György Spiró - Captivity

The sun was shining from behind, but as luck would have it, they were standing in the shade at the foot of the wall in front of the arcade.

The strategos sauntered off to the left before coming to a standstill between the entrance to the Temple and the altar, where an enormous metal basin was resting on the ground. That must be the golden laver in which the priests made their ritual washing. Uri screwed his eyes: the gold was dark and did not glitter, as it was in the shade.

Uri looked up at the Temple. From there, at its foot, all that could be seen was how massive it was.

Several steps led up to the gate, which was hidden by scaffolding. The two elderly men who had conducted his hearing were standing by the southeast corner, face to face with the strategos, who was looking east. Up above, on the altar of holocausts, the white-garbed priest was incinerating meat, possibly the legs of cattle. Thin wisps of smoke rose, not the dense clouds of the sacrifice for the feast, which could be seen from as far off as the fields, but ordinary, everyday fumes. Down below, three Levites were hard at work preparing the next hunks of meat to be burned, sprinkling them with oil. The slaughterer’s benches, which Uri had noticed as soon as they stepped out of the Antonia, were separated by a wall from the innermost courtyard, though this was not as high as the one screening the Court of the Israelites from the outside world. Uri saw the marble columns on which the carcasses were hanging; they were slung up by the legs, and he could see down them as far as the middle of the thighs, the lower legs being obscured by the wall. These were offerings to sacrifice to the Lord; he would not go hungry today, that was for sure.

The elderly men produced a stylus and wax tablet from under their mantles.

Uri was standing in the middle of the row of accused. It almost made him laugh out loud: he was standing in the very center of Judaism as a prisoner. Some crazy dream this was.

The strategos beckoned. Someone on the left end of the row was pushed forward, and he cried out. The accused made his way to the right of the elderly men and stopped. One of them gave a sign, and the prisoner stepped with trembling legs over a knee-high marble barrier, which, as Uri only now noticed, completely encircled the altar and the Temple and within which no one else was standing except the three Levites who were assisting the priest from the ground; even the strategos and the two elderly judges were standing outside it.

The men watching the ceremony exclaimed in consternation, while there were gasps from the women staring from the top of the wall on the right.

The prisoner moved groggily, proceeding by the southeastern corner of the altar, then turned northward and disappeared behind the altar, only to reappear a short time later from behind it, his head hung low, on the northwestern side, going past the strategos, though himself still inside the barrier, turning again at that corner and coming again before the other prisoners, made another circuit of the altar, by now sobbing and, though scarcely able to move, carrying on. The two elderly men looked on fiercely. When he came in front of the strategos at the end of the third circuit, the latter raised a hand. The accused halted, stepped back over the barrier and staggered toward the two guards, who seized him and set him back in the row.

The two elderly men wrote something onto their wax tablets.

The next accused man made a theatrical job of doing the same thing. Uri peered, not understanding anything. He could not see the faces very well, but he could hear the sobbing and could also see that they staggered as they made the circuit. Are we rehearsing penitence here?

In this case the strategos raised his hand after the fifth circuit, and his guards took the accused back to the row.

Uri counted: an aging man made the most laps around the altar — seven in all. He then stopped, the strategos stepped up to him, looked at him in the eyes for a lengthy time, and then gave a signal; only then did the guards lead him back to the row.

The two elderly men again scored a few lines onto their wax tablets.

When Uri’s turn came, he stepped forward of his own accord, not waiting to be pushed. He stepped over the barrier, he heard the groans and gasps, he went around the altar happy at having the chance to inspect it up close. On the northern side small green items of something or other were visible between the stones — moss perhaps. He was also able now to look at the Temple’s gate: there were no leaves! And the frame of the door was a dark metal like bronze, though it was really supposed to be gold. The decoration on it was not as sumptuous as that on the bronze gate to the Court of the Israelites. Inside was a gloomy space in which a further gate could be made out, with curtains hanging down in the gateway, embroidered floor-length curtains of blue, white, scarlet, and purple: scarlet being since time immemorial a symbol of fire; white, of earth; blue, of the air; and purple, of the sea. The eagle knocked down in the last days of Herod the Great was not over the gate; bold Jews had somehow climbed up onto the roof of the Temple and slid down from there on a rope — that was how they knocked down the eagle, and they had paid for it with their lives. Uri looked up: he could not imagine dangling on a rope there. The chamber behind the inner gate was dark, with no window or opening anywhere. In that chamber there must be a table with a costly menorah, a seven-armed candlestick of gold, and incense burners, though he could not see them while he was passing by. That outer sanctum in turn opened into an inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, in which there was nothing; the Ark of the Covenant had vanished at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, when Nebuchadnezzar sacked the whole of Jerusalem; and when the Jews rebuilt the Temple several decades later, the Ark was no longer there, and the emptiness in the Holy of Holies was a reminder of this. Uri ought to have been able to see the door to the inner sanctuary, but the curtains prevented him. In there was a gate of gold, as everyone knew, decorated with man-size gold bunches of grapes. He would have liked to stop and inspect the inside of the Temple, to step a little closer, for, after all, he was inside that magic barrier, but he had a feeling that this was not the right occasion. He passed by the gold laver, in which water was glistening. He looked up and saw that he was standing to the right of the strategos, who was watching him. Uri passed in front of him with his head held high, turned left, and reached the note-taking elderly men; he did not look at them but started on a new circuit.

He made seven circuits, and in doing so had a good peek at the Temple’s scaffolding, the altar of holocausts and the priest who was officiating up there, the Levites, the inner curtains — in short, everything that his peering eyes were able to make out as he went by. Uri was about to start an eighth circuit when he noticed from the protests of the two elderly men that something had happened. He looked back and saw that the strategos’s hand was raised. Uri stopped. The strategos stepped closer to the barrier and gazed at his face. Uri returned the stare. How young he is! He can only be five or six years older than me, and look what a high position he holds already. There was something strange about his face, his eyes perhaps. Yes, that was it! He had not noticed it before, but the strategos had gray eyes.

The two elderly men also stepped nearer and stopped. One made a motion with his head that Uri interpreted as meaning that he should step out, so he stepped back over the marble barrier, stopped, and looked at them. They had kindly faces with alert eyes; one had brown eyes, the other was swarthy, almost black, and their gray beards were tidy. The thinner of the two had an exceedingly lined face, with a long scar on his right cheek that went down to his neck. The other had a double chin but a distinguished bearing. They gazed at Uri’s face as if they were looking at a miracle; involuntarily, Uri smiled at them, at which the elderly men’s eyes flickered.