György Spiró - Captivity

Posides snickered in pleasure. He was a likable young man, smart, always ready to help, and for some reason he was fond of Uri.

Uri had once asked Posides whether he still had any sexual desire even though he had been castrated. Instead of being offended, Posides answered that he was used to feeling a pleasant tingling in the rectal area when he saw a good-looking woman or man, but that was all that happened, so all in all he probably came out better than anyone who had been left with their gender.

Of Claudius’s adult slaves, it was only Pallas with whom Uri did not manage to get on good terms. He was a tall, presentable young man with curly, dark-brown hair, soft-spoken and with an easy sense of humor, constantly larking about and very much a hit with women. Though he was a slave, he was permitted to bow even to ladies of high rank, and while talking with one he would even brush her back, arm or hair, as if by accident. Uri kept a beady eye open to see whether he took such liberties with Kainis, and although he never caught him doing so, he conceived something of a repugnance for the affable, slimy Pallas. His younger brother, Felix, was also one of Claudius’s household; he was shorter, did not flirt with women, and assisted Helius with dishing out meals.

Once Kainis asked whether there was not at least one intelligent person among the Jews of Alexandria, and Uri hesitated.

“There is Tija,” he said. “That is to say, Tiberius Julius Alexander, the alabarch’s second son. He’s clever, only cold as ice with it.”

Kainis winced as she conceded the point.

There were times when the girl would disappear for a whole day at a time, with Uri waiting and searching desperately for her. Narcissus shrugged his shoulders. Claudius sometimes took her with him as a nomenclator — someone who could prompt him with names — when he went to the Forum, where crowds of people would greet him and Claudius would have no clue who they were. Kainis would know and whisper a reminder; she would hardly forget a name, now, would she?

But then there were times, even when Claudius was there, when Kainis was nowhere to be found in the house.

“Maybe she has a business deal on,” Narcissus would say in that case.

It was not befitting for Kainis to be involved in business deals, and in any case where did she get the money to do business?

“Did you receive an inheritance from Antonia?” Uri leveled the question at her.

There was no need for her to answer, but she did:

“Yes, I did: one hundred thousand sesterces.”

That was a nice sum to have, provided one had no debts to start with.

“What do you use it for?”

“I bought two tenement houses,” she said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere near the statue of Cloelia.”

Cloelia was a legendary Roman virgin who was sent as a hostage to the Etruscans, escaped on horseback with a band of her fellow prisoners, and finally swam to safety across the River Tiber. So despite the fact that she was a woman, a statue of her on horseback was set up on the Via Sancta.

“How big are the houses?”

“I don’t know. Several floors, I think.”

“You mean you don’t even look at what you are buying?”

“No, Pallas arranged it; he collects the rent as well.”

Uri brooded as he gazed at the dark down on the girl’s thin neck; he would have loved to take a gentle bite.

“So what do you do with the money?”

“Nothing. Some day I’ll buy another tenement, then another…”

Kainis laughed.

She’ll be rolling in it by the time she is old, thought Uri. She has free board and lodging in Claudius’s house, and she is irreplaceable: in reality it is she who is being generous to Claudius.

“Don’t you intend to get married?”

Kainis stayed silent.

“No. I’ve no plans,” she eventually said.

Diminutive and fragile, she would be able to bear children who might be fine and healthy.

“I’ll take you to Zákinthos!” Uri exclaimed.

Kainis laughed.

“What’s the need there for another Kainis?” she retorted.

Uri was lost for words. Was there anywhere in Italia another woman who knew that on the island of Zákinthos there was a hill named Kainis?

Though even if she had not known it, there were still no other women like her!

They conversed in Latin, with Kainis guiding him. From time to time she would recommend a more refined word than the one Uri had employed; she sought to make certain that he speak perfect Latin as well. She must have some feelings for me, Uri speculated, hopefully but despondently.

Kainis would sometimes push the servants aside and set to cooking, with Uri prepping the ingredients. She knew a great range of recipes because someone had once chided her about not being able to cook, so in one single night she had leafed through a score of cookery books, committing them to memory. She would even take care that Jewish guests were given ritually clean food.

Uri was just in the middle of rinsing meat in cold water when Titus, of the blade-like lips and broad cheekbones, who was the aedile in charge of the roads, came to the fireplace. One story went that a year or so before, while walking in the city with Caligula, the emperor’s cloak had been soiled because the street on which the imperial foot was set had been muddy. Claudius’s guests would keep coming back to this episode, which was considered hilarious, and no end of jokes about mud followed, with Titus joining in the laughter.

Titus said something to Kainis, who burst out laughing.

A knife went through Uri’s chest.

Kainis was forever laughing; she loved laughing, but he had never heard her laugh that way before.

This laugh was neither loud nor soft, neither happy nor sad but something else — a laugh that spoke to one person specifically.

Uri strangled the bloody lump of meat in his hand.

The fellow with the broad cheekbones left.

Kainis fell silent.

She knows that I noticed.

He cautiously made inquiries with other people.

Titus and his brother, Sabinus, came from an equestrian family, their father a well-heeled tax administrator. Sabinus, a rich, stuck-up, garrulous dolt, cannot have cared too much for his younger brother because when Titus found himself strapped for cash he would only lend it to him on the condition that he registered it as a mortgage, and the loan was still outstanding. People sometimes joked about this with Titus, who would simply set his blade-lips in a broad grin and never let up with his assertions that a debtor’s fate was better than that of a creditor. On one occasion he ventured to put forward the interesting line of thought that we come into life as a loan at birth, and we pay back everything that was good in it in a single settlement with the agonies of our death throes. For anyone whose life had been rotten death comes as a pleasure: the gods evidently consider life’s debt as being settled and so, even-handedly, they spare such a person any death agonies. There was a wise rhetorician named Seneca, whom Caligula, on hearing him plead a neatly turned speech for the defense in the Senate, had ordered put to death. It was said, however, that on being told that Seneca was severely ill, coughing day and night, and having only a few days left to live, the emperor let him go on living. Seneca, who had laughed at Titus’s argument, had said that it would be nice to believe that life was equalized by death, but what about those who die in childhood in such a way that they have had no chance to be acquainted either with the value of credit or the importance of paying off of a debt? Uri could not remember what Titus’s response was because he was thinking of his little sister, for whom the cost of even her few years of consciousness as a child had been superhuman struggle.