György Spiró - Captivity

He left the yard and stood hesitantly among the houses. It was warm. He sniffed at his tunic, dirtied with chicken droppings. It was a good thing that he had left the fine ceremonial toga at the Antonia in his haste when he was taken before the judges, because if he had been wearing that, that too would have been spattered with chicken droppings.

The nearby fields all belonged to the village, and plainly they would have been sown with barley and wheat, so it didn’t matter where he began. He kept looking back and narrowing his eyes, trying to memorize the rhythm of the mud-brick cottages’ rooftops so that he would be able to find his way back to the coop without having to ask for directions.

The village lay in a valley, with gardens and plowed fields sloping — now gently, now steeply — as far as the woods.

There were many out at work on the fields. Uri stopped, screwed his eyes and peered through his fingers.

The field of barley was divided into several plots. On some, reaping was happening, while others were already reaped, and on others again the heads of grain were still bobbing untouched in the easterly breeze. All the same, the many small plots were clearly not all be of barley, because he noticed other kinds of heads of grain nodding in the breeze. Perhaps wheat… Barley and wheat alongside each other… Uri had a dim recollection that in Rome people who could not have sown or reaped for generations spoke about it being a mistake to sow a single kind of grain in a field, nor more than two; in other words, there had to be two kinds, with a space being left between them.

On one of the plots a strange contraption was doing the reaping. A figure wrapped head to toe in a cloak — a woman maybe — squatted on a seat rigged between two large stone wheels and tugged the traces of a pair of oxen drawing it along from the front. Making slow progress, it left strips in the soil behind it. An odd base of planks was fastened to its bottom in a similar way to how gemstones were worn around the necks of high priests. It crossed Uri’s mind that he was never going to see the high priest’s ceremonial garb or the gemstones around his neck. Was this something his companions from Rome might have seen at Passover? he wondered. Had they also stood next to the altar? Or was it just he, Uri, who had been party to that privilege, albeit with some delay? He gave a snort of laughter.

Farther off, men wielding sickles in their right hands chopped off heads of grain they held with their left hands, keeping hold of the stalks as they threw down the heads and moved on, stooping over as if they were in labor, only to grab more handfuls of heads of grain. When they could collect a whole armful of stalks in their left arm, they tied the bundle before throwing it down and moving on to gather more ears in the left hand, cut them away from the stems, and drop the heads on the ground.

Uri stood there and studied.

Gleanings could only be picked up from the places where the grain had already been taken away, but that was where the ox-drawn contraption was plowing. He needed to walk on.

He headed northward on the slopes of the hill.

He saw four men on one harvested plot, each of them with a pair of oxen harnessed to a wooden yoke. They held in their left hands a draft-pole that stuck back from the yoke and in their right hands the handles of two solid but crooked shafts, which were attached to each other and pushing into the soil. Uri went closer. Fitted to the bottom of the longer shaft was a metal plate shaped with a pointed tip, which shoveled the soil to the side.

So that was what a scratch plow looked like.

The men were plowing. Uri could not work it out. If winter was the season for sowing, why were they plowing now, after the harvest had been reaped?

A man approached him, a scarf on his head and a staff in one hand.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I want to glean,” said Uri.

“That’s not permitted. Clear off!”

“I’m staying as the guest of Master Jehuda ben Mordecai,” Uri proclaimed. “He advised me to glean.”

“So you’re Theo, the one who arrived yesterday?” asked the man in astonishment.

“That’s me,” Uri confirmed.

“And Master Jehuda told you to glean?” he continued incredulously.

“That’s what he said.”

The man pondered for a time and meanwhile kept brushing flies from his face; he smelled of dung, which must have been attracting them. I must smell too, Uri thought, because he also had flies buzzing around him.

“Well, if that’s what he said, I suppose you’d better glean,” the man finally came out with. “Only mind you don’t get in the way.”

“Which is a part where I can pick gleanings?” Uri asked.

“The parts that we’ve already gathered,” said the man before wheeling around and walking off.

Uri remained standing. The man went up to one of the plowmen, and they proceeded together for a distance before, all at once, he rapped the plowman’s hand with his staff. The plowman winced, pushed the plowshare deeper in the earth with his right hand, struggling and in pain, with the man walking beside him for a while, then coming to a standstill, turning away, and looking around to see whose hand needed to be rapped next.

That must be some sort of supervisor, Uri thought. A driver. I wonder if the workers are all slaves.

Uri sauntered over to an already harvested plot on which no one was working. He looked at the ground and squatted. Here and there on the soil, among the bundles of straw, lay some grains of barley and a miserable head or two. Was that the sort of thing he was meant to gather? How much to half a measure, an ephah or bushel? That was a lot — thirty-three pounds. Ruth cannot have had an easy time of it.

As he lolled on his back, Uri figured that he would be able to live comfortably on a twentieth of that, if he had something to collect it in, something to mill it with, as well as water and yeast to make it rise into a dough to knead, and then a vessel in which to roast it.

His mother had often baked wheat bread at home since that was cheaper than buying from a baker; Uri had seen how she did it, and as a small child he too had eagerly kneaded the dough. It was an enjoyable experience, giving the fingers a sense of pleasure. Back home, they had a basket in which to carry the flour home from the market; there was also water and yeast, a molding board, a vessel, oil if the dough were used to make flatbread, and a small clay oven in the yard. If they were baking leavened bread the oven had to be heated separately with extra wood, which Uri was happy to cut.

He could use his loincloth to carry the grain; he didn’t really need it, as it was so hot.

But then a whole day would be taken up in gathering a twentieth of a bushel, and it would take another two or three days to acquire yeast, water, a molding board and vessel, and he would not be able to do that on an empty stomach.

Perhaps I would be best advised to toast the grain like Ruth; then it did not need water or yeast. But where would he do that?

He heard a low whir of voices and raised himself on one elbow.

Two decrepit crones in tattered clothes were sliding on their knees toward him, gathering fallen heads of grain into a small linen sack; they did not bother with single grains. They had unprepossessing, wrinkled features, with straggling strands of hair slipping out from under their headscarf. They looked a lot like each other; either they must have been sisters or old age and destitution had made them similar. It could just be, however, that this was a mother and daughter who had reached the same stage in life.

They looked at Uri as he reclined, and their eyes were vacant. There was no sign of surprise or fright; they just looked and slid on farther on their knees, gathering up the heads of grain. They had a right to the pe’ah.