Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Dear friend, her trouble is now. In the wine shop … now.”

“I’m sure it’s exaggerated,” Hoopoe replied.

Meshab felt that he must stun his friend into reality, so he said bluntly, “Three years ago, when General Amram came here …”

“Now, now! Don’t say anything against General Amram,” Hoopoe warned. “After all, it was thanks to him that you’re now a freedman.”

Meshab was about to speak further when it occurred to him, for some reason he could not have explained, that Hoopoe had known about General Amram’s dalliance with his wife, and that the little engineer had been so determined to keep working at some new job after the walls were finished that he didn’t really care what yoke he would have to bear to win the next authorization. If Kerith could obtain his permission only by being congenial with the general, if that was the way it had to be achieved, there was nothing Hoopoe could do to alter the facts. Meshab looked at his friend and wondered if Hoopoe had gone willingly on those afternoon excursions which the general had invented.

To his surprise, Hoopoe volunteered the answer. “Did you think that I didn’t know that General Amram was trying to make a fool of me? ‘Go here, Hoopoe. Go there, Hoopoe.’ And did you think that when I went on his meaningless missions my wife was giving herself to him? Have you known Kerith so long without discovering that she is a woman of great purity?” Sorely wounded by Meshab’s conversation, he turned away but immediately came back to grab Meshab’s arm, saying with disdain, “On the day Amram reached Makor he had one thing I wanted, this tunnel, and I got it. I had “one thing he wanted, but he never came close to winning her. That year who was the foolish man?” And Meshab said no more.

At that moment Kerith was leaving the wine shop, for the third time that day, and she was impelled to do something she had not done before: she stopped boldly in front of the place where Gershom sat and for the first time spoke to him in the open street. “Where did you learn your songs?” she asked.

“Some I wrote,” he replied.

“And the others?”

“The old songs of my people.”

“Who were your people?”

“Levite wanderers.”

“The story you told about the scar? It wasn’t true, was it?”

“I have the scar,” he replied, and at that moment she wished more than anything else to be alone with this singer and with a laver of cool water to bathe his scar. But Meshab was entirely wrong when he guessed that she was in love in any physical sense with this stranger; she was not bedazzled by the lyrist, but she was captivated by the concept of a man expressing the religious longings of all men in song, and she responded to his music as if he had composed it for her alone.

“Could I ask how you got the scar?” she said.

“You could ask,” he replied.

“Would you care to sing in my home?” she suggested. “My husband will be arriving soon.”

“I would like to,” he replied, and although she was inclined to take the singer’s hand and lead him through the streets, she refrained from doing so, but he followed her casually and when she reached the shaft she asked one of the slaves, “See if Jabaal can join us,” and the man answered, “He’s down there now, talking with Meshab,” and she went to the rim and called into the deep hole, where her voice reverberated softly against the perpendicular rocks: “Hoopoe! Hoopoe! Hoopoe!” and on to a muted silence. It was the first time she had used this name in public.

In the weeks that followed, Gershom was frequently in the home of the engineer, most often when Hoopoe was there, but occasionally when only Kerith was free to listen to the singing. He showed himself an intense but gentle man, not forthright about his own history but unequivocal where his testimony concerning Yahweh was concerned. On the hills he had undergone some deep personal experience with his god and this took precedence over any personal problems. He had pretty well forgotten his wife and the man he had murdered. These were incidents that no longer concerned him, as were the conditions of his parents and his brothers. His songs of faith encompassed all these matters and in a sense explained them away; even Hoopoe and Meshab grew to enjoy the stranger’s singing, sitting for long spells in the evening as he told them, accompanied by his lyre, of the actuality of Yahweh:“He is in the whimper of the lamb I seek at night,

Lo, he is in the stamping of the wild bull.”

And after Gershom had sung for some weeks, while the tunnel was being finished, all in the house of Hoopoe were willing to accept him for what he had offered himself to be: a man who had run away from everything but the pursuing power of Yahweh.

At Hoopoe’s his listeners heard the songs from three different levels of comprehension. The Moabite listened to statements about Yahweh as he would have listened to a Philistine chanting about Dagon or a Babylonian singing of Tammuz. Since Baal was not involved, he was not involved; he respected Yahweh as the Hebrew god—no better, no worse than the others—and that was all. Hoopoe, on the other hand, was confused. Even his name Jabaal bore testimony to the fact that Yahweh took precedence over Baal, and Hoopoe was therefore inclined to accept the message of Gershom’s songs. But he also knew, as a practical engineer, that Baal continued to be far more real than this stranger cared to admit. “Let him dig a tunnel through rock,” Hoopoe whispered to Meshab, “and he won’t dismiss Baal so easily.”

Kerith exhibited a more complex reaction, evoked partly by the songs themselves but mostly by her maturing personal experiences. As for the songs, she was still gratified to hear in them a definition of Yahweh that included both austerity and lyric joy. As for herself, even before Gershom’s arrival she had been groping toward a more purified spiritual experience, as many in Israel would do in the centuries ahead, for the disappointments and contradictions of her life had proved that men and women required some central force to cling to. She had almost decided that for no man could this force operate effectively if it were shared between two different kinds of god: there could not be Yahweh and Baal. Reason told her that the time had come to accept one unifying entity who would absorb all lesser deities and she longed for identification with that all-embracing god. Personally she had long since abandoned Baal, but she was now prepared to condemn those who refused to do likewise, and these ideas she had nurtured by herself. To a minor degree they were an outgrowth of her longing for Jerusalem, but to a major degree they had generated that longing. She saw that Makor was merely a frontier settlement concerned with things that could be felt and touched, such as walls, olive presses and dye vats, and it was only logical that the town should insist upon holding on to its practical gods like Baal; but she had faith that in Jerusalem ideas were more important than things—the relationship of god to man, justice, the nature of worship—and she was convinced that in Jerusalem there must be many who thought as she did.

Then Gershom had arrived, empty-handed and without a history except for the charge of murder, and in simple words that soared through the dimly lit white-walled rooms and through the narrow alleys of the town itself he had stated that all she had been dreaming of was true. There was one god of unlimited power who could evoke joy in the human heart and security among nations. She had spent more than six years preparing herself for the seven strings of this chance lyre, and its music reverberated in her heart as if she were an echoing cave constructed for just such melodies. In the long days that she talked with the outcast she never allowed him to touch her, nor when he was gone did she wish he had done so. He had brought her a message from the mountains, and one does not embrace messengers; one listens to them. For his part, he had understood Kerith in those first few moments when she had brought him the food in the temple: she was a woman hungry for the higher world, for the more complete song, and in Makor she was miserable, tied down to its uninspiring syncretism of ritual for Yahweh and worship of Baal. He respected her and found joy in singing for her, since she grasped what he was saying.