György Spiró - Captivity

Tears welled in Uri’s eyes.

His father’s request that nothing other than a menorah be placed on his gravestone had been to no avail.

His plate may have been cheap, but it was fanciful all the same.

My idiot mother!

Here at last was someone he could hate. He gnashed his teeth, but they wobbled, loosening even further, so he quit.

His limbs were clutched by a cold numbness and he stood motionless, sobbing with despair, and only left once the torch started to flicker.

He trudged back toward the junction, and turned right to reach the gate, where he handed in the torch before going out into the open air.

He realized that he had not even looked for his little sister’s resting place above his father’s, hadn’t even checked to see if her name had been engraved. He deliberated for a while as to whether he should go back, but decided that he was not prepared to pay the caretaker a second time, and kept on walking toward a nearby stretch of the city wall.

A lot of new houses had been built in the neighborhood, near the Appian Way, and before long they would engulf the catacomb itself. The Appian Way was busy, the price of land was bound to go up and the city limits extended. Why wouldn’t the entrance to the catacomb be buried and its subterranean passages filled in to allow big houses to be built over them? Jews wouldn’t be living here; for them the place would be unclean, forbidden ground, but heathens had no understanding of these matters and would be quite happy to live their lives above the dead until their turn came to depart.

Tears were rolling down his cheeks; he found himself able to cry at last.

It would be nice to believe that all the dead would be resurrected at some point, thanks to the goodwill of the Eternal One. Perhaps — as the peasants in Judaea thought and even the Sadducees of Rome proclaimed — He will hold a Last Judgment when He sees the time is right, with all the dead recalled to life as they were when they was at their finest, completely intact. The dead, brushing off their funeral dress and with it their boniness, their dustiness, their fleshlessness, starting at the resounding strong voices of the shofar and the Anointed, would arise and look around in amazement, happily addressing one another in the resplendent light and benign sweet-scentedness of eternal life. How nice it would be to believe in all that; for then he would be able to tell to his father all that he needed to hear, and Joseph would be amazed and would even praise him, finally glad that his blind-as-a-bat son had successfully managed to grow up into a man.

That notwithstanding, Uri suspected that in the future he would sometimes talk to his father, and within himself might even hear the answers; he would not be able to face what had happened otherwise, because any resurrection was unforeseeably remote, and the state of death was frighteningly protracted.

It turned out that he already had a bride lined up.

A Roman man had to wed if he had no wish to pay the unmarried man’s tax, and that made no sense at all. Nor could he inherit if he remained unmarried.

Sarah eagerly listed her virtues: the girl was from a good family, not merchants it was true, just artisans, her father being a carpenter; she was what you might call sweet; she was over fourteen, her two older sisters were already married, and her younger sisters were still children. There was a firstborn son who was a carpenter like his father, and the second son worked as a docker.

Uri asked if the marriage had been arranged while his father was still alive. For a long time Sarah said nothing. Your father would be very pleased if he knew, she finally answered, after much evasion. It sounded like it was Sarah who had chosen Uri’s intended. It was a great honor, she never tired of saying, because Uri’s prospective father-in-law earned good money. Very good! “We shall not be left wanting!” she cackled, and persisted in castigating the Jews for not having granted them tzedakah after Joseph died on the grounds that they were able to make use of Uri’s tessera to get their monthly rations: “They have nothing to do with it. It’s a Roman provision, not a Jewish one!” The carpenter’s family lived in a nice house; he had given a decent dowry for the first two girls, and he was very busy with his hands, the prospective father-in-law. She could not, on the spot, off the top of her head, recall the name of Uri’s intended. “But she must be called something,” she said, before passing gloomily on to other matters: a significant debt had been left after Joseph died. It was impossible to know quite how big, and the bankers had suspended collection, counting on Uri’s return. “How on earth would we have paid — out of what?” Now that Uri had finally made an appearance, the debt would most certainly have to be repaid. That was why they had not taken the house away yet; much noise had been made about that, and several of the old houses in the neighborhood had been demolished to make way for new tenements, the foundations had already been dug. “Your father was casual with his money, son,” Sarah said. “I can’t for the life of me see why he was continually running up debts!” Uri knew but kept quiet about it. “You can’t be as casual about things, because from now on you’re the man of the house.”

“What is the monthly installment to pay off the debt?” Uri queried.

Sarah did not know, but anyway it was irrelevant because she’d had no need to pay it; there was no way for the bankers to recover the sum from her. “But we should have been given the tzedakah! Scum, they are! What scum! You never see such scum anywhere except among Jews!”

Uri asked about how his young sister had died. Sarah told him that she had coughed a lot, always coughing, and finally she had choked, gasping for air. A lot of children in the community suffered from spells of breathlessness, a lot of them died too, growing numbers of them; that must be what God wanted, they were better off close to Him. “She may be an angel by now!” Sarah exclaimed, leaving Uri wondering what training his little sister would have to go through to become an angel in the other world.

Sarah was all for taking Uri straightaway to introduce him to his future in-laws, but Uri dug in his heels: he had business with the elders, he wanted to see to that first of all. Sarah started arguing that marriage was more important, to which Uri responded mildly: “I’m the man of the house, so you’d do better to shut up.” Sarah fell into a stupefied silence, then began sobbing hysterically that she had not deserved this, she had always made sacrifices, she had never spared herself, and so on. Finally Uri escaped to the yard, and once he’d settled down he said in a low voice, too low for his mother to hear even if she tried, “I’m not your husband.”

He had difficulty tracking Severus down, but finally he succeeded in identifying a senator Severus, who also bore the name Solomon and was able to hand the alabarch’s letter over to him.

“Did you read it?” Severus asked.

“No, I didn’t,” said Uri.

Severus was a plump, wheezy man; he had started out as a weaver and turned himself into a merchant.

“Your father was a smart man,” said Severus. “You’ve got him to thank him for making your fortune.”

Uri was of a different opinion about that, but he just nodded politely.

Severus asked about the Bane in Alexandria; there had been horrific reports about it in Far Side. What was the truth of it?

“All of it,” Uri replied. “And much more besides.”

Severus gave him a cold look, having no sense of humor.

“A large number of Jews were killed, tortured, mutilated, beaten, burgled, robbed, humiliated, raped,” stuttered Uri, to satisfy the curiosity of the worthy members of Rome’s Gerousia as speedily as possible.