Judas (5 page)
Each day our situation grew worse. I helped out a little by running errands, polishing brassware, and scrubbing up after the cooks. But it was not enough. Mother got sick several days a month. Darcas kept up her insistence that Dinah be brought to the atrium. I sensed Mother weakening. She did not want to do it, but we were running out of ideas and time. Dark circles were beginning to appear under her eyes, circles that had to be covered with more and more paint. She looked worn out. One day when I saw her resolve beginning to crack, I said, “Let me go to the atrium. Don’t send Dinah.”
“Judas, Sweet, Darcas doesn’t want you. She wants pretty boys and young girls like Dinah.”
“If you send her there, she will die,” I said, frustrated and angry.
“Judas, it is not your decision. I am her mother and I will decide. It shall be as the Lord directs.”
“The Lord? Why is it always your god? What sort of god do you bow to, who allows these things to happen?”
“You hold your tongue.”
“Mother, look at us. Look at what we have become. Think of what you are about to do.”
Mother and I were becoming enemies. I did not wish it, but it was so. Dinah heard us arguing. I did not know if she understood, but the frown on her face made me think she did.
“Mother, wait a month. If we can’t find something in a month…” I did not finish. Why make Dinah worry.
“One month? What can you do in a month? Judas, you are just a boy.”
***
I spent a lot of time in the agora. With all the money that changes hands in that place I figured there must be something I could do besides cutting purses. Nearly all the merchants had boys working in their stalls with them. Twenty times I asked to be hired and always got the same reply, “Sorry.” The boys working in the stalls were sons or nephews. But one man, a seller of copperware, had no son. He had a hired boy. At the time, I believed him to be the luckiest boy in the world.
“Do you need another boy?” I asked.
“No. The only time I hire boys is when one disappears.”
“How often does that happen?”
“About every six months or so, but so far I have been lucky. This boy has been with me a year.”
I followed the boy for over a week. I kept thinking, “If something were to happen to him, I could take his place with the seller of copperware. If something were to happen…”
***
I do not know how it came about. People flooded the streets to celebrate one of their gods’ or goddesses’ days. The street boys were busy plying their trade. When it got crowded like that, they could cut purses with relative ease. Escape became more difficult, but as the crowd shifted and moved, they did not have to go so far to be safe. So Gaius and his friends were at work, and I shadowed the boy.
We stood on the edge of the wall where the Diolkos shelved into the sea. There were no railings, only bollards and bronze rings set in the stone for the ships and barges to moor to while they waited their turn to be hauled out of the water and rolled north. If you were not careful, if you did not watch your step, you could easily trip and fall. I moved closer to the boy. He stood between me and the work I needed. He had no sister out of her senses, no mother who daily grew older and less able to function. That is what I told myself as I watched him out of the corner of my eye.
The priests from the temple of whatever god they celebrated that day paraded past. Trumpets blared. Banners snapped and swirled around and the sheer number of marchers forced the bystanders to move back out of the way and pressed us closer to the Diolkos. I heard a shout from the left. Someone nearly fell. People laughed and hauled a man back to safety, grinning and looking embarrassed. The shoving and pushing continued. Suddenly, the boy disappeared. He was there and then he was gone. I heard a thud and the sound of a wooden crate splintering, followed immediately by a scream. The parade passed on and the people surged forward again. I turned and looked down.
The boy lay moaning on the deck of a small coastal trader moored at the foot of the wall. He must have hit the crate first because straw, slats, and shards of pottery lay scattered around him. He stared at his leg, his face white as chalk. The leg stuck out at an impossible angle and the shaft bone protruded out of the thigh. The ship’s master waved his arms furiously and bawled at the boy, but he did not listen. The master blustered on. The boy fainted.
I stared in disbelief and at the same time, relief. I wondered, did I do that? I could not remember. But I certainly wished it. I could have done it. I wanted to do it. Was wishing a thing the same as doing it? Would Mother’s angry old god think that?
***
The life of a stall owner in the agora is not an easy one. I thought, naively, that all one had to do was buy goods cheap and sell for more. Trading is not so simple. The agora in Cenchrea, they say, is the best of the half dozen or so in and around Corinth. Many men wished to establish businesses there, and, therefore, vied for a space. That created a long waiting list. My new master, Amelabib, had to wait and then pay a big bribe to get in.
He also had to pay the market master a portion of his daily profits. The Roman officials did not know about this fee, but no one dared complain. The few that did were later found floating in the harbor. Also, he had to bribe the soldiers who patrolled the market, or they would look the other way when the gangs came, roving groups of thieves and cutthroats, the few street boys, like Gaius, who survived to become men. If the soldiers did not keep them in check, they could destroy a man and his stall in a wink of an eye. Then someone else would have to bribe the market master to take his place and so it went. Amelabib did not know from one day to the next if his bribes were sufficient to keep him in the market or even alive. By cutting his profits to the bone, he had managed to stay in the market for three years.
I quickly abandoned any ideas I might have had about owning my own stall. But I watched and I learned. Amelabib told his friends I was a quick student and he would have to be careful or he would end up working for me. They laughed when he said it. Money could be made in the agora. It just took a little imagination and a measure of cunning.
Amelabib, a short, stocky man, had the yellow hair you see often in Acacia, already streaked with gray, and his hands were permanently blackened from handling copper all day. Our booth displayed everything from cheap trinkets to elaborately worked salvers, pitchers, and bowls.
We had to be paid in denarii. It was the rule—no foreign currency was to be used to purchase goods in this area. Roman officials determined the taxes they charged based on the day’s take, and they calculated their percentage in denarii. If someone tried to pay in coinage other than denarii, we had to send him to one of the official moneychangers. But often we changed the money for them and went to a moneychanger and converted it at the going rate. The officials understood this occasional necessity, and allowed it to go on in spite of the rules. Money changing without official permission, however, brought down a host of officials, including the local police and
judicato
. But a few people did, anyway. It seemed a better and safer way to make money than cutting purses.
***
One day Amelabib closed his stall early and took me to Corinth. He bought his copperware from an artisan on the other side of the city away from the Diolkos and inland, where all of the master craftsmen, the workers of metal and gems, the potters and shapers—all had their shops. It was nearly an hour before we reached the edge of the city. I could make out buildings up on the heights long before we reached the city. The Acrocorinth loomed above the city nearly touching the clouds, or so I thought. I had never seen anything quite like it.
If the south port of the tramway is the cloaca, Corinth is the head and heart. In Cenchrea, many buildings were made of wood and thatch, only a few of stone. They were brightly colored but small and mean compared to Corinth where all the buildings were of stone, white marble and pink granite, many painted in beautiful deep blues and reds, their column capitals gilded. When we turned into the straight street I saw it—Mother and Dinah posing again. I stopped and gaped. It looked so much like Leonides’ work, for an instant I thought, how did they manage to get it repaired and shipped over here?
“You have not seen Greek statuary before?”
“Yes, I have seen statuary like this.”
“It is Aphrodite and Eros, maybe you know them as Venus and Cupid?” Amelabib continued, “That is the way the goddess and the god always look. Artists look for models that have that look. You see the face and the way her body is proportioned…”
I did. Except for the nose, it could be Mother. My mother looked like Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility. No wonder Darcas wanted her so badly. If she were her slave, she could be sold for a very large sum.
“This is nothing,” Amelabib lectured on. “In Athens, there are even more. Now there is the city for the world. Even Rome cannot match Athens for beauty.”
I did not know about that. I had never been to either and had no plans to go. In fact, I had never ventured into the part of Caesarea where the statues and fine buildings were nor the part of the city which had brightly painted columns. I did not know about those things. We walked down the street but I could not take my mind off the figures.
We came upon one statue of a man in the middle of the street, bigger than life, and dressed in gilded armor. He had a helmet tucked under his arm and held an orb in his hand. The writing on the pedestal was in Latin and I could not read it. Amelabib squinted at it.
“It says, ‘Now is a child born by heaven’…yes, born by heaven…‘Smile…at the birth of this boy who will put an end to our wretched age…from whom golden people will spring…now does…Apollo…’ My Latin is not so good.”
“Who is this person?” I asked. He sounded wonderful to me.
Amelabib laughed very loudly. “It is Augustus, our late emperor, who says this of himself. He thought he was a god. All of these Roman emperors do that, even this new one, this Tiberius, probably. It is not enough for them to be the richest and most powerful men in the world, they must make themselves equal to the gods. What the gods think about this, I do not know.”
We walked on. My mind wandered back to the statues and if, in fact, all the statues of Aphrodite looked like my mother. It was an unsettling discovery.
“Be still ‘Little Hebrew,’” he said, his attention drawn to a disturbance up the street. He called me “Little Hebrew,” and even though I tried to tell him I did not accept that status, he shook his head and said, “In this world we don’t choose who we are, we just are. And you are Hebrew whether you like it or not.”
I did not argue with him, but I confess, I had enough of the god who made me less than human, who punished people for the wrongs of others, and who let little girls be raped and made crazy. I wanted no part of him.
“Try to look Greek,” he said under his breath, “the priestesses are coming.”
I tried to look like what I thought a Greek must look like. But with my red hair, I doubted I fooled anyone. As it happened, the priestesses had more important things on their minds that day than one insignificant boy who did not care about his mother’s or anyone else’s god.
“There,” he said, “you see there…all those beautiful girls?”
I saw them. They were very beautiful and dressed in stuff that let you see the outlines of their bodies.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“They are the women dedicated to Venus or Aphrodite, depending on whether you lust after women as a Greek or a Roman.” He laughed again.
“People give their daughters to the temple in hopes of finding favor with the goddess and sometimes a rich reward, too.”
“Give? They give their daughters to the goddess?”
“Yes. Most come from the poor farms and the families on the other side of the Diolkos. From families that cannot bring themselves to selling them into the ‘profession of love,’ if you know what I mean.”
I knew what he meant.
“You see that temple up there?” He pointed toward the top of the Acrocorinth. I looked up at an enormous building. I guessed the men of Corinth must have their minds turned to love more than anything else. As if he read my thoughts, Amelabib said.
“This goddess has the biggest temple in every city. No surprise there, eh?”
“Where do they all come from? There must be hundreds of women and girls.”
“There are two kinds of women in the temple. Some—those with much paint and red lips—are the temple prostitutes. They come and go depending on the needs of the priestess. The others are the Vestal Virgins. They must stay that way as a reminder they belong to the goddess. Those girls must be very special.”
“How special?”
“They must be beautiful, of course, nothing less would be acceptable to the goddess, and they must be visited by the goddess herself. If they are accepted, they are taken into the temple and their parents may never see or speak to them again. Some say the parents are given the money collected in the offering salver that day.”
“Visited? You mean the goddess appears to them?”
“It’s like that…or something…a messenger from the goddess, I do not know. Those are the mysteries. All I know is the goddess marks some young girls in some special way and the priestesses in the temple know what that is, and take only those who have it.”
I thought it must be like the wine stain the sandal maker in Caesarea had. He had a red blotch on his face he said the gods gave him. I scanned the Virgins. Their ages ranged from Dinah’s to old women. None of them had a wine stain. One or two of them looked familiar, like someone I knew. But I did not know any girls outside of the House of Darcas and these would not be from any place like that.
We climbed upward. The city on its western edge backed up to the hills. Above us was the temple of Aphrodite.
We wandered around the heights toward the southern edge of the city. I could not take my eyes off the buildings and statuary and so I did not notice where we were going. I ran into Amelabib who had stopped abruptly at a small stall set in front of a low house, the coppersmith’s home and shop. The coppersmith stood at his hearth, a big, rough-looking man, hands gnarled and black from years of working with copper, melting it, alloying it into bronze or brass, and hammering it out into pieces, some of such delicacy, I wondered how those cudgel-like hands could ever craft anything so beautiful. My master introduced me as his “Little Hebrew.”
“Oh ho,” the coppersmith boomed, “well, I am descended from the great Philistine metal workers. There is enmity between our people, so you’d better beware of me.”
I did not know what he meant. The only Philistines I ever heard of were ancient people whose name had been twisted to Palestine, which was what Romans called the land of my birth.
I stood as tall as I could and tried to look brave. He laughed a big laugh. You cannot always tell when someone is joking with you, whether you are safe. That man could turn me over to the Romans on nearly any pretext, and because I had no entry pass, no citizenship, because Mother did what she did to survive, I would not have a chance of seeing freedom ever again. In that corrupt city, where nearly everything was for sale, he could and would do it if the circumstances were right.
On our way back, our bundles of jewelry and copperware carefully concealed beneath our cloaks, my master said, “You should have yourself fixed, you know. This is not a good place to be if you are a Hebrew.”
“Fixed? What do you mean, ‘fixed’?”
“You know, you should have yourself repaired…in that place!”
“That place?”
He waved his hands around, irritated with me. “I know of a Greek surgeon, a very good man, who can fix you back the way you were born. All of the Hebrews that come here to live go to him. You will be safer if you do that.”
Ah, I thought—
that place
. I should undo with his Greek surgeon what the other one did, and for the same reason. It was unsafe in Corinth to be one of my mother’s people and equally unsafe not to be one in Caesarea. I knew then that my mother’s god must be mean and unmerciful. He punished me for being the illegitimate son of someone I never met. He made me an outcast wherever I went. He played cruel jokes on me for not being circumcised and then for being circumcised and he made it very clear I could never have a part of this world except at its fringes. Not Greek, not Hebrew, nothing.
“I will think about it.”
We did not talk much on the way back to Cenchrea. I was thinking about those girls and women. Why would anyone give a daughter to a goddess?