A Journey to the End of the Millennium (6 page)

While Abulafia told his partners about the mounting fear of the Christians over the approaching millennium, Ben Attar laid his hand lightly on Abu Lutfi’s shoulder as he lay almost in the campfire and reflected on how easy relations between Ishmaelites and Israelites were. Before the thousandth anniversary of the birth of their prophet, the Messiah son of Joseph and the Messiah son of David would have arrived to put every spurious prophet in his proper place. For Abulafia’s safety, Ben Attar advised him to come back across the border between the two great faiths in preparation for the millennium and take a house close to Benveniste’s tavern, where he could also lodge his wretched daughter and her nurse, so as to spend the millennial year in the company of those who counted the years differently. Who knew whether the unusual nature of the child, whom Ben Attar himself had not set eyes upon these seven years, might not arouse evil thoughts in the heart of someone who wished in this holy year to rid the world of all his own demons? Ben Attar couched his thoughts in cautious words
so as not to offend his beloved nephew. Although he might have been the first to notice that the face of the baby born to his nephew thirteen years before the impending millennium was not right, he would never have presumed of his own accord to associate her, by so much as a hint, with the demonic world.

It was her beautiful mother, Abulafia’s late wife, who in her despair had soon called her baby “my she-devil” or “the little witch,” so as to negate the evil thoughts of others by anticipating them. The poor woman thought she would show her family and friends that she was not afraid of her child, and was even prepared to see her strangeness as a kind of comical gift sent by heaven to try her. Not only did she make no attempt to hide the baby with the bulging eyes and the narrow forehead, but she made a point of taking her around, dressed in a shiny silk gown and adorned with colored ribbons, in an effort to include her kinsfolk and companions in the trial that God had sent her way. But it seemed that even if they tried, none could extract affection from a baby who cried in a deep, dull voice that made their hearts shudder. In particular, her grandmother, Abulafia’s mother and Ben Attar’s older sister, did not take to her. The old woman sank into depression at the sight of her demonic granddaughter, whom her daughter-in-law brought to see her every day, to show her how she was growing and developing. Abulafia was soon obliged to intervene so as to prevent his wife from making the poor child into the sole test of the world’s
humanity
. As he had difficulty in exercising his authority over her and getting her to cease her wanderings, particularly her daily visits to his mother, one morning he locked the iron-clad door of the house when he went out to Ben Ghiyyat’s little house of study, where he would intone the morning prayers in his beautiful voice before going off to serve in Ben Attar’s shop. At first he felt pangs of remorse for what he had done, then he believed that his wife would manage to escape, and eventually he was so busy that he forgot all about her. But when he returned that evening he found his house locked as he had left it, with the baby asleep in her cradle and his wife’s beautiful face pale and sunken in silent sadness. That night she knelt before him and
promised
not to disobey him again and not to take the baby to his mother, so long as he swore never again to lock her in alone with the baby, and he acceded to her request.

Consequently, not a soul suspected her motives when on the next day, before the time of the afternoon prayer, she appeared with her baby at Ben Attar’s shop and asked her husband to watch over the fruit of his loins for a short while, so that she might stroll in the market square and seek fresh amulets from the nomads coming in from the desert, in the hope that they might counteract the spells that were bewitching her daughter. In the meantime, Abulafia went as usual to chant the afternoon and evening prayers in his melodious voice in Ben Ghiyyat’s prayer house, and so Uncle Ben Attar was called upon to watch over the bundle that had been deposited among the bolts of cloth until her mother returned. But she was in no hurry to come back. At first she did indeed walk to the city gate and wander among the stalls of the nomads from the distant Sahara, but she recoiled from the twisted, hairy amulets of the idolaters, not even daring to pick them up and feel them. Instead she was attracted for some reason by an old fishhook made from an elephant’s tail, which she purchased, and she hastened outside the walls of the city to the seashore to try to catch a real fish. At that twilight hour there was not a soul to be seen on the shore except a Muslim fisherman, who was startled by her, for it was not usual on the seashore at Tangier to see a young woman wandering on her own, not to mention a Jewess, especially one holding a fishhook. And so when she addressed him and asked him to show her how to prepare the hook and cast it into the water, he hesitated at first to become involved with her, but because she was very beautiful he could not refuse her, and after learning from him what she learned, she removed her sandals, rolled up her robe, and clambered onto a rock, where she sat down and dropped her hook into the waves of the sea, which occasionally broke violently and splashed her. Her luck was with her, and in the first few minutes she managed to catch a large fish. Flushed with her unexpected success, she refused to leave the shore, which was wrapped in the glow of the setting sun, and the fisherman, who had begun to fear that this would not end well, wondered whether to remain where he was and see that the waves did not wash her away or hurry to carry news of her to whoever by now must surely be looking for her. But when darkness fell and the shadowy figure on the rock became blurred, he was afraid that if anything happened to her he would be held to blame, and so he ran inside the walls to tell one of
the Jews about her. Right inside the gate he stumbled on Abulafia and Ben Attar and the Jews from the yeshiva, who were looking for her, but when they hurried to the rock where she was said to be sitting, all they found was the fishhook thrust into a crevice. At first Abulafia turned on the fisherman, and then he demanded that he be bound and forced to confess the truth, but when at high tide the sea gave up his wife’s body, with her hands and feet tied with the colored ribbons she had used to adorn her daughter’s clothing, all knew at once that she had taken her own life and that no man’s hand had touched her for evil.

It was not only shame at his wife’s grievous sin and guilt at his own indifference and strictness which had caused it but also a terrible anger at his mother that made Abulafia ask to be banished from his native city. He thought at first to punish his mother by secretly leaving the accursed child in her house and going off himself to the Land of Israel, whose sanctity would atone for all their transgressions. But Ben Attar, suspecting his intentions, caught the poor wretch hiding in the hold of an Egyptian ship, and with the assistance of Ben Ghiyyat he compelled him at the last moment to return to dry land. To make up for the unsuccessful flight and to prevent a future recurrence, he proposed a small commercial expedition—to take some camel hides and skins of wild beasts from the desert to some merchants in Granada. As for the bewitched babe, if Abulafia’s mother indeed refused to take her into her home, Ben Attar himself would take care of her for the time being. Thus, instead of sailing eastward to the Holy Land, which
almost
certainly would have atoned for nothing and might even in its holiness have embroiled the sinner in additional sins, the grieving
widower
went to Andalus with a large and heavy cargo of hides, freed of bearing the reproaches of his kith and kin. Since Ben Attar’s first wife, who at that time was his only wife, was afraid to keep the deformed child in her home in case the new fetus that was or would be in her belly should peep out, behold his destined playmate, and refuse to emerge into the light of day, Abu Lutfi went to a nearby village and brought back for Ben Attar a distant kinswoman, an elderly,
experienced
nurse, who would look after the child in Abulafia’s empty house until the widowed father returned from his journey.

Abulafia, however, was in no hurry to return from his journey, but extended it considerably on his own initiative. When he learned that
people in the Christian country of Catalonia were eager for such hides as he had brought from the desert, he contained himself and did not sell the merchandise in Granada but traveled north and crossed the frontier of the faiths near Barcelona so as to meet Christian merchants, who indeed leapt upon his wares and doubled his profit. Instead of returning at once to Tangier, the young trader decided to exploit the breach he had made. He sent the proceeds back to his uncle with a pair of trustworthy Jews from Tarragona and requested fresh
merchandise
, while he himself pressed on into the villages and estates of
southern
Provence to identify new customers and gain a sense of their wants, taking advantage of the protection afforded by the signing in those years of a new treaty among the Christians known as the “Peace of God,” which was made with the aim of protecting traders and
wayfarers
. He did not inquire about the baby he had left behind. It was as if she did not exist.

This may have been the secret reason for the rapid success of Ben Attar’s trading network, whose head was in the Bay of Tangier while its two arms embraced the Atlas Mountains in the south and Provence and Gascony in the north. Afraid and ashamed to return to his native town and grateful to his uncle for looking after the infant, Abulafia had resolved to repay Ben Attar, his benefactor and employer, with feverish energy and imaginative resourcefulness, which year by year widened both the circle of his customers and the range of his merchandise. Abu Lutfi could no longer make do with his traditional spring journey to the northern Atlas but had to penetrate deeper into the valleys and the villages, and even inside the nomads’ tents, in search of polished brass ware, curved daggers, and pungent condiments, for the smell of the desert sufficed to attract and excite the new Christian customers, who began to remember as their millennium approached that their crucified Lord too had come to them from the desert. Meanwhile, the
Ishmaelite
nurse stayed with the bewitched child, who had been forgotten by everyone except Ben Attar, who looked in occasionally to check that she still existed and that he was not paying money to maintain a ghost.

But the baby, despite her many defects, did not seem to want to turn into a ghost. She insisted on remaining as real as always. Even though she was very backward in her development and limited in her movements, and her eyes remained bulging and blank, as though she
belonged to a different race, nevertheless she increased the range of her movement so that the stern-faced Ishmaelite nurse was obliged to take great care to see that there was no loophole in the house through which her charge might accidentally escape into a world that was not expecting her. At this point the uncle’s uncle, the sage Ben Ghiyyat, intervened, when he went in the spring to prepare Abulafia’s house for Passover. Whatever might have been the Creator’s purpose in forming such a creature, the covenant made at Mount Sinai still embraced her too, and her father who begot her could not be replaced by an
Ishmaelite
nurse, who owed nothing to the God of Israel except her inferiority. And even though Ben Attar was by now accustomed to the
responsibility
he had taken upon himself, and feared that if Abulafia were forced to take his child back his sense of guilt would be diminished and with it his energy and resourcefulness, which in the past two years had made Ben Attar into one of the grandees of the city, he did not wish to disobey his great uncle, who at fifty-five years of age seemed to frighten death itself. Although Abulafia could not be compelled to return to Tangier and take back his offspring, Ben Attar decided to take her to her father himself, in person and without prior warning.

And so, ten years before the millennium, Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi set out on their first journey from Tangier to the port of Barcelona. Although they repeated the journey summer after summer, increasing the number of ships each year, the memory of the first trip was
engraved
deeply in Ben Attar’s heart, and not only because of the novelty of the voyage, which showed him close up how the natural forces—the sun, the moon, the galaxies, the wind, the waves—contended silently opposite the lazily moving shoreline, but because of the intimacy that grew up in the narrow confines of the ship between him and his fellow travelers, especially the strange, dumb child, for even though she was attached by a cord to the nurse who accompanied her, it was not short enough to prevent her from toddling to him from time to time and attempting to thrust her little fingers into his eyes. Sailing slowly among the bolts of cloth, hides, and oil jars, against the background of the monotonous prattle of a Jew from Barcelona who was traveling with them, he forged a bond with Abulafia’s child, so that occasionally he even let her snuggle mutely against his chest and watch the forms of the two Ishmaelite sailors, who in the midday heat removed their
clothes and stood on the prow as naked as on the day of their birth. Occasionally, when they camped in some desolate bay on the way and he saw the child walking slowly along the shore in the evening twilight, he remembered her mother, who despite everything had bequeathed something of her great beauty to her defective child—a soft line on the cheek, a certain hue, the molding of a thigh. Indeed, on this voyage Ben Attar thought a great deal about Abulafia’s suicidal wife, as though he too bore some guilt, until one night on the sea, in pain and desire, she burst into his dreams.

As it turned out, he was very careful not to let the least hint of this dream escape from his mouth, precisely because the meeting with Abulafia was so emotional, so brimming with love and friendship, that the three of them wept real tears. Yes, all three of them. Abu Lutfi was the first to give in and burst into tears as he embraced his long-haired comrade, who was waiting for them in a new black Christian habit at the entrance to the Roman inn, to which the Jew from Barcelona had taken them. The sobbing of the manly Ishmaelite was so surprising that Abulafia was carried away. Then Ben Attar too felt a lump in his throat, but not enough to make him forget the final return of the child to her father’s care. He gave a signal, and the large nurse, who was standing a few paces away, drew forth the child who was hiding in her skirts and gestured to her to approach Abulafia, who first of all uttered a cry of panic at the unfamiliar bird that was fluttering toward him but then closed his eyes in pain and clasped his child to his chest warmly, strongly, as though he had just realized that he too had been longing for her in her loneliness. But on the next day, in between talking about merchandise and rates of exchange, about merchants’ hopes and
purchasers
’ fickleness, it struck Ben Attar that Abulafia imagined that they had brought the child there only to see him, and that she would
eventually
return whence she had come. Delicately but decisively, he had to remind his nephew of his duties as a father, supporting his words with texts supplied by the sage Ben Ghiyyat. Abulafia listened in
silence
and read the texts, nodding his head, and after reflection
consented
to take the child back. Was it only from a simple sense of paternal duty, or was it also because Ben Attar shrewdly offered him promotion from agent to full partner, so he would share in the profits of his work? Either way, there is no doubt that the old Ishmaelite
nurse’s agreement to go with Abulafia and continue looking after the child in his home in Toulouse until a replacement could be found also helped the widowed father reach his decision.