György Spiró - Captivity

“Of course, they do,” said Marcellus. “They live in Far Side: after all, they’re Jews.”

Uri shook his head.

“But for them, as best I know, there is nothing to choose between a Greek or a Jew.”

“Nor is there! No such thing a man or woman, Greek or Jew, master or servant…”

“There are also women?”

“There are! My own priest is a woman…”

Uri was staggered.

“A woman? As a priest?”

Marcellus elaborated in his relief:

“Any of us can become a priest! Man or woman, servant or master, provided their soul is pure enough!”

He recounted that at the supper that was put on every Saturday in honor of the Messiah (the Friday evening they would devote to the Sabbath like regular Jews) water would be served but it would be partaken of by way of wine because the Anointed had turned water into wine, and that miracle was repeated in all places where His faithful gathered together, and the supper itself was also consecrated to him.

Uri dimly recalled hearing something of the kind before; possibly Philo had mentioned that cranks of a similar stripe had arrived in Alexandria. They had presumably made a start on their evangelism earlier there than in Rome; it would also have been more fertile ground after the Bane.

“Do you have supper and pray?”

“Yes, we do!” exclaimed Marcellus enthusiastically. “We drink water on which the priestess has given the priestly benediction and through that it turns into wine, becomes holy water, and we partake of that, thinking of Him, and his Spirit invades us, and we pray to Him, who was killed but rose again from the dead to come among us a second time, and the Lord will surely come again because he has promised to do so!”

Uri nodded. Holy water was used by Greeks in their rites; the Jews had nothing equivalent, and it was forbidden for anyone who was not a born Cohen to utter the priestly blessing. This was some hybrid of Greek and Jewish religious notions in much the same way as in Alexandria Serapis was a blend of Greek and Egyptian traditions.

Out of that could only come a religious war of Jew against Jew.

“Did your Messiah who rose again from the dead have twelve disciples, by any chance?” Uri asked.

Flabbergasted, Marcellus said: yes, there had been. The twelve were his first apostles.

“Have you already been snooping on us?” he asked mistrustfully.

“No, I haven’t,” Uri replied. “It’s just that Mithras had that number of disciples. Well, and don’t you suppose that the Anointed happened to be born to a virgin? Mithras’s disciples make that claim about him.”

Marcellus protested: no, of course not, what nonsense! He had a regular father, Joseph by name, and his mother was Mariamne.

Uri helped himself to a dumpling, whereupon Marcellus resumed with a will. They peacefully dug in, and Uri meanwhile asked whether there were any Greeks in the group. Marcellus said there weren’t — just masters and servants, men and women. However, there were already Greek believers in Asia, and a lot of god-fearing Greeks in Syrian and Greek towns had converted to belief in the Messiah, who in any case believed in the God of Israel, only they had not been circumcised, and now did not need to anyway. Indeed, his own priestess had become a Nazarene there because both she and her husband were Roman, but they too had been driven out of Far Side under Claudius; they too had traipsed around in Italia but then sailed to Corinth, where had found employment in tent-making. It was then that the Holy Ghost had touched them, and since then, they were happy. The priestess’s husband had died shortly before; he had died happy, and Priscilla, the widow, was also happy in the knowledge that her husband was sitting in Light on the right hand of the Creator, next to the Anointed, who had expunged death for evermore.

Expunged death! God in Heaven!

Sitting in Light! The light of Enoch!

Priestess!

Uri gazed at the broad, flat face and the long, down-turned hook of the nose under which a straggle of black wisps of hair had begun to arise. The child not only had no father but no mother either, or so he felt.

Hagar and the girls cautiously edged in from the stairwell and were witnesses to the miracle that Uri and Marcellus were peacefully eating and conversing with each other; they did not know what to make of the transformation.

Uri looked at them.

If they understood, Uri reflected, I would say that I could finally be through with humanity.

Uri requested that Marcellus ask his priestess if he could also take part in a supper on Saturday. Marcellus was reluctant, but it was clearly something he could not refuse: they were willing to make a convert of anyone, Uri thought, and that was explicitly laid down.

The priestess sent word that the congregation was willing to accept Uri.

The believers did not seem any more lunatic or wretched than people do generally; indeed, their dress betrayed a degree of affluence, which came as a bit of an unwelcome surprise to Uri, though he himself could not have said why. They assembled in a secluded cottage, not far from the southern border of Far Side; it was where Priscilla had lived since she lost her husband. They had purchased the cottage with the money they had made in Corinth, with Priscilla explaining to Uri, as the newcomer, that they had made tents for nomadic tribes, since all the Jews there lived in towns and had nothing to do with agriculture.

Priscilla was of medium height, silver-haired, with a good physique, with strongly marked but not unpleasant features and a hint of a self-confident smile playing around her lips. She did not wear clothes of mourning, which Uri interpreted as meaning that they had expunged death, and anyone who had died was living.

They must be horribly afraid of death.

They must be horribly unable to bear being on their own, and ultimately unable to bear not being loved. They were unable to bear the human condition.

On Saturday evening, with the Sabbath over, sixteen of them sat on stools around a long table, with Uri as the seventeenth. I’m a prime number, he thought, being somehow very pleased with the idea.

Priscilla had a few innocuous words for each and every one, addressing them by name, and their faces would light up as if tears were glittering in their eyes, tears of hope, and she proceeded to break the bread and cut it into slices. They gazed reverentially before leaping up and distributing the bread, and then she poured water into the beakers from a jug.

“We are assembled here, my brothers,” intoned Priscilla, and a great stillness descended, “to give remembrance unto our Lord, who died for our sake and rose again from the dead for our sake, and who gave the gift of immortality to those of us who believe in Him, and ours has become the kingdom of Heaven here on Earth, because we are simple souls and we gained admission for that reason.”

The faithful mumbled an “Amen,” passed the beakers along the table, drank the water, then wept. Uri looked down at his beaker, sniffed it, and had a taste: it was water.

Then they partook of the bread, which was ordinary bread, and Priscilla said that the food was the last supper that the Lord, the Resurrected Anointed, ate on the evening before his death; this was repeated by the faithful throughout the world in whom New Life had taken root through the Holy Ghost that the Anointed had inspired into believers here on Earth.

Priscilla then recited the usual Sabbath prayer that had to be delivered on the Friday evening, but added on a priestly blessing.

Everyone shuddered, including Uri, who had seldom heard the blessing from any priest.

They all said “Amen” and took another draft from their beaker.

Priscilla then asked in almost a conversational tone what news the faithful had brought of the big wide world, and a quiet, informal conversation followed; their faces became animated, they took on life rather as if the Motionless, that dormant primitive substance about which Zeno writes, had been set in motion by the second, deeper substance, the Spirit. They spoke about Philippi, Thessalonica, and Ephesus, from which they had heard good things about their brothers and sisters. Priscilla was asked for news from Corinth, and with a slightly gloomy face she said that she had received a letter that there had been some debate between the apostles, but the matter seemed to have been resolved; for her own part, she added that some of these brothers were not without their vanity. Not that this was a problem, because it was our business in life to perfect our souls, there was a little time still left for that, not much but still a bit, before the Lord again appeared among us, but it would be unfortunate if this were to lead to strife among believers. The Lord took no pleasure in that.