There were few people in the streets; they were not hurrying. Peace reigned on all sides, and boredom. Nothing in this sleepy, pretty town suggested that disturbances of public order had taken place a few weeks before. The messengers had exaggerated as usual.
They clambered up the mountain, with Uri’s companions also stopping every now and then to look back at the harbor. They went by gardens with rich, dense vegetation screened behind high stone walls in the depths of which no doubt lurked immense villas that were obliterated from sight by the wall and the vegetation. By the entrances to several of the villas there were sentry cabins for the guards. In his belly, Uri sensed a strange emptiness; there was something threatening in the Roman prefect’s seat of residence that he had not felt elsewhere. The fate of the Jewish people could not have been too good under Herod the Great, who had conceived the town.
The hillside was not completely deserted, with laden carts creaking their way up and here and there a pedestrian carrying something on his back or head. But the artificial miniature city, named after Caesar Augustus, stood out in such a sharp contrast to everything that they had seen up till then on the route, and most especially with Rome, that Uri wished, more than ever before, that he was anywhere but where he happened to be.
“We’ll be there any time now,” Matthew panted, “but if you want we’ll climb a bit higher up to the peak, because from there you can pick out Jerusalem.”
Hilarus and Iustus ran on ahead, with the rest trudging on behind toward the top of the hill. They stopped. Matthew pointed to the east rather than southward. The weather was clear, with the sun shining on their backs, and Uri deduced from the whoops of his companions that they could genuinely see it. He turned in the same direction but saw nothing but an endless twinkling blur of blue and green.
“Can you see it?” an exultant Valerius inquired of him. “The Temple!”
“I can see,” said Uri.
He couldn’t see it.
It was time to pray. Matthew poured water from his jug into a bronze dish, and one after the other they rinsed their hands, got out their paraphernalia, affixed the phylacteries to their upper arms or foreheads, turned toward Jerusalem, and bobbing forward and backward said the Sh’ma: “Hear, O Israeclass="underline" the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It seemed to Uri that Israel was not listening; there was no one passing nearby. He rebuked himself for the thought; he was in the Holy Land after all. Valerius, Hilarus, and Iustus prostrated themselves with outstretched arms, while the others prayed standing up. Alexandros was weeping, but Uri felt nothing. He thought of his father: would he feel anything himself were he here?
They made their way down the mountain.
“You didn’t see it, did you,” said Plotius.
“Yes, I did,” Uri rebutted him angrily.
Plotius uttered a soft reproving gurgle, confidentially, so it would not have reached the others. Uri gritted his teeth; he is hurting me, but at least he’s watching. The insult did not please him, but the attention did.
The stone wall at the gate they halted at was covered with vines. Matthew rang a bell to announce their arrival. They waited. Matthew rang again, but there was no response.
“There must be servants around,” he said, troubled.
They might have been there, but either they did not hear or they did not want to open the gate. Alexandros, Hilarus, Valerius, and Iustus in turn pounded on the gate — all to no avail.
“Where are we going to stay?” Plotius queried, and, leaning against the wall, he put down his sack on the ground.
“With Simon the Magus,” Matthew replied. “He’s an important man. Physician to the prefect’s wife.”
“Oh!” was Plotius’s response. They waited to see if he was going to say anything else, but he did not speak, so it became no clearer whether he knew him. They lay down on the western side of the wall, the sun shining strongly on them.
Matthew made excuses: he knew that Simon still lived there; he had been renting the gorgeous residence ever since he had become a confidant of the prefect’s wife. He had not been notified that Simon might have moved; he had also stayed with him on his last two trips, the last time not six months ago, in the month of Tishri, when he had led a delegation for the Day of Atonement. He would know if anything had happened to him. But if he had moved nevertheless, then they would go back to the harbor, because he had an acquaintance there, the secretary to the representative of the Jewish fleet, who had sailed with him for years; he was certain that he’d be able to put them up at his place.
“Never fear,” said Matthew. “You’ll have a roof over your heads.”
They still had a bit of unleavened bread, so they snacked on that, and they still had some water from the boat, which they drank, and went on slumbering at the foot of the wall.
Uri cogitated on what sort of delegation Matthew might have been leading to Jerusalem six months ago. Money was not taken for Yom Kippur, only for Passover. There must be a continuous exchange of information and business between Jerusalem and Rome. Strange that his father had never spoken about it.
When the sun had sunk below the sea in the west, they turned again to Jerusalem and said their prayers.
Matthew paced restlessly.
They sat, backs propped up on the wall, gazing, out of sorts and wordless.
It crossed Uri’s mind that it would be no bad thing if the mission were to end at this point; if he could go straight back to the harbor and set sail on the first ship that was setting off for Alexandria.
On his own.
He would install himself in that famous big library, which Julius Caesar had put to the torch seventy-six years before with the loss of untold millennia of irreplaceable manuscripts, clay tablets, petroglyphs, and scrolls of parchment and cloth. It was rumored, though, that everything possible had since been replaced, and more than one Roman Jew able to offer manuscripts of value to the library in Alexandria had enriched himself. The whole stock was continuously being recollected, and although it was impossible to replace every single item, the rebuilt library of Alexandria once again counted as the world’s richest library.
He would read the works to which he could not gain access in Rome.
In his head there was a long list of the titles of works that absolutely had to be read, mainly mathematical works, the existence of which he had gleaned from public libraries in Rome, which did not hold the works themselves, only references to them. Once he had read those, he would get on a boat that was running from Alexandria to Ostia, finally get back to Rome and home, and lie around in Rome’s damp, cool, miasmic, leprous, malarial air, resting his throbbing head, his sore midriff, and his aching back, and when his father stepped in to upbraid him for something, he could start telling him what he had read, and his father would seat himself on his couch and listen entranced as he had never done before. He, Uri, would be inspired by the spirit and mentality of all the authors he had read, whose works had seeped into him, become one with his blood, and his father would be touched at last by the vast, prodigious human knowledge that emanated from his own son. His spirit, bogged down as it was in mundane cares, would be uplifted. Joseph rarely read, not having the time for it, but Uri was sure that these works would be of assistance to his cruelly fated father.
Down in the harbor a lavish display of lights went up, the brightest of which was the Pharos of Caesarea.
Matthew began talking about the Pharos of Alexandria, which stood at the entrance to the royal harbor.
“That is a sight to behold!” he said. “Hundreds of ships at anchor on both sides, some of them monstrously large: I once saw an Achaean quinquereme. You can hardly get a boat in there, it’s always jam-packed. If a mariner has no reliable contacts in the city and cannot drop the ‘right’ name, he may find himself kept waiting for weeks on the water. Dozens of craft make the rounds with pilots and excisemen between the harbor and the ships at anchor, and if the captain does not pay them unconscionable sums of money (since like everyone else they too work to fill their own pockets), then he will find his ship is constantly put to the bottom of the list until he sees sense or rows over to the city and raises the credit from a banker…”