God Knows

  I regarded him for a moment with my mouth agape. 'I sent her to you.'

  'You ought not to have done that,' he admonished me gently.

  'You told me to.'

  'And she certainly should not have allowed herself to be alone with me in my chamber.'

  'You sent away your servants.'

  'She did not cry out, did she? We were in the city, weren't we? She has to cry out. Otherwise she is just as much to blame as I am and can be stoned to death.'

  'Who would have come to aid her? You're the king's son.'

  'That makes no difference,' he rejoined. 'In the city she has to cry out.'

  'It's all her fault?'

  'Why are you getting so upset?' Amnon said placidly. 'Someday I'll be king, and none of this will make any difference, will it?'

  'The girl is shamed, Amnon,' I tried to impress upon him, 'and won't stop weeping. She won't come out of the house.'

  Amnon shrugged. 'If I'm going to have tQ worry about every girl who's shamed, I might never rape another one.'

  'Did you have to throw her out afterward?'

  'She disgusted me, Father. What else was I to do? The hatred with which I hated her afterward was much greater than the love with which I had loved her, so I wanted her out of my presence as quickly as possible. I could not bear her an instant longer. Don't you often feel that way about women after you've lain with them?'

  'Never,' I told him and, reflecting, added, 'except sometimes when they want to talk a lot.'

  'With me it's more than that,' he admitted introspectively. 'I almost always do. That's the only part of this whole thing that really troubles me. I may have a problem. I tend to feel revulsion for women as soon as I finish having sex with them. Why are you staring at me like that?'

  'I feel you may be in for a headache when you do become king,' I was obliged to inform him. 'I'm going to leave you a very big harem. You may not be able to make it there. You'll have a house full of women who will think of themselves as your wives and sweethearts and who, you tell me, will fill you with disgust. How will you stand it? It's like living inside a cage full of birds. Your harem will be hell. It's never much good at best. Yours will be a nightmare.'

  'I worry about that,' he confided pensively. 'I wonder if maybe deep down inside me there isn't something wrong with me, something mysterious, as with you and Jonathan.'

  I stared at him coldly. 'And just what in hell do you mean by that?'

  'Well, you know,' he said with a trace of impatience. 'I don't see why you're so touchy about it. I'm not the only one who talks about it, you know.'

  'About what?' I demanded. I was quivering with outrage.

  'About that friendship you had with Jonathan,' he answered, unruffled. 'It's not exactly a secret, you know. Even you come right out and talk about it in that poem of yours. Don't you say that you enjoyed his love more than you did the love of women?'

  'I say no such thing,' I disagreed violently. It was thoroughly upsetting to find that all of a sudden I was the one on the defensive. 'What I do say,' I explained with precision, 'is that his love to me was passing the love of women, not more enjoyable, which is a different thing entirely.'

  Says you, is what he seemed to be signifying as he regarded me with a look of skepticism. 'Where's the difference?'

  'I was exalting friendship,' I labored on to elucidate. 'And when you take into account that the only women I'd known up till then were Michal, Abigail, and Ahinoam, it's not such a tall claim, is it?'

  'You've heard the stories, haven't you?'

  'They're apocryphal. Read it again, read it more closely. All I was trying to say was that Jonathan had been a good friend and was as close to me as a brother. That's all.'

  'Like Absalom to me?' asked Amnon with a smirk, smoothing the sleeves of his tunic as though he were restless to leave.

  'Exactly.' I felt on a firmer footing now that we were back on the primary subject of our discussion. Jonathan and me--the very idea that this son of mine should throw it up to me now! 'Yes, just like Absalom and you. Has thy brother Absalom spoken to you?'

  'My brother Absalom?' It seemed to me he was toying with me in his affected lassitude. 'About what?'

  'His sister Tamar.'

  'Why should he? My brother Absalom has spoken nothing to me either good or bad.'

  'He does not seem wroth?'

  'Why should he seem wroth?' said Amnon. 'Who cares so much about a sister?'

  Simeon and Levi, was an answer I might have given had I thought of it, those two ferocious headstrong sons of Jacob and Leah, who avenged the defilement of their sister Dinah by killing the lovesick prince of Shechem and all the other males in his city. Simeon and Levi fell upon the city boldly with their swords when the time was ripe, while the men of Shechem were still sore from the acts of group circumcision to which they had submitted as part of the spurious nuptial agreement the two had proposed in order to render the men there unfit to defend themselves. They slew them all and spared neither the prince nor his father. And poor old patriarch Jacob was anything but pleased by the dangers they had wrought. 'Ye have troubled me to make me stink among the inhabitants of the land,' he berated Simeon and-Levi furiously, and ordered the tents struck and the cattle gathered and the earrings that were in their ears and their idols of strange gods buried under the oak that is in Shechem in preparation for the flight he foresaw would now be necessary. 'I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and slay me. And I shall be destroyed, I and my house.'

  So it happened that Jacob, my respected, complicated, overburdened ancestor, was forced again to flee for his life, but not, as I was, from a son, although he'd fled much earlier from his brother Esau, whose blessing he'd filched and whose birthright he'd bought for a mess of red pottage when Esau was back from hunting and so faint from hunger he thought he might die.

  Absalom bided his time. No doubt I should have been more severe with Amnon. Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. At least that was true of Absalom. With a patience, guile, * and self-discipline for which no one who knew him would have given him credit, he smiled and smiled for two full years and still was a villain. He did nothing. But in his heart Absalom hated Amnon, because he had forced his sister Tamar. And now I know he also hated me. He knew I loved him. He must have known I loved him, and he must have detested me all the more because he saw I doted on him slavishly. He must have known from the way I finally welcomed him into my presence after his long banishment. Maybe I'd kept him away too long: three years in Geshur, two here in Jerusalem, without letting him see my face. Maybe five years apart was much too long.

  I wonder what he really had in mind by asking me, along with all his brothers, to the sheepshearing celebration to which he lured Amnon into fatal ambush. I quail from thinking about the contingency plans he might have put into operation had I not declined. The first reports of slaughter that came howling into the city were horrifying: voices screeched hysterically of Absalom's having butchered all my princes, all of his brothers, all of my sons. My senses failed me. I could not breathe. People swooned in the streets of the city. Then my other sons began arriving in a disorderly rush with the grisly tidings that the enormous enmity of my son Absalom had centered only upon Amnon. Believe it or not, in contrast to those first overwhelming and incredible rumors of mass fratricide, that was good news.

  It was only for Amnon that Absalom had laid so carefully his plans for reprisal, and had commanded his servants in stealth, saying, 'Mark ye now when Amnon's heart is merry with wine, and when I say unto you, "Smite Amnon," then kill him. Fear not. Be courageous, and be valiant. Have I not commanded you?'

  And at the opportune moment, Absalom commanded them, 'Smite Amnon!' And they smote Amnon.

  So Amnon died in his cups and did not have the time even to attempt to know why. And Absalom fled to Geshur, where his grandfather was king, and was there three years. I did n
ot pursue, and I did not send to have this fugitive returned. A request for his extradition would undoubtedly have been honored, for Geshur is in Syria and all Syria was in vassalage to me. I let him stay, I let him live. But in one fell swoop I had lost them both, in one ghastly moment at a normal sheepshearing party. For Amnon I was soon comforted, seeing he was dead, but my soul longed to go forth unto Absalom. Joab knew. Every day, I mourned this loss of my handsome, surviving, splendid boy of whom I had always been so irrepressibly admiring. I worried about him. I lived in morbid dread I might never see him again.

  Joab perceived that my heart was toward Absalom, and eventually he took the bull by the horns. I did not try to hide that I wanted him near. But the law, I fretted-- the law. How could I pardon the one of my sons who had murdered another, bring back as my successor the youth who had killed the older brother standing before him as heir? Trust in Joab to demonstrate how easily it could be done.

  He began with the aid of the wise woman of Tekoah, sending her in first to break the ice and pave the way for the action he himself wished to advocate. He had her come to me as a widow costumed in mourning apparel. The wise woman of Tekoah fell on her face on the ground when she entered and did obeisance, then besought me with a convincing, woeful story purporting to be true which turned out in the end to be but another irritating parable.

  'Help, O king,' she said.

  And I said unto her sympathetically, 'What aileth thee?'

  And she commenced her sober charade by answering, 'I am indeed a widow woman, and mine husband is dead. And thy handmaid had two sons, and they two strove together in the field, and the one smote the other and slew him. And behold, the whole family is risen against me. They want me to deliver the one that lives, that they may kill him, for the life of his brother whom he slew and is already dead. And so they shall quench my one coal which is left, and shall not leave to my husband neither name nor remainder upon the earth. Will that bring my slain one back to life?'

  I saw the rightness on her side and was disposed to be compassionate. 'Go to thine house,' I said, 'and I will give charge concerning thee. Whosoever saith aught unto thee, bring him to me, and he shall not touch thee anymore.'

  Then said she, 'The people have made me afraid. I pray thee, let the king remember the Lord thy God, that thou wouldest not suffer the revengers of blood to destroy anymore, lest they destroy my son.'

  And I promised, 'As the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of thy son fall to the earth.'

  Then the woman continued resolutely, as though bent on obtaining more. 'Let thy handmaid, I pray thee, speak further unto my lord the king.'

  How could I refuse? 'Say on.'

  And the woman said, 'The king doth speak this thing as one which is faulty. Wherefore then doth the king not fetch home again his own banished son?' There was a momentary flicker of fear on her face when she heard my startled gasp. 'For we must needs die,' she went on hastily, as though to forestall any anger I might show at this incredible presumption, 'and are as water spilt upon the ground. Neither doth God owe respect to any person. Yet see, as with me, how He doth devise means, that a father's banished son be not expelled from him forevermore.' And the woman concluded, 'Let my lord the king now speak.'

  'Who put you up to this?' were the words with which I finally responded, and that she not be afraid, assured her I intended no harm. 'Hide not from me, I pray thee, the thing that I shall ask thee. Is not the hand of Joab with thee in all this?'

  And the wise woman of Tekoah, who indeed was wise enough to use flattery skillfully, replied as follows, 'As thy soul liveth, my lord the king is wise, according to the wisdom of an angel of God, to know all things that are in the earth. For thy servant Joab, he bade me, and he put all these words in the mouth of thine handmaid.'

  'Behold now,' I said as I released her, 'tell Joab you have done this thing, and bring him to me. By the way, just for my personal curiosity, you don't really have a son who slew another, do you?'

  'No, my lord, I do not. And I am no widow.'

  'I'm beginning to catch on.'

  With Joab himself I succumbed willingly to arguments from him that I hoped from the start would prove unanswerable. I was more grateful than I can describe for his realistic universal precept that no laws are legitimate and that, in consequence, there is no such thing as crime. And I could dispute with him no further after he propounded for me the celebrated golden rule upon which the civilized world turns to this day:

  'Always do unto others what is best for you.'

  Any possible further resistance by me was swept away. 'Go therefore,' I yielded magnanimously, as though I were the one doing him the favor, 'bring the young man Absalom home again.'

  And then Joab did a most surprising thing, which I have never forgotten and for which, perhaps, he has never forgiven himself. He fell to the ground on his face, and bowed himself and thanked me, even unto calling himself my servant and me his lord and king. All this from Joab? To this day I don't know what came over him. I was so astonished by such open and reverential submission from him that I came near weeping. We did a lot of weeping back then.

  'Today,' Joab professed, in this most unlikely outpouring of emotion, 'thy servant knoweth that I have found grace in thy sight, my lord, O king, in that the king hath fulfilled the request of his servant.'

  It took me a minute to recover from my surprise. 'But let him,' I directed, 'turn to his own house and let him not see my face. And let him know to take care, for he will be abhorred by the people.'

  So Joab arose and went to Geshur, and brought Absalom to Jerusalem. Only later, when I was slouching in flight from Jerusalem toward the Jordan, did it cross my mind that Joab's motives in making this supplication were something other than humane. Suspicions, once born, are never put to rest, and I am inclined to doubt him still. Absalom may have blown it all with the barley field.

  So after three years in exile, Absalom returned to his own house and did not see my face for two more. And to my amazement, he was anything but abhorred for having smitten his brother. In all Israel, in fact, there was soon none to be so much praised as Absalom. He was acclaimed for his beauty. I had joy from him. And unto Absalom there were born three sons--my grandsons, naturally--and one daughter, whom he had named Tamar, after her ruined dishonored aunt, my daughter. And she was a girl of a fair countenance, but that did not help her, for she soon lost her father in war anyway. Women named Tamar do not fare well in the Bible, do they? The first was that Canaanite woman who was widowed twice, the second time by her husband Onan, who sooner spilled his seed on the ground lest he give child to the former wife of his deceased brother and continue his brother's line, wherefore the Lord slew him. She had to adopt the attire of a prostitute, with her face covered with a veil, to seduce Judah, her father-in-law, into performing the levirate marriage to which she was entitled and into getting her with the child due her by a member of her dead husband's family. The second Tamar was my Tamar, who had the ill fortune to be raped by her half brother Amnon. And this little Tamar lost her father in the battle of the wood of Ephraim and was never heard from again.

  So Absalom, her father, dwelt in Jerusalem two full years and saw not my face or came into the king's palace even once. I basked in the reflected popularity I heard he was enjoying. I wanted so much to see his face, and his beautiful head of hair that was the wonder of all who beheld him, so long and full and luxuriant it was and as black and shiny as tar. I felt deliciously and maliciously vindicated each time I was told that he desired to come to me. Perversely and self-righteously, I forbade it, and felt oddly virtuous in frustrating us both. Quick-tempered Absalom was intractable at the end of those two years and ready to explode. Therefore, he sent for Joab to have him come to me to obtain full amnesty on his behalf. But Joab ignored his summons. When Absalom sent a second time, Joab still would not come. Therefore, Absalom said unto his servants, 'See, Joab's field is near mine, and he hath barley there. Go and set it on fire.'

  Then Jo
ab arose and came to Absalom unto his house and said, 'Wherefore have thy servants set my field on fire?'

  And plucky Absalom, without batting an eye, replied unto my general, 'Behold, I sent unto thee, saying, "Come hither," and you would not come. Behold, I will set all your fields on fire if you do not come when I call you.'

  'What is it that you want?' Joab was stymied. He knew his hands were tied.

  'Go to the king, my father,' Absalom ordered him, 'and speak for me that he therefore may allow me to see his face. Am I a stranger to him? Say to him wherefore am I come from Geshur if I am not to be his son again? Better it would have been for me to be there still. And tell him if there be any iniquity in me, let him kill me. Otherwise let me see his face.'

  By now it was beginning to appear that my son Absalom as desperately wanted to see my face as I did to see his, and would do everything in his power to effect that desired reunion. I listened with a great warm glow as I heard Joab indignantly recount what had taken place. It was good to see my eminent general fuming. I had never beheld him so balked, overwrought, and exasperated.

  'He vows to set fire to all my fields,' announced my captain and chief over all my host. I had to grin and laugh out loud. 'Wherefore did you bring him home from Geshur if you won't let him see your face? I pray, let there be peace between him and thee. What's the point? It had been better for all of us for him to have been there still rather than have strife now between us three.'

  Now, as you know, I did say yes.

  Absalom did not toady when I had him brought to me. He strode in with a swagger, as though he were the injured party, and, with no sound or look of gratitude or apology, bowed himself on his face to the ground before me. I relished his air of confidence and pride. I held his shoulders when he arose and I enfolded him in my arms with a sob. And I kissed him. I was in tears again. He did not kiss me.

  12 Snake in the Grass

  In the months that followed, I showered honors and presents upon him, and it came to pass shortly after we were reconciled that Absalom prepared him chariots and horses, and fifty men to run before him. Adonijah does that now. Absalom was the talk of the city. He was like a brilliant young god in whom the people rejoiced. And I took shameless vicarious pleasure in the adulation he received and in the energy he displayed with such graceful self-assurance. He justified my self-conceit by the dedication with which he pitched in to help with the tedious business of government, applying himself with an industry and a civic zeal never exerted by any of my other sons, before or since. He was, I honored us both, a chip off the old block.