The Lord God had taken good care to insert a day of rest after six days of labor; God well understood that a person can stick out six days on foot but would not take a seventh.
He went off to relieve himself, and he saw that his stool was blood-flecked. His rectum had been itching and throbbing for days, perhaps from all the walking. His father suffered from bouts of colic, especially when he was helplessly worrying about an uncertain business matter.
Uri was delighted by the bloody stool.
He felt that the common ailment brought him closer to his distant father, who would likewise be observing the Sabbath back at home; right now he must be setting off with Sarah and the girls for the house of prayer where upon the Sabbath morning the members of the congregation would collectively listen to the prayer, men and women together and with them any children able to walk. There were stories that in Judaea women were given a place separate from the men; Uri did not understand the need for this degrading differentiation. If the opportunity arose, he would ask Matthew about it someday.
He lolled on the grass the whole day long; it was nice and warm. He extracted the jug from the sack — he had just come to the end of the matzos and had long since polished off the fruit — and placed it under his back; he wrapped his father’s poor old cloak around himself, giving thanks to Joseph for begetting him, and stared at the skies. Up above, confused, multiple outlines blotched bluish, whitish, and grayish-blue, blurring into one another, unpredictably. Beyond that was Heaven, to which, at the end of his days, if he had worthily stood his ground down here below, he would hopefully ascend, there to meet with all the dear souls of his relations. That may have been a Greek idea originally, but the Jews had also adopted it, and quite rightly too; it was very reassuring.
The others in the delegation strolled around, chatted in twos and threes, but they did not go far, as that would have counted as traveling, which of course was forbidden on the Sabbath; they did not move farther than the tree under which the Torah had been read. No one spoke to him, but that did not bother Uri now; the Lord had seen well that on the seventh day one ought to rest. He must have seen the heavy toils of slaves in Egypt and wanted to give them too a reason for rejoicing on the seventh day. Uri exercised his feet; they hurt, but there was something ecstatic even in that. His rectum did not hurt now that he was lying down: it seemed as if the pain had departed from him also, along with the tainted blood.
He was surrounded by countryside of Edenic intactness, charming hills and moors, woods and fields, the glorious land of Campania, and needless to say there was a babbling brook nearby, as they had to drink and ritually bathe; God knew just where to conjure up a brook.
The whole of Italia was not yet cultivated; a vast amount of land was left fallow and belonged either to nobody or to the emperor, which came to the same thing. These hills had perhaps never been cultivated, with only sheep or goats sometimes grazing as they strayed in that direction. These were the sorts of landscapes about which verses were dashed off by bucolic Latin poets who developed an eye for the countryside because they lived in crowded cities.
Uri’s soul was filled, as he lay there, with cheerfulness and an unfocused yearning. At that moment he was at peace with the created world, with the Creator, and specifically because he very much wanted to experience right now the future for which he was predestined. Travel would play a part in it, as a matter of course, for how else would he have ended up where he was? Because he had done nothing wrong, he felt now that the trip to Jerusalem was in fact a gift.
The Lord wanted him to break free at last from his pagan reading matter, to grow up, and to see the Temple, which few in the Diaspora had the chance to see, and for his faith to be strengthened. Uri was one of the chosen people, however wretched he might consider himself to be. How could he not be one of the Lord’s chosen people too if he was one of those, everywhere in the world this morning, who had listened to the same passages from the Torah that not long before he had interpreted to Aramaic?
No one at all passed that way, only the birds flitted around and twittered, but even if someone had come by and seen seven men in tunics — they had taken off the outer garments, it was so warm; spring had arrived early that year — he would not suspect how happy they were.
Non-Jews have no idea, thought Uri, what a joy this was. For all the sufferings that the Lord has visited on his chosen people, it was nonetheless they who were His chosen people: they were worth more than all the rest simply by virtue of existing. That knowledge gave security; that knowledge was the guarantee that everything was fine and would continue to be fine no matter what bad things had happened or ever would happen. When the Messiah, who might become the Anointed Priest of all people but would be Jewish all the same, came, he, Uri, along with his people, would ascend among the privileged into Sublime Eternity.
He had a foretaste of that fine, celestial eternity right now, as his legs were aching less and his rectum was not cramping.
They got to the house they should have reached a day and a half earlier at daybreak on Sunday, but that kind of delay did not count for anything on a journey of this length, Matthew assured them.
Four houses stood on the settlement, surrounded by tall stone walls, and nothing outside gave any sign that Jews lived in one of the houses; it was just the same sort of house as the others. Uri mused how the Lord God and his servants, the angels, would not know which door to knock on when the time came, but then it occurred to him that they were able to recognize a soul, they could see through walls and bodies and faith, and were that not so they would make some serious errors, but that was impossible.
The residents of the house welcomed them with relief; they had been anxious on their account.
It was a big family, with three grandparents, two parents, eight children from adults down to a small infant: five sons and three daughters. They could not own land in their own right, it was true, they only rented, but they kept a lot of sheep, the children taking them out to pasture, whereas they would drive any who met requirements to the harbor a day’s walk away, and from there they would be taken by ship to Ostia and Jewish butchers in Rome.
Which harbor was that? Dicaearchia, naturally.
Uri asked how far that was from Rome.
Plotius stared in wonder.
“We’ve told you once already,” he replied.
Uri still did not understand.
“It’s what the Latini call Puteoli,” said Plotius. “No doubt because of all the little wells. It was founded by the Greeks and it still has many Greek inhabitants.”
Uri was overcome with shame.
“I know that,” he said, blushing. “Foul-smelling hot springs in that area, it’s supposed to be medicinal… Cicero used to own a property there…”
The homeowners told them that they themselves sheared the sheep, and they spun the wool themselves; they were able to get a good price for the yarn; in one of the rooms was an enormous wooden contrivance, a weaving loom. Obviously, the young girls spun the yarn; their mother had taught them how. On the kitchen wall, hung up on hooks by their handles, was a row of long daggers in the event that they needed to defend themselves, but they had never had to do so as yet.
They were prepared to receive the delegation and had baked enough matzos to last the whole week: they barely fit into the sacks. They also handed out wine in skins that were tied off and sealed with wax.