György Spiró - Captivity

That thought was comforting.

No doubt that is what happened, but he suspected his companions of searching through his sack, and, worse, had made the mistake of relaying that to Matthew. He would have to beg their pardon at the first suitable opportunity.

This was the first time since setting off that he had cheered up.

Life was glorious after all! He was walking in Italia on an important mission, among excellent companions, to Jerusalem — a wretched little Roman Jew, his sandals tied together and slung around his neck, the only one of the group who was barefoot, because sandals were expensive, one needed to take care of them.

Matthew was right; he would toughen up on the journey. Already the walking was easier; his body was already toughening up, the soles of his feet becoming callused. More than likely his eyesight was also improving.

He gazed at the many intermittent points of light against the outlines of the roadside trees: the bare branches would be covered by marvelous green foliage by the time they, having fulfilled their noble mission several months from now, would walk back this way.

Their progress was slower than Matthew had planned, because sunset on the first Friday, the onset of the Sabbath, overtook them in open country.

They had left the paved road by then; they did not have a trap with them, and so, sacks slung on shoulder, they trailed after Matthew up hill and down dale; he, it seemed, was thoroughly familiar with the zigzag route to be taken to avoid costly excise payments in the towns.

They said the Sabbath evening prayers under a tree in full leaf, and on this occasion Matthew read out relevant passages from the Torah scroll he from his sack. It was small, but the crowns of the two wooden staves on which the scroll was rolled were ornamented, maybe that too a gift from the Elders in Rome. Matthew asked Uri to interpret from Greek to Aramaic. Uri blushed; he had never before been picked for such a distinction, and he was amazed to be asked to interpret to Aramaic, of all languages, which, aside from Matthew, none of the others understood. But then again, to interpret from the Torah was a sublime task, whatever the circumstances.

In the more prosperous synagogues, a designated leader would read the Pentateuch text, sentence by sentence, in Hebrew, and another designated adult male, likewise held in high repute, a different person every Sabbath and feast day, would interpret the text sentence by sentence into Greek. In poorer houses of prayers in the provinces, so it was said, there was only a Torah in Greek and no need to interpret. The faithful would only say the “Amen” along with the leader.

Uri interpreted the Greek passages of the Septuagint into Aramaic, even though everyone spoke Greek as their native tongue. With prompts from Matthew, the companions dutifully said the “Amens” in the appropriate places. Uri interpreted fluently and elegantly; his face was burning, he was proud of himself. Matthew, who obviously spoke Aramaic, gave him no plaudits, then, when they began nibbling the matzos and preparing for a day of rest, he said — because one was permitted to speak, just not to work — on Sunday they would see the house where they were supposed to pass the night.

“We’ll call in,” he said, “in case anyone is worried about us.”

For Uri this was the first Sabbath in his life that he had celebrated away from home. He woke up early, said his prayers, rinsed down his feet with dew, dried them on his toga, and used his fingernails to burst the blisters and peel off the thickened skin. It was more a kind of nonchalant and light-hearted picking, rather than with serious corrective intent, as any medication, including self-medication, was forbidden on the Sabbath. It was lucky that the ground was dewy, though religion saw to it that a son of the chosen people would be able to wash his feet even were dew lacking, because there was always going to be soil.

The Lord God had taken good care to insert a day of rest after six days of labor; God well understood that a person can stick out six days on foot but would not take a seventh.

He went off to relieve himself, and he saw that his stool was blood-flecked. His rectum had been itching and throbbing for days, perhaps from all the walking. His father suffered from bouts of colic, especially when he was helplessly worrying about an uncertain business matter.

Uri was delighted by the bloody stool.

He felt that the common ailment brought him closer to his distant father, who would likewise be observing the Sabbath back at home; right now he must be setting off with Sarah and the girls for the house of prayer where upon the Sabbath morning the members of the congregation would collectively listen to the prayer, men and women together and with them any children able to walk. There were stories that in Judaea women were given a place separate from the men; Uri did not understand the need for this degrading differentiation. If the opportunity arose, he would ask Matthew about it someday.

He lolled on the grass the whole day long; it was nice and warm. He extracted the jug from the sack — he had just come to the end of the matzos and had long since polished off the fruit — and placed it under his back; he wrapped his father’s poor old cloak around himself, giving thanks to Joseph for begetting him, and stared at the skies. Up above, confused, multiple outlines blotched bluish, whitish, and grayish-blue, blurring into one another, unpredictably. Beyond that was Heaven, to which, at the end of his days, if he had worthily stood his ground down here below, he would hopefully ascend, there to meet with all the dear souls of his relations. That may have been a Greek idea originally, but the Jews had also adopted it, and quite rightly too; it was very reassuring.

The others in the delegation strolled around, chatted in twos and threes, but they did not go far, as that would have counted as traveling, which of course was forbidden on the Sabbath; they did not move farther than the tree under which the Torah had been read. No one spoke to him, but that did not bother Uri now; the Lord had seen well that on the seventh day one ought to rest. He must have seen the heavy toils of slaves in Egypt and wanted to give them too a reason for rejoicing on the seventh day. Uri exercised his feet; they hurt, but there was something ecstatic even in that. His rectum did not hurt now that he was lying down: it seemed as if the pain had departed from him also, along with the tainted blood.

He was surrounded by countryside of Edenic intactness, charming hills and moors, woods and fields, the glorious land of Campania, and needless to say there was a babbling brook nearby, as they had to drink and ritually bathe; God knew just where to conjure up a brook.

The whole of Italia was not yet cultivated; a vast amount of land was left fallow and belonged either to nobody or to the emperor, which came to the same thing. These hills had perhaps never been cultivated, with only sheep or goats sometimes grazing as they strayed in that direction. These were the sorts of landscapes about which verses were dashed off by bucolic Latin poets who developed an eye for the countryside because they lived in crowded cities.

Uri’s soul was filled, as he lay there, with cheerfulness and an unfocused yearning. At that moment he was at peace with the created world, with the Creator, and specifically because he very much wanted to experience right now the future for which he was predestined. Travel would play a part in it, as a matter of course, for how else would he have ended up where he was? Because he had done nothing wrong, he felt now that the trip to Jerusalem was in fact a gift.

The Lord wanted him to break free at last from his pagan reading matter, to grow up, and to see the Temple, which few in the Diaspora had the chance to see, and for his faith to be strengthened. Uri was one of the chosen people, however wretched he might consider himself to be. How could he not be one of the Lord’s chosen people too if he was one of those, everywhere in the world this morning, who had listened to the same passages from the Torah that not long before he had interpreted to Aramaic?