had not imagined himself capable of. From exchanging casual remarks in the twilight hour before the evening meal, commencing with the attempts of this elegant yet respectable woman, the widow of a distinguished scholar, to embellish her speech with a word or phrase in the holy tongue that she had learned from her late husband, and with some acute commercial observations that she let fall, there developed an intense conversation that continued until midnight. It was a licit exchange, in view of the widowed state of both the interlocutors, who were still nameless to each other, yet it contained a certain hint of boldness and even sexual license. When the cross on the belfry pierced the flesh of the moon, which was as round and pale as the famous local cheeses, and slowly let it drop behind the church, and total darkness fell in the chamber in which the pair were sitting, Abulafia felt a pleasant warmth spreading through his body. It was the first time he had met anyone who took the old story of his pain and affront seriously and listened with open sympathy to his continuing dream of revenge, while firmly and absolutely rejecting any suggestion that his daughter was the victim of a curse or enchantment.
If it was not a curse or enchantment, Ben Attar wondered, what was it? But even Abulafia could not answer that question. He could only talk of the astonishment and gratitude that had coursed through him at the end of that conversation. Here at last is somebody who gives rest to my soul, he had thought to himself as he inhaled the woman’s unfamiliar scent, which he had not only become accustomed to but even begun to enjoy. And as, like a child reading his mother’s lips, he sought the precise meaning of this slim, small woman’s words, which had been spoken in the Frankish tongue but slowly and clearly enunciated, with quotations from Bible stories and rabbinic writings, sheseemed to become stripped in his mind of her enfolding femininity, not, heaven forfend, so as to take on male attributes, but to reveal her primal and fundamental humanity, which is the true source of sensual excitement.
But precisely because he was so contented and elated, was he able to imagine that this steady, rational woman, Mistress Esther-Minna daughter of Kalonymos, who had subtly lanced the boil of his hatred for his mother, had begun to be strongly attracted to the man sitting opposite her, so that perhaps this warmth that had begun to spread through him sprang not only from her wise words but also from the heat that glowed in her, and that she was beginning to catch fire from the spark of her desire? Three or four times in the ten years of her widowhood she had been assailed by such a sudden attraction, but always she had succeeded in stamping it out, perhaps because the men she had been attracted to had been not only worthy but married. This time she was surprised by the youth of the man who had aroused her interest, as if on this occasion it was a desire not for a strange man that had sprung up inside her, but for all the children she had not been able to bear, who seemed to have burst into the world of their own accord and merged in this young man, a southern Jew, with his dark curls and his swarthy skin, whose very being was transformed that night by the shadows moving between the flickering candles and the moonlight into something rich and attractive.
True, Abulafia had become accustomed in recent years to various kinds of snatched infatuations, generally involving gentile women, that had arisen in taverns or marketplaces, and sometimes even on the road. Even though he came from the south, women discovered something oriental in his melancholy, since it was in the east that the beloved Son of God had suffered, and even though in the course of the years he had spent in Christian Europe Abulafia had endeavored, for his safety’s sake, to adapt his appearance to the places where he was trading, some traces of his alien origin could still be
If it was not a curse or enchantment, Ben Attar wondered, what was it? But even Abulafia could not answer that question. He could only talk of the astonishment and gratitude that had coursed through him at the end of that conversation. Here at last is somebody who gives rest to my soul, he had thought to himself as he inhaled the woman’s unfamiliar scent, which he had not only become accustomed to but even begun to enjoy. And as, like a child reading his mother’s lips, he sought the precise meaning of this slim, small woman’s words, which had been spoken in the Frankish tongue but slowly and clearly enunciated, with quotations from Bible stories and rabbinic writings, sheseemed to become stripped in his mind of her enfolding femininity, not, heaven forfend, so as to take on male attributes, but to reveal her primal and fundamental humanity, which is the true source of sensual excitement.
But precisely because he was so contented and elated, was he able to imagine that this steady, rational woman, Mistress Esther-Minna daughter of Kalonymos, who had subtly lanced the boil of his hatred for his mother, had begun to be strongly attracted to the man sitting opposite her, so that perhaps this warmth that had begun to spread through him sprang not only from her wise words but also from the heat that glowed in her, and that she was beginning to catch fire from the spark of her desire? Three or four times in the ten years of her widowhood she had been assailed by such a sudden attraction, but always she had succeeded in stamping it out, perhaps because the men she had been attracted to had been not only worthy but married. This time she was surprised by the youth of the man who had aroused her interest, as if on this occasion it was a desire not for a strange man that had sprung up inside her, but for all the children she had not been able to bear, who seemed to have burst into the world of their own accord and merged in this young man, a southern Jew, with his dark curls and his swarthy skin, whose very being was transformed that night by the shadows moving between the flickering candles and the moonlight into something rich and attractive.
True, Abulafia had become accustomed in recent years to various kinds of snatched infatuations, generally involving gentile women, that had arisen in taverns or marketplaces, and sometimes even on the road. Even though he came from the south, women discovered something oriental in his melancholy, since it was in the east that the beloved Son of God had suffered, and even though in the course of the years he had spent in Christian Europe Abulafia had endeavored, for his safety’s sake, to adapt his appearance to the places where he was trading, some traces of his alien origin could still be
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