No one spoke to him the whole day long, and the women said very little even to one another, given that a man was among them.
He staggered back to the barn and dropped down. He did not get his supper because by then he was deep asleep.
The next day at dawn, one of Master Jehuda’s assistants shook him awake, and he set off for the threshing ground. He was going to have to stick it out, he thought. He had asked about breakfast, whereupon the assistant, a spotty-faced youth, scoffed, “Later, out there, with the women.”
He loathes me. But why would that be? He carries out better work than I have. What does it matter here if I am a Roman citizen?
He mused on what the countless Roman citizens would say if they were obliged to sieve the day long for their food. There was little doubt they would rise up and the emperor would fall.
He picked up his sieve, plunged one hand into the grain, sprinkled it onto the sieve, and began to joggle it.
There were still pains shooting through his right shoulder; his legs developed pins and needles and went dead almost instantly. It was only early in the morning; when would it get to the evening?
Uri sieved away with his teeth gritted, though he did ask himself why he had to suffer every indignity without saying a word. Anyone else in his position would have rebelled long, long ago. Rebellion was fair enough, but what form might it take here?
I ought to escape, he conjectured.
He knew where from, but where would he escape to?
Back to Rome? Yes, but how?
Roving on his own, exposed to attack from any quarter?
He would be caught, taken back to Jerusalem, and thrown in prison again.
What have you meted out on me, O Righteous Everlasting One, and for what reason?
It seemed implausible that he would be able to continue sitting among strange women in Judaea, shaking a stupid, round object all day long simply because they did so.
He then noticed that he was humming quietly.
The women were in fact praying all the time! And now I am praying too!
The finding astonished him.
Perhaps this was the origin of psalms — this appalling joggling. The psalms may have been wordless to begin with, and it was only later that they were given lyrics. The Eternal One, the One and Only Lord, had not understood words, but he could have listened to chanting. It was obligatory for the Eternal One once he had offered an alliance with the people. I, who am a member of the Everlasting Lord’s chosen people, meet that alliance by renewing it day after day; let Him now do the same.
“That’s not the way to do it!” Uri heard.
The voice signaled that it was one of the more elderly women who had addressed him; he could not see her face, as it was obscured by her scarf.
“Then how?”
“More circular movements.”
The woman carried on sieving. Uri watched. She performed broad movements, so that grains dropped through over the entire surface of the screen. Uri looked down before his feet. His own pile was small because the grains were able to riddle through his sieve only at the center, whereas the diameter of the pile in front of the woman’s feet was indeed wider.
Uri groaned.
He was being called on to make an even bigger effort when even as things were his arms were almost falling off! The real place for these women was in a circus; they would make a much more skillful job of choking lions than the gladiators did.
Uri put down his sieve and sat there, motionless.
I’m not a slave, he thought. If I’m going to be kept as a slave, they’re going to have to strike me down. That’s enough of this.
He cast a stealthy glance to both sides. The women were waggling their sieves. From this comes the bread that sustains us; from this comes the sacrificial bread on which the Almighty is sustained when it is incinerated on the altar on high days and its smoke rises up to Him.
His stomach rumbled when it came to mind that he had been late when he reached the threshing ground and missed breakfast. He looked around. There was no sign that the women had been given anything: not a crumb to be seen. They would be bringing it later.
He felt ashamed.
These women, they were just as much the Lord’s creatures as he was. And they shake their sieves, and their arms are also falling off, but they keep on shaking. Their lives were terrible. That was something those lazy night watchmen who kept dozing off, to whose number he had been privileged to belong for a few days, had said nothing about. Why not?
He picked up his sieve, plunged one hand into the grain, sprinkled it onto the sieve and began to joggle it.
And hummed.
May the Lord hear what He had created. Look down and see and be ashamed.
It is not easy to catch the moment when a community accepts a person. When he looks back, of course, it is possible to tell that he has been accepted, but it is hard to reconstruct the crucial event. Uri’s hunch was that it was the moment during the second day of riddling when, having defiantly put down his sieve, he raised it up again. Right then, he was accepted by the women as one of them. They disregarded the fact that the Everlasting Lord had created him as a man, which is to say, an enemy. From that moment on he was considered to be a female, one of them. A slave.
Uri was wrong, however; he was not yet accepted then, only the next day.
What happened at daybreak that day was that Uri, tormented by the pains in his back and shoulders, with teeth gritted, set to the sieving, and he sieved and sieved, but somehow it went even worse than before: there was almost no debris left on the net of the sieve but all the more flax among the grain on the ground. Uri disconsolately waggled the wretched device around, making no progress.
The women and girls next to him were so engrossed in their own work that they were not even humming; they shook their sieves, but in silence.
That silence was suspicious to Uri. He looked at them, puzzled, but their faces were now even better veiled by their shawls. The sun was still low in the sky; it was warm but not yet scorching. There was no sense in the girls and women covering their heads in the morning. He had covered his own head the day before with a mantle (a hand-me-down that Master Jehuda had given him) but had been late in doing it, as by then the crown of his head was already sunburned.
Uri looked at the sieve sitting on his lap, then lifted it up close to his eyes.
The fiber mesh seemed different: the holes were larger. Uri made a careful inspection to see what was making it seem so. He discovered that every other strand had been removed, indeed in some places even two successive fibers. The fibers were pinned to the side of a wooden frame that had been bent into a circle. The pins were still in place, but some of them had been pried loose and the threads pulled out. Any debris would fall through the sieve, rendering his labors completely useless.
He looked up. The women were engrossed in their work.
Uri laughed out loud, chortling ever more whole-heartedly. Some person or persons had devoted yesterday evening to playing a trick on him. Before his eyes emerged a picture of an assiduous woman who had spent part of her night pulling strands out of his sieve instead of sleeping. Perhaps others had also been present and looked on eagerly, even helping with advice as to how many strands to pull out — the idea of not just every other one could have occurred to someone. There have not been many times when I was deemed worthy of that much attention, he thought, and roared with laughter.
All of a sudden, every single girl and woman also broke out laughing, and there must have been around three dozen of them too. The whole gathering chuckled happily.
A woman then got to her feet and brought Uri a new sieve. He thanked her, took it, checked that it was good, and, with difficulty choking back his laughter, resumed work.
One lunchtime several days later, Uri asked what would have happened if he had not laughed at the trick but instead had run to the supervisor and told on them. You would have had a hard time of it among us, came the answer.
It was a pleasant, gray-haired lady who responded; her face was wrinkled, but she still had her good looks, especially her deep-blue eyes. Uri greatly regretted that she was not twenty years younger, or he was not twenty years older, because they would have made a handsome pair, the two of them, but the Lord had other plans, blessed be He.
The day it happened, though, Uri carried on sieving, but at noon, when they were chomping on their lunch (all of the more elderly ones doing so toothlessly), it was she who said to Uri, “There’s no point in your riddling with us, Theo. We’ll do your work; you’d do better keeping us amused.”
“Fair enough,” said Uri, “but what should I do?”
“Tell us stories,” the woman said.
“What stories should I tell? Nothing interesting has ever happened to me.”
“Not stories about yourself but about the big wide world, and the afterlife.”
Uri pondered. He could find things to say about the world, but the afterlife was another matter!
“In our country, in Edom,” he said, “people don’t concern themselves much with the afterlife… They know nothing about it.”
“Others do, however,” said the lady. “We have scrolls, only we can’t read them. Men occasionally try to make them out, but they don’t have the time; they are tired out by the evening when they might be able to read. They’d rather curl up and snore. People say you can read. Read out the scrolls to us, and we’ll work in the meantime.”
“Is that permitted, then?” Uri inquired.
Several voices clamored loudly that it was not forbidden, so it was allowed. They would perform Uri’s work; the supervisor could hardly object.
That was a bargain Uri was happy to enter. He would never have thought that scrolls existed in a godforsaken village such as this. What could they be?
That day he went on riddling, but the next morning one of the women thrust a thick scroll into his hands. Years ago, it had been left in the village by a wandering prophet, whom Master Jehuda had driven away in a great hurry, because he was proclaiming exactly what Master Jehuda did when inspired. The woman said that there had once been a time when her husband had tried reading out short passages to her, but he had gotten bored with that: reading did not come easily to him, and it had been impossible to persuade him to carry on. Yet the scroll concerned the one thing that was of paramount concern to people: what happens to us after we die.
The scroll must have passed through many hands, as the edges of the parchment were frayed. Uri carefully blew the dust off his sieve, and placed the scroll in that.
“I’d like to wash my hands,” he said. “I don’t want to smudge it.”
Two women jumped up and brought Uri pitchers of drinking water to pour onto Uri’s hands. That was significant, drinking water being in such short supply, but the women’s thirst for knowledge was greater than their bodily thirst. Uri asked them to take great care in pouring it out: slowly and just a little. That was how he rinsed his hands.
His tunic was mucky, and he could not dry his hands on it, so he dangled them and let them dry like that. When they were dry, he carefully took the scroll out of the sieve.
He sat down on the ground, blown-clean sieve in lap, scroll in hand. It was not as hefty as a Torah but it was as bulky as some of Ovid’s shorter works. It was not rolled onto a stick, just around itself. He threaded his left fist into the empty center of the roll and with his right hand he cautiously, delicately pulled the sheet to the right, only just enough so that he would be able to read the two columns in which the copyists had transcribed the first page. He looked at the text: it was upside down and in Greek. He rewound it and now poked his right fist into the scroll’s central gap and pulled it out with his left hand, then just when the scroll was about to roll itself onto his left arm, he grasped it at the bottom, between the left index finger and thumb, and pulled it gingerly, gently, leaving it to rewind on the left side of its own accord.
To begin he read slowly, hesitantly, having to get accustomed to the lettering, the omissions, and the language, which, though it was Greek, was an old Greek, with Hebrew words cropping up every now and then. The author of the Greek text must have translated it from the Hebrew, and any words that he did not know he had left in his mother tongue. He had become accustomed to this by the time he had reached the fourth or fifth page; anything he could not decipher he eked out from his imagination. If the ensuing sentences contradicted his guesswork, he went back and reread it and retranslated it to Aramaic as best he could. The riddling women did not make any reproving remarks on his jumping back in the text or his corrections; they were glad the reading helped them forget their physically punishing and soul-destroying work.