Judah the Pious

by Francine Prose

  “Who ever heard of such a woman!” hissed Hannah icily, shaking her head. “Not I, surely—not I, who would cheerfully have followed Simon Polikov into the grave itself! But why am I wasting my breath; it is said that stubborn wives never repent of their natures until they are singled out to drive the Devil’s mules across the sticky, steaming swamps of Gehenna!”

  “I have repented enough,” Rachel Anna answered weakly; but Hannah Polikov was no longer listening. For the mention of her husband’s name had reminded her of her own tragedy, which she had briefly forgotten in the minor drama of her daughter-in-law’s abandonment. “You have no idea,” sighed the old woman after a while, “how painful it is to see only one teacup on the breakfast table when there have been two for thirty years.”

  In the long, strained silence which followed, the two women looked searchingly at each other, glancing away whenever their eyes met. “She seems older,” thought Hannah to herself, “paler, skinnier than a chicken. Her lips may still be that same crimson color, but now there is something sad and defeated lurking about the corners of her mouth.”

  “Surely this must have touched the old woman’s heart!” cried Casimir, whose own heart had nearly been pierced by this last image.

  “So it did,” nodded Eliezer, ignoring the flush of embarrassment which overcame the king immediately after his outburst. “At that moment, in fact, an odd mixture of sympathy and self-pity made the anger drain from Hannah Polikov’s body like a burnt-out fever, and her gaze grew steadier and kinder.

  “So what have you been doing since Judah left?” she asked at last.

  “Day-dreaming,” replied the girl.

  “What kind of life is that for a young woman?” demanded her mother-in-law good-humoredly.

  “A fairly common one, I should think,” answered Rachel Anna. “Except that most young women need not find their fantasies constantly interrupted by the harsh necessities of keeping alive through a winter in the wilderness.”

  “The winter,” said Hannah Polikov, looking distractedly around at the rotting floorboards, the tiny fireplace, and the gaping chinks in the walls and ceiling. “I had completely forgotten about the winter,” she murmured, flustered by the sudden realization that her own son had left his wife alone to face the icy blizzards and the snowbound isolation. “The winters out here must be unbearable; have you ever considered moving back to town?”

  “No,” answered the young woman. “I doubt whether I would be welcome there, and there are many things worse than a little cold weather. But,” she added with a half-teasing smile, “if you are inviting me to come live at your house, then I would be delighted, for, quite frankly, I have had more than enough solitude to last me a lifetime.”

  “That is not what I meant at all,” Hannah burst out. Then, mortified by the blunt inhospitality of her reaction, the old woman searched her mind for justifications and excuses. “My house is a small one, you have seen it yourself,” she muttered. “Even if my husband’s tiny pension could support us both, there would be no place for you to sleep in comfort.”

  “But certainly,” replied the girl calmly, “there is enough room in your home for two teacups on the breakfast table.”

  Hannah Polikov looked up, startled, then nodded slowly, thoughtfully, knowing there was no need to discuss the matter any further. “Gather your things,” she said, “and let us go. This forest air is dampening my bones.”

  And so Rachel Anna came to do her dreaming in Judah ben Simon’s childhood room.

  In the beginning, there were many delicate adjustments to be made. Hannah Polikov fumed constantly over a set of bad habits which irritated her mainly in that they were wholly unlike those of her late husband. Day after day, she bristled at the girl’s too-frequent bathing, her late rising, excessive eating, and, particularly, at the way she got underfoot whenever she attempted to help with the household chores. And this was not the worst of it. For the old woman sometimes found herself unable to remember the days when her body was full of milk, and free of pains, scabs and creases; at such moments, Hannah would fall victim to black moods and bitter fantasies, and would turn on Rachel Anna, cursing her youth, and accusing her of having bewitched Judah into traveling to Danzig for the sole purpose of stealing jewels and engaging in devilish activities.

  Her daughter-in-law weathered these storms without resentment; there were other facets of her new life which troubled her more. She hated going out into the close, crowded streets, hated the sight of headless rabbits dangling in the butcher’s shop, hated the triumphant village matrons and their leering husbands. Nor was it always easy for her to remain indoors. The odor of chickens boiling in a closed room nauseated her, so that often, choking from the acrid smoke of the fireplace, she had to run all the way back to the forest before she could breathe easily again. And she was so accustomed to sleeping in the open that the thin stream of air filtering in through her one narrow window made her dream of huge animals breathing on her back. Occasionally, when all of Rachel Anna’s minor sorrows became gnarled into a single knot of misery, Hannah Polikov truly had reason to complain of her daughter-in-law’s withdrawn and surly nature.

  “Then she should have left her in the forest,” interrupted the king, who had already grown impatient with the subject of bickering women.

  “No,” answered Eliezer, “that is not true at all. For gradually, just as Rachel Anna had predicted so many years before, the two women came to love each other.”

  “Surely you are using the term ‘love’ rather loosely,” smirked the boy. “For, if the ladies of my court are any measure, it would seem that women band together only to devise new methods of entrapping innocent males.”

  “King Casimir,” the rabbi sighed patiently, “you can see for yourself that my heroines have little in common with your court ladies. However, it is true that, for several months, their only bonds were the absence of their men and a common sense of having been abandoned; at first, they shared nothing but the afternoons they spent watching for signs of return—the long hours Rachel Anna passed scanning the north-south highway, while Hannah crept stealthily around the cemetery for fear of making too much noise and exasperating her husband’s spirit. At the end of these solitary vigils, the two women found only each other, walking slowly home at dusk. And the gentle, wordless understanding which characterized these chance meetings slowly laid the foundations of something deeper.

  Indeed, by the time the women had lived together a few months, they were already beginning to stay up late into the nights—drinking tea, sipping homemade currant wine, giggling like schoolgirls. Rachel Anna told bawdy stories she had learned as a little girl eavesdropping on her father’s business conferences; Hannah sang songs about faithless lovers which made them weep with such melancholy that neither noticed when the old woman forgot the lyrics to entire verses.

  Eventually, the warmth of their friendship gave Hannah such comfort that she no longer suffered the palpitations and night sweats which had plagued her since Simon’s death. Rachel Anna, too, began to smile more, and to feel a certain resigned contentment. She ceased brooding about Judah’s absence, stopped attempting to bargain with God for his immediate return. But, at the back of her mind, she knew that this new tranquillity was not without its price:

  Rachel Anna was gradually growing to feel less comfortable in the wilderness. By late July, she went to the woods only to attend the community Sabbath picnics, during which she watched her neighbors sitting on the sweet, shaded grass as if each green blade were a separate iron spike. Nor did she feel the slightest twinge of embarrassment, or even nostalgia, when the apothecary’s wife spent these outings bemoaning the days when the forest had been a bog of moral corruption. Finally, Rachel Anna found herself sharing in the general sense of relief when the chill October wind began to make these excursions unfeasible.

  Occasionally, though, after Hannah Polikov had gone to bed, Rachel Anna would lie awake in her attic room, wondering what had happened to their wooden shelter.
She would run through lists of wildflowers, conjure up visions of forest animals, and try to remember just how the pine needles had felt pressing into her bare thighs. All night long, she would torture herself with memories and regrets, until she was tearing at the edge of her embroidered linen bedsheets, and cursing herself, her fate, Jeremiah Vinograd, and Judah ben Simon.

  It was on a chill December night, sixteen months after her husband’s departure, that Rachel Anna fell asleep in one of these moods, and dreamed a strange dream:

  In her vision, she was standing before the shelter, filled with the certainty that Judah ben Simon was about to return. She felt expectant, peaceful, troubled only by a vague sense that the forest seemed somehow unfamiliar, lusher and more exotic than she had remembered it: the entire ground was evenly carpeted with emerald green moss. Curtains of apple and cherry blossoms hung down from the branches. Copper-colored foxes gleamed in the bright sunlight as they chased iridescent blue dragonflies across the fields. And snow-white peacocks strutted among the thickets, staining their feathers with the sweet juice of strawberries.

  “Perhaps I am in the wrong place,” she thought uneasily. Then, attracted by a muffled noise, she turned towards the elm grove and saw Judah ben Simon, sprawled naked on the ground, making love to a woman whom Rachel Anna recognized immediately as herself.

  “So this is what it was like,” she thought, watching them with the unquestioning curiosity of dreams. “So those are our arms, our legs, the colors of our bodies.” The next moment, she was no longer observing her double, but, instead, lay half-crushed by her husband’s weight, feeling the warmth of his skin against her breast and the soft, velvety moss beneath her. “Yes,” she decided happily, “this is exactly what it was like.”

  Locked together, they embraced again and again, without stopping—not even when the world around them began to change. First, the moss cracked and slid away in sheets, until they were left lying in the soft, slippery mud of a riverbank. The leaves turned yellow, red, brown, then floated gently down from the trees. The falling leaves grew thinner, lacier, lighter, and changed into snowflakes; frost appeared on the bare branches. At last, the soft earth hardened into a brittle film of ice, which cracked beneath the lovers; they fell deeper and deeper into the snowbank, holding each other tightly, crying out in fear and passion and joy.

  In the midst of that cry, Rachel Anna awoke to find herself alone in her room, drenched with sweat, although, having kicked the blankets off her bed, she lay unprotected against the fierce December cold.

  The King of Poland took a deep breath. “I do not see why that dream was so strange,” he blurted out, regretting it immediately, and deciding that the dignity of his royal position demanded greater restraint in responding to the rabbi’s story.

  “You are quite correct,” chuckled the Rabbi Eliezer. “Indeed, it is odd that Rachel Anna never had one like it before, especially during the eight months she had spent alone in the forest doing nothing but dreaming of Judah ben Simon. But I am afraid that you have misinterpreted me, King Casimir. For, when I referred to her dream as ‘strange,’ I was speaking not of its content, but, rather, of its consequences:

  “Not long after that cold December night, Rachel Anna knew beyond a doubt that she was pregnant.”

  IX

  “NOW THAT IS STRANGE!” exclaimed King Casimir. “And what is even stranger,” he continued, as his common sense gradually won out over his desire to think highly of the lovely young heroine, “is that you consider me naïve enough to believe yet another of your miracle stories. Unless I am mistaken, you have been speaking of a breathtaking woman, all alone in a village full of healthy men. And you honestly expect me to believe that she conceived a child in a dream?!”

  “I suppose not,” sighed the rabbi, obviously disappointed, “though your warmhearted response to the lovers’ perfect happiness had led me to conclude that you were more of an idealist. Certainly, I would hate to think that Your Majesty’s intellect was tainted with even the slightest trace of the pedestrian, the unimaginative, or the mundane. On the other hand, I would be equally upset to see the King of Poland automatically accept a story which was positively ridiculed by every peasant, merchant, landowner, apprentice, holy man, and idiot in Rachel Anna’s village.

  “For, as soon as the girl’s pregnancy became apparent, wave after wave of gossip began to sweep through the town. Every male over twelve and under fifty was suspected in turn; stage whispers, obscene gestures, petty cruelties and vicious insults were exchanged in the market place. Families turned in on themselves to root out the culprit; fathers clamped tight curfews on their sons’ late hours, and were in turn forced to deliver the house keys over to their wives promptly at midnight.”

  “But why the great scandal?” interrupted Casimir, feigning a certain bored sophistication. “Surely this was not the first love-child ever sired among the lower classes of the neighborhood?”

  “Of course not,” answered Eliezer. “The district orphanage was overflowing with such infants. But none of their cringing, guilt-ridden mothers had ever been so beautiful as Rachel Anna, nor so wild and headstrong as to stubbornly insist that her baby had been fathered in a vision.

  Indeed, the whole case was so singular that even Hannah Polikov could scarcely understand it. Unlike her neighbors, she knew that Rachel Anna would never have chosen a lover from the bumbling ranks of village manhood. In the beginning, therefore, she simply refused to believe that the girl might really be pregnant. “Don’t jump to any conclusions,” she counseled her. “Take your time. All this delay is just the cold weather freezing up your system.”

  Not until Rachel Anna’s belly began to swell did Hannah finally come to see that something very strange and significant had occurred; then, thoroughly perplexed, she embarked on a solid week of worry and deliberation. At the end of these seven troubled days, Hannah Polikov issued her final pronouncement on the subject of the girl’s condition. “Now I understand,” she proclaimed proudly. “It would appear that miracles run in our family.”

  But the old woman never understood why this remark should have upset her daughter-in-law more than all of the village matrons’ jeers. Actually, there were many things which Hannah and her neighbors failed to perceive: among them was the fact that the same proud girl who could offer such a calm, definite, consistent explanation of her pregnancy was actually more bewildered by it than anyone else.

  For how could she possibly comprehend an event which contradicted all her knowledge and experience? She did not believe in miracles; she could never interpret her pregnancy as an instance of God’s personal intervention, of His will moving in a new and unique direction. But she also knew that women do not ordinarily conceive in visions, and that she had not slept with any man outside her dreams. She refused to admit that a wonder might have befallen her; yet, at the same time, she realized that her condition could not have been caused by the sleight-of-hand and mirror tricks which the Biblical fathers had used to divide the oceans, tame wild beasts, and halt the sun.

  “King Casimir,” said Eliezer, leaning forward eagerly, as if he were about to communicate something of the greatest importance, “would you be at all astonished if your palace suddenly sprouted wings and circled three times around the sky?”

  The King of Poland nodded, smiling the silly grin of a young child being teased in a manner which he considers unduly babyish.

  “Then I assure you,” continued Eliezer, “that all your surprise at such a case would hardly amount to a fraction of Rachel Anna’s amazement. For the marvel she was witnessing seemed even more extraordinary than a flying castle, because it was taking place not in the atmosphere around her, but, rather, within her own once-familiar body. The young woman found this notion so overpowering that three months of her term elapsed before she was able to devise the small compromise which made it possible for her to deal with it: she merely expanded her concept of natural law to include one additional fact: conception may occur within the course of a vi
sion.

  Once having decided on this new precept, Rachel Anna proceeded to defend it against disbelief, slander, insult, and even the threat of outright persecution—a threat which would never have been suggested had her pregnancy not happened to coincide with the local mayoral election. For the paternity of her unborn child quickly became the one important issue in an otherwise uneventful campaign.

  In speech after speech, the reform candidate traced the entire scandal back to the incumbent’s decision to order the libertines lawfully wed; his worthy opponent, he claimed, had only succeeded in installing the licentious woman in their town, when he should have been working to exile her from the entire region. If he were in office, promised the challenger, he would personally flush the moral poison from their town by banishing both Rachel Anna and her mother-in-law under the terms of the Fraud and Heresy Act, which had last been invoked against the followers of Sabbatai Zevi.

  “A law which had been forgotten for thirty years,” chuckled the Rabbi Eliezer, shaking his head from side to side. “What sweeter, more nostalgic music could have fallen on the voters’ ears?” Two days after the reform candidate’s election, Rachel Anna was directed to leave town at once, unless she consented to recant her story and name her partner in sin.

  No one really expected this to happen, least of all Hannah Polikov, who knew her daughter-in-law’s stubbornness only too well. The old woman lacked the nerve to even so much as hint that the girl lie. Yet she was still more reluctant to abandon the home she had shared with Simon Polikov—afraid that all her memories might somehow remain behind and leave her with as little to look back on as a bitter old virgin. Torn by these conflicting fears, Hannah began to pass more and more time at the cemetery, placing heaps of flowers on her husband’s grave and pleading with his spirit to help her, to advise her, to tell her what he would have done in her situation.