When Uri heard what was happening, he hurried over to the gardens. He had engendered Marcellus; let him at least witness his death, assuming the dogs or tigers had not already devoured him. He was not worried about being recognized or being crucified because, so he felt, he had already seen enough of life.
Many hundreds of people were hanging on crosses, some head downward: some were still living, others were already dead. Horsemen kept order, relatives, water jugs in hand or on their head, searched forlornly and were not molested; a multitude of gawkers enjoyed the spectacle, which beat any entertainment put on at the Circus. Not since the Spartacus revolt had been suppressed had so many people been crucified, and that had been a long time ago.
Uri trod methodically; he had to walk up close to every single cross to see the face of the crucified person. It was a tiring procedure as he was constantly being jostled and shoved. The living moaned, pleading for water, writhing, choking, the shit trickling down their legs, blood dribbling from the mouths and ears of those who had been crucified upside down; the stronger ones, young men with their heads dangling down, could still flex their muscles and even as they hung there could bring their upper bodies into a horizontal position before dropping back down again.
Uri recognized many acquaintances from Far Side, but he would never have believed that they too would have joined this mad, fanatical sect. Either they had not joined, or the persons denouncing them were eager to lay their hands on their wealth. He was astounded when he discovered the dead body of aging Honoratus, as his left leg was missing; that must have been chopped off earlier. He quite certainly had not been a Nazarene, but a revolution was taking place in Far Side, with new people stepping into the places of the old elders, who were not equipped to do away with the Nazarenes. Many of the faces he considered to be Judaean; they had presumably come over as missionaries. He stood for a long time by one of the aged men who had been hanged head down: no longer alive, his long, silvery beard was fluttering in the breeze and as far as it was possible to make out from the inverted head, he had a smile on his face. He must have cheerfully gotten some big sins off his chest as he had been dying.
Uri spent the whole day walking around in the garden because new individuals were constantly being brought for crucifixion, but Marcellus was not among them. Had he escaped? Had he come to his senses in time? Had he been killed earlier?
At twilight Nero had the crucified set aflame so that they should provide light and the crowds would be able to see them: straw was heaped at the foot of the crosses and sprinkled with oil that it would burn with a lot of smoke. The dead sizzled mutely, the living screamed as they burned.
Alexandria had come to Rome. Until then, in Rome Jews had merely been scorned or laughed at; the Nazarene zealots had at last made them hated.
Marcellus clambered out from among the goats when Uri returned late that night.
“I didn’t see you crucified, dear son,” Uri greeted him unemotionally.
Marcellus was mopping goat droppings from his legs.
“Did you betray them, dear son?” Uri asked genially. “Did you race to inform against them? Was that how you saved your skin?”
Marcellus kept quiet; Hagar, as prescribed, wrung her hands.
“I don’t think I would have betrayed them,” Uri contemplated. “They were your family, your brothers and sisters…”
“They lied,” Marcellus hissed viciously.
“It took this long for you to realize? When they are being murdered? What kind of faith is that?”
“He will come,” Marcellus muttered, “only He will come by night, stealthily, like a thief… By the morning the world will be different… And wrongdoers will be the first to be pardoned!”
Uri fell silent.
There are still things I need to learn, he thought as he laughed. He howled with laughter for a long time, unable to help it.
Hagar looked at him in horror, Marcellus with hatred. Hagar then plucked a chicken, cooked; they said prayers for the dead and ate heartily without a word.
A construction fever like never before broke out in Rome. Nero announced that he was having a statue built, bigger than the Colossus of Rhodes had been, to be made of gold, raised in front of his palace, and he was applauded.
A lot of new housing on the Alta Semita and Vicus Longus, north of the Viminal, had burned down, and Uri’s murals were destroyed with them. This was a stroke of luck because the owners set to rebuilding their houses; their money had not been reduced to ashes. Uri had more work than ever before, so he was able to repay his debts.
He stayed outside of the hunt after Nazarenes; he was not counted as being a Jew — he was not a factor in people’s eyes and no one envied him his ramshackle mud-brick cottage, indeed, people were unaware of where he resided.
He brooded over the fact that people nowadays were no longer modest and humble enough.
They thought that no one before them had suffered, and nobody had thought about anything. People thought that they alone, like no one before, had an entitlement to survive death. They sneered at the tens and hundreds of millions who had lived before them — they had been imbeciles, they imagined, just for allowing themselves to die. They imagined that the Lord was singling them out, of all people, with His infinite grace, that they would be the first generation which was going to escape death, and that today’s world was the most dreadful of worlds in which to live and for that reason ripe for change.
These people had not read any historical works, or if they had, they grasped nothing from them.
Nor had they read the Holy Writ, as they should.
Uri ran through his own life in his mind and found that there had been innumerable occasions when he might easily have thought that no one had experienced worse things than he had — yet all the same he never thought that.
What made me so forbearing? What made me so meek? Did I imagine, perhaps, that I would be granted a second life? That if I endured this one, then I would get another one as a reward?
Maybe because I indulged in dreaming, I did acquire a second life? I daydreamed while I was reading, and I daydreamed while I was walking. I have had more than just one life.
The time had come to muse about that sort of thing because he had married off his daughters, his first grandson had been born, his sons had grown up and were not starving to death — what had become of them was quite another matter — and the Lord could not expect him to work on the survival of the species. Let his children look after themselves as best they could.
As he grew older, Uri felt a sweeping dismissive wave of the hand taking hold in his mind. Perhaps the Eternal One was exercising mercy to facilitate the departure of a believer from this world by bestowing on him, in due time, a mighty distaste for life. He was losing his teeth, his joints were losing their resilience, his back was losing its straightness, food and drink were losing their flavor, he was losing his virility, all so that there would be nothing for him to regret.
He did still want to read. Which reminded him that there had once been a time when he had wanted to build up a library for himself. Why not?
One Sunday he sauntered over into Far Side, where he had not been for a long time. Nothing had changed except that a few ugly tenement buildings had been thrown up. He turned into the house where Theo, before he had been castrated, had placed his scrolls on deposit. Over the intervening years the sympathetic young man’s back had grown crooked and gray hairs now flecked his hair; he expressed his willingness to return the scrolls that had been entrusted to him.