György Spiró - Captivity

In his spare time he used broken tiles that were being discarded as rejects to build up portraits of Kainis and others. This was noticed by the foreman, who eventually asked him if he wanted a job as a painter. Uri was reminded of Judaea, and Hiskiyya, who had painted all those fantastic birds in the palace that was being built for Queen Helena of Adiabene, so he took on a job as a painter.

After he had finished painting his first wall, Uri was offered a higher wage, and he accepted it.

Once again he was making money.

He had waited nineteen years for the chance to be a painter.

If only he could now stick to that as a trade.

He was well aware that he was not really cut out for painting murals, more for painting panels; those were small and needed to be looked at from close at hand. Mural decorations he would have to look at from a distance, and his pictures did not show up well from that perspective because he himself could only see shadowy blotches if he stepped back, and even that was something. Like the others, he painted in tempera, applying pigment ground to a paste in water to a solvent of egg yolk, milk, honey, and vegetable oil, onto a gesso ground, just as he had learned in Jerusalem. The alternative way, the encaustic technique (which employed a binder of molten beeswax into which the pigments were applied with a metal spatula, burned into grooves on the drawing), he knew only from written descriptions. In any case, this was used in Rome only in the houses of the very richest people, and they only painted the residences of the parvenu middle class in the eastern part of Rome proper, on the Viminal ridge and the hills around there.

He painted, gossiped, talked politics, and drank with the other painters and tilers, them drinking wine and he sticking to beer. Many a time they got so sloshed that after the noon siesta they would not wake up until the evening. He would hand one-third of his wages to Hagar, which in itself was no small amount, hiding the remaining two-thirds under one of the tiles in the villa that was under construction.

He took a fancy to one of the water carriers, a slim, young, firm-bodied, black girl with curly raven locks called Flora, and one afternoon seduced her, having no idea why the girl was willing to go to bed with him, and any time he asked she just giggled. Flora wasn’t brainy, but she was pleasant, and would fondle Uri’s male organ, amazed that it had no foreskin even when it just dangled limply, as she had never encountered its like before. He was cautious when making love to the girl, which he did in one of the remote nooks of the residence that was rising around them, taking particular care not to impregnate her. For the first time in many years he became a man again, poking her in any number of ways. The girl would playfully tweak the graying hairs on his chest and stroke the bald pate of his head, imagining, as she put it herself, that it was crowned with a thick head of hair.

Life, in short, acquired richness, but then one day at dawn the tenement building burned down.

The vigiles did not make an appearance, and Uri and his family had to run down a flaming, alarmingly crackling staircase dressed in no more than their tunics; it was a miracle none of them was consumed in the blaze, for the moment they got out the stairs collapsed and two of the other families on the fifth story, some twenty people all told, young and old, women and men, all perished.

The entire block of buildings in this slum area along the Via Nomentana caught fire and burned to the ground, rather as if it had been set alight at several places simultaneously, and presumably that is what really did happen. Uri hugged his trembling daughters, Marcellus wailed hysterically, and Hagar just sat staring vacantly. Frightfully burned people were lying on the ground, screaming; water was thrown over them, and they writhed and rasped until they passed away in dreadful agonies. Uri looked at them and was astounded because he could see that in fact they were choking to death, and it crossed his mind that perhaps we do not only breathe with our lungs, as one is taught, but in some other way, only we don’t know what that is.

They lost not only their personal possessions but also six months’ rent that they had paid in advance, but would never be able to use.

That too was a cause of the fire, Uri realized, because the insurer would pay out damages to the landlord, who would then have a new building thrown up in under two months and would then again have the brazen cheek to demand a whole year’s rent in advance from the new tenants. Uri seethed: he should have seen it coming. He would never grow a head on his shoulders; he was still always surprised at how evil people were.

The scum had us pay for the fire roofs before they set fire to the whole street!

They had to find somewhere to live.

They moved to a peasant dwelling which lay just within the city walls, close to the Porta Nomentana. Part of Uri’s secret cache of two-thirds of his wages went toward this; he told Hagar a fib about having been granted a loan, but then they also needed to eat, for the tessera did not bring in enough and Uri’s patron, Gaius Lucius, had died while they were away. Uri went once to his patron’s house, having bought a brand-new sportula for the occasion, but the deceased man’s sons had him chased off, having no wish to support a Jewish client. Afterward Uri had not gone in search of a new patron, hoping that he would be able to earn enough from painting. Marcellus had a prodigious appetite, and Irene too could pack it away; only Eulogia pecked at her food. When Marcellus turned fourteen he would be able to put on the toga virilis of a Roman citizen and he too would be entitled to a tessera, but they could not go hungry until then.

Uri then recalled that he had not taken advantage of the two bounties of three hundred sesterces that Caligula had distributed in person to the population, nor the one that Claudius had ordered to be distributed while they were in Puteoli, and this latter was the larger amount, because those with large families were entitled to receive one thousand sesterces, and Uri could prove he had three children. At cockcrow one day, before anybody was up, he went off to do his mural painting work and, around midday, rushed off to the local authority to assert his right to receive these. He was asked for all manner of verification, for which he had to go back once more to Far Side, and now it was with Iustus that he spoke. He had likewise become one of the superiors in the office of the Jewish community, no longer working as secretary to Honoratus but having secretaries work for him. Iustus put on an act as if Uri had never been ostracized, embracing him, patting him on the back, exulting greatly, and promising to collect all that was necessary to support Uri’s impeccable right of citizenship as a Roman Jew, for there were copies of all the documents in the archives, though it was quite obvious that he would do nothing.

Unexpectedly, however, Uri was judged retrospectively to have qualified to be granted four hundred sesterces, the amount Nero distributed to the plebs when he attained power, though the authorities would hear nothing further about any other monies. Uri hid that four hundred sesterces for even grimmer times to come.

They puffed and blew, snored and squabbled in the peasant dwelling, and they went hungry. The peasant himself, who moved out into the stable with his family, did not provide any fare, which had to be purchased separately. Hagar moaned and so did the girls, but the worst was when they did not moan, just sat there staring mournfully, accusingly. Marcellus would say nothing, not even to complain, but there were times when he would vanish for days on end and would not say where he had been, for all the clouts he was given by Hagar, who doted on him. Uri was reduced to screaming: