Within a few years, Michel had changed. Where Merav stayed small and lush in imitation of her mother, Michel shot up. Her shoulders broadened, her lips became—or so it seemed to me—more full. Most of the men still panted after her sister. They made up secret names for her so they could discuss her openly without anyone knowing. She became the topic of extended conversation, and no one the wiser that they spoke so freely about the king’s daughter.
I didn’t need any nicknames for Michel. The men around me would look at any young woman when she passed, including Michel, but she seemed not to notice. It became hard to tell if she didn’t feel our eyes on her, or if she accepted our attention as what was naturally due to her. Looking around at these boys and men with whom I shared every moment of my life, I felt as if I was the only one who studied her, my eyes drawn to her as if of their own volition. I’m not sure she knew I existed. I lived with a constant fear that she would catch me staring, and held my head even lower. It wouldn’t surprise me if she wouldn’t even be able to recognize my face. I never gave her the chance to get a good look at it.
I had been away from the capital for some time when I learned of her marriage. Of course, even in our small village, we had heard about David, the boy who came out of nowhere to become the nation’s great hero, its latest savior. I’d seen him, too, on my trips to the capital with our family’s wool and sheep. My father had always had a place of honor among the merchants at the back of the dining hall. Once he died, I took his seat. From there, I saw David. Short, slim, and burnished from a life in the sun, he walked with the assurance of a man twice his size. People wanted to be near him. When I served in the army, the greatest assignment had been to Saul’s own troop. Now, the men fought to be chosen for David’s.
Even the royal women, as bound by the king’s decrees as every man in that room, couldn’t hide the attention they paid to him. I had studied Michel with the intensity of a holy text for long enough to see how she noticed him too, and how she tried to hide it, just as I had done for so long when looking at her.
He accepted the adulation as if he was born to it. Only a few years younger than I am, and so unschooled in the way of war, and yet, each time I visited, he was more comfortable in the capital and the army.
Even after I was forced to leave the king’s service, I still knew many of the warriors who served him and talked with them in the hours after the evening meal. Those who had been assigned to David’s regiment crowed about their prowess. The ones who marched with Saul or Abner grumbled about David. “His rise in the ranks has been suspiciously quick,” they complained to me. “I worked for years, and here he’s mastered a sword in just months.” To top it all off, he played the lyre and sang. “It’s as if,” they said, “a girl’s fantasy has come to life to walk among us. He turns us invisible, not just within the palace, but in the whole city.” Girls still crowded the city gates to greet the soldiers, but they only wanted to catch sight of David, to dance and sing and make him take note of them.
When I heard that Saul had given Michel to David in marriage, my heart sank. I never really thought she would be mine, no matter what I had done in Saul’s army. No matter my heroics, the loyalty I had paid so dearly for, I never rose beyond the rank of foot soldier. I was even relieved to return to Gallim when I did. I could take care of my mother, my brother, and sisters. I could hide there, too, so the world didn’t need to know how much less of a man I was than when I had set out so many years before.
But Michel had been lodged in my mind for so long it was hard to let her image go, the tall, quiet specter that drifted through the dining hall and my dreams. It wasn’t right to think about another man’s wife, even if she was so far from my unremarkable life, and even if no one would ever know where my thoughts wandered during those long afternoons in the hills.
And so I put her out of my mind, focused on mastering my father’s trade, found good husbands for my sisters, and continued to make the trip through the mountains to the capital every season to buy and sell. Each time I went, the soldiers seemed to grow younger, the king older. Where once I was like them, now my clothes and skin never shed the smell of livestock. And there was David, going from one success to another, his days of shepherding flocks, the wind his only companion, long gone. It was impossible not to see how we had traded places. David, the warrior—more famous and beloved than I could ever hope to be—surrounded by adoring underlings. Me, just a rustic goatherd and sheepshearer growing more and more reserved with people as time wore on. I had grown used to the company of my animals, who never had much to say.
But there was a kinship between the two of us, even if only I realized it. I recognized the shepherd he used to be. The quiet assurance that made others want to fill his silences with chatter was familiar to me. Even in those early years, it was clear he was a born leader, the kind of man who knows how to hold his confidences, allow others to foist their ideas and beliefs onto him just enough to make each think that he, not David, had thought up all those notions and plans.
It was an interesting vantage, the back of the dining room that used to be so familiar to me. Once I had sat at the king’s own table every night. Now I saw David’s advance only when I came to the capital, my mind focused on the business of pleasing my customers, particularly the king, who made a point of repaying the sacrifice I had made by buying what I had to sell. It was impossible to miss how David seemed to grow in the months of my absence, but no one present at the beginning would have imagined how high he had set his sights. Looking back, the signs were all there from the start. Only Saul saw it, and no one believed him, not even his children.
What could not escape my notice was how changed Saul was, his hair still thick but graying, the skin of his face tightening over his broad cheekbones. There was a wariness in his eyes that was new, too. I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. I may have cast her from my mind, but it was Michel who still held my attention when she passed through the room. Marriage suited her. She had never been like Merav, who wore her marriage to one of Saul’s top generals like a crown of victory. Michel just seemed deeply satisfied, as if she had found the answer to a question that had been plaguing her. She seemed even more out of reach than ever, having crossed into a life I thought was closed to me forever.
Not a year later, when I returned to the capital, everything had changed. As usual, I brought a caravan of donkeys weighed down with jugs of oil pressed from our olive groves, pelts and bags of wool, and the best sheep my herds had produced. The market under the walls was as busy as ever. Coins passed into and out of my hand as they always did, but the city was different. Women and girls who had sung and run through the narrow alleys in the past, walked slowly and spoke in hushed tones. When I took my place for dinner, I noticed how stale and motionless the air seemed to have become.
Except for right around Saul, which crackled with his anger. Abner, still at his side, whispered in his ear every few minutes, trying, I could see, to calm him, to soothe his temper. The men in the dining hall, from the oldest and most distinguished to the freshest recruits who still felt the excitement of being in the presence of the king and all the powerful men of Israel, sat like stone altars, barely daring to move. Jonathan, always full of loud joviality, seemed sullen and distracted, his handsome face uncharacteristically anxious. David was nowhere to be seen.
When the women brought the food, I noticed that Michel was absent, too. I couldn’t inquire about her, of course, but I trusted everything would become clear eventually. People like to talk in the capital. If you are a man willing to listen, you will hear everything before long. It would have to wait until after what proved to be a silent, tense meal. Until Saul’s rage boiled over and he rose as quickly as a man half his age and snatched a spear out of the grip of one of his guards. Abner grabbed at Saul’s hand, but it was too late. The king had already flung it at Jonathan, missing his head by inches and lodging it in the wall behind the startled young man.
Jonathan jumped up. His
eyes jerked in his head, words desperate to escape his mouth. He swallowed them quickly. A crown prince knows better than anyone when to hold his tongue around the king.
Saul didn’t exercise such restraint. “You idiot,” he said. “Would you choose him over me? He will take everything from you!”
“He won’t, Father,” Jonathan said in as calm a voice as a man with a spear stuck in the wall behind him can muster. “We all love and revere only you.”
The room cleared quickly, everyone concerned and embarrassed at having seen the king’s loss of control. As we filed out, I caught sight of Saul sitting as if depleted in his chair. Abner and Jonathan loomed above him.
Outside, the men exploded with talk. “David is gone,” one of my long-known contacts told me. “Saul tried to kill him.” Another added, “He threw a spear at David just as he did tonight. What’s more, Jonathan and Michel are suspected of treason for helping him escape.”
Something had shifted in the months since I had last passed this way. Saul had always had one eye trained on the many men who would try to usurp his throne. The kingdom was full of ambitious men who would name themselves leader. He had swatted each away in turn. This time, he felt a threat rising within his own home. Saul had dropped any pretense of love for David. He regarded David as a threat, a danger to everyone, most of all to himself.
“Michel hasn’t been seen outside the women’s house in weeks.” The men around me had so much information. They detailed the political maneuvering of the kingdom in minute detail, but not one of them could tell me what had become of her beyond that bare fact.
Only I would learn the truth. That very night, Saul summoned me to his room. I didn’t even know he was aware of my presence in the capital. I had only seen him once since I’d arrived, and that was at dinner a few hours earlier when he had been distracted by dramas in which I was not a player. I should have known better. Never underestimate the king. I had lived by that mantra while a soldier. Civilian life had caused me to forget.
At first, I thought he was alone, but the room was dark. A single torch lit the entire space. As the shadows settled themselves, I could distinguish the outlines of a chair, armor propped up against the back wall. Even in the half-light, I could make out the braid of my wool woven into the wall hangings. The silhouette of a person, crouched as if ready to bolt, revealed itself against the walls. My heart leapt and shrank at once. I had never been this close to Michel before.
“Thank you for coming,” Saul said when I had entered. He seemed relaxed, in command of himself, once more the king I had known and served.
“I’m honored to be in your presence, my Lord,” I answered, not knowing what he could possibly want from me, why I was in a room with only him and his daughter.
“You are a good man, Palti. I can think of no one I would rather call ‘son’ than you. Leave all your goods with me. I will buy everything you have brought to the capital. Marry my daughter,” he pointed to Michel. “Take her home with you.”
Saul’s behavior in the dining hall earlier that evening had been shocking, out of character, but even that could not have prepared me for what he had just asked of me. Rumors that the king had become increasingly eccentric had been murmured throughout the kingdom for years. This, I saw, was proof of something much deeper.
“Your Majesty,” I said, stumbling over my words. “I am diminished.” I began again, “I am not fit for marriage. And your daughter,” I continued, unable to even say the words as they formed. I didn’t see a spear nearby, but Saul was still a large, strong man who could easily hurt me if I said the wrong thing. If his sudden anger at his own son was any indication, almost anything could set him off. He knew what I was going to say, though. He must have known that any man he brought into this room would think the same, but he brushed off my concerns. “Think nothing of the past,” he said. “Even a widow may remarry. Her former husband is dead to us all. You will marry her and take her back to your village.”
My head reeled. Had there been more light in the room, it probably would have caused my vision to blur. All my youthful fantasies were being offered to me as if on a platter. I wondered if I had not hidden my regard of Michel as well as I had thought, if the king had noticed it and allowed it for reasons known only to him. At the same time, I knew what this meant—I was to be the means of Michel’s banishment. And yet, what choice did I have? He was my king. I had followed him into battle. I still believed in him.
The king called Michel forward into the dim light that the torch threw over us. She unfolded herself from the floor, stood as tall and straight as I had ever seen her, and came to my side. She was not the woman I had longed for years ago. Her hair hung lifeless against her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, the skin on her cheeks and forehead blotchy over a pale base. When Saul gestured to me, I wrapped my mantle around both our shoulders, drawing her closer to me than any woman had ever stood. She smelled of salt and cinnamon. The king told me to take her hand in mine. I grasped my useless right wrist in my left hand, lifted it, and placed my fingers into her waiting palm.
Gallim
We watched her with interest, this city girl dropped into our quiet country life. Gallim is a small village, just a handful of stone and mud houses on the side of a mountain. It is too small even to have a wall around it. Even the old ones can’t remember a time when we didn’t need a lookout at the highest spot to watch out for encroaching enemies.
We couldn’t imagine what it must be like to go from a life at the crossroads of world, where people stream in and out as they make their way north to south, east to west, to the handful of windworn faces she encountered here. The inhabitants of the capital alone numbered more than most of us lived with for the entirety of our lives. Poor girl, we thought, to go from a city, surrounded by a thousand people, to this outpost.
Any young woman brought up in a bustling metropolis would find us backward. How much more so, then, the daughter of the king? At first, she tried to hide her identity from us, but there was always something different about her, even if she tried to tamp it down, to erase it. A person’s beginnings always leave their mark. Nothing is hidden in a small town. Secrets are hard to keep.
Palti had sent word that he would be bringing a bride home with him, but he said nothing about her. We rejoiced, of course, all of us. He was our greatest son, a hero to king and country. He had taken his father’s place in his home and on the council of town elders with grace, but he came back from war so different than the strapping young man he used to be. His mother despaired that no family would allow its daughter to marry him, though we all knew him to be kind, responsible, and let’s not forget, rich in land, animals, and gold. He had grown too quiet, had absorbed himself in his work. He let the village boys clamber up his torso and hang on his left arm like a tree. He trained the young men, was sober and serious when deliberating the town’s affairs. But he carried a bubble of solitude with him everywhere. No one had been able to pierce it.
He was the best that Israel had to offer, and yet, a moment’s action determined his fate. We watched him struggle to accept his new body, the life it held out for him. We saw his anger, then his deflated resignation. We thought he had given up on himself and that others would follow his lead, until the day we learned he had married. We prepared a feast, gave a shout when we saw them wind up the goat paths in the distance, Palti at the head of his train of donkeys, a servant at the back, and riding on the foremost ass, a woman, her head cloaked against the wind.
We only got a good look at her when they were in the center of town. All activity stopped. We were too curious to pretend this was an event like any other. It was strange, we thought, how she kept her head down, her hands tucked firmly into her sleeves. Perhaps, we thought, she was shy, as a new bride brought to her husband’s home often is, but her posture, rigid as a cedar, told another story.
“This is my wife, Michel,” Palti told us, after he had led the girl to his mother, who sat with the other women around the las
t of the oven’s fire. They had been baking a last loaf of bread, stirring a final pot of lentils. His mother, beaming, took the girl’s hands into her own. She tried to pull them back, or to turn them so that only the backs would show, but her palms peeked upward just long enough for some of us to catch sight of the darkened skin, tinged blue and shading into purple in their creases.
That set us all talking. Long after everyone had eaten and sung marriage songs in honor of the new couple. Long after everyone had filed by them, each greeted with a smile by Michel, our newest villager, who sat in state as if she had been here all along and we were the awkward newcomers, we retired to our houses and noted with raised eyebrows the curious fact of her dyed skin, glimpsed ever so briefly, but not to be denied.
Over the next few days, Michel joined the women each morning to stoke the fire, gather the water, and bake the bread. She kept her hands hidden away, and even when the other women removed their sandals to wash their tired feet before the evening meal, she kept hers on, offered to pour the water over everyone else’s dusty ankles, then politely declined when we offered to reciprocate.
She was a mystery to us. Friendly to everyone, from the oldest woman who wandered aimlessly around the houses, entering each as if it were her own, to the babies still wrapped in swaddling. She sat with the youngest mother, who had also been brought to our town as a wife recently, and cooed over the infant’s chubby hand, his toothless smiles, but she gave no clue about her life before the day she entered our circumscribed world. She had no stories to tell, never let slip a small detail from girlhood about her parents or some passing moment that had never left her. It was as if, we marveled, she came to us without a past.
We were equally curious about her new marriage. It was obvious that she and Palti did not know one another well when he brought her to live with us, but many brides are strangers to their husbands on the day of their marriage. Michel was as polite with him as with us all. It was Palti who surprised us. Normally the most reserved of men, he courted her openly, bringing dogwood blossoms to her at the end of the day, a newborn lamb to live as their pet. She laughed at the animal’s antics, and swept it into her arms. Still, we couldn’t shake the sense that she was ready to leave at a moment’s notice. That she didn’t think her time with us would last.
After Abel and Other Stories Page 15