Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [2]
And then there arose a situation on which everything else turned.
It had been the custom, as you may already have wondered about, that artisans such as the jar-maker and weaver might live outside the sheik’s compound, even as in other cities the situation might be the reverse. The jar-maker found this to be a good arrangement. It gave him all of the seeming liberty of a free man, at least in that he could move about the city, and when it came time to deliver his goods to the sheik’s compound he faced the bookkeeper almost as though he were an equal.
“Six large water jars,” he said one morning in the cool season when the river in the distance had become carpeted with migrating birds.
“Six large water jars,” the bookkeeper took notice. He recorded the transaction and with a wave of his stylus seemed ready to dismiss the jar-maker.
So it had gone with every delivery of every variety of container the jar-maker had created for his master, many times a year for a long number of years. Six water jars? Six water jars. Twenty cups? Twenty cups. Ten bowls? Ten bowls. He created them and delivered them. And dishes—yes, now and then the jar-maker turned dish-maker, using what he regarded as his wife’s family design—three lines horizontal, one vertical—for the plates from which the sheik and his guests would eat. Today, as was more often than not the case, it was diminutive jars. People drank from them often, which meant some got broken, always. Jars. The bookkeeper counted. And raised his hand to dismiss him.
Year in, year out.
All in the name of God.
The artisan in his soul felt as though his supposedly temporary arrangement with the sheik would last forever. His family was growing. And still he found himself, as if in a dream of continuous repetition sometimes talked about by street-shop philosophers in the town, arriving at the compound, ordering the assistant, a blue-black slave from the South given to him by the sheik, to carry the pottery, standing before the bookkeeper, and waiting to be dismissed.
A free life seems so simple, filled with small pleasures! All he desired in those moments was the right to turn and walk away without having to wait for the signal that he was dismissed. As discourteous as that would have been, he contemplated the delicious possibility of it.
But did that moment ever arrive?
Here in the shade of the courtyard, cool shadows drifting down on them and sheltering them from the direct rays of the sun and buffering the heat reflected off the red walls of the main house, he enjoyed feeling liberated within the confines of his indentured state, so that, it seemed to him in his momentary fantasy, if he stood still the moment would never pass and he could live within it, even push against its limits and enlarge them, until old age overtook him and he withered and died free.
A man never knew how free he might be until he became a captive, for a decade or a lifetime, and a free man never knew just how enslaved he was until he found himself behaving as though invisible ropes tethered him to a routine of years and months and days. And so the artisan stood there, deeply immersed in the moment, poised to turn at the lowering of the bookkeeper’s hand, fretting about the freedom he might never possess.
The bookkeeper cleared his throat, and the jar-maker shifted in his space, already turning.
“Before you go…” the sheik’s man said. “There is something…”
The jar-maker froze in place, fixed like one of the designs on his pots when the heat rose high enough to fix it forever. Freezing, heating—oh, he knew, he felt it in his blood, he was somehow done, done for this world.
The bookkeeper again cleared his throat in such a formal way