Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“I have betrayed Yahweh,” the old man wept. “All my life I have done those things that Yahweh has condemned. At whose hand was the Moabite slain but mine? At whose altar but mine?” He shivered with the memory of the profanation and pleaded, “Tell me of the Moabite.”

And Kerith, still seated on the floor, said, “He was a just man. In darkness he built the David Tunnel to save your town. When my husband was absent it was the Moabite who protected me. When he was freed from slavery he remained with us to finish the king’s tunnel. Meshab was a man that I shall remember with tears the rest of my life.”

The simple words were exactly those that King David wished to hear, the eulogy for a brave warrior and a good man. “Sit on my right hand,” he said to Kerith, and she took the position that she would often know in the king’s dying years; and to her David said, “The Moabite was valiant in battle, and I slew him. He was a vigorous defender of his gods, and I caused him to be slain. What have I done this day?”

The white-haired old man rocked back and forth between the two women who guarded him, and at last he said to Abishag, “Fetch me the kinnor,” but when he took the instrument which long ago he had played before King Saul he did not play it in the ordinary sense, as Gershom had been doing; he allowed his tired hands to fall across the strings in aimless fashion, building chords of no pattern and with no rhythm, and when the music had taken for him a form that the others could not hear, he chanted a psalm which he had composed many years before and which he often remembered in these late years:“O Yahweh, do not rebuke me in your anger,

And do not chastise me in your wrath.

Have mercy upon me, for I am weak,

Heal me, for my bones tremble.

I tremble very much.

But you, O Yahweh, how long?

Return, O Yahweh, save me.

Deliver me in accord with your reliability.

If I die I cannot sing to you,

For who in the grave can give you praises?

I am weary of my groaning.”

He continued his lament for human weakness, referring to the anguish he had known so often throughout his turbulent life, and those four who sat in that room, those misfit four who had gathered to converse with Yahweh—the white-haired king who had committed both adultery and murder, the exquisite child who had been cynically chosen to be an old man’s comfort and his last bedfellow, the loyal wife who was about to betray one of the truly good men of Israel, and the stranger whose crimes were not spelled out—that night those four seekers after Yahweh represented the future generations of the world who would respond to the cry of grief as they now did. The Judaism that King David had inherited was often a cold religion, rigorous and even forbidding, but it was saved by this outcry of human passion which David was now uttering and which Gershom had uttered on the hills. Remote and removed, there was Yahweh; here in the actuality of the white room there was a human heart approaching the end of its allotted seventy years; and between the two there was a passionate dialogue expressed in song: “Each night I make my bed swim.

I drench my couch with my tears.

My eye has wasted away from grief …

O evildoers, go away from me,

For Yahweh has heard the sound of my weeping.”

Thus David lamented, and the listeners in the night accepted the heartbreak of the vengeful old king as part of their own experience. Fully as much as the rigorous laws, his cry would become a part of Judaism.

Kerith saw Hoopoe no more. She spent that night in the hovel at the wool merchant’s, and in the morning when the royal procession turned southward to Megiddo and thence to Jerusalem she was lost somewhere in the motley, marching to the city she had been so determined to see. It was the transformation of Gershom the outcast that was the more spectacular, for he became in Jerusalem the keeper of the king’s music, directing the scribes as they collected on clay tablets many of the poems written by the king, and in the compilation appeared not a few written by Gershom himself. In time they passed into the liturgy of Judaism; they were sung in plain chant throughout the Presbyterian churches of Scotland; they became the hymns of Australia and the church music of South Africa; they were sung to many different tunes in many different religions, for wherever the words were read they were recognized as part of the authentic cry of man seeking his god, for Gershom was a singer, a man who could formulate words into patterns, and his words would live forever.

Hoopoe experienced a different transformation. When King David departed for Jerusalem, having ignored the tunnel, the heartbroken engineer climbed to the town walls like a farmer from the countryside or a yellow-stained Phoenician from the dye vats, and there he joined the mob as it shouted farewell to the great king. Hoopoe tried vainly to see where Kerith was, but she kept herself hidden. Nor was the king visible, nor Abishag nor Gershom: the four vanished from his life like ghosts that had come to wreak horror during a windy night and had fled with the dawn.

For some time he could not believe either that they had come or that they had gone. The governor, remembering that Hoopoe had abused the king at the death of the Moabite, thereafter refused to speak with the little man. With his slaves gone to Jerusalem, no further commissions of any importance were found for him. Townspeople, recounting the story of how his wife had run away with Gershom, made ballads of the affair to which they added the earlier escapade with General Amram, so that one of the most contradictory women who had ever lived in Makor was debased into a simple slut, and sometimes even Hoopoe heard men at the wine shop singing of her.

“They don’t understand,” he muttered to himself. In the house by the shaft he was left with two children who were destined to preserve the Family of Ur for future generations, but they took no interest in the shaft where women walked up and down, year after year, bringing into the city the sweet water from the hidden well. In Hoopoe’s lifetime the defenses of Makor—all due to his building genius—were not put to the test, so the townspeople could not appreciate what a brilliant thing he had accomplished; they began to take the well and the walls for granted, and as Hoopoe grew older they remembered him only as a queer little man who ran about the town poking his head into this hole or another, finding nothing.

“No man in Makor has a more appropriate name than Hoopoe,” they said, and the older he grew the more pathetic he became in their eyes: a chubby little man with no wife, no job, few friends. When Solomon became king and there was much building in Jerusalem, with boats shuttling back and forth between Aecho and Tyre, Hoopoe developed the illusion that he would soon be called to the capital to help the resplendent king, but in the beautiful city his name was unknown, and he was not sent for.

When he was an old man he disappeared for some time, and his unloving children suspected, or perhaps even hoped, that he was dead; but he was in the depths of the tunnel, that flawless piece of engineering which he alone had conceived, and he had brought with him a hammer and chisel and a small wooden scaffold from which he worked on the ceiling for several days. Young women passing beneath brought him a little food and speculated upon what he was doing.

“Is the roof going to fall?” they inquired.

“Have rats gnawed a hole downward from the fields?” they teased, not even knowing that it was he who had built the David Tunnel.

Hoopoe said nothing but kept chipping away, holding a blanket on the scaffold lest bits of stone fall on the heads of the patient women who walked back and forth. Finally he finished, and although he could not be aware of the fact, walked for the last time through his beautiful construction. At the well the great crisscross tiers of rock protected the roof from any trespass and would remain in position—a part of the earth—for three thousand years. The deep caves of antiquity were sealed and hidden. The well itself was cold and sweet and secure, sending forth as much water as the people needed, and the clean, fair tunnel climbed at its preordained pace to the foot of the shaft, which rose with its two lovely, twisting pairs of stairways into the sunlight.