The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  From among the permitted items Hoopoe identified the chisels, hammers and wedges he needed for finishing the tunnel, but when the time came for him to place them in a pile, an amusing impasse took place which the Phoenician had anticipated by inviting several of his neighboring shopkeepers in to watch. Iron was so precious that as soon as any was cast and sharpened, it was covered with animal fat to prevent rusting, and now Hoopoe grasped the first of his implements. The fat stuck to his fingers and he drew his hand away, staring at the greasy substance.

  “That’s right,” the ironmonger said. “It’s pork.”

  Even in those days the Hebrews were forbidden to eat pork, which they had learned from sorrowful experience could cause death if improperly cooked, and to them the entire body of the hog was repugnant. Phoenicians, of course, and the other seacoast peoples who knew how to prepare the meat, liked the tasty food and enjoyed laying little traps to embarrass the Hebrews—which the ironmonger was now doing.

  “It’s pork fat,” he repeated, and Hoopoe backed away, but when he saw the precious tools he could not refrain from grasping them and placing them in his pile. His hands became covered with pork fat, which at the end he smeared back onto the implements lest they suffer. At the end the Phoenicians laughed and helped the little engineer, providing him with a cloth for cleaning his hands.

  “Pork fat never hurt a man who likes iron,” the storekeeper said. “I’ll watch the tools till you bring your donkeys around.”

  Hoopoe left the ironmonger’s to inspect the interior of the city and was met by a guard from his caravan, who advised him where they would be sleeping, for he was not concerned about hurrying home; a sensible man could have left Makor that morning, been in Accho before noon, completed his business and been home again by nightfall, but the opportunity to visit a Phoenician city came so seldom to any Hebrew that Hoopoe intended to stretch it out as long as possible. Beside the waterfront he found an inn, where he sat at ease eating strange fish and looking with increasing thirst at an Egyptian merchant who was attended by two attractive girls who served him jugs of beer. Some of the brown liquid spilled along the corners of the man’s mouth and as it wasted itself on the pavement Hoopoe became increasingly fascinated by the bubbles it formed. They seemed like the essence of liquid, water intensified and wine improved upon.

  Remembering the warning that Hebrews must not drink beer in Accho, he turned away from the Egyptian and attended to his fried fish, but it had been so richly salted that his thirst increased. Bad luck brought an Aramaean to the eating place, and he ordered beer, which he drank in four huge draughts, throwing the last inch of liquid onto the pavement in front of Hoopoe.

  “They don’t strain the husks out,” the Aramaean said, ordering a second jug.

  “No, they don’t,” Hoopoe echoed, professionally. He picked up one of the barley husks and tasted it.

  “You like to have a beer?” the Aramaean asked.

  “I think I would,” Hoopoe said, and the Phoenician beer man brought him a large jug of the cool beverage.

  “Tastes good with fish?” the Aramaean asked. When Hoopoe nodded without taking the jug from his lips, the man said, “You know, in these places they put extra salt on the fish to make you want their beer.”

  At midnight Hoopoe was still at the inn, drinking beer and singing Egyptian songs with some sailors. He was loud but not boisterous, and the Phoenician guards did not molest him, even though they knew that he was not supposed to be there at that hour. It would have been difficult for them to explain why they did not arrest him, but primarily it was because he was a happy-looking man, visibly free of mean intentions. They supposed he had been working hard on some farm and was enjoying himself. At the one-o’clock watch he was singing noisily but stopped to explain to bystanders, “I do love a song. Listen to how that Cypriot sings. I tell you, a man who can sing like that is very close to Yahweh.” No sooner had he mentioned his god’s name among the unbelieving Phoenicians than he clamped his hand over his mouth in apology, but when he did so he began to giggle. “You mustn’t mind me,” he told the guards. “At home they call me Hoopoe.” And he left the table and walked unsteadily up and down, bobbing his head this way and that as his fat bottom weaved in the moonlight. “I’m a hoopoe bird,” he said.

  “Would you like to visit the girls?” the Cypriot singer asked.

  “Me? I’m married,” and he began to describe his wife while the innkeeper and the guards listened. “She is about this tall and more gentle than a breeze blowing in from the sea. All things that are beautiful she cherishes, so today I bought her this.” With fumbling fingers he unwrapped the length of braided glass and in the flickering light the eighteen multicolored strands were as beautiful as the woman for whom they were intended.

  “I have the best wife in the world,” he said with maudlin sentiment, “and the best friend, too, even though he is a Moabite. And let me tell you this! A lot of you people say unkind things about Moabites. They fight. They’re hard to govern. They attack you when you’re not … But let me tell you this. I trust my Moabite so much that on the day …”

  The two groats merchants from Makor came looking for him, and the Phoenicians said, “Better take the little fellow home.” And the Hebrews steadied him while he tried to straighten his legs.

  As the merchants walked him along the waterfront where ships rode at anchor in the bay, Hoopoe looked with poorly focusing eyes and knew only that the night was beautiful. “I was digging in that tunnel a long time,” he mumbled to the merchants, and he began to resent the fact that Meshab the Moabite had not been allowed to visit Accho with him. “He should be here,” he began to shout. “He did more than half the work.” He was willing to defend the merit of all Moabites, but his knees crumpled and he spoke no more.

  During the week that Hoopoe lingered in Accho work in the tunnels progressed, and in some ways, Meshab thought, it was providential that the fat little builder was absent, for Meshab could now go first to his own rock face and listen for sounds from the well end, then around to the well, where he was free to enter Hoopoe’s tunnel and listen to echoes coming from the shaft, and because the sounds grew stronger he was able to determine his location exactly and to modify slightly the direction of Hoopoe’s tunnel so that the two would meet as planned. Had Hoopoe been present it might have been embarrassing when it was discovered that his tunnel was definitely off target. However, when the Moabite saw again the short distance between the guide strings at Hoopoe’s end, he marveled that the Hebrew had been able to orient his tunnel at all. “The man’s a little genius,” Meshab told the crew. “He must be able to smell his way through rock.” And each day the sounds from one tunnel to the other became more distinct and the sense of excitement in the dark spaces increased.

  It had been Meshab’s custom, when his day’s work was done, to climb out of the shaft, check the tree to be sure it was still in line, flick the two strings to see that they hung freely, then climb the parapets to inspect the waterwall, which would soon be torn down when the silent tunnel that lay beneath was functioning. Then he would wipe his face and go to the house of Jabaal the Hoopoe that stood beside the shaft. There, in a rear room separated from the rest of the building, he would wash away the dirt and put on a robe which he had salvaged from the disaster in Moab. In heavy sandals he would sit for a while, contemplating the day when the tunnel would be finished and he would leave it a freedman. The years of his captivity had been tedious, but he had discharged them with dignity, remaining loyal to his god and dedicated to the future of his people. Often, when night was upon the town, he would walk in his Moabite robe slowly through the streets, out the gate and across the road to the slave camp, where he shared the noisome scraps served his men, trying by his example to keep the slaves inspirited; but on the morning Hoopoe had left for Accho, the little engineer had said, “Meshab, I want you to take your evening meals with Kerith,” but this the slave was unwilling to do, lest it bring Hoopoe in ridicule, and on the first
evening he ate in the slave camp.

  On the second evening a slave girl came knocking on Meshab’s door, with the message: “The mistress has more food than she can consume and wonders if you would care for some.” Putting on his Moabite robe he went forward to the main part of the house, where Kerith greeted him kindly and they shared the evening meal.

  In Moab he had been a man of some importance, owning fields and wine presses. “In not too many months I shall be back with my own people,” he told Kerith.

  “How much more digging is there to do?” she asked.

  “The little tunnels should meet … this month perhaps. We’ll see how they match up and then enlarge them into the real tunnel”—he showed her how their system would permit adjustments in any necessary direction, up, down or sideways—“unless we’re too far apart in some direction, and I don’t think we are.”

  “It’s very clever,” she said.

  “Your husband is the clever one,” Meshab informed her. “I could go elsewhere now and dig another tunnel like this one, but I could never have foreseen the many little problems …” He laughed. “I’m telling you things you don’t need to know,” he added.

  “When you go back to Moab, will your family …” She hesitated.

  “My wife and children were killed during a Hebrew raid. That’s why I fought so desperately. In a way, I’m surprised that your people let me live. Do you remember when General Amram saw me …” He noticed that she blushed shyly at the name of the Hebrew general and he recalled the contempt he had felt when he thought her involved in some way with the visitor, but he said nothing. He was forty-eight years old now and had seen much of life. He had learned that among the hot-blooded Hebrews it was a rare family that did not in the course of years experience some violent cascade of emotion; the stories men told at night of how their ancestors had lived, or of what King Saul or King David had done in his youth summarized the Hebrews. They were a mercurial people, running through a man’s hand like quicksilver, never fully to be grasped, and if Hoopoe’s pretty wife had been somehow engaged with General Amram, that was her problem. Hoopoe and Kerith were contented now, and he liked them both.

  “Do you think that when the tunnel is finished …” Kerith interrupted herself. “Well, you’ll be a free man then and you can go back to Moab. But Hoopoe … Do you think he might be invited to Jerusalem?”

  So that was it! Now Meshab understood what had happened. Kerith had longed to go to the capital. Why? Was it because Jerusalem was where decisions were made and where men and women of importance gathered? She had ingratiated herself with General Amram in hopes that he would further her wish, and the man had been killed in battle, ending that approach. The big Moabite smiled. It was nothing very serious when a woman wanted to be where she wasn’t, nor was it permanently reprehensible if she tried to further her own and her husband’s ambitions in the one practical way she had at her disposal. He had always liked this good-looking Hebrew woman, and now he appreciated her even more—but with a touch of amused condescension.

  “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  “You remind me so much of myself,” he said.

  “I?”

  “As a boy I longed to see other lands. The deserts of Moab were quite dull and I used to dream about Egypt or the sea or Jerusalem, the Jebusite capital. Finally I got to see Jerusalem.”

  “You did?” Kerith asked eagerly, bending forward across the low table.

  “Yes. On a rainy day I was marched up a steep hill with a yoke about my neck, and if the king had recognized who I was, I would have been killed. I saw Jerusalem. Kerith, be careful you don’t see it at the same expense.”

  “Are you saying that I ought not to long for such things?”

  “I’m saying that after I had seen Jerusalem with a yoke about my neck I realized that if the second part of my dream had come true, my wish to be on the sea, it would have come only if I were a slave chained to some Phoenician ship. A man can see Jerusalem any time he wishes. It depends upon the kind of yoke he’s willing to accept.”

  “I will see it. On my terms,” she said.

  On the third night Meshab was again invited to have his supper in the front part of the house, and on each succeeding night. He and Kerith discussed many things and he awakened to the fact that she was an exceedingly intelligent woman. Some of her chance remarks about General Amram—his arrogance, his vanity regarding victories over tribes that had owned few weapons—led him to believe that she was now able to assess her former actions, whatever they had been, rather honestly. But he also discovered that if any stranger were now to enter Makor with a more visionary attitude toward life, he could surely win this woman, for in a sad and passive kind of way she was weary of Makor and he guessed that she was weary of her good-natured husband, too.

  “If Bathsheba succeeds in making Solomon your next king,” he told her on the fourth night, “it’s supposed that he’ll try to build Jerusalem into a rival of Tyre and Nineveh. I’m sure that if that’s the case, a builder as diligent as Hoopoe will find a welcome.”

  “Are you?” she pleaded, and after a while she turned the conversation to Moab, asking Meshab if life there was similar to Makor’s, and he described the beautiful upland valleys that lay to the east of the Dead Sea.

  “We always fought with the Hebrews,” he explained, “and I’m sure we always will.” He told her the enchanting story of his countrywoman Ruth, who had left Moab to become the wife of a Hebrew. “This made her the great-grandmother of your King David,” he added.

  “I didn’t know that!” Kerith said, leaning her head back as she tried to visualize this unlikely story.

  “So David’s really a Moabite,” Meshab said, “and at the same time our most cruel enemy.”

  “David? Cruel?” A slave had spoken disparagingly of her king and she felt insulted.

  “Have you not heard? When he first conquered the Moabites he caused all prisoners to kneel before him on the battlefield and we were numbered One, Two, Three, each man with one of those numbers.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then David sent his soldiers among us, unarmed as we were, and all prisoners numbered One and Two were slain.”

  In the silence Kerith asked in a kind of fascinated horror, “And you were Three?”

  “No, I was Two, but as the soldiers were about to slay me David stopped them and asked, ‘Is this not Meshab the leader of the Moabites?’ And when he found that I was, he said, ‘He shall not be slain. He is brave and shall become my general,’ and he asked me, ‘Will you accept Yahweh and become a freedman?’ and I said, ‘I live and die with Baal.’ His face grew dark with rage and I thought he would kill me then, but he ground his teeth and cried, ‘No matter. He’s a brave man. Set him free.’ And with my freedom I rallied my defeated people and during an honorable foray I tried to overwhelm the tents of the Hebrew generals. It was then I killed the brother of Amram.”

  “That first day Amram said he had wanted to destroy you with his own hands. Why didn’t he?”

  “Because David had once offered me sanctuary. Instead of death, Amram gave me slavery.”

  She sighed and turned to other matters. “The other day the governor said that David might come north to see the water system. Tell me, is there a chance he would take Hoopoe south with him?”

  “Possibly.” The Moabite wished he could say something that would calm this impatient woman, but all he could think of was, “Jerusalem with a yoke around your neck is nothing to yearn for.”

  “I shall not be going with such a yoke,” she said firmly.

  “You’re burdened with it already,” he said. “A far heavier one than I wore that day.”

  On the fifth and sixth nights they met again, talking till the middle watch, and the big Moabite again felt a desire to remove the hunger that was endangering Hoopoe’s wife, and on the last night he said, “Kerith, is it possible that you fail to see what a great man your husband is, no matter whether he stays here or goes to J
erusalem?”

  “No one thinks of Hoopoe as a great man,” she replied.

  “I do. When it looked as if our tunnels were not going to meet, he took the blame upon himself. Even though he was the master and I the slave.”

  “He’s honest,” she granted. “But his name Hoopoe tells the story.” She laughed pleasantly, and not in derision. “He’s a dear man, and we all love him. I, too,” she added. “But in the past three years I have discovered that he is not the kind of man kings call to Jerusalem. And I am afraid.”

  “Remember the story of what your god Yahweh said, not far from here? ‘Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature. Yahweh seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but Yahweh looketh on the heart.’ ”

  Kerith accepted the rebuke but did not respond to it, for the slave’s mention of Yahweh diverted her attention and caused her to ask, “Meshab, why not accept Yahweh now and become a freedman?”

  “I will not turn my back on Baal of the Moabites,” the slave said, and this reiteration of faith, evoking in Kerith’s mind the misery of the slave camp, had a profound effect upon her and she asked in a hushed voice, “You would endure that camp?” She shivered at her recollection of it. “For how many years?”

  “Seven.”

  She bowed her head in recognition of a man who would accept such humiliation and filth rather than deny his god, but next evening toward sundown her thoughts were brought back to Hoopoe, for he came stumbling home at the end of a six-day drunk. He had walked the distance from Accho and was unkempt, dusty and chuckling to himself, He had walked because the Phoenician officials had become so attached to him that when he left Accho they gave him not only all the iron tools he had paid for but another portion as well, and he had deemed it preferable that the donkey haul these tools rather than himself. At the guard post he had forgotten to reclaim his dagger, for there he and the guards had finished his last jug of beer and had sung songs from Sidon, but in its place he had a beautiful Cypriot sword, given him by the governor of Accho, and two iron spearheads. He was relaxed and happy, and when he pushed his donkey through the gate he dumped off the cargo in front of the governor’s quarters, bowed to that official and staggered home to his wife. But as soon as he had washed up and cleared his head he called for Meshab, and the two men climbed down the shaft, where Hoopoe scrambled into the face of the rock to hear with startling clarity the night crew at the other facing, and he looked back at the Moabite with joy showing across his bearded face.