It transpired that it was not in vain that the nurse had insisted that Abulafia move to the street of the Jews, to whom he belonged by race and by faith, for only there could he have obtained the means to establish contacts with other Jews’ streets, in Tours and Limoges, An-goulême and Orléans, in Chartres and perhaps also in Paris. These were not always real streets, but sometimes merely narrow little alleys, or no more than the entrance to an alley, or a single house, or perhaps only a single room in which dwelled a solitary Jew. And so Abulafia’s eyes were schooled to discern in his surroundings not only the kings and dukes and counts who held sway but also the places where the Jews were scattered.
Slowly Abulafia was drawn back to his kith and kin, from whom in the early years he had distanced himself in the fear that they would try to marry him off and frustrate his dream of returning to his native town. He had already admitted to himself that this was not a concrete plan but a dream, and therefore he had nothing to fear from its being frustrated, because it is in the nature of a dream that it always remains in the power of the one dreaming it. Therefore, after moving to the street of the Jews in Toulouse and seeing that not only were there those who could exchange a word or two of Arabic with the nurse but some who would offer a smile or a caress to the bewitched child, his heart softened, and on his return from his journeys he would join the congregation in prayer, not only to recite—still with a raging heart—the memorial prayer for his wife, but also to question the Jewish worshippers about the roads to the north.
For the Jews, even those who had never traveled far from their town, always knew something about Jews from other towns, just as they always knew something that the gentiles did not yet know about themselves—for instance, that the devotees of the approaching millennium would be attracted particularly to goods coming from the desert, the sort of objects that Jesus and his companions in the Holy Land must have handled, for the faithful wished to make a welcoming home for the Son of God, who would soon descend from heaven with his apostles. Thus Abulafia, who could interpret the signs, no longer traveled from Toulouse to Agen or from Limoges to Bourges, but from one Jew to another, each of whom advised him not only about the new types of merchandise but about how to raise his prices. It was while he was traveling in this way, following the advice of the Jews, that he made the acquaintance in an inn in Orléans of a woman, Mistress Esther-Minna, the childless widow of a scholar who had passed away a few years previously in Worms, a small town called Vermaiza by the Jews, by the River Rhine in Ashkenaz. She had been invited after her husband’s death by her brother, Master Yehiel Levitas, a dealer in jewels and precious stones, to reside with him and his family in Paris, both to lighten the gloom of her loneliness and so that she could occasionally assist him with her good sense on secret missions to the towns and villages in the surrounding country.
It appeared that it was not only because she was a widow and childless, nor only because she was exposed to him in the somewhat licentious air of a wayside inn, but particularly because she was some ten years his senior that Abulafia had given himself easily to a lengthy conversation, which led him to a deep association that he had not imagined himself capable of. From exchanging casual remarks in the twilight hour before the evening meal, commencing with the attempts of this elegant yet respectable woman, the widow of a distinguished scholar, to embellish her speech with a word or phrase in the holy tongue that she had learned from her late husband, and with some acute commercial observations that she let fall, there developed an intense conversation that continued until midnight. It was a licit exchange, in view of the widowed state of both the interlocutors, who were still nameless to each other, yet it contained a certain hint of boldness and even sexual license. When the cross on the belfry pierced the flesh of the moon, which was as round and pale as the famous local cheeses, and slowly let it drop behind the church, and total darkness fell in the chamber in which the pair were sitting, Abulafia felt a pleasant warmth spreading through his body. It was the first time he had met anyone who took the old story of his pain and affront seriously and listened with open sympathy to his continuing dream of revenge, while firmly and absolutely rejecting any suggestion that his daughter was the victim of a curse or enchantment.
If it was not a curse or enchantment, Ben Attar wondered, what was it? But even Abulafia could not answer that question. He could only talk of the astonishment and gratitude that had coursed through him at the end of that conversation. Here at last is somebody who gives rest to my soul, he had thought to himself as he inhaled the woman’s unfamiliar scent, which he had not only become accustomed to but even begun to enjoy. And as, like a child reading his mother’s lips, he sought the precise meaning of this slim, small woman’s words, which had been spoken in the Frankish tongue but slowly and clearly enunciated, with quotations from Bible stories and rabbinic writings, she seemed to become stripped in his mind of her enfolding femininity, not, heaven forfend, so as to take on male attributes, but to reveal her primal and fundamental humanity, which is the true source of sensual excitement.
But precisely because he was so contented and elated, was he able to imagine that this steady, rational woman, Mistress Esther-Minna daughter of Kalonymos, who had subtly lanced the boil of his hatred for his mother, had begun to be strongly attracted to the man sitting opposite her, so that perhaps this warmth that had begun to spread through him sprang not only from her wise words but also from the heat that glowed in her, and that she was beginning to catch fire from the spark of her desire? Three or four times in the ten years of her widowhood she had been assailed by such a sudden attraction, but always she had succeeded in stamping it out, perhaps because the men she had been attracted to had been not only worthy but married. This time she was surprised by the youth of the man who had aroused her interest, as if on this occasion it was a desire not for a strange man that had sprung up inside her, but for all the children she had not been able to bear, who seemed to have burst into the world of their own accord and merged in this young man, a southern Jew, with his dark curls and his swarthy skin, whose very being was transformed that night by the shadows moving between the flickering candles and the moonlight into something rich and attractive.
True, Abulafia had become accustomed in recent years to various kinds of snatched infatuations, generally involving gentile women, that had arisen in taverns or marketplaces, and sometimes even on the road. Even though he came from the south, women discovered something oriental in his melancholy, since it was in the east that the beloved Son of God had suffered, and even though in the course of the years he had spent in Christian Europe Abulafia had endeavored, for his safety’s sake, to adapt his appearance to the places where he was trading, some traces of his alien origin could still be discerned in his way of dressing his curls or trimming his beard, or of selecting and matching the colors of his clothes, or even his manner of tying up his coat. Since his prosperity was apparent from the quality of his garb and the nature of his baggage, these liaisons flared up with particular intensity. However, they were short-lived, since Abulafia was careful to sever them in good time, so as not to surround himself with excessive fire. But not before he had managed to sell some goods that even his lovers had not intended to buy from him. Not a few homes of Provence and Aquitaine received sacks of condiments that would suffice not only to season their owners’ last supper but even the dishes of their heirs’ heirs.