That night at home he went to bed; it was a moonlit night. He closed his eyes and then opened them: he could still see light. It had been a transient dysfunction; he needed to get a good night’s sleep.
In his dreams he could see well; pictures had been sharp in his dreams all along. When he woke up and could see only vague outlines, and only out of the corners of the eyes, he groaned.
Good God! Is this blindness?
He had to wait several weeks for true blindness. Just enough time to make some necessary arrangements. He acquired a sharp scalpel to open his veins any time. He went out to see his daughters and inform them that soon he would be unable to see anything at all, so would they be so kind as to see to his daily needs if they had a wish to receive any inheritance: there would be more or less according to how they conducted themselves.
Irene wailed and cried crocodile tears; swarthy-skinned Isaac, her husband, the one-time water-carrier but more recently a tax collector, maintained his silence. Isaac, it was said, had worked his way onto the committee which assessed and collected the Jewish tax — a consilium, as it was called, with powers to search houses and a Latin praetor at its head. Uri congratulated him. They did not understand why he was not more enthusiastic.
It’s more than possible that this Isaac will be an executioner should the occasion arise, Uri contemplated, cursing Kainis for her munificence. The stupid woman might at least leave my grandchildren out of it if she was unwilling to bear me any children.
He repeated: would they be so good as to nurse him as he would be unable to see anything. They promised.
Eulogia, the younger daughter, looked at him dopily, glancing at her mother, who lived there. Hagar muttered angrily: “Your father acting up again, is he?” They had two children there.
Uri picked up his pay at all three building sites. At home he had devised ingenious hiding-places in the floor, and he split the coins between them. What a stroke of good luck it had been to learn tiling. With great difficulty he wrote out a final will and testimony, leaving blanks for the names.
He took a deep breath, then cautiously, staying close to walls, he stumbled his way over to Salutius’s place and asked for his share.
“Certainly,” said Salutius. “Of course.”
Only he did not have it as ready money because he had invested Uri’s share so it would earn a decent return, but there was no rush to take it out now because they could get it back later on at a nice interest.
“I need it now,” Uri said.
Not now — that was the agreement.
Salutius grubbed together slightly more than 3,000 sesterces; that was all he had at home of the 150,000. Uri counted it and had Salutius sign an acknowledgment of receipt.
“What did you invest it in?” he asked.
Salutius swallowed hard.
“Don’t be shy! I won’t bite your head off.”
Salutius still wavered, looking over Uri’s shoulder. Uri smiled encouragingly.
“They’re collecting for a Third Temple,” he whispered.
“Who are they — the lunatics?”
“Well, it’s Iustus and the elders. Your son dropped in personally to ask me for a donation…”
“And what if someone refuses to give?”
“People give — even those who have difficulty shelling out the Jewish tax. They take out a loan, and at a very low interest rate, I have to say.”
“Just who’s behind the money that’s being loaned, my dear son?”
Salutius did not know.
Uri snorted a laugh:
“So when is this Temple of theirs going to be built, dear son, and where exactly?”
“The promise is that if it hasn’t been built up in Jerusalem five years from now, the money will be returned with interest… They don’t take kindly at all if anyone refuses.”
Uri sighed even as he snorted:
“But every last penny of our money, dear son? A small amount would have done the trick!”
Salutius said nothing before beginning to yammer out that although the Eternal One had singled Rome out to punish the Jews for their sins, He would not abandon His people providing the people gave proof of their fidelity, and it happened that precisely in these fraught times a new alliance, more complete and deeper than ever before, was being struck between God and His people.
Uri shook his head and like a bird looked sideways at Salutius’s features, tortured as they were by heartburn and a bum heartbeat, and gave a nod.
“I’ll send around for my money in five years’ time,” he said and went off.
He wanted to find a servant.
Homer had also been blind; he dictated his Iliad to a servant, so tradition had it.
It is not true that one can’t live with blindness.
If one couldn’t, there was always the scalpel.
It was better to sleep because in his dreams he could see.
He knew he was awake by the fact that he couldn’t see. In the early days he could still make out a few patches and rejoiced that he could still see light, but after a while there was not even that.
He felt around for his hiding-places: the tiles were in place and not wobbling. Under one of them was the scalpel.
His daughters took turns visiting the Via Sacra, bringing him his meals and water and taking away the dirty things; they spent a little time with their father but they had nothing to talk about as Uri had no interest in how his grandchildren were progressing and mixed up their names.
He asked them to round him up a servant who was knew how to write, and they promised earnestly to try, but did not manage to find one.
He ought to have found one for himself earlier. Uri asked for a dog. Stray dogs, outcasts, roamed around in packs in Rome and would attach themselves to any living soul, but Uri’s daughters did not get him a dog, implying that they were scared to.
Uri sat by an open window, which faced southward, with the sunlight warming his face and imagined he could see the light. He imagined that he had the dog that had been on the ship: if he tried hard to imagine a thing, it was as if he were seeing it.
He made up stories about the dog: that it had been with him in Beth Zechariah, and with him in Alexandria, playing with him in the Gymnasium garden; he imagined the fuss the dog would kick up in the alabarch’s palace; he imagined making a present of it to Kainis, the young Kainis in Claudius’s house, and how sometimes the dog would run away to return to him in the Via Sacra and describe in a human voice the reign of the Flavian dynasty. It was a smart dog: Kainis’s intelligence and wit had rubbed off.
Uri would snicker to himself and bless the Eternal One for bestowing man with imagination when He created him.
He made up stories for himself, or dreamed them, and he laughed.
As he chewed with his toothless gums the dry flatbread that his daughters brought him he imagined he was eating barbel in Alexandria, and he could sense its aroma in his nose.
The Eternal One, may He be blessed, had also bestowed memory on man.
If a person lived long enough, his dead acquaintances cavorted like fish in silt and there was no knowing which of them might rise to the surface at any one time — maybe that was what was meant by the spirit world. Master Jehuda emerged, grumbled and laughed; appearing separately was the young, black-haired girl, and because she had been invoked by Uri she became his wife, and she lived out with him the rest of his days, and Uri sired a brood of children who miraculously were untouched by war and were even now living nicely in their village, all of them prosperous farmers. Uri also married Sotades’s younger sister, the devastatingly pretty Greek girl, slim, blue-eyed, and with the long blonde hair, and lived happily with her in Alexandria.