Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

hanging around and gazing out; in fact he was mocked on that account, and even his father had told him to lay off: “Spying is despicable,” was what he said, so Uri would spend long periods of time loafing deep in his alcove, as far as he could get from the window, and he hoped no one outside could make him out in the gloom. There was a story told about a weak- eyed but rich Latini who was able to see everything clearly by skillfully holding a ground diamond before his eyes and looking through it. But Uri had never encountered anything of the kind; indeed, he had never seen a gemstone at all. He feared going totally blind. Blindness was not common in the labyrinthine yard, and anyone who went blind did not roam around outside, but people could sometimes be

heard saying that this person or that had been struck down in that manner by the wrath of the Lord. Blind people, unless they were trachomatous, were not segregated; they were not regarded as unclean, merely unfortunate. Uri brooded for days andweeks andmonths on end about whether the Lord had marked him to be blind, or of it was simply a case of his having so much else to do that he was not paying attention, or maybe even Satan, or more likely Fate, intervening to cause this affliction. Uri held an assortment of Judeo-Latin- Greek notions about it because he had read a lot. What he really did not understand was why he had not been born blind from the outset, if that was his fate. Had the Lord changed his mind after he was already underway? What sort of considerations could be driving Him, he

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