Man lived as best he could, then died, and there was no Hell, no Heaven, the way the primitive Jews imagined over there in Palestine; there was no transmigration of souls, as the primitive Pharisees also believed, as no one rises up from the dead, or only after the coming of the Messiah, but that was still a long way off. “We have not suffered enough yet to be forcibly washed,” his father had said once, as had gullible Palestinian Jewish “people of the land,” the spiritually impoverished am ha’aretz, with their purblind, narrow-minded, and pernicious notions, which commercial travelers returning to Rome’s Jewish quarter from Palestine would often recall, disapprovingly, with a shudder.
Uri, in his hovel, spent a lot of time mulling over resurrection, coming to the conclusion that if the Creator had just a touch of compassion He would make resurrection possible, and he, Uri, would meet with many fair, clever, and wise people who had lived before he was born, and would also live after he was dead, and they would carry on a timeless discourse, rich in ideas, in a fragrant and radiant space without time, after the Last Judgment, where bodies become weightless and painless, and human bodies that had been restored by magic would float and fly even without wings, as he pictured himself doing in his most delightful dreams as, so to speak, a foretaste of existence after the Last Judgment. It was rational, even natural, for that to be so, because if there were no resurrection with Judgment Day and the end of time, an individual’s life would not have the slightest meaning at all.
Uri passed his time either with his eyes screwed up, gazing out at the life of the yard, happy at least that he could see at all, or else he read.
He did not need to be instructed in anything; he would have been able to instruct others, but he had no desire to do so, even though his father had asked him. If he did not count as a fully able-bodied man, let the community draw at least some use from him, and anyway teachers were paid, which was not a point to be sneezed at. His teacher, Eusebius, who was fond of Uri and rated his abilities highly, had also encouraged him, but in vain: Uri hated anything to do with the community.
Others could see well, he couldn’t.
Others did not have a head and feet and back that ached with pain.
Others were able to chew well, whereas he could only chew on the right side, because the teeth on the left side did not clench and had started to come loose, which was a sign that he was going to lose them. It was terrible, on the other hand, that the permanent incisors projected so far forward that he could not close his mouth properly, though admittedly they allowed him to whistle superbly through the gap that could be formed with his tongue, and sometimes people would greatly admire that, but he would rather have had normal teeth.
Other boys the same age were not going bald, as he had been since sixteen.
Others were not born freaks, as he was. It might not have been visible to everyone, but that is what he felt like, and that is what he became.
It was not solely on account of his physical problems, however, that he shut himself away in his hovel.
Around five years ago, when his eyesight had been better, not long after his bar mitzvah — his ceremonial initiation into manhood by the synagogue — he often went on strolls on the other side of the Tiber. In Rome, Jews could go wherever they pleased, and Uri, thanks to his grandfather, who had scraped together the money from his work as a slave to pay for his manumission, got married, begot a son, then died straight after — thanks to him, the grandson, Uri, had been born a Roman citizen.
Jewish though he was, he was a Roman citizen with full rights, so he did not pay the taxes that were imposed on non-Romans and non-Italians. Indeed, he was given money by Rome: through his patron’s intervention, he was awarded the tessera, which he was entitled to under the law since the age of fourteen, although the magistrate was perfectly able to string this out for years if some big shot did not snap at them. He had drilled a hole in the small lead token and wore it hidden under his tunic, slung low on his neck so it would not be stolen, and he would feel for it compulsively at frequent intervals.
If he showed it at the biggest distribution center on the Campus Martius, he would receive the monthly ration of grain that was due to paupers of unemployed Roman freedmen, the libertines who were capable only of begetting children — plebeians, as they were also called. Meat he would obtain on the right side of the Tiber, at home, as on the other side it was not possible to procure kosher meat; that was also where he drew the wine ration. A few taverns on that side let it be known that they also held stocks of kosher food and drink, but the public was banned from those taverns by the Roman gerousia or synedrion, or Sanhedrin as it was called in Judaea, the council which met at irregular intervals to decide on the affairs of the various congregations, as it had an interest in seeing that one and all purchased the produce of the official Transtiberian Jewish slaughtermen, and should only drink wine that was sold by the powerful Jewish wine victualers of Rome. It was possible to make an even bigger profit on wine than on meat because drinking wine was compulsory on feast days; wine victualers also sold the two-handled flasks, fired from white clay and freed of impurities, from which the wine was supposed to be drunk. Romans, both Jews and non-Jews alike, drank a lot of wine because wine did not loosen the bowels, whereas water often did. Somehow, the same victualers who shipped pure olive oil from Palestine to the Roman communities, as the use of Italian oil was judged a capital offense, upheld time and time again by the leadership of the congregations, given that substantial numbers of wine and oil importers were to be found among the elders of this collective leadership.
Uri self-righteously consumed a good deal less of the ration than he was entitled by its regulators, so that he too, along with his father, could consider himself a breadwinner. On the days his ration was to be handed to him, the whole family would be with him, which is to say his father, mother, and two sisters; together they would all carry their allotment back home. The wealthier among them would go with a handcart; the rest would take sacks and wicker baskets, because a handcart was too expensive. At times like that, Uri was happy that, through chance, thanks to a grandfather he had never seen, he was able to help his family. His father had also never seen his own father, because Joseph had been just a few months old when Thaddeus died at the age of twenty-five — five years earlier than the average life span for a slave (those long years of hard labor he had sweat out to pay his redemption bond cannot have done his health any good).
If a Jew was scheduled to receive his monthly grain ratio on a Saturday, or a Jewish feast day, he was allowed, under one of the still-active decrees of Augustus Caesar, of blessed memory, to go pick it up on a Monday, or whenever the holiday ended; the decree had not been repealed by Tiberius, even after he had expelled the Jews. There were Jews with a tessera who had kept a low profile in the vicinity of Rome during those months, but brazenly stole back into the City. The municipal administrators, long faced, had to dispense their allocation, because without an order of exclusion they were obliged to do so. There were some banished Jews, it was said, who threatened to bring a lawsuit against the reluctant official, and in the end the official had given way, even though he could have called out the sentinels to arrest the hectoring Jew. The world was crazy; it always had been, and it would remain so until the coming of the Messiah.
In truth, Joseph could have been a Roman citizen himself, because three children of his had been born there, and Augustus’s decree that the parents of three children should be awarded citizenship was still in effect. Uri had tried to persuade his father to apply for citizenship, on account of his children; he would no doubt be granted it with his patron’s intervention, which would mean that he too could have a tessera.