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.