György Spiró - Captivity

“You’re setting off for Jerusalem the day after tomorrow!”

Uri woke with a start.

His father was standing over him.

Uri raised himself up on his rags, picked up the scroll that had slipped from his hand to the floor, and looked up apologetically from where he was sitting. An awkward smile played across his lips, as it did whenever he was caught doing something, and he always was caught, even if it wasn’t anything bad.

His father fidgeted a bit in the gloomy nook, the gray February afternoon throwing light from the yard on his stern bearded features, his prominent cheekbones, his deeply set eyes; the little square thrown onto the wall happened to be gleaming just above Uri’s disheveled, greasy hair. His father was standing there somberly, no longer looking at him but gazing at the yard. He turned on his heels and pushed aside the carpet that hung over the doorway, so forcefully that it conveyed his deep-seated disgust at his son, at his own position, with Creation in general.

Uri had not yet fully regained consciousness; he was merely ashamed of what his father had caught him doing: falling asleep while reading. He had a habit of taking a nap in the afternoon, and even though he had nothing to do and was quite free to withdraw to his hovel and go to sleep whenever he wanted, he felt guilty about it nevertheless. It was as if reading were a penance, a humiliating duty, for some ancient sin that he had not even committed. Yet he liked reading; it was the only thing that he really liked to do.

Scroll in hand, he got up to his feet, stretched his aching back, turned his head around and cracked his neck, shrugged his shoulders repeatedly, bent down, then gazed out the window.

Uri shivered in the damp and chilly darkness of Rome in early February. Images from his dreams were still drifting around in his mind, sinking ever deeper like fish burrowing into the Tiber’s mud and merging with the murky halos in the yard. The dream cannot have been altogether disagreeable, because a pleasant feeling lingered, a hopeful image, though there was no point trying to recall it. It was as though his real living was done in his dreams. There were people sauntering around in the yard, but too far off to recognize; he saw them only in blurred outline. At this hour of the day they were probably women, because the menfolk were still going about their business.

Uri had poor eyes.

His leg was bad too. Ever since he was small, walking hurt his feet and ankles. His back usually hurt also. His right hip had turned out bigger than the left, but it was his eyes that were plagued worst of all; he was very near-sighted. It had not always been so. Up to the age of ten or eleven he had been able to do all the things the other boys his age could do, but at some point he dropped out of their games, moved less assuredly, squinted, and leaned ever closer to the scroll when he read. It had not bothered him at first, coming on so gradually that he had barely noticed; it was just that he often had headaches.

Eusebius, the teacher who took care of him and ten or fifteen other boys in the house of prayer (that was what the community paid him for), told Joseph that, in his opinion, Uri had poor eyesight. Joseph had protested: no one in his family had poor eyesight, his son included. The teacher just shook his head. Joseph’s first-born was his only son, his wife had not become pregnant again after the second girl was born, so the teacher realized that Joseph was in a difficult position.

That evening his father had interrogated him.

“Is it true that you don’t see well?” he asked pointedly.

He walked over to the farthest corner in the main room and asked how many fingers he was holding up. The main room was not all that big, but even so, the hand was a long way off, and it was dim as well. The oil lamp was barely flickering, but it gave off a lot of fumes, and that too was bothersome. Uri sighed and chose at random, “Two.” From the silence that followed, he could tell that he had guessed wrong.

That was when relations with his father started to go downhill.

He had always been the precious boy, the only whole person Joseph had managed to sire. He was the favorite. His father had been proud that his son knew how to read and write before other boys his age; he had boasted about him and had also started instructing him in the logic of business, as if he were already an adult.

His father repeated the experiment half a year later. Uri confessed then that he could not see how many fingers his father was holding up.

“Because you don’t want to see!” Joseph had shouted angrily.

That sentence had haunted Uri ever since.

From that point on, his father avoided him. He did not want to see that his son could not see. Doctors claimed that dried gum from the balsam tree had a beneficial effect on cataracts and shortsightedness, and as Joseph had once traded in, among other things, balsam and dates, and was at that moment still receiving them in shipments from Judaea, he instructed Uri to place over his eyes every evening a poultice soaked in a watery solution of powdered balsam gum. Uri diligently applied the compresses and was nauseated by the smell of the balsam, but his eyesight did not improve. Another six months, and Uri still could not see how many fingers his father was showing. Joseph hinted that he should stop with the poultices, since balsam was expensive.

Uri was relieved and also despondent.

He could read all right; indeed, if he screwed his eyes up tight he could even see farther away as well, and if he looked through a funneled hand he could even see for quite a distance, albeit only over a tiny area, but honestly quite a long distance. He tried that out a lot when he was alone, because, bit by bit, he retreated to the little hovel, rarely even stepping out into the courtyard, which he could see quite well, everything being so close. He would stare out at the yard through the cracks between his fingers, which also helped him to see the far-off corners.

It was a spacious courtyard, impossible to tell where it ended; in truth it had neither beginning nor end.

Houses on the far side of the Tiber — the Transtiberim in Latin, though the Jewish population referred to it simply as Far Side, as if they were looking back at themselves with pity from somewhere else, from the true Rome, even a bit disparagingly — had originally been built contiguous with their yards. They had formed a single elongated, complex, erratic, winding system of dwellings and alleys on the old-time Far Side. Because the Jews constructed their houses as they had in Palestine, with the windows and doorways opening only onto the inner courtyard, all that existed to the outside world was an interconnected wall. As a result, what had come into existence was an endless, seemingly impervious single-story zigzagging system of fortifications, spiked at irregular intervals with strong gates, both secretive and exotic to anyone not familiar with this part of the Transtiberim. Yet it was well known that the Jews lived a wretched existence: leprous Jews would beg around the Porta Capena, at the beginning of the Appian Way, for all to see, and many found themselves in that part of town, given that the main gateway to commerce on the southern side of the city was outside the nearby Via Ostiensis. Produce was cheaper there than around the Forum, so half of Rome shopped there. It would also have been obvious that haggard people with stooped backs swarmed around with their pitchers, bearded and in worn sandals and frayed togas: they were going for drinking water because the aqueducts supplied Far Side with polluted water, good for nothing more than irrigation, if at all. Requests had been made from one generation to the next, but they were not granted better water by the city, and in districts that were blessed with a better water supply, outsiders had to pay the locals good money for what the latter received free of charge. The water of the Tiber was drinkable in theory, but the Jews considered it unclean, especially when, from time to time, it overflowed with corpses, so they did not drink it or even wash with it. They preferred water from cisterns, and there were some benighted souls who, obeying the religious precepts of their ancestors more strictly than most, considered water from any other district impure, so their families were also prohibited from using it. There might well have been something to it, though, because the water in those lead pipes left a grayish scum on the children’s skin, who turned out slower and dimmer than the others.