György Spiró - Captivity

“My father needs me back home,” said Uri in desperation. “He’s a merchant, and I’m his only son.”

“You can also establish commercial links here that will be advantageous for your family,” said the official, and got to his feet. He must have had short legs, because he hardly became any taller. “It’s a plus that you speak Aramaic. The strategos wishes you an edifying stay in Judaea, Gaius Theodorus.”

They trekked northward on the road to Damascus, with Uri in the middle and on either side a young, well-built civilian swathed in a cloak.

One had a spear, the other a sword in his hand, and on their feet were the sort of sandals worn by the Jewish police, but they were rather shabby, and the cloaks were far from new. Uri still had tied to his ankles the well-made spruce sandals that he had been given before the dinner with Pilate. He stopped, as did the guards. He kneeled down and undid the knots, slipped the sandals off, then slung them, tied together, around his neck before straightening up. The guards cast lackluster glances at the sandals but said nothing. They moved on.

They held steadily northward. Uri looked back toward Jerusalem, but it was now covered by the bright green contours of mountains and hills. I didn’t see much of it, he thought to himself, but that little was not without its excitements. The guards said that they were passing through Bezetha, the New City, though Uri did not see much of that either, except that shacks and shiny new dwellings of the wealthy were mixed together, showing that Plotius had been right. Uri saw not one straight street.

The walking did him good. In prison his muscles had gotten out of trim, and the thickened soles that had been built up on his feet by sustained exercise had begun to thin. Once he got back to Rome he would walk a few hours every day, and he would never get into the habit of sitting around on tavern terraces.

They trekked steadily north on the road to Damascus, which was not a paved Roman road but a dusty dirt road that had been tamped down by carts, oxen, asses, camels, and people. Uri visualized the map of Palestine that he had seen on the scrolls of Strabo. To their east now lay the River Jordan, and they were making their way toward Samaria. He even asked if they were going to escort him into Samaria, but they were astonished by his denseness.

“We can’t go there! They would kill us,” one of them said, the spearsman on his right. He had rugged features and a protruding nose.

The centuries-old strife between these two people still held. The Samaritans were also Jews and took the local Israelite women as their wives and converted them. But for centuries now there had been no love lost with other Jews, and they did not pay tithes to the Temple in Jerusalem; indeed, they had built their own separate temple on Mount Gerizim, which a few generations before had been pulled down by John Hyrcanus, of the Hasmonean Dynasty, who were ethnarchs of Judaea, and since the death of Archelaus, a son of Herod the Great, the Samaritans, along with the people of Judaea, had been living under Roman suzerainty.

“Can one tell where the border lies?” Uri asked.

“Sure you can,” said the spearsman, keeping a straight face. “The moment you notice that you’re dead, you already crossed it.”

Not everyone here was a complete dolt, not even if they were rogues or policemen disguised in civilian cloaks.

They left the dirt road and now proceeded along paths. Uri saw terraced farmland, with people spaced apart from one another, bending over; he could not make out whether they were men or women, only that they were bent over between strips of grain; some were shorter than the others, perhaps children. They were harvesting some kind of cereal. In places where the grain had been reaped the stalks were collected into bundles, bound up either by themselves or with straw. Yes, they were harvesting! This was when they would have to harvest, since Passover, after all, was a holiday that celebrated the ripening of the crop sown in the winter. On the second day of Passover, an omer of barley was offered in the Temple to signal that grains from the new harvest could be consumed, as marked by the baking of unleavened barley bread on the day after the Passover. So that was the odd-tasting bread he had been given in prison after the other prisoners had been taken away.

“That’s barley, isn’t it?” he asked.

The sword-carrying guard snorted sardonically. They had been sparing in doling out his eyes, as his were little more than slits. Perhaps he did not see well either, and all the screwing up of the eyes had finally left its mark on his eyelids.

“And some wheat as well, isn’t there?” Uri asked hopefully. In Rome all they ever ate was wheat bread; that was what he was used to.

“It sure is,” marveled the spearsman. “It will be ripe is six weeks’ time — that’s what the Shavuot is about. They start to reap the barley in the Nisan, the first month of spring, wheat toward the end of Iyyar, and both of them in Sivan, the third month.”

That was good news. Uri was able to tramp on with his mind at ease.

They were passing near some flat-roofed, mud-brick houses, which must be some kind of village. Uri could only see a door to the dwellings, so maybe there were windows that looked onto an inner yard, rather like in the old Far Side, a few remaining tumbledown cottages of which had still been standing when Uri was a small boy. Some of the mud-brick houses stood on their own, whereas others had been built onto one another. The gardens were not fenced off, with date trees, fig trees, and vines growing, along with a few plants that Uri had not seen before. In most of the gardens there was a cistern; out of some of these ran earthenware pipes, perhaps for irrigation.

In some gardens, between the fruit trees and vine stocks, there were wooden dolls on which rags fluttered in the breeze.

“What are they?” Uri asked.

“Scarecrows,” said the spearsman.

Uri did not understand.

“The birds come along and eat everything,” said the spearsman. “But if they spot a human, they are frightened off. They think those dolls are people!” he said, and chuckled at the birds’ stupidity.

“It does no harm if real people scare them off from time to time,” said the swordsman. “Otherwise they get used to the dolls and work out that it’s a trick. Birds are not totally stupid, ravens in particular; scarecrows like that are no protection against them.”

“Or against locusts,” said the spearsman. “I’ve seen a swarm of migratory locusts. There’s no pestilence worse than that. By the time you can count to six, they will have stripped everything bare. They even go for your eyes to check if those are edible too.”

“Only if they’re famished,” said the swordsman. “If they are not as hungry, they don’t swarm and hardly eat anything. People usually have an idea when the hunger is setting in, so they make the harvest early in anticipation. In periods of drought a watch is kept for locusts with fires. It is possible to pick up a signal a day and a half beforehand when a migration is imminent. Then the whole village will race and pick everything, just as the locusts do — so people are themselves the locusts!” the swordsman laughed. “Worse! There are fools who clear off things that a locust will not touch! Things that are not yet ripe they cook, leave to ripen, boil, and reboil… At such times there will be no bread won from the barley, but beer… And not raisins from the grapes, but wine — and sour wine at that, no matter how much honey you add.”

“It’s just as well that jackals and lions only eat meat,” the spearsman ventured, “or there would be nothing left for humans.”

Uri inquired if there really were lions in Judaea.