Captivity

‌II Judaea

His head ached, but the cold was worse. He shivered, curled up, and noted that he was lying on a thin layer of straw on a stone floor. He opened his eyes.

It was mostly dark in the high, vaulted chamber. Two robust figures were seated on the stone, legs drawn up, backs to the wall, looking at him.

“What’s this?” Uri asked in Greek.

“Prison,” one of the figures replied in Aramaic.

Uri hauled himself up onto all fours, stretched his limbs, and wiggled his neck. Nothing broken. The nape of the neck ached a lot, but dully.

The builder had left a gap of a palm’s width to admit light very high up between the ashlar blocks. On the left wall, next to the wall opposite the slit, he spotted a wooden door with iron bands that could obviously only be opened from the outside. Uri stood up and inspected the slit; it had been cut into the middle of the wall, directly below the arch of the vault. As was his habit back home, he knocked on the wall, even smelled it. Blocks stacked beneath the slit were smaller than on the other walls, and moreover the wall only stretched up to the vault. The gaps between the stones had been liberally filled with a cement-like material, the mortar having trickled down before drying. It was quite possible it was laid later than the rest.

He tapped on all the other walls as well. All along the base of the wall opposite the slit there was a protuberance on which one could sit. Nearly rectangular ashlars of identical height had been placed next to one another, the gaps being plugged with gravel and earth.

What on Earth might the cell have been before it was converted into a prison?

He sat down and took a better look at the two figures. They were young men with coarse features; even seated it was clear that they were strong. Both were wearing tunics and cloaks, which was why they had been able to rest their backs on the cold wall. Where was his own cloak? It was in the sack. His father’s cloak. He regretted not having that.

“How long have I been here?” he asked in Aramaic.

“You were brought in the evening.”

Uri looked up. Beams of light were playing at the top of the wall above the door, but only above the door, grazing the wall diagonally, the rest being left in shadow.

“Is it morning now?”

“It will be noon soon.”

The slit must be facing east, or rather northeast.

Uri rubbed his belly.

“Do they feed you here?”

“You slept through breakfast. Next will be supper.”

“Just great!” said Uri.

He tested his eyes one after the other, but his sight had gotten no better from the blow. But it hadn’t gotten worse either.

He felt relief. He was only grateful when he thought of Matthew, who had informed on him and gotten him thrown in prison. I’m now in the right place for me, he considered, and laughed out loud.

The two figures exchanged looks.

The whole thing was now clear to Uri.

There would have been time before they left Rome to have his name added to the safe-conduct; after all, Plotius had said he was brought into the delegation even later, yet they had managed to get his name included. It was only Uri’s name that had been missing. Matthew had not so much as mentioned his name to the magistrate on the day before they had set off, as that was his last chance to declare that he would be traveling with six companions, not five. Plotius’s name had been added to the list even though it was only decided later that he would be coming. He, Uri, had been added to the list two days before, at Agrippa’s request, yet even so Matthew had not reported that; he could have done so at the time he was making the arrangements for Plotius. He had not.

Matthew must have planned in advance that he was going to inform on Agrippa’s presumed spy when he got to Jerusalem.

As a matter of fact, he had said so beforehand, in Caesarea, that evening when they had drunk wine together with Plotius. Of course, he had not been explicit, but Plotius had almost certainly understood. Plotius had also known what was going to happen, but he had said nothing — obviously because he agreed.

It did not pain Uri that he had been betrayed by precisely the two men he had thought most highly of among his companions.

I’m not suited for a delegation like this, he thought. Even prison is better; at least my position is clear-cut.

Uri realized that he was not afraid; he was quite sure he’d get out, and didn’t think that he was in true peril. There were adventures in store for him beyond his wildest dreams. How many Jews in Rome could tell a story of having been imprisoned in Jerusalem, of all places?

Uri laughed out loud.

He would no longer have to feel awkward among staid people of tawdry character and dubious intentions, prompted by petty political and venal commercial calculations.

I shall never again be a member of any delegation, he decided; no power on Earth can compel me.

He was glad that his instincts had not deserted him; he had sensed all along that something was wrong. He would have liked to think that he was simply imagining things, but he wasn’t. On the contrary, he had always sensed what he should have done.

I am perfectly sound.

He breathed deeply. The back of his neck ached, but he still felt strong. He would tell his father that he had grown up overnight: that was what had just happened to him.

“What’s typical here? Are prisoners interrogated at all, or just left to rot?” Uri inquired brightly.

There was a short pause before the one sitting under the slit spoke.

“Where are you from?”

“Rome.”

“You don’t say! Pay attention, then. A sentence has to be passed, so you get a hearing. The first thing to do is say this and that, you did nothing wrong, quite the opposite in fact, then someone weighs in with the accusations, and if there are any witnesses, they are heard, then the members of the court of law, the Beth Din, come to a verdict. In the villages three judges are enough, and in the towns it can be anything up to twenty-three, and verdicts have to be reached by a majority vote of at least two. The verdicts are given from the youngest, at the end of each row, to the oldest in the middle. While that is going on, you have to stand facing them, your hair has grown long out of remorse, and you are grieving, and you stand there penitently, your head hung low, even if you have pleaded innocence. If anyone has spoken on your behalf, they can say another word before the verdict is reached, but anyone who was a witness against you cannot speak again. After that, they cast votes. If you are acquitted, you are immediately released, but if you are condemned, they do not pronounce the verdict right then, only the next day… But if the next day is a holiday or the Sabbath, then only after that.”

“I don’t get it,” said Uri. “If three judges are enough, how do you get a verdict with a majority of three?”

“You don’t, in that case,” the other said. “The verdict is either unanimous or else they call in two more and from that point the two-vote majority applies.”

“Twenty-three judges?” asked Uri. “Even in a small town?”

“The towns are not that small!” said the one sitting under the slit, affronted. “Any place with five hundred adult males counts as a town! That means at least fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, though likely much more! The towns are not so small here.”

A local patriot, Uri thought cheerily.

“Are there that many judges in a town?” he asked. “Or are some of them lawyers as well? Sometimes prosecuting, sometimes defending?”

The other two did not understand, so Uri tried to describe what was meant by prosecuting and defending counsels and by a judge. Gradually they caught on.

“There’s nothing like that here,” said the one sitting under the slit. “There are men — tailors, cooks, joiners, tentmakers, robbers, thieves, that sort of thing.” He laughed at his own wit before carrying on.

“If they need you to try a case, the master sends for you. And you go to the house of prayer to try the case. If there is no two-vote majority, they keep on calling people until there is. But twenty-three is the most, and if a verdict is still not reached, then the case is referred to the Great Sanhedrin — that’s here, above where we are now… But even they do not always sit together; they too start with three members, and so on, all the way up to seventy-one. It’s not usual to bring cases here, though; the two-vote majority system works locally, sooner or later.”

“I’ve never heard of a case that could not be settled locally,” said the one seated closer.

“And this master, the elder of the juridical tribunal… where does he get the right to call others in to pass judgment? Is he the archisynagogos?”

That was a term that meant nothing to them, so Uri explained that he was thinking of the leading member of the congregation of a house of prayer. They shook their heads.

“He’s the master, that’s all there is to it!”

“Does he make a living from doing that?” Uri asked.

“Not at all!” said the one sitting under the slit. “He’s not allowed to take money for teaching, sitting in judgment, or giving advice. He has an occupation, though, as a tiller of the soil or limeburner or furniture maker… That’s why he is a master…”

“Or he robs and steals,” said the other.

They both laughed.

This really was another world.

“Have your cases already been heard?”

“Not yet,” said the one sitting under the slit.

“Mine hasn’t either,” said the other.

“When will they be?”

The one sitting under the slit looked up toward the light.

“Well, either right away, today, or else after Passover.”

“If not today, then it will be more than a week, next Monday, in eleven days’ time. The days for juridical sessions are Mondays and Thursdays. There are no other days.”

In other words, it was the same in Jerusalem as in the country, with a court being convened only on market days. If they did not come to hear a case by sunset today, Thursday, then they would not be able to do so on Monday either, on account of Passover, nor on the following Thursday, because that was also a half-holiday, on which it was forbidden to sit in judgment. There was a lot that could be done on half-holidays that was not permitted on full holidays — burying the dead, for instance, or healing the sick, but not sitting in judgment.

He did not like the idea of killing time here for eleven days. Better they come today. Let everything be settled, then he could go home to Rome, though he did not yet know how. Of course, as long as they gave him something to eat, even eleven days would be tolerable in the end, too.

“What are you in for?” asked the one sitting under the slit.

“I did nothing,” said Uri, and he gave another laugh. “You’re not going to believe it, but nothing at all.”

“You’re right, we don’t believe it,” said the other.

“Never mind,” said Uri. “Gaius Theodorus is my name.”

The other two remained silent. Uri shrugged his shoulders.

“So why are you here?”

“We’re innocent,” the one sitting under the slit said sardonically. “But we’re accused of robbery.”

How droll: I’ve fallen in among thieves. And they can’t even rob me of anything, because I have nothing!

“That’s quite a serious charge,” said Uri.

“Are you kidding?” said the other. “The most they can sentence us to is four or five years of slavery, and when that’s over, we will be released without having to pay a bond for our manumission. We’re not petty thieves, but robbers!”

“That is to say, we’re being made out to be robbers,” the one sitting under the slit added. “But they’ll have to prove it!”

Uri thought he could not have heard that properly, or maybe they had a different way with words, so he asked what they supposed the difference was between a robber and a thief.

They looked at each other in amazement. All the same, the one sitting under the slit then took it upon himself to explain, with considerate shouting and syllabifying so that even Uri would understand: a thief stole, whereas a robber took something away by force.

So Uri had heard right.

“A robber is given a lighter sentence than a thief?” he asked in astonishment.

The two looked at each other again.

“Are you Jewish in any way at all?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then you must be slow,” said the one who was seated closer, sighing before launching into an explanation. “A thief does not just steal; he offends the Eternal One by hiding himself from His countenance. He does evil on the sly, seeking to hide his evil deeds from the Lord. A robber, on the other hand, attacks from the front, and he does not offend the Almighty, because he does not hide from Him! A thief’s crime is therefore more serious!”

A fine, clear, religious exposition, thought Uri; the laws here really are different.

In Rome a robber would receive the death penalty, whereas a thief would be sentenced to a few years or eternal servitude, and there were two grades at that: he might remain a slave on Far Side or else he might be sold off in Italia, in Puteoli for example, where there is a famous slave market because human cargo is put into its harbor from every part of the empire.

If the offender were a Jew who was a Roman citizen, the Jewish jurisdiction in principle had to run the more serious punishments by a Roman court of law, but in practice the Curia would give the nod to any Jewish verdict; it had plenty to do as it was. The Latini tended to approve even sentences of death, and if, every now and then, an appeal was heard, neither defendant nor witnesses were recalled; the decision was a formality and invariably upheld the judgment. The superfluous right of appeal was reserved by Curia, on the other hand, and there were cases where they might want to save a person sentenced to death for political reasons — because he was of great interest to an influential senator, even to the emperor himself, being a favorite actor, lover, or something of the kind — then the Curia would dig in its heels until it had been given an appropriate bribe.

“What can a thief expect here?” Uri inquired.

“He is sentenced to death.”

That must be a newfangled law.

As he had learned it in Rome, a thief was obliged to reimburse four times the value of the stolen object, and once he had done that, he was set free. On the orders of Herod the Great, thieves were sold off as slaves and so a crowd of Jewish thieves, the “new ones,” had found their way to Rome. But the Roman prefects had put an end to that practice when Herod died.

“I once saw the execution of a thief,” said the man who was seated nearer. “Not a pretty sight.”

“Was he stoned?” asked the one sitting under the slit.

“No, burned alive.”

The man who was seated closer related the incident with relish. Every one of the villagers, even women and children, had assembled to watch; they were summoned to learn from it. The smith boiled up iron in a pan over an enormous fire, and when the iron was flowing, the bound thief had a scarf tied around his neck and pulled from both ends. He was strong and lasted a fair time without air, but he eventually gave out and opened his mouth wide, gasping for air. Well, it was then that the smith’s assistant poured the scalding iron into his gullet, made him drink it up until he burned. With white-hot metal pouring out through the holes in his burst-open chest and belly. The thief was still alive, but he was unable to shout out because he no longer had a throat; he was just writhing and burning from the inside out, with the scarf-pullers keeping hold from the two sides until the whole thing became a trickling live metal statue.

Uri shuddered.

“What if he hadn’t opened his mouth?”

“He would have choked,” the man who was seated nearer said. “But because the sentence was burning, not strangling, they would have forced the corpse’s mouth open and filled it with molten iron.”

“I can’t say I would be too happy to be burned alive,” the one sitting under the slit pondered. “I’d rather be strangled.”

“That’s not good either,” the other opined. “If done ineptly, that can drag on for a long time.”

“Stoning to death as well,” the one sitting under the slit. “They can pelt and pelt, but you’re still alive. Better to be strangled.”

“The best of all,” said the one seated more closely, “is if they chop off your head with a sword — a moment and it’s over.”

“That’s the foreign-style execution,” the one sitting under the slit scoffed. “No Edomite execution for me, thank you. I don’t want the angels having to search for the head that’s rolled away from my body when the time comes for resurrection; they’re quite capable of not noticing that they’ve stuck it onto the wrong body — a whore’s, say. No, thank you: I’d rather be strangled!”

Strange place, this Judaea; Jerusalem too must be a strange place. Uri smiled: he was there, though, even if he had seen nothing of it.

“Where is this prison exactly?” he asked.

“The high priests have their dwellings above us,” said the man sitting beneath the slit, indicating with his head the vaulting of the ceiling. “We’re being put up in a fair-sized building, to be sure. They don’t have it much better than us, now that we share residences,” he gave a hollow laugh.

“Where is this palace? In the Temple Square?”

“No, it’s in the Upper City. The Temple is nearby, to the northeast of here… Count five hundred steps and you’re there.”

Uri gazed up at the slit of a window, and he saw a tiny, faded-blue slice of the sky; the sun was no longer shining in. Even these affable rogues knew which way was northeast, and when the time comes for evening prayers that is the direction in which they would bow. From now on, neither would he have to bow toward Jerusalem when it came to prayer-time, because he was right there in the very middle, but toward the Temple just five hundred paces away.

“These were shops right here, where we are sitting,” said the one seated more closely, as he got to his feet to walk around. He was tall and powerfully built; he might easily have gotten a position in the Jewish police — indeed, had it not been for his Jewishness, even among Pilate’s litter bearers. “They rented the premises at a high rate from the high priests, but then the traders moved to the market square in front of Herod’s palace, because they could earn more there, both they and the high priests. There were more people. As a result something had to be done with the premises, and that is how it had become a prison.”

“It’s easier for them like this,” said the man sitting beneath the slit, and he too got up. He was not short but seemed a little on the pudgy side.

“Most recently the Sanhedrin has been sitting upstairs. The defendants don’t have to be escorted very far; better for them if we’re right here, underneath, in a shared building. There’s no need for a whole troop to take us all the way out to the Xystus, with us being sneaky enough to make a break for it along the way.”

Uri’s stomach rumbled. He had eaten nothing for a whole day now, and he could also use a chance to relieve himself. He looked around.

“Over there,” the plump one said, pointing to a corner opposite the door.

A broad-brimmed pitcher covered with a square slab of marble was standing there, the skewed slab indicating that it was not empty. Uri took the trouble to turn around and, pulling up his tunic with one hand and clutching his loosened loincloth with the other, finally managed to squat in such a way that the protruding excrement of the others would not rub off anywhere on him. He squatted with his back to the other prisoners, who just laughed at him. Maybe it would be best, he thought, if they were to hear me today.

Hours passed. It was getting dark outside.

“There you have it, boys,” said the plump one, sitting back down under the slit. “We’re going to be taking a shit in each other’s shit for another eleven days.”

The door opened and two guards entered; the one with a blazing torch in his hand stayed by the door, the other set two dishes down on the ground. In one dish there was some food, in the other water. The lankier rogue jumped toward the pitcher to hand it over to the guard, but he gestured: “Not now.” The guards left and locked the door.

Outside it became almost pitch-dark, though it was still just possible to make out that the two rogues were dabbling their hands in the dish of water before turning toward the pitcher and, bowing, saying the Sh’ma for that evening. Uri sprinkled water on his hand and said it with them. The pitcher happened to be to the northeast.

The two rogues then knelt down next to the dish and sniffed the food, like a dog would. They made a face and shook their heads before crouching back on their heels and cramming a chunk of the rations into their mouths. Uri did not move until they had finished and scrambled away from the dish. He then clambered to the dish, smelt it likewise, then prodded it with a forefinger. It was some sort of flatbread. He licked his finger: perhaps with a trace amount of honey in it, it was not something he had ever eaten before. He did not eat much, because they did not leave him a lot.

He scooped up some water with the palm of a hand and drank it.

In all truth, now was the time one ought really to sit down to supper.

It was the eve of Seder. They ought to have been given lamb like the rest of the Jewish world.

Of course, it could be that there had been a few morsels but the two rogues had polished them off.

He could see nothing; blindness must be something like this. He was alarmed.

“Can you see anything?” he asked.

“How the devil are we supposed to see, stupid, when it’s dark!” said the one sitting under the slit.

Uri’s mind was set at rest.

He was roused from his sleep by the rattling of keys. The door opened, and between two torchbearing guards two others led in, by the arms, an older, heavier man; the torches fluttered in the draft, and shadows flickered across the prisoner’s face and tunic. One of the guards then cut through with his dagger the cord that was pinning the fat man’s arms behind his back, then they left. Uri looked quickly to the side; his companions were still seated in their places. The new captive stood, not looking anywhere in particular. He was balding, and his bedraggled, graying beard was unkempt. He stood barefoot. The door was shut, and it became even darker than it had been previously. Nothing was said. The scanty straw rustled quietly under the new prisoner’s feet, then he took a seat next to Uri and sighed deeply.

“They won’t even let a man sleep,” said the one sitting under the slit.

There was a silence; the new prisoner breathed heavily.

“Did they beat you up?” asked the man sitting under the slit.

“No,” replied the new prisoner. He had a pleasant, deep voice, and although he spoke softly, it seemed loud.

“Let’s get some rest, then,” said the man to Uri’s right.

There was a silence; all four of them were awake.

“What are you in for?” asked the man sitting under the slit.

“Causing a disturbance,” said the new prisoner. He must be Galilean, judging by his accent.

There was a silence.

“Not a big enough disturbance, sadly,” he added after a pause.

“Why are we not sleeping?” said the other irately.

“You go on and sleep; we’re talking,” said the man sitting under the slit. “What disturbance was that, then?”

“We went up onto Temple Mount, the women’s court, on Tuesday, to buy turtledoves, and I saw that they were cheating people. I told them not to, but they just carried on. So I tipped a few tables over.”

There was a silence.

“So where have they been banging you up since Tuesday?” the man sitting under the slit asked.

“Nowhere. We were allowed to leave. We live outside the city.”

“I don’t get it. So they didn’t even arrest you on Tuesday?”

“No, we went back the next day, and they were still cheating, and again I told them not to, but they just carried on. The guards then came over, we had a discussion, and then we went home. It was only today, in the evening, that they came to where we live, and I told the others to scatter, but it wasn’t them they were after; they only caught me.”

“I don’t get it,” said the other, the one to Uri’s right. “They went looking for you afterward to arrest you? Why didn’t they take you into custody straightaway?”

“I have no idea,” said the new prisoner.

“It can’t have been that much of a fuss,” said the one sitting under the slit, “because our police take you in straightaway for much less, especially on Temple Square. There, just one word out of place is enough. They get bonuses for making arrests there, especially around feast days — a per capita sum, I’m telling you.”

“What do you mean by cheating?” Uri inquired.

“Obviously he’s referring to the way the moneychangers charge more than a kalubon to exchange currencies.”

“What’s that?” Uri asked.

“That’s the moneychangers’ fee: a silver ma’ah,” said the one sitting under the slit. “A sixth of a zuz. Do you know how much a zuz is?”

“No, I don’t.”

The robbers were getting worked up; there were sounds of shifting about.

“A zuz is half a shekel, which to say a dinar or an Attic drachma, or in other words four sesterces… A silver ma’ah is two pondions… Now, then,” the one sitting under the slit asked, “how many sesterces to a kalubon, kid?”

Uri made an effort to calculate it, but he got mixed up.

“Give it to him in prutahs, that’s the smallest copper coin,” said the other. “Something like that would certainly be in the damn fool’s hand… Thirty-two prutahs… That’s a kalubon.”

“A prutah is also called a lepton, that much I do know,” said Uri, proud of himself.

“So far you haven’t set hands on anything else, you wretch,” the one seated in the middle weighed in scornfully.

“So anyway, how many sesterces is that?” the man seated under the slit asked again.

“I have no idea.”

The two robbers guffawed; they could hardly get over the fact that someone might not be able to do the math.

“Two-thirds,” said the new prisoner.

There was a slight pause.

“That’s right,” said the one sitting under the slit, annoyed that his little game had been brought to an end.

No one said a word.

“Why? What do they charge instead?” Uri inquired.

“In some cases,” said the one sitting under the slit, “it may be as much as seven or eight pondions! I’ve even seen them go for seven or eight tresiths, and the stupid klutzes don’t even notice! They’re from the villages, and they’re clueless! Just so you know, you moron: one ma’ah is just two pondions and three-quarters of a tresith. Instead of taking one sixth of a zuz, they may pull in as much as three quarters of a zuz! Four times as much! The fools keep coming; they know nothing about what things are worth, just the same as you; the peasants never handle any money except at times like this, so they get swindled out of a fortune!”

“Half the profits are handed on by the moneychangers to the high priests,” said the other, who, to judge from the rustling, was sitting up. “Of course they cheat, but it’s the high priests who cheat the worst, the damned foreigners!”

“They even cheat over the doves,” the new prisoner chipped in. “For a dove bought to redeem a lamb, they ask double the price, even though that is prohibited. I told them they should only be charging a flat fee, but it did no good.” His voice sounded tired and resigned. “They brazenly leech on people’s faith. And the wretched people hand over what little money they have, because at all events they have to have two turtledoves to make an offering…”

“That’s the third tithe of turtledoves,” said the other sarcastically. “That’s what it’s known as, and that too finds its way into the pockets of the high priests… They’re the biggest thieves of all, the high priests! That’s also why they live here, over the prison… They know this is the right place for them, together with us. They’re bigger villains than us; that’s why their rooms are bigger too!”

They fell silent. Uri regretted that he had never had any Palestinian money in his hands, and he had paid no attention in Caesarea when his companions had been arguing over the value of the local coins. At least now he had learned that one ma’ah is two thirds of a sestertius; if the chance were to arise, he would tell them.

He broke into a smile. Now he was unlikely to be seeing much more of them, thanks be to the Lord!

“Have you come from Galilee?” the one sitting under the slit asked.

“Yes,” replied the new prisoner, starting up from his doze.

“Do you pay taxes there too?”

“Yes, we do.”

“There you go! So you voluntarily changed money on account of the sacrificial doves, so it’s actually forbidden to charge you a kalubon! You should be getting money changed for free! Free! Didn’t you realize?”

“No, I didn’t,” said the new prisoner wearily.

“The brazen cheek of it!” the one sitting under the slit exclaimed. “The dirty, low-down scum! But they never get tossed in the can like us, because they grease the palms of the high priests! The dirtbags!”

Uri woke at daybreak. The new prisoner was quietly praying, bowing in a kneeling position toward the pitcher. The other two prisoners were both sleeping with faces to the wall, their cloaks pulled over their heads. Uri was shivering; he had no cloak, and his waist, back, and shoulders were aching. The new prisoner had no cloak either, only a tunic of white linen, but he showed no signs of being cold; perhaps prayer was keeping him warm. He looked at Uri while praying. The older man was just a pace away, his face clearly visible in the dawn light. His tousled hair and beard were turning gray, and he had gentle eyes, clear, pale, maybe gray, set in a puffy face; he must have been a handsome man at one time. He is almost the same age as my father, Uri thought, and smiled at him. The new prisoner nodded back and went on with his prayers.

The door then opened, and in came the two guards. They yanked the coverings off the sleepers, held a torch close to each man’s face, and finally stopped in front of the new prisoner. He got to his feet; each guard took him by an arm and they led him out. The door was bolted again from outside.

“Let’s get back to sleep,” said the man lying to Uri’s right, and rolled back to face the wall.

Later in the morning, they were given fresh water and matzos, and also at last they took the pitcher out. The man sitting under the slit tried to teach Uri the values of all the currencies that were in use in Palestine, but Uri soon got bored; he was never going to have any money in this land. The rogues asked him how much he had been making in Rome, and how he had gotten there. Uri explained that he was a member of the delegation bringing money from Rome, and the robbers shut up for a long time at that.

“So you’re a Roman citizen, then?” the other man, the lankier one, asked.

“Yes, I am,” said Uri.

“Why didn’t you tell them?” the other exclaimed. “Jews are not allowed to arrest you!”

“I didn’t exactly have a chance to discuss the matter,” said Uri. “They banged me on the head.”

“Tell the guards when they come in this evening,” the man sitting under the slit advised. “They’re going to be petrified and take you straight off to a better place, better than this.”

Uri shook his head. He did not hold out much hope of any favors being done for him; Matthew, the head of the delegation, had been the one who informed on him. But he would somehow weather the ten days among these likable robbers. He would ask for a cloak.

It must have been around the second hour of the day when the door opened and five soldiers came in. They halted in front of the two robbers, who scrambled to their feet.

“Out with you,” ordered one of the soldiers.

“But it’s Friday,” protested the lanky one. “There’s no court hearing on a Friday.”

“Out with you,” the soldier repeated, prodding them with the tip of his spear.

The door then closed so swiftly that Uri did not get a chance to ask for a cloak, or to take leave of his cell mates.

He was now left alone in the cell.

He stood up, and began to move around.

He would ask not only for a cloak but also for something to read. He would manage well enough here; it did not matter if no one was brought in on account of the feast. During the two months since they had set out, he had no time on his own to read. He pondered on what scroll he should ask for, and whether they would bring it, but in the end it did not matter: anything so long as it was lengthy.

As it grew dark a guard brought the empty pitcher, along with water and two good-sized blocks of matzo. Uri got to his feet.

“Excuse me, sir, but I have no cloak… and I’d like something to read.”

The guard stared in amazement.

“No one reads here,” he said, and went out.

Uri grew dejected. This was going to make it a long ten days, so he made up his mind to recite from memory the Iliad or the Aeneid. He liked the Iliad above all.

He heard a dreadful horn blast. He froze; it was as if a fatally wounded lion had roared in his ear. What could that be? Surely a shofar did not sound like that? Had Passover started?

No one came in until Monday morning. Then he gave up the struggle. He was going almost mad every time he was unable to recall how a line went: he could see the letters in front of him, but it seemed as though precisely the lines in question had been deleted out of some sort of spite. It seemed his memory was not as good as he had supposed.

On Tuesday some kind of cloak was tossed to him, and he instantly wrapped it around himself; he felt feverish and was coughing. His gums were bleeding, his stool was bloodstained, and his stomach ached. He needed to take life more easily, he thought; I should not be worrying when I’m innocent.

On Wednesday he decided to do physical exercises as the Greeks did. There were several Greek-style gymnasiums in Rome; it was possible to look into the garden through the fence. Uri had kept his eyes peeled, sometimes peering through the cracks between his fingers, staring at how rich Roman youths ran around and stooped. Now here was an opportunity to strengthen his body; there was plenty of time. He toiled away until the evening, doing every exercise several hundred times, overdoing it so much that he spent the whole of Thursday just lying flat on his back.

Just three days to go, he thought on Friday morning; on Monday they will come for me and take me out of here. Whatever crime they suspect me of, they are not going to leave me here at state expense. He was still coughing, but his temperature had gone down.

On Friday afternoon he was given meat, decently roasted lamb. That and a pitcher — and in this one there was wine! He was able to celebrate the Sabbath in befitting fashion, albeit alone. That had to be a good sign: they had not forgotten him and did not want him to get totally run down.

Together with the meat they also brought dates, figs, and grapes, and those had even been washed. He also got some freshly baked barley bread instead of that sticky pap! Uri determined that this must be three days’ rations, the three whole days of the festival, and so it proved to be: for two and a half days nobody came in. On Sunday evening, the guard set down a nice, big dish of fruit and said, “They will be coming for you tonight.”

He took away the pitcher and did not bring another in its place.

At last.

He walked up and down the cell, tapping the walls. He wanted to imprint the place on his memory so as never to forget it. He summoned up the conversations that he had conducted with the robbers and the new prisoner so as not to forget them either. He was somewhat surprised at the affection in which he held them, even going so far as to have developed a fondness for this gloomy, cool cell. It had been his dwelling place in Jerusalem, he reflected, with a twinge of emotion.

Outside, evening was drawing in. All of a sudden the shofar sounded; to him it sounded as if it was coming from very close by. It had to be from the roof of the Temple that it was blown: it gave a terrible, raucous, penetrating noise.

That marked the end of Passover.

That night they came for him. He was not bound but led by the elbows from both sides. They went up a story to the first floor; torches burned on the walls. They reached a long, wide corridor, and the decorative marble floor under the bare soles of his feet felt warm; it was heated. He was led into a room with a real window, so he peered out into the dark with his eyes narrowed on the off chance that he might be able to see a bit of the city, but the guards turned him around. They let go of him and went away.

Uri found himself in front of a youngish man in military garb; he must have been a high-ranking officer, and he looked stern. A few soldiers, who might well be subalterns, were loitering farther off.

“Give him a good scrubbing,” the high-ranking officer said, “and a decent rub with oils.”

Silence fell. The commanding officer stepped a little closer and started to sniff. Uri bit his lip to stop himself from laughing.

“Not too foul,” he declared. “Get him straightened up, but nothing to eat, mind you!”

He swung around on his heels and strode off.

Uri was led back out into the corridor. They went down another flight of stairs and reached a lovely interior garden decorated with Greek columns and stocked with carefully tended plants; that too was lit by torches. There was a door on one side, and they entered. Uri’s nostrils were assailed by the odor of steaming water. He breathed a deep sigh of relief.

The waist-high water in the basin, which was lined with marble mosaics, was tepid, and he took great pleasure in being able to take a dip again in the nude. Around the basin lounged sleepy soldiers whose features he could not make out due to the distance and the steam, but they were of no interest anyway. He floated on the surface of the water. The ceiling of the baths block was lined with slates of transparent crystal, and Uri could make out a dim twinkle of faint stars.

He was left to enjoy it for a while, but then a whistle shrilled. Uri climbed out; he was swathed in a white sheet and rubbed down, then led into a room next door, and his limbs and body were massaged with oils. That was something Uri had never previously experienced; he was amazed at how pleasant it was. His hair was also sleeked with oil and his scalp was massaged vigorously before the nails of his fingers and toes were attended to, being carefully polished with a coarse, granular material. When they were done with that, he was taken into the next hall, where he was also able to take a dip in a pool of water; it was cold, and he was not permitted to soak for very long. With another whistle he was ordered out, rubbed down once more in a thick white blanket of fine wool, and escorted back to the first room, where he again had oil smeared over him, this one with a different scent from the first.

An elderly officer inspected the results, with Uri standing there naked. The officer walked around him as if he were a statue. He nodded and went away. Uri was then slipped into a crisp, fragrant, newly laundered tunic and over it a toga, a real toga like the ones worn by Roman patricians. Uri would never have been able to drape the single sheet of the garment into complicated folds on his own, but that was the task of practiced hands, finishing up with one end of the toga being put into his right hand to grasp. Like a statue of the emperor Augustus, that’s how I look, thought Uri. He was given a pair of sandals of the finest leather for his feet, with the straps delicately laced around his ankles, hardly being pulled at all when they were knotted.

This time it was a younger officer who scrutinized the result, tugged the toga a little higher, slung the end to point to the side on Uri’s right arm so that he only had to grip the rolled-up tip in his fist.

“Walk about a bit,” the officer said in Aramaic.

Uri did what was bidden.

“Straighten up!” the officer said.

Uri drew himself up and walked around like that. It was hard to believe that a pair of sandals could be so comfortable.

“Wait here, you lot, until we come,” the officer said before going off.

Uri was left there, done up, dolled up, and generally made ready in the company of five soldiers. Rank-and-file soldiers, he supposed, gazing at them with screwed-up eyes until all at once he noticed a young, fair-haired man.

He was the one to whom Matthew had shown the safe-conduct. Uri looked defiantly at him, and he turned away.

He recognized me too, Uri thought.

“Where are you going to take me?” he asked.

He got no reply. Uri nodded. It had been a silly question; it would become clear soon enough.

His stomach rumbled. However much he asked for something to eat, though, the high-ranking officer had forbidden that he be given anything.

It was then that the officer who had smelled him reappeared. The others all saluted like Roman soldiers, though this was the Jewish army, the Jerusalem division. It’s Rome that sets the fashion in everything, thought Uri, the Roman citizen. He almost broke into a laugh, so grotesque was the whole business he was being put through; true, many big adventures would be in store for him.

The officer set off out of the room; the five soldiers stepped up alongside Uri and marched him out into the yard, then onward.

He was awaited by a palanquin with four slaves amid a team of torchbearers, and he was ordered to get into the litter. He turned around inquiringly but was pushed forward. Someone opened the door of the litter, and Uri, head bowed, had to scramble in. He barely had time to find a place to seat himself when, all of a sudden, there was a lurch as the litter was picked up. With that, they were on their way.

There was a drumming of hooves from both sides. Not only was the palanquin itself magnificent, it also had a guard of honor.

The window of the litter was curtained. Uri pulled back one of the curtains but all he found behind it was a wooden board; it was not possible to look out of the litter. He grunted in irritation; now was the first time he had become impatient since he had been knocked out. I shall never see Jerusalem, he thought to himself.

He was carried for a while, and then the litter was again set down on the ground. The horses also halted.

“Make way for the Sagan!” he heard the cry.

The litter was lifted up again and carried onward. The escort of a clattering hooves did not accompany them any farther.

Sagan?

That young high-ranking officer had been the Sagan, or strategos, no less! The Levite commander of Jerusalem, head of twenty-four divisions who at every sacrifice stood at the altar at the right hand of the high priest and handed him the Torah scroll! The captain of the Temple guard! The bodyguard! The highest secular Jewish potentate!

The strategos himself had smelled him all over with his own nose!

The litter must conceal some VIP if the strategos were proceeding at the head of the procession.

Who are they mistaking me for?

The litter was set down and the door opened. Uri climbed out and drew himself up. He strove to grip the end of the toga less tightly in his right hand. Torchbearers surrounded him. The strategos glanced at him, then turned away. They were standing at the entrance gate to some palace, with a multitude of guards on both sides. Uri came to notice that the palace was made up of two conjoint wings.

“To Pilate, for dinner!” announced the strategos before turning around and setting off. The empty litter was picked up and carried behind him, with the escort also setting off in its wake. The boots drummed loud; Uri looked down and saw that he was standing on marble slabs.

He looked around him. Off to his right was a stone wall at a man’s height and before it a long and graceful row of Greek-style columns lit by torches. Above it were sky-scraping bastions, exceedingly high, three of them, one after the other. He turned back and discerned the outlines of a massive palace. What could it be?

He was shoved from behind and found himself obliged to enter a gate.

They took an impressive marble staircase upward; masses of big torches lit the way and they passed a larger-than-man-sized statue — Apollo perhaps — at the turn in the stairs.

If they were leading him to Pilate, then this must be the palace of Herod the Great, where the governor lived when he was in Jerusalem. And one of the three towers that he had seen outside was no doubt the tower of Phasael, named by Herod after his younger brother, but what were the other two called? Let’s see, he had read about that. Yes, that was it: Hippicus and Mariamne! The first was one of Herod’s friends, the other a wife before he had her killed. Forty, thirty, and twenty cubits high, but which was which? Yet that too was something he knew…

Fragments of thoughts, pages that he had read, whizzed through his mind; he tried to compose himself. He would have to be careful, to keep his wits about him. This was not the time to be deliberating about that sort of thing. It had been interesting to sample the life of a prisoner, but why get oneself put back in prison when there was no need?

At the top of the stairs they came to a standstill in front of a huge oak door decorated with gold leaves. Servants on each side held it open.

Uri entered. The door was closed behind him.

He could see a long, uncovered table, a hand’s span in thickness, and a great many low, ornamental couches. There were big torches burning around the walls. On the table were some gigantic ornamental candles. Three people turned toward him; they were reclining on one side at the left end of the table, and they were looking at him. Uri was unable to pick out their faces.

He stopped and bowed deeply.

“Come here, come!” he heard Matthew’s voice say.

Uri gritted his teeth, drew himself up and headed toward them before coming to a standstill at a respectful distance.

“Stretch yourself out here, next to me!” a gruff voice declared, also in Greek. It was a bald, clean-shaven, burly man, wearing a tunic and with gleaming rings on his fingers; he smiled.

Uri made his way around the end of the table and sat down at the place that had been indicated. He looked up. Matthew returned his gaze, visibly uneasy. Uri nodded with a smile. Matthew also smiled, and he nodded back. Could that have been a wink? Uri glanced at the head of the table. An elderly, white-haired, bearded man was reclining on his side; he was in an ornamental, Eastern-style garment and bareheaded. Uri gave him a bow of acknowledgment, and the elderly man nodded back.

“There’s no need for me to introduce Matthew,” the plump man said. “Apart from him, at the head of the table is a good friend of mine, the king of Galilee, who is likewise curious about you, my dear Gaius.”

Uri kept a hold on himself.

At the head of the table was reclining Herod Antipas and next to him Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judaea.

Herod Antipas was one of the sons of Herod the Great, and by virtue of that an uncle of Agrippa’s. He would have to watch out.

“It is a deep honor for me to be allowed into such distinguished company,” he managed to declare in a calm tone of voice.

“Just recline in comfort,” said Pilate. “I’m not going to quiz you on what you did over the feast days. I hope that you had a chance to rest yourself after the travails of your long journey. Unfortunately, I had many pressing matters to attend to. Passover is no holiday for me; I have to keep working even then, even harder than at other times, so it is only now that I am in a position to receive you. I hope your appetite will be whetted with strictly kosher food, given that there are three Jews present, and I, the sole non-Jew as always, will gladly accommodate to your customs.”

Uri set himself down, resting on one elbow like the other guests. It was an uncomfortable body position. He could not imagine how he was going to be able to eat like that; he was used to eating while squatting on his heels on the floor.

Servants brought a large gold bowl and set it down in front of Herod Antipas. He dabbled both hands in it, being followed by Matthew then Pilate and Uri, and they all dried their hands on table napkins. These were very fine, white cloths with curlicues of the same material embroidered into them. Uri took a close look at his own; there were no figures as such on it, just lines that twisted in on themselves so that nothing figurative would be seen. Pilate obviously used Jewish napkins.

Antipas stood up and turned toward the far end of the table; Matthew also got up and turned in the same direction. Uri also got up to turn toward the Temple, though he sacrilegiously glanced around to see where the pitcher might be. Pilate, still reclining, had lowered his head and immersed himself in thought so as not to disturb them. The three Jews — the king of Galilee, the pilot from Ostia, and the young Roman citizen — said the Sh’ma and then settled back in their places.

It came to Uri’s mind that in principle they were not supposed to eat as guests of a non-Jew or else they would become impure. But then there were many times en route that they had eaten at non-Jewish places, though the innkeepers invariably asserted that they served entirely kosher food and drink. Moreover, the Diaspora itself was unclean in principle and yet there were Jews living all over the world. Here, at the very heart of sacred and pure Jerusalem, all the ambiguities of Diaspora existence converged in a palace that had been built by half-Jewish Herod the Great and usurped by a non-Jew.

Servants came and poured wine into their goblets of murrhine glass. These were even bigger crystal goblets than in the Syracusan sawmill, each holding three or four units of wine.

“To your good health, my friends!” Pilate raised his glass. “Your good health, my fine Gaius Theodorus!”

Uri raised the full goblet, but it was too heavy for his weak arm, and his hand trembled. He tasted the wine as he reclined, but just a sip, and he took great care not to spill it on himself. A person can easily get drunk on an empty stomach. He needed to keep his wits about him; there was no watering down the wine here!

No, I had not been mistaken for somebody else. Matthew had told them all about me, including some things that were not true.

Salads and fruits on huge, marvelous bowls were brought in by servants, who then withdrew.

“I love eating,” said Pilate. “It’s no use my wife constantly prattling on about how I’m putting on weight all the time, my way of life is unhealthy, and I hardly exercise. I’m well aware of those things, but what am I to do when I can’t stand dieting?”

“It’s better to start a meal with pickled greens, salads, and the like before starting on meat, whether roasted or cooked,” Uri declared quite unexpectedly, as if he were reading it out.

He did not look across to the other side of the table, but he could tell that Matthew was surprised.

“How true!” exclaimed Pilate. “Celsus advises the same. As well as moderation. Sadly, though, I am going to be unable to resist all the many kinds of meat dishes this evening, and I would not advise that for you either, my dear Gaius. I’d love to be as slim as you are again! To be able to gorge myself without worries, because I still eat now, only uneasily! And I am often tormented by stomachaches.”

“That might well be due to the southern wind and spring,” Uri said by way of chatting, turning toward Pilate. “Celsus says that spring is the time for the onset of illnesses associated with the movement of humors…” He could almost see the text of the scroll of Celsus’s writings before his eyes, and, not even noticing that he’d switched to Latin, he went on: “Eyes stream, piles bleed, the digestive canal becomes inflamed, gallstones, dementia, angina, and nosebleeds all may arise, the tonsils become angry… Disorders of the joints and tendons are more common… As far as losing weight is concerned, one should bathe in saline hot water…”

A silence fell. Uri looked around. Matthew was looking at him aghast; Antipas also looked stony-faced. Uri felt a sudden sense of shame.

“My apologies for speaking,” he said in Greek.

“You did well to say it!” Pilate vigorously approved. “My own doctor also swears by Celsus, although of course he has adopted some procedures from Cassius and Erasistratus… He gets his annual fee of eighty thousand sesterces on the dot on the first day of January… It’s a lot, I know, but good physicians today cost a lot; the emperor’s physician gets three hundred thousand a year and finds even that too little, so I’m told, even though he does nothing, the lucky dog, because Tiberius has enjoyed excellent health all his livelong days and is in superb condition even now, I hear… I, on the other hand, overeat and, to be honest, there are times when I use an emetic, to be sure, even though Asclepiades does not advise it…”

“He was not in favor of purgation either,” Uri commented again, “whereas Celsus says that it is useful if you have to void strong medicaments… Though of course he does agree that it’s not good when it is employed for luxury’s sake.”

Matthew was still looking aghast. All he had ever seen in the young man was a tongue-tied, narrow-minded Jew, and now out of this had blossomed a loquacious Roman lazybones. Matthew shook his head in disbelief.

“Now, then, my dear Gaius,” said Pilate, turning his entire body to the left to see for himself, “what do you think about fever?”

“I am no physician, prefect… I’ve only read a thing or two and learned it…” He again quoted in Latin: “According to Celsus, fever is often the body’s way of defending itself, however odd that may seem.”

“Superb!” Pilate exclaimed. “My dear Matthew, I’m positively delighted by your delegate!”

“He’s a clever lad,” said Matthew.

Uri could sense the warning in his voice.

“So, let’s eat,” said Pilate, taking some of the salad greens and fruits.

There was a big murrhine dish and a tastefully fashioned silver spoon in front of everyone. Uri took for himself some of the fruit, and in doing so his eye was caught by the shiny, mirror-smooth tabletop surface on which the torches on the walls were mirrored. Never before had he seen veining as gorgeous as that; there were wonderful whorls in it, which in places coalesced in pink-colored peacock eyes. His eyes ranged over the whole surface; it had been made from a single slab of wood. It must have been worth a fortune.

“I’ve always had a partiality for Jews,” said Pilate. “Among them are so many clever, truly wise men. When I was getting ready to come to Judaea, I started to learn about the foundations of the Jewish faith; I was astonished at how expedient and humane your commandments are. I don’t share the widespread view in Rome that superstition is harmful; it can’t be if it has helped keep an entire people in existence for two thousand years.”

Uri had the feeling that Pilate was speaking sincerely, though of course it was perfectly possible to lie in a serious, sober voice. After all, politicians were the best of actors. But then, why say it if he did not mean it?

They feasted on salad greens and fruits; it was all fresh and appetizing. There was silence apart from the crunching made by their teeth. There was something else that was also there from which everyone took only a tiny portion. What could that have been? Marsh mallow leaves maybe?

Pilate pushed the dish away, whereupon Matthew followed suit, Uri too. Antipas took yet another small portion.

Servants jumped forward and changed the plates for new ones. Only now did Uri notice that the servants were all bearded; Jewish servants were serving up the food so that it would not become impure.

A great profusion of fish dishes came next. They had been braised whole: gigantic fishes of various species, all with scales and fins as specified by Jewish law. One servant, the scissorer, used a few deft movements of a flat spoon to fillet out the spine, while a second used a small knife to lop off the fish heads, and a third cut off the fins. The servants then vanished.

“Fish dishes are of moderate heaviness, Celsus asserts,” said Pilate. “We should not take too much of it, is my recommendation, because a miraculous peppered veal escalopes and a fantastic marinated mutton roast still awaits, if I am not mistaken.”

Uri saw before his eyes the text by Celsus: “The heaviest of them, which is salted, is for example the mackerel.” He kept quiet; he hadn’t the faintest idea what a mackerel looked like, and in any case the fish here were braised rather than salted.

He often went to the fish market in Rome; he loved the smell of fish, which revolted many, and he saw all kinds of marvelous sea creatures, arthropods, cephalopods, and shellfish, though he did not know the names of any of them and never asked since he could not eat them anyway.

He sensed that Matthew was moaning in satisfaction, and not at the sight of the fish, but because this time Uri had not spoken. He looked up; Matthew was gazing at the fish, it seemed he gave a nod.

We are in league, Matthew and I, Uri thought. The same Matthew that had me knocked on the head and carted off to prison. Interesting.

“I can particularly recommend those handsome little brutes,” Pilate said, pointing with a spoon at one of the dishes. “Barbel, that is.”

Uri shuddered.

“Someone once sent something of the kind to the emperor Tiberius,” said Uri, “and he ordered that they would do better to put it up for auction; he made a wager, saying he would be amazed if Apicius or Publius Octavius, those famed gourmands, did not snap it up… As best I know, Octavius won out. He paid five thousand sesterces for it…”

“There’s not much you don’t know, my dear Gaius!” Pilate cried out contentedly. “That’s very good! How did that information get to you?”

“It was a story that went around the markets in Rome.”

“Poor Apicius,” said Pilate. “He cut open his veins in the end…”

“Not for that reason, though,” yapped Herod Antipas, “but because he spent hundreds of millions on banquets, and when he grasped that he had only ten million left, he resolved that he did not want to live in poverty!”

Everyone tittered, Uri too. While he laughed he saw himself from outside. What a comfy stooge I’ve become, he thought.

Everyone took some fish — Antipas a lot, Pilate lashings of them, Matthew very little, and Uri even less. He modestly avoided the mullet even though Pilate encouraged him to try it: a fish only cost three thousand.

“Yes, indeed!” said Pilate. “Our own modest repast is nothing compared with the banquets that are thrown over the water! Lucullus knew what to do! When Cicero and Pompey dropped in on him without prior notice one day, he had a dinner served out straightaway that cost two thousand sesterces! Then there’s the wealthy advocate Quintus Hortensius, whose fishponds alone were worth three million sesterces! Then again, the dinners given by Maecenas! Fancy plying his guests with asses’ flesh!” Pilate chuckled. “Apicius had the geese stuffed with figs and dished up, roast, like that… I’m going to try that out one of these days. The mullet was served with a fish-liver sauce, which sounds intriguing… Pasties of the tongues of flamingos, peacocks, and nightingales — that’s the sort of thing Vitellius adores, he was telling me not long ago… Here we are, friends: garum sauce, all four kinds. Dip the fish in it! All the ingredients are kosher; they are all based on olive oil, ground pepper, wine, and honey, all clean… There’s watery, olive, vinegary, and wine-flavored. I get them brought in from a factory in Sparturia, five hundred sesterces per congius… I gave explicit instructions that they were to be made with Jewish oil, which is ten times more expensive than the non-Jewish oil… But then, as I say, what are our meals compared with those of the true hedonists! Nowadays Agrippa too spends two hundred thousand on a single supper, so I hear… He even gets them to prepare cinnamon gravy, even though it’s better as an unguent than a condiment.”

Uri listened, feeling not a scrap of eagerness; he finished cleaning a portion of fish with his spoon, dunked it with his fingers in the sauce and dabbled it around a bit before placing it in his mouth.

“First-rate!” he declared enthusiastically.

“They’re all sea fish,” said Pilate, “since Jews consider the sea cleaner than the rivers, though those too are pure, have I got that right?”

“That’s quite right, prefect,” said Matthew.

“There are hardly any bones in these,” said Pilate, “because bones, I have to tell you, they’re one thing I hate. I hate all superfluous difficulties, and that includes with food. There are difficulties as it is. There are plenty of people in Rome who look askance at my nurturing such good relations with Jews. I always hit it off excellently with your people. Whatever tensions may have arisen, it was never a fault on my part, nor, I hasten to add, on the part of the Jews! All the tensions came from Rome. Thanks be to my gods, and to your one and only Everlasting Lord, up till now I have always managed to repair the damage, and I very much hope it will stay that way.”

Pilate pushed his plate away from him, with Matthew immediately doing the same. Uri put another piece of fish in his mouth, though he did not dip it in garum first. Antipas helped himself to another large portion of the mullet and started to eat. There was a hush as everybody waited patiently until Antipas had finished. When he had swallowed the last mouthful, he too pushed his plate away.

Three quarters of the food served in the fish dishes had been left behind. Who was going to eat that? Was it going to be thrown out?

Servants jumped, and no sooner had the fish course disappeared than the three roast meats were there in front of them. Steaming away, they smelled dangerously tempting. New plates were set out.

I’m dining with a king and a prefect. This is not going to end well.

“It infuriates me,” said Pilate before anyone could help themselves, “that people should want to come between me and your people. I’m a disciplined person, thanks be to my gods, and to your one and only Everlasting Lord, and so far I have not fallen for any provocation. I come from a lowly background; I learned to discipline myself, and to the present day I have not forgotten that. It will not be through any doing of mine that I lose this post. The emperor is free to relieve me of my office, but let him do so to appoint me to a higher post. In the case of the viaduct, for instance, it was in your general interest, but I stepped back. I also did not allow myself to be provoked when those few dozen dimwitted fanatics were whipped up by a blatant lie to rush to Caesarea and protest in front of my palace; not a hair on their heads was harmed. Passover this year was more tense than usual, and I had to fear that a further provocation was stewing. I had to put an end to that, so I had three Jewish common criminals crucified. Let people see that I can also be hard-nosed, and that even my patience has its limits. Caiaphas the high priest was also concerned that dubious elements wanted to use the feast as a cover for public unrest, and he handed them over to me. They died; anyone who wanted could watch, anyone else could hear. I am only sorry that I had to make an example of them, but it seems the Jews drew the right lesson.”

Pilate now served himself a helping of meat.

“Every Jew knows that I am supporting the building of the city wall to the north out of my personal fortune, even though the emperor is more against it than for it. Now that’s not something I would do if I wanted a confrontational policy, is it? Why build you a wall if I only want to batter it down? I only sought to do good with the aqueduct, the stadium, and everything else I proposed! Any time Jews protested, I withdrew; peace is more important. But I can’t step back all the time! I have no intention of making it a regular practice to interfere in matters under the authority of the Jewish courts; I have neither right nor time to do so. This, though, was an exceptional situation. Let no one in Rome or Judaea make the mistake of supposing that I, whom they have only ever known as soft-hearted and agreeable, cannot put my foot down when necessary.”

Herod Antipas grabbed a portion from one of the roasts and put it on his plate. Matthew and Uri did likewise.

“My friend King Herod Antipas agrees,” said Pilate.

“Absolutely,” muttered Antipas as he ate.

“His presence here right now,” Pilate continued, “is highly esteemed and means a lot to me. We share this splendid palace now, and news of that will reach the ears of the powers that be soon enough, if it has not done so already. Our letters are not always answered, but they will understand our present coexistence. The Roman political rabble-rousers who would love to bring my name into disrepute and turn the emperor against me are on the wrong track. Peace and quiet reign in Judaea, and ever shall do so. The close alliance between the king of Judaea and the governor of Galilee is the guarantee.”

“There’s also endless plotting against me,” grumbled Antipas, staring gloomily straight ahead. “Ignorant people are continually needling me; I’m even driven to make war on my own ex-father-in-law! That is something I have no appetite for. My neighbors are being incited from Rome against me, Rome’s loyal ally; that’s going on all the time. The neighboring provinces would be peaceful forever were it not for the internal politicking in Rome that sets them against each other.”

“I can assure you, prefect—” Matthew began, but Pilate cut in, turning to Uri.

“Did you bring a message from Agrippa? If so, what? And to whom?”

Uri had been waiting for the question.

Matthew’s breathing on the other side of the table audibly quickened.

“Yes,” said Uri nonchalantly. “His message to the high priest was that he would leave him in office if he could be king.”

A silence fell.

Matthew’s breathing broke off.

Antipas snorted.

Pilate grunted then fell silent.

The silence persisted.

Uri reached for a plate, took a nice veal escalope and set it on his plate. Only then did he look up.

Matthew was looking at Pilate with a horrified expression on his face, Antipas was grinding his teeth. Uri squinted to the right. Pilate smiled a rueful smile then laughed it off.

“Well, what do you expect? Stands to reason! Let’s eat.”

When the dinner had ended, Pilate patted Uri on the shoulder.

“I hope that went down well, dear Gaius.”

“I’ve never eaten so many delicacies in my life!”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Matthew and Uri were led down to the front of the palace. They were standing in Temple Square, but it was dark, almost nothing could be seen; the moon was barely shining.

“Stay there!” said a soldier.

Matthew waited until the soldier had moved away before asking:

“Did you really bring a message?”

Uri burst out laughing.

“Whatever I say, you won’t believe it.”

Matthew slowly nodded. There was silence.

“You won’t believe me either,” he said gravely, “but I saved your life. I had you jailed, that’s true, but I told the prefect that you were probably carrying a message from Agrippa. The reason you were not executed is I said you knew something they needed to know. People who know nothing are crucified. I said you knew something important; I saved your life, do you hear?”

Uri shivered.

He was lying. I’m a Roman citizen; that’s why I was released.

Yet what if that wasn’t the reason after all?

A litter with four bearers appeared; it was tiny and ramshackle. They beckoned to Matthew and he got in. The litter was picked up and they set off.

A squadron was left with Uri in front of Herod’s palace.

“Let’s go!” an officer ordered.

Uri made his way alongside the colonnade, in the middle of a procession of soldiers dangling lowered weapons. He was able to take a peek at the hall behind in the light of the torches; under some vaults were a table and chairs, others were empty. He heard a drumming from above and looked up; soldiers were patrolling on the roof of the colonnade. He saw to the right the big palace that had attracted his attention on arrival: that must be the Hasmoneans’ palace. It was less ornamented than Herod’s palace. He spotted behind it a tall, dark, flat-roofed building that was separated from the palace by a wall at least eight cubits high. What could that be, he wondered.

They reached the end of the colonnade and left the square by a gate. A massive citadel with four towers stood before them, and they marched along one of its walls. The Antonia Fortress! Which meant that the flat-roofed building had to be the Temple!

They marched through a gate. Three soldiers accompanied Uri some five floors up a staircase, quite probably in one of the four towers. There he had to go through a door, which was then locked on him.

A terracotta lamp was burning in the room, one exactly like the lamps in use in Rome. There was a couch with a blanket, a copper bowl, a pitcher containing water, another containing wine, a tumbler, and a fruit dish with dried figs, dried dates, and raisins. The room had a window, but high up and not so much a window as an embrasure that had been left between stones at regular intervals to let air into the room or to fire arrows out from. It was a windy night, as could be felt even in the room. This too was a prison, only higher class.

I’m in the Antonia, he said to himself in some amazement.

The fort had been built by Herod the Great and was named after Herod’s patron, Mark Antony. It could have been renamed, given that Mark Antony had been defeated by Octavian, who then became the emperor Augustus, but since Herod also managed to find favor with the latter, he did not do that. It was said that Augustus respected fidelity — or maybe the matter was of no interest to him.

Uri poured some water into the bowl, washed his hands and face, and as on each occasion since he had been placed under arrest, he prayed without being able to put on a phylactery. He also did not know which way was east, so he picked one of the corners at random and, bowing in that direction, recited the Sh’ma.

He begged his Lord that it would not come out that he had lied.

Now, after the fact, he broke out in a cold sweat.

The matter was not at an end.

In the morning he would be brought in front of the high priest and would have to repeat what he had said. He would have to lie again once he had started, because if he were to tell the truth, which was that no message had been entrusted to him, then he would be asked why he had lied to Pilate. That too was a sin — maybe an even bigger one. It was not impossible that Agrippa would drop by this way, he would be led in front of him, and Agrippa would be flabbergasted: he had never seen this person in his life! Fair enough, thought Uri, but then I could say that the message had been passed on by my father, and he in turn had been told by someone else whom he thought was one of Agrippa’s people… No, that’s no good. I mustn’t get my father mixed up in this; he has enough worries as it is.

For a few seconds he thought he was losing his mind: if so many people believed it, maybe he had been entrusted with a message after all, only he had forgotten. Why else would he have found his way into the delegation? He had hardly understood that before, and now he understood it even less. He racked his brain but he had no recollection of anybody entrusting him with anything at all, and his father had most certainly said nothing.

Was such a thing as torture practiced in Jerusalem? Why wouldn’t it be? He would not be able to withstand it, but they would not believe whatever he yelled out in pain, and would go on torturing him.

It was not a good sign that they were going to keep holding him in prison.

But then it was a good sign that this was a comfortable prison.

Maybe they supposed he was one of Agrippa’s important people, and they did not know what to do with him until he had been asked. But if asked about him, Agrippa would just dismiss the business, saying he had no knowledge of such a person, which would mean at best losing his head: one chop was all it took. An exchange of letters between Rome and Caesarea would take two weeks… Did that mean he had just two weeks left of his life?

He ran over the dinner again in his memory and came to the conclusion that he had not made any missteps. Pilate had struck him as being honest; Matthew had been amazed, of course; and all three of them had believed that Agrippa had sent that message to the high priest. Why wouldn’t they have believed it if Agrippa really were the sort of person Matthew and Plotius had painted? It could be that Agrippa really had sent a message through one of them; who knows, it could well be literally the one that in his misery he had made up.

He pondered what might have prompted him to say that. He did not rehearse an answer, only that he would be asked that. He had improvised and been believed, so if they had believed him, he might be capable of improvising a truth.

But why did I improvise precisely that?

There was no fathoming the workings of the human brain. He found that he was able to justify the answer that he had given retroactively: Rome would always leave local leaders in power as long as they pledged their allegiance, because it took the view that if they acquired authority, then they must be suitable people with the right local connections. Rome would only parley with rebels if it wished to overturn the local powers.

Uri’s belly grumbled. He had eaten very little, not wishing to overtax his stomach after fasting. He felt tempted to take some fruit from the bowl, but it crossed his mind that it may have been poisoned. But then again, why poison him if they presumed that he knew something? Only people who know nothing are killed… Cruel, but appropriate. What if they thought that he knew more? What if they wanted to knock it out of him?

He decided to stick with the lie for the time being. If he were to be confronted by Agrippa, he would say that it was the only way he could think of to hang on to his life. Perhaps he would be forgiven.

Life is cheap here. In Rome too, of course. Suddenly, it came to Uri’s mind: Surely it was not those two amiable scoundrels and that third prisoner, the scandalizer, whom Pilate had crucified. It can’t have been. Those were surely not capital offenses with which they were charged; scandal was most certainly not. And anyway their court hearings could not have been held yet. It must have been others who were executed; they had been taken to another prison.

He really could not imagine that his chance fellow prisoners — whom he had very little chance to get to know properly — might no longer be among the ranks of the living.

It was only around daybreak that he eventually dozed off to sleep; the blanket was warm and soft, and he bundled up snugly in it.

He awoke some time before noon. He washed his hands and feet, prayed, took some of the fruit, and drank some wine with a little water. The whole thing seemed like an improbable dream. How had he ended up here, in this room of all rooms, in Jerusalem of all places?

The guards came. They led him out to a corridor and down some stairs. He was led into a room, and the escort stepped back to the wall and closed the door. Uri blinked. The light was beating in through a wide, tall window. There were three men seated in the room on one side of a table opposite him, their backs to the light. Uri bowed and moved closer to them. On his way, he recognized the strategos. He was seated between two elderly men who were not wearing priest’s garb. Uri felt relieved: the high priest was not one of them because he was not permitted to show himself in non-priestly apparel. It then crossed his mind that the high priest would hardly be entering the Antonia anyway.

“Gaius Theodorus!” the strategos spoke in Aramaic, turning toward the elderly men in turn. “Native of Rome, nineteen years of age: you came with the Roman delegation. You were carrying a message from Agrippa to the high priest.” He looked at Uri. “You said last night to the prefect that Agrippa’s message was that he would leave Caiaphas in office if he could be king. Is that right?”

Uri sighed.

“Yes,” he said.

There was a slight pause.

“If the high priest is called Caiaphas,” he added uncertainly.

There was another pause.

The strategos nodded.

“Is that why you became a member of the delegation?” the man sitting to the right of the strategos asked. There was nothing pointed or accusatory in the question.

“It is,” Uri said.

“How come you speak Aramaic?” asked the other elderly man.

“That’s my mother’s native tongue. That’s what we speak at home.”

“Are you a Roman citizen?” the man asked.

“Yes, I am.”

Silence fell. The two elderly men shook their heads.

“If you’re a Roman citizen,” declared the strategos, “then we are unable to hear your case. In the national interest, we shall nevertheless have to check if you have been telling the truth. If not, and it proves that you truly are a Roman citizen, we shall hand you over to Rome to make its ruling.”

One of the elderly men quietly asked something, and the strategos faltered.

“When did you arrive in Jerusalem?” he asked Uri.

“Before Passover… Wednesday perhaps.”

The strategos nodded and turned toward the elderly man.

“A week has gone by; he can be regarded as pure.”

The elderly man also nodded.

“You will be led out now,” said the strategos. “Wait your turn.”

Uri had been about to say that he would confess to everything as long as they did not torture him, but by then they were already pushing him outside. They stopped in the corridor. The two guards stood next to him but did not take him by the arms. They waited. So did Uri.

From Uri’s right, a thin man was dragged along, held by the arms by two guards. They stopped at the door, opened it, led him in, then shut the door.

Uri closed his eyes and went over the hearing again, only opening his eyes when it had ended. At that point the man was brought out. Those two guards likewise stopped, with the man between them looking at his feet and panting.

Yet another man was brought in from the right by two guards. The procedure was the same. Uri closed his eyes and once more went over the hearing, and when that was done this man was also brought out.

If that’s a court hearing, thought Uri, they get through their cases fast.

There were eight other prisoners besides Uri and sixteen guards by the time the strategos came out of the room, the two elderly men behind him. The strategos went to the left down the corridor, with the guards and the accused setting off after him.

They reached the end of the palace; the light hit Uri’s eyes. Below him was a drop of several stories deep. He grew dizzy. He threw a glance backward. On the third floor of the citadel they had stepped out onto the top of the double colonnade, which surrounded the Temple. The columns of white marble were covered with cedar planks. He looked up at the fortress. He could see a tower at each of the four corners, the eastern and southern ones being taller than the other two.

He turned to the front, southward. On his right there was a parapet on the top of the colonnade, guarding the outer edge, but not one for the inner edge, and the parapet was not high anyway, reaching the hips, so one might easily fall off. He had a sudden empty feeling in his stomach, and even though the top of the colonnade was not particularly narrow, fifteen or twenty cubits perhaps, he still felt dizzy. They would have to go the length of the stone-flagged ledge. He peered to the front, narrowing his eyes; the colonnade led past the mass of the Temple and met at the end, at right angles, with an enormous, very long colonnade that was two stories high; the upper level, which must have been the royal stoa, was narrower than the lowers. Around the middle of the colonnade, down on the right, a bridge: that must be the viaduct there had been so much dispute about, which connected the Upper City with Temple Square.

They moved slowly; Uri looked to his left and gazed at the huge, scaffolded edifice of the Temple. It was an odd, T-shaped structure, the farther block to the east being taller than the western limb pointed toward them, which had lower wings on both sides. Smoke was rising above the Temple; meat was being burned, sacrifices being made even at this time. The altar stone could not be seen from the wall; it was concealed by the giant building. The parts of the T-shaped building that were not scaffolded dimly gleamed white and yellow. As they got closer Uri could see that the enormous stone blocks were faced in some places with marble plates, in others with gold sheets. Presumably similar trim was going to be applied to the whole, and that was the reason for the scaffolding. He noticed the same sort of parapet on the flat roof of the T-shaped building as on the top of their own colonnade: it was of crenellated stone, perhaps so that soldiers would be able to shoot arrows downward if need be.

The Temple was a fortress, and that was why it was so massive and tall — maybe as much as one hundred cubits from its foundations. Buildings as imposing as this were not erected in Rome; the buildings on Capitoline Hill were much lower.

An empty space lay to the north of the Temple, toward the Antonia, with no more than a few people wandering in it. What might that be?

He nudged in the side the prisoner next to him, and indicated the square with his head.

“It belongs to the Gentiles,” said the sullen man.

In other words, that was the part that non-Jews could enter if they wished to observe the central edifice of the Jewish faith; they were not allowed elsewhere.

Uri was walking in the middle of the row, as far as he could get from the two edges of the ledge. When he looked to the right, there, beyond the viaduct, at the end of a long fortified wall stood Herod’s palace, where he had eaten dinner yesterday evening. He could see the two wings of the building, and was surprised at how tall the three towers at the northern end were, the most westerly of them being the tallest. All three towers seemed to have house-like structures on their tops, with windows and roof gardens. He was screwing up his eyes because he was unable to make them out well, with the white marble towers glistening fiercely in the strong sunlight. Someone else should be here, someone who can see, he thought. He looked back to the left, then again to the right. He was able to see that the Temple was higher than even the tallest of the towers. It may well be a regulation, he thought.

From the top of the colonnade he could also vaguely discern that the Temple esplanade was itself divided into a number of sections, and between these ran bulky brick and stone walls, higher than a man and of varied design. Uri cupped both hands in front of his eyes; the guard let him. On the eastern half of the large, paved square that was not built on and situated toward the Antonia, north of the Temple, skinned animal carcasses hung on hooks from huge columns. That was therefore the slaughterhouse, and it was from there that the hunks of the sacrificial offerings were taken to put on the top of the altar. Uri peered; he could see nothing to the east beyond the far colonnade, only peacefully leafing hillocks with trees and gardens. That was presumably the Valley of Hinnom, running between the hills and Temple Mount; it was from there that sacrificial animals were taken to the slaughterer’s bench. Somewhere down there would have to be the hand-over place where the Levite slaughterers inspected the sacrificial animals and any that did not prove to be intact would be rejected. That must be unpleasant, Uri considered: what was the procedure to be followed in such a case? It had to be redeemed with money, for an extra fifth over its value? Or bring a replacement animal later if one did not have that much money? How did it go?

To the right, a glorious colonnade ran from Herod’s palace toward the next construction, the Hasmoneans’ palace. It was a dark, plain building; he could not see it very well because of the sun shining in his eyes, but that palace was not encased with white marble, that was for sure.

They clambered up onto a two-cubit high platform, proceeding over the top of the gate above the viaduct. Uri dared not look down; one of the prisoners quietly said, “The Sanhedrin!” Uri took a grip on himself and looked down; he could see a quadrangular building pasted onto the base of the viaduct. Could that really be where the Great Sanhedrin held its sessions? The Hall of Hewn Stones? This building, the Xystus? He did not dare ask. His previous fellow prisoners had said that the Sanhedrin was no longer holding its sessions there.

Blinking, he searched for where the palace of the high priest, where he had been imprisoned, might be, but he could not see through the rooftops, and in any case he would not have recognized it. The Upper City was heavily built up; only the highest buildings stood out. Uri could not see a single straight road; the alleyways meandered capriciously, with huts standing next to huge houses. Here it was as if Far Side and true Rome had been jumbled up together. It was strange to see into gardens from the top of the wall; in some he saw glinting mirrors, water basins. The wealthy had their own mikvehs.

The top of the long, wide colonnade that rested on the high ramparts of the Upper City was likewise flat, with an exit from the first floor of Herod’s palace opening directly onto it. There seemed to be people strolling about on top of the colonnade right now, just like the evening before: yes, mercenaries, each with a spear in his right hand. No doubt the famous “right-handers.” Perhaps they were keeping an eye on the Upper City market square to intervene if they spotted any cheating at the stalls of the traders. Yet it was not here that his fellow prisoner had overturned tables but in the Temple Square, in the women’s court, to the left.

Uri stopped to look back. It was possible to walk on the top of the city wall from Herod’s palace to the top of the colonnades ringing the Temple Mount and the Antonia Fortress, which also had an exit opening onto it — the one that had spat them out. Several divisions of soldiers would fit onto the top of the colonnade, which spanned three sides of the Temple Mount, and that was not counting the broad roof of the royal stoa’s lower level. It was quite certain that one could also walk there along the wall; Herod the Great would not have been driven solely by a desire for extravagance when he had the colonnades put up.

“They’re watching us,” Uri heard from the row.

A few of the prisoners looked right, toward Herod’s palace. Uri could see figures moving around the small structures in front of the palace. Stalls? Was that the Upper City market? Yesterday evening he had seen nothing. Could it be that it was a movable market and everyone covered his handcart and stall for the night?

Uri’s fellow accused lowered their heads, some even screening their face with a hand or arm; they had spotted that some were peeking up from down below, about a stadion away, at the procession as it marched along the top of the wall. Sharp eyes they had.

They dropped back to the level of the colonnade’s top and walked toward the next entrance to Temple Mount, at the corner of its southern wall. Far below them was a long, broad flight of steps, broken at intervals by rest areas, with little dwellings in the valley glued to the right of its wall.

They now reached a flight of steps going down on the left of the colonnade to Temple Square. It was narrow and steep, but it had a stone handrail; only one person at a time could use it. Uri grasped the stone and clambered down, held between two guards, until he finally felt himself on the ground. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He could see opposite him, held up by high columns, the inner, western side of the monumental royal stoa, but he was given no time to gaze, because the guards pushed him toward the Temple.

They tramped across a large, empty, rectangular square, with the shadow thrown by the royal stoa reaching as far as the middle. Under their feet was rough paving, not marble like in front of Herod’s palace; they then went up fourteen steps and proceeded between low, chest-high stone balusters. Sunk into the middle of the square were two broad stairs that led downward, the way being decorated with stone tracery; obviously it was possible to get out from under the royal stoa by way of an underground passage into the open air to the south. That way lay the Acra, and past it the Lower City, where the poor people lived.

Another five steps took them to the inner wall surrounding the Temple. The entrance facing them seemed surprisingly narrow; two by two they were just able to pass.

They found themselves in another rectangular square, with colonnades built onto the wall on the right with moving figures. The structure, flanked on two sides, looked like a tiny fortification, with guards standing sentry before its closed bronze gate; the gate was low and single-leafed. What could that be?

People, some of them women, were standing, bowing their heads in prayer, kneeling, walking about. All were nicely dressed, their faces serious and uplifted. They looked sternly at the prisoners. There were some conspicuous raggedly dressed beggars rummaging around, some with both legs missing. One of the latter sped his mutilated trunk over toward them in a bounding sprint, his highly muscular arms supported on enormous palms, until one of the guards growled at him, whereupon he departed just as hastily. Here it was adults who did the begging, not children as in Rome. Vendors vegetated by their handcarts. In one, living turtledoves, tethered to a cord by the legs, cowered motionless, unable to control only the trembling of their heads.

“The women’s chamber,” Uri heard from the line.

In other words, women could only come in this far if they were Jewish — and they were not sick or menstruating.

The text of a description of the women’s chamber was summoned up before Uri’s mind’s eye. The treasury ought to be somewhere around here, but where? Surely it was not that tiny building with the narrow entrance. All that untold wealth of money, jewels, and golden and silver dishes about which legends had been told would not fit in there. Could this be where Simon the Magus had brought his money? Or was that structure just the entrance that led down to the treasure chamber, which was actually hidden in the depths of the Temple Mount? It was said that natural caves and man-made tunnels lay under the Temple Mount and led outside to beyond the city wall.

A few steps in a semicircular arc led to the next, hefty gate. The wall must have been some forty cubits high, with a steep, narrow staircase leading up from the left-hand side to the top, and there Uri saw several women lingering. What could they be looking at, he wondered. As he saw wisps of smoke rising over the other side of the wall, he knew at once that the altar was in the Chamber of the Israelites; women were not permitted to enter there at all, but it seemed they were not forbidden from watching the cremation of offerings from the top of the wall.

They went up the semicircle of steps, fifteen in all. Uri looked up. He was standing in front of a vastly high and wide, two-winged bronze gate, decorated with studs of solid silver and gold. Each of the bronze handles set into each wing of the gate, with the united efforts of four guards being needed to pull them open.

And the sound! This was the famous Temple gate whose creaking could be heard as far away as Jericho!

He saw the altar.

A rectangular structure fifteen to twenty cubits high, and at its base some fifty cubits high but narrowing higher up, with a ramp on the left leading to its top. That was made from gigantic ashlar blocks, with the angles of the gates being twisted into the shape of ram’s horns. At the top a man was continually bending over, incinerating the meat: the duty priest. People stood around, praying.

The other accused burst out in tears.

Uri shuddered.

He was able to see it after all. A Jew who was able to get to the inner space of the Temple was privileged; unhappy millions died without ever getting the chance to see it.

They were escorted off to the left, to the southern side of the altar, where they had to stand. There was a silence, then the slow creaking again: the bronze gate was being closed. Uri gazed at the altar, just ten steps away from him. It was made of gigantic, undressed slabs of rock. No other materials were used; they must have spent ages selecting and fitting the stones.

The sun was shining from behind, but as luck would have it, they were standing in the shade at the foot of the wall in front of the arcade.

The strategos sauntered off to the left before coming to a standstill between the entrance to the Temple and the altar, where an enormous metal basin was resting on the ground. That must be the golden laver in which the priests made their ritual washing. Uri screwed his eyes: the gold was dark and did not glitter, as it was in the shade.

Uri looked up at the Temple. From there, at its foot, all that could be seen was how massive it was.

Several steps led up to the gate, which was hidden by scaffolding. The two elderly men who had conducted his hearing were standing by the southeast corner, face to face with the strategos, who was looking east. Up above, on the altar of holocausts, the white-garbed priest was incinerating meat, possibly the legs of cattle. Thin wisps of smoke rose, not the dense clouds of the sacrifice for the feast, which could be seen from as far off as the fields, but ordinary, everyday fumes. Down below, three Levites were hard at work preparing the next hunks of meat to be burned, sprinkling them with oil. The slaughterer’s benches, which Uri had noticed as soon as they stepped out of the Antonia, were separated by a wall from the innermost courtyard, though this was not as high as the one screening the Court of the Israelites from the outside world. Uri saw the marble columns on which the carcasses were hanging; they were slung up by the legs, and he could see down them as far as the middle of the thighs, the lower legs being obscured by the wall. These were offerings to sacrifice to the Lord; he would not go hungry today, that was for sure.

The elderly men produced a stylus and wax tablet from under their mantles.

Uri was standing in the middle of the row of accused. It almost made him laugh out loud: he was standing in the very center of Judaism as a prisoner. Some crazy dream this was.

The strategos beckoned. Someone on the left end of the row was pushed forward, and he cried out. The accused made his way to the right of the elderly men and stopped. One of them gave a sign, and the prisoner stepped with trembling legs over a knee-high marble barrier, which, as Uri only now noticed, completely encircled the altar and the Temple and within which no one else was standing except the three Levites who were assisting the priest from the ground; even the strategos and the two elderly judges were standing outside it.

The men watching the ceremony exclaimed in consternation, while there were gasps from the women staring from the top of the wall on the right.

The prisoner moved groggily, proceeding by the southeastern corner of the altar, then turned northward and disappeared behind the altar, only to reappear a short time later from behind it, his head hung low, on the northwestern side, going past the strategos, though himself still inside the barrier, turning again at that corner and coming again before the other prisoners, made another circuit of the altar, by now sobbing and, though scarcely able to move, carrying on. The two elderly men looked on fiercely. When he came in front of the strategos at the end of the third circuit, the latter raised a hand. The accused halted, stepped back over the barrier and staggered toward the two guards, who seized him and set him back in the row.

The two elderly men wrote something onto their wax tablets.

The next accused man made a theatrical job of doing the same thing. Uri peered, not understanding anything. He could not see the faces very well, but he could hear the sobbing and could also see that they staggered as they made the circuit. Are we rehearsing penitence here?

In this case the strategos raised his hand after the fifth circuit, and his guards took the accused back to the row.

Uri counted: an aging man made the most laps around the altar — seven in all. He then stopped, the strategos stepped up to him, looked at him in the eyes for a lengthy time, and then gave a signal; only then did the guards lead him back to the row.

The two elderly men again scored a few lines onto their wax tablets.

When Uri’s turn came, he stepped forward of his own accord, not waiting to be pushed. He stepped over the barrier, he heard the groans and gasps, he went around the altar happy at having the chance to inspect it up close. On the northern side small green items of something or other were visible between the stones — moss perhaps. He was also able now to look at the Temple’s gate: there were no leaves! And the frame of the door was a dark metal like bronze, though it was really supposed to be gold. The decoration on it was not as sumptuous as that on the bronze gate to the Court of the Israelites. Inside was a gloomy space in which a further gate could be made out, with curtains hanging down in the gateway, embroidered floor-length curtains of blue, white, scarlet, and purple: scarlet being since time immemorial a symbol of fire; white, of earth; blue, of the air; and purple, of the sea. The eagle knocked down in the last days of Herod the Great was not over the gate; bold Jews had somehow climbed up onto the roof of the Temple and slid down from there on a rope — that was how they knocked down the eagle, and they had paid for it with their lives. Uri looked up: he could not imagine dangling on a rope there. The chamber behind the inner gate was dark, with no window or opening anywhere. In that chamber there must be a table with a costly menorah, a seven-armed candlestick of gold, and incense burners, though he could not see them while he was passing by. That outer sanctum in turn opened into an inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, in which there was nothing; the Ark of the Covenant had vanished at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, when Nebuchadnezzar sacked the whole of Jerusalem; and when the Jews rebuilt the Temple several decades later, the Ark was no longer there, and the emptiness in the Holy of Holies was a reminder of this. Uri ought to have been able to see the door to the inner sanctuary, but the curtains prevented him. In there was a gate of gold, as everyone knew, decorated with man-size gold bunches of grapes. He would have liked to stop and inspect the inside of the Temple, to step a little closer, for, after all, he was inside that magic barrier, but he had a feeling that this was not the right occasion. He passed by the gold laver, in which water was glistening. He looked up and saw that he was standing to the right of the strategos, who was watching him. Uri passed in front of him with his head held high, turned left, and reached the note-taking elderly men; he did not look at them but started on a new circuit.

He made seven circuits, and in doing so had a good peek at the Temple’s scaffolding, the altar of holocausts and the priest who was officiating up there, the Levites, the inner curtains — in short, everything that his peering eyes were able to make out as he went by. Uri was about to start an eighth circuit when he noticed from the protests of the two elderly men that something had happened. He looked back and saw that the strategos’s hand was raised. Uri stopped. The strategos stepped closer to the barrier and gazed at his face. Uri returned the stare. How young he is! He can only be five or six years older than me, and look what a high position he holds already. There was something strange about his face, his eyes perhaps. Yes, that was it! He had not noticed it before, but the strategos had gray eyes.

The two elderly men also stepped nearer and stopped. One made a motion with his head that Uri interpreted as meaning that he should step out, so he stepped back over the marble barrier, stopped, and looked at them. They had kindly faces with alert eyes; one had brown eyes, the other was swarthy, almost black, and their gray beards were tidy. The thinner of the two had an exceedingly lined face, with a long scar on his right cheek that went down to his neck. The other had a double chin but a distinguished bearing. They gazed at Uri’s face as if they were looking at a miracle; involuntarily, Uri smiled at them, at which the elderly men’s eyes flickered.

The strategos barked something out. The guards stepped up to Uri and to his great amazement did not set him back in the row but escorted him away toward the bronze gate in the eastern wall.

From there Uri could see little of what was happening to the other accused. They too circled the altar a few times, but none of them as many as seven times. Uri was standing opposite the altar and the east side of the Temple that loomed high behind it. With his eyes narrowed, and through the slits between his fingers, he made another attempt to estimate their size. He then looked at the men, who were standing excitedly and fixedly watching the accused as they circled the altar. Nobody looked at him, perhaps because he was standing close to them and they did not wish to stare intrusively.

When all the accused had gone around the altar, the strategos and the two elderly men sauntered over to the bronze gate, where the guards led the accused. They seemed to be somewhat relieved, no longer weeping and shrieking aloud, only sniveling. What Uri read from their faces was resignation and exhaustion.

As he went past, the strategos took another look at his face. Uri nodded, and the strategos snatched his gaze away in confusion, moving on further.

They retraced the same route that they had come by back to the Antonia. Uri now felt more secure in walking on top of the colonnades; he was right at the back of the line, with two guards behind him.

They halted in the corridor, with the others going on before finally disappearing at the turn at the end.

The strategos, with the two elderly men behind, approached Uri. They looked at him with amazement.

“We ask you to excuse us,” said the strategos, “but we had to follow the correct procedure. Until a decision is reached on your case, you will be extended our hospitality, and not in any way as a prisoner. I can promise that the decision will be made soon; after that you may move around as you choose in Judaea.”

Uri was relieved. He did not understand why the strategos had asked his forgiveness, but as far as he was concerned, that was not the important thing.

“When is my delegation going back to Rome?” he asked.

The strategos, who was already about to move on, looked back.

“They set off this morning,” he said. “You could not go with them in view of the investigation.”

“So when can I go after them? Maybe I shall be able to catch up with them while they wait for a boat in Caesarea…”

The strategos hesitated before coming out with it:

“You will not be able to go after them for the time being. It’s a dangerous trip for someone on his own, and we have no spare people to accompany you. I’ve already promised you that a decision will soon be reached.”

“You will come to no harm,” the double-chinned elderly man spoke. “A few weeks more and you will be able to travel back to Rome. Meanwhile, life here is also interesting.”

They withdrew. Uri looked at the guards.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

The guards did not answer.

This time he was taken to a charming small room, which had a Roman-style couch, with an expensive Oriental carpet as a cover, and a nice little table. The conspicuously narrow window started at chest height and, to judge from the way the light was falling, looked to the east, not toward Temple Square.
Uri looked through the window, leaned out, and narrowed his eyes.

He had expected to have a view of Jerusalem and Temple Square, but all he could see was the inner court of the Antonia Fortress. He was looking from the first floor, and even the parts of the building situated between the high towers were some five stories high. The inner court was entirely paved; for all Uri’s squinting there was nobody and nothing to see down there. The windows were small, as if built like that for the purpose of firing arrows.

He did not have long to wait; guards came and took him out to the corridor.

They went down to the ground floor, where he was shown into a room.

A young Jew clothed in a cloak was seated at a table, looking as if he either were a hunchback or simply had a negligent way of holding himself.

“My greetings, Gaius Theodorus!” he said in Greek. “Take a seat.”

Uri sat down on a stool opposite the table. How young he is, thought Uri, only three or four years older than me, if I’m not mistaken.

“I am pleased to be able to inform you,” the man went on in a neutral official tone, “that the high priests appreciate and are disposed to accept your request that, like your nostalgic fellow men of the Diaspora, you would like to become more thoroughly acquainted with Judaea, the land of your ancestors, and you wish to stay here for a while. They have designated as your place of residence a village, Beth Zechariah by name, which has an exceptionally pleasant climate, snuggled in attractive hilly country. You will set off today with two escorts.”

“I never asked for that favor,” said Uri. “I want to go home to Rome!”

“That is perilous on your own,” the young man replied calmly. “The delegation has already set off; we would not like you to risk your safety on your own.”

“In other words, I’m being exiled!” Uri exclaimed.

“There is no such punishment in Jewish law,” the man declared. “We have no such thing as the aquae et ignis interdictio, or banishment, and anyway no one has passed sentence on you. How could we? You’re a Roman citizen, and only a Roman court can bring charges against you.”

“Yet that is precisely what you’ve done just now!”

“I’m not passing sentence, simply chatting with you. And rest assured, I’m a Roman citizen myself.”

“What about my interrogation?”

“That was not a court hearing but a logging of information. The main thing is that on the lie detector test you proved innocent.”

Uri was aghast.

“You stood your ground on what you had asserted!” said the young man, not without a certain amount of respect. “No red spots broke out on your face. That’s rarely the case; they usually appear even on those who are innocent.”

Uri’s heart beat massively; he took a deep breath and rapidly exhaled.

If he had known that beforehand, he was quite sure that red spots would have covered his whole body as he circled the altar. He already felt his face was burning.

There was a silence. Uri gathered himself.

“I would like to speak with Pilate!”

“That, unfortunately, will not be possible. The prefect set off back to Caesarea this morning.”

“But that’s where I want to go!”

“We have no one to escort you there.”

“Is someone going to escort me to that village?”

“To there — yes, certainly.”

Uri pondered.

“May I write a letter to my father?” he inquired.

“You may,” said the young man, “but there’s no point: in Rome the delegates will relate to him what has happened. What happened is that you were captivated by the spell of the Holy Land and you decided to spend a few months among us. Elderly men in the Diaspora willingly resettle here to make this their grave, but there are also a fair number of young people — more than we know where to put them. There is nothing special about your request, or at most only that your case was brought to the front of the queue for a decision, and a favorable one at that. I’m not a native of Jerusalem either, and I had to petition to be allowed to live near the Temple; I had to wait years for the permit. Consider yourself lucky, Gaius Theodorus.”

The young man’s words were meant to be taken sarcastically, but the tone of his voice was not. Uri looked at him and stared, and it was then he noticed: he was sitting there in front of him but he could not register the man’s features, as if he were faceless — perhaps because he was seeking to fuse with his office. His look is screened off, he’s not looking at me, the person, but looking at a task. Uri strained to see. He was a black-haired, cross-eyed man with an olive complexion.

“My father needs me back home,” said Uri in desperation. “He’s a merchant, and I’m his only son.”

“You can also establish commercial links here that will be advantageous for your family,” said the official, and got to his feet. He must have had short legs, because he hardly became any taller. “It’s a plus that you speak Aramaic. The strategos wishes you an edifying stay in Judaea, Gaius Theodorus.”

They trekked northward on the road to Damascus, with Uri in the middle and on either side a young, well-built civilian swathed in a cloak.

One had a spear, the other a sword in his hand, and on their feet were the sort of sandals worn by the Jewish police, but they were rather shabby, and the cloaks were far from new. Uri still had tied to his ankles the well-made spruce sandals that he had been given before the dinner with Pilate. He stopped, as did the guards. He kneeled down and undid the knots, slipped the sandals off, then slung them, tied together, around his neck before straightening up. The guards cast lackluster glances at the sandals but said nothing. They moved on.

They held steadily northward. Uri looked back toward Jerusalem, but it was now covered by the bright green contours of mountains and hills. I didn’t see much of it, he thought to himself, but that little was not without its excitements. The guards said that they were passing through Bezetha, the New City, though Uri did not see much of that either, except that shacks and shiny new dwellings of the wealthy were mixed together, showing that Plotius had been right. Uri saw not one straight street.

The walking did him good. In prison his muscles had gotten out of trim, and the thickened soles that had been built up on his feet by sustained exercise had begun to thin. Once he got back to Rome he would walk a few hours every day, and he would never get into the habit of sitting around on tavern terraces.

They trekked steadily north on the road to Damascus, which was not a paved Roman road but a dusty dirt road that had been tamped down by carts, oxen, asses, camels, and people. Uri visualized the map of Palestine that he had seen on the scrolls of Strabo. To their east now lay the River Jordan, and they were making their way toward Samaria. He even asked if they were going to escort him into Samaria, but they were astonished by his denseness.

“We can’t go there! They would kill us,” one of them said, the spearsman on his right. He had rugged features and a protruding nose.

The centuries-old strife between these two people still held. The Samaritans were also Jews and took the local Israelite women as their wives and converted them. But for centuries now there had been no love lost with other Jews, and they did not pay tithes to the Temple in Jerusalem; indeed, they had built their own separate temple on Mount Gerizim, which a few generations before had been pulled down by John Hyrcanus, of the Hasmonean Dynasty, who were ethnarchs of Judaea, and since the death of Archelaus, a son of Herod the Great, the Samaritans, along with the people of Judaea, had been living under Roman suzerainty.

“Can one tell where the border lies?” Uri asked.

“Sure you can,” said the spearsman, keeping a straight face. “The moment you notice that you’re dead, you already crossed it.”

Not everyone here was a complete dolt, not even if they were rogues or policemen disguised in civilian cloaks.

They left the dirt road and now proceeded along paths. Uri saw terraced farmland, with people spaced apart from one another, bending over; he could not make out whether they were men or women, only that they were bent over between strips of grain; some were shorter than the others, perhaps children. They were harvesting some kind of cereal. In places where the grain had been reaped the stalks were collected into bundles, bound up either by themselves or with straw. Yes, they were harvesting! This was when they would have to harvest, since Passover, after all, was a holiday that celebrated the ripening of the crop sown in the winter. On the second day of Passover, an omer of barley was offered in the Temple to signal that grains from the new harvest could be consumed, as marked by the baking of unleavened barley bread on the day after the Passover. So that was the odd-tasting bread he had been given in prison after the other prisoners had been taken away.

“That’s barley, isn’t it?” he asked.

The sword-carrying guard snorted sardonically. They had been sparing in doling out his eyes, as his were little more than slits. Perhaps he did not see well either, and all the screwing up of the eyes had finally left its mark on his eyelids.

“And some wheat as well, isn’t there?” Uri asked hopefully. In Rome all they ever ate was wheat bread; that was what he was used to.

“It sure is,” marveled the spearsman. “It will be ripe is six weeks’ time — that’s what the Shavuot is about. They start to reap the barley in the Nisan, the first month of spring, wheat toward the end of Iyyar, and both of them in Sivan, the third month.”

That was good news. Uri was able to tramp on with his mind at ease.

They were passing near some flat-roofed, mud-brick houses, which must be some kind of village. Uri could only see a door to the dwellings, so maybe there were windows that looked onto an inner yard, rather like in the old Far Side, a few remaining tumbledown cottages of which had still been standing when Uri was a small boy. Some of the mud-brick houses stood on their own, whereas others had been built onto one another. The gardens were not fenced off, with date trees, fig trees, and vines growing, along with a few plants that Uri had not seen before. In most of the gardens there was a cistern; out of some of these ran earthenware pipes, perhaps for irrigation.

In some gardens, between the fruit trees and vine stocks, there were wooden dolls on which rags fluttered in the breeze.

“What are they?” Uri asked.

“Scarecrows,” said the spearsman.

Uri did not understand.

“The birds come along and eat everything,” said the spearsman. “But if they spot a human, they are frightened off. They think those dolls are people!” he said, and chuckled at the birds’ stupidity.

“It does no harm if real people scare them off from time to time,” said the swordsman. “Otherwise they get used to the dolls and work out that it’s a trick. Birds are not totally stupid, ravens in particular; scarecrows like that are no protection against them.”

“Or against locusts,” said the spearsman. “I’ve seen a swarm of migratory locusts. There’s no pestilence worse than that. By the time you can count to six, they will have stripped everything bare. They even go for your eyes to check if those are edible too.”

“Only if they’re famished,” said the swordsman. “If they are not as hungry, they don’t swarm and hardly eat anything. People usually have an idea when the hunger is setting in, so they make the harvest early in anticipation. In periods of drought a watch is kept for locusts with fires. It is possible to pick up a signal a day and a half beforehand when a migration is imminent. Then the whole village will race and pick everything, just as the locusts do — so people are themselves the locusts!” the swordsman laughed. “Worse! There are fools who clear off things that a locust will not touch! Things that are not yet ripe they cook, leave to ripen, boil, and reboil… At such times there will be no bread won from the barley, but beer… And not raisins from the grapes, but wine — and sour wine at that, no matter how much honey you add.”

“It’s just as well that jackals and lions only eat meat,” the spearsman ventured, “or there would be nothing left for humans.”

Uri inquired if there really were lions in Judaea.

“There are,” replied the spearsman. “They live in the Jordan Valley. They need water, but they can range out to here. It’s not a good idea to wander around in this part of the world on your own and without a weapon.”

“Robbers are a bigger threat,” the swordsman declared. “A lion will not attack two or three people, because it knows they will be armed, but that won’t stop a robber.”

“But only,” said the spearsman, “if they aren’t informed in advance that the group should be left untouched.”

“Are there many robbers here?” Uri inquired in some consternation.

“You bet!” said the spearsman. “There are many caves out this way, so yes, there are. But there’s no need to be afraid, because they have been forewarned that we are coming.”

Uri shook his head; he did not find that funny. The guards were no doubt exaggerating. They could hardly be so important that any self-respecting, dutiful, law-abiding robber bands should be given notice of them. And anyway how was that done?

All the same, he asked if they had encountered robbers before.

The swordsman grunted. The spearsman, after a brief pause, said with a deadpan face, “Every day.”

Uri laughed.

They obtained permission to stay in a barn for the night and were given water, bread, and figs that had been dried the previous year. Without even bothering to see who was providing the hospitality, Uri fell asleep as if he had been clubbed on the head.

They rose at daybreak; Uri was barely able to stand on his legs; his feet, thighs, and backside all ached, having fallen out of practice with walking. It went through his head that it was Tuesday. They took water from a wooden bowl to wash their hands, before turning to the south to bow and recite the Sh’ma. Both the guards had a tefillah, the small wooden box being held on the left arm under their cloaks, but Uri was still without one; his own phylactery right now was in the sack that was being taken back by his fellow delegates. The two guards prayed for longer than Uri did, which indicated to him that they were probably adding some extra text. He listened carefully but did not understand what they were muttering. They drank water and ate barley bread, which was just like what he had eaten in prison, and then they were on their way.

At noon they rested under a palm tree. By then it was already baking hot, and over the last hour Uri had walked using his arms to protect his head. His guards draped over their heads woolen shawls, which until then they had tied around their waists.

“There’s going to be a drought this year,” said the swordsman, staring at the brilliant blue sky as he lay. “Everything is going to burn, and we’re going to go hungry.”

“The rains should have come by now,” said the spearsman, nodding. “We’re between Nisan and Iyyar, and there has been not a drop of rain.”

Uri tried to guess where he would be when famine broke out in Palestine. He was amazed to find that he now had no destination, no object in life was left for him; he was no longer rebelling against destiny, sweeping him toward his unknown future. He looked at the countryside, to the extent that he saw anything, and the countryside that happened to be around him right then was no more real than the Rome that he had left two and a half months previously. The guards were pleasant men, the rascals in prison had been pleasant men, Pilate had been a pleasant man, but had red spots appeared on his face while he was jogging around the altar then he might not be alive. The whole thing was improbable; it was impossible to sense the weight of anything.

The sun was still beating down strongly when the guards got up and set off.

“It’s not far now,” the spearsman said by way of encouragement.

The sun had begun to go down by the time they reached a cluster of buildings. It was made up of mud-brick dwellings, with no girding wall.

The guards came to a halt.

“This is it,” said the spearsman. “Look for a master carpenter called Jehuda ben Mordecai. He already knows about you.”

“Aren’t you going any farther?” asked Uri.

“No, we have to hurry back,” said the spearsman. “Our greetings to Jehuda and his household. Peace be with you.”

“Peace be with you,” repeated the swordsman.

“Wait a moment,” said Uri, and unslung the sandals from around his neck. “Take these.”

His escorts were startled. They exchanged glances. The spearsman, touched by the gesture, sniffled.

“Our thanks, but which one of us should wear them?”

“If you sell off your worn sandals,” said Uri, “you’ll be able to buy a new pair, then both of you will get new footwear.”

They gave that some hard thought. The spearsman took the sandals in his hands, examined them, and nodded. The swordsman also took them in his hands, inspected them, even sniffed at them.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of with them,” he said to Uri. “They’re not as wicked as they pretend to be. I was a peasant myself.”

Uri wished them peace too and set off toward the mud-brick houses. He looked back; they were standing and watching. Uri waved, and they waved back.

Uri came to a stop amid the mud-brick dwellings. There was not a soul around. He turned back around, but the two escorts were gone.

Craftsman Jehuda ben Mordecai was a burly, strong man, and his smell was strong too, penetrating, like his voice; he was unable to speak quietly, only in a bellow.

“You’re the one they sent me?” he shouted out from the gloom when Uri stepped over the threshold, ducking because the doorpost was low. “How puny you are! I’m not going to get much that’s of any use out of you! Call yourself a joiner? Why, you can’t so much as lift a beam.”

Uri let his eyes become accustomed to the dark. There was a tiny window cut into the wall on the side that overlooked the yard, too small for even a child to wriggle through, possibly to prevent thieves from entering.

“Tell me, kid: what do they call you?” Jehuda ben Mordecai yelled.

Uri introduced himself, giving his official Latin name.

“Gaius!” thundered Jehuda in vexation. “Gaius, with Theodorus to go with it! All bad cometh from Edom, don’t you know that?”

The Edomites refused to allow Moses and the children of Israel passage through their land on their way to Canaan; they had to go around Edom and struggle over the River Jordan. But how long ago had that been? Two thousand years. The later Edomites were traditional descendants of Esau, and they deliberately vexed the Jews, being a kindred people, until the Arabs overran them, then the Nabataeans, after which they reassimilated to Judaism. Herod the Great was half-Edomite. Was it him that Master Jehuda was insulting? Why would he be?

“So, what do you want from me?” demanded Jehuda.

Uri shifted from foot to foot.

“Well, you’d better come with me, dopey Theo, and I’ll show you where you’ll sleep!”

Jehuda scrambled to his feet from the bed on which he had been lying, snorted, and squeezed past Uri out of the house.

Uri trotted after him. Jehuda aimed a few kicks at the chickens pecking around in the yard and cursed them. He stopped in front of a henhouse.

“Sling the chickens out,” he bellowed. “They’ll get on well enough out here! But don’t get the idea they’ll thank you for it!”

Uri looked at the coop. Was that going to be his quarters from now on? It was so small that he could not even climb in. A very odd sense of humor this master had. He looked around. There was a big barn opposite the house at the end of the yard; it had a big door through which even a cart could pass, and there was a ladder leaning against the wall up which one could clamber to the loft.

“I’m not giving you that!” Jehuda declared firmly. “That’s where my workshop is! I’ll show you, you misfit! I don’t show this to just anyone, so consider yourself honored!”

Jehuda stormed ahead, Uri following.

In the barn stood a group of uncompleted tables and chairs with pleated straw seats, around a crude workbench on which lay iron and bronze tools and nails. The floor had wood shavings tamped down into it. Leaning against one wall were adzes and planks.

“Splendid, aren’t they?” Jehuda asked Uri.

Uri mumbled something.

“Masters like me,” Jehuda said with evident satisfaction, “don’t make a living from explaining the law; we have honest occupations that pay their way, and anyone who does not have an honest occupation is in no position to explain the law! We’re not priests! How is it in Edom?”

Uri did not know how matters stood in Edom of yore.

“Who explained the law to your people?” asked Jehuda.

“Where?” Uri asked.

“Back in Rome, you half-wit!”

“In Rome we have teachers to explain it,” said Uri.

“Teachers!” roared Jehuda scornfully. “Teachers indeed!”

Jehuda stalked out of the barn, Uri in his wake. They stopped in the yard. Jehuda turned to face Uri and gave him a once-over. Dissatisfied with the sight, he shook his head. He sniffed the air.

“You stink!” he declared.

Uri lifted his arms and smelled.

“Maybe,” he said.

“There’ll be times when you stink much worse,” said Jehuda, satisfied now. “Stink as bad as my slaves, I’ll have you working that hard! Have no fear!”

Uri just stood there, his stomach rumbling, and cursed Judaea, Jerusalem, and all of Palestine to Hell and high water, blessed be the Eternal One.

Jehuda set off back to the house. Uri trailed after him, but Jehuda turned around, a vicious smirk on his face.

“Yours is the henhouse!” he declared roundly. “But if any harm comes to one of my hens, I’ll flay you alive!”

At that he stormed into the house, leaving Uri in the yard.

Not the most cordial of welcomes.

It grew dark, and finally there was a cooler breeze. The chickens pecked. Uri contemplated the coop. If he had Remus, the dog from the ship, with him, he would be able to offer him a marvelous supper.

He crawled into the coop on all fours. The chicks inside did not know what to make of him but just gazed fixedly; they had not learned that man was to be feared. Uri began to bark, and the chickens finally made a panic-stricken escape outside. When Uri settled himself on his belly and stretched out, his legs stuck out, but it was better to lie on his front, pressing his stomach, which was grumbling for food.

The devil take it all.

He woke up freezing cold and famished. In prison at least he had been given something to eat; it was not always better to be free as a bird.

It was still dark, with a big stillness all around except for some animals whining in the distance. They were screeching and yelping at regular intervals, one after the other, and then falling silent. Might they be jackals?

Uri backed out of the henhouse still on his stomach, sat up, and looked at the night sky. He saw multiple shiny sparkles above him: the stars.

Where there are hens, there must also be eggs, he thought.

Flat on his belly, he wriggled back into the coop and felt around. Finally, he found a nest with three eggs in it.

Jehuda had said nothing about eggs, only his chickens. An egg was not a hen.

He picked up one of the eggs, the one on his right, picked out two small holes in the shell with a canine, one on top and one on the bottom, the way his father had instructed him, then sucked out and swallowed the contents raw. Magnificent food! He then polished off the other two eggs similarly.

His stomach and his whole being could now be at ease. I had better make good use of this until I feel hungry again. He ordered himself to fall asleep.

On Wednesday morning Jehuda ben Mordecai pulled him out of the henhouse by the ankles.

It was only outside that Uri woke up, and then only partly. Daylight, he confirmed, and at that rolled onto his side, curled up, and tried to fall asleep again.

Master Jehuda knelt and poked his head into the henhouse. By now Uri was paying attention. Jehuda was squirming his massive shoulders, powerful back, and substantial backside rather like a boa that has just swallowed an elephant. He backed out again and sat up.

“Where are the eggs?” he asked severely.

“I ate them,” said Uri with some pride.

Jehuda’s face went purple.

“You pay for those,” he demanded.

“I’ll pay,” said Uri flippantly.

“The price is four prutahs a piece,” yelled Jehuda.

“That’s four leptons,” said Uri with a knowing air.

Jehuda stared in astonishment.

“Let’s see the money, then,” he muttered.

“I have nothing,” admitted Uri. “I can’t pay.”

Jehuda was flabbergasted. There was a hush.

“You have no money?” he asked in a slightly lowered voice.

“None,” said Uri. “I’ve had not a coin since I set off on this journey.”

The master digested this answer. He looked Uri up and down as he sat there in the chicken droppings.

Master Jehuda then got up, dusted himself down, and stood over Uri, who was still seated. He thought further, and Uri also scrambled to his feet. Jehuda posed the question again softly.

“You don’t have any money?”

“None,” Uri confirmed. “I have my entire fortune on me as I stand here.”

Master Jehuda pondered hard and long. Uri could not discern what his host might be deliberating.

“The quarters you can have free,” Master Jehuda declared eventually, indicating the coop with a nod of the head. “But there’ll be no food.”

“Fair enough,” said Uri.

“You can take from the pe’ah and the water barrel,” said Jehuda, “but leave it at that. You’ll get nothing from me!”

Jehuda nodded with great conviction at his own words, as if he were sanctioning a law, before starting off.

Uri piped up after him.

“What’s the pe’ah?”

Jehuda came to a standstill, turned around, and shook his head as if he were trying to get rid of a sudden deafness.

“You don’t know what the pe’ah is?”

“No, I don’t,” said Uri.

Master Jehuda again gave some thought.

“Feel free to take the gleanings, whatever there is,” he said finally, as if he were pronouncing a particularly weighty judgment, then went into his house.

Gleanings, gleanings — that sounded vaguely familiar, but what were they?

Gleanings… gleanings!

All at once a scroll sprang into Uri’s mind’s eye, and there was the word, near the beginning of the Book of Ruth.

In Bethlehem, Ruth, the widowed Moabite who had converted to Judaism, together with her mother-in-law, Naomi, also a widow, gathered among sheaves on the field after the reapers, and she roasted half an ephah of barley. In that way Ruth did not starve to death, and she became the wife of Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s who had let Ruth glean in his field. And Ruth bore him a son, who was nursed by Naomi, and they called him by the name Obed, who was later the father of Jesse, who was the father of David. So Ruth was the great-grandmother of David, greatest of the kings of the Jews.

The word in Rome was that in Palestine they were awaiting the coming of a Messiah from the house of David.

Uri looked about him. Various mysterious-looking wooden implements were lying around the yard — no doubt tools for gardening. Not far from the house stood two circular brass cisterns. Uri took a handful of water and washed his face, then drank. It crossed his mind that there would come a time when he would have to pay even for that. As noon was approaching, he said the morning prayer. If one had no phylactery and on it the little box holding the law, it was permissible as a last resort to recite it from memory, but one had to take care not to add or omit any words. Uri was now saying the prayer for the umpteenth time from memory; he was well used to it by now, though he had never done it in Rome.

He left the yard and stood hesitantly among the houses. It was warm. He sniffed at his tunic, dirtied with chicken droppings. It was a good thing that he had left the fine ceremonial toga at the Antonia in his haste when he was taken before the judges, because if he had been wearing that, that too would have been spattered with chicken droppings.

The nearby fields all belonged to the village, and plainly they would have been sown with barley and wheat, so it didn’t matter where he began. He kept looking back and narrowing his eyes, trying to memorize the rhythm of the mud-brick cottages’ rooftops so that he would be able to find his way back to the coop without having to ask for directions.

The village lay in a valley, with gardens and plowed fields sloping — now gently, now steeply — as far as the woods.

There were many out at work on the fields. Uri stopped, screwed his eyes and peered through his fingers.

The field of barley was divided into several plots. On some, reaping was happening, while others were already reaped, and on others again the heads of grain were still bobbing untouched in the easterly breeze. All the same, the many small plots were clearly not all be of barley, because he noticed other kinds of heads of grain nodding in the breeze. Perhaps wheat… Barley and wheat alongside each other… Uri had a dim recollection that in Rome people who could not have sown or reaped for generations spoke about it being a mistake to sow a single kind of grain in a field, nor more than two; in other words, there had to be two kinds, with a space being left between them.

On one of the plots a strange contraption was doing the reaping. A figure wrapped head to toe in a cloak — a woman maybe — squatted on a seat rigged between two large stone wheels and tugged the traces of a pair of oxen drawing it along from the front. Making slow progress, it left strips in the soil behind it. An odd base of planks was fastened to its bottom in a similar way to how gemstones were worn around the necks of high priests. It crossed Uri’s mind that he was never going to see the high priest’s ceremonial garb or the gemstones around his neck. Was this something his companions from Rome might have seen at Passover? he wondered. Had they also stood next to the altar? Or was it just he, Uri, who had been party to that privilege, albeit with some delay? He gave a snort of laughter.

Farther off, men wielding sickles in their right hands chopped off heads of grain they held with their left hands, keeping hold of the stalks as they threw down the heads and moved on, stooping over as if they were in labor, only to grab more handfuls of heads of grain. When they could collect a whole armful of stalks in their left arm, they tied the bundle before throwing it down and moving on to gather more ears in the left hand, cut them away from the stems, and drop the heads on the ground.

Uri stood there and studied.

Gleanings could only be picked up from the places where the grain had already been taken away, but that was where the ox-drawn contraption was plowing. He needed to walk on.

He headed northward on the slopes of the hill.

He saw four men on one harvested plot, each of them with a pair of oxen harnessed to a wooden yoke. They held in their left hands a draft-pole that stuck back from the yoke and in their right hands the handles of two solid but crooked shafts, which were attached to each other and pushing into the soil. Uri went closer. Fitted to the bottom of the longer shaft was a metal plate shaped with a pointed tip, which shoveled the soil to the side.

So that was what a scratch plow looked like.

The men were plowing. Uri could not work it out. If winter was the season for sowing, why were they plowing now, after the harvest had been reaped?

A man approached him, a scarf on his head and a staff in one hand.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I want to glean,” said Uri.

“That’s not permitted. Clear off!”

“I’m staying as the guest of Master Jehuda ben Mordecai,” Uri proclaimed. “He advised me to glean.”

“So you’re Theo, the one who arrived yesterday?” asked the man in astonishment.

“That’s me,” Uri confirmed.

“And Master Jehuda told you to glean?” he continued incredulously.

“That’s what he said.”

The man pondered for a time and meanwhile kept brushing flies from his face; he smelled of dung, which must have been attracting them. I must smell too, Uri thought, because he also had flies buzzing around him.

“Well, if that’s what he said, I suppose you’d better glean,” the man finally came out with. “Only mind you don’t get in the way.”

“Which is a part where I can pick gleanings?” Uri asked.

“The parts that we’ve already gathered,” said the man before wheeling around and walking off.

Uri remained standing. The man went up to one of the plowmen, and they proceeded together for a distance before, all at once, he rapped the plowman’s hand with his staff. The plowman winced, pushed the plowshare deeper in the earth with his right hand, struggling and in pain, with the man walking beside him for a while, then coming to a standstill, turning away, and looking around to see whose hand needed to be rapped next.

That must be some sort of supervisor, Uri thought. A driver. I wonder if the workers are all slaves.

Uri sauntered over to an already harvested plot on which no one was working. He looked at the ground and squatted. Here and there on the soil, among the bundles of straw, lay some grains of barley and a miserable head or two. Was that the sort of thing he was meant to gather? How much to half a measure, an ephah or bushel? That was a lot — thirty-three pounds. Ruth cannot have had an easy time of it.

As he lolled on his back, Uri figured that he would be able to live comfortably on a twentieth of that, if he had something to collect it in, something to mill it with, as well as water and yeast to make it rise into a dough to knead, and then a vessel in which to roast it.

His mother had often baked wheat bread at home since that was cheaper than buying from a baker; Uri had seen how she did it, and as a small child he too had eagerly kneaded the dough. It was an enjoyable experience, giving the fingers a sense of pleasure. Back home, they had a basket in which to carry the flour home from the market; there was also water and yeast, a molding board, a vessel, oil if the dough were used to make flatbread, and a small clay oven in the yard. If they were baking leavened bread the oven had to be heated separately with extra wood, which Uri was happy to cut.

He could use his loincloth to carry the grain; he didn’t really need it, as it was so hot.

But then a whole day would be taken up in gathering a twentieth of a bushel, and it would take another two or three days to acquire yeast, water, a molding board and vessel, and he would not be able to do that on an empty stomach.

Perhaps I would be best advised to toast the grain like Ruth; then it did not need water or yeast. But where would he do that?

He heard a low whir of voices and raised himself on one elbow.

Two decrepit crones in tattered clothes were sliding on their knees toward him, gathering fallen heads of grain into a small linen sack; they did not bother with single grains. They had unprepossessing, wrinkled features, with straggling strands of hair slipping out from under their headscarf. They looked a lot like each other; either they must have been sisters or old age and destitution had made them similar. It could just be, however, that this was a mother and daughter who had reached the same stage in life.

They looked at Uri as he reclined, and their eyes were vacant. There was no sign of surprise or fright; they just looked and slid on farther on their knees, gathering up the heads of grain. They had a right to the pe’ah.

A modern-day Ruth and Naomi, thought Uri. Or else I have dropped in a millennium earlier.

That thought had a lot of appeal.

His belly may have been aching, but he sat up and broke out into a loud laugh. The crones gave a start, pausing on all fours with their backsides pointed at Uri, but they did not turn around and look back; they were frozen still for a moment before they resumed inching forward as if nothing had happened. Like the chickens last night, they were not at all scared of him. Uri looked on them, delighted with the idea that they could look back on many, many generations of this simple, scanty existence.

What one saw here was something very ancient, something that could not be experienced in Rome. Maybe it had been worth the trip after all.

He also decided that he was not going to collect the gleanings; he would work. That had to pay something.

He stood up and peered, looking for the supervisor. He didn’t see him, but never mind, someone would set him on the right track.

After some indecisiveness, the supervisor took him on as a day laborer. Theo would not be given any money, but he would get lunch, though he would have to work for it until sunset.

He spent until the sun went down among women and children, binding the stalks that had been thrown on the ground into larger bundles, or sheaves as he learned they were called. The work required no expertise, but it was tiring. He noticed that the stalks cut up his palms and not those of the women. Perhaps they looked down on him, he imagined, because he was the only man among them, but he shrugged his shoulders: let them! Early that afternoon he really did get lunch like everyone else: two slices of barley bread dipped in vinegar. Two servants brought around the dish of vinegar, while a third sliced the bread as evenly as possible and, after dipping it in the vinegar, handed it to the next one.

Uri wolfed down the first slice he was given in just five bites. He burped loudly, and for a few seconds he felt content. He took the second slice more slowly and came to the conclusion that this was food he detested: it burned his tongue, his throat, and his stomach. He managed slowly to force it down but resolved that next time he would ask them not to dip the bread in vinegar. But how did the others cope with living off it from sunup to sundown?

By the time they finished work it was completely dark. Uri could see nothing at all, but he was guided by the women’s voices and exhalations as he stumbled home among them. The moon was out and shining to some extent, which was enough for them to see; without them Uri would have spent the night out in the field.

He felt an urge to defecate but did not dare to move aside, because by the time he was done they would be far away and he would never catch up.

Uri asked if they worked for their supper. At first they did not understand, and Uri thought he must be pronouncing the words incorrectly, but it wasn’t that: the question was meaningless. Of course they worked for dinner, they replied, when they finally grasped Uri’s question after the umpteenth time of being asked. Money? No, they did not get any money. The menfolk, yes; they received a daily wage and lunch. Bread and vinegar? Bread and vinegar. Nothing else? No, of course not; bread and vinegar was what they got.

“What sort of person is Master Jehuda ben Mordecai?” Uri inquired when they were close to the village, by now having to fight with all his might to hold back his bowels.

The women said nothing. A few of the girls gave evil laughs but said nothing either. Better I hadn’t asked, but then he put another question to them anyway.

“Is he a man of great knowledge?”

They were walking quietly in the dark into the village.

One of the women said, “He’s the master.”

The women then vanished among the mud-brick dwellings. Uri squatted and felt that he was spilling his guts onto the ground, with all his excrement voided in one fell swoop.

He could scarcely see a thing but nevertheless found his way to his host’s home at the first try. I’m not a lost person, he muttered under his breath and with some triumph, as he flailed with one hand to throw the chickens out of the coop to make room for himself to lie prone, flat on his belly, in their place.

On Thursday he woke of his own accord at daybreak. He did not wait for Jehuda to pull him out by the ankles but wriggled out backward, drank from the cistern, quickly gabbled the Sh’ma, and set off for the fields.

I’m even more soiled with chicken droppings than ever, he thought. Beelzebub, the lord of the flies, will find me not by sight but by smell alone; he was very pleased with himself at this new insight.

The supervisor told him that one of the plowmen had gotten sick and he should replace him.

“But I have no idea how to plow,” protested Uri glumly.

“You’ll learn,” said the supervisor.

He led Uri over to one of the pairs of oxen and showed him how the plowstaff should be held so that the plowshare bit into the soil, how the protruding end of the yoke should be grasped with the left hand, how the oxen were to be induced to start by thrusting it forward. The supervisor had a tough job stopping the oxen once they had set off, having to yell and pull back the yoke for a considerable time before they finally came to a stop.

“Right, now you,” said the supervisor.

Uri sat down behind the plow, grasped the stilt with his right hand and the beam with his left.

“That’s it,” the supervisor said encouragingly.

“Just a moment,” said Uri. “What pay do I get?”

“Your lunch,” said the supervisor.

“The men get pay as well,” Uri notified him knowledgeably.

“You’re not a man yet, Theo,” said the supervisor matter-of-factly.

Uri allowed the answer to sink in. There was some truth in it, as he had not yet paid half a shekel in taxes that year; that would only come next year, when he would be twenty years old.

“Fair enough,” he said, “but I ask that my bread not be dipped in vinegar.”

The supervisor pondered. He was plunged into thought for a long time, which suggested that the request was no simple matter.

“That’s not possible,” he declared finally, almost reluctantly. “The vinegar goes with it.”

Uri groaned quietly, then, with his left hand, pushed the rod on the yoke. The oxen did not respond, so Uri moved the rod more vigorously. The oxen reared.

“Shove the plow into the soil!” the supervisor yelled.

The pull from the oxen was so powerful that Uri all but fell flat on his face.

Uri tried to press the plowstaff down, and his right shoulder was wrenched, almost dislocating it.

“Shove down!” the supervisor shouted, striking Uri on the right hand with his staff.

The oxen, confused, began tossing their heads into each other and bellowing. They tried to run in opposite directions, and there was a tremendous crack; the plowstaff slipped out of Uri’s hand and fell on its side.

The supervisor howled and left.

Uri lay on the ground; his right arm was throbbing. He licked it; it was salty. He tried to move it but could not. He felt it swelling and puffing up; there would be no plowing with that arm that day. A sharp pain ran through his right shoulder; no plowing with that one either.

The plowmen gathered around and wailed.

“The yoke’s broken! The yoke’s broken!”

Uri sat up. His right hand was swollen, bleeding, and he was unable to move his right shoulder. He looked in amazement at the assembled throng of men and women screeching, “The yoke’s broken! The yoke’s broken!”

The same wail went up in Master Jehuda’s house from an elderly woman when Uri was helped in, a wet compress wrapped around his hand and shoulder. He was laid down on Jehuda’s own bed: “The yoke’s broken! The yoke’s broken!”

By then Uri was heartily sick of the whole thing, and he said as much.

“It will be fixed…”

The response was a general shrieking. The room full of servants, plowmen, and sheaf-binding women now set up a panicked cry: “Fix the yoke? Fix the yoke?”

Master Jehuda drove them away from his house with his yelling.

The only one left screeching about the yoke was the old woman. Master Jehuda began belaboring her with his fists and with great difficulty removed her from the room.

He seated himself, disheveled, sweating, panting, next to Uri on the edge of the bed, which sank under his weight, sending shooting pains through Uri’s shoulder.

“That’s big trouble you’ve brought, Theo!” Jehuda said disconsolately. “Big trouble you’ve brought on us!”

“I only wanted to plow to be able to eat,” Uri responded angrily. “I’m hungry!”

“I’ll give you something to eat,” said Jehuda, “but the yoke, the yoke!”

“They’ll repair it,” said Uri.

Master Jehuda cried out. Uri sat up on the bed and looked in amazement: the massive body of the man was shuddering as he sobbed.

“It’s forbidden to repair a yoke!” he cried out. “That’s big trouble you’ve brought on us, Theo! There’s going to be a drought because you’ve broken a yoke. An easterly wind has been blowing up till now as it is, and now it’s sure to keep blowing until the autumn! The yoke’s broken! The yoke’s broken!”

Oxen were held in such esteem in Judaea that whenever any of them turned wild and gored a man to death, not only the owner but also the oxen itself had to be present, chewing the cud, when it was sentenced; it was forbidden to sit in judgment in the absence of the ox in question, and if it was not there, then the hearing had to be postponed. That was what Uri learned as his hand and shoulder were being poulticed. He also learned that it was never permissible to repair a broken yoke and that although a wooden yoke was more fragile it was not permissible to employ a durable yoke made of metal, as it would signify eternal slavery, which should not be inveighed against either man or beast, blessed be the Almighty, who set this into law. It may not be written down, so one wouldn’t find it in the Torah, but it was the tradition dictated by the Eternal One, the protector of enslaved people and animals, blessed be He for this forever. The crack when the yoke broke undoubtedly reached the all-hearing ear of the Everlasting Lord, no doubt deaf to many prayers, and He was angry that men were tormenting his animals, and that was why as a punishment he will send a drought to the land of his chosen people. On account of that crack there would be drought and famine throughout Judaea and maybe even Galilee too!

This was all explained by Master Jehuda, who had been driven from his own bed and was obliged to sleep in the bed of the screeching old woman, who was his lawfully wedded wife, while Uri recuperated. The two beds had been put some way away from each other, although in Palestine, in principle, or so it was claimed in Rome, husband and wife were supposed to share the same bed. Maybe there was a different custom in Judaea, or perhaps the two of them had long not been a true man and wife.

The shoulder hurt, it was true (the puffiness and bruising of the hand had started to subside), but Uri still took great delight in stretching himself out on the hard couch and gazing through the tiny window overlooking the yard at the blue and green lights glinting outside as his stomach peacefully made music. He was given food: leavened bread, which at his request was not dipped in vinegar, along with greens and fruit and even wine — only raisin wine, admittedly, but it tasted good. The Lord might be justifiably angry about the yoke breaking, but not at Uri.

He was treated like an uncommonly welcome guest whose very presence was seen as an honor.

Uri inferred that it was for purposes of instruction that Master Jehuda had let him go hungry for two days when he first arrived, but it was not his business to roast his guest over a slow fire and eat him. There was something forced about his solicitude; he smiled and joked more than Uri would have allowed himself had he been in the same position. Might he be acting under instructions, he speculated, but then when, and from whom?

Uri was well aware that he had been banished to this village despite the fact that no punishment of the sort existed in Judaea; on this, the living puppet in Jerusalem must have been right. Still, Uri did not understand how a message would have gotten from Jerusalem to the master, unless, perhaps, his escorts had dropped in after they had parted with Uri. That, however, was not very likely, as Uri had quickly located Jehuda’s place, and there was no sign that his escorts had been there before him.

This evening marks the onset of the Sabbath, he mused. He would certainly not be asked to work tomorrow, by Sunday even his shoulder might be better, and it was rather unlikely that he would be entrusted with plowing anymore.

On the Sabbath two weeks ago he had been alone in the prison; the two rogues who were charged with robbery and the third man had been taken away. He had been alone in the prison cell for one week, and he had not known that he would be dining with the prefect. Now here he was, lying in a godforsaken Judaean village, the name of which he did not know; the hunchbacked official had told him, but it had not registered and now he was being looked after well even though he had committed a capital offense by breaking the yoke and because of him there would be a drought this year. He was damned if he could understand any of it.

There were occasions when time intensified; at others it stood still for years on end or barely trickled ahead. He could not say what had happened in this or that year in Rome since Sejanus and his children had been executed, but over these past three weeks in Judaea time had intensified, Uri concluded, and he strongly sensed that with every particle of his being, though he was well aware that time in Judaea, here in the country, had been standing still for centuries and millennia, and would do so forever; whatever might happen in Rome or the capital city of the next empire, sowing and reaping would be done the same way here.

Jehuda turned up at noon, puffing as he took a seat at the table, beside which there was a small bench. The elderly woman was cooking at the fireplace, while Jehuda peered in Uri’s direction.

“You’ll get lunch if you can get up,” Jehuda said.

“It’s not my legs that hurt,” said Uri, dragging himself to his feet and across to the table.

“Sit down, then — here, next to me,” said Jehuda, so Uri sat down there.

“Are you good at anything at all?” Jehuda inquired.

“That would be hard to say.”

“You must have been included in that delegation for some reason,” Jehuda exclaimed.

“I know a few languages,” said Uri.

Jehuda pondered that hard.

“For what purpose?” he finally asked.

“Well, so I can read this and that,” said Uri hesitantly.

“Except for the Torah there’s no need to read,” Jehuda declared. “All a person needs is there. Or do you hold a different view?”

“Yes, all a person needs is in the Torah,” Uri let it go at that, nodding enthusiastically. “A person only reads anything else to see what kinds of errors also exist, and if one wishes to convince someone that all a person needs is in the Torah; it’s better to know in advance what sort of silliness he is going to utter. It’s easier to refute arguments if one knows them in advance.”

Jehuda knitted his brow, chewing that answer over for some time. His spouse set down before them large earthenware plates with large helpings of noodles with raisins before returning to the fireplace. Jehuda was still chewing on Uri’s words, and Uri was glad that Jehuda clearly had no sense of humor.

“There’s no need to convince people,” Jehuda announced at last. “Not everyone needs to belong to the Lord’s chosen people; there are enough of us as it is. Nor is there any need to engage them in conversation.”

“Indeed, there are enough of us,” Uri nodded, “though there are not enough of us in the Diaspora; we are surrounded by non-Jews…”

“That’s why you’re unclean, you dirty people,” said Jehuda. “Though even if all the people in the Diaspora were Jewish, you would still be unclean because you don’t live where we do.”

“We envy you for that, Master,” said Uri respectfully. “I now envy myself for being able to be here among you.”

Jehuda smiled at that.

“That’s all right.”

Jehuda got up, twisted the strings of his tefillin around his forehead, tying them at the back of his head so that they hung down onto his shoulders. He glanced at Uri.

“Where’s your tefillin?”

“My companions have taken it back to Rome.”

“You mean you haven’t even got a tefillin?” the master snorted. “Woman! A tefillin for the child!”

The master’s spouse went out of the room. Jehuda looked around the room, where in one corner there were blankets lying around among other odds and ends.

“Woman!” thundered Jehuda.

The woman came back with a phylactery in one hand, which he put down on the table.

“Sew some tzitzits onto one of the blankets right away! The child doesn’t even have a gown!”

“Now?” the woman wailed out. “I’m right in the middle of cooking lunch!”

“No cooking, get sewing, and no lip!”

The woman did not answer but went across to the corner and started rummaging among the blankets.

“So anyway, tell me,” Jehuda sat back on the bench, “were you important delegates there at the altar at Passover?”

Uri also took a seat. Better to tell the truth, though it may not be necessary to talk about every last detail.

“I wasn’t there,” he said, “but it’s possible that the rest were.”

“And why weren’t you there? Did they think you were too young? Or there wasn’t enough room?”

“Well, that might have been the reason…”

“I’ve never stood by the altar myself,” said Jehuda. “Our turn never came… though I’m past forty-five now! Casting lots, rotation, fairness? Come on! They’re all fiddling there, in the Sanhedrin! Fiddling! Every year we trudge there and back three times over, and our turn still doesn’t come!”

“That’s hardly fair,” Uri asserted.

“It’s awful!” Jehuda declared. “But it’s a good thing you didn’t stand next to the altar, because our crowd would have hated you for it! As it is they are just going to feel sorry for you, you wretch, for having to live in Edom, that odious, abominable hellhole.”

Uri nodded. Edom was their way of saying Rome. That’s what they called it here, and they cursed it — that was all right. If anyone reported them for abusing Rome, they would say it wasn’t true, because they’d only mentioned Edom, not Rome. Cunning.

Master Jehuda did not know I was in prison. Better to deny it anyway; it was not possible to lock up a member of the Roman delegation in prison, but if that was what had happened, one must pretend that it hadn’t.

The woman came with the blanket onto the corners of which she had sewn fringes, one of the threads of which was blue as convention demanded. Jehuda took it from her, inspected it thoroughly, then nodded.

“Right.”

The woman put an earthenware dish in front of them on the table.

Jehuda stood up. The woman went back to the fireplace.

Uri also got to his feet and grasped the tefillin with his left hand; there was a leather box on it as there should have been. He put it down.

“I can’t wind it into place,” he said. “My shoulder hurts.”

“Woman!” Jehuda yelled so loudly that the mud-brick cottage shook.

The woman left the fireplace and came over to them.

“Wash your hands, then put the tefillin on his forehead!”

The woman hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” Jehuda yelled.

“I haven’t been in the mikveh yet,” the woman said quietly.

Jehuda kept quiet.

If his wife was unclean, then she could not put the tefillin on him.

Uri understood that if she touched it when she was unclean, then the tefillin would not be clean either. That was bound to be a source of complications.

It was. Jehuda shooed the women off to the mikveh. Naturally there was a mikveh in the village — a real double mikveh, in the garden of one of the farmers. It was communal, not his own, but he was still responsible for looking after it. A frequent check was made on the state of the mikveh, above all by Master Jehuda, who was also tasked with doing so.

“What’s a double mikveh?” Uri asked.

Master Jehuda’s eyes twinkled as he explained.

A double mikveh consisted of two basins, and it was possible to immerse oneself completely in one of them — that’s what the water was for. One did not immerse themselves in the other mikveh, and it was filled with water brought by the womenfolk from far away. Whenever the purity of the mikveh for immersion was in doubt, it was possible to transfer the contents of the clean water basin to it through a tube. A tenth of the water from the clean one bestowed cleanliness on the whole of the other; that was the tradition.

In Jerusalem, of course, there were no double mikvehs, only single ones. Which is to say that they could not be clean, to be sure. Of course, people believed they were clean, the miserable wretches. There wasn’t a really clean mikveh to be had in Jerusalem, but then again it was not necessary, because all Jerusalem was considered clean. Pilgrims to Jerusalem would do their ritual ablutions in those filthy mikvehs, and they had to purify themselves for a week in those before being allowed to step onto Temple Square. In Jerusalem there would be a great pushing and shoving around the mikvehs every Wednesday and Friday, when ritual immersion was obligatory.

Something clicked for Uri upon learning this.

“When I was taken to Temple Square, they asked me beforehand when I had arrived, and their minds were set at rest when they heard that I had been in the land for over a week…”

Master Jehuda nodded.

“All pilgrims have to purify themselves for a week, and for that period they are not permitted to step into Temple Square. Until then, they have to stay somewhere and eat something. That’s what Jerusalem makes its living from — foreign tourists… For one week, pilgrims spend their money — a handsome amount…”

Master Jehuda roared with laughter.

Uri broke into a smile.

“But you people from this village don’t need to get there a week before a holiday,” he said, “because you’re not pilgrims.”

Master Jehuda was pleased to hear that his guest had finally grasped the essential point.

“No, we don’t need to,” he confirmed. “Syrian Jews also do not have to. It is said that Antioch is like a suburb of Jerusalem, which makes us near enough to also be considered clean, provided we stay within the law in other respects. Which mikveh did you use for ritual bathing in Jerusalem?”

Uri weighed his reply.

“We weren’t given a name.”

“Still, where was it? I’m familiar with the City.”

“Somewhere in the lower town, it was…”

“It could have been in the Acra… What did it look like from outside?”

“My eyes are not good, master,” Uri said. “I can only see well up to an arm’s length.”

Jehuda sighed.

“So, that too!”

Uri nodded in commiseration; he sympathized with the master for having such an impossible individual charged to his care.

Master Jehuda contemplated, even farted in his efforts, before speaking.

“I’ll take you sometime to a neighboring village. There’s a man who’s blind as a bat there.”

Uri waited for Master Jehuda to go on, but something else came to Jehuda’s mind.

“Do you go to a mikveh to bathe yourselves over there in Edom?”

Uri hesitated.

Better not to lie, he thought.

“There are not many mikvehs,” he confessed. “We wash our hands and feet then sprinkle ourselves with water…”

“There are some big heathen baths, so I’ve been told,” said Master Jehuda.

“There are,” Uri admitted, “but we don’t go to them.”

This delighted the master so much that he personally, after washing his own hands, washed the phylactery in the outside cistern. He then grasped it by one thong and whirled it around in huge circles in the air, warbling benedictory phrases as he did so that it should dry. He tied it onto Uri’s forehead with his own hands, nicely arranging the straps in front and on Uri’s shoulders, thus making the three letters: the first was already written in the leather box, twice at that, and that was the letter shin; the second letter, a dalet, was formed by the knot at the back; and the two straps in front formed the third letter, a yod, with the three favored points together neatly proclaiming “ShDaY,” which is to say “Shaddai,” or “Almighty.”

It was not quite the same in Rome, where two tefillin had to be worn in principle, one attached to the forehead, the other to the upper left arm, and the yod was formed by the knot of the tefillin tied to the arm. When traveling, though, everyone had just one tefillah, but that was permissible in an emergency, which travel counted as.

That was the purpose of a phylactery: anyone wearing those three letters himself becomes almighty, just like the Eternal One.

“She needed to go to a mikveh in any case,” said Jehuda, offering excuses for his wife, “only I bundled her off a bit earlier than I had to. It’s difficult with women, who are only semi-human. Are you married yet, kid?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Be very careful whom you wed — very, very careful!”

Uri promised that he would be very careful.

They stood in front of the table. Jehuda turned toward the east — he feels he is in Jerusalem, Uri observed, and likewise turned to the east — and with repeated bows and in a chanting tone very loudly started to pray. He did not take out the piece of parchment in the tefillin, so Uri did not do so either; after all, in Judaea it was not obligatory to read the Sh’ma.

Uri also prayed, reciting the Sh’ma from memory. He again finished first, with Jehuda continuing and chanting a few benedictions that Uri recognized, as well as a few passages that he had never heard before, one being about the Messiah coming from the house of David, while the next one went “Give us this day tomorrow’s bread.”

Uri mused on that. It was not possible to eat tomorrow’s bread today, so this bread was not actual bread but food for the soul. The saying no doubt related to the End of Days, when the Messiah would arrive, and that must be connected with the former.

It was quite possible that the guards and the prisoners in the prison had recited the same sentences, only back then his ear had not yet fully adjusted to hearing Aramaic, and they had mumbled it softly.

On reaching the end of the prayer, Jehuda sat back down, and Uri sat down beside him.

“You people in Edom, that accursed, unclean place, do you only recite the Sh’ma before the arrival of the Shabbat Queen?”

“Yes.”

“May the Almighty raze Edom to the ground, and with it all the ungodly!” declared Jehuda, and he thereupon began eating the challah.

They polished off the loaf of bread, drinking wine with it, Jehuda knocking back four cups in a row, Uri just one.

“Don’t you all in Edom, may the Almighty raze it to the ground — don’t you ever drink?”

“Not a lot,” said Uri, blushing.

Jehuda scornfully looked him over.

“It shows, you puny lot!”

By the time his wife had gotten back from taking the ritual immersion, Jehuda was hungry again. She protested that the meat would have been ready long before if she had not had to break off to go early to the mikveh, but that did not stop Jehuda from reprimanding her once more.

After he stuffed himself with meat, Uri went back to lying on the couch. He burped and farted contentedly, feeling that he had never been safer since leaving Rome.

A lot of people crowded into the room as evening drew in, all Master Jehuda’s household — domestics and outdoor servants — along with guests from the village who had come together in the master’s house to greet the Sabbath, the arrival of the Sabbath Queen, in a fitting manner and, as it emerged, also to sleep there. Master Jehuda must be an important man if they came to his place on Friday evening and he didn’t have to go anywhere else.

Uri lay on the bed, squinting around at them in the lamplight. There was no menorah in the room, just ten oil lamps that smoked and gave off an unpleasant odor as they burned away. Uri secretly reviled the Lord for afflicting him with poor vision, because he could not see the faces of all the many people too well, though this would have been an excellent opportunity to scrutinize the village’s inhabitants. They were eating and drinking, but Uri was not hungry and did not get up. A few people noticed him and moved toward him and looked him over with curiosity; Uri smiled.

The hubbub and dim lighting were soporific, and he plunged into a deep sleep.

“Wake up!” Master Jehuda hollered. “Let’s get off to the house of prayer!”

Uri opened his eyes. He moved his right shoulder: it hardly hurt now.

No end of people were stirring in the master’s room; there were some two dozen men, women, and children sleeping on the floor, the air was thick with the fumes of candles and human exhalations; their reek was unfamiliar, Uri realized, as they were from nearby villages. The whiff given off by people there was different; he had become accustomed to the smell of his village.

After prayers and a snatched breakfast of a few bites, he found himself in front of the house.

Virtually the entire population of the village, several dozen men, women, and children had assembled there, some strangers having slept overnight, from Friday evening to the Sabbath holiday, at other houses, because there must have been around one hundred souls there in all.

Master Jehuda patted some cheeks, and slapped the behinds of some girls and women, then set off.

Uri trudged along in the middle of the crowd.

There were vessels sitting on the road at the village boundary. Here everyone stopped, broke off a piece of matzo, took some fresh green figs — Uri took some too — then moved on, because, while on Friday evening they could travel as far as they wished, from when the sun went down until sunset on the Sabbath they could go no more than two thousand cubits, and the house of prayer lay farther than that from their villages than it did from this village. The reason why the food had been set down at the edge of the village before the onset of the Sabbath was to mark it as their household’s boundary, so by that reasoning the synagogue must lie within a distance of two thousand cubits of this point.

It seemed there was not such a big difference between here and the Roman Far Side after all.

They went over the plowed field in single file on a scarcely noticeable track between plots. Uri noted that the heads of grain had been left standing in a row along the edges of the already harvested plots, and he even went so far as to ask why they were so sloppy in their work. The middle-aged man who was tramping in front of him, also barefoot, looked back in astonishment.

“That’s on account of the pe’ah,” he said.

“But doesn’t the pe’ah consist of fallen heads that have been left?” Uri asked.

“No,” said the man. “They’ve just been accidentally dropped, but it is not permitted to reap the edge of a field on account of the poor.”

“The pe’ah is the sixtieth part,” said the man behind Uri. “But that’s not easy to work out…”

“We count on the master to make a decision if there is any dispute about the size of the pe’ah,” said the one in front. “It is not all the same if the grain is in one plot or two, because if it’s in two plots then a pe’ah only has to be left on one…”

“Not always,” said the one behind Uri, and he started to list exceptions.

Uri was unable to follow the debate upon which they went into a passionate discussion of the finer legal points of the pe’ah.

They were treading in each other’s footsteps between the plots. Uri kept a constant check that he did not place his feet on the stubbly patches. It was a good thing they were not going any faster; in Judaea everything was slower than in Italia. These people were not even walking at a stadium or a stadium and a half in an hour.

“Don’t you leave a pe’ah in Edom?” later asked a younger man who came up on Uri’s footsteps.

“As it just so happens,” said Uri, “we don’t leave one because we can’t; we don’t own any land.”

With that, the dispute over the riddles of the pe’ah ceased. There was a silence. Even some people who were walking farther away stopped talking.

“You have no land?” the one who was walking in front finally asked, having come to a halt and so forced Uri to do the same, whereupon the entire line that was behind came to a halt.

“No, we don’t.”

“That’s impossible!”

“We don’t own any land,” Uri persisted. “It’s not allowed.”

“A curse on ruddy Bozrah!” the man standing behind him exclaimed.

A few more also cursed. Uri was now thoroughly confused. Bozrah had been the capital city of Edom many, many centuries ago, but why ruddy? Perhaps Edom meant “red” in Semitic languages.

“If you have no land, what do you make a living from?”

Uri sighed.

“We trade,” he said. “We have artisans, craftsmen, builders, dockers, scribes…”

“Handicrafts, we’ve also got them,” said a gruff voice from behind. “Jerusalem is overflowing with master craftsmen, the best in the world! But one can’t live without land. Land is life itself!”

“What do you people eat anyway?” another voice asked.

“Whatever we buy, I suppose,” said Uri.

“You… you mean you buy your food?”

That piece of news went right down the line: those Edomites pay money to buy food for themselves, they pay money to buy food for themselves, they pay money to buy food for themselves!

Unbelievable.

“Where do you buy the food?”

“In shops, at the market…”

This was so peculiar that people began to laugh. In shops, at the market!

“And how much does a measure of wheat cost in ruddy Bozrah?”

Uri was stumped; he did not know. With his tessera he got the grain free of charge, enough for the whole family, but he felt that this was better left unsaid; people just would not understand. They would not understand the whole Roman system.

“Something like six sesterces,” he said uncertainly.

“How much is that in zuz?” could be heard simultaneously from several quarters.

Uri sighed. He tried to recall what those pleasant plunderers had said in prison and replied at random, “One zuz.”

There was a big gasp of consternation.

“One zuz! One zuz for a single ephah in Edom! One whole zuz for a single ephah in bloody Bozrah!”

“You’re out of your minds,” declared the gruff voice from behind. “You’re paying twenty times more than you ought to!”

Uri gave a growl of accordance and nodded; he did not consider it his duty to acquaint them with the mysteries of the retail trade, especially when he was not entirely clear himself.

“You don’t produce any grain?” someone asked.

“No, we don’t.”

That was too much for them; they could not understand it at all.

Somebody started guessing how grain might reach Edom. Uri just smiled.

“The grain comes from Egypt,” he said. “That’s what the whole of Rome eats.”

More gasps.

From Egypt? But they don’t pay any attention to how things are baled. You can be sure moisture gets in, and that makes it unclean! Uri went on the defensive; there were quite a lot of Jews living in Rome, and they kept to the rules of purity. They only ate kosher meat; they cooked with Jewish oil, and the forefathers had been very scrupulous in ruling what a Roman Jew could and could not eat. If they had decided generations back that wheat from Egypt was edible, then it could not be unclean.

The climate of opinion around Uri grew antagonistic. Everybody in the Diaspora was unclean — there was your proof! It had now turned out to be unequivocally true as far as Edom was concerned.

It would have been better to have said nothing at all, Uri reflected.

The peasants had not come out of Egypt all that long ago, but we Roman Jews did a very long time ago, he recognized.

He needed to invent something quickly.

“That is the case,” he said loudly so everyone could hear. “We Roman Jews eat wheat grown by Jews in Egypt, and it undergoes strict inspections…”

It did no harm to make that up, because the position was already rather embarrassing. As they began to digest the announcement, the anger subsided.

There were cries from the front asking what the matter was, why they had stopped. People at the back started to shove forward, and the line started to move again.

“Why don’t you all rise up in revolt?” someone asked. “It’s a shame you’re treated like that!”

A prolonged, highly detailed storm of abuse against Edom ensued. People forgot about Uri and the original topic of discussion, thanks be to the Eternal One.

The synagogue was located in the next village.

People also arrived from other villages, and they all stood around in front of the small, mud-brick, straw-thatched building, chatting in gratifying and leisurely fashion. There were many hundreds of people — men, women, and children; the young and the aged; the poor and the well-off. Not even a tiny fraction of that crowd would fit into the house of prayer.

Like that million-strong mass in Jerusalem.

In front of the synagogue stood long, crudely built tables on which food had been laid out, covered with white tablecloths, the Sabbath meal that every Jew who was a guest of the house of prayer was given for free. It was the same as in Rome, only there the members of the congregation would sit inside a building. Uri was curious about how they would go about praying in Judaea.

They went about it in such a way that the Torah scroll, which normally resided in the house of prayer, was brought outside, and the readings were made from it in the open air. No one went into the house, no particular group was favored, and everyone said an “amen” at the end of the verses. The prayer leader, a young man, did not give a priestly blessing, suggesting that there might also be a shortage of priests in the Judaean countryside. Perhaps that was why the masters were important, Uri guessed; something of the priestly vocation’s intermediary role was shifted onto them, though they were not allowed to recite the prayers reserved for priests, give blessings, or dress in white.

Children kicked up a racket and women chattered as the communal prayer went ahead, giving the service a refreshingly relaxed, vital character. The prayer leader read in Hebrew from the Torah the part prescribed for that week, and an elderly man translated every two or three sentences into Aramaic so that the whole congregation could understand. Uri strained to hear what the elderly man was saying in the hubbub, and he was not such a bad interpreter; he had no scroll in his hands, but he must have prepared for the entire week, because it sounded as if he were chanting a text he had memorized perfectly. All the same, the prayer leader also had no faith that the crowd was paying attention, and he had to flutter a kerchief to signal to the congregated throng when they had to say “amen.” The crowd watched for the kerchief, yet they themselves did not pray, only said the “amens.”

After the reading, the prayer leader tagged on a sort of explanation, and that did not need interpretation, as he said it in Aramaic. The young man, four or five years older than Uri at most, was not exactly an imaginative individual; he expounded on how anything that is lost is not lost forever, and what dies does not die forever. Someone in the crowd commented that his mother had died recently; he no doubt had her in mind.

Right then, on track to complete the reading of the Torah by the autumn and start once more amid the Simchat Torah festivities, they happened to be at the Book of Samuel, the bit that anyone who happened to be paying attention could hear was about the Ark in which the Lord’s covenant with His people is kept was stolen by the Philistines but subsequently sent back in fulfillment of the Lord’s will.

The Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant from Shiloh at a time when the Jews still held the Ark in the Tabernacle, but, by a miracle, it was returned seven months later, so they retrieved this most ancient and holy box, in which the Tablets of Stone with the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses were kept, along with a few other precious articles, and on whose golden lid, in principle, the Almighty was seated and conversed with those who entered the sanctum. King David then took it to Jerusalem, and his successor Solomon built the First Temple, in the inner sanctum of which the Ark stood until it later disappeared.

Uri wondered whether others also wondered if the Ark might still be preserved somewhere. The Ark of the Covenant was not in the inner sanctum of the Second Temple, into which he had been unable to see, and that was why the Holy of Holies, the place that even the high priest could only enter once a year to testify to the Ark’s exalted absence, was empty. Uri seemed to recollect reading somewhere that Jeremiah once took the Ark and the Tabernacle and buried them in a cave on Mount Nebo, hiding the way to the place even from his own companions, and he also vaguely recalled reading that Josiah had hidden the Ark in the caves under Temple Mount. The important thing was that it had been missing ever since.

It would be an extraordinary and major event if it were to turn up; people would be greatly excited to see it.

Between “amens,” Master Jehuda joked with his friends, still speaking loudly. It was largely due to him that the prayer leader’s text was inaudible; he simply outshouted the young man, and Uri had a suspicion that this was for the purpose of showing that he, and no one else, was master around these parts, even if he was not leading the prayers.

The children ran around, with mothers trying — by occasionally rapping knuckles — to dissuade them from reaching out from under the white tablecloths and pinching wedges of the special festive bread. The dogs were not exactly respectful of the solemn occasion either, because, perhaps following the lead of the children, they raced around and barked in a manner that was quite unworthy of Jewish dogs.

When the communal service closed with the reciting of the Sh’ma, the prayer leader, accompanied by two elderly men, took the Torah back into the house of prayer, where he placed it back in its cupboard. He then came out and washed his hands in a bowl held out to him into which something was sprinkled, though Uri had no idea why he would do this and, indeed, asked.

“He was made unclean by touching the Torah scroll,” several around him said, quite at a loss to understand why anyone would ask.

“Unclean — from the Torah?”

Uri was astounded. Back home in Rome it was necessary to wash hands before picking up a Torah scroll.

It was an interesting way of looking at things, he reflected — to believe that a holy book might make a person unclean. Maybe that came from experience long forgotten by Roman Jews.

He inquired what was sprinkled in the bowl.

The answer was the ashes of a red deer doe’s remains, which are best for cleaning off fat.

Uri was staggered. Red deer does were mentioned in the Books of Moses, and symbolic ashes were used in Rome as well when they got to that point during the reading of the Torah, but here people in Judaea truly lived by the written word! Time stood still here.

The prayer leader drank a sip of wine, whereupon everyone jumped for the flasks of wine, poured some out for themselves and one another — women and children too. The flasks were drained in an instant.

That was also when the white tablecloths were taken off and everyone, whether standing or moving around, started eating. The food was barley bread, baked from the newly harvested grain, and it was dipped into vessels of vinegar and enormous dishes of salt, of which there was at least one per table. There were also greens on the tables, including some that Uri had never seen before. Once the bread was gone, the faithful resigned themselves to eating these. There was no meat because there was not much of that and it came only with the major feasts. Uri did well to grab two thick slices of bread, and he did not dunk them in vinegar but most certainly in the salt, and he took several helpings of the greens, which were not too popular.

He was left behind when it came to the wine, however, for which he did not begrudge the others. It was true that it was compulsory to drink some wine on the Sabbath, but it quickly ran out in the crush, so he did not commit a sin. He looked around all the same to check if anyone had spotted that he was not drinking, as he suspected that these nice people were nevertheless quite capable of upbraiding him for sinning and that Master Jehuda would impose the due penalty, but fortunately — thank goodness — no one was bothering about that.

The assembly, several hundred strong, that had gathered for the Sabbath from nearby villages was merry, and they were merry for the same reason Uri was: they would not have to work that day — plus they also got free food and drink. Uri noticed that freemen and slaves were eating together, with no essential difference between them on this occasion; in the end, Uri supposed, that was the main point of the holiday, and that was especially the sense of Passover, which, it was true, had passed, but on its first day the counting of the Omer, which lasted for fifty days until Shavuot, had begun and had now reached the fourteenth day. All those many tribes which eventually became the Israelites had been delivered out of slavery in Egypt, and it was no bad thing to remind oneself of that; let the slaves also enjoy being free for one single day a week, the Sabbath.

Passover was still close, and the residents of the nearby villages stood around Uri and compared their experiences on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Everyone in that part of the world was required to make the trip, as it lay within two days’ walk, and all had in fact made the trip and they could not get over relating the marvelous experiences they had two short weeks before.

On the way there, someone had gotten a thorn in their foot and was unable to get it out, so it had festered, and on the way back it had been cut open with a knife, though the festival was still going, or to be more specific it was a half-holiday, whereupon a dispute had arisen over whether it was permissible to cut the wound open on a half-holiday. What carried the argument was the notion that by the time the festival reached its very end the whole leg might go gangrenous and the individual would die. How he had screamed! It turned one’s stomach. Of course he was all right now, or rather not entirely, because last week a plow ran into his other foot, and that had festered, but he’d had it cut open too, and by the day before yesterday he was plowing again.

Another drank too much wine and fell into a cistern, and he floundered around for a long time before they were able to pull him out, because the wells in Jerusalem are very deep. He had wailed and cursed and lamented just like the prophet Jeremiah when he was cast into a cistern (or maybe it was a dungeon, because the princes were not too fond of him), and he was only hauled out much later, as had been the case with that drunk ten days ago.

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.

They related the story—“that was when you were not yet with us”—of how they would wet the ground first with water then set oxen loose to tamp the soil down solidly. They would repeat the wetting for several days, and the oxen would tamp the ground for several days, and, as he could see, the consistency was just fine.

They would then set to scattering the grain around with spades.

The grains were covered with husks and other bits of chaff. Uri found it hard to envisage how the grains would be picked out from a sea of what looked like debris. All the same, he too turned back with the others to pack more of it into the sacks.

They were treading a good, thick heap of crop by the time a strange treadmill appeared on the threshing ground one fine day. Uri recalled that he had seen something of the kind on the very first day: a plank drag contraption on two stone wheels, drawn by a pair of oxen, which left a trail after it. Now he was able to see one close up and from underneath. The plank was not very wide, about two feet or so, and another plank, some two or three times as long and studded irregularly with basaltic rocks, was fixed under the axle of the stone wheels. The women said the device was called a morag, or a threshing board. The supervisor, who seemingly could not do enough to make good the damage caused by the stick blow he had meted out previously, declared proudly that this was an instrument used by Jews alone in the world and unknown anywhere else. Threshing was done elsewhere too, of course, but in such a way as the Arabs, for instance, did it, with the oxen being driven around on the heads of grain, whereas in Syrian villages a stick was used to beat out the grain from the chaff, as of course was the case in Judaea with lighter grains, but a morag was something that could only be found in Judaea, and what a wonderful device it was too, being Jewish.

Uri watched as the oxen set off on the carpet of grain, with the rocks set under the plank tearing into the heap and, as Uri saw when he bent over, most of the grains dropping away from the husks.

The ox-drawn sledge would be passed slowly two or three times over the crop, then it was taken out to the fields, because it could also be used where the ground was firm.

However, Uri could still not see how the grain was going to be picked out.

“It is left like this,” said the supervisor, “while we wait for a wind.”

Uri put heads of grain into sacks for three days, and his back was getting used to the work by the time the wind picked up. It was noon. Everyone left the field and hurried toward the threshing ground. By the time they got there the threshing floor was full of people, each beating away with a wide, flat, wooden-handled bronze shovel called a mizreh.

Women and men alike had begun digging into the heap of grain, swiftly lifting the mizreh above their heads to toss the crop into the air.

The crop rose in the breeze to rain down on their heads and get caught up in their hair, and they sneezed and laughed as they bent down to scoop up another shovelful of the crop into the air.

Uri also picked up a mizreh and did likewise. He too sneezed, spat chaff from his lips, blew the straw and grains from his nose.

By the time they had finished, the breeze had also died down, but by then they were surrounded largely by grain, the heavier parts, as the breeze had blown away the lighter husks and chaff.

That’s clever, Uri thought.

The supervisor asked Uri if he wanted to be one of the guards; if he did, he would not have to fill any more sacks.

Uri agreed.

He did not have to fill any more sacks or do any more flailing; he could sleep by day, and when evening drew in he would stroll out with a few men to the threshing ground, staying there with them until a new day dawned, when they would be replaced by some elderly women who, though she might not be able to withstand even the weakest of robbers, could, on the other hand, unleash horrific screams, which were more effective.

A crop that size was worth stealing, he came to understand the first night, so the grain needed to be guarded every night from now on until the wheat was milled.

“Who would steal it?” Uri asked.

“Robbers,” he was told in some wonder, as if he were being instructed on a widely known natural phenomenon.

Uri was interested in robbers, but he had no desire to say anything publicly on the subject. Were there any in that area? They were to be found anywhere caves existed, and caves were to be found everywhere. Anywhere the Creator, blessed be the Eternal One, had let slip an opportunity to make a cave, robbers would gouge a lair out for themselves. They too need to eat, so they steal.

“Are they entitled to the pe’ah?” asked Uri.

Anyone who was needy could take from the pe’ah, and robbers, let’s be honest, are needy. They are not wealthy, because if they were they would be bankers in Jerusalem.

They could laugh at that.

“Can’t we steal from it?” Uri queried further.

The men were astonished. Well, the riddled grain was measured, hadn’t Uri seen? No. Well, anyway it was a separate team of men engaged to do that; the grain they were guarding right now had been measured, and tomorrow or the day after would be taken away to a barn and guarded there. A new lot of the freshly reaped grain would be brought here, and when that had been flailed and winnowed, that too would have to be guarded. So it would go to the end of the reaping season in Av, or even Elul.

That process could be shortened, Uri supposed, if all the plots were harvested at the same time, and naturally also sown at the same time in the winter. He even said as much, but they did not understand what he was going on about. Uri repeated it, adding that they would gain a bunch of time in the summer and could occupy themselves with something else.

That was not allowed, they said in alarm. It was prohibited to sow all the seeds at the same time! If some calamity were to befall the crop, then it would all be lost. The sowing was spread over two months for that reason, and the reaping over two or three months, but it had never been the case that all of the sown seed had been lost, thanks be to the Everlasting Lord, who had enjoined that it was prohibited to sow all the seeds at once.

Uri then inquired what sort of people his companions were, and they in turn recounted all the ways to get engaged in plowing or the other agricultural jobs there were for those who had no land, or were slaves, or were not firstborn sons, or had been obliged to sell their father’s land because the family failed to hit on a decent way to share it out after he died.

Many men went to Jerusalem in search of work, but there was no work in Jerusalem. It was impossible to find employment among the building works on the Temple as those jobs were inherited; there were around twenty thousand men working there, but it had been impossible for generations now to gain admittance to that sort of work. The Temple building workers were even paving the streets now, that was the latest fad, and it was impossible on that account even to obtain a job as a street paver. There were not many being taken on by the Jewish police force, because their pay was too high, and anyway the police did not do a thing; all they did was supervise in Temple Square and sometimes beat people up, and that was only when the three big feast days came around. Otherwise they just sunned themselves.

The craftsmen who sold mementos during the holidays were not taking people on either, and even if they could one could not rent a room in Jerusalem if you had not been a house owner for generations — though you could make a tidy sum from that during the holidays.

There were many men who went to Jerusalem despite all that. Many preferred begging and sleeping out in the streets to being robbers. They were tolerated when they used what they made begging to pay off the police, but they still kept getting kicked out of the City. Those wretches had finally lost touch with the land, even though it was both the Holy Land and holy in being meant for agriculture, even if it had not long belonged to the Jews.

Uri asked if the lands were redistributed every fifty years as the laws of Moses required. One of the guards that day was an old man who had lived for seventy years, and he said that there had been no redistribution yet, and he did not expect to see one either, even if he lived another seventy years.

None of Uri’s fellow guards owned any land; they were all peasants but landless. The well-off landowners did not need to watch crops by night.

Master Jehuda was also landless, he was informed, because he was a tenant, but he didn’t cultivate his land himself; he sublet it, which he was free to do. Master Jehuda was a good man — and a very learned man, because he was able to explain the laws. He railed nicely against usurers, and he was right to do so because usurers and tax collectors were the wickedest people on Earth, even if they were Jews.

Master Jehuda also lent out money, noted someone in the darkness, when a cloud just happened to be covering the moon.

Yes, he lent out money, that was true, came the answer, also in the dark, but only for low interest, and Master Jehuda himself had explained not long ago that this was allowed under the laws.

A protracted dispute started over whether Master Jehuda was aris, a tenant, or hokker, a landlord, since it made a big difference. An aris only rented the land for a year or two, and he passed on a portion of the crop, usually half, to the landlord. A hokker, on the other hand, rented the land under terms whereby he did not pay the landowner a certain fraction of the crop but rather a fixed amount of money that was stipulated in advance in the contract.

In the long run, someone said, it was all the same, because the good and the bad years canceled each other out, although it might matter in the short term.

Yes, but then Master Jehuda had been renting land for a long time.

Indeed, but there was no way of knowing from whom.

It turned out that in fact the night watchmen had no clue whose land they were working on for the bread and vinegar.

They did agree, though, that Master Jehuda could not be a sokker, who paid a money rental for a short tenancy.

Then, among the guards, some were sattels, who contracted for a season for half of the crop but also took on the job of night watchman because they would return to their big family after the spring sowing and do nothing until the next spring.

A sakkir, also to be found among the guards, lived on leasehold land in a small shack. He also received board through the goodwill of the supervisor and a sum of money when he left. The extremes of the contracts were one week and seven years, but normally it would be for three years, especially if the person was unmarried. Another guard had not married either, but he was older than thirty and would never have a family of his own. Uri took a look at him at dawn; he had no more than two teeth left in his mouth and ground his bread soaked in vinegar with his gums.

There was not one ikker, a farmer, among Uri’s companions, but all the more po’els, that is, journeymen, working for a day’s pay. The po’els did not tire of repeating to Uri that if he worked as a po’el, he would be obliged to receive the wage in advance, which was four or five leptons, or, if he could drive a hard bargain, as much as seven leptons a day, on top of which they were obliged to give him bread — one and a half slices.

One of their number was an older man, who had managed to find wives for his sons and husbands for all but one of his daughters. He had sold what property he owned — a decent-sized piece of land with four plots of barley and three of wheat — then leased it back from the new owner. There would have been no other way for him to find the dowry for his daughters and give some support to his sons in starting their new, independent lives; even his house was not his own.

“Whom does it belong to?” Uri asked.

“I don’t know,” said the old man. “The person who bought it from me sold it straightaway, but I’m still paying him and he’s paying the new owner. I asked who that was, but he wouldn’t say. Perhaps it’s a priest in Jerusalem who will later sell it to the Edomites.”

“Your sons will recover your land for you,” someone said in the dark. “They’ll drive out the foreigners and recover it!”

“If only they would!” the old man said gloomily. “It was my father’s land, Jewish land. If only they would recover it!”

Uri’s companions were in tattered rags and hungry, just like him.

There was no bread for the night’s work, nothing at all, and they would get only two leptons in the morning when the women relieved them. That had become a tradition, and that was what they said to Uri again and again each morning, as if this were the first time he’d heard it; the women could scream loudly if they were attacked by robbers, and it was easier to chase robbers by day.

Uri then asked how Master Jehuda made his livelihood.

The question received uncertain responses. Carpenter, yes, he had been that, but for a long time all the work had been done by his assistants, and he was rather tight-fisted about paying them, which was within his rights because he was the master. He was a well-to-do man as he rented land and employed people to cultivate it; he personally did not work, because he was the personification of the law. A good master he was too, because he was good at administering justice.

“Is the master really a judge?” Uri asked.

“Most certainly he is. What else would he be?”

“And there’s no priest out this way?”

Again they did not understand what he was asking at first, but eventually they caught on.

There was no priest within three days’ walking distance; the only priests were in Jerusalem, but there were many thousands of them.

There had been priests out in the country in the olden days, but then they had seen very little of their share of tithe paid for the priesthood, the sacrificial offering from the harvest, which was all collected in Jerusalem, so it was better for the priests to move closer, since the tithe was what they fed on, and the offspring of priestly families went up from the country to Jerusalem, and now only the odd token priest remained in the provinces.

But even when they were there, not all of them were in a good position. There were starving priests in Jerusalem too, because their share of the sacrificial offerings was decided by drawing lots, and that lottery was always open to dispute. The high priests, along with their favorites, took their cut, and everyone else got what was left; it was hard living on scraps.

This arrangement was not against the masters’ interest anyway; in the country it was the master craftsmen who passed judgment, and anyone who was literate could be a prayer leader. In the country it was the masters who led the people; the priests did so only in Jerusalem, and even there, to be sure, the big masters still have considerable prestige, because they were also to be found in the Great Council.

“Is Master Jehuda in the habit of leading the prayers?” Uri was curious. His companions could not recall ever having heard him leading the prayers, but then that was not his business. Let him explain the law and pass judgments in accordance with it. There were a great many lawsuits in Judaea; Master Jehuda had a difficult job keeping up, which was why he was so restless and roared all the time. Responsibility lay heavily on his shoulders; he had put on weight to bear it. That was why his sons had fled to far-off areas, all of them marrying in Transjordan. Master Jehuda’s sons had left him because they could not stand his temper tantrums.

It was good being able to spend the nights among the guards, wrapped up in warm blankets. Sweltering as it was by day, the nights were cool. The dew at dawn surprised Uri to the point that he would lick it from the bushes, he was so taken with the idea that the Everlasting Lord brought forth moisture even in such torrid weather.

It was also good that at last he was able to do exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way, and as well as the others. Any idiot, any am ha’aretz, can keep an overnight vigil, of course, but Uri did it even better; he never dropped off to sleep, whereas from time to time the others did. But then again, they were not looking to do a better job of something that any fool could do.

Uri was expecting to be questioned about Rome and the big, wide world, and to have to answer lots of questions about which he had no clue, but that didn’t happen; people took note of the fact that Uri had been born in Rome and also lived there, and the information had spread around that the Jews in Rome bought everything in shops, which the peasants had trouble coming to terms with, but Uri was asked about nothing else.

Or rather, he was asked if he had spoken with the emperor.

It was a word that they uttered somewhat dubiously, and it occurred to Uri that perhaps they might not even know who the present emperor was by name. Indeed, from the standpoint of a Roman Jew it made no difference either. Whoever the emperor was, he ruled over them.

He told them that he had not spoken to the emperor.

The Judaean peasants shook their heads in disapproval.

An emperor’s role was to get to know his subjects, hear their complaints, and take good suggestions to heart. He should not step into the Lord’s shoes and have statues made of him or his image minted on coins.

Uri pointed out that the peasants were not allowed to see a high priest eye-to-eye, but that was different, they said: a high priest was not an emperor.

Uri maintained doggedly that they hadn’t seen the prefect either.

A prefect was only a prefect; he didn’t count.

“But the emperor is your emperor too,” said Uri, “and you also haven’t seen him.”

“He’s not our emperor but theirs.”

“Whose is that?”

“The Edomites.”

“I see. So, what about me? Does that make me a full-fledged Edomite?” Uri tried to pin them down.

That proved a trickier question than they initially thought, and two nights was not enough to get to the bottom of it. After all, Theo was Jewish just like them, but then he was also living among the sinful Edomites who were enemies of the Israelites. This made Theo sinful because he was unclean and lived among the unclean.

“Except he is here in Judaea right now. Is he sinful here?”

“Here he’s not sinful because he is cleansed among us.”

“And if he goes back, then what?”

“Then he becomes unclean again.”

“Is everyone in the Diaspora unclean, even if they keep their faith?”

Opinions on that were exceedingly divided, but most of them thought that he would indeed be unclean. Every Jew should reside in the dwelling place of his ancestors. The Eternal One had given them Canaan, and everyone was under an obligation to fight dispersal in his own way. If that could not be while he was alive, then he should certainly return to the Holy Land after death.

Their advice to Uri was not to go back to Rome; he was in a good place here. No one who farmed the land starved to death; he also received two slices of bread, though he hardly did anything, and he should appreciate that. He could also drink free wine every Sabbath, and if he were to learn how to plow eventually, he would get daily wages, no small amount at that, and within half a year he’d be able to buy himself a pair of sandals. If he was looking to start a family, he could do that; he was the right age, and there were heaps of girls here who were just ready for the picking.

They warned him not to miss out on the next time they had to take their tents to Jerusalem, on the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the days that follow — a long holiday that everyone from the neighborhood attended right through to the end. He should go up onto the Mount of Olives, where the marriageable girls danced every day and anyone could pick and choose to his heart’s content.

Girls would be dressed up very nicely for the occasion, having sewn the white linen dresses themselves. Girls from the neighborhood all danced there at the beginning of autumn — even those whose fathers kept them hidden at home all year, either because they were exceedingly pretty creatures, the apples of their fathers’ watchful eyes, or because they were shamefully hideous. But at Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, all the girls danced up there at the Mount of Olives, pretty and ugly alike, and that is somewhere Theo really should visit, they said. He wouldn’t come back empty-handed, they’d guarantee it.

There, in that peaceful Judaean night, Uri very much longed to look at the girls on the Mount of Olives, though he had no idea where it was located in relation to his prison cell and the Antonia. He longed to take his pick among the girls and to satisfy his duties to married life not just on Fridays but on every single blessed day that the Lord gave them.

He asked them if they had chosen brides for themselves on the Mount of Olives.

No, not them, but lots had.

“Which of you are married, anyway?” he inquired.

A few were, but most were unmarried. One needed a lot of money to start a family, but Theo could do that because his father would surely send him money from Edom.

Uri did not feel it was his duty to enlighten them as to his family’s financial situation, as they wouldn’t understand in any case.

It became clear that many rich Roman Jewish heads of families gave financial support to family members left behind in Judaea, even if the fathers or grandfathers had never even seen them. The shores and provinces of the Great Sea were interwoven with far-reaching, invisible family spider’s webs, and Uri was not in the least surprised when he was told that there were even people in nearby villages who, being the relatives of prosperous Jews living in the Parthian Empire, sometimes quite unexpectedly received an allowance of one kind or another from Babylon. It wasn’t unusual for even the most learned masters who specialized in this sort of thing to be unable to disentangle their precise ties of kinship, yet all the same these unexpected gifts arrived from afar.

It was among these uneducated and illiterate peasants keeping watch over the crop by night that Uri came across a marvel with an exceptionally good memory. He was unable to say how old he was, and he too was called Simon, like the magus, and he had not left the village even once in his life. But he was able to retain every single thing he had ever heard; his memory was unable to delete a single thing. That was how the Everlasting Lord had created him, and the wretched creature was totally satisfied with his lot. He was a short, bald, pot-bellied, lazy man, with lots of laughter lines under his eyes. Whatever subject was under discussion he was able to string together such a multiplicity of anecdotes, with explanations tagged on, that his companions just couldn’t stop laughing. Simon had no liking for keeping vigil, but then he did not like to plow either; he preferred not to eat for days, or else he gleaned and roasted the grain somewhere. He had no family and no place to live.

Uri dared quietly to ask this Simon the name of the village whose hospitality he happened to be enjoying.

“Beth Zechariah,” said Simon.

That was what the hunchback had said, wasn’t it!

“It’s quite a famous village,” declared the homeless, roofless Simon. “When the Hasmoneans revolted, Judah Maccabee, the son of Mattathias, made an alliance with the Romans, occupied Jerusalem, and raised a new altar, but Antiochus Epiphanes, at the head of an army of fifty thousand foot soldiers, five thousand horsemen, and one hundred elephants, invaded Judaea from Syria, occupied Bethsura, and razed it, leaving no trace, and it was right here, in the defile where Beth Zechariah lies, that Antiochus clashed with Judah and his forces. And Judah’s younger brother, Eleazar ben Mattathias, singled out the biggest of the elephants, supposing that it was on the back of this one that King Antiochus was seated. He wounded the elephant from below, in the belly, and it collapsed, burying Eleazar beneath it. It was not on this elephant, however, that Antiochus was seated but a common soldier, as a trick. The Jews lost the battle too, and Antiochus went on to occupy Jerusalem, but he was not in a position to do much, as his food ran out, so he trailed back to Syria. Judah Maccabee could not handle the opportunity, and he fell in another battle, and the next of his bothers, Jonathan the Hasmonean, was also killed…”

“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.”

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.

The day it happened, though, Uri carried on sieving, but at noon, when they were chomping on their lunch (all of the more elderly ones doing so toothlessly), it was she who said to Uri, “There’s no point in your riddling with us, Theo. We’ll do your work; you’d do better keeping us amused.”

“Fair enough,” said Uri, “but what should I do?”

“Tell us stories,” the woman said.

“What stories should I tell? Nothing interesting has ever happened to me.”

“Not stories about yourself but about the big wide world, and the afterlife.”

Uri pondered. He could find things to say about the world, but the afterlife was another matter!

“In our country, in Edom,” he said, “people don’t concern themselves much with the afterlife… They know nothing about it.”

“Others do, however,” said the lady. “We have scrolls, only we can’t read them. Men occasionally try to make them out, but they don’t have the time; they are tired out by the evening when they might be able to read. They’d rather curl up and snore. People say you can read. Read out the scrolls to us, and we’ll work in the meantime.”

“Is that permitted, then?” Uri inquired.

Several voices clamored loudly that it was not forbidden, so it was allowed. They would perform Uri’s work; the supervisor could hardly object.

That was a bargain Uri was happy to enter. He would never have thought that scrolls existed in a godforsaken village such as this. What could they be?

That day he went on riddling, but the next morning one of the women thrust a thick scroll into his hands. Years ago, it had been left in the village by a wandering prophet, whom Master Jehuda had driven away in a great hurry, because he was proclaiming exactly what Master Jehuda did when inspired. The woman said that there had once been a time when her husband had tried reading out short passages to her, but he had gotten bored with that: reading did not come easily to him, and it had been impossible to persuade him to carry on. Yet the scroll concerned the one thing that was of paramount concern to people: what happens to us after we die.

The scroll must have passed through many hands, as the edges of the parchment were frayed. Uri carefully blew the dust off his sieve, and placed the scroll in that.

“I’d like to wash my hands,” he said. “I don’t want to smudge it.”

Two women jumped up and brought Uri pitchers of drinking water to pour onto Uri’s hands. That was significant, drinking water being in such short supply, but the women’s thirst for knowledge was greater than their bodily thirst. Uri asked them to take great care in pouring it out: slowly and just a little. That was how he rinsed his hands.

His tunic was mucky, and he could not dry his hands on it, so he dangled them and let them dry like that. When they were dry, he carefully took the scroll out of the sieve.

He sat down on the ground, blown-clean sieve in lap, scroll in hand. It was not as hefty as a Torah but it was as bulky as some of Ovid’s shorter works. It was not rolled onto a stick, just around itself. He threaded his left fist into the empty center of the roll and with his right hand he cautiously, delicately pulled the sheet to the right, only just enough so that he would be able to read the two columns in which the copyists had transcribed the first page. He looked at the text: it was upside down and in Greek. He rewound it and now poked his right fist into the scroll’s central gap and pulled it out with his left hand, then just when the scroll was about to roll itself onto his left arm, he grasped it at the bottom, between the left index finger and thumb, and pulled it gingerly, gently, leaving it to rewind on the left side of its own accord.

To begin he read slowly, hesitantly, having to get accustomed to the lettering, the omissions, and the language, which, though it was Greek, was an old Greek, with Hebrew words cropping up every now and then. The author of the Greek text must have translated it from the Hebrew, and any words that he did not know he had left in his mother tongue. He had become accustomed to this by the time he had reached the fourth or fifth page; anything he could not decipher he eked out from his imagination. If the ensuing sentences contradicted his guesswork, he went back and reread it and retranslated it to Aramaic as best he could. The riddling women did not make any reproving remarks on his jumping back in the text or his corrections; they were glad the reading helped them forget their physically punishing and soul-destroying work.

Uri was holding the Book of Enoch, he ascertained from the very first sentence.

He had heard of the existence of such a scroll, but not one person in Rome had a copy of it, or if they did, they were not admitting it, and it was the sort of work that the City’s public librarians never collected.

These are the words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the Elect and righteous, who will be living in the Day of Tribulation, when all the wicked and godless are to be removed…

Enoch begat Methuselah and lived 365 years, no less, as it states in the fifth chapter of Genesis. His father was Jared, who had lived 162 years before he begot Enoch. Like Elijah, Enoch was transported to Heaven in a chariot of fire. He may not even have died and was assumed to Heaven by the Lord in such a manner anyone witnessing it would have died. According to the Torah, his son Methuselah lived 187 years. He was Noah’s grandfather. The passage in question being found very near the beginning of the First Book of Moses, it is read out in every single Jewish prayer house on the first Sabbath of every year, not long after one year’s reading of the Torah is completed and an immediate ceremonial beginning is made to reading it out again.

Uri was helped in the translation by the fact that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah made in Alexandria, was also in use in Rome; there it was not necessary to translate the Torah into the vernacular because everyone was familiar with the Greek Torah, and there was only the odd household that kept a Hebrew Torah. On the other hand, the Ten Commandments on the parchment scroll in the mezuzah affixed to the doorpost of every house, as well as in the tiny scroll in the little leather box of every tefillin, were always written in Hebrew.

It occurred to Uri that he had never given any thought before as to what it must be like to live to 365—as many years as there were days in a year by the Roman calendar. Other Jews cannot have found much to get hung up on with that number: that was what was stated in the Torah, and even if it was a fairy tale, it was a true one and there was no need to give it further thought.

The Holy Great One will come forth from His dwelling, and the Everlasting Lord will tread upon the earth, even on Mount Sinai, and appear in the strength of His might from the heaven of heavens. And all shall be smitten with fear, and the Watchers shall quake. And great fear and trembling shall seize them unto the ends of the earth… And the earth shall be wholly rent asunder, and all that is upon the earth shall perish, and there shall be a judgment upon all men. But with the righteous He will make peace and will protect the Elect.

Uri read with great trouble, and although the riddling women did not ask him for any correction, he had to retranslate the opening passage to make more sense of it.

He was not in a position to notice, struggling as he was, that it was not the sense of what he was saying so much as his deep, pleasantly ringing bass-baritone voice. Its meaningless music helped the women in their work and swathed their minds in a soothing warmth. It was the voice of a man, who might still be little more than a child, but nevertheless that of a man, not the eternal chirrup of riddling women.

Uri read and translated extemporaneously what was written in the chapter concerning angels:

And it came to pass, when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of Heaven, saw and lusted after them… And Semjaza was their leader… And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And these are the names of their leaders: Samlazaz, their leader, Araklba, Rameel, Kokablel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqlel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Sariel. These are their decarchs…

Uri came to a stop. The women went on swirling their sieves.

He asked if they understood the meaning of the word Decarch, which he did not know how to translate into Aramaic. They didn’t, so he paraphrased the sentence, saying that these were the names of the leaders of each group of ten men. The women nodded with an air of exasperation and waited for him to continue; they had no great wish to understand the exact details of the tale.

That unsettled Uri, who would have liked to give an accurate translation, if any at all. This is where he had the feeling that something more was at work between the women and himself than the translation of a story. But then he was reluctant to go into that, so he went on.

And all the others, together with them, took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they bore great giants, whose height was three thousand ells, who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood…

Uri stopped and looked up. The women went on riddling; they were waiting for him to continue. They did not appear to have been shocked by all the monstrosities — the monstrosities in the story, not those in real life. After all, human beings do not normally devour one another’s flesh and drink their blood, though they were perfectly capable of imagining these things.

Uri went on.

And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures…

At this the women perked up, and they asked questions about what those might have been, but Uri plowed on implacably.

And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal taught astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to Heaven…

Uri glanced up and saw that the women were expecting him to continue, shuttling their sieves impatiently.

The writer who had pieced the book together was not over-endowed with talent and inspiration, Uri reflected. After all, he could not even remember whom he had listed just before as leaders of the groups of ten. He went on translating, seeing that this was what had been asked for, and it was better than riddling or sifting.

And then Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from Heaven, and they saw much blood being shed upon the earth, and all lawlessness being wrought upon the earth, and they spake unto the Lord… Then said the Most High, the Holy and Great One spake, and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him: “Go to Noah and tell him in my name, ‘Hide thyself!’ and reveal to him the end that is approaching: that the whole earth be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and destroy all that is on it. And now instruct him that he may escape and his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world.”

Uri stopped again. Uriel was his own nickname: it was a jolt to see it written down, and suddenly the text acquired a new relevance. He hoped the name would appear again. He went on.

And again the Lord said to Raphael: “Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever, and cover his face that he may not see light. And on the day of the great judgment he shall be cast into the fire. And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons. And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin.”

Uri raised his eyes. He did not grasp what the text was driving at, but the women must have done so rather better because they assiduously carried on with their riddling while waiting for him to resume. The women wore scarves for good reason; by now the sun was high in the sky, Uri’s own head was being burned, and he was parched. There was a hush. One of the women looked up, removed her own scarf and handed it to Uri.

“You’ll get a touch of the sun,” Uri said.

“I can pull my robe up over my head,” the woman said, and did just that. Uri gratefully knotted the scarf onto his head before carrying on reading the senseless text. It was still better than riddling.

And to Gabriel said the Lord: “Proceed against the bastards and the reprobates, and against the children of fornication, and destroy the children of fornication and the children of the Watchers from amongst men, and cause them to go forth: send them one against the other that they may destroy each other in battle…” And the Lord said unto Michael: “Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgment and of their consummation, till the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated.”

Uri read and translated the whole day long, and for the whole of the week he recounted the scroll, which the owner had asked be returned to her every evening but then gave back each day. By the time Uri, his head reeling, had reached the end, the women asked him to read it again, but now to try a bit harder.

Starting again from the beginning, Uri strove to couch the antiquated language into more everyday Aramaic. The women were amazed that a scroll might be construed in more than one way and recalled details from his halting first effort, which they asked him to recite. Uri tried to explain that the text had been written many generations ago, and meanwhile the Greek language had changed, as Aramaic had, but they could not understand; it was the language they had been handed down by their parents, and they in turn by their parents, and it was the same language. Uri did not push the matter further; he chose to let it spread in the village that Theo was a strange marvel: he could read something once, but not a second time.

The riddling and sifting women — for by then they had done the sifting, which was the final phase of the winnowing process, begun after the grain had been brought back from the mill, and they were riddling the newly threshed grain as it came in — nonetheless enjoyed the tale more the second time around, and when Uri reached the end again, they begged him to read it a third time. By then the supervisor himself was in the habit of hanging around; at first he had merely turned up more often on the pretext of checking the work, but in the end he would perch among them and, enthralled, listen to the adventures of Enoch. Uri had a shrewd suspicion that the plowmen were quite pleased that things had turned out that way, and would repay him for his service when the occasion arose, because during those days, thanks to him, they were spared the rigors of the supervisor’s stick.

Another thing also happened.

One day a frail young girl was riddling with her sieve next to Uri. Uri noticed she was radiant in some manner but did not pay it any attention; that evening, however, the girl took off her headscarf, and Uri suddenly felt a deep-seated, tingling pang in his chest. Never before had he seen such loveliness. She had an oval little face, close-knit black eyebrows, long, jet-black hair, dark-brown eyes, a snub nose, nicely arched lips, slim arms, slender wrists, and long, thin fingers. Uri propped his head on his elbows and just gazed, spellbound. The girl sensed it, took one triumphant glance at him from under those black brows, and burst out laughing.

Uri averted his gaze in shame. The spectacle had consumed his entire inner being. He began to fume, because in casting his mind back he distinctly recalled that he had been entranced by the young girl the whole day long. Why was it only now that she was acting as if she had just noticed him?

That night Uri tossed restlessly, unable to sleep, his body no longer drained by work. He would have preferred to sleep but couldn’t; in a half-sleeping state he relived the Book of Enoch.

It’s not such a bad idea at all, he mused, if every time women were expecting offspring they could see the rotten end that awaited their children and mourn them in advance with their sighs, and their pleas for mercy would be in vain.

It was all very well that Enoch took pity upon the guardian angels mixing with the children of men, and he went off, sat down at the waters of Dan and wrote out their petition. That’s practically Homeric, Uri thought, to read this petition in the presence of the Lord of Heaven till he fell asleep — not the Lord but Enoch himself, the author of the petition! Someone finds himself in the presence of the Lord, reads his petition to the Lord and meanwhile falls asleep!

In his dream, visions fell down upon Enoch, apocalyptic visions. That’s pretty good as well, Uri thought, and he could see before his eyes the letters, which he had already gone through twice, but even more so the scene that lay behind them, colorful and sharp, and which the writer also saw, it would seem, being able, like Uri, to think pictorially.

In Enoch’s vision, clouds invited him and a mist summoned him, lightning hastened him, and the winds lifted him upward; that is how he was borne into Heaven. He reached a wall built of crystals and surrounded by tongues of fire. Enoch went into the tongues of fire and reached a large house with walls or crystal, tessellated floor of crystal, and groundwork all of crystal. Its ceiling was like the paths of the stars, illuminated by lightning flashes, and between them were fiery cherubim, and a flaming fire surrounded the walls, and its portals blazed with fire. And Enoch entered that house, and it was hot as fire and cold as ice. (The author of the scroll must also have been in lands that were farther north than Palestine, Uri supposed in his more prosaic earthly fashion.) And in that house there was a second house, an even greater one built of flames of fire, and in it stood a lofty throne with wheels looking like the shining sun and cherubim. On the throne was seated the Great Glory, and His raiment shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow. None of the angels could enter that house or behold Him. Ten thousand times ten thousand stood waiting for His orders before Him, who could do anything.

Enoch was also standing there, and the Lord railed against the degenerate angels who had lain with women, saying:

As for the spirits of Heaven, in Heaven shall be their dwelling, but as for the spirits of the earth which were born upon the earth, on the earth shall be their dwelling. And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth until the day of the great judgment in which the age shall be consummated.

And the Lord bade Enoch to say to them, “You have no peace.”

So much for Heaven as far as the scroll was concerned.

Uri contemplated what more might be added but there wasn’t anything. Heaven, it seemed, was not too interesting.

All the more so the earth and the Underworld.

And they brought me to a place in which those who were there were like flaming fire, and, when they wished, they appeared as men.

Uri recollected that sentence precisely; he had translated it at first sight, and only then had he thought about it.

Man as a fire — not bad. Man as a thing — not bad. Things that could assume human form if they wished. That sort of thing could be read about neither in Greek nor Roman poetry. The person who wrote down the Book of Enoch must have known a thing or two about men. Plato would have been delighted to listen, might have even given its philosophy a once-over.

I too am a flaming fire, Uri reflected. What is so different about being human?

I saw the great rivers and came to the great river and to the great darkness, and went to the place where every flesh walks.

What sort of river was that? What kind of place was that, where every flesh walks? Human flesh?

And I saw a deep abyss, with columns of heavenly fire, and among them I saw columns of fire fall, which were beyond measure alike toward the height and toward the depth. And beyond that abyss I saw a place which had no firmament of the heaven above, and no firmly founded earth beneath it. There was no water upon it, and no birds, but it was a waste and horrible place. I saw there seven stars like great burning mountains, and to me, when I inquired regarding them. The angel said, “This place is the end of Heaven and Earth; this has become a prison for the stars and the host of Heaven. And the stars which roll over the fire are they which have transgressed the commandment of the Lord in the beginning of their rising, because they did not come forth at their appointed times. And He was wroth with them, and bound them till the time when their guilt should be consummated — even for ten thousand years.”

Uri liked the idea of the Lord punishing the reluctant stars.

And there was in it four hollow places, deep and wide and very smooth. How smooth are the hollow places and deep and dark to look at. Then Raphael answered, one of the holy angels who was with me, and said unto me, “These hollow places have been created for this very purpose, that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble therein, yet that all the souls of the children of men should assemble here. And these places have been made to receive them till the day of their judgment and till the great judgment.” I saw a dead man crying, and his voice went forth to Heaven and he cried. And Raphael said: “This is the spirit which went forth from Abel, whom his brother Cain slew, and he cries against him till his seed is destroyed from the face of the earth…”

He can cry for ages, thought Uri.

Enoch then came to the Garden of Righteousness and he saw from afar many very great, beautiful, glorious, and magnificent trees, and the Tree of Knowledge, whose holy fruit they eat and know great wisdom.

“This,” said Raphael, the holy angel, who was with Enoch: “This is the tree of which thy old father and thy aged mother, who were your ancestors, have eaten, and they learned wisdom and their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they were driven out of the garden.”

Uri was reclining, half-asleep. It was the first time in many months that he had come across letters; he was tired out by the task of translating.

Since he had been compelled to live away from Rome and his books, he had hardly missed exerting any mental effort, and now, in this godforsaken village, here was this prophetic, vision-packed ancient scroll in Greek. An odd coincidence, as if the Lord were guiding him back to his original path.

Never before had he read anything so slowly and scrupulously, so the listeners could fully absorb the material. There were not many scrolls in Judaea — the Torah and a few scrolls of the Psalms certainly. The text struck him more deeply here, precisely because there was nothing else. The more tightly the writing is rationed, the greater the effect it has.

He had been sleeping badly ever since he was forced into employment as a reader. But now the reason he could not sleep was because he saw the little girl, her pretty face, the slender neck, the eyebrows that almost ran together above her nose, the fine dark hairs on her arms and also on her legs. A woman for all that! Uri groaned. A raging emptiness was worrying his insides. A horribly happy torment.

He was apprehensive about getting up the next day. If he translated the scroll once again for the women, was he also going to return to the sieve?

He wished the scroll were longer.

The Eternal One was merciful to him, though; the scroll was in the woman’s hands again, and he was asked to read it through yet again, but now starting from the point that concerned the Lord of Spirits, because they had taken a great liking to that bit.

Uri muttered a prayer of thanksgiving as he peered around in search of the young girl. He did not see her, however, so he sighed and went on to read out the Vision of Wisdom seen by Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Cainan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam. On reading and translating it this time, he discovered that this part might well be of more recent origin than the rest. Here there were only Greek words, not any Hebrew. Maybe that meant the scroll was not the work of a single author.

Deepening his already sonorous voice even further, Uri almost crooned through this reading, directing it at the young girl, even though she was not present.

And when the Righteous One shall appear before the eyes of the righteous, whose elect works hang upon the Lord of Spirits, and light shall appear to the righteous and the elect who dwell on the earth. Where then will be the dwelling of the sinners, and where the resting place of those who have denied the Lord of Spirits? It had been good for them if they had not been born. When the secrets of the righteous shall be revealed and the sinners judged, and the godless driven from the presence of the righteous and elect, from that time those that possess the earth shall no longer be powerful and exalted, and they shall not be able to behold the face of the holy, for the Lord of Spirits has caused His light to appear on the face of the holy, righteous, and elect. Then shall the kings and the mighty perish and be given into the hands of the righteous and holy. And thenceforward none shall seek for themselves mercy from the Lord of Spirits, for their life is at an end.

So taken were the vengeful women by this passage that Uri was obliged to read it out for a fourth time. They even stopped riddling, and kept nodding and calling out: “Yes, that’s how it will be; that’s exactly right.” The more prudent, being fearful of this prophecy, asked him to carry on.

He was unable to do so because one of the women, Rachel by name, said that she had seen the skies open and an angel had descended to take action against the powerful. Rachel had deep-set eyes and looked intently for long periods in one direction. All her limbs were withered. The other women, though, backed her up; what Rachel had said was true, because she had already told them as much earlier. Rachel also related that in her dream she had been visited by the same Gabriel Enoch encountered. Gabriel had spoken of huge rats, but Rachel could not fully understand why, and the angel had not come again to explain further. Still, it was quite certain that he would because she had heard his voice, albeit only briefly, when she was wide awake.

Another woman, Anna, told of how when she was young, when her mother was dying, a prophet had spoken to her about the heavens, and how up there her mother would lie on soft feather bedding and the boils would disappear from her back, and the gangrene of her legs would heal. The boils had disappeared since then, because that had been many, many years ago, and in her dreams she would see her mother on the other side, and she was completely healthy, even more sound than when she had been living in this world.

Others corroborated her claims.

“When our dead relatives visit us in our dreams they are unscathed, and Master Jehuda said that this was no mere chance, because if we were good and our souls were clean, then we would win a vision of Heaven; that was our reward for our obedience. On these occasions we were able to see our loved ones after the Day of Judgment, for which every dead person readies himself in great haste. It is necessary to be ready by the time everybody is reborn. Everybody will be as they were in the prime of life, may the Eternal One be blessed for not resurrecting anyone who is ill, as that would be a great and unjust cruelty! Surely the Lord could not want that. ‘If we were not good and our souls were shackled by our evil actions,’ said Master Jehuda, ‘then we see nothing, or only horrors.’ And we must listen to what our dead relatives say. Their chatter may seem meaningless, but they know very well what they are saying. We just have to try hard to understand.”

Others said they had seen demons exorcised from the bodies of sick people. They were exceedingly vile — hairy, with tails, hooves, and teeth like wild beasts’.

They told him that in Jerusalem many were overcome each year by a wonderful dream in which they would bathe in the Hinnom during the feast days. It was well known that the long-lost Ark of the Covenant was not in fact lost but there, wisely concealed in the bed of the river before our ancestors went to Babylon, and to this day the Eternal One was in that submerged ark. He sent dreams to his believers through the rays of the sun, and the faithful who truly observed the law dreamed the truth. They owned very little and could not sacrifice very much, but they had love for the Lord in their hearts, so they observed the law; that was what counted, not the size of the sacrifice. The wandering prophets had already told them as much when they had come here to console them, and they had surely been right.

The more sober-minded among the women asked Uri to continue; they were not curious about the dreams of common people but Enoch’s dreams. Uri resumed.

And it shall come to pass in those days that elect and holy children will descend from the high Heaven, and their seed will become one with the seed of the children of men…

“That of their daughters,” someone said.

“It says ‘children’ here,” said Uri.

“Does that mean women descend and become one with our husbands?”

“That I don’t know,” said Uri. “I’m only translating what is written here.”

The women began to argue about what the holy children who would descend from Heaven, the angels, might be. Were they boys or girls? The scroll’s owner considered that some paired with boys, others girls, depending on their own gender. An aging, stringy women said with a wheeze that devils were all male and angels all female, as could be seen on Earth. Some young women protested that they had come across a brood of women possessed by devils of both genders. A portly, loud woman reminded them that when a sorcerer had healed an unhinged Judith and successfully exorcised her demon, he said that she had a male devil in her.

“What sort of cure was that? She went and died!”

“Yes, but only six months later, and it’s not certain the healing helped at all.”

“Most certainly it is! Everyone dies from being cured. It’s best not to cure anyone but to pray for them.”

Here was something they could all agree on: praying always helped, while medical treatment only seldom did, and even then it was not certain that the treatment was what had done it.

The supervisor came up and the women started to wriggle the sieves assiduously, whereas Uri carried on. The supervisor lay down on one side, supporting his head on his arm. He popped a grain of barley into his mouth and began to chew it.

And there I saw One who had a head of days, and his head was white like wool, and with him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man, and his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels. I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was. And he answered and said unto me, “This is the Son of Man with whom dwelleth righteousness, and who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden. Because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him, and whose lot hath the preeminence before the Lord of Spirits in uprightness for ever. And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats, and he shall loosen the reins of the strong and break the teeth of the sinners. And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms because they do not extol and praise Him, nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them. And he shall put down the countenance of the strong, and shall fill them with shame, and darkness shall be their dwelling, and worms shall be their bed…”

Silence reigned, except for a heaving of sighs.

And in that place I saw the fountain of righteousness, which was inexhaustible. And around it were many fountains of wisdom, and all the thirsty drank of them and were filled with wisdom. And their dwellings were with the righteous and holy and elect. And at that hour that Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord of Spirits, and his name before the Head of Days… He shall be a staff to the righteous whereon to stay themselves and not fall, and he shall be the light of the Gentiles and the hope of those who are troubled of heart… For this reason hath he been chosen and hidden before Him, before the creation of the world and for evermore…

At this point the supervisor asked what the Son of Man was called.

Uri said that the text did not give any name.

“It should, though,” some said.

Uri replied that he only read and translated, and he did not know. He added that even he did not understand every word.

He was not clear how the Son of Man was formed before the creation of the world, and by whom. Did that mean there was another Creator and another Creation, that our Lord’s Creation had been torn down and rebuilt, and all that remained of the old was the Son of Man? And he had been in danger of being stricken down by God for a long time, and our Everlasting had only now forgiven him for existing? And had the Lord, who formed everything, also given a part in that formation to Mithras, who spans the stars every thousand years and is thus a second Creator beside the Creator? And could that second Creator perchance have been named the Son of Man in the text?

No one answered the questions, nor did they understand them. They had not heard about Mithras, and they did not wish to, simply because they had not previously heard about him. Another name would have been too much, as would another Creator. They were quite content with the One who punishes and to whom they had to make sacrifices to appease.

Uri set aside those thoughts for the night and carried on with the story his audience could not get enough of.

In these days, downcast in countenance shall the kings of the earth have become, and the strong who possess the land because of the works of their hands, for on the day of their anguish and affliction they shall not be able to save themselves… Because the Elect One standeth before the Lord of Spirits, and his glory is for ever and ever, and his might unto all generations… On the day of affliction on which evil shall have been treasured up against the sinners. And the righteous shall be victorious in the name of the Lord of Spirits… And in those days shall the earth also give back that which has been entrusted to it, and Sheol also shall give back that which it has received. And Hell shall give back that which it owes. For in those days the Elect One shall arise, and he shall choose the righteous and holy from among them, for the day has drawn nigh that they should be saved… And in those days shall the mountains leap like rams, and the hills also shall skip like lambs satisfied with milk…

It was a treat for him to say, and a treat for them to hear, that Enoch knew for sure there would be a resurrection.

Not for everyone, however!

There mine eyes saw a deep valley with open mouths, and all who dwell on the earth and sea and islands shall bring to him gifts and presents and tokens of homage, but that deep valley shall not become full. And their hands commit lawless deeds, and the sinners devour all whom they lawlessly oppress, yet the sinners shall be destroyed before the face of the Lord of Spirits, and they shall be banished from the face of His earth, and they shall perish for ever and ever. For I saw all the angels of punishment abiding there and preparing all the instruments of Satan. And I asked the angel of peace who went with me, “For whom are they preparing these instruments?” And he said unto me, “They prepare these for the kings and the mighty of this earth, that they may thereby be destroyed.” And I looked and turned to another part of the earth, and saw there a deep valley with burning fire.

And they brought the kings and the mighty, and began to cast them into this deep valley. And there mine eyes saw how they made these their instruments, iron chains of immeasurable weight. And I asked the angel of peace who went with me, “For whom are these chains being prepared?” And he said unto me, “These are being prepared for the hosts of Azazel, so that they may take them and cast them into the abyss of complete condemnation, and they shall cover their jaws with rough stones as the Lord of Spirits commanded… And in those days he will open all the chambers of waters above the heavens and of the fountains which are beneath the earth. And all the waters shall be joined with the waters. That which is above the heavens is the masculine, and the water which is beneath the earth is the feminine. And in those days the angels shall return and hurl themselves to the east upon the Parthians and Medes. They shall stir up the kings, so that a spirit of unrest shall come upon them, and they shall rouse them from their thrones, that they may break forth as lions from their lairs, and as hungry wolves among their flocks. And they shall go up and tread under foot the land of His elect ones. And the land of His elect ones shall be before them a threshing-floor and a highway. But the city of my righteous shall be a hindrance to their horses. They shall begin to fight among themselves, and their right hand shall be strong against themselves. A man shall not know his brother, nor a son his father or his mother, till there be no number of the corpses through their slaughter. And their punishment be not in vain. In those days Sheol shall open its jaws, and they shall be swallowed up therein. And their destruction shall be at an end; Sheol shall devour the sinners in the presence of the elect.”

That part was greatly to the taste of the bloodthirsty women, and even more so was Enoch’s proclamation.

“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.

On some law-days they might have nothing to do; they would sit in the shade, snacking on the challah baked by the master’s wife, sipping wine and scratching, the master dispensing pearls of wisdom. But there would be other occasions they were called on to make decisions on two or three matters, in which case they would have to deliberate hard, with their brows furrowed in deep thought. The master’s wife served the challah and wine but otherwise was not to be seen; she had no right to participate. The closing of the day’s affairs was dinner, the master’s wife serving it with a surly look, slapping it down and departing. Master Jehuda, Esdras, Johanen, and Uri would consume the food and drink, then the two magistrates would leave and Master Jehuda would ask Uri what he thought — whether they had done well in sorting out that day’s business, and whether they had served the law in a manner that was pleasing to the Lord — and would sit smugly as Uri told him that they had.

It was around this time, toward the end of the day, that the assistants would come to the house and give an account of what they had done that day, whether they had finished this or that chair or couch or table, whether they had managed to sell it, and to whom, which adze or knife had become blunted and whether they had been able to whet it anew. It was never news of major matters that they reported, but it was always embellished and made to sound important, and Master Jehuda took pleasure in the details.

The people who requested advice or were in litigation were also interested in the tiny details. Uri never ceased to be amazed at the questions. To whom does fruit hanging over a fence from a tree on the other side belong? To whom does water situated on the boundary line between two properties belong? Whose duty was it to repair the cistern? Who should pay the cost of a broken vase, a slave’s owner or the slave himself? Was it permissible to slaughter a neighbor’s stray chicken? What punishment was due to a slave boy who fell asleep while watching a flock and let a sheep go missing? What was the owner’s liability? But then there were also some more serious issues with which the judges might wrestle for weeks.

The three of them were charged with determining whether a firstborn animal brought before them was ritually pure and flawless and therefore fit to be handed over to the priests as a sacrificial offering.

Three of them were needed because none of them was a kosher butcher. A firstborn lamb, calf, chick, or any other clean animal species would be carefully examined: the ears to check they were not damaged, likewise the mouth and nose; the legs to check whether they were broken, and the tail too; the eyes to ensure they were not dropsical or inflamed and the white had not infiltrated the black of the pupil, which was an imperfection (though not the other way around because any color was allowed to infiltrate white, white being clean). Uri’s presence inspired them to conduct even more thorough investigations than usual.

There was one religious matter that they pondered on for a long time.

A man by the name of Ezekiel had died unexpectedly, but his widowed wife, Martha, mother of three sons and many daughters, did not wish to marry her deceased husband’s elder brother, Thomas, which she would normally be obliged to do by the rules of levirate marriage unless she underwent the ceremony of halizah.

“Such a thing still exists?” Uri asked.

Yes and no, he was told. It still existed under the law, but was not common by tradition. Still, custom had to defer to the law, seeing as the Lord had commanded that two people who did not desire each other’s bodies should not be united. Out of that there would be no proliferation. The Creator had commanded that people should multiply, and that command took priority over the levirate, which was compulsory of course, but except for when a woman was infertile, since then she had no value to the Lord.

In such a case, Master Jehuda explained, the usual practice was for the wife to take the brother-in-law’s left sandal and publicly spit in front of him as a sign that she did not wish to enter a levirate marriage. Because her dead husband’s family could not tolerate such humiliation, by this coarse act she would extricate herself from their ownership and return to her father’s family. Even if her father had long since died, her male relatives were obliged to accept her under their ownership, a woman being a man’s property through the wish of the Lord, who also subordinated the beasts to man. The same would happen if a dead man’s brother did not wish to marry the widow, Master Jehuda explained, except in that case the brother would take off the dead man’s sandal and spit in front of the widow and the halizah would be in force.

However, in this case, Thomas, the elder brother, was unwilling to validate the halizah, saying that his younger brother had wished to dissolve his marriage bond and had gone as far as having a bill, a get, written out and signed by two witnesses. The widow had hidden it but he had somehow found it. The woman ought to be regarded as divorced, he argued, and the removal of the sandal and the spitting should be regarded as invalid.

Jehuda said that they would give some thought to the matter, and Thomas left. He was a swarthy, vigorous man with dark eyes and a menacing gait.

All four of them carefully studied the divorce instrument. It was scrawled in Aramaic, but still legible.

It was the first time Uri had seen a divorce bill.

“What do you make of it?” Jehuda inquired.

Uri shrugged his shoulders.

“A divorce bill has to contain the signatures of the husband and two witnesses and to state what it is, for what purpose, and when it was written,” said Jehuda.

“Those things are all present,” said Uri.

“It’s a forgery,” Johanen declared roundly.

“I believe so too,” Master Jehuda said. “But then what proof do we have?”

“Thomas is always lying,” said Johanen, “even when he is not speaking.”

Esdras confirmed this.

The two magistrates had no great liking for Thomas, Uri had to conclude, and he waited with some curiosity to see if they would dismiss the dubious evidence on that account.

They established, however, that the ketubah did figure in the text.

The ketubah was the marriage document recording the husband’s obligations to his wife and what she is entitled to so as not to be left destitute in the case of a divorce. It was a form of contract also made in Rome which often gave the people who dwelt on Far Side reason to gossip for weeks on end about which women had received how much money upon being divorced. Reading that in this case the ketubah concerned land, Uri asked what the custom was in Judaea.

Master Jehuda gave a mischievous laugh.

“Among us, a ketubah can only ever be about land,” he said. “There’s the issue! So?”

Esdras and Johanen scanned the letter of divorce once more but could find nothing odd about it.

“You’re all blind,” Master Jehuda declared with a superior air. “It says here that the woman is to receive a land area equal to seventeen qabs of grain and a stretch of orchard equal to four qabs. What do you make of that, then?”

They still saw nothing wrong with that.

“Right, then,” said the master, taking a deep breath, his face shining and eyes glinting as slyly as any Roman lawyer’s, before launching into his explanation. “They had three sons. The eldest inherits twice as much as the other two, which makes four parts, two of which go to the firstborn son. It says here the deceased man owned fields equal to sixty-five qabs plus five qabs of orchard. As far as the field area is concerned, you have to subtract the seventeen qabs that are owed to the woman from the sixty-five qabs, leaving forty-eight qabs. The eldest son will get twenty-four, and the other two, twelve each. That’s all in order, because then everyone gets more than nine qabs, the minimum required. However, if the mother gets four qabs of the orchard, that will leave the three sons altogether one qab. The obligatory minimum portion of an inheritance is half a qab of orchard; one is not allowed to bequeath any less than that! Ezekiel must have been fully aware of the size of his property. He could not have bequeathed to Martha a stretch of orchard equal to four qabs, because in so doing that would have left only one qab over, and splitting that into four half-qab portions just cannot be done! Under the law Martha could only have been due three qabs; then at least the sons would have been left two qabs, of which one qab was due to the firstborn and a half a qab each to the other two. But that’s not what is written here, so it’s invalid!”

Esdras and Johanen just gazed stupidly, while Uri did the math in his head.

“That’s true,” he said. “But maybe the man made a mistake in his calculations.”

“In principle, he could have,” Master Jehuda nodded. “In such cases the power is vested in us to correct a bill of divorce and to get it signed by him and the witnesses. But he’s dead now, and it’s useless for us to alter it. So what are we to do?”

Master Jehuda’s manner of proceeding was to tease things out by posing questions; he had no other approach.

Esdras and Johanen had no idea; Uri mulled it over.

“I have no idea,” he announced.

“That’s it!” exclaimed Master Jehuda. “That’s it! We have to hear the woman out! Didn’t that ever occur to you?”

Uri bit his lip; that had not occurred to him. He was being put to shame by a bumbling, blaring, blustering master craftsman! He fumed.

Master Jehuda sent a servant to the widow with a message, and she appeared on the next law-day. She was a sad woman dressed in mourning clothes like any elderly widow, though her sons were still minors and she could not have been more than twenty-five years old. She said that her husband had never wanted to divorce her; that was merely a lie constructed by his elder brother, who, she was now hearing, wanted to marry her even though they had never been able to stand each other. She didn’t understand what this might be about. She herself had never seen the bill of divorce.

Master Jehuda sent away Martha, the widow, and summoned the two alleged witnesses to the letter. One had the features of a mouse, the other of a rat; Uri shuddered when he saw them. They were both in rags and stank to high heaven.

Both asserted that Ezekiel had dictated the bill of divorce in their presence and that they had signed it in front of him when he was still alive (the date was on it). They had also been present when he handed it to his wife.

Jehuda dismissed them.

“So?” he asked.

In Esdras’s opinion Martha had been telling the truth, while in Johanen’s opinion that was not necessarily the case.

Uri then asked when a bill of divorce became valid.

“That’s a good question,” Master Jehuda nodded. “According to the sage Hillel a bill of divorce becomes effective when the woman receives and reads it and understands she is again free to marry. But according to his colleague Shammai it is valid if it is simply read out in front of her.”

“The two witnesses were bribed,” said Uri. “Only I don’t understand why.”

“That’s it!” exclaimed Master Jehuda. “Let’s assume Ezekiel did not want a divorce. The elder brother would then be obliged to marry his younger brother’s widow, in which case all the property would be his. Thomas knew, though, that Martha would be unwilling to marry him after her husband’s death and would quite certainly go through with the ceremony of halizah. In that case he would get nothing. However, with a forged bill of divorce, which can’t be proven to have been drawn up after the event, the relation between mother and sons would be destabilized. The forged bill of divorce would raise discord, one or more three of the sons flees to Thomas to be kept under his guardianship, and he, together with them, composes a last will and testament containing the inheritance to which they are entitled. Until they have reached the age of majority, he administers it and derives the benefit, with only the very little the law provides going to the widow. She is wiped out, and he accomplishes his aim. No doubt he was attracted to Martha, who was very good-looking when she was young, but even then she did not wish to share his bed, so this was his way of getting revenge!”

Uri was astounded as he listened to the master: the beast knew a thing or two after all! Uri was none too pleased in realizing it.

“Martha was a pretty girl when she was twelve,” Master Jehuda nodded, lost in reverie. Esdras and Johanen nodded along too. They gave thanks to the Lord for creating something of beauty; if only he had created it to last just a tiny bit longer! Uri imagined the black-haired young girl, who could not be much older than Martha had been when she was still entrancing. In another fifteen years she too would be an ancient hag.

“So, what should we do to prevent this disgraceful deed?” the master asked.

Uri thought a bit before answering.

“It seems likely, I know, that the bill of divorce was forged, but let’s pretend that it’s genuine. The woman spits in front of her brother-in-law and no longer has to become his wife. We ratify the ownership of the land but amend the bit that relates to the orchard. Instead of four qabs she’ll get three.”

“That we can’t amend!” screeched Master Jehuda. “Only the head of the family can do that, which in this case means the dead man’s older brother, Thomas. There is no brother older than him, only younger brothers, and the father is no longer alive.”

They fell silent. It was no easy matter sitting in judgment in Rome, where one couldn’t tell who was the head of a clan, and evidently it wasn’t easy here either, even if everybody had known everybody else since birth.

“One thing we can do,” said Master Jehuda after some rumination. “We drum up two witnesses who swear they saw Thomas, the elder brother, forging the bill of divorce. Then it’s two witnesses’ word against two — and all four are lying. There’s no way for one side to disprove the other. It will cost the widow a bit, but it will be worth it. After hearing the false witnesses we will decide that the bill of divorce is genuine, but faulty and thus null. Since the deceased is not in a position to rewrite it, it’s as if it did not exist. We will not request that the head of the family correct it; that’s not a requirement. The woman will not insist on it; she spits in front of him, so she’ll be left to live in peace with her sons and daughters.”

A sage man was Jehuda; he was not a master for no reason.

Slow-talking Johanen nodded respectfully and kept on nodding until he noticed that he was in fact shaking his head. With great difficulty he formulated his objection, which was, “If the bill of divorce is faulty, it ought to be amended.”

“It doesn’t need to be,” said Master Jehuda, turning purple.

“Yes, we need to,” persisted Johanen.

Everyone looked at Esdras, who was not just slow of speech but slow in his thinking. He cogitated long and hard before shaking his head. Master Jehuda jumped up irately and, quite spryly considering his bulk, raced around the room.

“You can’t mean that we should ask Master Joshua, can you?” he bellowed.

Esdras prepared himself to give a slow nod, at which point the matter suddenly took on an unexpected new complexion. As it was explained to Uri, it would be necessary to see Master Joshua in the seventh village for him to give an opinion.

Uri suspected that there were no warm feelings between Jehuda and Joshua: both were masters and the authority of their respective villages, so what reason would they have to respect each other?

The issue then came up of whom to send to see Master Joshua.

The two elected magistrates were unwilling to go; it was quite enough that they were already losing their Mondays and Thursdays during the harvest.

Johanen put forward a few names, but Master Jehuda did not believe any of them were suitable, at which Johanen took offense. Uri inferred that he had recommended various relatives or their sons.

Esdras, out of slowness and for safety’s sake, had no recommendations. Jehuda looked at Uri.

“I can go,” he said. “But give me someone to go with who knows the way.”

He was glad at the prospect of at last getting free of the village. Other villages might be no better, but at least he would be away from this one.

Master Jehuda, however, decided that Uri could not go.

“You’ve been placed under my care,” he said, with something that almost resembled affection. “I couldn’t bear it if any harm were to befall you on the way.”

Uri protested that no harm would befall him, but Master Jehuda was unbending. Of course, Uri thought gloomily; he’s my jailer, that’s what he was instructed by the fire signals. He’s frightened I’ll make my escape.

In the end, they sent someone else, with whom Uri was not acquainted; he was a young man but already married, and he spent a long time in whispered conversation with Jehuda in a corner before eventually setting off. He returned two days later, and again there was a lengthy whispered conversation with Master Jehuda.

On the next law-day, when at dawn people reluctantly trudged off toward the house of prayer, clay tablets under their arms, Uri stood in front of the house, watching them, and Master Jehuda greeted the two elected magistrates with a transfigured countenance.

“I’ve got the solution!” he exclaimed jubilantly.

They ate challah, sipped wine, and the master expounded. He announced with some sorrow that the messenger’s trip had proved fruitless. Master Joshua had provided no advice of any use, even though he did possess a lot of the oral tradition in written form. Still, the Teaching did not have to be in written form so long as it was in heads and hearts, Master Jehuda declared. He nodded in agreement with himself and the two elected magistrates enthusiastically joined him.

The Eternal One, Jehuda made known, did not wish for this complex affair to remain unresolved, and while the messenger was talking with Master Joshua, who had no ideas to offer, the Creator had divulged to Jehuda the solution to the problem in a dream.

The bill of divorce was original; there could be no doubt about that, and there was no need to call in new witnesses. An error had been committed when it came to transferring the orchard portion of the property, and that error could be attributed to the fact that Ezekiel, may he rest in peace, had not been of sound mind when he dictated the ketubah. If he had not been of sound mind when he made the list of his wealth, then it was reasonable to suppose he did not wish to divorce either, since Martha had been a faithful wife, as anyone would be able to attest. On those grounds, then, the whole bill of divorce was null and void.

Jehuda went on. “Martha is lucky that Thomas miscalculated. Only the Eternal One could have clouded his mind when he muddled up the details of the orchard, just as it is the Creator dictating our judgment, blessed be His name.”

Master Jehuda had made a wise decision; the parties were able to acquiesce to it, and it satisfied Uri’s sense of justice. Still he would gladly have sought out that Master Joshua in the seventh village to ask him whether it was true that no ideas had occurred to him — along the lines, say, of Ezekiel not being of fully sound mind. He also considered whether partial judgments based on preconceptions were reached in all matters that were even just a tiny bit complicated.

Master Joshua’s name came up again soon enough.

Uri woke up one morning to find Master Jehuda standing gravely over him.

“Did I oversleep?” asked Uri in a panic, and sat up.

Master Jehuda shook his head.

“No, you didn’t oversleep, but for a week starting today you cannot sleep in the barn.”

“What did I do?” asked Uri, a little irritated.

“You didn’t do anything,” said Master Jehuda. “That’s an order, though. You are going to sleep in my room for a week, starting today.”

Uri scratched his head; the change was not much to his liking.

Since it was not a law-day, he was free to gaze at the slow, leisurely puttering of the assistant cabinetmakers, an agreeable activity given that it was blazing hot outside. It must be tough out in the fields right now. When the day drew to a close he went into the master’s place.

The master was reclining on his bed and staring at the ceiling. His wife sat by the window, sewing something in the dark. They had not yet lit a lamp.

When she saw Uri, she jumped up, furiously snatched a blanket, and clattered out of the house.

“Have I done something to offend her?” Uri queried.

“She offended you, the guest, for leaving without showing you any hospitality!”

Uri still didn’t understand. Jehuda sat up.

“Master Joshua,” he said, “big brains that he is, explains the law by saying that a menstruating woman need not sleep separately, but tradition makes it absolutely clear that a women should sleep for a week outside the house because she’s unclean! Master Joshua is stirring women up against us! It has driven my wife mad as well; at this time in the month she rages outside in the barn for a week! The custom is quite clear, though, and she knows it full well!” He then added confidentially, “Master Joshua, big brains that he is, uses his explanations of the law against me, but I can see through his game!”

Uri felt uneasy and did not have a single pleasant dream the whole week. Meanwhile, he had to listen to Master Jehuda’s infernal snoring from the other bed.

He did not see why Master Jehuda had to banish his wife for a week when they didn’t even share a bed.

As far as they knew in Rome, married partners in Palestine shared beds.

Master Jehuda’s wife might be glad that she was able to sleep outside in the barn, Uri thought. At least it was quiet there. Why had she stormed out so angrily?

Uri took notes in Master Jehuda’s house up till Shavuot, which fell on the sixth of Sivan, fifty days after the first day of Passover, which also marked when reaping of the wheat began. Because the gathering of the barley was still in progress, every hand was needed, Uri’s included.

Shavuot was a splendid festival, the ending of the Feast of Weeks. Flowers would be gathered to decorate the houses, wine would be drunk, and prayers said. People would go in procession to the shul, sing psalms, and listen to readings of the Torah, which would invariably include the Ten Commandments. The passages would be explained by prayer leaders, the masters among them. Work was still an urgent matter, and people got up at daybreak the next day for the harvest. Uri was put to work gathering the ears of grain, bending down like any of the women, a serrated blade in his right hand. His back ached but he did not complain.

The women wanted to hear the Book of Enoch from him all over again, but anything they did not understand they would ask to have explained, taking it for granted that Uri had a much better understanding (after all, he was the one reading it). I’ve become Enoch’s priest, Uri realized. The scroll was not there, but Uri was able to recite it from memory. When they asked about the large house built of crystals, he shared the vision that had come to his mind upon reading it, which differed from what the women imagined. He did not believe in the existence of angels but was obliged to give an account at particularly great length, given that the Book of Enoch passed on very little information about them. He spoke about the archangel Uriel, who radiated light but was unaware that inside him was the eternal flame of a sanctuary lamp. It was something he had made up, and it pleased the women.

He noticed that in the fields he was improvising ever more audacious tales. When he became wary of this and hesitated, the women pleaded with him until he felt bound to continue. Merged into the Book of Enoch were embellished and modified Greek and Roman fables. Uri astonished himself with how readily the storytelling went. There were times when he came to a standstill, because sometimes he too had to work and lost his breath, but the women would not stop urging him to continue. Uri once suggested someone else continue, it wasn’t so difficult, and provoked a general outcry. The women were convinced that Uri had already read secret chapters of the Book of Enoch back in Babylon (Why Babylon? Wasn’t Edom their name for Rome? Uri asked himself) and that it was his duty to share that knowledge with them. So Uri always picked it up again. Somehow, whenever he had to repeat a story he had already told and got to the first sentence, a picture would come to him, and he would begin telling the women about that picture. The picture would then come to life, and all he had to do was to relate what was transpiring before his mind’s eye, as if the image actually existed but he were the only one who saw it and had to describe it for the blind. When they questioned him on where he took the stories from, Uri himself would fib that back home in Babylon he had indeed read and heard other bits of the Book of Enoch. That would set their minds at rest, but Uri became uneasy. There was something sinful about his telling stories as if he were reading, and although he did not believe in devils, it was still a bit like having Satan dictate what he said.

When he was not telling tales, Uri would peer around as he bent over, searching from the side of his eyes for the lovely young girl. Finally he spotted her. She was balancing a pitcher on her head, so she must have been assigned to water-carrying duties; she smiled at him and moved on. Uri was again bewitched by those two dense, almost contiguous eyebrows. He asked what the girl’s name was, and after some hesitation the women told him: Miriam. A daughter of Master Jehuda’s slaves, and herself a slave, like all her older sisters and brothers.

Constantly, awake and in his dreams, he saw a vision of the lovely girl before his eyes. His entire inside pulsated, became a throbbing, exasperating, blissful torment as he began to think about how he could purchase her. He made inquiries as to what the price of a slave was. In Rome the starting price was eight hundred sesterces, or roughly the price of a cow, but it might go as high as one hundred thousand for an expert at some task. The women could make nothing of prices in sesterces, but they did know that the price of an agricultural slave laborer was forty zuz.

Uri’s heart sank. Forty zuz, or 160 sesterces, was no small amount, even in Rome.

It then became clear that this was the price for an adult male slave; women cost only half that. Uri breathed a sigh of relief. He tried to calculate how many days he would have to work as a journeyman in Judaea to scrape together the twenty zuz or eighty sesterces needed to buy the lovely young girl for himself.

A good worker in Jerusalem might earn one denarius per day, he was told when he asked about — not so different from Rome, where one could make around four sesterces. For twenty days’ wages in Jerusalem it was possible to buy a woman, but in the countryside even an experienced journeyman would not make one tenth the going rate in Jerusalem. So, it would be worth getting a job as a worker in Jerusalem, if only he could find a way of somehow getting back there. For the time being, however, he had to work unpaid for his lunch of bread dipped in vinegar, which he now ate just the same as the rest. Although it still upset his stomach, the vinegar did help quench his thirst in the hellish heat, and there was not enough water for all the girls with pitchers on their heads to serve the harvesters.

Get a laboring job in Jerusalem!

The supervisor, who remained on friendly terms with Uri and missed no chance to greet him when he checked up on the reaping women, said that he too had gained work as a laborer in Jerusalem, working as a paver on the roads for one denarius per day. He’d almost had to pay more for his bread and board, so he had returned to the village. Jerusalem was an expensive city. Most of the workers had no home to go to and slept like beggars out on the streets, where they were often robbed of whatever money they had. A man could consider himself lucky if he managed to save twenty or thirty zuz in a year.

A whole year’s work to earn the money to free a slave girl? Not so impossible.

Rome vanished from his consciousness; the only thing in the world was the present — the monotonous reality of barley and wheat fields, Judaea, nothing else. Uri suspected that he was starting to lose his senses, but he did not really care. He dreamed of having a family of his own. The young girl would bear him many children while he plowed and harvested, or learned about carpentering, and to the end of his days he would live here with the girl, who would never age. It was as if it were not the days of his exile he was spending in this village, as if his exile could not come to an end, ever.

Uri lay out in the field whenever he could during the lunch break, which was not long, and gazed at the sky.

The firmament was different here, so too were the spirits with which man was surrounded; the past, present, and future were different, the religion too, than they were in Rome. Uri was overcome by different images, different stories. Enoch was a living presence here, whereas in Rome it was Plato and Ovid. Enoch did not understand Plato, nor vice versa, but both were present where they were valid. Nothing valid in the Jewish quarter of Rome pertained here, whereas the Roman Jews had no awareness of Enoch.

How could that be?

The Eternal One must have been fed up with Uri’s infantile dreams because one morning he cut his left hand on a head of grain. It was bleeding heavily and the women advised him to go home to Master Jehuda, who had an herbal infusion that quelled bleeding.

Clutching the two bleeding fingers of his left hand with his right hand, Uri trudged back home from the fields. It was a route he knew well by now. He entered the house and stood there blinking. After the blinding outside light he could hardly see anything, hearing only a grunting and high-pitched shriek. The master’s wife was the one he saw first, sitting under the window and sewing something assiduously. The sounds emanated from over by the bed. Uri stepped closer and saw his prostrate master, who was fat but had surprisingly spindly legs that stuck out naked from underneath his rolled-up shirt. On his belly, unclothed, was the lovely young girl, riding him in a seated position, her long black hair let down and cascading. The master grunted while the young girl screamed and rode, and the master’s wife sewed.

Uri was so scared he couldn’t move. The master noticed someone had come in, and as he lay there he took a sideways glance at Uri and broke into a grin.

“Pretty little creature, isn’t she? No one could claim this is a goat!” he exclaimed, giving the girl’s naked behind a hefty whack and laughing uproariously. “If I’m in need of hands to work for me, I make them myself!”

The master’s wife glanced at Uri. In her eyes was a look of profound, blank loathing that encompassed everything living and lifeless — a curse. The young girl continued to ride on the master’s belly, oblivious.

Uri turned on his heels and ran out of the house. He raced over to the poultry yard and shooed the hens from one of the coops. Wings flapping, they scattered in panic. He crawled in and, flat on his stomach, hands clutched to his head, cried tears of anger.

He had to break free.

He was a Roman citizen; no one could force him to carry out slave labor in Judaea. He had not been sentenced for anything by any court of law. Everything that had been carried out against him over these months was illegal.

He would set off in any direction and just keep on going. The main thing was to get away from here.

The thought put him in a cheerful frame of mind. Things had become boring here anyway; new adventures awaited. Whether he would manage to get back to Rome at all was subject to doubt. But then what was home? Rome was a long way away, and the nineteen years that he had been obliged to live there had not been particularly pleasant. There was a world beyond Rome and Judaea.

Two days later he went out to the fields and waited until breakfast was brought. He ate the slice of bread dunked in vinegar, drank long drafts of water from a pitcher set in front of him by an elderly woman, put down his sickle, and slowly set off. No one looked after him, assuming he had something to attend to and would be back later.

Uri walked northward. The harvest was in progress all around, and the sun was blazing hot. Uri pulled his mantle over his head and kept walking. He was headed toward Samaria, where they hated the Jews of Judaea and did not pay tithes to the Temple in Jerusalem, but he was not a Judaean Jew; he was a Roman citizen with a mind of his own.

Around midday he decided to lie down and rest. What was the point in hurrying when he didn’t even know where he was going?

Sleep overcame him under a fig tree. The foliage of fig trees throw impenetrable, thick, marvelous shadows, may the Eternal One be blessed for creating them. It was late in the afternoon when he awoke.

He opened his eyes and could see human legs around him. He looked at the legs. They were all barefooted except for a single pair in sandals.

Uri sat up and studied the sandals before looking up.

There were seven dour male faces looking down at him. Two of them seemed familiar — he had been harvesting with them during the previous weeks — but he had never seen the others. He inspected the individual wearing the sandals more thoroughly, and the man inspected Uri back. Uri somehow felt he had seen that face before. Yes, that was it! He recalled the spearsman who had accompanied him from Jerusalem to Master Jehuda’s place. Uri nodded; it was the spearman’s younger brother.

Uri drew his legs up and waited for them to speak, but they remained silent. Uri looked the man in sandals straight in the eyes.

“Those were my sandals once,” he said impertinently.

Silence. Then the man in the sandals said, “I know.”

Uri was relieved. He clambered to his feet and stood there.

There was silence again.

“You’re going to have to go back,” the sandaled man said in a friendly tone. “You’re the guest of Master Jehuda.”

“I don’t care to,” Uri informed them.

Silence again as the men digested this response. Then the sandaled man, the spearsman’s younger brother, said, “You have to. We are here to defend the village. The master requested our help. We help him, and he pays us. We’ll escort you back lest there be any trouble.”

“I would prefer to stay with you in the caves,” Uri declared.

Another silence.

“That’s not possible,” said the sandaled man apologetically. “Master Jehuda didn’t say you could take to the caves, among the robbers. Or was that what he said to you?”

Uri pondered his response. “No, he didn’t say that,” he admitted.

They set off back to the south.

They were sturdy fellows, and they certainly did not give the appearance of wanting for anything. They were tidily clothed, and no ribs stuck out of their skin. Their tread was surer than that of peasants.

Uri laughed, nodded, and hummed a tune to himself.

It seemed Jerusalem was recruiting its police force from among the robbers, and out here in the country the robbers nurtured close relations with masters and acted as a local police force too. Like the master operating as a faithful representative of the Sanhedrin, they had no other choice. There was no way of escaping; the state was lying in wait behind every bush.

The robbers came to a stop at the edge of the village.

“Go back to Master Jehuda,” the man with the sandals advised. “If you try to leave again, we’ll catch you again.”

Uri nodded.

“My greetings to your brother,” he said.

“I’ll pass them on. Peace be with you.”

“Peace be with you all.”

Uri stood at the edge of the village like the spearsman and swordsman had done when, on their arrival at the village two months before, Uri had set off to look for Master Jehuda. He looked back and cordially waved. The robbers stood motionless.

Master Jehuda was gruff in his welcome.

“What do you expect from me?” he growled. Uri knew by now that his demeanor was more acting than genuine emotion. “That I kiss your ass because you were dumped on me? Isn’t this good enough for you? Can I help that? What’s your problem with me? Why do you want to ruin me?”

“I’m bored,” Uri announced. “At least let me return to Jerusalem!”

“Permission has to be granted for that,” the master grumbled.

“Get it,” Uri, the Roman citizen, urged.

“How am I to get it? From whom?”

“I’m not interested, just get it! Send a fire signal!”

“That costs! Each and every letter is three pondions!”

“So?”

“You pay for it!”

“How can I? You know very well that I have no money. You pay! You give loans at usurious interest rates and bankroll those robbers as your policemen!”

“You still pay, you good-for-nothing!” the master fumed, now with genuine passion.

“Pay yourself, you’ve got the money!”

“I don’t have the slightest intention of paying,” the master seethed. “Three pondions for each letter, vowels included! And they don’t even send those, the lazy bastards — only the consonants, but they still charge for them! I’m not willing to pay them! Lousy gougers, getting rich at my expense! I’m not letting them pinch my vowels!”

Uri could sense the bile accumulating within himself and did nothing to prevent it. Thoughts of the lovely young girl and her thrilling eyebrows had disappeared, and the throbbing in his insides he had felt each time he saw her had vanished; only a masculine desire for revenge remained, that of a murderer.

I’ll have forty other wives, Uri thought, each lovelier than Miriam.

“I’ll pay the half-shekel tax now,” said Uri scornfully, though quite unexpectedly even for himself.

The master did not understand and became flustered.

“That’s only needed at the end of winter,” he exclaimed.

“I want to pay it now!” Uri insisted with all the stubbornness of someone who wanted to grow up.

“Impossible! It’s collected in Adar!”

“And I’m going to pay in Sivan!” yelled Uri.

There was a lull. Uri took a wicked delight in all this. How on earth would he get half a shekel together now when he hadn’t a single prutah to his name? The master, though, did not think of that. He was alarmed. Never before had there been a case of someone wishing to pay the half-shekel tax in the summer. Not ever. The boy was crazy.

“Fair enough,” Jehuda said in a conciliatory tone, trying to smile. “You won’t work any more. Do whatever you please, but no trying to escape or you’ll be brought back anyway. I don’t want any scenes. What do you need? Tell me and you’ll get it.”

Uri kept quiet. There was no way now he would get what he had wanted. She had been taken by Satan, in whom he had never believed before but who existed all the same.

“I want a woman,” he whispered.

Master Jehuda was flabbergasted but pricked up his ears.

“What’s that you said?” he asked, flushed by keenness to help.

“A woman,” Uri said hoarsely.

“A woman?” Master Jehuda repeated and, as Uri could see, was highly relieved. “No problem. You’ll get as many women as you want. Which one? Just say, and you’ll get her. We’ve got slave girls growing out of our ears! I’ll call them together, all you have to do is point. Free for as long as you stay here.”

Uri gave a groan.

“I’ll set up the workshop as a dwelling,” said Master Jehuda obligingly. “Set it up just fine! Say, half of it… That’s quite a lot of space, isn’t it? Well, you know yourself… Half. I’ll partition it from the workshop with a wall… You’ll get a bed and chairs. No more sleeping on the floor. You can lounge around on that comfy bed all day long, and I’ll send you the women. As many as you want! Only don’t ruin me! I don’t deserve that. I’ve never treated you anything less than well!”

Uri was ashamed to ask Master Jehuda for a woman, but he accepted the dwelling. In a room separated from the workshop, he could lie on a pallet stuffed evenly and generously with crisply fresh straw, brushing the flies away and feeling extremely miserable. He was free, but he was bored.

He had behaved abominably, in the way that only young men can, and he could not for the life of him understand why Master Jehuda did not take advantage of that. Uri could only draw the conclusion that this fearsome, voracious, loudmouthed, red-haired, fat man, who was held in such high public esteem even far away, was even weaker than he was.

Uri gnashed his teeth. He had to do something or he would go crazy.

I’ll be a cabinetmaker, he decided.

Two days later Uri snuck into Master Jehuda’s house. He did not find Miriam or the master’s wife there. Master Jehuda was sitting hunched over a scroll, his forehead supported by both hands, and seemed mightily care-laden. He looked up.

“I have to anathematize someone!” he declared unhappily. “Dreadful!”

Uri nodded, then announced that he wanted to learn carpentering given that he happened to live in the workshop.

“So learn it,” said Master Jehuda irately, as Uri was showing him no sign of sympathy.

So Uri let the assistants know that on Master Jehuda’s orders he would become a cabinetmaker, and they should show him all the tricks of the trade.

The assistants were less than pleased; it was a good craft, and the three of them were the only ones who plied it within a radius of a day and a half’s walking distance, and now they had to instruct a competitor. However, they did not have the nerve to take a stand against Master Jehuda.

They told him to take a seat in the workshop and watch.

They spent the whole day smoothing down planks of wood. Uri became bored and requested to be allowed to do something himself. They told him there was a spare plane that needed to be sharpened. Uri spent the rest of the time using a piece of hard stone with a milled surface to rub the metal surface. It did not wear away easily, and there was no pleasure in doing it.

The next day the work was no different, and Uri got angry. He noted where there were lamps in the workshop, stole back that night, and by the light of two lamps he took a chair apart to find out how it was assembled. He was unable to put it together again because a joint broke. When the assistants kicked up a fuss about it the next day, Uri cheekily endured it, simply shrugging his shoulders. The chief assistant raced off to make a complaint to Master Jehuda, but he was unwilling to take the twenty paces to the workshop and instead just sent the message that Uri should be instructed in everything if that is what he wanted.

Barely one month later, by the middle of Tammuz, by his own efforts he had produced a nice little table. It did not rock however much it was pushed about, its top was shiny and smooth, and the grain stood out beautifully. No glue or packing material had been used in the joints but it still did not wobble. They told him what it was, one of the better kinds of wood, but Uri did not catch the name. He rubbed his wrists; they had given him the hardest wood just to make him struggle.

“This is my sort of work,” he stated happily.

He had to bend down close to the wood to work it, and his close-up vision was brilliant, even better than that of the others. He even noticed tiny fibers in the wood. The Everlasting Lord created me to be a carpenter, he concluded, and he reproached his Creator for not making him aware of this much earlier.

The assistants told him that he might want to give inlay work a try.

Uri did not know what that was. Making sketches with a twig in the dust, they explained that particularly expensive tabletops had parts chiseled away into which the master would set minute strips of other woods in marvelously multicolored designs. They could not show him any examples; tables of that kind were not found in the provinces, only at the homes of the rich in Jerusalem. But there were some tabletops on which fantastic birds and plants were to be seen, all put together from strips of wood and staggeringly expensive.

From discarded bits of wood, Uri cut up strips to be inlaid, paring and shaping them to fit together, concocting attractive patterns the like of which, so the assistants said, no one had done before. Uri could see that this was something he was cut out for.

He enjoyed working with wood, inhaling its fragrance, gazing at the contours of a cut-off butt’s edge, taking a long, hard look at the concentric circles of a knot or gnarl. He enjoyed shaping wood with a sharp blade, brushing away the sawdust. He enjoyed these things so much so that he did not really need to think of anything else, not even why he happened to be precisely where he was. When they showed him, with the aid of the sort of wheel potters use, that it was also possible to mold wood in a similar fashion as clay, using the legs to push a treadle and drive a wheel so that an affixed piece of wood was spun around while a blade, pressed steadily onto the wood, cut shavings off it, Uri felt as overjoyed as the Creator may have felt in forming man from clay.

If only my father knew how this trip to Jerusalem had put a craft in my hands! He’ll know someday, and he will be astonished and delighted that his son’s poor eyesight is good for something in spite of everything.

“Gizbarim! Gizbarim! Gizbarim!”

That was the cry to which Uri awoke at daybreak one day. He clambered out of the barn. It was still dawn, but people were hurrying out to the fields, women and children included. Uri peered; he could not see the faces but there were so many of them all of a sudden that he had the feeling he had not yet encountered most of them before, small though the village was. Could they be from nearby villages? Had they known beforehand that something was brewing?

One of the assistants who had popped into the barn informed Uri that the train of carts had arrived to take the First Fruits and the First Ripe Fruits to Jerusalem (not the Tithe, which was collected separately and was not being taken now).

“How do you know?”

“They sent a message.”

“Did some delegate come?”

“The message was sent by fire signals. This year they’re late; they usually come a couple of weeks before Shavuot, but due to the drought, everything has been burning up and the animals are scraggly. They waited in the hope that it would rain.”

“When do they normally collect it otherwise?”

“Like I said, a couple of weeks before Shavuot, but the villages out here usually only get a message and then take it into the City themselves. They only come to take it from a lot farther away. They don’t collect it from the Transjordan; it is brought voluntarily. There is another gathering in a fortnight or so, before Sukkot…”

The excited assistant ran out of the barn, clean feast-day sandals on his feet.

Uri washed quickly in the yard. It hadn’t rained for weeks, and the water was at hand in a pitcher, brought by women from a remote well. He said his prayers, bolted down a slice of dry bread, and hurried after the others.

People were standing in a long chain at the outskirts of the village, so Uri joined them. Girls were carrying pitchers around and splashing water onto people’s hands, which they then rubbed together. Uri received a drop and he scrubbed too. He had never seen the people of the village washing their hands before eating or prayers, that being customary only in the Diaspora. The girls had their hair pinned up, and their freshly laundered dresses clung damply to their bodies, rousing Uri’s desires. The menfolk were carrying sacks, barrels, and clay pots, with Master Jehuda scurrying excitedly among them. It must be something major brewing if he had gotten up at dawn. Master Jehuda was fussing about the cleanness of earthenware bowls, wiping the dew off them with a white linen cloth.

When he spotted Uri, he explained: “Moisture attracts flies! The uncleanness of mosquitoes will pass, but not that left by flies!” He scurried on, now crying out that lentils would be brought.

Was it lentils they would be eating today? Was that the festive fodder? Lentils had never once been served since Uri had been in the village. It was explained to him that the lentils were used to gauge the purity of grain; dirt smaller than a lentil was acceptable, but anything bigger would make a whole sack of flour unclean, and priests could not eat it. He was reassured that the presence of a lentil was purely symbolic, as there was no chance of a piece of a lentil-sized flyspeck remaining in grain; they took great care of that.

The empty bowls were set down on a blanket on the ground to Uri’s left. The sacks and barrels stood to his right. Animals were also driven onto the field, the calves and lambs still stumbling.

No one ate a thing, taking great care that their hands not be dirtied. They stood in the sun in festival mood. A table was set out on the field covered with white tablecloths upon which stood wine and water and a mixing bowl. Master Jehuda smoothed down some invisible creases in the tablecloth. He inspected the wines. He inspected the bowls that had been wiped clean and wiped them a bit more, and he also wiped their outsides, as it was said that flyspecks were common on the outsides.

The gizbarim, it turned out, was what the collectors were called; they were the ones who went out into the countryside to collect the First Fruits and the First Ripe Fruits. The Temple had three such treasurers, and these officials took orders from the katholikin, or deputy receivers, who, Levites of the high priesthood were also occupied with collecting. On ceremonial occasions, once the population had handed in their ritual offerings in Jerusalem at Sheep Gate by the North Wall, next to the big pool, it was the katholikin who examined everything to check that it was clean and intact so that Levites would have no qualms about consuming it. The priests would get a tenth of this tithe. In principle, a Levite would get ten times more than a priest, but priests had come to Jerusalem from all over Palestine and now there were more of them there than in the olden days.

A priest was coming to us today from Jerusalem! He would give us a blessing too!

There was great joy even as the sun blazed over the thousands of people lying about or standing in line with garments covering their heads. Master Jehuda walked around inspecting everyone with a severe expression on his face, as if he were able to look through them. He suddenly stopped in front of one of the boys.

“When was your uncle buried?” he asked.

“Last week,” said the lad.

“Were you present?”

“Of course.”

“Who else was there?”

“Well, the whole family…”

Master Jehuda gathered the family together, a dozen or so people, youngsters, old people, women, and children, eventually found themselves standing at the front of the line.

Jehuda stood in such a way that his shadow did not overlap any of their shadows. He gazed at them for a long time before instructing them to leave.

The head of the family, a sturdy red-haired man, protested: a week had gone by since the burial, they had every right to be there. Jehuda did not budge an inch: it was not certain that they had become clean since then — maybe yes, maybe no. The situation was disputable, so they couldn’t stay.

Uri saw, because the dispute took place just four paces away, that it took great effort for the burly red-haired man to maintain his self-control before he nodded and set off, the other members of his family glumly in tow. They would not partake of the priest’s blessings, the unfortunate people, because the master had decided so.

Jehuda looked at Uri.

“It is just possible that they threw a shadow on the dead man!” he said with a care-laden, conscientious look. “If it did, then they became unclean and a priest should not even see them because the uncleanness of a corpse crosses onto anyone throwing a shadow on it. It may be that they didn’t throw a shadow on the deceased, but that’s not certain. We can’t take that risk.”

Master Jehuda moved on, deliberating very hard about what still had to be done so that everything would go perfectly smoothly.

From the distance there was a cry of “Demah! Demah!”

Uri asked what that was.

It was agricultural produce that may or may not have been truly tithed. For safety’s sake it would later be tithed anyway, but it could not be used as an offering of either First Fruits or the First Ripe Fruits; it would have to be taken back.

The carts arrived at about midday. The collection in the previous villages must have dragged on. Indeed, people commented disparagingly, they slept all the time.

Eight big ox-drawn carts arrived, one after the other. On the first the priest, a man with a rectangular cropped beard and garbed in a white linen robe, snoozed on the box seat, and a man with a cloak sat beside him. It went along the line of people that he was the Levite deputy receiver, come from Jerusalem, the katholikos. On the last cart lurched eight armed men, one a civilian in black. The other carts were already laden with sacks and cloth-covered pots, with some calves tethered to the back of one of them. On that cart there were also chickens shut up in large cages dopily dozing.

That’s odd, thought Uri. Gizbar sounded as if it might be a word of Persian origin, and katholikos was Greek, of course. Why was there no Hebrew or Aramaic word for a collector?

The carts drew up. Master Jehuda went over to the priest. The priest clambered down from the cart, whereupon Jehuda prostrated himself on the ground. The rest of the crowd kneeled. Holding both arms out before him, the priest said a prayer and pronounced the priestly benediction. Uri, likewise kneeling, looked around. The others, transfigured, were ecstatically on their knees, many weeping for joy. They were blessed for their diligence by the priest through whom they won the blessing of the Lord himself. They had labored hard and long so that the Lord would obtain his victuals; they had earned the benediction. The Levites and the priests would later consume the First Fruits and the First Ripe Fruits on behalf of the Eternal One’s consecrated bellies. The chosen among the chosen people.

The katholikos and the armed men also got down. The katholikos seated himself on a barrel. He produced a papyrus, unrolled it, and placed it on a small table set in front of him. Master Jehuda sent over a youngster, who, blushing fiercely, placed the flats of his hands on it so that it would not roll back. The youngster looked around proudly for having been given such an important job. The Levite dipped a goose’s quill in a little inkwell dangling at his chest and scratched at the papyrus.

A chair was placed under the priest, who sat down, and an awning was held over his head. The priest’s head drooped, perhaps he dropped off to sleep. He had done his bit by giving the benediction, something an ordinary mortal was never allowed to pronounce.

The armed escort was given food and drink. They lay down under a tree and quietly snacked.

The civilian in the black robe did not get down from the last cart. Uri could not see his face clearly and had no idea who he might be.

The katholikos made a sign. The supervisor, who was standing beside the little table with the awning holders, also signaled. At the end of the line closest to the table the people started singing a psalm. Some around Uri joined in, and the singing spread along the row. When it came to an end, people started carrying bowls and sacks to the little table. People standing in the chain passed the sacks from hand to hand, untied them in front of the little table, and poured some of the contents out into each bowl. The katholikos examined the flour — there was both barley and wheat in the sacks — and more was only poured out when he gave a nod.

The crowd went into a new psalm, then another. They would carry on for as long as the hand off was in progress.

Uri sang along in his boredom, his back now aching from all of the standing around. They would spend the whole day here at this rate. He had a strong sense of urgency that he had seen this before, and he knew that he ought to be doing something else now. There was no sense of urgency in the minds of the others; they lived in the holy moment that had just taken place. This was an exalted day, the time they received forgiveness for their sins from the Lord. Uri felt a twinge of guilt for not having the feeling that his sins could be forgiven in such a manner.

The priest was dozing, and no one took any notice. Uri was perplexed both at why he was not livelier and why people were not bothered. The priest had an intermediary function between the Lord and His people, but he seemed not to serve it. A prayer-spouting puppet.

The Levite, on the other hand, was an important person. He was not satisfied with one of the bowls, which in shame, without a word of protest, was then immediately thrown to the side so hard that it broke. He also found fault with the quality of one sack’s contents; it was set aside and the opening tied again. Perhaps a fly had gotten into it, or else the deputy receiver had deemed it damp, but whatever the case it would be left behind, to be eaten by the local peasants.

The katholikos beckoned, and Master Jehuda leapt over. A young lad held a bowl in front of the katholikos’s nose. He fished out something from a barrel of oil with a stick and gave it a long, hard look. He dug around in the bowl of lentils with the other hand, took out a single lentil, and measured it against whatever the something was. He weighed it over for a long time, then nodded; the barrel could be put on the cart.

The people around Uri breathed a sigh of happiness and redoubled their singing. It had been a long time since any oil they pressed had been considered impure. Uri regretted that hitherto he had not participated in pressing olives.

When the sacks were done with, it was the turn of the fruits. These were carried on plates and placed before the Levite, who examined every single specimen. The feebler ones were set aside. They would be for us to eat, Uri surmised. Yet they had all been cut down with a flint knife, because that was never unclean. However, it was a case not of the flint knife being unclean but rather of the fruit being unclean.

On a sign given by Master Jehuda, the line broke and the singing stopped. The sudden stillness woke the priest, who stepped into a basin of water, dabbled his feet, bent down and splashed water on himself, stepped out of the bowl, and wobbled over to a table with wine and water. He chanted a prayer, and the Levite mixed wine into a glass of water, which the priest drank. This was the signal for the armed men to start drinking and eating, and now those who up until then had just passed the harvest down the chain started eating. The chain had been formed not to make the work easier (after all, one man could have carried the sacks) but so that everybody would have a part to play.

Once lunch was over, it was time for the calves and lambs, which were lying on straw at the foot of the trees. They were sprinkled with water before being led in front of the katholikos, who closely examined each one from its teeth to its hooves, he alone being qualified to do this because he counted as an expert. There were not so many firstborn animals in the village, Beth Zechariah being small. Uri thought there were too many, but then he was reminded that they were also gathering the best animals, not just the firstborn. The examination proceeded slowly, and more than one of the animals was judged faulty. Those animals would be reared and eventually slaughtered; they were good enough for the second tithe, the provender set aside for the villagers themselves to eat during the pilgrimage. The second tithe could be substandard; only the first tithe, which went to the priests and the Levites, had to be perfect.

The katholikos used a paintbrush dipped in red dye to mark the brow or wings of the selected animals and gestured that the owners should take them back into the shade. It was high time too, with the animals panting and near fainting from thirst. From that moment on, the owners were former owners and merely shepherds for the animals, because the priests — which is to say the Eternal One — now owned them.

The civilian in black now got down from the last cart, looking like someone in mourning, and made his way to the table. The soldiers lined up facing the inhabitants. The man in black halted. Silence fell.

“Who’s that?” Uri whispered.

“The tax collector.”

Animals, sacks of grain, and fruit were set before him, but no one checked their quality. This would go to the Romans in taxes, so it did not matter if it was impure. The tax collector stood there and counted. The sacks were loaded onto the cart, the livestock tethered to the back of the cart. The priest was sleeping or pretending to sleep. The Levite moved into the shade. The rows of people broke up as they gossiped, their backs turned to the tax collector.

“How much is the Edomite tax?” Uri inquired.

One percent of everything was the per capita tax, and one and a half percent the tax on produce. The tax collector was Jewish, and he paid an annual fixed sum to secure the right to collect taxes for Edom. If he happened to pull in more, the margin was his; if it was under, he bore the loss. He was evil, the tax collector, and he standing with the population was of a person in mourning: his testimony would not be accepted, it was forbidden to accept any present from him, and if he gave money to a person, it was forbidden to exchange it. Tax collectors went around the countryside with priests, Levites, and soldiers because they feared popular anger. It was a miracle that people were willing to act as tax collectors at all.

“They ruin the feast for us,” people said tartly.

Against sober voices counseling that one ought to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, people complained bitterly about being ruined by Edom’s shameless tax collectors.

“How does he know how much needs to be taken in?” Uri asked.

“He just does.”

Once a year the heads of households had to go to the tax collector in the nearest town and declare how much of what produce had been cultivated and how many souls there were in their families. That declaration was only checked in very rare instances; there just were not enough tax collectors. In that particular village there had never yet been a check on the Roman tax; no tax inspector would make it out alive if there were, that was for sure. All the same, they paid their taxes honestly to Edom because that was what their leaders demanded, and it was also what was demanded, for instance, by Master Jehuda, and if Master Jehuda said that they had to pay taxes to Edom, then they paid the tax, because Jehuda was the master.

Children did not have to be declared at birth but only once they reached seven years of age. That had been the case since Edom ruled them, maybe because so many died early in childhood. They did declare them to the priests, though, and if the firstborn was a son, they would immediately pay five sela’im to redeem him, because that son belonged to the Lord (or, in other words, to the priests), and he would have to be purchased back from them. Boys born subsequently would also have to be declared or they would not be circumcised, and girls were also declared. After each and every childbirth, even for a girl, the mother would sacrifice a lamb and a dove, or, if she was very poor, just two doves. Anyone who had no money — five silver sela’im was a huge sum, the equivalent of twenty drachmas! — would have to sign a promissory note that it would be paid as soon as they were able.

“And can a priest relieve a man of that debt?” Uri queried.

“No, that belongs to the Lord. It can never be paid off in crops, only in Tyrian silver.”

“The priest can give the money as a present to a poor family if he sees fit,” someone commented.

But they were in no mood for explanations; they wanted to grumble. So they carried on grumbling — in hushed tones so that the tax collector could hear, but not the Levite resting in the shade two paces farther away.

As if it were not enough that they had to pay a water fee, even though there was no aqueduct coming their way, all they had were their own cisterns and wells; as if it was not enough that they had to pay a road levy every time they went on a highway, festival periods aside, and there were times when they might have to go to Jerusalem in connection with a lawsuit; as if it was not enough that they had to pay a house tax even though they had put up their shacks with their own bare hands; as if it was not enough that they had to pay a frontier-crossing toll every time they needed to enter a town surrounded by a wall. Some three to four percent of their crop was taken away because the amount paid to the tax collector was more than two and a half percent, and if he was not happy he wouldn’t have his say here but would report them straight to Jerusalem, which meant that the high priests would bring some unfavorable decision with regard to the village, such as not allowing them to enter the City on feast days, or pushing them farther back in the hierarchy of the twenty-four tribes so that they would never get to stand next to the altar. So whatever they thought to themselves, they would fill separate wineskins for the tax collector, which would not go toward enhancing the emperor’s wealth but his own.

Uri then asked where all the crops and animals ended up. Were they shipped across the Great Sea to Italia?

No, because the present emperor had forbidden it. All the meat and grain had gone bad on the long journey, and since then it had been used locally, sold at the bigger markets. The money received from that was used by the prefect to maintain the soldiers and officials. That tax stayed local.

“We keep our occupiers going,” said sage heads.

“In the same way we brought them down on us!” said even sager heads.

Uri made a quick mental calculation. If the Roman tax, including the water levy, the house tax, the road taxes, the frontier-crossing tolls, and the produce were put at five or six percent of the total harvest, that was probably not far off the mark.

He quizzed people about the exact taxes on the Jews of Judaea, and they readily and proudly enumerated them.

They gave the Levites one tenth of everything edible, out of which one tenth went to the priests.

They also put aside another tenth for themselves to cover the three big festivals. They consumed this during the long journeys and in Jerusalem itself, and it was generally insufficient. There had been cases when they had to go hungry and thirsty for two or three days during the walk back home.

When adjudged guilty, they would pay for sacrifices in sin and guilt offerings. That was quite common, to be sure. The Lord created us as sinful beings, but He did not hold any ill will if we duly repented and propitiated Him.

If a wish or vow of ours should be fulfilled, a votive offering would be given, with the breast and right shoulder of the sacrificial animal going to the priests. We would gladly give these because the supplication would be heard by the Eternal One, may He be praised.

The priests received all first fruits and every firstborn male animal, and that was precisely what was being collected now, as Uri could see.

The ground tax was the year’s first fruit of the wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and honey. The priests also had a right to the very best of the crop, which was was also being collected that very day. That meant the best of the food that stemmed from any plot of land or tree. Either a person knew himself what was best or else the experts — the masters and supervisors — would draw his attention to it. The most important of these products were the wheat, wine, and oil. One fifteenth of their entire income would be put aside for that purpose, even though nowhere had it been set down in writing and it was not even measured. The heave offering comprised a cake of the first of the dough, which was due on wheat, barley, oats, and rice, and it was not food as such but the offering had to be given in the form of dough, being fixed at one twenty-fourth if it was for private consumption, or one forty-eighth if it was for sale by baker.

A toll had to be paid at the gates of a city to enter.

All adult men paid half a shekel of sacrificial money annually at Passover, which is two drachmas.

They would also have to pay to get coins changed because sacrificial money could not display a graven image of anyone.

To buy two doves they would have to pay the price of three.

A pe’ah was left with everything.

Deductions were made to pay for alms, the tzedakah, the rations that went to the neediest, the disabled, the infirm, and itinerants. This differed from place to place, being whatever the master said.

They paid for the upkeep of the ritual bath.

They paid for the teacher who instructed the children.

They paid for the kosher butchers, the shochets.

Uri mused on how much all that might amount to — no doubt more than half of an average year’s income, even though altogether it was not all that much.

But none of that was Roman tax, those were just the Jewish dues, though the Jews were unaware of the fact.

Five percent imperial tax as against at least fifty percent Jewish dues.

It wasn’t certain, Uri reflected, that the tax Rome received was worth the trouble. The empire in the provinces was self-sufficient, and what went on was economically rational; in fact Rome was not seeking profits, yet it still aroused hatred in people’s souls.

If the imperial tax was assessed on self-declared income, as it was in Rome, Uri went on thinking, then men would not declare even one tenth of their real income, and maybe one would perchance forget all about the age of that seven-year-old child and therefore not pay the poll tax for the child for a year or two more, and if Rome genuinely did not have enough people or means to check the authenticity of the self-declaration, then the Jews of Judaea were barely paying any taxes to Rome.

As if they were not even a province of Rome!

It was a free country, but its inhabitants were unaware.

Rome did not impoverish them; Rome made no money on the Jews.

He sensed that it would not be a good idea to enlighten them; they would stone him. They considered themselves pariahs, oppressed and eviscerated by a foreign power, with their sole enemy Rome, or Edom, no one else.

Barefooted, tattered men, women, and children were standing around next to him. They had no festive clothes to don to observe feast days; these were the same garments they wore on the Sabbath. In Rome even Jewish beggars did not look so strapped and shabby, however hard they might try.

It was necessary for their self-esteem to see the foreign power as being responsible for their misery, yet it was not the cause.

Rome had nevertheless taken something: their pride. It was not a sound policy, which should be brought to the emperor’s attention. How could pride be expressed in monetary terms? What unit should be put on it? Half a pride equals two oxen?

The priest looked up at the sky. The day had begun to draw to a close. He asked something of Master Jehuda, who then launched into an enthusiastic explanation. The priest shook his head, and Master Jehuda gesticulated disconsolately, but the priest demurred and dragged himself back up onto his cart.

“He will not be spending the night with us,” people around Uri muttered in disappointment.

The katholikos got up onto the box seat, the soldiers clambered onto their cart, the tax collector scrambled onto the last one, and the eight carts moved off onward toward the north. They could collect at one more village before nightfall.

The carts left clouds of dust floating over the dry land. The drought was my fault, it came to Uri’s mind. Master Jehuda was lying on the ground on his stomach, his big belly pushing his backside up. The villagers fell to their knees or likewise prostrated themselves. Uri kneeled. Another psalm was chanted, with Uri joining in. By now he knew both the Judaean text and the melody. “Give us this day our daily bread,” he chanted.

It had been a joyous day. They had partaken of a priestly benediction, the Everlasting Lord had forgiven them for all the sins they had committed since the last priestly benediction, and they could sin again until the next time. Their firstborn and their best livestock as well as their best ripe fruits would end up with the Lord; very few had been found to be imperfect, which was something to be proud of. At the end of it all, that was the sense of this fine day, and the woeful figure of the tax collector was long forgotten.

As in Rome, everybody would be granted forgiveness anyway by going to the bank of a nearby river at the start of Rosh Hashanah and throwing in some object. The sins of the past year would adhere to that object, and the river would carry them away with it, while they would be left, cleansed, on the bank.

These people are not sinners in any case, Uri thought. They have neither time, nor strength, nor money, nor imagination for that.

The festival was not over. That evening, oil lamps were lit, and they all traipsed out to a field at the edge of the village where a bonfire was already crackling. They sang psalms, and the young men began capering. The girls grouped together and giggled as they watched them. The girls did not dance, only the young men, who were also allowed to drink. They pranced around barefoot, in their festive best, waving around sticks and whooping. The elderly reclined, supping, and watched them with forgiving, sage smiles: let them jump around until they drop. Uri was also invited. He was at first reluctant, but he eventually joined in the leaping around. He knew he looked stupid, but he capered determinedly.

There were some villages where people would walk on lit coals, but this was not a Jewish custom. It came from Persia, and it was nothing special: lit coals make no impression on feet with thick soles.

A few days later the Levites’ carts again made an appearance, this time for the early summer tithe. Now there were eighteen carts, some already fully laden with produce and poultry, four-footed livestock trotting in their wake.

The people again gathered at the outskirts of the village, driving the animals, lugging open sacks of grain, fruit, and vegetables in large bowls. The law — not the law of Moses but the one in force — told them that “anything edible is to be tithed.” They did not bring any firstborn or best animals or the best produce; those had already been allocated and were guarded and nursed, with care being taken that they personally should be able to carry the offering up to Jerusalem for Sukkot, thereby removing the burden of transport from the shoulders of the Levites.

One Levite with a long stick paced in front of the animals and counted them. When he got to every tenth one, he pointed at it with the stick and a second Levite dipped a brush in a bucket of red paint and daubed a sign on the animal’s brow or wing. It might happen that an animal would jump impatiently out of line, in which case the Levite would gesture that it should be marked and the counting would start again at one.

The Levite might also do the counting, but then he would have to count in pairs for the rest of the day, Uri learned.

One of the sheep that had been marked raced back among its fellows. There was a mix-up, and the Levite gestured and the sheep next to it was also marked. The mark was washed off with a damp rag from the one that had rejoined the flock. Animals also had rights, they too having been created by the Almighty.

Uri stood in the crowd. This time the mood was not festive, because there was no priest present. He looked at the produce that the village had gathered: grain, shorn fleeces, oxen, cattle, poultry.

It wasn’t much. It was a poor village.

Then he looked at the three laden carts and the livestock that were tethered behind them, the tithe that fell due the village at the beginning of summer.

It was a lot.

It was not the wish of the Eternal One that Uri should become proficient in all aspects of carpentry, and around the middle of Av, Master Jehuda summoned him to say that he had received a message from Jerusalem that Uri was to return. There was no knowing why, but Uri was to go now.

The wheat was still being reaped and fruit gathered in. They had already started on the vintage, with the grapes being trampled in big tubs. There really would have been a need for his hands and feet too, Uri thought as he and two others set off back south. He curtly took his leave of the master and even more curtly of the assistants; they were able to breathe a sigh of relief that Uri had finally gone.

I didn’t make any friends, Uri concluded, but he was not sure whether he should lament the fact.

He walked with practiced tread and did not converse with his companions; he used a mantle Jehuda had given him to cover his head. Two younger boys accompanied him with great respect and did not dare to address him. His exile must have given off a different impression than Uri imagined.

Master Jehuda had instructed them that Uri was supposed to report to a certain Joseph, son of Nahum, in the Upper City when they got to Jerusalem, and the youths had promised to ask without fail for a written acknowledgment of receipt from this Joseph when Uri was handed over.

They saw traces of abandoned construction work with weeds growing over some parts of it, but there was no city wall to the north. Stunted hedging had been planted all around the City, including the north, not so much on account of possible attacking armies as of fresh arrivals who could be extorted. Everyone had to enter via one of the gates and pay a toll, and even though the hedging was such that it was easy for anyone to step over, a Jew simply did not do that, and the toll would be paid. Uri remembered that from the north the Damascus Gate was the only one through which he could have left the City weeks before, but he was wrong; there was another northern gate, the Jericho Gate, at the beginning of the road leading straight and steeply to the Temple Mount, but they were not headed that way.

Before entering the gate, Uri paused to look back. Hills, downs, fruit trees, all green, all peaceful, all sleepy. He peered as the youths respectfully waited. Earlier they had shouted out that they could see the Temple, and no doubt they did because they were approaching the City along the spine of a high elevation. One of the youths kept asserting that they were now passing over Mount Scopus, which is to say Mount Lookout. Those heading for the festival would pass this way, but they were going on still farther in the Kidron Valley, to the east of the City.

Uri could not see the Temple, try as he might. Perhaps it was a phenomenon like some sort of cloud.

Yet I seem to have better eyesight than ever, Uri mused.

And veritably he could distinguish individual trees and bushes from each other better than before. That was impossible, he thought. Still, in the village he had been able to look at, touch, and smell plants as never before; what from afar continued to be uncertain contours now filled with content. In fact, as he had to recognize, he had been seeing from memory, and he was surprised that such a phenomenon existed.

One of the youths tugged out from under his robe a leather satchel tied to his waist. This was the money. He was hugely relieved when the boy had counted out the toll for the guard, and nothing more remained in the satchel. By then their two days of provender had run out; the two youths would be walking back home without food or drink, but for them two days of hunger was not a great price to pay if they could enter Jerusalem.

His escorts prostrated themselves and wept as they prayed.

Uri was unmoved, but he too knelt and murmured a prayer.

It was approaching noon when they reached the City. People ambled slowly in this residential area of the City. It was a strange hodgepodge of new and older housing, seedy buildings and guarded palaces surrounded by high fences, broad boulevards, and narrow alleyways, and, in its center, ditches separating it from the Antonia Fortress. This was Bezetha, the Jewish name for Kainopolis or New Town, through which Uri had been led by the two guards when they had set off for Beth Zechariah. Uri did not remember a single street or house; he may well have been confused then.

The youths did not dare accost anyone; they were awestruck just to be walking through the Holy City and could only gape in astonishment. Before now they had only reached the neighborhood of Jerusalem, never the City itself. Uri had to make inquiries himself as to whether anyone knew a Joseph ben Nahum. The passersby shook their heads and carried on strolling. Uri by now was hungry and thirsty, since they had finished off the provisions for the journey yesterday evening. On top of that, he wanted to be rid of the youths.

They saw a large market to the left, so they went over to take a look. This could not be the market in the Upper City, Uri realized, as he had seen from the wall that it was situated in the square directly in front of Herod’s palace, and here there was no sign of any palace. They started asking vendors where the other market was located and were directed farther south.

They finally got to the Upper City and, upon emerging from the winding alleyways, they kept on southward until they reached the city wall. They proceeded westward beside the wall until they got to a gate. Uri recognized the large building at the southeast corner of the Upper City as the Antonia Fortress, where he had already had the pleasure of being quartered. To the right rose the Temple, its top occasionally visible among the haphazard jumble of streets and houses, as he too could now see, though he still felt nothing. The youths were trembling in their excitement, hardly able to walk, dumbfounded. Uri again asked passersby where the person in question resided, but none knew.

Finally someone came to a halt.

“Joseph ben Nahum?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t live here but in the City of David.”

“But I was told,” Uri said with some irritation, “that I should look for him in the Upper City.”

“Well, then you’d better go to the palace of the high priest. That’s where the Sanhedrin comes together.”

Uri was startled. There were memories tying him to one of the arches of that palace.

“What does he have to do with the Sanhedrin?” Uri asked.

“He’s a member,” the man said, bowed politely, and went on.

The youths were flabbergasted. Theo, whom they were accompanying, was paying a visit to no less than a member of the Sanhedrin! Uri glanced at them. They would be talking about this for weeks back home, and even next year it would still be a topic of conversation during the reaping and winnowing.

I’ve become as famous as that dumb Manasseh, Uri thought. He laughed out loud.

Everyone knew the way to the palace of the high priest, though it was far from easy getting there because they repeatedly had to turn left and right in the twisting streets.

Finally a small square opened before them in front of a two-story palace. Uri stopped and looked along the wall at ground level. Yes. Arches carved from ashlars, seven each to the right and to the left of the ornamental gateway. It was here that vendors had set up their stalls before they were moved in front of Herod’s palace and the arches were bricked up to create twelve prison cells. Their doors could only be reached from inside, each of them separately. There was just one row of bricks separating them from the square, so if a person shouted from inside, he could be heard outside. Why did it never occur to us to shout?

Something still did not add up. If he was in the cell and facing the door, then the slit window had been high up and to the right, but the windows could not have abutted one another, as there had been fresh air coming in through them.

“I’ll only take a moment,” he quickly said to the idling youths, and set off along the wall toward the left of the north-facing main entrance.

He turned at the corner of the building and looked up.

At a height of around seven feet was a small vent facing east. The slit window of the corner cell.

That was where he had been imprisoned with the two robbers and the third person and then alone.

There were women walking about in the street, baskets or pitchers in hand. People must have been roaming around like this back then as well; it would have been possible to shout to them, and they would have heard.

He listened to test whether he could hear anything from inside. Maybe there were prisoners in the cell right now. He heard nothing.

Inside they did not know they could be heard. Or else the cell was empty.

But then what could he have said back then to those on the outside? That he was innocent but had been arrested? Even if he had yelled and been heard, what were they supposed to do? They would have quickened their pace in alarm. He was surprised that he had heard no street noise through the window — or was it forbidden to come this way during festivals?

In Rome there was just one prison, the carcer, a small, aging building kept purely for show. Although in the provinces of Italia there were workhouses for escaped slaves, robbers, and thieves, all arrested people were held in their own homes. It would have been very odd to have defendants packed into the basement rooms of the palace of the Pontifex Maximus, the chief of the priests, especially given that the Pontifex Maximus for quite some time had been none other than the emperor, who lived on the Palatine (or at least lived there in principle, as Tiberius had for many years been living on the isle of Capri).

Uri strolled back to the elated youths and motioned to them that they should wait before knocking on the palace gate. It was opened, revealing two Jewish soldiers standing sentry. Uri said that he was looking for Joseph ben Nahum.

“Who’s looking?”

“Gaius Theodorus from Rome.”

There was a lull as some people inside murmured something.

“You can come in,” a voice said.

Uri turned around and waved to the youths, who just gawped as they watched him enter and the gate slam behind him.

A guard escorted him without a word along the ground level to the right — the opposite direction from where his former cell lay. Uri heaved a sigh of relief. The corridor received light from an inner space to the left; a well-trimmed garden with tall trees, clipped bushes, and fountains. He then found himself in a small room with a window cut high up in the wall, reminiscent of his old cell, and the guard shut the door.

Joseph ben Nahum was a gaunt, elderly gentleman, each and every hair white, even his eyes were a pale gray that was almost white. There were a number of stools and a table on which there were scrolls.

Joseph offered Uri a seat.

“What was it like with Master Jehuda?” he inquired affably.

“Interesting,” said Uri frankly. “I would find it hard to say what exactly I learned in the village, but I don’t have the feeling it was a waste of time.”

“Splendid,” said Joseph. “We have not placed any pilgrims with him so far, but that seems to indicate that we might do so in the future.”

Uri kept quiet; it was not his place to raise any objections to this honor.

Joseph also fell silent, and Uri sensed that he was hesitating.

He thought back to the young official who three months ago, in the Antonia Fortress, had directed him to Master Jehuda. He could not recall any of the man’s features. He glanced at Joseph’s face; this one he would be able to recollect in the future.

“We are well aware, dear Gaius, that you wish to return to Rome, but until the opportunity to do so arises, you might place your knowledge and experience at our disposal. We would be extremely grateful.”

“First of all I want to go to Alexandria,” Uri said, surprising even himself.

Joseph nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, we can assist with that,” he said.

“It’s something I really want,” Uri said in excitement.

“I’ll do what I can,” Joseph declared.

It’s not certain that he’s an enemy, Uri thought. The white-haired man appealed to him, but caution was no bad thing.

“What was the trip from Rome like?” Joseph queried.

Uri was staggered. How far back that now seemed!

“Easier than I imagined,” Uri replied. “We didn’t drown in the sea, we weren’t slaughtered by highwaymen, we didn’t die of hunger even once.”

Joseph laughed.

“Lots of people come from Rome for Rosh Hashanah,” he said. “You could go back with them. Until then we’ll place you in a pilgrim group. We were thinking it would be good for you to be with the Babylonians. They’ve got a nice place, and they’re hospitable.”

Uri considered the proposal.

“Don’t the Jews from Alexandria have a guesthouse?” he asked.

“They do,” said Joseph, “but we would still suggest the Babylonians.”

“I’d be seen as a spy and ostracized!” Uri exclaimed. “I don’t want to live in any community! I don’t want to know anything about anybody!”

Silence reigned.

Joseph looked straight at Uri, who pursed his lips.

“If you’re not going to live in a community, where you get free food and board,” said Joseph cordially, “then you’ll have to earn your keep.”

“Fine,” said Uri.

“What skills do you have?”

Uri pondered before giving his answer.

“I learned to be quite a good cabinetmaker with Master Jehuda,” he said. “But I don’t know if people here are looking for furniture-makers. I don’t want to be a roofer, that’s for sure, because I get dizzy.”

Joseph ruminated on that.

“I know about just one builder who might be looking for a cabinetmaker,” he said, “but before I send you over there, I’ll have to ask if I’m allowed to do that.”

“Where do they make those decisions?” Uri inquired in all innocence.

“At higher levels,” Joseph replied, not without a touch of malice.

So the lunacy carries on, Uri thought to himself. They still believe I’m somebody important.

“All right, then,” said Joseph. “Until a decision is made you’ll stay at my place as a guest.”

“I’m grateful, master.”

Joseph froze. Uri fell silent; he was convinced that he was sitting opposite a Pharisee master: there was something both of Simon the Magus and Jehuda about Joseph ben Nahum. Joseph returned a rueful gaze before nodding.

The boys from the village were given a stamped acknowledgment of receipt and, in accordance with Master Jehuda’s instruction, immediately set off back to Beth Zechariah. Uri found himself thinking that he would be quite glad to be going along with them. He gazed after them before going back through the gates of the high priest’s palace.

He waited in a room on the ground floor until Joseph, worthy member of the Sanhedrin that he was, had finished his work. His accent was Galilean, Uri concluded in thinking back, and that surprised him somewhat. He was given water and fruit. The door was shut; Uri opened it once while he was waiting and looked out into the corridor, but no one was on guard. Joseph ben Nahum trusted him.

With a torch-carrying guard to accompany them, they walked down into Acra, the Lower City.

In the evening light they went along alleyways crammed with people, Master Joseph sunk in thought, Uri looking around him.

The bereft slept out on the streets, curled up in little piles like garbage set outside the houses. They had no belongings apart from the clothes they wore, and their stomachs rumbled even in their sleep, while up above, on both sides of the alley, the rich, oblivious to them, took the air and drank, shouting merrily across to one another from roof terraces ornamented with tubs of plants. Also sipping wine were their small children, who had been granted the unparalleled Jewish luck to have been born in the City; they too yelled and screeched merrily, the rich of the future, who did not have the stomach to look down onto the alleyway. The two shores of Sodom and Gomorrah, Uri reflected, and between them Sheol.

The homeless held their hands out lazily, without conviction, and did not look up at them. Perhaps they had done all the begging they could get out of themselves for that day, or else they could see it was rather unlikely that anyone escorted by a guard with a torch would be of a generous disposition.

Joseph took care not to step on them.

They passed through a gate under the Romanesque aqueduct that ran southward beside the inner city wall, then they turned north along the far side of the wall before descending a set of steps into the valley and climbing up the opposite hill. Uri asked what the valley was called.

“It’s the Tyropoeon, the Valley of the Cheesemakers,” Joseph said.

“And that is what the aqueduct bridges over?”

“Yes, only more to the north.”

They proceeded among small, old, rickety houses, through alleyways that could barely be called roads. It was a district much to Uri’s liking.

“It reminds me of Far Side,” he said, “only that’s flat.”

“I’ve never been to Rome,” said Joseph.

“It’s interesting, though.”

They ambled on. Joseph displayed to Uri no further interest in the empire’s capital city.

“I live on my own in the house,” he said. “My family does not live with me.”

The torchbearer halted outside one of the houses, and they entered, whereupon the torchbearer bowed, wished them a good evening, and set off back to the Upper City.

They were greeted by an elderly servant, and Joseph asked for the supper.
A back room led off from the front one, and behind the back room was a small garden with a foot-deep basin and a table surrounded by benches. The servant set on the table a terracotta oil lamp of precisely the kind that was in use in Rome. On the roofs of the small white houses that encircled the garden like a wall, neighbors, whole families with children, were perched, drinking and calling across to one another. As soon as the lamp was lit on the table, they greeted Joseph, and he in turn wished them a good evening. The roof of Joseph’s house was also flat, but there was no ladder propped up against the wall.

“Is this the City of David?” Uri asked.

“It only borders it,” said Joseph. “This is the lower part of Acra; we’re not far from the Essene Gate and the Pool of Siloam. It’s only possible to reach the City of David in a circle, because the old wall is still standing. There is a fine basin of water next to the Siloam. At times like now, when no festival is on, one can immerse in it.”

Uri suspected that Joseph did not wish to share the garden basin with him, but no matter.

“Can I go to Temple Square?” he asked all of a sudden.

“What, now?”

“Not now, but by day.”

“You can go now, as it’s open until midnight, but you won’t see very much of it.”

“I saw it once, but I’d like another look. Do I need to be cleansed for a week beforehand?”

“You don’t have to,” Joseph said. “You’ve been cleansed by being in Judaea.”

The servant brought two plates, one with bread, the other with greens. He also fetched a pitcher of wine and two earthenware cups.

“Thank you,” said Joseph.

“Thank you,” said Uri.

The servant went back into the house. Joseph got up and sprinkled some water from the basin on himself, then turned north and waited. Uri likewise sprinkled water from the basin on himself and turned north. Joseph had the shorter prayer because Uri spoke the prayer as he had learned in Beth Zechariah. Joseph stood quietly until Uri had finished, then resumed his seat on the bench. Uri sat beside him.

“Did you also say the part about ‘Give us this day our daily bread’?” Joseph inquired.

“That’s how I learned it in the village,” said Uri. “I thought that was the way everyone in Judaea said the Sh’ma.”

“Not everybody,” said Joseph. “Only people who believe the end is nigh.”

“And you don’t?”

“The end is equally nigh at all times. I am one with those who believe the end may come at any time.”

Joseph picked from the plates.

The food was good to eat, the wine good to drink — a light, slightly acidic wine to which they added no water — and it was good to hear the voices of the chattering neighbors.

“What was your trade in Galilee?” Uri inquired.

“I was a glassblower,” answered Joseph.

“That’s a good trade.”

“Good, but it doesn’t pay as much as in Italia.”

“How did you become a master?”

Joseph gave it some thought.

“I don’t rightly know,” he said. “It sort of happened that way. People seemed to trust in me.”

“Did you do any healing?”

“I’m not a magus,” said Joseph. “I have too little faith to heal people.”

Uri waited to see if the pleasant but serious man was going to ask him a thing or two, but he didn’t. Either I’m of no interest to him, Uri mused, or he already knows too much about me. He hesitated to bring up the matter of Agrippa and confess that it was out of error that he had been seen as some sort of messenger. He made up his mind that if Joseph asked, he would be frank, but he would not bring it up himself. Joseph did not ask him, however.

Once they had finished the wine, Joseph said, “I’m trying to persuade them that it would be better if you had some work. Feel free to wander around the city, but don’t leave because you’ll only have to pay a toll to get back in.”

“I won’t leave,” said Uri, and laughed. “Anyway, I have no money.”

“Do you want some?”

“No, thank you.”

“As a loan — to be repaid when you start earning money.”

“No, thank you, all the same. I can manage fine without — assuming, that is, that I can have meals here.”

“You eat as much as you want here. Just speak to Solomon, the servant. You’ll have to yell, though, because he’s hard of hearing.”

“And my eyesight is poor,” said Uri. “He’s old, I’m young — we complement each other.”

Joseph bade him a good night and went into the house. Uri sat out in the garden for a while, waiting until the neighbors climbed down from their roofs.

What business does Joseph have with knowing that my eyesight is bad? Why did I tell him? To show that I’m no longer ashamed?

Uri got up early the next morning and went into the City. He was surprised at how small it was.

Jerusalem was living its normal everyday life, not swarming with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. A seaside town in Italia would be much the same with the passing of summer: sleepy, unhurried, dead.

The Roman mercenaries were not patrolling atop the colonnades but were standing about chatting in front of Herod’s palace, the palace of the Hasmoneans and the Antonia Fortress. The market in the Upper City was full of stalls where sleepy vendors sold doves and every manner of jug, household article, and soil in small vessels: the holy soil of Judaea for pilgrims from distant lands, who, even when there were no holidays would still crop up from time to time. Few moneychangers were serving; they had mostly withdrawn under the arcades, where they blathered with the soldiers. Uri was mobbed by beggars and had a hard time getting rid of them. It did him no good saying he didn’t have anything to give them because they simply didn’t believe him, leaving Uri no alternative but to make a run for it. Nowhere, though, did he come across the legless beggar who raced around on his hands.

He found it odd that he was quite free to enter Temple Square. The bored Jewish police idled under the colonnades and paid no attention to the altar, where the duty priest made the burned offerings. Inscribed in Greek and Latin on the superb Corinthian brass gates separating Temple Square from the Women’s Court was the warning that entry was forbidden for non-Jews. Through the Temple gates Uri could see no more of the interior than he had the first time, in fact less, because he was not allowed to step over the marble railing. He might have done so when the guards were not looking, for the minute of so that it would take until they noticed, but it never so much as entered his mind to do that.

Although he remembered an even bigger edifice, the Temple was still enormous. It was completely surrounded by scaffolding, but he saw hardly anyone at work; the few workers were just tinkering around. Levites were again lounging around the altar, carrying blocks of wood, or washing their hands in the golden bowl. They took exsanguinated, boned pieces of meat from the slaughterer’s bench to the altar, sprinkled blood around, and sprayed the flesh with oil.

Uri stood on the south side of the altar. Three months before he had stood in the shadow of the wall, but now the sun shone on his head. It was later in the day and almost midsummer. The harvest was in full swing in Judaea. The paving burned the bare soles of his feet.

Not so long ago he had stood here as a suspect, and he had been made to walk seven times around the altar. Now he was again standing there, but at his own liberty.

There was no sign anywhere that in this holy place it was customary to force accused individuals to circle around the altar.

It was quiet and no one was pestering him. It was almost as if the two episodes of standing around had not happened in the same world. Maybe the episode three months ago was not even congruent with itself. Uri was certainly not the same person who had set off from Rome five months ago.

There were a few pilgrims, a couple of women accompanied by a group of men, standing atop the gate and piously watching the incineration, but most were either hanging around and chatting on the shaded, northerly side of the Temple or listening under similarly shaded arcades to the orations of prophets with bushy beards and blazing eyes. The lazy guards gave scant heed to the preaching and didn’t give the impression of wishing to censor the words of the ardent orators. That was a wise practice, Uri acknowledged; if anything could be aired, then nothing had any weight. Still, it was curious that incitement was allowed in the immediate proximity of the Temple, the very center of the Judaic faith. Uri listened to the preachers, and it was not too much to say that the word incitement was unfitting; the lamentations of Jeremiah could be heard from the lips of speakers with impassioned eyes the whole day long.

One was tenacious in his hate-filled ranting about doom, disaster, and punishment of evil, but his incandescent, repetitive, and unimaginative words, like those of the rest, were lost in the prattling of his audience and the pandemonium of the other preachers. Uri was curious as to how long the speaker would be able to keep up the tedious tide. He got hoarse by noon, but he was no hoarser by the evening; he just kept on and on and incessantly on. Uri recognized the accomplishment, but he was alone. The preacher did indeed glance at him from time to time, but he did not notice that Uri spent the whole afternoon listening to him; it was not people to whom he wished to communicate something, but the Lord.

Also idling in Temple Square were individuals of scholarly air who expounded quietly and at length, backing up their statements with arguments. They explained the law to those standing around, many of them young men. Uri was surprised at how many men of leisure were loitering about, despite it being the time of day when most people should have been working. They would have been better plowing or plucking grapes! He then came to his senses and was amused by his own neophyte peasant consciousness.

There was a surplus of priests in Jerusalem. They were easily differentiated from everyone else by the white robes and the fact that they haughtily held their noses high. There cannot have been any fewer Levites either; indeed, there had to be even more of them if only a tenth of the tithe they received went to the priests, but they had no distinguishing dress. At first Uri shuddered at the very sight of priests’ robes, just as he had in Rome, where priests were rarely to be seen, but here there were so many priestly garments that Uri’s shuddering quickly abated.

What might be going on in his head, I wonder, Uri had pondered whenever he saw a priest. The priests in Rome were menacing to look at, and Uri expected to be struck dead any time he glimpsed one. A priest’s robes also seemed to Uri to be part of the Creator’s robes, and to touch them would be fatal. He would never dare speak to them, ever. He had thought that priests were in direct contact with the Lord Almighty and might address him any time they chose and get an instant answer. But with there being as many priests as there were here in Jerusalem, the Creator could not possibly speak to each and every one at the same time. What was going on in their heads must be more interesting than that.

Priests loitered on their own or in groups all over the City, and, not being on duty, they were unhurried, bored, and talkative. Uri did not accost any of them, though he would have been quite interested to know if the portion they were entitled to from the sacrificial offerings provided enough for them and their families. He vaguely recalled someone somewhere saying that some priestly families were on the verge of starving.

He could not be very Jewish if his soul was untouched by even the slightest feeling of joy to be able to spend time in Jerusalem. The youths, his companions, had wept. Good for them.

He was tormented by misgivings; that must be the cause of his strange state of mind.

He was being kept in Jerusalem, kept in the country, fed and watered as if he were livestock marked for slaughter. People will come along one day and slaughter me, and if my carcass is found to be without blemish, I’ll be served up on the altar, my smoke will rise up to the Almighty and the priests will eat me; if my carcass is with blemish, on the other hand, I’ll be eaten by ordinary Jews. It would be more reassuring if they were to milk their cows more regularly, but they don’t do that.

What am I being kept here for?

That evening Joseph was late in getting home, and Uri had already eaten supper in the garden.

“You haven’t been assigned work yet,” Joseph said, “but they’ll make arrangements soon.”

Uri did not ask who the “they” were.

Joseph started to eat, and Uri watched. Eating was clearly not much to Joseph’s liking; he seemed tired. He must fulfill some important office in the Sanhedrin, Uri thought.

Uri made up his mind to interrogate him.

“Why is the work on the Temple taking so long? I saw from the harbor at Caesarea that the work there was completed in just a few years, yet that was a vast undertaking — much larger in scale than the construction of the Temple, yet if I’m not mistaken they were started at pretty much the same time.”

“Construction on the Temple started earlier,” said Joseph.

“Why all the fiddling about?”

“It was completed long, long ago,” said Joseph. “They’re burnishing the finishing work; it keeps on being knocked down, then relaid… It’s marble and gold, expensive.”

Uri did not understand.

“It nominally gives work to twenty-five thousand men,” said Joseph, “and that is too few. We really ought to be employing and paying a force of one hundred thousand, but that is beyond our capacity. You’ve seen how many beggars are living here, how many are dying in the streets. They lost their land so they came here; there’s no way we have of forbidding it. On what grounds? Before long we’ll be able to pave the whole city with them…”

Joseph’s voice and mien were weary; this appealed to Uri.

“Freeloaders in Rome get state support,” he said. “Me too.”

Joseph nodded.

“Rome is wealthy,” he said. “Rome has the means to support a few hundred thousand plebeians. We, on the other hand, cannot afford it, though we ought to be supporting at least that many or even more. We’re poor, and we’re breeding at a breakneck rate.”

“Still, a time has to come when the scaffolding is taken down,” Uri opined.

“We are doing the best we can to make that sublime and solemn moment fall as far into the future as possible. Before then we’ll pave the nearby hills… Then there will be stupendous celebrations; everyone will rejoice except us. What are we going to set about doing with that mass of people? Ever more of them as time goes by! Order them not to reproduce when the Creator Himself encourages them to do precisely that?”

“All the same, is it near the end?”

Joseph broke into a smile.

“At the depth of the soul every generation expects some catastrophe,” he said. “People have been preaching about this for centuries, but few fear it. They would like to believe that it will happen in their lifetime and make their period exceptional. They believe that they will avoid death by the skin of their teeth and that the moment of their death will coincide with their resurrection. For my part, I am afraid. It’s not that I don’t place infinite faith in the Lord who created me, but I’m alarmed at the naïve confidence that people have in this arrangement. It’s as if the Lord had not given us the freedom to sort out our own lives for ourselves. If we do it well, He is pleased, and if we do it badly, He is saddened, but He is not in the habit of intervening. I have read the whole of Scriptures; He has never intervened.”

This was when Uri came to understand that not everyone here was stupid. Not that Master Jehuda was stupid at all, but Simon the Magus and Joseph ben Nahum saw a lot more than he did.

“Not all masters speak that way,” he said.

Joseph shook his head.

“What am I master of? It so happened that in my village I was good at my craft, grinding millstones and constructing water-lifting contraptions, and others noticed that I was a better miller than what they were accustomed to and started consulting me about business. As if I were smarter than them! Well, I wasn’t, but that’s how it was. Out of sheer terror I started reading, in case books had the answers. I didn’t notice but before long I was being addressed as master, then I was expected to explain the law, and before long I was a judge… My wife was more cautious. She had married a young miller’s son with flour in his eyes and flour in his hair. She had borne children for him, not for a master. But am I supposed to turn out of my house anyone who comes seeking my advice? A wretch who is just hopefully standing there? I took speedy leave with my family to settle down in another village that did not have a miller, and there I became a glassblower. But then it all began again.”

The man really was a master.

“I wasn’t careful enough,” said Joseph. “Word about me spread… Men sent by King Antipas tracked me down and brought me before him. He wanted me as a counselor, as he did not have many trained people around him. The old elite had no liking for him, and he had done nothing to raise a new elite for himself. I wasn’t willing to accept the position and went back to my village; all I wanted was to work. But people did not let me; they thought I’d rejected the offer because I was holding out for more money. They asked, pleaded, and finally threatened. I wasn’t given any peace; they started working on my family… I wasn’t firm enough, and in the end I was unable to say no.”

Joseph looked at Uri.

“Don’t ever let slip what you know — and still less what you don’t know — because that knowledge is priceless, and people know that full well.”

Uri shivered. A similar sentence had been said to him by another Joseph — his father.

“Don’t get noticed. Don’t stand out. Don’t trust anyone,” Joseph said, and averted his eyes. “You’ll be used and then thrown away; whether you live or die, it’s all the same to them. Be suspicious. If people love you, take an interest in you, caress you, be very afraid. Be especially wary of anyone who takes you into their confidence or to whom you are attached, because that person is also a human being, a selfish, cowardly, opportunist, abject scoundrel. Your enemies are the only ones in whom you will never be disappointed.”

Uri sighed. He suspected that he would share no more suppers with Joseph.

There was, however, one more shared supper the next day.

“They approved it,” Joseph said, and he seemed to be sincerely pleased.

He told Uri that he would be able to get a job on a nearby building site in the City of David. The walls of the palace were standing and the roofing was ready, but they needed a cabinetmaker, and there was a mosaic floor to be laid. It had been started six months before, a palace for Queen Helena.

“Where is she from, if I may ask?” Uri inquired.

“She’s the consort of the king of Adiabene.”

Uri did not venture to ask where exactly Adiabene lay. It was most likely a tiny kingdom somewhere in the East, though west of Babylon. He seemed to recall hearing the name before, only he had not taken much notice.

“From Rome’s point of view,” Joseph said, “it’s probably barely noticeable…”

Uri broke out laughing, and even Joseph had to smile.

All at once Uri saw before his eyes lines from a scroll: “The marriageable girls are sold by auction to the bridegrooms, always selling first those who are the more highborn…”

“For just as ablution is customary after touching a corpse,” Uri quoted aloud from memory, “so also is it customary after intercourse. And in accordance with a certain oracle the custom of Babylonian women is the have intercourse with a foreigner…”

“I have no idea if it is still the same today,” said Joseph, “but around fifty years ago Strabo took the descriptions of others, and they are unlikely to have been all that fresh at the time, but anyway for him the description applied to all the Assyrians, and it was more a fable than a fact.”

Uri nodded respectfully. Joseph spoke Greek and was a well-read man.

“Right now King Monobaz is their ruler,” Joseph carried on. “A sort of tribal king, but Rome recognized him, and so did the Parthians. His wife, Helena, and their eldest son Izates let it be known not so long ago that they wished to convert to Judaism, but Monobaz did not. As a result the palace where you’ll be working is being built for Helena, the Jewish queen, and Izates, the Jewish heir to the throne.”

Uri was amazed.

“They converted — to Judaism?”

“What’s strange about that?” Joseph commented. “There are plenty of Greeks, too, who convert in Syria, in Hellas, in Macedonia, in Armenia, you name it…”

“But a queen? And the heir to the throne?”

Joseph nodded.

“The story is that a clever merchant by the name of Ananias paid a visit, and he converted them. Only I know of no merchant by that name. I do, however, know a former high priest, the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the present high priest…”

Uri was shocked.

“It’s a royal family,” said Joseph. “We couldn’t refuse. There was one difficulty, however, one that was hard to overcome, which is that Queen Helena was not only King Monobaz’s consort but also his older sister.”

Uri was even more amazed. Jewish law forbids incestuous marriage between a brother and sister.

“What was the solution?” he asked.

“Helena could not divorce, because then she would no longer be queen,” Joseph responded. “But if she were living separately from her husband, then from the moment she converted it was possible to handle her like a divorced woman.”

“But what if she did not get a divorce bill?”

“Since Monobaz was not Judaized, he could not be compelled to produce a divorce bill. Helena married her younger brother under the laws of Adiabene before she was converted to Judaism, and by converting she was absolved of all previous sins.”

Uri shook his head.

“But it still can’t be lawful,” he said. “Herod the Great slept with his sister Salomé, but even he didn’t dare marry her.”

“The interesting case is not Helena. Izates would be willing to get circumcised, and he’s the heir to the throne of Adiabene! Just think about it, Gaius: Adiabene will have a Jewish king. The only legitimate Jewish king in the whole world! Antipas is only tetrarch, and so was Philip before him, but Izates will be king — and as a Jew! Rome has assented, although incestuous marriage is also forbidden there.”

Uri sipped the wine. Joseph was speaking quietly. From the surrounding rooftops, loudly and all at the same time, neighbors were talking, children shrieking, women laughing; they had little interest in the queen of a small far-off country becoming Jewish.

Large forces are at work, Uri reflected.

If Rome had assented, then that meant the emperor Tiberius had given his assent, and if the reports were true, Agrippa, who wanted to become a Jewish king, had access to him. What Joseph had said suggested that the heir to the throne of Adiabene, a child still, wanted to be circumcised, which would make him Agrippa’s rival, and he in turn was supported by Jerusalem against Alexandria, the supporter of Agrippa.

Something still did not add up.

“As far as I know,” he said, “Herod the Great had his son Alexander killed, and his sons, Tigranes and Alexander, and their descendants in turn became the kings of Armenia… So Armenia down to the present day is ruled over by a Jewish king…”

Joseph nodded.

“That’s true, but then Armenia is a long way away, and it’s far from certain that the emperor insists that Herod the Great’s descendants should become Jewish kings…”

That applies to Agrippa as well, Uri thought to himself.

It can’t be pure chance Joseph is sending me to work on that building site, Uri thought. When I’m brought before Agrippa, I’m supposed to report to him that a big palace is being put up in the City of David for the mother of a future Jewish king.

“Agrippa is well aware of all this,” Joseph spoke.

Uri blushed in the dark.

“I’m not a spy,” he declared.

“I never thought that you were,” said Joseph. “I didn’t say it because of that. But the workers know also, so don’t be left knowing less than them. The queen and her son will move into the palace on Yom Kippur, since there will be a huge celebration anyway, and then the whole world will know about it. In any case, you won’t meet Agrippa before then, because the high priests informed him long ago that he was not welcome in Judaea.”

“Does that mean I have to remain in Jerusalem until Yom Kippur?”

“Until then for sure.”

They sipped their wine.

“Don’t let yourself stand out among the workers,” Joseph advised. “Don’t be any more diligent than them. Someone will come in the morning, and he will accompany you to see the foreman. It would not do if you were treated like a peasant; you’re a Roman citizen, a pilgrim, and a cabinetmaker. They have a hut on the Mount of Olives. Some of the workers live there, the rest sleep in the street in the city. You would do best to sleep in the hut; you have to pay, but it’s worth it. Watch your money, though it won’t help. The wages are handed out a week in advance; that’s the custom. None too clever, I have to say, but one can’t do anything to change it; the arrangement evolved when people did not steal. Pay for your supper a week in advance. The owner of the hut runs a good canteen. Use the rest of the money to buy yourself a pair of sandals.”

The foreman had a stick in his hands but it seemed too long to be used for beating people. Uri took it to be a plain old standard-bearing pole. He did not seem pleased that he was being made to take on a cabinetmaker.

“Well, all right, then,” he said when Uri’s companion, a burly, middle-aged man had repeated that it was the Sanhedrin’s wish. “We’ll find something for him to do.”

The middle-aged man went away, leaving Uri standing in the half-finished building, on the ground floor of which men were seated and sprawled.

“We’re waiting for the tiles,” said the foreman. “Right now there is no cabinetmaking work. I’ll drop a word later on to have you taken onto the payroll. What’s your name?”

“Gaius Theodorus,” said Uri.

“What kind of name is that?”

“It’s Latin. I’ve come from Rome.”

The foreman raised his eyebrows in wonder, then shrugged his shoulders and went off.

Uri looked around at the palace under construction.

The ashlars were marble-lined both inside and out, the basin in the center of the atrium on the ground floor was marble, the staircase marble, the columns marble. On the upper story the larger blocks of stone and the smaller stones that were fit in between them were plastered over. There was a man working in one of the rooms, painting colored birds next to one another on the wall opposite the window. Uri entered to take a closer look. Pots of paint were lined up on the floor, which had not been paved yet. The painter stepped aside so that Uri might admire his work. Extraordinary, man-sized birds bedecked in vibrant colors lined the wall, one next to the other, and they all had something cloddish, oafish, hilariously human in their features. Uri stepped up close to the wall, his nose almost brushing the half-finished, still wet paint.

“Do birds like this exist anywhere?” he inquired.

“Not on your life!” replied the painter self-assuredly. “I make them up!”

The whole wall had a blue and green base with capriciously intertwined plant tendrils, runners, and branches. The enormous birds were fit in at the front of those.

“It’s marvelous,” said Uri sincerely.

The painter nodded.

“This is the queen’s bedroom,” he gestured around him.

“Isn’t she going to be frightened by these creatures?” Uri asked.

“Not on your life!” said the painter. “I also paint monsters, but these birds are friendly.”

Uri asked how many rooms the master would be painting and what sort of figures they would have. Well, there was the queen’s bedroom and then there would be three guest rooms. He had been given a free reign in the designs; all they had requested was that he shouldn’t paint any improper scenes.

“Mind you, I’m an expert at those, too,” he declared. “In Antioch I painted three bordellos from top to bottom. They were very pleased with the result and even gave me a letter of recommendation!”

Uri sniffed the paintings, which had a strange odor. The painter explained what each pigment was made of and where it came from. The purple dye came from Tyre, where the most highly prized mollusks were bred. They also produced many good dyes in other colors, but for some reason the painters from Sidon were the best. Generally speaking, Phoenician painters, stargazers, and land surveyors were highly talented, the master said enthusiastically. He had trained as a surveyor himself and had even visited Tyre, but he had grown tired of computations; they gave him headaches.

When the painter asked what he did, Uri explained that he was a cabinetmaker and had started work that morning.

“There isn’t much need for cabinetmaking work,” said the painter. “The furniture will be coming from Alexandria.”

“One piece or another is bound to get damaged in transit,” Uri offered hopefully.

“That may well be possible.”

Uri asked if Queen Helena would have to remove all the fine birds from the wall when she became Jewish, or would it be enough to hide them under a curtain, but the painter did not get what he was driving at.

“It’s the portrayal of living creatures,” said Uri. “That’s not allowed for us Jews…”

“That’s long dead and buried!” the painter exclaimed, breaking into a laugh. “Rich Jews the world over have been filling their houses with pictures of animals and people since I don’t know when! Jewish sarcophaguses are decorated with naked Greek gods. I carved two myself when I was in Antioch, one of Apollo, the other of Dionysus, for good, upstanding Jews who kept to the letter of the law. I wouldn’t be a painter if there were no customers for the work, would I?”

This pleasant man was the only one working; the other workers were lolling about or sauntering in the shade of the cool, half-ready palace.

Uri took a seat among them and introduced himself. They grunted by way of a greeting and resumed their small talk.

At midday water and griddle bread were brought out, with a helping for Uri as well.

Nothing happened after lunch either. A couple of workers dozed off, while others went out into the yard and sat down in the shade, where they scribbled figures in the dust. Uri asked them what they were up to.

“As you can see, we’re laying down some floors,” said a portly, elderly man, and guffawed.

“We’re waiting for the mosaic tiles. They’re said to be in Caesarea.”

Uri said he hoped it would not be long before he got to grips with learning that craft, because he had spent a day learning how to rest. The portly man laughed.

He was called Judas, and he had three younger brothers among the workers. They too seemed intelligent.

Uri introduced himself, saying that he had come from Rome. Judas asked him how well workers got paid over there. Uri had only the daily wages of dockers to go on; skilled workers no doubt earned a lot more. There were no docks in Jerusalem, so that was of no interest to them. They asked him how much he could earn as a cabinetmaker. Uri had to confess that he had picked up cabinetmaking since he had been in Judaea, so he didn’t know about it in Rome.

“Whereabouts in Judaea?”

Uri told them about Beth Zechariah and Master Jehuda. Judas and his brothers had never been in that part of the world, though they too were villagers by background and had a thing or two they could relate.

They were peasants, six boys and three girls. Judas was the firstborn, but only in the sense that priests use since their mother had been pregnant when their father was wed to her. He was the sort of firstborn for whom the priests would be paid five Tyrian shekels, but he was not permitted to inherit property on that account, in other words, he wasn’t entitled to a double share. A boy like that was considered illegitimate even if the man who had sired him married his mother; a man is a different person as a bachelor than after he has taken a woman as his wife. None of that had mattered as long as their father was alive; they lived and got by working on the land. But their father died after he spiked his foot on a nail. His leg and abdomen had swollen up, and he choked to death, hard as they had prayed for him. Then it had been necessary to split the wealth into seven and a half equal portions (daughters were only due half shares). Those seven and a half equal portions — fifteen portions out of which each of the daughters had gotten one and each son, two — were not enough for anyone’s livelihood. In any case, it was prohibited to split land into such tiny portions. They had bickered for a long time until they, four of the brothers, had grown tired and left the village, leasing the land for free to the other two brothers and the three sisters, having made a declaration to that effect to the village’s master and two witnesses. When two of the girls had gotten married it had been possible for them to take a dowry. The two boys who stayed behind were now grubbing the land, with their mother and remaining sister cooking for them. They would stay, because that sister was a bit weak in the head and no one would wed her. Things may be tight, but they managed to make a living.

The four elder brothers had learned the carpentry trade and been squeaking by in Jerusalem for ten years now. They had no house, nothing at all, but they thought themselves lucky not to have starved to death. They had worked on putting up the Temple, private houses, and warehouses beyond the city walls, but there were not so many jobs now. It was a good thing that this palace was being put up, and there were rumors that Izates, the princeling from Adiabene, would eventually have his own separate palace; maybe they could get jobs on that.

Uri then asked if, by any chance, they had worked with a Roman by the name of Plotius, because he too was a joiner.

“A big, black-bearded bloke?”

“That’s the one!”

Judas nodded. He was a clever man, able to plan houses, and not at all badly, but he had been banished from Jerusalem because he stole.

“Are you sure?” Uri asked.

“No, I’m not sure he stole,” said Judas, “but he was driven out anyway. Of course if there had been any proof he would have been in much bigger trouble. True, they wouldn’t be able to sell him off as a slave, what with his being a Roman citizen, but people like that are carted off to the prefect in Caesarea. He investigates the matter, and if he finds the charge to be well-founded, then the accused is sent back to Rome and sentenced there.”

Uri said that Plotius had not run into any trouble, indeed he had been able to return to Jerusalem as a delegate, which indicated that he hadn’t stolen anything after all.

“He might have done some stealing anyway,” chipped in one of Judas’s brothers. “It all depends who he stole for.”

Judas gave a dirty laugh and confirmed that if you were going to steal, it made a big difference whom you paid off.

“The richer they are, the more they steal,” he declared. “Jerusalem is well-known for that.”

“Just who are the wealthiest ones?” Uri asked.

“Well, the wealthiest ones…” said one of Judas’s brothers, winding up for a long discussion.

Nothing happened until late that afternoon, when the foreman appeared, blew a whistle, and raised his stick in the air. The men scrambled to their feet, gathered around him, and walked out of the City of David through one of the city gates. They said that this was the Fountain Gate, that had long been its name, though there was no fountain anywhere near. The foreman tuned southward at the gate, and a few of the men followed. They were going to go through the Essene Gate into the Lower City, but most of them went through the meadow along the Valley of Kidron toward the river. The River Kidron itself was little more than a shallow trickle, with a plank leading over it to the other side.

“There’s a lot more water in it in the autumn and spring,” said Judas, “just in time for the festivals. But the drought is so bad this year that the river might dry up completely.”

Lying about on parched stretches of the riverbed were broken wheels, rusted metal implements, rags, rubbish, leather bags, and animal skeletons — all the things that the celebrating masses had dropped or thrown into the water. It passed through Uri’s head that this was the river in which tens of thousands of people yearning to cleanse themselves took a dip.

On the other side of the river they trudged up to the top of the Mount of Olives, proceeding past well-kept gardens, with small houses built of timber and stone dotted about at wide intervals.

They reached one cottage, where one of the workers rapped on the door. An elderly lady looked out before throwing up her hands in astonishment.

“You people already? So early! You should be ashamed, such loafers!”

This was the canteen Joseph had mentioned. Three tables of roughly-hewn timber stood in an unfenced garden. The cistern was empty, so the workers washed their hands in a bowl. They waited for something to happen. Uri grew restless.

“I was told that the week’s wages were paid in advance,” he said.

They confirmed that indeed they were.

“All the same, I didn’t get any pay today,” he countered.

“We get paid on Sunday,” they said.

Uri tried to work out what day it was. The Sabbath he had spent in the village, so it must be Tuesday or even Wednesday. It was in fact Wednesday. His companions insisted he would get no pay until Sunday, so he shouldn’t hold out any other hope. Sunday was the day the cashier came; he wasn’t in the habit of coming any other day.

“But I’ve got no money,” said Uri.

They were astonished. How could that be? Uri was in no mood to go into any details and instead asked them what they thought the chances were that the elderly woman would give him supper on credit until Sunday evening. They hemmed and hawed again but gave him no answer.

When the woman brought out plates of bread and cooked meat and placed them on the table, the workers reached for them without saying any prayers or even washing their hands. Uri stepped up to her, politely introduced himself and laid out his difficulty.

“One more hungry mouth to feed! That’s all I needed!” she exclaimed in an unfriendly tone. “Pity they didn’t warn me in time. It can’t be done, it just can’t… We make no profit as it is, and now we’re expected to pay for being big-hearted!”

On that note she went back indoors to fetch the broiled greens. The aroma assailed Uri’s nostrils.

The workers tucked in, with Uri standing by watching.

Judas growled at one of his brothers to give Uri some bread. The brother flared up in anger and went red in the face, but he still tore off a crust and set it down on the table. Uri did not touch the bread and walked farther off.

What Joseph had referred to as a hut might have originally stored tools but had since been renovated. Uri felt quite at home there, as it was not much different from a stable. The workers were still eating outside when Uri rubbed his hands clean on the earthen floor of the hut. Uri turned west, where he suspected the Temple was located, recited the short version of the Sh’ma, lay down on the sparse straw in one corner, and spread out over himself his sole possession, a blanket that Master Jehuda had given him, with fringed tassels along each of the four hems. He lay on one side, his legs drawn up so that the stomach cramps would be less distracting. After all, he had eaten twice that day, breakfast at Joseph’s house and then again at noon in the palace under construction. If he did not have to do any work, he would last on one meal a day until Sunday. He would be moving around less and eating a lot. The palace was already connected to a water supply, and he had taken a drink, which tasted fine.

He woke at daybreak to find he was freezing and the air was smoky.

He sat up and searched around in the gloom for his blanket but could not find it. His hand struck a sleeping man, who groaned. He felt in the other direction and again knocked against somebody else. Hunger gnawed at his stomach. He realized that if he were to go out right now he was unlikely to find a space to fit back into, and outside it might be even colder. At least the smoke was giving a bit of warmth, and anyway he was not going to find the blanket right now. He lay back down and, humming to himself and rocking as if he were praying, managed to slip into a light sleep.

It was morning, and the others had gone out to have breakfast. Uri got up from where he lay prone, and looked for the blanket. He searched the whole hut without coming across it. It had undoubtedly been stolen, and if he had any money, that would have disappeared too. Good thing he had no money. If he had a pair of sandals, those would have been slipped off his feet. Good thing he had no sandals.

He set off after the voices fading into the distance and caught up with them at the plank crossing over the brook. They were engrossed with one another and joked with full bellies; no one spoke to him.

The dark blocks of the city wall, the Temple, the palaces and towers now sparkled with a golden color as the morning sun shone on them from the east, the direction of the Mount of Olives. Uri had trouble mapping out the buildings’ boundaries but could see the color well. He was lost in wonder that such a color existed.

The workers did not have to pay at the city gate; they were known to the guards. Uri wormed in among them, his head bowed, and was not noticed.

The foreman arrived at the palace late that morning. Uri stepped up to him, greeted him and asked whether he could be given an advance on his wages.

“Oh, of course,” the foreman said. “You weren’t here on Sunday…”

The foreman agonized over what to do.

“It’s fine by me,” said Uri, “if you let drop a word at the canteen to let me eat on credit…”

The foreman shook his head.

“I can’t get over there nowadays; I haven’t got the time… Ask Judith, the woman who runs it, she’s a decent sort, just a bit grumpy. You have to ask nicely, yes, that’s the way around it. Don’t ask her husband, he doesn’t make the decisions, she does.”

The foreman was delighted with that plan and gave Uri a friendly pat on the back before rushing off to attend to some urgent matter upstairs.

Uri drank a lot of water those days and chewed his lunch slowly, beginning to suspect he was not really entitled to it.

On Friday afternoon they went back to the hut early, the Sabbath being the Sabbath however you looked at it. They made their prayers to the northwest, the direction in which the Temple was actually located. Uri also received a share of the supper on the Sabbath. This is charity I receive, he thought, like some destitute vagrant. He was not offended, though; he got roast meat for the first time in ages. He again chewed slowly, deliberately, almost cautiously — not too much but not too little either. The wine made him slightly tipsy, and the next morning he slept past the morning prayer.

On Sunday morning he marched cheerfully along with the others toward Fountain Gate, not even trying to avoid the gaze of the gatekeepers, who still did not haul him out from among the others, either because they were not looking in his direction or had already seen him going out.

The cashier arrived in the morning escorted by two guards, though they were carrying no weapons. The cashier squatted in the atrium, opened his case, and took a scroll out. He ticked off the names of those whose wages had been counted. Uri was left at the end. The cashier shut the case, rolled up the scroll, and rose to leave.

“I’m owed as well,” said Uri.

The workers looked his way.

“Everyone got theirs,” said the cashier.

“I haven’t gotten mine yet,” said Uri.

“There’s no other name on the roll,” said the cashier.

Uri saw red. He yelled inarticulately that they would regret this, that he was going to report them, that everyone would be in for it. Even the guards stiffened, uncertain about what to do.

“I’ll tell Joseph, the one in the Sanhedrin,” bawled Uri. “They can make your lives truly unpleasant, you dolts! This is enough from you all! I’ve had enough! Enough!”

The workers had fallen silent. The panic-stricken cashier started to make excuses: that was all the money he had been given, nobody had said anything, it was not his fault if somebody was not on the roll.

“Who is responsible?” demanded Uri.

The foreman appeared, having heard the shouting.

Uri tore into him.

“It’s your fault. It was up to you to inform people, you scum! You’d better go right now and tell them I’ve been taken on, and bring me my wages!”

“Come on!” the foreman said mockingly. “It’s not as if you moved so much as a speck of dust.”

“You go right now,” Uri whispered. By now he had grown hoarse. “If you don’t, I’ll see that you’re taken care of! Joseph ben Nahum is not exactly going to thank you!”

At this the foreman was alarmed; his tone changed.

“Why didn’t you say so to start with?” he wailed. “You didn’t tell me, none of you did… You didn’t come with him. How was I supposed to know?”

He turned on the cashier.

“Give him his wages!”

“I can’t, I have no more money with me!”

“Never mind,” whispered Uri. “You can come back later and bring it then. Gaius Theodorus is my name. Take note of that!”

The foreman wrote down Uri’s name, and Uri checked it; he had made three mistakes.

“Correct that,” Uri said sternly, pointing out the incorrect letters. “There, there, and there.”

The foreman flushed but made the corrections.

“I won’t be able to bring it today,” the cashier remonstrated. “It’s closed already… Tomorrow…”

“I’m not prepared to starve for another day,” Uri declared. “I need to pay for the whole week in advance, and to lay down the money today. You’ll have to drum up the money from somewhere and come back, because if you don’t I’m going to report you. And you too!” he said, turning toward the foreman.

Silence fell. The workers enjoyed the scene quietly.

“Fine,” said the foreman. “I’ll give you an advance, but then I’m getting it back next week, okay?”

“It’s all the same to me,” said Uri, “as long as I get my wages!”

The cashier and his two escorts departed, and the foreman took a pile of coins out of his pouch and counted them, bemoaning why Gaius Theodorus had not spoken up in time. He had a huge amount of respect for Joseph ben Nahum and the whole Sanhedrin and the higher-ups! Why didn’t Gaius Theodorus speak up before this?

He pressed the coins into Uri’s palm.

At least he registered my name, reflected Uri as he stuffed the coins into his loincloth.

The foreman had urgent business to attend to, so he hurried off. The workmen chortled. Uri sat back down, leaned his back against a wall and looked at the fountain, which was now operating. The sculpture portrayed fish clinging to each other like a bunch of grapes, with the water spurting from the topmost fish.

Judas took a seat beside him.

“You’ve got a big mouth,” he said. “I’d never have thought so from the look of you.”

“It was big,” Uri croaked.

Judas laughed.

“How much money were you given?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “My wages for the week.”

“And how much is that?” Judas asked.

The others gathered around, sitting or stretching out.

Uri tried to recollect what they had said about this back in Beth Zechariah.

“A drachma a day,” is what came to mind.

The workers laughed.

“Only the very best get that much,” one of them said.

“I’m a very good worker,” Uri whispered with conviction.

That raised a laugh.

“So, how much did you get?” Judas pushed. “Let’s see.”

Uri stood up and took the coins from his loincloth. The workers tittered. Uri spread out the small change, a mix of silver and coppers. He had no idea what they were or what they were worth. He arranged the identical ones next to each other.

Judas slowly counted them up, doing a careful job as he had nothing else to do.

“Three ma’ahs, one tropik, two tresiths, twelve issars, two aspers, four pondions, one hundred and twelve prutahs…” He looked up. “Do you think that’s about seven drachmas?”

The workers were quickly rolling on the ground with laughter; a couple of them traced out the numbers in the dust and became absorbed in adding them up.

“Half a zuz, plus half a zuz, plus a quarter zuz, plus a half zuz, plus two fifths of a zuz, plus one third of a zuz, plus roughly three fifths of a zuz… That can’t come to more than three zuz, man!”

Uri sat again; the workers crowed.

“One drachma is how many zuz?” Uri asked, his ears starting to redden.

The workers roared with laughter, still rolling on the ground. Even the painter popped his head out from the upper floor, curious to find out what everyone found so amusing.

“One drachma is how many zuz? Lord Almighty! You’re asking how many zuz in a drachma?”

Naturally, one drachma was one zuz, and the foreman had handed over less than half of Uri’s weekly wage! Menachem had dipped into his pouch and unerringly handed over half! Menachem wouldn’t make a mistake with something like that! He has a good feel for it; he’s had plenty of practice!

After they had amused themselves, Judas fished a piece of papyrus out from somewhere and wrote down the more important exchange rates for Uri to memorize. Uri thanked him and bundled the coins back into his loincloth.

They had laughed at him, but not all that much; they had accepted him, because he had dared to speak up.

The breakfast, supper, and lunch, which Judith also delivered to the workers, cost altogether two-fifths of a zuz per day, and the use of the room, another one-fifth per day. She took all of the money Uri had, did some lengthy calculations in her head, and gave back some of it, not a lot.

“So you have money after all!” she said, raising her index finger. “I knew it, you dark horse!”

Uri stuffed the remaining coins back into his loincloth.

Two days later unsightly, itchy red spots covered his testicles and the bases of his thighs. He and wealth did not get along well, he concluded. Early the next morning, while the others were still sleeping, he scratched a place for the coins in the ground, not far from the big holes that had been dug as a privy at the bottom of the garden. He hoped the money was not going to be made irretrievably unclean. He washed the loincloth thoroughly and hung it out on a tree branch so that it would be dry by evening. That was a mistake, because come evening the loincloth was gone. Never mind, he told himself; at least it won’t chafe my balls.

He was paid the next week’s wages in full. He had seen other workers shoving off without anyone caring, so, without asking for permission to leave work, he went that same day to the Upper City market, where he bought himself a new loincloth and a new pouch. He put the money in the pouch and tied it to his waist under his long shirt. There was a long stretch along the row of stalls selling second-hand goods; he looked around, thinking that this was probably where his tasseled blanket had ended up not so long ago. He didn’t see that particular one, but he did see others; however, he did not buy one, there being no point as it was now so warm at night. He did buy an ointment for every imaginable skin complaint; it did not come from laserpicium, because that was unknown in this part of the world, but it was not balsam either: he had smelled it. It was sold in small jars, five tresiths a jar, which was expensive, because that was five-eighths of a zuz, as he now knew, but he could allow himself the expense. He put a jar in his pouch and strolled contentedly back to the City of David.

That evening he paid for all the coming week’s meals and added what was left, which now came to a tidy sum, to the coins he had already stashed. He was delighted to have come across such a safe bank in the land of Judaea. If he ever met Simon the Magus again, he would recommend it.

Uri spent a lot of time sitting on the upper floor, gazing at the activities of Hiskiyya, the painter, while the other workers on the ground floor fretted or, in the Roman style, played games of chance, which are forbidden to Jews. Hiskiyya had by now finished with the queen’s bedroom and had begun on Izates’s room. There was no one pushing him; he just liked working. Uri asked if he might try his hand at painting one of the figures, but the painter was unwilling to let him. Uri tried arguing that if he messed anything up, Master Hiskiyya would be able to correct it easily, but the painter insisted that it was wrong to waste costly pigments. The next day Uri appeared with a piece of papyrus and some chalk, which he had bought in the nearer market in the Lower City; he asked if he might copy the figures the master had already painted. Hiskiyya permitted it, so Uri stepped up close to the wall, squatted, drew, stood up, stepped close to the wall, squatted back down, drew… He spent the rest of the day contentedly doing that.

“Well, I never!” Hiskiyya said that afternoon, wagging his head. “That’s not bad at all… Pity about your being semi-blind, because you could have made a wonderful painter…”

Uri would have been happy to go on drawing, but the Almighty again had other plans in store for him than his making progress in that craft. The next day the sheets of mosaic for which they had been waiting for weeks finally arrived.

The crates, lying in straw and themselves lined inside with straw, were lifted carefully from the big carts. There were sixteen long, bulky crates, four on each cart. The foreman jumped around nervously, watching each crate get opened. A count was made, noted by the foreman, of the marvelous square-shaped, painted, and fired tiles and the smaller bits that would have to be laid around them to make the pattern. Once that had been done, all the pieces were carefully placed back in the crates.

The foreman signed a papyrus to indicate that he had received the crates and their contents were without loss, after which the unloaded carts clattered off.

The foreman divided the workers into watches to stand guard. It would not do to leave the readily transportable and valuable tiles there as they had done with the marble blocks before they had been built into the palace; it would have taken more than a whole night to lift those. Uri would be on the first watch in the evening. He was not pleased, as it meant that they would have to go without supper that day, and in the days to come there would be little opportunity to make that up: Old Ma Judith, such a decent woman, was not going to give them more. He was glad, on the other hand, that Menachem had put him on the same watch as Judas and his brothers.

Uri was relieved when Judas sent one of the brothers off to buy supper for them all.

That evening, by the light of the oil lamps, they were eating warm griddle bread with a delicious goat’s milk cheese accompanied by wine when Menachem turned up in the company of two torchbearers. He politely wished them all a pleasant meal, then said something to the torchbearers, who picked up one of the crates and carried it out of the atrium. Uri did not understand what was going on, but Judas and his brothers went on eating, so he did too. Before long two torchbearers reappeared and carried off another crate; Menachem wished them a good evening, then he too went off. A cart could be heard creaking outside, then silence fell.

“What was that about?” Uri asked.

“He was just checking whether we were on guard,” said Judas. “It wouldn’t look good if any of the mosaics were to be stolen.”

“And so?”

“We were on guard.”

One of his brothers could not hold in his peals of laughter.

“But they carried off two crates of them!”

“Sure they did. Look, Gaius, any site you can’t steal from is a site where no building will take place.”

Uri absorbed that answer.

“But won’t those two crates be missed?” he responded.

“No,” said Judas, “because the shortage will be made up by slipping in a bit more cement along the walls to make it look like it was the design from the start. It will still look very imposing.”

Uri probed a little further, asking about where Menachem had taken the crates, and who he had sold them to.”

“It’ll be a place he’s had a long time now,” one of the brothers concluded. “Menachem is the foreman on more than one site. He’s also stolen marble and sheets of silver from here without it ever being noticed.”

Uri was beginning to grasp what sort of crimes Plotius had been accused of.

“That’s nothing,” Judas suggested. “A drop in the sea, and if one thinks about it, there’s no Jew harmed. The small palace is going up at the expense of the king of Adiabene, and it will decorate the city of Jerusalem, and those two crates will also go toward the decoration of a house in Jerusalem. The only ones who are harmed are the people of Adiabene, but so far as they are concerned it doesn’t matter what exactly their king fritters away their taxes on because he’s going to fritter them away in any case.”

At this the three younger brothers also perked up.

“This is not the way to organize a really grand theft,” said Gedaliah, the youngest. “Let’s just suppose, purely for the sake of theory, that the priests wanted to steal. That can never happen, and there’s no record of such a thing ever happening, but just suppose.”

“So, let’s suppose,” said Uri, now curious.

“Let’s also suppose that the high priests wanted to steal,” Gedaliah continued. “Not that they ever did such a thing! It would never even cross their minds, but purely for the supposition’s sake.”

“Purely a supposition,” said Uri. “But how would a high priest steal?”

“By stealing the Almighty Lord’s property, that’s how,” said Judas. “They would set up a system like this. To start with, the priests would receive the meat — all sacrificial offerings, with rules on which parts belonged to the Levites and which to the priests, which could only be eaten in the Temple and which outside, which could go to their immediate families, and which to their in-laws.”

“The thing is, though, all the animals that make up the priesthood’s property, before sacrifice, are held by herdsmen in pens on the nearby hills. If one of those animals got injured, then it would no longer be immaculately pure and could not be placed on the altar as a sacrificial offering, but the priests are free to do with it what they wanted. They could eat it or sell the meat; it didn’t matter now because it belonged not to the Lord but to the priests.”

“Let’s just suppose that this is actually the practice. It would mean everyone in Jerusalem could guzzle themselves to death with meat, while in the provinces they’d be left without even enough for feast days.”

The tale accorded fully with Uri’s experiences. In the countryside they rarely ate meat, and there was little even for festivals, whereas people here, even they themselves, had plenty. He had seen meat being sold in the market, kept cool by goatskin bags of cold water — lots of meat, almost like in Rome. He had also seen live poultry and wondered how that could be.

He still did not fully understand how the system worked, so they explained.

“A sacrificial animal belongs either to the Lord or to the priests,” Judas said. “It was pure when brought into the process. Otherwise it would never have been picked out in the countryside, and the authorities would not have allowed it to cross the border into Jerusalem. Any declaration about the animal made by the priests is invalid because they are the owners, and the word of an owner, according to the law, is null and void. It is a fine law, a wise law; our predecessors were experienced men for setting down the law, blessed be their names. The word of a herdsman, by contrast, is acceptable by law, because he is not the animals’ owner. A fine law that too, a wise law. After all, why would anyone who was not the owner lie? Only, like any law, this too leaves some room for play. Shepherds, for instance, might swear that a ewe stepped in a ditch, and that was how its leg came to be broken, and that testimony would have to be accepted because a shepherd is not the owner of the livestock entrusted to his care, and from that moment on the priests are free to do with it what they wish.”

“But then who would instruct a shepherd as to what sort of statement he needed to make?” Judas asked with a malicious laugh. “A priest, of course. Let us say that an animal designated by a priest has its leg broken by the shepherd, hitting it in just the right spot with his staff, it immediately becomes imperfect just on that account. Or he cuts its nose, clips a bit from the ears, after which the butchers examine it and declare — for what else can they do? — that the animal has become unclean, and right away the animal is off to the market, and the priest makes money on it. He gives the shepherd a few prutahs, the butcher a few ma’ahs, but the real profit is the priest’s. Or rather: would be. He has to give a few zuz to the high priests, who head the whole shady business and do the bookkeeping. In that way it would be possible for Jerusalem to be choking in meat in while the peasants all around die of starvation.”

Only hypothetically, of course, added Yoram, another of the brothers, because nothing like that had ever happened, and Uri must have seen with his own eyes that people ate less meat than in the countryside.

“Oh, indeed!” Uri affirmed. “I was quite surprised myself!”

Judas’s brothers said that if indeed things were like that, then no city in the world would be more sinful than Jerusalem because everything the Ten Commandments forbids is sinful, and those who were the Law’s foremost servants would be committing sin first of all. It would be a miracle if rebellion did not break out on account of such ungodliness. But then there was little chance of that, with Jews being so law-abiding, and the peasants did not know what was going on. Even if they were told about it by excited rebels with wild, burning eyes, they would not believe it, so pure were their souls. It was divine luck that this was purely hypothetical and that no high priest or ordinary priest, no butcher or shepherd would do such a thing, at least not in Judaea.

Laying mosaic tiles was tiring, backbreaking work — hard on the knees but interesting all the same.

Setting the ready-made square or hexagonal sheets of mosaics alongside one another did not take any effort in itself, but to produce nice designs from the small pieces of stone was an exciting challenge, and Uri kept on badgering Menachem until he allowed Uri to join in this part of the work. He enjoyed choosing among the small, colored, square-cut chips of stone and fitting them alongside each other, smoothing some of them down to fit with the rest. Uri loved fiddling around and now he had free reign. The picture to be laid out was outlined by the painter, but he left the workers to their own devices and would only look at the end result.

Judas was quite right: the two stolen crates of tiles went unnoticed.

Uri now understood why mosaic-laying was such an expensive business; it involved the work of a huge number of people — people to hack out the variously colored stones, others to cut them down to small fragments, people to cut them into squares, people to transport them, people to sketch a design, people to lay them out… He recalled the huge number of splendid mosaics that he had seen in Rome and could not understand why he had never given this thought until now.

He had gotten used to Judith’s grouching and even made the acquaintance of her fat husband, who spent all day lying around the house and praying. His fellow workers had accepted him as if he had been living among them for years, working on the outer cladding of the Temple; they no longer stole from him and had even forgiven him for the sin of having been born in the unclean Diaspora. They had no interest in Rome; that was a long way away, whereas they could relate many tales about Jerusalem. They told stories about lodging houses where their sandals were swiped from off their feet while they slept, how they had been short-changed by foremen who were much more villainous than Menachem, how the puffed-up rich had treated them like slaves, even though they were free men, all their ancestors had been, as far back as family memories went, which was many generations back. It had crossed their minds to leave the city and join up with some band of robbers, though they had given up on that idea; it was only certain tribes that had traditionally occupied themselves with robbery, so they could only be underlings at best.

It would be nice if they could make money from smuggling, but having been born in the middle of Judaea they had no contacts with the Jews of the Parthian empire, so they had discarded that idea too. For a few years they had toyed with joining a community of the devout, which would have certain advantages, like being sure they would never die from starvation, but they would have no freedom of movement and be subject to the will of a leader. There were many such pious communities all over the place, with families in every town who made their living out of being more devout than a high priest. There were times when people would not speak to one another for weeks on end because that was what the leader had ordered. They might not be able to step outside the house for weeks or be allowed to establish contact with women outside the community. They helped one another everywhere, but they looked down on those who were less zealous. Judas and his brothers preferred to knock around as workers in Jerusalem.

Uri looked forward to Rosh Hashanah and the immense throng that would arrive for the long series of festivals. It would surely be interesting to observe how people celebrated at the city he had become an inhabitant of by chance. This was a time, said the workers, when it was possible to drink a lot and eat a lot, with the break from work lasting for two weeks. However, they had not heard anything about white-garbed brides-to-be for sale dancing on the Mount of Olives. If they didn’t know, it must be a fairy tale, Uri concluded.

They went into great detail about the festive garments of the high priest, because they had lived in Jerusalem for so long that most of them had been able to stand by the altar and see him. Even those who had not stood near the altar could visualize the priest’s exact appearance, with his breastplate, set with four rows of three small square gemstones each, representing the twelve tribes of Israel. It was as if anyone who happened to be staying anywhere near Jerusalem at the time had seen it with their own eyes.

They also recounted that wicked Edom laid claim to the high priest’s vestments the whole year round, storing them in the unclean palace that Herod had built. Only two days before the festivals did the prefect’s people hand the garments over to the high priest’s representative so that the high priest might don them for sacrifices, and at Passover, as the Law allows, and also for Yom Kippur, which the Law commands. After the festivals the garments would be handed back to the Edomites, thus becoming unclean again. The Sagan’s men would have to spend a whole day cleaning it before the high priest could clothe himself. The workers strongly objected to the humiliating practice; even Menachem himself was in agreement.

Uri was never asked about Rome, either by the workers or, for that matter, the peasants in the village, but they still had their own firm ideas about what the Roman Empire was. No question that it was Beelzebub’s snare, which the Everlasting Lord permitted; He had a habit of amusing himself by sowing dissent among men and waiting for the good to triumph even without his assistance. The Roman Empire was a test that the Lord had given his chosen people. He had made it so powerful so that it would be harder for the good ones to vanquish, so that they would brace themselves, strive a little. But Beelzebub would be defeated, the workers were quite convinced of that, and Jews would recover the right to look after the high priest’s vestments, and the foreign forces would clear out of the Holy Land at long last. What about the Lord’s works in Babylon? There had been just one language until He had confounded all the languages of the earth there, so that the people should no longer understand one another’s speech, which highly amused Him. The Tower of Babel fell down and Babylon’s power ended, yet the Jews had escaped, thanks to the mercifulness of the Eternal One.

Uri just nodded and did not attempt to point out that the chosen people were not the only ones the Eternal One had put under the yoke of this gigantic empire. Nevertheless, he too had often wondered what the sense was in having a single power rule over the Great Sea and all its coasts and the inner lands — to wit, all the known world, beyond which there was little, not counting the Parthians, India, and China, which were so far away that their existence seemed unfathomable beyond the silk that came from there.

The Creator must have some purpose with the Roman Empire, Uri supposed, but he did not know whether to adopt the standpoint of a Roman or a Judaean Jew. He could not imagine the tens of thousands of Jewish men who lived in Far Side all of a sudden marching off to the Forum and declaring that from that day onward all Rome should worship a single god and all the inhabitants of the empire’s seat being converted in one stroke, shattering all idols, and becoming eager servants of an Invisible Lord. Of course, Cicero on one occasion in a lawsuit had spoken of the Jews of Rome as being a nation of rascals. Uri had read the collected speeches the great orator made in tribunals and, now he came to think of it, a hint of fear seemed to be emanating from those contemptuous words, as if the advance of that dirty, loquacious riffraff could be a threat to Rome’s integrity. But the Jews were an overwhelmingly poor and humble people in Far Side, and just happy that they were tolerated.

As Uri saw it, he himself was a beneficiary of the power that the workers considered their deadly enemy and against whom they invoked their gravest curses when breathing their solitary prayers. This was now the third occasion when he had sensed how ambiguous his position was as a Roman citizen in Judaea, and if the truth be told, he was also in an ambiguous position as a Jew in Rome. He thought back to what had run through his head while watching the cohorts from Caesarea marching past: our army pushing our people from the road. But then what kind of soldiers were those? There had not been a single Italian or Roman citizen among them. It was all more complicated than something the Almighty could have created; he had created something beautiful and rational, then it slipped out of his hands.

It was the month of Elul, and Uri hoped that nothing would happen until Rosh Hashanah, at the beginning of next month, on Tishri 1–2, so that he could spend the long festival in Jerusalem. Ten days after Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, came Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the biggest of all the Jewish festivals, and on Tishri 15 would come Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, and that festival would last until Tishri 23, the festival of Simhat Torah, the day of rejoicing in the Law, which would mark the end of a year of weekly Torah readings in the shul, and also the restarting of the cycle. Virtually the whole of Tishri, then, was a festival. By that time it would be September in Rome, and the Jews of Far Side asserted that the weather at Rosh Hashanah was always good for at least ten days, as it was necessary for it to be good on Yom Kippur. His mother too had said it each time August came around, nice and early: “You’ll see, the weather will be fine in September, when it gets to Rosh Hashanah.” And it had always been fine, and his mother was proud to be Jewish.

The weather was also fine in Jerusalem at Rosh Hashanah, on Tishri 1.

That day no one worked. In the evening a fire was lit in the hut, and they held a communal prayer with an informal family mood. The next morning they rambled down the Mount of Olives and crossed the River Kidron, but this time instead of entering the City through the Fountain Gate they went to the Valley of Hinnom where many people were already strolling ceremoniously. All the workers had taken with them some insignificant tiny article, which they threw into the Hinnom with a murmured prayer. Uri tossed a prutah into the water to carry away with it all his past year’s sins. He asked why it was that the Kidron was not good enough as a river for that purpose; the Hinnom had also dried to a brook as the autumn rains had not yet arrived. Their reply was that the Hinnom was the river of the wicked, where children had been sacrificed in Israel’s darkest days; the river could not forget this.

That evening it was possible to eat, but the next day was for fasting.

Rosh Hashanah in Jerusalem was a rather somber affair, Uri decided. He was expecting Yom Kippur and Sukkot to be more exciting, but the Almighty cannot have wished for Uri to see a glittering festival in Jerusalem, because on Tishri 4, when they resumed work on the palace, a man came and had a whispered conversation with Menachem, after which Menachem came over to Uri to say the man had come for him.

“Where am I going?” Uri asked.

Menachem did not know, but the man was following instructions from the Sanhedrin and would now accompany Gaius.

“Am I going to come back here?” Uri asked, thinking now of the tidy sum that he had buried under the tree next to the privy.

Neither the messenger nor Menachem had an answer.

He was not even able to take proper leave of his colleagues.

This time they proceeded northward along the Valley of the Cheesemakers and entered a smaller building a bit to the east of the Xystus, which Uri had by now learned used to be where the Sanhedrin had held its sessions. The building was known as the Hall of Hewn Stones, as the judges, all seventy of them, had at one time sat in several semicircular rows around a stone platform reserved for the accused or the petitioner.

Uri was curious to see whether he would be received by Joseph or the hunchback whose name he did not know.

It was a Jewish military officer. He was a middle-aged, stocky man, bald and with strongly protruding eyebrows.

“The reason I asked you to come, Gaius,” he said, “is that I would like to make a deal with you. At Rosh Hashanah a delegation will be setting off for Galilee, and I would like you to be a member. You would be passing through Samaria under the leadership of an experienced commander.”

Uri held his peace, not knowing what to make of the matter.

“Who would I be representing?” he inquired.

The officer did not understand.

“I’m a Roman citizen,” Uri added. “Is Rome sending me?”

“You are a Jew,” said the officer, “and you’ll represent Judaea, if you prefer. But like I said, we are offering a deal. You are an experienced delegate, and if you return we would reward you by sending you to Alexandria as you wish.”

Uri’s heart leapt. Alexandria! To swap this dusty provincial small town, sleepy Jerusalem, where nothing ever happened, for the true center of the world!

This meant that Joseph ben Nahum had indeed passed on his request.

“Fair enough,” Uri said. “When do we set off?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

I won’t have time to pick up my money, Uri thought. Never mind.

He was already walking off to the meeting-place in the company of three taciturn Jewish soldiers when he was struck in retrospect by the odd way in which the officer had expressed himself. “If you return,” he had said, though he might equally have said “upon your return.”

Samaria was dangerous. Why are we not avoiding it, as those traveling between Galilee and Judaea customarily do? They had time to choose a detour, and maybe we are now taking an urgent message to someone.

And anyway, who’s this we?

Uri established that he was more thrilled by this new assignment than by spending the whole day laying mosaics in the company of familiar workers, as much as he truly enjoyed that.

I’m an adventurer, he reflected, both remorsefully and proudly.

They cut across the square at the Temple, went down the serpentine path, exited the City through the Jericho gate, and took a northeasterly route. Uri was quite certain that his escort had no idea what kind of mission they were sending him on, so he did not try to interrogate them. That reticence seemed to meet with their approval, as they did not try even once to prod him into saying something.

They came to a rest by a village house that was bigger than usual and had two soldiers on sentry duty in front.

His escort handed him over, took a draft of water, and headed back toward the City.

There were eight mules grazing in the yard. There will be eight of us, including me, Uri reflected. A mule is an elegant beast compared to an ass, appropriate for longer journeys. He was quite sure that his backside was going to get saddle-sore over the first few days.

One of the guards ushered him into the house.

There in the gloom sat a throng of people, a mix of soldiers and civilians.

“Pax to you, Gaius Theodorus!” said an officer.

“Pax to you too! Pax to you all!” said Uri.

“He’s the last of your companions,” said the officer, turning to the civilians. “Gaius Theodorus, young though he may be, is an experienced traveler; he was a member of this year’s Roman delegation, and he has spent time as a peasant and a worker in Judaea to cleanse himself.”

There was a murmured welcome. The officer did not introduce any of the other members of the delegation to him, and they didn’t say anything themselves. Uri had no wish to converse with anybody and spent the night squatting in one corner. During the long trip he would get to know them.

The next morning they went northward on mule-back.

They did not carry any weapons, only a sack with bread, olives, and fruit.

Uri took special note of two figures clothed in white. He at first thought them to be priests, but they did not behave like priests. Their mantles were short, hardly reaching their knobby knees, and they did not give a priestly benediction; indeed, they did not engage in conversation with anyone. Each had a trowel dangling from his belt.

Riding his mule at the back of the procession, Uri saw that his companions, with the exception of the officer, were seated clumsily on their mules. Not experienced travelers, then.

Uri’s thighs ached, but he was familiar with the feeling, and by tomorrow they would no longer be aching. His companions would not become acquainted with the feeling until that night, the skin of their behinds broken-skinned and bleeding, but that would also clear up with time. Uri sat rigidly upright; if he were ever to get a crick in his back, as had happened once on an ass in Sicily, his life would be sheer misery for days on end. His back was the one thing he needed to watch out for, nothing else.

They carried on northward, first crossing the road to Damascus, then advancing across fields. It was a journey that Uri was now familiar with, having done it twice before — once to Beth Zechariah and once back, only those times it had been on foot. Even carried by mules they did not make faster headway.

None of the other seven gave any sign of knowing one another, but for all Uri was concerned that did not exclude the possibility that there might be old alliances among them. They exchanged no words, maybe fearing that there might be squealers among them. My companions might just as easily be disagreeable figures who don’t know what to do with people, just like me, Uri thought, then chided himself: he knew nothing about his companions, so it was wrong to presume anything about them.

When they rested and ate, Uri reclined on his side and did not touch the smarting calluses that had formed on his thighs; in two days’ time they would no longer hurt. The others despondently felt at and squeezed the calluses and blisters on their backsides; as they were close to him, Uri could see them all too well. I rise above them all in traveling, he thought blithely, notwithstanding the fact that he was the second puniest of the lot. He had noticed earlier a young man even punier than himself, with colorless hair and watery eyes, his entire frame in poor condition. The lad took the bruising surprisingly well, however; he may have had an opportunity to ride a mule or ass before. True, his feet did not touch the ground, so there was no need for him to make an effort to keep them lifted. He also had long arms and thin fingers, so what might he be? A pickpocket? He did not look fit for anything else.

Uri scrambled to his feet and went behind the bushes to relieve himself. He heard a noise of something rustling about and looked up. One of the white-garbed men was squatting, while the other was carefully scooping earth over his own turd with a trowel. The other then finished, stood and, started to dig, strewing the earth he dug in a nice little mound over the feces. Both took care, making sure that the shovel did not touch the excrement. Uri could only wonder.

The big heat wave was prevailing, with a dry easterly wind bowing. I brought this on, Uri contemplated. He was waiting for one of his companions to make some comment and curse the east wind, which was associated with drought, but no one said anything. Maybe they were all town dwellers. Uri felt an urge to vilify the east wind if they wouldn’t, but he resisted the temptation. I’m schooling myself not to disclose what I know, he thought, but then he mused that his knowledge of easterly winds was not truly thorough. Some people had told him that this brought drought and he had believed them, but maybe it was not so; he had no personal knowledge of it, so it was better to keep his mouth shut.

The officer stood, mounted his mule, and set off. The others followed without a word being said.

As evening drew in, they reached the edge of a village. Uri narrowed his eyes to try and make out whether this was a village he had seen before, but nearly all the villages looked alike. The scattering of houses, the settlement with no wall — that is what made it less than a town. With the officer leading they slowly jogged among the houses, before which old crones and children were seated, staring at them. The officer asked which was the master’s house, and they pointed it out.

The master was a short man with a wrinkled face. The officer dismounted from the mule and drew the master to one side. He explained something, slipped a hand under his tunic, and gave a handful of coins to the master, who bowed, accepted the money, and hid it under his tunic in a pouch of some kind.

“Are we going to get something to eat, or maybe even quarters for the night?” asked the scrawny youth.

Uri shook his head but didn’t say anything.

We haven’t been pestered for two days by robbers, the thought occurred to him, but he hadn’t said anything. The day after tomorrow another master will have to be sought out and he too will have to be paid off. It will not be possible to pay him any less than the first, because by then he will know for sure how much his colleague got — if no other way, via message by fire.

Uri’s suspicion proved correct; they simply had a drink of water before moving on, and they only stopped when even Uri felt weary. He tethered his mule to a tree, recited the long Judaean version of the Sh’ma, pulled out his loaf of bread, spread his blanket, and lay down on it. He set about his meal with relish, his body pleasantly tired by the travel. The officer watched him, then he too said his prayers, followed by the others.

“Is this where we’re going to spend the night?” came a tremulous, horrified voice.

“Yes,” said the officer.

“But we might get robbed!”

“No one is going to rob us,” said Uri. “Quite the opposite, the robbers will be keeping watch over us as we sleep!”

Whether that was true or not, the next morning all their belongings were still there.

They prayed, had breakfast, and resumed the trekking on muleback.

Uri screwed his eyes up, now beginning to sense that the countryside was familiar, that they were somewhere in the neighborhood of Beth Zachariah.

My village, Uri thought, and he laughed at himself for feeling so emotional about it. He wiped the tears from his eyes with a snicker. What a dolt I am!

He felt a strong temptation to lead the party to Master Jehuda; his companions would be amazed to see that he was on home ground here, and it would do wonders for his prestige. All the same, he decided against doing so: he was not on intimate terms with them, and he was not going to betray to them those whom he regarded as his kinsmen. The thought also ran through his head that Master Jehuda and the others, even the young girl, were part of a long-gone past; it now belonged to somewhere else, locked in the realm of memories. It would not be right to disturb the passage of time; one had to move on.

The officer moved to one side to wait for Uri at the back of the line; the rest kept on trotting northward.

“Have you been around here before?” he asked.

“I have,” Uri replied. “But no farther north.”

They swayed along beside each other on their mules.

“I’m Aaron,” the officer said. “I already introduced myself to the others before you arrived at the house.”

The mules trod slowly but surely; there was no need to spur them on.

“These mules are experienced travelers,” commented Uri. “Same as me…”

Aaron gave a snort of laughter.

After hesitating a little, Uri asked, “Where are we headed anyway?”

Aaron did not answer immediately but eventually came out with, “Tiberias.”

“Why are we not avoiding Samaria?” Uri asked.

Aaron sighed.

“Because that’s the order,” he said, and promptly moved off to the front.

They proceeded all day, not even stopping for lunch; anyone who felt hungry had to eat on muleback. We’re in a hurry, Uri thought. I wonder why.

He did a quick calculation. In four days’ time it would be Yom Kippur. Every Jew who lived within three days’ traveling distance of Jerusalem would now be preparing to set off. From this area they would reach it in two days. Tomorrow they would be passing through a region from which people were just setting off southward to Jerusalem. It’s odd, Uri thought, but we’re going in exactly the opposite direction.

He shuddered.

It was the same as the shiver that had gone through him in Rome when he had grasped that he had to reach Jerusalem for Passover, but he did not understand why he was shuddering now. This was not the same kind of journey. He nevertheless felt some presentiment; there was no knowing what it was, but it was unsettling.

The next day they reached the border between Judaea and Samaria. There was nothing marking it, but the party became tenser than they had been up till then, and Aaron was even more taciturn than before, if that was possible. That night he split them up into shifts to stand guard, estimating time from the arc of the moon across the branches of a tree. Uri was allocated to the dawn shift, but he spent much of the night awake thinking. We are creeping along like robbers, he thought. If it was necessary to stand guard, then the safe passage they’d bought from the robbers had expired, so from now on it was other robbers that had to be feared.

He still knew nothing about his traveling companions, merely that the two men in white-tunics consistently buried their excrement under a mound of earth. What could had enticed them into this, he wondered? Did they also long to go to Alexandria? Or were they, perhaps, guilty of some misdemeanor and paying for it by having to take part in this delegation?

In the morning they moved off, still northward.

At the edge of a village they noticed that people were congregating: old people and children, men and women gathered around two carts loaded with animals and produce. They must be setting off for the festival in Jerusalem, Uri thought. Aaron resolutely jogged in front as they took the path leading into the village.

When they were near the group of people, Aaron jumped off his mule.

“Peace be upon you!” he greeted them.

“And upon you!” a few of the people answered.

Uri narrowed his eyes; he could not see the faces clearly.

“For the festival?” Aaron asked.

“Yes, the festival,” they replied proudly.

“We’ll meet up there,” said Aaron.

“We’ll meet there!” they replied.

Uri’s group carried on northward.

He swayed as he walked, half-asleep when he was suddenly startled into full consciousness.

Those people were setting off southward whereas we are still headed northward. Why, then, had Aaron said that we would meet up with them at the festival? That can’t be true!

On the path they encountered a larger group, which was driving livestock and a cart, but they were headed north.

This was already Samaria! These people were not striving to reach Jerusalem but their own ruined shrine in the north, at Mount Gerizim.

Was that where we were headed?

The temple of the Samaritans had once stood on Mount Gerizim, which they had built in defiance of the Temple in Jerusalem that had been demolished. There they had made sacrificial offerings of incinerated meat to appease a wrathful Lord, and before Herod the Great it had been destroyed by John Hyrcanus, then the king of the Jews, and since lain in ruins. However, the Samaritans kept making sacrificial offerings among the ruins even now, and they hated the Jews, with whom they shared a common God and language.

They had difficulty making further progress along the path, continually changing course because of pedestrians, forcing the mules to trample untrodden shrubland, listening to the joyful singsong. Like the Judaeans, the Samaritans chanted psalms; they were taking sacrificial animals and produce to the ruins of their own temple.

These people are not going to harm us, it occurred to Uri; they believe that we too are going to make sacrificial offerings at their temple, that we are not hostile Jews but their brothers.

A cunning dodge, that: a Jew from Judaea could hardly be safer in traveling in Samaria. Presumably we are also saving ourselves a substantial detour on the way to Tiberias.

But what about the way back? Shall we be coming back at the time of the Festival of Booths, like good Samaritans? But traveling is forbidden for them, too, at that time.

By the afternoon every path had become clogged with people, and the mules, unused to such activity, constantly tugged this way and that, balking and coming to a standstill.

These people struck Uri as being happier than those on the road from Caesarea to Jerusalem.

A prophet with a flowing beard went along in the center of one group, yelling hoarsely, with people joining in.

“The Ark of the Covenant!” they shouted.

Aaron held back until he was in step with Uri at the end of the line.

“Move it! We’re making progress too slowly. Don’t fall behind.”

“What are those people shouting?” Uri asked.

“You can hear them yourself,” Aaron said, pressing on to the front.

That evening they were unable to find a place for themselves, so they made camp among a throng of people.

A divine miracle has occurred, people kept on saying, joyously, both to themselves and to each other. The Lord has had mercy on us, God is with us, blessed be the Eternal One. They bowed to the north and prayed, saying a short Sh’ma, and they never wearied of proclaiming that those alive right now were joyous because the Ark of the Covenant had turned up. It was a miracle, a miracle! The Almighty had worked a miracle: the Ark of the Covenant had been found!

Uri shuddered.

He had already given some thought to the Ark of the Covenant on the journey. It was as if his thinking about it had caused people to start talking about it. They wielded shovels, sticks, and swords; serious men and shriveled elders and irrational children and wailing women. The Ark of the Covenant was in the depths of Mount Gerizim; the depths of the Holy Mountain were concealing it. It only had to be dug out.

So that was what we were going to do — dig it out!

They prayed and chanted throughout the night; it was impossible to sleep.

By daybreak Uri had formed a clear picture for himself.

The Lord had appeared in a dream to a certain Matthew, a prophet, and informed him that the lost Ark of the Covenant was hidden by Mount Gerizim, and also told him exactly where it was to be sought. Upon awakening Matthew doubted whether he had really spoken with the Lord in his dream, but when he turned his gaze on the mountain he saw a burning bush in its depths at exactly the spot the Lord said the Ark of the Covenant had been buried centuries ago. Matthew raced over and began digging, but he realized that he alone was not equal to the task, and he set to preaching to the populace what the Lord had told him, calling on them to dig alongside him. He had been preaching the words of the Lord for a week now. The Lord was well aware when to announce the secret because the people would be flocking there for the Day of Atonement anyway; indeed, many had set off earlier than usual. Everyone would dig, and the Ark of the Covenant would be found, and with the Ark of the Covenant, power! Because the Lord is seated on the Ark of the Covenant, and in this way he would raise the Semites of Samaria above all peoples, blessed be His name!

As to what kind of man this Matthew was, no one had anything to say; obviously they did not know him. But the important thing was not so much who this prophet was but that the Lord God had appeared to him in a dream.

Uri, however, was troubled.

He would have been extremely pleased were the Ark of the Covenant to come to light, but he found himself unable to believe it was about to happen. If it had not been located for centuries on end, and why would it now in particular? The peaceful landscape of Judaea and Samaria did not exactly give the impression that Judgment Day was nigh.

No way are we going to Tiberias, it occurred to him. Mount Gerizim had been the destination from the outset.

But why?

He began to calculate.

They had been traveling for four days now. If the vision really had come to Matthew a week ago, as people were saying, then it would have taken at least four days for news of it to reach Jerusalem. Messages could be sent by fire, but that was not usually used for long, complicated messages, as vowels were left out and meanings could easily be misunderstood. It was quite probably a courier who had carried the news. It must have been at least eight days ago, or even earlier, that the courier had arrived in Jerusalem with the news that people were going to search for the Ark of the Covenant at the festival with shovels and swords in the depths of the mountain. We’re being sent there to see whether the chest comes to light.

Uri muttered discontentedly to himself that the story was not credible.

There was no chance of the actual chest turning up, Uri thought. Had another chest been fabricated? Had the Samaritans forged one and buried it on the mountain so that it would be found and they could assert ownership and gain the upper hand over other Semites? Even supposing that was the case, why precisely was it us, newcomers to Judaea, who were going to be put in proximity to the chest? What might our task be — to bear witness to the fact that the chest was a fake or, on the contrary, that it was genuine? But then who amongst us would have the courage to bear witness on a matter like that? If that chest came to light the high priest would have to see it, but there is not a priest among us!

We have been sent to Samaria as spies, to spy on those looking for the Ark of the Covenant.

The Samaritans were so joyous that they paid no attention to them. They scarcely even greeted the two in white robes, though they recognized and appreciated that they did not worship toward the Temple in Jerusalem. Aaron had heard the familiar way that the two white-robed men addressed the Samaritans, but he had let it be.

How could it be that men in white robes lived in Judaea and didn’t pray toward Jerusalem? Was it not all a single religion? Or was it a single religion that had broken up into several faiths?

Roman Jews, like the priests of Jerusalem, did not believe in a Hereafter or the immortality of souls or the transmigration into a new body, yet Master Jehuda and other masters believed in these things. They still belonged to one religion, however, because they made sacrificial offerings to the Temple. But was anyone who did not make such sacrifices a Jew at all? Was where one paid taxes a criterion of Jewishness? The Jews of Parthia who had stayed in Babylon paid no dues, or like the Roman Jews sent only half a shekel in taxes, yet they were still Jews. What did they believe in?

To believe in an Invisible, One and Only, Everlasting Lord, to see Him, to strive with the Lord, as the name Israel literally means — maybe that is enough to be Jewish. The Eternal One binds His people to Himself with a bond stronger than the Ark of the Covenant: He has the menfolk’s prepuces cut off, and that is the mark that shows they are His.

From then on they were surrounded night and day by an intoxicated throng. The Samaritans had not drunk any wine, but they had become inebriated by their own souls, and as far as the eye could see signs of the Divine presence, the Shekinah, His Immanence in the world, the Holy Spirit, appeared in the fields and trees, in the grass and sky.

For the Samaritans this Day of Atonement was more significant than usual. Uri was pleased when he recognized this. Once he got back to Rome, he would recount it all in detail to his father.

They moved with the crowd. The walkers were hemmed onto the narrow tracks as there were no other paths. Stones, clods of earth, and protruding roots cut their unshod feet, and Uri felt a twinge of guilt watching from above on the back of a mule. They made slow progress, adopting the pace of the mass anyway, so Uri got down and walked on among the people. His feet were sore but he did not mind, as the soles would soon be as tough as leather. Aaron saw but did not upbraid him. The two white-robed men noticed and also dismounted, leading their mules by the tether. The others, though, stayed on their mules.

Progress was slow.

“We are Essenes,” one of the white-robed men said. “What about you? Where are you from?”

Uri gave a brief outline. The Essenes humphed.

“Was it your people, then, after whom the gate in Jerusalem was named?” Uri asked.

“Our forbears,” they answered proudly.

Uri carried on walking with the Essenes, who were greeted gladly by the singing Samaritans attached to the throng.

The day becomes long if a person is walking, and talk is slack until the sun sets. That was how Uri learned that Essenes, of whom he had never heard in Rome, were few in Judaea, perhaps just a few thousand altogether, but had been there for a century now. There were places where they lived in their own houses, with the occasional scattered family member living in a village or town; wherever they were they helped one another and obeyed the commands of their leader. When Uri asked whether they had a single leader in Judaea, they first gave an evasive answer, then confessed that there were several sects of Essenes and several leaders. Many Essenes maintained only frigid relations with those Essenes that still paid dues to the Temple, but they still considered them clean; the Essenes alone had striven for purity in this mire that the Almighty had unleashed on Earth during recent generations. The high priests and even the masters left them alone. Individuals and even whole families could join the Essenes, but it was difficult to gain admission. Newcomers were subject to a trial period, during which it was not permitted to do or, above all, think anything impure. Thoughts could also be impure; indeed, it was mainly thoughts that were impure, stemming as they do from the bowels, and they condemned impurity of thought among themselves. They would regularly recount to each other their thoughts, even their dreams, and the community would discuss them and judge whether they were clean. If not, the leader would impose a punishment on the person who had thought or dreamt it.

They carried a trowel at all times because they were allowed to leave no impurity in their tracks on the face of the earth. They never resorted to arms, although a trowel might be used a weapon if it was whet. They only used it in self-defense, and if it was ever used as a weapon it had to be buried deep in the soil, at least five feet deep, because blood made it impure and would never wash away. Violent use of the trowel had to be confessed to the community, who would judge whether it was legitimate or not. If it wasn’t, the leader would mete out a harsh punishment, the harshest of which, for the Essenes as it was for the Jews, was ostracism, even if a follower had attained the highest rank of initiation, the fourth.

Both of the Essenes had attained the second degree, though only after many years, because unfortunately they were not born Essenes. Their leader had nominated them for this delegation in response to the high priest’s request for Essene involvement.

Uri felt inclined to live in an Essene community for a while, though he did not admit it, as it would have been a futile wish.

Unclean Samaritans were not to be found among the Essenes, the Essenes said disparagingly, as they walked with the masses toward Mount Gerizim and politely returned the respectful greetings of the unclean Samaritans.

By the second day of advancing through the crowd Uri was singing their psalms softly to himself, having learned the texts; they did not sing many psalms in Rome. Joyfully treading in step with pipes, the Samaritans were carrying their produce northward — wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, honey. They said a golden-horned ox decorated with olive branches proceeded at their head, while the women carried fruit in baskets wreathed with laurel leaves on their heads. It was one of the psalms of King David that they sang most often, the thirtieth:

I will extol thee, O Lord, for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.

O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.

O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from Sheol; thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.

Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favor is life; weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.

Lord, by thy favor thou hast made my mountain to stand strong; thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.

I cried to thee, O Lord; and unto the Lord I made supplication.

What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth?

Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me; Lord, be thou my helper.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;

To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent, O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.

He switched to a dance rhythm as he hummed the psalms, in the way that the others did, and found out that it was easier to move ahead by dancing and singing in this manner.

One more day, Uri thought to himself as evening drew in, and we shall be reaching the sacred mountain.

They had just set up camp for the night when Aaron, who was standing and looking to the north, called them over to him. He pointed to the distance, up in the sky. Uri didn’t see anything, but Uri’s companions did, and a great excitement took hold of them. Others looked in the same direction and noticed too.

“Birds,” whispered the thin youth, Jehoram.

Uri squinted but could still see nothing.

The sun was peacefully preparing to go down.

People discussed something excitedly, a few cried out, then there were ever more people as a large group arrived running from the north, yelling, “Soldiers! Soldiers! Soldiers!”

The tribes got together, and the elders consulted one another. There was a general commotion, no one lay down to sleep.

Those coming from the north related with sobs that soldiers had attacked and slaughtered the people assembling at the foot of Mount Gerizim. Syrian soldiers, a whole cohort; they had come from the north, from Antioch via Galilee, and encamped peacefully two days ago at the foot of the hill, but then they had unexpectedly set upon the people, striking at will, chopping, lashing. Many had died — children, women, and old people alike.

“Let’s push on,” said Aaron.

They resumed their northward muleback trek in the gathering twilight, while people streamed past in the opposite direction, shouting, lamenting, raising their hands to the heavens, and cursing.

That night they stretched out farther away from the trail. Aaron again organized them into a duty roster. He ordered a start soon after daybreak the next day, only allowing them a drink from a brook but giving them nothing to eat.

By the morning they reached the village of Tirithana at the foot of the hill.

Several hundred corpses were scattered around, with blood, or something very like it, still oozing from some of them. Fires were smoldering. Children, women, and old people, decapitated, without legs, impaled, all lay motionless, among them mourning relatives kept vigil, whole clans beating their chests, sprinkling ashes on their heads, rocking back and forth as they prayed and rent their garments.

There were no soldiers to be seen.

Aaron went with two men into the village to seek out the elder. Meanwhile the rest sat down. Uri felt a dull empty numbness overcoming his insides. He had no wish to look at the dead bodies, but some force ordered him to look. The women were all dressed in colorful garments; they had been cut down in their finest clothes.

Here and there, wailing mourners raised a dead person aloft to take them to be buried. A crowd tried to carry the body of a small child; everyone wished to get near, jostling and wailing, shaking fists. The mountain loomed on high; Uri narrowed his eyes but couldn’t see any ruins, only the clouds above.

An old man was being carried off next to him. A long, white beard flowed down his face, and his eyes were open as if in wonder, even though he was dead.

Farther off, a man who had been split in two lengthwise was now being put back together, his innards stuffed back into his abdomen and the two halves knotted together with cord. A sword blow had landed on his shoulders and split him apart again down to the navel.

Uri shivered; he would have easily vomited had there been anything in his stomach. Aaron knew full well when he did not allow them to eat.

Uri suddenly discovered that even sitting down he was rocking back and forth, quietly intoning a prayer for the spiritual tranquility of the murdered. That made him feel better. He grasped a handful of earth and sprinkled it on his head; the ground was cool, which was gratifying.

Aaron appeared with the two companions.

“We’re going back,” he declared.

Two mules that had gone lame during the journey were left behind, and they proceeded in turn by muleback and by foot. Aaron hustled them along, almost as if they had been responsible for the murders of those several hundreds.

They spent the Day of Atonement praying in a cave. It occurred to Uri that Aaron had too much local knowledge for it to have been pure chance that they came upon a suitable cave on the way back — and what’s more, an uninhabited cave.

Uri entered the high priest’s palace in Jerusalem for a third time, this time along with his companions.

Before that they took a dip in the basin of the bathhouse built on Mount Zion, the water in which was only knee-high. The Essenes said that they, having seen dead bodies, would be going through a cleansing process for another week.

It was only on the third day that the reek, the stench of rotting human flesh, comparable to nothing else, left Uri’s nostrils.

They were now led to the upper level, where they entered a chamber. Someone came and took Aaron away with him.

They waited.

Uri wondered whether Joseph ben Nahum was here in the palace. What did he know about the mission?

They waited and held their peace.

Eventually a short old man in a blue robe and white tunic appeared, supported by two men, Aaron and the hunchbacked, narrow-eyed man who had sent Uri to Beth Zachariah.

All the others prostrated themselves, and Uri quickly followed.

The old man made a sign of blessing with his right hand and took a seat on a bench. The other two remained standing. Uri’s fellows got to their feet, as did he.

Aaron then spoke.

“The high priest Ananias has honored us by welcoming us in person.”

Uri squinted. So this was the high priest who was no longer a high priest but father-in-law to the present high priest, as someone had said.

Aaron carried on.

“It is Ananias’s wish that as a sign of reaching agreement on the text that is to be read out you all subscribe to it with your signatures.”

The young man unrolled the scroll in his hands and started to read in Greek.

Without being asked, Jehoram, the scrawny youth, interpreted fluently into Aramaic. Not a pickpocket, then, but an interpreter. So he had been the spy among us, the Sanhedrin’s man.

The text read that they, the members of a festival delegation from Judaea heading for Mount Gerizim, on the morning of the day of the festival in the village of Tirithana were eyewitnesses of an attack by the Judaean cohort on a celebrating throng misled by the false prophet. Several hundred people had been slain.

That was exactly what Uri was able to hear in Aramaic as well; the youth interpreted it accurately.

But we were not eyewitnesses, and the cohort was not Judaean but Syrian.

“Are you in accord?” the high priest asked.

“I’m in accord,” said Aaron.

He stepped over to the small table on which the hunchbacked young man had placed the scroll and wrote his name on it with a quill, the inkpot held by the young man.

Everyone else, the Essenes included, went over and added their names in turn.

Uri was the penultimate; only Jehoram, who politely stepped aside, would follow him. It did cross Uri’s mind what would happen if he were to speak out and ask that the text be corrected because it was a lie as it stood. What would happen? He would be clapped in prison and would never reach Alexandria, that’s what would happen.

They needed several witnesses, preferably people belonging to different sects, and they clearly considered a Roman with full rights of citizenship to be important.

Uri dipped the quill’s nib in ink and wrote his own name in Greek letters under the others.

So did Jehoram.

The high priest got to his feet.

“Thank you, my sons. May the blessings of the Eternal One be upon you.”

He recited a priestly benediction, his right hand raised toward them, his fingers splayed, then left the chamber on the arm of the young man.

“I, too, thank you,” said a relieved Aaron. “You may pick up your rewards on the ground floor. Jehoram will lead you there.”