Judah the Pious (11 page)

The next morning, Hannah Polikov put on her husband’s overshoes and slogged through the muddy forest to fetch Judah back for the funeral. Since Simon had never remarked on the odd finality of their son’s last good-by, Hannah had naturally assumed that his failure to visit them for six months represented a clear cut victory for the redheaded demoness. This idea so infuriated the old woman that, when she finally discovered the girl lying on a heap of brownish pine needles in the half-dark wooden shelter, it was all she could do to keep from throttling her.

“Where is my son?” she demanded angrily, in a tone which implied that she expected to hear nothing but lies.

Rachel Anna, who had been studying a yellow spider spin its silvery web across the ceiling, was so startled by her mother-in-law’s arrival that she was unable to respond for several minutes. “In Danzig,” she whispered at last.

“In Danzig!” cried Hannah suspiciously. “Swear it on your mother’s soul!”

An entire range of emotions passed across Rachel Anna’s face before it assumed a somewhat shakier version of the composure it had worn during her first meeting with Hannah Polikov. “On my mother’s soul,” she answered softly, “he has gone to Danzig to study orchids and tigers.”

“Then he really was crazy after all,” sighed Hannah, sinking down beside Rachel Anna on the dried-out pine needle bed. “And now there is no one but me,” she groaned. “For all Simon’s success in finding a son to say the memorial prayers for him, he might just as well never have married me.”

“Has something happened to your husband?” asked Rachel Anna.

“All deaths are the same,” answered the old woman brusquely. “There is no point talking about it. Besides, what happened to Judah ben Simon is much more important, and that is what I have come to hear.”

Rachel Anna, however, had no desire to narrate the story of Judah’s departure, even though she had rehearsed it so many times in her mind. She wondered if she would be able to tell it calmly, without tears; it all seemed strange to her, unreal, as if she were being ordered to relate a nightmare. Stalling for time, Rachel Anna rubbed her eyes with her thin, work-callused hands.

Hannah Polikov recoiled in horror from the sight of the sixth finger. Soon, she perceived that the reality of it was far less gruesome than she had imagined, but, by then, Rachel Anna had already noticed—and, in that one look, had suddenly remembered what it was like to deal with other people.

“Late in August,” she began, her clear, defiant voice ringing through the embarrassed stillness, “Judah ben Simon met a stranger outside the apothecary shop.”

“The apothecary shop,” murmured Hannah, her eyes widening with concern. “Which one of you was sick?”

“Judah was only buying poison for a troublesome cat,” the girl answered.

“So that is what all his fancy science has come to!” snorted the old woman. “Killing cats!”

“It never proved necessary,” replied Rachel Anna coldly. “The cat disappeared by itself right after Judah ben Simon left.”

“And where did you say my son went?” cried Hannah, fearing that all these new developments would surely unhinge her mind.

“I am trying to tell you,” said her daughter-in-law. “Now listen: that August afternoon, when I returned from gathering herbs in the forest, I saw him pacing back and forth in front of our house, twitching like a marionette. At first, I could barely understand the words tumbling from his mouth, but, gradually, I began to comprehend that a traveling mountebank had told him something about a great naturalist living near Danzig, teaching his precious scientific truths to anyone who might care to listen.

“‘Never trust a mountebank,’ I had laughed nervously, trying to make a joke of it. ‘They have been known to steal the silver from old women’s hair.’”

“And right you were!” interrupted Hannah.

“If only Judah ben Simon had thought so,” sighed Rachel Anna. “Two hours later, he had gathered together all his clothes and pennies; then, kissing me so violently that I almost fell over backwards, he set off toward the north-south road.”

“Yes,” nodded her mother-in-law, not without a trace of satisfaction. “When it comes to a choice between women and work, the good man will always choose one way.”

“But it was
I
who made the choice,” said Rachel Anna quietly. “Judah ben Simon begged me to go with him, but I refused.”

Hannah Polikov could not have been more surprised had her daughter-in-law suddenly sprouted sidelocks and a full beard. “What was the matter with you?” she asked, staring at her in awe.

“Pride and obstinacy,” replied Rachel Anna. “That is the plain truth, how else can I explain it? The journey which brought me here from Cracow was so tiresome that I swore never to embark on another. And I truly believed that no scientist in the world could lure Judah ben Simon away from me. Indeed, I believed it until the moment of his departure; then, watching him leave, I wanted to run after him, to hold onto him, to call him back. But pride and obstinacy were standing at my sides like two burly Cossacks, pinning my arms behind my back, stopping my mouth, rooting my feet to the ground.”

“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.