Joseph made an unexpected request at this point: that Uri only return to the catacomb when he, the father, was buried, but never again. He asked that Sarah and the girls stay outside. He also asked that nothing be put on the sepulchral plaque apart from a menorah; no name, no age, nothing else. Let no bird be painted or engraved on the plaque, nor shofar, nor wine flask, no lulav, no etrog — nothing.
Uri was shaken that his father was speaking about death.
Not much later, he realized that his father had marked him to step into Fortunatus’s shoes, and wanted to prepare him mentally.
His father’s emotional blackmail felt demeaning and sneaky, but he had nothing against a notary’s work. It was a cushy job; there was no need to spend all day, every day in the house of prayer; the only bad thing was that you were the servant of the archisynagogos and could not talk back.
An archisynagogos was not a priest but a layperson who had a position of esteem in the congregation, on account of his wealth, for instance, and he was generally elected to look after communal affairs for a five-year term. Annianus, the current archisynagogos, was an uptight, hysterical man, and difficult to get along with. On the other hand, a grammateus was well paid, twice as much as a teacher and four times as much as a limeburner. True, a glassblower was much better paid, and the more shrewd merchants made even more, but a grammateus was a good prospect and could take his pick of the girls. By the time he was twenty, virtually every Jewish young man in Rome was married, so Uri still had a year. As a grammateus he would have free choice of single girls older than twelve, and there were lots of those, and every father dreaded that his daughter would remain a spinster. Uri loathed the thought of marriage, but he conceded that it was a fate he could not escape. For days he was thrilled to have his choice among potential brides; he would cast a leisurely eye over girls, sizing up their charms, and at nights he would have such terrible dreams that he would have to quickly rinse out his tunic in the morning. Neither Sarah nor Joseph made any remark about the tunic that was left out to dry on the line, as if they had not noticed.
One evening Joseph announced furiously that Honoratus wanted to put up his idiot son of sixteen for the post of grammateus, even though he could barely write and knew no other language but Greek, and could not count either. Honoratus was a rich and influential man, the owner of three tenement buildings in the Syrian quarter, and his wife was a cousin of the banker Tullius Basileus. The only sort of person who might knock Honoratus’s son off his perch was someone like Uri.
Uri said nothing, just nodded. Gaudentius, the son, was so dumb that he stood no chance of getting the job as grammateus.
Joseph smiled happily, taking Uri’s silence as a sign of agreement. He left no stone unturned; yet it was still the idiot who was named grammateus, with the favor of Annianus.
Uri relaxed. Being a notary for a hysterical archisynagogos was not such a great deal; marriage could also wait.
Then two months later, Gaudentius, Honoratus’s idiot son, died unexpectedly, having lived just sixteen years, two months, and three days, as was nicely engraved on his sepulchral plaque. Uri, in his cubbyhole, said prayers for him; he genuinely felt sorry for the blockhead and could not help it if, by the grace of the Lord, he had been seen as good-for-nothing in life.
Joseph took a new lease on life and once again started to pay visits to influential members of the assembly.
Then the influential members of the assembly, on Annianus’s advice, decided that the next son born to Honoratus should be the grammateus, and, until that son was conceived and born, let the post be discharged by others, who would relieve one another every three months. Joseph was assured that Uri was highly placed on the list of substitutes, even if he was blind as a bat. Joseph had a few salty words of his own, as a result of which Gaius Theodorus, son of Lucius Ioses, was removed from the list. From that point on, Uri was left in peace and out of harm’s way, and when he was not reading in his alcove, he sauntered over to the true Rome.
There was much he saw and heard, and he would gladly have reported on these rambles to his father, but his father avoided talking with him. He would gladly have reported on them to his friends, but he had no friends. He was mocked on account of his physical defects, hated because he wrote, read, and calculated better than them and even so did not work.
He would have carried on with these pleasant, solitary wanderings for the rest of his life, scraping by on handouts from the state and his patron, dipping into books, parasitically, carefree and undemanding, had something not happened.
Unexpectedly, from one day to the next, unrest broke out over the way the Praetorian prefect Sejanus was deposed for his despotic rule as the plenipotentiary representative of Tiberius Caesar, who was living on the island of Capri (that is to say, his rule over the Latin wealthy was despotic; he did not trouble Jews, because they were simply of no interest to him). Many people were seized, and the entire leadership bodyguard was replaced; indeed, they had already been hacked to pieces. Uri happened to be poking around the street of goldsmiths, the Via Sacra, near the Forum, because he liked looking at jewelry, when people started shouting and he was carried along with the crowds to the foot of the Gemonian Stairs, where the dead bodies had been laid out for public display. That was where he saw a corpse for the first time in his life, and not just one but a dozen or more, and more than one of them without a head. Uri wanted to run off, but the crowd would not permit that; indeed, he was jostled into the front row, right in front of the soldiers who were shoving the crowd back, just as the executioner and his assistants dragged an adolescent boy and a girl of about ten years old over to the steps by their hair. Both had long fair hair, perfect for dragging.
A cry went up from the crowd.
Uri was standing near the stairs, so he had a good view.
The executioner went for the boy first, who wisely chose not to protest, and with one blow his head tumbled down.
The girl, by contrast, wailed and pleaded: she did not dispute that she had committed some sort of crime and should be punished as a child would lawfully be punished, but she never committed a capital offense and did not deserve to lose her head.
Silence fell; the executioner hesitated.
People in the crowd bawled:
“It is forbidden to put a virgin to death!”
That was true; Uri himself was familiar with Roman law, having studied it out of his own sheer diligence, because his people were only instructed in Jewish law, at their own request and in keeping with the obliging decree of the great Augustus. Not a particularly wise decision, Uri thought to himself more than a few times, unless Augustus had cunningly wanted to ensure that no Jew could ever become a lawyer.