Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“I have the best wife in the world,” he said with maudlin sentiment, “and the best friend, too, even though he is a Moabite. And let me tell you this! A lot of you people say unkind things about Moabites. They fight. They’re hard to govern. They attack you when you’re not … But let me tell you this. I trust my Moabite so much that on the day …”

The two groats merchants from Makor came looking for him, and the Phoenicians said, “Better take the little fellow home.” And the Hebrews steadied him while he tried to straighten his legs.

As the merchants walked him along the waterfront where ships rode at anchor in the bay, Hoopoe looked with poorly focusing eyes and knew only that the night was beautiful. “I was digging in that tunnel a long time,” he mumbled to the merchants, and he began to resent the fact that Meshab the Moabite had not been allowed to visit Aecho with him. “He should be here,” he began to shout. “He did more than half the work.” He was willing to defend the merit of all Moabites, but his knees crumpled and he spoke no more.

During the week that Hoopoe lingered in Aecho work in the tunnels progressed, and in some ways, Meshab thought, it was providential that the fat little builder was absent, for Meshab could now go first to his own rock face and listen for sounds from the well end, then around to the well, where he was free to enter Hoopoe’s tunnel and listen to echoes coming from the shaft, and because the sounds grew stronger he was able to determine his location exactly and to modify slightly the direction of Hoopoe’s tunnel so that the two would meet as planned. Had Hoopoe been present it might have been embarrassing when it was discovered that his tunnel was definitely off target. However, when the Moabite saw again the short distance between the guide strings at Hoopoe’s end, he marveled that the Hebrew had been able to orient his tunnel at all. “The man’s a little genius,” Meshab told the crew. “He must be able to smell his way through rock.” And each day the sounds from one tunnel to the other became more distinct and the sense of excitement in the dark spaces increased.

It had been Meshab’s custom, when his day’s work was done, to climb out of the shaft, check the tree to be sure it was still in line, flick the two strings to see that they hung freely, then climb the parapets to inspect the waterwall, which would soon be torn down when the silent tunnel that lay beneath was functioning. Then he would wipe his face and go to the house of Jabaal the Hoopoe that stood beside the shaft. There, in a rear room separated from the rest of the building, he would wash away the dirt and put on a robe which he had salvaged from the disaster in Moab. In heavy sandals he would sit for a while, contemplating the day when the tunnel would be finished and he would leave it a freedman. The years of his captivity had been tedious, but he had discharged them with dignity, remaining loyal to his god and dedicated to the future of his people. Often, when night was upon the town, he would walk in his Moabite robe slowly through the streets, out the gate and across the road to the slave camp, where he shared the noisome scraps served his men, trying by his example to keep the slaves inspirited; but on the morning Hoopoe had left for Aecho, the little engineer had said, “Meshab, I want you to take your evening meals with Kerith,” but this the slave was unwilling to do, lest it bring Hoopoe in ridicule, and on the first evening he ate in the slave camp.

On the second evening a slave girl came knocking on Meshab’s door, with the message: “The mistress has more food than she can consume and wonders if you would care for some.” Putting on his Moabite robe he went forward to the main part of the house, where Kerith greeted him kindly and they shared the evening meal.

In Moab he had been a man of some importance, owning fields and wine presses. “In not too many months I shall be back with my own people,” he told Kerith.

“How much more digging is there to do?” she asked.

“The little tunnels should meet … this month perhaps. We’ll see how they match up and then enlarge them into the real tunnel”—he showed her how their system would permit adjustments in any necessary direction, up, down or sideways—“unless we’re too far apart in some direction, and I don’t think we are.”

“It’s very clever,” she said.

“Your husband is the clever one,” Meshab informed her. “I could go elsewhere now and dig another tunnel like this one, but I could never have foreseen the many little problems …”He laughed. “I’m telling you things you don’t need to know,” he added.

“When you go back to Moab, will your family …” She hesitated.

“My wife and children were killed during a Hebrew raid. That’s why I fought so desperately. In a way, I’m surprised that your people let me live. Do you remember when General Amram saw me …” He noticed that she blushed shyly at the name of the Hebrew general and he recalled the contempt he had felt when he thought her involved in some way with the visitor, but he said nothing. He was forty-eight years old now and had seen much of life. He had learned that among the hot-blooded Hebrews it was a rare family that did not in the course of years experience some violent cascade of emotion; the stories men told at night of how their ancestors had lived, or of what King Saul or King David had done in his youth summarized the Hebrews. They were a mercurial people, running through a man’s hand like quicksilver, never fully to be grasped, and if Hoopoe’s pretty wife had been somehow engaged with General Amram, that was her problem. Hoopoe and Kerith were contented now, and he liked them both.

“Do you think that when the tunnel is finished …” Kerith interrupted herself. “Well, you’ll be a free man then and you can go back to Moab. But Hoopoe … Do you think he might be invited to Jerusalem?”

So that was it! Now Meshab understood what had happened. Kerith had longed to go to the capital. Why? Was it because Jerusalem was where decisions were made and where men and women of importance gathered? She had ingratiated herself with General Amram in hopes that he would further her wish, and the man had been killed in battle, ending that approach. The big Moabite smiled. It was nothing very serious when a woman wanted to be where she wasn’t, nor was it permanently reprehensible if she tried to further her own and her husband’s ambitions in the one practical way she had at her disposal. He had always liked this good-looking Hebrew woman, and now he appreciated her even more—but with a touch of amused condescension.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“You remind me so much of myself,” he said.

“I?”

“As a boy I longed to see other lands. The deserts of Moab were quite dull and I used to dream about Egypt or the sea or Jerusalem, the Jebusite capital. Finally I got to see Jerusalem.”

“You did?” Kerith asked eagerly, bending forward across the low table.

“Yes. On a rainy day I was marched up a steep hill with a yoke about my neck, and if the king had recognized who I was, I would have been killed. I saw Jerusalem. Kerith, be careful you don’t see it at the same expense.”

“Are you saying that I ought not to long for such things?”

“I’m saying that after I had seen Jerusalem with a yoke about my neck I realized that if the second part of my dream had come true, my wish to be on the sea, it would have come only if I were a slave chained to some Phoenician ship. A man can see Jerusalem any time he wishes. It depends upon the kind of yoke he’s willing to accept.”

“I will see it. On my terms,” she said.

On the third night Meshab was again invited to have his supper in the front part of the house, and on each succeeding night. He and Kerith discussed many things and he awakened to the fact that she was an exceedingly intelligent woman. Some of her chance remarks about General Amram—his arrogance, his vanity regarding victories over tribes that had owned few weapons—led him to believe that she was now able to assess her former actions, whatever they had been, rather honestly. But he also discovered that if any stranger were now to enter Makor with a more visionary attitude toward life, he could surely win this woman, for in a sad and passive kind of way she was weary of Makor and he guessed that she was weary of her good-natured husband, too.