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

been alarmed and depressed at the sight of the cramped little cabins, the swaying deck fenced around with ropes, and the sacks of condiments and jarstied together in the dark hold, which gave off unfamiliar, pungent African odors at night. Accustomed as he was to the bright beauty of his home town, Seville, and to the elegant courtesy of its inhabitants, he was terror-stricken at the sight of the half-naked Arab sailors with yellow flaxen ropes wrapped around their bodies, shouting orders gruffly to each other and cuffing the black slave who ran in and out among them. The two veiled women too, sitting on the bridge barefoot in colorful robes, did not reassure the new traveler as he tried in vain to control his son, who shinned blithely up and down the ropes like a little monkey. In the twilight, as the ship set sail slowly into the vast ocean that he had never so much as set eyes on before, and as it began to heave beneath him relentlessly in a previously unknown rhythm, he was overcome with dizziness and nausea. Shamefully, privately, through a small porthole, he cast forth upon the waters illumined by the reddish glow of the sunset the morning meal that the congregation in the house of study in Cadiz had offered him in gratitude for the homily he had delivered to them, and at midnight he spewed out from the depths of his bowels the remains of the farewell dinner that his late wife’s family had held for him in Seville. By dawn, exhausted by a sleepless night, he felt that he might make his peace with the sea, but when he set eyes on the empty eye sockets of the baked fish the black slave set before him, his stomach erupted all over again. He immediately vowed to fast. He was accustomed to vows and fasts from the time of his wife’s illness. But still the nausea did not abate. Pale, gaunt, with sunken eyes, he no longer tried to conceal his suffering but openly leaned over the ropes with his mouth wide open and his eyes fluttering, staring wildly, like a fish taken from the sea, dreaming of the day they would reach the port of Lisbon, where he could withdraw from this maritime adventure. He was not made for this. He was just like the prophet Jonah, he said apologetically to the owner of the ship, who had hired him and pinned his hopes on him: the sea was not happy with him. Only God did not summon a great fish to swallow him whole.
    Ben Attar was accustoming himself to the idea that he might have to do without the help of religion in the confrontation that lay ahead with the new wife and the sages she mustered on her side, for if he sent the rabbi overland from Lisbon to Paris he would arrive only in the autumn, by which time they would be on their way home, when to hissurprise Abd el-Shafi intervened. Knowing nothing of the part of the rabbi in the expedition, he felt responsible as captain for the suffering that his ship was causing the new passenger. First he took it upon himself to slow the ship, but seeing that the rabbi continued to suffer, he obtained permission from Ben Attar to halt for a whole day. He turned into a quiet cove, furled the sail so that not even the slightest breeze would rock the ship, cast anchor, and fixed the two steering oars opposite each other so the ship would be perfectly stationary. On the old bridge, from which the caliph’s officers had once kept watch on the Christian ships to make sure they did not cross the invisible line that divided the Mediterranean between the two opposing faiths, he set a comfortable couch stuffed with wool and straw and draped with soft, gently colored rugs for the thirty-three-year-old rabbi, whom he saw as ringed around with a fine aura of sanctity. There they settled the suffering passenger, whose very beard had turned green. Then the captain began to boil up a special brew that the Vikings had used to allay the panic of those captives whom they did not kill: a decoction of fish fins flavored with finely ground scales, quenched with lemon juice, to which was