In the depths of the night the second wife felt a spasm in her spine, and quickly she arched her head back to relieve the pain a little. There was pitch darkness all around, for even the moon had vanished from the window. After a day of such hardships and commotions, her mind was soothed by the dark quiet that embraced her, if only she could still the spasm that drew her back like some little goblin determined to turn her aside from the straight and narrow. There still hovered in her mind the seven strange Jews with horn-shaped hats on their heads, who had come to reinforce the Andalusian prayer leader drawn to her bedside. Was it only pity for her weakness that had saddened the little rabbi, or was he also trying to admit to her that her private little speech about two husbands was no less dear to him than the vehement speech he had delivered among the wine casks in the winery outside Paris?
At that, a fancy began to float in the second wife’s desperate mind that if she tried to fulfill the desires of the Jews who had prayed for her recovery and arise from her sickbed, Rabbi Elbaz might accept in return, if only symbolically, the role of her second husband, and so not only strengthen the message of the southerners to the northerners but also continue to serve her first husband as a learned rabbi and able interpreter of any new question that might arise. This surprising thought so rejoiced her soul that her lips parted in a smile, as she imagined that on their way home they might all disembark in Cadiz in Andalus and go together to the rabbi’s home in Seville, to fetch his belongings and his clothes and his holy books, then load them onto the old guardship and sail away to that little well-tended house that looked out on the meeting of the ocean and the Inner Sea. And although the goblin’s vicious hand still twitched the muscles of her back, the smile and this fantasy strengthened her will to recover.
As she rose from her bed and crouched to relieve herself in the basin stained with her tainted blood, she caught sight of her husband’s sturdy form creeping into the chamber to watch over her. Lifting her from the basin, he laid her down very carefully in her bed, and although he knew that the physician and his wife might have heard his stealthy footsteps, he did not yield his right, the right of a loving husband, to caress her cheeks and kiss her feet, so as to strengthen her spirits and relieve her suffering. If this were not a holy day, when marital acts were forbidden, he would have offered her proof positive that in his eyes she was neither tainted nor enfeebled but a healthy, whole woman deserving of love according to the season of her desire and her status.
But despite the North African husband’s conviction that abundant love would hasten his second wife’s recovery, she continued to be racked by spasms, and her head with its disheveled mane of black hair continued to arch backward as though she were trying to make a living bridge with her frail form on this simple bed offered to her by an apostate physician in Verdun. If her husband had promised to give her a second husband, her tortured body might have been soothed by hope, for this woman who had been plucked in the tenderness of youth from her father’s house believed she possessed enough love to attract and keep two husbands. But with all the power of his attentive love, Ben Attar could not imagine in his heart that his suffering wife was indeed capable of being, like him, twice wedded. Thus it did not occur to him to fetch her a second husband, but only a physician, who, hearing the sound of Ben Attar’s kisses in the next chamber, rose and came to watch over his patient.
When the physician saw how she suffered, he at once fed her some of his yellow potion and strewed healing herbs upon her and around her. When she was a little relieved, he hastened to draw aside part of her robe and lay his beard upon her heart to hear the throbbing of the tainted blood in her veins. Then he palpated her small belly and inhaled the smell that rose from her navel, and a mysterious smile flitted across his face. Silently he went to the window to ensure that no stranger was spying on them, and for want of an alternative he strained to retrieve a few words of the holy tongue from the recesses of his memory to induce Ben Attar, who stood clenching his fists, to redouble his love and care for his young wife, for she was no longer alone but carried another, tiny life inside her.
The news pierced Ben Attar’s heart like a knife, and not only doubled but tripled his anguish, so that it seemed for an instant that with a merchant’s bold and stubborn despair he might try to bring the fetus forth from the womb of the invalid, who had fallen into a deep slumber, and entrust it to that of the first wife until the second wife’s fate was decided. So thoughts of this kind would not drive him mad, he asked in the morning twilight, when Rabbi Elbaz entered the chamber to raise his spirits, for the first wife to be roused and for her to be joined by all the other members of the congregation, so that they could form a dense wall around the second wife and block her way to the hereafter.
4.
Alone she is left now, her covering cold.
Beholding his loved one her lord laments.
Calmly she journeys, barklike her bed,
Darkness directs her, we know not where.
Ebbs now her spirit, thy dear one departs,
Fails now the vision, dashed is the dream.
Gone without gaining pardon or peace,
Hoarding up vengeance, dead is the dove.
In secret caressing melts now the love,
Kissing a dear foot—crowning content.
Loved in her lord’s arms, never alone,
Moves now the curtain another’s desire.
Now in the northlands somber and sad,
Ocean-wide grimness holds thee from home.
Pause to remember one mournful man
Quite worn with weeping, a suitor despised.
Ruthless and fearful lawyers proclaimed it:
Stern interdiction and baleful ban,
Tearing asunder first wife from second,
Undone forever comradeship close.
Voyaging unfriended, seeking release,
Wrapped in yon widower’s whispering words,
Yet stay a moment, fatal reflection,
Zealous I follow, faithful to death.
5.
In the course of the morning prayers, the seven Jews from Metz realized from the deep anxiety the North African displayed for the health of the young woman inside the little house that she was someone special to him, someone he held in particular affection. But as they were unable to interpret what they saw, it was hard for them to avoid thinking that it was a question of carnal sin—in other words, that the sister-in-law was also a secret, beloved concubine. At once they began to investigate, and once they had manage to persuade the young Elbaz to speak, the patient’s true position was revealed—namely, that she was neither sister-in-law nor concubine but an additional wife, a legal wife but a second wife nonetheless. What troubled the contingent from Metz, it emerged, was not the truth now revealed, but the untruth the rabbi had told them when he had solicited them to come. Before they consented to proceed with him to the solemn service of the high priest of old, according to his own rite, the great Babylonian master, they withdrew for a consultation in a corner of the woods, not far from the wall of a convent, and eventually the little Andalusian rabbi was invited to join them to explain why he had lied to them. At first the rabbi was evasive, fearing to disclose the matter of the ban in case, tempted to associate themselves with their brethren of Worms, the Jews of Metz dissolved the congregation in the middle of the prayers and departed with the scroll of the Torah that they had brought with them. Being uncertain, however, whether the forgiveness granted on the Day of Atonement would extend to a lie pronounced in the course of the worship, he yielded and disclosed the whole truth, though in a terse and laconic fashion.