A Journey to the End of the Millennium (23 page)

So they advanced steadily, between halts, along the right roads. Meanwhile, the approaching year 4760 lashed them in their
imaginations
from afar as though it had joined the long whip that Abd el-Shafi had improvised from a rope from the ship, which he waved above the horses’ heads as though he were breathing life into an invisible sail.

Abulafia and Ben Attar had thought at first they would stay in wayside inns because of the chilly nights, but they were surprised to discover that the bright skies of Champagne retained something of the warmth of the day even after dark. When they realized at the first inn where they halted, in Meaux, what a large and smelly throng of
Christians
was crowded into the sleeping quarters, and how thin the
partition
between the men and the women was, Ben Attar decided, with his nephew’s concurrence, to try to spend the night under the vault of heaven. Not far from the inn they drew up the two wagons facing each other and tethered the four horses together; they made a comfortable place for the three women to lie, and they left the rabbi’s son to sleep among them, to interpose his lean body, at least symbolically, between south and north. The three Jewish men found themselves a sleeping place among the wares in the larger wagon, and the two mariner-wagoners slept under it between the large wheels, so that anyone who tried to move the wagon would wake them at once. As for the black pagan, he was ordered to roam around and scare off anyone who might try to disturb their sleep.

And so Mistress Esther-Minna slept close to the southern uncle’s two wives, their breathing accompanying her own and their sighing punctuating her own dreams. Occasionally she was alarmed by the thought that Ben Attar might be unable to curb his desire and might leave the large wagon in the middle of the night and raise the flap of the smaller wagon, to seek love even from one who did not owe it to him. Then she would retreat on her own, leave the triple bed in
confusion
, and hasten to stand beside the silent horses as though seeking their protection. Very soon the young slave would emerge from the
darkness and offer her a hot drink made from bitter, tasty desert herbs, which would restore her peace of mind.

The following night, camping under the stars near an inn called Dormans, after a long but pleasant day’s journeying amid vineyards planted on little hills—they had even been invited by an enthusiastic vintner to view one of the caves in which he stored his wine—she woke again, uncertain whether it was the proximity of two wives belonging to a single man that had disturbed her sleep or the mixture of joy and fear she felt at the impending encounter with her native town and her late husband’s kin, the Kalonymos family. Again she stood beside the horses, wondering where the unseen fire was over which the black servant invisibly brewed the bitter herbal drink that she needed more and more each night.

The next day, when they reached the dark stone walls of Chalons and a fine drizzle began to fall, Ben Attar wanted to enter the town and find them a real roof to put over their heads, but eventually he dropped the idea and turned the two wagons into the shelter of a small wood so they could prepare for the night. But the dripping of the rain on the canvas cover of the wagon gave him no rest, and fetched him out of his bed to see whether the Ishmaelite wagoners required more covering. While these turned out to be fast asleep, he found the woman who was his adversary swathed and trembling, with her infusion, and he made her a shallow bow. Before retreating in obedience to the law regulating contact between the sexes and reinstalling himself in the men’s wagon beside her husband, he could not resist pronouncing a few words of courtesy in his atrophied Hebrew, careful to filter out any hint of protestation or anger about the sorrow and suffering she had caused him for several years now.

In the morning it transpired that they had been mistaken to fear entering the walls of the town, which turned out to be a labyrinthine place but very welcoming to Abulafia and Ben Attar, who could not overcome their commercial instincts and at first light entered the main gate to offer bags of condiments and earthen jars of olive oil for sale. Despite the early hour people pounced on their wares, and they were generously repaid in food and drink. The two partners, whose former cordial partnership had now been revived, could not help regretting the
small quantity of goods they had brought with them and the long journey that still lay ahead, although it did cross Ben Attar’s mind that a reduction in his stock would increase its attractiveness and double its value.

After breakfast they made their way haltingly toward the border with Lotharingia, stopping other wayfarers and pronouncing the name Verdun. But those questioned persisted in shaking their heads and talking not about Verdun but about a place called Somme, which would have to be crossed first, before the road to Verdun lay open ahead. It soon became clear that Somme was the name not of a town or a village but of a region of dense forest. The ground under the horses’ hooves, which had been soft and crisscrossed by brooks and streams, became hard and gray and dry. The following day they began to descend and ascend terraces of land like gigantic flights of steps leading to the Lotharingian border, and the soil, which had been chalky, turned tawny. The garments of the local people also changed their form and color, with crimson standing out more and more in the men’s breeches, which became wider, and in the women’s aprons, which became longer. From time to time the travelers alighted from the wagons and walked, not only to relieve the horses but to enjoy the views of the winding River Meuse, until they came to the town of Verdun, which was entered through a gate in its fortifications. Through this gate passed not only traders but lines of fair-haired, blue-eyed Slavic slaves of both sexes, shackled together with light chains.
Outside
the town, beyond the wooden bridge over the river, stood different guards, gleaming grayly in their coats of mail, fingering the broad, heavy scabbards of their swords, and raising their visors in pleasure and surprise to learn how powerful the yearning of a Jewish woman for the Rhineland was, if she was so successful in infecting both her near and her more remote kin with it.

But despite their sympathy towards the Jews seeking entry to the land of the Moselle and the Rhine, the guards refused to exempt them from paying a tax on the merchandise heaped up on their wagon. When the Jews tried to argue, maintaining that this was not
merchandise
but merely a few small gifts for the many kinsfolk awaiting them in Worms, the officer of the guard was momentarily confused, but after a moment’s reflection he ruled that the wagon with the gifts, together
with the Jewess returning to her homeland, should be taken to a nearby customs house so that an authoritative and responsible answer could be found to the question of the difference between merchandise and gifts.

It was too late for them to retract their absurd sophistry, and so Abulafia too had to leap quickly up on the big wagon, so that his wife would not be left alone with the stubborn Lotharingians. While the wagoner, Abd el-Shafi, whose rank and dignity when at sea no man guessed at, battled with two soldiers who were attempting to wrest the reins roughly from his hands, Ben Attar ordered the other sailor to attach himself to the wagon that was rolling away, to thwart any
impure
purpose that might lurk behind this demand for clarification. Thus Ben Attar was left alone with his wives and the rabbi and his son before the walls of Verdun, under a soft gray autumn sky, in a lush green meadow traversed by rivulets, cut off by a bend in the river. He averted his gaze from the black slave, who was now compelled by the guards to remove his clothing and present himself for inspection as naked as the day he was born, so that they could verify precisely how far his blackness extended. From behind the town wall, where the convent of Saint Vanne rose with its two rounded towers, there now burst a sound of singing accompanied by the lowing of a mournful beast. The guardsmen did not seem to be surprised by the sound, and at first they seemed to dismiss it with ribald talk. But gradually they too came under the spell of the sonorous resonance of the music on the other side of the wall, and they released the naked youth, who donned his green robe made from the first wife’s dress and, shivering with embarrassment, rejoined the five Jews, whose fears for Abulafia and his wife gnawed at their souls and prevented them from listening to the singing that filled the grayish brightness of the late afternoon.

All except the second wife, who from the moment the first notes sounded had felt her insides turning over. It was as though the
entrancing
music that curled around her joined her to her only son, whom she had left behind in her parents’ house on that faraway
continent.
Suddenly her patience snapped and she was unable to resist any longer, and she rose to her feet and begged Ben Attar to take her to the source of the singing, as though there she might find a balm that would soothe her sorrow. Fearing a further dispersal of the company, Ben
Attar tried at first to refuse his wife’s strange request and quell her spirit, but the young woman, still transported by the new music, would not relent, but shamelessly kneeled before him, sobbing and trying to kiss his feet, until in confusion he turned to the guards, who were observing them with faint curiosity, and implored them with broad gestures to silence the strains of song that were driving his wife out of her mind.

But the Lotharingian guards neither could nor would silence the singing, which they were clearly enjoying. Consequently, if Ben Attar wanted to quiet this sudden turbulence in his wife’s soul, he must do as she asked and take her inside the walls of the town. He told the first wife, who was staring wide-eyed at her companion, to resume her place inside the wagon, and he begged the rabbi to join her with his son, while the young slave was instructed to climb up onto the driver’s empty seat and take up the reins in one hand and the whip in the other, so that if anyone tried to harm them during his brief absence he could flick his whip and disappear in an instant down the highway that stood open before them. After explaining to the soldiers with broad gestures and an apologetic smile what he intended to do and what he was leaving behind in their care, he took a firm hold of his wife’s thin arm, and she trembled expectantly as he steered her hesitantly through the gate into the town of Verdun, making straight for the place the music was coming from.

It had been more than sixty days, ever since the beginning of the bold, amazing voyage on the ocean and the river and the additional journey overland, since Ben Attar had been able to escort a lone woman in public, as he had done on occasion on the waterfront in Tangier. He looked compassionately at the young woman walking
trippingly
at his side or at his heels, who had not noticed, or chose not to, that in her inner commotion her veil had fallen away from her brown face, which was delineated by the simple yet precise hand of a hidden artist. He did not know if it was the sound of the music that had given her the desire and the strength to force him to take her out of the little company, or if it was her longing to be alone with him, not just as a woman wriggling submissively on a narrow bed in total darkness but under the vault of heaven and in a wide open space. Indeed, the husband and his second wife were walking now under a gray sky,
between the furrows of a piece of land scattered with tombstones so uniform in form and color that it seemed as though those lying beneath them had all died and been buried together. And there, close to the wall of the convent of Saint Vanne, stood a solitary house, and before its open door were standing, to the amazement of the North African travelers, not a band but merely a pair of musicians, a man and a woman, whose combined voices had made their music loud and strong, especially since they were accompanying themselves on lutes. But as Ben Attar hesitated to advance, the second wife broke away from him, stood tall, and threw herself upon the musicians and into the doorway of the house itself. The darkness inside was crowded with dozens of jars, vials, and flasks full of powders, herbs, and potions, and a
physician
or apothecary stood there, aged about thirty, bareheaded and with a close-cropped beard, listening to the music that was being played for him. Behind him hung a terracotta image of the suffering savior.

The two musicians seemed to be pleased at the arrival of a new and exotic listener, and they played even louder in her honor, but the proprietor, noticing the fine shadow of a woman’s robe falling across the square of light at the entrance to his house, hurriedly gestured to them to stop playing and came out to see who was sharing the fee he had just been given for his medical attention to the two musicians, who had first listened to his advice and swallowed his potions and only afterward announced that they were penniless. He stared at the two strangers, who might be seeking healing for themselves. Then he
inclined
his head and introduced himself, first in Teutonic, then in Frankish, and finally in Latin. Even though he could see that they shared no common language, he persisted, extracting with gentle,
flowery
gestures not only the names and surnames of his unexpected visitors but also the names of the places they had visited during their astonishing journey from the continent of Africa to their new destination.

Neither Ben Attar nor his second wife, who now opened her
narrow
amber eyes wide, could tell whether this healer of Verdun, who presented himself, either humorously or seriously, as Karl-Otto the First, could really grasp the vast distances they had traversed or the antiquity of their lineage. But of one thing they were certain, and that was the power of the attraction they had for this crop-bearded,
black-clad
physician. With an impatient gesture he now dismissed the two musicians and their musical tribute so that he could pay attention to the two strangers, whom he was eager to invite into his home, even if they were not patients in need of his healing potions.