He walked with gritted teeth, his head bowed down to make clear there was no point asking more questions. The others drew away, then Matthew pushed ahead also and took the reins back from Iustus, who had proven expert in road construction. Because it really was him, the stonemason and house-builder, Uri had meanwhile assured himself that this — the one to whom Matthew had temporarily handed the reins — was the same as the Iustus whose grandfather had reported to Gaius Lucius’s father that Uri’s grandfather had been stealing when his grandfather had never stolen anything. That was something his father had told him once.
He was half-asleep by the time Matthew called a halt, unharnessed the donkey and tethered it to a tree. They took from their sacks the tefillin, bound it to their forehead or arm, said a prayer while facing southeast, then lay down, each placing his sack beneath his head. There was no water with which to rinse hands and feet, so they rubbed them with soil instead, as that was considered clean. No one asked Matthew if he had aimed for this coppice deliberately or had failed to reach the intended hostelry. It was on my account that progress was so slow, Uri reflected; that is not going to make them like me any better.
He had almost fallen asleep when he noticed that the others were whispering with Matthew. They’re talking about me; they want to get rid of me. I’m the problem.
So what?
The first inn they stayed in was small and ramshackle but reasonably clean; there were six men idling in togas, sitting next to one another on a bench. The group took seats next to them. Uri wearily wiggled his toes; he had slogged on manfully, eating little and drinking little, as his stomach could not take much. His companions must have seen that he was suffering without a word of complaint, trying to keep up.
His companions eyed the men suspiciously; Uri blinked in their direction but could see nothing remarkable. Even if they were robbers, they were quiet. Then, to his surprise, the men began speaking with women’s voices. He narrowed his eyes: the togaed individuals were women, but they wore their togas the same way men did in Rome. Uri was amazed, since in Rome the women went around in tunics with long sleeves, so this was evidently the fashion in the provinces.
Uri would have kept on looking, but his companions were there too and it would not do to stare openly. By now Uri had the feeling that they had warmed toward him a bit; in fact, they were even striking up conversations with him.
By now he had gotten to know their names.
One of them, a muscular, proud man by the name of Alexandros, was a merchant; he was acquainted with Joseph, he said, and had a high opinion of him, which pleased Uri greatly.
Another answered to the name of Valerius and was a hyperetes, or assistant to the archisynagogos, not as a grammateus but as maintenance man, which essentially meant he was a cleaner. Although a nobody and a nothing, he was still the only person in the delegation with a religious occupation. Uri had never come across him before; Valerius’s services were done for the Hebrew temple, which was located a long way from the temple to which Uri went, because it stood on the Via Aurelia, outside the city wall, to the west of the center of Far Side. People who used the Hebrew temple spoke Greek. A couple of generations ago the language of the divine service was perhaps Hebrew or Aramaic, from which the name for the house of prayer might have derived, designating it as a position beyond the river, because the Greek “Hebraios” comes from Aramaic “ibrhay” or Hebrew “ibrhi¯,” meaning “from beyond the river.”
The strong, black-bearded one was called Plotius and said he was a joiner. He mostly kept silent, but Uri would have been glad to hear more from him.
The thickset little busybody was a teacher by the name of Hilarus. No surprise that he was teacher; it’s their job to find fault with everything and everybody. Uri was just thankful his own teacher had been nothing like that.
Anyway, Uri did not dare scrutinize the women, but he did notice what while waiting for their supper his companions, strong adult males that they were, were gaping at them and, all except Matthew and Plotius, fidgeting restlessly on the bench. It struck Uri that marriage does not efface all traces of sexual desire. The Lord knows, he intoned noiselessly, what specters and hideous urges still await me in life!
They were still dining when four Latinian youths dropped into the hostelry. Judging from their clothes and jewels, they must have been rich; maybe they were headed to the country house of one of their fathers, but they hitched their horses in front of the inn. On entering the premises, they weighed the situation and sat down next to the wilting damsels, who livened up, and while the Jews stared into their plates as they chewed, they took drinks. When the Jews had finished the meal, the four youths and six women went upstairs.
By then even Uri had comprehended that these women were professionals. He knew from his reading that whatever takes place in a hostelry does not count as marital infidelity in a court of law. He kept quiet, and so did his companions. From upstairs a sound of tittering, periodic screaming, rhythmic panting, pounding, and creaking of the floor could be heard.
Uri had encountered prostitutes before in Rome while going around his favorite part of the city, the Subura, with ladies in short sleeveless tunics sometimes accosting him and offering to take care of him for two or three asses; the whores in Rome were proverbially dirt-cheap, there being too many of them. Uri always retreated panic-stricken, precisely because, thanks to his father’s good nature, he would always have enough money on his person to pay for their services. He had no money on him now, thank the Lord, so he was in no place to proposition the worthy ladies, were he to be seized by a momentary madness.
They slept in a warehouse, packed together on the ground. For a long time Uri could not get to sleep, listening to the snores and wheezing of his companions and imagining what might be going on upstairs in the inn.
Naked men and women were not unknown sights to him, Roman statuary not exactly being prudish. Paintings in the public library also depicted fauns and nymphs who had nothing on, and the painter had not given Helen too many clothes either, portraying her virtually naked at the side of a Paris with a conspicuous hard-on.
Uri feared sexuality and yearned in equal measure for a woman to initiate him at last. Hanging around in the true Rome, he could hardly shield his eyes from open displays and depictions of sexuality. There were statues of humans, murals of naked nymphs also, in the houses of even rich Roman Jews — not that Uri saw them, as he had no access to such places, but there was talk all over Far Side about it being possible for Jews to purchase with impunity a sarcophagus portraying a nude Venus or Poseidon in specialist shops run by non-Jews, and Levite cemetery attendants would raise no objections. The Elders of Rome took the view that portrayals of man or beast were prohibited only on hilltops, because there they might be worshiped as idols, whereas anywhere else was permitted. Sarah was always happy to inveigh against this disgusting, barbaric custom any time she brought food and drink and clean clothes to a weary Joseph when he got back home, as were a wife’s duties, after all. Uri too understood that the Torah contained a general prohibition against portrayals of both man and beasts, and he simply could not make his mind up whether to support the written Law or the spoken Word in his soul.
When the weather was good, which it was for eight or nine months in the year, benches would be set up on the street, and it was possible to gaze at the bustle for hours on end, and there were few bigger amusements going in the Rome of those days. Sitting in a Roman tavern, Uri would look at the women and try to imagine what kinds of children he would father with each, and how.