It was not Alexandria he had to conquer, but Rome.
He did not know how he was going to do that, or for what purpose, but he sensed that he, an experienced, fully grown man, would be able to accomplish anything; the whole of life stood before him, and why should that not be marvelous? His heart beat under his ribs as never before.
The vessel moored at the neglected, moldering docks of Far Side. Uri was delighted that he would soon be home.
It was into the afternoon by then, and on the shore a familiar stench rose from the big leather depots: as a child he had told his father he wanted to work with skins because there were a lot of Jews in that trade, but Joseph had protested that it was a lowly occupation, because the smell was so unpleasant, and besides that tanning ruined the hands. Uri was amazed to be walking on a street he knew, among houses he knew. Nothing had changed. Clearly, people here had experienced nothing new since he had left; perhaps they had not even noticed that two years and ten months had gone by. Yet so much had happened! For example, Alexandria had gone to ruin, and with it whatever had been grand and fine and proud in man — but then again, there were not many Alexandrians who were aware of that; certainly, nobody in Rome had noticed.
He paused before Far Side’s inner gate. The neighborhood was so unchanged that what he had lived through during his travels seemed, all at once, improbable, the lengthy, disturbing, all-too-colorful dreams of a single night. He fingered his chin; the prickly touch of the hard bristles of his thick, reddish beard was reassuring. A person doesn’t grow a beard overnight.
He tiptoed carefully through the puddles of the inner yard; in front of the houses women were washing in tubs and cooking on open fires, children racing around, filthy, barefooted, and screaming, staring in fright at the newcomer. Reaching his childhood home, Uri halted. Something had happened; the house was ramshackle, and did not use to be in such a dilapidated state. Never mind; he had enough money to repair it. He took a deep breath, pushed aside the carpet hanging over the doorway, and stepped in.
He was struck by the heavy, musty smell and the gloom. There was just one lamp burning indoors, smoking as ever.
A sturdy woman with a shawl over her head was standing with her back to the door, leaning over a tub, while on her right, in his old niche, someone was lying on the floor. The woman turned around and looked at him.
My God! What a hideous woman my mother is!
“I’m back!” said Uri.
The woman stood, scratched her arms, eaten up by contact with lye, while the eldest of his two sisters got sleepily to her feet in the niche.
“Where’s Father?” Uri asked.
The woman wrung her hands; the sister clung to him, pressing to him, slobbering over him, sniveling.
“Son,” Sarah declared solemnly and severely. “Your father and little sister were taken away by the Lord.”
She must have practiced that a lot.
He went to the cemetery on his own. It was raining, there was a cold wind blowing; his shoulders and knees were aching. His mother continued on doing laundry, while his sister did the shopping using Uri’s tessera, as she had done for the past two and a half years since their father’s death.
Uri stopped at the entrance to the catacomb scooped out of the limestone hillside, just where he had stood with his father all those many years ago, when it had still be hoped that Uri would step into Fortunatus’s post at the house of prayer. But Fortunatus’s son had become the new grammateus, and since then he too had died. What had the boy been called? Gaudentius! His life had not exactly been blessed with too much joyfulness either.
Uri straightened up and tried to hold back his tears. Then he proceeded down the stairs and entered through the gate. The caretaker’s mudbrick cabin lay on the right, lamps alight in it; there were no candles burning in the silver menorah, this not being a feast day. Woken up from his sleep, the guard searched through the sheets of parchment for a long time. Uri helped him out with six asses. Finally the guard located the crypt, unrolling the plan of the catacomb and showing Uri where he had to go. For another four coins he lit a thin torch and thrust it into Uri’s hand before settling back on his ledge.
The subterranean passages were wide enough for two or three people to pass. Uri walked straight ahead, then at the fourth junction turned left and continued along the passage. When he guessed he should be close, he brought the torch closer to the walls on his left and right to study the inscriptions on the plates of the rows of burial niches hollowed into them. The air was chilly, but he barely felt it; it was colder outside. He pottered around for a while, looking at marble plates, stone plates, terracotta plates — the material chosen depended on the wealth of the relatives of the deceased — until, finally, on a half-size terracotta plate (the other half of the burial niche still yawned emptily) he spotted his father’s name: Ioses Lucius, lived 41 years, three months, and two days. The engraver had scratched the angular, uneven Greek capital letters into the clay while it was still damp; it had so thoroughly dried out that there was barely a gap between the two names. Under the name he could make out the symbols for a menorah, shofar, etrog, and lulav, drawn in the same perfunctory, slapdash fashion.
Tears welled in Uri’s eyes.
His father’s request that nothing other than a menorah be placed on his gravestone had been to no avail.
His plate may have been cheap, but it was fanciful all the same.
My idiot mother!
Here at last was someone he could hate. He gnashed his teeth, but they wobbled, loosening even further, so he quit.
His limbs were clutched by a cold numbness and he stood motionless, sobbing with despair, and only left once the torch started to flicker.
He trudged back toward the junction, and turned right to reach the gate, where he handed in the torch before going out into the open air.
He realized that he had not even looked for his little sister’s resting place above his father’s, hadn’t even checked to see if her name had been engraved. He deliberated for a while as to whether he should go back, but decided that he was not prepared to pay the caretaker a second time, and kept on walking toward a nearby stretch of the city wall.
A lot of new houses had been built in the neighborhood, near the Appian Way, and before long they would engulf the catacomb itself. The Appian Way was busy, the price of land was bound to go up and the city limits extended. Why wouldn’t the entrance to the catacomb be buried and its subterranean passages filled in to allow big houses to be built over them? Jews wouldn’t be living here; for them the place would be unclean, forbidden ground, but heathens had no understanding of these matters and would be quite happy to live their lives above the dead until their turn came to depart.
Tears were rolling down his cheeks; he found himself able to cry at last.
It would be nice to believe that all the dead would be resurrected at some point, thanks to the goodwill of the Eternal One. Perhaps — as the peasants in Judaea thought and even the Sadducees of Rome proclaimed — He will hold a Last Judgment when He sees the time is right, with all the dead recalled to life as they were when they was at their finest, completely intact. The dead, brushing off their funeral dress and with it their boniness, their dustiness, their fleshlessness, starting at the resounding strong voices of the shofar and the Anointed, would arise and look around in amazement, happily addressing one another in the resplendent light and benign sweet-scentedness of eternal life. How nice it would be to believe in all that; for then he would be able to tell to his father all that he needed to hear, and Joseph would be amazed and would even praise him, finally glad that his blind-as-a-bat son had successfully managed to grow up into a man.