7.
She crumbled the ashy lavender and straightened the rug once more on the floorboards to make the place more inviting for sleep, already waiting to fold the mourner into its embrace. The first wife was also intending to extinguish the lamp before leaving, so the shadows flitting among the timbers would not disturb her husband, whose eyes were following her every movement. But before she could reach out to the lamp she was stopped by two commands that were evidently interconnected: Do not put it out and do not leave. It was as though the North African Jew felt that to the presence of his first and now only wife was added something new, which could not be deciphered in darkness but needed a full flame to bring to light everything that was latent within it. Small wonder, then, that these few words, spoken gently and longingly yet firmly, made the large, calm woman tremble, and her eyelids slowly sank.
Although she knew only too well that it was forbidden to mourn on festive days, that what Ben Attar was doing here in the belly of the ship was a private and rebellious mourning and the Andalusian rabbi had warned him that heaven would not recognize it, she was nevertheless a little frightened of the sudden upsurge of desire that, despite its strict legality, not only burst forth from sorrow and mourning but might also contain a strange desire to join the dead wife to the living one in a single congress on the rug. She raised her eyes imploringly to her husband and tried to indicate to him with a slight gesture of hesitation that if what was stirring here was a need of the body and not of the heart it would be better to wait a few days more until the ship had set sail again, its swaying motion helping to soothe the body that had become so stiff and hard on the arduous land journey, which had not yet ended.
But Ben Attar’s mind was directed not at all to his own body but to his wife’s, whose warm being surrounded and caressed every pore in his flesh. Though he had not touched her as a man since that dreamlike nocturnal entry into the narrow alleys of Worms when his two wives had been snatched away from him, he knew by looking that on the funereal journey from the Lotharingian to the Frankish river, the living wife had neither stiffened nor hardened, but on the contrary had softened and widened, and that a new opening might have opened up in her. This he set about exposing, not only with the seriousness of his lovemaking but also with a hint of resentment, which surprised him both with its novelty and with its strength.
Though the resentment was directed not against the wife who was with him, whom his lips and hands were exploring with powerful desire, but against the one who was absent, who had so quickly despaired of her secondary status that she had wanted not to remain on the earth but to be embraced by it, the only wife nevertheless sensed that it was aimed at her, and for the first time since she had known herself as a woman, she felt herself repudiating her husband, as though the arduous journey she had made between those two great European rivers had made her into a new woman. Even though in the narrow confines of a tiny cabin, hemmed in by timbers blackened by the fires of ancient combat, any repudiation could be only mental and not real, Ben Attar was obliged to hold her fast as he stripped her of layer after layer of clothing, something he had never had to do before, for her nakedness, with all its mysteries, had always been offered to him generously and totally, from the outset, without any effort on his part.
Their strange, frenetic struggle confirmed her fear that the husband who was disrobing her was not only trying to unite with what she had now acquired as sole wife but was also seeking within her the remnants of his second wife. This certainty, which made her soul shake with sorrow and pain, also surprisingly aroused within her a sharp, unfamiliar thrill, so that for a moment it seemed as though her two breasts, breaking free from the fiercely ripped fabric of her restraining clothing, were not only her own breasts but those of another woman, whose nipples and navel were arousing and fueling her own desire.
Indeed, by the lamplight flickering on her plump form and on limbs that had been filled out and rounded by those leisurely dinners beside the campfire on their wayside halts between the Île de France and Lotharingia, it became clear to the increasingly agitated husband that the prophecy of his heart had not been mistaken, and that on those accursed, miserable days, as his second wife was ebbing away, his first wife was secretly flowering. The excited Ben Attar hastened to untie one of the yellowing cords with which Abd el-Shafi had bound the beams together, this time not to tie himself up, as he had done during the sea voyage to assuage and console a young wife for the sorrow of being the second and not the first, but to bind the hands of this large, heavy woman, his only wife, who was now required to satisfy his lascivious desire, which despite all that had occurred still refused to relinquish the power of its duality.
Was it the same desire that was welling up in the belly of the ship that drew the young idol-worshipper back along the dark lanes of the north bank to the cottage with the idols, where he had been imprisoned that afternoon with the two Jewish children? He was attracted there not only by a strange urge to worship at last before a representation of his own image rather than images of strangers, but also because he could not forget the laughter of the women who had so boldly reached out to touch his private parts, which had since remained full and stiff in homage to them. Although the black youth’s desire was as yet virginal and vague both in its objects and in its limits, the autumn night of Paris, concealing its stars with a fine mist, was charming and seductive enough to lead this son of the desert, the sensitive heir of the navigational skills of his ancestors, safely among the dark cottages and fields, the croaking of frogs and the howling of jackals and the barking of foxes, straight to the woodcarver’s cottage, where to his joy a small light was still shining.
The face suspended in the open window was so dark that the man did not notice the youth staring at him from so near, even though it was his image that the sculptor was trying to conjure up in his mind. Even in the depths of the night, while the three women lay sleeping among the figurines scattered around the room, the desire of his craft did not leave the old artisan alone, for before the Son of God revealed himself in his last and final form in the approaching millennium, the sculptor wished to season the vision of his savior with the features of a man of alien race. With his copper chisel he continued to gouge the white flesh of the block of wood before him, struggling to dredge the black face up from the dimness of his memory, not suspecting that it was right beside him, framed in his own window. But the eldest of the three women, turning in her sleep, noticed the dark visitor, who was drawn in wonder to his own image emerging from the flesh of the white wood. Without saying a word to the craftsman, who was totally absorbed in his work, she rose and tiptoed barefoot outside and stretched out a warm hand to touch the bare neck of the African, who was so startled and excited by the renewed touch on his flesh that he was too afraid even to turn his head.
The old woman, who despite her white hair was full of the sap of life, did not release the fair prey that had been attracted to the light out of the depths of the night. With a grip that might have been a caress she drew him inside the cottage. She was in no hurry to hand him over to the surprised artisan, but took him close to the darkening embers of the dying fire so he could warm his body before being stripped of his tattered clothes. Although the young man did not know whether she was trying to strip him in the middle of the second watch of the night as a model for the artisan’s image or for her own benefit, he did not hold back but undid his belt himself, so as to display to the man and the woman, who were both smiling amiably, his trimmed manhood, which was aching and lengthening, having been unable for so many hours to find relief.