The two nuns smiled at each other on hearing the generous offer, knowing perfectly well that it was utterly unacceptable to introduce two such strong men into a convent of women who led a constant struggle against delusions and fantasies. They abandoned their impertinent request and disappeared through the gateway of the convent, not before making sure that the worshippers had indeed taken the scroll of the law and were heading toward the graveyard, where they would conclude their prayers.
When the tops of the trees of the abandoned wood were stabbed by shafts of light, the seven Jews from Metz were seized by fear and trembling at the approach of the concluding service, when the gates of repentance in heaven would be closed, and they sought to remove the rabbi from the office of cantor and chant the all-important concluding prayers themselves according to the rite and melodies of their own dear, distant congregation. Ben Attar made a covert sign to the rabbi from Seville not to resist but to yield his place to a local Jew, whose prayers might help to avert the harsh decree that menaced him. He also told the young African to approach him, so that he could seek consolation in the desert scent that rose from his body, a fragrance of dried thorns and smoke of ancient campfires, which the long ocean voyage and the additional journey overland had not been able to erase.
Then as the local cantor began to wail the prayer in a tune familiar to the city guard of Metz: What shall we say before thee, O thou that dwellest on high, or what shall we recount before thee, O thou that inhabitest the heavens, for surely thou knowest all the hidden things. Ben Attar, as he swayed in distress, knew that from now on he would have to increase his dependence on his God, for his first wife, the wife of his youth, emerged wearily from the physician’s house and collapsed on the threshold in a posture of mourning, indicating wordlessly to her husband, who was wrapping himself in the concluding prayer, that the days of his double marriage were ended.
Although it was clear to the North African merchant that the confession of the closing prayer had no power to eradicate the guilt of the death he had brought upon his wife, not because of a stubborn journey made to demonstrate dual love but because of a desperate attempt to justify it, he did not forsake his place among the other worshippers to run to his dead wife. Instead he importuned the Lord of forgiveness to pity and to inscribe in the book of life his only remaining wife, who would soon need not only comfort for the death of her companion but also renewed assurance.
It was only when the end of the evening service marked the conclusion of the holy day—which was also the Sabbath day, when lamps must be lit and spices sniffed, and the appropriate blessings pronounced over sweet wine so that they might safely cross the frontier between sacred and profane—that he hastened to the little house, at whose doorway the physician’s wife stood, barring the entrance to her two children so they would not find themselves standing in the dark in the presence of a corpse. A little way away stood Abd el-Shafi, sea captain and chief wagoner, waiting respectfully for his lord, his eyes running with tears. He knew only too well how hard and sad their journey would be from now on, without the second wife. He embraced the Jewish merchant and uttered words of condolence to him, saying how fine and wonderful was the destiny of the one who at this moment was ascending with her little bare feet the golden staircase of paradise, and how harsh was the lot of those who must continue to plod their weary way through this world. Since all day long he had watched the Jews fasting, he forced Ben Attar to taste a morsel of the warm bread that he and his companion had baked for them, before the merchant went in to take his leave of the one who had departed without permission.
Then Ben Attar stood silently in the total darkness beside the young woman’s body, his eyes roving over the gray outlines of a stilled arc and a startled gaping mouth, and pondered the final leavetaking on this narrow cot in this strange house in this grim and gloomy Christian town, whose terrible memory he would carry with him all his life, even if he never returned here. Surprisingly, he thought also of Abulafia, his nephew and protégé, who could not imagine at this moment, wherever he might be, that the failure of the partnership of heart and body that his uncle had taken upon himself, to atone for the sin of Abulafia’s previous wife’s drowning, had now renewed, amid rage and wrath but with redoubled force, their severed partnership, and annulled not only the ban and interdict of Worms but even the repudiation of Paris. When Ben Attar sensed Rabbi Elbaz’s presence beside him in the darkness, removing the prayer shawl that had been hung up as a curtain at the window, not so as to grace the departed by letting in the gentle moonlight but to use it to hide the slowly whitening face under the cloth and thus begin to separate the second wife from her husband, he turned sternly to face the little rabbi to tell him that he had no intention of either holding a funeral service or burying his dear second wife in this accursed town. Instead, he meant to take her body back to Paris, to prove incontestably to the stubborn repudiatrix and her brother, Master Levitas, that he stood before them now as a fit and proper business partner, the husband of a single wife, and that consequently the severed partnership could now be renewed, although in the midst of wrath and pain, and indeed it could be confirmed forever by the testimony of a grave and a monument set up in the very courtyard of their home.
Ben Attar, feeling that the rabbi was moved to anger and might even break the bonds of loyalty and assail him with harsh words about a journey that would be so disrespectful of the departed one, and refusing to entertain a reply that might contradict his resolve, even if it were embellished with a scriptural citation or a legal precedent, took down from the shelf the flask containing the yellow potion and swallowed the entire contents at a single gulp. Then he left the little house somewhat unsteadily, bumping into the apostate physician, who was arriving with his catechist, the priest. Without saying a word, with an air of utter desperation, Ben Attar thrust the two of them aside and strode as though sleepwalking toward the Jews from Metz, who were standing in terror, unobtrusively eating their meager meal. Pressing right into the middle of the little wood, he stumbled and fell in a heap among the trees, desiring not to die but to sleep and then to sleep.
She is dead, the rabbi bitterly taunted the physician, who appeared neither disconcerted nor repentant over the false hopes he had persisted in raising during the previous day. He turned calmly to the ecclesiastic and translated the news of the death into the local dialect, to demonstrate to him that he had attended to this Jewish wayfarer from a sense of medical duty alone, not as a mark of any special favor, and that Jews too, and not Christians only, might expire upon his bed.
By way of reinforcing his words he invited the learned man into his home, into the moonlit inner chamber, to show him the patient whom the angel of death had mercifully put out of her suffering. The little Andalusian rabbi followed on their heels, to ensure that they did not take advantage of the dead woman’s helplessness by any unseemly or disrespectful action, such as making the sign of the cross or pronouncing alien prayers for her repose. It seemed, however, as if the ecclesiastic, lacking the power to evangelize and thus admit to heaven one who was already dead, had lost interest in the infidel soul that had already departed to its fate, and demanded to hear instead the tale of the body that had failed, and the mystery of that powerful spasm, which the physician named in the learned tongue of the ancient Greeks tetanus, thus ascribing to the illness grandeur and beauty in addition to its seriousness.