She longed to wake her brother and tell him of her new fears, but she did not know where he was sleeping. She felt a sudden upsurge of anger against the effrontery of her townsfolk, who had scattered and isolated the travelers like witless babes. She also felt a momentary regret that she had submitted herself to a further legal contest, and like Rabbi Elbaz, who had groped his way through the darkness of her house in Paris two weeks before, seeking to escape from it, she abandoned her goose-feather bed and tried to find her way out of the crooked wooden house, which although she knew it so well, suddenly seemed to her like a ship that had run aground on a sandbank. But as she was wrestling with a new, unfamiliar bolt, which had been fitted to the outer door against the menace of the approaching millennium, the master of the house, young Kalonymos, her husband’s brother, heard her. Not daring to approach her alone in the darkness, he hurriedly roused his wife to calm his former sister-in-law’s distress.
This young and charming Mistress Kalonymos, one of whose early ancestors had endowed his descendants’ eyes with a remarkable greenish sparkle, succeeded not only in calming Mistress Esther-Minna’s panic but in filling her with renewed enthusiasm for the penitential prayers that awaited them all. Gently she led the woman who, if not for her childlessness, would have been her own husband’s first and only wife back to her old matrimonial bed, and compassionately covered her with the quilt that she had thrown off in a fit of rage, so that she could enjoy a few hours’ rest before she was awakened to attend divine worship. A synagogue for women only had been built in Worms in these latter years, and there a female cantor intoned the chants and put on the phylacteries for the recital of Hear O Israel.
This surprising news soothed away Esther-Minna’s fears in a miraculously gentle way. The hope that the women in her native town might have enough good sense to put right what the ignorant, barefoot women in the winery near Paris had done wrong cooled her desperate thoughts and brought on Esther-Minna the slumber that her body so longed for. In fact, four hours later Mistress Rachel daughter of Kalonymos had to exert herself considerably to rouse the dear and honored guest from her profound sleep, so that she should not miss the women’s prayer in the Frauenshul, seeking pardon and forgiveness on this last day of the dying year not only for their own sins but perhaps also for those of all other women, wherever they might be.
These women included Ben Attar’s two wives, who were not spared by the exigent people of Worms. In the darkness of the last watch of the night, with a misty breeze blowing off the river, they were led forth from their separate houses, wrapped in heavy capes but without veils or jewelry, to be taken with their faces exposed to public gaze to that modest chamber abutting the synagogue of the men, who were also converging now like ghosts from all directions for the penitential prayers. Among them were the other travelers, who stood in the narrow lane in a state of utter exhaustion: Abulafia, Ben Attar, and Rabbi Elbaz, who had just remembered to ask where his boy was. They were all dressed in black cloaks on the instructions of their hosts, either to warm their southern bodies and protect them from the cold, dank breeze blowing off the river or to conceal their crumpled, threadbare traveling robes. All three of them were befuddled by deep but insufficient sleep and by an evening meal whose taste they still had not identified, and at first they had difficulty recognizing one another, as though being separated by their hosts had wrought some profound change in them.
Now Master Levitas appeared, lucid and wide awake and in full command of himself. He looked affectionately at his fellow townsmen, who were so carried away by religious fervor on this occasion that they did not even spare the three Ishmaelites, but seated them on a bench in the court of the synagogue, so that sparks of sanctity escaping from the Jews’ prayers might lighten their gentile darkness. Ben Attar’s heart suddenly went out with painful longing to his two wives, who were being led to the prayer through a tangle of trees and long grass like a couple of bears, their beautiful faces, revealed now for all to see, turned to him with an expression of wonder rather than anger, as though they were asking him, Will your mind know no rest until you have demanded a last and final test of your double love even here in this grim, benighted place?
The little Andalusian rabbi had not ceased to think about this test from the moment he had entered the walls of this small town. On seeing Mistress Esther-Minna, his adversary, wrapped in a light pelisse and surrounded by townswomen who were leading her with respect and devotion to their little synagogue, perhaps to fortify her by binding the straps of the phylacteries on her arm, he intuitively knew that he must beware here not only of the women but of the whole congregation, which was united and tempered by religious zeal. Unlike what had occurred in the winery at Villa Le Juif, here he would have to demand not a broad panel of jurors but a single judge, who would have the wisdom and vision to see from the depths of the marshes of the Rhineland what he, Rabbi Elbaz, had long since seen among the blooming gardens of Andalus.
7.
While the morning prayer was being recited, after the end of the nocturnal penitential prayers, Rabbi Elbaz forced himself to scrutinize the faces of the worshippers around him in order to find a man who might be fit to serve as sole arbiter in the engagement that was about to be joined. His surprise victory at Villa Le Juif had taught the Andalusian rabbi one simple lesson—that in a court of law, whoever selects the judges controls the verdict, without any need of subtle speeches or scriptural proofs. Still, he could not forget how, in the half-darkness of the winery, with the torchlight shining on the little must-stained feet of those women, he had managed to astound even himself with his bilingual oration. During the nights of the journey from the Seine to the Rhine he had repeatedly tried to polish that speech in his mind. But he was also mindful of the saying attributed to the imam of the great mosque of Cordoba: “Never repeat the winning tactics of a previous war.” A speech that had captured the hearts of emotional, tipsy Jews in the Île de France would not succeed with these sober-minded Jews of the Rhineland, who were now scrutinizing the new rabbi from Seville over their prayer shawls no less than he was inspecting them.
Before finding new tactics that would finally remove the conditional status hanging over the partnership between north and south and force the stubborn new wife to reconcile herself to her duo of aunts from the golden shores of North Africa, he sought to assess the spirit of the scholars praying all around him, so that he could select from their midst a man whose spirit was free from the tyranny of the congregation. He decided to decline his hosts’ offer to take him home after the service, like the other travelers, and put him back to bed, to make up for his lost sleep and garner strength for that evening’s prayers. Instead he asked to be taken, just as he was, in his tattered Andalusian robe, for a walk through the muddy lanes of Worms, so that he could become well acquainted with the place and everything in it, Jews and gentiles, dark house of study and grim church alike.