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

prevented her from taking whatever she wanted from his body and his soul. Maybe like this she would be able, if not to forgive him, at least to reconcile herself to the fact that he had married her as his second, not his first, wife.
    Although she was surprised that he surrendered himself to her so unconditionally, stripped and bound, which he had never done before, she still recoiled from him and was in no hurry to remove her shift, but took down the lamp to shed light on the body stretched out at her feet, to check whether since their last lovemaking any more curls on his chest had turned that silver color that always excited her so, because it was given to so few men to have their hair turn white before death cut them off. Now she confirmed what she had imagined. The same days of sun and clear skies that had ruthlessly tanned her own skin had whitened the hair on her husband’s head and chest, so that it was hard to know whether to lament the new signs of his approaching demise or to rejoice over the mysterious beauty with which they endowed him. A sweet sadness flooded her soul, and she could not refrain from laying her curly head upon the chest of the man who had come to her so late in the night.
    In the silence that encompassed her, she was unable to feel, as she had hoped, the beating of her husband’s heart. All she could feel was the painful and unfamiliar outline of his ribs. With a strange selfish thrill she reflected that not only had her own body become gaunt from seasickness and meager rations, but her husband’s sturdy frame too was becoming lean from constant worry about the future of his business , which was threatened, more than anything else, by his marriage to her. And now a venomous gleam flickered in her beautiful, slightly myopic eyes, which had so far been narrowed to slits and now opened in offense. She looked contentedly at what in her bedroom at home merely appeared and disappeared between her body and the sheets, whereas here it was entirely revealed, shrunk into itself, as though it had changed into a mouse. So sorry did she feel for that part of her husband’s body and for herself that she lifted her head a little, and still without looking at the face of the man who had bound himself before her, she began to speak about the first wife, which she had never dared to do before.
    A shiver of fear shook Ben Attar, and his eyes closed. He had become accustomed on this long voyage, in the evening twilight, when the waves swallowed the last traces of the sun, to sometimes finding the two women sitting on the bridge where in bygone days captains had commanded battles. With their gaudy veils fluttering in the sea breeze, they exchanged words without looking at each other, with blank faces, like a pair of spies. He had the feeling that throughout this long sea voyage they were passing to each other the most hidden secrets touching him, and his heart swelled with dread, and also with excitement, at the thought of the horizons of desire that extended before the three of them. And sometimes he went so far as to imagine that he could bring to Abulafia’s new wife in Paris, who was pitting herself against him, not only a living proof that would overcome her opposition but a new, sharp temptation that she would have no defense against—a temptation that he could now feel upon his flesh, in his loins, here in the swaying cabin, between the slurping of the water, the smells of the spices, and the quiet groaning of the young camels, as the young wife questioned him about his lovemaking earlier in the night and answered her own questions.
    Her answers caught the picture and the feeling as accurately as if she had somehow participated in that lovemaking, and as if even now that she was alone she did not want to let go, at least in speech, of what he had done to the first wife. Panic-stricken, he tried to free his hands, which were coiled in his silver chain, and take hold of her face and stop her mouth. But the