György Spiró - Captivity

Severus shook his head.

“That sort of thing could never occur in Rome!” he asserted. “The Jews of Alexandria must have upset the Greeks somehow.”

Uri was unsure how to respond to that, so by way of encouragement noted.

“It’s all the better for us; Rome has thereby gained in importance.”

Severus wrinkled his brow and pondered. Lord! What on Earth can the alabarch and his lot want from this dolt? This is Solomon! Uri thought.

Severus broke the seal on the letter, unrolled it in leisurely fashion, read it, and mused. Uri just stood.

“So, when are they coming?” Severus asked.

“I have no idea,” answered Uri. It seemed somebody was coming to Rome from Alexandria.

“But one can’t just do that at a moment’s notice!” Severus exclaimed. “Quarters have to be organized to put them up! It’s not as simple as that!”

Uri was on the point of leaving and had even bid farewell, but then Severus asked him where he had gotten through the hard times.

“In the Sector,” Uri replied.

“What’s that?”

Uri sighed deeply.

“It’s a bit like Far Side over here,” he answered.

“Then you had luck on your side,” Severus declared. “It’s better to spend hard times among our kind. Jews always help one another; that is why the Eternal One helps us.”

Uri nodded fervently and departed.

At first, Joseph (and, after his death, Sarah) had made do by living off Uri’s tessera; that may have been illegal, but it had been overlooked by the municipal administration. Uri suspected that any time the question was raised at the food distribution center as to why the owner of the tessera did not come in person, Sarah would go into hysterics about how he was sick or she was taking care of his business, or would dream up some other excuse, and the officials would simply give up just to get rid of her.

Sarah never tired of weeping and imploring, saying over and over again that he should pay a visit to his bride-to-be, because word would get around soon enough that Uri was back, then they would be offended and call off the marriage. “People like us can’t dream of making a better match!”

But Uri first wanted to get a clear idea of where he stood on the matter of the debt.

Three bankers saw him and told him that after his regrettably premature death the repayment of Joseph’s loan, out of compassion and respect for the womenfolk he had left behind, had been benevolently suspended until now, but now that his legal heir had returned, they would be compelled to ask him to restart the monthly payments immediately.

That was how Uri got to know, from the bankers rather than his mother, that his father had died four months after Uri had set off from Rome. Now where was I then? I was in Beth Zechariah by then; it must have been around Shavuot. How was it that I felt nothing?

Maybe my Father died because he thought I was no longer alive.

He was jerked back into the present: the numbers were laid out.

His father’s debt, at twenty percent interest, came to 240,000 sesterces, which, spread over twelve years, meant 20,000 per year, or 1,666 and two-thirds per month. Of that, Joseph had paid back 6,666 and one-third sesterces, so the remaining debt stood at 233,333 and two-thirds sesterces, with the installments amounting, in round numbers, to 1,620 per month.

Uri breathed a sigh of relief: he made a quick mental calculation of how much it would be at compound interest, as would have been the case had he borrowed from Alexandrian bankers. He came up with an astronomical amount: for a debt maturing in twelve years’ time he’d owe 1,780,000 sesterces or, calculating backward, 12,361 sesterces per month. No Roman citizen, even if he were rolling in cash, could afford that.

Thanks be to the Eternal One! These people were, as yet, blissfully ignorant of compound interest.

But he grew despondent nevertheless.

Perhaps it would be better not to get married after all, he speculated, because then he could not legally inherit, which meant the debt could not be inherited either. But then they would take the house away, leaving Sarah and Hermia homeless.

He had been given 450 drachmas by the alabarch, equivalent to 180,000 sesterces — very generous of the cowardly worm, it was — and of that he had spent only 150 sesterces on the journey. One could hardly say he had spent lavishly. But even if he handed over 1,250 sesterces a month he wouldn’t be able to cover the monthly repayment on the loan, let alone be left with anything to live on — and who in Far Side earned as much as a legionnaire? Very few, only the wealthiest. The claim was unrealistic, even if the sum his father had managed to pay back over four months had, by some miraculous honesty, been deducted from the total.

Uri sat in front of his judges, the bankers, and felt numb.

He could not have been the first wretch who had sat like this before them, because, after a brief pause, one of them, Julius, spoke up:

“Given that you are just now commencing your independent life, and given that you personally did not incur the debts — although, as we know, you were Joseph’s sole beneficiary — we are willing to extend a fresh loan to you, though of course only on condition that you accept the assistance.”

Uri understood very well: if he accepted, then he would be in debt to the end of his days. But then again, he was trapped for the rest of his life anyway if he didn’t accept it…

It went through his mind that his mother and sister were none of his business; they should be left to their own fates.

But they were his father’s business.

From now on they were entrusted to him on that account.

“If you don’t accept,” Julius continued dispassionately, yet cordially, “your house will be expropriated in lieu of the debt, and you will become homeless. A five-story tenement will be built on the site, and it is solely out of respect for your father’s merits and your own prospective future earnings that we did not expropriate it before. In the event that you decide to leave your family to their own devices, we shall have you excluded from Rome’s Jewish community and sell you into slavery. If you flee, a wanted poster will go out to the whole of Italia. We held to a firm belief that the favorite of the Jews of Alexandria, who acted as courier for King Agrippa, would return one day to Rome and pay off his father’s debt. You’ve come back; now pay! If you are unable to pay, then take out a loan. You have talents, you have experience, and you can make use of your father’s contacts… You have contacts of your own in Alexandria… You were a royal courier… You have capital and acquaintances; at the very worst you have not estimated how much all that is worth. Count it up, deliberate, and give us an answer.”

Uri responded instantly:

“How much will you lend me?”

The bankers became friendlier and brought out previously prepared contract for a loan. Fine wine was poured, and Uri signed the contract without hesitation. That accomplished, Uri would, until the end of the year, only have to pay about half the monthly amount he had previously calculated, and the full amount only from January of next year onward, which, with the payments on the new loan tacked on, would come out to around two thousand sesterces per month.

It mattered not, as long as something came up by then.

Purely to tweak the bankers’ noses, after the contract had been signed and completed, Uri asked:

“Why is there no prosbul in it?”

“We never enter into seven-year contracts, my dear boy,” Julius chuckled. “Our planning is long-range. There was no prosbul in the contract we made with your father either.”

A prosbul had at one time been employed in Judea, but even there it no longer existed. Under one of the injunctions of Moses, all debts were null and void when they entered a Sabbatical year, but if a prosbul were attached to the debt bill, under the more recent unwritten law, the formula meant there was no such limitation in the seventh year.