A Journey to the End of the Millennium

by A. B. Yehoshua

  To this end he engaged Abulafia in a lengthy conversation, and because the mute child trembled and moaned at the sight of the horn nodding on his head, Abulafia took him outside and walked with him amid the mud and mire of Paris, among swine, horses, and asses. Leading him across a small wooden bridge, he strolled with him along a wide dirt track known as the Road of Saint James, along which the pilgrims departed on their way to the shrine of Saint James of Compostela at the tip of Iberia. The cold-mannered German pointed out to Abulafia the pilgrims clad in thick capes, with their broad-brimmed felt hats adorned with a scallop shell, holding long poles with leather water bottles attached to the tips, preparing themselves for their long and arduous journey. Then he showed him the women bidding them farewell while braiding their hair and wrapping their ankles in scarlet leggings above their feet, which were shod in stout sandals. All this was meant to indicate to the Moroccan Jew that true faith requires meticulous preparation. Then he explained to the bridegroom the steps of the marriage ceremony in due order, lest any exotic desert whim or Mediterranean habit disrupt the sacrosanct ritual. He introduced some anecdotes from Worms, which, while it might lack the attraction of Paris, and though its houses still rested on gnarled piles, was not lacking in one thing: Jewish scholars. Dead scholars, who watched over living scholars, who in their turn were preparing the world for future generations of scholars still unborn. Clearly, it was vitally important that the future generations should be born in the purity of wedlock, and what purity could there be without security and peace, which were protected by interdict and ban against a man who might seek to take to himself a second wife, or to divorce his wife against her will?

  Abulafia understood that the visitor whom his bride and her brother had summoned from the Rhineland was drawing a clear connection between the annulment of the partnership with Ben Attar and the marriage with Mistress Esther-Minna. Consequently, he was not surprised when, upon their return to the inn—after the pilgrims, who had at first taken the German for a man of consequence, had eventually recognized the Jew in him and pelted him with rotten apples as a first virtuous deed on their arduous journey—Master Kalonymos drew forth from his luggage two strips of dark parchment inscribed in red ink, one for the bridegroom, to remind him of what he had just learned, and the second for the rejected partner, to be sent to him that summer by hand of messenger, together with what was due to him by proper reckoning in exchange for the merchandise that had been sold the previous year.

  And so, on Thursday the eighteenth of Iyar, the thirty-third day of the Omer in the year 4757, after he had promised to his new kinsfolk to dissolve the partnership, final consent was given and the marriage took place. But when the summer month of Tammuz came and the messenger was due to leave for the Spanish March, Abulafia, overcome by a powerful longing for the Bay of Barcelona, repented of the promise he had given. Notwithstanding the grim expression that overtook the pallid face of his new wife, to whom he had been drawn with a mixture of fear and strong desire ever since their wedding night, he was not prepared to part from his old partners by means of a letter, nor did he dare to take it upon himself to divide up the proceeds of the year’s trade and send it by the hand of a stranger. Consequently, after swearing again to his wife and his new brother-in-law that this time he really would take his leave and dissolve the successful partnership so that the repudiation might take effect, he took to the road himself. So divided was his heart between the awesome oath he had sworn and the pain and sorrow that awaited him that he lost his way, and in the Sierra de Andorra he was saved from falling into the hands of highway robbers only by a black leper’s coat that he had bought at the last moment and now donned. And so his delay was extended by ten more days, and for a second year Abu Lutfi joined in marking the fast of the ninth of Ab.

  Clad in his leper’s habit, sounding a clapper so as to keep healthy folk at a distance, Abulafia found his two business partners lying prostrate in the heat of the day between two ruined marble columns that had once adorned the Roman inn. Despite the words of joyful greeting, the embraces and the bows, the southerners could already discern in their northern partner’s lovely eyes the grim signs of separation. When the Ishmaelite heard that Abulafia wished to cut the partnership off in its prime, and was not intending this time to accept the six boatloads of merchandise, he lost his self-control and, getting to his feet, began to wheel around in a rage, until he suddenly stopped in front of a huge olive tree and hit his head against it, the tears coursing down his cheeks, quite different from the tears of joy of the first meeting that had taken place at this very spot eight years before.

  It was not easy for Abulafia to comfort him, both because he was not reconciled in his own mind to parting and dissolving the partnership and because he knew how hard it would be for a Muslim man, who could marry wives according to the state of his wealth and divorce them at will, to understand, let alone respect, the spirit that had animated the new rules, which he now presented to Ben Attar upon a sheet of parchment darkened by the shade of the Black Forest. So they waited as the Ishmaelite’s sobs gradually subsided. Before he could emerge from his grief and reach a false notion that all this was merely a trick that the two Jews were playing on him so as to exclude him from the partnership, Ben Attar decided to subvert the new orders from the north by freely making over his share of the new merchandise to Abu Lutfi, so that Abulafia could accept it without any difficulty from the hands of a non-Jew, who was not subject to the edicts emanating from the Rhineland, or indeed to those coming from Babylon or from the Land of Israel.

  At first Abulafia hesitated to consent to a solution whose southern simplicity would be laughingly dismissed by his fastidious kinsfolk. However, since the boats had already been sent back to Tangier and the goods that had been piled up in Benveniste’s stables for more than three weeks were already enraging the horses and asses whose living quarters they were crowding, he could not be indifferent to the distress of his old partners, and so he consented to accept the merchandise from the hand of the Ishmaelite, who had suddenly, uncomprehendingly, become the owner of everything. But all this, Abulafia warned them once more, was only on condition that all the goods be transported as they were straight to Paris, there to receive the stamp of approval from his kin before being sold to gentiles. His trader’s instincts whispered to him that the higher prices he would receive for them in the Île de France would amply compensate him for the additional hardships and expenses of the long journey.

  While Abu Lutfi was hurriedly mounting his horse to gallop south to Granada, confident that the solution the Jews had found to their problem would also hold good for the wares he would gather during the following year, and despite the lateness of the season, with the first cool signs of autumn already discernible in the air, uncle and nephew found it hard to take leave of each other, for who knew whether this might be their last parting? Since they had been deprived of their joint prayers for the ninth of Ab, with its lamentations and its grief, they wanted to be together to recollect the joy of the daughters of Israel who in bygone times had gone out in search of love and a marriage partner on the fifteenth of the month. But the melody of Abulafia’s prayer turned gloomy at the sight of Ben Attar’s sad face, and so, without being bidden, unable to contain himself, in the darkness gathering around them at the end of their prayers, without campfire or stars in the sky, he began to speak out in praise of the new Mistress Abulafia, so that Ben Attar would not start to hate her. He spoke at length of her wisdom, her refinement, and her charitable deeds, and he dwelled especially on her tender care for his poor child, who had found shelter in her home. Little by little there emerged between the lines his wonder at his desire for the blue-eyed, fair-haired woman, until, carried away in ever more confessional speech, he let fly little secrets of his bedchamber like sparks from a bonfire.

  They parted from each other with mixed emotions. On chilly autumnal roads, journeying with purposeful determination, Abulafia took his six heavily laden carts to his new home
in Paris, to hear from his beloved wife and her brother a clear and decisive verdict, which, as expected, dismissed any Ishmaelite subterfuge to dissimulate the continuation of the partnership with the twice-wed southern Jew. To thwart any further attempt at Mediterranean sophistry, they insisted on confiscating the whole of his stock in trade and selling it themselves, so as to be satisfied that the partnership had been broken once and for all, at their own hands. They agreed to send the proceeds of the sale, after deduction of expenses, southward in its entirety, to the two partners who were now deemed past partners, along with the Ishmaelite nurse whose time had elapsed.

  When the two southern partners arrived once more at Benveniste’s tavern in Barcelona, this time with seven boatloads, in the hope of renewing their trade, they were informed by Benveniste that Mistress Esther-Minna had anticipated them. He led them, excited at the thought of finally meeting the new wife face to face, to a small cubicle in his stable, and there, in the darkness full of smells of straw and hay, knelt the old Ishmaelite woman calmly surrounded by her bundles, gleaming with the golden bangles she had amassed in the course of her years of service, a broad grin exposing the single tooth that remained in her mouth. And before they could recover their senses, she drew from her bosom a familiar leopard-skin pouch containing gold coins, the proceeds of the highly successful sale of the merchandise, to be divided now between two instead of three. And so, in the year 4758 of the creation according to the reckoning of the Jews, 388 of the Prophet’s removal from Mecca to Medina, two years before the portentous millennium of the Christians, Abulafia’s delays turned into utter absence.

  6.

  After so many days of soaring and heaving between the mast and the ropes of a swaying ship, it was small wonder the dry land exercised such a powerful pull even on light, nimble legs that they refused to go on standing silently atop the wide hill that rose gently on the north bank of the river, and without asking permission they sank slowly and carefully into a full oriental kneeling position on the ground, toward the thrill of grass, stones, and clods of earth, whose smell had been all but forgotten during the long voyage. Even the joyful dampness that now bedewed those young eyes did not dim one whit the attentive look the rabbi’s son directed at his master, who from all his men that afternoon had selected the boy from Seville as his sole companion on an early, somewhat furtive reconnaissance, intended to prepare for the first stage of the contest with the business partner who had withdrawn into the nearby city.

  By the ruins of a stone arch, perhaps left over from an ancient Roman temple, the Jewish merchant from North Africa now stood gazing with contained excitement at the fields and woods exposed in this saffron-colored light of lazy summer, already tinged with the fresh gray droplets of autumn. From his minute inspection, it appeared for an instant that Paris, the city toward which he had been sailing for so many weeks, was not only situated there to his east, entrenched on a little island in the River Seine, but could also be to the north of the hill he was standing on, and even to the west, and certainly to the south, where the beautiful bend of the river glowed like soft steel, as if every one of the dirt tracks that kissed the little stone arch like rays of light meeting at their star could in its own way lead the two foreign Jews to that radiant city.

  But for the small boy, who was following the ship’s owner attentively and with interest the whole time, there was no doubt that as the first twilight came on, Ben Attar would choose the track that led eastward, not only because it led straight to the gray island with its huddled houses, but because this was not a mere track but a real road, so resolutely straight that it had carved a broad passage for itself between fields and trees that seemed to make way for it, and it seemed to invite not only a man and a boy to stride along it safely in the gathering twilight, but whole marching armies. Before the moment came when they set forth to seek out the people his father was supposed to admonish with his learned arguments, the child knew that they still had to study well, before dark, the appearance of the stray buildings scattered on both sides of the river. A church tower rose stiffly on the right bank in the clear light not far from the water’s edge. Now, as they looked at it, her bells sounded toward the distant Jews.

  For several days Ben Attar had known that his first meeting with his nephew and business partner had to take place in total privacy, without the presence of the new wife or any of her stern kinsfolk. Nevertheless, it must not be a chance or secret encounter, in an alley or a field, but upon the very threshold of Abulafia’s house, so that the sacred duty of hospitality, which was supposed to be ingrained in a southern man like second nature, would overcome, by the force of tradition and habit, any attempt on the part of the new wife or her severe young brother to extend the repudiation that had been pronounced against him into a veritable interdict, which would instantly dash all the hopes of the bold expedition. Consequently, it was not only an element of agility and surprise that was needed, but also detailed prior knowledge of the house to which the merchant from Tangier was intending to introduce not only himself but also his two wives, who, once their way had been smoothed by the rabbi from Seville with appropriate scriptural verses, would express merely through their placid existence the image of happiness and love that the arbitrary edict emanating from a small town in Ashkenaz sought to destroy.

  And so, on learning that afternoon from a pair of fishermen that the town of Paris was waiting to appear around the next bend in the river, Ben Attar had instructed Abd el-Shafi to halt the ship, and prepared himself to go ashore. He had briefly entertained a mischievous thought of surprising Abulafia in his own disguise of a monk or a leper, but he had immediately dismissed it, fearing some theological question he would be unable to answer. Thus he had made do with the garb of an Andalusian Christian who, weary of the Ishmaelites, was seeking out holy places—although, according to Abulafia, it did not seem that this town was particularly notable for sacred sites that might attract a pilgrim from far-off lands. He got his wives to stitch him together a multicolored robe compounded of various styles, so that it would be hard to pin him down to a single identity.

  Yet he knew he must not venture alone into a strange city, for a man on his own may vanish without a trace, while two men can always testify for each other, if not in this world then in the next. At first he thought of taking the rabbi from Seville with him, in order to interpret the unfamiliar Capetian environment by means of the Latin he commanded, and also to exercise some legal authority over the Jews whose repudiation he had come to contest. But on further reflection Ben Attar decided that it would be better not to reveal all his weaponry at the outset, and he did not know whether Rabbi Elbaz had recovered from the poetic intoxication that had laid hold of him on the ocean. He thought of taking Abu Lutfi, in the hope that his wronged Ishmaelite presence might make Abulafia feel some remorse for the merchandise that had been so laboriously amassed and so casually brushed aside. But eventually he abandoned this thought too. It was not right that he should leave two tender women and a rabbi utterly transported by poesy to the mercy of sailors who, notwithstanding their honest comportment in the course of the voyage, were nevertheless total strangers; and it was also fitting to ensure that there would be somebody on the ship who would be able to sail her back to North Africa if, heaven forbid, he should disappear in this unknown city.

  Whom did he have left? In his heart of hearts Ben Attar would have liked to take his sea captain, not only because he would probably have somewhere in his mind some useful ancient lore from the Viking attacks on Paris at the end of the previous century, but because of his pleasing disposition and his honest, open look. But how could one leave a sailing ship laden with merchandise in a coursing river without a captain? As a last resort he thought of taking one of Abd el-Shafi’s burly seamen with him. But again doubts began to nag. This might be just what the stern new wife was waiting for, that he should turn up on her doorstep with a simple, rough, threadbare Arab seaman, so that she could say, So this is the living wild source of
your partner’s desire. Or should he take the young black along with him? The slave’s sharp desert senses would certainly guide him straight to the house on the strength of a whiff of Abulafia’s scarf, but his rampant thirst for idolatry would have him prostrating himself before the silver ritual chalice in the home of the Parisian Jews, kneeling before the Sabbath candlesticks, and rendering Ben Attar’s own religion profoundly suspect. Consequently, it might be best for him to go on his own. But as he raised his eyes heavenward to seek encouragement from his God, who had been so kind to him and his ship during the long voyage, he noticed young Elbaz swaying at the masthead, and said to himself in the words of Scripture, It seems that this was the lad I was praying for, not only because a man who has a child with him preserves his humanity even in a strange city, but also because if Abulafia insisted on rejecting him, the child might remind him of his own childhood, when his uncle had taken him to the seaside and held him in the waves, yet always took him home safe and sound.