György Spiró - Captivity

There was going to be war. Everyone was counting on that, even though it was peacetime; the builders of the military road had counted on war decades before. Simon the Magus could also see it coming and was doing what he could to save his money while he could.

At the edge of the road lolled women in scanty dresses made up in the Egyptian style. Their faces were daubed white, with their eyebrows picked out in dark paint and their lips red. Even Uri could see their features as they were standing no more than three or four feet away. He estimated the distance between the women as thirty to forty cubits; every one of them, old or young, had a half-crazed look about her. Some stood motionless, like resigned statues; others swayed, their legs apart, or whistled; others mechanically licked the corners of their mouths, or wiggled their backsides, or even pulled out their breasts to display. The travelers pretended not to notice. Uri assumed that some people were skimming off the top of whatever the women made, just as much of the profit his father made from silk was raked off. The reason the whores were allowed to live, as was his father in Rome, was because they made money for someone; the moment they ceased to be of use, they would be disposed of.

It would be good to talk about this with Joseph, but it was something that could not be discussed.

He couldn’t tell his father that he was being treated like a prostitute. No, that wasn’t the right word. He couldn’t tell his father that he was a slave.

The good thing about thoughts is that one can chew on them for a prolonged period, which made walking more tolerable. He was again carrying his sandals around his neck, and the bare, hardened soles of his feet tramped the military road from Caesarea to Jerusalem. His ankle became sore much sooner than it had in Italia, on account of the rough ground, he supposed, or as a result of the week of inactivity in Caesarea.

When they set out, the seven of them were the only ones walking on the road, but as the day went on they encountered ever more people on the way to Jerusalem, to the festivities. For these people, however, there was no need to set out so early: they lived more than three days’ walking distance from the Temple. Nowhere had it been set down in writing, but since the time of Herod the Great, the notorious marathon distance — twenty-four stadia — had been customarily regarded as one day’s walking distance, the notion adopted in the rich towns of Palestine and Syria along with the quinquennial Olympic games. The members of the delegation managed to cover a daily average of one and a half times that much, but then they were, so to speak, professional walkers, and apart from small sacks they were carrying nothing else, no animals, baggage, week’s provisions, or infants.

By noon the innocuous crowd had proliferated, swelling to a group of several hundred Jews; people from nearby villages had taken to the military road to avoid the bumps of unpaved paths with their traps, carts, and barrows.

They could not be asked for road tolls now that they were on their way to a festival, Uri supposed, gaining an insight into the logic of the Pax Romana.

Families and clans walked together, and they carried with them everything that was intended for sacrifice at the Temple. Wheels creaked under carts loaded with plant and animal offerings. There were baskets on the heads of the womenfolk, smaller baskets on the heads of the children, also containing sacrificial offerings.

They marched along in their finest clothes, singing psalms, with the psalms intermingling and a cacophony of sounds arising. For many even the finest clothes were rags, the best sandals, bare feet. Their skin was ulcerated, their bodies scrawny. The oxen pulling the carts were also scraggly, their bones very nearly poking through their hides. The bellies of the countless small children were swollen over their skinny thighs, the bellies of the cattle, donkeys, and camels similarly swollen. This was poverty that Uri had never seen in Italia or Rome.

Could this be my people?

He looked at the shuffling old folks and the small barefoot brats that kept straying off. Already, at six or seven years of age, children had to go to the festivities in Jerusalem; the smallest, the infants of one or two years of age, traveled on their fathers’ backs, and he envied them: he too had hung on to his father’s neck when they had fled, and he had been the family’s only child.

He looked at the solemn heads of families, swathed in their gowns, the women covering their faces; a procession the likes of which it was impossible to imagine in Rome, even though there one could find almost anything imaginable. There, every Jew went to his own synagogue for Passover, and he would have a hearty lunch. Here, there was a mass pilgrimage, and families, so it seemed, took along with them not just the sacrificial offerings but their entire wealth, including all their cattle, their tents as well, either on their backs or on carts, fearing perhaps that anything left at home would be filched. In front and at the back of the carts were tethered horses, foals, oxen, and cattle, with the poultry thrown into the carts themselves; these could not all be sacrificial animals, it was just that they dared not leave them at home, unguarded, in the village — otherwise they would be stolen by robbers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, so they took with them to Jerusalem their entire fortunes, everything, and then, once the festival was over, they would drive them back home again, or at least as many of the cattle, children, and old people who were still alive after the major effort. This migration back and forth occurred at least three times a year, as if the settled Jewish peasants were returning to their ancestral nomadic lifestyle three times a year; as if wandering were in their blood and the festivals had been codified merely to give free rein to this primitive instinct.

In the autumn, for the Day of Atonement, the holiest feast in the Jewish calendar, there must be even bigger crowds on the move in Judaea. The Feast of Booths, harvest festival, and feast of thanksgiving is called Sukkot for the hastily erected bivouacs, roofed with straw; these were still being carried and would be set up somewhere. Only the name given to this feast is Passover, the spring festival commemorating, in part, the deliverance of Moses and his people and, in part, the ripening of the early-winter sowing of barley.

So many tents and tent poles were being carried that Uri was convinced that tent-making must be the best of all trades in Palestine.

Where would this vast mass of people pitch their tents? he wondered. Hardly in the city, for that was surely paved; indeed, he seemed to recall it being said that the paving of the city had been in constant progress since the time of Herod the Great. This continuously growing throng of people was surely going to camp outside the city during the three most important days of the festival, with many spending the entire week under a tent. There were a couple of half-holidays in between the feast days, but the crowd would still be there, close to Jerusalem, and only then would it set off for home.

He looked at the faces, and with few exceptions they struck him as foreign.

Among them were many faces that he had not encountered in Rome, either among the Jews or the inhabitants of the true Rome. They resembled, most of all, Arabs, Egyptians, Numidians, Ethiopians, and Abyssinians. If the men had not been wearing gowns over their heads, or there had been no kerchief covering the women’s heads, and in some cases a veil as well, he would have had a tough time recognizing them as Jews. The Jews in Rome were not like these; there the Jews were Roman.

They spoke either Greek or Aramaic, and it was only the psalms that were in Hebrew. They sang it inaccurately, garbling words, mixing up word endings; they did not understand the psalms, warbling them in a plaintive drawl, just as they had heard them from their parents. Perhaps it was the essence that one did not need to understand the psalms, just croon and mumble them under his breath in a nonsense language. One has to speak to God, Uri supposed, in a language that has no sense; maybe He understood that. The Lord was hardly going to fool around with meaningful words; He had too many things to worry about, what with all existing worlds being entrusted to Him, not just our earthly world. There must be a fair amount of trouble in the heavenly world as well, with the angels squabbling, to say nothing of the devils, those curious puppets of God whom He had created — after all, He had created everything — to have someone to worry about when He was bored. Maybe He inspired the embrace of bad causes deemed necessary so that men would not castigate Him on their account; maybe the devils were just like Sejanus had been, and the Lord God just like the emperor Tiberius. The Lord was not paying attention to us, and if He hears anything at all, He hears only a querulous, chanting song; but then if He was almighty, He would understand that.