God Knows Read online

  'Is this thy voice, my son David?' he answered me, and wept. 'I will seek no more to do thee harm.' The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon.

  Later, the Philistines cut off his head when they found him dead, and nailed what was left of him to the walls of the city of Bethshan.

  Gory deeds? I've got more than enough for every taste. I have suicide, regicide, patricide, homicide,15 fratricide, infanticide, adultery, incest, hanging, and more decapitations than just Saul's. Listen.

  I had sons.

  I had concubines.

  I had a son who went in unto my concubines in broad daylight on the roof of my palace.

  I had a star named after me--in London, England, yet--in 1898. Whoever heard of a star of Samuel.

  One of my sons murdered another of my sons, and what was I supposed to do about that? Cain and Abel? That was then and this is now. God dealt with Cain himself: 'Start walking,' he said.

  So Cain took to the road and Adam was off the hook. But I had the whole jam-packed city of Jerusalem watching to see what I was going to do after Absalom killed Amnon.

  And now the same thing is about to happen again, and I get to pick which will reign and which will die. Adonijah or Solomon. A painful decision? Only if I still cared about my children or the future of my country. But the truth is, I don't. I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.

  I'm far too old, I feel, to be a father anymore, although I'm not too old to be a husband, and I want my wife Bathsheba back in bed with me. I think I may have been the first grown man in the world to fall truly, passionately, sexually, romantically, and sentimentally in love. I practically invented it. Jacob took to Rachel the first time he laid eyes on her at the well in Haran, but Jacob was a boy, and that was a puppy love compared to mine. He worked seven years to get her, then worked seven more when her weak-eyed sister was fobbed off on him in her place on his wedding night. I had Bathsheba the first day I saw her. I had fucking from her that made my brain spin in those few great years I enjoyed with her in which, one day after the next, I could think of nothing better I wanted to do morning, noon, evening, and night than fly back to her16 side and lock my hands and my mouth and my groin and my soul to her flesh once more. Oh, boy, did I cleave to her! We loved to kiss and talk. We trysted secretly, embraced on the way to the couch, made giddy jokes and laughed excessively, and enjoyed every other kind of cozy, intimate hilarity together until the day the roof caved in with the news she was pregnant.

  'Holy shit!' were the words that sprang to my lips.

  I don't know whose idea it was to recall her husband. Uriah the Hittite, from the siege at Rabbah-Ammon to legitimatize the fruits of my adulterous intercourse with his wife as the appropriate issue of his own. But I know it didn't work.

  'Uriah, go home,' I enticed him handsomely, and sent a mess of meat and other victuals to his house to help fuel the licentious marathon Bathsheba and I had mapped out for him. 'Enjoy yourself. You have brought me good news of the campaign.'

  He elected instead to sleep like my servants on the floor of my palace, in quixotic and telepathic solidarity with his comrades-in-arms still encamped in the open fields of Ammon, and in frustrating obedience to our Mosaic laws respecting cleanliness and combat. You could not go into holy battle for at least three days after lying with a woman. Or with a man either, for that matter, or even with a sheep, a goat, or a turkey. People wishing to evade military service commonly lie with their wives, their concubines, or their turkeys just before a call-up. We call this conscientious objection. But Uriah was not even a Jew. Go reason with a Hittite.

  'Uriah, go home,' I proposed, suggested, commanded, beseeched him frantically all the second day. 'Go home, Uriah, please go home. Probably your wife is expecting you. Your wife is a luscious woman, I'm told. Stick it to her. Go give her a boff or two. Shtup her. You've earned the pleasure.'

  Again he slept on my floor instead. Did the bastard know something? I felt myself going mad. I don't know17 whose idea it was to send him back into battle to be killed. Let's call that one hers.

  The widow Bathsheba moved into my palace as my eighth wife as soon as she finished mourning her dead husband.

  And immediately she asked to be queen. We had no queens. Would that stop my darling from continuing to ask? Within an hour of arriving in my palace she had examined the apartments, closets, and cosmetic pots of all my other wives and demanded that her own be better and more. The ballsy baby was my favorite from the start. I took more delight in my love for Bathsheba than I did even in my love for Abigail, my elegant lady of quality and refinement who fed me the best lentil soup, barley bread, and leeks I ever ate in my whole life and would be content to cook for me now if she were still among the living. Bathsheba, when I met her, would not put her hands into dishwater if there were any way to avoid it, and she never had to do so again once I took her as wife.

  Now she comes to see me daily only in a subversive effort to insure her safety. Her native selfishness is fascinating still; it's heartening to perceive that some things never change. Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun? She knows much about making love but not much about men, or what can lie in our hearts. She hardly concerns herself with what might lie in mine. Instead she keeps asking that I make Solomon king.

  'No way,' I started telling her laughingly the day he was born. 'There's a dozen ahead of him.

  'Now there is only Adonijah.

  'It's not myself I'm thinking about,' she says, 'but the future of the people and the country.

  'She's thinking only of herself. She cares no more about the future than I do. She insists that I've given her my word.

  'I'm sure you must have made that promise to me sometime,' she says. 'I could never make something like that up.

  'Bathsheba could always make up any lie she chose and instantly believe it true. Her duplicity is transparent. But never underestimate the power of a woman. See what happens in Kings I. I'm the best there, too. Solomon may have more space, but is there anything in his whole life to compare with any portion of mine? The only smart line he ever spoke--the one directing Benaiah to kill Joab in the tabernacle--he got from me. All of the good ones in Proverbs are mine, and so are the best in the Song of Solomon. Study my last charges. They're marvelous, witty, dramatic, climactic. With Shimei I'm merely ingenious. I'm infinitely more decisive with my kinsman Joab, loyal lifelong companion and courageous military captain over all my host for almost my entire career. Not once has he wavered in his allegiance to me and even now, in ripe old age, he has committed his hardy arm and forceful authority to safeguarding the remainder of my rule and securing the orderly transfer of my throne to the only heir with a legitimate claim to receive it.

  For sturdy, loyal, valiant Joab, I decreed: 'Kill him! Waste him! Blow the bastard away! '

  I was always full of surprises, wasn't I? And I was smart enough to appreciate that for Solomon you had to spell everything out. I'll let you in on a secret about my son Solomon: he was dead serious when he proposed cutting the baby in half, that putz. I swear to God. The dumb son of a bitch was trying to be fair, not shrewd.

  'Do you understand what I'm saying to you about Joab?' I asked him with a look of intent scrutiny and waited for his leaden nod before I added for stress, 'Do not let his hoar head go peacefully down to the grave.'

  Solomon lifted his eyes from the clay tablet on which he was scratching his notes and asked, 'What's a hoar head?'

  'Abishag!'

  Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not l
et it make a difference if she did.

  'I don't do things like that anymore,' Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, 'I am sick of love.

  'She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refuse to trade and I refuse to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But that would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

  2 Of the Making of Books

  Of the making of books there is no end and the longer I reflect on this tale of mine, the stronger grows my conviction that killing Goliath was just about the biggest goddamn mistake I ever made. Saul drafted me into his army that same day and I have been living under the sword almost all my life since. Fucking Bathsheba, then fucking her again, then again and again and again, and holding her in my arms until I almost could not hold her longer, and could not bear separating from her--that could have been my second biggest mistake. Nathan really got on my ass about that one, and the next thing I knew there was a dead baby. Love is potent stuff, isn't it? My love for Bathsheba back then was as terrible as an army of banners, as pale as the moon in its heartache, as clear as the sun in its joy. God and I had a pretty good relationship until He killed the kid; after that I kept my distance. I'm sure. He's noticed by now, for it's been almost thirty years.

  One time even before that, in an access of pride during a lull between conquests, I decided to construct a spectacular edifice to myself and call it a temple of the Lord; but God said no. God knew my inward reason. Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, all is vanity. God had no need for Ecclesiastes to acquaint Him with vanity.

  Nor did I from my youth, for I knew even better than my three infuriated older brothers at the battlefront that I was afire with conceit and bursting with a zeal to show off when I found myself with the chance to fight Goliath one on one. There was no way I was going to let that opportunity pass.

  I paid no attention when my brothers ordered me to go back to Bethelem after I had delivered the foodstuffs sent them by my father for their maintenance in battle. Instead, with the dauntless effrontery for which I was already unpopular in my family, I bounded deftly from outpost to outpost on my mission of crafty instigation, exciting curiosity all along the battle line with my reckless impudence and bold candor. Who could resist wanting to learn more about the brash and fresh-faced lad from the hinterlands of backward Judah who had arrived in their midst so providentially and appeared so willing?

  Not Saul. Certainly not Saul, who, with resolute and uncustomary good sense, was striving to create a standing professional army in place of the unwieldy voluntary musters of tradition, in which individual families like my own, or separate clans and tribes, chose to participate or not each time a military crisis arose. Saul was centralizing a government. He had beaten the Ammonites at Jabesh-gilead, whipped, with a good deal of indispensable help from his son Jonathan, the asses of the Philistines at Michmash, and overrun the Amelekites in the desert to the south. It was in the course of assaulting the Amelekites that he had alienated Samuel for all time by taking the king for ransom and the best of the cattle for booty: his commission from Samuel, speaking for God, was explicitly to destroy all, slaying both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, and camel and ass. Saul was too uncomplicated in intellect to produce the only lie that might have placated our raging holy man: 'I forgot.' He gambled instead on the clumsy excuse of having taken the cattle for sacrifice.

  'To obey is better than to sacrifice' was the gruff rebuke from the saturnine figure who was benefactor to both of us sequentially. 'Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath rejected thee as king.'

  I could have told Saul it wouldn't work. Samuel hewed the Amelekite king, Agag, to pieces, left in a sulk for his home in Ramah, and came no more to see Saul until the day of his death. For Saul, this rupture with Samuel meant a burden of mental distress he was not always able to bear, as well as a tangle of quandaries from which he was never able to extricate himself completely. For me, it was a break.

  I was familiar with Saul's methods of recruiting. Every time he saw a strong man, or a valiant man, he took him unto himself for his permanent fighting force as a mercenary to be well rewarded for his prowess and enthusiasm with liberal shares of the spoils. When, after the duel, I was back with the head, the sword, and the armor of Goliath--it would have needed more strength than you think to lug all that crap back up the hill without help--Saul took me to him that same day and would let me go no more home to the house of my father.

  I have to confess that living under the sword was not always that disagreeable when we were robustly smiting away at Philistines, Ammonites, Moabites, and Syrians and trouncing them with such predictable regularity that winning seemed easy and bravery normal. But war with Abner, Sheba, Amasa, Absalom, and even Saul were conflicts of a different sort entirely. These were countrymen. Some were blood relations. Amasa was a nephew, Absalom my son. I meant what I said when I said, 'Absalom, O my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee!' but neither God nor Joab afforded me the chance. Destroying your own son for some slight and pardonable infraction--as Saul wished to do to Jonathan--might appear an intoxicating treat to some fathers. Not to this one. I could hardly ever bring myself even to scold any of mine. I think I spoiled them all by sparing the rod--most of them did vile or foolish things, even my favorites. Especially my favorites. And when Absalom was dead, I cried as though my heart must surely break.

  I cried even longer when my infant child lay very sick and slowly died. For seven days I grieved with my face to the ground. I ate no bread. Nebuchadnezzar went mad and ate from the ground like an ox. I was sane and did almost the same thing, hoping by my fasting and weeping to move God to be merciful. Fat chance. I could better have moved a mountain.

  That was one flaw in my makeup--I felt for my children, at least for my sons. I took no account of my daughters. That was another flaw, and I paid for it dearly in ways still too intricate to unravel fully. When my lovely daughter Tamar was raped by her half brother Amnon, I was upset, naturally. Mainly, though, I was annoyed that I had been put in an awkward situation which I hoped somehow would resolve itself. I took no action. I counted on the matter to blow over, as indeed it seemed to. And two years later I was mourning the violent death of Amnon and the exile of avenging Absalom, who fled into Geshur after staging his slaughter.

  Three years passed before Joab coaxed me to permit his return. Two years more before I allowed Absalom into the palace to see my face. Absalom bowed. I kissed him. In no time at all he was launching his armed rebellion that forced me to abandon my city of Jerusalem and flee to the other side of the Jordan.

  'Remember the curse?' reminded Nathan, almost with glee, as we picked our way on foot from the back of the city toward brook Kidron. The victory of Absalom was all but absolute. A streak of lightning gives more warning. And I a puissant king. I left ten concubines behind to keep my palace clean.

  Of course I remembered the judgment of God relayed to me through Nathan that he now chose to call24 a curse. Whatever possessed me to suppose I could go unpunished for sending Uriah the Hittite to his death? That I knew I should not escape punishment was evident in my spontaneous accord with the impoverished man in the parable invented for the instance by Nathan--the man who was deprived of his one lamb by the rich man who owned many.

  'As the Lord liveth,' I declared with an anger greatly kindled against the haughty culprit, 'the man that hath done this will surely die.'

  'Thou,' declared Nathan, and clapped his hands with a squeal of happiness at the success of his ploy, 'art the man.'

  The bastard had me dead to rights. And t
he litany of reprisal he recited did indeed have much of the flavor of a curse.

  'Three ways there are to humble thee with repentance,' he began. 'No, make that four. Yea, four things there are that know no surcease of sorrow.' Nathan moralizing is as vinegar to my teeth, as smoke to my eyes. Compared to Nathan, Polonius was as silent as the Sphinx. Now, however, my mood of apprehension gradually lifted while he spoke.

  That the sword would never depart from my house caused me scarcely any concern; since when, before or after, has there been much peace for anyone dwelling in this Fertile Crescent between Asia and Africa and between the Arabian desert and the Mediterranean Sea? Or anywhere else in the world that we know of? I could settle for that, and my attention was in danger of meandering as he started to dilate on section two of my Olympian sentence, which proved no more alarming.

  Evil would rise up against me in my own house. So what? This was an eventuality taken for granted by every Jewish parent. What father is ever spared all kinds of trouble from his children? Our Judges were no better off. Samuel's sons took bribes; those of his predecessor, Eli, lay with women at the tabernacle of the congregation. And I had more children than I could count. Do any of them ever know the meaning of gratitude? It's so much sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child.

  Part three was rather remote: because I had lain with another man's wife, shame of like kind would come to me through mine from a neighbor. That seemed fair enough if it ever occurred. But who could foretell from Nathan's enigmatic words that a son of mine would be the 'neighbor' to enact with my wives in the sight of the sun what I had performed with Uriah's wife in shadows and stealth? Who would have guessed that Amnon would rape and degrade his half sister? Where is there even one clue in Nathan's lengthy enumeration of the punishments awaiting me that he was talking not of separate penalties but of interrelated consequences that would fuse into a comprehensible whole with the sudden insurrection of my son Absalom?