György Spiró - Captivity

They were still dining when four Latinian youths dropped into the hostelry. Judging from their clothes and jewels, they must have been rich; maybe they were headed to the country house of one of their fathers, but they hitched their horses in front of the inn. On entering the premises, they weighed the situation and sat down next to the wilting damsels, who livened up, and while the Jews stared into their plates as they chewed, they took drinks. When the Jews had finished the meal, the four youths and six women went upstairs.

By then even Uri had comprehended that these women were professionals. He knew from his reading that whatever takes place in a hostelry does not count as marital infidelity in a court of law. He kept quiet, and so did his companions. From upstairs a sound of tittering, periodic screaming, rhythmic panting, pounding, and creaking of the floor could be heard.

Uri had encountered prostitutes before in Rome while going around his favorite part of the city, the Subura, with ladies in short sleeveless tunics sometimes accosting him and offering to take care of him for two or three asses; the whores in Rome were proverbially dirt-cheap, there being too many of them. Uri always retreated panic-stricken, precisely because, thanks to his father’s good nature, he would always have enough money on his person to pay for their services. He had no money on him now, thank the Lord, so he was in no place to proposition the worthy ladies, were he to be seized by a momentary madness.

They slept in a warehouse, packed together on the ground. For a long time Uri could not get to sleep, listening to the snores and wheezing of his companions and imagining what might be going on upstairs in the inn.

Naked men and women were not unknown sights to him, Roman statuary not exactly being prudish. Paintings in the public library also depicted fauns and nymphs who had nothing on, and the painter had not given Helen too many clothes either, portraying her virtually naked at the side of a Paris with a conspicuous hard-on.

Uri feared sexuality and yearned in equal measure for a woman to initiate him at last. Hanging around in the true Rome, he could hardly shield his eyes from open displays and depictions of sexuality. There were statues of humans, murals of naked nymphs also, in the houses of even rich Roman Jews — not that Uri saw them, as he had no access to such places, but there was talk all over Far Side about it being possible for Jews to purchase with impunity a sarcophagus portraying a nude Venus or Poseidon in specialist shops run by non-Jews, and Levite cemetery attendants would raise no objections. The Elders of Rome took the view that portrayals of man or beast were prohibited only on hilltops, because there they might be worshiped as idols, whereas anywhere else was permitted. Sarah was always happy to inveigh against this disgusting, barbaric custom any time she brought food and drink and clean clothes to a weary Joseph when he got back home, as were a wife’s duties, after all. Uri too understood that the Torah contained a general prohibition against portrayals of both man and beasts, and he simply could not make his mind up whether to support the written Law or the spoken Word in his soul.

When the weather was good, which it was for eight or nine months in the year, benches would be set up on the street, and it was possible to gaze at the bustle for hours on end, and there were few bigger amusements going in the Rome of those days. Sitting in a Roman tavern, Uri would look at the women and try to imagine what kinds of children he would father with each, and how.

He was attracted by the darker-skinned, wild-looking women from far-off lands, Ethiopians especially. They were tall and slender, and they wore their decorative veils with grace, not walking so much as gliding on their long legs, walking along the street as if they were carrying themselves on their own palanquin, even though their ears were pierced. Uri used to daydream about one day converting an Ethiopian woman like that to the Jewish faith, purchasing her out of slavery, and her bringing a cartload of children into the world by him, to the greater glory of the Lord.

There was barely a tavern in Rome in which women did not sit around next to the men; these women were likewise professional, and Uri might avert his gaze, but he could not stop his ears from hearing their puerile suggestions. His command of Latin grew superbly in the process. It was also quite usual for erotic drawings by well-versed hands to appear on house walls, and it was impossible not to see these; they would even desecrate the walls of villas on the Capitoline from time to time, though graffiti like that vanished quickly, as they were washed off by the sentinels. Non-Jewish plebeians with whom Uri was on good terms in the true Rome related that the best paintings were to be found in the thermal springs, always offering some new instruction, and female staff would even demonstrate a desired position with a guest, albeit not cheaply. Uri considered himself lucky that, being Jewish, he was not allowed to frequent such baths, though he was dying to try everything out.

It was late when he finally got to sleep, almost daybreak, and he found it near impossible to get up for the morning prayer. When he wanted to get the matzo from his sack he could not find it at first, and he was alarmed that it might have shaken out somewhere en route, but then he found it, though it was broken up.

Someone had been through the sack.

The pleasant feelings of the previous day evaporated.

They didn’t trust him; they were suspicious.

But what could they have been looking for in a sack that had been given him by Matthew? They could see that, apart from his father’s cast-off cloak, he had arrived with nothing.

After the morning prayer they ate a hearty breakfast to fortify themselves from the journey ahead; the women were languishing in place, while the rich Roman youngsters had taken off. Still, it was not how they looked after group sex that concerned Uri, but only the dreadful emptiness of his belly into which he crammed the food. His companions chatted merrily and even spoke to him pleasantly enough; they did not notice that his mood had altered.

Before the start — there was again a trap to carry the luggage, this time with two donkeys, which meant they would be walking — Uri went up to Matthew and declared gloomily:

“Someone’s been through my sack.”

Matthew cast a glance at him. There was no sympathy in the look but also no malice.

“Was anything taken?” he asked.

“No,” Uri replied, surprised.

“Well, then, no harm came of it,” Matthew replied, and turned away.

Uri was disconsolate. He would have liked to take after this group of strong men, to please them; he had no trouble accepting Matthew as a leader and mentor, but for some reason they were suspicious of him. His father was right: they bore him malice from the outset, and all because his wretched father had been put in a worse position than ever before by Agrippa’s request. And he could not even tell them; they wouldn’t believe him anyway.

He worried away as they walked; on account of that, he did not feel his legs hurting him so much. He no longer looked at the countryside; it was just boring evergreen cypresses everywhere, gentle slopes, hills, withered over-wintering vines, dormant crops, leafless woodlands, and every twenty-five stadia a post where the wealthy could change horses but their group could not drop in, not because it was forbidden but just because everything was more expensive. Uri no longer wondered about anything; he did not blink, just mulled things over bitterly.

Then it occurred to him: what if his sack had not been tampered with deliberately? They all looked the same, after all; maybe someone had mistaken it for their own.