Uri staggered down to the shore. The sun was blazing hot; it was the time of day people were wont to creep into the shade for a nap. He washed his feet in the sea, noticed some mussels and sighed for the sin he was about to commit before prising them open and slurping up their contents. They tasted wonderful.
He didn’t know what to do. Perhaps he should wait until the evening before setting off southward along the city wall until he reached Lake Mareotis and could look for Philo’s house there.
Perhaps the alabarch was gathering his private army together and would return. It would be nice to think that, but then again it was clear that the lot of them had run away like cowards. The financial muscle and brains of Alexandria’s Jews — to whom he owed a debt of gratitude. He sighed with relief: he owed them nothing, they had deserted him when it came to the crunch.
Late in the afternoon a small group clambered over the city wall; they too ran toward the shore. Uri emerged from a shaded thicket. They were young Jewish men; they related how the previous day a large throng had gathered around noon at the amphitheater in the Eastern Harbor and speakers had demanded that the Jews place statues of the emperor in their synagogues exactly as Greeks did in their own shrines. Jews should observe the laws of Egypt and the empire; there should be an end to exceptionalism.
That was bad news: they had embroiled the emperor in all this. The Greeks were well aware that the Jews were not able to place any graven image in their places of worship. It wasn’t they themselves who had dreamed this up: artful ideologues had fed them. Like Isidoros, or Flaccus.
Someone brought up the idea of walking along the lakeshore as far as Marea, where the Third Legion was stationed, to place themselves under their protection. The soldiers would keep them fed and watered. Flaccus would put the revolt down for sure; the prefect would be bound to mobilize the army. Perhaps on the way there they would meet a cohort which was heading for the city.
Uri held his counsel.
At dawn the young Jews set off for the west along the shore. Uri climbed back over the wall in the same spot as before, and made his way back to the cemetery.
There were no Jews there any more. Maybe they’d been caught, but maybe they had just moved on.
He slept lightly, like a wolf, alternately fully alert and sound asleep. In that borderland between the waking state and sleep he was beset by strange visions. He saw himself from the outside: he was lying amid the bushes, but he also had a house, a marvelously splendid, grandiose house in Rome, and he was waiting for his children to get back home from somewhere: he had loads of children and he was rich, but then all at once the walls of the house disappeared, people tramped through the rooms, ate and drank, paying not the least attention to the host, Uri took offense.
I’m curious, that’s why I go back, he realized in one of the lucid moments. It doesn’t matter if it’s dangerous.
In his half-sleep he saw dogs, so he turned into a dog himself so as not to be attacked. He pitied them: being a dog meant canine captivity for life. He ought to change into a stone, but that wasn’t any good either: eternal captivity as a rock. Stars twinkle as they struggle in the captivity of their stellar existence. Nothing is able to be anything but what it is. It needs to be said.
That morning Uri got quite far to the south, keeping near the city wall so that in the event he was attacked he could quickly spring back over it. Over that way, too, the wall was neither tall nor fortified everywhere. It would have done no harm if, in the course of his long, solitary exploratory jaunts around Alexandria he had found out some more details. Why did I have no suspicions? I ought to have. The signs were there to be seen.
His thinking was that if he were to be pursued, once over the wall he would untie a boat on the lake and row off to the west: rowing single-handed at sea was not a good idea, but it was perfectly possible on a lake. But no one came along by the wall, so he carried on walking eastward. At the main canal to the east, the Taurus, he turned to the north. He passed by huts and workshops; there were few people out on the streets, and although they looked on him as an intruder, no one set upon him. Some stray dogs sniffed at him mistrustfully, they did not bite, obviously sensing that he would bite back.
Southeast Alexandria was living its own particular everyday life: asses were transporting goods, smiths smithing, cloth dyers dyeing cloth, in the gardens there were women at work in vegetable beds — this was no neighborhood for rabble from the harbor. It crossed Uri’s mind to ask to be admitted into one of the workshops; he could offer his labor and spin out the few days it would take before things went back to normal — after all, the prefect could not allow the whole city to go up in flames — but he decided not to take the risk: it would be better in Delta. He may not know anyone who lived there, but at least there were Jews.
He kept on swinging the staff until he finally decided to throw it away. Anyone who lives by weapons dies by them. But he stopped and went back for the stick. It wasn’t he who had started the carnage; this was something else.
Now he recalled that he had mislaid the scroll that he had taken to the Paneion. He was annoyed by that. It was a valuable scroll that he had taken from the alabarch’s library. Where could he have left it? He could not recall.
The staff at least was a good, strong length of walnut. He carried it in his right hand to give the impression that he was right-handed. Uri loathed all combat sports; he preferred sprinting to any of them them, though he was not too fond of that either. Now, though, he firmly gripped the staff as if he were holding onto the hand of the Eternal One.
He just has to have some goal in mind for me.
No doubt that was also the thought of those who were choked to death on the pyres before they charred peacefully away.
By now he was approaching Delta. He saw a large group drawing near coming from a side street on the left. He narrowed his eyes to get a better look, then stopped. A few characters with cudgels were driving around a dozen people before them, running at the double. As they got near Uri, one of the cudgel wielders yelled over:
“Come on, then! We’ll see how these Jews run!”
Uri joined them.
“Where are we headed?”
“Delta!”
It was two or three families they were herding on, from time to time beating them, men, women, old people and young alike. Uri brandished his own staff but did not hit anyone.
“They’ve all got to be collected,” panted one of the cudgel wielders, a large, muscular man with an intelligent look on his face, who was cheerfully, contentedly, almost amicably belaboring the Jews.” All to Delta… All… From everywhere…”
Doubts now arose in Uri as to whether it was such a good idea after all to go to Delta, but the pursuers were all strapping young men and would quickly overtake him if he were to make a run for it, so he trotted along with them.
They halted beside a pile of rubbish. Two of them waded in, flailing with their cudgels at the scraps of papyri, rags, and heaped-up debris, treading carefully, slowly, systematically. The site was drying out as the haulers had not picked up garbage for weeks now. Uri squinted first at the Jews, then the Greeks. The Greeks were standing with lowered cudgels. There were eighteen Jews and, from their standpoint, even if Uri was included, just five Greeks, the sixth and seventh still thrashing around with their cudgels in the garbage. The Jews could make a run for it, at least the young and fit could, but they didn’t. Instead they stood there, puffing and blowing, disconsolately, a couple of them even mumbling their prayers. Could it be that they, too, supposed that Delta would be a better place to be?