Judah the Pious (12 page)

“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.”

“N
OW
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 vision.

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.

At last, one foggy March morning, she heard Simon’s unmistakable, adenoidal whine piercing through the clouds and filling the air around her. “Hannah!” it called out in a familiar, loving, yet peculiarly ceremonial tone. “The whole business is very simple. If you cannot make the girl change her story, then you must make the officials withdraw their charges. You know what authorities have the power to declare a man innocent of heresy.”

“Of course I do, Simon!” exclaimed the widow, slapping her forehead. “How stupid of me to have overlooked that! How selfish of me to have bothered you!”

That afternoon, still murmuring these sincere apologies, Hannah Polikov set out on her second journey to the court of Judah the Pious at Cracow.

“As you may remember,” said Eliezer, pursing his lips together somewhat impishly, “I told you that Hannah’s first trip to that noble city took more than six months. Perhaps, then, you may be surprised to learn that, over twenty-five years later, the old woman covered the entire distance to Cracow and back in less than four weeks. And the dissimilarities between this expedition and the last did not end there; for Hannah’s return was also wholly unlike the homecoming which had taken place so long before.

This time, crowds of onlookers lined the streets, telling their children the almost-forgotten story of Judah ben Simon’s birth, and watching closely to see if the widow’s return from Cracow might mean the beginning of more miraculous goings-on; but as soon as they perceived that her vaguely troubled face bore none of the beatific radiance of a woman about to experience one of God’s wonders, they shook their heads and went home.

This time, too, Hannah Polikov did not wait until nightfall to reveal the results of her journey, but began talking the minute she crossed the threshold of her house. “Rachel Anna!” she called. “Bring me a warm towel and some hot tea. All that walking has made my feet swell like the limbs of a corpse.

“I am no longer a young woman,” she sighed, collapsing into a chair. “Here, at home, I hardly notice, but out there, on the road, every mile introduced me to another throbbing nerve and aching muscle.”

“Is that why you seem so unhappy?” asked Rachel Anna solicitously, filling her mother-in-law’s cup.

“Unhappy!” cried Hannah, pulling herself up straight and twisting her lips into an artificially ecstatic grin. “Who’s unhappy? I haven’t been so joyous since my wedding day. True, I was somewhat disappointed at not being able to see the great Judah the Pious, who had just left on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to weep for us all at the sacred Wailing Wall. But, aside from that, my trip was a total success; the treatment I received could not have been better. As soon as I declared my case an emergency, I was granted a private audience with Reb Daniel of Warsaw, acting head of the Cracower court during the beloved sage’s absence.

“The moment I saw Reb Daniel, I said to myself: ‘Nobody will ever call this one a saint.’ But perhaps, God forgive me, my judgment was prejudiced by the scholar’s unattractive appearance, by his fat, bandy-legged body, his pock-marks, and his slightly crossed eyes. For, when he smiled merrily and rose to greet me, a second thought almost made me cast this first impression from my mind. ‘Certainly,’ I decided, ‘this man is so wise, so just, and so reliable that I would not hesitate to entrust him with the care of my mother’s soul.’

“For this reason, I felt not the slightest embarrassment in relating your story, not even when it proved necessary to add certain details which no respectable woman would ever dream of discussing with a strange man. Yet despite all my faith in Reb Daniel, my heart still began to pound when he scratched his curly, black beard and told me that he could not possibly decide my case there and then, no more than a good physician would consider diagnosing the malady of a patient he had never seen. My palpitations increased when he and all his colleagues assembled to consult the spirit of their absent master, so that I thought the blood would come bursting from my veins by the time they pronounced their verdict.”

Suddenly, Hannah stopped, and, fumbling in her bodice, produced a scrap of paper from which she proceeded to read aloud:

“Because of the unusual nature of this case, in light of its capacity to open certain special avenues of philosophical discourse, the chief wise men of Cracow hereby announce that they will transport their entire court three hundred miles, in order to investigate and pass judgment at the scene of the petitioner’s home.”

“When are they coming?” asked Rachel Anna listlessly.

“In two weeks,” replied her mother-in-law. “And then, if you are found innocent, you will be respected, perhaps even venerated, more than any other woman in Poland.” The old woman paused, but, after several moments had passed without any reaction from the girl, she began to speak again. “I can appreciate your being disappointed,” she said, “that Judah the Pious will not be back in time to officiate at this session. But still, I cannot understand why you are wearing such a long face, why you are not singing and dancing in ecstasy.”

“Because,” answered Rachel Anna, wondering how she would ever be able to explain her dealings with the Cracower court to Judah ben Simon, “because you have forgotten to drink your tea.”