György Spiró - Captivity

“Was it robbers?” Marcellus asked in a whisper.

“Probably,” said Uri.

“Are we too going be burned out?”

“We’ve got nothing,” Theo reminded his brother, “so they let us live.”

Uri just stood, tears flowing.

The children and women looked on horrified. Never before had they seen him cry.

They spent the night sleeping amidst the ruins.

“Why did you cry, Papa?” Theo asked quietly.

Uri sighed.

“I would have liked to have a family just like theirs,” he said. “They laughed incessantly! Played jokes on one another! Talked nineteen to the dozen, everybody at the same time! They loved each other! I thought about them every now and then both in Judaea and in Alexandria… Hoping that one day I would have a family like that.”

“And didn’t you?” Theo asked.

Uri hugged him, kissed his cheek, and pulled him close.

“Yes, I did, thanks be to the Eternal One.”

On the wider highways they’d encounter freight carts; from them it was possible to buy greens, water, and flatbread; occasionally groups of suspicious characters would hurry past. Perhaps escaped slaves or highwaymen, but they did not bother them: the family was too big and they quite obviously had nothing.

The children got used to constantly being on the move, with even the girls discovering the advantages of the lifestyle, with their grandmother and aunt never in a position to continually dress them down. With a vacant look on her face, Sarah would wash their clothes in a stream and hang them out to dry on tree branches; she would divide up the food and wash the dishes, complaining of neither heat nor cold. Hagar even gave up on her constant sniveling when she saw it made no sense, while Hermia whenever possible would lie down and escape into sleep.

With a knife Uri cut himself a staff and so too did Theo, along with a slender one for Marcellus after he, naturally, demanded his own. Uri demonstrated to Theo how to fight with a staff, and Marcellus wanted to join in and learn. The womenfolk and the girls gaped to see Uri fighting, prancing forward and backward, brandishing the staff, somersaulting, feinting to trick his invisible opponent. Hagar was amazed and even Sarah came out of her semi-stupor.

“Where did you learn that?” she asked.

“At the Gymnasium,” said Uri. “I also learned how to throw the javelin, shoot with a bow and arrow, and fight with a sword.”

Marcellus’s father immediately grew in his eyes, and while his elder brother and father practiced face to face, he set about tree trunks, whacking them over and over again until his own stick broke, at which he burst into floods of tears and Uri had to cut him a new one.

The knife he carried under his tunic, tied to his back on the left, so that he could produce it quickly if they ever came under attack. No one attacked them, however, among the wonderful hills of the Campanian countryside, where so much tasty fruit was growing in the wild. Uri still remembered what was edible, steering clear of the mushrooms, being unfamiliar with them.

He lost weight, his paunch vanishing and his muscles becoming satisfactorily toned, and much to his sons’ joy he found he could leap from a standing position almost as far as he had been able to back in Alexandria. Theo would leap, Marcellus would leap, and the girls also leapt with much screaming. Uri’s chest no longer ached, nor his rectum, nor his remaining teeth, and his heart beat nice and slowly.

During the day they got into the practice of padding along southward, quietly satisfied that they would not die of hunger, with odd scraps of poems coming to Uri’s mind.

He recalled just one line from a poem by Archilochus: “He wanders unhinged on the path of his bleak, vagrant existence.” That had already been known to men many centuries before.

Another line, from Gorgias, came to mind: “Why should we lead happier lives than those, the beautiful ones?”

These were the sort of lines Uri crooned to himself. Theo asked where they came from, and this father enlightened him.

“That’s what poetry is good for,” Uri brooded. “Lines come to mind when you find yourself in situations similar to those of which poets once sang, and it makes you feel at ease. If something already happened to them, then it’s quite all right! You’re wandering, and people who died a long time ago wander with you.”

He added in some amazement that it was strange how short poems were worth much more than epic verse.

Common prayer was worth even more.

The family prayed aloud both in the morning and the evening. When he had been at home in Far Side Uri had generally missed both, because he left early to attend to business rather than waking up with his family and, whenever possible, he got home when they were already asleep. Now, following Uri’s lead, they prayed and lay down to sleep together. Experience had shown that yesterday they had not died of starvation, they had not been devoured by wolves, nor had they frozen last night, so in all likelihood the Almighty was protectively watching over them, and since they had committed no sin, either against Him or against other people, it would be no different tomorrow.

Theo noticed that in reciting his prayers his father said something in a different way than he was familiar with. Before they ate their meal, he would say a grace customarily used in Judaea: “Give us tomorrow’s bread today.” This was not something the Roman Jews said, nor indeed did it make much sense, as they would usually pray for the Lord to give their daily bread today, so Uri was slightly surprised when Theo asked him what he meant: he was not aware that it had slipped out.

“I rather think,” he said, “that it is a reference to the Messiah’s coming.”

“The thing that the Nazarenes talk about as coming ‘again’?”

“Quite probably.”

The others adopted the same wording.

After supper and before they turned in for the night, Uri, with help from Theo, would teach Marcellus and the girls a little Latin. The girls were none too happy, but Uri encouraged them by saying that they would find better husbands that way. Marcellus did not need encouraging as he always wanted to know whatever his brother knew, the only trouble being that he wanted everything right away, without having to work for it. At these times Sarah and Hagar would draw their blanket up over their head and pretend to sleep, while Hermia would stare glassy-eyed into the air.

To go to sleep they would wrap up in their blankets with the small ones in the inside, rather like a wolf pack.

“Papa,” said Theo one evening. “It’s true, isn’t it, that you love us more than you used to?”

Uri was moved.

Musing, he said:

“Maybe it’s more a case of liking myself a little better.”

“Yourself?”

“It seems that I prefer being an outlaw to anything else. Maybe the Eternal One created us all to be outlaws, that’s our natural state, only he forgot to engrave into our souls that we should want to remain outlaws.”

Puteoli, where they were going to live, had to be close, as now they found they had to go westward, toward the sea.

There was no road any longer, only gardens — some tidy, some derelict — with narrow, weed-covered paths between them, and Hermia one day stepped on a thorn. It went deep into the sole of her right foot, and Uri and Hagar and Sarah all took turns attempting to extract it, Uri with his knife, the others with their nails. Hermia wailed; it was hurting a lot. They waited a while and Uri gave it another try, but it was in vain.

“Just leave me here!” Hermia pleaded. “You all just go on.”

Uri shook his head.

The children went off to steal fruit, the adults stayed with her. It grew dark and they slept under some bushes.