A Journey to the End of the Millennium

1.

In the beginning of the winter of that year, in the middle of the month of Shevat, a few days after the year of the millennium embraced Christian Europe in its reality, Joseph son of Kalonymos fell ill, and a short while later he departed this life. His wife, who was now left a widow for the second time, repeated to all those who came to comfort her, with a persistence that was almost disrespectful to the deceased, that evil had entered her home at the moment of weak-mindedness when her husband allowed himself to be persuaded by that strange foreign rabbi to serve as arbiter in the accursed case of dual matrimony that came up from the south. From that day he had definitely lost his peace of mind and his spirit was disturbed, and even long weeks after the parties to the dispute had left Worms and the land of Ashkenaz he still walked around looking as though he had been struck by a wondrous nightmare, until heaven took pity on his soul.

Did he regret his decision? Or did he consider that he had gone too far to please the woman he had been denied, whose appearance before him as a suitor at the mercy of his kindness had aroused such conflicting emotions in his breast that he had been unable to control them? His despairing widow was unable to answer such questions, for he had never told her, or indeed others, what had really happened during his private examination of the two North African women, and in fact he himself may not have been certain until the day of his death that he had understood rightly what he believed they had said.

Indeed, after Rabbi Elbaz, supported on either side by burly Ishmaelites and a black slave, had tried to discourage Joseph son of Kalonymos with a gloomy vision of a messianic age packed with abandoned, dejected Ishmaelite women, the alarmed judge had tried once more to communicate with the assembly on the other side of the curtain, so as to gauge its reaction and know what to do and say. But when the rabbi’s son entered in his new cloak and hat, looking, despite his dark complexion, like a long-established child of Worms, Joseph son of Kalonymos suddenly understood that he had no need to seek beyond the curtain but that he could draw strength from deep inside himself. From that moment his self-confidence increased, to the point that his curiosity to see the two wives with his own eyes became a real, urgent duty.

A duty first and foremost toward Mistress Esther-Minna, who stood before him radiating the beauty of her anxiety. Although he did not know whether it was her parents alone or she too who had rejected the match with him, he recognized that he did not have the right to brush aside her distress, which had been considerably aggravated by the continued silence of her young husband, who may have tried to circumvent the legal ruling by an elusive deception. Therefore, as an impartial judge, he felt it was his duty to offer an opportunity to the repudiating wife who had returned to seek justice in her native town. He did not mean to favor the love of his youth, but neither did he wish to be a stranger to the beautiful, delicate face, whose transparent pallor crushed his heart. At last he asked Master Levitas to take her outside with all the others and bring the merchant’s two wives into the little courtroom, heated by the warmth of the large candles, to be questioned as witnesses.

It appeared that this was the moment the women of the community of Worms had been waiting for, for in an instant the two wives, who had been held in strange seclusion ever since they had emerged from the wagon in a state of near-collapse, had finally been fetched from two different streets and brought to the synagogue. Ben Attar’s heart was embittered at the sight of his wives, wrapped in coarse black cloaks, their faces uncovered and bare of kohl, jewelry, or any adornment, as though the local women had deliberately decided to remove the enchanting decoration that distinguished one wife from the other and to expose them as far as possible in their stark femininity, so as to mock their duality. But as the distraught Ben Attar hastened toward his wives, the women of Worms boldly blocked his way and did not let him approach, as though his purpose were to subvert their testimony rather than simply to comfort them.

Without a single word having been said to them, the pair were led behind the curtain into the cleared courtroom and were stood side by side before the judge, who was shaken by such excitement at this double vision standing exposed before him that it was all he could do to prevent himself from fleeing for his life into the bosom of the wise congregation, which even behind the drawn curtain continued to follow all his movements. Since he did not know whether the prohibition of intimacy between a man and another’s wife applied also in the case of a pair of wives, he told the Elbaz child to remain, with the additional purpose of serving as interpreter.

Although it was hard to conduct a private interrogation without a common language, Joseph son of Kalonymos was determined to dispense with the overabundant services of Elbaz, fearing that the clever rabbi would distort and improve the women’s replies and the accuracy of the investigation would be undermined. He preferred to make do with the little unskilled interpreter, who would translate simple questions and answers faithfully, even if not precisely or completely, from the Hebrew of the prayerbook to the Arabic of the marketplace and back again. Moreover, it might be supposed that after their long journey in each other’s company, the women and the child had got to know each other, and he would be able, by means of gestures and expressions, to exact from the frightened pair who stood all alone before him the incriminating testimony that would compensate for Abulafia’s obstinate silence.

Even though the prayer leader of the synagogue of Worms had never before interrogated witnesses, he had learned from Tractate Sanhedrin and from the words of others that everyone must first be warmed and softened, so that the outer husk may be easily peeled off and the pale kernel exposed. Therefore, in warmly conciliatory tones, he extracted from each of the women her name, and then proceeded to ask for the names of their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters, their uncles and aunts. He made no distinction between the names of the living and of the dead, or between those of near and remote kin. Soon the courtroom in Worms was filled with a small Mediterranean congregation, which mirrored and contrasted with the German congregation audible behind the curtain.

Not content with names alone, Joseph son of Kalonymos wished to know the age of each one named, and this was harder, because the accurate reckoning of years is always shrouded in mist, and the long voyage followed by the considerable overland journey had only served to thicken it. Indeed, so confused had the time of the one wife become with that of the other that it might have seemed at one point as though the first wife were younger than the second, had not the little interpreter succeeded in putting the record straight and enabled the curious northern judge to enter, by means of a fragile bridge of half-forgotten Hebrew and the gesticulations of an excited child, into the interiors of two separate houses on the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea, with their pots and pans, beds and bedclothes, and to seek beyond the scent of flowers, the exuberant spices, and the throngs of children the secret of the shame and reproach of enforced duplication.

To this end the arbiter wished to remove the younger wife a little way and to remain alone with the first wife, who seemed to him in his innocence and inexperience as the weak link from which he could extract a complaint of sorrow, pain, and shame, so that the arbitration that was shortly to be delivered would not only follow as the natural outcome of what had been said, but might even appear as a genuine act of rescue. However, he suddenly hesitated to discharge the second wife and remain alone with the wrath of the first, whose age, he now knew, was that of his own wife, and her height, he now saw, the same as hers. This hesitation resulted not only from his uncertainty about whether the presence of a boy who had not yet reached the age of legal majority was enough to satisfy the prohibition on intimacy, but more particularly from fear that out of the anguish in the older woman’s soul a secret or open curse of death might burst forth, directed against her tall, dark, slim adversary, with her delicate, handsome face and her amber-colored eyes that occasionally flashed with an emerald-green spark.

It seemed as though Joseph son of Kalonymos had also caught the infection of the duality that had come up from the south to defend itself, since he was now unable to muster the inner resolve to remove the second wife but sought only to put a little space between her and the first wife. Since he could not hide her away inside the holy ark, he told her, with the help of the gestures of the little interpreter, to squeeze herself into a narrow recess between the holy ark and the east wall, and asked her to cover her head with an old curtain that he had discovered in a drawer, so that she should not hear what her opponent was saying against her.

But to his great surprise, Joseph son of Kalonymos did not manage to extract a single word of calumny against the second wife from the first, even though the latter knew that the other could not hear her. On the contrary, if previously the first wife’s love for the second wife had been distant, because she had not known her, after traveling with her for sixty days on board an old guardship and for a further twelve days on a cramped wagon, the first wife’s soul had become so closely bound to the other’s that this duality, which had journeyed to the heart of Europe to contend for its life, would return home so much stronger and more united that it would no longer need two separate homes but could make do with a single house. A single house? The arbiter was alarmed, for he immediately thought of his own home, a wooden house with bales of straw piled on its roof and black piles supporting its rickety frame, with an additional fair-haired wife walking from room to room, receiving what she had been denied a score of years before.

From the noises coming from behind the curtain, the novice inquisitor could sense that his public was beginning to grow restive at his diligence. Any member of the community, even if he had been raised to unwonted and questionable prominence, was obliged by his nature and upbringing to exercise some self-restraint, and therefore the congregation, cut off from its holy ark, now hoped that this prayer leader and blower of rams’ horns would not forget that his pleasant voice and knowledge of the order of service did not authorize his moderate intelligence to distract him from his duty.

This duty Joseph son of Kalonymos undoubtedly remembered while he sought to replace one woman with the other so as to conclude the examination of the witnesses. He was surprised to discover that to duty was added enjoyment, as though these two strange Jewish women who had been entrusted to him this evening had been joined by other women who had appeared in his life, such as the comely woman who had brought this case and who now waited outside, beside her husband, or his own wife, who awaited him at home, not forgetting his departed first wife, buried so long ago in the clay of the small cemetery beside the Rhine. For a moment it seemed as though his flesh were invested not merely by a duality of wives but with a veritable multiplication of thereof. This was a dangerous moment. He gestured to the child to remove the ragged old curtain from the second wife’s head. And despite his fear of the ban on intimacy, he overcame his shyness, banished the first wife beyond the large curtain, and bid the second wife approach, in the hope that this one might offer him at least a grain of adverse testimony and so enable his conscience to pronounce judgment in the spirit of the sages of Ashkenaz.

Indeed, now there was some hope. Unlike the first wife, who was constrained in her speech, carefully weighing each word, so she did not incriminate or besmirch the duality so beloved by her husband, the second wife let fly a spate of whispered Ishmaelite speech so long and rapid that the youthful translator was completely muddled and took hold of the holy ark as though to hide himself there. Gradually it emerged that in the lowest part of the ship there had been secretly hatched, besides the fetus that had been growing in the young woman’s belly, not some mere plea or complaint but a highly charged dream, which the northerner’s first short opening question was enough to release in the form of a declaration that resounded in that narrow space as if it were the whole wide world.

Ever since this wife had shed her veil, she had understood, from the looks that were cast not only on her back now but on her face as well, that she was not alone, and that she had many partners to her dream. Although she had not been asked about it, she lost no time in recounting it to Joseph son of Kalonymos, who would soon be thrown into turmoil.

Just as the women of Worms had taken off her fine silken veil on the eve of the New Year, so she now permitted herself, at the end of the Sabbath of Penitence, to let fall from her shoulders the black cloak that the sanctimonious women had wrapped her in and stand slim and blushing before the arbiter in a colorful embroidered robe of fine cloth that had faded a little from being washed in seawater. From the jumble of Jewish Arabic that now poured from her small mouth, the astonishing truth gradually emerged that not only was she willing to be subjected to dual wedlock, she herself wished to contract a dual marriage. Having no complaint against the first wife, whose patience and kindness she had learned to appreciate during the long shared journey by sea and land, she was experiencing a mounting envy of a husband who had two wives to himself while they only had one husband between them.

Even though at this moment the inquisitive judge knew that his professional curiosity might have made him go too far, he still could not stop himself. And even if Joseph son of Kalonymos was not yet entirely convinced that his young interpreter—who was doing his best by means of frantic gestures and broken Hebrew, eked out by half-remembered roots and fragments of words from the prayerbook—was really translating correctly the words of the woman who was standing so boldly before him, he sensed, from the fierceness and bitterness echoing around the little court room, that it was not duality that the second wife perceived as a threat but singularity. Consequently he could not restrain his curiosity and was sufficiently carried away to put a strange question: A second husband? Like whom,for example? And while he was still regretting his unnecessary question, the young translator was already relaying the answer, whether on his own initiative or out of the heart of the Ishmaelite storm that was raging before him: Like you, my lord, like you, for instance …

This was a real arrow loosed against him, and it both pierced his soul with a strange desire and poisoned it with a new fear, as though it were only now that he understood, on his own account, the profound source and the true meaning of the prohibition that the whole community was attempting to transmit to him from behind the curtain: Duplication inevitably leads to multiplication, and multiplication has no limits. His whole body was trembling and his face paled at the thought that this woman might attempt to put her claim, outrageous yet correct according to its own logic, into effect, and divest herself also of her Mediterranean robe. Without wasting time on further reflection, he picked up the loose black cloak from the floor and gently but firmly placed it around the young woman’s shoulders as though covering an invalid, before wrenching aside the curtain that divided him from his congregation.

As though the time had come for the standing prayer, the whole community rose to its feet. Already Rabbi Elbaz was hurrying toward Joseph son of Kalonymos, and after a slight hesitation he was joined by Ben Attar and by Master Levitas. Only Abulafia continued to stand where he was, his face blank, even though he could have no doubt that the moment of decision had come. The ruddy-faced judge asked the rabbi from Seville to lend him the little black ram’s horn before he announced his verdict. Elbaz hesitated for an instant, as though sensing the approaching disaster, but he could not refuse one whom he himself had elevated to a position of distinction only a short while ago. As though waking from sleep, the prayer leader took the dark Andalusian horn as it appeared from its hiding place in the folds of the rabbi’s robes, and closing his eyes, he put it to his lips, as though to reinforce his coming pronouncement with a blast from heaven. He blew three southern notes, long and sadly tender, followed by a still small sound, and then, with closed eyes and with fear and trembling, he pronounced not merely repudiation against the southern partner but a ban and an interdict.

To make his meaning plainer, Joseph son of Kalonymos had recourse to two languages—first, to admonish and encourage his friends, the muddy local Teutonic tongue, mingled with a few flattened, lugubrious Hebrew words, and then the holy tongue itself, with a clarity that brooked no appeal. He sealed his pronouncement with a rapid sequence of short sharp notes on the ram’s horn, which he then returned to its stunned owner. Only then was the pregnant silence broken by murmurs of approbation tinged with admiration for this modest prayer leader, who had dared to lead his flock to a distant but clear horizon. While a furious Rabbi Elbaz was explaining the verdict in rapidly whispered Arabic to the crestfallen merchant, Abulafia’s head spun and he sank as though in a faint. As Mistress Esther-Minna cried for help, Master Levitas, true to the spirit of the new decree, carefully interposed himself between her and the outlawed uncle, not yet certain whether the interdict that had just been pronounced so decisively also embraced the two wives, who were now once more standing side by side.

Until one of the true scholars of the community could explore the full implications of this arbitration, from which traditionally no appeal was possible, the Jews of Worms preferred to segregate their banned guest speedily from the rest of the people. It seemed that someone with singular wisdom and foresight had already rented a small room for the vanquished disputant in the home of a gentile widow in a narrow street not far from the church. In the dark of night, by the light of a flaming torch and to the accompaniment of the chorus of frogs in the river, Ben Attar was conducted there together with the black slave, who was deemed by the community a suitable companion for a man under ban. But Rabbi Elbaz, the furious, desperate complainant, adamantly refused to abandon the owner of the ship that was to carry him home to Andalus and followed after him and climbed the rickety wooden steps at his heels, not only to bring him comfort and to seek advice but also to demonstrate publicly his utter contempt for the ban that had been pronounced here. Indeed, he even vindictively contemplated pronouncing a counterban of his own upon the whole community.

But in the little room belonging to the gray-haired, blue-eyed gentile woman, who offered the banned Jew no more than a bed and a crust, the rabbi felt that he owed his Moroccan employer, who had trusted him and brought him from Andalus to help him repair the broken partnership, a greater consolation than a public outburst of anger or wild visions of revenge. Although he could only guess what had happened during the private interrogation of the second wife in front of the holy ark behind the curtain, he felt he did have a real solution for the banned merchant, who was left with a ship full of merchandise in the heart of wild and desolate Europe—a solution that might be temporary but that would enable him, despite everything, to renew his partnership with his dear nephew, who had collapsed in a heap as if he were a young woman at the news of the interdict.

But would the little Andalusian rabbi, who was now groping in the thick darkness of a crooked Rhenish room with only three walls—one of which might still have a crucifix hanging on it—have the courage to speak out and explain the plan that he had thought up as a possible escape route even before he had persuaded Ben Attar to set out for a second legal confrontation on the Rhine? Tears of sorrow and compassion but also of secret longing stung Elbaz’s eyes at the startling but generous thought that he himself might free the banned man from the double marriage that was his downfall, not only by releasing the second wife from her marriage vows but by wedding her himself and taking her into his home in Seville, so that she should not remain alone.

But while Rabbi Elbaz was floundering and longing for an opportunity to explain his new plan, Ben Attar asked him to hasten and demand from the Jews of Worms the return of his vanished wives, for it was his intention to bring them both to him, even in this tiny room in a gentile house. All the concern of the banned merchant was not for himself or his merchandise but only for his two wives, his only ones, lest they were assailed by anxiety that he might be thinking of betraying his dual love. So hard and stern was Ben Attar’s voice as he commanded the startled and disappointed rabbi that the man of God felt that since he had failed in his mission, the North African Jew valued him no more highly than the black slave who was now removing his master’s shoes.

2.

In the third watch the second wife thought she heard a faint blast on the ram’s horn, and her heart sank in fear. While she was trying to compose herself in the unfamiliar, alien silence, there floated before her the bloodshot eyes of the arbiter, to whom she had weak-mindedly allowed herself to reveal the secrets of her heart. Again she tormented herself, not for anything she had said but for what she had not managed to say. Rabbi Elbaz, who earlier that night had had to contend for a long time with the excitable hostesses of the two southern women in order to gain their return to their banned husband, had tried to calm the young woman and console her over what she had said, some of which he had learned vaguely from his son, the little interpreter. But it had seemed to the second wife as though the rabbi’s words of comfort had been spoken faintly and halfheartedly. Had he been secretly trying to bind her to him in a compact of guilt, in the knowledge that he too would be called to account not only for the failure of his apocalyptic speech but also for his mistaken choice of judge, a man who had disguised his weakness with an overhasty and cruel verdict? Or had he conceived some strange idea of encouraging the young woman with soothing words to continue to cling to the right of counterduality that she had demanded for herself, to see how far it might go?

One way or another, his words of comfort had only served to confuse her, and now, as she silently rose from the pallet that was all the Christian landlady could offer her unexpected guests, she hastily wrapped herself in the rough black cloak that the local women had given her and slunk past her husband, who had curled up in a fetal position between two large logs that he had rolled out from a corner. Stepping over the first wife, who was sleeping as peacefully as a corpse, with her hands joined, facing a long, sharp-edged, sloping iron bar that supported the ceiling of the triangular cubicle, the second wife entered the other chamber. Wishing not only to escape the curse of the ban but to try to put right the wrong she had done by her rash words, she held her sandals in her hand and slipped noiselessly past the Christian landlady, who was spending the night in a large chair, covered by the pelt of a black bear, whose stuffed head hung on the wall beneath the figure of the Crucified One, who bore his sufferings even in the dead of night.

Although the old woman sensed the shadow flitting past her and momentarily opened an eye, she did not stir at the flight of the Jewess, who descended the creaking, swaying wooden steps toward the darkened narrow alleys of the sleeping town. The foreign woman was alert to the silence all around her and to the huge silhouette of the church, wrapped in a yellowish mist, and yet she clung resolutely to the aim she had set herself, to seek out among the little houses the home of the hosts who had cared for her so generously since she had come to Worms so that they could take her to the arbiter and she could plead with him to listen to what she had not managed to say, in the hope that he might retract the interdict that he had pronounced because of her. And despite the darkness and the marshy vapors, which made her lose her way in the narrow streets of the little town, she recognized the right door and promptly knocked upon it.

But nobody, either in that house or in those on either side, heard the second wife’s light knocking, for the Jews of Worms were fast asleep, having found peace of mind after the days of turmoil, as though the interdict and the ban had swept from their hearts the wonderfully sinful new thoughts brought to their town by the southern disputants. And so the second wife, whose shouting had no effect either, had no choice but to grope her way to the synagogue itself, first to the modest little women’s synagogue, where she knelt for a while after the manner of the Ishmaelites, who manifest total submission before making any request, and then hesitantly entering the men’s prayer hall by the unfinished western wall, slipping between the empty rows, and finally pressing herself into the narrow recess between the holy ark and the eastern wall.

Was it possible that the North African woman’s tormented heart had divined that the judge, Joseph son of Kalonymos, would also be unable to sleep in the coils of this night, and that he too, whether from an access of new strength or from a hint of remorse, would be unable to prevent himself from rising early and coming to his pulpit, either to prepare himself for the morning prayers of the Fast of Gedaliah or to join his body and soul to the place where three women had stood the previous night, waiting for the words to fall from his lips? Therefore, as he picked up the fallen red curtain and drew its corners together, piously pressing his lips to the golden letters embroidered on the faded velvet, then folded it carefully away and put it back in its proper place, no cry of alarm escaped from his mouth when yesterday’s witness suddenly appeared before him. It was as though it were self-evident that after such a stern verdict those who lost would come back to plead, like this young foreign woman, who knelt before him like a primitive pagan.

While her narrow, fin-shaped eyes sought to meet those bloodshot eyes that had hovered before her in her nightmares, she began without delay to speak. Since she had no interpreter to assist her, she mixed into her rapid Ishmaelite speech a few words that had been pronounced repetitiously in the New Year’s prayers, so that for a moment she imagined that the man who leaned toward her compassionately would also understand in the dawn light that was scratching at the yellowish windows the nature and spirit of the counterduality that she claimed not only for herself but for women in general. For while a man demanded duality of body, a woman demanded duality of soul, even in the form of the tiny soul that was encased in her womb.

But could a fearful, confused man, even if he were assisted by the best of interpreters, understand at dawn the new explanation of the obscure testimony of the previous evening? In his terror that some early-rising worshippers whom three successive days of intensive prayers had left unsated would enter the synagogue and find their prayer leader closeted in uncompromising and utter intimacy with another man’s wife, albeit one of a pair, Joseph son of Kalonymos did not even begin to try to understand what the second wife was attempting to say to him in her Ishmaelite tongue, but hastened first of all to raise the form that was kneeling before him cautiously but firmly to its feet and expel it from the sacred place that was forbidden to it.

But the second wife resisted, and with arms still tanned a deep brown from the long sunny days at sea, she clung to his pulpit with all her strength, until the judge, realizing that his arbitration had not been completed, was forced to his embarrassment to unclench her hands by force. Seeing that she still persisted in kneeling and holding on to his knees, he bent over, trembling and blushing, and attempted vainly to free himself. Then, feeling how tightly the southern woman was holding him, he knew that he must take her out of his prayer house, and very firmly he began to walk outside, dragging the young woman into the back yard of an old stable. Only there, under an overcast sky, in the pungent manure, did he manage to free himself at last from the grasp of her hands and from her struggling legs, which were now scratched from the synagogue’s rough wooden floor. In stammered Hebrew he asked forgiveness from God and also from her, not for dragging her but for daring to touch her at all. Since terms of pardon and forgiveness were so familiar from the prayers for the New Year that had just passed, the second wife guessed the meaning of this man who was speaking to her so distractedly. He was demanding forgiveness only, with no regret or understanding, as he left her alone in the morning mist laden with cold drops of fresh rain.

Exhausted and abandoned, her hands and knees grazed by the roughness of the black wooden floor, the second wife began to make her way back between the small wooden houses, whose crookedness gave them a dizzy air. Although the black cloak protected her from the lashing rain, it could not allay the indignation of the little fetus that had been dragged along with her, and was not prepared to accept pardon from anyone, so for a moment she felt that it was demanding to be spewed forth instantly. Assailed by weakness, she turned aside between the piles that supported one of the houses, and there, in the shadow of the long grass and bushes that grew from the lush, marshy soil, beside a stream whose cold water gurgled among discarded household utensils, she began to vomit up everything that was within her—determined, however, not to lose the new little soul that had been conceived by the dutiful desire of a man making his way at night between the bow and the hold of an ancient guardship.

That man, who did not yet know what he had or had not brought forth, was still sunk in deep sleep, which dimmed, even if it could not wholly cancel, the interdict that lay upon him. The first wife, who had woken and taken stock of the other’s disappearance, hesitated to wake the husband whose face was buried in the fresh dry straw of the pallet. Although more than twenty years had passed since their first night together and she had often watched while he slept, she had never felt so tender toward him, seeing him for the first time bury his face in the bedding to hide it as he slept. She stared through the open doorway, cocking an ear to catch the returning footsteps of the second wife, so that on her return she could waken their husband to a single trouble rather than two.

But the footsteps of the second wife did not come, and the first wife began to understand that she must be stopped before she reached a point from which there was no return. Yet still she pitied Ben Attar, and granted him a few more moments of blessed ignorance before reaching out and carefully removing the blades of straw that clung to his beard and hair. For a moment the waking North African’s eyes were as bloodshot as those of the arbiter who had pronounced judgment against him. But it seemed that he remembered well where he was, and why he was here. As he rose from his bed, his sharp eyes noticed the second wife’s absence. She has gone, the first wife said very quietly. I have waited for her, but she has not come back.

The merchant of Tangier, who remembered only too well the rapid loss of one young woman, knew that they must hasten to stop her before she reached the riverbank. Since today was the Fast of Gedaliah, he did not need to consider whether the black bread brought by the gentile landlady was fit for eating, but inclined his head politely and thrust it away, and donning a local black cloak over his bright robes he hurried in search of the missing woman. He did not have to go far before he met Jews hurrying to prayer, who had not expected to come across the banned visitor so early in the morning. Despite the distress and embarrassment that urged them to avoid him, they could not disregard the real panic that marked his countenance as he appealed in broken Hebrew and with frantic gestures for help.

Since they feared to enter into a conversation that would shatter the newly pronounced ban, the Jews retreated in confusion, but instead of fleeing they hastened to summon Rabbi Elbaz, so that with his Andalusian virtue and learning he might cushion the Rhenish ban and explain what was troubling the peace of the southern Jew, for whom they had come to feel a strong affection. When the Jews of Worms learned of the disappearance of the second wife, panic spread through the community, and a demand arose that the morning prayers might be shortened so they could gather a large company to search for her and restore her to her husband, even if she was the cause of the ban and the interdict. News of her disappearance soon reached the synagogue and crept up to the reading desk, causing Joseph son of Kalonymos to cut short his chanting and boldly confess to his comrades what had happened beside the holy ark a short time before.

The Jews drew some comfort from his words, which seemed to rule out abduction, a thought that pierced every Jewish heart with double dread, leaving only the fear that she might have become lost or fled. So little time had elapsed since the woman’s dawn meeting with the judge that there was some hope that she had not managed to go too far. But before the search began, some punctilious Jews still demurred, wishing to assure themselves that the ban pronounced the previous night had referred to the husband alone and not to his wives; otherwise they might run the risk of seeking a forbidden object, and it would be better to invite the participation of gentiles, even the Ishmaelite guests, who had not yet risen for their own morning prayers. For added security, they too were summoned. First the two burly wagoners, Abd el-Shafi and his mate, were brought from their respective billets, and then they fetched the young pagan, who at once and without hesitation set off in pursuit of the missing woman, whose scent he had absorbed deep within himself during the long journey. Before much time had passed he found the secluded spot where she had collapsed, in a dark space choked with long grass and discarded household objects, framed by the piles that supported one of the houses.

She was brought forth at once, very weak but safe and sound, apart from some bleeding scratches on her hands and legs. Even though the Fast of Gedaliah had commenced, the Jews tried to make her drink something as they dressed her wounds, and the women of Worms desired to take her into the house beneath whose piles she had hidden herself, to help and strengthen her before sending her on her way. But Ben Attar allowed nobody to touch his second wife, and since the interdict forbade anyone to speak to him, it was impossible to persuade him otherwise. Sternly and proudly, he stood and ordered his Ishmaelites to ready the wagons and harness up the horses. For an instant it seemed as though it were he who had placed the local Jews under a ban and not the other way around, for he seemed to avoid meeting the gaze of those around him, even the blue eyes of Master Levitas, whose habitual thin smile was wiped off his face the moment he was summoned.

But where were Abulafia and his new wife? Had they been forbidden to come, or were they trying to spare themselves the pain of the final parting from the grim-faced, discomfited uncle, who was resolved to set out at once on the return journey?

The speed and skill with which the little procession was prepared for the road were amazing to behold. Two or three commands from the southern Jew were enough to bring the three Ishmaelites to a fever pitch of activity and to send Rabbi Elbaz off in search of his son. As for the Jews of Worms, who were already tired from the beginning of the fast and confused by the strange morning’s events, they stood around the two large wagons, sorry to be deprived of such wonderfully colorful and exciting guests, and even though in their heart of hearts they longed to keep them in their midst for the ten days of penitence and for the joyful festivals to follow, they knew only too well that the arbiter’s judgment, however hastily arrived at, was final and brooked no appeal, and so it was best, perhaps, for the banned man and his company to go on their way, to soften the pain of parting.

Before Ben Attar set forth on his journey and their sorrow was forgotten, the Jews of Worms hastened to load the wagons with food and drink, blankets and warm apparel, candles and dishes, little silver candlesticks and wine for ritual purposes. Although the ban forbade them to speak to the women or touch them, they brought dozens of small gifts for them, and they also brought sacks of feed for the horses, who were already sniffing the air of the journey ahead. But where was Abulafia? Ben Attar’s heart quivered with pain. Where was his dear partner hiding himself? And where was the blue-eyed woman, who had turned her repudiation into final rupture? Did they know that at this moment, in the mist rising from the river and drifting into the Black Forest, their kinsfolk were leaving them forever, vanishing into the west on the first stage of their long journey to the south?

Master Levitas saw it as his duty to hasten and inform his sister of the sudden departure of Ben Attar and his company, and he also stirred himself to obtain special dispensation from a revered scholar, Rabbi Kalonymos son of Kalonymos, for Abulafia to meet his uncle briefly so as to take his leave of him. But Abulafia declined the generous offer. Not only did he refuse to leave his chamber, he lay in his wife’s former matrimonial bed and would not even join Mistress Esther-Minna, whose throat suddenly choked with tears as she watched from the little window while Ben Attar pleaded with the good folk of Worms not to load any more gifts on his two wagons, which were slowly sinking into the yielding Rhenish clay.

Even if Abulafia was yearning to fall into his beloved uncle’s arms and beg the pardon of the partner who was returning empty-handed to the azure shore of their native land, the soul of this curly-haired man, who had not yet donned his phylacteries nor said the morning prayers, bridled at the thought of a further meeting with his second aunt, the secret basis of whose being he had finally discovered yesterday in his uncle’s passionate and unexpected confession. Even if she replaced the veil on her face and covered herself in layer upon layer of cloaks, she could not conceal from him any longer the form that was hidden within her, the form of that miserable, admired, beloved sinner, naked and drowned, who in vengefully destroying herself had punished him and banished him to a faraway land. Therefore, with all his might he must shut himself up in this former bridal bed which creaked beneath him, for he knew only too well that if he went to take his last leave of his uncle, he would not be able to restrain himself, tender and sorrowful as he was, from tearing the second wife away from Ben Attar, ripping out the form that was hidden inside her, and throwing it, if not into the salt sea of their birthplace, at least into his new wife’s freshwater river.

Thus Abulafia knew that he had better wait until the rumble of his uncle’s wagons faded away in the distance. The same rumble disturbed the chief wagoner, Abd el-Shafi, who felt the wheels straining. When they pulled up in the square in front of the belfry in Speyer, a town where no Jews dwelt, they decided to lighten the load and offered a goodly part of the gifts that the community had generously heaped upon them for sale to the local inhabitants, who pressed around them curiously. Although the distance separating Worms from Speyer was not more than fifty miles, the gifts, converted into merchandise, aroused such great interest that Ben Attar was amazed at his ability, with no common language and with no knowledge of the local customs, to sell the Worms Jews’ old clothes, jars of honey, dull copper candlesticks, and bottles of ritual wine, accepting in exchange, on Abd el-Shafi’s advice, an elderly but sturdy mule. On this the black youth was at once seated, so that he could ride out ahead of them and sniff out the right road, which they had taken two weeks earlier in the opposite direction.

For they were alone now, in a strange and alien expanse, without Mistress Esther-Minna’s command of the Teutonic and Frankish tongues and Abulafia’s experience of the roads. All they had at their disposal were Rabbi Elbaz’s limping Latin, the young slave’s finely tuned desert nose, and the two expert mariners’ knowledge of the winds and the motion of the stars. The Day of Atonement, which flickered ahead of them like a menacing black beacon, spurred them on to greater speed and effort, so that they would cross the border between Lotharingia and Francia in time to seek refuge in the Jewish congregation of Rheims, who they hoped would not yet have heard news of the ban.

Indeed, there seemed no reason why the master of the little convoy should not realize his modest ambition, for the wagons were more lightly loaded now that they lacked the two passengers who had caused the ban, and now that the gifts had been bartered for the whiskered mule, which walked proudly ahead of the wagons, bearing the lithe form of the master tracker, who was happily sniffing out the right route. Nevertheless, Ben Attar had the feeling that a mysterious heaviness had laid hold of the wheels as they advanced between fields and hills toward the silvery furrow of the Saar Valley. In fact, it was hard to explain what was slowing them. At first they suspected the autumn breezes, which occasionally soaked them in gentle drizzle; yet the spirits of the wagoners seemed to be revived by each soaking, as they cracked their whips at the drenched horses.

It was only when they made their third night halt, near the small village named Saarbrücken, not far from the octagonal burial church that Mistress Abulafia had excitedly recognized as marking the approach to her native land, that Ben Attar understood that the hidden source of their loss of impetus was to be sought not in the mud that impeded their wheels or in any slackness in their manner of driving but in a spiritual cause. At first he wondered if it were not due to gloom brought on by the ban and interdict, which, plausible though they were, were nevertheless particularly irksome because they had been pronounced so abruptly and by such a simple man. But gradually he realized that the thing that was holding them back was not hovering around the wagons but was hidden deep inside them, in the continued silence of the second wife, who sat slumped at the side of the wagon, wrapped in two black cloaks, stubbornly refusing evening after evening to taste the food that the first wife prepared. Indeed, at first sight the cause of her ill humor seemed plain enough—two deep gashes that crisscrossed her slender legs, marked by pearls of dried blood. But was it really only physical pain that prevented her from joining the others for the evening meal, or was it also resentment and anger at all that had taken place?

Even though she was still careful not to reveal her secret testimony on the eventful night of the arbitration, she worried that the truth had become known to her husband, either from Elbaz or from his son, the little interpreter, who very tenderly brought her a steaming bowl of meat stew from the campfire. Therefore the look the second wife bestowed upon the little go-between was blank and withdrawn, and she added to the two cloaks that she had brought from Worms the first wife’s black cloak, which lay beside her. She kept her mouth firmly closed, not only against eating any of the food that the first wife cooked for her but also against letting out any cry of despair at what she had said behind the curtain on that terrible night, and at the words she had tried to add next morning in the same place before the same man, who should have listened to her instead of hurting her.

To whom could she now say what would never be understood? Perhaps only to the oceanic fetus, which was cloaked in the envelope of her womb and demanded additional warmth from its mother, who was shivering inside and trying with all her might to hoard what warmth she could, for its sake and for her own. Again, as at every hour of this journey, there came before her inner eye the wondering face of one who would cease to be her only son in a few more months, the dear child she had left behind with her parents in Tangier, who although he might not yet have forgotten his mother had certainly forgotten his father, who was now raising the flap of the wagon to inquire after his second wife and see whether she had tasted her food. When Ben Attar saw the bowl lying shamefully where it had been put, his spirit was greatly disturbed, and all the resentment and blame he nursed toward her on account of the counterduality that she had dared to ask for herself—which he mistakenly understood as physical rather than spiritual—burst forth at her refusal to strengthen herself with the stew that had been set before her.

Now she was alarmed, for she had the feeling that he was about to feed her himself, against her will, something he had never done before. She began to sob, but very quietly, so as not to be heard by the company gathered around the campfire, particularly the first wife, who was asking Abd el-Shafi to tell her about the movement of the stars in the sky. But the Elbaz child heard the muffled crying inside the covered wagon and his heart curdled within him, and before his father the rabbi could stop him, he had lifted the flap and seen the owner of the ship, the leader of the expedition, raising his second wife and feeding her with the stew made for her by the first wife, who had suddenly fallen silent.

Deep in the night, when the rest of the company was fast asleep, the second wife arose from her bed and went a short distance away, to a tree where a little jackal or dog was tied by a rusty chain. It had come up in the evening to scavenge the remains of the company’s supper and been caught by the black slave, who with Ben Attar’s tacit permission had taken it in as a pet in place of the young camel that had been left behind on board the ship. The little beast, which had already become used to the travelers, whimpered and wagged its tail as the second wife approached, and without a moment’s hesitation lapped up the vomited remains of the stew she had been forced to swallow. Only then did she feel better. Desperately pale and buffeted by successive waves of heat and cold, she gulped the cold air of the autumn night and looked toward the remote campfire of another company of traders, who were transporting slaves from the east to the west.

Eventually she returned to her bed, wrapped herself in her sweat-soaked cloaks, and closed her eyes to seek a little rest, not suspecting that her footsteps had woken the Andalusian rabbi, who had followed her movements through a crack in the canvas cover of the other wagon. For a moment Elbaz wondered if it would be right to wake her husband and inform him that the meal had not reached its destination. But he restrained himself, as though he was in no hurry to reveal to anyone else, even the husband himself, the faint signs of illness that had appeared in the dead of night and that filled his heart, in the depths of darkest Europe, with an old longing for the last days before he was widowed. But in the morning, when he went to wash the sleep from his eyes in the little stream and found the second wife busy laundering her robe, he did not hold back from asking shyly yet affectionately how she was, and even though she smiled in thanks, as though there were no care in her heart, he could sense from the redness that suffused her bare cheeks that the fever in her body was mounting.

Ever since the women of Worms had made them remove their veils, the Moroccan women had been in no hurry to replace them, not only because they had seen how women could stand boldly with bare faces before the Lord himself, but especially because on the return journey the company of travelers had drawn even closer together and become a single family with three attendant servants and a rabbi, who could be considered a kind of kinsman. He had become so concerned for the second wife’s health that he now demanded that Ben Attar halt the wagons at intervals to let her rest, lest a graveyard rather than a synagogue await them on the approaching Day of Atonement.

Thus the little procession wound its way more slowly, and by evening prayers on the fourth day Ben Attar found himself staring alone at the distant horizon where the fading light glowed pink above the walls of Metz, the town where he had planned to spend the coming night. But could he allow himself to take no notice of the fever? It was sufficient to put a hand to the brows of both his wives by way of comparison, to perceive the growing threat to the second wife, whose handsome face, despite her efforts to make light of her distress and smile pleasantly, not only at her husband but at anyone who greeted her, undeniably bore an unfamiliar flush because of a disease that had originated in the manure in an old stable and had infected the blood that oozed from the scratches on her legs.

On the morning of the fifth day, the day preceding the eve of the ever-approaching Day of Judgment, after hours of sleeplessness beside the campfire had blackened his love with anxiety, a bold decision seized Ben Attar. Instead of feeling his way in discomfiture and confusion among the Jews of nearby Metz to discover whether the news of his ban had preceded him, he would press on before the coming of the holy day to the next halt, the little border town of Verdun, so that in the event of any mishap they would be close to the home of that strange apostate physician who had shown such interest in them on their way to the Rhineland. It was even possible, Ben Attar continued to himself, by way of strengthening his resolve, that before the physician’s solitary house beside the church they would hear once again that wonderful song, with two distinct yet intermingling voices, which had so entranced the second wife and might now revive her spirits. But as Ben Attar did not know whether there were Jews in Verdun who would welcome them into their congregation, he divided his little company in two. He himself would take the smaller wagon, with the feverish wife and the cool-headed one, to the little border town, while he would dispatch Rabbi Elbaz and his son to Metz, the favorite town of Emperor Charlemagne, to gather, in exchange for gold coin but also under constraint of pious duty, eight qualified Jews to make up a company of ten males, like the eight Jews whom Benveniste had used to bring up from Barcelona to the ruined Roman inn to celebrate the ninth of Ab. Thus he might mark the holy day in a private, if temporary, congregation, hired by his own gold and untroubled by any ban.

At noon on the sixth day, the eve of the Day of Atonement in the year 4760 of the creation of the world according to the reckoning of the Jews, in the ninth month of the year 999 since the birth of the wonderful suffering child who by his death was to win so many hearts, the North African trader spied the stone bridge over the Meuse, which abutted at its eastern end the stone and clay walls of little Verdun. Even if by some chance the news of his ban had preceded him here, he did not need to fear an inquisition from the physician, who without waiting for overzealous Jews to ban him had separated himself from them first. Therefore, as the horses drew up on the spot where they had halted before, a few paces away from the Lotharingian sentries with their sparkling mail and glinting swords, he instructed the mariner-wagoner and the black youth to protect the two wives, who had seated themselves against the wheels of the wagon to rest after the tiring journey and to breathe the cool autumnal air, while he himself entered through the town gate without delay, crossed the graves of slaves who had met their death here, and hastened to the solitary house near the church, to the physician Karl-Otto the First, whose being at once a gentile and not a gentile conferred a great advantage upon him now in the mind of the southern Jew, who believed that a few words of the ancient holy tongue would suffice to secure his assistance.

And assistance was needed. He had discovered from the trembling that racked the second wife’s frame as he helped her down from the wagon that the illness he was pitted against, like himself, had not rested during the previous night. If there was any man here who called himself a physician, his aid was needed, however meager his skill. Again, as on the last visit, Ben Attar found the door of the house standing open. In the half-darkness of the double chamber, under the earthenware crucifix, he stared again at the long row of jars filled with multicolored potions and powders and at the gray metal forceps and tongs, as though everything were ready to deliver him except for the renegade physician himself, who was absent.

The physician’s wife, however, was at home, and she had no difficulty in recognizing the stranger in the white robe, for it was only two weeks since he had stood here last. Once again Ben Attar shivered on observing her likeness to Mistress Esther-Minna, who had utterly upset him. But this did not prevent him from bowing to her and pronouncing the physician’s name, as he remembered it. The woman nodded her head, as if to confirm that her husband the physician was indeed alive and well, but her countenance expressed sadness, as though she had not yet reconciled herself to the apostasy. Ben Attar, who had no time to meditate on others’ regrets but only to proclaim his own distress, stretched out his hand to indicate the road along which he had come, closed his eyes, inclined his head to indicate an imaginary bed, and sighed the gentle sigh of a sick woman. But though the physician’s wife opened her eyes wide with sympathy as she followed his gestures, still she did not respond. Then the North African merchant took a step toward her, pointed to the sun which stood high in the sky and to the direction in which it would set, and whispered in Hebrew, clearly but in a pleading tone, Yom Kippur, and repeated again and again, Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur, and he clapped his hand over his mouth to indicate to the woman what would be forbidden soon to those who had not changed their faith, in case she had forgotten. But it was evident that she had not forgotten, for at once she nodded, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, called her children inside and locked them in with a large key, and led the southern traveler into the heart of Verdun, to her husband the physician.

Ben Attar followed the woman through the narrow streets of the little town, and on their way they passed a large slave market, where warriors and farmers bargained over yellow-haired, blue-eyed pagan Slavs who were attached to a large stone. The local people smiled at the physician’s wife and led her to a large house, which she promptly entered, accompanied by her visitor. It was a noble mansion, whose occupants welcomed the newcomers warmly and conducted them respectfully into a hall spread with carpets, with weapons hanging on the walls. There, on a large couch, sat a venerable Christian with his hands crossed on his chest and his eyes closed, listening attentively and smilingly to the renegade physician, who was letting blood from his neck.

Ben Attar said to himself that this might be the way to save his second wife, by letting some of her blood to calm her spirit, and he took a step toward the physician, to examine what he was doing more closely. The latter, noticing his wife and her companion, gave them a sign to indicate that he had grasped the urgency of their mission, and he speedily concluded his work and came outside to meet them. At once Ben Attar bowed to him deeply, but he renounced the attempt to explain his distress in the holy tongue. Instead, he closed his eyes, inclined his head upon an imaginary bed, and shivered a little and sighed in imitation of his sick wife. Then he gestured to the horizon, to the place where the sun would soon set, and repeated again, Yom Kippur,YomKippur.

3.

There was no way of knowing whether it was the announcement of the approach of the Day of Judgment that caused the physician to postpone a bloodletting that had been arranged in the home of another nobleman and hurry to attend a patient outside the town walls, or whether it was simply the curiosity of an apostate who had already been excited on their previous visit by the sight of Jews who were so different from those from whom he had detached himself. Indeed, the sight of his young wife lying beside the wheel of the wagon made Ben Attar feel that his anxiety was well founded, for her condition had worsened during his short absence. Not only had her shoulders not stopped shaking, but the gentle autumnal breeze had begun to trouble her, and she had had to ask the first wife to find the cast-off silken veil and cover her face and even her eyes with it. And when Ben Attar lifted her for the physician of Verdun, he felt her gaunt frame stiffen a little in his hands.

The physician’s eyes had not yet turned to the patient but first sought the little Andalusian rabbi, not only so that he could translate the nature of the North African woman’s pains (which were causing her to twist her head) into a civilized tongue, but also so that he could enlighten him about the end of the great contest with the Rhenish Jews, whose outcome might help him to understand what had befallen the young woman. But the rabbi was missing, and the larger wagon had vanished too, and so had that repudiating woman, so fine yet sharp of eye and stern of countenance, who had abhorred him for the faith he had adopted and railed at him for what he had turned his back on. And so the physician had no other way open to him but to try to understand from the halting language of the prayers of his forefathers what was tormenting the young woman, whose bright red eyes indicated that she would be better off in bed in a darkened room than in the open air by the Meuse, exposed to the stares of the guardsmen. It was plain that something or someone had tainted her blood.

Even though it would have been right and proper for this new-made Christian to decline to admit Jews, even sick ones, into his home, the apostate could not suppress his pity for this suffering woman, especially since he was still excited by the desire to extend his knowledge of these exotic Jews. He suggested to Ben Attar that they take the patient to his house, so that he could more readily combat the illness with the help of all those potions and drugs and medical implements that were ready and waiting to save life, which is sometimes likened to a passing shadow or a fleeting dream. It would be better too, the physician opined, for the first wife to accompany them, so that she could prepare ritually fit food for them, for there was not a single Jew available for the purpose in the whole of Verdun.

Ben Attar, his anxieties vindicated, was glad to hear the counsel spoken by the physician, whose apostasy did not detract in Ben Attar’s opinion from his medical skill or his humanity. Since he had been doubtful all along about Rabbi Elbaz’s chances of persuading eight qualified Jews from the community of Metz to leave their families and their house of prayer on the eve of the Day of Atonement, even in exchange for gold coin, and travel some thirty miles to a little border town so as to make up a temporary wayside congregation for a foreign Jew whose wife had fallen sick, he knew that no purpose would be served by waiting outside the walls. He had explicitly said to Elbaz that if he could not accomplish his mission, he was not bound to hasten to rejoin them, but on the contrary, it would be preferable for him to spend the Day of Judgment together with his son in the midst of a large Jewish community, cleansing his soul and sanctifying himself by prayer and enlisting the whole congregation in supplications to the Almighty to grant recovery to the sick woman and peace of mind to the well one—for surely the prayers of a banned man’s advocate are more efficacious than his own.

As the midday sun moved from the Lotharingian side of the border into Champagne, the captain of the guard also took pity on the young woman, and gave permission for the foreign company to enter the town with their wagon. Slowly the two horses advanced between the graves of idolatrous Slavs who had expired in slavery, and very cautiously the mariner-wagoner led the wagon into the square in front of the little church. At the entrance to the house stood the physician’s wife, watching them, with her two sons, who already looked just like Lotharingians, only sadder, holding on to her apron. Ben Attar firmly refused the help of the burly Ishmaelite and the young idolater in lowering the second wife from the wagon, accepting no other assistance than that of the first wife’s strong, warm hands in guiding the invalid, whose face was lit by a faint, plaintive smile at the sight of the house to which she had been so attracted only two weeks before. For an instant her footsteps faltered, as though she hoped to hear again the sound of two intertwined but different voices singing on the threshold of this house in exchange for skillful healing.

Very slowly the second wife was helped into the physician’s home and with double care was laid on a narrow bed, and the large iron basin in which large river pebbles gleamed was brought close to her. Ben Attar covered his wife with the two black cloaks that the Jews of Worms had given her as a gift. The physician did not delay but sprinkled fragrant medicinal herbs all around, and made her drink a potion that was the color of egg yolk. The young woman did not attempt to resist her physician, but obediently drained the bitter potion to the dregs, and for the first time since the company had left Worms a cheerful smile broke out on her face, as though she were trying to say to those who surrounded her, Now all will be well. At the sight of this smile Ben Attar, unable to restrain himself, retreated into a corner of the dark room and wiped away copious tears of gratitude. The darkness and the quiet seemed to do the patient good, and the yellow potion also hastened to do its work, for the tremor in her shoulders was gradually becoming less severe. Moved, the merchant tried to give the physician an advance payment in the form of a small precious stone, but the physician, aware that he was dealing with a wealthy, principled Jew who would not pay him with a song, declined the jewel, which sparkled in the dark, with a calm smile, as if to say, The time will come.

Meanwhile, on a small plot of land behind the church, the Ishmaelite and the idolater without delay prepared a meal for the Jews so that they could take their fast. A verdant smoke rose from a fire of twigs and thorns, on which the first wife could cook a stew in a large cooking pot. Ben Attar hastened to the town market to fetch white doves to atone for the sins and transgressions committed by others with the cooing of their pure little souls. Again his throat choked with tears at the thought of his sick wife’s smile as she lay in the physician’s house. Even if the physician was finally unmasked as a charlatan, he wished to trust him as a kinsman. Yea, as a kinsman, Ben Attar muttered to himself in surprise. As a kinsman, he repeated with bitter defiance, as though the ban that had followed him from Worms, clinging to him as stubbornly as an evil demon, had suddenly made of him too something of an apostate.

But not such an apostate, heaven forfend, as to shirk the observance in all rigor, even in these difficult circumstances, of the commandments of the holy and awful day that was descending slowly upon the world. He carefully felt the flesh of the Lotharingian pigeons in the market of Verdun, which fluttered in fear in his hands. After filling his sack with a dozen milk-white birds well tied together, he headed back to his small company. His heart suddenly missed a beat at the sight of the pole of the wagon lowered to the ground, the horses nowhere to be seen. Was it possible that the gentiles had taken advantage of his absence and his troubles to take the horses and flee? But at once, cocooned as he was in hope and security like a baby inside its caul, he calmed himself with the thought that his Ishmaelite had not fled but merely taken the horses to graze in a nearby meadow. Without delay he pressed on to the back of the church, where in the leaden light of an overcast sky he came upon the solitary first wife crouching barefoot over the fire that the Ishmaelites had made, in a crumpled, smoke-blackened robe, patiently stirring the stew with a large wooden spoon, her stern face flushed in the light of the fire, which was almost scorching a trailing lock of her hair.

Seventy days and upward had passed since the ancient guardship had set sail from Tangier to ride the wild ocean waves so bravely toward a distant town named Paris, yet amid all the hardships that had visited the expedition, by sea and by land, Ben Attar had not known a single moment that could compare for bitterness and gloom with this terrible moment when he stood so alone, without rabbi or fellow worshippers, without business partner or nephew, without servant or sea captain, without horses or congregation, without even a house of prayer. Placed under a ban in the heart of an alien land, with his cargo-laden ship far away, pent up in the harbor of Paris. And all this a few hours before the start of the Day of Atonement, behind a little church built of grayish timbers, staring brokenheartedly at the wife of his youth wrestling with a fire like a servant while his second wife lay in pain in the house of an apostate physician. Although he wished with all his being that he could blame himself for what was befalling them all, because of his obstinate urge to demonstrate to the world the depth of his love not only for his two wives but for his nephew, he felt that he did not have the right, whether in defeat or in victory, to detract from the force of the destiny that had guided him, for good or for ill, since the day of his birth.

Yes, despite his desire, the North African merchant was not so proud as to take all the blame and responsibility upon himself alone, as though he had become the only true master of his deeds. Moreover, he knew only too well that if he fell to his knees before his first wife and beat his breast and confessed his guilt, she would be very confused and sad, not knowing what to do with the guilt or its owner. But if he spoke repeatedly of blind fate, which sometimes smites a man and sometimes caresses him, she would nod agreement and know how to comfort him. Without complaint or anger or regret, she would remind him of how beautiful the light of this holy eve was in their own azure city, and how radiantly white the raiment of their two sons was as they went, at the conclusion of the meal, to the synagogue of the old uncle, Ben Ghiyyat. And if that selfsame fate willed it, it was very possible that in a few more days they would board the ship in the port of that small dark town and sail back home to their own dear city, and wash away in the waters of the ocean whatever ban or interdict had been pronounced against them by the Jews of the Black Forest, whose self-assurance was as great as their numbers were small.

With these words, which his first wife might have spoken if he had mastered his pride so far as to ask her for words of comfort, he soothed the dread that had caused his legs to tremble since he had left the Rhineland, and with a heart filled with love he approached the large, barefoot woman as she crouched over her cooking pot, took hold of her ample shoulders, and drew her gently away from the fire, which for a moment seemed to be trying to follow her. He produced from the sack a single pure white dove, bit through the thread that bound it to the others, and holding it by its two red legs, he waved it in a circular motion above the disheveled hair of his first wife, who closed her eyes gratefully. This is thy substitute, this is thy exchange, this is thy expiation, this dove shall go to its death and thou shalt enter into a good long life and into peace. And just as his great uncle used to take a sharp butcher’s knife and slaughter the lamb of atonement in the presence of the atoned members of his household, so Ben Attar severed the head of the dove and handed its bleeding body to his first wife, who waited for the fluttering of the little wings to cease before plucking it and preparing it for the meal preceding the fast, to be joined in due course by the doves that would atone for the remaining members of the little family.

Ben Attar now concealed a dove in the folds of his robes, and added a second dove to it, for the sick woman, who would require a double atonement. There in the physician’s dark room, Ben Attar found his second wife where he had left her, sunk in a deep, peaceful sleep, as though the yellow potion that the apostate physician had administered to her not long before was doing its work. But he hesitated to draw forth the doves from the folds of his robe, for at her bedside he found not only the physician but also a black-clad priest, who had come in response to the news of the arrival of the Jews at the house of his disciple the apostate, to warn the new Christian against backsliding or relapsing. The physician, Karl-Otto the First, as he called himself, had to prove to his former catechist that he had no secret attraction to his previous faith but was merely displaying the simple charity of a physician toward a young woman who was suffering, and that even if she belonged to a company of Jews, these were different Jews, who were under the protection of distant Ishmaelites and therefore had no intention of settling in Verdun or anywhere else, but were planning to leave Europe and journey far, far away.

But no man of the Church, and certainly not this one, who stood so dignified and stern, was able or authorized to believe in the existence of another category of Jews, even if they did come from a distant, dark continent. Since on principle the priest considered all Jews alike, he had to be on his guard in case his protégé, who had voluntarily abandoned a sect of blind, error-ridden God-killers in favor of a faith of salvation and love, was deceived into supposing that any Jew might be saved, even if he possessed the sad, dark nobility of this North African who had now entered the room. Ben Attar was examining the light fading in the window, and realized that he had only a little time to awaken his second wife gently yet firmly, sit her up in bed, and revolve two white doves first around her head and then around his own, like some savage idol-worshipper, and to declaim the ancient formula: This is our substitute, this is our exchange, this is our expiation, this dove shall go to its death and we shall enter into a good long life and into peace. On no account could he flinch at the physician’s embarrassed countenance, or at the faint smile of contempt on the face of the priest; he had to complete the ritual by slicing off the heads of the two curiously blinking little birds and drop them, oozing blood, onto the black earth floor at the foot of the bed, confident that they possessed as much healing power as the sparkling array of multicolored flasks lined up under the crucifix.

The young woman sat flushed and confused, her golden nose-ring twinkling like a tiny star in the half-darkness. She was still wondering whether sharing an expiatory dove with her husband was a sign of desperation or of great hope. Meanwhile she obediently took the skin full of water that her husband placed in her hands, closed her eyes, and swallowed slowly, nodding agreement with a faint smile when he whispered to her in Arabic about the meal that the first wife was cooking outside over a fire, which was intended not only to satisfy their hunger and delight their souls but particularly to restore to all of them, and especially to her, such a beloved woman, the strength that had left them since ban and interdict and insult had been cast in Worms, ostensibly upon the twice-wed husband alone but in fact upon them all.

Ben Attar did not linger at his second wife’s bedside, even though his heart yearned to remain by her side and watch over her recovery, but went out to give the two slaughtered doves to his first wife so that she could add them to the stew. Outside the clouds broke and soft sunlight played around him, and suddenly tears welled in his eyes, as though out of the sorrow and despair a new ray of hope had burst, not only at the memory of the faint smile that had flitted across his second wife’s flushed countenance, or at the sight of the meal that his first wife was preparing in readiness for the fast, but also at seeing the two horses and the mule returning from pasture, emerging slowly from behind the gray wooden church. His heart went out to his two servants for returning his property, as though he had really feared that they might vanish with it. A strange idea flashed through his mind of atoning for them too, so as to fortify them on the Day of Judgment that was fast approaching, in case the powers above mistook them for Jews. He told them to approach and bow their heads before him, and out of the large sack he took two more doves, and holding them by the legs he circled them three times above the egg-shaped black skull of the young idolater and three times above the grubby blue turban of the mariner-wagoner. So they would not suspect him of black magic, he also circled the doves above his own head, and he provided a shortened translation of the formula into rich Arabic before deftly removing the birds’ heads and throwing them to the jackal, who devoured with gusto whatever was put before him.

Surprisingly, although he was alone and abandoned, his mind was calm, and the love that welled up within him for all who stood around him and belonged to him comforted and strengthened him for a new and unique experience, which he had never had before in his forty-four years—to be his own prayer leader on this awesome day. Although it was still early and three whole hours remained before the sun would sink behind the treetops, he began to feast, so that he would be filled with food and his soul would be free from hunger pangs and composed for prayer, the better to plead for his second wife’s recovery. Seated beside the fire, he dipped his bread in the steaming stew that his first wife served him and patiently chewed one helping after another. A light slumber descended upon him, and through his fluttering eyelids he saw the priest leaving the physician’s house, followed by the physician himself, clutching a leather bag. A sated tiredness took possession of him and the smoke of the fire befuddled his wits, so he lay down on the ground and stretched out his legs, drowsily but gratefully watching as his first wife spooned some of the steaming stew onto a platter and broke off some delicate morsels of pigeon flesh to add to it, to take to the second wife, who might perhaps need to be helped to eat.

But he did not doze for long. Soon the whinnying of horses interrupted his dreams, and the delightful prattle of the rabbi’s son awoke him from his sleep. Opening his eyes, he found himself surrounded by strangers who looked like Jews. Farther away stood the large wagon, with its pole hanging limply, as Abd el-Shafi and the black slave led the horses to the meadow behind the church. Before he could rise to his feet, Rabbi Elbaz fell into his arms, smiling proudly. Ben Attar’s heart rejoiced, not only because his company was reunited and Jews had been found who were prepared to join it as it stood trapped before the Creator on the Day of Judgment, but more particularly because now he could finally dispel the terrible suspicion that the rabbi too was seeking to reject him.

It seemed as though his luck had turned again and was smiling on the tenacious traveler. The Jews of Metz, whom the news of the ban had not yet reached, had been ready to come, with the satisfaction of fulfilling a command as their only reward, to make up a quorum of ten for a Jewish wayfarer whose sister-in-law, his wife’s sister, had fallen sick. So Rabbi Elbaz had chosen again, as in Rouen, to attach the two women to each other by a more usual and acceptable relationship, in order not to arouse unnecessary thoughts. Only one slight cloud darkened the joy. On the way, one of the Jews had had second thoughts and had turned back to Metz, leaving seven men instead of eight. If no other Jews could be found in Verdun, how would they make up the quorum?

Since the sun in the sky could not wait for another Jew to be born in Verdun and reach the age of legal majority—for from India to Abyssinia and from Babylon to Spain, the Jews of the entire world were standing and waiting to inaugurate the solemn fast—and while the seven Jews from Metz were hastening to atone for themselves with the doves left in the sack and decapitating and plucking them to add them to the stewpot steaming in the smoke of the fire, it was clear to the shrewd Andalusian rabbi by what device he might produce another Jew, although only a temporary one, for the purposes of the prayer. As usual without disclosing anything of his plan to Ben Attar, who had gone into the physician’s house to hurry his first wife, who for some reason was lingering with the second wife, he separated himself from the group and went behind the gray church to the pasture where the horses were grazing, to tell the wise Abd el-Shafi that if the prayers of supplication for the recovery of the sick woman were to be accepted in heaven on the holy day, there was no alternative but to transform the black African into a Jew for the space of a single day.

While Ben Attar joined his first wife and the apostate physician’s wife, who were both trying, one with words and the other with pleading looks, to persuade the ill woman to taste at least a thimbleful of the reddish stew, in the green meadow Abd el-Shafi and the rabbi from Seville were stripping the young slave of his robe and immersing the smoothness of his black nakedness in a little pool of water that the River Meuse had managed to send this far. Since Abu Lutfi had farsightedly circumcised the black youth before taking him on board, so the sailors would not attempt to do it themselves, all that remained for Rabbi Elbaz to do was to turn him into a Jew by immersing him twice, once to wash away his idolatrous delusions and once to purge him for his reception by the chosen people. At once the other Jews were called to immerse themselves and to confess to one another sins both genuine and feigned, and if possible to flagellate themselves a little, before saying the afternoon prayers and gathering around the fire to eat their last supper—eight born Jews and one proselyte, waiting for the leader of the expedition to make up the number ten.

But the leader of the expedition was not yet able to leave his second wife. After sending the two other women out of the dimly lit room, he tried, using the soft language of love, not only to feed her some tender morsels of pigeon with his own hands but to repeat to her that the only effect of despair and guilt was to poison the world. A new hope was brewing in the North African’s mind that everything that had befallen them would fly away like dust, and the ban and interdict, having failed to overtake them on their rapid flight westward, would turn tail despondently and sink forever into the soggy mire that surrounded the prayer house in Worms. The second wife listened attentively to his words and yielded to his entreaties to swallow some of the bean stew, including some pieces of the flesh of her tender expiation, encouraged by her husband, who set her an example by eating some with her. Despite an occasional tremor in the muscles of her back, Ben Attar did not relent until between them they had licked the platter clean.

When Ben Attar emerged into the evening twilight, completing by his presence the congregation of ten males required for public prayer, there was no reason for further delay. Indeed, the first wife had resourcefully located in the luggage a prayer shawl for the new black Jew, who was seized with excitement and dread on realizing that he had been attached to the faith of the Jews at their most sacred and awesome hour. Although Abd el-Shafi assured him that his affiliation was temporary and short-lived, the slave’s heart still quaked within him as the strange Jews closed in all around him and turned to face the east. It was evident from the first moment that two different prayer rites would have to be combined somehow in the course of the holy day—that of the Jews of the Christian kingdoms, who were faithful to the abbreviated but intense rite of Rav Amram Gaon, in which the service for the Day of Atonement began with the words “O God and God of our fathers, let our prayer come before thee and do not reject our supplication, for we are arrogant and stiff-necked,” and that of the Jews of the Muslim caliphate, who were accustomed to the more expansive and detailed wording of the older rite compiled by Rav Saadia Gaon, which brooded over the opening of the Atonement liturgy in these words: “Thou knowest the mysteries of the universe and the innermost secrets of all living beings. Thou searchest the chambers of the belly and seest the innards and the heart. Nothing is hidden from thee, nor is aught concealed from thine eyes …”

Therefore the two rites were attentively and respectfully blended together, and even the melodies adapted themselves to each other, and all was done cautiously, quietly, and properly, so as not to attract undue attention from the Verdun folk, who were gathering to pray in the gray church of Notre Dame, and also not to disturb the devotions of the two Ishmaelite sailors, who had been moved by the religious fervor of those around them to prostrate themselves on the ground in testimony to others and to themselves too that they also had a prophet, who was all the younger and fresher for having come more recently. In the face of such pluri-religious piety, the apostate physician, who had returned from his visits and his bloodletting, did not hasten to church but sat down in the dark on the doorstep of his house, hugging his two small sons and staring unseeingly at the outlines of the Jews which filled the little wood nearby.

Does our worship make him feel regret or hatred? wondered Rabbi Elbaz, who had been sent by Ben Attar at the end of the evening service to the second wife, to bolster her spirits with a special prayer, and who now stumbled over the physician as he sat in the doorway of his house, flanked by his two sons, as though to block the entrance against the Jews, who had turned his home into their own domain. But when the physician saw that the rabbi bowed his head humbly and withdrew, he felt a pang of remorse in case he had offended the small man of God, and he hastened to straighten himself and dismiss the sons, and he invited the rabbi into the inner chamber, possibly so they could resume the conversation they had embarked on during the previous visit, which had been peremptorily cut short by a look from the blue-eyed woman. The inner chamber was very somber, being lit by only a single small candle fixed to a crucifix. The physician’s wife was sitting at the bedside of the second wife, who was lying peacefully with her head inclined backward, as though an invisible hand were drawing it like a bowstring.

At the sight of the rabbi a spark of life flared in the sad amber-colored eyes. She sat up a little in bed, and in hoarse Arabic she implored Elbaz to ask the physician to extinguish the candle, for even its faint light pained her eyes. Although he was surprised at her request, he translated it into his quaint Latin for the benefit of the physician, who, unperturbed, nodded his agreement, as though confirming to himself his diagnosis of the illness. Picking up the candlestick in the form of a crucifix, he handed it to his wife to put in a seemly place in the other chamber. Now that the room was in darkness, the moonlight shone more brightly through the single small window, and the second wife at once turned toward it in wonder, as though not understanding how she had failed to notice it before and wondering how she could diminish it, if not extinguish it altogether. She turned her flushed face toward the rabbi from Seville with a kind of smile in her bloodshot eyes, as though surprised that she could ask him to put out the moon for her sake. He responded with a wide, open smile, perhaps the first smile since they had met on the old guardship, and the sweet smell of his late wife’s sickbed assailed his nostrils, so that a hard knot of tears constricted his throat. Suddenly he could stand it no more, and in a whisper he turned to the physician and asked in the ancient Hebrew tongue, Will she live?

But the physician did not reply, as though the tongue in which his forebears had prayed and supplicated had been erased totally from his memory. It was only when Rabbi Elbaz translated into his broken Latin that he answered, Yes. She is young. She will live. If we make haste to let her tainted blood. The rabbi’s heart leaped with emotion, as though he had been taken straight back to his little house in Seville and his dead wife had come back to life. Tears of happiness clouded his eyes, and while he was wondering whether to begin the prayers for the young woman’s recovery at once or wait so that his words of supplication might wrap themselves compassionately around her spurting blood, there came a tumult from the doorway. Her eager, tormented husband was pushing the congregation of seven Jews into the room with their confused new co-religionist, and in tones that brooked no refusal he demanded that his hired rabbi immediately begin the full and complete prayer for the recovery of his second wife, so that heaven above would not have any excuse or pretext to shirk the obligation to bestow mercy on a being in whom there was no sin.

The apostate physician, who had opened the door of his house to a sick Jewess, albeit a foreigner and a second wife, through Christian charity reinforced by the ancient medical oath, found himself, to his great alarm, pressed into a small space with Jews of assorted varieties who had come to reinforce the prayers of the gaunt rabbi, who now, from the depths of his memory, embarked on a small anthology of supplications that had been well formed in his mind during his wife’s prolonged illness in Seville. The woman who was lying facing him turned her beautiful amber-colored eyes back and forth between Ben Attar and Rabbi Elbaz, as though the latter had become a second husband to her. But the apostate did not allow the Jew from Seville to be too carried away by his prayers, for not only did it suddenly occur to him that they tended to cast doubt on his own medical skills, but they also in a sense undermined his newly chosen faith and dragged him back toward the fate he had escaped. So he raised his hands to silence the Jews who had invaded his house, and fetching a large thick needle and a small knife, he bade all of them leave the chamber, for the time had come to pass from words to action. Moreover, once the patient’s tainted blood had been let, the only prayer that would be due was one of thanksgiving.

So he banished all the Jews except for Ben Attar and the rabbi, whom Ben Attar insisted on keeping at his side so that he could continue to pour out his supplications, although silently, while the physician bared the second wife’s shoulder and proceeded to draw forth a fine jet of blood that was imbued by the moonlight with a strange gray color. The woman’s eyelids gradually closed, as though the spurting blood gave her not only some comfort but even pleasure and relief. Her handsome, sharply etched features, which had become emaciated during the past days, now took on in the shadowy chamber a masculine toughness that strengthened her resolve to hold on to life with all her might. And a single heartbeat seemed to unite the two men who stood at her bedside and watched the physician as he gathered the blood in the metal basin containing the river pebbles. Was it not time to stop the flow of blood? Ben Attar wondered anxiously, and he took a step toward the physician, who seemed as spellbound by the bloodletting as the two spectators. But the physician appeared to be waiting for the white pebbles to turn dark with blood, for then he gently and painlessly withdrew the large needle from the woman’s bare shoulder while she sank into a deep sleep, as though the tainted blood that had now been drained had been standing in the way of her peace.

Only now did her husband approach her and cover her slack body with a checked blanket, and ask the Andalusian rabbi to raise his voice, so that even the drowsiest angels in heaven might hear the last supplication for the recovery of this young and so beloved woman. When the prayer was concluded and he drew the rabbi with him out of the chamber (though the rabbi was reluctant to leave), he saw the apostate’s wife, who bore more visible signs of the sorrow of apostasy, approach to take the vacant place at the patient’s bedside. Will she live? Rabbi Elbaz asked in Latin as the physician joined them outside to breathe the cool Lotharingian night air, and after considering he finally nodded silently. Yes, she will live, he replied solemnly, with the assurance of an experienced physician, lightly touching the tip of his boot to the rabbi’s son, who had fallen asleep beside the silent embers of the Jews’ fire. And he continued unexpectedly, And this child too will live …, and sensing the rabbi’s alarm he added, And you too will live, and the merchant and his family will live. He hesitated for a long moment before continuing softly, But they will not live, and he indicated the forms of the seven Jews who were arranging their bedding beside the large wagon that had brought them from Metz.

How will they not live? asked the startled rabbi from Seville. Seeing that the physician was looking away and saying nothing, as though he were regretting the words he had let slip, he gave vent to his alarm once more: Why will they not live? At last the physician had no alternative but to take the stubborn rabbi by the arm and lead him a short distance toward the darkened church, and there, in a field that smelled of newly cut wheat, by a little fire that his sons were busy lighting, he was able to whisper a strange, somber confession: it would be the duty of the Christians, when they discovered at the end of the millennium year that the Son of God was not coming down from heaven to save them, to kill those Jews who refused to convert to their faith. So he is not coming down from heaven after all? the Andalusian rabbi said in surprise, to this renegade Jew who was foretelling the future with such assurance, as though unknown secrets were revealed to him with the blood that he let in the homes of his noble patients. And the physician shook his head. No indeed; since the faithful were so numerous and so dispersed, any visit from the Savior would only cause schism and strife, so it was more natural and fitting that instead of the Lord’s coming to his followers they should go to him, to the place where he might most readily be found, to the sepulcher in a far-off land. The Land of Israel? the rabbi guessed at once. It was plain that the news that the Christians would go there, perhaps even before him, made him sad and disappointed. Yes, there, the physician confirmed. And so that Europe is not abandoned to the mercy of the Jews, who will remain here alone, the faithful will have to kill them all.

Even the children? the rabbi asked in alarm, trying not to miss a word of the dark vision that blazed in the physician’s mouth as he drew him ever nearer to his sons’ fire. Yes, even the children, said the physician, but not these, and he stroked his little sons’ shaved heads affectionately as they snuggled up to him. And not their children, or their children who will come after them. The rabbi stopped still, trying to avert his gaze from the flame that was swaying so cheerfully in the dark heart of the holy Day of Judgment. And even though he knew perfectly well that neither he nor any other Jew was making this fire burn, still a faint dread shuddered inside him, as though conversing with the apostate were a sin in itself. He carefully and politely separated from the physician and laid out his bedding beside his young son’s, and put his arms around him to get a little warmth. Between his drooping eyelids there flickered the image of a new Jew, a dark-skinned young barbarian, standing awake among the sleepers, wrapped in his new prayer shawl and sunk in thought, trying to understand how the old gods might join the new ones.

In the depths of the night the second wife felt a spasm in her spine, and quickly she arched her head back to relieve the pain a little. There was pitch darkness all around, for even the moon had vanished from the window. After a day of such hardships and commotions, her mind was soothed by the dark quiet that embraced her, if only she could still the spasm that drew her back like some little goblin determined to turn her aside from the straight and narrow. There still hovered in her mind the seven strange Jews with horn-shaped hats on their heads, who had come to reinforce the Andalusian prayer leader drawn to her bedside. Was it only pity for her weakness that had saddened the little rabbi, or was he also trying to admit to her that her private little speech about two husbands was no less dear to him than the vehement speech he had delivered among the wine casks in the winery outside Paris?

At that, a fancy began to float in the second wife’s desperate mind that if she tried to fulfill the desires of the Jews who had prayed for her recovery and arise from her sickbed, Rabbi Elbaz might accept in return, if only symbolically, the role of her second husband, and so not only strengthen the message of the southerners to the northerners but also continue to serve her first husband as a learned rabbi and able interpreter of any new question that might arise. This surprising thought so rejoiced her soul that her lips parted in a smile, as she imagined that on their way home they might all disembark in Cadiz in Andalus and go together to the rabbi’s home in Seville, to fetch his belongings and his clothes and his holy books, then load them onto the old guardship and sail away to that little well-tended house that looked out on the meeting of the ocean and the Inner Sea. And although the goblin’s vicious hand still twitched the muscles of her back, the smile and this fantasy strengthened her will to recover.

As she rose from her bed and crouched to relieve herself in the basin stained with her tainted blood, she caught sight of her husband’s sturdy form creeping into the chamber to watch over her. Lifting her from the basin, he laid her down very carefully in her bed, and although he knew that the physician and his wife might have heard his stealthy footsteps, he did not yield his right, the right of a loving husband, to caress her cheeks and kiss her feet, so as to strengthen her spirits and relieve her suffering. If this were not a holy day, when marital acts were forbidden, he would have offered her proof positive that in his eyes she was neither tainted nor enfeebled but a healthy, whole woman deserving of love according to the season of her desire and her status.

But despite the North African husband’s conviction that abundant love would hasten his second wife’s recovery, she continued to be racked by spasms, and her head with its disheveled mane of black hair continued to arch backward as though she were trying to make a living bridge with her frail form on this simple bed offered to her by an apostate physician in Verdun. If her husband had promised to give her a second husband, her tortured body might have been soothed by hope, for this woman who had been plucked in the tenderness of youth from her father’s house believed she possessed enough love to attract and keep two husbands. But with all the power of his attentive love, Ben Attar could not imagine in his heart that his suffering wife was indeed capable of being, like him, twice wedded. Thus it did not occur to him to fetch her a second husband, but only a physician, who, hearing the sound of Ben Attar’s kisses in the next chamber, rose and came to watch over his patient.

When the physician saw how she suffered, he at once fed her some of his yellow potion and strewed healing herbs upon her and around her. When she was a little relieved, he hastened to draw aside part of her robe and lay his beard upon her heart to hear the throbbing of the tainted blood in her veins. Then he palpated her small belly and inhaled the smell that rose from her navel, and a mysterious smile flitted across his face. Silently he went to the window to ensure that no stranger was spying on them, and for want of an alternative he strained to retrieve a few words of the holy tongue from the recesses of his memory to induce Ben Attar, who stood clenching his fists, to redouble his love and care for his young wife, for she was no longer alone but carried another, tiny life inside her.

The news pierced Ben Attar’s heart like a knife, and not only doubled but tripled his anguish, so that it seemed for an instant that with a merchant’s bold and stubborn despair he might try to bring the fetus forth from the womb of the invalid, who had fallen into a deep slumber, and entrust it to that of the first wife until the second wife’s fate was decided. So thoughts of this kind would not drive him mad, he asked in the morning twilight, when Rabbi Elbaz entered the chamber to raise his spirits, for the first wife to be roused and for her to be joined by all the other members of the congregation, so that they could form a dense wall around the second wife and block her way to the hereafter.

4.

Alone she is left now, her covering cold.

Beholding his loved one her lord laments.

Calmly she journeys, barklike her bed,

Darkness directs her, we know not where.

Ebbs now her spirit, thy dear one departs,

Fails now the vision, dashed is the dream.

Gone without gaining pardon or peace,

Hoarding up vengeance, dead is the dove.

In secret caressing melts now the love,

Kissing a dear foot—crowning content.

Loved in her lord’s arms, never alone,

Moves now the curtain another’s desire.

Now in the northlands somber and sad,

Ocean-wide grimness holds thee from home.

Pause to remember one mournful man

Quite worn with weeping, a suitor despised.

Ruthless and fearful lawyers proclaimed it:

Stern interdiction and baleful ban,

Tearing asunder first wife from second,

Undone forever comradeship close.

Voyaging unfriended, seeking release,

Wrapped in yon widower’s whispering words,

Yet stay a moment, fatal reflection,

Zealous I follow, faithful to death.

5.

In the course of the morning prayers, the seven Jews from Metz realized from the deep anxiety the North African displayed for the health of the young woman inside the little house that she was someone special to him, someone he held in particular affection. But as they were unable to interpret what they saw, it was hard for them to avoid thinking that it was a question of carnal sin—in other words, that the sister-in-law was also a secret, beloved concubine. At once they began to investigate, and once they had manage to persuade the young Elbaz to speak, the patient’s true position was revealed—namely, that she was neither sister-in-law nor concubine but an additional wife, a legal wife but a second wife nonetheless. What troubled the contingent from Metz, it emerged, was not the truth now revealed, but the untruth the rabbi had told them when he had solicited them to come. Before they consented to proceed with him to the solemn service of the high priest of old, according to his own rite, the great Babylonian master, they withdrew for a consultation in a corner of the woods, not far from the wall of a convent, and eventually the little Andalusian rabbi was invited to join them to explain why he had lied to them. At first the rabbi was evasive, fearing to disclose the matter of the ban in case, tempted to associate themselves with their brethren of Worms, the Jews of Metz dissolved the congregation in the middle of the prayers and departed with the scroll of the Torah that they had brought with them. Being uncertain, however, whether the forgiveness granted on the Day of Atonement would extend to a lie pronounced in the course of the worship, he yielded and disclosed the whole truth, though in a terse and laconic fashion.

The seven Jews of Metz, hearing with astonishment and a whit of pleasure how much firmness their brethren of the Rhineland had displayed, were fearful of rendering null and void the prayers they had prayed so far in the company of a banned Jew and a lying rabbi, for they knew that they would have no opportunity to repeat the holy Day of Judgment and put right whatever might have been disqualified in the prayers. So they decided to see themselves as people who had heard but not understood, postponing the full explanations until after the conclusion of the service, which they wished to press on to swiftly. But now one of the ten was missing—the banned man himself, who took advantage of the short pause in the prayers to hurry to the bedside of his second wife, eager to see how she fared. Since dawn he had entrusted the bedside vigil to his first wife, but he was not certain that it was fitting for the latter’s face to be the last image his second wife saw if the angel of death came to her.

Since midnight Ben Attar, abandoning false hope, had no longer held back from pronouncing the name of the foe who had insinuated himself into the bosom of his family. Indeed, since the early hours he had had the feeling that here in Verdun it was not a single fiend that threatened them but a whole band of fiends, gliding easily through the cold gray mist that wafted through the narrow streets and over the meadows, stealthily attaching themselves to the little congregation of Jews, and gathering around the new, temporary Jew, who stood wrapped in his prayer shawl, attending earnestly to the strange words evoking the service in the holy of holies in the ruined temple in Jerusalem: O Lord, I have sinned, I have done iniquitously, I have transgressed against thee,I and my household. I beseechtheebythyname to pardon the sins, the iniquities, and the transgressions that I and my household have committed against thee. As it is written in the Torah of Moses thy servant, from thine honored mouth, “For on this day he shall make an atonement for you to cleanse you from all your sins before the Lord.”

Unable to contain his impatience and wait for Rabbi Elbaz with his soft, wavering voice to conclude the high priest’s confession, Ben Attar had slipped away once more to the physician’s house. The doctor had left his Jewish patient alone and gone to do his rounds of peasant huts and noble houses, perhaps to avoid the suspicion caused by excessive and prolonged contact with the company of Jews. Thus, in the half-darkness of the inner chamber, whose window was veiled by a prayer shawl, the twice-wed merchant’s eyes encountered only those of his first wife, who was afraid to utter any word of protest or despair in the presence of this good, devoted man, who realized as soon as he entered the room that his young wife’s condition had deteriorated further.

Indeed, in addition to having her head thrust back in pain, her eyes veiled against the light, and her ears plugged with wax, her breathing was now labored. A terrible dread filled Ben Attar’s heart, for he did not know what he would say or how he would excuse himself to her father, his childhood friend, who had trusted him and given her to him as a girl in the tender first flower of youth. Now he could not even offer her father a grave upon which to prostrate himself. And how would he comfort his son? Not the fetus in her womb but his elder brother, who had been left with his grandfather and grandmother in Tangier and who would require satisfaction from his father for the many days he had dreamed of his mother’s return, when she had already departed this life.

The North African merchant scrutinized the countenance of the mistress of the house, the physician’s wife, who had crept into the room, to learn from her experience whether the terrible despair that had seized hold of him was justified. But the pale little woman’s eyes gave him no clear hint, but only reminded him of the blue eyes of another, of the new wife whose repudiation had begotten death, which was groping its way toward his second wife’s bed. For the first time since Ben Attar had heard of the existence of that woman, beside the campfire by the Bay of Barcelona, he felt how heavy was the hatred he had borne her in his heart for so long, and how deep his vengeance would be. But on account of the sanctity of the day of forgiveness and atonement, he forced himself to stop the feelings that were rising up within him, and gently and compassionately he approached the patient’s bedside.

There, beside the physician’s colorful flasks, he removed the fine veil from her pure, emaciated face, so that she could see the tenderness and sadness in his eyes. He removed the soft wax from her ears, so that she could hear the sound of the prayers coming from the little wood next to the house. All so that she might be certain that neither he nor any other member of the company intended to abandon her in this terrible moment, but on the contrary, they were all joining together in body and soul in the fight against the angel of death, who, even if he was close to the house, was still motionless in the doorway, listening in as much astonishment as the Lotharingian worshippers to the wonderful, richly colored description, full of poetic eloquence, flowing from the mouth of Rabbi Elbaz as he sang the service of the high priest on the terrible and awesome day.

So as not to fail the congregation that had gathered for him alone, Ben Attar cut short the words of affection and comfort that he was heaping upon his second wife, and with profound yet unspoken gratitude he nodded to his first wife, who was covering the patient’s eyes again with the fine gauze veil and stopping her ears again with pieces of soft wax, and hurriedly he left the small chamber to rejoin the other worshippers. It was as well that he hastened back, for Rabbi Elbaz needed southern reinforcement. He was motioning to the seven northern Jews not to hold themselves back and content themselves with a polite genuflection, like Christians, but to prostrate themselves devoutly upon the ground, as though the holy of holies had merged with the physician’s house that stood before them, and the little wood had been transformed into the Temple court and Verdun into the beloved City of David. Thus they could join not in spirit alone but in body too in the memory of the priests and the people who stood in the court, who when they heard the honored and awesome Name spoken distinctly by the high priest in sanctity and purity, bent the knee, prostrated themselves, and fell on their faces, and said, “Blessed be his honored, majestic Name for ever and ever.”

At first the northern Jews had difficulty joining in the full-length prostrations of Rabbi Elbaz and his son, and of Ben Attar and the young barbarian, who extended themselves lithely on the ground like Muslims at prayer. But slowly their souls were won over by the splendor of the rhymed and ornamented verses, and obeying the passionate rabbi’s gesture, they rubbed their foreheads repeatedly, if cautiously, on the reddish soil of Verdun, in the hope that such deep and humble prostration in the company of one banned Jew, one lying Jew, and one black Jew of doubtful Judaism might be added to the afflictions of the fast and fortify the virtuous act they had committed in making up ten for prayer. So might their purity be strengthened on this strange Day of Judgment, and their powers of resistance be doubled in the new year that was beginning, a gentle Jewish year that held in its womb the dragon of the frightening millennium.

As though to reinforce the newfound self-righteousness of the northern Jews, who dispersed at the end of the service to rest for a while under the trees, the overcast sky suddenly parted and the autumn sun exposed a bare patch of sweet blue sky which stabbed Ben Attar’s entrails with a sharp pang of longing for his children, his kinsfolk, and his friends in Tangier, who must be enjoying an afternoon rest at this very moment, reclining on gleaming white couches in large, calm rooms. The next instant his nostrils were assailed by a foreign smell of forbidden meat emanating from the smoke curling up from the chimney of the small house. Was the apostate physician about to return home, and was his wife preparing his dinner? he wondered as he hastened to the corner of the convent wall to see whether he could see the eagerly awaited figure of the renegade. And indeed, Karl-Otto the First, as he styled himself could be seen approaching, holding his medical bag. Ben Attar hurried to meet him, ostensibly to hasten the physician’s footsteps, but perhaps unwittingly he was also attempting to postpone as long as possible the moment of his own return to the inner chamber, to his accursed holy of holies, where the rites of death might already be commencing.

Will the woman live? Rabbi Elbaz asked again fearfully, in his quaint Latin. Yes, she will live, the physician assured him, with the same confidence he had displayed the previous day. But they, he insisted on adding, gesturing toward the Jews of Metz, who were dozing beneath the trees, will not live, neither they nor their children. He pursed his lips with a look of grim resolve, and entering his house, he embraced his two children firmly, perhaps to comfort himself for having exchanged such a holy day for an ordinary working day. Then he washed his hands to remove the dust of the roads and the blood of peasants and nobles which he had let all morning, dried them on a soft towel, and prepared to eat the roast meat that his wife had cooked for him. But disturbed by Ben Attar’s looks, he set down his knife and went into the inner chamber, making a sign to the first wife to give up her place beside the second wife, whose head was still tilted back and whose mouth gaped wide open as though she were short of air.

For a moment it looked as though the physician were at a loss for what to do, but then he rummaged in his little wooden chest and extracted a soft reed tube, which he proceeded to insert carefully in the second wife’s throat. He poured down it some of the yellow potion that was so efficacious at soothing pain, and indeed, in a moment the strung bow relaxed and the amber-colored eyes opened wide. Gradually the eyelids drooped wearily and the lips parted in a faint smile, as though now, at the height of her torments, she had been vouchsafed a moment of acute pleasure. The alert physician seized this moment of grace, and before she sank into slumber he took out his knife and needle, bared a lovely shoulder, and let out a further quantity of tainted blood into the basin, which now contained fresh white river pebbles.

The second wife’s body now seemed to find relief, and the painful spasm relaxed and disappeared within her sleep. Ben Attar judged that this was an opportune moment for him to elude the savours of the dinner that the physician’s wife was serving to her apostate husband and join the others for a rest in the little wood, until the daylight had mellowed enough for the afternoon prayers to commence. When Abd el-Shafi and his friend brought the four horses and the mule back from pasture, proudly waving their tails, washed and gleaming from the rest and grooming they had received on this holy day, and the physician emerged from his house for another round of bloodletting inside the walls of Verdun, Ben Attar went to rouse the young slave, the temporary Jew, who had remained kneeling all this time before the scroll of the Law, which had been placed in the branches of a tree. He made him join the rabbi, who had assembled the other worshippers together so he could pronounce the prayer that opened the afternoon service, which stabbed Ben Attar’s innards with renewed dread: The men of faith who were strong in good works have passed away. Valiantly wielding shield and buckler, they averted calamity by their supplication. They were to us like a fortified wall, and like a protection in the day of wrath and affliction. They appeased anger and fury, they restrained ire by their petitions.Before they invoked thee thou didst answer them, for they knew how to implore and propitiate by their supplications …

The fervent murmur of the Jews’ devotions entered the window of the physician’s little house and penetrated the clouded consciousness of the second wife, and with it the spasm returned to her spine, drawing her head back again like a bent bow. With a great effort she opened her eyes, in which there flickered now the grim mane of the angel of death, who had crept in stealthily and now lurked behind the first wife’s back, pretending to share in her light sleep.

Surprisingly, a renewed slumber came over her, as though the remote wailing chant of the men in the nearby wood were soothing the fear that was sapping her spirits. In the midst of the painful spasm that had laid hold of her back like a vampire, she suddenly felt a tender longing for the women’s prayer house in Worms and that female cantor who had stood wrapped in a prayer shawl, wearing leather phylacteries. Behold, thus I shall not prevent you taking me out of this world. She was flooded with sadness and self-pity, which were blended, miraculously, with a gentle flush of pride. And in the twilight of this new thought, which stubbornly darkened within her, she tried to understand to whom that you was addressed—whether to her husband, or to that red-haired arbiter at whose feet she had sunk, to the rabbi from Seville, who was chanting the pentitential prayers in a tired, hoarse voice, or perhaps to the angel of death, who had disguised himself in the plump form of the first wife, who was bending over her affectionately and nodding to show not only that she understood the good new thought that had been born but that she agreed with it.

While the second wife struggled with all her might to expel the breath that threatened to stifle her, and a ray of light that had managed to infiltrate through the curtain revealed in her motionless eyes a glint of satisfaction at the sobbing of her angel of death, two young nuns came forth from the Benedictine convent, sent by the abbess to ensure that the Jews were not so carried away by their devotions that their vain thoughts defiled a world that was preparing itself for vespers. Surprisingly, the mere appearance of the proud, self-confident sisters was enough to halt the Jews in their prayers, so they could hear a clear demand in the local language that they should move their worship from the little wood toward the bare, tomb-strewn field, and should also lend the convent the young slave, whose slim build and dark skin rendered him suitable for shinning down into the well and fetching up a lost bucket. The Jews from Metz, who understood only too well with whom they were dealing, declined even to translate the sisters’ strange request for the benefit of the rabbi and Ben Attar, but took it upon themselves politely but firmly to refuse to lend a temporary Jew, who by his patient but fervent presence was contributing to making up the ten required for worship. They offered the women instead the two burly Ishmaelites, who were checking the wheels of the wagons for the next stage of the journey.

The two nuns smiled at each other on hearing the generous offer, knowing perfectly well that it was utterly unacceptable to introduce two such strong men into a convent of women who led a constant struggle against delusions and fantasies. They abandoned their impertinent request and disappeared through the gateway of the convent, not before making sure that the worshippers had indeed taken the scroll of the law and were heading toward the graveyard, where they would conclude their prayers.

When the tops of the trees of the abandoned wood were stabbed by shafts of light, the seven Jews from Metz were seized by fear and trembling at the approach of the concluding service, when the gates of repentance in heaven would be closed, and they sought to remove the rabbi from the office of cantor and chant the all-important concluding prayers themselves according to the rite and melodies of their own dear, distant congregation. Ben Attar made a covert sign to the rabbi from Seville not to resist but to yield his place to a local Jew, whose prayers might help to avert the harsh decree that menaced him. He also told the young African to approach him, so that he could seek consolation in the desert scent that rose from his body, a fragrance of dried thorns and smoke of ancient campfires, which the long ocean voyage and the additional journey overland had not been able to erase.

Then as the local cantor began to wail the prayer in a tune familiar to the city guard of Metz: What shall we say before thee, O thou that dwellest on high, or what shall we recount before thee, O thou that inhabitest the heavens, for surely thou knowest all the hidden things. Ben Attar, as he swayed in distress, knew that from now on he would have to increase his dependence on his God, for his first wife, the wife of his youth, emerged wearily from the physician’s house and collapsed on the threshold in a posture of mourning, indicating wordlessly to her husband, who was wrapping himself in the concluding prayer, that the days of his double marriage were ended.

Although it was clear to the North African merchant that the confession of the closing prayer had no power to eradicate the guilt of the death he had brought upon his wife, not because of a stubborn journey made to demonstrate dual love but because of a desperate attempt to justify it, he did not forsake his place among the other worshippers to run to his dead wife. Instead he importuned the Lord of forgiveness to pity and to inscribe in the book of life his only remaining wife, who would soon need not only comfort for the death of her companion but also renewed assurance.

It was only when the end of the evening service marked the conclusion of the holy day—which was also the Sabbath day, when lamps must be lit and spices sniffed, and the appropriate blessings pronounced over sweet wine so that they might safely cross the frontier between sacred and profane—that he hastened to the little house, at whose doorway the physician’s wife stood, barring the entrance to her two children so they would not find themselves standing in the dark in the presence of a corpse. A little way away stood Abd el-Shafi, sea captain and chief wagoner, waiting respectfully for his lord, his eyes running with tears. He knew only too well how hard and sad their journey would be from now on, without the second wife. He embraced the Jewish merchant and uttered words of condolence to him, saying how fine and wonderful was the destiny of the one who at this moment was ascending with her little bare feet the golden staircase of paradise, and how harsh was the lot of those who must continue to plod their weary way through this world. Since all day long he had watched the Jews fasting, he forced Ben Attar to taste a morsel of the warm bread that he and his companion had baked for them, before the merchant went in to take his leave of the one who had departed without permission.

Then Ben Attar stood silently in the total darkness beside the young woman’s body, his eyes roving over the gray outlines of a stilled arc and a startled gaping mouth, and pondered the final leavetaking on this narrow cot in this strange house in this grim and gloomy Christian town, whose terrible memory he would carry with him all his life, even if he never returned here. Surprisingly, he thought also of Abulafia, his nephew and protégé, who could not imagine at this moment, wherever he might be, that the failure of the partnership of heart and body that his uncle had taken upon himself, to atone for the sin of Abulafia’s previous wife’s drowning, had now renewed, amid rage and wrath but with redoubled force, their severed partnership, and annulled not only the ban and interdict of Worms but even the repudiation of Paris. When Ben Attar sensed Rabbi Elbaz’s presence beside him in the darkness, removing the prayer shawl that had been hung up as a curtain at the window, not so as to grace the departed by letting in the gentle moonlight but to use it to hide the slowly whitening face under the cloth and thus begin to separate the second wife from her husband, he turned sternly to face the little rabbi to tell him that he had no intention of either holding a funeral service or burying his dear second wife in this accursed town. Instead, he meant to take her body back to Paris, to prove incontestably to the stubborn repudiatrix and her brother, Master Levitas, that he stood before them now as a fit and proper business partner, the husband of a single wife, and that consequently the severed partnership could now be renewed, although in the midst of wrath and pain, and indeed it could be confirmed forever by the testimony of a grave and a monument set up in the very courtyard of their home.

Ben Attar, feeling that the rabbi was moved to anger and might even break the bonds of loyalty and assail him with harsh words about a journey that would be so disrespectful of the departed one, and refusing to entertain a reply that might contradict his resolve, even if it were embellished with a scriptural citation or a legal precedent, took down from the shelf the flask containing the yellow potion and swallowed the entire contents at a single gulp. Then he left the little house somewhat unsteadily, bumping into the apostate physician, who was arriving with his catechist, the priest. Without saying a word, with an air of utter desperation, Ben Attar thrust the two of them aside and strode as though sleepwalking toward the Jews from Metz, who were standing in terror, unobtrusively eating their meager meal. Pressing right into the middle of the little wood, he stumbled and fell in a heap among the trees, desiring not to die but to sleep and then to sleep.

She is dead, the rabbi bitterly taunted the physician, who appeared neither disconcerted nor repentant over the false hopes he had persisted in raising during the previous day. He turned calmly to the ecclesiastic and translated the news of the death into the local dialect, to demonstrate to him that he had attended to this Jewish wayfarer from a sense of medical duty alone, not as a mark of any special favor, and that Jews too, and not Christians only, might expire upon his bed.

By way of reinforcing his words he invited the learned man into his home, into the moonlit inner chamber, to show him the patient whom the angel of death had mercifully put out of her suffering. The little Andalusian rabbi followed on their heels, to ensure that they did not take advantage of the dead woman’s helplessness by any unseemly or disrespectful action, such as making the sign of the cross or pronouncing alien prayers for her repose. It seemed, however, as if the ecclesiastic, lacking the power to evangelize and thus admit to heaven one who was already dead, had lost interest in the infidel soul that had already departed to its fate, and demanded to hear instead the tale of the body that had failed, and the mystery of that powerful spasm, which the physician named in the learned tongue of the ancient Greeks tetanus, thus ascribing to the illness grandeur and beauty in addition to its seriousness.

Rabbi Elbaz, brokenhearted at the sight of the departed woman’s motionless little foot, once more reproached the physician for his false promise, in a voice stifled with tears, but this time not in the broken Latin he had learned from the Christians of Seville but in the ancient tongue of the Jews, which had the power of giving particular force to whatever was spoken in anger or frustration. The apostate seemed to be deeply disturbed by the antique garb of the reproach being repeatedly hurled at him, and as though to defend the angel of death, who appeared to have made a mistake, he went over to the window and opened it wide and looked at the seven Jews of Metz, who were standing weary and perplexed around the first and now only wife, who was handing them slices of the bread the Ishmaelites had baked. Indicating them all with his finger, the physician repeated, this time not in Latin but in strange, crushed Hebrew, the second limb of his accursed prophecy: But these will not live. And the rabbi, although he had heard these words more than once already, trembled all over, as though the utter failure of the comforting part of the physician’s prophecy reinforced the effect of the baneful part.

Noticing that his son, the neglected orphan, was standing at the doorway with his dark eyes fixed on the body of the dead woman, near whose cabin on board ship he had sought the sweetness of sleep, the rabbi pulled himself together. He hurriedly pushed the child out of the chamber so that he would not merge the death of this strange woman with that of his mother in his imagination. He handed him over to the first wife, so that she could give him some of the warm black bread that the goodhearted Ishmaelites had baked, and although he himself felt not the slightest pang of hunger, he forced himself to eat some of the warm, sourish bread too, and to recover some strength, for now, faced with a lord who had permitted himself to fall so soundly asleep, the Andalusian rabbi would have to change from counselor to associate, and who knew, perhaps also into a leader.

Because the North African merchant had neither spasm nor pain to disrupt his sleep, the yellow potion acted on him with double force, and for hour upon hour he lay so motionless in the little wood beside the convent that it seemed as though the sleep of God itself were enclosing him on every side. In the morning, when Abd el-Shafi was harnessing two of the horses to the larger wagon as arranged, to drive the seven Jews of Metz home, Rabbi Elbaz suddenly decided to remove two fine gold anklets carefully from the dead woman’s smooth, cold feet and give them to the borrowed congregants, not, heaven forbid, by way of recompense for a virtuous action that was its own reward, but merely as a token to sweeten their return. Knowing how firm was Ben Attar’s resolve not to bury his beloved wife in a bare field, he instructed the black temporary Jew, who was the last remnant of the dissolved congregation, to gather some gray planks of wood for the construction of a strong sealed coffin in which the second wife might be transported respectfully and safely to the burial ground in Paris.

It was only the sound of hammers that Sunday afternoon that finally woke Ben Attar from his yellow slumber. In the delicious misty languor of awakening, it seemed to him that he had never set sail on his ocean voyage, neither with the first wife nor with the second, but that he was lying comfortably on his big bed in his azure house, and the sounds issuing from the inner courtyard informed him that his older children were hastening to fulfill the command to build a tabernacle for the approaching festival. But as the coils of his deep slumber detached themselves, he became aware of the hardness of his bed, and through the screen of russet leaves that stirred before his eyes he was joined to the gray sky of Europe, which had turned repudiation to interdict and interdict to death.

In an instant memory assaulted him and a sharp pang of hunger and loss pounded in his head, and he rose to his feet and went to a nearby stream to wash his face. As he did so, a smell of burning reached his nostrils, and he saw that his living wife, who had probably remained beside him all the time to watch over him lest anyone disturb his sleep, had also succumbed to slumber, and was lying in her rumpled robe beside some smoking logs on which his dinner was keeping warm. In the silence of the wood, without seeking out the rabbi or anyone else, he fell like a wild beast upon the slightly burned food, which was seasoned by the supreme condiment of two days’ hunger. And without waking the wife of his youth, he turned to the physician’s house, from which bluish smoke was rising, to see if by some miracle someone had sprung back to life there.

Entering that house, which in the past two days he had entered and left as freely as if it were his own, Ben Attar saw the physician’s wife standing beside the stove, stirring the supper with a large wooden spoon. Her little blue eyes looked at him with a hint of reproach, as if to say, And a fine time to he waking up. Guiltily he hung his head, and with an aching heart he entered the other chamber, where he was startled to see his second wife wrapped in her shrouds like a parcel ready for dispatch. He did not know who had dared to dress his dear one so without asking his consent. Was it the physician, or the Andalusian rabbi, impatient to resume the journey?

Without further thought, he hurriedly closed the door of the chamber behind him and feverishly unbound his second wife and looked again on that splendid face, which had become sharper during the night that had elapsed, so that it seemed now like that of some large quaint bird. His trembling hand hesitated to raise her eyelids gently and look for the last time at that old, dear emerald sparkle, which had never failed to set his heart aflame. And while he was taking his leave, slowly, with a kiss and a caress of the body that had given him so much pleasure and joy, he heard behind him the rabbi, who had entered without knocking and was gazing with total freedom at the woman laid out before him, as though her death had made him at last into a second husband.

At once the rabbi gave Ben Attar an account of his actions during the day, without excuse or apology, as though it were natural that he should assume authority while his lord slept. Again, as when he had decided to travel to Worms for a further judgment, Ben Attar stood stupefied at the little rabbi’s audacity, not only because he had taken it upon himself to remove the anklets from the North African’s wife’s feet with his own hands and give them to the Jews from Metz, whose destruction might well be nigh, as a recompense for their trouble and pain, but also because he had authorized himself to give the mule that they had bought in Speyer to the physician, in payment for his simples, his hospitality, his yellow potion, his bloodlettings, and his accommodation of the corpse. But Ben Attar did not utter a word of reproach, for he was pleased and grateful to discern that Rabbi Elbaz had consented to his request to postpone the burial. Indeed, the Ishmaelite seaman and the slave had already been told to hasten and make a strong sealed coffin.

So the North African expedition lingered no longer within the walls of Verdun. At midnight, when Abd el-Shafi returned from Metz with the large wagon, the coffin was loaded onto it and Ben Attar and the rabbi arranged comfortable seats for themselves on either side of it, so that they could accompany the deceased during the journey with verses of psalms, which might console and strengthen her soul, which merited a final rest. Meanwhile the two Ishmaelite wagoners were checking the horseshoes and adjusting the harnesses, while young Elbaz greased the wheels. The young African, whom Abd el-Shafi had not yet released from the bonds of Judaism, was packing the cooking pots under the supervision of the only wife and loading them onto the smaller wagon. Meanwhile, the physician, who had tethered the mule to a tree near his house, seemed to be having some trouble composing himself sufficiently to take his leave of the Jewish travelers. Ceaselessly he roamed among them, sketching on the ground the best and safest way to Paris, and a tear welled for an instant in his eye. With the first light of dawn, just as the first crack of the whip sounded out, he suddenly exclaimed with emotion, You shall live. In flowing Latin he assured the travelers, You shall return to your Ishmaelites, and there you shall live. And to reinforce his words he repeated the last phrase in the holy tongue: There you shall live.

With the slow motion of the wheels of the wagons as they moved westward, Ben Attar’s soul was pierced with sadness as he took his final leave of the place where his second wife had smiled her last smile. On hearing the rabbi’s voice beginning what was necessary and urgent for a journey, the first tears rolled down his cheeks: I liftup mine eyes to the hills, whence shall my help come. My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He shall not let thy foot stumble, thy guardian shall not slumber. Behold, he that guardeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy guardian, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. By day the sun shall not smite thee, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall guard thee from all evil, he shall guard thy soul. The Lord shall guard thy going forth and thy coming in, from now and forever-more.

And so they journeyed from Verdun to Chalons and from Chalons to Rheims and from Rheims to Meaux and from Meaux to Paris. The route was well etched in the memory of the wagoners and in the idolater’s nostrils. Since the nights were chilly and on occasion they were lashed by the rains of autumn, they preferred this time to lodge in wayside inns or peasant cottages. But they never left the second wife’s coffin alone under the sole care of Ishmaelites; there was always at least one Jew beside her, Ben Attar or the rabbi, the first wife or the Elbaz child. By the third day, which was the eve of Tabernacles, a heavy, cloying smell had begun to come from the sealed casket, and looking up they could see a black vulture circling patiently in the sky overhead. Out of respect for the dear departed one, who longed to return to the dust, the rabbi from Seville decided to exercise rabbinic license and to deem the dry land sea and the wagon to be the equivalent of a ship, and in this way they did not have to rest from their journey on the festival but could recite the festive prayers and fulfill the obligation to construct a tabernacle while moving. They pressed on with all speed to the Île de France, abbreviating their meal stops and making do with little sleep. Even when Abd el-Shafi discovered a peasant on the way using a new kind of plow that had an additional, curved blade, which turned the earth by its side, thus cutting a wider and deeper furrow, Ben Attar did not allow him to linger long enough to study it or sketch it for the benefit of the peasants of Tangier and its hinterland, but insisted that they crack the whip and urge the horses on.

By the morning of the second day of Tabernacles, as in the course of their morning prayers they crossed the bridge over the Marne and turned westward to join the busy north bank of the Seine, they were compelled to fold back the dark cover of the larger wagon and expose it to the world, so that the fresh smell of the riverbank vegetation might relieve the fetid air coming from within. Even though this exposure obliged them to fend off an occasional vulture or crow that alighted on the coffin, their spirits rose at the sight of the familiar island of the little Frankish city, resting gracefully in the middle of the river in a riot of roofs and towers beside its little white uninhabited twin. A pleasant warmth surrounded the North Africans as they entered Paris, as though their brief stay a full month before had attached them to the city with proprietorial bonds. As they approached in the light of the setting sun, they were more and more eager to see among the craft clustered in the port the green flag of the old guardship.

It was not until the horses drew up right alongside that they managed to recognize her. Even the captain’s face fell on beholding the change that had overtaken his ship. In the thirty days that they had been away, the partner Abu Lutfi, left with nothing to do, had decided to change from a buyer to a vendor, in order to test the worth of the desert merchandise among the local inhabitants. To this end he had dressed the old guardship in multicolored rags and clothed the five crewmen in finery to attract the Parisians. Indeed, the burly seamen were running around among the olives and the heaps of dried fruit, the pale honeycombs and heaps of copper pans like so many salesmen, adorned with silken scarves and rainbow-colored turbans, and they even seemed to have mastered some words of enticement in the local language.

For his part, Abu Lutfi also seemed to have some difficulty in recognizing his Jewish partner as he stood on the riverbank with his company, pale and gaunt and dressed in threadbare clothes, for he ignored him and continued haggling with a local merchant, gesticulating expressively. But when he felt the warm hand of the black slave, who had lithely climbed aboard, his breath was taken away, and dropping the copper jug he was holding, he fell to his knees and prostrated himself in thanksgiving to the god of the Jews, who had not prevented great Allah from bringing his dear ones back safely, Jews and Ishmaelites alike, from the Black Forest of the Rhineland. To judge by the bows and embraces and kisses and rapturous praises of destiny, which had spared the adventurers its blows, it seemed that Abu Lutfi was not interested in knowing about the fate of the expedition, or whether his Jewish partner had succeeded in trouncing his adversaries with the rabbi’s help in the further contest on the Rhine. The Ishmaelite evidently clung to his view that the whole of this great journey, on sea and by land, was totally unnecessary, for Jews by their nature are incapable of achieving a final and decisive judgment.

Therefore, to tell Abu Lutfi about the judgment that really had befallen, although not by virtue of speeches, Ben Attar took him to the stern, where, amid sacks of condiments and crates of dried fruit, before the opening that led down to the hidden cabin of a wife who had not returned, he recounted in a roundabout way the tale of the angel of death who had struck them, and even gestured toward the sealed coffin that lay all alone on the quayside, with the Elbaz child standing guard beside it. Although Ben Attar had supposed that the news of the young wife’s death would be hard and painful for his partner, who had gone to great lengths each year to find her some special gift in the desert, he had not imagined that Abu Lutfi would be so distraught that he would suddenly wave his hands in the air and hold his head in despair, as though the death that had made so bold as to snatch off such a beloved passenger could cut off such a great and hairy head. On witnessing the grief of the Arab, who drew a small dagger and made a cut in his robe as a token of sympathy, Ben Attar too let loose, perhaps for the first time, a cry of terrible loss, which had been reined back until that moment.

But the pleasant autumn sun of Paris did not stand still in the sky to wait for all the grief, pain, joy, and hope that mingled in that great meeting on board the old ship to be expressed and stilled. Rabbi Elbaz, already impatient at the sight of the two partners comforting each other as though they were two husbands of a single wife, canceled all the license to delay the burial that he had granted since they had set forth from Verdun and stood resolutely before Ben Attar demanding immediate interment. To this end they must proceed instantly to the house on the opposite bank of the river, to announce to the kinsfolk who had issued the repudiation and the ban that all they had held to be settled and sealed was undone, and that they were to prepare a plot of ground that very evening for the departed wife.

At once, however, a doubt arose as to whether the kinsfolk in question had returned to Paris, or whether they had decided to remain on the banks of the Rhine to keep the Day of Atonement and the feast of Tabernacles in Worms, so as to rejoice with their holy congregation over the ban that had been declared. While the rabbi thought about whether to send his clever son secretly to the other bank with one of the crewmen to find out who was in the house, Abu Lutfi testified that there was no need, as he had seen Abulafia a couple of days before among the throng of Parisians on his deck, looking pale and miserable and disguised as an elderly peasant woman.

That being so, said Abu Lutfi, who knew their younger partner’s disguises from the meetings in the Spanish March, there was no sense in further delay; they should set out at once. It was decided that the rabbi should lead the cortege, while the banned husband should remain concealed some way off, to avoid a further, irreparable repudiation. At once the five seafaring salesmen were ordered to take off their colorful garb and replace it with clean, somber robes, so that they could carry the gray wooden coffin in a dignified manner through the narrow streets of the Cité to the Jews’ house on the south bank, or left bank, according to the river’s flow. And in the Rue de la Harpe, near the statue of David staring at Saint Michael’s fountain, in the last of the evening twilight, the Andalusian rabbi on his own entered the thick iron-studded door that he remembered well having had difficulty opening. In the courtyard, near the well, he found a small hut constructed of twigs and branches, in which the opposing party was eating its festive meal by the light of a small lamp. He did not enter the tabernacle, but announced his presence by clearing his throat. Mistress Esther-Minna was the first to hear him, and she peered out of the hut. Not recognizing him, she called Abulafia, who emerged wearing a hat with a horn of black velvet in the Worms style and black robes, as though he had anticipated the imminent mourning. Despite the darkness he recognized the uninvited guest as the Andalusian rabbi, and he started to shake, as though realizing that something had occurred. Without a moment’s pause he hurried over to the little rabbi and embraced him warmly. But on this occasion Elbaz was seeking neither greeting nor embrace but merely information about the location of the nearest Jewish cemetery where they might inter a coffin they had brought with them. A coffin? Abulafia asked apprehensively. What coffin? And the rabbi drew him into the street, where the five seamen were standing around the coffin, which was lying on the pavement.

What is inside? whispered Abulafia fearfully, in a broken voice, having already perhaps sniffed the terrible cloying smell. The rabbi was filled with pity at the sight of the apprehensive third partner, who was trembling in front of the large coffin, fearing that it might house his banned uncle. But then the new wife, Mistress Abulafia, emerged from the house to see what had so attracted and detained her young husband. It seemed that she had not yet noticed the coffin or the seamen standing in the narrow street but only Rabbi Elbaz, and her delicate little face flushed with pleasure at the sight of the shrewd Andalusian rabbi, who had bested her once and had now been bested in his turn, and she dropped a little curtsy of respect and asked him with a cheery smile, So you have returned?

At that, the North African merchant emerged from the recess where he had concealed himself. His hair and beard were unkempt, his robe was torn, and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. Before Mistress Esther-Minna could draw back, he answered her question clearly: We have returned, but not all of us. With an air of grim despair that contained a hint of lunatic glee, he hurled himself upon the coffin and pulled out one of the planks, to furnish clear proof that henceforth the old partnership could be revived without contravening any new edict. While Abulafia clutched the wall to stop himself from collapsing, Ben Attar fixed his black eyes straight on the wide blue eyes and asked with utter hostility, Is the new wife satisfied?

6.

The Andalusian rabbi’s firmness having paid off, the second wife was laid to rest that very night in a little burial ground squeezed between a fair vineyard, the property of Count Galand, and a small chapel dedicated to the unfortunate Saint Mark. At first Ben Attar had demanded that his second wife be buried in the courtyard of his in-laws’ house, so that the grave might be watched over and tended by his kinsfolk. Abulafia was at once eager to do his uncle’s bidding, but Master Levitas gently refused the request, which seemed to him to be merely vindictive, and persuaded the merchant and more especially the rabbi from Seville not to leave the deceased alone in the courtyard of a Jewish family, which might be here today and gone tomorrow, but to lay her to rest in a real cemetery, close to other deceased folk, so that she would not be overlooked at the time of the resurrection of the dead. While the sailors, transformed now into gravediggers, cleared away the undergrowth and dug an ample grave pit, Ben Attar, grim-faced and weary, distracted by grief and exhaustion, listened as Master Levitas sang the praises of the place where he was laying his wife to rest. It was odd that Master Levitas, a clear-thinking Jew who could hardly bear Jewish old wives’ tales, let alone those of the Christians, so far forgot himself as to tell Ben Attar the story of Mark the hunter, who cruelly killed a doe and her young fawn in full sight of the terrified stag, which thereupon opened its mouth and prophesied in human language that he who had not spared a mother and her child would one day inadvertently kill his own wife and child. To prevent this terrible prophecy from coming true, Mark shut himself away forever in a little house surrounded by ancient Merovingian tombs, secured with an iron door and stout bolts and a grille on the window, and lived on the generosity of pilgrims setting out on the Road of Saint James for the holy shrines of the southern lands. Since he had managed to flout such a clear and terrible prophecy by willpower alone, his calamity brought him strength and his sin was a source of sanctity, and his little house became a chapel that served as a landmark for pilgrims setting forth on their long journey.

The grieving husband did not fathom the intent of Master Levitas’s strange tale, but one realization had been growing steadily stronger within him since the beginning of the nocturnal funeral cortege—namely, that his second wife’s death had decisively ended the ban and interdict declared against him in Worms by the red-haired arbiter, the poetic and heartless prayer leader. Not only did Abulafia, whose heart had been smitten with sorrow and guilt by the young woman’s death, cling to his grim-faced uncle as a slave clings to his master, but even the reserved Master Levitas was unable to disregard the misfortune of these people who had been defeated from an ethical and a legal viewpoint alike, and so he summoned up all his resources of attention so as to listen with sympathy and compassion to the story of her last hours and her death as recounted with deep feeling by Rabbi Elbaz.

Mistress Esther-Minna’s fair foxlike countenance, however, betrayed not only sorrow and sympathy but also the first tokens of a new alarm. While her feet sank into the freshly dug earth piled around the edge of the grave, and while she listened to the rabbi reciting the prayer for the dead, she realized that the North African uncle’s daring, epic journey had indeed achieved its purpose. As the frail body wrapped in pale green silk slid as though of its own accord into its last resting place, between the chapel and the vines, it took with it the last restraint that might have prevented her footloose husband from recommencing his travels.

Supposing that she insisted on joining him, she thought quickly, would he agree to take her with him? Or would he make her stay at home to keep her promise to look after his poor child, whom she herself, in a moment of weakness, had wrested from the Ishmaelite nurse and taken under her own wing? In which case, Mistress Abulafia thought, tormenting herself, who would warm her cold feet at night, now that she had become accustomed to the soft hands of the southern man? And who would give her a glimmer of hope of turning her barrenness to fruitfulness, if only to demonstrate to her stern mother-in-law in Worms that the fault had not been hers? Meanwhile, until the new direction that the contest might take became clearer, she must try to soothe Ben Attar’s feelings, for even the darkness of night could not conceal the hatred he felt toward her. At the conclusion of the burial she gathered the inner strength to approach him and offer her condolences, and even to beg him to fetch from the ship his first and only wife, who was as precious as an aunt to her, so that both of them, together with the reverend rabbi and his son, might accept the hospitality of her home and fulfill the command to dwell in a tabernacle. Since she had not hesitated to welcome his double menage into her home previously, there was even less reason to do so now.

But Ben Attar, whose robe was now disfigured by a long, ugly rent of mourning made by the little rabbi, waved her offer away and declined to enter her house. He was firmly resolved to return at once to his ship and shut himself up with his grief in the very cabin in the stern that had been the last home of his wonderful deceased wife. There was no hope that the entreaties of the fair-haired woman, or her brother’s pleas, might deflect him from his purpose. He frostily signaled to his men to take up the empty coffin and return to the old guardship, for only there would it be seemly to receive any visitor who might wish to honor the command to comfort the bereaved.

Early the next morning, after a long night bereft of sleep, Mistress Esther-Minna assembled some choice food and gave it to her Teutonic maidservant to carry, and joined Abulafia for a morning visit to the ship, which had donned mourning though there was only one mourner aboard (for the first wife, though willing, was unable to be a mourner, not being blood kin to the deceased). On the bridge in the bow, in the midst of sailors waking from sleep, Abulafia and his wife encountered the first wife, with a serious look on her bright face, very carefully laundering her dead co-wife’s fine silken gowns, which Ben Attar wished to give to his orphaned son, so when the time came he would be able to dress his bride in them and by so doing be comforted somewhat for the loss of his mother, without even a grave or a tombstone upon which to weep.

Abu Lutfi greeted the early callers with a bow, accepted the large leather bag of food from the gentile maid with thanks, and led his restored partner and his agitated lady to the stern. This was Mistress Esther-Minna’s first visit to the Moroccan ship, and consequently she took short, clumsy steps, particularly when she was slowly helped down the rope ladder into the dark hold, where fine slivers of morning light hovered in the air together with the odors of various desert wares that had lingered between south and north because of her stern repudiation. While the visitor marveled at the depth of the small ship’s belly, she was suddenly startled by the grunting of the camel, which rose slowly and with great dignity on its long legs to greet her with its small head. For a woman who had been born and bred to the sound of croaking frogs and howling wolves, there was an attractive peacefulness about this patient, calm desert beast, whose small head might indicate a lack of wisdom but not any viciousness of character.

The northern woman finally stooped and entered the cabin where the second wife’s spirit still hovered, and where her husband had chosen to sit and receive condolences, in this gloomy corner, accompanied by the gurgle of the river underfoot, surrounded by timbers that had been weakened in some ancient sea battle but strengthened in readiness for the present expedition by the captain and his crew. Since Mistress Esther-Minna had absorbed some words of Arabic during the month of confrontation in Villa Le Juif and Worms, she realized that the conversation between uncle and nephew did not concern the pain of death or the memory of the deceased woman’s good qualities but went straight to the future hope of the revived partnership. Even Abu Lutfi, the quiet Ishmaelite partner, was excited now, and with precise gestures he described the quality and quantity of all the goods that had been longing for three months to leave the darkness of the hold and burst forth into the brightly lit world outside. At the sound of the commercial Arabic babble in full spate, Mistress Abulafia’s pale blue eyes darkened with sorrow, and she left the little cabin to wander down the avenues of large jars and swollen sacks, laying a soft hand on a pile of skins and cloth and making a shiny copper cooking pot ring with a tap from the toe of her shoe before halting silently before the Elbaz child and the black idolater, who were feeding the young camel with one of the loaves of bread she had brought on board.

This may have been the moment when a strange notion was born that would create a new reality after the end of the Tabernacles week and the days of mourning. Since the previous night Mistress Esther-Minna had not ceased to consider how she could defend her marriage against her husband’s renewed traveling, not only because she wanted to deprive her jubilant brother of the pleasure of validating the warning he had issued back in the year 4756 against the frivolity of a match between an older widow and a questionable wandering southerner, but more particularly because she regretted every night that passed without furthering the hope that beat within her breast. And so, after returning to the cabin of mourning to take her leave of Ben Attar, whose coldness toward her seemed weaker, she obtained her husband’s permission to return home alone, leaving him with his restored partners so that he could discuss business with them to his heart’s content.

But Mistress Esther-Minna had no intention of sitting quietly in her corner and waiting for her husband to depart on his travels; she wanted to discover whether a spark could ignite a conflagration. That afternoon, seeing that her husband had not yet returned, she decided to go back to the ship with food and drink, as was fitting for a visit of condolence. But this time she took the poor child with her, washed and scrubbed and clothed in a fine robe. Although the startled girl walked clumsily and somewhat lopsidedly, she led her calmly along the winding streets of the island, among Parisians hurrying to their evening meals, and helped her without mishap across the new bridge that led to the ship moored on the north bank. It transpired that Abulafia had gone off with Abu Lutfi to sell their merchandise in the market of Saint Denis, and so, for lack of choice, she waved her arm to summon the pagan, who was standing all alone on the bridge, staring westward like an admiral, to help her get the heavy child on board and lower her slowly into the hold, in the conviction that an encounter with the noble, sad desert beast would soothe her desperate soul, however slightly.

Even though the girl gripped her stepmother’s gown in terror, Mistress Esther-Minna felt, with her sensitivity and experience, that behind her fear the child was absorbing the smell of her southern childhood, and that in looking at the camel she was recognizing something she had lost. For lo, the trembling ceased, and her large black eyes fixed on the peacefully waving little tail. Perhaps this is the solution to the problem that has been tormenting me, the new wife’s soul suddenly claimed, though she could still not determine precisely what the solution was, or even what the problem that required a solution was. Then Abulafia could be heard on deck, speaking in Arabic to Abu Lutfi, and the merry liveliness of his noisy conversation showed that far from deepening his old melancholy, the second wife’s death had released him from it, so that it seemed as though a new happiness animated him. From now on, she felt sure, her young husband would be able to guard himself against any further designs that might threaten his beloved partnership.

When the two of them descended into the hold and Abulafia discovered his daughter standing calmly beside the camel, trying to feed him a slice of black bread from her pudgy hand, a cry of encouragement burst from his mouth at the strength of his dear wife, who, according to his understanding and his own notions, was tempting the accursed enchantment that had taken hold of his daughter to change its dwelling place from his child’s soul to that of the camel. Although it was impossible to tell whether the stubborn sprite really would exchange the soft body of the child for the little rounded hump of the patient creature, Abulafia seemed to betray a new weakness of purpose, for now, for the first time since the end of the reign of the stern Ishmaelite nurse, who had been sent to Barcelona in his stead to put an end to the partnership, he saw a charming smile again on the face that should have been as fair as her mother’s, if it had turned out differently.

Indeed, in the half-darkness of the hold of the old guardship, among sacks of condiments and jars of oil, a new affection seemed to flow not only between the camel and the odd child but also between Abulafia and his wife, who even in moments of carnal intimacy seemed to have had difficulty in looking straight at each other ever since the North African expedition had burst upon them. So the following day Abulafia himself took his daughter down into the hold, which was gradually being emptied of its cargo, and asked the Elbaz child and the slave to keep an eye open to make sure that the growing friendship between the girl and the beast did not cause her any harm.

Meanwhile, the grieving husband sat in his torn robe, hidden away in a cabin in the bowels of the ship, pursuing his silent mourning despite the festive season. From time to time the first wife descended to him, bearing food or drink, to rub his hands and feet with almond oil and to sing the praises of the departed. Even the rabbi, who was not happy about this secretive mourning, which impugned the joy of the feast of gathering in and the commandment to dwell in a tabernacle, visited him occasionally to speak words of admonition. Ben Attar listened and nodded, his eyes dull, his head drooping on his chest, his expression that of one who wishes to die by degrees. But when his partners, Abulafia and Abu Lutfi, came in, he shook off his gloom to utter a short, sharp sentence about the price of a copper pot or the urgent need to find someone in the Capetian capital to rid them of the burden of the camel.

Before the camel could be offered for sale it must be taken ashore and fed, and it would be best to send it to graze in the fine fields and vegetable gardens of the Duke de la Teulerie, which adjoined a dense forest called by the locals Lupara on account of the packs of wolves that roamed it, attracted by its burrows. Therefore, toward the close of the festive week, on the eve of the Solemn Assembly, one of the sailors was sitting in a garden holding a long cord, at the other end of which a long-necked item of merchandise delicately cropped the tenderest greenery in Paris, pricking up its ears curiously from time to time at the Jewish boy and the young idolater chatting in the language of the desert and at the disturbed girl, who was reminded by the sounds of Arabic of the nurse who had been taken away from her.

Now that the autumn blew an occasional cold breeze over the Île de France, the young people, knowing that in a few more days they would be summoned to board the ship and sail away and that for days and nights on end they would sway to the monotonous rhythm of the wind flapping the sail, sought to enjoy to the full the rustle of the russet leaves on the firm ground. Since the rabbi’s son had absolute faith in the son of the desert to take them safely home again, especially if it was somewhere as simple and straightforward as the right bank of the river, he offered to take his companions on a short excursion to the top of a low knoll that could be seen some way off, which he had no doubt was the same hill, topped with a ruined arch, from which he and Ben Attar, the first of all the passengers on board, had seen the enchanted city.

But he had unwittingly mistaken for the western hill another, northern one, which seemed low only because of a white smudge that spread in its center. Since the girl walked with a slight bias that constantly had to be corrected, the Andalusian child, who had become the leader of the small expedition, wondered whether they should keep climbing the slope, whose steepness was only too evident to their young legs, or whether they should turn around and go back to the ship before the drizzle that was accompanying them turned into a full-scale rainstorm. While he was still debating, the rainclouds burst, turning clothing and flesh to a single pulp, until they had no choice but to take shelter beside a large cottage that they had previously taken pains to avoid, since black smoke was spiraling up from its chimney. While they huddled unobtrusively under the overhanging thatch, the demon in the girl’s soul suddenly broke into its old howl, which outdid the tumult of the rain and brought two smiling women out of the silent house, dressed in colorful gowns stitched together, to the boy’s surprise, from the green silk that they had brought on their ship and bartered for eggs and cheese on their way to Worms.

When the women caught sight of the young visitors pressed against the outer wall of their cottage, they were as joyful as hunters who have caught a splendid prey. The boy and the black slave calculated the chances of running for their lives, but the women caught the girl and invited her into their cottage, so that her two companions had no choice but to follow in the hope of rescuing her. They found themselves in a large room with a rush-covered floor, and in a corner a small fire burned, over which hung on a spit a delicious-smelling piglet, its eyes closed with a self-important air. The boy’s soul shuddered at the proximity of the forbidden, unclean beast, but the African turned excitedly toward a row of brightly painted wooden images, all representing the same young man, with impassive countenance and a short beard, spreading his arms out wide to save his soul or to embrace the world, it was impossible to tell which. While the two women laughed heartily, in fact somewhat indecently, at the young visitors’ confusion, the door of an inner chamber opened and a third woman appeared, carrying a skinny baby in her arms and followed by a lean yet agile older man carelessly dressed in paint-stained garments, whose name, Pigealle, the youngsters had difficulty catching.

Just as the pagan was astonished at the sight of the row of figurines, so the man seemed excited at the sight of the dark-skinned denizen of the desert who had happened into his house, and dragged him firmly over to the window the better to inspect his face. The women had already sensed the man’s urgent desire, and as though by tacit agreement they smiled at the visitors and set about busily making them welcome. First they removed their sodden robes and made signs that it would be better if the visitors took off their baggy trousers too, so as to dry them by the fire, and meanwhile they hurried to cut thin slices from the hindquarters of the piglet dozing over the fire.

The only son of the rabbi from Seville, unable to bear the disgrace that had come upon him, leaped to his feet to thrust away the slice of abominable meat being offered to him on the tip of a knife. But he was unable to prevent the girl, whose nakedness was covered by a sheepskin coat, from snatching the morsel and putting it to her mouth. Even the African, who might or might not have reverted from his temporary Judaism to his original paganism, was seized by a frenzy of eating and also drinking, since the lean old man, who had not taken his eyes off the young man since he had removed his trousers and revealed his black nakedness, plied him with ruby wine, possibly with the intention of befuddling his mind and diminishing his resistance. Indeed, the Frankish wine achieved its purpose well, for the youth, after giving thanks in the form of a deep obeisance toward one of the figurines, submitted himself to the ministrations of the women, who led him into the inner chamber and laid him on a bed, then gracefully folded one of his legs and gently stroked his young manhood so that it roused itself until its narrow slit stared at the enthusiastic artisan, who was already screwing up his eyes and drawing a first bright scarlet line on a wooden panel.

And so the youngsters were held captive by these strange but insistent hosts, who barred the door of the cottage until the old artist had finished studying, with line and color, what could be learned from the naked body of a member of an unknown race lying before him. But in the midst of the silence of the slowly passing hours there rose the old wail of the accursed girl, which threatened to become a scream. The women hurriedly silenced her with fine fragrant slices from the haunches of the piglet, whose face still bore a pensive and melancholy air. The boy from Seville, who knew himself and was aware that the hunger raging inside him was liable to drive him out of his wits, closed his eyes and covered them with his hands, and tried his hardest to imagine how his father the rabbi would reason in his place. After a short while he came to a simple conclusion, in the spirit of the logic of his sire’s bold discourses. If heaven, which watched over all and exacted payment for every deed, had not hastened to take the soul of a Jewish girl who was gorging herself ceaselessly and with evident pleasure on the forbidden and abominable meat, it might be meant as a clear sign to him that instead of being a martyr to his hunger, which was bringing him close to fainting, it would be better to strengthen himself so he could be ready to escape and raise the alarm.

A plan took shape in his head, and slowly he removed his hands and opened his eyes. He found a great silence all around, for the sated girl had fallen asleep at the feet of one of the women, while from the adjoining chamber there came only the sound of chisel on wood. Rising to his feet, he started to walk across the large chamber in feigned aimlessness, blushing at the sight of the Frankish babe sucking at the pale round breast of the young woman, who eyed the boy calmly. Then, casually, he turned toward the remains of the piglet, still hovering above the dying fire. With an effort he stared into the eyes of the roasted creature as though trying to learn the secret of its stubborn persistence in its unclean nature. Suddenly his face lit up, and he decided to punish it for its obstinacy, and reaching out, he grabbed a pinkish chunk, brought it warily to his mouth, and licked it with the tip of his tongue, wondering at the flavor, which resembled salted butter rather than meat. Before nausea could well up, he thrust the piece of meat into his mouth and chewed it rapidly, then, before its uncleanness had a chance to affect him, he tore off another chunk and thrust it into his mouth, and then another, and one last one to strengthen his spirit in the face of the terrible deed he had done. Only then did he approach the door, unbar it, and run for dear life, paying no heed to the voices of the women, who tried to stop him.

From the pink color of the sky, which had cleared, he realized that they had been detained for a long time and that evening was approaching. He made for the river, which to the best of his knowledge lay straight ahead. For the first time since he had joined the expedition he was utterly alone, among the empty fields that surrounded the small Parisian isle. Since he was careful to avoid isolated cottages along the way, particularly a large one with many windows from which loud sounds of singing were coming, the boy seemed to have caught the girl’s slantwise movement, and his little legs took him along paths that led westward rather than south, so that as twilight descended he found himself not, as he had hoped, on the bank of the river but on top of the little star-shaped hill crowned with a ruined Roman arch where he had stood with the leader of the expedition on that first evening. Then the boy’s body shook with a sob of gratitude that he had been shown the way. Because he could not spew forth what he had eaten, he fell to his knees, as he had learned to do from the black pagan, and swore to expiate the sin he had sinned by means of fasting and prayer. As the twilight extinguished the sun’s dazzling death throes, and on the island in the midst of the river the Parisians began to kindle the lights that would show the little wayfarer the right direction to take, he chose once more the avenue that led him to the open square beside the riverbank, in the hub of which he was surprised to discover the little pile of stones that he had made with his own hands on that distant evening, which still stood, indicating the way back.

When the boy reached the boat, he was not surprised to hear that the black slave and the girl had returned before him and had been taken by Abulafia to his house on the opposite bank, but he was surprised that his father had not waited anxiously for his return but had accepted Abulafia’s invitation to say his evening prayers in the tabernacle. Had the dumb girl managed to recount the sin of the abominable meat, and had his father decided to disown him? Deep sorrow seized the boy, and he tried to drive out the impurity that clung to his guts with a cake of dried figs sprinkled with cinnamon. But the fragrant sweetness spreading in his mouth did not calm his soul, and he decided to seek consolation from Abu Lutfi and Abd el-Shafi, who, being gentiles and therefore living their uncleanness without blame or guilt, might be able to soothe away the sin that burned inside him. He was surprised to find them on the old bridge, sitting and conversing conspiratorially with a third man, a stranger clad in the local garb. Seeing the boy approaching, they fell suddenly silent, and he too halted, as it occurred to him that their impurity, even if it were as wide as the sea, did not extend to the eating of pork, and that if the smell of his abomination assailed their nostrils, their wrath might be doubled at his assault on two faiths at once. So he turned back to the stern and descended into the hold, which during the day had given up all its cargo, now scattered in the world, and stood dark and empty, with only the tawny camel stepping through the emptiness as through the desert.

In this dark space the boy was suddenly flooded with longing for the second wife, beside whose cabin only had he been able to surrender himself to long hours of sweet slumber. He groped his way to the bowels of the ship, to rediscover the scent of the abandoned cabin. There, by the light of a lamp, surrounded by the fragrance of herbs and nard burning on a little incense burner, he discovered the ship’s grieving owner in the company of the first wife. They were sitting together on a blanket spread on the ground, dining in silence. Deep in the bowels of the ship, attentive to the faint flow of the river beneath them, Ben Attar and his wife seemed cut off not only from the existence of the city of Paris but also from whatever was being hatched above their heads on the bridge.

When they caught sight of the young visitor coming to offer his condolences, they smiled at him affectionately and invited him to join their meal and help himself to some of the remaining stew. At first he wished to refuse, not only because he was not in the least hungry, but also because he was afraid to dip his defiled fingers into a clean cooking pot. But he also feared that they might suspect him of refusing to touch the pot because tears of mourning might have fallen into it or because of the touch of the dead woman’s spirit that still inhabited the cabin. Therefore, so as not to offend the owner, in whose hand lay his own safe return to Seville, he dipped cautious fingertips into the pot and picked out a chunk of meat that still smelled of sheep droppings. When he put it into his mouth and closed his eyes, he could see a simultaneously nauseating and attractive image of the furtive faces of the green-clad women in the cottage, standing around the head of the piglet, about to cut off its ears. Finally the nausea that had been restrained thanks to the friendly looks of the gentile women burst forth, and the boy turned deathly pale and swayed fearfully. He tried to escape, but his strength deserted him, and leaning over among the soot-stained timbers, he vomited up clean and unclean meats together. When he saw what was happening in the beloved wife’s cabin he let out a wild shriek, as though the raucous little demon that inhabited the girl had entered him too.

Surprisingly, the owner and his only wife showed no signs of revulsion, nor of anger at the way he had sullied the cabin of their memories, but rather of terror, as though the death that had struck their household once might succumb to the temptation to strike again. With hands experienced in childrearing they discerned a fever lurking behind the pallor, and so they hurriedly wrapped the little body in a blanket and laid a damp cloth on the eyes that stared at them guiltily. Ben Attar hastened up onto the bridge to tell Abd el-Shafi to send a sailor to clean up the cabin. And he dispatched the young pagan, who had just returned from the house on the other bank, to summon Rabbi Elbaz back from Master Levitas’s tabernacle, the splendor of which had driven all thoughts of his only son’s absence out of his mind.

But before Elbaz could arrive and take charge of the boy, who had fallen asleep, Ben Attar took advantage of the respite afforded by this chance occurrence to interrupt his self-imposed mourning in the bowels of the ship, if only for a short while, and to inspect the goods that were ready to leave the ship. He gratefully inhaled the cool night air of the Parisian isle, from which rose the smoke of many fires and sounds of merriment. Screwing up his eyes, he tried to discern on the other bank the place between the vines and the chapel where his young wife rested, waiting to take her last leave of her husband when the memorial was erected on her grave.

He shivered slightly. His wife’s hand was touching his nape. Though it seemed to him that her touch was firmer than usual, he was not certain, for ever since they had arrived at Worms they had avoided touching each other. He looked closely at the dear face that had accompanied him since his youth and that now invited him to descend to the cabin, which was ready for his return, cleaned and tidied and fumigated with lavender to dispel any unpleasant odor. Only the feverish child was still there. Should he be moved somewhere else, or stay there until his father arrived? Ben Attar decided not to touch the boy but to wait for Rabbi Elbaz, who indeed arrived after a short while, alarmed and breathless, stumbling on the rope ladder, and hastened to bend over the child curled up on the floor and call his name anxiously. Then the boy’s bloodshot eyes opened, and despite their tiredness they stared severely at his father’s face. Did he know about the sin he had committed? And if he did, could he save him from the harsh verdict?

At least it is not the cold arching spasm that draws the head toward its death. A strange hope burst forth in the Andalusian rabbi’s soul at the sight of his son curled up on the floor of the cabin like a soft bundle. Was it possible that the absent woman had sent an evil spirit to harm the rabbi, because of the permission he had given to transport her unburied from Verdun to Paris? Me, not him, he shouted bitterly at the spirit, and hurriedly picked the child up in his arms to take him away from the ship to the Jews’ tabernacle.

Yes, the rabbi from Seville had suddenly lost his faith in the ship’s owner, and even rejected rudely the compassion of the first wife, who offered to help him to cover the child. In this way Elbaz fell prey to an evil thought, for he suspected Ben Attar of trying to punish him for his unsuccessful speech in the synagogue in Worms. Since Ben Attar knew that it was forbidden to accuse a man in the midst of his grief or to impede him in his despair, he immediately told Abd el-Shafi to order his sailors to make a stretcher out of ropes so they could move the sick child safely to the opposite bank. The gates to the island were already closed, so they put out a boat and carefully lowered the boy, strapped to the stretcher, onto it, and also his anxious father, and in case of any mishap they also sent the black slave, for whom this was the third crossing to the south bank this day. There was something wonderfully graceful about the little boat pulling away from the colorful, wide-bellied Muslim ship onto the calm surface of the moonlit river, gliding over it almost without a ripple from north to south, toward the convent of Saint Germain des Prés, which was in the process of being rebuilt.

It was nearly midnight when a heavy knock sounded on the ironclad door of the Jews’ house, and the nephew and partner and his wife, who was now a partner despite herself, were asked urgently to take in a sick child with a secret abomination burning within him, lending his eyes a sunken look as though they were outlined with kohl and painting his cheeks with a porcine pinkness. Mistress Esther-Minna welcomed the sick child with great animation, which betrayed, despite her evident distress, signs of mysterious joy. It was as though by means of this sick child coming to be nursed back to health in her house she might be reattached to the members of the expedition, and above all to its leader, whose failure had brought her down as well. Despite the advanced hour, she spared neither her maidservant nor the sleep of her husband, although he immediately sank back onto his bed. She did not even spare the howling of the girl, who had returned from her outing excited and disturbed but not dejected. It was Mistress Esther-Minna’s aim now to be simple and generous, and not only clever and right. She welcomed her little guest by turning the sleeping arrangements upside down. First she moved Master Levitas to one side of the little tabernacle and put Rabbi Elbaz to sleep there too, so that he could share in honoring the commandment, and then she entreated Abulafia to take a coverlet and disappear into his daughter’s chamber to find his sleep by her side, all to enable her to set the boy down next to her in her husband’s bed, so that she could watch over him with her full attention until morning.

Mistress Abulafia lay awake and alert beside the motherless child from Seville, determined not to miss a breath or a murmur, a sigh or a groan, whether due to pain or to a dream. Outside, the kindly moon had sunk in the sky, and black velvet sailed slowly upon the Seine, which embraced between its two graceful banks the heart of little Paris. Then a new and terrible dread mingled with a gentle, uncomprehended happiness in the soul of this childless woman who was no longer young, as she swore to herself that she would not allow the angel of death to strike a second blow at these dark-skinned southerners, who had been dragged to Europe by the force of her repudiation. Instead, she would enlist the full force of her virtue and resourcefulness in the service of this sick child, to whom it was not only her duty but her desire to be a second mother.

So awake was Mistress Esther-Minna that she dispensed not only with sleep but with the lightest catnap. She rose from her bed and stood like a sentry over the sick child, who tossed and turned in his sleep as his sin donned and doffed various nightmarish forms. So deep was the silence all around that Mistress Esther-Minna felt that she could not only catch every rustle and creak of her house but even interpret it correctly. From the other side of the wall came Abulafia’s rapid breathing, as he tried to ignore his daughter’s disturbed spirit while she lay beside him. Below, in the little tabernacle, the rabbi was pouring out his prayers in a whisper, so as not to disturb Master Levitas’s sleep, perfumed as it was with the joyful command to dwell in booths. So wonderful was the silence all around her that she imagined that if she opened her window and strained her ears she would catch not only the thudding of the water against the side of the ship but even the idolater’s footsteps as he made his way longingly to the sculptor’s cottage. And if she tried very hard, closing her eyes and inclining her head and extinguishing every stray thought or wish inside herself, she might even hear the faintest sigh of the first wife as she sought love in the bowels of the ship.

7.

She crumbled the ashy lavender and straightened the rug once more on the floorboards to make the place more inviting for sleep, already waiting to fold the mourner into its embrace. The first wife was also intending to extinguish the lamp before leaving, so the shadows flitting among the timbers would not disturb her husband, whose eyes were following her every movement. But before she could reach out to the lamp she was stopped by two commands that were evidently interconnected: Do not put it out and do not leave. It was as though the North African Jew felt that to the presence of his first and now only wife was added something new, which could not be deciphered in darkness but needed a full flame to bring to light everything that was latent within it. Small wonder, then, that these few words, spoken gently and longingly yet firmly, made the large, calm woman tremble, and her eyelids slowly sank.

Although she knew only too well that it was forbidden to mourn on festive days, that what Ben Attar was doing here in the belly of the ship was a private and rebellious mourning and the Andalusian rabbi had warned him that heaven would not recognize it, she was nevertheless a little frightened of the sudden upsurge of desire that, despite its strict legality, not only burst forth from sorrow and mourning but might also contain a strange desire to join the dead wife to the living one in a single congress on the rug. She raised her eyes imploringly to her husband and tried to indicate to him with a slight gesture of hesitation that if what was stirring here was a need of the body and not of the heart it would be better to wait a few days more until the ship had set sail again, its swaying motion helping to soothe the body that had become so stiff and hard on the arduous land journey, which had not yet ended.

But Ben Attar’s mind was directed not at all to his own body but to his wife’s, whose warm being surrounded and caressed every pore in his flesh. Though he had not touched her as a man since that dreamlike nocturnal entry into the narrow alleys of Worms when his two wives had been snatched away from him, he knew by looking that on the funereal journey from the Lotharingian to the Frankish river, the living wife had neither stiffened nor hardened, but on the contrary had softened and widened, and that a new opening might have opened up in her. This he set about exposing, not only with the seriousness of his lovemaking but also with a hint of resentment, which surprised him both with its novelty and with its strength.

Though the resentment was directed not against the wife who was with him, whom his lips and hands were exploring with powerful desire, but against the one who was absent, who had so quickly despaired of her secondary status that she had wanted not to remain on the earth but to be embraced by it, the only wife nevertheless sensed that it was aimed at her, and for the first time since she had known herself as a woman, she felt herself repudiating her husband, as though the arduous journey she had made between those two great European rivers had made her into a new woman. Even though in the narrow confines of a tiny cabin, hemmed in by timbers blackened by the fires of ancient combat, any repudiation could be only mental and not real, Ben Attar was obliged to hold her fast as he stripped her of layer after layer of clothing, something he had never had to do before, for her nakedness, with all its mysteries, had always been offered to him generously and totally, from the outset, without any effort on his part.

Their strange, frenetic struggle confirmed her fear that the husband who was disrobing her was not only trying to unite with what she had now acquired as sole wife but was also seeking within her the remnants of his second wife. This certainty, which made her soul shake with sorrow and pain, also surprisingly aroused within her a sharp, unfamiliar thrill, so that for a moment it seemed as though her two breasts, breaking free from the fiercely ripped fabric of her restraining clothing, were not only her own breasts but those of another woman, whose nipples and navel were arousing and fueling her own desire.

Indeed, by the lamplight flickering on her plump form and on limbs that had been filled out and rounded by those leisurely dinners beside the campfire on their wayside halts between the Île de France and Lotharingia, it became clear to the increasingly agitated husband that the prophecy of his heart had not been mistaken, and that on those accursed, miserable days, as his second wife was ebbing away, his first wife was secretly flowering. The excited Ben Attar hastened to untie one of the yellowing cords with which Abd el-Shafi had bound the beams together, this time not to tie himself up, as he had done during the sea voyage to assuage and console a young wife for the sorrow of being the second and not the first, but to bind the hands of this large, heavy woman, his only wife, who was now required to satisfy his lascivious desire, which despite all that had occurred still refused to relinquish the power of its duality.

Was it the same desire that was welling up in the belly of the ship that drew the young idol-worshipper back along the dark lanes of the north bank to the cottage with the idols, where he had been imprisoned that afternoon with the two Jewish children? He was attracted there not only by a strange urge to worship at last before a representation of his own image rather than images of strangers, but also because he could not forget the laughter of the women who had so boldly reached out to touch his private parts, which had since remained full and stiff in homage to them. Although the black youth’s desire was as yet virginal and vague both in its objects and in its limits, the autumn night of Paris, concealing its stars with a fine mist, was charming and seductive enough to lead this son of the desert, the sensitive heir of the navigational skills of his ancestors, safely among the dark cottages and fields, the croaking of frogs and the howling of jackals and the barking of foxes, straight to the woodcarver’s cottage, where to his joy a small light was still shining.

The face suspended in the open window was so dark that the man did not notice the youth staring at him from so near, even though it was his image that the sculptor was trying to conjure up in his mind. Even in the depths of the night, while the three women lay sleeping among the figurines scattered around the room, the desire of his craft did not leave the old artisan alone, for before the Son of God revealed himself in his last and final form in the approaching millennium, the sculptor wished to season the vision of his savior with the features of a man of alien race. With his copper chisel he continued to gouge the white flesh of the block of wood before him, struggling to dredge the black face up from the dimness of his memory, not suspecting that it was right beside him, framed in his own window. But the eldest of the three women, turning in her sleep, noticed the dark visitor, who was drawn in wonder to his own image emerging from the flesh of the white wood. Without saying a word to the craftsman, who was totally absorbed in his work, she rose and tiptoed barefoot outside and stretched out a warm hand to touch the bare neck of the African, who was so startled and excited by the renewed touch on his flesh that he was too afraid even to turn his head.

The old woman, who despite her white hair was full of the sap of life, did not release the fair prey that had been attracted to the light out of the depths of the night. With a grip that might have been a caress she drew him inside the cottage. She was in no hurry to hand him over to the surprised artisan, but took him close to the darkening embers of the dying fire so he could warm his body before being stripped of his tattered clothes. Although the young man did not know whether she was trying to strip him in the middle of the second watch of the night as a model for the artisan’s image or for her own benefit, he did not hold back but undid his belt himself, so as to display to the man and the woman, who were both smiling amiably, his trimmed manhood, which was aching and lengthening, having been unable for so many hours to find relief.

A similar circumcised male organ, albeit a limp and childish one that still knew neither pain nor enmity, was exposed between the legs of young Elbaz as he tossed and turned in the coils of his fever upon Abulafia’s bed, trying to tear off his tunic and trousers with his little hands. Although Mistress Esther-Minna attempted delicately to cover up his private parts and conceal them from her eyes, the child kept trying to push the coverlet away again, as though it were not a simple covering but an abominable shaggy beast clinging to him. But Mistress Abulafia neither wakened her husband to share in her anxiety for the child nor called Rabbi Elbaz up from the tabernacle to join her in praying for the little Andalusian. This woman had such confidence in herself that she preferred to pray to heaven on her own, without partners whose prayers might be rejected.

Since she was not so naive as to rely on prayer alone, she hastened to rouse her old Lotharingian servant and told her to boil some water so that she could wipe away with a soft, damp towel the perspiration and the remains of vomit that clung to the child’s thin limbs, as well as the tears trickling down his face. She adamantly rejected any attempt to explain events as the result of witchcraft or demons—faithful to her late father, Rabbi Levitas, who liked to find in every detail and in every place, however obscure or mean, the holy spirit, which should be listened to—so she now tried, while washing the rabbi’s son, whose tangled curls reminded her suddenly of her husband’s, to extract from his mutterings the secret of the young people’s excursion on the right bank. A strange excursion, which had made the clever boy feverish and confused and had relieved the wretched girl of her depression.

But when the boy fluttered his scorching eyes and saw the bright eyes of the new wife, whose repudiation had brought real calamity upon the owner of the ship and failure to his father the rabbi, he sealed his lips. Although the wise and fair woman was leaning over him with tender maternal affection, he knew only too well that if he let out the secret of the swine’s flesh in his guts, it would become a two-edged sword that would be plunged straight back into his belly. But Mistress Esther-Minna, who had suffered for several years because of the silence of the holy spirit dwelling in the mute girl, would on no account allow the holy spirit contained within this strange boy the right of silence. Moreover, in the half-light of the second watch, this dark-skinned, tousled child looked like a little Abulafia who had miraculously arrived in her house in order to be shaped and educated from scratch. Thus she decided to draw out the Andalusian holy spirit by roundabout means. Picking up her chair, she placed it at the head of the bed, behind the child, who was lying on his back, washed and perfumed, so that he would not see her face and fear her reactions but might think that he was talking to himself in a dream. In fact the whispered questions of the hidden woman brought instant replies from the innocent young heart, although not in the language in which they were asked but in wild, fragmented Andalusian Arabic. Even though Mistress Esther-Minna understood not a word of the passionate Arabic confession that sought to yield up to her the sin of eating abominable things, she did not interrupt the flow of the words but listened very intently, in the confident hope that having begun in the tongue of the Ishmaelites, it would eventually end in the tongue of the Jews.

Meanwhile, the Arabic confession pierced the curtain to enchant with its old familiar tones the spirit of a young girl whose depression had been turned to wonder as by the wave of a magic wand, and whose dullness had been turned to terror by the sight of the carved images, the women’s laughter, and the taste of swine’s flesh. Instead of rising and howling as she usually did, to summon up from the sea depths the mother who had abandoned her forever, she crept cautiously out of her bed to stare attentively at her father, Abulafia, who had fallen peacefully asleep at her side. And instead of tugging insistently at his hands as usual, to remind him to give her back the mother who had forsaken her, she merely reached out a small but firm hand to touch his curly locks and stroke his face, so that he would open his eyes and produce for her out of the misty night not her lost mother but the young idol-worshipper, who might lead her back to the cottage of wonders on the opposite bank of the river.

The words of the boy Elbaz’s Ishmaelite confession had the power not only to pierce a curtain and excite the dream of the wondering girl in her cubicle but to continue down the winding wooden staircase and to float, faintly yet clearly, through the greenery bedecking Master Levitas’s little tabernacle, which symbolized the transitory nature of human existence, particularly of that of the Jews. There, beside the palm fronds, myrtle sprigs, and boughs of willow, bound together and placed like a slim, fresh second wife on Master Levitas’s couch, was one who could not only hear the feverish child’s muddled Arabic confession but understand it too. But the rabbi, his own mouth tainted by the abominable food eaten by his only begotten son, took care not to stir from his place or utter a sound, so as not to offer a sign to the young confessor that his father was suffering with him.

Meanwhile, in the little cabin in the bowels of the old guardship anchored in the harbor, a strange new thought on the subject of sin and punishment was deliriously coursing. The North African husband, whose eyes roamed excitedly over the ample, pity-inspiring nakedness of the large quiet woman shimmering on the floor of the cabin, suddenly believed that he could merge the young mistress of the cabin who had gone to her rest with the first wife who was lying in front of him. Therefore, before he submitted to the lust fermenting in his blood, urging him to fall to his knees to embrace caress kiss lick bite the pure rounded parts of his wife’s body, he closed his eyes for an instant, and with the imagination of his desire he conjured up the face and body of his second wife. Now he could see the narrow amber-colored eyes with their green glint, could scan the long brown legs, the legs of a girl who had been married before she had run her course, could feel with the palms of his outstretched hands the smoothness of the flat stomach, the firm, desire-laden breasts, the jab of the reddish nipples erect with passion. To the sound of the gurgling of the Seine underneath him, he clung resolutely to his desire to blend two lusts in a single act of coupling. But while he melted and dissolved in longing for the duality taking shape within him, and while his hand was groping to remove his robe so as to add passionate nakedness to an unbridled congress replete with possibilities, he felt his rigid member anticipating him in its quest for satisfaction and relief, and, still beating against the mourner’s rent in his robe, helplessly enveloping itself, and itself alone, in a warm slippery coating of its own seed.

Is this the congress I was longing for? Ben Attar thought in a fit of despair and disappointment at the seed he had discharged in vain into the little cabin. For if so, this is not a congress but a punishment that I am seeking to inflict not only upon myself but upon the one who is left with me. Indeed, the first wife, who had learned since her nuptials to interpret every detail of her husband’s actions, could already detect the smell of the vainly spilled seed in the dark cabin. Her heavy hips, which had been arched in anticipation of coupling, subsided disappointedly on the rug on which had slept another woman, who had not disappeared even in death. The hands that had longed to comfort with gentle caresses the beloved man’s weary, aching form quietly unfolded. Although she was ostensibly freed now, she did not even cover her cheated nakedness but merely blew out the now pointless lamp, curled up like a huge white fetus, and tried to join her humiliation not only to that of the absent woman, who had been expected to put off her shroud and couple against her will, but also that of the manhood that had lost its head and missed its aim.

Indeed, this manhood was now shamefully soft, limp and weeping. Although it feared to approach the sole wife in this state, for she might already have despaired of it, it knew that its only hope of redeeming itself was through real contact, which would bring consolation if not consummation. So the owner of the ship went down on his knees in the dark and cautiously felt with his lips along the woman’s naked body to locate the right and proper place in which to bury this shamefaced object. And there, in the wide space between her breasts, Ben Attar felt a moistness in his beard, so that for a moment he was startled by the idea that the woman, having despaired of his manhood, was attempting to suckle him. Cautiously he reached out his hands and brought her two nipples close to his ears, perhaps to hear the sound of this new flux. But the hillocks of sweetness that gently tickled his earlobes were dry, and to judge by their soft limpness, desire was still far from them. Only then was the man who had led the arduous expedition from the south to the north obliged to recognize that the tears he had held back so stubbornly for so many days were now pouring un-stoppably from his eyes.

Ben Attar could not have imagined how wonderful and sweet the woman found the man’s tears flowing between her breasts. She kept quiet, careful to give no sign that might cause them to stop. Sometimes it is precisely when manhood fails and gives way that maleness takes on a sweet and attractive taste. Even though she knew the tears were for the second wife, who was lost forever, for whom henceforth he was precluded from finding a substitute, she was neither offended nor angry. On the contrary, she felt proud that the tears for a woman who was lost were not lost themselves, but flowed between her own breasts and dripped into her navel. She had a hope that the second wife’s tears might moisten her own desire and enter in all purity into her womb, this womb that now parted its lips to whisper with its little tongue the sole wife’s announcement that she did not want the man’s fantasy but only his real presence and his love.

The spirit of the imagination can not only be extended, it can also run riot, as it did now among the women waking each other up in the woodcarver’s cottage at the sight of the young visitor, who had been drawn in the depths of the night to worship naked before the representation of his own image. First they laughed a little and jabbered in their own language at the sight of the ebony figure standing in silence and seeking the lines of its face wrestling with the white flesh of the wood, but slowly their eyes seemed to widen in sweet dread at the sight of the neat groove dividing two dark gleaming buttocks carved by a perfect hand, until the white-haired woman sighed deeply and put her little hand to her mouth to bite it.

The woman’s open display of desire, instead of making her friends snigger in embarrassment, swept away any anxiety over pleasure at the sight of this nocturnal tempter standing in all the splendor of his youthful manhood. The innocent devotion with which the African stranger stripped himself before the old craftsman inflamed the lascivious imagination not of one woman alone but of all three, opening a dark breach to a new, disturbing, but infinitely degenerate horizon.

Already a flash of lecherous complicity passed from one woman’s eyes to the others’, and was silently aimed at the elderly master of the house, to check whether he still needed the visible image standing motionless before him, or whether the young man might now be requisitioned for another need, neither artistic nor religious but full of the wonderful sap of life. The old woodcarver, whose spirit was so amused by the women’s excitement filling his cottage that it seemed to be infecting him too, laid down his chisel, dusted the wood chips off the block of wood struggling to find its wounded identity, then covered it with a piece of cloth as though to hide from its view the orgy that was about to break out. Then he withdrew to his cot in a dark little corner, but he did not cover his face before he knew which of the three women was favored by fate in the draw.

It emerged that the three women were unwilling, or unable, to wait to draw lots, preferring to cast in their lot together in unbridled licentiousness. Before they could strip off their garments they approached the youth, whose black flesh gave them the freedom to pass him from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from lust to lust, as though he were an animal rather than a human. The more the triangular desire raging in the third watch of the night intensified in its brazen savagery, the more the wonderful thrill that transported the crumbling virginity of the son of the desert became blended with sorrow and pain. From the groans of pleasure bursting from his mouth, resembling the sound of a wild camel, he knew that to the end of his days he would have no rest from the fury of his longings, which would always draw him and his descendants to make their way from the south to the north.

Surprisingly, with the first glimmer of daylight on the horizon, the same tones of sorrow and pain were intermingled also in the thoughts of Esther-Minna, whose heart was pierced by a fine new longing. Unlike the slave who was being tossed about in the old woodcarver’s cottage on the right bank with the kisses and bites of three unbridled women, the painful longing in the Jews’ house in the Rue de la Harpe next to Saint Michael’s fountain aimed gently and compassionately in the opposite direction, from north to south. Ever since that night when Ben Attar first appeared in her house with the boy, she had ostensibly been waiting only for the moment when she would finally be freed from the nightmare of the southern expedition that had come to turn her world upside down, but now, as the moment of their departure came closer and closer, Mistress Abulafia felt a certain sadness at losing her discomfited visitors, perhaps especially because of her new anxiety about the Andalusian child who had finally sunk into a deep sleep in her husband’s bed. For after he had finished mumbling and groaning his confession in the outlandish, impenetrable language of the Ishmaelites, he began, this time in the familiar and holy tongue of the Jews, to recount his fears concerning the imminent sea voyage.

Esther-Minna had never before had a real child whom she could train in the paths of righteousness by day and watch over by night, and so when Rabbi Elbaz’s outline appeared in the doorway of her bedchamber with the first breeze of morning, she hurried out to meet him, to prevent him from depriving her of this graceful, curly-headed little boy who had finally found rest in sleep. She intensified her description of the past night’s fever, and made the father promise to let her atone for what she had occasioned with devoted nursing and suitable vigils. Yes, now she felt regret for the obstinacy of her repudiation, if not for any sin. And the rabbi from Seville rubbed the sleep from his eyes in amazement, for ever since he had first disembarked from the old guardship in the port of Paris, he had never heard a word of regret from his elegant opponent, whose blue eyes now reminded him of the blue sky of distant Andalus, which he did not know if he would ever see again.

Mistress Abulafia hastened to the tabernacle to waken her brother from a night’s sleep sweetened by the command to dwell in booths and by the rustle of the breeze in the greenery and the scent of the citron that lay beside his couch. With unusual firmness she asked the befuddled Master Levitas to allow the rabbi to lead the prayers for the day of the Great Hosanna, so that he could be the first to strip the willow by beating it with all his might in memory of the ruined Sanctuary and its worship. And so it was. To the accompaniment of the raindrops that had been skipping on the surface of the Seine since dawn and the voices of the Frankish travelers on the river, Rabbi Elbaz was the first to begin the recitation of the hosanna: May you be delivered and saved from war and from famine, from captivity and from pestilence, and from all manner of destroyers and from all manner of punishments that are experienced in the world. May you all go up to Jerusalem the pure, and may your feet trample upon those who hate you, and may your feet dance in the court of the sanctuary, and may you raise in your hands the fruit of the citron tree, palm fronds, myrtles, and willows of the brook, and say, “Hosanna, Lord saveus!”

But the rabbi’s hosanna did not penetrate into the bowels of the old guardship tied up on the northern shore and swaying now under the feet of the Ishmaelite crew, woken from their slumbers by the rain. Even less could the recitation that shook the tabernacle on the left bank reach as far as the old artisan’s cottage at the bottom of the hill of the white smudge. But while the idol-worshipper’s body was still lying wearily among the idols at the feet of his own shrouded image, bitten by the greedy desire of the Gallic women and stained by the endless outpourings of his seed, Ben Attar too was woken by the rain, and accompanied by the sound of the camel shuffling around in the belly of the ship and the smell of the remains of the condiments, which had spilled from the sacks and mingled with each other, he began to stroke, kiss, and squeeze with all his strength the only wife he had left. And the first wife hastened to respond to the wakening man with all the power of her love in a perfect and unique congress that was free from all extraneous thoughts and from any remnant.

8.

Had the time not come at last to unfurl the triangular lateen sail on the tall mast of the old guardship and raise the anchor from the bottom of the Seine? Had the time not come to depart from this Europe with its darkening sky and sail back to the safety of home? Even the patience of such a hardy and experienced captain as Abd el-Shafi was strained at the sight of the wind and rain lashing the Île de France on the Day of Rejoicing in the Law, for who knew as well as he how urgent it was to set sail and leave before the northern winds grew stronger on the ocean? So anxious was the captain that he was prepared to protest against the calm Ishmaelite fatalism that left it to Allah to govern the infinite world according to his mysterious will, and he demanded urgently that Abu Lutfi stir his Jewish partner from the hesitations of his grief and force him to put off the torn robe of mourning and bring himself up from the bowels of the ship to the old bridge, to pronounce there the order that all the Ishmaelites had been so eagerly awaiting—to leave desolate Europe behind and return to luxuriant Africa, to hear once more the sweet sound of the muezzin’s call.

Perhaps it was the blood of Abd el-Shafi’s grandsire’s sire, who had been taken captive by the Vikings more than a century before and had spent many years as their prisoner, that sharpened the captain’s senses to perceive the dangerous, unhealthy hesitancy that was spreading like ivy over all Ben Attar’s thoughts and deeds. This fear concerned not only the voyage, which had lost the charm of novelty and adventure and was left mainly with the memory of hardships and distress, but also a deeper doubt about the leavetaking, both from the nephew, whose partnership had been renewed through blood and suffering, and from his blue-eyed wife, whose stern elegance had suddenly changed her old repudiation into a powerful new attraction.

In truth, a strange new attraction emanated from this woman toward the sorrowing uncle, the extinction of whose duality had left around him, or even within him, a new, unclear space, like that left by the loss of a severed limb. There was no way of telling whether Esther-Minna herself was in command, or was even aware, of the new quality emanating from her toward the uncle, who consented in honor of the closing days of the autumn festivals to emerge from his close mourning in the bowels of the ship, bathe and dress his beard and hair, and exchange his rent robe for a fresh one, so that he could clasp to his breast in holiness and purity the soft little scroll of the Law that was handed to him by Master Levitas and execute the modest dance ordained by custom.

What precisely was the secret of this strange new attraction passing between the northern woman and the southern man, which was able to delay the moment of parting despite the impatience of the Ishmaelite seamen? The North African’s enmity toward Abulafia’s new wife still blazed within him, and if his young wife had not departed to what was supposed to be a better world, it would not have occurred to Ben Attar to withdraw from the campaign he had launched, and despite the ban and interdict pronounced against him by the prayer leader in Worms he would have sought out another river on the European continent and challenged the woman to a third round. There, on the north or south or west or east bank, he would not have allowed the rabbi from Seville to appoint a court or a judge, but he would have taken the stand himself, alone and face-to-face with the stubborn woman, and overwhelmed her repudiation with a speech woven not of texts of the sages but of the wisdom of life.

His second wife’s unexpected death had indeed brought him a victory, but it was a hollow and bitter victory that had not extinguished his anger. Thus the nature of the new attraction that joined the two adversaries was unclear. Surely it was not possible that now, on the brink of the departure from Europe and the parting of north from south, the mind should be expected to endure the mounting suspicion that the extended intimacy enforced upon these two who had traveled together from Paris to Worms had kindled in one, or even perhaps both, a demented, forbidden fantasy, and that the hope of realizing it was delaying the departure? The date had already been set for the summer meeting of the renewed partnership in the Bay of Barcelona, and there remained nothing for Ben Attar to do at the close of the festival but to give the order for the Ishmaelite crew to spread the sail, weigh anchor, and glide downstream to the mouth of the river and out onto the great ocean, which, who could tell, might be longing to rock the old guardship on its waves.

Ostensibly what delayed them was the sickness of the rabbi’s son. This sickness Mistress Abulafia fomented with dark potions, so that she could plead with the rabbi and more particularly with the leader of the expedition to take pity on the little invalid, and instead of exposing him to wind and rain linger a little and let him recover in the comfort of her bed. But a sixth sense told the merchant of Tangier that behind his new niece’s pleas there lurked a brazen wish from which he himself might draw some advantage. Therefore, before determining what reply he should give, he sent his only wife to the sick child to discover, by questioning and feeling him, what was real and what was feigned in his body and his soul. The experienced, sensitive woman returned with news for her husband. Although it was almost certain that the eating of abominable flesh, which had so upset the child and infected him with guilt, was no mere fantasy, it had touched his soul alone and not his body. In other words, the sickness itself was entirely feigned.

Still Ben Attar held back from speaking ill of the feigned invalid, who had been taken under such a gentle yet enthusiastic wing. Since he even felt a certain compassion for the desire for a child that had suddenly arisen in the bosom of a barren adversary who was no longer young, he tried to think afresh how he might turn the pretended malady into a further pledge to fortify his partnership. Precisely because of its dramatic rupture, there might still lurk in the renewed partnership some hidden cracks through which that accursed repudiation might grow back, by attempted prevarication, by dispatching a strange agent, some private local associate instead of Abulafia to the summer meeting in Barcelona to bring the North Africans their money and take the new merchandise. Although it would not occur to Ben Attar to postpone the sailing on account of a woman’s desire for a curly-haired child, it seemed that he would be willing to abandon the young passenger and leave him behind in Paris until the following summer, so that he could recover body and soul. This he would do on condition that Abulafia would give an explicit promise, backed by an oath on the soul of his wife—not the living one but the first, drowned one—not only to watch over the child as the apple of his eye but to join him to the purse of money that he himself would bring to the ancient inn overlooking the azure bay of the Spanish March. Only when they had finished chanting the lament for the ruined shrine together would they hand the child over to Abu Lutfi, who would choose a young horse for him from Benveniste for the night ride by way of Tortosa, Toledo, and Cordoba back to his waiting father in Seville.

It was surprising that Ben Attar, who was already enthusiastic about Esther-Minna’s excitement at taking under her wing, without the pain or trouble of childbearing, a full-grown, black-curled, clever child, whom she might take by the hand and promenade through the lanes of the little island without shame or reproach, did not take the trouble to obtain Rabbi Elbaz’s assent to having his young son expropriated in order to buttress the partnership between north and south, which had been renewed by dint of a death alone. Indeed, on the basis of the familiarity acquired in the course of the journey, the merchant suspected that the rabbi he had hired in Andalus would not only be pleased to spare his only child the hardships and dangers of the return sea voyage, but would even seek to join him. But Ben Attar, unwilling to dispense with the rabbi’s company and learned conversation on the ocean waves and unwilling to be left alone with his only consort in the midst of alien Ishmaelites, chose to keep his own counsel for the time being. He spoke not a word to the anxiously waiting Jews, but went first to the ship to consult his faithful old Ishmaelite partner about his new plan.

But Abu Lutfi turned out to be not so faithful, for during the proprietor’s absence he had taken it upon himself to give permission to the ship’s captain not only to prepare the ship for sailing but to embark a new cargo in place of that which had been discharged, so as to stabilize the ship on the ocean. A new cargo? exclaimed the amazed Jew, who since his second wife’s death had let his commercial vigilance slacken. Is there anything fit to buy here in this godforsaken land that might interest people in the South? Abu Lutfi made no answer, but merely winked and led his partner into the hold, from which there rose a strange and unfamiliar smell mingled with a new sound. There, in the darkness of the space that had been cleared of its cargo, Ben Attar saw human beings attached to the timbers of the old guard ship.

Slaves? the Jew whispered in horror, and at once he asked himself whether there were not a disturbing sign here of things to come, for Abu Lutfi, who had begun as a humble assistant in Ben Attar’s shop in Tangier, had never before dared to act on his own initiative without obtaining the blessing of his Jewish master. Was this the price the Ishmaelite was levying for his participation in the vicissitudes of the conflict of the Jews, a conflict that despite its hardships had incidentally broadened and strengthened the Arab’s mind and perhaps his soul as well? Or was it merely evidence of a new contempt or even anger that the Ishmaelite felt for the weakness of a husband who had allowed his young second wife to depart this life in her prime, only to please a new woman, whose hair was fair, her eyes blue, her countenance pale and sad?

Come and see close up, whispered Abu Lutfi to his partner, who was still hesitating to advance into the bowels of his ship, from which a new menace seemed to emanate. But the Ishmaelite relentlessly compelled the Jew to inspect the new, disturbing human cargo, which froze at the sight of the new master, who was wondering about its nature and also its value. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Ben Attar could discern the slaves and distinguish them one from another. His heart pounded as he saw that there were five tall, thin males dressed in long leather tunics. And his breath stopped for an instant as he noticed that the slivers of daylight filtering between the timbers glinted on yellow hair and blue eyes, whose sadness and sub-missiveness the darkness was unable to disguise. With a rush of excitement whose strength caused him real distress, he sighed, closed his eyes, and turned a grim face toward Abu Lutfi, who was smiling proudly, to inquire not only as to the price of the disturbing cargo shackled in the hold of his ship but also as to its faith.

It was remarkable how his natural commercial instincts had led this Jew with no previous experience of slave trading to make precisely the right connection between the two questions. Abu Lutfi proudly recounted how, while the Jews were praying for remission of their sins in Verdun, Abd el-Shafi had made the first contact with a slave dealer, and how after the death of the second wife they had covertly agreed that in return for five sacks of fragrant condiments and ten copper caldrons he would receive five northern slaves, whose modest price was due not to any mental or bodily defect or weakness but purely to a defect in their faith, or, it would be truer to say, in their lack of faith. For their origin was in the wild remote regions in the extreme north of this gloomy continent, where even a thousand years had not sufficed to bring the good news of the birth, death, and resurrection of the crucified god. In simple speech, these were also idol-worshippers, albeit fair northerners rather than dark southerners, whose inscrutable and unsteady thoughts and deeds made them unpredictable and therefore dangerous, so it was no wonder that their price on the local slave market was so low.

Idol-worshippers? Ben Attar whispered despairingly to Abu Lutfi, who nodded his head, his eyes gleaming. And what shall we feed them on? And who will look after them? But the Ishmaelite was so pleased with the deal he had done on his own initiative that he promised his Jewish friend to take full responsibility for the new cargo. Not only would he stay close to them to ensure that they caused no mishap, but during the long voyage he would also try to teach them to speak some Arabic and to understand orders, which would increase their value and their selling price. He had no doubt that their fair and reddish hair and hue, their blue and green eyes, would attract and excite the folk in Andalus and the Maghreb, who would clamor for a further consignment.

Ben Attar said nothing, but a strange sadness overtook him and made him want to escape. He hurried up on deck, where Abd el-Shafi and some of the burly seamen, who had treated him respectfully before, roughly seized hold of his garment and rudely asked him to set sail at once, before the northern winds blew up and turned the ship into a deathtrap. Ben Attar felt that this new violence and impudent speech were occasioned not only by his hesitancy but by the absence of the second wife, for whose death the Ishmaelites held him indirectly to blame. Hurriedly he mumbled a new promise. But it seemed that the Jew’s promises were worthless now, for the men threatened him openly that if he did not assemble the Jewish passengers forthwith, they would weigh anchor at dawn and sail without them, and even without him.

Ben Attar knew that their threat was genuine and that if he did not agree to leave, he would lose his ship. Suddenly he felt lighter, as though the Ishmaelites had managed to trample under their rough sandals once and for all the hesitancy that had been consuming him ever since he had arrived in Paris. He hastened to Abulafia’s house on the left bank to summon his wife and the rabbi urgently back to the ship, and to discuss with Abulafia and his wife not only the conditions under which the supposed invalid might be left in their home but particularly those under which he would be returned the following summer. Ben Attar still could not shake off his doubts and uncertainties touching the patched-up partnership. It was as though the dagger of the ban that had been thrust into him had not vanished or been returned to its sheath on the death of the second wife but had merely been wrapped in a soft old cloth, and on his departure from Europe some pretext would be found to plunge it into his image, which would haunt this gloomy house like a ghost. He suspected that Esther-Minna had not forsaken her hostility to this partnership, which would take Abulafia out of her control once more and set him to wander the distant roads of the south, where he would be reunited with his uncle. Who could guarantee that Ben Attar would not craftily revert, there on the faraway dark continent, even in secret, to the ways of his forebears?

It would be better, Ben Attar said to himself as he hurriedly crossed the river by way of the charming lanes of the little isle, to accede to the sudden desire of a childless woman for a temporary adopted son, in order to strengthen the renewed partnership indirectly. Surprisingly, he was still not troubled by the possibility that Elbaz would resist any attempt to deprive him of his only son as a pledge. Did the Jewish merchant really think that in hiring a rabbi, one hired not only his knowledge and his wisdom but also his feelings and his soul? Or was there a secret desire to punish the Andalusian for the self-confidence and love of debate that had lured them into agreeing to a further tribunal in that boggy midden on the Rhine?

But when Ben Attar was standing with the other Jews around the bed of the young traveler, whose black eyes opened in terror to hear his fate decided, and announced his willingness to leave him behind, he realized that his authority was waning among his fellow Jews as well as among the Ishmaelites. Not only did Rabbi Elbaz not require his consent to entrust his son to Mistress Abulafia for convalescence, but he had already decided to invite himself to stay as well and to accompany his son on the journey overland.

In an instant and for the first time, the merchant experienced a powerful new fear that would—so he felt in his desperation—accompany him through his life as though it had become his second wife. His face flushed and he began to tremble with rage at the treachery of the rabbi, who was willing to abandon him and his only wife, who was sitting quietly in a corner of the room, unveiled, staring at her husband with her gentle eyes, and to let the rabbi would let them sail all alone, without the protection of his sanctity or prayers, in the old guardship, her deck swarming with impudent Ishmaelites while in her hold were shackled idol-worshippers who might be concealing Lord knew what schemes behind their blue eyes. If this rabbi dared to usurp Ben Attar’s authority and honor in this way, who could tell whether this desertion betokened not only a grim turn in the destiny of the journey home, but also a secret plot to sabotage the renewed partnership by another cunning betrayal, which would make the rabbi, returning with his son to Andalus next summer, into a courier for Abulafia, who might still be held back by his wife?

Vengeful thoughts continued to race through the North African’s mind. If a plot was afoot, perhaps he ought to warn the rabbi that if he abandoned his employer, he would forfeit the promised fee for his wisdom and learning, especially since in the end these had availed nothing. But on further reflection, the experienced merchant held back from uttering the threat that was choking him, certain that Abulafia and his wife would find a way of recompensing the rabbi for his lost fee, and also because it was clear to him that what was needed in this desperate twilight of the festival’s end was not a threat, which would exacerbate the rift and heighten the loneliness and dread of the journey home, but only sense and sensitivity, which would ensure that the imminent parting between the southern and northern partners should retain within it an additional pledge which would make certain that at the beginning of the month of Ab the ancient Roman inn would indeed witness a cordial meeting between a loving uncle and a beloved nephew.

Ben Attar stared deep into the eyes of his nephew’s wife, trying to determine the proper pledge to exact from this stern contestant so that the blood of his young wife should not have been shed in vain on the altar of the renewed partnership. Esther-Minna, unperturbed by the man’s piercing gaze, neither lowered her eyes nor dimmed their radiance, but merely narrowed them slightly in a gentle and reproachful warning, soundlessly inviting the apprehensive southerner to listen instead of staring. Indeed, the many hours that these two strong and determined adversaries had spent in each other’s company had taught them to interpret each other correctly. Moreover, the North African was unable to forget how this woman had collapsed in a swoon on the night of her defeat in the judgment at Villa Le Juif, and how he had bent down to raise her from the undergrowth and carried her some distance in his arms to the campfire. No wonder, then, that he understood her hint and obeyed her invitation to avert his eyes and prick up his ears and hearken to her pledge, beginning now to howl behind the curtain.

After all, if they could all agree to leave an Andalusian boy-child in the heart of Europe, where the stormclouds were already gathering at the approach of the millennium, as a pledge to guarantee the partners’ summer meeting in the Bay of Barcelona, it was only right to reinforce it with a parallel pledge and take another child in his place from north to south. And if no boy-child was available for the purpose, a girl-child would serve as well to make the curly-haired young husband overcome any scheme that a stern, childless, proud, and suspicious wife might hatch to sabotage his renewed relations with the rock from which he was hewn. In this way Ben Attar might ensure that Abulafia would indeed come himself to the Spanish March, to take his daughter back from the enchanted continent to the accursed one.

That was the strange idea that now flickered, to their shared astonishment, at one and the same moment in the minds of two hardened adversaries, who had skirmished at first from a distance of two continents, then face to face, and who now, on the brink of parting, in the midst of the hesitations and suspicions they nursed in their hearts, were united in fear and weariness in a new idea. By seeking to exchange one child for another, they would ensure not only the existence of the summer meeting in the Bay of Barcelona, as Ben Attar wished, but also its propriety, as Esther-Minna desired.

Anyone who listened attentively to the girl’s renewed crying could recognize that since meeting the southern children, her howls of despair had turned into howls of longing. And anyone who, like Esther-Minna, did not believe that witchcraft and demons had played a part in her birth could only be pleased to return her, if only for a short time, to the azure shores of her native land, so that she could revel in the smells and colors that had faded in her memory and exchange the torments of longing for sweet reality. Moreover, in this way, liberated from the obligation to attend to her, Mistress Abulafia would be able to accompany her husband on his springtime journey, not only to enjoy the partners’ meeting in the inn but to observe close up how the Christian millennium passed in Ishmaelite territory, without Jewish duality of wives, and also to see with her own eyes how the clever uncle divided up the spoils of trade.

And so, on a Parisian autumn evening, to the sound of the bells of the abbey of Saint Germain des Prés, which abutted the riverbank, the old repudiation melted away and the partnership reborn from the dust of the nearby grave of the second wife was strengthened and reforged in the flickering candlelight, so powerfully that it seemed it would henceforth be even stronger and firmer than it had been before Abulafia made the acquaintance of his wife in the inn in Orléans. While Abulafia was still trying to comprehend the converging intentions of his wife and his uncle, the whispered instruction was already being given behind the curtain to the Teutonic maidservant to make the girl ready for a sea voyage and to prepare her cubicle for the supposed invalid, who was rubbing his little feet against the covers as he might have rubbed them against the great mast. Even Master Levitas, who knew how to beget a further thought out of any new idea, wasted no time in wondering at the doings of his older sister, but was already musing on the possible advantage he could take of the Andalusian rabbi’s wit and wisdom, so that by the next spring they would not be eating the bread of charity.

Finally, wearied and worn out, Ben Attar made a sign to his wife to rise up and follow him, and without glancing either at the rabbi or at Abulafia he hurried out of the house, as though fearing some further attempt by the new wife to tighten his partnership to the strangling point. Emerging into the cool evening air, he crossed the river by the swaying ferry and made his way confidently through the lanes of the Parisian isle, which had become a kind of second home for him in the course of the past month, to bring to Abu Lutfi and Abd el-Shafi the good news that the long-awaited order was now lying upon his tongue. As he approached the little anchorage on the right bank and looked at the mass of masts and sails huddled together in the darkness of the little port, his breath was taken away by the fear that the Ishmaelites might have put their threat into effect and set sail without him. But no, the old guardship was still bobbing there, and despite the long time that had elapsed since she had first cast anchor in the harbor of the Île de France, she had not been sullied by her surroundings but still stood out from the Christian craft all around.

The deck was empty, apart from the light of a single lantern, and it seemed that no one had sensed their coming, to unroll the ladder. Since Ben Attar did not yet know that the black slave, who could not discern his masters’ presence by their scent alone, had not returned to the ship from his amatory expedition on the right bank, he began to think that some plot had been hatched against him. Then, as his feet sank into the mud of the riverbank and his wife’s face disappeared again behind a heavy veil, he felt his whole being shaken by despair and disappointment at the rabbi’s abandonment of him, and he raised an Arabic cry that startled the Frankish sailors all around him, but not those who should have been listening on the ship. Just as he was about to call again, his wife removed her veil and, anticipating him, gave a loud, wild shout that he would never have imagined her capable of producing. The woman’s piercing cry summoned the seamen up from belowdecks, and here was Abd el-Shafi hurrying to fetch his master and his only wife up onto the deck of their ship in his strong arms.

Tomorrow we sail for Africa, Ben Attar announced to his captain, as though Africa were not thousands of miles away but just beyond the horizon. Abd el-Shafi said not a word but smiled and nodded, as though he did not need the Jew’s consent to set sail but was only waiting for Abu Lutfi to finish attending to his slaves. Indeed, to judge by the way the seamen were excitedly coming and going to the hold, it seemed as though the stabilization of the ship had been reinforced in the past few hours and some new human cargo, requiring more room, had been taken down belowdecks. Consequently, it was not to be wondered at if the news that the rabbi and his son had left the expedition was received with satisfaction, or if the additional news concerning the new passenger, a bewitched young girl, was met with some misgivings. But when Abu Lutfi was reminded how ten years before she had crawled among the piles of merchandise on the first boat that had sailed to Barcelona, he agreed to take her on board once again.

It seemed as though this Ishmaelite, who had been so easygoing and restrained before, was gradually taking control of the whole ship, to the point that Ben Attar was fearful of descending belowdecks to see what had been added to the shackled cargo. In the gloom gaining control of his soul, he did not join his first and only wife, who had installed herself in her cabin in the bow, but went first to look for the young idolater, to get him to brew him some of his beloved herbal drink. To his amazement, it seemed that the town had swallowed up the black youth. Not only did Abu Lutfi not know where he had gone, but he was not even taking the trouble to look for him, as though now that he had taken on so many new slaves he did not need the old one. Meanwhile the night was growing darker, and the Jew, whose fear was growing stronger all the time, stood leaning on the rail, while all around the crew was busy preparing the ship to sail. With painful longing in his eyes he stared at the lights of the little town as though he were looking for the burial place of his second wife, in whose dust he suddenly wanted to warm himself, instead of being presently cast upon the cold depths of a savage ocean.

At the end of the third watch the triangular lateen sail was hoisted and unfurled in all its splendor, and it seemed that nobody and nothing could stop the old guardship from sailing down the Seine to the ocean and making her way back to her warm homeland. In the murky morning light Abu Lutfi woke his Jewish partner, who had dozed off despondently huddled among empty sacks on the old bridge, and announced the arrival of the new passenger, who was standing like a woolen bundle on the riverbank, between her sire and his new wife, with a glowing flush on her cheeks, dressed in warm new clothes to protect her from storms at sea.

She was not the only passenger joining the ship, whose sail was beginning to fill, for in the first broken rays of daylight Ben Attar could make out to his surprise the small, familiar form of Rabbi Elbaz. It turned out that although the rabbi had remained true to his resolve not to endanger his son with the sea voyage, even if he was only a feigned invalid, and to trust the promise given by Abulafia and his wife to return him to Andalus overland and to receive in return their unfortunate little girl, so far as he himself was concerned he had changed his mind and was determined to rejoin the old guardship, not only in order to return to Seville as fast as possible and receive the promised fee, but to prove to the North African Jew who had hired him that he would neither abandon nor betray the mission he had accepted, to defend the status and propriety of a second wife. Even if God had decided to take her to himself and to bury her on the left bank of faraway Paris, her erect, noble form was deeply engraved in the rabbi’s soul, and her robe and veil still floated before his eyes. No, Elbaz would never forget her, and the speeches he had made for her and about her, both in the winery at Villa Le Juif and in the synagogue of Worms, shone like diamonds in his memory, side by side with the legal texts and moral sayings that he had not managed to weave into his speeches but that he kept ready, if needed, for a further contest of wits in the case of a second second wife.

Thus, confused, excited, and even a little frightened, Elbaz boarded the ship with his bundle and fell into Ben Attar’s arms, burying in his lord’s chest both his loyalty and his apprehensions about the coming journey. It looked for a moment as if they were silently exchanging tears. Since he would be alone in his cabin near the bow and it was out of the question for the girl to be put in the hold, the bewitched young passenger was put next to him, after a light wooden partition had been erected. Already Mistress Esther-Minna was hastening to make both his bed and that of the quaking child comfortable with thick covers, and she hugged the girl tight to quell her fears while Abulafia acceded to Abu Lutfi’s request to go belowdecks to peer at the cargo of slaves, who were shifting restlessly, waiting for the ship to sail. But when Abulafia came up on deck again, flushed and confused by what his eyes had seen, he said nothing, either to his new wife or to his uncle, in order not to delay the long-awaited moment of departure.

When the moment did come, it was not quiet but tuneful, for before they weighed anchor and disembarked those who were staying behind, Abd el-Shafi placed his hands on his ears to hear only the silence of his God and began to wail like the muezzin of the great mosque in Tangier, issuing the call of the Prophet to the faithful to fall on their faces and beseech Allah to turn all adverse winds to fair ones. Although there were too few Jews to compete with the eight prostrate Muslims, they could still muster a company, numbering not three but four, for Master Levitas, not neglecting the sacred duty of leavetaking, had risen early and stood now on the bridge of the ship to reinforce the parting prayers of the southern Jews. When both the Muslims and the Jews had concluded their prayers and the neighboring Christian seamen had added their blessings, there was nothing whatever to prevent the ship from retracing its route to its point of departure.

Back again came the slight rocking motion, which seemed to have been forgotten during the forty days on land. Although it was the gentle motion of the river rather than the violence of the ocean, the current was still surprisingly rapid, either because they were now going downstream or because of the autumn winds. No sooner had the travelers remembered to turn around to take their leave of the little Parisian isle than it was gone, hidden by the first bend of the river and swallowed up in the brilliance of the eastern sun soaring relentlessly behind them, soon to dance before the prow of the ship as she gathered speed. But the calm presence of the beauty of nature on either bank no longer soothed the Jewish travelers’ hearts as they leaned silently on the ropes that fringed the deck, but a faint dread forced them to scan the undergrowth for a human figure with whom they could at least exchange a parting wave. The chill and gloom of the European autumn seemed to intensify the silence of the world, and since there was no child at the masthead to survey the world beyond the vegetation on the riverbank, anyone wishing to make some contact had no choice but to seek a sign of life in the beautiful purple leaves that fell slowly and soundlessly from the boughs of the great, sad trees that cast their shadows deep on the fast-flowing water.

Although the captain, who had once more bound himself to the mast and attached crewmen to his traces to navigate better, clung resolutely to his decision to press on night and day toward the great ocean, he could not fail to accede to a firm request from Abu Lutfi, whose authority on board was growing hour by hour, to put in briefly at the port of Rouen. Perhaps the duke who had bought the little she-camel from them had realized that for the sake of the health of the young desert creature in his care it would be best for him to furnish her with a male partner, at a modest price. Thus, in the twilight of the second day after the tawny ship pulled out of the port of Paris, the anchor was lowered again not far from the little houses of Rouen. Abd el-Shafi, who was unwilling on any account to detain the ship until daybreak, had a dinghy lowered into the dark water and sent the Ishmaelite merchant, with the Andalusian rabbi as interpreter, in search of the duke or his Jewish counselor, to make them the astute offer. But before much time had passed Abu Lutfi returned despondently to Ben Attar, clutching some yellowish tatters in his hand. The she-camel had not endured for long in her new owner’s care, and because of neglect or pining for her mate, she had breathed her last and collapsed in an open space behind the cathedral. Instead of wrapping the noble desert beast in a shroud and giving her decent burial until the millennium arrived, with its promise of universal resurrection, the Christian duke had exposed her to the curiosity and greed of the local inhabitants, who had soon cut her up into little pieces and realized whatever they could for them, so as to recover something of the purchase price. They had not spared even her hide, but had stripped it off and tanned it, and discovered its wonderful property of restoring the shine and sparkle to tarnished gold or copper.

But Ben Attar paid no attention to the plaints of his old partner, who since the disappearance of the black pagan had become bitter and domineering. Without saying a word, he took a strip of soft, yellowish hide from the remnants of the she-camel and brought it close to his face, to see whether the little tatter of skin still retained the smell that used to assail his nostrils each time he made his way through the hold on his way to the second wife’s cabin. While the captain gave orders in the dead of the night to weigh anchor, light a great lantern at the prow, and sail on, the North African Jew was so overcome with the sadness of sweet longing for the wife he had lost that he could not resist descending into the bowels of his ship to take a brief look at the abandoned cabin.

In the semidarkness, beside the outline of the he-camel, whose fate was apparently sealed since the death of his mate in Rouen, the Jewish proprietor discovered that his captain had cleverly given the new slaves oars that protruded outward through ancient openings in the side of the ship, which had been closed up and now had been reopened. As he groped his way amid the creak of oars and the splash of water, he observed, from the number of the shapes moving around him, that his partner had increased and reinforced the stabilization of the ship. Feeling a new excitement rising up and shaking his guts and his loins, he approached to inspect the nature of the new arrivals, who were huddled in the cabin where he had sat as a mourner. But before he could lower his eyes he was pierced by the frightened, curious looks of three flaxen-haired, blue-eyed women shackled to each other by their long legs. Abu Lutfi explained with a conspiratorial smile what a good bargain he had made just before they set sail, but he was pushed away impatiently by the Jew, who hurried up on deck to discover that despite the late hour, everyone was awake—not only the captain and his crew, but even his wife, who was sitting swaddled in several layers of clothing on the old bridge, listening to the chatter of Rabbi Elbaz, who was still wondering if he had been right to leave his only son, an orphan, in the care of a strange woman, an obstinate adversary and childless contestant.

Even though Ben Attar knew that it would be impossible to conceal from his wife and certainly from the rabbi what his eyes had just beheld belowdecks, he tried to delay giving the news, and wordlessly, with a weary gesture, he gently indicated to his wife that she should leave the rabbi from Seville and return to her cabin. Right then, as an improper and unworthy suggestion rose up to him from the bowels of the ship, he needed to discover again, with a fearful body, how far one could push the limits of a sole wife in carnal knowledge, which always contained some spiritual knowledge as well.

But when he left the cabin at the close of the third watch of the night, while the indefatigable Abd el-Shafi, full of the excitement of being under sail again, looked down on him from the mast, he knew what he had always known—that one woman could never fulfill the promise of another. His eyes sought in vain for the black slave, who would always emerge from a corner and between watches, between wives, would prostrate himself and touch the hem of Ben Attar’s garment submissively before handing him the steaming herbal brew. Where was the idolater? the Jew asked himself longingly. Who had detained him? Was he alive? Had the new slaves so turned Abu Lutfi’s head that he had so easily abandoned his faithful servant? For if Ben Attar were to exert his imagination to the utmost, he could not imagine that he could never track the slave down, even if he exercised the full weight of his old authority and managed to stop the ship and turn her around to search for the lost African all over the Île de France. This was not only because the black youth was too well hidden in that faraway cottage, secure in the clutches of three women who were determined, as the millennium drew nigh, to satisfy the desire of the old woodcarver to add the lines of an alien race to his vision, but also because the captive himself, the gleaming black youth, had fallen in love with his captivity, within which the spring of his passion flowed so strongly.

So Ben Attar strode off dejectedly to seek out another co-religionist, who would stand with him against a loneliness that he had never acknowledged before and that now flooded his whole being. Since the rabbi was fast asleep, he drew aside the thin partition to inspect the girl, his own kin, who was sailing back to her birthplace as a counter-pledge. Only now, in the silent moonlight that contended with the first rays of dawn, did he observe how the baby who had crawled on board the first boat to Barcelona had grown and filled out. A strange idea gripped him—to surprise Abulafia and his wife and to give them back at their meeting in the Spanish March a little girl who was betrothed, if not actually wed. If he persisted, there was no doubt that despite the enchantment or, who knew, even because of it, he would be able to find someone who would want to make love with the heavy but lush and youthful form that was now sleeping, cramped and curled up, in the tiny cabin. Despite her accursed enchantment, she recalled the beauty of a young woman who had abandoned her and disappeared into the depths of the sea.

Now he rose, so surprised at the new thought that had been born in him that he could not find rest or return to his bed before descending into the belly of the ship, of which he still considered himself the sole master, to check not only whether Abu Lutfi was really keeping watch but also whether the three blue-eyed women were still attached together at their long legs. There in the bowels of the ship, it turned out that one of the women had fallen suddenly sick and had been loosed from her bonds, and was sitting in a corner, pale and trembling, with her head thrown back, covered in a soiled and torn silk robe that had been found among the sooty timbers. Ben Attar, recognizing with pain the source of the torn robe, stood silently staring at the blue eyes, which opened and turned in defeat to his feet, and at the thin hands of the idol-worshipper, who was clutching the image of an animal. Because he knew that he would never, ever touch her, or her companions, he went back up on deck.

The North African Jew thought to himself, This is what the new wife and all her wise friends who dwell on the Rhine desire—that from now on I shall take on every day anew, but only in my mind will there be crumbs and tatters of a second wife who has vanished. He was enfolded in such deep sorrow that he could not resist waking Rabbi Elbaz to look him straight in the face and tell him how great was the defeat he had suffered, for the renewed partnership between north and south could never atone or comfort him for what he had lost forever on this journey.

But the rabbi from Seville, caught up in his own sleepy thoughts, heard the words of the ship’s owner as he lamented for what he had lost as if all the troubles of the world were subsumed in this sorrow. It was as if they would not soon have to face the waves of the raging ocean, where the river flowed into the sea and an ancient sunken Viking ship stood like a great bird, and fierce northern winds would turn the fate of the second wife into a gentle, easy story compared to the story of what awaited her husband and his party. Suddenly the little rabbi was filled with joy at having agreed to leave his son with Mistress Abulafia, so that despite the millennium he could return safely overland to his home. He already imagined Master Levitas and his sister clothing the child in the black garb of the people of Worms and placing a hat with a horn on his head, and waking him in the morning, a little feverish, to sit and study an ancient text and a new law. Then tears welled in his eyes for the child who was saved, and once more the poetic urge woke within him, to write one more poem, the fourth. He felt around him to see whether that old quill pen and inkwell were still there among the timbers of the cabin. But he found nothing. And so he was compelled, to the accompaniment of Ben Attar’s long drawn-out keening, to save in his head the first line that had composed itself inside him: Is there a sea between us, that I should not turnaside to visit thee…

Haifa, 1994–1996