A Journey to the End of the Millennium (4 page)

Even though Ben Attar trusted his Ishmaelite partner—indeed, felt affection and friendship toward him—he was pleased as the sound of Abu Lutfi’s horse’s hooves faded into the red of the dying day, for only then did he feel free to leave aside concern with commerce, coin, and news of the world and hear what had happened in the previous year to his beloved kinsman, who had been sundered by a cruel fate from his native land and his family. Although it was not prudent for two strangers, and Jews to boot, to stray too far from the inn in the
darkness
, the eager pair, after first taking care to conceal their respective leopard-skin pouches, pressed on into the thick of the wood, making for a spot that had become dear to them ever since their first meeting. There, among jutting rocks in the mouth of a cave hollowed out by some ancient earthquake, they lit a fire, not only to ward off any local wolf or inquisitive fox, but also to sprinkle the embers with fragrant herbs, whose smoke curling around them might perfume the joys and sorrows of the year that had passed. Notwithstanding his great
curiosity
to hear all about the private life of the exile, who had years before abandoned the sun and sea of North Africa in favor of the loneliness and backwardness of Christendom, Ben Attar knew well that his
seniority
conferred the obligation to speak first. He was duty-bound to give an account of kinsfolk—wives and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and other relatives and friends—whom Abulafia was keen to learn all about precisely because they had betrayed him, and then to slake his nephew’s thirst for his native town, with its white houses and narrow alleys, its olive trees and palms, its vegetable gardens, its golden beach and its pink harbor. And finally to help Abulafia weep again, across the years, for his beautiful young wife, who had drowned herself because of the bewitched, feeble-witted child she had brought into the world, doubling and redoubling by her scandalous death the shame she had brought upon her husband, so that he had been compelled to banish himself.

And so, in the sweet sadness of remembrance of the past, they spent a wonderful summer’s evening together on the border of the Spanish March, which neatly divided the two great faiths from each other. And although they both felt an occasional flickering anxiety for
the fate of the third partner, who was at this moment galloping into the depth of the night with his leopard-skin pouch dangling near his privy parts, they were also pleased that the Muslim was no longer with them, for now they were free to season their conversation with words from the holy tongue, and on the morrow, the eve of the fast of the month of Ab, when Benveniste came up together with a quorum of Jews hired especially for the purpose of praying and wailing for the ruin of the Temple, they would forget the purses full of gold and the wiles of commerce, and taking ash from the fire and smearing it on their
foreheads
, they would join in the eternal fear and mourning of their people.

On the eastern horizon the firmament was sinking somewhat, and the moon had declined to the height of a man. Even though the captain’s sole responsibility was to sail the ship, he had caught Ben Attar’s anxiety about the secret, noncommercial purpose of the journey, and he rose and woke Abu Lutfi, who had been put to sleep by the mere smell of the wine, so that he should stir the ship’s owner, sprawled in a drunken stupor on the deck, to visit the wife who was waiting for him in the stern. Soon dawn would break and put an end to their last night on the open sea, and from now on they would lose their anonymity; on either side of the Seine they would be tracked by suspicious natives, full of the panic of the approaching millennium, who would certainly try to board the alien ship to inspect her and find out what she was about. As Ben Attar slowly rose from the depths of his slumber, he not only felt on his face the cool, urgent breeze of the last hours of the night but also found himself looking into his partner’s anxious eyes as Abu Lutfi shook him roughly. He thought painfully how wrinkled the Ishmaelite’s face had become these last years, perhaps on account of the repudiation emanating from the northern partner.

Though Ben Attar wondered how he would manage to spread the wings of his desire a second time, he nevertheless hurriedly stood up, swaying at first and leaning on the side for support, staring at the dark
water lapping at the stationary ship. The fire was still burning at the mouth of the invisible river, and on the shimmering water could be seen the enchanted silhouette of a gigantic bird. All the Jew’s senses were opening up toward the night, which was filling with new signs, and he was almost driven to kneel, as though he had been infected by the pagan faith of the young slave, who was now standing nearby, awake as ever, with his bells tinkling in the breeze, ready to raise aloft the oil lamp and light the way before the dawn should break.

Here in the stern of the ship he had great need of the guiding light, for the breadth of the ship’s hindquarters added to the confusion and deepened the darkness. He had to beware not only of the piles of cloth, the bulging sacks of condiments, and the large oil jars roped together like captives, but also of animals, which stood up as he
approached
, their sad eyes flickering in the darkness. The space that had opened up in the hold of this old guardship after the soldiers’ bunks had been removed had inspired Abu Lutfi to add to the sheep and chickens intended for consumption a pair of very young camels, a male and a female, tethered to each other with flaxen ropes, as a present for Abulafia’s new wife, to soothe her mind and help her feel and smell the essence of the Africa from which her young husband had come. At first Ben Attar had rejected this notion, but eventually he had agreed, not because he believed that the woman really wanted a pair of camels, but from a vague hope that the strange, rare animals might arouse
sympathy
among those of high class, who liked to buttress their nobility by means of wonderful things. But are these little camels really capable of surviving the journey? wondered Ben Attar, watching the black slave, who could not refrain from either worshipping or affectionately
embracing
their delicate little heads. True, Abu Lutfi did not forget to feed them a small bundle of hay every week, to which he occasionally added slices of greenish rancid butter churned before they set sail, but their bloodshot eyes and the incessant trembling of their little humps did not seem to bode well. And when will the end of the journey be? A sigh escaped from Ben Attar’s heart as he descended lower and lower. Would he ever manage to return to his beloved Tangier and embrace his children again?

Upon entering his second wife’s chamber, Ben Attar tried to waken and expel the rabbi’s young son, who instead of sleeping next to his
father in the bow had recently become fond of falling asleep in this very spot, by the dark curtain. But the boy, who spent most of the daylight hours helping the sailors, either climbing up to the crow’s nest to scan the wide expanse of sea or pumping bilgewater, was sleeping so deeply that Ben Attar decided to let him be. He took the lamp from the black slave and ordered him back up on deck. Only when he was certain that the slave’s footsteps were fading into the space overhead did he draw the curtain aside. Behind it was another curtain, so that he had to bend double and almost crawl on all fours to enter his second wife’s bedchamber.

In this place that she had sought out for herself, so close to the bottom of the ship that you could hear the gurgle of the water, Ben Attar was assailed by the special odor not only of her body but of the rooms of her home so many miles distant. It was as if even in this cramped cabin she managed to cook her stews, air her bedding, and cultivate her flowerbeds. By the shadowy lamplight cast on the ancient, soot-blackened timbers of the guardship, which had almost gone up in flames in one of the great caliph’s battles, amid rumpled bedclothes, discarded garments, and candle ends, it occurred to him that this woman had been waiting for him to come to her ever since the
beginning
of the night. His heart sank at the thought that all this prolonged, eager waiting might have sharpened needles of resentment that would frighten away his desire. He had hoped to enter unobserved and grope his way quietly into her bed, so as to become part of her sleep before he became one with her body, so that she would dream him before she sensed him. Only then would she be able to forgive him for bringing with him tonight the smell of the first wife’s body, which he was always careful not to do.

But she was awake. Her long, fin-shaped, amber-colored eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, like those of a newly trapped wild beast. In the city a veritable maze of alleys separated his two houses, so that each wife could feel that her universe was separate and
self-contained
—although he, who plied between the two, knew that the distance was less than it appeared to them, and in fact he was sometimes amazed at how little it was. Some nights, smitten with the
anxiety
of delicious longing, he climbed up onto the roof and floated across to the roof of the other house over the domes of the white city,
which lay still in the moonlight like the breasts of pale maidens
floating
on a lake, as though he were a sailor leaping from prow to stern. That may have been the reason why at the beginning of the spring, when, at first desperately and later enthusiastically, he had first thought of gathering together the merchandise that had been sadly idle for nearly two years, sailing with it to that faraway town called Paris, and having a face-to-face meeting with the partner who had been severed from them, it had not seemed strange to take both his wives with him. He was convinced that the calm, harmonious
presence
of the two wives side by side would prove to Abulafia’s new, knowledgeable wife better than any rhetorical argument how far she was from understanding the quality of love that prevailed on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Of one thing Ben Attar was always certain: his deep and precise knowledge of the nature of the care and love that inspired happiness and security in his wives. Every act of love with one of them involved an anxious concern for the other. Otherwise, how could he have asked them to leave their children and do without servants, to give up the scented warmth of spacious homes with beautiful tableware and
luxurious
beds, and squeeze like fugitives from a war into tiny, rocking cabins on board a ship sailing north instead of east, on an unknown route? If he himself, who had passed his fortieth year and was entitled to contemplate seriously the approach of death, was prepared to
endure
the hardships of such a lengthy journey, were they, being so much younger than he, entitled to refuse? Surely they knew well that it was also for their sakes that he was undertaking this daring voyage. Even if they felt apprehension about their ability to withstand the hardships, surely they should feel no less apprehension about the wandering of a solitary man, who for many long days would be not only without a bedmate but without a kind word to caress his careworn brow. If he were to take with him only the first wife, whose two sons were now old enough to fend for themselves, and spare the second, whose only child was five years old and still tied to the hem of her robe, surely he would be undermining the living and compelling proof of the stability and equilibrium of his double marriage, by means of which he wished to surprise his nephew’s sanctimonious wife, who could not imagine even now, in this dawn when he was at the mouth of the river, that in a few
more days he would glide on his strange guardship to the very threshold of her house, to bring her this living proof.

Ben Attar’s uncle, however, the famous scholar Ben Ghiyyat, was not entirely happy about the idea of subjecting two wives who had scarcely met to prolonged and indelicate proximity in the narrow confines of a small ship. Surely it would be an assured source of storms and troubles over and above those caused by the winds and the waves. So that his nephew would not be left alone in the company of sailors, who were in the habit of seeking sin in every port, the good uncle had a mind to send a letter to his friends in Andalus asking them to prepare for the honored voyager, from his first port of call, Cadiz, a third, temporary wife, for the purpose of this journey only. A woman who would be at home on the ship and happy dwelling on the sea, with the waves as her companions. A woman whose bill of divorce would be signed together with her marriage deed and would be waiting for her on her return, in the port in which her married life had begun. Politely, with due respect to his distinguished uncle, whose white hair and beard he greatly admired, Ben Attar swiftly declined this well-
intentioned
initiative, which would only add fuel to the fire that was already burning against him far away. He was absolutely confident of the power of his understanding love to quell any storm caused by
loneliness
or jealousy, like that which was now pent up in the confines of this cabin.

At home he was always careful not to lie down beside his second wife, let alone touch her, until he was certain of her utter
reconciliation
, for even a grain of resentment can reduce desire to mere ardor incapable of bringing relief. Consequently, whenever back in Tangier he entered her delightful bedchamber, with its high, blue-washed
ceiling
and its window looking out on the sea, he would first scrutinize her long, lovely face, whose angularity sometimes recalled that of a sad man, and if he observed the slightest shadow around her eyes or her mouth he preferred not to approach her, even if the sweet pain of desire was already burgeoning in his loins. First he would go over to the window to look at the boats in the bay, then he would return and walk slowly around her bed, which was covered in striking colorful blankets that Abu Lutfi found especially for her among the nomadic tribes of the northern Sahara. Softly and casually he would start talking to her
about the troubles and pains of kith and kin, so that the miseries of the world would enter into her and soothe away any resentment or grudge that she felt toward him. Only then, when he could see the dim amber hue of her eyes sparkling with moisture brought out by the duty of compassion, would he permit himself to sit down on the end of her bed, which was also his own bed, and quivering with excitement, as though traveling back in time to his wedding night, he would delicately draw her perfumed legs, their down smoothed and softened by warm honey, one at a time out of the rumpled covers, and press them to his face as though trying to identify with his lips the legs of the young woman who had stamped on the dust of the small yard of her home when he had come and indicated to her father his wish to marry her. Only then did he permit himself to begin to caress her from the top of her long thighs down to her toes, talking all the while softly and
unhurriedly
about the prospect of his death, which in the case of a man like him, who had passed his fortieth year, was not only possible but indeed natural. And only thus, with the permission he gave her to contemplate without any sense of guilt a new young husband who would wed her after his approaching death, did her shuddering acceptance begin, and he would feel her foot clench in his hands. Unlike the first wife, who was shaken to the core of her being by any talk of death concerning himself or others, this one, who was younger and sadder, was attracted by talk about his death, which not only stirred her curiosity and hope for herself but also aroused her tender desire for him, which he promptly took up and sprinkled upon himself like fragrant powdered garlic.

But now he was afraid to mention the reassuring prospect of his death even in a lighthearted or jocular way. The subject might appear brightly lit and charged with sweet sadness by the window looking out over the Bay of Tangier, but here, in this cramped little cabin in the very bottom of the creaking ship, it filled even him with dread.
Therefore
, without a further unnecessary word of apology, he entered, hung the lamp on an iron hook above her bed, unbuckled the belt full of jewels and laid it by her head, then boldly removed all his clothes. But before lying down naked next to his wife he tied his ankles with some coils of yellow rope left over from those with which the caliph’s admiral had reinforced the ship’s timbers, and then he took off the heavy silver
chain that hung around his neck and bound his wrists together with it, so that she would understand that nothing prevented her from taking whatever she wanted from his body and his soul. Maybe like this she would be able, if not to forgive him, at least to reconcile herself to the fact that he had married her as his second, not his first, wife.

Although she was surprised that he surrendered himself to her so unconditionally, stripped and bound, which he had never done before, she still recoiled from him and was in no hurry to remove her shift, but took down the lamp to shed light on the body stretched out at her feet, to check whether since their last lovemaking any more curls on his chest had turned that silver color that always excited her so, because it was given to so few men to have their hair turn white before death cut them off. Now she confirmed what she had imagined. The same days of sun and clear skies that had ruthlessly tanned her own skin had whitened the hair on her husband’s head and chest, so that it was hard to know whether to lament the new signs of his approaching demise or to rejoice over the mysterious beauty with which they endowed him. A sweet sadness flooded her soul, and she could not refrain from laying her curly head upon the chest of the man who had come to her so late in the night.