So she merely smiled and inclined her head when Rabbi Elbaz turned and inquired politely as to her well-being, as though seeking merit for himself, on the assumption that his wonderful speech had been partly responsible for her fainting. And when they alighted at midnight in the Rue de la Harpe, by the statue of a man holding a harp, and smelled the smell of the river, she smiled again and bowed submissively to the North African man as he entrusted his two wives to her with the newfound authority of the head of the family, although he himself felt constrained to hasten to the ship to inform his anxious Ishmaelite partner that his prayers to Allah had not been in vain, and that with morning they would be able to begin unloading the cargo. It was only after Mistress Abulafia had taken the two women upstairs and smoothed the rabbi’s bedclothes and turned his pillows lest he suffer from sleeplessness beside the two women, who had vanished into their respective chambers, that she instructed the old maidservant to heat some water for her to bathe herself in in the small room that Master Levitas had put at her disposal.
Naked in a large, exquisitely ornamented copper tub that Abulafia had given her as a betrothal gift, her small pink body gleaming, despite her age, with purity and freshness, the blue-eyed woman scrubbed herself with the help of her pagan maid, not so much to remove the lingering scent of the desert elixir as to blend it with the perfume of her usual soap. When she saw that Abulafia wanted to come in and undress, she dismissed her maid and stood before him in all her splendor before putting on the lightest shift she had. And while this curly-headed man who was at once husband and nephew, repudiated and attracted, interpreter and accused, victor and vanquished, began to remove his clothes, she told him in a voice only the depths of night could endow with such firmness that since the repudiation of the twice-wed uncle had failed and the partnership with him was about to be revived, she was declaring herself to be a rebellious wife who no longer desired her husband. According to a powerful and ancient law, whose source was not the rabbis of Ashkenaz but the heads of the Babylonian academies themselves, who were universally considered as unchallenged legal authorities, a rebellious wife who no longer desires her husband is compelled to submit to immediate divorce.
The desire that made Abulafia’s soul dizzy did not permit him to digest what had been thrown in his face, and he continued to undress himself, as though the words he had heard had been spoken not by the desired woman, gleaming before him with cleanness, with all her parts revealed to him under her light shift, but by another woman, a hidden, furious, disobedient shade who wished to spatter his ardent seed upon the cold flagstones. With the blunted senses of a man in the grip of lust, Abulafia maintained a blank silence and continued to divest himself of his remaining garments, displaying in the little glass that stood on the chest of drawers his face blackened by the fire and his arms scratched from his terrified quest for one who a few hours earlier, he had been certain, had tried to do to him in the wood what another, previous wife had done to him years before in the sea.
Even though Mistress Esther-Minna took a step or two backward and even raised her hands to repel her young husband, who refused to recognize the seriousness of the rebellion confronting him, she was taken by force, roughly and against her will, into the arms of a naked man who would have been willing to have had her faint again if only he could satisfy his lust at once. But just then, as though coming to the aid of the woman in distress, as she grappled not only with her husband’s desire but with her own as well, there arose behind the curtain the insistent strident wail of a girl who still missed her Ishmaelite nurse. Abulafia now found himself contending not only with the rebellion struggling in his new wife’s damp, fragrant frame but also with the ghostly cry of his dead wife, calling to him for help from the depths of the sea through the raucous voice of their child.
So his new wife made good her escape, as though Abulafia’s flesh and blood made concrete in the child wailing on the other side of the faded curtain took priority for her over his flesh and blood now suffering torments in her presence. When she left the chamber to go to the crying child, Abulafia’s strength gave out. For three whole days, ever since his uncle had appeared in the doorway of his house, he had been buffeted and pressed between beloved but powerfully opposing forces. Just as he was, naked, with his erect member still projecting like a dagger looking for a new target, he entered the tub in which his supposedly rebellious wife had just bathed, seeking in the suds the warmth and fragrance of the flesh that had eluded him. And with the wretched child’s bawling still piercing the curtain beside him, his eyes closed painfully at the sight of his spent seed floating on the water.
After a while, still in this water, he heard his wife talking to him gently, compassionate and friendly. Although the verdict of seven ignorant judges was no better in her view than that of the seven wine casks on which they had been sitting, she was not so arrogant as to demand that the verdict be annulled, if only out of respect for the rabbi. Since she could not forget either the oriental courier’s applause or the smile that had played around Abulafia’s lips as he translated the rabbi’s words one by one, or particularly the calm curiosity of her brother, her own flesh and blood, on hearing the effrontery of the speech, she had no alternative but to wrap herself in her sorrow and separate herself from all that was most precious to her. And she prayed it would not be accounted sinful by the God of Israel if for the first time in her life she found herself envying the Christian women, who in time of affliction could abandon all and withdraw into a nunnery. But since Jews had no nunneries, all she could do was return to her native town, where her first husband’s kinsfolk lived, in particular her brother-in-law, who had released her from the bonds of levirate marriage on the death of her husband so she could join her brother in Paris. And so, in simplicity and good will, she said to her husband, who lay immersed in water that still bore the scent of her flesh, My repudiation has failed and your partnership is revived, and henceforth you are free once more to travel the trade roads disguised as a monk or a leper, to your beloved uncle and respected partner, with his wives and his condiments. Only divorce me first, my lord, and I shall not trouble you or any man further. Then I shall take my leave not only of you and your child butof my brother and his family, and return to the river of Ashkenaz,the river of my childhood, which is incomparably wider and deeper than the river beyond that window.
In fear of the refusal that was sure to follow, she quickly plunged the candle flame into the cooling bathwater in which her startled husband was still splashing, and in the great darkness that fell suddenly on the small room she put on a wrap over her light shift, then she quietly toured her guests’ bedchambers to make sure that no one was passing a sleepless night because of inattention on her part. But the four North African travelers, weary and lulled by their victory, did not require any attention from their hostess, whose stubborn repudiation had brought them from the far ends of the earth. Finding that the two wives were breathing calmly in their beds, that the blanket had not slipped off the curled body of the boy Elbaz, and that the rabbi’s beard had not become entangled in the embroidery of his pillow, she went to the kitchen to see what food she might offer her guests in the morning, which was not far off. Some time later she returned silently to her own chamber, to find Abulafia wrapped in his traveling cloak, sleeping on a chair beside the bathtub with the large extinguished candle still in it, and there was no way of telling whether he had fallen asleep so swiftly so as not to have to face the rebellion that had been raised against him.