Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

all; he was very near-sighted. It had not always been so. Up to the age of ten or eleven he had been able to do all the things the other boys his age could do, but at some point he dropped out of their games, moved less assuredly, squinted, and leaning ever closer to the scroll when he read. It had not bothered him at first, coming on so gradually that he had barely noticed; it was just that he often had headaches. Eusebius, the teacher who took care of him and ten or fifteen other boys in the house of prayer (that was what the community paid him for), told Joseph that, in his opinion, Uri had poor eyesight. Joseph had protested: no one in his family had poor eyesight, his son included. The teacher just shook his head. Joseph’s first- born was his only son, his wife

had not become pregnant again after the second girl was born, so the teacher realized that Joseph was in a difficult position. That evening his father had interrogated him. “Is it true that you don’t see well?” he asked pointedly. He walked over to the furthest corner in the main room and asked how many fingers he was holding up. The main room was not all that big, but even so, the hand was a long way off, and it was dim as well. The oil lamp was barely flickering, but it gave off a lot of fumes, and that too was bothersome. Uri sighed and chose at random, “Two.” From the silence that followed, he could tell that he had guessed wrong. That was when relations

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