He could still write, which was something to be thankfulfor—but thankful to whom? His fingers were cramped into a writing attitude and clenched about a pen could still do their work. But they were growing worse, and abandoning the gods, once and for all, he took other measures. He gave his money to a man who took his afflicted hand and thrust it into a pan of almost boiling hot mud; to a woman who filled his palm with oil and gently rubbed and pressed and prodded until the oil had been absorbed; to a man who had attempted to press the fingers and the bony protruberance of the palm, flat between two boards, excruciatingly painful and quite ineffective.
He had tried to learn to write with his left hand, practising surreptitiously; and his left hand could write, but in a fashion quite unsuitable to the narrow columns of an account book. It wrote a large, sprawling hand, square and ugly, and no amount of determination, no amount of practice, could make it write otherwise. And looking ahead into the future Balthazar saw himself like a chariot horse, injured at the Races and sold, doomed to drag out a limping, ill-fed life, dragging a heavy cart until it died. He was a writing slave, and of what use was a writing slave with a crippled hand?
He was in this particularly vulnerable state when one of the houses slaves died, died mounting the stairs to the living quarters and dropping, as he fell, a tray laden with porcelain dishes from Cathay in the far East, which the Greek in one of his travels and transactions had managed to acquire. Over the dead man nobody had mourned, but the Greek’s wife’s lamentations over the broken dishes had been loud and long.
The slave bought to replace the dead man was a Jew, named Eliezer, and he was, by his own account, a slave by choice. His aged father had fallen deeply into debt.
“He was seventy, I was his youngest son. Unknown to me he had sold all that we had, and borrowed money from a Samaritan who demanded heavy interest. He was about to be shamed and disgraced. The Samaritan agreed to take me, and to cancel the debt. So I am a slave. But my father’s debt was paid and I have obeyed the law—Thou shall honour thy father and thy mother. I was misled. By our law no slave can be held for more than seven years. Whatever his value, in the seventh year he must be set free. But other people have other laws and I have now been in bondage for twice seven years and my father, if he is still alive, is doubtless in debt again, being a fool in business. Still, I did what I could.”
Balthazar was much impressed to learn that a man could voluntarily sell himself into slavery, that hated state, and even more impressed by Eliezer’s indomitable cheerfulness which was not the cheerfulness of the light-headed and thoughtless kind which seemed to be the only kind available to slaves, and which Balthazar himself had never attained. This cheerfulness, he discovered gradually, was based upon hope and faith, both rooted in a religion, which as it was revealed, bit by bit, was astonishingly different from any of those he had sampled. Eliezer’s god was a spirit who had on earth no physical representation at all and who demanded not the occasional present or the bowing down in this place or that, but control of a man’s whole life, from the moment he waked in the morning until he fell asleep at night.
“It is the Law,” was Eliezer’s explanation of everything, down to his refusal to eat certain kinds of meat and his frenzied attempts to do as much of the seventh day’s work on the sixth as was possible. The reward for keeping this law might come in this life.
“Jehovah never deserts a just man,” Eliezer said, and it was plain to Balthazar that Eliezer still, after fourteen years of slavery, was hopeful for liberating action from his god; but this life was not all, a just man could count upon life after death when he would be gathered to his fathers and enjoy everlasting felicity.
It took some time for Balthazar to learn all this, since his work lay in the counting house and on the docks, and Eliezer’s kept him to the domestic side of the house, but whenever they could they drifted together and the talk took a religious turn. One evening Balthazar stretched out his right hand which he usually concealed as much as possible and laid it on Eliezer’s knee as they squatted together in the dusty courtyard.
“Look,” he said.
“A handicap to anyone,” Eliezer said gravely, having looked.
“And doubly so in a scribe.”
“If it were yours and you prayed for a cure, would your God answer you?”
Eliezer hesitated and then said:“No. In the old days there were prophets who could work wonders; Elijah restored a dead child to life; Moses made a dry path through the sea. But there have been no prophets for the last five hundred years. Besides,” he hesitated again, ‘if Jehovah answered that kind of prayer nobody would ever be sick or blind or crippled … or a slave.”
“Have you ever prayed outright for your freedom ?”
“As I would ask for a melon from a stall? No. I have asked my God not to forget His servant in his bondage and exile. And that prayer He has answered.”
“How do you know?”
“In my heart,” Eliezer said simply.
“In his heart a man knows whether he is forgotten by God or not.”
“How?”
“He becomes melancholy. Perhaps I can best explain to you by way of a story… .“He told Balthazar the story that all Jewish children knew, the story of their first King, Saul, who was forgotten by God and went melancholy-mad. And then by contrast he told another story, that of Job. He ended with a quotation, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him’.
Balthazar dimly realised that though this god of the Jews offered no remedy for the contracting fingers, he might offer some remedy for the apprehension with which he himself regarded the future, and also, almost equally important, something to fill the emptiness within him. When Eliezer said, “In my heart’, Balthazar had understood, because his need was the need of all men, all the temple-frequenters, the sacrifice-offerers, the need to feel that somebody, somewhere saw you as an individual and cared.
After that talk he became assiduous in his questions. Did Jehovah have a temple?
Yes, indeed, Eliezer said; it was in Jerusalem, the most beautiful and holy building in the world. It was the ambition of every pious Jew to visit it, at the Feast of the Passover, at least once in his life. Eliezer told Balthazar in great detail about the building of the Temple—which he had never seen; its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, its rebuilding by the liberated Jews, under Ezra, by people who worked with a trowel or a shovel in one hand and a sword, a club or a dagger in the other—that made a stirring tale; and finally its enlargement and beautification by Herod.
“And here, in Tyre?” Balthazar asked.
“Your god has no temple here?”
Eliezer suddenly looked uncomfortable.
“One God, one Temple,” he said.
“In other places we have a meeting house, a synagogue, where the Law is read and expounded and the songs of praise chanted.”
“There is one in Tyre?”
“There is one in any place where any number of Jews are gathered together.”
“And you go to it?”
“When I can—which is not very often. A house slave has little leisure,” Eliezer said.
“Listen!” He jumped up with what Balthazar could only puzzledly regard as relief at the sound of the bell which summoned him.
There was then a time when Balthazar, hot foot after this, the last of his gods, found Eliezer very odd and evasive, which was strange, because to say the least a scribe-accountant by even talking to a mere house slave, honoured him. But the day came when Balthazar could say to Eliezer:
“I am interested in all that you tell me of your god. When next you go to your synagogue, tell me. I will ask leave to go with you.”
Eliezer’s face took on the peculiar colour which all pale-faced men showed under any strain.
“That is not possible,” he said, avoiding Balthazar’s eye.
“Because I was not born a Jew?”
He could see Eliezer wavering between tact and honesty. Honesty won and Eliezer said:
“It is not that. It would be better if you asked no more and accepted my answer—it is not possible.”
“Because I am black?” He’d never been particularly conscious of his colour; it was true that most of his kind were slaves but that was because of their misfortune, not because of their colour, and there were plenty of men, quite as black as he was, who came to Tyre to visit