Without a single word having been said to them, the pair were led behind the curtain into the cleared courtroom and were stood side by side before the judge, who was shaken by such excitement at this double vision standing exposed before him that it was all he could do to prevent himself from fleeing for his life into the bosom of the wise congregation, which even behind the drawn curtain continued to follow all his movements. Since he did not know whether the prohibition of intimacy between a man and another’s wife applied also in the case of a pair of wives, he told the Elbaz child to remain, with the additional purpose of serving as interpreter.
Although it was hard to conduct a private interrogation without a common language, Joseph son of Kalonymos was determined to dispense with the overabundant services of Elbaz, fearing that the clever rabbi would distort and improve the women’s replies and the accuracy of the investigation would be undermined. He preferred to make do with the little unskilled interpreter, who would translate simple questions and answers faithfully, even if not precisely or completely, from the Hebrew of the prayerbook to the Arabic of the marketplace and back again. Moreover, it might be supposed that after their long journey in each other’s company, the women and the child had got to know each other, and he would be able, by means of gestures and expressions, to exact from the frightened pair who stood all alone before him the incriminating testimony that would compensate for Abulafia’s obstinate silence.
Even though the prayer leader of the synagogue of Worms had never before interrogated witnesses, he had learned from Tractate Sanhedrin and from the words of others that everyone must first be warmed and softened, so that the outer husk may be easily peeled off and the pale kernel exposed. Therefore, in warmly conciliatory tones, he extracted from each of the women her name, and then proceeded to ask for the names of their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters, their uncles and aunts. He made no distinction between the names of the living and of the dead, or between those of near and remote kin. Soon the courtroom in Worms was filled with a small Mediterranean congregation, which mirrored and contrasted with the German congregation audible behind the curtain.
Not content with names alone, Joseph son of Kalonymos wished to know the age of each one named, and this was harder, because the accurate reckoning of years is always shrouded in mist, and the long voyage followed by the considerable overland journey had only served to thicken it. Indeed, so confused had the time of the one wife become with that of the other that it might have seemed at one point as though the first wife were younger than the second, had not the little interpreter succeeded in putting the record straight and enabled the curious northern judge to enter, by means of a fragile bridge of half-forgotten Hebrew and the gesticulations of an excited child, into the interiors of two separate houses on the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea, with their pots and pans, beds and bedclothes, and to seek beyond the scent of flowers, the exuberant spices, and the throngs of children the secret of the shame and reproach of enforced duplication.
To this end the arbiter wished to remove the younger wife a little way and to remain alone with the first wife, who seemed to him in his innocence and inexperience as the weak link from which he could extract a complaint of sorrow, pain, and shame, so that the arbitration that was shortly to be delivered would not only follow as the natural outcome of what had been said, but might even appear as a genuine act of rescue. However, he suddenly hesitated to discharge the second wife and remain alone with the wrath of the first, whose age, he now knew, was that of his own wife, and her height, he now saw, the same as hers. This hesitation resulted not only from his uncertainty about whether the presence of a boy who had not yet reached the age of legal majority was enough to satisfy the prohibition on intimacy, but more particularly from fear that out of the anguish in the older woman’s soul a secret or open curse of death might burst forth, directed against her tall, dark, slim adversary, with her delicate, handsome face and her amber-colored eyes that occasionally flashed with an emerald-green spark.
It seemed as though Joseph son of Kalonymos had also caught the infection of the duality that had come up from the south to defend itself, since he was now unable to muster the inner resolve to remove the second wife but sought only to put a little space between her and the first wife. Since he could not hide her away inside the holy ark, he told her, with the help of the gestures of the little interpreter, to squeeze herself into a narrow recess between the holy ark and the east wall, and asked her to cover her head with an old curtain that he had discovered in a drawer, so that she should not hear what her opponent was saying against her.
But to his great surprise, Joseph son of Kalonymos did not manage to extract a single word of calumny against the second wife from the first, even though the latter knew that the other could not hear her. On the contrary, if previously the first wife’s love for the second wife had been distant, because she had not known her, after traveling with her for sixty days on board an old guardship and for a further twelve days on a cramped wagon, the first wife’s soul had become so closely bound to the other’s that this duality, which had journeyed to the heart of Europe to contend for its life, would return home so much stronger and more united that it would no longer need two separate homes but could make do with a single house. A single house? The arbiter was alarmed, for he immediately thought of his own home, a wooden house with bales of straw piled on its roof and black piles supporting its rickety frame, with an additional fair-haired wife walking from room to room, receiving what she had been denied a score of years before.
From the noises coming from behind the curtain, the novice inquisitor could sense that his public was beginning to grow restive at his diligence. Any member of the community, even if he had been raised to unwonted and questionable prominence, was obliged by his nature and upbringing to exercise some self-restraint, and therefore the congregation, cut off from its holy ark, now hoped that this prayer leader and blower of rams’ horns would not forget that his pleasant voice and knowledge of the order of service did not authorize his moderate intelligence to distract him from his duty.
This duty Joseph son of Kalonymos undoubtedly remembered while he sought to replace one woman with the other so as to conclude the examination of the witnesses. He was surprised to discover that to duty was added enjoyment, as though these two strange Jewish women who had been entrusted to him this evening had been joined by other women who had appeared in his life, such as the comely woman who had brought this case and who now waited outside, beside her husband, or his own wife, who awaited him at home, not forgetting his departed first wife, buried so long ago in the clay of the small cemetery beside the Rhine. For a moment it seemed as though his flesh were invested not merely by a duality of wives but with a veritable multiplication of thereof. This was a dangerous moment. He gestured to the child to remove the ragged old curtain from the second wife’s head. And despite his fear of the ban on intimacy, he overcame his shyness, banished the first wife beyond the large curtain, and bid the second wife approach, in the hope that this one might offer him at least a grain of adverse testimony and so enable his conscience to pronounce judgment in the spirit of the sages of Ashkenaz.