocked Darius I and Xerxes, boasting that he had conquered greater seas than they had; the story goes that the emperor had many of his friends tossed into the sea, though he, the innkeeper could not confirm this because he had been serving guests — there was such a crush at the time, huge it was! There were many who drank in flower-bedecked clothes, and there’s no question that Neptune was scared stiff, because the sea was flat as a pancake, and no one drowned in it.

Uri nodded an acknowledgment.

Well, the emperor and his retinue went away, and the bridge stayed up for a while, and lots of people came to see it, so from the business point of view those were boom times: three thousand paces over to the other side, and the same back! (That doesn’t come to twenty-six stadia, Uri thought to himself, because that would come to about twenty-two thousand paces.) The reason the bridge was built was because Thrasyllus, the divine Emperor Tiberius’s soothsayer, once said that Gaius had about as much chance of assuming power as he did of riding a horse across the Gulf of Baiae. Well, he had become emperor, and he’d ridden a horse across the water, the innkeeper bragged, and he even admitted, after Uri had ordered wine and paid for it, that although the marble relief was placed at the Puteoli end of the bridge, he’d had it moved here so that no harm should come to it; this was a good spot, because all the other innkeepers had picked up and moved on.

The emperor must be a real head case, Uri concluded, and he was glad that he would never have to see him, just as he had never seen Tiberius.

In Ostia, he was tempted to spend a day and have a look at Matthew’s four columns, which most probably were buried in the ground somewhere south of the harbor, or perhaps the synagogue was already under construction and the columns were already standing, but then he gave the idea up; it was more important to see his father as soon as he could. He came across a vessel that was sailing right away, but it was carrying a cargo of blocks of desiccated balsam resin. Not a good portent, Uri thought, but then he shrugged his shoulders and booked passage, taking the boat along the Tiber up to Rome. He stood in the prow so that the breeze would spare him the overpowering aroma of balsam. His eyes were narrowed to slits, and he drew the shabby cloak tightly around him as the weather was cool; he had gotten quite unused to cold over the three years he had been away. When the hills of Rome came into sight, he felt an unexpected sensation of joy and triumph.

It was not Alexandria he had to conquer, but Rome.

He did not know how he was going to do that, or for what purpose, but he sensed that he, an experienced, fully grown man, would be able to accomplish anything; the whole of life stood before him, and why should that not be marvelous? His heart beat under his ribs as never before.

The vessel moored at the neglected, moldering docks of Far Side. Uri was delighted that he would soon be home.

It was into the afternoon by then, and on the shore a familiar stench rose from the big leather depots: as a child he had told his father he wanted to work with skins because there were a lot of Jews in that trade, but Joseph had protested that it was a lowly occupation, because the smell was so unpleasant, and besides that tanning ruined the hands. Uri was amazed to be walking on a street he knew, among houses he knew. Nothing had changed. Clearly, people here had experienced nothing new since he had left; perhaps they had not even noticed that two years and ten months had gone by. Yet so much had happened! For example, Alexandria had gone to ruin, and with it whatever had been grand and fine and proud in man — but then again, there were not many Alexandrians who were aware of that; certainly, nobody in Rome had noticed.

He paused before Far Side’s inner gate. The neighborhood was so unchanged that what he had lived through during his travels seemed, all at once, improbable, the lengthy, disturbing, all-too-colorful dreams of a single night. He fingered his chin; the prickly touch of the hard bristles of his thick, reddish beard was reassuring. A person doesn’t grow a beard overnight.

He tiptoed carefully through the puddles of the inner yard; in front of the houses women were washing in tubs and cooking on open fires, children racing around, filthy, barefooted, and screaming, staring in fright at the newcomer. Reaching his childhood home, Uri halted. Something had happened; the house was ramshackle, and did not use to be in such a dilapidated state. Never mind; he had enough money to repair it. He took a deep breath, pushed aside the carpet hanging over the doorway, and stepped in.

He was struck by the heavy, musty smell and the gloom. There was just one lamp burning indoors, smoking as ever.

A sturdy woman with a shawl over her head was standing with her back to the door, leaning over a tub, while on her right, in his old niche, someone was lying on the floor. The woman turned around and looked at him.

My God! What a hideous woman my mother is!

“I’m back!” said Uri.

The woman stood, scratched her arms, eaten up by contact with lye, while the eldest of his two sisters got sleepily to her feet in the niche.

“Where’s Father?” Uri asked.

The woman wrung her hands; the sister clung to him, pressing to him, slobbering over him, sniveling.

“Son,” Sarah declared solemnly and severely. “Your father and little sister were taken away by the Lord.”

She must have practiced that a lot.

He went to the cemetery on his own. It was raining, there was a cold wind blowing; his shoulders and knees were aching. His mother continued on doing laundry, while his sister did the shopping using Uri’s tessera, as she had done for the past two and a half years since their father’s death.

Uri stopped at the entrance to the catacomb scooped out of the limestone hillside, just where he had stood with his father all those many years ago, when it had still be hoped that Uri would step into Fortunatus’s post at the house of prayer. But Fortunatus’s son had become the new grammateus, and since then he too had died. What had the boy been called? Gaudentius! His life had not exactly been blessed with too much joyfulness either.

Uri straightened up and tried to hold back his tears. Then he proceeded down the stairs and entered through the gate. The caretaker’s mudbrick cabin lay on the right, lamps alight in it; there were no candles burning in the silver menorah, this not being a feast day. Woken up from his sleep, the guard searched through the sheets of parchment for a long time. Uri helped him out with six asses. Finally the guard located the crypt, unrolling the plan of the catacomb and showing Uri where he had to go. For another four coins he lit a thin torch and thrust it into Uri’s hand before settling back on his ledge.

The subterranean passages were wide enough for two or three people to pass. Uri walked straight ahead, then at the fourth junction turned left and continued along the passage. When he guessed he should be close, he brought the torch closer to the walls on his left and right to study the inscriptions on the plates of the rows of burial niches hollowed into them. The air was chilly, but he barely felt it; it was colder outside. He pottered around for a while, looking at marble plates, stone plates, terracotta plates — the material chosen depended on the wealth of the relatives of the deceased — until, finally, on a half-size terracotta plate (the other half of the burial niche still yawned emptily) he spotted his father’s name: Ioses Lucius, lived 41 years, three months, and two days. The engraver had scratched the angular, uneven Greek capital letters into the clay while it was still damp; it had so thoroughly dried out that there was barely a gap between the two names. Under the name he could make out the symbols for a menorah, shofar, etrog, and lulav, drawn in the same perfunctory, slapdash fashion.