Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Rimmon noticed the peculiar use of the word I, and he realized that his mother could not be the one who was speaking; she, regaining consciousness, experienced for the first time the mystery of knowing that words had come from her mouth which she had not uttered. Both were aware that an incident of tremendous significance had occurred, but each was loath to investigate. Rimmon did not want to believe that Yahweh was speaking to him, for he could not consider himself worthy of such elevation, while Gomer knew that she was an ignorant woman who could neither read nor write, with no more possessions than she could gather into a large bag. In her life no man had loved her, and her son owned a father whose name no scroll recorded. It was not to such persons that Yahweh spoke; he did not choose people from the postern gate to represent him, and Gomer and her son drew away from any assumption of prophecy.

Trying to be matter-of-fact Rimmon asked, “Didn’t Sennacherib destroy Jerusalem? Like Makor?”

“I don’t think so,” his mother said in her own voice. Vaguely she remembered an old fable of how the city had been saved. “The cohorts were ready to strike, but they vanished.” And as two ordinary pilgrims they entered the city.

They came upon a scene that could not have been duplicated anywhere in the contemporary world, neither in young Greece, where mysteries were practiced, nor in old Egypt, where celebrations along the Nile were sumptuous. In Babylonia, of course, there was grandeur and in Persia an awakening power, but only in Jerusalem could one see the solemn passion of an entire people, coming to focus on one splendid temple constructed centuries earlier by Solomon. It was to this apex of Hebrew faith that Gomer had brought her son for a purpose which she could never have comprehended, and before the temple they bowed.

Then Rimmon led his mother outside the walls to a mount of olives at whose foot ran the Brook Kidron, rich with gardens and pomegranate trees and beds of many vegetables. From the trees the young farmer cut boughs and four corner poles, and with his cords built of them a booth in which he and Gomer would sleep for eight nights: on the mount as far as one could see were these booths, each with its branches so interlaced that a sleeping man could waken in the middle of the night and see the stars. Thus the Hebrews remembered the lonely decades in the desert when they were coming to know Yahweh in their ragged tents: each year all men of Israel and Judah took to their booths as Gomer and Rimmon did now.

In the morning they rose early and left the mount of olives, returning inside the city, where they worshiped at the temple, Gomer standing outside with the women while her son went into the sacred place to gaze at the holy of holies, to which only a few priests were admitted. Later he joined his mother to observe the animal sacrifices during which perfect bulls were led lowing to the altar, and here as the solemn rite was concluded, with incense penetrating the brain, Rimmon caught an understanding of man’s eternal submission to Yahweh; and as the sacrificial fires twisted upward the significance of his faith was burned into his consciousness. This city he would remember forever, and on the sixth day Gomer heard him whispering, “O Jerusalem, if I forget you let my eyes be blinded, let my right hand lose its cunning.”

But it was not only for these solemn moments that pilgrims made the long trek to Jerusalem; for after the days of worship had ended, after the fields were gleaned and the grapes were pressed, lyric celebrations occurred in which festivities as old as the land of Canaan were re-enacted, and none was more compelling than the night on which the unmarried maidens of Israel dressed themselves in white gowns, newly made, to go out into the vineyards on the way to Bethlehem where ceremonial grapes had been held in reserve, and there to nominate one of their number to enter the wine press with her new dress clutched about her knees, where she would dance upon these final grapes while her sisters sang in the most ravishing tones the unharmonized plain chant of longing:“Young men, young men of Jerusalem!

Lift up your eyes and see whom,

See whom, see whom,

You shall marry.

Look not for beauty,

Look not for smiles,

But look for a girl of good family,

A family that worships Yahweh.”

And as the girls danced about the wine press Rimmon watched with growing wonder the freshness of the faces and the desirability of these laughing eyes as they flashed past him in the torchlight, begging him to sample them, to see whom he would marry.

But after a while the girl whose ankles were deep among the grapes grew weary, and she signaled for a replacement, and by chance the girls of Jerusalem picked as her successor a beautiful stranger from the north, Mikal the daughter of the governor of Makor, and men swung her into the wine press. As she clutched her new dress to keep it from being stained, Rimmon experienced the curious sensation that the dress was in a sense his dress—it had come from his kitchen and he had known it before even Mikal had known it—and it danced of itself, a swirling, beautiful white robe; and he reached for his mother’s hand, congratulating her upon having made such a garment.

Then his heart exploded with the love that would never leave it, for it was not the dress that was dancing, but a girl twisting her head to the music, laughing, trying vainly to keep the juices of the grape from staining her new dress, and finally, when she saw that she could no longer protect it, dropping it and throwing her hands in the air as the tempo of the music increased and she became stained even to her face with the purple that in the end dripped from her chin as she tried to taste it with her red tongue. It was a primitive moment that recalled the entire history of the Hebrews from before the days when they knew Yahweh or the Pharaohs, and Rimmon stood entranced, but when the music ended and it became some other girl’s turn to press the symbolic grapes, it was he who lifted Mikal from the vat, and she hung for a moment in the air, looking down at him.

“Rimmon!” she cried, and she allowed him to set her upon the ground and to brush away the grape juice, and when his rough hand reached her face she did not draw back, but kept her stained chin raised toward his, and he kissed her.

On the way home from Jerusalem he informed his mother that he was going to marry Mikal, and she objected on the grounds that a Hebrew boy should not marry a girl whose family was more Canaanite than Hebrew. Rimmon would not listen to this argument, and his mother found in him the same kind of hardness that she had had to develop over the preceding decades. This pleased her insofar as her son’s character was concerned, but it frightened her when applied to the matter of selecting a wife, and she wondered what she could do to prevent a hasty decision. As they were picking their way through the swamp north of Megiddo she asked casually, “Are you aware of what Governor Jeremoth’s name means?”

To Hebrews a man’s name carried a significance unknown in other nations, and Rimmon, anticipating his mother’s purpose, said, “It means high places, and he worships in the high places.”

“His whole family does, and for him to go to Jerusalem, or for his daughter to dance at the festival, is offensive.”

“Are you warning me against Mikal?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes. Our town has many excellent Hebrew girls, loyal to Yahweh.” She was strongly impelled to advise him that he had been chosen by Yahweh for some austere purpose, that it was imperative for him to make his peace in all ways with Yahweh, but she could not do this, for she had no conception of what mission he had been called upon to serve. She therefore gave the limpest of all arguments: “Have you considered marrying Geula? She comes from an old priestly family.”