Judah the Pious

by Francine Prose

  “No,” replied his son. “The idea of doing research came to me suddenly, in the course of that first argument, as an excuse for myself, so you would not think I was just being lazy. But after that I set out to make the lie true, and began to study the plants and animals until my love for them became real.”

  “I see,” said Simon.

  “But my life did change when I learned about that so-called miracle, for I began to hate religion for having made a fool of you. Now I am older, I no longer brood about it, but it has left me with a powerful distrust for all superstition. And I still shudder each time I imagine that senseless mockery of a burial.”

  “If it is any comfort,” whispered the old man, “I myself never had much faith in that miracle. Your birth was nothing but a lucky coincidence, that’s all.”

  “Of course,” agreed his son. “Yet she believed in it, and you indulged her foolishness. That is what I find difficult to forgive.”

  “Of course,” nodded Simon, somewhat irritably. “I understand completely. But, unless your science discovers some way of changing the past, I cannot see any point in our discussing this. And now, since we are agreed, suppose we change the subject. Let me ask you: how is your wife?”

  “Very well,” answered Judah, feeling a slight pang of uneasiness. “I am on my way to her now.” Then, during the silence which followed, he realized that there was nothing left to say; walking to the center of the room, he kissed the top of his father’s head. “Good-by,” he murmured, staring hard at the old man. “And say good-by to Mama for me.” A moment later, Judah ran from his parents’ house, fighting back tears, just as he had done so many years before.

  “Good-by,” sighed Simon Polikov, watching his son depart.

  VII

  “AT FIVE O’CLOCK THAT evening,” continued the Rabbi Eliezer, “Judah ben Simon accidentally encountered Jeremiah Vinograd once again. Preoccupied by the conversation he had just had with Rachel Anna, the young man would never have noticed the mountebank, had he not spotted his brilliant scarlet turban gleaming on top of a dry, sandy rise, beside the north-south road. Judah turned and climbed the barren hill until he stood directly above the herbalist, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground.

  Jeremiah Vinograd remained staring straight ahead, lost in a deep trance. His back was perfectly straight, motionless; his hands rested quietly in his lap. All his energy seemed concentrated in his skinny toes, which were sticking out from the hem of his brown velvet robe and wriggling spasmodically in the dirt.

  “Listen,” hissed Judah ben Simon. “I could not persuade my wife to come with me, no matter how many times I told her what you said. I could understand her reluctance to go. She has been ill lately, plagued with insomnia, constantly exhausted; but still, her stubbornness so enraged me that I left our house in a fury. And I have decided to go alone.”

  “Ah,” croaked Jeremiah Vinograd, emerging from his meditation. “Only this afternoon, you were positive that she would follow you to the furthest corners of the earth.”

  “I was wrong,” replied the young man tensely.

  “Perhaps it is for the best,” mused the mountebank. “After all, it is said that the old fellow was once a great heartbreaker.”

  At this, Judah ben Simon raised one eyebrow and began to pester Jeremiah Vinograd with a series of eager questions; but the charlatan had fallen back into his stupor, and did not answer. After a few moments, Judah sighed. He returned to the road, hailed a passing ox-cart, and, six weeks later, arrived in the city of Danzig.

  “Danzig!” cried King Casimir, whose memory of that town was permanently blighted by the dysentery he had contracted there as an eight-year-old prince touring his father’s kingdom. “Are you telling me that this ruthless villain left his beautiful wife to the mercy of the wild beasts just to visit Danzig? Are you saying that this so-called scientist abandoned the fragrant wild thyme and parsley to study the stinking sewer lichen of Danzig?”

  “No, I am not,” replied Eliezer calmly. “And, in the hope that my hero will soon regain the sympathy which you felt for him just a moment ago, I will ignore the terms you use to describe him. No, King Casimir, Judah ben Simon did not remain in Danzig. How could he have stayed there, when he perceived the city as a raging battle in which the enemy surrounded him, hurled speeding carriages at him, threw buckets down at his head, rolled chickens and small children beneath his feet like cannonballs? Indeed, he struggled through the crowded alleys as quickly as possible, and, still following Jeremiah Vinograd’s vague directions, left the city through the western gate.

  Then, for the first time since the start of his journey, Judah ben Simon’s heart ached with regret. He cursed the day he had left Rachel Anna, and the stupidity which had made him take the word of a crazy mountebank, who had sent him to seek his heart’s desire in a region as empty and unpromising as the fields of the moon.

  For the path which Judah followed across the bleak, sandy landscape seemed to lead nowhere. Snaking through the scrubby hills, it twisted so often, turned back on itself so unnecessarily, and branched into so many blind forks that it appeared to have been built to satisfy someone’s peculiar whim, rather than to take a traveler to his destination. Seven miles from Danzig, the path ended at the base of a deserted, desolate ridge.

  Judah ben Simon sat down on a mound of earth, which crumbled beneath him, leaving him on the ground. At first, he felt only despair, but soon grew strangely elated as he began to imagine revenging himself on Jeremiah Vinograd, and returning to Rachel Anna. Smiling to himself, he could almost hear the questions she would ask about the Polish landscape, the streets of Danzig, and the rugged coast; resolving to see the ocean just once before going home, he stood up and headed into the sharp, briny wind.

  Suddenly, halfway up a small hill, Judah ben Simon stopped. There, not far from where he stood, was an enormous mansion, perched on a steep cliff overhanging the sea. The house was executed in the classical style, to look something like Judah imagined the Parthenon. But the rambling wings and side buildings had so fractured the pure symmetry of the Greek model that the sculptured chariots seemed to follow each other aimlessly along the frieze, stumbling around the numerous corners, seeking some lost starting point. And the white marble columns and stone façade had obviously been defeated by the Baltic cold; they were chipped, weatherbeaten, overgrown with white lichen.

  In many ways, this house resembled the mansion which Jeremiah Vinograd had described. But it was not until Judah looked up to see the astrolabes and sextants mounted on the flat roof that his knees almost buckled with excitement and relief. Immediately, he began to scramble up the gentler slope of the dune, struggling against the fine sand which slid back beneath his feet.

  After almost half an hour, he reached the top of the incline, and his heart leapt once again. For, surrounding the house was a spacious garden, landscaped without any shaded benches or granite sculpture, without any regard for comfort or beauty. Rather, the plot had clearly been intended as a sort of arboretum; the plants were spaced far apart in meticulously neat rows, and small, carefully lettered tags had been attached to each sapling.

  This garden filled Judah ben Simon with so much pleasure that he scarcely noticed the fact that everything in it was dead. Grinning radiantly, he stepped over the grass which had been parched brown by the salt wind, past the shriveled vines which leaned limply against the trellises. And his smile grew even brighter when the bronze door, on which the Three Graces danced woodenly through the thick patina, swung open at his touch.

  Judah walked briskly through the long corridors, passing in and out of the spacious rooms which were furnished with narrow wooden beds, straight-backed chairs, and cluttered worktables. “A student dormitory,” the young man told himself happily. “An ascetic palace of the intellect.” But gradually, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, Judah began to feel the vague, aching discomfort which was to remain forever linked in his mind with that mansion near Danzig.

  “King
Casimir,” murmured the Rabbi Eliezer, leaning back in the throne and surveying the mirrored walls around him, “I can think of no better setting than your lovely palace in which to describe that house. For here, surrounded by so many glittering reflections of ourselves, we should have no trouble understanding how an architect may come to discover all his plans dominated by a single motif.

  Now the designer of that structure had suffered from just such an obsession; his taste, however, ran not to mirrors, but, rather, to the sort of illusionist murals which have since become quite the rage. No doubt you have seen them in your travels, King Casimir, those flat surfaces which are disguised to give the appearance of boundless three-dimensional space, of rolling sheep meadows, cloud-dusted heavens, and sublime mountain vistas.

  Such paintings covered every wall and ceiling of the great house through which Judah ben Simon moved; as he went from room to room, he found himself leaving the misty moors of Britain for the crowded bazaars of the Levant, the starry vaults of paradise for the blazing pits of hell. At last, somewhat dizzy, standing on the threshold of a room surrounded by panoramic views of the centaurs’ grove, he came upon a group of men.

  “I sincerely doubt,” mused the rabbi, “whether you have ever experienced the emotions which affected Judah ben Simon at that moment. For I simply cannot imagine a scene in which the King of Poland arrives to find his presence unexpected, unwelcome, positively ignored. Be thankful, Your Majesty, that you will never be able to comprehend the shame which overcame the young man when the ten scientists inside the room raised their heads, took one look at the newcomer, and clearly felt no need to honor him with a second glance. Without a word, they resumed their work, returned to the vials boiling over the open fireplace and to the thick ledgers half-filled with their cramped, even scripts.

  “Is this the home of Dr. Boris Silentius?” the young man blurted out, fighting against his nervousness and embarrassment.

  The scientists exchanged significant, slightly irritated glances, then turned to a thin man near the window, whose bald, bullet-shaped head was bowed low over an enormous book bound in red velvet.

  Judah ran over to the man, and, pressing both palms on his desk, leaned close to him. “So you are Dr. Silentius,” he cried eagerly. “You are the one who studied with the great Carl Gustavus Linnaeus, the one who traveled the world, applying his system to the white tigers of Bengal and the black orchids of the Amazon?”

  “I am not Dr. Silentius,” answered the bald man gravely. “I am merely Dr. Twersky, his student.”

  Mortified by his mistake, Judah wheeled around, seeking to find the master and beg his pardon; he peered at each scientist in turn, until Dr. Twersky winced with annoyance and spoke again.

  “Dr. Silentius,” he pronounced in a sepulchral tone, “has not left his room since February, when he was stricken with an attack of the tragic wasting disease which he contracted during his last visit to the tropics.”

  The young man failed to react to this for several minutes; then, his whole body suddenly became charged with tension and disappointment. Trembling violently, he was forced to press his fist against his mouth to keep from screaming. “So I have come for nothing,” he muttered, his voice thick with suppressed tears.

  The scientists, many of whom had never seen such raw emotion before, were thrown into confusion; squirming in their seats, they looked beseechingly at Dr. Twersky.

  “Calm yourself,” he said at last. “You have not come for nothing. You may stay here, at that empty desk, watching our research, listening to our conclusions, learning what you can. For surely you have not yet reached such a high level of advancement that only Silentius himself can help you?”

  “Of course not,” answered Judah ben Simon. “Of course not,” he grinned, delighted by the generosity of the doctor’s invitation. “I would be grateful for anything you could tell me, and for any fragment of your wisdom I might gain.”

  He hurried to the empty chair, and, for almost two years, left it only to eat the coarse oat porridge on which the scientists subsisted and to sleep four hours each night on a hard plank bed. There, he listened to the others with so much concentration that his mind had neither the time nor the energy to wander back to Rachel Anna or his home. Scribbling as fast as he could, he strained to hear every word of their lengthy discussions on the subject of gorillas, Venus flytraps, armadillos, red-eyed salmon, and grizzly bears. He wrote down every statistic derived from the bubbling vials and rooftop astrolabes, transcribed and underlined every reference read aloud from the journals of Dr. Silentius, which were gathered in the velvet-covered volume on Dr. Twersky’s desk.

  Aside from these occasional citations, Dr. Boris Silentius was never mentioned; indeed, the only sign of his presence in the mansion came at six o’clock every evening, when one of the elder scientists carried a bowl of porridge down the hall which led to the invalid’s room at the back of the house. Judah ben Simon first understood the meaning of this ritual a few days after his arrival, and inquired solicitously and somewhat curiously after the doctor’s health; but he was rebuffed and silenced by the distant, impatient stares of his colleagues.

  These detached glances were to set the tone for Judah’s relations with the other scientists. They considered him an observer, an outsider, and were not particularly interested in his name, his religion, or his ten years in the forest. In a moment of lightheartedness, they nicknamed him “the enthusiast” because of the tears of joy which had come into his eyes when he had first heard them speak of the giant blue whales of the South Seas. They were serious, hard-working men, who conscientiously avoided all distractions.

  Judah, on the other hand, could not help noticing certain things about his fellow workers. He soon understood that Dr. Twersky had been appointed their leader because he was the only one with any talent for practical organization. He saw that the fat, smooth-skinned mathematician on his left winced each time there was a mention of blood, though he had apparently been born into a long line of eminent surgeons. He learned that the withered old scholar to his right had ended his fifty-year career as an alchemist by being tarred, feathered, and driven from his home after having suggested that gold might never be refined from the baser metals. And he discovered that the bearded chemist who tended the beakers was a secret mystic, who awoke each dawn in the bed nearest Judah’s, crying and pleading with the Holy Ghost to stop beating its wings above his head.

  These observations did not at all dampen Judah’s respect for the scholars, whose dazzling knowledge had made him come to revere them as gods; but, after more than twenty months, he began to notice something which reminded him that they were men:

  One May morning, the scientists had fallen silent, and were struggling to comprehend the enormity of the great white-necked condor of Patagonia. “It is a gigantic bird,” mused Dr. Twersky, “at least three times the size of the huge hooded crows which inhabit the woods due south of our own Cracow.”

  Having never participated in these discussions before, Judah ben Simon was extremely reluctant to draw attention to himself; yet, despite the apprehension which sapped all the strength from his body, he felt compelled to speak. “Wait,” he whispered softly, “I myself have seen the hooded crows which live in the South, and they are quite small, not much larger than the magpie.”

  The scientists turned to face him, and a shocked, accusing silence fell over the room. “Well,” muttered Dr. Twersky sarcastically, “it would seem that our young enthusiast has already learned so much during his short stay here that he now knows more than his teachers. But perhaps you will still accept the authority of Dr. Boris Silentius, who has written in his journal that the hooded crows of Poland are extremely large.”

  “I am sorry,” replied Judah, bowing his head. “I did not mean to contradict.”

  Telling himself that the crows which had inhabited his neighborhood were probably stunted in stature, Judah attempted to forget the incident. But, during the next few weeks, he found himself taking a more
active part in the discussions, and subtly trying to maneuver them towards the subject of the Polish woods. He grew restless, dissatisfied, without knowing quite why; until at last, on a hot summer night, lying on his unyielding wooden bed, he finally admitted the reason for his mounting uneasiness:

  He had begun to realize that Dr. Twersky and his associates knew nothing about science.

  Unwilling to accept this possibility, Judah jumped out of bed and ran to his notebooks. But there, on page after page, was the damning evidence, the names of animals which had never lived in Poland, of plants which had never grown in the southern forests. The same creatures he had studied for ten years were unrecognizable in the scientists’ descriptions of their color, size, and habits; the mushrooms he had eaten all his life were classified as deadly poisons.

  “Perhaps,” thought Judah desperately, “they are merely misinformed about their own land. Such things have been known to happen. Perhaps their research is better than their command of natural history.”

  But, when he had frantically added and re-added the calculations which had been drawn from the vials and sextants, he realized that the figures did not total, and suddenly recalled the brown, withered garden outside the house. By the time Judah ben Simon joined the others for breakfast, he even caught himself wondering whether such fantastic beasts as the gryphon, the sphynx, the garuda, and the hippopotamus had ever really existed.

  “King Casimir,” said the rabbi, “there are some men for whom disillusionment is far worse than illness, or the loss of love, or even death itself.”

  “I know,” replied the king, in a mournful voice. “I myself have had some experience with disillusionment.”

  “Good,” said Eliezer. “I knew that you would soon regain your sympathy for my hero. And certainly, you will now be able to understand the terrible anguish which overcame Judah ben Simon when he realized that he had wasted two years of his life among posturers and pretenders, who had spouted their half-truths and fancies, and had made him doubt the facts that he had observed with his own eyes.