The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

“We need them there,” the king grunted. At this point Abishag indicated that David must return for his rest, but he was in a difficult mood and refused to comply. “I have been told that you have in Makor a singer who plays on the lyre.”

  The governor looked about to see who this might be, and Kerith said to the king, “There is a fine singer. Shall I fetch him to my house?”

  “I’ll go to his,” David said, and not one of the officials knew where Gershom lived, but Kerith did, and she led the king to the temple, then to the wine shop, then to the wool merchant’s, and finally to the small room in back where Gershom lay sleeping beside a jug of wine. The place was dark and smelled of rancid sheepskins, and the governor started to drag the king away, but David insisted upon entering the room, where he stood with Abishag on one side and Kerith on the other, looking down at the sleeping man.

  “It’s the king,” Kerith whispered, shaking him.

  Gershom looked up, thinking that children had come upon him as they often did, and he saw that the king had lifted his lyre and was trying the seven strings, which were slack upon the pegs. Gershom brushed his hair back, adjusted his dirty garment and pulled himself to his feet. “It’s a good lyre,” the young man said.

  “And I’ve been told that you’re a good singer,” the king replied. He handed the young man the instrument and waited. Gershom reached down, took a swig of wine, washed it about his mouth and spat it into the street. He indicated a broken chair, which Abishag brought for the king, but he paid no attention to Kerith or the king’s beautiful attendant. He sat on a pile of wool which had not yet been combed and spent some time adjusting himself and tuning the strings. It was a quiet moment, with men in the alleyway pressing against the door as the governor warned them to be silent. It was an apprehensive moment when no one should speak, but Kerith said quietly, “Sing of the lamb and the bull.”

  Gershom looked at her in surprise, as if she were an intruder, but the king asked, “Is that a fine song?”

  “It is one you would like,” Kerith said, and the king nodded.

  Gershom was now finished with tuning his lyre, and he played random music until, unexpectedly, he struck a series of harsh, commanding chords which seemed to please the king. Then, in a powerful cry, he called:

  “Oh, who among us can speak of Yahweh?

  Who knows his mysterious ways?

  He is in the whimper of the lamb I seek at night,

  Lo, he is in the stamping of the wild bull.”

  And the manner in which he changed from the initial cry of longing to the simplicity of the night scene, then to the vigor of the bull’s actions pleased the king, and he sat back in the solitary chair, listening to the artistry of the young man, and after more than an hour of songs the old king took the lyre himself and let his fingers fall across the strings, but he did not try to sing. Tears came to his eyes and he sat for some time with the lyre, until Abishag said quietly, “Now we must retire,” and he followed her like an obedient child.

  That night there was singing in the governor’s house, which marked the first time that Gershom had been invited into that august center, and on succeeding days the king repeatedly asked the young man to sing for him; and the time came when David was prepared to take the lyre himself and to sing some of the glorious compositions which he had offered Yahweh in the young years when he was loved as the sweet singer of Israel, and the two psalmists sang together for many hours. On the fourth day, when the king had not yet seen more of the tunnel than the mouth of the square shaft, he concluded a singing session by stating firmly, “When I return to Jerusalem this young man shall accompany me,” and he put his arm about Gershom as though the latter were his son.

  When King David uttered this command Kerith was sitting beside him and the words reached her with climactic force. The visit of the king had been like a series of hammer blows, coming at the end of six years of metaphysical turmoil: she had witnessed the humiliation of her husband and had seen the low regard in which a man like King David held the mere digging of a tunnel; she had also seen the clarity of judgment with which he had selected Gershom as the one talent in Makor worth taking to the capital. All that King David did placed the abstract wisdom of Jerusalem athwart the pragmatic values of Makor, for without knowing it the king had acted as if he wished to prove her tentative conclusions correct. For a brief spell following the departure of General Amram she had allowed Jabaal and Meshab to divert her attention from Jerusalem and she had begun to doubt her own conclusions; but now King David and Gershom fortified them and she would never again be deterred from doing what she had long ago decided was right. She was ready to take the decisive steps that would lead her to the City of David.

  When the singing ended she walked boldly with Gershom to his hovel, and at the doorway she said quietly, “When you go with the king to Jerusalem, I shall go with you.”

  He was in the act of throwing his lyre onto a pile of wool and he did not bother even to break the rhythm of his arm. “I want you to,” he said, without looking at her.

  “Tonight I will stay here,” she said, but even with those words they were afraid to embrace.

  Slowly she walked home, considering what she must tell Hoopoe, but when she entered the house by the shaft that had accomplished so little she said simply, “I am going to Jerusalem. With Gershom. I shall live with him the rest of my life.”

  Later she recalled that as she said these words her fat little husband looked just like a hoopoe bird, twisting his neck this way and that, as if he were seeking a hole in which to sink his foolish, his lovable, his laughable head. “You mustn’t,” he pleaded, following her from room to room as she packed a few belongings. When they reached the room where they had spent their passionate nights he said, “You can take the rope of glass,” but she left it behind, not willing to hurt him by saying that it was gaudy Phoenician ware; but the chunk of amber set in Persian silver she took.

  At the door of the house, standing by the great empty shaft that had mocked her plans, she said good-bye to the pathetic little engineer, and when he tried in trembling voice to ask why this wrong thing was happening, she said at last, “Stay with Makor and the old gods, I cannot.” And she was gone.

  In his desolation, alone with two children that his wife had deserted and the tunnel that the king did not want, Hoopoe sought the one man who could give him counsel. In the gray and somber twilight he went to the postern gate where Meshab was finishing the tower that would hide the telltale marks and there in his perplexity he asked the Moabite to reason with Kerith, but to his surprise Meshab refused to leave the tower. “I shall keep hidden until King David leaves,” he explained.

  “But why?” Hoopoe asked. All that was happening confused him.

  “King David bears deep hatred for my people.”

  “But he’s part Moabite himself,” Hoopoe protested, and his need for help was so obvious that Meshab, in spite of what he knew might happen, laid down his trowel, washed his hands and consented to talk with Kerith; but as the two men left the wall, one of King David’s captains spotted the Moabite and ran crying through the streets, “The assassin of Moab is among us.” At first Meshab tried to run back to the wall, but gleaming spears cut off that escape, so he did what he had long planned to do if trapped as he now was. He ran past the shaft, along the curving street that led from the postern gate and into the temple, where he threw himself upon the altar, clutching the stone horns.

  Hoopoe had scarcely reached him in the sanctuary when soldiers appeared at the door, only to draw back when they saw what action the Moabite had taken, but shortly King David himself, unattended by Abishag, alone and old and white with fury, strode to the altar. “Are you the Meshab whose life I spared in Moab?”

  “The same. I seek your sanctuary.”

  “Did you not kill Jerebash, the brother of Amram?”

  “In battle, yes.”

  “And throw down the temple to Yahweh?”

  “In siege, yes.”

  �
�You have no sanctuary.”

  “I plead the sanctuary you ordained.”

  “I refuse it!” David thundered. “I saved you once and you warred against me. Guards! Seize him!”

  A shocking fight marred the silence of the temple, for Meshab had no intention of being taken alive, and the struggle became more violent when Hoopoe sprang to the defense of his friend and shouted at the king, “He is a freedman claiming sanctuary.”

  “He defied Yahweh!” David cried, half insane.

  Spurred on by the king the guards knocked Hoopoe aside, but even as he fell to the floor he shouted once more, “David! Don’t defile your own sanctuary.” Then a guard kicked him in the mouth, bringing blood that choked him.

  The guards were now free to concentrate on the Moabite, but he defended himself with mighty strength until ten dragged him from the altar, causing it to crash to the floor, where it broke into two pieces, and the sight of this shattered altar infuriated David even more: he was a man capable of nursing terrible enmities and he cried, “Slay him!” And seven came at the former slave with spears, and his powerful arms gathered them to his chest as flint sickles once gathered wheat, and he fell at the feet of the king, where he was stabbed many times until his blood flowed across the temple floor to where Hoopoe lay. A priest, reveling in the horror, chanted, “Yahweh is revenged. Thus Yahweh strikes those who oppose him.”

  Finally the young girl Abishag found her king in the bloodstained temple and took him by the hand and led him to his couch. Then he had time to reflect upon the vengeful thing he had done, and he beat his forehead with his fist and repented this latest in a long chain of sudden passions that had scarred his life. He found that he could not banish from his mind the figure of the Moabite freedman clutching at the altar, nor from hearing the pleas for sanctuary. The execution had been an impulsive, ugly outburst and already David was haunted by regret.

  In deepening repentance he asked for the young lyrist, whose consolation he needed, and messengers went to the small room at the back of the wool store, where they found not only Gershom but Kerith, kneeling over a small bundle of clothes which she had brought from her husband’s house; and when the messenger told Gershom that he must bring his kinnor to comfort the king, the psalmist said, “I must bring Kerith, too. I cannot leave her here.” And when he passed through the streets to serve his king, Kerith walked behind, wearing a gold-colored robe and an amber amulet.

  They found King David huddled in a corner of the governor’s quarters, Abishag at his side and holding his left hand. He was ashen with remorse, an old man tormented by ghosts—the latest less than an hour old. “I have betrayed my own law,” he mumbled and he would have confessed more, but Gershom took a stool by the door and as Kerith sat on the floor beside his feet he began playing some of his songs, and he kept to those the king had already heard. And as he plucked the seven-stringed lyre, bringing from it sounds like the wind and the movement of lambs across the fields in spring, the old king lost his bitterness and he closed his eyes as if he were asleep, but the fear of loneliness with which he clutched the hand of Abishag proved that he was well awake and listening with great longing to the words of the young singer.

  After Gershom had reviewed songs which the king knew, he was inspired, for some reason that he could never thereafter explain, to launch into a song which he had composed some years before on a day in the mountains when he had been wondering what things the ideal king would do; and his words echoed across that white room as the conversation between the people of Israel and their king:

  “Rejoice in Yahweh, you righteous men,

  For praise becomes the upright.

  Give thanks to Yahweh with the lyre,

  Sing praises with a psaltery of ten strings.

  Sing to him a new song.

  Play skillfully with shouts of joy.

  For the word of Yahweh is upright.

  His works are established in truth,

  And he loveth righteousness and justice.”

  The last three lines of the poem were but the preface to ideas of the kingly state, but they struck the guilty king with such vigor that without opening his eyes he signaled with his right hand that the music was to stop. He rose, and still self-blinded groped his way a few steps across the room, then fell on the floor, on his knees and elbows, from which position he beat his head several times on the floor until Abishag rescued him and forced him to open his eyes and make his way back to his chair.

  “I have betrayed Yahweh,” the old man wept. “All my life I have done those things that Yahweh has condemned. At whose hand was the Moabite slain but mine? At whose altar but mine?” He shivered with the memory of the profanation and pleaded, “Tell me of the Moabite.”

  And Kerith, still seated on the floor, said, “He was a just man. In darkness he built the David Tunnel to save your town. When my husband was absent it was the Moabite who protected me. When he was freed from slavery he remained with us to finish the king’s tunnel. Meshab was a man that I shall remember with tears the rest of my life.”

  The simple words were exactly those that King David wished to hear, the eulogy for a brave warrior and a good man. “Sit on my right hand,” he said to Kerith, and she took the position that she would often know in the king’s dying years; and to her David said, “The Moabite was valiant in battle, and I slew him. He was a vigorous defender of his gods, and I caused him to be slain. What have I done this day?”

  The white-haired old man rocked back and forth between the two women who guarded him, and at last he said to Abishag, “Fetch me the kinnor,” but when he took the instrument which long ago he had played before King Saul he did not play it in the ordinary sense, as Gershom had been doing; he allowed his tired hands to fall across the strings in aimless fashion, building chords of no pattern and with no rhythm, and when the music had taken for him a form that the others could not hear, he chanted a psalm which he had composed many years before and which he often remembered in these late years:

  “O Yahweh, do not rebuke me in your anger,

  And do not chastise me in your wrath.

  Have mercy upon me, for I am weak,

  Heal me, for my bones tremble.

  I tremble very much.

  But you, O Yahweh, how long?

  Return, O Yahweh, save me.

  Deliver me in accord with your reliability.

  If I die I cannot sing to you,

  For who in the grave can give you praises?

  I am weary of my groaning.”

  He continued his lament for human weakness, referring to the anguish he had known so often throughout his turbulent life, and those four who sat in that room, those misfit four who had gathered to converse with Yahweh—the white-haired king who had committed both adultery and murder, the exquisite child who had been cynically chosen to be an old man’s comfort and his last bedfellow, the loyal wife who was about to betray one of the truly good men of Israel, and the stranger whose crimes were not spelled out—that night those four seekers after Yahweh represented the future generations of the world who would respond to the cry of grief as they now did. The Judaism that King David had inherited was often a cold religion, rigorous and even forbidding, but it was saved by this outcry of human passion which David was now uttering and which Gershom had uttered on the hills. Remote and removed, there was Yahweh; here in the actuality of the white room there was a human heart approaching the end of its allotted seventy years; and between the two there was a passionate dialogue expressed in song:

  “Each night I make my bed swim.

  I drench my couch with my tears.

  My eye has wasted away from grief …

  O evildoers, go away from me,

  For Yahweh has heard the sound of my weeping.”

  Thus David lamented, and the listeners in the night accepted the heartbreak of the vengeful old king as part of their own experience. Fully as much as the rigorous laws, his cry would become a part of Judaism.

  Kerith saw Hoopoe
no more. She spent that night in the hovel at the wool merchant’s, and in the morning when the royal procession turned southward to Megiddo and thence to Jerusalem she was lost somewhere in the motley, marching to the city she had been so determined to see. It was the transformation of Gershom the outcast that was the more spectacular, for he became in Jerusalem the keeper of the king’s music, directing the scribes as they collected on clay tablets many of the poems written by the king, and in the compilation appeared not a few written by Gershom himself. In time they passed into the liturgy of Judaism; they were sung in plain chant throughout the Presbyterian churches of Scotland; they became the hymns of Australia and the church music of South Africa; they were sung to many different tunes in many different religions, for wherever the words were read they were recognized as part of the authentic cry of man seeking his god, for Gershom was a singer, a man who could formulate words into patterns, and his words would live forever.

  Hoopoe experienced a different transformation. When King David departed for Jerusalem, having ignored the tunnel, the heartbroken engineer climbed to the town walls like a farmer from the countryside or a yellow-stained Phoenician from the dye vats, and there he joined the mob as it shouted farewell to the great king. Hoopoe tried vainly to see where Kerith was, but she kept herself hidden. Nor was the king visible, nor Abishag nor Gershom: the four vanished from his life like ghosts that had come to wreak horror during a windy night and had fled with the dawn.

  For some time he could not believe either that they had come or that they had gone. The governor, remembering that Hoopoe had abused the king at the death of the Moabite, thereafter refused to speak with the little man. With his slaves gone to Jerusalem, no further commissions of any importance were found for him. Townspeople, recounting the story of how his wife had run away with Gershom, made ballads of the affair to which they added the earlier escapade with General Amram, so that one of the most contradictory women who had ever lived in Makor was debased into a simple slut, and sometimes even Hoopoe heard men at the wine shop singing of her.