György Spiró - Captivity

He loathes me. But why would that be? He carries out better work than I have. What does it matter here if I am a Roman citizen?

He mused on what the countless Roman citizens would say if they were obliged to sieve the day long for their food. There was little doubt they would rise up and the emperor would fall.

He picked up his sieve, plunged one hand into the grain, sprinkled it onto the sieve, and began to joggle it.

There were still pains shooting through his right shoulder; his legs developed pins and needles and went dead almost instantly. It was only early in the morning; when would it get to the evening?

Uri sieved away with his teeth gritted, though he did ask himself why he had to suffer every indignity without saying a word. Anyone else in his position would have rebelled long, long ago. Rebellion was fair enough, but what form might it take here?

I ought to escape, he conjectured.

He knew where from, but where would he escape to?

Back to Rome? Yes, but how?

Roving on his own, exposed to attack from any quarter?

He would be caught, taken back to Jerusalem, and thrown in prison again.

What have you meted out on me, O Righteous Everlasting One, and for what reason?

It seemed implausible that he would be able to continue sitting among strange women in Judaea, shaking a stupid, round object all day long simply because they did so.

He then noticed that he was humming quietly.

The women were in fact praying all the time! And now I am praying too!

The finding astonished him.

Perhaps this was the origin of psalms — this appalling joggling. The psalms may have been wordless to begin with, and it was only later that they were given lyrics. The Eternal One, the One and Only Lord, had not understood words, but he could have listened to chanting. It was obligatory for the Eternal One once he had offered an alliance with the people. I, who am a member of the Everlasting Lord’s chosen people, meet that alliance by renewing it day after day; let Him now do the same.

“That’s not the way to do it!” Uri heard.

The voice signaled that it was one of the more elderly women who had addressed him; he could not see her face, as it was obscured by her scarf.

“Then how?”

“More circular movements.”

The woman carried on sieving. Uri watched. She performed broad movements, so that grains dropped through over the entire surface of the screen. Uri looked down before his feet. His own pile was small because the grains were able to riddle through his sieve only at the center, whereas the diameter of the pile in front of the woman’s feet was indeed wider.

Uri groaned.

He was being called on to make an even bigger effort when even as things were his arms were almost falling off! The real place for these women was in a circus; they would make a much more skillful job of choking lions than the gladiators did.

Uri put down his sieve and sat there, motionless.

I’m not a slave, he thought. If I’m going to be kept as a slave, they’re going to have to strike me down. That’s enough of this.

He cast a stealthy glance to both sides. The women were waggling their sieves. From this comes the bread that sustains us; from this comes the sacrificial bread on which the Almighty is sustained when it is incinerated on the altar on high days and its smoke rises up to Him.

His stomach rumbled when it came to mind that he had been late when he reached the threshing ground and missed breakfast. He looked around. There was no sign that the women had been given anything: not a crumb to be seen. They would be bringing it later.

He felt ashamed.

These women, they were just as much the Lord’s creatures as he was. And they shake their sieves, and their arms are also falling off, but they keep on shaking. Their lives were terrible. That was something those lazy night watchmen who kept dozing off, to whose number he had been privileged to belong for a few days, had said nothing about. Why not?

He picked up his sieve, plunged one hand into the grain, sprinkled it onto the sieve and began to joggle it.

And hummed.

May the Lord hear what He had created. Look down and see and be ashamed.

It is not easy to catch the moment when a community accepts a person. When he looks back, of course, it is possible to tell that he has been accepted, but it is hard to reconstruct the crucial event. Uri’s hunch was that it was the moment during the second day of riddling when, having defiantly put down his sieve, he raised it up again. Right then, he was accepted by the women as one of them. They disregarded the fact that the Everlasting Lord had created him as a man, which is to say, an enemy. From that moment on he was considered to be a female, one of them. A slave.

Uri was wrong, however; he was not yet accepted then, only the next day.

What happened at daybreak that day was that Uri, tormented by the pains in his back and shoulders, with teeth gritted, set to the sieving, and he sieved and sieved, but somehow it went even worse than before: there was almost no debris left on the net of the sieve but all the more flax among the grain on the ground. Uri disconsolately waggled the wretched device around, making no progress.

The women and girls next to him were so engrossed in their own work that they were not even humming; they shook their sieves, but in silence.

That silence was suspicious to Uri. He looked at them, puzzled, but their faces were now even better veiled by their shawls. The sun was still low in the sky; it was warm but not yet scorching. There was no sense in the girls and women covering their heads in the morning. He had covered his own head the day before with a mantle (a hand-me-down that Master Jehuda had given him) but had been late in doing it, as by then the crown of his head was already sunburned.

Uri looked at the sieve sitting on his lap, then lifted it up close to his eyes.

The fiber mesh seemed different: the holes were larger. Uri made a careful inspection to see what was making it seem so. He discovered that every other strand had been removed, indeed in some places even two successive fibers. The fibers were pinned to the side of a wooden frame that had been bent into a circle. The pins were still in place, but some of them had been pried loose and the threads pulled out. Any debris would fall through the sieve, rendering his labors completely useless.

He looked up. The women were engrossed in their work.

Uri laughed out loud, chortling ever more whole-heartedly. Some person or persons had devoted yesterday evening to playing a trick on him. Before his eyes emerged a picture of an assiduous woman who had spent part of her night pulling strands out of his sieve instead of sleeping. Perhaps others had also been present and looked on eagerly, even helping with advice as to how many strands to pull out — the idea of not just every other one could have occurred to someone. There have not been many times when I was deemed worthy of that much attention, he thought, and roared with laughter.

All of a sudden, every single girl and woman also broke out laughing, and there must have been around three dozen of them too. The whole gathering chuckled happily.

A woman then got to her feet and brought Uri a new sieve. He thanked her, took it, checked that it was good, and, with difficulty choking back his laughter, resumed work.

One lunchtime several days later, Uri asked what would have happened if he had not laughed at the trick but instead had run to the supervisor and told on them. You would have had a hard time of it among us, came the answer.

It was a pleasant, gray-haired lady who responded; her face was wrinkled, but she still had her good looks, especially her deep-blue eyes. Uri greatly regretted that she was not twenty years younger, or he was not twenty years older, because they would have made a handsome pair, the two of them, but the Lord had other plans, blessed be He.