Uri nodded.
“These are bleak times; bleak times, indeed,” Hilarus sighed, even biting into his lower lip. “But we’ll put on a splendid bar mitzvah for your second son — just you wait and see!”
Seeing that he was in Far Side anyway, Uri also paid a visit to the library where five years previously Theo had placed his scrolls on deposit. The weaver who had run the library then was no longer alive; his place had been taken over by his son.
“Yes, indeed,” said the gangly, hollow-chested, dark-haired young man, highly strung and blinking. “Right away.”
He soon reappeared with some twenty scrolls, though Uri had thought there were fewer.
“Remarkable works they are,” the young man said deferentially. “Most instructive!”
Uri looked the young man over; he must have been around twenty years old. He really has read them; pity he’s not my own son.
“They’re in very good condition,” he commented.
“Naturally.”
Uri wavered:
“I’m prepared to let them stay on here,” he finally declared. “Let others read them.”
There was a brief pause.
“Your trust is highly flattering,” the young man said, clearly touched. “I’ll give you a receipt, so you can take them back any time you wish.”
“That’ll be fine.”
Uri had no idea how he was going to make a living. He calculated that they had sufficient money to last them another two or three months; something would surely turn up by then.
One morning he was approached by the caretaker, who was somewhat afraid of him had been trying to get on his good side after finding that he could not simply blather on for any length of time with him as he could with the other residents; the man asked whether he was by any chance interested in a job as a tiler on a construction project. Uri was interested.
At the time large-scale festivities were being held no more than seven or eight stadia away from the Via Nomentana on the Field of Mars, where Nero had ordered a new timber amphitheater to be built. Uri merrily tiled away while these were going on, being not the slightest bit curious about what the new emperor looked like. Marcellus, Hagar, and the girls attended the celebrations since all Rome was going, and they did not feel apprehensive about being in the crowd as now they could at last feel that they were true Romans. Uri went on tiling and kept on sniffing himself; the other laborers noticed nothing, but he felt he could not get rid of a stench of urine.
In his spare time he used broken tiles that were being discarded as rejects to build up portraits of Kainis and others. This was noticed by the foreman, who eventually asked him if he wanted a job as a painter. Uri was reminded of Judaea, and Hiskiyya, who had painted all those fantastic birds in the palace that was being built for Queen Helena of Adiabene, so he took on a job as a painter.
After he had finished painting his first wall, Uri was offered a higher wage, and he accepted it.
Once again he was making money.
He had waited nineteen years for the chance to be a painter.
If only he could now stick to that as a trade.
He was well aware that he was not really cut out for painting murals, more for painting panels; those were small and needed to be looked at from close at hand. Mural decorations he would have to look at from a distance, and his pictures did not show up well from that perspective because he himself could only see shadowy blotches if he stepped back, and even that was something. Like the others, he painted in tempera, applying pigment ground to a paste in water to a solvent of egg yolk, milk, honey, and vegetable oil, onto a gesso ground, just as he had learned in Jerusalem. The alternative way, the encaustic technique (which employed a binder of molten beeswax into which the pigments were applied with a metal spatula, burned into grooves on the drawing), he knew only from written descriptions. In any case, this was used in Rome only in the houses of the very richest people, and they only painted the residences of the parvenu middle class in the eastern part of Rome proper, on the Viminal ridge and the hills around there.
He painted, gossiped, talked politics, and drank with the other painters and tilers, them drinking wine and he sticking to beer. Many a time they got so sloshed that after the noon siesta they would not wake up until the evening. He would hand one-third of his wages to Hagar, which in itself was no small amount, hiding the remaining two-thirds under one of the tiles in the villa that was under construction.
He took a fancy to one of the water carriers, a slim, young, firm-bodied, black girl with curly raven locks called Flora, and one afternoon seduced her, having no idea why the girl was willing to go to bed with him, and any time he asked she just giggled. Flora wasn’t brainy, but she was pleasant, and would fondle Uri’s male organ, amazed that it had no foreskin even when it just dangled limply, as she had never encountered its like before. He was cautious when making love to the girl, which he did in one of the remote nooks of the residence that was rising around them, taking particular care not to impregnate her. For the first time in many years he became a man again, poking her in any number of ways. The girl would playfully tweak the graying hairs on his chest and stroke the bald pate of his head, imagining, as she put it herself, that it was crowned with a thick head of hair.
Life, in short, acquired richness, but then one day at dawn the tenement building burned down.
The vigiles did not make an appearance, and Uri and his family had to run down a flaming, alarmingly crackling staircase dressed in no more than their tunics; it was a miracle none of them was consumed in the blaze, for the moment they got out the stairs collapsed and two of the other families on the fifth story, some twenty people all told, young and old, women and men, all perished.
The entire block of buildings in this slum area along the Via Nomentana caught fire and burned to the ground, rather as if it had been set alight at several places simultaneously, and presumably that is what really did happen. Uri hugged his trembling daughters, Marcellus wailed hysterically, and Hagar just sat staring vacantly. Frightfully burned people were lying on the ground, screaming; water was thrown over them, and they writhed and rasped until they passed away in dreadful agonies. Uri looked at them and was astounded because he could see that in fact they were choking to death, and it crossed his mind that perhaps we do not only breathe with our lungs, as one is taught, but in some other way, only we don’t know what that is.
They lost not only their personal possessions but also six months’ rent that they had paid in advance, but would never be able to use.
That too was a cause of the fire, Uri realized, because the insurer would pay out damages to the landlord, who would then have a new building thrown up in under two months and would then again have the brazen cheek to demand a whole year’s rent in advance from the new tenants. Uri seethed: he should have seen it coming. He would never grow a head on his shoulders; he was still always surprised at how evil people were.
The scum had us pay for the fire roofs before they set fire to the whole street!
They had to find somewhere to live.
They moved to a peasant dwelling which lay just within the city walls, close to the Porta Nomentana. Part of Uri’s secret cache of two-thirds of his wages went toward this; he told Hagar a fib about having been granted a loan, but then they also needed to eat, for the tessera did not bring in enough and Uri’s patron, Gaius Lucius, had died while they were away. Uri went once to his patron’s house, having bought a brand-new sportula for the occasion, but the deceased man’s sons had him chased off, having no wish to support a Jewish client. Afterward Uri had not gone in search of a new patron, hoping that he would be able to earn enough from painting. Marcellus had a prodigious appetite, and Irene too could pack it away; only Eulogia pecked at her food. When Marcellus turned fourteen he would be able to put on the toga virilis of a Roman citizen and he too would be entitled to a tessera, but they could not go hungry until then.