The torch was disintegrating in his hand, its last embers disappearing among the bushes. So when Ben Attar stumbled over Mistress Esther-Minna in the dark, for a moment he did not know whether he had happened on a human being or on some soft unknown European animal. When he leaned over her, touched her, and tried to lift her, muttering some words to her in Hebrew to see if she had passed out, she, realizing that a fainting fit would justify her disappearance and her silence, closed her eyes tight and imagined herself as the third wife of the sturdy man who was lifting her up, feeling all the trembling of pain and humiliation in her new condition. And for the first time in her life, she, who had always kept her composure and clarity of mind, struggled to make herself dizzy so she could try to faint.
When she opened her eyes, she realized that she had not been pretending to faint, for she was lying by the fire covered with someone else’s robe while Abulafia’s face hovered over her full of astonished admiration, as though in fainting she had acquired a quality she had not possessed before. But although she was very curious to know whether her husband or the twice-wed man who had found her had carried her out of the woods to the fireside, she realized that this was not the time to ask, when all the travelers were surrounding her with affection and fear, as though her fainting had atoned for all the offense of the repudiation. So great was the concern for her welfare that the first wife was unstitching one of the seams in the lining of her undergarment, which also served as a kind of secret pouch, and drawing out a tiny vial of sharp-smelling unguent that Abu Lutfi brought her every year from the desert. To judge by the secretive way he gave it to her, it seemed that this was the fabled elixir extracted from the brains or testicles of impure but intelligent monkeys, whose pungent smell was so special that when the first wife rubbed a single drop of it into the new wife’s sallow temple, she had no choice but to sit up immediately.
4.
The strange smell of the drop of desert elixir penetrated the new wife’s temple, immediately flooded the whole of her being, and even seemed to be regulating her breathing, striking a new chord inside her that only reinforced the novel idea that had just come into her mind. When Esther-Minna rose to her feet and climbed smiling into the wagon, leaning out of mere politeness on her husband’s arm and declining with thanks the soft bed of leaves that the two wives had amiably contrived in the depth of the wagon for her, she could clearly envisage the words she would speak to her husband when he was standing before her alone in the small chamber that had been provisionally allocated to them in her brother’s wing of the house.
So firmly had the decision concerning the new direction of her life taken root within her mind that she even dispensed with consulting her brother on his return—or perhaps it was also because for the first time in her life a breach had been opened up in her faith in this brother, who had so often served as her oracle. Even now, in the swaying darkness as the road climbed among the ruins of the city of Lutetia, she could not forget the affront of the faint spiritual smile that had flitted across his face as he listened to Rabbi Elbaz’s dangerous speech, as the rabbi had sought to transform the sorrow and pain and happiness of the marriage bed into a simple and easy pleasure. How was it possible, Mistress Esther-Minna brooded resentfully, that this brother, who like her had grown up in a house immersed in true religious discourse, should think that any idea, if it was only dressed up with a few biblical verses, deserved sympathetic examination with the mind, even if the soul should abhor it?
But Master Levitas, who was now crossing the night on horseback on his way back to Villa Le Juif, was not thinking about the rabbi’s speech, nor was he troubled by what his sister might be thinking. Master Levitas was determined to overtake the scribes and preserve his reputation by giving them the promised honorarium, and also to find the Radhanite merchant and offer him a higher price for his two Indian pearls. It was impossible for this Parisian businessman’s sharp mind not to make a connection between the other’s forceful and hostile intervention during the judgment and the very low price he had offered him the day before. But when Master Levitas reached the winery, swathed in the shadows of its vines, he found the proprietor and his little crowd of workers fast asleep, as though they had been impatient to explore in their dreams the wonderful verdict that they had just heard delivered. And since the three scribes were on their way to Chartres in a cart and the merchant from the Land of Israel had vanished into thin air, Master Levitas had no alternative, as he paced vainly among the wine casks, but to listen to the prattling of the old woman judge, who at the sound of the surprise visitor’s footsteps had hurriedly emerged from the heap of fox furs, which in any case had failed to warm her flesh.
Shivering slightly in the night chill of early autumn as he sheltered between two wine casks on the former judges’ dais, wrapped in an old fox skin, Master Levitas waited for the light of morning to hand over the promised fee with his own hands to the proprietor and to inquire where the courier from the Land of Israel had gone. In the meantime, while waiting for the dawn, he listened to the babbling old woman, who, faithful to the rabbinical precept “Do not speak much with womankind,” did not permit the Parisian to get a word in but assailed him with her rapturous impressions of the dark-skinned Jews from the south, the beauty of their wives with their fascinating robes, the purity of the rabbi’s speech, and the sweetness of his child. In particular she dwelled repeatedly on the powerful appearance of Ben Attar, who might—who knew? the widow permitted herself to dream—enlist her as a supplementary wife on board his ship when it sailed back to his sunny homeland.
Master Levitas sat in silence, his eyes closed, and despite the shiver of tiredness he tried, as a level-headed, practical man, to unravel a first fine thread of thought that would enable him to arrange a compromise between the partnership that had been resurrected by a lunatic verdict and his sister’s self-respect. Perhaps the interminable, contemptible prattle of the old woman who had attached herself to him in the depths of the night was beginning to cloud his mind; how else could a decisive, clear-headed man such as himself seriously contemplate proposing himself as a fourth member of the revived partnership between south and north, even if only to interpose his own stable, reliable personality between the uncle and his nephew and thus cushion the threat of double matrimony that so alarmed his sister? The only reason such an original and bizarre idea sprouted in the mind of this anxious, responsible brother in the depth of night was because he was far from his sister, who was now bathed in the warmth of her husband’s body in the dark of the wagon, as though since she had been bested in the arbitration and fainted in the wood his love and desire for her were redoubling by the minute. It was precisely because Mistress Esther-Minna felt this so clearly that she was convinced she did not need her younger brother’s consent or any novel stratagem on his part to make a new declaration to the man who would soon be standing before her in the candlelight and removing his clothes.