God Knows

  Saul's basic failing, I believe, was a parochial inability to understand that the same theocracy plucking him up from a hillside meadow to be ruler over Israel would be quick to disown him as soon as he began to reign like one. His offenses were inconsequential. At Michmash, earlier, Saul performed the sacrifice before battle when Samuel was late showing up. That wasn't his fault. When his men were finished, they ate meat with the blood. That wasn't his fault either, and he castigated them for having done so. And who but God could blame him for his failure to follow through on his curse and execute Jonathan?

  For this you fire a king? Not by me you don't, even though I was the beneficiary.

  I never had such conflicts with prophets and priests, thanks to Saul, who left a clear path for me by reducing their number and their authority. What did it cost me to throw Zadok and Abiathar a smile and a nod every now and then, to resign myself to the garrulous homilies of Nathan when I had to? We had no temples or synagogues, no rabbis, and we could forget to observe the Passover each year if we had something more entertaining to do. We kindled fires on the Sabbath and could even work if we wanted to. No one reprimanded us for keeping our household idols. We had no daily or weekly prayers to recite, and our God, like the slumbering volcano He once was reputed to be, was dormant for the most part, and tended to say little when He wasn't talking to me. All I had to do was bring a lamb to the altar of the priests every once in a while; they slaughtered it and I was finished. Thank you too, my good fellow, and a very merry Christmas to all you as well; of course I'll be happy to come again. Neither God nor Saul ever thought of naming another Judge to follow Samuel, and Saul kept near him no prophet or priest. What was the poor creature to do? It isn't easy to be a king if you've got no real feel for the job and no footsteps of a predecessor in which to follow. No wonder he worried. Great wonder, though, that he plunged into the first of his numbing depressions on the very day that the spirit of the Lord departed from him and moved to me, and that I was the one they sent for to snap him out of it. For reasons still mysterious to me, I was already known in Gibeah as someone with a cunning hand on the harp and a person skilled in the arts of war. I had never even been to war. But I could carry a tune and I was damned good with the sling.

  As far as anyone knows, Saul had no history of emotional instability prior to the day Samuel anointed me, other than a single episode of religious ecstasy with other prophesying fanatics among whom he chanced to fall and with whom he went dancing about wildly down the mountain, stripped off his clothes, and rolled about naked in the dirt awhile with his mouth frothing. That would have been tipoff enough of trouble to come to anyone less enamored than God with the concept of His own infallibility.

  How I loved that man Saul. How I looked up to him, even when he drove me away and hunted me; how I yearned to be sealed into his embrace and taken into his household as a member of his family. That never happened.

  He meant more to me than God. I still have dreams about Saul; I have never in my life had a dream about God. My dreams of Saul are of longing, remorse, and reconciliation. When they sent to fetch me to cure him, I walked from Bethlehem to Gibeah as though every step were on hallowed ground. I went barefoot, my mission seemed holy. For much of the way I felt out of breath from awe. He was Saul the famous, I was going to meet him. He was my lord the king. He was the savior of Israel, the military leader who had routed at Jabesh-gilead the besieging Ammonites for his first big victory, and had trounced the Philistines at Michmash for his next. And now he was feeling low.

  Irony of irony, said the Preacher, that I, the unwitting cause of his disease was called upon to supply the remedy.

  I wanted to call him father. I did call him father. Each time I addressed him as my lord the king, I was calling him father. Each time he answered, he called me his son. In the years I was near him, I wanted to hug him. In the years I was distant, I wanted to be back. He was impassive in affection and kept me at bay. He said he would make me his armor bearer and forgot to. He said he would always remember me and didn't. He said I would be to him always as one of his own sons. Had I known at that time how he felt about his children, this would have been cause for concern.

  When I arrived with my harp at the mud-brick house in Gibeah, they invited me to bathe my feet. Of course I jumped at the chance. I soaked my tired feet in cool water in a clay basin awhile and dried when thoroughly with the woolen towels offered me. I followed timidly to the doorway to which I was led. I stepped through the entrance alone into the low-roofed chamber in which Saul had been brooding so terribly in silence and in solitude.

  My heart sank the minute I saw him. My lord the king was clearly in a very bad way. A tall and barrel-chested man of almost unbelievably massive muscular development, he was slumped forward like something inanimate in a half-reclining position on a small wooden bench at the rear of the room. His shoulders sagged and his head was hanging. His hair was tangled, his beard matted. His sun-browned forearms, heavily veined, lay limp on his thighs. At first he did not stir and he struck me tragically as a mighty machine fallen into disuse. There was a minute in which I was frightened. He sat with an expression of resigned and incurable agony, diffusing a silent gloom that seemed to me almost as painful to witness as to suffer. The room was dim, the atmosphere thick, but the entire experience was nothing at all as you may have been led to imagine it was by Robert Browning--no, not the least bit like Robert Browning. Why listen to him? I was there, Browning wasn't; he was in Italy sending home thoughts from abroad. At no time did Saul climb laboriously to his feet like a man weighted with an unutterable misery and unfold his tortured physique with upraised arms extended sideways to station himself in the figure of a cross. Crucifixion was a Roman invention, not a Hebrew, and this was a thousand years before the Romans even existed. Our preference in executing people was to burn them with fire and stone them with stones, and we did very little of either. It was so much easier to tolerate our sinners and live with the headaches they gave us than to judge them and kill them. Why make a fuss? More often than not, we would leave them to heaven or simply have somebody fall with their swords on our enemies. And here's something else: not a one of us then would have cared a pinch of snuff about any second coming of a Messiah, let alone a first, or even said a single word about either. Who needed a Messiah? We had no heaven, we had no hell, we had no eternity, we had no afterlife. We had no need for a Messiah then, and we have none now, and the last thing any sensible human being should want, to my way of thinking, is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.

  I'm not even sure we really had that much need for a God as much as we did seem to have a need to believe in Him. I do know that just about every good idea emerging in my chats with Him originated with me. The plan of stealing through the mulberry trees to encircle the Philistines at night at the second battle of Rephaim was His. But I'm not sure it made that much difference, or that I wouldn't have thought of it myself. I do know that Joab's idea of attacking them frontally at dawn did not sit well with me.

  Saul, by the wretched, inert look of him, probably held a different attitude from mine about the need for a God. Although a foot basin had been prepared for him and placed nearby, his toes and ankles were caked with the dust of the earth. Shapeless slippers of sheepskin lay overturned on their sides near the wall against which his javelin and his spear leaned with their points upward. A mat of roped wool was unrolled on the floor, with a bolster of coarse goatskin at the head. Even though he was king, Saul spurned a bed and slept on the ground.

  I had no doubt he knew I was there from the instant I entered. It took awhile, though, before he stirred and turned slowly to contemplate me. He lifted his hand above his eyes as though to shade them from the glare from the doorway behind me. I stared back at him intently. He looked like a man who wanted to weep. He had that desolate, ruined look of someone in love. I know that lifeless, empty anguish of love from my first years with Bathsheba when things were going so frenetically well, and k
now it also from those endless fits of longing afterward when they began so uncontrollably to change. In good times and in bad, those incomparable requirements of the aching heart seldom lessened much.

  'Who are you?' Saul asked at last, pathetically, almost whispering from a throat that sounded inordinately dry. 'I have trouble remembering things.'

  I was choked for a moment by a sudden flood of compassion that filled me with both tears and nausea. 'I am David, the son of your subject Jesse the Bethlehemite.'

  'I have trouble remembering,' he repeated.

  'I am going to play for you,' I told him.

  'Are you going to play for me?' he inquired distantly, and paused for answer from me with his mouth hanging open, like a man with a stroke.

  'I am going to play and sing for you.'

  'They tell me,' he mused inquiringly, 'that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.'

  'I've often heard that too,' I answered meekly in my youthful tenor as pure as a choirboy's.

  But frankly, I didn't put much stock in that adage. My nephew Joab has always owned as savage a breast as existed anywhere in the world, and the effect upon him of my music has always been to exacerbate rather than tranquilize his turbulent nature. Even as children of the same age growing up together in Bethlehem, my playing and singing had always put a gulf of antagonistic incompatibility between us. He would jog and lift weights; and I would compose an ode to a daffodil.

  With an apathetic nod, Saul signaled for me to enter farther and find what I thought was a suitable place, and then he looked away with downcast eyes and waited. I had come to Gibeah with my eight-stringed lyre in order to demonstrate my considerable technical skill to fullest advantage. Now I clasped the instrument tightly to my chest in an effort to conceal the trembling of my hands. My mouth felt paralyzed. Saul appeared no longer interested. Tensely, I made myself ready on a low stool, with one bare knee to the ground. I licked my lips and upper palate with a tongue that felt stiff, and I tried to begin. My first note smothered in my gullet with a little muffled sound, almost a croak. I was grateful Saul didn't seem to be paying attention. My voice quavered off key on the two notes following, and I began to lose heart. But then I saw him quiver and start with surprise at the first full touch of my fingers to the strings, as though the tremulous chords lingering in the air were setting in motion somewhere inside him sympathetic vibrations of response that resonated through his entire being. My confidence was restored without my even realizing it was back. I felt in firm control and knew with certainty that I was sounding better and better as I went on, singing like an angel in a voice that was too young for a man's and too sweet for a girl's.

  I began with a simple and brief Russian lullaby of my mother's with which she used to croon me to sleep when I was a child and afraid of the dark and which in later years she would hum to herself about the house when content. Saul heard me attentively and was pleased, I thought, and I proceeded boldly to some lengthier and more complex inventions of my own. Of arms and the man I sang, of the wrath of Achilles, and of man's first disobedience to God, in that order, little supposing in my arcadian naivete that I was embroidering on topics which would either excite his prejudices and anger him, or move him to nostalgia and compunction. Lucky for me it was the latter. In my fortuitous choice of subject matter I might well have been unknowingly guided by a higher power, and then again I might not have been. I heard Saul sigh. I saw his limbs relax and gently regain their flexibility. I watched the dark, rigid lines of his face disappear, saw his expression loosen itself from the grip of fatalistic despair and soften into an attitude of pensive reverie. His head began to dip ever so slightly in tempo with the melodic flow of my music.

  I was pleased by these visible proofs of my success. What a splendid and inspiring picture I must have made! I was so white and ruddy. And it was obvious I was working miracles. While the last notes of my epic on man's first disobedience of God still floated in the air, Saul roused himself and straightened with something of a smile. He flexed his shoulders as though rediscovering his ability to move>>> them and then stretched out his arms. He opened wide his jaws and yawned serenely. I concluded my performance with my early ode to a daffodil.

  Of course I was eager to do more. For a change of pace, I had in mind for an encore, had he insisted upon one, a lively and mildly risque ditty of my own about a passionate shepherd to his mistress. But Saul stood up from his bench like a man exhausted who knows what he is about and informed me with a gesture that he had heard enough and was satisfied. He shambled slowly across the room and lowered himself to his sleeping mat with a moan of content, sitting in utter silence for several moments with his arms crossed upon his knees. I feared again that he had forgotten me. I did not want to move. The sound of his breathing was loud and regular. After another minute had passed, he lifted a hand and motioned me to come to him. I approached diffidently and knelt to the level of his eyes when I was before him. He took my head delicately in both his enormous hands and looked deeply into my face with a kind of reverent and solemn gratitude. My heart beat rapidly.

  'I will never forget you,' he told me in a low voice. 'I shall want you always with me. You should be to me as one of my children. As of morning tomorrow, I will want you to serve me as my armor bearer.'

  I spent the night in my cloak on a smooth dry patch of earth I located near the front corner of his house. I could not sleep much. My mind was a carnival of glittering hopes and dizzying expectations. In the morning they sent me away. When Saul and I again faced each other two years afterward on the day of my killing of Goliath, it was as though he had never set eyes on me before.

  6 In the Service of Saul

  In the service of Saul I soon found it almost impossible to do anything right. The more I succeeded, the more I failed. I survived and excelled and began to get a name for myself for smiting Philistines. You think Saul was proud? Jonathan was. Even Abner approved of my cunning, prudence, valor, and growing military reputation. But there was just no pleasing Saul with anything after the first time he beheld for himself the women coming out of the cities of Israel with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of music to greet me and to answer one another melodiously, singing:

  hkh shvl blpv vdvd brbbtyv:

  Or, in translation:

  'Saul hath slain his thousands

  and David his ten thousands.'

  What could I do if I was turning out to be ten times the warrior Saul was?

  Nevertheless, it perplexed me tremendously to see him grow so very wroth. If looks could kill, I would have been finished, and he eyed me narrowly from that day and forward, even after I was his son-in-law and was expected to eat most evenings at the royal table in his house in Gibeah. Who could eat with so much aggravation?

  I can clearly recall the hour that my fortunes with Saul took their disquieting turn for the worse. We were buoyantly trooping along homeward, in jaunty return from another victory over the Philistines in which I had again acquitted myself with distinction. Then the women came out with their tabrets and other instruments of playing to sing of Saul's thousands. Their refrain was music to my ears, and I grinned, of course, honestly anticipating that Saul would rejoice with some display of paternal pride in the acclaim I was receiving. I could not have been more mistaken. It was with a startled and lowering face that Saul heard them. I saw him look daggers at me as he quickened our marching cadence to hurry away from the throngs lauding me. After the women had been left behind, Saul drew Abner with him in my direction as though to make inescapably certain I would overhear his words and observe his reprimanding demeanor.

  'They have ascribed unto David ten thousands,' he said loudly. 'Did you hear them? '

  'I heard them.'

  'Ten thousands? You heard?'

  'I heard, I heard, ' answered Abner uncomfortably. 'And to me they have ascribed but thousands. You heard that too?'

  'I heard them, I heard them. '

  'He was nowhere near ten thousand. '


  'You know how women are. '

  'But I achieved my thousands, didn't I? '

  'Easily.'

  'They were singing just for him--you heard them, didn't you?--and dancing for him too. They were paying practically no attention to me. You saw? You heard?'

  'I heard, I heard,' said Abner. 'What do you want from me? I've heard them before.'

  'You heard them before? ' demanded Saul. 'When? '

  'Lots of times.'

  'Why didn't you tell me?'

  'Why should I aggravate you?'

  Saul was glaring at me murderously when he growled, 'What can he have more to satisfy him than the kingdom?'

  To tell you the truth, something akin to that very thought had been rattling around in my own mind since the time I joined Saul and began doing so well, but always, I swear, with the airiness of an adolescent fancy rather than the constancy of a vaulting ambition that might someday overleap itself. I made no play for the throne of Saul until after he was dead. Ask anyone. Ask Achish, king of Gath.

  To understand my bafflement, keep in mind that I was but a child at the time, as green about the ears as a youth from the country could be, with little knowledge of the perversities and ambivalences with which the human heart is capable of polluting itself. Who could conceive back then of the enormity of Saul's brooding hatred for me or comprehend the threatening paradox that the more I accomplished to gratify him, the greater would grow the jealousy and wrath he felt toward me? I know I was hurt when I saw him so angry with me that first time, and I was flustered in a queer and guilt-ridden way each time I found him so thereafter.

  The evil spirit came upon Saul for the second time in his life the very next day. Word spread fast through Gibeah that he was again in a state of mysterious melancholia. I took my harp from its kidskin cover at the first report and waited. Saul could not stir from his chamber, rumor had it. He would not taste food or wash his hands or the dust of the earth from his feet. He had no desire for sex. He refused to comb his hair or clean his fingernails. When they lit the olive oil in his lamps, he blew out the flames, muttering uncivilly that he preferred to curse the darkness. They thought of me quickly. No more time-wasting attempts to stay him with flagons or comfort him with apples. Music, they wanted. I jumped at the invitation to play and sing for him, at the opportunity to return to his favor by expunging from his brain the sinister phantoms by which he was tortured. I felt blessed by Abner's supplications, singled out by heaven as someone meant for unique things, touched with sublime grace by the magical quality of my music to heal. And once again, I was Johnny-on-the-spot.