Uri sighed.
“They are going to starve us, come what may. Then an epidemic is going to erupt, and we shall have no way of breaking out.”
Nicolaeus nodded.
“They have a big pile of booty now,” he said, “but that’s just a one-off. Flaccus will not get a share of the real spoils… These wretched little killers will hardly get a thing… You can’t loot the same house twice over… The rich Greeks, on the other hand, will pick up our business partners and our contacts… That’s the real prize! No one in the wider world gives credence any more to the Jews of Alexandria. We’ve foolishly allowed ourselves be fleeced; that sort of thing can happen again at any time, we’ve become unreliable trading partners, that’s the problem! A big problem!”
Uri thought about that and decided it was the unadorned truth.
Whatever happened, this was the end of Jewish Alexandria.
The Greek riffraff on the other side of the wall mocked the Jews who offered to do deals with them, swearing at them, calling them pestilent, cat-murdering slaves, Moses’ leprous people, and then, of course, in the end they took the money and that night brought food and water. The water was not stagnant and though the food might have been less than they asked for, the Jews of Delta were not flagrantly shortchanged. The Greek wretches wanted to make money as best they could.
Late in the afternoon they also hurled over the barricaded walls many copies of a proclamation by Flaccus in which he explained the formation of the Sector as a justified reprisal for countless breaches of the peace by Jews. Hereafter, the document stated, Jews might live within it, but nowhere else in Alexandria. According to the proclamation — and this was what hurt those in Delta most — the Jews counted as newcomers in Alexandria, and the restrictive stipulations that governed foreigners would henceforth be applicable to them as well.
Countless breaches of the peace by Jews? What a hideous lie! We have always observed the law! Our own, God’s law, first and foremost, but also whatever was their prevailing law! Even the infamously Judaeophobic debauchee Euergetes III did not think of anything like this in the days when he attacked us!
Foreigners to Alexandria — us? Newcomers? When our rights were graven in stone by king Soter? Those tablets exist to this day in the Museion. Emperor Augustus confirmed and expanded those rights, which are proclaimed for ever and a day by his stele in front of the Sebasteion — that is, if it has not already been toppled. Us, whose Greek Torah, the Pentateuch, was deposited in the Museion of the king’s palace as a precious document, the most precious of all, also for ever and a day — that is to say, if they have not incinerated that too! Us, who always scrupulously paid every tax to king and emperor and city? Us, who have been living here for three hundred years? Ever since Alexander the Great paced out the city’s boundaries three hundred years ago? We, whose very activities allowed the city to flourish at all?
We have become the foreigners, outlaws, newcomers, slaves?
We were here even before the first Greek simpleton slave set foot in Egypt! We were already here two thousand years ago when Moses led his people out of here! We came home three hundred years ago; we are natives! Homegrown inhabitants!
In spite of which it is now we who are wrongfully burned and massacred!
Uri had to admit it, Aristarchus had been right: these people had been pampered, they were deadly stupid.
The real trouble was not what the proclamation stated — Flaccus’s declaration that the Jews were to be foreigners — but what it implied, namely that he was going to set his armed forces against Delta. That was the real problem. Soldiers would be guarding the Sector from now on, not Greek riffraff who were open to bribes. It would become impossible to acquire food, impossible to break out.
Flaccus, “our Aulus,” had not gone about things in so stupid a fashion, after all. He had managed to create an internal enemy, and by intervening against it he was going to forge unity between the Greeks and the legions. Rome was going to have a tough nut to crack if it wanted to remove Flaccus. It would come to war, and Flaccus’s chances against Rome were not at all bad.
Uri sensed that the sight of the Jews choking to death on the fumes of the pyre had not inspired in him the appropriate sympathy and horror, and he wondered why not. Perhaps because he had already seen that sort of thing at the foot of Mount Gerizim. Thinking back on that scene now, in retrospect, he was astonished to discover that even then he had not been as shocked as he ought to have been. No, not truly shocked.
Ever since he had witnessed the rape and execution of Sejanus’s daughter, nothing had surprised him. Then he’d had to vomit, but since then he’d lost the ability to be sick.
For seven years I have been aware of the terrible deeds of which man is capable.
The only difference is that now I’m being hunted too — an important difference, but not one of essence.
He was amazed to consider just how many people had turned out to be scoundrels who he had naïvely thought to be decent and honest. How is it possible for someone who had known the essence of man in general for so long, since he was fifteen, since the Eternal One had blessed or cursed him with the knowledge, had chosen him — how could he still be so mixed up when it came to the details? What was this invincible desire in him, to see created man as better than he was?
Where did this instinct to decency, in him even now, come from? Why had it not entered his head, basking in the light thrown by alabarch’s huge presence, to demand that he be given privileges?
He saw before his eyes the figure of his father: he had toiled his whole life long but had never once given up his honesty. Maybe that was how he had been created by the Lord. Still, Uri had not been created from the same mold as his father; he’d had bestowed on him a voluptuous nature, he was indolent and selfish, a hedonist in every way, but even so he had inherited his father’s self-tormenting honesty. Tears came to Uri’s eyes at the thought of his father having left him to his own devices when his eyesight had deteriorated, yet he had only wanted what was best for his son when he had him squeezed into the delegation.
There was much lamenting in the Sector at this time, and every reason for it, but tears did not come to Uri’s eyes on that account. All that was happening in the Sector was what man commits against man. But there was one thing — the fact that his father’s honesty had permeated him, through his very flesh and bones, and he could not rid himself of it even when Jew bared fangs against Jew in the Sector, Jew cheated Jew, stealing from and falsely accusing him, even when all Jews were being held in captivity by wretched Greek scum who had been reduced to evil — that did not come simply from what mankind was capable of.
The joy he felt was at past human actions.
Perhaps the Eternal One had not willed it to be so, He who lets let every evil deed be committed in the pursuit of some unknowable higher goal. But there could be no doubt that if He happened to be glancing this way right now, He too was taking delight in this miraculous bond between father and son. He would tell his father as much, find words of some sort for this indescribable miracle, modest and undemonstrative words, and yet his father would understand all the same. Then they would both weep, embracing one another, Father and Son.
For that to happen, of course, he had to live through the Bane, as it was called in the Sector on the model of Onslaught, Attack, Calamity, Sacrifice, Holocaust, Havoc and other similarly inaccurate and idiotic names. He had to live through the Bane, and to get back home to Rome.
Negotiations with the Greeks slipped out of the hands of the council members: rebels — a group of young strongmen — drove those who were bargaining for the elders away from the northern gate with cudgels, fists, and knives; they paid the Greeks for two days worth of supplies directly, received the food, and distributed it among their own kith and kin. That shift in power did not last long, however, because the Greek rabble were replaced by legionnaires, and there was no making deals with them.