Judah the Pious

by Francine Prose

  “As far as I can tell,” replied Rachel Anna. “But, nevertheless, everyone in town has been terrified of me since the birth.”

  “Why should that be?” murmured her husband, almost afraid to hear her answer.

  “Because,” she replied softly, “I did not make a single sound during the entire eighteen hours of my labor.”

  “How could you have done that?” Judah ben Simon asked in amazement.

  “The answer to that is simple,” said his wife. “It was not so terribly painful. After all, women have been giving birth for centuries, in places where a single cry might ruin the hunt and so starve their whole tribe. But the question of why I did it is far more difficult to answer. Maybe I did not want the townspeople listening to my suffering like a concert, telling each other that I was finally being punished for all my shameful pleasures. Maybe it was the fault of the village midwife, who advised me to shriek as loud as I could, telling me that tears were a woman’s lot, that they would help me ease the agony.

  “Yet, whatever my reason, the outcome could not have been more certain: ‘Animals and witches give birth this way,’ pronounced the midwife solemnly, ‘not human women.’ And, ever since, our neighbors have avoided the house, and have taken to saying that this innocent baby is the offspring of an enchantress and her demon lover.”

  As Rachel Anna spoke these last words, Judah could no longer meet her gaze; he shut his eyes, and knew that the time had come. “Rachel Anna,” he whispered, “who is the father of the baby?”

  “You are,” she replied deliberately. “You came to me in a dream.”

  “Whose child is this?” repeated her husband.

  “Yours and mine,” she said.

  “But that is impossible,” he exploded. “I cannot imagine,” he continued, when he had regained his self-control, “how you could have forgotten the years we lived together, and all the things we believed in. Rachel Anna”—Judah’s voice took on an almost pleading tone—“listen to me: I swear that I love you still, I swear that I will forgive you for this and raise the child as if it were my own. I will not even ask you to reveal your lover’s name. Just tell me the truth, tell me that you do not really subscribe to this lie, to this superstitious nonsense about fantasies and visions.”

  “What can I say?” sighed his wife. “I conceived this child by you and no one else, one December night, in the midst of a dream.”

  “But you are asking me to believe in a miracle!” the young man cried desperately.

  “No,” she answered, “I am asking you to believe in a scientific fact, but you are simply too close-minded, too stubborn, too narrow in your notions of science. Suppose you had never seen a bird, Judah ben Simon, and I told you there were large animals capable of coasting and gliding on the breeze. Certainly, you would accuse me of talking miracles, and scorn me for telling superstitious fables about things which have never happened in nature. And yet—”

  “That is exactly the point,” Judah broke in. “With my own eyes, I have seen wrens flying through the air. Therefore, I know that they exist. But I have never yet seen a child conceived in a dream.

  “I can accept only what I know for myself, Rachel Anna; the only meaningful fact I learned at Dr. Boris Silentius’s home was the etymology of the word ‘science,’ which comes from the ancient root meaning ‘eyes.’ I have seen children born from the mating of men and women, not of women and dreams. Unless you tell me that you slept with a living man, nine months ago, you are asking me to believe in a miraculous work of God.”

  “All right, then,” snapped Rachel Anna. “Hold on tight to those unshakeable truths of yours. If you insist on thinking that the conception of our child was a miracle, then I am talking about a miracle.”

  “But you are lying,” he shouted.

  “I am telling the truth,” she replied, without the slightest tremor of doubt.

  Judah ben Simon rested his head in his hands. “In just a few days,” he said quietly, “I could have overcome my jealousy of another man; I could have resumed living with you as happily as before my journey. But I could never adjust to sharing my life with a woman who believed in miracles. I would rather exile myself from the entire region, far away from all memories of you.”

  Rachel Anna said nothing as he rose from the bed and walked slowly from the room; an instant later, her voice rang out so loud that the chickens in the outer courtyard woke up and fluttered their wings.

  “Wait!” she screamed, in a manner which allowed her husband no choice but to turn back. “I knew,” she began, as soon as she saw his face again, “that I had married a stubborn man, but I was unaware that I had married a stubborn fool. I am disappointed, I would have expected better from you. But I cannot make up lies to keep you, not even though I know you are about to leave the house and depart from the village forever.”

  Rachel Anna paused for a minute, and, when she spoke again, her voice was thick with tears. “You are so obstinate,” she whispered, “there is no way I could ever convince you that I am right. I can only ask you to promise me this. Swear to me, Judah ben Simon, that you will return to me immediately if you should ever see, with your own eyes, something stranger than a child conceived in a dream.”

  “I promise to come back with the story of my first miracle,” he muttered, and left the room for the second and final time.

  XI

  “IN THE WORDS OF Judah the Pious,” said Eliezer, aware that the young king was attempting to conceal some new anxiety, “‘Speak your heart and rob the physician of his fee.’”

  “All right, then,” sighed Casimir at last. “What bothers me is this: I believe that I can now foresee the outcome of your narrative; and I am wondering how I can sustain my interest when I already know that Judah ben Simon must eventually encounter some great miracle and return home to seek his wife.”

  Rabbi Eliezer of Rimanov laughed out loud, then raised his eyes in an expression of suffering patience which the boy had last seen on the painted martyrs in his royal chapel. “Even if you are right,” he said, “what then? I can assure you, there is no reason to fear boredom or disappointment. It is true that my hero will discover untold wonders as my story nears its finish—but why should that upset you? Do you think that a single one of your subjects finds his enjoyment of the Easter plays diminished by the knowledge that they must necessarily conclude in the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Life?”

  The king was too stunned by Eliezer’s presumption to reply.

  “You see,” continued the old man, interpreting his listener’s silence as a sign of agreement, “it is not such a terrible thing to know the end. Indeed, I am proud of you for having perceived it so soon, and I would hate to punish your foresight and perspicacity by interrupting my narrative in the middle. Therefore, with Your Majesty’s permission, I will resume my tale again.

  “Soon after Judah ben Simon left his mother’s house,” continued the Rabbi Eliezer, “he found himself roaming the deserted streets and alleys of his village. He passed by the Rabbi Joseph Joshua’s schoolroom, by the town bakery, the market, and the empty lots in which he had dug for treasure as a boy. He walked out towards the woods, then, thinking better of it, merely skirted the edges of the forest; he revisited the cemetery where his mother had been briefly interred so long ago, and where his father now lay for eternity. Judah did not cease his wandering until daybreak, when the shopkeepers who came out to open their shutters began to whisper and point at him. Then he broke into a run, and instinctively headed back towards the highway from which he had come the previous night.

  Just outside of town, Judah ben Simon gazed absent-mindedly towards the hill where he had last met Jeremiah Vinograd—and spotted the embroidered brown velvet cloak and the red turban. Making his way up the incline, Judah noticed the familiar matted hair and streaked beard; but this time, he saw, the mountebank seemed so alert and cheerful that his face appeared to glow with merriment in the pale dawn light.

  “Hello!” shouted the herbalist, r
ecognizing the young man at once. “Did you ever succeed in killing that wretched cat?”

  “What cat?” asked the other.

  “The last time I saw you,” explained Jeremiah Vinograd, “you were leaving the apothecary’s, where you had just bought some poison for a wildcat whose screams were annoying your wife.”

  Staring down into the mountebank’s maniacal, ice-blue eyes, Judah ben Simon suddenly realized that he no longer wanted revenge for the years he had wasted in Danzig. “Ah, the she-cat,” he sighed, so exhausted that he could not refrain from sinking to the ground beside the old man, “the poor she-cat seems to have been forgotten by everyone. At any rate,” he continued, unable to resist an urge to reproach the charlatan, “I must remind you that our last conversation did not take place outside the apothecary’s, but here, on this very spot, as I was on my way to visit your friend Dr. Boris Silentius.”

  “Oh yes,” murmured Jeremiah Vinograd, tapping his forehead, “perhaps we did exchange some words about the good doctor. But I regret to say that I cannot remember meeting you here on this lovely hill. I hope you will pardon my forgetfulness; that summer was a particularly stormy time in my career, during which I was much given to brief trances and sudden fits of aphasia. But now I am completely recovered, thank you, and absolutely overjoyed to remake the acquaintance of a fellow scientist.” The old man paused. “And a former student of the great Dr. Boris Silentius?” he added questioningly.

  “Yes,” nodded Judah, “a former student of the great Dr. Boris Silentius.”

  “How wonderful!” exclaimed Jeremiah Vinograd. “Since you have studied with Silentius,” he said, watching to ascertain the young man’s reaction, “you may be interested in an article I have in my possession, an object which may have a certain—shall we say—sentimental value for you. But before I exhibit this treasure, let me first explain the reasons why I bother to drag this souvenir of Boris Silentius around with me from town to town.

  “In addition to being a man of science and a thespian,” declared the mountebank proudly, pulling himself up straight and brushing some sand from the front of his robe, “I am also something of a collector and a connoisseur. But I am not at all like your typical collector: I refuse to be classed in the same league with those misguided old women who squander their leisure hours and spare pennies just to cram their cupboards full of glass bottles, bits of old lace, tea cosies, balalaikas, and butterflies.

  “No,” he continued, “I am a collector of collections—or, to be more exact, a pilferer of selected objects from the collections of others, from the most meticulously assembled and catalogued collections in the world. I can neither understand nor explain why this hobby should so fascinate me; the trickery and theft involved are truly my only vices. But whenever I behold the prize of a lifetime’s effort, or the one perfect specimen necessary to complete an entire series, I find it impossible to resist.

  “For that reason,” said the herbalist, reaching into the enormous canvas bag which lay on the ground beside him, “I have here, direct from the Paris thieves’ market, the one pair of pincers which the Marquis de Lyons needed in order to possess all the favored instruments of Torquemada. I am also the proud owner of the jawbone of Saint Isidore, specially obtained for me from the vaults of Toledo by a greedy young friar. This piece of tattered cardboard is The Ruined Tower from an ancient tarot deck—assembled, card by card, by a penniless Syrian widow. And this torn parchment is the final page from an Anglo-Saxon law book, which I collected from a British scholar, whose life’s work involved the completion and repair of this very manuscript. Nor am I overly scrupulous about borrowing from my fellow mountebanks; otherwise, I would never have gotten Genghis Khan’s pillbox from a colleague of mine who chanced to save such things.

  “But enough of this boasting,” concluded Jeremiah Vinograd, when his sack was half-empty, and an incongruous assortment of objects littered the earth, “what first set me on this track was my desire to show you one item from the worthy collection of Dr. Boris Silentius. And this is it!” he announced, again reaching into the bag, “the entire pelvic girdle from that lovely skeleton which the doctor unearthed near the Danzig coast. Surely you must have noticed its absence from his arrangement?”

  Judah ben Simon shut his eyes to avoid looking at the heavy, butterfly-shaped bone. “I am no longer interested in Dr. Boris Silentius’s pathetic, twisted mind!” he cried angrily. “The sight of that skeleton made me suffer once—what good did you hope to accomplish by reminding me of it?”

  Suddenly, Jeremiah Vinograd jumped to his feet, and, glowering in fury, thrust his face down towards that of the young man. “Where are your manners?” he shouted. “Only a boy your age could be so cocksure, so boorish, so lacking in all graciousness. Not only did you neglect to thank me for showing you my treasures, but now you dare address me in a tone which a gentleman would never use, not even to reprimand a thieving servant. Let me remind you: I am the one and only Jeremiah Vinograd, scientist and mountebank, artist and magician, master of illusion and reality. Which is to say: I have been practicing my craft for fifty-five years, Judah ben Simon, and I know more about every aspect of life than you have learned from all your gazing at the trees.

  “Indeed, if you had any of the makings of a genuine scientist, you would have thought to examine these bones for hidden clues about the eminent student of Linnaeus. And, in time, you might have discovered a fascinating story, a tale which might have proved important in guiding your thoughts and your future—the history of my first encounter with Dr. Boris Silentius.”

  Realizing that the herbalist’s accusations were not unfounded, Judah ben Simon bowed his head in shame. “You are right,” he admitted. “I apologize for my rudeness, and would very much appreciate hearing about your relationship with the doctor. Perhaps there is something we might learn from our common experience.”

  “Something you might learn,” the mountebank corrected him, and, instantly recovering from his rage, smiled and sat back down on the ground. “Ten, eleven, maybe twelve years ago,” he began, his voice assuming a reflective and nostalgic tone, “I had the misfortune to spend several months in the prison at Padua. It was an unspeakably insanitary place, which I would never have graced with my presence but for a certain misunderstanding about the nature of my trade.

  “Fortunately, a true soldier of fortune like myself can quickly adjust to the most dismal surroundings; but, just as I was beginning to feel at home in my cell, my privacy was rudely invaded by a skinny, frenetic chatterbox of an old man—you know the individual to whom I am referring.

  “It soon became apparent that my fellow prisoner, who identified himself as the great Dr. Boris Silentius, was to be the butt of our jailer’s crudest jokes and insults. For his crime was a peculiar and unsettling one: he had been found guilty of robbing graves, of rooting up cemeteries from the northern Alps to the southern Apennines.

  “In the course of his ceaseless conversation, my cellmate defended himself to me, arguing that his so-called sin was merely another misunderstood aspect of his experimental research. All he had been doing, he claimed, was studying the structure and significance of human bones, comparing them with those of animals, and investigating the relation between these skeletons and the spirits of their dead owners.

  “But who could believe him?” Jeremiah Vinograd demanded of his listener. “With his madman’s eyes, his smooth skin, and his long, trembling fingers, the old fellow certainly looked the part of the midnight ghoul. And none of his scientific prattle ever explained the reason why his researches were apparently restricted to the frames of beautiful women who had died at an early age.

  “Yet gradually, as our friendship deepened, I had to admit that Boris Silentius was certainly no simpleton when it came to the subject of nature; he could talk for hours about orchids, tigers, elephants, and jungle begonias. Indeed, I had never seen a plant or animal in all my travels which the doctor could not describe in the most intimate detail. And, if this alone had not
convinced me, there was also the fact that Silentius could blather away in Latin, naming species, classes and kingdoms as if they were lullabies learned at his mother’s knee.

  “At any rate, I finally came to believe that my poor cellmate was actually what he claimed: an accomplished naturalist and a onetime disciple of Carl Gustavus Linnaeus. Besides, I reasoned at the time, I myself had been imprisoned on false charges, by men who could not distinguish between a master herbalist and a petty swindler. Had fate not intervened, I might well have accepted the doctor’s invitation to join him at his family home in Danzig, to which he planned to return after his release. But, be that as it may, the moral of my story should still be clear to you, young man: it is not always easy to tell the true scientists from the graverobbers, the criminals, and the madmen.”

  “But did you not realize that Boris Silentius was a lunatic?” cried Judah ben Simon. “Surely you must have known that you were sending me to learn science from a crazy man? How could his circular chatter, his impossible stories and his bones not have struck you as unmistakable symptoms of insanity?”

  “Perhaps I suspected that the doctor was a bit eccentric,” replied Jeremiah Vinograd, clicking his tongue sympathetically. “But I would never, never have ventured to pronounce him insane. My long life has taught me to be extremely cautious in making such definite and final judgments. I have learned that, aside from a man’s heart, nothing can deceive and make a fool of him like his own two eyes.

  “Let me show you an example,” continued the mountebank, taking yet another object from his bag and handing it to Judah ben Simon. “How would you identify this fine specimen?”

  The young man examined the limp, withered petals, noticing their purplish-red color and their heavy, perfumed scent. “It is a wilted rose,” he said, embarrassed at having to declare the obvious.

  “Right!” nodded Jeremiah Vinograd, taking back the flower. “Now, on the basis of all the wilted roses you have observed with your own two eyes, tell me: how long do you think it will be before these poor petals begin to drop from the stem?”