But on that winter’s night in Orléans, he was so moved by the older woman’s curiosity that he refrained from qualifying as love her sensitive interest in his thoughts and deeds, which did not even omit an inquisition into the character of his partners and friends. Me too? Ben Attar asked in a whisper, with his head cocked and with a surprised laugh, his eyes likening the galaxies twinkling above his head to the glittering embers of the log in the campfire. It emerged that the woman had shown an interest not only in Ben Attar but in Abu Lutfi as well, and even in Benveniste and their summer rendezvous. She had been excited to hear, for example, of the total confidence that Abulafia and Abu Lutfi invested in Ben Attar to be the sole arbiter of the distribution of the proceeds of the previous year’s business.
And so, on the eve of the fast of the ninth of Ab, Ben Attar learned for the first time about the meeting with the new, clever woman, but he could not yet imagine how decisive and fateful she would turn out to be for him, or how one day he would be compelled to purchase a big old guardship, load it with the merchandise that had piled up over two years, separate his wives from their children and their homes, and take them on a tiring and dangerous journey from North Africa into the heart of Europe, in the company not only of his partner but of a rabbi from Seville, hired to pit his wisdom against hers. In that summer five years before the millennium, when he first heard from Abulafia about his meeting with Mistress Esther-Minna, Ben Attar was interested in her words and her questions rather than in her form and the nature of her womanhood. But as he came to recognize the particular excitement that informed the speech of his partner, who did not even conceal his intention of accepting the new woman’s invitation to visit her family home in Paris, Ben Attar also began to interest himself in the appearance of the woman from the Rhineland, and was surprised to learn that she was a small, elegant woman with her hair gathered at the back, perhaps so as to reveal her intelligent face and her pale eyes better.
Pale? Pale in what way? Ben Attar wondered. When Abulafia described the precise tinge of blue of the widow’s eyes and the flaxen color of her hair, likening it poetically to the color of the ocean licking the golden sands of the North African coast, Ben Attar’s soul trembled, for not only did he now sense Abulafia’s responsive love for the new woman, but for the first time he understood that there might be Jews in the world whose most remote ancestors had never been in the Land of Israel.
Who could say that curiosity about these Jews, who may have had some Viking or Saxon blood in their veins, was not one of the unwitting causes of Ben Attar’s journey, which, with the entry to the river, from the time when sea and land met, was taking on a special sweetness? The River Seine welcomed this ship that had traveled so far and carried it along like a father carrying his child. True, it was midsummer, and there was no knowing the depth of the river and whether there was some danger to the hull of the ship, but the warm brightness surrounding them spoke only of affection and hope, and without noticing, they had eaten up since dawn, despite the many bends, a very considerable distance. And the evening was still gradually drawing in the slowly fading redness. Back home the evening fell swiftly, whereas here the sunset was extended, and the twilight struggled for its life. Abd el-Shafi had noticed that two weeks had passed since the lengthening of the twilight hour began, but at sea the drawing-out of the twilight is not as spectacular as inland, where the trees cast reflections of reddish light upon the water. Since morning the captain had been lashed to the mainmast, and despite his worries he was enjoying this unusual form of navigation. And even though Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi were both of the opinion that it was high time to stop and encamp, the pleasure of sailing got the better of the captain’s fears, and he steered the ship upstream into the darkness, relying on the young eyes of the rabbi’s son, who remained at the masthead so as to be the first to cry “Rouen!”
As the darkness deepened all around, limiting the child’s vision, new, unfamiliar sounds came from the river. The dull ringing of the bell of Rouen church echoed from afar, and they understood that the pair of young lovers who had been lowered from the ship a few hours earlier had already announced their coming, for all unawares the river had filled with small boats, which surrounded the ship as though attempting to imprison her.
5.
During the night there was no contact between the boats from Rouen and the strange ship, as though hosts and guests alike were reluctant to diffuse in darkness the excitement of the encounter. In silence the boats remained where they were, surrounding the Arab sailing ship in a semicircle, and it was unclear whether they were blocking her way or protecting her. Every now and again a boat changed its position for no apparent reason, the plash of oars sounding clear and pure in the warm night air. Around midnight Ben Attar tried to halt the flow of his thoughts by entering his first wife’s cabin, laying his head between her legs, and waiting for slumber to sever his soul from his worries, but they refused to depart, and compelled him again to seek the deck and Abd el-Shafi and Abu Lutfi, who were sleeping peacefully upon the lowered mainsail, watched over by the black idol-worshipper, who crouched at their feet. Ben Attar looked at them enviously. Their worries were not his worries, he mused as he listened to the boats that surrounded his ship, trying to discern their purpose from their melodious sound.
Eventually he roused the two Arabs and quietly told them of his decision. Until the true intentions of the people of Rouen were revealed, and also so as not to impose too heavy a burden on their minds, it would be better if all the passengers aboard the ship should be deemed to share the same faith. A faint laugh lit up the captain’s white teeth. Could the Mohammedans then be changed to Jews by morning? Neither by morning nor by Judgment Day, Ben Attar muttered to himself, but he patiently explained to his partners that so long as the Umayyad caliph Hashim II, who was supposed to protect them, clung stubbornly to his Islamic faith, it was for all his subjects in times of adversity to cloak their own faith in his. What, even Rabbi Elbaz? Yes indeed, came back the resolute reply, both the rabbi and the rabbi’s son.
In the case of young Elbaz, the rabbi’s son, it would seem the change had already taken place some time before. From the moment he had come aboard in the harbor of Cadiz and felt the motion of the deck, his soul had understood that this was where he would rediscover the rocking and cradling that his late mother had deprived him of, and so he had clung to the ship as though it were the swing he had swung on in his lost childhood. When his father had subsided into seasickness, and in his terrible confusion had lost contact with his son, the frightened boy had looked for protection to the sailors, who unhesitatingly sent him to climb the mast, both to keep him occupied and to test his strength. And there it was, atop the mast, that the young traveler began to grow. For he sometimes imagined, at that great height, that the erect shaft of the ship was stirring between his skinny, naked legs, so that he was unable to resist the idea that he was its true master and the men scampering about far below on the deck were under his command. It was on account of this vision that the crew treated him with affection and respect, adopting him as a young sailor.
He rapidly adopted them in return. The boy immersed himself in the sailors’ ways, learned the secrets of their tongue, and imitated their manner, so that he looked, in his short breeches and red turban, as though he had been born into the light of day not from his mother’s womb in Seville but from the ancient belly of the guardship. Nevertheless, the rabbi was pleased with his son. He had not forgotten the reproaches of his kinsfolk, who had pleaded with him to leave the motherless child behind and not subject him to the tedium and perils of the lengthy voyage. But the rabbi had insisted. After enduring the death of his wife, he was not willing to face a further parting. And when he beheld the boy’s limbs filling out in the light of the sunshine and the azure sea, his skin growing dark and smooth, and his happy, eager sharing in the work of the ship, he knew that he had been right to obey his own instincts rather than hearken to his family and friends. But once each day, at the time of the evening prayer, he firmly removed the little sailor from the ropes and steering oars, seated him on the old bridge between Ben Attar’s two wives, facing the prow which cleaved the ocean’s reddening waters, and read a psalm or two with him, lest he forget that there was dry land beyond the vast deep.