The Secret Chord: A Novel (6 page)

I set out the reed pens and the phial of ink I had blended, and waited. When the old woman began to speak, her voice had a slight rattle, like a breeze through dry grass. She spoke in low tones, so that I had to strain to hear her.

“‘Tell Natan everything.’ That was the king’s message. His order.” Her mouth thinned as she said this. There was an awkward silence between us.

“The message did not please Shammah. It does not please you.”

“Please me? How should it please me? I have lived very quiet all these years. The story of the king has never included me, and for good reason. I never thought he would want anyone to hear what I have buried so long in silence. You will have to be patient with me, therefore. These things that he suddenly bids told are not easy things. After all the good that has come to him, I cannot think why he wants to probe these old wounds. ‘Tell Natan,’ my son says. As if it were nothing. Well. Maybe it is, to him, now . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and she looked away from me, her eyes welling. The girl was at her side in a moment, offering a bowl of rosewater and a cool cloth. Nizevet took it, and pressed it to her brow for a moment. Her face was scored all over with lines, but the skin was delicate and unblemished, and the bones beneath the aged flesh were very fine. I saw that there had been great beauty, once. I would have wagered a talent that beneath her linen headdress, the silver hair was still streaked through with fading tongues of fire. When she started to speak again her voice was low and full of emotion. I could see the strain in her face as she tried to command herself.

“The name I gave him. Beloved. It was my act of defiance, you see. He was the only one of my sons I named. Their father had been quick to give names to all the others. But to this one, he would give nothing. Not even a glance. He hated the very sight of him. Had the infant died, Yishai would have rejoiced.”

What she said shocked me so that I stopped writing and stared at her. She gazed back, a hint of amusement in her troubled eyes.

“I see in your face that you doubt me. You will know why, presently. The older boys took their lead from their father. They treated their youngest brother as if he were an unwelcome stranger. Even Natanel—the closest in age, the kindest of them—ignored him. That was the best of the treatment he received at their hands. The older brothers put vinegar in his drink and gall in his food. They beat him and accused him of thefts for which he was blameless. No one knows these things that I am telling you. No one outside the family. And—before this odd command of his, if you had asked Shammah or any of the others, they would have denied it.”

I had known her sons, most of them, but not well. None was close to the king, not one of them part of his inner circle. While she lived, his sister, Zeruiah, stood close in his affection and confidence, and her three sons, most especially Yoav, were prominent men. David’s brothers, by contrast, had enjoyed lesser places at court. Yet in all my time at the king’s side, there had been no hint of enmity. Nizevet seemed to read these thoughts as they passed through my mind. She smiled slightly.

“No one wants to remember how it was. The king, perhaps, least of all. But I remember. How could I not? When he was barely six years old, his father ordered that he be sent away from the
beit av
—the family home—to tend the sheep up in the hills. He was to live in a little hut of stone and branches, and come home only to get supplies. It was to get him away from the house, you see, so that Yishai would not have to look upon him. And this, too: the hills were full of lions then—not like now, when one rarely hears of an attack. How was a six-year-old supposed to survive out there alone? I believe Yishai hoped for his death. I wept the day he left, the crook—too large for him—threaded over his narrow shoulders, his slender wrists draped over the cane. He had the cheeses, olives and dried grapes I had packed for him tied in a cloth on his back. He looked small, and helpless, and lonely. My heart ached over it. I was in agony for him. But now I think that it was a good thing he got away from his brothers’ persecutions and his father’s open hatred. Those years in the hills taught him many things. You could say that they made him the man he became. For better . . .” she paused and drew a deep breath. “And yes, perhaps, for worse. Should a mother say such a thing?” She gave a swift, wan smile. “‘Tell everything,’ so he said. And so. Everything.”

As she spoke, my pen scritched across the parchment and my mind filled with memories of David at our first meeting on the high hills above my village. I imagined him as that small shepherd boy, living in the long silences broken only by the baaing of the ewes and the clatter of stones shifting as the herd moved over them. I imagined the sharp scent of thyme crushed under the hooves, and the calls of the little birds in the thorn bushes.

He must have found ways to fill the long days and the silences. In those silences, perhaps, he discovered the consolations of music. I interrupted to ask her this, and she told how he fashioned his first harp. He had heard a harpist only once, when some itinerant musician had come to play in Beit Lehem. But out there in that hut, from ram’s horn and sinew, by trial and error, he fashioned a crude instrument of his own, and learned how to draw prodigious sound from it.

He found his voice there, she said. There, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.

As I wrote down her words, it came to me that there was something else he must have found there. Something that a boy who lives all his life in a busy household or a crowded town might never find. He found the ability to hear. In those endless days and in the still nights, I believe he learned what it means to really listen, a skill I had seen him wield to great effect. Men love the sound of their own voices, and David knew how to let them speak. I had seen taciturn fighters and oily-tongued emissaries alike undone by David’s ability to draw them out. He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to fill.

And this, too: our holiest men have always gone into the wilderness to hear the voice of the Name. Avram was in the far desert under a star-encrusted sky when the Name promised him descendants as numberless as those stars. Moshe was in the distant hills, and also a shepherd, when Yah spoke to him in the crackling fire. David heard some echo of the divine voice out there, too, I am sure of it. For when the time came for him to speak in the world, his words carried the roar of holy fire. How else to account for his poetry, those words that fill our mouths and hearts and give us voice to praise, lament, beseech and atone.

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.”