Free Judah the Pious by Francine Prose

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.
    “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