To whom could she now say what would never be understood? Perhaps only to the oceanic fetus, which was cloaked in the envelope of her womb and demanded additional warmth from its mother, who was shivering inside and trying with all her might to hoard what warmth she could, for its sake and for her own. Again, as at every hour of this journey, there came before her inner eye the wondering face of one who would cease to be her only son in a few more months, the dear child she had left behind with her parents in Tangier, who although he might not yet have forgotten his mother had certainly forgotten his father, who was now raising the flap of the wagon to inquire after his second wife and see whether she had tasted her food. When Ben Attar saw the bowl lying shamefully where it had been put, his spirit was greatly disturbed, and all the resentment and blame he nursed toward her on account of the counterduality that she had dared to ask for herself—which he mistakenly understood as physical rather than spiritual—burst forth at her refusal to strengthen herself with the stew that had been set before her.
Now she was alarmed, for she had the feeling that he was about to feed her himself, against her will, something he had never done before. She began to sob, but very quietly, so as not to be heard by the company gathered around the campfire, particularly the first wife, who was asking Abd el-Shafi to tell her about the movement of the stars in the sky. But the Elbaz child heard the muffled crying inside the covered wagon and his heart curdled within him, and before his father the rabbi could stop him, he had lifted the flap and seen the owner of the ship, the leader of the expedition, raising his second wife and feeding her with the stew made for her by the first wife, who had suddenly fallen silent.
Deep in the night, when the rest of the company was fast asleep, the second wife arose from her bed and went a short distance away, to a tree where a little jackal or dog was tied by a rusty chain. It had come up in the evening to scavenge the remains of the company’s supper and been caught by the black slave, who with Ben Attar’s tacit permission had taken it in as a pet in place of the young camel that had been left behind on board the ship. The little beast, which had already become used to the travelers, whimpered and wagged its tail as the second wife approached, and without a moment’s hesitation lapped up the vomited remains of the stew she had been forced to swallow. Only then did she feel better. Desperately pale and buffeted by successive waves of heat and cold, she gulped the cold air of the autumn night and looked toward the remote campfire of another company of traders, who were transporting slaves from the east to the west.
Eventually she returned to her bed, wrapped herself in her sweat-soaked cloaks, and closed her eyes to seek a little rest, not suspecting that her footsteps had woken the Andalusian rabbi, who had followed her movements through a crack in the canvas cover of the other wagon. For a moment Elbaz wondered if it would be right to wake her husband and inform him that the meal had not reached its destination. But he restrained himself, as though he was in no hurry to reveal to anyone else, even the husband himself, the faint signs of illness that had appeared in the dead of night and that filled his heart, in the depths of darkest Europe, with an old longing for the last days before he was widowed. But in the morning, when he went to wash the sleep from his eyes in the little stream and found the second wife busy laundering her robe, he did not hold back from asking shyly yet affectionately how she was, and even though she smiled in thanks, as though there were no care in her heart, he could sense from the redness that suffused her bare cheeks that the fever in her body was mounting.
Ever since the women of Worms had made them remove their veils, the Moroccan women had been in no hurry to replace them, not only because they had seen how women could stand boldly with bare faces before the Lord himself, but especially because on the return journey the company of travelers had drawn even closer together and become a single family with three attendant servants and a rabbi, who could be considered a kind of kinsman. He had become so concerned for the second wife’s health that he now demanded that Ben Attar halt the wagons at intervals to let her rest, lest a graveyard rather than a synagogue await them on the approaching Day of Atonement.
Thus the little procession wound its way more slowly, and by evening prayers on the fourth day Ben Attar found himself staring alone at the distant horizon where the fading light glowed pink above the walls of Metz, the town where he had planned to spend the coming night. But could he allow himself to take no notice of the fever? It was sufficient to put a hand to the brows of both his wives by way of comparison, to perceive the growing threat to the second wife, whose handsome face, despite her efforts to make light of her distress and smile pleasantly, not only at her husband but at anyone who greeted her, undeniably bore an unfamiliar flush because of a disease that had originated in the manure in an old stable and had infected the blood that oozed from the scratches on her legs.
On the morning of the fifth day, the day preceding the eve of the ever-approaching Day of Judgment, after hours of sleeplessness beside the campfire had blackened his love with anxiety, a bold decision seized Ben Attar. Instead of feeling his way in discomfiture and confusion among the Jews of nearby Metz to discover whether the news of his ban had preceded him, he would press on before the coming of the holy day to the next halt, the little border town of Verdun, so that in the event of any mishap they would be close to the home of that strange apostate physician who had shown such interest in them on their way to the Rhineland. It was even possible, Ben Attar continued to himself, by way of strengthening his resolve, that before the physician’s solitary house beside the church they would hear once again that wonderful song, with two distinct yet intermingling voices, which had so entranced the second wife and might now revive her spirits. But as Ben Attar did not know whether there were Jews in Verdun who would welcome them into their congregation, he divided his little company in two. He himself would take the smaller wagon, with the feverish wife and the cool-headed one, to the little border town, while he would dispatch Rabbi Elbaz and his son to Metz, the favorite town of Emperor Charlemagne, to gather, in exchange for gold coin but also under constraint of pious duty, eight qualified Jews to make up a company of ten males, like the eight Jews whom Benveniste had used to bring up from Barcelona to the ruined Roman inn to celebrate the ninth of Ab. Thus he might mark the holy day in a private, if temporary, congregation, hired by his own gold and untroubled by any ban.
At noon on the sixth day, the eve of the Day of Atonement in the year 4760 of the creation of the world according to the reckoning of the Jews, in the ninth month of the year 999 since the birth of the wonderful suffering child who by his death was to win so many hearts, the North African trader spied the stone bridge over the Meuse, which abutted at its eastern end the stone and clay walls of little Verdun. Even if by some chance the news of his ban had preceded him here, he did not need to fear an inquisition from the physician, who without waiting for overzealous Jews to ban him had separated himself from them first. Therefore, as the horses drew up on the spot where they had halted before, a few paces away from the Lotharingian sentries with their sparkling mail and glinting swords, he instructed the mariner-wagoner and the black youth to protect the two wives, who had seated themselves against the wheels of the wagon to rest after the tiring journey and to breathe the cool autumnal air, while he himself entered through the town gate without delay, crossed the graves of slaves who had met their death here, and hastened to the solitary house near the church, to the physician Karl-Otto the First, whose being at once a gentile and not a gentile conferred a great advantage upon him now in the mind of the southern Jew, who believed that a few words of the ancient holy tongue would suffice to secure his assistance.