György Spiró - Captivity

All of a sudden Uri came to a halt.

He had spotted a short, frail, snub-nosed girl with wide eyes, her chestnut hair cut short in a boyish style, who moved toward Narcissus and whispered something to him. Narcissus nodded then turned to Uri.

“Gaius, Caenis; Caenis, Gaius. He’s a Roman Jew and a friend of Philo Judaeus, and he’s familiar with shorthand.”

Narcissus pronounced Caenis’s name in the Greek style: Kainis. The girl nodded and looked Uri straight in the eye.

Uri had never seen eyes like that before: big, dark brown, glistening, deeply searching, inwardly directed, with premature wrinkles of sadness under the lower eyelids. Uri was transfixed. A lot of time passed before Kainis averted her gaze and went out into the garden. Uri gazed after her, thunderstruck.

“No woman ever lived who is cleverer than her,” Narcissus’s voice echoed in his ears.

Uri glanced at him. Narcissus was staring with paternal veneration after Kainis.

“Who is that girl?”

“Antonia’s coiffeuse,” said Narcissus. “I picked her out at the school for slave children; I paid for her, she was just twelve at the time… Her eyes caught me; I looked into her eyes and was thunderstruck. Antonia bought her release, but she too has stayed on here because Claudius adores her.”

Uri sighed deeply.

“He has never touched her,” Narcissus blurted. “I’d never allow that! But Claudius couldn’t do without her: Kainis has a simply staggeringly good memory.”

Kainis came back from the garden, she carried some dew-drenched blankets on her frail shoulders.

Uri stopped in front of her.

“You’re said to have a staggeringly good memory,” he said hoarsely.

The girl stopped and looked at him.

“You don’t look much like a boy,” said Uri.

The girl broke into a laugh.

“Bones like a bird, though,” she declared.

She had a deep voice.

Uri was nonplussed.

Elatus, she explained, had a daughter called Kainis, who had been raped by Poseidon and in vengeance changed into a man, invulnerable to weaponry, so that she could never be raped again. She vanquished all until people caught on to the fact that they could kill her by by burying her alive. So it came to pass, but she rose up into the heavens in the form of a bird.

Narcissus did not understand the brief parable, after which Uri quietly sighed in Aramaic: Dear God!

“Let not the name of our maker pass your lips,” she retorted in Aramaic.

Uri’s heart hammered.

“Are you Jewish?” in his confusion he stuttered out the question in Greek.

“I don’t know who my parents were,” Kainis responded in Greek. “But I can’t be Jewish, because they do not abandon a daughter. I can’t be Germanic either, because they likewise do not rid themselves of girls. Which means that I could be Latin, Gallic, Hispanic, Copt, Arab, Greek, Punic, Illyrian, Etruscan…”

“How did you come to learn Aramaic?” Uri asked in Aramaic.

“There were people from every nation imaginable in the paedagogium,” Kainis replied. “Each spoke in their own language…”

Narcissus growled but it was unnecessary to order Uri away from the girl, because Claudius limped up at great speed, took Kainis by the arm and pulled her away. The girl dropped the blankets and Narcissus leaned down to pick them up.

“The chances on the dice-throwing yet again!” he groused. “They’ve got a mathematical system; they worked it out together, and it offers quite odds for winning, but only if enough people play for the right length of time… Kainis has explained it twenty times over, but I still don’t get it…”

Narcissus set off with Uri following.

“She can remember throws of the dice going back decades,” Narcissus declared proudly. “Each game, going back decades! Every throw!”

“That’s not possible,” said Uri. “She’s only a child!”

“She’s at least twenty-five years old,” said Narcissus, “and I should know because I purchased her!”

Uri’s breast was filled with a happy, anguished, aching gnawing that he had never felt before. He wanted to see Kainis every minute of every hour of every day — to at least see her, and to breathe in her fragrance if he could. He saw her wherever he looked; he saw her in Far Side, he saw her on the Jewish Bridge, he saw her in his waking state and in his dreams, and in his imagination he carried on never-ending conversations with her. It was better, but also more painful, to see her in reality. Opportunity to do that was offered by the fact that the alabarch’s group only spent any time in Agrippa’s cleaned-up house when they returned there to sleep, they spent their days, staying late into the night, across the way at Claudius’s house, and though they no longer had any need of Uri, they completely forgot about rescinding his assignment.

Almost all those who hung around at Claudius’s place could speak Greek, and if they didn’t, then there were plenty of willing voluntary interpreters. Claudius himself never really noticed whether he happened to be speaking Latin or Greek. Uri was terrified that his superfluity would come to light and he would never again be able to see Kainis’s gliding figure, so he was particularly diligent in the work that he did for Philo, collecting material for the book that he was writing against Flaccus, even discovering that Caligula had sent a team of assassins after the exiled prefect, and that he had, at last, been slain.

Philo was delighted to write the closing sentences of the book: “Thus he fell, justice righteously inflicting on his own body wounds equal in number to the murdered Jews whom he had unlawfully put to death. And the whole place flowed with blood… Such was the end of Flaccus.” Uri also contrived to chase down a few Etruscan sources for Claudius, which Philo and the alabarch were very proud of and Claudius himself praised him for. Uri was thus able to breath a sigh of relief; maybe he would not be sent away for the time being, there was room for him, too, among the many parasites.

Only on Friday afternoons did he return home to spend the Sabbath with his family; he got through the Friday night coupling, and on Saturday evening, as soon as he was free to do so, he raced back to Rome proper, to Claudius’s villa on the slopes of Palatine Hill. All he missed was Theo, his son. He consoled himself with the thought that he would spend a lot of time with him later, when it would pay to do so.

Uri conversed with the slaves and the freedmen, doing one favor or another for them, with Narcissus benignly helping him to find acceptance from them. Still, Messalina’s servants did not accept him, but ultimately it was better that way; Claudius’s and Messalina’s servants loathed each other, and Kainis had allied herself to Claudius.

He asked the girl if Claudius had ever tried anything with her. By then he knew that the seemingly innocuous Claudius was lecherous enough to proposition any woman; his first daughter was not in fact a child of his first wife’s but of a slave girl known as Boter. When he discarded his first wife, the five-month-old girl — who was not even hers — was set before her front door and, since then, the divorced woman had brought her up.

Kainis chuckled, because she liked nothing more than to laugh:

“Of course he tried it, but I asked him which he would prefer: my pussy or my brains. Claudius weighed his answer carefully and came to the conclusion that since almost every other woman had a pussy he would rather have my brains; since then we have gotten along fine.”

Claudius was far from being as stupid as he made out.

Kainis related that Antonia had always run her son down; told everyone left, right, and center that even the dumbest slave was cleverer than that cripple, until in the end people believed her. That way Claudius had managed to stay alive.