That was how Uri got to know, from the bankers rather than his mother, that his father had died four months after Uri had set off from Rome. Now where was I then? I was in Beth Zechariah by then; it must have been around Shavuot. How was it that I felt nothing?
Maybe my Father died because he thought I was no longer alive.
He was jerked back into the present: the numbers were laid out.
His father’s debt, at twenty percent interest, came to 240,000 sesterces, which, spread over twelve years, meant 20,000 per year, or 1,666 and two-thirds per month. Of that, Joseph had paid back 6,666 and one-third sesterces, so the remaining debt stood at 233,333 and two-thirds sesterces, with the installments amounting, in round numbers, to 1,620 per month.
Uri breathed a sigh of relief: he made a quick mental calculation of how much it would be at compound interest, as would have been the case had he borrowed from Alexandrian bankers. He came up with an astronomical amount: for a debt maturing in twelve years’ time he’d owe 1,780,000 sesterces or, calculating backward, 12,361 sesterces per month. No Roman citizen, even if he were rolling in cash, could afford that.
Thanks be to the Eternal One! These people were, as yet, blissfully ignorant of compound interest.
But he grew despondent nevertheless.
Perhaps it would be better not to get married after all, he speculated, because then he could not legally inherit, which meant the debt could not be inherited either. But then they would take the house away, leaving Sarah and Hermia homeless.
He had been given 450 drachmas by the alabarch, equivalent to 180,000 sesterces — very generous of the cowardly worm, it was — and of that he had spent only 150 sesterces on the journey. One could hardly say he had spent lavishly. But even if he handed over 1,250 sesterces a month he wouldn’t be able to cover the monthly repayment on the loan, let alone be left with anything to live on — and who in Far Side earned as much as a legionnaire? Very few, only the wealthiest. The claim was unrealistic, even if the sum his father had managed to pay back over four months had, by some miraculous honesty, been deducted from the total.
Uri sat in front of his judges, the bankers, and felt numb.
He could not have been the first wretch who had sat like this before them, because, after a brief pause, one of them, Julius, spoke up:
“Given that you are just now commencing your independent life, and given that you personally did not incur the debts — although, as we know, you were Joseph’s sole beneficiary — we are willing to extend a fresh loan to you, though of course only on condition that you accept the assistance.”
Uri understood very welclass="underline" if he accepted, then he would be in debt to the end of his days. But then again, he was trapped for the rest of his life anyway if he didn’t accept it…
It went through his mind that his mother and sister were none of his business; they should be left to their own fates.
But they were his father’s business.
From now on they were entrusted to him on that account.
“If you don’t accept,” Julius continued dispassionately, yet cordially, “your house will be expropriated in lieu of the debt, and you will become homeless. A five-story tenement will be built on the site, and it is solely out of respect for your father’s merits and your own prospective future earnings that we did not expropriate it before. In the event that you decide to leave your family to their own devices, we shall have you excluded from Rome’s Jewish community and sell you into slavery. If you flee, a wanted poster will go out to the whole of Italia. We held to a firm belief that the favorite of the Jews of Alexandria, who acted as courier for King Agrippa, would return one day to Rome and pay off his father’s debt. You’ve come back; now pay! If you are unable to pay, then take out a loan. You have talents, you have experience, and you can make use of your father’s contacts… You have contacts of your own in Alexandria… You were a royal courier… You have capital and acquaintances; at the very worst you have not estimated how much all that is worth. Count it up, deliberate, and give us an answer.”
Uri responded instantly:
“How much will you lend me?”
The bankers became friendlier and brought out previously prepared contract for a loan. Fine wine was poured, and Uri signed the contract without hesitation. That accomplished, Uri would, until the end of the year, only have to pay about half the monthly amount he had previously calculated, and the full amount only from January of next year onward, which, with the payments on the new loan tacked on, would come out to around two thousand sesterces per month.
It mattered not, as long as something came up by then.
Purely to tweak the bankers’ noses, after the contract had been signed and completed, Uri asked:
“Why is there no prosbul in it?”
“We never enter into seven-year contracts, my dear boy,” Julius chuckled. “Our planning is long-range. There was no prosbul in the contract we made with your father either.”
A prosbul had at one time been employed in Judea, but even there it no longer existed. Under one of the injunctions of Moses, all debts were null and void when they entered a Sabbatical year, but if a prosbul were attached to the debt bill, under the more recent unwritten law, the formula meant there was no such limitation in the seventh year.
In practice, then, the question had no meaning.
However, Uri was feeling impish.
“Might I see my father’s contract?”
Julius shook his head.
“It wasn’t a written contract that we made,” he said. “Word of mouth was enough. We knew your father: he was an honest man, may his memory be blessed.”
Uri calculated and recalculated.
He worked out the minimum sum the dowry needed to amount to for him to be able to pay back at least part of the monthly interest for a year or two.
It occurred to him that he ought not to have signed that quite obviously infeasible contract. What if they had tried to get his father to sign it and he had been unwilling? He had paid it back as long as he was able, and he had died doing so.
Uri was dismayed to realize that it had not been due to his absence that Joseph had died, but rather it was the burden of the debt, the sacrifice he had made for his son, that had killed him.
And I signed it! What a dope I have been yet again, my God!
Sarah would hear not a word about the deal that Uri had made. He did try, it has to be said, to get her to understand what it came down to, she protested that she had no interest in any such things, just a good match — a happy future for her firstborn son.
It did occur to Uri that maybe his mother knew more than she was letting on; maybe she knew everything, and only out of obdurate nastiness was she pretending that she understood nothing. In fact, it made no difference whether she understood. He had already decided that he was not going to leave his mother and sister to their own devices.
The carpenter and his family received them with great ceremony that evening, because Sarah, in line with custom, had sent a woman on ahead to act as marriage-broker. The prospective father-in-law’s married daughters were not present; they represented the property of their husbands’ families and had nothing more to do with their father’s family.
Uri gazed at his intended; she had been dolled up, her flat, broad features burning with blushes of shame, and she sat uncomfortably on the couch with her little sisters, who tried to suppress their giggling as they stared impudently, in a prying manner, at Uri. His intended, on the other hand, gazed steadfastly at the floor, a single act of rebellion against a fate she otherwise faced with total resignation.