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Linked together in this way, the two wagons advanced over the reddish soil of the Rhine Valley, led by the stallion. The refined young man displayed his enthusiasm and determination, pulling the North African Jews behind him day and night, attached to his saddle, so that they would not, heaven forbid, miss celebrating the New Year in his home town. But there is a difference between traveling by day alone, with night halts for rest, and traveling day and night, and the travelers soon became faint and dizzy and lay piled on one another like a stirring heap of rags. Even the Ishmaelite wagoners, hardy mariners that they were and accustomed to staying awake for long stormy days, drooped limply on their seats, and if the young slave had not continued to urge the horses on with the whip, it is doubtful whether the two linked wagons would have succeeded in entering the narrow street of the Jews in Worms in the twilight of the last day of the departing year and drawing up among the small bowed houses resting on huge rough-hewn piles.

The litigants alighted semiconscious from the wagons, and they might have collapsed on the spot if the good folk of Worms, particularly the trusty Kalonymos family, forewarned of the arrival of the little convoy, had not hastened to lead them to various homes and families so that they might bathe and revive their weary bodies and their flagging souls in the twenty hours that remained before the onset of the festival. Without consulting the exhausted visitors, they efficiently separated menfolk from womenfolk, Jews from Ishmaelites, horses from wagons, and put at the disposal of each group and class the facilities appropriate to it. What was surprising was that the Kalonymos family treated their kinswoman Mistress Esther-Minna exactly like the southern foreigners, and did not exempt her from any of the obligations that were laid upon the others. Together with Ben Attar’s two wives, she was taken gently but firmly for ritual cleansing to a large bathhouse that in ancient times had served the Roman troops and that still had small cubicles paved in green marble, in one of which Mistress Esther-Minna now attempted vainly to conceal her pale, blushing nakedness from the curious, startled eyes of her two female adversaries.

After the three women had come out of the bath and been toweled dry and led respectfully each to her place, the uncle and the nephew, the conditional partners, were also brought in for immersion, as was Rabbi Elbaz, dragging his struggling son along into this abyss of abundant naked masculinity. Meanwhile, in a small back yard, a pure meal was served to the three gentiles, to soothe their minds before they too were asked to bathe themselves, in drawn water rather than river water, in preparation for the festival. And because there was a great deal of work to be done in a short space of time, especially since in this year of 4760 the two days of the New Year’s festival were followed immediately by the Sabbath of Penitence, other Jews of Worms, eager to have a share in fulfilling the sacred obligation of hospitality, groomed and fed and made much of the five horses, which had not been spared and had not spared themselves to bring the traveling Jews into an established Jewish community for the festival so that they might all worship together in a single synagogue.

Thus, with affection as well as alacrity, the local people absorbed the newcomers into the fabric of their existence. Since on the eve of the Days of Awe there was no one who did not wish to gain the credit of inviting into his home such wonderfully clever guests, who had come from the other end of the world to plead their cause before the wisdom and justice of the Jews of the Rhine, tables were instantly spread and beds were offered in the homes of ten families at least, so that every family could have at least one guest, and it made no difference whether that guest was a woman, a child, an Ishmaelite, or even a young idolater. As for the travelers, who had become accustomed during the long journey to being part of a single moving human lump, to the degree that they had even begun to share each other’s dreams, they found themselves in the middle of the night not only bathed and well fed but also separated, each of them lying alone on a strange bed, protected by a curtain, sinking in a soft mattress from which a few goose feathers protruded, and surrounded by black empty space, no longer daring to share someone else’s dream.

But Mistress Esther-Minna not only did not want to dream now, she flatly refused to go to sleep. Despite the shadows crowding in on her, she realized that the Kalonymos family, who had exchanged few words with her, had chosen for her the bedchamber of her youth, where her first husband, a sensitive scholar, had tried in vain to bring a child into the world with her, until he had given up in despair and died. Was this the hand of chance, she asked herself, or had her husband’s kinsfolk known how deeply she yearned for this dear chamber? It was said to have served as the sleeping quarters for the first generations of Jews to come at the king’s command from Italy, who had brought with them from the Alps some fair-haired, blue-eyed pagan servants who were so devoted to their Jewish masters that they had eventually cast off their strange idols and adopted their faith. Who had vacated his big bed for her? Mistress Esther-Minna wondered with excitement tinged with a hint of fear. Was it possible that this was the bed of her brother-in-law, Master Isaac son of Kalonymos, whose mother, her own mother-in-law, had not been willing after the death of her firstborn for her childless daughter-in-law to wait until her other son came of age but had firmly insisted that she should ceremonially withdraw the handsome youth’s little shoe and spit on the ground before him, as the law demanded, before going to seek consolation in the home of her younger brother in Paris.

Although Mistress Esther-Minna was well acquainted with the character of her fellow countrymen, who clothed even the most delicate and affectionate sentiments in sternness, yet she was disappointed and bewildered, for she had expected a warmer reception. She had innocently hoped that her townsfolk would be impressed by her devotion and resourcefulness in bringing such stubborn foreign Jews all this way to submit themselves to local justice, which she had come during her long years of absence to imagine as being the very acme of perfection. But she had overlooked one thing—that the great strength of the Jews of Worms was that they never considered their justice perfect, and that during the ten years since she had left her kinsfolk and her friends, they had exerted themselves constantly to improve and perfect it. Today, on the eve of the double day of jubilation, they were not prepared to be impressed by her bringing into their midst such a disturbing case for adjudication; on the contrary, they were inclined to view her with suspicion and distrust, like excellent judges who, in a conscious effort not to favor one side or the other, view both, before the case is heard, as sinners.

The woman returning to her homeland felt all this in the cool looks her former kinsfolk vouchsafed her. In the night, in this bed where she and her late husband, for all their passion, had failed to make a child, her heart was so anguished that a single drop of sorrow could flood it with fear. Suddenly even the impossible seemed possible. Perhaps here too, in the place that had seemed to her most safe and pure and decent, she was liable to be surprised again, for in the conscious effort not to favor one side or the other, and out of compassion for the simplicity of the southern Jews who had traveled such an awesome distance, the sages of her town might, like the court in Villa Le Juif, allow themselves to be led astray by the seductive words of the Andalusian rabbi and pronounce a verdict against her, which would not only renew the partnership forever but imprint a humiliating fantasy with a double stamp of propriety, northern and southern.