György Spiró - Captivity

“Woe to those who build their houses with sin; for from all their foundations shall they be overthrown, and by the sword shall they fall. And those who acquire gold and silver in judgment suddenly shall perish. Woe to you, ye rich, for ye have trusted in your riches, and from your riches shall ye depart, because ye have not remembered the Most High in the days of your riches. For ye have acquired it all in unrighteousness, and ye shall be given over to a great curse. And in those days in one place the fathers together with their sons shall be smitten, and brothers one with another shall fall in death, till the streams flow with their blood… From dawn till sunset they shall slay one another. And the horse shall walk up to the breast in the blood of sinners, and the chariot shall be submerged to its height… I tell you, ye sinners, ye are content to eat and drink, and rob and sin, and strip men naked, and acquire wealth and see good days… And although ye sinners say, ‘All our sins shall not be searched out and be written down,’ nevertheless the hosts of Heaven shall write down all your sins every day!”

The supervisor, who’d seemingly abandoned his old habit of hitting them hard with his stick, gave a nod, and the women sighed in agreement. They persevered in the sifting, satisfied that, according to the scroll, the Day of Judgment was nigh and that they were the Lord’s chosen people. They were the righteous because they had nothing; they would remain alive, and their dead would all be resurrected by the Everlasting Lord. In the meantime, it was necessary to put food on the table until that happened.

Uri, tired of reading, lay on his back in the field, and had to keep wiping his watering eyes; the women meanwhile did his work. He got up and began to walk around, his way of taking a break. He was looking for the young girl, but all the women wore a shawl on their head and he couldn’t find her. His efforts in vain, he set himself down again, rolled onto his front, pulled his gown over his head and fell asleep like Enoch before the face of the Lord.

That evening Master Jehuda came to see him in the workshop. By then Uri had just eaten supper (the assistants had given him fresh milk and soft challah bread); he sat up on the rush matting and burped.

Puffing, Master Jehuda took a seat.

“If you can deal with reading so well, no doubt you can write too,” he said sarcastically.

“Yes, I can,” said Uri.

“Well, then, you’d better write for me from now on.”

Master Jehuda looked around at the workshop, half-finished tables and chairs lying scattered all around. He shook his head; it truly was untidy, but he said nothing. Uri did not say anything either. It is not to my host’s liking that I entertain the womenfolk; I’m being banned from their company and shall never see the girl again.

Laboriously, Master Jehuda got to his feet, swaying as he stood. He was very fat; his legs could hardly support him. Comfort is not good for one.

Uri politely got up.

“How long am I to stay with you, Master?” he asked.

Master Jehuda turned the answer over before responding.

“I don’t know,” he said in an unexpected burst of honesty. “They’ll let me know sometime.”

“Will a delegation be coming from Jerusalem to you regarding my case?” Uri queried. “Could I truly be such an important person?”

“Delegation? What are you talking about? They use fires to signal — like before you arrived.”

“You mean, you knew in advance that I was coming?”

“We always know if someone is being sent to us. We find out everything about him.”

“Have you been sent guests before, then?”

“It’s happened.”

“Can letters of the alphabet also be transmitted in the fire?”

“Every letter can, but there are also old signals, certain combinations of words… I don’t understand how it works, what the fire-watchers do.”

Uri let his mind stray. He had a vague idea that somebody, somewhere, had once talked about messaging with fire. Would that have been in Syracusa?

“Does the news spread quickly?” he asked.

“Yes, quickly. It takes two or three days to reach Antioch from Alexandria.”

Syracusa again came to Uri’s mind; yes, it was there it was mentioned. Plotius had spoken about it. Where could he be now, Uri wondered.

Master Jehuda set off out of the barn.

“Master, do you think I could be a fire-watcher?”

Jehuda turned around and shook his head.

“No, you couldn’t. It’s one of those hereditary occupations like that of the Levites.”

Uri became the master’s notary, and he was forced to conclude that the master did do some work every now and then, even if it was not much to his liking.

He used to see petitioners in the morning, before lunch, with magistrates and witnesses dropping by on Mondays and Thursdays. That particular village did not hold fairs, but they still kept to the same law-days as the rest of Palestine. Everyone would take off their sandals at the threshold as a mark of respect and enter the house barefoot. Uri now had no sandals, but he would still scratch the sole of one foot with the other before entering.

On those days, the young men of the village would walk off to the synagogue, where they held the Sabbath ceremony. There they learned the elements of calligraphy from a teacher who came over from four villages away and whose pay was pooled by the communities of seven villages (seven being a magic number). Unlike in Rome, girls were not taught reading or writing or arithmetic; they were destined for work in the fields and house, so it was better they remained stupid. The Creator, blessed be His name, preserve us from argumentative women.

People came to the master’s place on days besides the Sabbath, of course, and not just on fair-days. They came at the most varied times of day, for advice of all kinds. Uri now understood that Jehuda did not see them all simply out of good humor; it was his responsibility as master. People came with questions relating to matters of health and purity to which even Uri knew the answer, but then there were more complex issues concerning purity that he had never so much as heard about before.

For the most part the visitors came on matters of lawsuits or to make a report against someone. People would inform on a neighbor for eating unclean food, or stealing, or brawling, or for talking unkindly about others, or not sleeping with his wife on the night of the Sabbath, for not washing their hands before prayers. They would squeal on their wives for using foul language or burning the food, and they complained about their children and mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law and everyone else.

The master would listen to them as he quietly dozed, then politely request them to bring at least two witnesses the next time. For the most part that would take away an informer’s desire for vengeance, and only a fraction of them would return with two witnesses. But then not many days later the same people would drop by again with something else, and the master would again listen to them; that was his job as a master. Uri’s initially caustic stance on squealing gradually altered: informing was a way of life, and in general it had no consequences, and the complainers usually suspected as much when they set about elaborately framing their complaints. When Roman Jews whispered in the ear of some powerful rich man, it would have serious consequences.

On Mondays and Thursdays the master would be joined by two men who were spared having to work in the fields those two days. It was always the same two Uri saw, both middle-aged, brawny men, Esdras and Johanen. They and the master constituted the three-man court of law.

Years ago, they had been elected by the rest to serve as judges alongside the master, and all the signs indicated people were happy with them. They must have had some sort of demon residing in them to be able to sit by the master’s side and pass judgment every Monday and Thursday for years on end. They received no emolument of any sort, judges being disqualified from receiving pay for their work, and even suffered a direct loss because for those two days they were unable to work on their land. Having their own lands is what gave them their prestige. Others did the work for them on law-days, but they forswore personally supervising their workforce in favor of working on the community’s behalf, whatever loss it might entail.