“Fair enough,” Jehuda said in a conciliatory tone, trying to smile. “You won’t work any more. Do whatever you please, but no trying to escape or you’ll be brought back anyway. I don’t want any scenes. What do you need? Tell me and you’ll get it.”
Uri kept quiet. There was no way now he would get what he had wanted. She had been taken by Satan, in whom he had never believed before but who existed all the same.
“I want a woman,” he whispered.
Master Jehuda was flabbergasted but pricked up his ears.
“What’s that you said?” he asked, flushed by keenness to help.
“A woman,” Uri said hoarsely.
“A woman?” Master Jehuda repeated and, as Uri could see, was highly relieved. “No problem. You’ll get as many women as you want. Which one? Just say, and you’ll get her. We’ve got slave girls growing out of our ears! I’ll call them together, all you have to do is point. Free for as long as you stay here.”
Uri gave a groan.
“I’ll set up the workshop as a dwelling,” said Master Jehuda obligingly. “Set it up just fine! Say, half of it… That’s quite a lot of space, isn’t it? Well, you know yourself… Half. I’ll partition it from the workshop with a wall… You’ll get a bed and chairs. No more sleeping on the floor. You can lounge around on that comfy bed all day long, and I’ll send you the women. As many as you want! Only don’t ruin me! I don’t deserve that. I’ve never treated you anything less than well!”
Uri was ashamed to ask Master Jehuda for a woman, but he accepted the dwelling. In a room separated from the workshop, he could lie on a pallet stuffed evenly and generously with crisply fresh straw, brushing the flies away and feeling extremely miserable. He was free, but he was bored.
He had behaved abominably, in the way that only young men can, and he could not for the life of him understand why Master Jehuda did not take advantage of that. Uri could only draw the conclusion that this fearsome, voracious, loudmouthed, red-haired, fat man, who was held in such high public esteem even far away, was even weaker than he was.
Uri gnashed his teeth. He had to do something or he would go crazy.
I’ll be a cabinetmaker, he decided.
Two days later Uri snuck into Master Jehuda’s house. He did not find Miriam or the master’s wife there. Master Jehuda was sitting hunched over a scroll, his forehead supported by both hands, and seemed mightily care-laden. He looked up.
“I have to anathematize someone!” he declared unhappily. “Dreadful!”
Uri nodded, then announced that he wanted to learn carpentering given that he happened to live in the workshop.
“So learn it,” said Master Jehuda irately, as Uri was showing him no sign of sympathy.
So Uri let the assistants know that on Master Jehuda’s orders he would become a cabinetmaker, and they should show him all the tricks of the trade.
The assistants were less than pleased; it was a good craft, and the three of them were the only ones who plied it within a radius of a day and a half’s walking distance, and now they had to instruct a competitor. However, they did not have the nerve to take a stand against Master Jehuda.
They told him to take a seat in the workshop and watch.
They spent the whole day smoothing down planks of wood. Uri became bored and requested to be allowed to do something himself. They told him there was a spare plane that needed to be sharpened. Uri spent the rest of the time using a piece of hard stone with a milled surface to rub the metal surface. It did not wear away easily, and there was no pleasure in doing it.
The next day the work was no different, and Uri got angry. He noted where there were lamps in the workshop, stole back that night, and by the light of two lamps he took a chair apart to find out how it was assembled. He was unable to put it together again because a joint broke. When the assistants kicked up a fuss about it the next day, Uri cheekily endured it, simply shrugging his shoulders. The chief assistant raced off to make a complaint to Master Jehuda, but he was unwilling to take the twenty paces to the workshop and instead just sent the message that Uri should be instructed in everything if that is what he wanted.
Barely one month later, by the middle of Tammuz, by his own efforts he had produced a nice little table. It did not rock however much it was pushed about, its top was shiny and smooth, and the grain stood out beautifully. No glue or packing material had been used in the joints but it still did not wobble. They told him what it was, one of the better kinds of wood, but Uri did not catch the name. He rubbed his wrists; they had given him the hardest wood just to make him struggle.
“This is my sort of work,” he stated happily.
He had to bend down close to the wood to work it, and his close-up vision was brilliant, even better than that of the others. He even noticed tiny fibers in the wood. The Everlasting Lord created me to be a carpenter, he concluded, and he reproached his Creator for not making him aware of this much earlier.
The assistants told him that he might want to give inlay work a try.
Uri did not know what that was. Making sketches with a twig in the dust, they explained that particularly expensive tabletops had parts chiseled away into which the master would set minute strips of other woods in marvelously multicolored designs. They could not show him any examples; tables of that kind were not found in the provinces, only at the homes of the rich in Jerusalem. But there were some tabletops on which fantastic birds and plants were to be seen, all put together from strips of wood and staggeringly expensive.
From discarded bits of wood, Uri cut up strips to be inlaid, paring and shaping them to fit together, concocting attractive patterns the like of which, so the assistants said, no one had done before. Uri could see that this was something he was cut out for.
He enjoyed working with wood, inhaling its fragrance, gazing at the contours of a cut-off butt’s edge, taking a long, hard look at the concentric circles of a knot or gnarl. He enjoyed shaping wood with a sharp blade, brushing away the sawdust. He enjoyed these things so much so that he did not really need to think of anything else, not even why he happened to be precisely where he was. When they showed him, with the aid of the sort of wheel potters use, that it was also possible to mold wood in a similar fashion as clay, using the legs to push a treadle and drive a wheel so that an affixed piece of wood was spun around while a blade, pressed steadily onto the wood, cut shavings off it, Uri felt as overjoyed as the Creator may have felt in forming man from clay.
If only my father knew how this trip to Jerusalem had put a craft in my hands! He’ll know someday, and he will be astonished and delighted that his son’s poor eyesight is good for something in spite of everything.
“Gizbarim! Gizbarim! Gizbarim!”
That was the cry to which Uri awoke at daybreak one day. He clambered out of the barn. It was still dawn, but people were hurrying out to the fields, women and children included. Uri peered; he could not see the faces but there were so many of them all of a sudden that he had the feeling he had not yet encountered most of them before, small though the village was. Could they be from nearby villages? Had they known beforehand that something was brewing?
One of the assistants who had popped into the barn informed Uri that the train of carts had arrived to take the First Fruits and the First Ripe Fruits to Jerusalem (not the Tithe, which was collected separately and was not being taken now).
“How do you know?”
“They sent a message.”