Free A Journey to the End of the Millennium by A.B. Yehoshua

embraced the Atlas Mountains in the south and Provence and Gascony in the north. Afraid and ashamed to return to his native town and grateful to his uncle for looking after the infant, Abulafia had resolved to repay Ben Attar, his benefactor and employer, with feverish energy and imaginative resourcefulness, which year by year widened both the circle of his customers and the range of his merchandise. Abu Lutfi could no longer make do with his traditional spring journey to the northern Atlas but had to penetrate deeper into the valleys and the villages, and even inside the nomads’ tents, in search of polished brass ware, curved daggers, and pungent condiments, for the smell of the desert sufficed to attract and excite the new Christian customers, who began to remember as their millennium approached that their crucified Lord too had come to them from the desert. Meanwhile, the Ishmaelite nurse stayed with the bewitched child, who had been forgotten by everyone except Ben Attar, who looked in occasionally to check that she still existed and that he was not paying money to maintain a ghost.
    But the baby, despite her many defects, did not seem to want to turn into a ghost. She insisted on remaining as real as always. Even though she was very backward in her development and limited in her movements, and her eyes remained bulging and blank, as though shebelonged to a different race, nevertheless she increased the range of her movement so that the stern-faced Ishmaelite nurse was obliged to take great care to see that there was no loophole in the house through which her charge might accidentally escape into a world that was not expecting her. At this point the uncle’s uncle, the sage Ben Ghiyyat, intervened, when he went in the spring to prepare Abulafia’s house for Passover. Whatever might have been the Creator’s purpose in forming such a creature, the covenant made at Mount Sinai still embraced her too, and her father who begot her could not be replaced by an Ishmaelite nurse, who owed nothing to the God of Israel except her inferiority. And even though Ben Attar was by now accustomed to the responsibility he had taken upon himself, and feared that if Abulafia were forced to take his child back his sense of guilt would be diminished and with it his energy and resourcefulness, which in the past two years had made Ben Attar into one of the grandees of the city, he did not wish to disobey his great uncle, who at fifty-five years of age seemed to frighten death itself. Although Abulafia could not be compelled to return to Tangier and take back his offspring, Ben Attar decided to take her to her father himself, in person and without prior warning.
    And so, ten years before the millennium, Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi set out on their first journey from Tangier to the port of Barcelona. Although they repeated the journey summer after summer, increasing the number of ships each year, the memory of the first trip was engraved deeply in Ben Attar’s heart, and not only because of the novelty of the voyage, which showed him close up how the natural forces—the sun, the moon, the galaxies, the wind, the waves—contended silently opposite the lazily moving shoreline, but because of the intimacy that grew up in the narrow confines of the ship between him and his fellow travelers, especially the strange, dumb child, for even though she was attached by a cord to the nurse who accompanied her, it was not short enough to prevent her from toddling to him from time to time and attempting to thrust her little fingers into his eyes. Sailing slowly among the bolts of cloth, hides, and oil jars, against the background of the monotonous prattle of a Jew from Barcelona who was traveling with them, he forged a bond with Abulafia’s child, so that occasionally he even let her snuggle mutely against his chest and watch the forms of the two Ishmaelite sailors, who in the midday heat removed theirclothes and stood on the prow as naked as on the day of