And so, in the sweet sadness of remembrance of the past, they spent a wonderful summer’s evening together on the border of the Spanish March, which neatly divided the two great faiths from each other. And although they both felt an occasional flickering anxiety for the fate of the third partner, who was at this moment galloping into the depth of the night with his leopard-skin pouch dangling near his privy parts, they were also pleased that the Muslim was no longer with them, for now they were free to season their conversation with words from the holy tongue, and on the morrow, the eve of the fast of the month of Ab, when Benveniste came up together with a quorum of Jews hired especially for the purpose of praying and wailing for the ruin of the Temple, they would forget the purses full of gold and the wiles of commerce, and taking ash from the fire and smearing it on their foreheads, they would join in the eternal fear and mourning of their people.
2.
On the eastern horizon the firmament was sinking somewhat, and the moon had declined to the height of a man. Even though the captain’s sole responsibility was to sail the ship, he had caught Ben Attar’s anxiety about the secret, noncommercial purpose of the journey, and he rose and woke Abu Lutfi, who had been put to sleep by the mere smell of the wine, so that he should stir the ship’s owner, sprawled in a drunken stupor on the deck, to visit the wife who was waiting for him in the stern. Soon dawn would break and put an end to their last night on the open sea, and from now on they would lose their anonymity; on either side of the Seine they would be tracked by suspicious natives, full of the panic of the approaching millennium, who would certainly try to board the alien ship to inspect her and find out what she was about. As Ben Attar slowly rose from the depths of his slumber, he not only felt on his face the cool, urgent breeze of the last hours of the night but also found himself looking into his partner’s anxious eyes as Abu Lutfi shook him roughly. He thought painfully how wrinkled the Ishmaelite’s face had become these last years, perhaps on account of the repudiation emanating from the northern partner.
Though Ben Attar wondered how he would manage to spread the wings of his desire a second time, he nevertheless hurriedly stood up, swaying at first and leaning on the side for support, staring at the dark water lapping at the stationary ship. The fire was still burning at the mouth of the invisible river, and on the shimmering water could be seen the enchanted silhouette of a gigantic bird. All the Jew’s senses were opening up toward the night, which was filling with new signs, and he was almost driven to kneel, as though he had been infected by the pagan faith of the young slave, who was now standing nearby, awake as ever, with his bells tinkling in the breeze, ready to raise aloft the oil lamp and light the way before the dawn should break.
Here in the stern of the ship he had great need of the guiding light, for the breadth of the ship’s hindquarters added to the confusion and deepened the darkness. He had to beware not only of the piles of cloth, the bulging sacks of condiments, and the large oil jars roped together like captives, but also of animals, which stood up as he approached, their sad eyes flickering in the darkness. The space that had opened up in the hold of this old guardship after the soldiers’ bunks had been removed had inspired Abu Lutfi to add to the sheep and chickens intended for consumption a pair of very young camels, a male and a female, tethered to each other with flaxen ropes, as a present for Abulafia’s new wife, to soothe her mind and help her feel and smell the essence of the Africa from which her young husband had come. At first Ben Attar had rejected this notion, but eventually he had agreed, not because he believed that the woman really wanted a pair of camels, but from a vague hope that the strange, rare animals might arouse sympathy among those of high class, who liked to buttress their nobility by means of wonderful things. But are these little camels really capable of surviving the journey? wondered Ben Attar, watching the black slave, who could not refrain from either worshipping or affectionately embracing their delicate little heads. True, Abu Lutfi did not forget to feed them a small bundle of hay every week, to which he occasionally added slices of greenish rancid butter churned before they set sail, but their bloodshot eyes and the incessant trembling of their little humps did not seem to bode well. And when will the end of the journey be? A sigh escaped from Ben Attar’s heart as he descended lower and lower. Would he ever manage to return to his beloved Tangier and embrace his children again?
Upon entering his second wife’s chamber, Ben Attar tried to waken and expel the rabbi’s young son, who instead of sleeping next to his father in the bow had recently become fond of falling asleep in this very spot, by the dark curtain. But the boy, who spent most of the daylight hours helping the sailors, either climbing up to the crow’s nest to scan the wide expanse of sea or pumping bilgewater, was sleeping so deeply that Ben Attar decided to let him be. He took the lamp from the black slave and ordered him back up on deck. Only when he was certain that the slave’s footsteps were fading into the space overhead did he draw the curtain aside. Behind it was another curtain, so that he had to bend double and almost crawl on all fours to enter his second wife’s bedchamber.
In this place that she had sought out for herself, so close to the bottom of the ship that you could hear the gurgle of the water, Ben Attar was assailed by the special odor not only of her body but of the rooms of her home so many miles distant. It was as if even in this cramped cabin she managed to cook her stews, air her bedding, and cultivate her flowerbeds. By the shadowy lamplight cast on the ancient, soot-blackened timbers of the guardship, which had almost gone up in flames in one of the great caliph’s battles, amid rumpled bedclothes, discarded garments, and candle ends, it occurred to him that this woman had been waiting for him to come to her ever since the beginning of the night. His heart sank at the thought that all this prolonged, eager waiting might have sharpened needles of resentment that would frighten away his desire. He had hoped to enter unobserved and grope his way quietly into her bed, so as to become part of her sleep before he became one with her body, so that she would dream him before she sensed him. Only then would she be able to forgive him for bringing with him tonight the smell of the first wife’s body, which he was always careful not to do.
But she was awake. Her long, fin-shaped, amber-colored eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, like those of a newly trapped wild beast. In the city a veritable maze of alleys separated his two houses, so that each wife could feel that her universe was separate and self-contained—although he, who plied between the two, knew that the distance was less than it appeared to them, and in fact he was sometimes amazed at how little it was. Some nights, smitten with the anxiety of delicious longing, he climbed up onto the roof and floated across to the roof of the other house over the domes of the white city, which lay still in the moonlight like the breasts of pale maidens floating on a lake, as though he were a sailor leaping from prow to stern. That may have been the reason why at the beginning of the spring, when, at first desperately and later enthusiastically, he had first thought of gathering together the merchandise that had been sadly idle for nearly two years, sailing with it to that faraway town called Paris, and having a face-to-face meeting with the partner who had been severed from them, it had not seemed strange to take both his wives with him. He was convinced that the calm, harmonious presence of the two wives side by side would prove to Abulafia’s new, knowledgeable wife better than any rhetorical argument how far she was from understanding the quality of love that prevailed on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.