A Journey to the End of the Millennium Read online

  Weakened, Ben Attar said to himself, but no more than that. When Abulafia’s mother, his own elder sister, suddenly took to her bed, Ben Attar was in no hurry to tell her son, and even in their summer meeting in the Roman inn he concealed the seriousness of her illness, lest the morose son hasten to her sickbed to poison her last days with words of reproach. Only after her interment did Ben Attar dispatch a special messenger, who pursued the orphan along the highways of Provence for many days to take him news of her death, which was received as expected, without tears and even with a slight smile. Then indeed Ben Attar asked Abulafia to return, even for a short visit, to execute his mother’s will and perhaps, who knew, to make his peace with his kinsmen, to whom he shortsightedly ascribed the blame that was his own. But Abulafia, who had lost the sweet kernel of the vision of his great revenge, was still far removed from any willingness to make his peace with anyone else, so he sent word to his uncle to sell his share of his mother’s estate on his behalf and bring the proceeds with him to the next summer meeting.

  By this time Ben Attar’s heart was deeply moved by the loneliness of his kinsman, the balance of whose mind was disturbed by the combination of guilt and love for his wife. He had even begun to wonder whether he had behaved correctly in extracting his nephew from the hold of the ship bound for the Holy Land, for the sanctity of the ancestral land might possibly have sucked some of the poison out of his innards and imposed order on confusion. Even more he regretted the alacrity with which he had executed his famous uncle’s orders to restore the child to her father, for her deformed presence repelled marriage brokers and continued to keep her mother’s memory alive. Bound hand and foot, Abulafia’s wife remained engraved on the memories of others too, including Ben Attar himself, who that terrible night on the seashore had been unable, despite himself, to avert his eyes from the naked woman who lay so wonderfully beautiful upon the sand. Since then, such were the thoughts that Ben Attar pondered in his heart: If I, who saw her so degraded, cannot forget her beauty to this day, what must her husband feel?

  However, Ben Attar also recognized the benefit of the younger partner’s loneliness, which delivered a special impulse to business, for a salesman who has no wife to draw him homeward but is tempted by every new place, however remote, in the hope of discovering there the reflection of the beloved image, goes where no other trader will go, and even if the goods he has for sale are strange and unneeded, the mere fact of their appearance there compels their purchase. The demand for Moroccan merchandise did indeed increase in Provence, so that every summer they were obliged to add another ship to the convoy setting sail from Tangier, and if ten years before the millennium, at the first meeting, when they brought the child and her nurse, one ship sufficed, now, five years later, five ships were scarcely enough. True, it was not only Abulafia’s energy and resourcefulness that had achieved this, but also the rise in the Christian population, for as the millennium approached the dying strove to defer the day of their death and babies hastened their birth, so as to ensure their presence in the year that was said to bring an abundant quickening of the dead.

  Yet despite the rapid enrichment of the three partners, or perhaps because of it, Ben Attar grieved for his nephew’s loneliness. Refusing to give up hope, he persisted in seeking among his nephew’s innumerable tales and plans the rustle of a woman’s skirt. And so, when the evening of the ninth of Ab arrived, after Abu Lutfi mounted his steed and vanished into the afterglow of sunset on the long mountain path that wound its way to Granada, Ben Attar began to describe to his beloved nephew and business partner, carefully and delicately, using two interwoven languages, the terrible wilderness of loneliness that his stubbornly maintained widowhood would condemn him to. But in that summer of the year 4755, which was year 385 of the Hegira according to the Mohammedans, five years before the millennium of the Christians, when the lamentations for the loss of the twice-destroyed Temple had softened and sweetened the souls of the two Jews and at their feet in the ashes of the dry grass of late summer the flames of the campfire had become a fragrant Cyclops’ eye, Abulafia wrapped his head in his scarf and laid it on a stone, thrust his legs out in front of him, and, still fingering the hidden purse of coins that had been given to him a few hours earlier and fixing his eyes on the glimmering sea of stars overhead, began to speak again of Paris. But this time he spoke not only about the town but also about a woman who lived there.

  It transpired that it was not in vain that the nurse had insisted that Abulafia move to the street of the Jews, to whom he belonged by race and by faith, for only there could he have obtained the means to establish contacts with other Jews’ streets, in Tours and Limoges, An-goulême and Orléans, in Chartres and perhaps also in Paris. These were not always real streets, but sometimes merely narrow little alleys, or no more than the entrance to an alley, or a single house, or perhaps only a single room in which dwelled a solitary Jew. And so Abulafia’s eyes were schooled to discern in his surroundings not only the kings and dukes and counts who held sway but also the places where the Jews were scattered.

  Slowly Abulafia was drawn back to his kith and kin, from whom in the early years he had distanced himself in the fear that they would try to marry him off and frustrate his dream of returning to his native town. He had already admitted to himself that this was not a concrete plan but a dream, and therefore he had nothing to fear from its being frustrated, because it is in the nature of a dream that it always remains in the power of the one dreaming it. Therefore, after moving to the street of the Jews in Toulouse and seeing that not only were there those who could exchange a word or two of Arabic with the nurse but some who would offer a smile or a caress to the bewitched child, his heart softened, and on his return from his journeys he would join the congregation in prayer, not only to recite—still with a raging heart—the memorial prayer for his wife, but also to question the Jewish worshippers about the roads to the north.

  For the Jews, even those who had never traveled far from their town, always knew something about Jews from other towns, just as they always knew something that the gentiles did not yet know about themselves—for instance, that the devotees of the approaching millennium would be attracted particularly to goods coming from the desert, the sort of objects that Jesus and his companions in the Holy Land must have handled, for the faithful wished to make a welcoming home for the Son of God, who would soon descend from heaven with his apostles. Thus Abulafia, who could interpret the signs, no longer traveled from Toulouse to Agen or from Limoges to Bourges, but from one Jew to another, each of whom advised him not only about the new types of merchandise but about how to raise his prices. It was while he was traveling in this way, following the advice of the Jews, that he made the acquaintance in an inn in Orléans of a woman, Mistress Esther-Minna, the childless widow of a scholar who had passed away a few years previously in Worms, a small town called Vermaiza by the Jews, by the River Rhine in Ashkenaz. She had been invited after her husband’s death by her brother, Master Yehiel Levitas, a dealer in jewels and precious stones, to reside with him and his family in Paris, both to lighten the gloom of her loneliness and so that she could occasionally assist him with her good sense on secret missions to the towns and villages in the surrounding country.

  It appeared that it was not only because she was a widow and childless, nor only because she was exposed to him in the somewhat licentious air of a wayside inn, but particularly because she was some ten years his senior that Abulafia had given himself easily to a lengthy conversation, which led him to a deep association that he had not imagined himself capable of. From exchanging casual remarks in the twilight hour before the evening meal, commencing with the attempts of this elegant yet respectable woman, the widow of a distinguished scholar, to embellish her speech with a word or phrase in the holy tongue that she had learned from her late husband, and with some acute commercial observations that she let fall, there developed an intense conversation that continued until midnight. It was a licit exchange, in view of the
widowed state of both the interlocutors, who were still nameless to each other, yet it contained a certain hint of boldness and even sexual license. When the cross on the belfry pierced the flesh of the moon, which was as round and pale as the famous local cheeses, and slowly let it drop behind the church, and total darkness fell in the chamber in which the pair were sitting, Abulafia felt a pleasant warmth spreading through his body. It was the first time he had met anyone who took the old story of his pain and affront seriously and listened with open sympathy to his continuing dream of revenge, while firmly and absolutely rejecting any suggestion that his daughter was the victim of a curse or enchantment.

  If it was not a curse or enchantment, Ben Attar wondered, what was it? But even Abulafia could not answer that question. He could only talk of the astonishment and gratitude that had coursed through him at the end of that conversation. Here at last is somebody who gives rest to my soul, he had thought to himself as he inhaled the woman’s unfamiliar scent, which he had not only become accustomed to but even begun to enjoy. And as, like a child reading his mother’s lips, he sought the precise meaning of this slim, small woman’s words, which had been spoken in the Frankish tongue but slowly and clearly enunciated, with quotations from Bible stories and rabbinic writings, she seemed to become stripped in his mind of her enfolding femininity, not, heaven forfend, so as to take on male attributes, but to reveal her primal and fundamental humanity, which is the true source of sensual excitement.

  But precisely because he was so contented and elated, was he able to imagine that this steady, rational woman, Mistress Esther-Minna daughter of Kalonymos, who had subtly lanced the boil of his hatred for his mother, had begun to be strongly attracted to the man sitting opposite her, so that perhaps this warmth that had begun to spread through him sprang not only from her wise words but also from the heat that glowed in her, and that she was beginning to catch fire from the spark of her desire? Three or four times in the ten years of her widowhood she had been assailed by such a sudden attraction, but always she had succeeded in stamping it out, perhaps because the men she had been attracted to had been not only worthy but married. This time she was surprised by the youth of the man who had aroused her interest, as if on this occasion it was a desire not for a strange man that had sprung up inside her, but for all the children she had not been able to bear, who seemed to have burst into the world of their own accord and merged in this young man, a southern Jew, with his dark curls and his swarthy skin, whose very being was transformed that night by the shadows moving between the flickering candles and the moonlight into something rich and attractive.

  True, Abulafia had become accustomed in recent years to various kinds of snatched infatuations, generally involving gentile women, that had arisen in taverns or marketplaces, and sometimes even on the road. Even though he came from the south, women discovered something oriental in his melancholy, since it was in the east that the beloved Son of God had suffered, and even though in the course of the years he had spent in Christian Europe Abulafia had endeavored, for his safety’s sake, to adapt his appearance to the places where he was trading, some traces of his alien origin could still be discerned in his way of dressing his curls or trimming his beard, or of selecting and matching the colors of his clothes, or even his manner of tying up his coat. Since his prosperity was apparent from the quality of his garb and the nature of his baggage, these liaisons flared up with particular intensity. However, they were short-lived, since Abulafia was careful to sever them in good time, so as not to surround himself with excessive fire. But not before he had managed to sell some goods that even his lovers had not intended to buy from him. Not a few homes of Provence and Aquitaine received sacks of condiments that would suffice not only to season their owners’ last supper but even the dishes of their heirs’ heirs.

  But on that winter’s night in Orléans, he was so moved by the older woman’s curiosity that he refrained from qualifying as love her sensitive interest in his thoughts and deeds, which did not even omit an inquisition into the character of his partners and friends. Me too? Ben Attar asked in a whisper, with his head cocked and with a surprised laugh, his eyes likening the galaxies twinkling above his head to the glittering embers of the log in the campfire. It emerged that the woman had shown an interest not only in Ben Attar but in Abu Lutfi as well, and even in Benveniste and their summer rendezvous. She had been excited to hear, for example, of the total confidence that Abulafia and Abu Lutfi invested in Ben Attar to be the sole arbiter of the distribution of the proceeds of the previous year’s business.

  And so, on the eve of the fast of the ninth of Ab, Ben Attar learned for the first time about the meeting with the new, clever woman, but he could not yet imagine how decisive and fateful she would turn out to be for him, or how one day he would be compelled to purchase a big old guardship, load it with the merchandise that had piled up over two years, separate his wives from their children and their homes, and take them on a tiring and dangerous journey from North Africa into the heart of Europe, in the company not only of his partner but of a rabbi from Seville, hired to pit his wisdom against hers. In that summer five years before the millennium, when he first heard from Abulafia about his meeting with Mistress Esther-Minna, Ben Attar was interested in her words and her questions rather than in her form and the nature of her womanhood. But as he came to recognize the particular excitement that informed the speech of his partner, who did not even conceal his intention of accepting the new woman’s invitation to visit her family home in Paris, Ben Attar also began to interest himself in the appearance of the woman from the Rhineland, and was surprised to learn that she was a small, elegant woman with her hair gathered at the back, perhaps so as to reveal her intelligent face and her pale eyes better.

  Pale? Pale in what way? Ben Attar wondered. When Abulafia described the precise tinge of blue of the widow’s eyes and the flaxen color of her hair, likening it poetically to the color of the ocean licking the golden sands of the North African coast, Ben Attar’s soul trembled, for not only did he now sense Abulafia’s responsive love for the new woman, but for the first time he understood that there might be Jews in the world whose most remote ancestors had never been in the Land of Israel.

  Who could say that curiosity about these Jews, who may have had some Viking or Saxon blood in their veins, was not one of the unwitting causes of Ben Attar’s journey, which, with the entry to the river, from the time when sea and land met, was taking on a special sweetness? The River Seine welcomed this ship that had traveled so far and carried it along like a father carrying his child. True, it was midsummer, and there was no knowing the depth of the river and whether there was some danger to the hull of the ship, but the warm brightness surrounding them spoke only of affection and hope, and without noticing, they had eaten up since dawn, despite the many bends, a very considerable distance. And the evening was still gradually drawing in the slowly fading redness. Back home the evening fell swiftly, whereas here the sunset was extended, and the twilight struggled for its life. Abd el-Shafi had noticed that two weeks had passed since the lengthening of the twilight hour began, but at sea the drawing-out of the twilight is not as spectacular as inland, where the trees cast reflections of reddish light upon the water. Since morning the captain had been lashed to the mainmast, and despite his worries he was enjoying this unusual form of navigation. And even though Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi were both of the opinion that it was high time to stop and encamp, the pleasure of sailing got the better of the captain’s fears, and he steered the ship upstream into the darkness, relying on the young eyes of the rabbi’s son, who remained at the masthead so as to be the first to cry “Rouen!”

  As the darkness deepened all around, limiting the child’s vision, new, unfamiliar sounds came from the river. The dull ringing of the bell of Rouen church echoed from afar, and they understood that the pair of young lovers who had been lowered from the ship a few hours earlier had already announced their coming, for all unawares the river had filled with sm
all boats, which surrounded the ship as though attempting to imprison her.