Meanwhile, Mistress Esther-Minna remained seated in the next room beside her parchment, which seemed even more severe in the evening shadows, impatiently waiting for the return of her husband, who was wandering around on the right bank with Abu Lutfi, who had come ashore to discover what did or did not attract the notice of the Parisians in the market of Saint Denis. Ever since the partnership had been disbanded, Abulafia had nurtured a sense of guilt not only toward his good uncle but also toward the partner from the desert, whose weeping at their parting he could not forget, and so he now treated the Ishmaelite with great patience. He showed him every stall, every object, translated every remark, as though he did not have important guests at home who might forgive his absence only because they were all wrapped up at the moment in their sleep. His wife, however, did not forgive him, and she went down to the front gate to see who would arrive first, her young husband or her young brother. As time wore on and the darkness deepened, the space carved out inside her by worry increased, and for an instant she was seized by a terrible fear that neither of the men would ever return and that she would become the third wife of the North African merchant who had settled in her house. When the rabbi’s son woke from his powerful sleep—for it was fitting that the first to wake should be he who had fallen asleep first, young though he was—and, approaching her in a daze, unthinkingly clung to her apron, she could not prevent herself from bursting into bitter tears, which were only assuaged by the whinnying of her brother’s horse. She permitted herself to dispense with courtesies and announced to him at once what had taken place in the house from which he had been absent for a whole day. Her trusty brother listened expressionlessly, as usual, maintaining his inner peace and his clarity of mind so as to calm his distraught older sister with well-weighed words of moderation. What was there to fear? The decrees were clear, and natural justice rendered them irreversible. And if those dusky Jews demanded a judgment according to the law of God, they would have it, and with great clarity too. For in between pearls—there had turned out to be two pearls, not one—he had managed to convene a special court at Villa Le Juif, which would convert the indecisive repudiation of the past into the definite ban of the future.
PART TWO The Journey to the Rhine, or the Second Wife
1.
In the second watch of the night, Rabbi Elbaz awoke, suddenly feeling so hungry that the heavy sleep fell away from him even before he realized where he was. At sea the stars in the heavens had caressed his opening eyes and helped him remember, whereas now his eyes were filled only with thick, coal-black darkness. But as he got up and groped at the world around him, he was startled by the warmth of the boy sleeping next to him. He had become accustomed to sleeping without him ever since the child had insisted on descending into the bowels of the ship at night and spreading his bedding near the second wife’s curtain. But here he was beside him, just like in their little house in Seville, curled up lean and fetuslike and sighing occasionally like an old man.
Even though the chamber was warm, the rabbi piled his own coverlet on the young sleeper, then set off in search of something to quell his hunger before he went outside to feel the dome of heaven over his head and relieve the sense of suffocation. Where was Ben Attar? he asked himself, drifting like a sleepwalker along the long winding corridors of this large, complicated house in the hope of finding a stray crust of bread. Had his employer managed to arrive in the wake of his wives, or was he still being compelled to prove to the Parisian guards the innocence of his ship’s intentions? For a moment he tried to locate the merchant by the odor of his clothes, but the new smells of the strange house had dulled the memory of the familiar scent of his fellow travelers. Then, inadvertently and in all innocence, he touched the soft plump back of the first wife, who responded by turning over on her bed with a luxuriant grumble.
When he finally found the kitchen, there was neither a crust of bread nor any other forgotten morsel on the table, but only a pile of bright iron cooking pots and a display of polished copper pans hanging on the wall, reddening with their gleam the pallid glow of the moonlight. But if the kitchen offered no hope of food, there was at least a spiral staircase leading down to the lower story. Only here the darkness was so dense that great resourcefulness was required not only to locate the outer door, which unlike the gracefully ornamented doors of the houses in Seville was clad in crude iron, but also to draw back silently the numerous bolts that restrained it, so as to escape from the hard darkness into the night with its caressing breeze and soft sounds. Despite the lateness of the hour, Paris was not entirely still between her twin banks, and even here, on the deserted southern bank, there could be heard a guttural gurgle of conversation between a man and a woman, who, to judge by the slow yet urgent pace of their talk, did not find the hour too advanced to lust after each other. For a moment the rabbi from Seville was tempted to approach them silently and perfume himself with their love, even if it was couched in a foreign tongue, but fearing that his sudden appearance might be misconstrued, he drew up a large log from the woodpile standing ready for winter and sat to enjoy the pleasant moonlight, first picking off a few pieces of soft bark to chew to still his hunger.
A light hand landed upon him. It was the child, who had woken and come out in search of him. He too pulled out a log, sat down on it, and began to ask questions, which came bursting out of him now, at the tail end of the second watch. Was this the house, were these the people for whom they had bobbed on the ocean waves for so many days and weeks? And would this really be their final stop, or would they sail on upstream to some other destination? Up to now the boy had seemed to ignore the purpose of the journey his father had imposed on him, surrendering his young being enthusiastically to the ship and her crew. But from the moment they had disembarked onto dry land his old nature had returned, and he felt homesick for his little house and everything else—his cousins and his friends, and the earthen flowerpots hanging on the bright blue-painted walls. Why had they gone onto that ship, he asked his father grumpily, and what was their business in this gloomy house? And if Ben Attar did decide to stay here with his wives, who would take them back to Andalus? Would another ship come to fetch them? Or would they go home overland? The father tried to revive his son’s flagging spirits, and after promising him that the day was not far off when they would return to Seville, he tried to explain again the purpose of the expedition, telling him about the partnership that had been built up in the course of many years, and its disruption on account of Abulafia’s remarriage and his new wife’s alarm at the idea of two women being married to one man. When he saw that his son had difficulty comprehending Mistress Esther-Minna’s animosity toward Ben Attar, Rabbi Elbaz drew the child’s bowed head toward him, to look into his eyes and see whether, despite his youth and innocence, he was capable of both understanding the new wife’s fears and guessing the meaning of the replies his father was preparing. Surely he had spent so many days close to the merchant and his two wives, both on deck and in the hold, that he would be better placed than anyone else to testify whether there was any suffering or sorrow there.