Testament by Nino Ricci

Author:Nino Ricci [Ricci, Nino]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37508-7
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2002-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

It was night when we arrived in Alexandria, so that I saw only the lamps that lined the central boulevard and the great arcades there. For the longest time this was all I knew of the city proper, for we went at once to the district set aside for the Jews and did not emerge from it for many months. In the Jewish quarter there were many splendid homes as in Jerusalem, but also many hovels, and it was to one of these that we made our way, the house of a cousin of Yehoceph by the name of Yirmeyah who had lived in the city for many years. He gave us a room at the back of his courtyard for which we paid rent, and we shared our meals with him and with his children and his wife, an Egyptian woman as dark as an Ethiope who spoke neither Hebrew nor Aramaic.

As it fell out, there were problems at that time between the Jews and the Alexandrians, for the Jews had petitioned Augustus for all the rights of citizens but the Alexandrians opposed them. So it was that Yirmeyah said to Yehoceph, You have come at the worst time, since there is no work for Jews with the Greeks, but only with other Jews. Thus Yehoceph came to work for his cousin, at half the pay he had earned at the temple and doing many jobs that were difficult for a man of his age, since Yirmeyah, to keep him employed and so earn his own commission, contracted for every sort of work that came their way, whether it be carrying bricks or laying pavement or digging latrines.

We went on in this way for some time, though it did not seem just to me what Yirmeyah paid us for Yehoceph’s work nor yet what we paid him in rent, for once our lodging and board had been accounted for, there was next to nothing that remained to us. In the end I spoke to some of the other women of the quarter and discovered from them that Yirmeyah cheated us, taking advantage because we did not know the ways of the city and spoke no Greek. I went to Yehoceph and said, Your cousin is a thief. He seemed ready to strike me then, because he could not imagine that one of his own family would cheat him. But because I would not retract my accusation Yehoceph agreed to bring it to Yirmeyah, since he judged it fair that he respond to it.

Yirmeyah, however, did not dispute the charge but immediately made his own.

You have defiled my house with a bastard, he said, though we had told him nothing of this matter. So we saw that my sin had followed us from Judea and we were to be cursed by it.

There are many who would have turned you away, Yirmeyah said, but I took you in, so to make it seem that he had committed no crime in cheating us, or that he himself was purer than we were though he had married an Egyptian.

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