'Where did you learn how to do things like that?' I asked in my innocence.
'Some of my earliest girlfriends were whores.'
There is nothing at all like jealousy in Bathsheba now if she is present while Abishag is ministering to me. Nor ever any of that spontaneous vim with which Sarah, childless, volunteered her servant girl to Abraham for the propagation of his offspring and rooted them both on to fruition from without the tent. A giving nature is not Bathsheba's. A taking nature is. This wife of mine is proud of that and so am I. When one is infatuated, faults are endearing that in others would be heinous. Someone else might wish to strike her dead for her dispassionate attitude toward me. Someone else would not understand her as I do, or treasure her as fully.
'Are you feeling warmer today?' is just about as much as she can bring herself to say about my enfeebled condition. 'You seem to be getting thinner. I don't think anything she can do is going to help. What have you said about that feast those people want to give? Is there anything new? What's it all for, anyway?'
This is a different woman from the feverishly possessive one I took into my palace. I wish she were still as jealous. In keeping with custom, Bathsheba offered the daintiest of her servant girls for me to lie with and keep as a concubine when she settled in, but added, with an aspect of serious purpose and grim determination, that she would cut my balls off if I accepted.
'I'm not going to have her gloating at me.'
I was equally pleased each time she was successful in intercepting me on my way past her apartment in search of someone different in my harem who might capture my fancy for the moment. Arms akimbo, gorgeous head cocked, she would bring me to a halt at her doorway with a despotic voice that compelled respect.
'And just where do you think you're going?' she was likely to demand. 'You come in here right this minute. Get your skirt up.'
And there we would be once more in a matter of seconds, at it again on her mattress with our skirts up around our necks in thrashing copulation, making the frenzied beast with two backs.
Now she gives tips to Abishag. When she watched me put my hand on Abishag, I spied a flicker of attention move through her, and she leaned an inch nearer to stare with a keener intentness than she had shown in either me or my virginal consort before. In a dull, sleepy voice, she has since occasionally questioned the girl briefly about her thoughts and her past to satisfy some faint glimmer of curiosity.
Abishag is in awe of Bathsheba and regards her at all times with the wide-open, respectful gaze of idolatry befitting a legend. She is so dark, she answers, because of the sun, for she was made by her mother to keep the vineyards of the family in her home in Shunem. More than anything, she wishes to be pleasing to everyone here and tries as hard as she can to be liked by all. Trying hard to be pleasing to others, my wife dryly remarks without raising her cheek from her hand, is not the best way to succeed in becoming so.
'What do you want with an old woman like me,' were the words with which Bathsheba refused me the last time I propositioned her, 'when you have a pretty girl like her?'
For as long as I've known her, she has been fashioning sequences of plans too convoluted to materialize and timetables for achievement too far-reaching to be met. Definitely, she lacks the discipline of mind needed to impose some consistency on the lies she tells. I have a better memory for her duplicities than she has. Bathsheba lied about everything and told the truth about everything. Her lily-white face would flood a vivid scarlet whenever I caught her in one of those ruinous discrepancies into which I would guilefully conduct her; and then, inevitably, she would laugh from her whole torso, without trace of misgiving, reminding me again in that impenitent and admirable way of the image I keep of Abraham's feisty Sarah, although Bathsheba has never been as plucky or as good-natured.
Sarah had much the better spirit. Sarah, barren, gave Hagar to Abraham for procreation. Hagar, with child, despised her mistress and flaunted her pregnancy over her. She picked the wrong party. Sarah flew upon the uppity servant girl and drove her off into the desert. Not until the Lord appeared with assurances did weeping Hagar dare return. That was Sarah for you, our first Jewish mother, of whom I am so fond and proud.
And Abraham too was remarkable. A father of many nations, God said He would make him, and kings would come out of him. His seed would be as numerous as all of the stars in the heaven and would possess the gates of his enemies. He forgot to add it would take much time. Gracious and peaceful by nature, Abraham took up arms to rescue his nephew Lot from abductors and debated persuasively with God to spare even this one just man in the destruction of Sodom rather than to destroy the righteous with the wicked. He was already rich in cattle and silver and gold when the Lord appeared to him in the form of three strangers in the plains of Mamre as he sat in the door of his tent in the heat of the day. Had they been but passing bedouins, he doubtless would have responded with the same instinctive hospitality, and he was the essence of gentility and etiquette when he invited them to wash their feet.
'Rest yourselves beneath that tree. I'll have some water fetched.'
He hurried inside the tent with instructions for Sarah.
'Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes of bread upon the hearth.'
Then he ran to his herd and chose a tender calf to be dressed and served with butter and milk. At that time, it was still okay to eat our meat with butter and milk. Abraham stood by them while they ate in the shade of the oak tree. Wiping their mouths when finishing, they repeated to Abraham the information given to him once before that Sarah would bear him a son. Abraham was contemplative. Listening in the tent door, Sarah heard the prophecy. She laughed. God knew.
'Wherefore did Sarah laugh?' asked God.
'I didn't laugh,' Sarah lied.
'You did so,' insisted God. 'I know you did. What's the matter? Do you think that anything is too hard for Me to do?'
Abraham and Sarah are the only ones I know of who ever got a laugh out of a conversation with God.
Christ knows I could have used one often. I could use one now. But I know more than anyone that I'm not anywhere near the person Abraham was, or so willing and obedient a servant. Abraham was saintly, I guess. Or stupid. He was prepared to go all the way along with God when tested with the order to bring his young boy Isaac up a mountain, build an altar, and sacrifice the child upon it.
'My father,' said Isaac, carrying the wood. 'Behold, we have the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb to be sacrificed for the burnt offering?'
And Abraham said, 'My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering. Let us go together.'
Abraham built an altar. He laid the wood on the altar. And he stretched out his hand for the knife with which to slay his bound son. Only then did the angel of the Lord call to him out of heaven and reveal the ram caught in a thicket by his horns that was to be substituted for the boy in the sacrifice. Now God knows I would not have done that, covenant or no covenant. When the notion arose in His head to kill my infant, He had to do the whole job Himself. He knew I would not lift a finger to help. I did all the praying and fasting I could to influence Him to desist. There was no changing His mind. I lacked the genius to sway Him that was congenital in Moses and Abraham. But Moses and Abraham were pious men who were devoted to Him fully. And I was never pious or devoted. I'm not devoted to Him now. God will have to make the first move if He wants to end this tension between us. I have my principles; and I too have a long memory.
They named their baby Isaac, which means 'he laughs.' With Rebekah as wife, Isaac sired twins. Isaac favored Esau. But Rebekah advanced Jacob, and I doubt Isaac laughed much when, dim of vision with cataracts but with a lip-smacking yen for savory venison, he recognized he'd been hoodwinked into giving the blessing reserved for Esau to Jacob, who had disguised himself in goatskins as his hairier brother. Isaac then had to hear Esau's cry of universal despair that seems to me must pierce almost every human heart.
'Bless m
e, even me also, O my father,' Esau begged bitterly and lifted up his voice and wept. 'Hast thou no blessing left for me? Hast thou but one blessing? O my father, bless me, even me, also.'
So many times those same words could have been my own.
Esau raged aloud against Jacob, swore to kill him. 'I'll crush his feet. I'll break his bones.'
Instead, when next they met, this artless man embraced with tears of love and unweakened family longing the brother who had appropriated his birthright and his blessing. This was after Jacob, with immense trepidation, had sent ahead his four families and remained all night by himself on the safe side of the brook, where he wrestled to a draw until daylight with a cryptic angel who left him with a damaged hip and told him, upon leaving, that his name would no more be Jacob but Israel.
We still call him Jacob.
And I strongly doubt that Jacob, who was as smooth a man as Esau was a hairy one, did much laughing either when he awoke after his wedding night and discovered that the girl inside the bridal veil and nightgown with whom he'd lain in the nuptial bed was not the Rachel he had toiled seven years to obtain but the sore-eyed sister Leah. Rachel was beautiful and well formed and Jacob had loved her from the day of their first meeting at the well. Leah had pinkeye. Seven more years of indentured servitude to Uncle Laban were necessary before Jacob could have his Rachel too.
Leah bore children quickly. Rachel had none, and it was a little like the Sarah-Hagar story all over again. Consumed with envy, Rachel thrust her handmaid Bilhah onto the mat with Jacob to conceive children as her surrogate. Leah counterattacked with her maid Zilpah, giving her to Jacob as a wife. With so many women playing such active roles in this orgiastic contest of childbearing whipped up by these competing, hot-blooded sisters of Haran, the poor patriarch found himself being screwed silly four times a day, and it's a wonder his brains didn't go soft. At long, long last, Rachel produced Joseph, then Benjamin. By the time they left off, the tired old man found himself with twelve sons and a daughter by four women. Embalming Jacob was the only existing way to honor his sacred request that his remains be carried back into Canaan and laid to rest with his fathers in the cave of Machpelah before Mamre in Hebron. Sleeping already in the cave of Machpelah were Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Leah. Missing now from these first families is only the adored Rachel, who died in the desert giving birth to Benjamin and was wrapped in strips of linen and buried in sand.
Joseph, the late-born favorite of his father, was already seventeen when presented with the coat of many colors, and old enough to know better than to go showing it off to his sweating older brothers, who were already resentful of the maddening partiality of which he was the spoiled and insufferable recipient. And Joseph had a dream. They were all binding sheaves. His stood upright in the center and those of the others bent to it in obeisance. I've had worse dreams. And he dreamed yet another dream, in which the sun and the moon of his parents and the eleven drab stars representing his brothers all dipped in the sky to bow down73 to him in homage. Another nice dream. But he was a dumbbell for crowing about it. I would have wanted to kill him too. And--presto! They stuck him down a well. And abracadabra! All of a sudden, give a look: he was a grand vizier, and the Pharaoh had made him ruler over all the lands of Egypt.
So it all somehow came to pass, didn't it? It was almost as though God knew what He was doing: only because they had sold him into slavery was he there in Egypt with the means to save them.
Coming into his days, Joseph too asked that his bones be carried up out of Egypt to the land sworn by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses saw that it was done. And Joseph also was embalmed when he died at a hundred and ten in the very last sentence of Genesis. Embalming was not then a transgression of the Mosaic code, because we had no Mosaic code for another four hundred years. All we had was a covenant with God that every century gave indication of having been from the beginning a very bad deal. Abraham kept his part of the bargain.
But God made no tangible move to satisfy His end of the contract until the day He summoned Moses to the burning bush and told him:
Take off your shoes.'
Moses was standing on hallowed ground.
Now there is the man I want most in all history to speak with. My affinity to Joseph is as nothing to the empathy, awe, and reverential admiration I feel for Moses. 'W-w-w-why me?' was precisely the right question to issue from this startled, unassuming fugitive in the Midian desert. But Moses held them together and remained in God's good graces, didn't he, for forty years, against every hardship and obstacle imaginable. God was provoked repeatedly by the people He had chosen. They moaned and muttered against Moses; the priests charged him with arrogating too high a station to himself, the sinners fornicated and74 worshipped idols, and his sister and brother disputed his authority because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married. As a matter of record, the marriage of Moses to the Ethiopian woman proved a compatible one, and just about the only time she ever raised her voice to call him a dirty Jew was after he had raised his voice to call her a nigger.
Such tumult in that desert. Hardly had the Red Sea closed behind them upon the Pharaoh's chariots than they began to forget the stern taskmasters in Egypt who'd made them serve with such rigor and had turned their lives bitter with such hard bondage. They remembered the fleshpots and the bread they'd eaten to the full, the leeks, melons, and cucumbers. In Rephidim the people murmured against Moses because there was no water.
'Is this what you brought us up out of Egypt for?' they berated him. 'To kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?'
God led them to water. He provided manna from heaven, an omer a day for every man, the tenth part of an ephah, but after forty years of an omer a day of manna, the people were murmuring again and clamoring for more than just manna.
'There is nothing at all but this manna,' they cried. 'We remember the fish, which we had freely in Egypt, and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. Who can eat so much manna? Is this what you brought us up out of Egypt for?'
God supplied them again with quail, then poisoned the flesh while it was yet between their teeth, in a very great plague. Go figure Him out. Build this, build that, use this kind of wood for one thing, and that kind of wood for another, and don't seethe a kid in the milk of its mother? Why? He isn't saying. Spitework, if you ask me. Ask Him. The people were as naked as pagans when they danced about the golden calf. An old man was stoned to death for collecting sticks on the Sabbath. Korah rebelled with his family of Levites for a larger stake in the priestly duties; they wanted the right to light the incense. The Reubenites rebelled. Many of the children of Israel turned again and again to the worship of other gods. A man brought a Midianitish woman right into the midst of the congregation to lie with her in his tent, and both were thrust through the belly by Phineas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, who thereby mercifully averted still another plague. Miriam died, Aaron died. But Moses pulled him through. He was as nearly perfect as it is possible for a human to be. He asked nothing for himself, and nothing is what he got. I am arrogant enough to wish I were as modest as he, and modest enough to know that this is arrogance. His face was aglow when he descended the mountain after seeing God, and the people feared to come near. He talked back plenty too, and even once lost his temper with God when he heard the people weeping for food throughout their families because they were hungry, every man in the door of his tent.
And the anger of Moses was kindled and he demanded of the Lord: 'God damn it, where am I supposed to get the flesh to feed them? Why are You doing this to me? What have I ever done wrong that You lay the burden of all these people on me? Who needs it? They're not my children, are they, that I have to be responsible for them and listen to them crying when they have no food. Where do I shine in? How much longer is it going to take?'
'I told you I would do it little by little,' God reminded, 'until thou be increased, lest the land become desolate because th
e bugs and the beasts of the field multiply against you. I warned you I would do it not in one year.'
'But twenty, thirty, forty?' Moses protested with disbelief. 'I just don't care anymore. It's too much, just too76 much for me to bear. Forgive us and deliver us this minute, and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written. I'd rather be dead than go on this way. If ever I've found favor in Your sight, then kill me right now out of hand instead of letting me see any more of this wretchedness.'
'Give it to Him, Moses!' I want to cheer him on whenever I recall his words. 'That's giving it to Him good!'
And the Lord repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people. But it was in response to this outburst by Moses that God sent quail until it was coming out of their nostrils, then followed it up with disease while the meat was still unchewed. Who won? Who was right?
I need some answers.
I want to talk to Moses. I would like to make him understand that just because I don't like my statue in Florence doesn't mean I don't like his in Rome or that I blame him for mine. His is great. I could use his advice. I would like some tips from him on how to get along better with God, how to end this long silence between me and the heavens without sacrificing my dignity. Once, in utmost secrecy, recalling how Saul had succeeded through the witch of Endor in speaking with the spirit of Samuel on the eve of the battle of Gilboa, I decided to have a go with the spirit of Moses. What could I lose? I knew I would be violating laws and breaking commandments in a-whoring after wizards and witches and others trafficking with familiar spirits. But I was a king. I was desolate, I no longer had my God, and I felt I was losing my grip. Without a God, you turn to things like witchcraft and religion.