György Spiró - Captivity

It was on the tip of Uri’s tongue to ask who would be carrying the loads of money that had been collected by the Jews of Rome for the feast, and to whom they’d be delivered, but he swallowed the question. The others did not ask either.

Maybe they do not know quite how much money they were delivering, but without any doubt it was a huge fortune. Worth slaughtering them for.

Matthew slung his sack on his back and set off. The rest picked up their luggage and followed.

They went out through the gate; the two guards blinked sleepily after them before locking the gate again.

Beside him strong, seasoned men stepped with buoyant strides. He was the youngest, the least worthy, the weakest. How long would his legs hold up?

Being a lefty, he carried his sack on his right shoulder, bouncing it up from time to time to get a sense of its weight and to guess whether it was him carrying the money. It would have to come to hundreds of talenta, and that would have to weigh a great deal. His sack was not heavy, though, so he could not be carrying it.

Were they going to take turns?

Had it been divided up between them?

Lifting his sack, he estimated that it could not weigh more than thirty Roman libra — twenty pounds, say. Sixty to seventy-five pounds was the weight of the food that he and his father used to lug back home as the ration issued on his tessera. He wondered how many sesterces might fit into a sack, or rather how many denarii, or silver pennies, each of which was worth four sesterces? Say they were carrying a total of twenty thousand denarii between the seven of them, which would mean that he was perhaps carrying one seventh of that. One denarius would weigh ⅟84 of a libra, and his sack did not weigh more than twenty or twenty-eight pounds. That meant he might be carrying two and a half to three thousand denarii.

But where would that be?

There had to be some tried-and-true method, Uri supposed, and he marched on, completely immersed in his calculations. They were surely not making a futile trip in this, the 3,760th year anno mundi , from the creation of the world.

Up till then, the offering had always reached Jerusalem, for even when it was robbed, it was collected anew and delivered later. It had gone this way for ninety-eight years, since the first Jews landed up in Rome; a sacrifice was supposedly sent, in accordance with tradition, already in the first year, and that was surely true. It must have been a small sum, no more than a few hundred asses altogether, but it was saved at the expense of their stomachs, collected, and sent off. They themselves were unable to go: their ears were pierced and they lived their life in chains, but non-Jews could be persuaded to take it — for money. They paid and sent the money, and have every year since then. More and more, as things began to take a turn for the better for the Jews in Rome, and for a fair amount of time, they had been carrying the money themselves, with official permission.

By now they were walking over into the true Rome. Uri did not turn around to glance at the Jewish quarter on the far side, since all he would have seen anyway was fuzzy blotches.

At the Circus Maximus they swung southward. These were all familiar streets; Uri would never have imagined the day would come that he would pass that way in such an official capacity.

They tramped silently, like people who were on an important mission.

They left Rome by the Porta Capena. Wagons laden with produce were by then already creaking their way in toward the markets.

They came to a halt at the beginning of the Appian Way, at the Jewish house of prayer near the cemetery.

“Let’s take a rest,” Matthew said. “Anyone who wants breakfast may eat.”

“May we open the sacks now?” one man asked. Uri took a squint: he was a strong man with a thick, black beard.

“They are yours,” Matthew said. “A present from the community.”

Uri nibbled on a matzo; that was his favorite, and some days that was all he ate, because matzos were able to sop up the acid that would well up in his stomach.

“Let’s move off now!” asserted a thickset man.

“Our goal is not to walk ourselves into the ground,” said Matthew. “We shall have plenty of chances to walk. Just wait.”

They were silent and ate.

“Where shall we get water?” asked the thickset man.

“There will be water everywhere we stop,” said Matthew. “Wine as well.”

The day was dawning. More and more wagons appeared in the street.

Along the Appian Way came an empty wagon with two oxen in harness. Matthew got to his feet and waved; the wagon stopped.

Matthew climbed on next to the driver at the front; the other six clambered onto the back. The wagon turned and set off in a southerly direction.

The beating of Uri’s heart began to slacken when he wedged his sack under his back. Everybody was silent, and Uri did not dare give the once-over to the companions with whom he would be confined for months on the long journey. He gazed at the countryside; he could see the roadside cypresses fairly clearly but not buildings and plants that were more than 100 or 150 paces away. For him they were a blur of greenish, yellowish, and brownish blots, and the sky above, as it was February, a clear blue. Uri peered through narrow eyes, more with the left one because he saw better through that, using the right eye more for reading and inspecting small objects.

They jolted along on the wagon without a word. Uri regained his composure; the trip might be tedious and without incident, and if his companions were not talkative and did not pester him unnecessarily, he might be able to put up with them. The signs suggested that they too were awed to take part in this sacrosanct journey. Uri felt a twinge of conscience: his father had paid out two hundred thousand sesterces so he could jolt along on this wagon now, and even so, he was not truly glad. He made up his mind that he was going to be glad.

It was hard to control his outrage when he realized that his father had loaned Agrippa roughly two and a half times as much money as the total offering of Rome’s Jews that they were bringing to Jerusalem.

Better not to think about it.

He jolted along on the wagon and became sleepy.

He had the sense of being enclosed in a husk: nearby things that he could readily see were, so to speak, pressed onto his body by a fabric of colored blotches, and because there was nothing of interest in the visible world, he was in the end in the grip of a hazy trust that there would be an opportunity in the course of the long journey to reflect as he did in his little recess back at home, although without having his treasured scrolls at hand, but then the bulk of those were already committed to memory. Beyond the cage of the visible world, inside the space of these thoughts, he was filled with a sense of the security that slaves feel: he had no cares for anything, his companions would take care of him and defend him, and it seemed that he would not even be forced to chitchat with them, which was something he detested.

After all, he was the exception, he had done nothing to deserve the distinction; his companions had no doubt all done something that merited membership in the official festive delegation to Jerusalem, in adherence to the rotation principle of the Elders, in consultation with the archisynagogoses of the individual assemblies and taking their recommendations on board, or else modifying them — who could know exactly what went on in the rare sessions of the Roman Sanhedrin — had decided on these individuals, obviously with good reason; better that he spoke with them as little as possible so that his own unsuitability, both spiritual and physical, should not come too soon to light.

As Uri jolted along on the wagon with his taciturn companions, staring at the trees as they slowly retreated (the oxen pulled the wagon no faster than they would have been able to walk), and as these trees assumed ever more uncertain outlines in the distance, it dawned on him that even after his eyesight had deteriorated he had still been able to move around confidently in the true Rome and also in the labyrinthine, interconnecting inner yard of Far Side, because he could project memorized images onto the present so that he knew exactly what was where, and he only got confused in the real Rome if he was unable to find a building that had once stood but had burned down or been dismantled and another built in its place. In those cases, he would walk around the place a number of times to make a mental note of it. Now, though, these were all new places of which he had no memories or any notion, and he had to reach the sad conclusion that, indeed, someone else ought to have been sent on this big journey instead. He was not even going to see the splendor of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, not even if he was allowed to get close to it, to be sure, not even if he was allowed to stand directly beside the altar stone that is said to be situated right in front of the Temple. To be allowed close to the altar is a huge blessing; the scrimmage is fierce, and only the true elect are admitted into the small space. They might admit a delegation from Rome, perhaps, but even then maybe only the leader.