A Journey to the End of the Millennium (28 page)

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
sub
jected
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.