As though to reinforce the newfound self-righteousness of the northern Jews, who dispersed at the end of the service to rest for a while under the trees, the overcast sky suddenly parted and the autumn sun exposed a bare patch of sweet blue sky which stabbed Ben Attar’s entrails with a sharp pang of longing for his children, his kinsfolk, and his friends in Tangier, who must be enjoying an afternoon rest at this very moment, reclining on gleaming white couches in large, calm rooms. The next instant his nostrils were assailed by a foreign smell of forbidden meat emanating from the smoke curling up from the chimney of the small house. Was the apostate physician about to return home, and was his wife preparing his dinner? he wondered as he hastened to the corner of the convent wall to see whether he could see the eagerly awaited figure of the renegade. And indeed, Karl-Otto the First, as he styled himself could be seen approaching, holding his medical bag. Ben Attar hurried to meet him, ostensibly to hasten the physician’s footsteps, but perhaps unwittingly he was also attempting to postpone as long as possible the moment of his own return to the inner chamber, to his accursed holy of holies, where the rites of death might already be commencing.
Will the woman live? Rabbi Elbaz asked again fearfully, in his quaint Latin. Yes, she will live, the physician assured him, with the same confidence he had displayed the previous day. But they, he insisted on adding, gesturing toward the Jews of Metz, who were dozing beneath the trees, will not live, neither they nor their children. He pursed his lips with a look of grim resolve, and entering his house, he embraced his two children firmly, perhaps to comfort himself for having exchanged such a holy day for an ordinary working day. Then he washed his hands to remove the dust of the roads and the blood of peasants and nobles which he had let all morning, dried them on a soft towel, and prepared to eat the roast meat that his wife had cooked for him. But disturbed by Ben Attar’s looks, he set down his knife and went into the inner chamber, making a sign to the first wife to give up her place beside the second wife, whose head was still tilted back and whose mouth gaped wide open as though she were short of air.
For a moment it looked as though the physician were at a loss for what to do, but then he rummaged in his little wooden chest and extracted a soft reed tube, which he proceeded to insert carefully in the second wife’s throat. He poured down it some of the yellow potion that was so efficacious at soothing pain, and indeed, in a moment the strung bow relaxed and the amber-colored eyes opened wide. Gradually the eyelids drooped wearily and the lips parted in a faint smile, as though now, at the height of her torments, she had been vouchsafed a moment of acute pleasure. The alert physician seized this moment of grace, and before she sank into slumber he took out his knife and needle, bared a lovely shoulder, and let out a further quantity of tainted blood into the basin, which now contained fresh white river pebbles.
The second wife’s body now seemed to find relief, and the painful spasm relaxed and disappeared within her sleep. Ben Attar judged that this was an opportune moment for him to elude the savours of the dinner that the physician’s wife was serving to her apostate husband and join the others for a rest in the little wood, until the daylight had mellowed enough for the afternoon prayers to commence. When Abd el-Shafi and his friend brought the four horses and the mule back from pasture, proudly waving their tails, washed and gleaming from the rest and grooming they had received on this holy day, and the physician emerged from his house for another round of bloodletting inside the walls of Verdun, Ben Attar went to rouse the young slave, the temporary Jew, who had remained kneeling all this time before the scroll of the Law, which had been placed in the branches of a tree. He made him join the rabbi, who had assembled the other worshippers together so he could pronounce the prayer that opened the afternoon service, which stabbed Ben Attar’s innards with renewed dread: The men of faith who were strong in good works have passed away. Valiantly wielding shield and buckler, they averted calamity by their supplication. They were to us like a fortified wall, and like a protection in the day of wrath and affliction. They appeased anger and fury, they restrained ire by their petitions.Before they invoked thee thou didst answer them, for they knew how to implore and propitiate by their supplications …
The fervent murmur of the Jews’ devotions entered the window of the physician’s little house and penetrated the clouded consciousness of the second wife, and with it the spasm returned to her spine, drawing her head back again like a bent bow. With a great effort she opened her eyes, in which there flickered now the grim mane of the angel of death, who had crept in stealthily and now lurked behind the first wife’s back, pretending to share in her light sleep.
Surprisingly, a renewed slumber came over her, as though the remote wailing chant of the men in the nearby wood were soothing the fear that was sapping her spirits. In the midst of the painful spasm that had laid hold of her back like a vampire, she suddenly felt a tender longing for the women’s prayer house in Worms and that female cantor who had stood wrapped in a prayer shawl, wearing leather phylacteries. Behold, thus I shall not prevent you taking me out of this world. She was flooded with sadness and self-pity, which were blended, miraculously, with a gentle flush of pride. And in the twilight of this new thought, which stubbornly darkened within her, she tried to understand to whom that you was addressed—whether to her husband, or to that red-haired arbiter at whose feet she had sunk, to the rabbi from Seville, who was chanting the pentitential prayers in a tired, hoarse voice, or perhaps to the angel of death, who had disguised himself in the plump form of the first wife, who was bending over her affectionately and nodding to show not only that she understood the good new thought that had been born but that she agreed with it.
While the second wife struggled with all her might to expel the breath that threatened to stifle her, and a ray of light that had managed to infiltrate through the curtain revealed in her motionless eyes a glint of satisfaction at the sobbing of her angel of death, two young nuns came forth from the Benedictine convent, sent by the abbess to ensure that the Jews were not so carried away by their devotions that their vain thoughts defiled a world that was preparing itself for vespers. Surprisingly, the mere appearance of the proud, self-confident sisters was enough to halt the Jews in their prayers, so they could hear a clear demand in the local language that they should move their worship from the little wood toward the bare, tomb-strewn field, and should also lend the convent the young slave, whose slim build and dark skin rendered him suitable for shinning down into the well and fetching up a lost bucket. The Jews from Metz, who understood only too well with whom they were dealing, declined even to translate the sisters’ strange request for the benefit of the rabbi and Ben Attar, but took it upon themselves politely but firmly to refuse to lend a temporary Jew, who by his patient but fervent presence was contributing to making up the ten required for worship. They offered the women instead the two burly Ishmaelites, who were checking the wheels of the wagons for the next stage of the journey.