After Abel and Other Stories

by Michal Lemberger

  Her dark eyes narrowed, their usual seriousness replaced with something else. Wickedness, I thought, or something kinder. “Do you think I’ll have to push you out a window sometime also?”

  “Depends who’s chasing me, I suppose.”

  That was the moment something shifted between us, some chasm closed. Michel lifted my hand, as tenderly as she would a newborn baby, and kissed its shrunken palm. She held it like that, as if it were still strong and could grip her back, all the way back to Gallim.

  Gallim

  We are used to our quiet life here. Danger surrounds us, but that is the nature of life, and no different for us than for anyone else. We turn to God for protection against the ravages of man and nature. But there are no prayers to say, no sacrifices to offer when we turn against each other.

  Even our little outpost is not cut off from the world. Word of the deeds of others makes its way in. We heard that David had run to Moab. He took his family and a growing camp of followers with him, a mob of wanderers that he trained into a personal army, then sold its services to the highest bidder. Everyone in Israel abhorred him.

  The news came quicker after that. David was always the topic of discussion. We stopped singing odes to him when we realized he had returned, was menacing the towns and landowners for protection and gold. Anyone who stood in his way was cut down and then, like a conquering general, David let loose his men to take lands, cattle, women. As if to make sure no one misunderstood, David buried the owners’ bodies and took their wives as his own while the graves were still being filled.

  We had heard, too, about our proud king’s decline. How he raved, eyes wild, becoming suddenly as strong as a youth and then sagging again into the despair of old age. Time proved Saul right. David was after the crown. The civil war that followed was inevitable, unstoppable. We stayed loyal, of course. Everyone with a penny to his name did, while the outcast and bitter flowed to David, who took them all in, told them they were God’s elect.

  Michel had been with us so long by then that we, to our horror, forgot who she was when the whispering started. The women sucked on their teeth and spit on the ground when David’s name was mentioned, said he was no son of Israel. She sat quietly then, as still as the mountain itself. When we would come to our senses, recall that she had more at stake, that her father and brothers had to battle every day to stave off the growing threat that David presented, we shut our mouths in embarrassment, tried to turn the conversation to the state of the olive harvest or to criticize the knots in the youngest girls’ pulled wool. It was no use. There was nothing else to speak of. Israel was at war with itself.

  We heard more. Of David’s many wives, his ravaging of the countryside. Michel sat still when a messenger, his clothes not yet stiffened with blood, ran into town with the news that Saul and Jonathan had died. She ripped the neck of her dress and put ashes on her head, as a good daughter should, but there was no change in her. She still worked beside us, still laughed with the children and walked hand-in-hand with her husband, put her head close to his to speak as all couples do, the murmured and inconsequential words that bound one to another.

  Palti, too, was changed. As their love grew, their comfort with one another gave him back some of the youth he had lost. For so long, he had walked among us as a man marked. He hid behind his work, going out with the flocks as often as possible. We tried to show him that we still esteemed him, but only when Michel came, when she began to look to him in the way of women, did his back unbend, his brow clear. She brought him back to himself and to us, and for that we were thankful.

  Palti

  I watched as she slowly grew to love life in Gallim, to be among the women who sleep and wake every day in the same place, confident in neighbors who will feed them in sickness, dance with them in celebration, cry with them after the deaths they will inevitably see. Cry over them when it is their turn to die.

  She still wasn’t one of them, not really. At night, when we were alone, she would confide in me. “I wish I could put on the grace of their simplicity,” she said. “They send their boys off to my father’s army believing that if their sons die, it is for something more glorious than the king’s latest whim or folly. They wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth, that our world is driven by one man’s desires and those wily enough to whisper in his ear. The rest of us get used and discarded.”

  It hurt me to hear her speak this way. I wanted to think our love would erase the outside world. I thought that with enough time, she would become like the women I had grown up among.

  I still wanted a child. I wanted her to be the mother of my children, but each month she would turn me away from our bed, tell me to return the next week.

  I begged her to reconsider. “I’ve seen how you take the babies of Gallim onto your lap. They all lean into your arms. I watch how you soothe their cries,” I said. “You would make a good mother.”

  “I want to say yes.” She looked pained. “But I can’t, now more than ever. Not with Saul dead and David stalking the country.”

  Another man would grow resentful. He might even come to hate her, but I had lived too long without love to pull it from her. I had wrapped her in the folds of my love. Nothing could unwind it.

  Gallim

  She lived well among us for a few years. The signs of her old life disappeared. The dye faded from her hands. Her heels were round and pink. She was happy. Until we started to hear what David’s ambition had wrought. How many dead, how much taken.

  Something broke in her the day a woman staggered into Gallim, collapsed as if she’d run from the other end of the country. She lay panting on the ground as we rushed to pour water over her skin and into her mouth. She had lost her sandals somewhere, leaving the soles of her feet torn and cracked. When she recovered enough to speak, she pulled herself to all fours, pushed back onto her haunches, a tattered heap of a woman, and, ignoring us all, looked straight at Michel.

  “You knew me once,” she said. “I served you and your sister both. Do you recognize me?”

  Michel was caught off guard. This woman was a ragged wretch. Her clothes were shreds hanging off a threadbare skeleton, her hair matted with grease and the dust of the road. Leaves and small twigs caught in its tangles. She didn’t talk wildly. She didn’t raise her voice, but there was something about her that made the women hold their young children close. She had the reek of death on her. It spilled out of her eyes and mouth. No one would touch the spot where she sat on the ground for fear of infection.

  “They’re all gone,” she said, as if they were alone in the courtyard, though we all crowded around. “They are all taken from us.” Her mouth stretched wide then, a death’s mask grin, but instead of laughter, loud sobs scraped out of her throat and mouth.

  “Men came, twenty at least. And my master was away fighting. It was just women and children. No one there knew how to raise a sword. We didn’t own a spear between us. They ran us through. I tried to save her. I swear.”

  “Who?” Michel asked, but we all saw that she already knew the answer. She was asking for confirmation, as if she needed to hear the words to believe them.

  “They grabbed her boys, down to the little one, whose legs still shook beneath him when he walked. She was inside with the baby. God save me from ever seeing such things again!” She wailed again. “I told her to run, but the door was open. She saw them butcher her children. She ran out, clutching her infant, but she couldn’t save them. One of the men saw her, snatched the baby out of her arms, dashed him against a wall.”

  Michel had stood impassive at every evil tiding that had been brought to us. This news made her legs go weak. We caught her, held her up between us.

  “I tried to make her flee,” the woman continued, “but she wouldn’t leave her sons, even though they were lifeless corpses. Reason left her at the end, I’m sure of it,” she said, as if offering a small kindness amid a roaring chaos. “She told me to kill her, but I couldn’t. I tried to take her by the arm, to drag h
er away, into the fields. I thought we could run here together. She shook me off, rushed toward the soldiers. Your sister threw herself onto a sword and died with her boys. I have been running since to get here, to tell you.”

  At first, everyone was silent. Then the keening started, low at first, one woman’s wail picked up by another, until all the women of Gallim joined in. We were crying for her loss. Only Michel didn’t cry. She stared at the woman on the ground, but it was as if she had gone sightless and saw nothing. Then she turned away, walked to her house, and closed the door behind her.

  Palti

  I got back from the pasture as fast as I could. The old women tried to pat my arm, the young to comfort me with looks that showed sympathy and something more, a pain that had become personal. But no matter how they loved her, this was not their loss. Michel bore it alone.

  I rushed past them all, ran into our room. She lay on our bed in the dark. I couldn’t tell if she was asleep, but she spoke as soon as I walked in.

  “I’m next. There’s no one else left.”

  “You’re safe here.” I tried to assure her. “David is only sending his army for the men who could take the throne from him.”

  She turned, put her hand to my face, which retained the warmth of my run against the chill of her fingers. “I tried to tell you.” There was such sadness in her voice. “I will never be anything other than Saul’s daughter.”

  “You are my wife,” I said. “David abandoned you to your fate. He never looked back.”

  “There are still men in this country who would follow Saul, even if they had to do it through me.”

  “Please, my love, have faith. David has forgotten you.” I could hear myself begging, whether of her or of God I still don’t know.

  She cried then. She buried herself in me and let loose all the sorrow of a person whose past has been destroyed. Michel was all that was left of the house of Saul, which had rejected her. They had given her to me.

  Gallim

  She changed after that. We watched her grow thinner, her skin grey as sage leaves. She still rose to work with us in the morning, came out into the fields to help with the lambing, sat down to eat at dusk, but she rushed away to vomit up whatever she ate, then reeled back to us, her eyes rimmed red, lips chapped and dry. She always looked on the edge of illness. Finally, she stopped coming out of her house. Day after day, a neighbor girl went in to look after her, spent long hours at her side, along with Palti, the silence he had finally shook off overtaking him again.

  The better part of a year passed. We tried to go on, but the nation remained in turmoil. David was king in the south, growing stronger by the day, but the north still rebelled against him. Gallim was caught on the border between the two. Our watchtowers were never empty now. Israel’s unrest gave the Philistines and Ammonites, all our old adversaries, an opening to wreak more havoc, and we were on our own, loyal to a dead king, a headless state.

  The Moabites came closest. First, the birds took to the sky in the hundreds, released shrill calls of distress as they surged away. We saw the smoke before the flames licked the hilltops and tried to swallow heaven. Our enemy had set the pines on fire to clear a path directly to our village. The smell wove thickly into our lungs. Every villager mourned the loss of that place, the cool shade and the cold pond. We remembered playing there as children. Couples wrapped their arms around each other, clung tight to the memory of loving there out of sight and protected.

  So we were ready for the alarm when one of our scouts ran down the hill, warning that a band of soldiers was approaching. The men of Gallim gathered at the mouth of the town, strongest at the front, to defend us any way they could. Our relief was great, then, when we saw who walked toward us. Abner, whom Saul had trusted, led his men among us. We greeted him with a cheer, thinking he was our savior, the bearer of the first good news we’d heard in years.

  But we had opened our arms to the devil. He hadn’t come to give us comfort, but to rip us apart.

  “I’m here to speak to Palti,” he said, looking around the crowd. Palti stepped out from among the other men, smiling to see his old captain.

  “I’ve come to take her back to her husband,” Abner said, his face hardened even to his former soldier.

  “I’m her husband.”

  “A woman can’t be married to two men at once. I wouldn’t think I’d have to explain that to you,” Abner said, his voice filled with scorn. “But the king thanks you for watching over her so well these past years.”

  We didn’t know what to do, what to say. Michel solved that for us. She pushed her way through the crowd, shoving us aside. We had never seen her like this. Her face was soft and haggard, her hair wild. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days, but she blazed with rage. She shook with it. “You too, Uncle?” she demanded. “You would betray my father’s memory, turn away from a lifetime’s loyalty?”

  Abner looked almost apologetic. The mask of cold detachment dropped from his face. “I am still a soldier. The war is over. David is my king now. He has demanded that his wife be returned to him. I will obey him.”

  She threw herself at him then. Fury gave her vigor, and she attacked him with her whole body. This, we saw, was the woman who had faced down the king. Too late we realized that she had always been filled with anger, that it lay brimming beneath the surface. How well she hid it from us behind her open-mouthed laughter and love for Palti.

  They were matched in height, but he had the advantage of weight and strength, and a lifetime of battle. Abner easily caught her hands, held them tight until Palti intervened, gently removed her from the older man’s grip, kept her close by his side.

  “Please,” Palti begged. “Don’t do this. I have given so much and have so little.” It was the first we had heard him speak of the sacrifice he had made for king and country. He had held it until that moment, when he needed it most.

  “I always liked you,” Abner replied. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you over this. Don’t make me take her by force.”

  We were shocked at how casually Abner spoke. Palti had no answer to his threat. He could do nothing but hold onto his wife. Abner considered for a moment, then made an offer. It was nothing, an insult, but Palti grabbed at it. “We will take her with us, but you can walk with her for a bit, so you can say goodbye.”

  We watched them leave, Palti and Michel, their hands grasped tightly to the other, surrounded by soldiers. Their feet kicked dust into the air. Soon, that was all that was left of them.

  Palti

  I cried the whole way. I begged Abner to reconsider. I told him Michel and I would leave Gallim, leave Israel, that no one would hear from us again. I told him I just wanted my wife.

  Michel walked silently beside me the whole time. Whatever will she had shown before was gone. Her hand clutched mine, but otherwise she seemed slack, emptied out. The fight had left her.

  Eventually, she spoke. “Stop. You won’t change his mind. We’ll lose our last moments together.”

  Tears fell freely down my cheeks. “Why don’t you argue?” I was desperate, angry even at her. “Do you want to go back there, to your real husband?”

  She stayed quiet, mild no matter what I said. “You have taught me how to love and be loved. I will take that with me, because there will be no love where I am going.”

  We kept walking. The soldiers had given us a little room. They walked ahead of us and behind us, but we were alone.

  “My time with you has been my real life. Everything before, everything that is to come, is nothing. You are the husband of my heart, but you need to forget me now.”

  I sobbed, “I can’t.”

  “You can. Go home. Take another wife. She will be lucky to have you. Cherish what we’ve done. There is no fighting this anymore. They’ll kill everyone in Gallim if I don’t go back to him. They’ll burn the village to the ground until nothing is left.” She was so resigned, so unlike the woman I had brought into my home years before. She was also right. We were powerless a
gainst the new king.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wish I had trusted you sooner. I wish you hadn’t been drawn into the mess of my life. You have so much left to do.” Her voice became urgent. “You must do it. You must do it, because I will never be allowed to again. Do you understand?”

  There was so much more I wanted to say, but I did understand. I was crying too hard by then to answer. I nodded. I would obey.

  We walked a long way, but we came to the end too quickly. I could see David’s camp on the next ridge. It spread over the entire mountain, a dragon with a fearsome head and a mighty tail.

  “This is as far as you go, Palti,” Abner said. There was no malice left in him. It seemed he even felt bad for me. “Don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be. Go home, man. Don’t make so much fuss over a woman.”

  There was no answer I could give him. There was nothing I could say to a man who didn’t understand why I would want this woman, how she had freed me from myself, had opened me to life after I had given up on it. He pulled her hand from mine. I stood frozen as they made their way into the valley, my last sight of her clouded by my own tears.

  Gallim

  We mourned her loss. We tore our clothes, draped ourselves in ashes. We knew she was as lost to us as if she had died. We tried to console ourselves with memories of her beauty, her resilience. The elders pointed to the smoldering patch where the pines used to stand, reminded us that it was David’s forces that had pushed the Moabites back and kept them from destroying us. “Be thankful,” they scolded. “He could have been angry, but he chose mercy.”

  We pretended loyalty after that, sent our boys to fight in his army, our taxes to fill his treasury. When guests came through Gallim, we sang songs of praise to Israel’s king. But during the long seasons of windy isolation, we remembered Michel, and how we had sheltered her. She had walked among us like a queen, left us like a ghost. It’s hard to keep a secret in a village, but we keep hers yet.