Judah the Pious (8 page)

“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 which 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?”

“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.

“A
T 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.