The flatfish was good, but it was noticeably flavored with honey, so Uri sprinkled on some salt and ate it like that. He had no idea with whom he should speak, or about what. Those around him were all strangers, as he did not recall ever seeing any of them at the Basilica. Perhaps they did not attend that and instead went to their own synagogues; but then again it was perfectly possible that they did go to the Basilica but were normally seated some distance from him.
“They’ll put elephants onto us”—that phrase struck his ear.
Two men were sitting at the end of the table; the words had come from one of them, cutting through the surrounding din.
“They’re expensive,” said the other.
“They’ve already gone to Ethiopia to fetch them,” the shorter figure insisted.
“Are you kidding? No way!”
“They’re trained to pick up human scent trails, human blood,” the short one claimed. “When they’ve done that they trample us down. The next thing is they’ll habituate them to Jewish blood…”
A child’s cries drowned out the voices, with the infant screaming as if it were being skinned alive. The mother tried to soothe it, but the infant was in the midst a temper tantrum, and eventually the father irately lost his temper too:
“What do you think this Greek gentleman is going to say if you bawl like this?”
The child swiftly fell silent; Uri could only gape in amazement.
He smiled at the infant, but that only set off a fresh wave of panic-stricken howling, prompting the mother to thrust its head into her lap while the father looked apologetically across at Uri.
“Only a tiny tot as yet,” he said. “Not used to going out…”
Uri smiled.
They take me for a Greek.
He then realized that the proprietor of the bistro had also assumed he was Greek; they would not have served him boneless fish.
He left half of the fish and almost the entire jug of wine, paid and hurried off. He checked whether his stomach was going to be upset or whether he was going to vomit up the unclean food, but no: he wasn’t. He then asked himself whether he wanted to be ill, or rather, was he happy that he could now eat even unclean food? Back at home his mother had frightened her children with the idea that a Jew who ate unclean food would become gravely ill, possibly even die.
Maybe flatfish wasn’t so unclean after all, judging by local notions, as it was in Rome. No it couldn’t be unclean; in a Jewish restaurant they would not cook unclean food even for Greeks.
On Tuesday he asked Apollos what was known about elephants.
Apollos recounted that Philopator’s African elephants had lost the battle against the Indian elephants of Antiochus the Great…
“What else?”
“There’s an anecdote about Aristophanes of Byzantium. He grew up in Egypt, unlike Callimachus or Eratosthenes. He was a pupil of Zenodotus, Callimachus, and of Machon, the Jew-hating comic poet, and published an edition of the Iliad based on the work of Zenodotus, the Homeric scholar and first superintendent of the Library of Alexandria, as well as Hesiod, Alcaeus of Messene, Anacreon, and Aristophanes the Comedian. His edition of Pindar was especially important, and he also published Aristotle’s Historia Animalium… Anyway, Aristophanes of Byzantium is said to have fallen in love with a flower-selling girl who had an elephant as her lover… Maybe not a real elephant, just the nickname for a well-hung fellow. Eumetes II suspected that he wanted to move to Pergamum, which was not too much to peoples’ liking at that time because of Byzantium’s bitter rivalry with Pergamum, so he had Aristophanes of Byzantium locked up in prison and later strangled…”
Uri sighed. What was there that Apollos did not know? But then he had been able to bury his head in books for much longer than Uri had.
“Anything else?” he asked. “Are Jews afraid of elephants?”
“Yes, they are afraid,” said Apollos, “and with good reason. Ptolemy VI Philometor and his consort, his sister Cleopatra II, charged the Jews with the defense of the realm; Onias IV and Dositheos were the two military commanders… His brother, Ptolemy Physkon, set out from Cyrenaica against Cleopatra II, was victorious, had the Jews of Alexandria stripped naked and bound, women and children too, and had them cast before elephants that were made drunk. The elephants did not trample the Jews, however, but instead turned on the king’s own people. Physkon took this to be a divine portent and reprieved the Jews; indeed, he raised them to the status of councilors, and this day was for a long time a feast day for the Jews of Alexandria, being held sometime after Shavuot, though already by the time my father was a boy, when he spent three years here, it was no longer being celebrated… In my opinion not a word of it is true.”
Uri recounted what he had heard in Delta on Sunday. Apollos just shook his head.
“That’s just nonsense. The elephants are not usually brought from Ethiopia but Nubia and the Sudan,” he said. “But it’s a long time since that happened.”
“All the same, that’s what people imagine.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Apollos.
They both fell silent.
On Sunday Uri went again with Apollos to the amphitheater.
There were several theaters in Alexandria, but the most authentic of them was built near the Eastern Harbor and was sited so the open end of the auditorium faced toward the north, maybe to allow for the observation of fleets of ships by the audience. It was this amphitheater that Uri had seen through the gemstone on the day of his arrival in Alexandria. The actors performed mostly comic sketches as tragedies had never had much appeal in Alexandria, even in its heyday. The audience was comprised mostly of Greeks, with exceptionally few Jews: Apollos pointed them out because Uri could not discern them, and not just due to his poor eyesight. The sketches were performed with little in the way of costuming or makeup, the catch-words and accents of the city’s famous Greeks parodied in half-baked improvised stories which were purloined from earlier Greek comedies and simplified. Uri recognized barely any of the celebrities. Apollos, who had been living in Alexandria longer, would occasionally mutter the name of the person who happened to be featured at the moment. The stories were trite and the jokes vulgar but the audience lapped it up, and even Uri got the point of a fable about goat-shagging Auillios since Avilius was the middle name of Aulus Flaccus. He and Apollos listened aghast to the tasteless witticisms and the terrified bleats of a genuine goat, which was not exactly keen on a man attempting to couple with it.
“That’s Pharoseidon, a stage-name, he’s very popular,” Apollos — who liked going to the theater — whispered. “He will appear on two or three stages in an afternoon.”
“And does he take the goat around with him?”
The mimic left off shagging the goat and stepped to the front of the stage: he was a short, bald, elfin man with a slight speech impediment; odiously perspiring, he began a discourse on the topics of the day, and even responded to questions from the audience — perhaps not entirely unprompted — all the while staying in character as Auillios. How did he, Auillios, see the future of Alexandria? Well, the way he imagined it was that five hundred thousand Jews would be brought in from Judaea, because they eat less than one hundred thousand Greeks and there would be no need to provide shelter for them. Snickers. He imagined changing Greek tarts for Jewish ones because their vaginas were better greased and always wide open. Laughter. He imagined importing loads of pigs from Judaea, because Jews liked them most of all. Whinnies. They like them so much that they don’t eat them, suspecting that fellow spirits resided in them. A load of guffaws. He imagined promoting the use of the Syrian language in Alexandria because nobody understood it. Roars of approval, stormy clapping.