In the real Rome, his mongrel character faded into insignificance among the many hundreds of thousands of freakish people. At first sight he did not even look to be a mongrel; there were large numbers of people who were even more of a mess — sick, maimed, ulcerated, wounded, veteran legionnaires, and useless, cast-off slaves with missing limbs, wailing and begging for alms at every turn. He became acquainted with that bank of the Tiber and was witness to many things that his Jewish contemporaries were denied because, being intact, they were preoccupied with life on Far Side and did not have time to wander around in the true Rome. He, however, could wander; his father never asked what he was doing with his time, nor did anyone else.
Being a Roman citizen with full rights, he was entitled to enter into conversation with all sorts of people in the true Rome, and he tried to speak with everybody in their own mother tongue. These were wonderful language lessons, and one did not even have to pay for them. Over there, he thrived, shone, played roles, bluffed; he was just one of Rome’s malingering plebeians. Back home, withdrawn in his shack, he was a pariah among the Jews because of his poor eyesight, his bad legs and back, not fit for physical labor. Among Jews he was nobody, yet in the true Rome he was a man of equal rank to whom, should he speak, people would listen just like anyone else, and they would pay as little notice to his opinion as they did anyone else’s. At home, he did not dare offer an opinion about anything; over there, however, he chattered, passed judgments, held forth and butted in on any conversation. He had a Jewish self, and he acquired a Roman self; both sides would have been amazed to see him in the other milieu. But that they did not see.
He never denied, if asked, that he was Jewish, but nothing was made of it. “A Jew’s just like everybody else, only crazier” was the general, patronizing view of atheistic Jews and their unfounded arrogance that placed their one god above all the other gods. There was nothing hostile in that view; it was more disdainful indulgence, something that amused others. In this enormous city, citizens had gotten used to a great variety of peoples who found ways to get by in the world, and every one of them, without exception, was in Rome, with its comic superstitions and ludicrous customs. Where lanky Germanic people who barely spoke broken Latin were the emperor’s best Praetorian Guards; where philosophers descending from everywhere discoursed only in Greek, not Latin; where splendid delegations arrived from all parts of the world; where countless deposed kings were preparing to claim their throne and loafed around with their populous families; where a statue of the gods of every conquered people stood in the Forum — all except the Jewish God, the Unrepresentable One. A single Roman Jew with full civil rights counted little and raised no passions.
The only thing Uri was ashamed about was the begging of the grubby, bare-footed Jewish children running around the true Rome in gangs of four and five. The children were coached by adults — former beggar children themselves, well schooled in the psychology of prospective donors — in what they should say in Latin and Greek, how to surround a wealthy gentleman or lady and plead aggressively, and how to look even more destitute than they were. These adults would then collect the day’s take from the children. Any upstanding Jew was appalled by the practice, but the Elders did not forbid it, with some no doubt raking off a share of the income; names were flung around, often baselessly, of those who supposedly profited from the children.
When it became clear that Uri had bad eyesight, Joseph had also been approached to have his son tail after the indigent children as an overseer, so that they would not hide away the money that they had begged, but his father had chased them out of the house with cries of outrage. Uri knew precisely which of the idle Jews over there were keeping an eye on the gangs of beggar children. That was the one time he gave thanks for his bad eyesight, because when the Elders called his father in on account of his scandalous behavior, he could invoke his son’s shortsightedness and say that he had been so enraged by the suggestion because he thought they were poking fun of a well-known defect. On that occasion, no punishment had been inflicted on Joseph.
Maybe being a boss to children back home in Rome was better than being jolted along toward the unknown, he thought to himself now.
He watched Matthew’s back at length as he sat beside the wagoner. He was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man of middle age with sharp, sunburned features, thick, light-brown hair, and blue eyes, as Uri had already noticed at daybreak. It must be good to be strong like him, accustomed to traveling.
The silence must have been too protracted for Matthew’s taste, as he partly swung around and started speaking.
He begged forgiveness for rudely interrupting his companions’ sacred meditations, but he felt it was incumbent on him, as their leader, to give a short account of his life and therefore their commander, as it were, on this journey. It was a matter of regret that the delegation to Jerusalem from the community of Jewish congregations was not being led by a man of Roman citizenship; he was merely a citizen of the Italian provinces, but the Elders had found that this was the safe solution, and up till now that had in fact been so: on the occasions he had led the journey, no harm had come to them.
He lived in Ostia, as he had said before. He was proud of the town, and at least two thousand out of a population of approximately twenty thousand were Jewish. They had a house of prayer and a public bath next door, everything they needed, and there were also private baths in or next to the houses of the richer citizens.
There were a great variety of peoples living in this important seaport, the importance of which would only grow; in it there was a sanctuary to Isis and a sanctuary to the renowned Magna Mater, to Cybele, mother of the gods, and to many other Eastern deities, like Mithras, what would be expected in a port town. But it was his fervent hope that a Jewish house of prayer would eventually be built that people from distant lands would flock to admire.
The Latini in Ostia had exquisite baths, a magnificent stadium, an amphitheater that held four thousand spectators, a substantial records office, the houses of the wealthier citizens, some of the houses of Jews also, had hypocaust heating systems, and some of these were on two floors, provided with an ample balcony where it was possible to sit outside in the evening. He did not say it to boast, but his house was one of them; it had been completed not even six months ago; it is true that it was situated outside the town walls. On the sea coast to the southeast of the town itself that extramural territory — and incidentally he had not had to pay the municipal administration for it, or to be more exact, the land did not belong to the town, but he had asked for a written document, which he received, to the effect that he was permitted to build on it — would be worth something one day, perhaps even more than a plot inside the town. Previously he had lived in a tenement with his children, but they had outgrown the two rooms of that apartment and, over his wife’s protestations, he had put all the money he had saved into this villa; so far no one had attacked the house or robbed it. Not far from the house were two mausoleums and the Bona Dea sanctuary, which were likewise outside the Porta Marina. The new mausoleum had been consecrated not long before, but he had personally known the individual to whom it had been erected, the famed C. Cartilius Poplicola, slayer of the pirates who had once tried to ransack all the ships in the harbor but had all come to a bad end. Poplicola, the new mausoleum’s occupant who had passed away to an eternal peace, had been a dignified old man in his final years, who had loved company and threw large banquets; he, Matthew, had visited him on two occasions and could also say that both times Poplicola had stroked his face with his hand because in the twilight of his years he had gone completely blind.