György Spiró - Captivity

“When was all this?” Uri asked.

“A long time ago.”

“Is there any trace of that battle?”

“There is.”

“Have they found the bones of men and elephants?”

“No,” said the homeless Simon. “Those turned into earth, to grass, to trees, and to barley. We have been eating them ever since, and we are living — that’s the trace.”

Uri would have been happy to carry on as night watchman until reaping was over, but it got to the ears of Master Jehuda that Uri was deriving pleasure from chatting with the others, and to stop him asking any more questions he ordered that Uri stop working as a guard.

The supervisor put him on a day shift, against his better judgment. Uri was assigned the task of driving the birds off a rather large field.

It did not go well.

In addition to Uri’s efforts, there were scarecrows set up on poles in the field, but there was no wind to make them flap, and the birds were no longer startled by them.

On the first day Uri raced across the field assiduously whenever he spotted a bird, and the birds would take to the air, settle on a tree, and wait. The moment Uri sat down, the birds swooped down on the field to pick seeds. Uri would run after them, the birds would fly up, settle on a tree again, and wait.

Uri was dog-tired before noon.

He sat on the harvested field and watched the birds feeding. The birds, impudent creatures, dared to get close and peck. Uri searched for stones and threw them, but not a single one hit.

The vague outlines of a human shape could be seen moving around a neighboring field as well, so Uri got to his feet and worked his way over. The scarecrow on that field was a small boy of maybe seven or eight.

He had a slingshot, and around him were the carcasses of something like eight birds.

Uri inquired where a slingshot could be obtained. The boy took fright, thinking Uri wanted to take his, but Uri reassured him that was not his intention, so the boy told him that everyone made his own.

“What happens to these birds, then?” he asked.

“They get eaten by other birds,” the boy said.

“Not us?”

“These are unclean.”

The boy went off to get near another bird with the slingshot.

Why, though, was he collecting the carcasses of the birds he had shot down? Did he perchance get something like a prutah each for them? Did someone check?

Uri lounged, and occasionally lobbed a stone at the birds, of which they took not the slightest notice. Any bird that dared to hop closer, he inspected more thoroughly. How hideous they were, when it came down to it, but then again, how free. He stretched out on the ground, closed his eyes, and waited for them to come over and tear his liver out. He would never have imagined he could so hate these living creatures, though it was not hate so much as envy.

That evening he said to Master Jehuda that the job was not going well; he was not a seven-year-old boy, he should be given something else to do. Master Jehuda said morosely that he would think about it.

He came up with the idea that Uri should riddle grain.

It was the supervisor who imparted the decision, and Uri was not pleased; he took exception to the fact that it was not Master Jehuda who had communicated this personally. Uri was by this point sleeping in the barn with the master’s chairs and tables, where the master’s assistants sawed and trimmed off with adzes the excess wood and produced joints and dovetails. The master looked in from time to time to check that they were working, so he would have had plenty of chances to speak with Uri.

But who knows, maybe this would be another adventure. He did not know how to do the riddling, and so far he had spoken little to the womenfolk; perhaps they might have the odd thing or two to say. It might be interesting.

Riddling was done not just by married women but also by young girls. They began at first light and continued until the sun went down. Lamps and oil were expensive, so they did not work in the evenings, even during the harvest period.

The riddling was done at the edge of the threshing ground. Even after it had been threshed and winnowed, the grain still contained debris. In the next step, kevarah , women sat and shook a round sieve with fiber mesh attached to its bottom. The grains would fall down through the gaps, and the debris left on the surface would then be skimmed off and set aside to be mixed with straw to make fodder, or else pounded in a mortar and mixed into animal dung. With any remaining chaff that was saved, it could be used for laying fires.

A use was found, therefore, for everything that the Everlasting Lord had given man to use.

But this was not the end; the grain would be sieved several times before it was taken off, and after it had been ground (that, too, was women’s work), it was jiggled through finer and finer sieves — so went the riddling.

Uri would never have thought that there could be so much involved in turning grain into flour.

When the supervisor led Uri to join them, saying that he should be given a sieve, the women hardly glanced up before going on with their riddling.

Uri lifted the sieve, finding it to be heavier than he would have imagined, and watched how the women riddled.

They weren’t too attractive, he ascertained, and they all wore scarves so their heads would not be baked by the sun. The women hummed unself-consciously, swaying a little back and forth as they sat, picking out the chaff, scooping up a fresh palmful of grain onto the sieve, swirling it, shaking it, and again picking out the bits of muck…

An awful job, Uri thought: to do that the whole day long could drive a person mad.

Either the women were mad, or else they had gotten used to it from doing it since they were little; they did it without complaining, singing softly to themselves. They only let up in the early afternoon, when the lunch arrived: two thin slices of barley bread, which the servants dunked in vinegar before handing over.

Pitchers of water were also brought, which the women, one after another, took deep drafts from before setting aside to drink from later on.

Uri, being a man, was not offered any water.

He accepted the bread dipped in vinegar; he had come to the realization that the vinegar was good, after all, for warding off feelings of thirst.

By then he had begun to feel as if his shoulder and upper arm were going to break off and his back disintegrate. His legs went to sleep from all the sitting, and he could no longer feel them.

He gritted his teeth and suffered wordlessly, sieving until the sun went down.

These women were veritable Goliaths, and he the David who had not been given a sling; a sieving David. It would be no surprise if even these women had a laugh at his expense.

The cereal grew in one big heap beside the women, the discards in another. But in Uri’s case there were just two small heaps.

The dwindling sun was ruddy in the sky when the women finished their work; Uri too. The women shoveled the grain into sacks and put a canvas sheet knotted at the edges over the dross so that it would not be blown away by the wind. Uri was unable to shovel; indeed, he could barely get to his feet. Sieving was worse than anything he had been pestered into doing before.

No one spoke to him the whole day long, and the women said very little even to one another, given that a man was among them.

He staggered back to the barn and dropped down. He did not get his supper because by then he was deep asleep.

The next day at dawn, one of Master Jehuda’s assistants shook him awake, and he set off for the threshing ground. He was going to have to stick it out, he thought. He had asked about breakfast, whereupon the assistant, a spotty-faced youth, scoffed, “Later, out there, with the women.”