After the three women had come out of the bath and been toweled dry and led respectfully each to her place, the uncle and the nephew, the conditional partners, were also brought in for immersion, as was Rabbi Elbaz, dragging his struggling son along into this abyss of abundant naked masculinity. Meanwhile, in a small back yard, a pure meal was served to the three gentiles, to soothe their minds before they too were asked to bathe themselves, in drawn water rather than river water, in preparation for the festival. And because there was a great deal of work to be done in a short space of time, especially since in this year of 4760 the two days of the New Year’s festival were followed immediately by the Sabbath of Penitence, other Jews of Worms, eager to have a share in fulfilling the sacred obligation of hospitality, groomed and fed and made much of the five horses, which had not been spared and had not spared themselves to bring the traveling Jews into an established Jewish community for the festival so that they might all worship together in a single synagogue.
Thus, with affection as well as alacrity, the local people absorbed the newcomers into the fabric of their existence. Since on the eve of the Days of Awe there was no one who did not wish to gain the credit of inviting into his home such wonderfully clever guests, who had come from the other end of the world to plead their cause before the wisdom and justice of the Jews of the Rhine, tables were instantly spread and beds were offered in the homes of ten families at least, so that every family could have at least one guest, and it made no difference whether that guest was a woman, a child, an Ishmaelite, or even a young idolater. As for the travelers, who had become accustomed during the long journey to being part of a single moving human lump, to the degree that they had even begun to share each other’s dreams, they found themselves in the middle of the night not only bathed and well fed but also separated, each of them lying alone on a strange bed, protected by a curtain, sinking in a soft mattress from which a few goose feathers protruded, and surrounded by black empty space, no longer daring to share someone else’s dream.
But Mistress Esther-Minna not only did not want to dream now, she flatly refused to go to sleep. Despite the shadows crowding in on her, she realized that the Kalonymos family, who had exchanged few words with her, had chosen for her the bedchamber of her youth, where her first husband, a sensitive scholar, had tried in vain to bring a child into the world with her, until he had given up in despair and died. Was this the hand of chance, she asked herself, or had her husband’s kinsfolk known how deeply she yearned for this dear chamber? It was said to have served as the sleeping quarters for the first generations of Jews to come at the king’s command from Italy, who had brought with them from the Alps some fair-haired, blue-eyed pagan servants who were so devoted to their Jewish masters that they had eventually cast off their strange idols and adopted their faith. Who had vacated his big bed for her? Mistress Esther-Minna wondered with excitement tinged with a hint of fear. Was it possible that this was the bed of her brother-in-law, Master Isaac son of Kalonymos, whose mother, her own mother-in-law, had not been willing after the death of her firstborn for her childless daughter-in-law to wait until her other son came of age but had firmly insisted that she should ceremonially withdraw the handsome youth’s little shoe and spit on the ground before him, as the law demanded, before going to seek consolation in the home of her younger brother in Paris.
Although Mistress Esther-Minna was well acquainted with the character of her fellow countrymen, who clothed even the most delicate and affectionate sentiments in sternness, yet she was disappointed and bewildered, for she had expected a warmer reception. She had innocently hoped that her townsfolk would be impressed by her devotion and resourcefulness in bringing such stubborn foreign Jews all this way to submit themselves to local justice, which she had come during her long years of absence to imagine as being the very acme of perfection. But she had overlooked one thing—that the great strength of the Jews of Worms was that they never considered their justice perfect, and that during the ten years since she had left her kinsfolk and her friends, they had exerted themselves constantly to improve and perfect it. Today, on the eve of the double day of jubilation, they were not prepared to be impressed by her bringing into their midst such a disturbing case for adjudication; on the contrary, they were inclined to view her with suspicion and distrust, like excellent judges who, in a conscious effort not to favor one side or the other, view both, before the case is heard, as sinners.
The woman returning to her homeland felt all this in the cool looks her former kinsfolk vouchsafed her. In the night, in this bed where she and her late husband, for all their passion, had failed to make a child, her heart was so anguished that a single drop of sorrow could flood it with fear. Suddenly even the impossible seemed possible. Perhaps here too, in the place that had seemed to her most safe and pure and decent, she was liable to be surprised again, for in the conscious effort not to favor one side or the other, and out of compassion for the simplicity of the southern Jews who had traveled such an awesome distance, the sages of her town might, like the court in Villa Le Juif, allow themselves to be led astray by the seductive words of the Andalusian rabbi and pronounce a verdict against her, which would not only renew the partnership forever but imprint a humiliating fantasy with a double stamp of propriety, northern and southern.
She longed to wake her brother and tell him of her new fears, but she did not know where he was sleeping. She felt a sudden upsurge of anger against the effrontery of her townsfolk, who had scattered and isolated the travelers like witless babes. She also felt a momentary regret that she had submitted herself to a further legal contest, and like Rabbi Elbaz, who had groped his way through the darkness of her house in Paris two weeks before, seeking to escape from it, she abandoned her goose-feather bed and tried to find her way out of the crooked wooden house, which although she knew it so well, suddenly seemed to her like a ship that had run aground on a sandbank. But as she was wrestling with a new, unfamiliar bolt, which had been fitted to the outer door against the menace of the approaching millennium, the master of the house, young Kalonymos, her husband’s brother, heard her. Not daring to approach her alone in the darkness, he hurriedly roused his wife to calm his former sister-in-law’s distress.
This young and charming Mistress Kalonymos, one of whose early ancestors had endowed his descendants’ eyes with a remarkable greenish sparkle, succeeded not only in calming Mistress Esther-Minna’s panic but in filling her with renewed enthusiasm for the penitential prayers that awaited them all. Gently she led the woman who, if not for her childlessness, would have been her own husband’s first and only wife back to her old matrimonial bed, and compassionately covered her with the quilt that she had thrown off in a fit of rage, so that she could enjoy a few hours’ rest before she was awakened to attend divine worship. A synagogue for women only had been built in Worms in these latter years, and there a female cantor intoned the chants and put on the phylacteries for the recital of Hear O Israel.
This surprising news soothed away Esther-Minna’s fears in a miraculously gentle way. The hope that the women in her native town might have enough good sense to put right what the ignorant, barefoot women in the winery near Paris had done wrong cooled her desperate thoughts and brought on Esther-Minna the slumber that her body so longed for. In fact, four hours later Mistress Rachel daughter of Kalonymos had to exert herself considerably to rouse the dear and honored guest from her profound sleep, so that she should not miss the women’s prayer in the Frauenshul, seeking pardon and forgiveness on this last day of the dying year not only for their own sins but perhaps also for those of all other women, wherever they might be.
These women included Ben Attar’s two wives, who were not spared by the exigent people of Worms. In the darkness of the last watch of the night, with a misty breeze blowing off the river, they were led forth from their separate houses, wrapped in heavy capes but without veils or jewelry, to be taken with their faces exposed to public gaze to that modest chamber abutting the synagogue of th
e men, who were also converging now like ghosts from all directions for the penitential prayers. Among them were the other travelers, who stood in the narrow lane in a state of utter exhaustion: Abulafia, Ben Attar, and Rabbi Elbaz, who had just remembered to ask where his boy was. They were all dressed in black cloaks on the instructions of their hosts, either to warm their southern bodies and protect them from the cold, dank breeze blowing off the river or to conceal their crumpled, threadbare traveling robes. All three of them were befuddled by deep but insufficient sleep and by an evening meal whose taste they still had not identified, and at first they had difficulty recognizing one another, as though being separated by their hosts had wrought some profound change in them.
Now Master Levitas appeared, lucid and wide awake and in full command of himself. He looked affectionately at his fellow townsmen, who were so carried away by religious fervor on this occasion that they did not even spare the three Ishmaelites, but seated them on a bench in the court of the synagogue, so that sparks of sanctity escaping from the Jews’ prayers might lighten their gentile darkness. Ben Attar’s heart suddenly went out with painful longing to his two wives, who were being led to the prayer through a tangle of trees and long grass like a couple of bears, their beautiful faces, revealed now for all to see, turned to him with an expression of wonder rather than anger, as though they were asking him, Will your mind know no rest until you have demanded a last and final test of your double love even here in this grim, benighted place?
The little Andalusian rabbi had not ceased to think about this test from the moment he had entered the walls of this small town. On seeing Mistress Esther-Minna, his adversary, wrapped in a light pelisse and surrounded by townswomen who were leading her with respect and devotion to their little synagogue, perhaps to fortify her by binding the straps of the phylacteries on her arm, he intuitively knew that he must beware here not only of the women but of the whole congregation, which was united and tempered by religious zeal. Unlike what had occurred in the winery at Villa Le Juif, here he would have to demand not a broad panel of jurors but a single judge, who would have the wisdom and vision to see from the depths of the marshes of the Rhineland what he, Rabbi Elbaz, had long since seen among the blooming gardens of Andalus.
7.
While the morning prayer was being recited, after the end of the nocturnal penitential prayers, Rabbi Elbaz forced himself to scrutinize the faces of the worshippers around him in order to find a man who might be fit to serve as sole arbiter in the engagement that was about to be joined. His surprise victory at Villa Le Juif had taught the Andalusian rabbi one simple lesson—that in a court of law, whoever selects the judges controls the verdict, without any need of subtle speeches or scriptural proofs. Still, he could not forget how, in the half-darkness of the winery, with the torchlight shining on the little must-stained feet of those women, he had managed to astound even himself with his bilingual oration. During the nights of the journey from the Seine to the Rhine he had repeatedly tried to polish that speech in his mind. But he was also mindful of the saying attributed to the imam of the great mosque of Cordoba: “Never repeat the winning tactics of a previous war.” A speech that had captured the hearts of emotional, tipsy Jews in the Île de France would not succeed with these sober-minded Jews of the Rhineland, who were now scrutinizing the new rabbi from Seville over their prayer shawls no less than he was inspecting them.
Before finding new tactics that would finally remove the conditional status hanging over the partnership between north and south and force the stubborn new wife to reconcile herself to her duo of aunts from the golden shores of North Africa, he sought to assess the spirit of the scholars praying all around him, so that he could select from their midst a man whose spirit was free from the tyranny of the congregation. He decided to decline his hosts’ offer to take him home after the service, like the other travelers, and put him back to bed, to make up for his lost sleep and garner strength for that evening’s prayers. Instead he asked to be taken, just as he was, in his tattered Andalusian robe, for a walk through the muddy lanes of Worms, so that he could become well acquainted with the place and everything in it, Jews and gentiles, dark house of study and grim church alike.
While Ben Attar was wondering whether to join the inquisitive rabbi on his walk through the town, which was now steeped in a milky light, or to go and demand that he be given back his two wives, who at the end of the women’s prayers (which were shorter than the men’s) had been taken back to their hosts’ homes, a pair of armed, mail-clad horsemen entered the synagogue, holding the inventory sent by the customs officer of Verdun. These men had been given the task of overseeing the distribution of goods not only to the descendants of the Christ-killers but, according to a new and generous interpretation of the ducal authorities, also to those who revered the Christ. The two wagons, which were standing outside the synagogue with empty shafts, were soon cleared not only of the bags and bolts, reduced and multiplied by the first wife’s resourcefulness, but of the rest of the travelers’ personal effects, which had also been changed into gifts by the generous order. So on this festive night the local folk seasoned their pork chops and their wolf stew with new spices from the desert, poured olive oil from Granada on their salad, and decorated the walls of their homes with brightly colored strips of silk embroidered with threads of gold torn from the robes of Ben Attar’s wives, while ragged urchins in the church square unpicked the Ishmaelite sailors’ big sandals to make a long rope. It was just as well that the Jews of Worms hastened to compensate the distressed litigants with matching gifts, and instead of the bright robes that had been torn to shreds by the excited Christians they dressed them all, Jews and Ishmaelites alike, in dark robes tied with shiny black belts with fringed tassels, and put pointed hats on their heads, so that it was not easy to distinguish them from the local Jews, who would soon scan the skies in search of the new moon, which was believed to draw with a golden thread not only a new month but a new year.
But before the fine crescent appeared at the twilight hour, threading its way rapidly through the dark tatters of cloud, and a satisfied sigh arose at this confirmation that the calendar from the hills of Jerusalem was still operating so accurately, they honored the rabbi’s wish to stroll around their town and patiently replied to his questions. The sages, who as they walked had accustomed themselves to his unfamiliar, difficult way of uttering Hebrew from the depths of his throat, invited him to a chamber in the synagogue where there was a chest stuffed with obsolete texts and broken remains of twisted yellowing rams’ horns, to hear him deliver a little homily on the subject of the sanctity of the coming day so that they could make an assessment of the intellectual acumen of the southern visitor, of which Master Levitas had given them prior warning.
Elbaz hesitated at first between a wish to lull his adversaries’ concern about the danger he represented and a desire to make them aware of the pitfalls of the battlefield. He started with some trite generalities about the binding of Isaac, but he allowed himself to expatiate on the shape of the small gray horns of the original and authentic ram of the Land of Israel, which was offered up in place of the beloved son who was not indeed an only son. As though with the intention of warming the hearts of the local Jews toward the Ishmaelites who had come with them, he addressed to his curious hearers a few kind sentences about Abraham’s elder son, who had been cast out thirsty behind a bush in the desert of the Beautiful Land, where all of Abraham’s descendants were destined to meet on the day of final redemption, whether they wished it or not. And the rabbi contented himself with this little sermon, after noting that what he had said about a messianic meeting with Ishmaelites in a desert land had surprised his hearers greatly.
But there was no time to explore the subject further, for the festive service was close at hand and they needed to hasten to prepare the body so that it might not disturb the soul during the prayers. One of the scholars who had listened to the short homily, however, could not find any rest, and would not leave
the Andalusian alone, for he was eager to hear more about the shape of the small gray horns of the original ram of the Land of Israel, whose slaughtered cries the Jews were said to reproduce each year at this new moon of the month of Tishri. This red-haired scholar had a special reason, for he was the one who would lead the prayers and blow the ram’s horn, so it was no wonder that his imagination was captured by the story of a simple small dark ram’s horn that trumpeted forth sound without unnecessary twists and spirals.
The thought suddenly flashed through Elbaz’s mind that this curious man might be a suitable arbiter in the matter of double matrimony. He resolved to pay special attention to him. He withdrew into a corner with him, and took from the innermost pocket of his baggy trousers a small black ram’s horn that he had borrowed at the last moment, before boarding the ship, from the synagogue in the port of Cadiz, for according to the original calculation of the journey, without the overland extension, they should have heard the sound of the horn on their way home, somewhere on the ocean between Brittany and the Bay of Biscay. While the astonished scholar of Worms was feeling the simple Andalusian horn, which to judge by its fineness had evidently been taken from a mountain goat rather than a ram, Rabbi Elbaz attempted unobtrusively to take stock of the man’s character with a few test questions well directed to his purpose, which he was keeping hidden until he had had an opportunity to consult Ben Attar.
A Journey to the End of the Millennium Page 24