ofreproach. Only after her interment did Ben Attar dispatch a special messenger, who pursued the orphan along the highways of Provence for many days to take him news of her death, which was received as expected, without tears and even with a slight smile. Then indeed Ben Attar asked Abulafia to return, even for a short visit, to execute his mother’s will and perhaps, who knew, to make his peace with his kinsmen, to whom he shortsightedly ascribed the blame that was his own. But Abulafia, who had lost the sweet kernel of the vision of his great revenge, was still far removed from any willingness to make his peace with anyone else, so he sent word to his uncle to sell his share of his mother’s estate on his behalf and bring the proceeds with him to the next summer meeting.
By this time Ben Attar’s heart was deeply moved by the loneliness of his kinsman, the balance of whose mind was disturbed by the combination of guilt and love for his wife. He had even begun to wonder whether he had behaved correctly in extracting his nephew from the hold of the ship bound for the Holy Land, for the sanctity of the ancestral land might possibly have sucked some of the poison out of his innards and imposed order on confusion. Even more he regretted the alacrity with which he had executed his famous uncle’s orders to restore the child to her father, for her deformed presence repelled marriage brokers and continued to keep her mother’s memory alive. Bound hand and foot, Abulafia’s wife remained engraved on the memories of others too, including Ben Attar himself, who that terrible night on the seashore had been unable, despite himself, to avert his eyes from the naked woman who lay so wonderfully beautiful upon the sand. Since then, such were the thoughts that Ben Attar pondered in his heart: If I, who saw her so degraded, cannot forget her beauty to this day, what must her husband feel?
However, Ben Attar also recognized the benefit of the younger partner’s loneliness, which delivered a special impulse to business, for a salesman who has no wife to draw him homeward but is tempted by every new place, however remote, in the hope of discovering there the reflection of the beloved image, goes where no other trader will go, and even if the goods he has for sale are strange and unneeded, the mere fact of their appearance there compels their purchase. The demand for Moroccan merchandise did indeed increase in Provence, so that everysummer they were obliged to add another ship to the convoy setting sail from Tangier, and if ten years before the millennium, at the first meeting, when they brought the child and her nurse, one ship sufficed, now, five years later, five ships were scarcely enough. True, it was not only Abulafia’s energy and resourcefulness that had achieved this, but also the rise in the Christian population, for as the millennium approached the dying strove to defer the day of their death and babies hastened their birth, so as to ensure their presence in the year that was said to bring an abundant quickening of the dead.
Yet despite the rapid enrichment of the three partners, or perhaps because of it, Ben Attar grieved for his nephew’s loneliness. Refusing to give up hope, he persisted in seeking among his nephew’s innumerable tales and plans the rustle of a woman’s skirt. And so, when the evening of the ninth of Ab arrived, after Abu Lutfi mounted his steed and vanished into the afterglow of sunset on the long mountain path that wound its way to Granada, Ben Attar began to describe to his beloved nephew and business partner, carefully and delicately, using two interwoven languages, the terrible wilderness of loneliness that his stubbornly maintained widowhood would condemn him to. But in that summer of the year 4755, which was year 385 of the Hegira according to the Mohammedans, five years before the millennium of the Christians, when the lamentations for the loss of the twice- destroyed Temple had softened and
By this time Ben Attar’s heart was deeply moved by the loneliness of his kinsman, the balance of whose mind was disturbed by the combination of guilt and love for his wife. He had even begun to wonder whether he had behaved correctly in extracting his nephew from the hold of the ship bound for the Holy Land, for the sanctity of the ancestral land might possibly have sucked some of the poison out of his innards and imposed order on confusion. Even more he regretted the alacrity with which he had executed his famous uncle’s orders to restore the child to her father, for her deformed presence repelled marriage brokers and continued to keep her mother’s memory alive. Bound hand and foot, Abulafia’s wife remained engraved on the memories of others too, including Ben Attar himself, who that terrible night on the seashore had been unable, despite himself, to avert his eyes from the naked woman who lay so wonderfully beautiful upon the sand. Since then, such were the thoughts that Ben Attar pondered in his heart: If I, who saw her so degraded, cannot forget her beauty to this day, what must her husband feel?
However, Ben Attar also recognized the benefit of the younger partner’s loneliness, which delivered a special impulse to business, for a salesman who has no wife to draw him homeward but is tempted by every new place, however remote, in the hope of discovering there the reflection of the beloved image, goes where no other trader will go, and even if the goods he has for sale are strange and unneeded, the mere fact of their appearance there compels their purchase. The demand for Moroccan merchandise did indeed increase in Provence, so that everysummer they were obliged to add another ship to the convoy setting sail from Tangier, and if ten years before the millennium, at the first meeting, when they brought the child and her nurse, one ship sufficed, now, five years later, five ships were scarcely enough. True, it was not only Abulafia’s energy and resourcefulness that had achieved this, but also the rise in the Christian population, for as the millennium approached the dying strove to defer the day of their death and babies hastened their birth, so as to ensure their presence in the year that was said to bring an abundant quickening of the dead.
Yet despite the rapid enrichment of the three partners, or perhaps because of it, Ben Attar grieved for his nephew’s loneliness. Refusing to give up hope, he persisted in seeking among his nephew’s innumerable tales and plans the rustle of a woman’s skirt. And so, when the evening of the ninth of Ab arrived, after Abu Lutfi mounted his steed and vanished into the afterglow of sunset on the long mountain path that wound its way to Granada, Ben Attar began to describe to his beloved nephew and business partner, carefully and delicately, using two interwoven languages, the terrible wilderness of loneliness that his stubbornly maintained widowhood would condemn him to. But in that summer of the year 4755, which was year 385 of the Hegira according to the Mohammedans, five years before the millennium of the Christians, when the lamentations for the loss of the twice- destroyed Temple had softened and
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