The Secret Chord Read online

  Struck by this realization, I had let my thoughts drift from Nizevet, who was recounting the more practical details of their lives at that time. “I was his only contact,” she said. “When he came down to the house for provisions, all the others shunned him. But I would steal hours with him. I would bathe him, cut his hair, dress him in the warm things I had woven for him. I tried to feed him enough love to make up for the way his father starved him. But it was never enough. How could it be?”

  I nodded as I set down her words. I understood then that I had witnessed his long search for that missing love. That need is, you could say, his great strength and his grave weakness. Then she said something that made me shift in my seat.

  “Yishai was a good man.” She saw my involuntary movement and turned her hand over and tilted her head in a gesture that seemed to ask me to attend more closely to what she was about to say. “I see, after what I have just told you, that you doubt me. But it is true. He was an upright man, who sacrificed often and kept the law, in letter and in spirit. He was known for it. People looked to him for guidance. I was just a child when I married him, so to me he was like father and husband both. Kind, gentle, generous. He inherited a middling flock and built it into the largest in all of Beit Lehem. Our house, too, he expanded, over time. Not this place—” She waved a dismissive hand at the pleasant yet modest buildings surrounding us. “Our beit av was made of dressed stone and cedar, very fine. It went to my eldest, Eliav, of course, when Yishai died, and now has passed down to Eliav’s son in his turn. But in those days I had a wing of my own, just for my servants and me, with a chamber for the looms so that we could work sheltered from the weather. I bore Yishai strong sons and modest daughters, and he honored me for that. What more should a woman expect in her life? I know well that most receive much less.

  “But you are a man; you must know how it is. When a woman has borne a man so many children, even if she is still young, she is no longer the bride he once desired.”

  I did not interrupt her. I did not, as she assumed, know how it was. How could I?

  “It is a common story,” she continued. “But for a man of Yishai’s character, it is not an easy thing to give way to lust as a lesser man might do. He could have taken other wives, but he had promised me, in the early heat of our union, that he would never do so. And he was a man of his word.

  “Still, I began to see his eyes drift elsewhere. I knew he struggled. And then came my new maidservant, a Knaanit. She looked so much like me. It was an uncanny thing. Younger, of course. I think that is why, in truth, he hired her, even if he was not aware of what he did. He could not take his eyes from her. She was a good girl, from a decent family, who had sent her to our service because of Yishai’s upright name. If she had been a willing slut, I might have acted differently. I might have turned my face away and let it unfold. But I could see how she drew her mantle higher when he walked into the room, how she hurried to complete her tasks and get away from him. How she contrived, as best she could, to avoid finding herself alone with him. His attentions frightened her. She wanted what any girl wants, honorable marriage and sons of her own. She knew that Yishai’s lust, if satisfied upon her, would put all that at risk. But I knew it would happen one day. She could not hide from him indefinitely. So I sent her away to my daughter Zeruiah’s house, on a pretext, as my daughter had recently been brought to bed with her third son. In doing so, I angered Yishai, even if he could not say so. She was my servant, supposedly, to dispose of as I liked. So his resentment festered, and he began to turn on me. In any case, that was when he started to rake over the matter of his ancestry, to try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our union.

  “I have said already that Yishai was ardent in his observation of the laws. And you will know that it has been the law since Moshe that the Ivrim must not marry from among the Moavites, as they were the tribe who denied passage through their lands when the Ivrim fled Mitzrayim. You know also that my husband’s grandmother was the Moavite Ruth, who lay with Boaz just before he died. Some doubted that Yishai’s father, who resulted from that union, was the legitimate issue of Boaz, and there were whispers at that time. This was all finished long before our wedding, and no one raised any question but that Yishai did me honor in choosing me to marry.

  “But as his illicit desire burned him, so he turned to this old gossip about his grandmother Ruth. He flailed at himself, saying our marriage was unfit, that he, grandson of a Moavite, had not had the right to marry an Israelite of pure lineage, and that our marriage was unclean and we must separate. You can imagine how hard it was for me to hear it. Harder still when he refused to lie with me, infrequent as that had become since his passion for my servant took hold of him. Daily, he became more obsessed with the imagined uncleanness he had engaged in. He refused to take a dish from my hand, a cloth to wipe his brow. In the end, he put me by, and I returned, ashamed, to my father’s house.

  “Still, even with me gone from the house, he did not act on his lust immediately. I believe he wrestled with himself, knowing in his heart that desire had twisted his soul. But finally his baseness overpowered him, and he sent to our daughter ordering that she return the Knaanit maid to our home. The girl came to me, in secret, weeping, saying Yishai had made demands that she could no longer gainsay, and that he intended to have her that night.

  “I have said she looked like me. And since the misery of my situation, I had fasted and lost the flesh that comes after childbearing. I had also thrown myself into physical tasks, to take my mind off my sorrows. My own sister had, not long since, taken my face in her hand and reflected, in some surprise, that my misery became me most excellently, and had returned to me my youthful form, even as it had extinguished all my joy. This remark of hers, I think, put the notion in my mind. I told my maid to go back to Yishai, to pour his wine that night unwatered, and as much as he would take. When the time came and he insisted on retiring with her, to claim a maiden’s right to modesty and ask that the lamps be extinguished. At that time, I promised her, I would take her place. Together, we went to the market and purchased some balsam scent. She would wear it that evening, and so would I, when I took her place.”

  Nizevet stopped speaking then. A pale flush had crept up the wattled skin of her throat, and she pulled at her mantle to hide it. I looked away from her, to ease her shame. As the silence persisted, I said, softly, taking care to keep my eyes only on the parchment under my hand: “And so Yishai’s unlawful lusts were answered in the body of his lawful wife?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see her hands working, one washing against the other in her agitation. Then she gathered herself, and went on in a great rush.

  “For all my contrivance—I used an egg white to feign a young girl’s juiciness, and smeared the bed with drops of chicken blood—I did not have to play a part. I wept, just as that innocent girl might have wept, and my tears incited him. His lust seemed to feed on the idea of my helpless despair and his own power over me, and when he took me it was with the hard hands of a stranger. Wife or no, I felt defiled. When he fell off me into a drunken sleep, I got up to creep away. The moon had risen by then. As I opened the door, he raised his head and stared at me. I was sure, in that moment, that my deception would be plain to him. I was afraid. But he was still drunk of course, and half asleep, and gave no sign that he recognized me. But neither did he call me back. In the morning, he sent for the maid and dismissed her, blaming her, unfairly, as the cause of his sin. He came to me, begging me to return to him. I did. I longed for my home and to be once again a proper mother to my sons. But between Yishai and me, much had been ravaged, and even though I assured him he was forgiven, when he lay with me, he was no longer able to perform as a man. By then, truly, I did not care. My affections had been so trammeled, I no longer hungered for bodily love from him. But it became a problem soon enough, when I could not hide the fact that I was with child. This was in the
fifth month since he had lain with me unknowingly. He, of course, bereft of any other explanation, believed that the child I carried was begotten adulterously during our separation. I could not tell him the truth for fear of what price he might exact, in his humiliation, on the maid. Not even when he tried to beat it out of me.”

  I looked up. Her eyes met mine, steady now.

  “Oh, yes. He stooped to that. Only once, when he was drunk. But the fact that it happened at all only confirmed my fears of what he might be capable of, and so I sealed my mouth and kept the secret. That is how the baby—my last child—was, in the eyes of his father, a mamzer.”

  She seemed to gag on the word, and no wonder. That word, whose roots dig down into rot, corruption, defect, the unwelcome other, the despised alien.

  “The child I called David—Beloved—was, as Yishai thought, an outcast from the congregation of Israel unto the tenth generation, according to the law of Moshe. Contrary to our law, and, I must say, contrary to his own nature, Yishai did not speak his mind on this to anyone. He should, of course, have gone to the gathering at the gate where he sat with his fellow elders, and disowned us both—me and the child I carried. I do not know if he held his peace out of some lingering regard for me, as the mother of his other sons, or to protect himself lest I, accused, accuse him in my turn. In any case, to the world, we appeared like many another family where regard has waned between a man and wife, and a father takes a set against a particular one of his children for reasons that are his own and of no public concern. I deluded myself that things would change. In the best of times, men have little regard for infants, no matter how comely. But when the child begins to walk and speak, to look like them in gesture or feature, ofttimes their hearts soften and their interest swells. I have seen this, with Yishai and many other men. And David was a beautiful child, of the sort that draws eyes. He was forward, too, in walking and in speaking, a lively child with a curious nature and a sweet temperament. But all these blessings just seemed to goad Yishai all the more. It did not help that David, of all my children, favored me, without any one feature of Yishai’s plain in his face. If the child ran to him, he would push him away or answer his gesture with a cuff of the hand. Soon enough, David learned better than to try for his father’s notice, and would keep out of Yishai’s way.”

  I could not restrain myself. It seemed impossible to me that a mother would keep a secret that proved so costly to her son. So I put it to her directly: “Even after some years had passed, you did not feel you could tell Yishai that David was his son?”

  She drew a trembling hand across her brow. “Oh, I did tell him, in the end. I had to. It became so painful, watching him torment that child. The maid was beyond his reach by then, married honorably to a young man in another village, and I—I did not care what became of me. Better I should bear his anger than my son bear it. But it did no good. He still hated David because he reminded him of that night of weakness, and because, once he knew the truth, he felt humiliated, made the fool.”

  She sighed. Her frail body quivered. But then she drew a breath and went on.

  “Not all was misery in our home. The older sons, Eliav, Avinadav, Shammah and the others, gave us joy and pride, growing into honorable manhood. The girls we had married in good season to suitable husbands. Eliav won early distinction as a soldier in Shaul’s army. Shaul’s general, Avner, saw his quality and promoted him to head a unit in the field. In time, he became one of Avner’s principal officers. I think that you are too young to remember those years, when Shaul himself was young, and had been drafted reluctantly to the kingship. You have known hard fighting in your time, I am sure of it. But most of what you have experienced of war was as a victor. That was not the way of it then.”

  I did not interrupt her to assure her that I did know. I had made it my business to study those times, to learn every detail I could of Shmuel and his relationship with Shaul. I had seen Shaul once only—briefly, in the half-light of dawn. I was still a boy then, gripped by fear, in the fog between two moments of prophecy. That huge man, our king and our pursuer, asleep, his fate in David’s hands. But Shmuel I had never seen at all. He died when I was just beginning to realize that I shared his gift, or his burden. I would have given much to have sat with him and had his counsel. There are not many men who have stood as I do at a king’s side and said to him what must be said, whether the words be welcome or no. So I had done what I could to learn about Shmuel, questioning every man who had known him. Their memories were of the times when each tribe held on in its own scattered hamlet, constantly called to this skirmish or that one. We were hill shepherds from small settlements, always threatened by the Plishtim in their wealthy cities on the coast, where they worshipped their many gods, forged their iron, made their handsome pots of red and black, and wove rich cloths, the likes of which we, in our sheepskins and homespun, seldom saw. They were organized and united under their serens. But we did not fight as one people in those days, and so we were weak.

  And then the day came when the Plishtim routed us completely, penetrating deep into our territory, killing thousands and capturing the ark of the Name. They carried it away deep behind their lines to their chief city, Ashdod. The ark, the very soul of our people for five hundred years. Yah himself had instructed Moshe in its design, and the artist Bezalel had crafted it—the acacia wood lined and clad with purest gold; the hammered figures of the cherubim, cunningly wrought of one piece with the cover, their raised golden wings outspread, sheltering the tablets of the Word that lay within. It was our chief treasure: precious and beautiful, sacred and powerful. When our priests carried it onto the field of battle, the tips of the golden wings caught the very light of the sun, and sent up such a blaze as struck awe into our enemies and gave heart and strength to our own fighters. It worked for us then, as it does now, as a mighty weapon. We look at it, and remember who we are: the people of the One, the children of the great Breath of Life. We recall that the ground on which we fight has been promised to us, and always a new frenzy boils in our blood. The power of the idea swells like a great wave—you can feel it pulse within you, around you. The army becomes one with this idea, and then we break upon the enemy with mighty force.

  But that one time, the force was not enough, and the very ark itself was lost. The woe of it sucked the heart out of us. When a messenger brought the news to our high priest and chieftain, Eli, he fell back in his chair and died on the spot. All glory seemed gone with the ark fallen to our enemies and housed, as we heard, in their heathen temple beside their idol, the grain god Dagon, as if it were just any other trophy of war.

  That was when the talk began that we must have a king, as other nations had, to lead us in battle. It was talk born out of a heartsick desperation, the fruit of utter despair. Shmuel warned the people against it. He said that a king would be a yoke upon freedom and a charge upon our purses. He, of course, was famed for taking nothing from the people, not so much as a sandal strap or a sheepskin. But as he grew old, and his sons began to take over some of his tasks, they proved corrupt. And so the clamor for a king grew. Moshe’s law had allowed for the possibility of a king, and in the end, Shmuel gave way. He found Shaul, tall and handsome, and anointed him, just as the people demanded. Shaul, at first unwilling, accepted his destiny and grasped it with a hard hand. He united the people with threats, butchering oxen and sending the pieces to each of the tribes, saying that if they did not join him and fight, they would be butchered just so, in their turn.

  Shmuel, perhaps still not reconciled with the very idea of kingship, drove Shaul hard. It seemed he could do nothing right; Shmuel held him to measure with a harsh rod, and neither Shaul’s worship nor his warfare met Shmuel’s mark. Even the victories against the Plishtim did not satisfy. Instead, Shmuel proclaimed that the Lord of Armies commanded total war be made on the Amalekites, in retribution for ancient grievances. Nothing was to be spared. So, Shaul made war, and routed them, and captured their king. But
in the aftermath of battle, when the soldiers were used to take spoils, Shaul wavered. He feared rebellion from his troops if he denied the accustomed rewards after such hard combat. So he allowed them to keep the best of the flocks for themselves. When Shmuel arrived and heard sheep bleating in the pens, he castigated Shaul for disobeying. “As you have rejected the command of the Name, so he has rejected you as king,” he declared, and turned to leave. The king, pleading for forgiveness, reached out and grasped Shmuel’s robe. It tore in his hand. “So has the Name torn kingship from you,” said Shmuel. He withdrew to his own lands at Ramah, and never saw Shaul again as a living man. This estrangement sat heavily upon Shaul. Some say it drove him mad.

  As Nizevet had lived through these times, and I had not, I let her tell all this in her own way, waiting patiently for the thread of her account to stitch up once again to her personal story. Which it did, at last, on a day sometime not so very long after that final estrangement, when Shmuel arrived unexpectedly in Beit Lehem, seeking out Yishai.

  “I did not know how to feel that day,” she said. “I dreaded Yishai involving himself in intrigues against the king, especially with our elder sons serving at his side. Shmuel made pretense that he had come only to sacrifice, and had brought his servant leading a heifer for that purpose. Yishai and all the elders went up to the altar and did the rites in the presence of the townsfolk. Yishai had told me to make everything ready to receive Shmuel after the rites, and so I did. I had asked the servants to take out the mats from the upper chamber and give them a good beating. I was overseeing their replacement, and ordering in the braziers—it was winter, and very cold—when Yishai and Shmuel arrived. I saw the look on Yishai’s face and it surprised me. He was lit like a torch with pleasure and anticipation. I could not think what could come from Shmuel to affect him in such a way. Shmuel had nothing to give that Yishai could possibly want. The old judge was famous for the austerity of his ways, the simplicity of his household in Ramah. Nor was an evening with him an occasion for levity. He was a stern man who thought only of his duty. Yet here was Yishai, beaming like a man who has just been gifted a pair of oxen.