A Journey to the End of the Millennium (20 page)

Suddenly Master Levitas stood up and struck his brow. Only now had he remembered that in the confusion of the departure from Villa Le Juif he had forgotten to pay the scribes their promised honorarium, and they were bound to suspect that he had ignored his promise
because
the case had not turned out as he had wished, as though the sum were not a fee but a bribe. So distressed was Master Levitas by the thought of this false suspicion that he could find no peace; he could not eat or drink, but walked round and round the fire in a state of dejection. It soon became clear to him that the only way to recover his peace of mind was to return at once to the winery and discharge the forgotten debt. Though Abulafia tried to persuade his brother-in-law to wait for a day or two and not to set out alone at night, Mistress
Esther-Minna
, who knew her brother better than he did and understood that no power in the world could stop this man from hurrying to clear his good name, instructed the startled wagoner to unharness the horse she had been stroking a little earlier and give it to her brother, so that he could atone as quickly as possible for his sin.

While the sound of the horse’s hooves died away to the south, she felt her loneliness intensifying unbearably, so that even her husband’s curly hair, which she loved so much that she sometimes combed it herself in bed, seemed suddenly wild and strange in the firelight. Now she had a strong desire to hurry home, although she did not forget that tonight too her double bed would be requisitioned for the southern visitors. But it did not seem as though the people sitting around the fire were in any hurry to leave. They sat side by side, cross-legged and relaxed, sipping the hot infusion and producing little leather pouches containing multicolored seasonings that they sprinkled on everything they ate to excite their tongues. They were conversing in Arabic in a profound southern calm, as though they were sitting on the safe golden beach of their homeland instead of in a wild and desolate landscape.

It was now perfectly apparent that Master Levitas’s departure was the sign for the two wives to unbend. As soon as they saw that the gentile wagoner was dozing on the driver’s seat of the wagon, they allowed themselves to hitch up their veils a little. Now that the
restoration
of the partnership had turned the hardships of the long journey into something purposeful and successful, they broke into merry
chatter
with each other, laughingly teasing not only Ben Attar but Abulafia too, and even venturing to mock the rabbi, who had laid his head in his son’s lap so as to be better placed for searching for new stars that were not visible in Andalus. And Abulafia, even though he was aware of his wife’s mood, could not be indifferent or cold toward the family
conversation
that was gushing all around him. To please his wife, he leaned toward her from time to time to translate a sentence or two here or there, particularly from what the second wife was saying, for in the flickering firelight she had begun to take charge of the conversation with a kind of pert vitality, as though when she changed her clothes in the bushes she had also received an assurance or promise from her husband that had reinforced her self-confidence.

But Mistress Esther-Minna’s gloom only intensified, as though a crack had appeared in her famous self-assurance. If she had possessed a veil, she would have been happy to hide her face behind it, first and foremost from the glances of her husband, whose evident cheerfulness she found so abhorrent that she felt she wanted to die. Rising swiftly from her place, she headed toward the trees, as though she too were seeking a quiet spot to do what the others had done before her. But as she walked in the dark among the big trees she felt empty rather than full, hungry rather than sated, so she did not stop but pressed on into the thick of the wood, not walking straight ahead but describing a wide circle centered on the flickering fire, until all at once she heard the startled cry of a small wild animal. Stopping short, she rubbed her head despairingly against a tree trunk, as though her God had been
completely
defeated and from now on she must beg for mercy from the trees of the field.

While Mistress Esther-Minna conjured up the image of her young, desired husband packing his sack and saddlebags next summer and setting off to travel a thousand miles to the Bay of Barcelona, to receive from his uncle and partner not only brassware and condiments but also
the scent of double marriage, which clung like the odor of cinnamon to his clothing, the husband in question stood up and began to walk anxiously around the fire, wondering whether his wife’s protracted
absence
demanded his intervention or whether her honor obliged him to hold himself back. Finally, unable to restrain himself, he called her name aloud, hoping for a sign of life. But his wife, hearing his call like a distant echo, held back her reply, not only because she was not certain that her voice would carry that far but also in the belief that only thus, in the dark silence of the damp green thicket, would she find the courage to think a new thought that could dispel the new threat to her honor.

Even though Abulafia knew in his heart that his new wife was silent only to arouse in him a lover’s anxiety, he was not certain whether the spirits of the night would allow her to execute her plan without harming her. Once he was convinced that she was persisting in her silence, he decided to bring her back to the fireside and headed straight for the point from which she had set out, believing that she would be a few paces beyond; but when he had sought her for several long minutes without success and his cries met with no response, he returned to the fire, alarmed and upset that the imagined loss had turned out to be real.

Ben Attar improvised two torches from handfuls of dry leaves and twigs, one for himself and the second for the young husband, who had already lost one wife in the sea, so it was only natural that he should exert himself now not to lose a second in the forest. But Mistress Esther-Minna did not want to get lost, and in fact she was not very far either from the fire or from the two men who were looking for her, their torches flickering among the trees. Because she had not gone in a straight line but had described a wide arc, she was now on the opposite side from her seekers, so she could sit huddled up small under the tree she had just rubbed herself against, her hands clasped at her bosom, sunk deep in thought, waiting for them to give up hope. Then she could return with ladylike composure to the fire, excited by a new idea that had taken root in her heart. But by then the two men who were looking for her had split up and were going in different directions. While her husband went in the same straight line, as though he truly believed that his wife had decided to return to Paris alone, perhaps
navigating by the stars, the older uncle, more familiar with the minds of women, had turned back, for his fine senses told him that a woman who could make him travel for so many long weeks on the ocean was capable of taking care of herself.

The torch was disintegrating in his hand, its last embers
disappearing
among the bushes. So when Ben Attar stumbled over Mistress Esther-Minna in the dark, for a moment he did not know whether he had happened on a human being or on some soft unknown European animal. When he leaned over her, touched her, and tried to lift her, muttering some words to her in Hebrew to see if she had passed out, she, realizing that a fainting fit would justify her disappearance and her silence, closed her eyes tight and imagined herself as the third wife of the sturdy man who was lifting her up, feeling all the trembling of pain and humiliation in her new condition. And for the first time in her life, she, who had always kept her composure and clarity of mind, struggled to make herself dizzy so she could try to faint.

When she opened her eyes, she realized that she had not been pretending to faint, for she was lying by the fire covered with someone else’s robe while Abulafia’s face hovered over her full of astonished admiration, as though in fainting she had acquired a quality she had not possessed before. But although she was very curious to know whether her husband or the twice-wed man who had found her had carried her out of the woods to the fireside, she realized that this was not the time to ask, when all the travelers were surrounding her with affection and fear, as though her fainting had atoned for all the offense of the repudiation. So great was the concern for her welfare that the first wife was unstitching one of the seams in the lining of her
undergarment
, which also served as a kind of secret pouch, and drawing out a tiny vial of sharp-smelling unguent that Abu Lutfi brought her every year from the desert. To judge by the secretive way he gave it to her, it seemed that this was the fabled elixir extracted from the brains or testicles of impure but intelligent monkeys, whose pungent smell was so special that when the first wife rubbed a single drop of it into the new wife’s sallow temple, she had no choice but to sit up immediately.

The strange smell of the drop of desert elixir penetrated the new wife’s temple, immediately flooded the whole of her being, and even seemed to be regulating her breathing, striking a new chord inside her that only reinforced the novel idea that had just come into her mind. When Esther-Minna rose to her feet and climbed smiling into the wagon, leaning out of mere politeness on her husband’s arm and declining with thanks the soft bed of leaves that the two wives had amiably contrived in the depth of the wagon for her, she could clearly envisage the words she would speak to her husband when he was standing before her alone in the small chamber that had been provisionally allocated to them in her brother’s wing of the house.

So firmly had the decision concerning the new direction of her life taken root within her mind that she even dispensed with consulting her brother on his return—or perhaps it was also because for the first time in her life a breach had been opened up in her faith in this brother, who had so often served as her oracle. Even now, in the swaying darkness as the road climbed among the ruins of the city of Lutetia, she could not forget the affront of the faint spiritual smile that had flitted across his face as he listened to Rabbi Elbaz’s dangerous speech, as the rabbi had sought to transform the sorrow and pain and happiness of the marriage bed into a simple and easy pleasure. How was it possible, Mistress Esther-Minna brooded resentfully, that this brother, who like her had grown up in a house immersed in true
religious
discourse, should think that any idea, if it was only dressed up with a few biblical verses, deserved sympathetic examination with the mind, even if the soul should abhor it?

But Master Levitas, who was now crossing the night on horseback on his way back to Villa Le Juif, was not thinking about the rabbi’s speech, nor was he troubled by what his sister might be thinking. Master Levitas was determined to overtake the scribes and preserve his reputation by giving them the promised honorarium, and also to find the Radhanite merchant and offer him a higher price for his two Indian
pearls. It was impossible for this Parisian businessman’s sharp mind not to make a connection between the other’s forceful and hostile intervention during the judgment and the very low price he had offered him the day before. But when Master Levitas reached the winery, swathed in the shadows of its vines, he found the proprietor and his little crowd of workers fast asleep, as though they had been impatient to explore in their dreams the wonderful verdict that they had just heard delivered. And since the three scribes were on their way to Chartres in a cart and the merchant from the Land of Israel had vanished into thin air, Master Levitas had no alternative, as he paced vainly among the wine casks, but to listen to the prattling of the old woman judge, who at the sound of the surprise visitor’s footsteps had hurriedly emerged from the heap of fox furs, which in any case had failed to warm her flesh.

Shivering slightly in the night chill of early autumn as he sheltered between two wine casks on the former judges’ dais, wrapped in an old fox skin, Master Levitas waited for the light of morning to hand over the promised fee with his own hands to the proprietor and to inquire where the courier from the Land of Israel had gone. In the meantime, while waiting for the dawn, he listened to the babbling old woman, who, faithful to the rabbinical precept “Do not speak much with
womankind
,” did not permit the Parisian to get a word in but assailed him with her rapturous impressions of the dark-skinned Jews from the south, the beauty of their wives with their fascinating robes, the purity of the rabbi’s speech, and the sweetness of his child. In particular she dwelled repeatedly on the powerful appearance of Ben Attar, who might—who knew? the widow permitted herself to dream—enlist her as a supplementary wife on board his ship when it sailed back to his sunny homeland.

Master Levitas sat in silence, his eyes closed, and despite the shiver of tiredness he tried, as a level-headed, practical man, to unravel a first fine thread of thought that would enable him to arrange a
compromise
between the partnership that had been resurrected by a
lunatic
verdict and his sister’s self-respect. Perhaps the interminable,
contemptible
prattle of the old woman who had attached herself to him in the depths of the night was beginning to cloud his mind; how else could a decisive, clear-headed man such as himself seriously
contemplate
proposing himself as a fourth member of the revived partnership between south and north, even if only to interpose his own stable, reliable personality between the uncle and his nephew and thus
cushion
the threat of double matrimony that so alarmed his sister? The only reason such an original and bizarre idea sprouted in the mind of this anxious, responsible brother in the depth of night was because he was far from his sister, who was now bathed in the warmth of her
husband’s
body in the dark of the wagon, as though since she had been bested in the arbitration and fainted in the wood his love and desire for her were redoubling by the minute. It was precisely because Mistress Esther-Minna felt this so clearly that she was convinced she did not need her younger brother’s consent or any novel stratagem on his part to make a new declaration to the man who would soon be standing before her in the candlelight and removing his clothes.

So she merely smiled and inclined her head when Rabbi Elbaz turned and inquired politely as to her well-being, as though seeking merit for himself, on the assumption that his wonderful speech had been partly responsible for her fainting. And when they alighted at midnight in the Rue de la Harpe, by the statue of a man holding a harp, and smelled the smell of the river, she smiled again and bowed submissively to the North African man as he entrusted his two wives to her with the newfound authority of the head of the family, although he himself felt constrained to hasten to the ship to inform his anxious Ishmaelite partner that his prayers to Allah had not been in vain, and that with morning they would be able to begin unloading the cargo. It was only after Mistress Abulafia had taken the two women upstairs and smoothed the rabbi’s bedclothes and turned his pillows lest he suffer from sleeplessness beside the two women, who had vanished into their respective chambers, that she instructed the old maidservant to heat some water for her to bathe herself in in the small room that Master Levitas had put at her disposal.

Naked in a large, exquisitely ornamented copper tub that Abulafia had given her as a betrothal gift, her small pink body gleaming, despite her age, with purity and freshness, the blue-eyed woman scrubbed herself with the help of her pagan maid, not so much to remove the lingering scent of the desert elixir as to blend it with the perfume of her usual soap. When she saw that Abulafia wanted to come in and
undress, she dismissed her maid and stood before him in all her
splendor
before putting on the lightest shift she had. And while this
curly-headed
man who was at once husband and nephew, repudiated and attracted, interpreter and accused, victor and vanquished, began to remove his clothes, she told him in a voice only the depths of night could endow with such firmness that since the repudiation of the twice-wed uncle had failed and the partnership with him was about to be revived, she was declaring herself to be a rebellious wife who no longer desired her husband. According to a powerful and ancient law, whose source was not the rabbis of Ashkenaz but the heads of the Babylonian academies themselves, who were universally considered as unchallenged legal authorities, a rebellious wife who no longer desires her husband is compelled to submit to immediate divorce.

The desire that made Abulafia’s soul dizzy did not permit him to digest what had been thrown in his face, and he continued to undress himself, as though the words he had heard had been spoken not by the desired woman, gleaming before him with cleanness, with all her parts revealed to him under her light shift, but by another woman, a hidden, furious, disobedient shade who wished to spatter his ardent seed upon the cold flagstones. With the blunted senses of a man in the grip of lust, Abulafia maintained a blank silence and continued to divest
himself
of his remaining garments, displaying in the little glass that stood on the chest of drawers his face blackened by the fire and his arms scratched from his terrified quest for one who a few hours earlier, he had been certain, had tried to do to him in the wood what another, previous wife had done to him years before in the sea.

Even though Mistress Esther-Minna took a step or two backward and even raised her hands to repel her young husband, who refused to recognize the seriousness of the rebellion confronting him, she was taken by force, roughly and against her will, into the arms of a naked man who would have been willing to have had her faint again if only he could satisfy his lust at once. But just then, as though coming to the aid of the woman in distress, as she grappled not only with her
husband’s
desire but with her own as well, there arose behind the curtain the insistent strident wail of a girl who still missed her Ishmaelite nurse. Abulafia now found himself contending not only with the
rebellion
struggling in his new wife’s damp, fragrant frame but also with the
ghostly cry of his dead wife, calling to him for help from the depths of the sea through the raucous voice of their child.

So his new wife made good her escape, as though Abulafia’s flesh and blood made concrete in the child wailing on the other side of the faded curtain took priority for her over his flesh and blood now
suffering
torments in her presence. When she left the chamber to go to the crying child, Abulafia’s strength gave out. For three whole days, ever since his uncle had appeared in the doorway of his house, he had been buffeted and pressed between beloved but powerfully opposing forces. Just as he was, naked, with his erect member still projecting like a dagger looking for a new target, he entered the tub in which his
supposedly
rebellious wife had just bathed, seeking in the suds the warmth and fragrance of the flesh that had eluded him. And with the wretched child’s bawling still piercing the curtain beside him, his eyes closed painfully at the sight of his spent seed floating on the water.

After a while, still in this water, he heard his wife talking to him gently, compassionate and friendly. Although the verdict of seven
ignorant
judges was no better in her view than that of the seven wine casks on which they had been sitting, she was not so arrogant as to demand that the verdict be annulled, if only out of respect for the rabbi. Since she could not forget either the oriental courier’s applause or the smile that had played around Abulafia’s lips as he translated the rabbi’s words one by one, or particularly the calm curiosity of her brother, her own flesh and blood, on hearing the effrontery of the speech, she had no alternative but to wrap herself in her sorrow and separate herself from all that was most precious to her. And she prayed it would not be accounted sinful by the God of Israel if for the first time in her life she found herself envying the Christian women, who in time of affliction could abandon all and withdraw into a nunnery. But since Jews had no nunneries, all she could do was return to her native town, where her first husband’s kinsfolk lived, in particular her brother-in-law, who had released her from the bonds of levirate marriage on the death of her husband so she could join her brother in Paris. And so, in simplicity and good will, she said to her husband, who lay immersed in water that still bore the scent of her flesh,
My
repudiation
has
failed
and
your
partnership
is
revived,
and
henceforth
you
are
free
once
more
to
travel
the
trade
roads
disguised
as
a
monk
or
a
leper,
to
your
beloved
uncle
and
respected
partner,
with
his
wives
and
his
condiments.
Only
divorce
me
first,
my
lord,
and
I
shall
not
trouble
you
or
any
man
further.
Then
I
shall
take
my
leave
not
only
of
you
and
your
child
but
of
my
brother
and
his
family,
and
return
to
the
river
of
Ashkenaz,
the
river
of
my
childhood,
which
is
incomparably
wider
and
deeper
than
the
river
beyond
that
win
dow.

In fear of the refusal that was sure to follow, she quickly plunged the candle flame into the cooling bathwater in which her startled
husband
was still splashing, and in the great darkness that fell suddenly on the small room she put on a wrap over her light shift, then she quietly toured her guests’ bedchambers to make sure that no one was passing a sleepless night because of inattention on her part. But the four North African travelers, weary and lulled by their victory, did not require any attention from their hostess, whose stubborn repudiation had brought them from the far ends of the earth. Finding that the two wives were breathing calmly in their beds, that the blanket had not slipped off the curled body of the boy Elbaz, and that the rabbi’s beard had not
become
entangled in the embroidery of his pillow, she went to the kitchen to see what food she might offer her guests in the morning, which was not far off. Some time later she returned silently to her own chamber, to find Abulafia wrapped in his traveling cloak, sleeping on a chair beside the bathtub with the large extinguished candle still in it, and there was no way of telling whether he had fallen asleep so swiftly so as not to have to face the rebellion that had been raised against him.