For how could Abulafia complain now about his uncle’s double marriage, when he had known for several years that his uncle had purchased his old house in his home town, to honor the grievous memory of the wife who had departed for the depths of the sea, and had installed there a second wife, a new aunt, whose existence he not only did not consider invalid but was openly pleased about, even if she was his own age? Since he could not suddenly protest against something that he had accepted and approved of for such a long time, he had been obliged to ask his new family to frighten him and to order him to feel revulsion toward his own flesh and blood.
At this point the interpreter’s voice became so choked that nobody in the dark winery could understand a word of the last sentences, which had pierced him like sword thrusts. So the merchant from the Land of Israel, who had been listening attentively to the Arabic original, decided to venture a small shortcut. Turning to his neighbor, the scribe, who was gaping apprehensively, he very slowly, in a voice free from any guttural exaggeration, summarized what had been said so far in archaic Hebrew with the Jerusalem pronunciation, so that the scribe would spring to his feet, a gaunt figure dressed in black, and clothe the summary in the local language for the benefit of his fellow judges, who were sitting silently on the wooden dais, and for the benefit of the audience, which had been drawn by the heated dispute to emerge from among the wine casks and edge closer to the two disputants—and closer too to the new wife, who had immediately grasped Ben Attar’s shrewd tactic in forcing her pained husband to leap to the defense of his loyalty to the partnership, and in so doing to expose to public gaze a crack (only a small one, she hoped) between him and her.
Into this crack Rabbi Elbaz now attempted to insert like a lance the sermon he had devised while rocked by the waves of the sea. But Mistress Esther-Minna hastily forestalled him. Her heart was seething at the sight of her husband standing stock-still, staring at his uncle with a strange, startled smile on his face, as though the terrible suspicion that had been laid at his door had spread through his body like a paralyzing poison. Without knowing whether she had the right to speak, she took the floor and passionately appealed to the court as a plaintiff, speaking volubly in the local Frankish dialect, first of all to dispel contemptuously any suspicion of another, secret partnership on her husband’s part, and then to disclose at last the true, emotional source of the repudiation, which was even more important to her than the edicts that had arrived from the Rhineland.
Master Levitas, who had been well aware since the morning of his older sister’s mental turmoil, and of her desire and indeed her ability to achieve a breakthrough, took a few cautious steps toward her, so that his calm presence and steady disposition, even if they were not expressed in words, might delineate a certain border, in case she were tempted to cross it. While Ben Attar had been speaking, this Parisian pearl-dealer had been looking neither at the accuser nor at the accused but at the faces of the four women who had volunteered to be selected by ballot as judges. By the look of sorrow that appeared briefly on their faces at the mention of all the unsold merchandise, and by the flicker of suspicion at the sight of Abulafia’s pallor as he was held responsible, Master Levitas, a cautious, intelligent man, understood that from now on it would be a mistake to feel any certainty about the outcome of the case. Accordingly, it would be wise to restrain any sign of self-confidence or pride on the part of his small but ready-tongued and straight-backed sister, whose fair features, carved like those of a beautiful hound, were glowing in the torchlight.
But his fears were unfounded. His sister’s opening words gave no hint of pride but merely a faint hint of shrewdness, borrowed this very moment from her southern adversary. And just as Ben Attar had begun his accusation not with his own pain but with that of his Arab partner, so she too sought to ground her defense not in herself or her abhorrence of double marriages but in the story of Abulafia’s unfortunate daughter, who was still tormented by the puzzle of being abandoned by her young mother, a beautiful and beloved woman.
Here Master Levitas touched his sister lightly, not because he objected to her line of attack but to remind her that it was right and proper to give her opponents an opportunity to understand the words that would soon, with God’s help, defeat them. Once more Abulafia, the accused, had to be asked to serve as interpreter, this time in the opposite direction, from Frankish to Arabic. Even though he now stood between his uncle and his wife, the two beings who were dearest to him in the world, he turned his gaze toward Rabbi Elbaz, who was standing facing him in his rabbinical robe, which was worn out by the nights and days on board ship, nodding his head slightly as though in prayer and swallowing every word that was uttered as if it were a sweetmeat. As earlier the younger partner’s life had been conjured up in the deposition of his senior partner, now it continued to be recounted through the startling thoughts of his new, vivacious wife, who so embellished her argument with every small detail of her husband’s life, even some he had forgotten himself, that at times he had to halt the spate of words in order to examine, before translating, whether what his wife was saying about him had really happened.
But what could such an examination avail, when it was only now, in the semidarkness of the winery, that he understood that his wife had devotedly collected every detail he had told her about his life and his travels, like someone compulsively gathering oysters on the seashore in the belief that each one must contain a small pearl? At their first meeting in Orléans, before that blazing hearth, when the proper widow had been startled by the willingness of this dark-skinned, curly-haired young merchant from North Africa to talk to her shyly but frankly about himself, she had asked herself how it was that this good-looking, easygoing man had been roaming the forests and villages of a strange land for seven years without attempting to marry and set up a home. On that first night, Mistress Esther-Minna explained, she had understood that only a man whose love for his wife continued to well up inside him like a gushing spring, even if that wife no longer existed, could behave in this way. But if that was truly so, she had continued to ask herself, how was it possible for that drowned wife, who had received such great love from her husband, to get up one day, dismiss so easily everything that had been lavished upon her, abandon her husband, pluck colored ribbons from the clothes of her baby daughter, who needed her so much, and bind her hands and feet and throw herself into the sea?
That night in the inn at Orléans, the new Mistress Abulafia did not hesitate to confess before the court, she had already experienced a great feeling of compassion for this child, abandoned with an Ishmaelite nurse in a small house in the street of the Jews, close to the castle in Toulouse. She felt a powerful urge not only to understand the mystery of what had happened but to share her understanding with the widower, who was continuing to wander the roads, confused by his own lack of understanding. A new love was needed to overcome the old, Mediterranean one—not, heaven forbid, to drive out the memory of the earlier love, but to enable Mistress Esther-Minna to reflect from close up on the secret of its vitality and also of its weakness and failure. But it was only at her second or third meeting with the young merchant, when the winter was past and the spring too was nearly over and gone and when Abulafia had innocently disclosed the existence of polygamous marriages in the lands of the Ishmaelites, not by way of metaphor but as a known fact, and even as a family matter, since the subject of conversation was his own uncle, the senior partner in the glorious partnership, that she had had a feeling that the nub of the secret that had caused the disaster had slipped out. But still she had said nothing, waiting until she was united body and soul to Abulafia, so as to satisfy herself that there was nothing weak in the man’s powers of love, neither in respect to his new wife nor evidently in respect to his first wife, who, according to his testimony, had always known how to receive his love and believe in its faithfulness. It was only then that she had begun to draw a connection between the terrible, desperate deed of that dead wife and the threat that he might take a second wife, which would apparently neither require nor demand any break in or lessening of his love for his first wife. Yes, it was precisely when a second wife entered a household, through simple duplication, like the birth of another child, that she contained within herself a terrible destructive power, especially for a first wife who believes she has a curse on her womb. And so, did Esther-Minna have any need to justify herself for the repudiation that had spread within her? It grew greater with time and sharpened like a spear which could not only defend her new husband against the disgrace of discovering among the sacks of spices and the copper vessels in Benveniste’s stable an additional wife, brought for him in the ship by his uncle, but also, yes indeed, to avenge, however inadequately, the sorrow and fears of the drowned wife, who had been taken naked from the watery depths.