A similar circumcised male organ, albeit a limp and childish one that still knew neither pain nor enmity, was exposed between the legs of young Elbaz as he tossed and turned in the coils of his fever upon Abulafia’s bed, trying to tear off his tunic and trousers with his little hands. Although Mistress Esther-Minna attempted delicately to cover up his private parts and conceal them from her eyes, the child kept trying to push the coverlet away again, as though it were not a simple covering but an abominable shaggy beast clinging to him. But Mistress Abulafia neither wakened her husband to share in her anxiety for the child nor called Rabbi Elbaz up from the tabernacle to join her in praying for the little Andalusian. This woman had such confidence in herself that she preferred to pray to heaven on her own, without partners whose prayers might be rejected.
Since she was not so naive as to rely on prayer alone, she hastened to rouse her old Lotharingian servant and told her to boil some water so that she could wipe away with a soft, damp towel the perspiration and the remains of vomit that clung to the child’s thin limbs, as well as the tears trickling down his face. She adamantly rejected any attempt to explain events as the result of witchcraft or demons—faithful to her late father, Rabbi Levitas, who liked to find in every detail and in every place, however obscure or mean, the holy spirit, which should be listened to—so she now tried, while washing the rabbi’s son, whose tangled curls reminded her suddenly of her husband’s, to extract from his mutterings the secret of the young people’s excursion on the right bank. A strange excursion, which had made the clever boy feverish and confused and had relieved the wretched girl of her depression.
But when the boy fluttered his scorching eyes and saw the bright eyes of the new wife, whose repudiation had brought real calamity upon the owner of the ship and failure to his father the rabbi, he sealed his lips. Although the wise and fair woman was leaning over him with tender maternal affection, he knew only too well that if he let out the secret of the swine’s flesh in his guts, it would become a two-edged sword that would be plunged straight back into his belly. But Mistress Esther-Minna, who had suffered for several years because of the silence of the holy spirit dwelling in the mute girl, would on no account allow the holy spirit contained within this strange boy the right of silence. Moreover, in the half-light of the second watch, this dark-skinned, tousled child looked like a little Abulafia who had miraculously arrived in her house in order to be shaped and educated from scratch. Thus she decided to draw out the Andalusian holy spirit by roundabout means. Picking up her chair, she placed it at the head of the bed, behind the child, who was lying on his back, washed and perfumed, so that he would not see her face and fear her reactions but might think that he was talking to himself in a dream. In fact the whispered questions of the hidden woman brought instant replies from the innocent young heart, although not in the language in which they were asked but in wild, fragmented Andalusian Arabic. Even though Mistress Esther-Minna understood not a word of the passionate Arabic confession that sought to yield up to her the sin of eating abominable things, she did not interrupt the flow of the words but listened very intently, in the confident hope that having begun in the tongue of the Ishmaelites, it would eventually end in the tongue of the Jews.
Meanwhile, the Arabic confession pierced the curtain to enchant with its old familiar tones the spirit of a young girl whose depression had been turned to wonder as by the wave of a magic wand, and whose dullness had been turned to terror by the sight of the carved images, the women’s laughter, and the taste of swine’s flesh. Instead of rising and howling as she usually did, to summon up from the sea depths the mother who had abandoned her forever, she crept cautiously out of her bed to stare attentively at her father, Abulafia, who had fallen peacefully asleep at her side. And instead of tugging insistently at his hands as usual, to remind him to give her back the mother who had forsaken her, she merely reached out a small but firm hand to touch his curly locks and stroke his face, so that he would open his eyes and produce for her out of the misty night not her lost mother but the young idol-worshipper, who might lead her back to the cottage of wonders on the opposite bank of the river.
The words of the boy Elbaz’s Ishmaelite confession had the power not only to pierce a curtain and excite the dream of the wondering girl in her cubicle but to continue down the winding wooden staircase and to float, faintly yet clearly, through the greenery bedecking Master Levitas’s little tabernacle, which symbolized the transitory nature of human existence, particularly of that of the Jews. There, beside the palm fronds, myrtle sprigs, and boughs of willow, bound together and placed like a slim, fresh second wife on Master Levitas’s couch, was one who could not only hear the feverish child’s muddled Arabic confession but understand it too. But the rabbi, his own mouth tainted by the abominable food eaten by his only begotten son, took care not to stir from his place or utter a sound, so as not to offer a sign to the young confessor that his father was suffering with him.
Meanwhile, in the little cabin in the bowels of the old guardship anchored in the harbor, a strange new thought on the subject of sin and punishment was deliriously coursing. The North African husband, whose eyes roamed excitedly over the ample, pity-inspiring nakedness of the large quiet woman shimmering on the floor of the cabin, suddenly believed that he could merge the young mistress of the cabin who had gone to her rest with the first wife who was lying in front of him. Therefore, before he submitted to the lust fermenting in his blood, urging him to fall to his knees to embrace caress kiss lick bite the pure rounded parts of his wife’s body, he closed his eyes for an instant, and with the imagination of his desire he conjured up the face and body of his second wife. Now he could see the narrow amber-colored eyes with their green glint, could scan the long brown legs, the legs of a girl who had been married before she had run her course, could feel with the palms of his outstretched hands the smoothness of the flat stomach, the firm, desire-laden breasts, the jab of the reddish nipples erect with passion. To the sound of the gurgling of the Seine underneath him, he clung resolutely to his desire to blend two lusts in a single act of coupling. But while he melted and dissolved in longing for the duality taking shape within him, and while his hand was groping to remove his robe so as to add passionate nakedness to an unbridled congress replete with possibilities, he felt his rigid member anticipating him in its quest for satisfaction and relief, and, still beating against the mourner’s rent in his robe, helplessly enveloping itself, and itself alone, in a warm slippery coating of its own seed.
Is this the congress I was longing for? Ben Attar thought in a fit of despair and disappointment at the seed he had discharged in vain into the little cabin. For if so, this is not a congress but a punishment that I am seeking to inflict not only upon myself but upon the one who is left with me. Indeed, the first wife, who had learned since her nuptials to interpret every detail of her husband’s actions, could already detect the smell of the vainly spilled seed in the dark cabin. Her heavy hips, which had been arched in anticipation of coupling, subsided disappointedly on the rug on which had slept another woman, who had not disappeared even in death. The hands that had longed to comfort with gentle caresses the beloved man’s weary, aching form quietly unfolded. Although she was ostensibly freed now, she did not even cover her cheated nakedness but merely blew out the now pointless lamp, curled up like a huge white fetus, and tried to join her humiliation not only to that of the absent woman, who had been expected to put off her shroud and couple against her will, but also that of the manhood that had lost its head and missed its aim.