György Spiró - Captivity

Last year, Uri learned, Titus had taken as his wife a certain Domitilla, about whom little was known, only that she had come with a substantial dowry and that at the very end of December she had given birth to a baby boy, who had likewise been named Titus.

In other words, Titus had married on account of the dowry.

He seemed to recall that Kainis had once referred to that. Her little face had been dark and wicked when she had said that every man marries for money.

Titus made only rare appearances at Claudius’s house. Uri would watch closely what he did and with whom he spoke. On those occasions Kainis more often than not did not show herself among the guests, and there were many times when neither Titus nor Kainis were present in Claudius’s house.

It was agreed beforehand, Kainis knew in advance when he was not going to come! They must have a rendezvous in the city. They were lovers!

How, he wondered, did they make love? Did Titus lay that hulking, heavy body on the tiny woman and crush her? Or did Kainis ride the monstrous prick of that broad-cheeked character? What sort of things did they get up to with each other?

Uri made an effort to examine his own instincts objectively: what his body sensed when he was picturing Kainis or he stood beside her and breathed in her fragrance. The girl had a Kainis fragrance; she did not use any ointments or grasses, did not pluck hairs from her legs, did not paint her eyebrows or eyelids, did not wear silks or put on a wig. Uri imagined Kainis naked, but his penis did not stiffen, there was only a huge, aching gap in the pit of his stomach as if he did not need to screw the girl but eat her up. He gazed at her long, thin fingers and would have liked to tear them apart and swallow them raw.

On Friday nights he would couple with the now big-bellied Hagar from behind as if he were ejecting his stools through a smarting rectum. He made an effort to think of Kainis but what kept coming to mind was the young Judaean slave girl as she rode on the master’s fat belly.

He would try at least to summon up the bodies, faces and odors of the prostitutes in Alexandria, and how they would expertly but lovingly manipulate him but, like the city now sunk to the bottom of the sea, they too had vanished as if they had never been.

I’ll go crazy, he thought.

But then he noticed that Titus was spending a growing amount of time talking with Tija; he couldn’t hear what they were talking about but they guffawed a lot.

Maybe I have brought them together, he reflected furiously, enviously, jealously, the way only a slave was able to be angry. Kainis’s questions had not been nnocuous: she had been spying through me.

Uri cursed the Eternal One for creating him a Jew and debtor who would never be a free man.

Bribing Helicon went more smoothly than had been anticipated. An envoy arrived at Agrippa’s house on Sunday morning: the emperor would await the Jewish delegation from Alexandria on Monday at noon in the garden on Vatican Hill.

Uri found it awkward that Honoratus’s confidant, Iustus, also made an appearance, and it was decided that on an ornamental litter the two of them would have to take a bust of Germanicus that the alabarch was due to present to the emperor on that festive occasion.

The statue was carried under Iustus’s direction from Far Side to the gate of the Vatican garden, where they were waiting.

Colonnades and terraces extended along the right bank of the Tiber, with the vast garden reaching its end in a high wall at the foot of Vatican Hill. It was a splendid garden as far as Uri was able to judge through his squinting eyes; in any event the place was a kaleidoscopic mix of shades of green, but he was mostly concentrating on not letting the litter tip and the bust crash down from it. He was carrying the poles at the rear end of the litter, while the shorter Iustus manned the front as his eyesight was all right. Uri kept his eyes fixed on the ground; the path was made up of small, yellow grains and he was concerned that his new sandals might slip on it.

Iustus and Uri also had to carry on their backs sacks containing statuettes, necklaces, pendants, and jewelry made of gold, precious gemstones, and woods, each item a piece of extraordinarily delicate workmanship: they had originated from the pyramids of Egypt, the alabarch’s men having seized them from industrious Copt looters.

To the right of the litter walked the alabarch and Philo, Marcus and Tija on the left, each man wearing a beautifully folded, brand-new toga, which they had spent a long time arranging on each other before setting off. The litter bearers also had on new tunics and footwear; Iustus ascribed to that no great significance as he had always been well catered for, but Uri was very pleased because he would never have bought such things for himself.

The master gardeners who had landscaped the garden had cut up the area into parklands and bowers, and before the marble benches stood marble statues, which spouted water. On and around the benches, lazily and leisurely, lingered knots of muscular young men who, according to Iustus were gladiators and actors, the emperor’s favorites. It was rumored that one of the emperor’s favorite actors was the pantomime artist Mnester, another the tragedian Apelles of Ashkelon; the whispers about the latter held that, like any Greek from Jamnia or Ashkelon, he hated Jews. That might be true, but it was also whispered that Mnester was half-Jewish. Uri would not have recognized them anyway, but Iustus — who usually accompanied theater-mad Honoratus to the theaters and knew all there was to know about the actors — muttered that in his opinion Apelles and Mnester couldn’t be there because it was impossible to believe they would have sobered up this early in the day.

It was May and the sun was beating down. Two bodyguards were pacing easily in front, their thighs thick as tree trunks, as was only fitting, though Uri was not awed in the least.

Maybe Bassus was somewhere around; indeed, it would be right for him to be present when the emperor received a delegation from Alexandria.

At one of the bowers the bodyguard signaled, at which Philo and the rest came to a halt, as did Iustus and Uri with a little wobble of the litter. As no one ordered them to put it down, they kept on holding it. One of the guards went into the bower, the other stayed with them. Birds twittered their praises of the Pax Romana.

Uri’s palms were sweating. It would be better to set that statue down. He had made a list of all the things they were taking as gifts for the emperor, with the statue being one of the items listed along with the rare Egyptian knick-knacks; by then it was on his lips to say that the notion was none too well-conceived, but he choked that down as he did not want another fruitless dispute with Philo, who was dead set on placing his trust in the emperor’s goodwill and never tired of proclaiming what luck it was for the Jewish people that Agrippa had been Caligula’s tutor.

The messenger who had informed them of the appointed time for the reception had in the meantime handed back a countersigned copy of the approved list of gifts, though the counter-signatory’s name was indecipherable. There was little chance of being able to truly surprise the poor emperor with the imperial administration so assiduously at work.

Uri stared at the nape of the neck of the marble bust; it was gracefully fashioned, the curls of hair painted dark brown. It must be a fine job, being a sculptor: no need to see people or make conversation with clods, just spend the day carving a dumb block of stone and bringing a thing of beauty out of it. One solution would be to enter service as an assistant to a Greek sculptor. Admittedly, Rome was already littered with statues of every kind as the emperors and the wealthy had procured so many splendid pieces from all over the world that there was hardly any space left for the living, and yet new shrines and sculpture parks were always being created — that was really big business, not balsam. It was a pity that sculpting was forbidden for Jews.