“I’m Theocritus from the XXIInds…”
The voice could be heard coming softly from the outside and directed inward.
“What do you want?” Uri asked.
“I’m going to throw some food over! Watch your head! Don’t eat it all in one go…”
Uri sat up. A parcel plopped down on the ground.
“Have you got it?”
“Yes, I have,” Uri replied.
He slithered over and undid it. There was a flatbread, honey, and a flask of water inside. Uri ate slowly and not too much; he drank all the water. He pricked up his ears.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Theocritus from the XXIInds… Don’t forget it!”
He heard steps on the other side of the wall, then silence.
Uri tucked what was left under his tunic and slept a sleep without dreams.
The flatbread and honey kept him going for two days. He continued to recline near the south wall, and on one occasion a group of people were preparing to bury him before he growled “Not yet,” at which they took fright and slouched off.
Three evenings later another voice called through the wall. This time it was a man who gave his name as Democritus, also from the XXIInds. He threw over a flatbread, water, and some smoked fish. He asked what Uri’s name was, and Uri had to think very hard before it came to mind that he was Gaius Theodorus. He was more pleased by the name than was the mercenary.
“Got that… And don’t forget: Democritus from the XXIInds.”
“I won’t… And now I won’t forget my own name either.”
This can’t go on much longer, Uri reflected, as he again tucked the remainder under his tunic. The legionnaires are beginning to fear reprisals. Theocritus and Democritus, Theocritus and Democritus from the XXIInds… I’ll have to bear witness for them when this is all over.
He received food the same way twice more; he divided it up, sat, pondered, and all of a sudden he saw before him the saltcellar — the salinon—the geometrical figure consisting of four semicircles. He was able to follow Archimedes’s demonstration as never before, as though it were written on a tablet, showing that the area covered by the four quadrants of a circle was pi times the square of the radius.
He even managed to work out how Posidonius of Alexandria, who later settled down on the island of Rhodes, had been able to construct a spherical triangle and suspected, though he was not able to prove conclusively, Archimedes’s demonstration that the sum of the angles of a tripleuron, a spherical triangle, was greater than two right angles. Demetrius, his mad mathematics master in the Gymnasium, had endeavored in vain to find the proof, had even given it to the students as an assignment, but nobody had been able to crack it. Uri now felt that he could demonstrate it: he saw the signs on his imaginary tablet, deduced it right to the end, and when he succeeded he whooped in delight. Starvation had only diminished his body; none of his brains had gone missing!
The vision soon subsided, but the long demonstration was now lodged somewhere deep in his brain and would remain retrievable, or so he hoped as he lay there without papyrus and ink. Perhaps he would need to eat smoked fish and the memory would be evoked. There was still a bit left of the smoked fish that had been thrown over the wall. It was ritually clean — the pagans were aware of what the Jews were allowed to eat.
It will be Rosh Hashanah tomorrow, someone near him was saying, Tishri 1.
Uri slowly trudged his way northward. He would see how Rosh Hashanah’s celebrated so that he could regale his father when he got back home.
Rosh Hashanah was not celebrated in the Sector, however — that was the decision of the remaining elders, and maybe rightly so. They also decided, and posted notices making the decision public, that celebrations of the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles would also be canceled: there was nowhere for them to pray in, no house of prayer left for the Jews of Alexandria, and there was no use in pretending. There would also be no fasting, and this too had a certain logic.
So there was no celebration of Rosh Hashanah, no one read out from the Septuagint, no one made any speeches; those who were still alive just sat and stretched out on the road the whole day long, praying to themselves. Uri prayed among them, squatting on his heels and bowing to the east. The quiet, even, constant murmur which emanated from them and enveloped the entire day was soothing and hypnotic. Whenever they noticed that someone had died, they dragged the body to one side so that they might inter it after the holiday, and then they went back to their praying.
Perfect democracy in action, Uri reflected, silently laughing to himself.
On the day after Rosh Hashanah he trudged back to the south wall, his feeding trough, and he waited for his manna from Heaven. It came, moreover, this time it was again faceless Democritus who hurled it over. It never even entered Uri’s head to share it with someone else. While he was eating two of his teeth dropped out: two fine, healthy incisors from the lower jaw, bloodied by the gums.
His lower jaw would now be even more receding; he would no longer be recognized. He laughed and carried on happily digesting the food.
Early in the afternoon of Tishri 10, the first day of the Feast of Booths, Uri awoke to the sound of people shuffling past him in a great hurry. He was angry because he had been having a pleasant dream: he was strolling through a marvelous countryside, surrounded by children, his own children, the youngest of whom reminded him of his younger sister, only she did not have a choking cough. The countryside was rather like Campania, with houses of the sort one might find there nestling at the foot of the hills, houses like the one in which he had once been a guest of that jolly family, vociferous in its happiness, not far from Puteoli. He clambered to his feet. He was not even aware that Dikaiarchia and Puteoli were one and the same. The dream was lost, he had been unable to retain it; he greatly regretted that he would not be able to live as a human henceforward. He narrowed his eyes. There was a large gap yawning in the south wall, but that was not the way that people were hurrying. They were headed to the north.
“It’s over! Over! Over!”
A throng of men, women, the remaining children and tough oldsters shuffled, tottered, and dashed their way through the wide-open north gate.
To either side stood a line of soldiers, and behind them a crowd of staring, alarmed Greeks.
Uri shuffled along with the crowd, past the ransacked, rubbish-strewn Basilica, then westward. There inside, on the chariot on which Carabbas had been pulled a few weeks before, stood a huge statue — obviously of Caligula. It crossed Uri’s head that this was double sacrilege: for one thing, of a Jewish synagogue, for a second, of the emperor, but this was more of a vague suspicion, he would not have been able to cast that into words, his brain was exhausted. Those who tumbled to the ground were considerately helped to their feet by morose soldiers; Uri was surprised to notice that he was too. The crowd shuffled and staggered along the main thoroughfare toward the Heptastadion; farther on, well-fed Jews were joining the procession from side streets; they had not lived through the Bane in the Sector. The Greeks were dumbfounded, looking at the procession, to find that any of these people were still alive.
Uri stopped, panting. He had seen Apollos threading his way through the crowd: he looked to be in fine shape, barely deprived of food.
The Jews marched along the Heptastadion, singing. Some exhausted, emaciated individuals fell to the ground and stayed there — dead. The jubilant living plowed on over them.
On reaching the island of Pharos, they waded into the sea, their arms raised to the heavens, and, as loudly as their throats would bear, sang out their prayers of thanks to the Eternal One for having saved His people again.