György Spiró - Captivity

“Just like the Torah!” said Uri, screaming with laughter. “I swear to you that I wrote one of the volumes: Philo didn’t make a single correction.”

They drank until they were truly drunk; Uri was still dizzy when he took a boat back to Puteoli the next day.

They had enough money to last for a year or so. Uri soon became bored with Naples: the aimless walking, the dropping into taverns, the life-endangering glare, the patched-up boats, the dull-witted boatmen who would steer their craft into the paths of the big freighters, only avoiding head-on collisions at the last second with much screaming, and having nothing to read anyway.

Something would have to come along.

Five years after he had the Nazarenes expelled from Rome, Claudius was assassinated.

Prior to that the emperor had his Greek counselors, Isidoros and Lampo, beheaded. The boatmen in the harbor of Puteoli, who did nothing much beyond boasting and swilling, knew the two characters well because they had been obliged to cut them in on a portion of every consignment — a percentage which had grown steadily over the years. Isidoros, so the story went, made a disrespectful comment about the emperor, apparently calling him, in a fit of pique, the illegitimate son of Salome, the old Jewish king’s younger sister, who was well known as a whore; some negotiations at which they were present happened to be under way, Claudius gave a sign, and the heads of Isidoros and Lampo fell in one swish of a blade.

Uri remembered what Isidoros had requested of him in Alexandria, namely to mourn his passing when it came. He was unable to mourn him: why, precisely?

If anything, he was angry at him. Clever man that he was, why had he not slinked away with his millions to the countryside? There he could have gotten by, but he had wanted to be at the center of things. Maybe he had been infuriated that the emperor was a man who knew a lot less than he did. Isidoros had not been such a wise man after all.

Claudius had been poisoned with mushrooms by his wife, Agrippina; that was the way she killed him. There’s no way of knowing how people had gotten hold of that idea, but it spread the length and breadth of Italia.

It wasn’t as if they were sorry for Claudius, who — as was well known since someone had kept a careful tally and circulated many copies in Puteoli as well as elsewhere — inflicted the death penalty on 35 senators and 224 Roman equites at the urging of Narcissus or Messalina. Uri had even seen a scandal-sheet of this kind, with many familiar names on the list, including each and every slave who belonged to Messalina — they were presumably condemned to death by Narcissus. No women’s names appeared on the list, though in many cases their husbands or fathers had died in their stead. He did not see Kainis’s name listed anywhere either.

Domitius, a son of Agrippina, the sister of emperor Caligula, whom Claudius had adopted and who called himself Nero, was installed as the new emperor. His father, the first husband of Agrippina, was reportedly a cheat and an overbearing character in general. The young emperor was just seventeen, so Annaeus Seneca, who was already a senator, was recalled by Agrippina from banishment and appointed as his tutor, so thus as far as internal affairs were concerned he became de facto supreme ruler, sharing rule with Burrus, the Praetorian Prefect, who saw to Nero’s correspondence in Greek, which is to say he saw to all foreign affairs.

Poor Britannicus, was the general view.

Narcissus was captured at his house in Baiae; he was dragged to Messalina’s grave and there stabbed to death, and by then had amassed four hundred million sesterces, all of which now passed to Nero.

It occurred to Uri that if he had known Narcissus lived so close to Puteoli he would have paid him a visit and tapped him for more money.

Nero came in for much praise from the people: what a nice, smart boy he is, he’ll make a great emperor.

Nero did indeed make a good start, declaring, on the advice of Seneca and Burrus, an amnesty for all of those who had not been convicted for crimes against public morality by Claudius and his board of judges, and Uri was unexpectedly realized that he was now free to return to Rome if he still had a copy of the expulsion order.

He still had it in the leather satchel, next to the Torah scroll.

There were many who were unable to go back to Rome right away because over the intervening years they had lost their expulsion orders.

Uri was amazed that the Nazarenes had also been accorded an amnesty. He remembered how in Claudius’s house Seneca had often warned Rome against new conquerors, saying, “Those we vanquish today will subjugate us tomorrow,” and in saying that he included the Jews; indeed, he meant them first and foremost. Perhaps we do not add up to a large number of souls, Uri supposed; we do not count as a source of real danger.

They managed to get back to Rome in two weeks, along the way sleeping in beds in hostelries and eating splendid meals. The children and Hagar were all excited, we’re going home, we’re going home, they kept on repeating, though Uri was well aware the children in particular could have no clear memories of Far Side.

He had a big argument with Hagar, who wanted to return to Far Side, but Uri dug his heels in.

“Our house was pulled down, and I hated it anyway!” he said. “And I’m not prepared to live among Jews any more!”

“But we’re Jews ourselves!” Hagar protested.

“There are four and a half million Jews in the world,” said Uri, “but only forty thousand of them live in Far Side! We have the right to live wherever we please!”

Hagar had no arguments, no matter how much she shouted at him at the top of her voice, but for once that made no impression on Uri. The children did not voice an opinion, not even Mama’s favorite.

Uri rented a dwelling on the Via Nomentana, or at least the very end of it, in an ill-reputed eastern suburb of true Rome. The place was on the fifth floor of an unplastered timber tenement building; the rent — cheap though it had to be paid a year in advance — was collected, in return for a regular receipt, by a caretaker, a boozy, bossy busybody who yammered on incessantly, to which the other residents would respond in kind. He was in charge of nine tenement buildings in the area, and once he’d made his rounds taciturn collectors would take the money from him to the landlord, though who that was even the caretaker did not know.

Uri said to Marcellus:

“Life for many people is little more than being born in Far Side, padding around all the time by foot and getting as far as the Via Nomentana, a mere mile and a half from where they were born!”

Marcellus gave an inane stare.

Theo would have understood him.

The house may even belong to Kainis, Uri speculated, and laughed to himself in the way he had been doing recently: cryptically and mirthlessly.

It was the sort of tenement in which the largest and most expensive dwelling was situated on the ground floor, and the higher one had to climb up the narrow, creaking, rickety, wooden steps without a railing, constantly at risk of tumbling down, the cheaper and more cramped they were.

Their dwelling consisted of a single room, in which the cooking was done, the smoke and steam let out by holding the shutter out wide, and in which they also slept, on the floor.

There were three more dwellings on the fifth floor, the others even more cramped, and without even curtains over their doorways. It was impossible to tell exactly how many people lived in them, despite Uri’s efforts to ferret that out.

At the foot of the staircase was the always-closed front door of the best of the dwellings, occupying the entire ground floor, said to be inhabited by a prosperous Thracian wine merchant. Before this stood an enormous uncovered wooden pail into which the occupants emptied the slops of their chamber pots; the contents of the filled pail was taken away each day by fullers, after the turds were taken out by shovel or by hand in front and scattered on the street in front of the entrance to the building. Only the urine was valuable, as that was used to launder the clothes and blankets that the idle Romans had no wish to trouble themselves with cleaning. The house stank throughout all five floors of shit, piss, food, smoke — the stench of human effluvia.