“The whole thing is cursed,” Isidoros finally said.
Uri shuddered.
“Weep for me, my boy, when I’m dead and gone,” Isidoros said, clambering to his feet and leaving.
Uri sat numb. He looked for the departing figure of the gymnasiarch but all he could see among the crowd were uncertain outlines. It came to him that he had no idea if Isidoros had a family: he had seen him purely as an intellectual being, albeit his being a man.
The examinations were still in progress when people were again plunged into mourning. Emperor Caligula had fallen ill. Exams were suspended, public baths were closed, a ban was placed on all assemblies, in Greek shrines and Jewish houses of prayer everyone asked or pleaded with their own god or gods for the emperor’s recovery; the Serapeion was inundated by worshiping Greeks. Uri went in as usual to work, but the book editors advised him unenthusiastically: maybe in the autumn.
It was a change that Uri could only deeply regret because he was finally making inroads with some of the editors. Among these outwardly gray and dreary figures were some of considerable learning, with whom it was possible to become engrossed in profound discussions connected with the particular problems of his copying work, and maybe they even got to like him. They never disturbed one another as they calmly fiddled around during the prolonged copying sessions. He was fond of the quiet, dry, cool ground floor; the tall windows gave no view outside, the external world existed only in a kind of constant dream. It was a peaceful nook where he worked for money, that is true, but he was also free to vanish into it and daydream at his leisure. Time and peace were necessary to acquire new knowledge through rewriting the knowledge of the ancients, through the spirit that resided in those old texts, delighted to be awoken. Uri would ponder, while he was copying, what kinds of previously unread, unimaginable ideas might form in his brain that day, and that pleased him. The thoughts were like the tiny fish that had scudding around him as he’d waded into the sea up to his knees when they had arrived at Sicily. He did not always manage to catch them; most slipped out of his grasp and vanished without a trace. But sometimes in the morning, when he was half-awake, they would swim back past, and he would make a mental note of them. He found that more fish swam back while he was reading historical works than while he was copying mathematical books, and occasionally, as he mused briefly in his resting place, he had visions that brought together the present age and events long past. Once or twice he saw Alexandria, the whole of it spread out before him, along with its known past and its possible futures, and he would even scare himself, conjuring up an empty desert on the ground where Alexandria had once stood. It must be that Alexandria has not accepted me after all, Uri pondered, and I am seeking my revenge.
Flaccus was nowhere to be seen. Uri had gotten through his exams, but had yet to learn the results. The Gymnasium was deserted. The summer holiday started without the academic year coming to a formal close, though it was usually marked with a big ceremony.
Couriers came and went at the alabarch’s palace; Uri knew many of them by sight, but now he noticed some new ones among them. Philo thought it best to retire to his place in the country, with Tija in tow, neither of them offering a date for their return. Uri was not invited. Marcus took part in the discussions held by his father, while Uri was left to his rooms in the alabarch’s palace, suddenly all alone.
He should go to Memphis.
He was not on terms with the alabarch to ask directly for permission: that was the sort of thing he could have brought up with Philo — he could even have asked him for the money — but Philo was not there to be asked.
What is the point of staying in Alexandria?
Uri roamed the city, where life went on at the lower ebb of funereal anxiety: the baths were closed, so the girls were unable to pursue their craft at the customary places (though they were said to be hanging around outside the city instead). Taverns were also closed, though the markets were functioning, patrolled by soldiers, on the lookout for any crowd that might gather so they could stroll over and disperse it. No one defied them, but the hatred was plain to see on all sides. At this time of semi-mourning for the ailing emperor, Uri preferred simply to sit around the harbor, his feet dangling above the water; as the lading onto and off of passing ships went on, albeit half-heartedly, because there was no pleasure to be had going ashore in Alexandria.
On Friday evening Uri went to the Basilica, where Sabbath services went ahead as normal; he was allowed to sit next to Alexander and Marcus as before, and said “Amen” along with the congregation at the bidding of the pale red kerchief, but he felt no sense of fellowship. The stargazers no longer thronged around him, though they too were seated as usual on the bench allocated to their profession.
Have I suddenly become a loser — and why?
It dawned on him that in the year and change since his arrival he had not made a single Jewish friend, not even a potential business contact.
Had he just frittered his time away? What would his father say?
He ought to go back home to Rome.
Back, after more than two years’ wandering, to his wretched cubbyhole, that dank and dark lair?
There was no way he could go back home.
But all the same, there was no way he could stay.
It would be nice to go to a tavern with Sotades, Hedylos, and the rest to fool around and crack jokes, quote the ancient poets, and improvise parodies, but for some reason that no longer seemed possible. Sotades was happy when the exams were over; he had embraced Uri, and then his Greek admirers, who had likewise sat through all his appearances, after which they had gone down to the harbor to get stinking drunk. That, of course, was when the taverns had still been open, but the moment they closed Sotades had disappeared, gone back home to the country. The Greek students who were resident in Alexandria obviously still looked one another up, but no one came looking for him. But then what business would they have going to the palace of a Jewish chief excise man? It was a pity that the Gymnasium’s dormitories were closed over the summer.
During that somber season, every now and again, Uri would climb to the top of the Paneion, the hill with corkscrew paths that stood in the middle of the Gymnasium’s grounds, where he had been so fond of reading. Now that he had no scroll or book with him he just stared, seeing very little with his bad eyes. He methodically went around all the parts of the city that he had not yet visited, feeling the walls of the buildings, sniffing around: who could say when he would have to leave, or whether he would ever return. He thought of himself as a traveler without any assigned duties. He mused about that. It occurred to him how free he was. Everyone he knew was proceeding from A to B with some particular goal in mind, all the Greek students, the Jewish ones too, Apollos and Tija. Apollos wanted rights of citizenship as an Alexandrian Greek because his parents were just Jews in Memphis, whereas Tija, who was already a Greek citizen, wanted to set up a business that made military catapults to become even richer than Marcus, who stood to inherit two-thirds of their father’s wealth. Everybody had a goal, was pushed or driven by something.
What on Earth is driving me? What is this unholy freedom?
He was gripped by an odd sensation: it was as if this miraculous Alexandria, this prodigious, phenomenal city were somehow unreal, as if the worms of evanescence were diligently at work destroying its imperishable buildings, made as they were of granite and marble, as if the parasites of Time, those invisible deathwatch beetles which feed on stone, had already done their damage, all that was needed was a moderately stiff northerly breeze from the harbor and the whole lot would come crashing down. What would be left, he wondered? Perhaps one or two slim books and pallid scrolls, not in the Serapeion — that sturdy, solid fortress would be blown away with the rest — but in a few private collections about which he had no knowledge.