György Spiró - Captivity

“I said no!”

The bruisers grabbed hold of Theo. Uri roared in fury and flung himself on one of them but simply rebounded off his rock-hard abdomen. People looked their way: at last something was happening.

“He’s not for sale!” Uri bawled.

The buyer stuffed money and a written document into a sack and threw that on the ground. Uri’s hands were twisted behind his back and he was kicking and shouting inarticulately; the onlookers found it uproariously funny.

Theo was then bundled onto a cart.

“Don’t worry, father! Take care of yourself!” he shouted as he looked back.

The bruisers took off after the cart. Uri would have run after them but he was tripped up by a bystander, to great applause.

Uri lay flat on his face on the ground, panting, the nape of his neck throbbing.

“You bastards!” he yelled.

People around about snickered and then dispersed. No one spoke to him or touched the sack that lay beside him on the ground. Someone began gesticulating and shouting from the platform, attracting the attention of the idle onlookers given that Uri could not be expected to be the source of any further amusement.

Uri himself sat up and stared dully at the sack. He opened it, poured out the money and started to count it.

Squatting on his heels, dizzy, he counted 1,960 seterces.

He was left to scrape the money together and stuff it back in the sack. Also lying there on the ground was a written contract regarding two thousand sesterces, signed by someone called Maronius, which had been given a stamp of state approval, above which was an official text that read that the buyer had deducted tax from the price paid for the slave, signed with some illegible scrawl.

Uri related to Hagar what had happened.

Hagar was not too upset: she had never liked Theo, because she could see how much Uri loved him; she loved Marcellus, whom Uri had not liked.

She told the children that Theo had run away.

Uri protested that he had not run away but been kidnapped as a slave!

“It’s my fault!” Uri cried out. “I wanted to sell myself, though not out of self-sacrifice, I know that now, but simply because I was seeking to escape from my responsibility — for you all! And the Lord is punishing me for my dishonesty by hitting me where it hurts hardest: he’s taken Theo away!”

This was too much for the children to take in; they whimpered and batted their eyes dutifully but they took what Hagar had said as being the truth. They understood that he had simply run away, and they secretly cursed him and envied him.

They then rented a dwelling in the center of Puteoli because the women and children did not dare go to the harbor on their own; to some extent they were justified because public safety in Puteoli had become atrocious as the town had become impoverished, with unemployed youths tearing about the place with cudgels, robbing women and battering children. Only in the port area was there some degree of order as the municipal authority had posted vigiles in that part of town.

The dwelling space they obtained consisted of two unfurnished rooms, one for the women, the other for children, without even a curtain between them. Uri resumed his search for work. He rambled around unsteadily, his eyesight even worse than ever, in the grip of insomnia as he was unable to sleep, continually going over in his mind what had happened: if he had been in good shape he would have decked at least one of the six bruisers.

“Anything precious is wrecked!” he kept reiterating obsessively at night. “We wreck anything at all!”

Half-asleep, the children would grumble; they wanted to sleep.

It became autumnal, with the vacationers moving back to Rome. The house was unheated and Uri’s back throbbed painfully; water had only been installed on the ground floor and so had to be carried up from there. Uri bought a water jug, a basin, and some pots and pans at a nearby market.

Sarah washed, cooked, and carried up water from the tap downstairs, but one day she had a dizzy spell, slipped, and rolled down the stairs, breaking her neck.

“She did not want to live any more, and the stairs sensed that,” Hagar whispered into the children’s ears. Uri reddened but said nothing.

The funeral was expensive: Uri was unable to haggle for a price reduction and the Jews of Puteoli were unsympathetic, requiring him to install a gravestone, saying they would not bury her unless there was one (the stonemason must have had an arrangement to get a commission). In Puteoli there were no catacombs in which to carry out burials; the Jews had a plot of land at the foot of the hill.

On the stone, Uri had engraved Sarah’s name and the fact that she had lived forty-five years; the Italian stonemason kept reminding him that it would cost a bare ten sesterces more to engrave an etrog, lulav, and menorah, but there Uri drew the line. It was not nice to take revenge on a dead person, but that was what he did to his mother for having engraved on his father’s grave marker all the things he had expressly asked not be there.

Sarah was buried. They ran out of money; Uri finally took a job as a fuller.

He might have found better work, but his soul wanted to do penance.

Fulling consisted of walking all day long on clothes that had been thrown into huge tubs of human urine — nothing more. Among the people who did this were convicted prisoners, drunken wretches, lonely madmen, deserters, bankrupt businessmen, vagrant peasants, all kinds of reprobates, but not a single slave. Uri was astonished that only freedmen were permitted to perform such a menial task, but when one of them — while drunk — slipped, fell, and broke his arm it became clear why: being a freedman, he was not entitled to any compensation, however much he pleaded. A freedman’s body was also free; it was at his disposal and so had no value. A slave’s body, by contrast, did have a value because it did not belong to him, so if he was injured, his owner was entitled to be compensated.

Uri trampled clothes in the urine, rinsed them, then mangled them with a rolling pin — backbreaking labor. Urine was a disinfectant — that was known back in the time of Hippocrates but what was not known — or maybe it had just been kept under wraps — was that urine attacks the feet. It corroded Uri’s skin, sometimes to the point of making it hard to drag himself back home, where he would find that Hagar had not left him any supper, having ensured that the children eat up everything by the time he got back. Uri would rub fish oil onto the bone-deep abscesses on his feet and moan in pain.

“You stink!” Hagar averred.

“You stink!” averred Marcellus, with Irene and Eulogia following suit.

Uri might have wondered whether his wife or children were more repelled, but he did not wonder at all, just existed, in a light sleep that reeked of piss. He had dreadful dreams: he would be the owner of a nice big house on a hillside but it would be open on all sides and people would walk through as if he were not even there. In another recurring dream he would be residing on the top floor of a building and would want to go home but the stairs had been replaced by a rickety ladder and that had broken, so he needed to clamber up on a narrow plank, but he was dizzy and his feet slipped, leaving him hanging between ground and sky, unable to reach his dwelling. He hated most of all a dream in which long, thin worms crawled out of his toes; he would grab them and keep on pulling at them, but they were seemingly endless.

Marcellus, being his mother’s darling, gained ascendancy over the others. He remained stubby-faced and hook-nosed, with dark hair and skin; there was no knowing what strains of African or Asian tribes had spitefully taken up residence in him. Uri did not have the strength to give any instruction either to him or to his daughters, who had turned out ugly, with buck teeth, gaunt features, and hooked noses; they had picked up a smattering of kitchen Latin while roaming unsupervised about in the harbor quarter, but they never read anything. Uri also read nothing, and they had no scrolls apart from the Torah, so that the kids spent their time hanging around the harbor. Hagar now did the washing and cooking, not moving from the third floor except to shop. She was frightened of the unknown town and unable herself to get straight in her mind even which way was north or south. She had never learned to speak a word of Latin because everyone in the markets spoke Greek, and here she was unable to talk with the neighbors because they did not speak a word of Greek, coming from Latium as they did. My so-called loved ones are all going to be stupid, Uri thought. Dear God, this was Your wish.