It was not easy for Abulafia to comfort him, both because he was not reconciled in his own mind to parting and dissolving the partnership and because he knew how hard it would be for a Muslim man, who could marry wives according to the state of his wealth and divorce them at will, to understand, let alone respect, the spirit that had animated the new rules, which he now presented to Ben Attar upon a sheet of parchment darkened by the shade of the Black Forest. So they waited as the Ishmaelite’s sobs gradually subsided. Before he could emerge from his grief and reach a false notion that all this was merely a trick that the two Jews were playing on him so as to exclude him from the partnership, Ben Attar decided to subvert the new orders from the north by freely making over his share of the new merchandise to Abu Lutfi, so that Abulafia could accept it without any difficulty from the hands of a non-Jew, who was not subject to the edicts emanating from the Rhineland, or indeed to those coming from Babylon or from the Land of Israel.
At first Abulafia hesitated to consent to a solution whose southern simplicity would be laughingly dismissed by his fastidious kinsfolk. However, since the boats had already been sent back to Tangier and the goods that had been piled up in Benveniste’s stables for more than three weeks were already enraging the horses and asses whose living quarters they were crowding, he could not be indifferent to the distress of his old partners, and so he consented to accept the merchandise from the hand of the Ishmaelite, who had suddenly, uncomprehendingly, become the owner of everything. But all this, Abulafia warned them once more, was only on condition that all the goods be transported as they were straight to Paris, there to receive the stamp of approval from his kin before being sold to gentiles. His trader’s instincts whispered to him that the higher prices he would receive for them in the Île de France would amply compensate him for the additional hardships and expenses of the long journey.
While Abu Lutfi was hurriedly mounting his horse to gallop south to Granada, confident that the solution the Jews had found to their problem would also hold good for the wares he would gather during the following year, and despite the lateness of the season, with the first cool signs of autumn already discernible in the air, uncle and nephew found it hard to take leave of each other, for who knew whether this might be their last parting? Since they had been deprived of their joint prayers for the ninth of Ab, with its lamentations and its grief, they wanted to be together to recollect the joy of the daughters of Israel who in bygone times had gone out in search of love and a marriage partner on the fifteenth of the month. But the melody of Abulafia’s prayer turned gloomy at the sight of Ben Attar’s sad face, and so, without being bidden, unable to contain himself, in the darkness gathering around them at the end of their prayers, without campfire or stars in the sky, he began to speak out in praise of the new Mistress Abulafia, so that Ben Attar would not start to hate her. He spoke at length of her wisdom, her refinement, and her charitable deeds, and he dwelled especially on her tender care for his poor child, who had found shelter in her home. Little by little there emerged between the lines his wonder at his desire for the blue-eyed, fair-haired woman, until, carried away in ever more confessional speech, he let fly little secrets of his bedchamber like sparks from a bonfire.
They parted from each other with mixed emotions. On chilly autumnal roads, journeying with purposeful determination, Abulafia took his six heavily laden carts to his new home in Paris, to hear from his beloved wife and her brother a clear and decisive verdict, which, as expected, dismissed any Ishmaelite subterfuge to dissimulate the continuation of the partnership with the twice-wed southern Jew. To thwart any further attempt at Mediterranean sophistry, they insisted on confiscating the whole of his stock in trade and selling it themselves, so as to be satisfied that the partnership had been broken once and for all, at their own hands. They agreed to send the proceeds of the sale, after deduction of expenses, southward in its entirety, to the two partners who were now deemed past partners, along with the Ishmaelite nurse whose time had elapsed.
When the two southern partners arrived once more at Benveniste’s tavern in Barcelona, this time with seven boatloads, in the hope of renewing their trade, they were informed by Benveniste that Mistress Esther-Minna had anticipated them. He led them, excited at the thought of finally meeting the new wife face to face, to a small cubicle in his stable, and there, in the darkness full of smells of straw and hay, knelt the old Ishmaelite woman calmly surrounded by her bundles, gleaming with the golden bangles she had amassed in the course of her years of service, a broad grin exposing the single tooth that remained in her mouth. And before they could recover their senses, she drew from her bosom a familiar leopard-skin pouch containing gold coins, the proceeds of the highly successful sale of the merchandise, to be divided now between two instead of three. And so, in the year 4758 of the creation according to the reckoning of the Jews, 388 of the Prophet’s removal from Mecca to Medina, two years before the portentous millennium of the Christians, Abulafia’s delays turned into utter absence.
6.
After so many days of soaring and heaving between the mast and the ropes of a swaying ship, it was small wonder the dry land exercised such a powerful pull even on light, nimble legs that they refused to go on standing silently atop the wide hill that rose gently on the north bank of the river, and without asking permission they sank slowly and carefully into a full oriental kneeling position on the ground, toward the thrill of grass, stones, and clods of earth, whose smell had been all but forgotten during the long voyage. Even the joyful dampness that now bedewed those young eyes did not dim one whit the attentive look the rabbi’s son directed at his master, who from all his men that afternoon had selected the boy from Seville as his sole companion on an early, somewhat furtive reconnaissance, intended to prepare for the first stage of the contest with the business partner who had withdrawn into the nearby city.
By the ruins of a stone arch, perhaps left over from an ancient Roman temple, the Jewish merchant from North Africa now stood gazing with contained excitement at the fields and woods exposed in this saffron-colored light of lazy summer, already tinged with the fresh gray droplets of autumn. From his minute inspection, it appeared for an instant that Paris, the city toward which he had been sailing for so many weeks, was not only situated there to his east, entrenched on a little island in the River Seine, but could also be to the north of the hill he was standing on, and even to the west, and certainly to the south, where the beautiful bend of the river glowed like soft steel, as if every one of the dirt tracks that kissed the little stone arch like rays of light meeting at their star could in its own way lead the two foreign Jews to that radiant city.
But for the small boy, who was following the ship’s owner attentively and with interest the whole time, there was no doubt that as the first twilight came on, Ben Attar would choose the track that led eastward, not only because it led straight to the gray island with its huddled houses, but because this was not a mere track but a real road, so resolutely straight that it had carved a broad passage for itself between fields and trees that seemed to make way for it, and it seemed to invite not only a man and a boy to stride along it safely in the gathering twilight, but whole marching armies. Before the moment came when they set forth to seek out the people his father was supposed to admonish with his learned arguments, the child knew that they still had to study well, before dark, the appearance of the stray buildings scattered on both sides of the river. A church tower rose stiffly on the right bank in the clear light not far from the water’s edge. Now, as they looked at it, her bells sounded toward the distant Jews.