A Journey to the End of the Millennium Read online

  It was not only shame at his wife’s grievous sin and guilt at his own indifference and strictness which had caused it but also a terrible anger at his mother that made Abulafia ask to be banished from his native city. He thought at first to punish his mother by secretly leaving the accursed child in her house and going off himself to the Land of Israel, whose sanctity would atone for all their transgressions. But Ben Attar, suspecting his intentions, caught the poor wretch hiding in the hold of an Egyptian ship, and with the assistance of Ben Ghiyyat he compelled him at the last moment to return to dry land. To make up for the unsuccessful flight and to prevent a future recurrence, he proposed a small commercial expedition—to take some camel hides and skins of wild beasts from the desert to some merchants in Granada. As for the bewitched babe, if Abulafia’s mother indeed refused to take her into her home, Ben Attar himself would take care of her for the time being. Thus, instead of sailing eastward to the Holy Land, which almost certainly would have atoned for nothing and might even in its holiness have embroiled the sinner in additional sins, the grieving widower went to Andalus with a large and heavy cargo of hides, freed of bearing the reproaches of his kith and kin. Since Ben Attar’s first wife, who at that time was his only wife, was afraid to keep the deformed child in her home in case the new fetus that was or would be in her belly should peep out, behold his destined playmate, and refuse to emerge into the light of day, Abu Lutfi went to a nearby village and brought back for Ben Attar a distant kinswoman, an elderly, experienced nurse, who would look after the child in Abulafia’s empty house until the widowed father returned from his journey.

  Abulafia, however, was in no hurry to return from his journey, but extended it considerably on his own initiative. When he learned that people in the Christian country of Catalonia were eager for such hides as he had brought from the desert, he contained himself and did not sell the merchandise in Granada but traveled north and crossed the frontier of the faiths near Barcelona so as to meet Christian merchants, who indeed leapt upon his wares and doubled his profit. Instead of returning at once to Tangier, the young trader decided to exploit the breach he had made. He sent the proceeds back to his uncle with a pair of trustworthy Jews from Tarragona and requested fresh merchandise, while he himself pressed on into the villages and estates of southern Provence to identify new customers and gain a sense of their wants, taking advantage of the protection afforded by the signing in those years of a new treaty among the Christians known as the “Peace of God,” which was made with the aim of protecting traders and wayfarers. He did not inquire about the baby he had left behind. It was as if she did not exist.

  This may have been the secret reason for the rapid success of Ben Attar’s trading network, whose head was in the Bay of Tangier while its two arms embraced the Atlas Mountains in the south and Provence and Gascony in the north. Afraid and ashamed to return to his native town and grateful to his uncle for looking after the infant, Abulafia had resolved to repay Ben Attar, his benefactor and employer, with feverish energy and imaginative resourcefulness, which year by year widened both the circle of his customers and the range of his merchandise. Abu Lutfi could no longer make do with his traditional spring journey to the northern Atlas but had to penetrate deeper into the valleys and the villages, and even inside the nomads’ tents, in search of polished brass ware, curved daggers, and pungent condiments, for the smell of the desert sufficed to attract and excite the new Christian customers, who began to remember as their millennium approached that their crucified Lord too had come to them from the desert. Meanwhile, the Ishmaelite nurse stayed with the bewitched child, who had been forgotten by everyone except Ben Attar, who looked in occasionally to check that she still existed and that he was not paying money to maintain a ghost.

  But the baby, despite her many defects, did not seem to want to turn into a ghost. She insisted on remaining as real as always. Even though she was very backward in her development and limited in her movements, and her eyes remained bulging and blank, as though she belonged to a different race, nevertheless she increased the range of her movement so that the stern-faced Ishmaelite nurse was obliged to take great care to see that there was no loophole in the house through which her charge might accidentally escape into a world that was not expecting her. At this point the uncle’s uncle, the sage Ben Ghiyyat, intervened, when he went in the spring to prepare Abulafia’s house for Passover. Whatever might have been the Creator’s purpose in forming such a creature, the covenant made at Mount Sinai still embraced her too, and her father who begot her could not be replaced by an Ishmaelite nurse, who owed nothing to the God of Israel except her inferiority. And even though Ben Attar was by now accustomed to the responsibility he had taken upon himself, and feared that if Abulafia were forced to take his child back his sense of guilt would be diminished and with it his energy and resourcefulness, which in the past two years had made Ben Attar into one of the grandees of the city, he did not wish to disobey his great uncle, who at fifty-five years of age seemed to frighten death itself. Although Abulafia could not be compelled to return to Tangier and take back his offspring, Ben Attar decided to take her to her father himself, in person and without prior warning.

  And so, ten years before the millennium, Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi set out on their first journey from Tangier to the port of Barcelona. Although they repeated the journey summer after summer, increasing the number of ships each year, the memory of the first trip was engraved deeply in Ben Attar’s heart, and not only because of the novelty of the voyage, which showed him close up how the natural forces—the sun, the moon, the galaxies, the wind, the waves—contended silently opposite the lazily moving shoreline, but because of the intimacy that grew up in the narrow confines of the ship between him and his fellow travelers, especially the strange, dumb child, for even though she was attached by a cord to the nurse who accompanied her, it was not short enough to prevent her from toddling to him from time to time and attempting to thrust her little fingers into his eyes. Sailing slowly among the bolts of cloth, hides, and oil jars, against the background of the monotonous prattle of a Jew from Barcelona who was traveling with them, he forged a bond with Abulafia’s child, so that occasionally he even let her snuggle mutely against his chest and watch the forms of the two Ishmaelite sailors, who in the midday heat removed their clothes and stood on the prow as naked as on the day of their birth. Occasionally, when they camped in some desolate bay on the way and he saw the child walking slowly along the shore in the evening twilight, he remembered her mother, who despite everything had bequeathed something of her great beauty to her defective child—a soft line on the cheek, a certain hue, the molding of a thigh. Indeed, on this voyage Ben Attar thought a great deal about Abulafia’s suicidal wife, as though he too bore some guilt, until one night on the sea, in pain and desire, she burst into his dreams.

  As it turned out, he was very careful not to let the least hint of this dream escape from his mouth, precisely because the meeting with Abulafia was so emotional, so brimming with love and friendship, that the three of them wept real tears. Yes, all three of them. Abu Lutfi was the first to give in and burst into tears as he embraced his long-haired comrade, who was waiting for them in a new black Christian habit at the entrance to the Roman inn, to which the Jew from Barcelona had taken them. The sobbing of the manly Ishmaelite was so surprising that Abulafia was carried away. Then Ben Attar too felt a lump in his throat, but not enough to make him forget the final return of the child to her father’s care. He gave a signal, and the large nurse, who was standing a few paces away, drew forth the child who was hiding in her skirts and gestured to her to approach Abulafia, who first of all uttered a cry of panic at the unfamiliar bird that was fluttering toward him but then closed his eyes in pain and clasped his child to his chest warmly, strongly, as though he had just realized that he too had been longing for her in her loneliness. But on the next day, in between talking about merchandise and rates of exchange, about merchants’ hopes and purchasers’ fickleness, i
t struck Ben Attar that Abulafia imagined that they had brought the child there only to see him, and that she would eventually return whence she had come. Delicately but decisively, he had to remind his nephew of his duties as a father, supporting his words with texts supplied by the sage Ben Ghiyyat. Abulafia listened in silence and read the texts, nodding his head, and after reflection consented to take the child back. Was it only from a simple sense of paternal duty, or was it also because Ben Attar shrewdly offered him promotion from agent to full partner, so he would share in the profits of his work? Either way, there is no doubt that the old Ishmaelite nurse’s agreement to go with Abulafia and continue looking after the child in his home in Toulouse until a replacement could be found also helped the widowed father reach his decision.

  This furnished an excuse for a further meeting, since Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi promised the Ishmaelite woman that they themselves would come the following year to take her back to North Africa. Behind that promise no doubt lay the satisfaction and enthusiasm arising from the present meeting. After two years of new and exciting commercial business conducted thus far by means of occasional envoys, through letters, some of which had gone astray, and on the basis of unreliable rumors, Ben Attar now realized that there was no substitute for Abulafia’s living, gushing words, describing the adventures of each bolt of brightly colored cloth, each sack of rare condiments, each inlaid dagger, which was the source of a veritable saga of exchanges unwinding like a snake until the final transaction resulted in a coin of silver or gold, or a heavy precious stone. No orderly narrative delivered by a trustworthy and clever emissary could replace that leisurely, relaxed conversation with the agent, whose stories hatched a whole clutch of subtle insights, suppositions, and hopes, which persuaded the merchant from Tangier that there really was a change in the air and that the poor benighted souls of the Christians beyond the mountains wanted at this time to be joined to the south and the east by means of their hides, cloths, and copperware. To these practical factors must be added, of course, the joy of reunion of kinsmen and comrades in that pleasant spot steeped in the azure of the Bay of Barcelona and reached by a smooth, calm sea voyage. Now that uncle and nephew had become in a sense partners, although not yet equal ones, it seemed that a summer meeting of these members of a small but ancient faith on the frontier between two great faiths that sought to swallow each other would become a fixed custom.

  On the return voyage from Barcelona to Tangier, however, on board the ship that was now lightened of its cargo, Ben Attar was suddenly stricken with fear. He felt himself to be naked and exposed. He missed the company of those bolts of cloth and sacks of condiments, which always warmed his heart and gave him a sense of security, and he needed that assurance all the more now that his belt and pockets were full of the coins and precious stones that Abulafia had brought him. True, Abu Lutfi was beside him, although from the moment they had embarked his old assistant had seemed for some reason to be alienated and displeased, whispering a great deal with the two Ishmaelite sailors, who seemed to have been smitten with a kind of religious fervor on the return journey, for instead of dancing naked on the prow of their boat they now knelt in prayer five times a day. It was not surprising that Ben Attar had forgotten how tedious the prattle of the Jew who had accompanied them to Barcelona was, and now he missed his company. In his newfound loneliness he even felt a pang of longing for the backward child, remembering with an ache in his heart how she had toddled toward him, tied by a cord, to peer into his eyes. He thought now that if the child were once again lying in his bosom, the Ishmaelite sailors would refrain from attacking him in his sleep, stealing his money, and throwing him overboard. But the little girl was now beyond the Pyrenees, and all Ben Attar could do was to order the sailors to hug the coast, in the hope that there would be someone nearby who could testify against them if they tried to harm him. But they adamantly refused, supposedly for fear of hitting a sandbar, and Abu Lutfi not only refused to intervene but even defended their decision. Had the Ishmaelite managed to follow Ben Attar’s conversation in Hebrew with Abulafia when he had promoted him to partner, while Abu Lutfi had to content himself with the leftovers? Ben Attar’s fear grew stronger, and by nightfall he had come to regret the whole expedition. He sat hunched in the stern of the boat with a dagger hidden in the folds of his robe, straining to keep his eyes open, waiting for the attack.

  Abu Lutfi sensed his Jewish master’s new fear, but did nothing to allay it. He had not managed to understand the Hebrew words spoken by the campfire at the old Roman inn, but he was sensitive enough to infer that if his employer was afraid not only of the sailors but of himself as well, it was a sign that he felt some new guilt toward him, so that when Ben Attar summoned him after a sleepless night and offered him a large gold coin he refused it, on the assumption that it was worth less than his forgiveness for an unspecified guilt. Ben Attar, startled by his refusal, was convinced that when the attack came Abu Lutfi would abandon him to his fate. So it was that after a second night without sleep, realizing that his strength was waning, he made up his mind to appoint the Ishmaelite as a partner as well, so that from now on the silver and gold would be as precious to Abu Lutfi as the apple of his eye.

  Although in the course of this voyage Ben Attar had acquired two partners to share his profit, he felt that he was not returning to Tangier diminished but, on the contrary, increased and strengthened. And when the fast sailing ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and to the calm, steady blue of the Mediterranean was added the wicked, dreamy green of the great ocean that lapped at the walls of his fast-approaching native town, he understood how long the arm he had stretched out toward the distant northern horizon was, and he knew too, as he remembered the new confidence and earnestness that had radiated from Abulafia, that from now on the new partner in the north would stimulate the new partner in the south, and that the new partner in the south would charm the new partner in the north, while he himself, remaining where he was, would cast his protection over the two of them, keeping an intelligent pressure on the reins and receiving his share. The outline of the great cliff was still shimmering behind them like a tawny idol, and already the yellowish African midday light was flooding them, soaking the white walls of the city with a pleasant warmth. And they were ringed with the fishing boats of Tangier, and the fishermen, identifying the newcomers, greeted them happily on their return from their long journey. As Ben Attar disembarked onto dry land, he kissed the sand and gave thanks to his God for bringing him home safely, but instead of proceeding directly to his house, he handed his bundles to a young man and told him to inform his wife and servants that they should prepare a celebration for his arrival, while he for some reason headed for Abulafia’s house, which was now emptied of the last vestige of its owner. As he opened the iron-clad door with the key that was concealed on his person, he reflected that at this very moment, in the far north, Abulafia, dressed in black, might be taking his bewitched daughter with her tall nurse into a dark, gloomy house in Toulouse, no doubt surrounded with frightening crosses, and he felt sorry for them, because the house he was standing in was flooded with light and warmth, its floor was clean, and in a corner, neatly folded and tied into a bundle, was the bedding and clothing of the old nurse, who was still unaware that she would never return here. But nothing at all remained of the child’s things: it was as though she had never existed.