“Then, one day, the richest man in the village, who has everything—flocks, herds—he gets a visitor, and instead of slaughtering one of his own beasts, he steals that poor man’s little ewe, slaughters it, and serves it to his guest.”
David threw aside the grape stalk in his hand. “That man deserves to die! Tell me his name! I’ll see to it that he pays for that lamb four times over, because he was greedy and had no pity.”
“His name?” I said quietly. “You really want to know who he is, that greedy, pitiless man? That man who had everything?”
“As the Name lives, so I do.”
“That man is you.”
He stood up, knocking the tray so that the grapes fell and rolled across the flagstones.
I stood, too, crushing the grapes under my feet. The red pulp oozed, like wounded flesh. I walked up to him until we were eye to eye. He returned my gaze, insolent. He intends to brazen this out, I thought. He thinks I’m chastising him for adultery. He doesn’t realize I know about the murder.
I spoke in a low voice. “You. Given everything. You are a hundredfold more guilty than the rich man you just condemned. You took more than a man’s wife from him. You took his very life.” His face changed in a second with the realization that I knew the full extent of his crimes.
I turned abruptly away and strode across the room to the alcove. I looked at the model pieces, the forest of towering columns, the sumptuously scrolled capitals. The arrogance of it nauseated me. I swept my hand across the table, knocking the pieces to the floor and grinding them under my heel. When I spoke again, it was not in my own voice, but the other one. This time, however, I could hear my own words. There was no blinding pain, just coldness as the brutal judgment sprang from my lips.
“The God of Israel says this: You will never build the temple. You are stained body and soul from your bloodshed and your butchery. Therefore, that great and holy task is not for you. I anointed you king of Israel. I rescued you from the hand of Shaul. I gave you Israel and Yudah. If that were not enough, I would give you twice as much and more. Why, then, have you flouted my commandments? You put Uriah to the sword. You took his wife in adultery. Then know you this: The sword will never depart from your house. I will make a calamity against you within your own house. I will take your wives and give them to another man before your very eyes and he will sleep with your wives under this very sun. You acted in the dark, but this I will make happen in the broad light of day, in the sight of all Israel!”
There was a silence in the room so complete I could hear the hushed footfalls of a servant’s bare feet in the passageways and the clop of a donkey’s hooves passing in the street below. David stood motionless, flushed. His eyes glittered. His fists clenched at his side. He raised them, balled, the muscles of his forearms jumping. He will kill me now, I thought. Then he raised his hands to his head and dragged at his hair.
“I stand guilty before the Name.”
He dropped to his knees and bowed his head, covering it with his arms as if to fend off a blow. His body shook. He wept. I put my two hands out and pushed his arms away gently. I rested my two hands in the soft thicket of his hair. I felt a wave of love and pity for him as the knowledge of his future pain surged through me.
I thought of Moshe, speaking to our ancestors after he transmitted the law to them. “I have set both before you, the blessing and the curse,” he said. “Life and death. Therefore, choose life.”
David’s time of choice was behind him now, irrevocably. He would know both blessing and curse, each in the fullest possible measure. Everything had happened to him. Everything would happen to him. Every human joy. Every human sorrow. Pay four times over, he had said. In his own words. And so it would come to pass. For the one life he had taken, four of those he loved would be swept away from him in violent ruin.
“Listen to me.” The voice was my own. I placed my hand under his chin and raised his wet face. “These things I have foretold—they are not all of them to happen to you yet. You will go on, and become renowned, and do great things and take joy in them. Later, when you are old, you will pay in full. For now, this: the first price you will pay. The baby you will have—this mamzer you have made—he will not live. Prepare for that. The rest, put out of your mind. Be glad that the Name has remitted your sin and let you live to atone it.”
And atone he did. He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the greater matters of state. As confession of his misdeeds made the crimes public knowledge, so also did word of my prophecy spread out, first through the city and then across the Land. Our people, who had once taken comfort in Natan’s oracle, now spoke instead, in hushed voices, of Natan’s curse. If people had been wary of me before, now their aversion became extreme. Common folk would cross the street to avoid me; women would draw their mantles across their faces and make the sign against the evil eye.
Only David still sought me out, heaping me with honors and attention. I was the first to hear his song of lamentation and prayerful contrition. For days, weeks, it was the only song that he would sing. I believe it was one of the finest he ever composed.
Purge me with hyssop till I am pure;
wash me till I am whiter than snow . . .
Hide your face from my sins;
blot out all my iniquities.
Fashion a pure heart for me . . .
Save me from bloodguilt . . .
You do not want me to bring sacrifices;
You do not desire burnt offerings;
You desire the sacrifice of a sorrowful spirit;
You will not despise
a crushed and contrite heart.
So he sang. And so, I suppose, he believed. And yet, as I had told him, Yah did demand a sacrifice of him. Bloodguilt demanded a blood price.
XIV
In winter, a few days after the child was born, the king sent for me. I stopped short at the door. Batsheva was there, the child nestled sleepily against her breast. I had not expected that.
She had her head down, her back half turned to me. But even from that partial view, I could see that she was, as David had said, a striking woman: creamy skin, a glossy fall of obsidian hair, which she wore unbound and uncovered. Even in her loose robe it was possible to discern long, slender legs, a supple rounding of hips, and generous breasts, against which the baby lay, his thick shock of hair bearing fiery witness to his paternity. When David presented her she looked up, and I took a step backward. Her eyes were unexpected: a luminous blue. Also shocking: despite her tall, full figure, the face that gazed up at me was the face of a child. She was very young.
Awkwardly, not knowing how else to greet her, I asked how she did.
Her voice, when she answered, was the breathy voice of a shy girl, barely audible. “Very well, I thank you. Far better than I have a right.” She gave a swift smile, very brief. But it was as if the sun had come out. A man might do a lot, I thought, to win that smile.
David cleared his throat. “It’s her first, you know. She never had one with . . . him. The midwives said they’d never seen a first come so easily. And I know it’s not just words. Ahinoam, Avigail, Maacah, Hagit, Eglah, Avital . . .” He counted them off on his fingers, the wives who had borne him children. “All of them, the first time, long labors. Days, sometimes. But Batsheva . . .” He looked at her and his face softened. “She turned to me at dawn and said she felt the first pain”—so she shared his bed, even in late pregnancy—“and by noontime they handed me my son.” He reached down for the boy. She settled the infant into his large hands, where the baby—a good size for a newborn—suddenly looked rather small. Batsheva’s eyes locked with David’s for an instant, in the uncomplicated bliss of new parenthood. But then she bit her bottom lip, and his face darkened.
“We—I—
asked you to come because I wanted you to see him.” He held out the infant. “See how healthy he is. I—we—we wonder if what . . . you’ve said, at times, that these prophecies of yours don’t always lend themselves to straightforward interpretation. That you see a part, maybe, but not the whole.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “That was how it used to be.” Before the desert visions made everything clear to me.
“What I am asking—what we are asking—is this: Is it certain this boy will die? Is there any room, in what you saw, what you were shown, to give us hope?”
I looked from one to the other of them. Their eyes—dark amber, deep blue—were trained on me like archers’ eyes, taking aim at some truth they imagined I held in my heart. I studied the baby in David’s hands. Pink-skinned, perfect, his small fists punching the air. I closed my eyes. His arms fell flaccid, spilling out of David’s grip. The tiny fists uncurled, the fingers limp, motionless. His skin gray as mortar. Crusts of dried mucus sealed his nostrils, eyelids.
“No hope.”
Batsheva gave a cry and raised her fist to her mouth. David sucked in a breath and clutched the infant to his heart.
“You will not have long to wait. It will be soon.”
The fever rose the following night. It burned him alive for six days. All through that time, David fasted, lying out in the open, on the cold winter ground.
Courtiers, those who cared for him, came to me, begging me to go to him, to tell him to eat and to take shelter, lest he, too, sicken and die. I did not go, knowing it was fruitless. Yoav did try to reason with him, as did Zadok and Aviathar. But he would not listen.
When the baby died on the seventh day, no one dared to bring him word, worried that he might do something mad and terrible, so great had been his grief during the illness. They were standing there, off at a distance from where he lay, debating it, when I arrived. I don’t know if he overheard, or whether my presence was enough to open his eyes to the truth.
He ran a dry tongue over cracked lips. “Is the child dead?” he rasped.
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath, and before he had exhaled he was on his feet. “Draw me a bath!” His servants looked at one another, confused. “Now!” he said, brushing the dirt off himself and walking toward the bathhouse. They scurried after him. After bathing, he called for oils to anoint himself, put on fresh linens and went to the tent of the ark, where he prostrated himself. Then he came back to his house and called for Batsheva, I suppose to console her. Later, he ordered a large meal, to which he invited his close counselors.
Yoav sat across from him, clearly perplexed. Finally, he blurted it out, in his blunt soldier’s way. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “When the child was alive you fasted and wept. Now he’s dead, you dry your eyes and feast.” David put down his chicken leg and wiped his mouth. He spoke with the weary air of a man obliged to explain the obvious. “When the child was alive, I thought, Who knows? The Name might have pity on me, so I fasted and prayed that my son might live. Now he’s dead, why should I fast? Can fasting bring him back again?” His eyes filled. “I shall go to him, but he shall never come back to me.”
He sent then to have his six living children brought before him, to bring him comfort. The boys were Amnon, Avshalom, Adoniyah, Shefatiah and Yitraam, and his only daughter, full sister to Avshalom, Tamar. I rose and left the room before they arrived. I could not look at them.
I decided, that night, to leave David’s household. I knew too much of what was coming to remain there. I asked if I might take rooms outside the palace, and be at his service at need. So he gave me this house across the wadi, nestled in its old groves of olives and almond. He wanted to raze it and build me something grander, with dressed stone and cedar left over from the materials the king of Tyre had sent him. But I said no. As soon as I walked into these plain rooms, I knew that no new house could suit me better. I knew that the large shutters would keep the rooms cool in the heat of summer and let the sun spill in to warm the whitewashed walls in winter. When Muwat flung open the shutters for the first time, the sun flared on the pink flagstones, worn to a soft sheen by generations of feet. It splashed upward, so that I blinked in the glare. When I opened my eyes, I saw him; dark-haired, bright-eyed, the beautiful boy with the grave, thoughtful face. The promise. The reason.
It was the vision of a moment, but I knew, as certainly as I have ever known, that it was a true vision, and that he would come to this house and stand there, in the window. I have no child of my own flesh, called out of the void by love, or pride, or desire. But I saw that I would have a child of the spirit, mine in heart and soul. That I would serve him, as I served his father, until he grew so great in wisdom that he would not need my counsel, and I could live out my waning days in peace, free from the visions and the pain that attended them.
And I knew I would do it right here, in this house, as I have. As I do.
XV
In the month of olive harvest, it was common enough to see strangers on the paths of this mount, carrying staves to strike the boughs and coarse cloth to catch the ripe fruit. I was sitting on the terrace, the outer gate open. The shifting light as the clouds passed across the valley, the silvering of the olives at the noon hour, the glare of the sun on the stones of the city and its changing profile as the work of building went forward—all of this gave me pleasure.
I had a scroll open on the table in front of me, a work of history from Mitzrayim. Since my time among the Plishtim, I had become interested in our neighbors and their gods. But the glyphs of Mitzrayim are difficult, their meanings various and dependent on context. The hot sun on my back and the low hum of the bees were making me too drowsy for the effort needed to follow the text.
I noticed two women climbing the path toward my house. I took them for harvesters, since the trees on the terraces above my house were heavy with fruit. But as they drew nearer I saw that they carried neither stave nor burlap.
The path dwindled to a goat track beyond my house; mine was the last dwelling. I could not think they intended to come to me. There was no call for women of the town to seek me out. Most of them, in truth, would go an hour’s walk out of their way to avoid me. Except for Muwat, who handled my simple needs, I lived entirely alone. The press of people around David, with whom I still spent a good part of my time, was more human company than I craved. I retreated to my house for solitude, and few around the king lamented my absence. I knew well enough that most people sighed with relief when I left the room.
Still, the women approached. I let the scroll close on itself. Their mantles were plain, undyed homespun, drawn down modestly over their brows. They walked easily even though the way becomes steep near to my house, so I took them to be young women. Only as they drew close did I notice that the leather of their sandals was finely worked.
Muwat had gone to the city market, so I had no choice but to greet them myself. Wearily, I pushed myself up from the table and walked to the open gate to ask their business.
And then the taller one addressed me by name, and I knew that breathy, girlish voice, even though I had heard it only once. Like a dissonant chord, her presence struck an uneasy note. Royal women did not leave the city unguarded, dressed in homespun. I mouthed some rote greeting and ushered her inside. She spoke softly to her serving woman, who nodded and remained on the bench in the garden.
Inside the house, she walked to the window, tossing off her borrowed mantle and letting it fall unregarded to the floor. Underneath she wore a fine linen robe, dyed a pale sky blue, subtly embroidered around the hem and sleeves with a thread of darker blue—the color of her eyes—and belted with silver filigree. Her black hair was caught in a thick twist down her back, tied round by a fine silver fillet.
How dare she come here in this way—duplicitous, disguised—clearly without the knowledge of the king. I waited for her to turn or speak, but she did neither.
“I do no
t think you came all this way to admire the view,” I said coldly.
She turned then. She wore the cringing face of someone who awaits a blow.
“Indeed, Natan, I hardly know why I came.” Her lip trembled, and there was a catch in her voice. “I have no cause to expect kindness from you . . . of all people.” Her eyes brimmed and tears spilled down her cheeks. She made no move to wipe them away.
“Sit down,” I said. The room was sparsely furnished—I preferred it that way—but there was a good couch from the palace that David had sent me as a gift. She took an uncertain step and sat, her spine still very erect even though her shoulders shook. Her entire face—her lovely face—was wet now, and still her eyes welled and overflowed.
“What’s happened?” I said, less harshly. “Why have you come to me?”
“I’m carrying another child.”
This was unsurprising news. It was well-known that in the second year of their marriage, the king’s ardor toward Batsheva had not waned. Muwat reported the chamber servants’ gossip: Batsheva was with the king on every night except for the time of the month when she was forbidden, which was when David did his duty by his several other wives.
“Is that so grievous a thing?” I asked. “It’s natural, that you think of the last time. But this is different. This infant will not be victim of divine wrath. You need not fear.”
“I don’t fear divine wrath,” she said.
“But you are trembling.”
“I fear you, Natan. And I fear the king.”
I laughed. “Why would you fear the king?”
“Why would I not fear him?” She looked up, her face suddenly hard. “Do you think I did not fear, dragged from my home in the dark, to be debauched and discarded?”
I regarded her coldly. Easy enough to cry rape, when you are the one who has invited the seduction. Still, I turned away from that fierce gaze, fingering the writing implements on my table as I replied. “And I suppose there was no private place inside your house where you might have bathed, instead of the rooftop directly overlooked by the king’s terrace.” My voice dripped with sarcasm. “Of course, you didn’t realize. You had no idea you would be seen and admired, invited to his bed. A bored girl with an absent husband; you never entertained the idea that it would be diverting, to be desired by a king.”
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