A Journey to the End of the Millennium (39 page)

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.

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.