Laying mosaic tiles was tiring, backbreaking work — hard on the knees but interesting all the same.
Setting the ready-made square or hexagonal sheets of mosaics alongside one another did not take any effort in itself, but to produce nice designs from the small pieces of stone was an exciting challenge, and Uri kept on badgering Menachem until he allowed Uri to join in this part of the work. He enjoyed choosing among the small, colored, square-cut chips of stone and fitting them alongside each other, smoothing some of them down to fit with the rest. Uri loved fiddling around and now he had free reign. The picture to be laid out was outlined by the painter, but he left the workers to their own devices and would only look at the end result.
Judas was quite right: the two stolen crates of tiles went unnoticed.
Uri now understood why mosaic-laying was such an expensive business; it involved the work of a huge number of people — people to hack out the variously colored stones, others to cut them down to small fragments, people to cut them into squares, people to transport them, people to sketch a design, people to lay them out… He recalled the huge number of splendid mosaics that he had seen in Rome and could not understand why he had never given this thought until now.
He had gotten used to Judith’s grouching and even made the acquaintance of her fat husband, who spent all day lying around the house and praying. His fellow workers had accepted him as if he had been living among them for years, working on the outer cladding of the Temple; they no longer stole from him and had even forgiven him for the sin of having been born in the unclean Diaspora. They had no interest in Rome; that was a long way away, whereas they could relate many tales about Jerusalem. They told stories about lodging houses where their sandals were swiped from off their feet while they slept, how they had been short-changed by foremen who were much more villainous than Menachem, how the puffed-up rich had treated them like slaves, even though they were free men, all their ancestors had been, as far back as family memories went, which was many generations back. It had crossed their minds to leave the city and join up with some band of robbers, though they had given up on that idea; it was only certain tribes that had traditionally occupied themselves with robbery, so they could only be underlings at best.
It would be nice if they could make money from smuggling, but having been born in the middle of Judaea they had no contacts with the Jews of the Parthian empire, so they had discarded that idea too. For a few years they had toyed with joining a community of the devout, which would have certain advantages, like being sure they would never die from starvation, but they would have no freedom of movement and be subject to the will of a leader. There were many such pious communities all over the place, with families in every town who made their living out of being more devout than a high priest. There were times when people would not speak to one another for weeks on end because that was what the leader had ordered. They might not be able to step outside the house for weeks or be allowed to establish contact with women outside the community. They helped one another everywhere, but they looked down on those who were less zealous. Judas and his brothers preferred to knock around as workers in Jerusalem.
Uri looked forward to Rosh Hashanah and the immense throng that would arrive for the long series of festivals. It would surely be interesting to observe how people celebrated at the city he had become an inhabitant of by chance. This was a time, said the workers, when it was possible to drink a lot and eat a lot, with the break from work lasting for two weeks. However, they had not heard anything about white-garbed brides-to-be for sale dancing on the Mount of Olives. If they didn’t know, it must be a fairy tale, Uri concluded.
They went into great detail about the festive garments of the high priest, because they had lived in Jerusalem for so long that most of them had been able to stand by the altar and see him. Even those who had not stood near the altar could visualize the priest’s exact appearance, with his breastplate, set with four rows of three small square gemstones each, representing the twelve tribes of Israel. It was as if anyone who happened to be staying anywhere near Jerusalem at the time had seen it with their own eyes.
They also recounted that wicked Edom laid claim to the high priest’s vestments the whole year round, storing them in the unclean palace that Herod had built. Only two days before the festivals did the prefect’s people hand the garments over to the high priest’s representative so that the high priest might don them for sacrifices, and at Passover, as the Law allows, and also for Yom Kippur, which the Law commands. After the festivals the garments would be handed back to the Edomites, thus becoming unclean again. The Sagan’s men would have to spend a whole day cleaning it before the high priest could clothe himself. The workers strongly objected to the humiliating practice; even Menachem himself was in agreement.
Uri was never asked about Rome, either by the workers or, for that matter, the peasants in the village, but they still had their own firm ideas about what the Roman Empire was. No question that it was Beelzebub’s snare, which the Everlasting Lord permitted; He had a habit of amusing himself by sowing dissent among men and waiting for the good to triumph even without his assistance. The Roman Empire was a test that the Lord had given his chosen people. He had made it so powerful so that it would be harder for the good ones to vanquish, so that they would brace themselves, strive a little. But Beelzebub would be defeated, the workers were quite convinced of that, and Jews would recover the right to look after the high priest’s vestments, and the foreign forces would clear out of the Holy Land at long last. What about the Lord’s works in Babylon? There had been just one language until He had confounded all the languages of the earth there, so that the people should no longer understand one another’s speech, which highly amused Him. The Tower of Babel fell down and Babylon’s power ended, yet the Jews had escaped, thanks to the mercifulness of the Eternal One.
Uri just nodded and did not attempt to point out that the chosen people were not the only ones the Eternal One had put under the yoke of this gigantic empire. Nevertheless, he too had often wondered what the sense was in having a single power rule over the Great Sea and all its coasts and the inner lands — to wit, all the known world, beyond which there was little, not counting the Parthians, India, and China, which were so far away that their existence seemed unfathomable beyond the silk that came from there.
The Creator must have some purpose with the Roman Empire, Uri supposed, but he did not know whether to adopt the standpoint of a Roman or a Judaean Jew. He could not imagine the tens of thousands of Jewish men who lived in Far Side all of a sudden marching off to the Forum and declaring that from that day onward all Rome should worship a single god and all the inhabitants of the empire’s seat being converted in one stroke, shattering all idols, and becoming eager servants of an Invisible Lord. Of course, Cicero on one occasion in a lawsuit had spoken of the Jews of Rome as being a nation of rascals. Uri had read the collected speeches the great orator made in tribunals and, now he came to think of it, a hint of fear seemed to be emanating from those contemptuous words, as if the advance of that dirty, loquacious riffraff could be a threat to Rome’s integrity. But the Jews were an overwhelmingly poor and humble people in Far Side, and just happy that they were tolerated.