With the slow motion of the wheels of the wagons as they moved westward, Ben Attar’s soul was pierced with sadness as he took his final leave of the place where his second wife had smiled her last smile. On hearing the rabbi’s voice beginning what was necessary and urgent for a journey, the first tears rolled down his cheeks: I liftup mine eyes to the hills, whence shall my help come. My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He shall not let thy foot stumble, thy guardian shall not slumber. Behold, he that guardeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy guardian, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. By day the sun shall not smite thee, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall guard thee from all evil, he shall guard thy soul. The Lord shall guard thy going forth and thy coming in, from now and forever-more.
And so they journeyed from Verdun to Chalons and from Chalons to Rheims and from Rheims to Meaux and from Meaux to Paris. The route was well etched in the memory of the wagoners and in the idolater’s nostrils. Since the nights were chilly and on occasion they were lashed by the rains of autumn, they preferred this time to lodge in wayside inns or peasant cottages. But they never left the second wife’s coffin alone under the sole care of Ishmaelites; there was always at least one Jew beside her, Ben Attar or the rabbi, the first wife or the Elbaz child. By the third day, which was the eve of Tabernacles, a heavy, cloying smell had begun to come from the sealed casket, and looking up they could see a black vulture circling patiently in the sky overhead. Out of respect for the dear departed one, who longed to return to the dust, the rabbi from Seville decided to exercise rabbinic license and to deem the dry land sea and the wagon to be the equivalent of a ship, and in this way they did not have to rest from their journey on the festival but could recite the festive prayers and fulfill the obligation to construct a tabernacle while moving. They pressed on with all speed to the Île de France, abbreviating their meal stops and making do with little sleep. Even when Abd el-Shafi discovered a peasant on the way using a new kind of plow that had an additional, curved blade, which turned the earth by its side, thus cutting a wider and deeper furrow, Ben Attar did not allow him to linger long enough to study it or sketch it for the benefit of the peasants of Tangier and its hinterland, but insisted that they crack the whip and urge the horses on.
By the morning of the second day of Tabernacles, as in the course of their morning prayers they crossed the bridge over the Marne and turned westward to join the busy north bank of the Seine, they were compelled to fold back the dark cover of the larger wagon and expose it to the world, so that the fresh smell of the riverbank vegetation might relieve the fetid air coming from within. Even though this exposure obliged them to fend off an occasional vulture or crow that alighted on the coffin, their spirits rose at the sight of the familiar island of the little Frankish city, resting gracefully in the middle of the river in a riot of roofs and towers beside its little white uninhabited twin. A pleasant warmth surrounded the North Africans as they entered Paris, as though their brief stay a full month before had attached them to the city with proprietorial bonds. As they approached in the light of the setting sun, they were more and more eager to see among the craft clustered in the port the green flag of the old guardship.
It was not until the horses drew up right alongside that they managed to recognize her. Even the captain’s face fell on beholding the change that had overtaken his ship. In the thirty days that they had been away, the partner Abu Lutfi, left with nothing to do, had decided to change from a buyer to a vendor, in order to test the worth of the desert merchandise among the local inhabitants. To this end he had dressed the old guardship in multicolored rags and clothed the five crewmen in finery to attract the Parisians. Indeed, the burly seamen were running around among the olives and the heaps of dried fruit, the pale honeycombs and heaps of copper pans like so many salesmen, adorned with silken scarves and rainbow-colored turbans, and they even seemed to have mastered some words of enticement in the local language.
For his part, Abu Lutfi also seemed to have some difficulty in recognizing his Jewish partner as he stood on the riverbank with his company, pale and gaunt and dressed in threadbare clothes, for he ignored him and continued haggling with a local merchant, gesticulating expressively. But when he felt the warm hand of the black slave, who had lithely climbed aboard, his breath was taken away, and dropping the copper jug he was holding, he fell to his knees and prostrated himself in thanksgiving to the god of the Jews, who had not prevented great Allah from bringing his dear ones back safely, Jews and Ishmaelites alike, from the Black Forest of the Rhineland. To judge by the bows and embraces and kisses and rapturous praises of destiny, which had spared the adventurers its blows, it seemed that Abu Lutfi was not interested in knowing about the fate of the expedition, or whether his Jewish partner had succeeded in trouncing his adversaries with the rabbi’s help in the further contest on the Rhine. The Ishmaelite evidently clung to his view that the whole of this great journey, on sea and by land, was totally unnecessary, for Jews by their nature are incapable of achieving a final and decisive judgment.
Therefore, to tell Abu Lutfi about the judgment that really had befallen, although not by virtue of speeches, Ben Attar took him to the stern, where, amid sacks of condiments and crates of dried fruit, before the opening that led down to the hidden cabin of a wife who had not returned, he recounted in a roundabout way the tale of the angel of death who had struck them, and even gestured toward the sealed coffin that lay all alone on the quayside, with the Elbaz child standing guard beside it. Although Ben Attar had supposed that the news of the young wife’s death would be hard and painful for his partner, who had gone to great lengths each year to find her some special gift in the desert, he had not imagined that Abu Lutfi would be so distraught that he would suddenly wave his hands in the air and hold his head in despair, as though the death that had made so bold as to snatch off such a beloved passenger could cut off such a great and hairy head. On witnessing the grief of the Arab, who drew a small dagger and made a cut in his robe as a token of sympathy, Ben Attar too let loose, perhaps for the first time, a cry of terrible loss, which had been reined back until that moment.
But the pleasant autumn sun of Paris did not stand still in the sky to wait for all the grief, pain, joy, and hope that mingled in that great meeting on board the old ship to be expressed and stilled. Rabbi Elbaz, already impatient at the sight of the two partners comforting each other as though they were two husbands of a single wife, canceled all the license to delay the burial that he had granted since they had set forth from Verdun and stood resolutely before Ben Attar demanding immediate interment. To this end they must proceed instantly to the house on the opposite bank of the river, to announce to the kinsfolk who had issued the repudiation and the ban that all they had held to be settled and sealed was undone, and that they were to prepare a plot of ground that very evening for the departed wife.