György Spiró - Captivity

In practice, then, the question had no meaning.

However, Uri was feeling impish.

“Might I see my father’s contract?”

Julius shook his head.

“It wasn’t a written contract that we made,” he said. “Word of mouth was enough. We knew your father: he was an honest man, may his memory be blessed.”

Uri calculated and recalculated.

He worked out the minimum sum the dowry needed to amount to for him to be able to pay back at least part of the monthly interest for a year or two.

It occurred to him that he ought not to have signed that quite obviously infeasible contract. What if they had tried to get his father to sign it and he had been unwilling? He had paid it back as long as he was able, and he had died doing so.

Uri was dismayed to realize that it had not been due to his absence that Joseph had died, but rather it was the burden of the debt, the sacrifice he had made for his son, that had killed him.

And I signed it! What a dope I have been yet again, my God!

Sarah would hear not a word about the deal that Uri had made. He did try, it has to be said, to get her to understand what it came down to, she protested that she had no interest in any such things, just a good match — a happy future for her firstborn son.

It did occur to Uri that maybe his mother knew more than she was letting on; maybe she knew everything, and only out of obdurate nastiness was she pretending that she understood nothing. In fact, it made no difference whether she understood. He had already decided that he was not going to leave his mother and sister to their own devices.

The carpenter and his family received them with great ceremony that evening, because Sarah, in line with custom, had sent a woman on ahead to act as marriage-broker. The prospective father-in-law’s married daughters were not present; they represented the property of their husbands’ families and had nothing more to do with their father’s family.

Uri gazed at his intended; she had been dolled up, her flat, broad features burning with blushes of shame, and she sat uncomfortably on the couch with her little sisters, who tried to suppress their giggling as they stared impudently, in a prying manner, at Uri. His intended, on the other hand, gazed steadfastly at the floor, a single act of rebellion against a fate she otherwise faced with total resignation.

Before long she will be as hideous as my mother, thought Uri. I’ll be saddling myself with two terrible mothers in one go.

Uri cut the courtesies short to ask how much, exactly, was the dowry.

Such frankness took the decent carpenter aback; he played for a bit more time by asking his wife, then hemmed and hawed a bit before stating a disgracefully low sum. Uri burst out laughing, then started to talk about the time he had spent as a cabinetmaker in Judaea. At that his prospective father-in-law perked up and, despite the mute disapproval of his wife, whose forehead was hidden behind a mop of thick hair, he began to ask in detail about aspects of the trade in Judaea, and Uri was able to supply plentiful expert information. The prospective father-in-law asked as to whether Uri was intending to carry on working as a cabinetmaker in Rome, and Uri declared that it was the last thing on his mind; he would be taking over his father’s commercial ventures, there was much more money to be made that way. That filled his prospective mother-in-law with boundless hostility, his prospective father-in-law with respect. The play-acting continued until Uri had haggled his way to the necessary dowry.

Sarah sat on a small chair all through the proceedings, her back straight, an occasional severe glance serving to keep a tight hold on her daughter, who was constantly on the verge of a giggling fit.

The wedding was set for mid-February, in two months’ time.

Even Uri himself was unsure what he was might hope to accomplish during this two-month respite.

It came to mind that he had a source of an income in mind; it was high time he paid a visit to Gaius Lucius, his patron. By then it was mid-December, however, and on the seventeenth the Saturnalia would bubble over. It was rumored that this year Emperor Caligula had most graciously added on an extra day, so that now the festival would last eight days in total. When a Saturnalia was in progress, the wisest patrons would flee the city, and it was more than likely that Gaius Lucius had already done just that; he could therefore only be expected in early January, after the similarly inebriated New Year festival, when every patrician was obliged to take a fresh oath of loyalty to the present emperor and to Augustus the Divine. (The story went that on the present emperor’s orders it was no longer necessary to take an oath to Tiberius but that it was now required to take one to his departed and deified sister, Drusilla.) Since he had returned home, Uri had never once crossed the bridge to the other bank, to Rome proper, and the magnificent processions and events of the Saturnalia were of no interest to him; he had seen enough of those. He sat in his nook, from which his sister, of her own accord and without a word of protest, had moved out, and alternately alert and half asleep he mulled over the problem of how he might be able to provide for his family.

He searched for any documents of his father’s relating to the conduct of his business affairs but found nothing. Sarah told him, with surprising respect, “Your father kept it all in his head.” Uri could remember that his father had sometimes entered into a ledger his revenues and expenditures, but that was nowhere to be found; indeed, nothing at all of his which had been left behind, not even an item of clothing. He asked his mother if she had thrown everything away, at which Sarah sighed and nodded: “Anything that reminded me of your father was painful to me.” Uri ground his wobbling teeth again; his mother had thrown everything away, certainly not out of grief but because she had wanted no trace left behind of a husband with whom she had been obliged to spend those loathsome decades of her life.

There being no documents, Uri had no idea where to start looking for his father’s business partners.

Mentally he went through his trips to Judaea and Alexandria in search of business opportunities. There was always silk. That was not used in Judaea — the people there were poor — but in Alexandria it was worn by concubines and catamites, wealthy Greeks and wealthy Jews; despite Tiberius’s ban on wearing it in Rome twenty years ago, everyone who could afford it still wore it. Yes, maybe silk. Or was something else, an original idea, needed?

He was, he concluded regretfully, not cut out to be a merchant. The job called for a special instinct, a nose for things that he was incapable of cooking up.

In the middle of January Uri picked up the sportula his father had abandoned — the one thing of his which was left, because his mother and sister had used it along with his own to carry home the food they were given on showing his tessera — and set off to see Gaius Lucius.

Uri was kicking his heels glumly, waiting for the others to finish cramming their sportulas, when Gaius Lucius addressed him.

“Who’s this we’ve got here?”

The patron beamed indulgently at him, his double chin becoming triple, his eyes now barely visible, glowing within the folds of fat.

“I’m Gaius Theodorus, dear patron, the son of Ioses Lucius…”

Gaius Lucius was delighted and embraced him.

“It’s a long time since I last saw Ioses. How is he?”

“He died.”

“Oh! And you, if I remember right, you traveled off to somewhere…”

“Yes, I traveled a bit.”

“Whereabouts?”

“To Judaea, then to Alexandria.”

Gaius Lucius nodded appreciatively.

“So, what did you bring from Alexandria?”