The speed and skill with which the little procession was prepared for the road were amazing to behold. Two or three commands from the southern Jew were enough to bring the three Ishmaelites to a fever pitch of activity and to send Rabbi Elbaz off in search of his son. As for the Jews of Worms, who were already tired from the beginning of the fast and confused by the strange morning’s events, they stood around the two large wagons, sorry to be deprived of such wonderfully colorful and exciting guests, and even though in their heart of hearts they longed to keep them in their midst for the ten days of penitence and for the joyful festivals to follow, they knew only too well that the arbiter’s judgment, however hastily arrived at, was final and brooked no appeal, and so it was best, perhaps, for the banned man and his company to go on their way, to soften the pain of parting.
Before Ben Attar set forth on his journey and their sorrow was forgotten, the Jews of Worms hastened to load the wagons with food and drink, blankets and warm apparel, candles and dishes, little silver candlesticks and wine for ritual purposes. Although the ban forbade them to speak to the women or touch them, they brought dozens of small gifts for them, and they also brought sacks of feed for the horses, who were already sniffing the air of the journey ahead. But where was Abulafia? Ben Attar’s heart quivered with pain. Where was his dear partner hiding himself? And where was the blue-eyed woman, who had turned her repudiation into final rupture? Did they know that at this moment, in the mist rising from the river and drifting into the Black Forest, their kinsfolk were leaving them forever, vanishing into the west on the first stage of their long journey to the south?
Master Levitas saw it as his duty to hasten and inform his sister of the sudden departure of Ben Attar and his company, and he also stirred himself to obtain special dispensation from a revered scholar, Rabbi Kalonymos son of Kalonymos, for Abulafia to meet his uncle briefly so as to take his leave of him. But Abulafia declined the generous offer. Not only did he refuse to leave his chamber, he lay in his wife’s former matrimonial bed and would not even join Mistress Esther-Minna, whose throat suddenly choked with tears as she watched from the little window while Ben Attar pleaded with the good folk of Worms not to load any more gifts on his two wagons, which were slowly sinking into the yielding Rhenish clay.
Even if Abulafia was yearning to fall into his beloved uncle’s arms and beg the pardon of the partner who was returning empty-handed to the azure shore of their native land, the soul of this curly-haired man, who had not yet donned his phylacteries nor said the morning prayers, bridled at the thought of a further meeting with his second aunt, the secret basis of whose being he had finally discovered yesterday in his uncle’s passionate and unexpected confession. Even if she replaced the veil on her face and covered herself in layer upon layer of cloaks, she could not conceal from him any longer the form that was hidden within her, the form of that miserable, admired, beloved sinner, naked and drowned, who in vengefully destroying herself had punished him and banished him to a faraway land. Therefore, with all his might he must shut himself up in this former bridal bed which creaked beneath him, for he knew only too well that if he went to take his last leave of his uncle, he would not be able to restrain himself, tender and sorrowful as he was, from tearing the second wife away from Ben Attar, ripping out the form that was hidden inside her, and throwing it, if not into the salt sea of their birthplace, at least into his new wife’s freshwater river.
Thus Abulafia knew that he had better wait until the rumble of his uncle’s wagons faded away in the distance. The same rumble disturbed the chief wagoner, Abd el-Shafi, who felt the wheels straining. When they pulled up in the square in front of the belfry in Speyer, a town where no Jews dwelt, they decided to lighten the load and offered a goodly part of the gifts that the community had generously heaped upon them for sale to the local inhabitants, who pressed around them curiously. Although the distance separating Worms from Speyer was not more than fifty miles, the gifts, converted into merchandise, aroused such great interest that Ben Attar was amazed at his ability, with no common language and with no knowledge of the local customs, to sell the Worms Jews’ old clothes, jars of honey, dull copper candlesticks, and bottles of ritual wine, accepting in exchange, on Abd el-Shafi’s advice, an elderly but sturdy mule. On this the black youth was at once seated, so that he could ride out ahead of them and sniff out the right road, which they had taken two weeks earlier in the opposite direction.
For they were alone now, in a strange and alien expanse, without Mistress Esther-Minna’s command of the Teutonic and Frankish tongues and Abulafia’s experience of the roads. All they had at their disposal were Rabbi Elbaz’s limping Latin, the young slave’s finely tuned desert nose, and the two expert mariners’ knowledge of the winds and the motion of the stars. The Day of Atonement, which flickered ahead of them like a menacing black beacon, spurred them on to greater speed and effort, so that they would cross the border between Lotharingia and Francia in time to seek refuge in the Jewish congregation of Rheims, who they hoped would not yet have heard news of the ban.
Indeed, there seemed no reason why the master of the little convoy should not realize his modest ambition, for the wagons were more lightly loaded now that they lacked the two passengers who had caused the ban, and now that the gifts had been bartered for the whiskered mule, which walked proudly ahead of the wagons, bearing the lithe form of the master tracker, who was happily sniffing out the right route. Nevertheless, Ben Attar had the feeling that a mysterious heaviness had laid hold of the wheels as they advanced between fields and hills toward the silvery furrow of the Saar Valley. In fact, it was hard to explain what was slowing them. At first they suspected the autumn breezes, which occasionally soaked them in gentle drizzle; yet the spirits of the wagoners seemed to be revived by each soaking, as they cracked their whips at the drenched horses.
It was only when they made their third night halt, near the small village named Saarbrücken, not far from the octagonal burial church that Mistress Abulafia had excitedly recognized as marking the approach to her native land, that Ben Attar understood that the hidden source of their loss of impetus was to be sought not in the mud that impeded their wheels or in any slackness in their manner of driving but in a spiritual cause. At first he wondered if it were not due to gloom brought on by the ban and interdict, which, plausible though they were, were nevertheless particularly irksome because they had been pronounced so abruptly and by such a simple man. But gradually he realized that the thing that was holding them back was not hovering around the wagons but was hidden deep inside them, in the continued silence of the second wife, who sat slumped at the side of the wagon, wrapped in two black cloaks, stubbornly refusing evening after evening to taste the food that the first wife prepared. Indeed, at first sight the cause of her ill humor seemed plain enough—two deep gashes that crisscrossed her slender legs, marked by pearls of dried blood. But was it really only physical pain that prevented her from joining the others for the evening meal, or was it also resentment and anger at all that had taken place?
Even though she was still careful not to reveal her secret testimony on the eventful night of the arbitration, she worried that the truth had become known to her husband, either from Elbaz or from his son, the little interpreter, who very tenderly brought her a steaming bowl of meat stew from the campfire. Therefore the look the second wife bestowed upon the little go-between was blank and withdrawn, and she added to the two cloaks that she had brought from Worms the first wife’s black cloak, which lay beside her. She kept her mouth firmly closed, not only against eating any of the food that the first wife cooked for her but also against letting out any cry of despair at what she had said behind the curtain on that terrible night, and at the words she had tried to add next morning in the same place before the same man, who should have listened to her instead of hurting her.