God Knows

  I began my serenade to Saul most delicately with my pure and innocent singing voice and my eight-stringed lyre. I was as divine as a castrato. Nothing but the best for my king. I knew by the lucid timbre of the first note from my lips that I had never been better. Again I was privileged to observe the gently restorative effects of my genius as my plaintive melody pervaded his overburdened consciousness. Before my eyes he began to recover, emerging astonishingly from the state of catatonic depression into which he had plummeted overnight and in which I had found him when I entered. He stirred, he moved, he rediscovered himself, he came back among the living. And I had conducted him there. It was marvelous to behold. As I glided without hesitation into my rather stirring. 'Ode to Joy,' Saul stiffly moved his head from side to side, as though searching for my tempo and testing his authority over this neural impulses. He arched his back, then reached his arms out to the side with the elbows bent and rotated the knobs of his shoulders in their girdles of muscle. At last he raised his clouded face to study me. He wore the doleful look of a man who had been given shattering news some time before and who only now felt able to begin pulling himself together. I was glad when I saw him regarding me with what I would call a look of deep gratitude and undying devotion. There was no doubt he knew I saved him. He smiled slightly, apologetically, a spark of understanding igniting in his bleary, swollen eyes as he made me out and recognized me. I felt redeemed--now he would be more indebted to me than ever before. I gazed at him in happiness. The next thing I knew, the crazy son of a bitch was lunging to his feet for his javelin and casting it at my head with all his might! I was horrified. The javelin landed with a loud thwack in a beam of wood beside me, the quivering shaft humming only inches from my ear. Who would believe it? The bastard was really trying to kill me! For moments I sat there unable to move, my mouth agape, until he dived for a second javelin to fire at me and missed again. Then I bolted to my feet in terror and avoided the hell out of his presence as fast as my legs would carry me.

  Abner was unperturbed when I related to him what had occurred. 'You have got to learn to take the bad with the good,' he advised me philosophically, scratching his pitted face with one hand and pausing to suck on a pomegranate he held in the other. 'He missed you, didn't he?'

  'Twice.'

  'So what are you complaining about? It's not as though he hit you, is it?'

  'Can you at least get my harp back? It's the best one I've got.'

  'The thing to do,' said Abner, returning with my lyre, 'is to stay out of his presence until he has a change of heart.'

  Saul made that easy by removing me from him. I expected death or demotion. Instead, he appointed me a captain over a thousand. Then he dispatched me on combat missions in remote places with bands of a dozen or two dozen men against invading mobs of Philistines moving into the valleys or pillaging or occupying our villages in northern Israel or southern Judah. Dutifully, I went out whithersoever Saul sent me and behaved myself wisely in all my ways, endeavoring to gladden him by doing so. Fat chance. All Israel and Judah seemed to grow to love me because I went out and came in before them on my triumphant forays of liberation and safekeeping. But not Saul. The more wisely I behaved, the more afraid and resentful of me he appeared. My desperate, self-defeating efforts to propitiate him were maddening in their futility. I was at a loss. I suffered palpitations, and wrote a splendid psalm about them.

  What endures as one of the regrettable facts of my life is that my future father-in-law and I were never again to be at ease with each other after that first episode with the javelins. What had I done to deserve that? You tell me. It seemed to me that we both continued delving for a solution to that riddle and could arrive at only the same one: nothing. Such an answer was equally disturbing to us both. But his attitude of sullen grievance and simmering fury never abated fully. I felt myself in continual peril, and in a continual mood of repentance. How was it possible to atone to this patriarchal figure for what I had not done? At best each of us was embarrassing to the other. It was obvious at other times that he could not bear the sight of me without manifesting visible symptoms of a turbulent and menacing agitation. His antipathy was evident to all about him and a matter of nervous concern to Jonathan and others. I myself could not make head or tail of it. What did he want from me? Who could dream back then that, because of Samuel, he was wrestling every day with an impulse to slay me that was close to ungovernable? The malignant fuck was sending me out on these undermanned expeditions to distant places in the pathetic and distracted hope he could let the hand of the Philistines be upon me instead of his own.

  Saul was of the opinion--with good reason, perhaps --that I was loved by God. And he feared, therefore, when in his right mind, to slay me himself. What Saul was attempting with me was what I was much later to perform with more successful results against that unfortunate sucker Uriah the Hittie. I didn't want to slay him myself, yet I had to be free to marry his wife before the indications of the pregnancy grew undeniably evident.

  There is no new thing under the sun, is there, certainly no new plots. Show me anything whereof it may be said 'See, this is new,' and I will show you it hath been. There are only four basic plots in life anyway, and nine in literature, and everything else is but variation, vanity, and vexation of spirit. I sure as hell know I didn't feel loved by God in this tempestuous period. Instead, I felt much vexation of spirit, for Saul clearly loathed me incessantly with an animosity that was unappeasable. The error I committed in my trusting naivete was to assume that he really meant what he said in his logical wish that I triumph over his enemies. But he was enraged and demented each time that I did. You could have knocked me over with a feather again, therefore, when a delegation of his servants arrived to tell me that Saul's daughter loved me and that Saul wanted me to be his son-in-law. Such is the vanity of human wishes that in no time at all I was able to trick myself into believing he now approved of me. All is vanity, you know, all, all in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit. In almost no time at all, it became to me the most natural thing in the world that the king's daughter should be in love with me.

  In retrospect, I see that the more unusual phenomenon was that I took to combat as easily as I did, as though destined for it from birth I was never warlike as a child. People forget that Goliath was the first man I had ever killed. I had never even been to battle before. Reports that I was a man of war and a valiant man are but the lacework of hero worship; otherwise I would already have been on the scene in the trenches of Shochoh, wouldn't I? Saviors who capture the imagination traditionally arrive unheralded from obscure or pedestrian origins. That was true of me. Where would the climax be if I were merely one famed fighter who'd triumphed over another? Achilles' defeat of Hector is the weakest part of the Iliad--he was the odds-on favorite going in. Homer was really not much good at building a story, was he, but then, of course, Homer was stuck with the truth.

  Growing up in Bethlehem, I didn't care much for games of war or group activities of any kind. I was never the equal in enthusiasm of my nephews Joab, Abishai, and Asahel for the manly martial arts they indulged in for fun. Because I was the last born in a large family and they were the earliest offspring of my oldest sister, Zeruiah, we were near to each other in age. I was always more deft with the less highly regarded sling and preferred casting stones by myself--a solitary, romantic figure, I thought, meditating on my poetry and musical compositions as I did so, and simultaneously safeguarding my sheep. Joab and the others would spend carefree, exhausting hours lifting weights and doing push-ups and wind sprints, and smashing things with their makeshift hammers and axes in games of war against imaginary hordes of Philistines. I slung stones in far-off pastures; I composed my celebrated 'Air for the G String' one overcast, windy day while gazing as though blind at the graying, unshorn rumps of my small herd of sheep.

  My fame as a gifted young composer and as a prodigy with a cunning hand on the harp was, however, well deserved and widely known about the countryside w
hile I was in my teens. I don't think Joab valued that at all. Joab always was churlish on the subject of my songwriting. To Joab, all male singers are suspect, and male dancers too. I'm sure he thought I was queer. To me, on the other hand, the man that hath no music in himself is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and often I defiantly told that to Joab in just those words, even after I was king. I was also, as I may have hinted, fantastically good-looking as a young man, even pretty in a faintly feminine way. I doubt he liked that either. I never would give him or anyone else satisfaction by pretending to minimize the immense pleasure I took in my handsome bearing and winning smile, and my self-deprecating ways. Old women clucked over me, young wives and unmarried girls fixed longing stares upon me, and even occasional strange men traveling through would give a start of surprise upon catching sight of me and stare at me hard with inquiring expressions freighted heavily with something more insinuating than normal objective appreciation. I was a comely person and knew I made a good appearance. There was that neck of mine that has been compared to a tower of ivory, and my bushy locks that have been described as black as a raven's--and not just by me. I am not exaggerating when I tell you I often witnessed the most beautiful of my sheep bleat with desire and turn their heads to make wistful cow's eyes at me.

  To me, therefore, it shortly began to seem not at all extraordinary that the king's daughter Michal had fallen in love with me. Why shouldn't she? Wasn't my skin whiter than milk and more ruddy than rubies? Who was around that was better? Such is the innate capacity of vain men for self-delusion that I soon reasoned it equally plausible that Saul would so welcome my marriage to his daughter as to make things simple for me in the matter of the means to pay for her. It did not cross my mind that he might spy in the amorous inclination of his daughter an opportunity to set a snare for me by which he thought to make me fall by the hand of the Philistines.

  'Is the king displeased?' I inquired when informed that Michal loved me.

  'He wants you to be his son-in-law,' Abner answered concisely. Only afterward did I discern that the answer he gave was not to my question. Abner never proved easy for me.

  'I had the impression he didn't like me,' I said diffidently.

  'You're first on his list.'

  'Who am I?' I demurred, with appropriate humility. 'And what is my father's family in Israel, that I should be son-in-law to the king? I am lightly esteemed. '

  'Not by him.'

  'He really likes me? '

  'When you go out and fight with the Philistines, ' Abner reminded, skillfully begging the question again, 'you slay them with a great slaughter, and they flee from you. '

  'Does the king notice that? '

  'Is there salt in the sea ? '

  'He never says anything in praise of me. '

  ' You know he is shy. '

  'He gives me the feeling sometimes that he's afraid I am up to something.' I squirmed a moment.

  'What better way to pacify that fear than to make you a member of his house and keep you close to him? '

  'Would that really do it?'

  'It was my suggestion. '

  'Can one say no to a king?' I asked rhetorically.

  'Does a bull have tits? '

  'Does the wild ass bray when he hath grass? '

  'Have we got all day, David?' Abner never did appear much enchanted with me as a person.

  'I am a poor man,' I cautioned with proper modesty, getting right down to the gist of the matter. 'I have no money, I have no land. Even those few poor sheep I used to watch in the wilderness were my father Jesse's, and not my own.'

  Abner replied with amusement. 'Does the king need money? Does Saul suffer in want for land or sheep?'

  'Are the sands of the desert made of silver?' I replied brightly.

  'Or the weeds of the forest made of gold?' continued Abner, with that deficiency of emotion that rendered him always an enigma to me. 'Saul is the king and can always take as much money, land, and sheep as he chooses. No, the king desireth not any such dowry for his daughter. He wants but a token, some tangible earnest of good faith.'

  'What tangible earnest?' I asked warily.

  'A trifle, a pittance for the king's daughter that will not impoverish your father or you or leave you even temporarily strapped. Saul does not want wealth.'

  'With what will I pay for her, then?' I was now constrained to ask.

  'With a pound of flesh,' was the answer I got.

  'A pound of flesh?' I echoed with surprise.

  'Or ten or twelve ounces, whatever they all add up to,' Abner remarked in an offhanded way. He watched me levelly with hooded eyes.

  I had trouble figuring it out. 'What kind of flesh?'

  'Philistine flesh.'

  'I just don't get it,' I admitted frankly.

  'Foreskins,' said Abner with exaggerated patience, as though I had been privy to all conversations and was obtuse in overlooking a fundamental point. 'The king wants foreskins. Bring him but a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of his enemies, and you shall be his son-in-law. That's all that he wants. A hundred foreskins.'

  Foreskins? I nearly jumped for joy when I understood. A hundred Philistine foreskins? I could bring him a thousand!

  'I will give him two hundred!' I cried exultantly, in a mixture of boastful liberality and conservative good sense. 'When does he want them?'

  'The sooner the better, I should think,' Abner decided, 'from everyone's point of view. While she still has her looks and is young enough to bear children. Saul wants grandsons.'

  'I start at once.'

  'How long will it take? You can have what men you need.'

  You would have been charmed by the proficiency with which I began calculating aloud. Abner appeared spellbound. It would require, I projected fluently, a minimum of four able-bodied young Israelites to take hold of a live Philistine and wrest him motionless to the earth in a supine position, a fifth to lay hands on his privy parts and elevate his member with a firmness sufficient to overcome any spontaneous urges to flinch from the surgical procedure intended, and a sixth with a sure hand on the blade to trim the Philistine foreskin expertly from the glans of the penis. I have a mania for neatness in some matters that is almost anal. The last two men could contribute with their weight to the total force necessary to hold the unconsenting subject pinned in place on the ground. I was not counting on voluntary compliance. Allowing about an hour, on average, to locate and seize each Philistine for circumcision, and working with four squads of six men taking their daylight nourishment on the prowl rather than breaking for lunch, I estimated hopefully that we could gather daily--

  Abner abruptly shook free from the trance in which he had been listening to me. 'David, David,' he interrupted. He rolled his eyes skyward and weakly raised a hand, requesting forbearance. 'I think you may be missing the underlying goal of this exploit. We want you to kill the Philistines, not convert them. We don't care if you bring back the whole prick.'

  Again I found myself overjoyed, and nearly whooped out my feelings in a squeal of rapturous hallelujahs. I was able to perceive that killing the Philistines and bringing back the whole prick would facilitate my task considerably.

  But who would believe it? Who would figure for even one second that someone as artless as Saul could construct so diabolic a snare to secure by the hand of the Philistines the downfall of the man who had begun to assume in his disordered brain the sacred aura of the being picked by God to replace him? Not I for one not by a long shot, not until the nefarious details of the Machiavellian scheme were unfolded to me by Jonathan long afterward and then confirmed by my wife Michal the night she entreated me in near hysterics to get my ass out the window fast if I was interested in saving it.

  And not my bluff nephew Joab, for another, who leaped at the chance when I invited him to assist me as my captain of twenty-four. Even back then, hale Joab desired nothing better than to charge into strife against any adversary, and he hardly ever troubled himself with reasons wh
y. It was blunt Joab who one spring, at that time when kings again went forth to battle, asked my approval to march with six hundred men and Abishai up through Turkey into the Crimea to conquer and occupy Russia and Asia first and then all of the rest of Europe as far northward as Scandinavia and as far to the west as Iberia and the British Isles, even unto the Irish Republic.

  'We go to war in the spring, after our harvests are in,' was the first of the objections I raised with Joab. 'They go to war in autumn, after their harvests are in. How could we get together?'

  'We can leave in the spring when our harvests are in and fall upon them in the summer before their harvests are in,' Joab answered plainly.

  'What would you eat if you fall upon them in the summer and don't have the grain of their threshing floors to live on?'

  'We could bring along dried figs,' he replied. 'In Scandinavia we could live on herring.'

  Perhaps I should have given more consideration to his grand proposal, instead of renewing my campaign against the Ammonites in Jordan and the Syrians to the north. What a name I would have for thyself now! Who needed so much sand and rock? I didn't have enough?

  It's no puzzle to me any longer that Saul looked so disappointed at the completion of my labor, when I reappeared before him in Gibeah in excellent health and presented the contents of my basket to him in full tale. I was worried initially that he was discontented with the quality of the foreskins or of the Philistine pricks, but I had alerted Joab to leave behind any that were the least bit deficient in size or symmetry, and I had witnessed him sorting through our daily catch diligently. Not until we were half a day's march out of Gibeah had I leaked a word to Joab or anyone else about the peculiar objectives of the quest upon which we were embarked. My information was electrifying.