A Journey to the End of the Millennium (26 page)

Now the rabbi understood why his son had not taken his eyes off the man, and why he had tipped his little black hat at the precise angle favored by his host. He suspected that the invisible hand of a good angel was touching him kindly, and his mind hastened to confirm the choice it had made. It would be good to plead his cause before a judge who, like Ben Attar, had had experience of two wives, even if not simultaneously. For a moment Elbaz wanted to join his boy as a guest in the house of his chosen one, in order to make a close study of the weak points of his mind and his character, but he gave up the idea, fearing that excessive propinquity might arouse suspicion. He decided, though, to offer this Joseph his little black horn during the service next morning, so that he might try to make the softer and darker southern sound on it.

Before the North Africans went their separate ways to eat the
festive
meal with their respective hosts, the rabbi hurried to share his new thought with Ben Attar and seek his permission to place the case in the hands of a single carefully selected judge. The merchant, who had so far been obliged to bestow retrospective approval on the decisions the rabbi had imposed on him, was surprised at the suggestion, but after some thought he gave his consent, because he too had realized that the unruly simplicity of the makeshift court near Paris would be replaced here by the stern, united knowledge of a community that was sure of itself. Thus it would be better to be judged here by a single, humane person who was accustomed to stand and pray with the
congregation
behind him rather than in front of him.

Then Rabbi Elbaz approached Master Levitas, whose eyes were searching the women coming out of their synagogue, looking for his sister, and gave him a first indication, not in his own name but in that of Ben Attar, the party to the suit, of their wish for the case to be heard in Worms by a rather restricted panel of judges, in fact by a single arbiter. At this the other, who had learned from his bitter experience in Villa Le Juif the same lesson as the rabbi—namely, that whoever selects the judges controls the verdict—pricked up his ears shrewdly, and apprehensively he asked the Andalusian rabbi, who looked just like a local Jew now with his black cloak and pointed hat,
A
single
arbiter?
Why?
Surely
we
could
benefit
from
the
combined
wisdom
of
several
judges?

But Rabbi Elbaz held his ground. On the contrary, it was precisely because this community contained such an abundance of scholars, who learned from each other but also scrutinized and threatened each other, that they should prefer the option of a single judge, who would take full responsibility for the final separation between uncle and nephew, south and north. But who would the single judge be?
Master Levitas’s fears increased, though he was heartened by the gentle
presence
of his sister, who now, after the evening service, appeared
charming
and radiant among the townsfolk. Surely the boy was not to be charged with selecting him, as at Villa Le Juif? It turned out that the rabbi was demanding not any kind of ballot but merely the
straightforward
right to choose, which by any standards of justice and ethics should belong to the complainants, who, confident of the rightness of
their cause, had risked life and limb upon the stormy ocean to come and make their protest. Even when they had won their case, they had generously agreed to submit to a further hearing, in the depths of the forests and swamps of Ashkenaz, in a wretched and benighted town full of sharp-witted, learned kinsfolk of the other side. Honesty and propriety decreed that they should be granted the right to choose the individual who would pronounce the final verdict.

In the face of such powerful arguments Master Levitas had nothing to reply, although he wondered whether his elder sister, whose bright eyes held a fleeting smile, could fathom the purpose of the Andalusian rabbi, who had set forth his case so enthusiastically in the holy tongue. Over the festive dinner in the home of his host, the elderly rabbi of Worms, the rabbi from Seville saw that the right of choice that he had arrogated was already granted, and all that remained was to investigate the chosen candidate. Consequently, between discussions of a
scriptural
character, he attempted to extract some further information about Joseph son of Kalonymos. When he heard, by the by, that many years previously Joseph’s parents had wished to betroth him to Esther-Minna Levitas, but that her parents, being very particular, had preferred a whole Kalonymos to half a Kalonymos, his spirit trembled, as though it were being not merely touched but caressed by the good angel. It was possible that two different qualifications might converge, and that
justice
might be reinforced by a wish to be avenged for the affront of past rejection.

Neither did Rabbi Elbaz disclose the next day, at the morning prayer, the secret of the single judge—not even to his employer, the merchant, who stood stiffly among the worshippers at the side of his beloved nephew, the curly-haired conditional partner, whose musical talents enabled him to join even in the most complex chants of the Rhenish congregation, so that the leader, Joseph son of Kalonymos, feared for a moment that he had a rival. But when they took out the scroll of the holy law and laid it upon the reading desk, and Joseph son of Kalonymos blew upon a massive twisted yellow ram’s horn the
threefold
blasts prescribed by tradition, a vague terror fell upon Rabbi Elbaz. It was as if the raucous, insistent sound of the German ram’s horn contained a new and urgent warning for him. However, he composed himself, particularly after the scroll was replaced in the holy ark and
Joseph son of Kalonymos turned to him and invited him to grace the service by blowing the little black southern horn that the rabbi had managed to conceal from the eyes of the customs officer in Verdun.

And so, slowly, with restrained excitement, the first day of the festival passed, and after it, in leisurely fashion, amid persistent drizzle, the second day too, whose afternoon service was followed immediately by the evening prayers for the Sabbath of Repentance. And still Ben Attar did not know, and may not even have wanted to know, in which of those black-beamed wooden houses raised on stilts his two wives were secreted. The gray autumn skies of the German town seemed to have soaked up the North African merchant’s constant dual love and filled his soul with a tangled despair that was apt to cloud his mind, so that for a moment there was a fear that he might leave everything behind him, take the strongest and best of the four horses that had faithfully brought them here from the Seine from the stable behind the synagogue, and gallop back alone to Africa.

If at the outset Ben Attar had wanted to prove, as in Paris, his quiet ability to realize fully and in perfect equality his rights and duties as a husband, he had quickly understood, perhaps because of the way the local Jews had managed to isolate him from his wives right from the start, that it was not from the man that they were expecting proof here, but from the wives. But proof of what? he wondered again as he
noticed
his wives reappearing in the women’s synagogue on the two days of the festival. Was it religious piety, he mused in irritation, or was there also an intention of tarnishing their souls with fear and perhaps even guilt, as though the great love that had delighted and continued to delight them both had been illicit from the outset?

From the moment that Master Levitas had placed before the
community
Rabbi Elbaz’s firm request to appeal to the decision of a single judge, the spirit of the Jews of Worms had flagged, since for several days they had been entertained by the thought that they would
dispel
the tedium of the ending of the festival and the Sabbath with a pleasant discussion of the fate of three women. But when they were assembled in their synagogue after the closing ceremony of the
Sabbath,
not to sit in judgment as a community but merely to be passive spectators, waiting to see which scholar the busy little rabbi would choose, they still did not imagine that he would place a further
constraint upon them and adamantly insist that the hearing should be held behind closed doors, so that the judge who dared to sever north and south forever would not be supported by the presence of a fanatical assembly.

Thus they were reluctantly made to put up a double curtain in the synagogue, to separate the public from the space reserved for the court. But for all his stubbornness, the rabbi could not prevent them from improving the light by increasing the number of candles and lanterns, so they would not miss seeing the litigants as they were
summoned
into the small, hidden space next to the holy ark. True, it was not as it had been in the large space of the winery in Villa Le Juif, where the torchlight had cast mysterious, enlarged shadows into the corners of the hall so that the judges, sitting on wine casks, could imagine that they were floating in the depths of hell, where all mortals, men and women alike, are split into their dual human nature; here in Worms the Andalusian rabbi wanted to define a small, well-lit space, where the parties to the dispute and the witnesses would be pressed close together with each other and with the arbiter, whom it was now time to detach from the assembly of Jews filling the synagogue.

Even though the candidate, Joseph son of Kalonymos, was sitting apparently absent-mindedly in a corner, half listening to the chatter all around him, it seemed that he had had a premonition that he would be chosen, not so much from the readiness with which he handed his candle to the man sitting next to him or the alacrity with which he rose to his feet, but rather because he had remained wrapped in his prayer shawl after the evening prayers. He may have wished to excuse himself to his friends for being chosen, as though the judge’s seat that he was being summoned to occupy were merely the natural extension of the lectern where he regularly officiated, as an ordinary elderly man,
undistinguished
from his fellow men and sounding the ram’s horn as
occasion
required.

A stir of disappointment ran through the faithful public as they divined how cleverly the Andalusian visitor had chosen from among them a lenient judge, who, although his strength was in his voice rather than in his intellect or his book-learning, could not be disqualified, for who could claim that one who was deemed fit to represent the
congregation
by leading the prayers was not fit to represent it by serving as
arbiter? But there were a few men, among whom naturally was Master Levitas, who knew and remembered that the man who had been
selected
was not only a widower who had had experience of two wives, albeit consecutively and not concurrently, but had also been a
candidate
for betrothal to Mistress Esther-Minna, and who suspected that what had been denied him in the past might well stir his antagonism in the present.

Master Levitas darted behind the curtain, where Rabbi Elbaz was already escorting an embarrassed Joseph son of Kalonymos to his seat and standing Ben Attar and Abulafia facing each other, wishing to exploit the momentum of the amazement he was causing and to open the proceedings at once, apparently counting on a lightning hearing that would be conducted in the holy tongue alone. But Levitas,
grasping
with alarm the sudden deterioration of the situation and the
possibility
that because of his own and his sister’s excessive self-confidence the sly rabbi from Seville might succeed in securing a verdict against them again, in the heart of their native country, burst into a frantic discourse in the harsh local German dialect, leavened with flattened Hebrew words. Whether he did this to save precious time or to foil the rabbi’s understanding, he addressed himself boldly to the judge, who all the time kept anxiously tightening his grayish prayer shawl around his shoulders.

The whole of Master Levitas’s impassioned speech concerned only one demand: that his sister, Mistress Abulafia, should be brought into the hearing, for she counted herself as a party to the case no less than her husband. Although the suggestion made Joseph son of Kalonymos’s heart quake, he did not grant his consent before turning to the foreign rabbi who had chosen him, questioning whether the wife could be brought in, even though she was apparently not a member of the
partnership
herself. For a moment the rabbi seemed taken aback, but even though he saw no way of opposing the request, he still refused to make a concession for nothing, and so, without knowing why or wherefore, he suddenly sought to balance her presence with that of the three Ishmaelite sailors or wagoners, for it was thanks to their toil no less than to divine favor that the parties had arrived here safely.

The good people of Worms rose excitedly to their feet at the sight of the three Ishmaelites, summoned to the synagogue from their
several
lodgings, being taken one by one behind the curtain. While the whole congregation devoutly muttered the time-honored blessing to the Creator of all manner of folk on seeing the young black man
passing
through their midst, Mistress Esther-Minna slipped in by a side entrance. Master Levitas, after a momentary pang of remorse for
allowing
Rabbi Elbaz to fill the small space of the courtroom with these gentile servants, still believed that he had behaved correctly, for it was a long time since his older sister had seemed so comely and attractive as on that Saturday evening, standing beside the holy ark with her hair bound up in a fine silken snood. Not only had sleeping in her former marital bed soothed away the effects of the hardships of the journey and her anger at the southern visitors who had burst into her life, but the pleasant prayers that had filled the dank marshy air of her native land had smoothed her wrinkles and put life back into her pink cheeks and her blue eyes, which now smiled amiably into the blushing face of the arbiter, who remembered only too well how a score of years earlier her dear departed parents had forbidden her betrothal to him.