Judah the Pious (7 page)

In the fading sunlight, Rachel Anna looked back at him, too surprised to blush at the compliment. “I have also witnessed public executions,” she said. “Does that mean I am a famous murderess? Listen, Judah ben Simon: having glimpsed the sage with my own eyes, I cannot deny that he is an amazing man. But, aside from that, I swear to you that my experience with superstition has been much more painful than yours. For it is likely that you were honored as a blessed miracle-child by your neighbors, while I have been scorned as a witch and a demoness all my life.”

“Because of your eyes?” asked Judah.

“Because of my eyes,” she nodded. “But also because of something else.” Then slowly, cautiously, Rachel Anna raised her left hand, displaying the trump card which, she had always known, would someday help her win one game. And that was how Rachel Anna’s sixth finger came to be discussed in the forest.

“And was he not disgusted by this?” cried the young King of Poland.

“Not in the least,” grinned Eliezer. “In fact, he was so comforted by their common perspective on religion that he soon let himself be charmed into the web which Rachel Anna was spinning around them with her glittering conversation. Together, they talked of life in Cracow, and of all the things which Judah had learned in the forest. They spoke honestly and openly, bravely revealing all the secrets which they had always kept to themselves, though Rachel Anna seemed somewhat reluctant to dwell on the subject of her past.

“It is an old story,” she smiled. “My father tried to marry me to an old man, whose body was as foul-smelling as his riches. I would not want to bore you with the details. But someday you will overhear me telling it all to our children, for I would not want them to think that their mother materialized out of nowhere.”

“Let us not have any talk of children, or marriage, or even true love,” laughed Judah, “lest our life be complicated by foolish expectations and constraints. We should live together as friends and companions, coming no closer than that until we have as much faith in each other as we do in the sturdiness of that enormous elm.”

“Agreed,” said Rachel Anna, who felt so strictly bound by this bargain that, the very same night, she did not hesitate for a moment to creep beneath Judah ben Simon’s blanket.

“And were they good at this business of lovemaking?” inquired King Casimir, who had been waiting for this part all along, and was hoping to obtain certain mysterious and precious bits of information.

“Very good,” smiled the rabbi, then grew suddenly serious. “King Casimir,” he said, “it has just occurred to me that there is nothing in the world more poetic, more romantic, more full of possibility than a love story of this sort, a love story which one virgin would not blush to tell another. On the other hand, there is nothing more preposterous.”

“Why?” asked the boy bashfully, unable to meet Eliezer’s eyes. “I do not see why a romantic love story cannot be just as believable and true-to-life as the most common anecdote. For surely you are not one of those who claim that love is merely a procession of shrewish women, grinning lechers, and cuckolded old men.”

“Of course not,” protested the rabbi. “But I am glad to see that you possess such a wise, comprehensive understanding of the nature of love.”

“It is only a matter of experience,” replied Casimir proudly. “I have been around, you know. I have learned that the onset of love is much like the terrible melancholy which creeps over one’s whole body on a warm spring evening, and that the height of passion is something akin to the shivers which follow a cooling bath on a hot summer’s day.”

“Indeed,” murmured Eliezer thoughtfully, staring at the boy in amazement. “King Casimir,” he said, after a short pause, “there are many audiences which would make me quite uneasy at this turn in my narrative. But you have so reassured me that I no longer have any qualms about dealing with the delicate matter of love in your presence. Now, I must ask you to help me along, and together we will construct the story of Judah ben Simon’s love. For we may be the only two men left in the world who might still believe it.”

“N
EEDLESS TO SAY,” SMILED
Eliezer, resuming his tale, “neither Judah ben Simon nor Rachel Anna wasted a moment of their first night together thinking of their neighbors in town; yet there were many villagers who, having once glimpsed Rachel Anna, dreamed of the beautiful young couple all night long. By the next morning, they had turned their dreams into a legend, which changed and grew as it spread through the countryside. In telling this tale, the young girls always emphasized the tenderness of Judah ben Simon’s passion, while the married women seemed more concerned with his perfect fidelity; naturally, the scholars most enjoyed finding historical precedents for the idyllic romance, and began referring to the pair as ‘the new Adam and Eve.’ And there was one facet of the legend which inspired even the most sophisticated country bucks with a certain awe:

It was said that the handsome couple gave in to the urgings of love everywhere, even in the most unexpected and uncomfortable regions of the forest.

Oddly enough, this rumor owed its existence to the village children, who had come home from outings in the woods imitating the mysterious cries, murmurs and giggles which they had heard filtering through the screens of ferns and flowers. Their parents, many of whom had never uttered such noises themselves, still understood immediately what these sounds signified; nevertheless, they scolded their offspring for having wandered so near the child-eating woodland trolls that they had overheard their digestive grumbles, and forbade them to revisit the forest.

“And tell me,” interrupted King Casimir slyly, “did these innocent children also happen to
see
anything in the places from which the noises came?”

“Possibly,” shrugged Eliezer.

“For example?” persisted the king, driven to such boldness by his fear that the rabbi might otherwise overlook such essential matters.

“That, I suppose, would have depended on the season,” replied the old man patiently. “In summer, they might have spotted the couple rolling through the sweet green meadows, or on the riverbanks, slippery with mud. In autumn, they may have seen them making love in heaps of fallen leaves; in winter, on the frozen crust of twelve-foot snow drifts.”

“Twelve-foot snow drifts!” repeated the boy incredulously.

“Winters are stormy in those parts,” said the rabbi.

“Amazing,” murmured Casimir, who could barely stand to leave the palace during the colder months. “Such passion is truly amazing.”

“Not necessarily,” answered the old man sensibly. “After all, I must remind you that generations of children have been conceived in every season, long before the canopied bed and the silken sheet were ever invented. But, frankly, what
I
find amazing is the life which Judah ben Simon and Rachel Anna led in between these moments of passion. For, as I heard this story, the lovers never quarreled, or exchanged an impatient word, never grew tired or bored in each other’s company—not even when the January blizzards kept them imprisoned in their tiny wooden shelter for weeks at a time. Soon, they learned to share the work which Judah had begun, and to order their lives so that they had no needs which the forest could not satisfy; they received nothing from the town, except for the few pennies and honey cakes which Judah ben Simon brought back from his parents’ home.

By unspoken agreement, Judah always paid these infrequent visits alone. For as soon as the Polikovs had realized that Rachel Anna would never mold their son into a proper householder, they had lost all desire to hear her name. Still, they were invariably overjoyed to see their son, and to discover that the redheaded woman was not making him moody, sickly, or despondent.

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.