But would the little Andalusian rabbi, who was now groping in the thick darkness of a crooked Rhenish room with only three walls—one of which might still have a crucifix hanging on it—have the courage to speak out and explain the plan that he had thought up as a possible escape route even before he had persuaded Ben Attar to set out for a second legal confrontation on the Rhine? Tears of sorrow and compassion but also of secret longing stung Elbaz’s eyes at the startling but generous thought that he himself might free the banned man from the double marriage that was his downfall, not only by releasing the second wife from her marriage vows but by wedding her himself and taking her into his home in Seville, so that she should not remain alone.
But while Rabbi Elbaz was floundering and longing for an opportunity to explain his new plan, Ben Attar asked him to hasten and demand from the Jews of Worms the return of his vanished wives, for it was his intention to bring them both to him, even in this tiny room in a gentile house. All the concern of the banned merchant was not for himself or his merchandise but only for his two wives, his only ones, lest they were assailed by anxiety that he might be thinking of betraying his dual love. So hard and stern was Ben Attar’s voice as he commanded the startled and disappointed rabbi that the man of God felt that since he had failed in his mission, the North African Jew valued him no more highly than the black slave who was now removing his master’s shoes.
2.
In the third watch the second wife thought she heard a faint blast on the ram’s horn, and her heart sank in fear. While she was trying to compose herself in the unfamiliar, alien silence, there floated before her the bloodshot eyes of the arbiter, to whom she had weak-mindedly allowed herself to reveal the secrets of her heart. Again she tormented herself, not for anything she had said but for what she had not managed to say. Rabbi Elbaz, who earlier that night had had to contend for a long time with the excitable hostesses of the two southern women in order to gain their return to their banned husband, had tried to calm the young woman and console her over what she had said, some of which he had learned vaguely from his son, the little interpreter. But it had seemed to the second wife as though the rabbi’s words of comfort had been spoken faintly and halfheartedly. Had he been secretly trying to bind her to him in a compact of guilt, in the knowledge that he too would be called to account not only for the failure of his apocalyptic speech but also for his mistaken choice of judge, a man who had disguised his weakness with an overhasty and cruel verdict? Or had he conceived some strange idea of encouraging the young woman with soothing words to continue to cling to the right of counterduality that she had demanded for herself, to see how far it might go?
One way or another, his words of comfort had only served to confuse her, and now, as she silently rose from the pallet that was all the Christian landlady could offer her unexpected guests, she hastily wrapped herself in the rough black cloak that the local women had given her and slunk past her husband, who had curled up in a fetal position between two large logs that he had rolled out from a corner. Stepping over the first wife, who was sleeping as peacefully as a corpse, with her hands joined, facing a long, sharp-edged, sloping iron bar that supported the ceiling of the triangular cubicle, the second wife entered the other chamber. Wishing not only to escape the curse of the ban but to try to put right the wrong she had done by her rash words, she held her sandals in her hand and slipped noiselessly past the Christian landlady, who was spending the night in a large chair, covered by the pelt of a black bear, whose stuffed head hung on the wall beneath the figure of the Crucified One, who bore his sufferings even in the dead of night.
Although the old woman sensed the shadow flitting past her and momentarily opened an eye, she did not stir at the flight of the Jewess, who descended the creaking, swaying wooden steps toward the darkened narrow alleys of the sleeping town. The foreign woman was alert to the silence all around her and to the huge silhouette of the church, wrapped in a yellowish mist, and yet she clung resolutely to the aim she had set herself, to seek out among the little houses the home of the hosts who had cared for her so generously since she had come to Worms so that they could take her to the arbiter and she could plead with him to listen to what she had not managed to say, in the hope that he might retract the interdict that he had pronounced because of her. And despite the darkness and the marshy vapors, which made her lose her way in the narrow streets of the little town, she recognized the right door and promptly knocked upon it.
But nobody, either in that house or in those on either side, heard the second wife’s light knocking, for the Jews of Worms were fast asleep, having found peace of mind after the days of turmoil, as though the interdict and the ban had swept from their hearts the wonderfully sinful new thoughts brought to their town by the southern disputants. And so the second wife, whose shouting had no effect either, had no choice but to grope her way to the synagogue itself, first to the modest little women’s synagogue, where she knelt for a while after the manner of the Ishmaelites, who manifest total submission before making any request, and then hesitantly entering the men’s prayer hall by the unfinished western wall, slipping between the empty rows, and finally pressing herself into the narrow recess between the holy ark and the eastern wall.
Was it possible that the North African woman’s tormented heart had divined that the judge, Joseph son of Kalonymos, would also be unable to sleep in the coils of this night, and that he too, whether from an access of new strength or from a hint of remorse, would be unable to prevent himself from rising early and coming to his pulpit, either to prepare himself for the morning prayers of the Fast of Gedaliah or to join his body and soul to the place where three women had stood the previous night, waiting for the words to fall from his lips? Therefore, as he picked up the fallen red curtain and drew its corners together, piously pressing his lips to the golden letters embroidered on the faded velvet, then folded it carefully away and put it back in its proper place, no cry of alarm escaped from his mouth when yesterday’s witness suddenly appeared before him. It was as though it were self-evident that after such a stern verdict those who lost would come back to plead, like this young foreign woman, who knelt before him like a primitive pagan.
While her narrow, fin-shaped eyes sought to meet those bloodshot eyes that had hovered before her in her nightmares, she began without delay to speak. Since she had no interpreter to assist her, she mixed into her rapid Ishmaelite speech a few words that had been pronounced repetitiously in the New Year’s prayers, so that for a moment she imagined that the man who leaned toward her compassionately would also understand in the dawn light that was scratching at the yellowish windows the nature and spirit of the counterduality that she claimed not only for herself but for women in general. For while a man demanded duality of body, a woman demanded duality of soul, even in the form of the tiny soul that was encased in her womb.
But could a fearful, confused man, even if he were assisted by the best of interpreters, understand at dawn the new explanation of the obscure testimony of the previous evening? In his terror that some early-rising worshippers whom three successive days of intensive prayers had left unsated would enter the synagogue and find their prayer leader closeted in uncompromising and utter intimacy with another man’s wife, albeit one of a pair, Joseph son of Kalonymos did not even begin to try to understand what the second wife was attempting to say to him in her Ishmaelite tongue, but hastened first of all to raise the form that was kneeling before him cautiously but firmly to its feet and expel it from the sacred place that was forbidden to it.