God Knows

  Philistine doctrine back then insisted that madness was contagious, and subsequent scientific studies have proved this primitive superstition largely correct.

  Following up my initial advantage of surprise, I pulled out all the stops. Plunging toward the flabbergasted monarch, I dropped to one knee, grasped his hand in one of mine, and spread my other over my chest in a manner denoting unbearably deep feeling, and I opened wide my jaws as though to go further with my song. Achish pulled back from me as though I were leprous. He bounded out of his throne with a yelp, and I followed as he retreated backward in horror. Poor Achish. I rolled my eyes about full circle in their sockets and regaled him with my very admirable imitation of a Jewish laughing hyena. In all ways I could think of I feigned myself mad in their hands. I scrabbled at the doors of the gate, making canine epileptic noises, and I let my spittle fall down all over my beard. Achish squealed and whimpered in panic each time I made a motion toward him with my arms outspread, as though I were ambitious to afflict him fatally with something catching. He glared wildly at the men who had brought me to him.

  'Lo, you see the man is mad!' he berated them, screaming. 'Wherefore then have you brought him to me? I am king of Gath. Have I need of more madmen that you have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence? Shall this fellow come to my house? Better he should bring me boils, palsy. Get him out, put him out quickly lest he cast his plague upon all our houses.'

  I did better than Hamlet with my madness. I saved my life. All he did was carry on precociously and divert attention from the fact that nothing much believable goes on in the play between the second act and the last.

  They drove me from the palace and out the gate of the city, beating and prodding me from a hygienic distance with long staves and with the hinder end of their spears.

  'Where shall I go?' I bewailed them. 'Saul seeks my life.'

  'Try Gaza,' one of them advised conspiratorially, 'or even Askelon. But tell it not in Gaza that we put you out. And publish it not in the streets of Askelon. Maybe they will let you in. In Askelon, madmen do not stand out.'

  I elected not to go to Gaza or Askelon, but to wend my way back into the remote places of Judah and eventually to make my lair in the cave Adullam. The choice proved a good one ultimately.

  But that night I bedded down alone again, in another forsaken place, after I had walked dispiritedly as far from the city as I could go before I tired. I sat myself down on a fallen tree beside a small pool in a wood near the fork in the road. I hung my harp on a willow and wept when I remembered Gibeah, recalled my auspicious beginning and all of the good things in the offing that now seemed out of reach forever. I had never in my life been in lower mood than I was that evening. I wondered where in the world I could go. Adam out of Eden had a more coherent sense of direction than I did and was much better off.

  With fresh water from the pond, I washed the spittle from my beard with my bare hands and wiped my face with the sleeve of my dirty cloak, and that's another thing that pisses me off about that stupid statue of Michelangelo's in Florence that's supposed to be me: he's got me beardless, clean-shaven, without a hair on my face--and not only that, he's got me standing there in public stark naked, with that uncircumcised prick! If that Michelangelo Buonarroti had possessed even the dimmest idea of how we Jews felt about nudity then, he never would have put me up there on that pedestal out in the open with my schlong hanging down, and with that homely, funny foreskin no self-respecting Jew would let himself be caught dead with. We're not even allowed to go up by steps to the altar, that our nakedness be not discovered thereon. Besides, I was already much too busy when I was that age; I never had time like his David did to stand around all day for centuries doing nothing, with just a sling on my shoulders and no clothes on, not even a loincloth to hide my nakedness, just waiting for something interesting to show up. It may be a good piece of work, taken all in all, but it just isn't me. And besides, if Bathsheba was telling me the truth, I have, or did have, a much bigger dick than he does, even without the funny foreskin. Foreskins are always so funny-looking I'm surprised anyone keeps them. That's the real reason we circumcise; we like to look nice. There's nothing mysterious about it. The statue of me by Donatello in Florence is even worse--a scandal, a sacrilege--but at least they've got that one off the beaten track in the Bargello, where no one important ever goes.

  No, what we have from Michelangelo, I'm afraid, is not David from Bethlehem in Judah but a Florentine fag's idea of what a handsome Israelite youth might look like if he were a naked Greek catamite instead of the hardy, ruddy-faced shepherd boy who walked to Shochoh with a carriage of provisions for his three brothers that day and stayed to beat down the detestable boasting of the Philistine giant Goliath.

  And that was another melancholy thought crossing my mind that night outside Gath and plaguing me further with a deep sense of unfairness. This was a hell of an unjust spot for the guy who had killed Goliath to find himself in!

  Eventually, I slept, and my lashes were stuck together with tears I shed while I slumbered. When I awoke, my head was filled with dew and my locks with the drops of the earth. At once I felt worse. Watching the morn in russet mantle clad creep o'er the hills, I felt my heart die within me as I realized suddenly that just about no one ever mentioned Goliath anymore, neither Philistine nor Israelite, and I began to wonder if the day of my killing him had ever really taken place.

  8 In the Cave of Adullam

  In the cave of Adullam in the outskirts of Judah above the plain of the Philistines, where I climbed by myself to hide out for a while after coming back up from Gath, my fortunes began to take their turn for the better. It was no fun at the start, and the improvement did not occur overnight. I slept on the ground in a worn cloak amid menacing black things changing shape in the darkness, and pondered the phenomenon that man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. I watched fireflies for diversion.

  As knowledge of my lurking place leaked out and spread, people, to my surprise, began laboring their way up through the steep and barren rock-strewn hills to enlist in my service. They trudged in alone or in groups of two or three, some days faster than I could keep count, arriving to join up with me in an ever-swelling stream. And such people you wouldn't believe! Riffraff. Scum. Ne'er-do-wells. Thugs and ruffians. Everyone that was in distress, and everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, all gathered themselves unto me, and I became a captain over them. It began to look as though every deadbeat, misfit, rascal, and freebooter in the land was ambitious to throw in with me. I was soon posting sentinels to beat back all but the most formidable and battle-hardened. Those I let stay were durable, fearless, and experienced, for life as fugitive outlaws in the wildernesses of Judah through which we were soon set to roam is not for the timid or the weak or for people who, like all my sons, were spoiled by easy circumstances.

  Joab was one of the first to join up with me. He came for the adventure, bringing two more of my nephews, his brothers Abishai and Asahel, with him. The rest of my family sped to me for their lives. Fearing a bloodbath from Saul, all of my brethren and all of the others in my father's house came down hither to me as fast as they could make it when they heard of the stronghold I was establishing in the holes in the walls of the caves of Adullam. Everything left behind was confiscated. I took them in, of course, even my ratty brothers, who were all, I was gratified to observe with the passage of time, destined to lead obscure lives that brought them to the attention of nobody. There were soon with me about four hundred men. We knew the countryside and were fleet of foot. One of the first things I did was put my mother and father out of the way. I traveled west to Engedi and thence across the Dead Sea to Mizpeh in Moab to see if I could place them there with the king for safety, and he did allow them to come forth and dwell with him. The old family tie through my paternal great-grandmother, Ruth the Moabitess, paid off, and I was able to discharge my filial obligations to my parents with good conscience. My fath
er now was doddering with old age, and Moab was as good a nursing home as any in which to divest myself of him and my mother.

  As the numbers of my men increased, we made for ourselves the dens which are still found in the mountains and caves and strongholds. In these early stages, Fineberg's law operated greatly to my advantage in my apprehensions about Saul and my foreboding that sooner or later he would set out with thousands to take me. Fineberg's law held that if he could see me where I was hiding, I could see him coming and therefore have time to take whatever steps I deemed appropriate. I could pack and get out of his way. And if the terrain into which he had confined us was hard, bleak, and forbidding, it was also relatively inaccessible and was impregnable to frontal assault and invulnerable to siege. We could simply circle off to the side away from him and give him the slip each time he advanced with his superior numbers. And that's pretty much the way it worked out each time he did come down into the wilderness of Engedi, into the wilderness of Maon, and into the wilderness of Ziph. I was able to elude him easily and there were those two times I had him lying on the ground asleep before me and could have killed him. I made sure he knew it, too.

  'Is this thy voice, my son David?' he asked each time, blinking and squinting as though smarting with pain, and wept when he understood I had spared him.

  Engedi was funny because Saul traipsed right into the cave in which we were hiding and did not detect our presence. Something similarly farfetched happened to Odysseus with the Cyclops, didn't it? The one time Saul did have us nearly encompassed in the wilderness of Maon, the Philistines obligingly came to my rescue by putting pressure on him elsewhere and compelled him to withdraw to resist them. That was not, you know, the only time that Philistine and I cooperated to the advantage of both. In fact, my only compunction when I went with King Achish to fight for the Philistines against Saul at Gilboa was that I had no compunction. This caused me often to wonder about myself. My dilemma, in retrospect, in going to fight against Saul and my own people is that I had no dilemma. Who asked them to remain obedient to Saul when they already knew he was such a fucking lunatic? I had no dilemma with Uriah, either. Bathsheba was pregnant, he obstinately declined to sleep with her and unwittingly disguise her infidelity, I sent him back to be killed. I gave him two chances, didn't I? Did I kill Uriah to avoid a scandal or because I already had settled in my soul that I wanted his wife? God knows. For not only is the heart deceitful in all things, it is also desperately wicked. Even mine. This danger in being a king is that after a while you begin to believe you really are one.

  Fineberg, you know, is capricious, and Fineberg's law ceased operating to my benefit as the size of my private army grew larger. If the craggy region in which we dwelt provided a natural fortress, it was also sufficiently inhospitable to deny the formidable force that developed around me the comforts and luxuries that might have induced us to remain. It was no kind of life. Thus, the day inevitably dawned when it was expedient to roll up our belongings and penetrate farther into Judah from the boundary of the Philistines. We made the move with considerable vim and some trepidation. Faint heart never fucked a cook. Off we went from Adullam to a new site in the forest of Hareth. And next, after due discussion and deliberation, we took our first dynamic step and embarked upon a bold martial venture against a troop of Philistines who had stormed into the Judean town of Keilah and were pillaging the threshing floors.

  It was just before we ventured to Keilah that I talked to God for the first time. And He answered. He helped me decide. Back then, He always answered me, and I had no need for a Samuel or a Nathan. I could speak for myself. I was on even better terms with my God, back then, than they ever were. No wonder I grew proud. I had to learn later that pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

  Abiathar, sole survivor of the horrendous massacre of the priests and their households, fled down to me then, holding the sacred ephod of his dead father, high priest at Nob, in his hand. He brought news of the carnage. It dumbfounds me still that others went on serving Saul after that, and that he was always able to muster his three thousand to chase me. Because he was a king? What is a king? I have been a king for forty years and still don't know why people rejoiced to see me, felt sanctified by a word or look from me, why my soldiers cared enough about my life to risk their own to preserve me. I took Abiathar in because his father had died praising me.

  'Who is so faithful as David among all thy servants?' his father had said defiantly, defending me to Saul.

  To which Saul decreed, 'Thou shalt surely die.'

  'Abide thou with me, fear not,' I hastened to assure the young Abiathar, who looked like a ghost and was quailing with fright. 'For he that seeketh thy life seeketh my life. With me thou shalt be shielded. I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.'

  I have kept that promise and want to make certain that my old friend will be secure after I'm gone. Adonijah is no problem, for Abiathar, naive and orthodox as always, is helpful toward Adonijah and endorses his idea for a big outdoor luncheon on the hill. Bathsheba and Solomon leave me in doubt.

  'Be charitable,' I observe to the former, 'to those who are old and well stricken with age, like Abiathar. Someday, you know, you too will be old.'

  'Abiathar?' my blonde Bathsheba replies vaguely, and allows the substance of my thought to go right by her while fingering sensuously one of the gold hoop earrings she is wearing.

  Solomon is harder work, because he doesn't simulate.

  'Shlomo, please pay very close attention to what I'm about to say to you. I have great concern for my priest Abiathar.' I find myself pausing with a frown. My son the prince is conscientiously indenting even these prefatory remarks of mine in his tablet of clay. 'When I am dead and buried--'

  'May you live forever,' he breaks in.

  '--it will probably fall to your brother Adonijah to be king.'

  'He is only my half brother,' Solomon is punctilious in reminding me.

  'Should anything unforeseen betide Adonijah to prevent his becoming king--'

  'Yes?' says Solomon, looking up quickly.

  '--I would want you to follow to the letter what I say now about Abiathar.'

  'What could happen to Adonijah to prevent him from becoming king?'

  'We are here now to talk about Abiathar,' I reprove him. And then I am distracted again by his busyness with his stylus. 'Solomon, give me the answer to something that intrigues me. Why do you still write in clay when almost everybody else now uses papyrus?'

  'I think I'm getting smart,' he says with a nuance of vanity.

  'How are you getting smart?'

  'Paper rots in our wet weather and the ink always begins to run.'

  Maybe he is getting smart. I nod sadly. 'I worry so much already about all of my scrolls,' I admit. 'Sooner or later they will spoil, and no one will ever be able to read a word about me after I'm gone. I wish I had taken my words down in clay.'

  'I take your words down in clay.'

  'I mean all of my words, even those I say to other people, especially those I've written. My proverbs and my psalms and my other songs.'

  'Put your scrolls in a cave at Engedi at the Dead Sea,' Solomon tells me with a certitude bordering on presumption.

  'What are you talking about?' I bridle.

  'If you wish to preserve them. That will do it.'

  'Yeah-yeah.'

  'They'll last there.'

  'Never mind.'

  'I mean it,' Solomon insists.

  'Have it your way.'

  'The air is without moisture at the Dead Sea,' Solomon goes on, 'and your scrolls will last for years if you store them carefully in one of the caves at Engedi.'

  'Stop talking like a fool,' I chastise him when I've had more than I can take. 'How can paper last for years? I was telling you. ...'

  'Abiathar,' he reads back, in reminder.

  'Has been my friend almost all my life.' I am annoyed with myself for having allowed him to waste my time.
'Through thick and through thin. I want to be at peace concerning him. No matter what ensues after I have given up the ghost, I wish Abiathar to be held guiltless of all things, by you and all others. Do you understand my meaning?'

  Solomon nods gravely, as though impressed deeply by the responsibility with which I have just entrusted him. 'I understand your meaning.'

  'What is my meaning?'

  'You do not want me to let his hoar head go down in peace to the grave, right?' He is consulting his writing for verification.

  Oy vey, I groan silently, and fortify myself with a deep breath. 'No, no, no, no, no!' I fairly scream at him. 'Are you moronic or something? Can't you get even one thing right?'

  Solomon is unshaken by my outburst. 'You do want me to kill him, don't you?'

  'No, Shlomo,' I correct him with a sigh. 'I don't want you to kill him. There is a difference. Don't you know what guiltless means?'

  'No.'

  'No?' My train of thought, so to speak, is stopped in its track. 'You don't know what guiltless means?'

  'No,' says Solomon.

  'Can you figure it out?'

  'Hoar head?' he guesses.

  'Oh, shit. No, Solomon. Are you sure you are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone? It will take much to persuade me.'

  'I don't know what that means,' he answers.

  'Does the apple ever fall far from the tree? '

  'I don't know what that means either. '

  'Your mother tells me you say that a lot.'

  'I heard it from you. '

  'I never said it until I heard it from you.'

  'I can look it up.'

  'Look everything up,' I direct him emphatically, 'because you've got everything I've been telling you about Abiathar confused with Joab and Shimei. '

  'Shimei?' He looks blank.

  'You forgot already about Shimei?' I am hurt and indignant. 'I never told you about Shimei?' I am appalled that he shakes his head. 'You really don't know about Shimei? How can that be? How he cursed me and threw filth at me when I was running away from Jerusalem, and how he groveled in the dirt at my feet when I came back triumphant after putting down the rebellion of Absalom? You never heard about Shimei and the rotten things he did to me? Sure I told you about Shimei. I know I told you about Shimei. What the goddamn hell's the matter with you anyway? '