But Uri knew: it was him he wanted to take a look at.
They lined up to take their jumps before him. Uri breathed deeply, knowing by now how to regulate his mind to ensure that his body would function at its best.
His turn eventually came, he grasped the weights and stepped up to the line, took one last deep breath, and started to swing them to and fro before giving them a powerful swing forward and jumping with legs flexed.
He had never jumped that far before.
It was measured with a tape. He had leapt over sixteen feet.
A buzz went up when the instructor announced it: pupils did not usually jump that far. Uri stood up straight then put the weights down.
“Once more!” came Isidoros’s voice.
Uri picked up the weights, swung them again, and leapt again. He sensed it had not been as good; he was angry with himself: how could he mess up a second jump so badly?
That too was measured, and even so was over fifteen feet.
Isidoros nodded before setting off for the main building.
“I wouldn’t mind giving it another go,” said Uri.
The head halted and turned around:
“Right, then!”
Uri picked up the weight, concentrated for a long time before swinging the weights then jumping. He sensed immediately that this would be the worst of all his jumps that day.
It was measured, and came to fourteen feet and a bit.
That was not bad either, of course, and the others would have been very happy with it, but Uri was furious.
“That’s exactly why I don’t like Jews,” said Isidoros, and left.
There was a still as people gloated.
“I am a fool!” said Uri to himself. “Why bother jumping around so much?”
A few laughed out loud; the instructor patted him on the shoulder and also snorted a laugh.
That evening at last he was spoken to in the dormitory. He was now accepted because he had not done so well on the second and third attempts: he too was a frail mortal, and the head was no more in favor of him than anyone else, so he was fit to engage in conversation.
I would have been in big trouble, Uri came to realize, if I had jumped even farther on he second attempt, though he knew full well that he had made bigger jumps in the course of his solitary training sessions.
What came to mind was his father’s warning not to disclose to others what he knew.
My father could have jumped really far, good Lord, only he realized that it was better not jump at all.
I’ll tell him about this; at last he’ll be pleased with me.
Uri was counting on being praised by the tutor for physical training, but instead of that he made a total fool of him when he asked the class to list the Olympic victors. Uri had in fact genuinely memorized the huge body of data of who had won what event, going back centuries: a horrendous mass of data of thousands of disciplines, names, and results, and Uri did not get one wrong, yet he failed all the same. He did not get it; the tutor left smugly satisfied. The classmates tittered: Uri had not memorized the corrected register given by Aristotle, but the very first list, which was by the sophist Hippias of Elis.
Uri bit his lip: the classmates had handed him Hippias’s list. They had deliberately not let him in on the secret that he ought to have been learning Aristotle’s register.
They had gotten their revenge after all.
He did not tell tales on them, just memorized Aristotle’s list.
Who would have guessed that Aristotle concerned himself with that sort of thing in his spare time! Mind-boggling! On top of which he had included in his chronology data for the Spartan Games, Olympic Games, even Romulus’s genealogy. A big ass, Aristotle too, when it came right down to it.
Uri soon made friends with the Jewish Apollonos, who was here known as Apollonos Gamma, being the third of the Apollonoses. They were brought together by oratory, as in this subject Apollonos proved truly unbeatable, his incredible dodging and weaving, his viewpoint bringing together extremes that were unimaginable to any normal mind, so that Uri listened entranced each and every time he managed to close the arch of his coruscating wittinesses nicely on time. The others had already become used to it and would roar with laughter, applaud and whistle their approval, while Uri had to recognize that he was not going to be able to compete, his brain not being as speedy and imaginative.
Not that his own orations were uninteresting, just more earthbound and objective than Apollonos’s. Uri made no use of unusual epithets or memorable similes, but he knew how to project an image of what he was saying, because as his sentences followed one another, he himself could see what he was talking about.
Apollonos set great store on that.
“Your brain is rich, fertile ground,” he said to Uri. “You can produce anything on it, whatever it is seeded with. And you have a great eye.”
Uri had to laugh: him, a great eye!
“Right you have!” Apollonos avowed. “You can see spatially: depth, distance, proximity, colors, shades, contexts. You may be short-sighted now but you must have seen perfectly at some stage, and you still recall that. It’s not your eyes that you see with but something else. You will still see well if you become blinded.”
Uri shuddered.
His relationship with Tija took a strange twist.
At the Gymnasium they did not speak much, even avoided each other, as if by agreement. From the fourth weekend, when Uri took advantage of the possibility of a pass, they spent the Sabbath and Sunday, which counted as a free day for the Greeks, together in the alabarch’s palace — a full two and a quarter days from sundown on Friday evening, as if to annul the other days of the week, as if they were not students at one and the same Gymnasium. Tija was pleasant, communicative, gossipy, telling witty and cynical tales about the gymnasiarch, the teachers and fellow students, bringing Uri to the realization that Tija was telling the truth. He sensed that Tija was not envious of any of the Greeks, only of Apollonos Gamma — but of him, profoundly. Uri could also sense that because during the week he acted as if he never saw him, Tija was not jealous of him. Uri shrugged his shoulders: that was just the way he was, what could one do? Uri was glad he had the chance to learn much from him.
Things were going well at the Gymnasium: he was accepted, he made good progress in physical training and found the other subjects easy to master, read a vast amount. Despite that, something was still missing.
So, this was the renowned Gymnasium? The tutors so absent-minded, the students so forgetful? His Greek classmates were friendly, Apollonos Gamma too, indeed Apollonos seemed to have taken a real shine to him; Tija would nod if they ran into one another in one of the Gymnasium’s rooms or in the garden, whereas Isidoros could not let any encounter pass without throwing out some Judaeophobic jest; yet for all that there was something dreamlike, unserious, about this existence. Uri would willingly have brushed the feeling aside, except that Apollonos confirmed it for him: something was brewing.