Judah the Pious

by Francine Prose

  Their neighbors, however, were not so easily contented; instead, they burned with righteous indignation when, two years after Rachel Anna’s arrival, their children reported that the trolls were still giggling and panting in the underbrush. At last the burghers’ wives managed to pressure the mayor into issuing an emergency edict, ordering the lovers to wed at once; for marriage was the only weapon which the villagers thought powerful enough to stamp out such unbridled passion.

  Of course, such edicts were quite rare in a region where half the Christian marriages were based on informal agreements, and where none of the Jewish weddings had ever been recorded by the state; yet Judah ben Simon and Rachel Anna complied readily, indifferently. And so it happened that their wedding day came to replace the birth of Christ and the first day of Creation as the date from which the villagers measured the passing years.

  “My father,” sighed the Rabbi Eliezer dreamily, “was there to see it with his own eyes. It was, as he told me, one of those chilly, misty March days, when all the sadness of a lifetime seems to hover just outside the window. At precisely four in the afternoon, Judah ben Simon and Rachel Anna appeared out of the dense fog at the edge of town, and began to walk slowly down the main street. Families rushed from their houses to watch them; the children grinned, babies gaped, their parents smiled wistfully. For, in this town, where bridal garments were tailored sensibly, to be used eventually as shrouds, no one had ever seen such a couple before—not even, if you will excuse my saying so, King Casimir, when the royal party passed through, and the king and queen themselves peered briefly from the windows of their painted carriage.

  Rachel Anna was dressed in the same bright green gown she had brought from Cracow; but now, it was decorated with ropes of violet crocuses, white daffodils, and golden forsythia. Dozens of live, blue-green iridescent scarabs were fastened in her orange hair; on top of her head was a lacy veil, woven from spider-webs, which caught the moisture of the air in pearls, and hung down almost to her bright emerald-and-sapphire eyes. Judah ben Simon was clothed more simply, in a loose-fitting suit stitched together from soft, russet furs and honey-brown skins. With his saffron hair and wheat-colored complexion, Judah ben Simon reminded the merchants of their spice houses, and made the peasants remember their finest harvests.

  Stringing behind the couple like tacks drawn to a magnet, the villagers followed them to the rabbi’s door, then pressed inside, crowding the dank parlor so thickly that the startled schoolboys were forced to leap from their benches and press their backs against the wall to keep from being smothered. No one who could possibly squeeze a few inches of space for himself remained outside; even the Muslim carpetmaker stuck his head in the door, though he had always told his children that one whiff of air from a Jewish home could poison an entire flock of sheep.

  Under express orders from the mayor, the rabbi was easily convinced that Rachel Anna came from a fine, Jewish family, and that the union would not pollute old bloodlines. Of course, Judah’s former schoolmaster had never entertained so many strangers before, and, in his excitement, accidentally omitted certain essential prayers from the ceremony, so that the service lasted barely two minutes. Then, he grasped the bride’s shoulder, made a few references to her husband’s youthful incompetence in the classroom, and sent the happy couple on their way.

  The crowd burst out onto the street like sparks from a firecracker; there, they discovered that the sun had come out. Certainly, that is nothing unusual, the sun breaking through the clouds at the end of a March day. But when men are looking for a sign of heavenly benediction, almost anything will do. A cry of wonder went up from the crowd, and people smiled at the sky, praising God at the top of their lungs.

  Who knows how celebrations begin? An old man drapes his arm around the shoulders of a friend, a young girl squeals with delight, someone whistles the opening bars of a polka. At any rate, a full-blown carnival was soon barreling through the town, pausing only to cheer the newlyweds as they slipped back into the woods; then, the procession doubled back through the sidestreets, engulfing everyone—the shopkeepers, the moneylenders, the clerks, gravediggers, and even the pinched-looking mayor, who could not help congratulating himself on the great political success of his new edict. Jugs of strawberry wine were passed from hand to hand; there were stacks of blinis, plum preserves, clotted cream. Snare drums kept up a steady dance rhythm, while fiddlers and piccolo players, vying to outdo each other in the sweetness of their melodies, played on past midnight. Neighbors forgot their quarrels, strangers linked arms and danced, enemies kissed.

  Though the townspeople celebrated dozens of festivals each year, everyone agreed that there had never been such merrymaking before. Perhaps it was the beauty of the bridal couple which lightened their hearts; perhaps it was the coming of spring. Perhaps it was the absence of the couple’s parents, whose presence at weddings always served to remind the revelers that their joy was emptying someone’s wallet; for Simon and Hannah Polikov remained in their home all that day and night, with the curtains drawn tight.

  By the next morning, however, the groggy villagers were more inclined to regard their nighttime gaiety as the product of a black magic enchantment. Yet, no matter how painfully their heads throbbed, no matter how fervently they repented their recklessness, they could not quite forget how happy they had been, nor could they keep from wondering if they would ever be so happy again. Thus, the day of Judah ben Simon’s wedding came to be associated in the townspeople’s minds with a bittersweet nostalgia which disturbed and dissatisfied them like the memory of a first crush. No one was surprised when a plague of broken engagements infected the town, and, years later, many would remember this period as the time when their parents first began sleeping in separate beds.

  Aside from its devastating impact on village morale, the wedding accomplished nothing; despite the mayor’s assurances, the lovers’ shamelessness was never tamed by the humdrum rituals of married life. Rather, their passion grew constantly stronger, and might well have sustained them through a lifetime of uninterrupted contentment, were it not for the succession of jolts and tremors which undermined the foundations of their marriage.

  “Wait,” cried Casimir, his forehead wrinkling with concern. “I have scarcely had a quiet moment in which to enjoy your hero’s happiness, and already you are telling me of his troubles.”

  “King Casimir,” smiled Eliezer, “if I had a week to pass in your delightful company, I would cheerfully list all the small pleasures and tendernesses which brightened the couple’s life together. But times of great peace are notoriously uneventful, and such niceties would add little to my story. Rather, you will simply have to accept my word about the quality of their happiness, and listen while I describe the beginnings of their sorrow.”

  One bright July afternoon, as Rachel Anna raised her face to the sunlight, Judah ben Simon suddenly noticed a pale scar, faded and flattened by the years, arching all the way across his wife’s graceful neck.

  “What is this?” he asked, running one finger along its jagged length. “A souvenir of some past duel?”

  “Yes,” laughed Rachel Anna. “Exactly. When I was three years old, I provoked a neighbor’s boy into attacking me with a kitchen knife. I almost died; and even when I recovered, I could not speak for six months. But the odd thing was that the boy who injured me was also struck dumb, and did not recover his voice until weeks after mine returned.”

  “So you were a witch even then,” teased Judah ben Simon.

  “Be careful,” smiled his wife. “For I dimly remember a remark like that sparking our childish fight in the first place.” Then, laughing happily, she stretched out one arm and pushed her husband backwards, until the discussion ended in the dense, dark quiet of the forest floor.

  But it did not end there for Judah ben Simon. Rather, it was continued in his daydreams, in which he repeatedly imagined the gleaming knife, the gaping wound, the two children tearing at each other’s throats; and it went on in his nightmares, in wh
ich he saw crowds of redheaded little girls lying near death, drowning in quicksand, falling from the sky like rain. “For some odd reason,” he told Rachel Anna, after he had failed to add a single word to his notebook for several days, “I am finding it difficult to concentrate.”

  Yet the reason was not really so odd at all: he had begun to realize that Rachel Anna was mortal.

  Now the fact of death was nothing new for someone who had lived a dozen years in the wilderness, who had dissected carcasses, reassembled skeletons, and desiccated skulls; nor was it surprising to a naturalist who could predict the approximate life expectancy of a dragonfly, a dandelion, and a man like himself. But, until he had seen the scar, it had simply never occurred to him that his wife’s life was as brittle as a length of bone, and subject to the same unchangeable laws which governed all living things.

  For the first time, Judah began cautioning Rachel Anna about wandering too near the marshes, scrambling too quickly up the rocky hillsides, and failing to watch out for the poisonous snakes which nested beneath stones. Her disregard of these warnings only made it harder for him to work, for he was always listening tensely to make sure her footsteps followed closely behind his. Finally, even their lovemaking became for him a fearsome ritual, in which he was conscious of nothing but the light, quick beating of her heart.

  Nor was he able to share his worry with Rachel Anna, since he did not wish to infect her with his fear. Unable to extract the truth from him, she finally interpreted his constant brooding as a temporary sadness of the blood brought on by the humidity, and waited for it to pass.

  Suddenly, the Rabbi Eliezer jerked his spindly body to the edge of the throne and leaned forward. “Excuse me, King Casimir,” he said, “but I have completely forgotten to ask your views on this delicate subject of death.”

  “I am quite resigned to it,” sighed Casimir majestically.

  “A healthy attitude,” nodded Eliezer. “I only wanted to make sure that you were not one of those unfortunate people who make the entire journey to hell and back each time the matter is mentioned.”

  “I am not nearly so suggestible,” said the king. “But still, I can understand Judah ben Simon’s position; for if I had such a beautiful woman, I would also worry about losing her.”

  “Ah,” murmured Eliezer. “Another soul lost in the Garden of Earthly Delights. But that is another matter entirely. As for now, I am quite pleased that you find it so easy to empathize with my hero, for perhaps you will be better able to understand the complex ways in which Judah’s fears were to influence his actions during the rest of that summer.”

  “One night, early in August, Rachel Anna started suddenly from a deep, dreamless sleep. She sat bolt upright, her body tense and wary; then she began to sigh and toss about in a manner intended to wake her husband.

  Judah ben Simon opened one eye and rolled over, murmuring the soothing, meaningless nonsense syllables which had always been sufficient to comfort his wife after a bad dream; but, this time, she was not so easily calmed. “Listen!” she whispered, her voice shaking with fright.

  From the close, hot darkness near their shelter came the frantic, insistent shrieks of a terrified woman.

  Judah ben Simon laughed. “It is nothing,” he said. “You must be a very sound sleeper not to have heard those noises before. For that is the voice of an old admirer of mine, a lone wildcat who has come to visit me summer nights since my first year in the forest. By now, I am familiar with the most intimate details of her personal life; she is unmarried, childless, with a special taste for brown field mice. But I have never actually seen her, for, like many older ladies, she prefers to visit young men on the darkest nights, when the ravages of time are more likely to go unnoticed.”

  “Now you are making me feel like the jealous wife,” said Rachel Anna, nestling comfortably against her husband’s chest. Yet, as soon as she felt his regular breathing, and knew that she and the wildcat were alone together in the dark, all her uneasiness returned. Throughout the night, she stayed awake, trying to understand how a crying animal could terrify her so badly, telling herself that she was merely experiencing one of those strange, sudden nighttime fears which vanish with the first sign of dawn.

  The next morning, Rachel Anna was still afraid. All day long, anxiety nibbled at the pit of her stomach, and, by nightfall, seemed to have bitten clear through: the cat had begun screaming again. Curled up in Judah’s arms, Rachel Anna tossed, shivered, and wept.

  Night after night, the wildcat returned, despite the flares which the couple burned outside their shelter, despite the burrs and thistles they scattered on the ground; each night, the shrieks seemed to grow wilder and more shrill.

  “What is it that scares you?” whispered Judah ben Simon. “Is it the noise itself, or the darkness, or some frightening memory from your childhood?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Rachel Anna. “I have never been afraid of anything before.”

  “And this terror,” he persisted. “What is it like?”

  “I cannot describe it,” she replied, and began to tremble again.

  Staring out the window at the blazing fire, Judah ben Simon decided that his wife had contracted his fear for her like an attack of plague. Assuming all responsibility, he watched guiltily as she grew steadily paler, more nervous and unhappy, until, one rainy morning, he looked at her face and saw the same brittle, redheaded skeleton which had grinned in his worst nightmares.

  It was then that Judah ben Simon decided to poison the cat.

  Until that time, Judah had never killed an animal, except when faced with starvation in the dead of winter; even the pelts for his wedding suit had been gathered from carrion. But now, convinced that his wife’s life was at stake, he set to work brewing deadly mushrooms and berries into a colorless liquid, into which he dipped small minnows caught from the river as bait. But, when it became apparent that instinct was protecting the wildcat against these natural poisons, Judah resolved to go into town and purchase some of the precious arsenic which generations of villagers had used against the rats invading their homes.

  At eleven in the morning on a muggy August day, Judah ben Simon strode purposefully into the village. The town was quiet; the shutters were drawn against the heat, and the streets were deserted. Indeed, the only figure to be seen along the entire length of the main road was that of a stranger, leaning against the doorway of the apothecary shop. He was a large-boned man, with long, matted black hair and a beard streaked with red and gray. His ice-blue eyes had a wild, almost maniacal look; his skin was wrinkled, rough, and weatherbeaten. Had the foreigner not been dressed as a mountebank, in a velvet cloak embroidered with alchemical symbols and hung with bells, Judah would surely have taken him for a traveling holy man, one of the rootless mystics whom one occasionally encountered wandering towards the East.

  Judah ben Simon looked at him curiously, nodded, and walked inside the store. Behind the counter was the apothecary’s scrawny wife, the most pessimistic woman in the town. “Judah ben Simon,” she intoned mournfully, “welcome to my shop. Tell me, has your marriage gone sour yet, as my tea leaves predicted on the day of your wedding?”

  “No,” muttered the young man coldly.

  “Well, give it time,” shrugged the woman. “What can I do for you?”

  “I would like a penny’s worth of arsenic,” said Judah.

  “I knew it!” she cried, and ran off towards the back room in which the poisons were locked. Judah paid her with a coin he had received from his parents, picked up the parcel, and left. Then, just as he stepped out the door, someone grabbed roughly at the arm of his jacket; without looking around, Judah knew it was the stranger he had noticed before.

  “Excuse my boldness,” croaked the man hoarsely, “but I could not help overhearing your conversation, and learning that you are the same Judah ben Simon of whom I heard so much during my last visit to Cracow. I never expected to have the good fortune of exchanging a word with you, though it has often occurred to me
that we might have much in common. For I am Jeremiah Vinograd, the famous herbalist and healer, something of a naturalist in my own right; we are, you might say, brothers of the trade. And in my travels I have met certain individuals and learned certain things which, I imagine, might be of interest to you.”

  Drawing Judah ben Simon away from the apothecary’s open door, Jeremiah Vinograd talked without stopping for half an hour. Then, with a crazy laugh and a slap on the back, the mountebank sent the young man on his way.

  Fascinated and upset by what the charlatan had told him, Judah walked slowly back through the town; just beyond the last house, he stopped short and headed back in the direction of his parents’ home.

  Inside the house, it was damp and dark. Simon Polikov was alone, huddled over the kitchen table, trying to read; he was eighty years old, nearly blind, and looked to Judah like a frail, grotesque dwarf. Simon looked up. “Hello,” he said. “Your mother’s gone to the next village to buy wool.”

  “At her age?” murmured Judah.

  “She is not so old,” frowned Simon. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” replied Judah.

  A long silence fell, during which Simon peered intently at his son; suddenly, he recalled that this was the first time they had been alone together for more than ten years, and that there were certain questions which he had never been able to ask in front of Hannah.

  “Tell me,” he blurted out. “Did you really leave the school because of all those things that happened before you were born?”

  “I was tired of school long before I heard about them,” Judah answered quietly. “You yourself must remember how my attention kept straying out the window whenever I tried to assist you with the morning prayers.”

  “I remember,” sighed Simon. “But all this love for studying the forest, did that come from finding out about the miracle?”