Who was now sitting very quietly, full of terrors yet also of hopes, in the large wagon on the way back to Paris. Although he was squeezed between his wife and his brother-in-law and facing his uncle and aunts, his eyes, eluding the gaze of anyone close to him, were fixed on the gaunt back of Rabbi Elbaz, who had sat down beside his son, next to the wagoner, so as to crown his joy at his victory with the sight of the unfamiliar stars and be free to mumble to himself the lines of the new poem he was composing, to brand it deep on his memory. All were now silent, but while the successful party was feeling very hungry, their discomfited hosts not only felt no hunger pangs but seemed to have forgotten the existence of the second hamper tied to the side of the wagon. Abulafia did not feel hungry either, not because he felt defeated and dejected but because he could not put out of his mind the moment when he would have to stand alone facing his wife and comfort her for her failure, and at the same time admonish her gently on account of the unnecessary suffering that her strange repudiation had caused. Gently, he repeatedly promised himself, for the formal public annulment of the repudiation invited him to go back next summer to the frontier between the two worlds, to the azure Bay of Barcelona, which here, in the dank darkness of the wagon, seemed to him illumined by a thousand enchantments. Since he wanted to clarify his own thoughts and the thoughts of those about him, he assumed the authority of the head of the household and ordered the wagoner to halt the horses at the same wood and by the same stream where they had eaten by day, so that they might eat by night.
It transpired that all the travelers, on either side of the dispute, whether they were hungry or not, were very happy at the halt that Abulafia had imposed on them, even though they had not yet traveled very far and Paris was not far away. After the hubbub of the verdict, they all wanted to be by themselves for a while, hidden from their companions by the darkness but exposed to the dome of the sky. As soon as the wagon stopped, the rabbi dragged his son into the bushes to stretch their legs and attend to some bodily functions that had been postponed out of the respect due to the religious court. Nor did Ben Attar hesitate to lead his two wives deep among the trees, although in the opposite direction, to enable them to do whatever they had been prevented from doing before. Before they returned, Master Levitas went to the stream to fill a pot with clear water, while Abulafia helped the wagoner untie the hamper from the side of the wagon and went off to gather wood for the small fire he planned to light for his guests. Mistress Esther-Minna was left standing on her own beside one of the horses, holding on to the bridle with one hand while with the other she absently stroked the broad, rough brow of the horse, who waited patiently for the woman’s pleasant small hand to leave him so that he could join his partner in cropping the fresh grass.
Abulafia, accustomed to traveling, soon had a good fire going, and the sound of its crackling was soon joined by the rustling of the robe of Ben Attar’s first wife, who had returned alone, without her husband. When she saw that Mistress Esther-Minna was still deep in thought beside the well-mannered horse, she offered to help Abulafia spread the cloth and slice bread and cheese and hard-boiled eggs. It was just as well that Jews give thanks after the meal, not before it, so there was no reason to restrain the famished child until Ben Attar and the second wife returned. It was sufficient for him to wash his hands in the water that Master Levitas poured over them and recite two short blessings before he received a large slice of black bread from the first wife. And although it was not fitting that Mistress Esther-Minna should continue to stand to one side like a sulky guest rather than a responsible hostess, she did not stir from the horse until she heard the rustle of the second wife and Ben Attar emerging from the undergrowth. Now the reason for their delay became clear, for the young woman had exchanged her silk robe for a simple but warmer garment of cloth. Mistress Esther-Minna, still without uttering a word, gave them a sad, absent-minded smile and joined the pair as they strolled slowly across the dark field toward the fire, which was growing stronger by the minute.
Only her younger brother, who was better able than her husband to discern the depth of her distress, hastened to rise up as she approached and helped her to find a comfortable place beside the fire. Unable to eat anything, she did at least accept a proffered goblet of wine to fortify her broken spirits. And she did indeed need fortification, in part against the caress of the rabbi’s eyes, which lingered on her face and body, arousing additional anxieties now that she had learned to recognize the shrewdness of his thoughts. So great was her anxiety that she trembled at the light, soft touch of the first wife, who with a friendly smile offered her a cube of cheese on which the Hebrew word for “blessing” was stamped as a guarantee of its fitness for Jewish consumption. What have I done? Mistress Esther-Minna asked herself in despair. Instead of dissolving the partnership privately, with blandishments and excuses, I have reinforced it with the verdict of that stupid, drunken crowd. In vain she sought the eyes of her husband, who did not appear sad or downcast but merely very busy boiling water for a fragrant infusion of dried leaves that the first wife extracted from a pouch.
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 receive
d 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.
4.
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 o
n 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.
A Journey to the End of the Millennium Page 19