A Journey to the End of the Millennium Read Free

possible to find anything at all? Surely a thousand years then will be like thousands of years now. Who knows whether in a thousand years’ time clear, concrete understanding will not have removed its responsibility for our abstruse and muddled history, just as we have got rid of the “history” of the cavemen? Still, surely we won’t just be forgotten like that. Surely it’s not possible that not a single molecule of memory will be found for us, like a yellowing manuscript at the bottom of a forgotten drawer, whose very cataloguing guarantees its eternity even if not a single reader ever discovers it. But will the catalogue itself survive? Or will some totally different cipher fuse and scramble everything that has gone, so that our image can never again be intertwined as we imagine it to ourselves?

1.
    In the second watch of the night, finding himself woken by a caress, Ben Attar thought to himself that even in her sleep his first wife had not forgotten to thank him for the pleasure he had afforded her. He brought the caressing hand to his lips in the deliciously swaying darkness , intending to plant another kiss upon it, but the touch of its dry heat on his lips soon corrected his error, and disgustedly he thrust away the hand of the black slave, who, sensing his master’s revulsion, vanished. Lying where he was, naked and very drowsy, Ben Attar was once more tormented by anxiety about the journey. He reached out to check whether the youth, who had dared to intrude so far into his bed to wake him, had not also touched the belt full of precious stones, which he now hastily buckled on before donning his robe. Silently, without a word of parting, he slipped out of the tiny cabin and climbed the rope ladder onto the deck. Even though he knew perfectly well that his departure, however silent it was, would wake his wife, he was confident that she would have the self-control not to detain him. Not only was she aware of where his duty now lay, but it was even possible she shared his hope that he would be in time to discharge it before the dawn of day.
    But to judge by the twinkling summer stars that filled the firmament , the dawn was still far off. The breeze that was gently clearing the sleep from his eyes as he climbed on deck was not the kind of breeze that blew up suddenly toward the third watch, but just a gentle billow that soon vanished into the void they had identified the previous day, by the intersection of the winds and the smell of the water, as the mouth of the River Seine, for which their hearts had been yearning ever since they first set sail from the Maghreb more than forty days before. So as not to miss the precise opening of the river that would take them into the heart of the Frankish lands, the captain had given orders before sunset to stop the ship, drop anchor, tie up the two steering oars, and wrap the great sail around the long yard that hovered about the gently slanting mast. In the space on deck, freed of the suffocating motion of the great triangle of canvas, the rope ladders became improvised hammocks for the crew, who, unable to abandontheir curiosity even at this deep and intimate hour of the night, squinted drowsily to watch the Jew, the ship’s owner, recharging his desire, anxious not to let himself down or to fail his second wife, who was expecting him in the stern of the ship.
    Meanwhile, a faint tinkle of bells accompanied the shadowy figure of the slave who had woken his master with a long, impudent caress, as he slipped out now from among the baskets of merchandise, proffering without expression a basin of pure water. Surely, Ben Attar brooded resentfully as he freshened his face in the icy water, the slave could have made do with the little bells attached to his tunic instead of intruding into Attar’s cabin to steal a look at his nakedness and that of his wife. And without a word of warning or reproof, he suddenly slapped the slave’s black face with all his strength. The boy reeled