Even the customs officer had not been sure of the difference between merchandise and gifts. But since he, like the captain of the guard, suspected that the Jews were deviously intending to sell the goods disguised as gifts on their way to Worms, he had made an inventory of everything in the wagon, including the travelers’ own clothes and cooking pots, and sent it by a fast rider to the governor of Worms, so that when the Jews arrived they could be inspected to ensure that no gifts had been magically turned back into merchandise along the way and that everything declared as a gift really reached its intended recipient. Only in this way could the Lotharingian authorities be reassured.
The Jews were dejected not only because the Christian had cunningly outwitted them, but because they had a nagging fear that thanks to the inventory flying ahead of them to the Rhine, not only their goods but even their pots and clothes and everything else they possessed had been turned into gifts, and who knew whether they would have to buy back the “gifts” they had been compelled to give? That evening, as they camped under a large wooden bridge near the town of Metz, Ben Attar noticed his first wife, on her own initiative, ripping open a bag of condiments, emptying out the contents, and then cutting the material of which the bag was made into two and sewing two bags in its place. In this way she was doubling the quantity of merchandise, so as to save half of it from the threat of being designated as gifts. By the time they encamped the following night, she had not only doubled the number of sacks of condiments but the bolts of cloth and even the pale honeycombs.
Again it seemed as though the more the desert merchandise shrank, the more it increased its attractiveness and worth to the wayfarers and town-dwellers between the Meuse and the Moselle and between the Moselle and the Rhine. The bags of spices were now so small that the purchasers did not need to bring them close to their noses to smell them, but could insert them in their nostrils so as to have an effortless and uninterrupted access to the spicy scent of a faraway dark continent. So fearful were Ben Attar and Abulafia of the inventory, however, and of appearing to be merchants dealing in “gifts,” that they sent the black idolater ahead of them with a laden tray, as though this were his personal property which he was offering for sale on his own responsibility and the Jews following behind were merely advising him about the prices.
Because the Lotharingians were meaner than the Franks and Burgundians, they were easily attracted to the small, new, unfamiliar goods, whose transient nature would soothe away in advance any regret they might feel at the impulsiveness of their purchase. The two experienced traders could sense where and how strongly the winds of commerce blew in the land of Ashkenaz, and they were beginning to discuss how to prepare themselves for the still conditional meeting in the Bay of Barcelona the following year, the year of the millennium itself.
Thus, between light warm showers of autumn rain, the litigants traveled slowly toward the town of Worms. Up hill and down dale they advanced along wide, easy roads that sometimes skirted a gray fort or the ruins of an ancient Roman camp. Occasionally the horses’ hooves encountered boggy yellow puddles that the wagon wheels would sink into if Abd el-Shafi was not careful. Sometimes the convoy had to halt so that a wheel damaged on a rocky descent could be straightened or the horses’ harnesses adjusted. Sometimes they had to wait for hours for a ferry to return from the opposite bank of a river, or haggle with an obstinate farmer before crossing a field of stubble. But still it seemed as though the onward impetus of the road was stronger than the mishaps and delays. Whenever the wagoners felt a fair wind blowing, they could not resist their mariner’s instincts, and asked permission from the master of the expedition to untie the covers of the wagons and hoist them like small black sails, to make the horses fly faster.
Small wonder, then, if Rabbi Elbaz, transported back to the voyage by the howling of the wind in these strange sails, relapsed into his old poetic intoxication, which gradually stretched his sense of the passage of time. For while the stubborn litigants were advancing slowly through Lorraine on the spent back of the month of Elul, the last month of the old year, they were being slyly outflanked by a fresh young month of Tishri. The Jewish travelers realized that they were liable to reach the community of Worms in the midst of the blowing of the ram’s horn for the new year, so Mistress Esther-Minna, who was apt to keep track of the passage of sacred time, tried gently to speed the journey. But the desire to deal in the doubled gifts, which the first wife produced every night with the help of the second, delayed the members of the conditional partnership, who clung to each moment that deferred the determination of their conditional status.
When the wagons entered the region of the Saar, moving very close to the flow of the cold, shining river, amid the bulk of high hills whose ancient origin molded their tops like black domes, there appeared among the oak and ash trees the burial church of the Alter Turm, which Mistress Esther-Minna recognized excitedly by its eight grim sides. Indeed, there was no need here to shout the name of the Rhine to receive from wayfarers a halfhearted reply that gave only a direction. They could announce the names of towns—Speyer, Worms, Mainz—and receive not only nodding confirmation of their famous existence but an enthusiastic, well-informed wave of the arm pointing to a precise road. Naturally, to the fair-haired woman’s constant worry that they might have to stop and hear the sound of the ram’s horn while standing beside a black pagan in a dark forest was added the nostalgic memory of the cool air and the smell of the turf of her native land being crushed under the horses’ hooves. Abulafia’s new wife’s fearful longing took hold of him too. Even Ben Attar and the rabbi were eager now to reach the town on the Rhine and welcome the Jewish New Year there, the year 4760, from whose womb in a hundred days or so would burst the Christian millennium, so young and wild.
But it is doubtful whether the progress of the wagons could have been accelerated any more as they advanced over a desolate plain descending to the valley of the Rhine if, like some phantasm, Master Levitas himself had not suddenly appeared, mounted on a proud stallion. It transpired that contrary to his hope, the level-headed younger brother had not found any peace at home in Paris after his sister had left with her adversaries. After hastily depositing the members of his household, including the half-witted orphan, with his friends in the winery at Villa Le Juif, to spend the approaching days of penitence and judgment with them, he had hastened with the first of the Indian pearls to a beautiful duchess who loved jewelry and exchanged it for a splendid and renowned stallion from her husband’s stables. The horse would carry him swiftly by shortcuts to his native town, Worms, ahead of the main party, to ensure secretly that the mishap that had occurred in the shadowy winery would not be repeated on the banks of the Rhine, but that on their arrival they would be received by a proper, irreproachable law court, full of outstanding scholars, who would not merely speak but would sing forth the right verdict.
But when, after a couple of days’ half-secret stay in his birthplace, it became clear that Ben Attar’s company was not arriving, while the sound of penitential hymns at night was growing ever louder, he began to fear that some mishap or second thought had made the twice-wed trader turn around and go back. Thus he had decided to break cover and ride out to meet the litigants and speed them into the ambush that he had laid for them. To his dismay, he had discovered that a mere three days before the holy day the two wagons were still a score of leagues from the town of Speyer, which did not contain a single Jew. And so, as a former resident, Levitas offered to escort the convoy to its journey’s end, and he also suggested that they should cease to halt at night. Ben Attar, who had been infected with Esther-Minna’s fear, accepted the clever brother’s suggestion and instructed Abd el-Shafi, who was accustomed to sailing in the dark, to attach one wagon to the other with a short stout rope, and to tie the front wagon with a long rope to Master Levitas’s saddle, so that the travelers were assured of arriving at their destination together.