A Journey to the End of the Millennium

by A. B. Yehoshua

  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.

  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 cove
rlet 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.

  Indeed, this manhood was now shamefully soft, limp and weeping. Although it feared to approach the sole wife in this state, for she might already have despaired of it, it knew that its only hope of redeeming itself was through real contact, which would bring consolation if not consummation. So the owner of the ship went down on his knees in the dark and cautiously felt with his lips along the woman’s naked body to locate the right and proper place in which to bury this shamefaced object. And there, in the wide space between her breasts, Ben Attar felt a moistness in his beard, so that for a moment he was startled by the idea that the woman, having despaired of his manhood, was attempting to suckle him. Cautiously he reached out his hands and brought her two nipples close to his ears, perhaps to hear the sound of this new flux. But the hillocks of sweetness that gently tickled his earlobes were dry, and to judge by their soft lim
pness, desire was still far from them. Only then was the man who had led the arduous expedition from the south to the north obliged to recognize that the tears he had held back so stubbornly for so many days were now pouring un-stoppably from his eyes.

  Ben Attar could not have imagined how wonderful and sweet the woman found the man’s tears flowing between her breasts. She kept quiet, careful to give no sign that might cause them to stop. Sometimes it is precisely when manhood fails and gives way that maleness takes on a sweet and attractive taste. Even though she knew the tears were for the second wife, who was lost forever, for whom henceforth he was precluded from finding a substitute, she was neither offended nor angry. On the contrary, she felt proud that the tears for a woman who was lost were not lost themselves, but flowed between her own breasts and dripped into her navel. She had a hope that the second wife’s tears might moisten her own desire and enter in all purity into her womb, this womb that now parted its lips to whisper with its little tongue the sole wife’s announcement that she did not want the man’s fantasy but only his real presence and his love.

  The spirit of the imagination can not only be extended, it can also run riot, as it did now among the women waking each other up in the woodcarver’s cottage at the sight of the young visitor, who had been drawn in the depths of the night to worship naked before the representation of his own image. First they laughed a little and jabbered in their own language at the sight of the ebony figure standing in silence and seeking the lines of its face wrestling with the white flesh of the wood, but slowly their eyes seemed to widen in sweet dread at the sight of the neat groove dividing two dark gleaming buttocks carved by a perfect hand, until the white-haired woman sighed deeply and put her little hand to her mouth to bite it.