György Spiró - Captivity

When the sun had sunk below the sea in the west, they turned again to Jerusalem and said their prayers.

Matthew paced restlessly.

They sat, backs propped up on the wall, gazing, out of sorts and wordless.

It crossed Uri’s mind that it would be no bad thing if the mission were to end at this point; if he could go straight back to the harbor and set sail on the first ship that was setting off for Alexandria.

On his own.

He would install himself in that famous big library, which Julius Caesar had put to the torch seventy-six years before with the loss of untold millennia of irreplaceable manuscripts, clay tablets, petroglyphs, and scrolls of parchment and cloth. It was rumored, though, that everything possible had since been replaced, and more than one Roman Jew able to offer manuscripts of value to the library in Alexandria had enriched himself. The whole stock was continuously being recollected, and although it was impossible to replace every single item, the rebuilt library of Alexandria once again counted as the world’s richest library.

He would read the works to which he could not gain access in Rome.

In his head there was a long list of the titles of works that absolutely had to be read, mainly mathematical works, the existence of which he had gleaned from public libraries in Rome, which did not hold the works themselves, only references to them. Once he had read those, he would get on a boat that was running from Alexandria to Ostia, finally get back to Rome and home, and lie around in Rome’s damp, cool, miasmic, leprous, malarial air, resting his throbbing head, his sore midriff, and his aching back, and when his father stepped in to upbraid him for something, he could start telling him what he had read, and his father would seat himself on his couch and listen entranced as he had never done before. He, Uri, would be inspired by the spirit and mentality of all the authors he had read, whose works had seeped into him, become one with his blood, and his father would be touched at last by the vast, prodigious human knowledge that emanated from his own son. His spirit, bogged down as it was in mundane cares, would be uplifted. Joseph rarely read, not having the time for it, but Uri was sure that these works would be of assistance to his cruelly fated father.

Down in the harbor a lavish display of lights went up, the brightest of which was the Pharos of Caesarea.

Matthew began talking about the Pharos of Alexandria, which stood at the entrance to the royal harbor.

“That is a sight to behold!” he said. “Hundreds of ships at anchor on both sides, some of them monstrously large: I once saw an Achaean quinquereme. You can hardly get a boat in there, it’s always jam-packed. If a mariner has no reliable contacts in the city and cannot drop the ‘right’ name, he may find himself kept waiting for weeks on the water. Dozens of craft make the rounds with pilots and excisemen between the harbor and the ships at anchor, and if the captain does not pay them unconscionable sums of money (since like everyone else they too work to fill their own pockets), then he will find his ship is constantly put to the bottom of the list until he sees sense or rows over to the city and raises the credit from a banker…”

It would have been good to hear more about Alexandria, but all of a sudden some servants with laden baskets on their heads appeared on the steeply sloping street. At first all that could be seen were the wobbling baskets and only after that the heads. They were followed by a few armed men, and behind them came eight slaves bearing an ornate palanquin up the hill. A litter borne by eight slaves was a rare enough sight even in Rome, where even the wealthy made do with four. It was set down at the gate as gently as if they were transporting eggs, and out of it descended a tousled, black-bearded, rotund figure, balding and with graying hair and bushy eyebrows and wearing an exquisitely draped toga.

This was Simon the Magus.

Their host had made his arrival. They got to their feet to greet him.

Simon offered no excuses; after all, they might just as easily have arrived a day or two earlier or later. He just nodded by way of welcome, greeted Matthew in Aramaic as an old acquaintance and embraced him too, though without a smile on his face. The gate was opened and they were finally able to go in.

They made their way through a splendid, well-kept garden to the stone house, which was larger than that of the proprietor of the sawmill in Syracusa.

Room was made for them in an enormous chamber somewhat like an atrium. They were given wood benches to rest their backs on, and on those were mattresses spread with fine linen. They took a dip in a sumptuous tiled pool, prayed, and then gathered for supper, by which time Simon had also changed, putting on a clean tunic. His hair and beard were uncombed and he was pop-eyed with weariness.

They were served a meal of countless dishes, among them a great variety of meats (Simon knew that having been on a ship, they had eaten no meat for weeks) and fine wines. They fell on the food and ate with gusto, whereas Simon the Magus took only small bites of everything.

Uri looked around; there was nothing to suggest that the person dwelling in the house was a physician.

Simon started speaking Greek with them, but he struggled with the declension of words and the mysteries of the aorist tense, so after a few glasses he switched to Aramaic. He spoke with an easily recognizable Galilean accent. Matthew spoke Aramaic, and now it was suddenly revealed that Plotius spoke it perfectly; not surprising, thought Uri, given that he had spent quite a few years in Judaea, though he found it peculiar that he had not made this clear before. So Plotius too was also testing my Aramaic that Sabbath when I interpreted the reading, he thought.

Hilarus spoke Hebrew, so he was able to follow what the host was saying, more or less, and for the benefit of Iustus, Valerius, and Alexandros, a Jewish servant interpreted from Aramaic to Greek — perfectly, as far as Uri could tell.

Simon tried to banter, but he wasn’t suited to play the role of man of the world, as he was quite obviously unable to set his worries aside, and although no one asked him, he began to talk about them.

He had gotten back to the house so late because he had been trying to call in the outstanding debts of his creditors, and that was no easy matter. He had been concentrating almost exclusively on that for several weeks, and he had been forced to realize that lenders took a much bigger risk than he would ever have imagined. He had been poor for all of his days; he had limped the length and breadth of Galilee as an itinerant sorcerer, curing where he was asked and seeing very little in the way of money as he generally worked for room and board until, by a stroke of luck, Pilate, having heard about the cures he had achieved, sent for him and asked him to restore his sickly wife to health. He did indeed manage to help the lady recover, and he had been given a large amount of money by a grateful Pilate, after which he had gone away and for a few weeks had resumed his healing work in the villages of Galilee, until Pilate’s men caught up with him and called him to the palace, where the condition of Pilate’s spouse had taken a turn for the worse. A few days of speaking to the lady once more brought an improvement; Pilate had retained his services, and since then had very generously supported him financially. It now seemed that the curative effect was no longer working; he would not be able to keep his job much longer, and he wanted to be sure that the money he had saved was in a secure place. He did not regret having to leave this beautiful house: he had been content in stables and sties, and in fact greatly missed the smells of the land and livestock; he missed the country people, who were more appreciative than the rich, even when they could barely pay him, not even in kind, if they had nothing. But if he had come by money, better it should not go astray.