György Spiró - Captivity

That was something that could amuse people endlessly, and different bits of the story had to be repeated time and time again.

The older men teased the girls, having seen that they were attracted to the young priest who had guided them to the valley. Though they also found out that he was unwed, the girls balked at the very idea of becoming a priest’s wife; a priest could never marry a girl who was not from a priestly family, and thus no son of theirs could ever be a priest, either. They wouldn’t think of bringing ruin on that handsome priest, just so long as he had a wife who came from a priestly family, be she ever so ugly, old, and shrewish, with hairs sticking out of her ears, nose, and rear.

People had a good laugh at that too.

They compared notes on who had stayed where in Jerusalem during the festivities.

The villagers had made camp for ten days on end either in the Kidron Valley or in the Valley of Hinnom, and they did not even try to get into the City, as they knew there would not be room for them anyway and the guards would have chased them away because the people of this whole surrounding district were not entitled to pass inside the city walls.

Manasseh, said somebody else, had stood in Temple Square some twenty years before.

There were a lot of people who knew Manasseh, who was famous precisely for the fact that he had once stood by the altar in front of the Temple. Many indeed asked how he was getting on, and whether he was here; he was somewhere around here, just earlier they’d seen him down a whole flask of wine in one go. He already had seven grandchildren, five of whom were boys, so Manasseh was a happy man — though a few screws were coming loose as he aged.

Uri’s thoughts also strayed back to how he and the rest of the delegation had fed two weeks ago on the military highway on the way from Caesarea to Jerusalem, and what his thoughts had been about the throng striving to get to Jerusalem. It had been foreign rabble as far as he was concerned, one big mass; he had no idea that the individuals in the crowd might have names, or that also walking among them had been one called Manasseh, who had once stood by the altar at which his tribe’s animal sacrifices had been burned and who had seven grandchildren. Uri took a strong liking to this Manasseh who was now going soft in the head, and he wished to have the chance of meeting him one day.

I have already stood on Temple Square, it crossed Uri’s mind. How people would envy me if I told them.

Master Jehuda stepped over to him, leading an old man by the hand.

“Here he is,” Jehuda exclaimed triumphantly, letting go of the old man’s hand. “Talk to each other!”

At that he left them.

There was silence. The old man blinked; Uri greeted him politely and stayed quiet.

“So, you’re that weak-sighted kid from Edom?” the old man inquired.

Uri muttered something in reply.

“Blessed be your weak-sightedness, Theo,” said the old man, and he stretched out a hand, found Uri’s face, and stroked it.

Uri stood there petrified.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Give thanks to the Almighty, son,” the old man said, and leaned closer to Uri’s face. He narrowed his eyes to slits to see better.

Is that how I screw up my eyes? Uri wondered in horror.

“Aren’t you happy with yourself, lad?” the old man asked.

“Not always,” said Uri cautiously.

“That’s a mistake. I’ve been blessed by the Almighty, and so have you, only you don’t yet know it. Because I didn’t see well, I couldn’t sow or plow, so I learned how to read instead. I read a lot, and that made me clever, and other people sensed that and used to come to me from the village for advice. They still come from distant villages, and I can help them, because I’ve read a lot and thought a lot, and I gained prestige. That was what the Lord wanted from me, and I understood it in time. People love me, lad, and they will love you too, because the Lord wanted you to be weak-sighted. Be thankful, son!”

Tears came to Uri’s eyes. He grasped the weak-sighted old man’s hand and kissed it. The old man was surprised and gave Uri a searching look straight in the eyes from close up.

“You don’t see all that badly,” he determined somehow, and at that lost interest. Nevertheless, he shook his head and said, “Be proud, son, that you too were created for life for a short while. I ask you now to accompany me back to the table, because I would like to eat a bit more.”

Uri linked arms with the old man, guided him to a table, handed him a plate of fruit, and the old man started nibbling. Uri looked at his wrinkled face, his happy features, then, without a word, stepped quickly away.

Until late in the afternoon people were taking snacks, and there was no end to the jabbering, but there was nothing else to do until someone evidently gave word that the feast there, in front of the small house of prayer, had come to an end, because the inhabitants of the different villages swiftly separated and set off in various directions back home, chanting psalms.

“How about it?” bellowed Master Jehuda exultantly. “Are there Sabbaths as superb as that back where you come from?”

“No, there aren’t,” answered Uri with conviction.

They became reconciled to the notion that Uri was unfit for any sort of agricultural work.

He would not have to plow again, the Lord preserve us; it was enough that Theo had brought just one drought on Judaea in one year, it was said, but Uri, with his sharpened sense of hearing, concluded from something in their voices that they did not consider the breaking of the yoke to be as serious a sin as they had originally said, and it seemed that they were not seeking to blame him entirely for the drought which was indubitably persisting.

Jehuda consulted with a few of the wealthier landowners, and they decided that Uri should continue to bind sheaves with the women.

He had to hold in his right hand a short-handled sickle, which had a twisted blade with backward-set teeth on it. In his left hand he grasped the heads of grain and brushed the kernels from them. He was clumsy in doing it, having to brush five or six times until the majority of the grains had fallen to the ground, together with a fair bit of the rest of the ear. That was when it dawned on Uri that he ought to do things the other way around, with the sickle in his left hand and the heads of grain in his right. He tried this new way, but he was immediately jumped on: that was not permitted, it was not the way to do it.

Uri lowered his arms dejectedly; if a person was not allowed to be left-handed in Judaea, then he was not going to work.

The work supervisor, who treated him like a delicate, fragile vessel, suggested he bunch smaller sheaves into bigger ones, but Uri was still slow.

In that case he’d better lug the sheaves.

Uri’s back and waist ached, so he went to tell the driver, who, whether he liked it or not, was obliged to assign him to work with the women who took care of sweeping up the grain.

Uri suspected that the supervisor reported back to Master Jehuda every evening what he had gotten him to do (in short, nothing) and Master Jehuda would approve any new suggestion from the supervisor.

The sweeping-up went better. All that had to be done was to sweep together the dried grains, pack them into sacks, and carry them off on a cart or on their backs to a threshing floor at the outskirts of the village, where the grain was shaken out. The sacks were taken back to the fields, because there were not enough sacks but a lot of grain to be transported.

This was the goren , the threshing ground, and it had to be at least fifty cubits beyond the outskirts of any town or village. Uri gazed around and asked where this village’s outskirts were, as he could not see any boundary. The women tittered: the village’s limits were imaginary, and this threshing ground was exactly fifty cubits from them. The fence around the threshing ground was formed by prickly bushes so that when the wind picked up, it would catch the grain; this was one reason why the threshing ground could not be located in a high and open place.