Perhaps it was the mood of earnest solemnity descending upon the Jews of Villa Le Juif after the two beautiful services had stamped upon the departing day a double seal of music and holiness that breathed fear into the four women selected by the game of blind-man’s buff. When the president’s wife, the tall mistress of the winery, was invited to mount the wooden dais, followed by the pleasant-faced oriental merchant, with the scribe close on his heels, looking gaunt and dusty in his black cloak but also earnestly determined to represent his two disqualified colleagues faithfully, the four women judges, who apparently failed now to understand the meaning of their desire for the touch of the dark boy, stood huddled in a corner, clinging to one another and too frightened to climb onto the dais. At this point Mistress Esther-Minna intervened. Desiring an additional female element, her faith in the justice of a verdict decided by three judges notwithstanding, she was filled with enough indignation and fury to echo in Abulafia’s heart for the rest of his life, depriving him of any hint of regret that he might have doubled the number of his wives if he had not migrated from the south to the north. And so, with a gentle voice that concealed no little sternness, she induced the three young women and the elderly vintager to relax their hold on each other and join the three people who were already seated importantly on wine casks spread with old fox skins, with a torch blazing in front of them.
Everything was now ready. It was not the “seven good men of the city” demanded by writ who were seated upon the dais but merely seven ordinary men and women selected by a form of ballot, but this was simply because for close on a thousand years now there had been no wholly Jewish town but only small, dispersed communities, driven onward from one place to the next by troubles and dangers. There was nothing now to prevent Ben Attar from rising to his feet and setting forth his plea, for which he had come such a long way, although now, after the double service, it seemed to have shrunk. This may have been the reason that he seemed still to hesitate, sunk in thought, until Rabbi Elbaz was obliged to give him a sign of encouragement. Indeed, ever since the merchant and his entourage had entered the inner court of Villa Le Juif that afternoon and from there proceeded into the hall of the winery, his spirit had seemed to be failing. It was as if he had not imagined that he would really and truly come face to face with that repudiation, which from the vast distance separating Africa from Europe had seemed to him like the panic of Jews chiefly fearful of Christian opinion, or that only two days after disembarking from his ship he would be summoned before a strange, hastily convened court in the dark hall of a remote rustic winery. For the first time since he had conceived the idea of the journey, he experienced a vague fear of defeat.
Surprisingly, however, he felt pity not for himself, nor for his two wives, who had been forced to leave their children and their homes, but for his Ishmaelite partner, Abu Lutfi, whom Ben Attar now imagined sitting in the darkness of the ship’s hold close to the solitary camel, praying to Allah for the success of his Jewish partner, although he would never, ever understand, however many times it was explained to him, why a Jewish merchant who lived with his wives and enjoyed the respect of Jews and Ishmaelites alike should care about the repudiation of faraway Jews living in dark forests on the shores of wild rivers, in the heart of a remote continent.
This feeling of guilt and compassion toward the Arab, who had given and would continue to give his own strength and money to a journey with whose purpose he could not identify, now charged Ben Attar with such powerful feelings of shame and sorrow that he sternly scrutinized the face of his nephew Abulafia, who was smiling at him with a kind of strange perplexity. Abulafia was standing before him not only as a defendant but also as an interpreter, who would be called upon to render his opponent’s words faithfully. For a moment Ben Attar was filled with anger against his nephew, whom he had so lovingly reared, for his inability to stand up to his new wife, and for involving him not only in a long and wearisome voyage but also in this sad and unjust rift. So fiercely did his anger burn that he dispensed with the services of his nephew as interpreter, and in a deep voice that at once commanded silence in the hall he spoke a few hesitant words in the ancient tongue of the Jews, in the hope that those who understood would communicate his meaning to the others present. After a few sentences, however, he realized that it would be better for him to abandon his atrophied, jerky Hebrew in favor of fluent and colorful Arabic, which not surprisingly conveyed the full force of his distress.
Abulafia was surprised and troubled by the opening of his uncle’s plea, which centered not on himself but on Abu Lutfi. But Ben Attar held firmly to his course. Yes, he wished to begin his plea with the pain and sorrow of a third party, a gentile, who every autumn for the past ten years had driven his camels to the northern slopes of the Atlas Mountains, wearying himself among tiny villages and remote tribes to seek out and discover the best and most beautiful wares to please his northern partner’s customers.
Gradually Ben Attar’s audience was able to apprehend the nature of that wonderful threefold partnership, which extended from the Atlas Mountains beyond the Moroccan shores, wound through the towns and gardens of Andalus, then sailed slowly up to the Bay of Barcelona and to the enchanted meeting place in the Spanish March, climbing thence along the eastern slopes of the Pyrenees and spreading like a colored fan through Provence and Aquitaine, continuing along the routes of Burgundy and groping its way up to the Île de France. Ben Attar did not spare them the details. On the contrary, with rare precision he set forth the clever, rich framework devised by three partners who were joined together not only by understanding and trust but also by fellowship and friendship, trying to earn a living from the delights of the Mohammedans of the south, who sent their cumin, cassia, and cardamom to simmer in the steaming Christian stewpots of Narbonne and Perpignan.
This was the manner of Ben Attar’s speaking: after a few sentences he would stop, fix his eyes on Abulafia’s, and silently count the Frankish sentences as they came out of his mouth, fearing that the translation might omit some words. But his fears were unfounded, for not only did this interpreter not wish to leave anything out, but as one of the members of the legendary threesome, he contributed details on his own account to reinforce the story, so carried away by his words that he forgot that soon he would have to defend himself against the tale that he was so eagerly translating.
The face of the thick-bearded merchant from the Land of Israel, who drank the words straight from their Arabic source, was already beginning to darken as Ben Attar described the first signs of Abulafia’s deceit—the curious disguises, the hints of his repudiation, the ever-increasing delays that opened gaping black chasms in the minds of those who awaited him, until the last summer, when that terrible, final, and definitive absence had occurred, leaving the two southern partners alone among the horses and donkeys in Benveniste’s stable, alarmed at the huge quantity of merchandise that surrounded them. Amazingly, the plaintiff refrained from pointing an accusing finger at the new wife who had appeared from the Rhineland, or even from mentioning her name. It was as if Abulafia were alone in the world, and the blame were his alone—as though the accursed repudiation had been born only in the nephew’s mind, and caused him to turn against his friends. So it was no wonder that it was now hard for the interpreter, who in the course of translating was magnifying his own guilt, to continue interpreting faithfully while he was compelled to hear such harsh words from his uncle, who coldly, in rich but precise Arabic, attributed to his nephew the vile suspicion of simply trying to dissolve the old partnership in order to replace it with a new one that might turn out to be more lucrative. And since, Ben Attar’s ruthless denunciation continued, it was hard for the traitor to abandon his loyal partners on some pretext of deception or unfairness, for their business relations had always been honest and just, he had invented a kind of strange repudiation of his uncle’s double marriage, and, not daring to express this repudiation in his own name, he had put it into the mouth, so to speak, of his new, foreign wife.