THE NEW INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
BY THE AUTHOR OF CATCH-22
Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombadier in the Second World War, afterwards attending the colleges of New York, Columbia and Oxford, the last on a Fulbright scholarship.
He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of, progressively, Time, Look and McCall's.
It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961.
His second novel, Something Happened was published in 1971; and Good as Gold in 1979. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven. Joseph Heller now lives in East Hampton, New York.
Also by Joseph Heller
CATCH-22
SOMETHING HAPPENED
GOOD AS GOLD
God Knows
Joseph Heller
1984
But how can one be warm alone?
Copyright
GOD KNOWS
A BLACK SWAN BOOK 0 552 12507 5
Originally published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape Limited
PRINTING HISTORY
Jonathan Cape edition published 1984
Black Swan edition published 1985
Copyright (c) 1984 by Scapegoat Productions,
Inc.
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Digitized by the Internet Archive. in 2012//archive.org/details/godknowsblackswanjose
1 Abishag the Shunammite
Abishag the Shunammite washes her hands, powders her arms, removes her robe, and approaches my bed to lie down on top of me. I know even as she takes gentle possession of me with her small arms and legs and with her tiny plump belly and fragrant mouth that it will do no good. My shivering will continue, and she will fear she has failed me again. The chills that rack me grow from within. Abishag is beautiful. They tell me the child is a virgin. So what? I've had beautiful virgins before and felt I'd wasted my time. Both women I've loved most in my life were married when I met them and had learned how to please me through living with their first husbands. Both times I was lucky, for their husbands died at just the right time for me. Abishag the Shunammite is a comely, tidy girl of yielding and obedient nature and quiet, graceful motions. She bathes each morning, each afternoon, and each evening. She rinses her hands and washes her feet more often than that and scrupulously cleans and perfumes beneath her arms each time before she draws near to feed me, cover me, or lie with me. She is slight and delicate in body and very young, with a smooth and dusky complexion, glossy, straight black hair combed back and downward and rolling outward at her shoulders into an even curl, and very large, meek inviting eyes with huge whites and dark irises that are almost the shade of ebony.
Even so, I would rather have my wife, who asks to see me now at least twice a day. But she comes only in anxious concern for her life and for the safety and future high station of her son after, so to speak, I am no longer among the quick. She does not care about me and probably never really did. She wants her son to be king. Fat chance. He's my son too, of course; but I have others--more, I think, than I have memory left to name should I ever try to list them. The older I get, the less interest I take in my children and, for that matter, in everyone and everything else. Who gives a damn for the country? My wife, large and wide-hipped, is a breathing contrast to Abishag in almost every vital respect. Unlike Abishag, she habitually has an unfriendly stare for everyone, and her eyes are blue, small, and keen. Her skin is fair, and she still dyes her hair yellow with that mixture of saffron and loosestrife she perfected eons back after decades of trying. Tall, brazen, selfish, and formidable, she is more than a match for the shy servant girl and subjects her frequently to rude looks of inspection. With the native instinct of the born connoisseur, her scornful eye asserts confidently that she was always more knowledgeable than Abishag when it came to men. Probably she still is. And probably she always will be. But she has long since given all that up.
As usual, my wife knows what she wants and is unashamed to ask for it. As usual, she wants everything and wants it now. With guilty gaze shifting nervously from mine, she feigns detachment from an ulterior motive and alludes, with an air of innocent and fluttering distraction, to promises we both know I never made. And as usual, she has concentrated on her objective with an intensity so single-minded as to allow no consideration to any subtle strategy that might actually assist in its fulfillment. She cannot make herself believe, for example, that I still might really love and want her. I continue to ask her to lie beside me. She feels we are both now too old. I don't. So to warm and minister to me instead, I have Abishag the Shunammite, who has oiled her arms and lovely young brown breasts with sweet-smelling lotions and scented her neck, ears, and hair. Abishag will try her best without succeeding, and when she rises from my bed, I will be just as cold as before, and just as forlorn.
All day long the light in my room is dreary, as though densely clouded with too many invisible motes. The flames in my oil lamps flicker dimly. My eyes often close without my sensing that I am again drifting off into another brief sleep. They usually feel gritty, inflamed.'Are my eyes red?' I will inquire of Abishag.
She tells me they are very red and soothes them with trickles of cool water and glycerine squeezed from strips of white wool. The weirdest silence prevails under my roof and outside my windows in the streets and seems to hold and muffle all the jarring noises of the city in a deadening grip. About my halls, my watchmen and servants go on tiptoe and speculate in whispers. Perhaps they are making bets. Jerusalem is prospering as never before, but the populace is astir with rumors and alarming expectations. The atmosphere is rife with suspense and increasing dread, with mounting displays of ambition, deceit and hungering opportunism. None of this upsets me anymore. The people are splitting into opposing camps. Let them. The threat of a bloodbath is already quivering electrically in the nightly sea breeze. Who cares? My children are waiting for me to die. Who can blame them? I've led a full, long life, haven't I? You can look it up. Samuel I and II. Kings. Chronicles also, but that's a prissy white-wash in which the juiciest parts of my life are discarded as unimportant or unworthy. Therefore, I hate Chronicles. In Chronicles I am a pious bore, as dull as dishwater and as preachy and insipid as that self-righteous Joan of Arc, and God knows I was ne
ver anything like that. God knows I fucked and fought plenty and had a rousing good time doing both until the time I fell in love and the baby died. Everything took a turn for the worse after that.
And God certainly knows I was always a vigorous, courageous, and enterprising soul, overflowing with all the lusty emotions and desires of life until the day I waxed faint in warfare on the field at Gob, was succored by my nephew Abishai, and grasped beyond all possibilities of continued self-deception that I had passed my physical peak and could never again be counted on to defend myself in battle. Between sunrise and sunset, I had aged forty years. In the morning I was feeling like an indestructible young man, and in the afternoon I knew I was an elderly one.
I don't like to boast--I know I boast a bit when I say I don't have to boast--but I honestly think I've got the best story in the Bible. Where's the competition? Job? Forget him. Genesis? The cosmology is for kids, an old-wives' tale, a fey fantasy spun by a nodding grandmother already dozing off into satisfied boredom. Old Sarah's fun--she laughed and lied to God, and I still get a big treat out of that. Sarah is almost real in her generous, high-spirited good nature and rivalrous female jealousy, and Abraham, of course, is ever up to the mark, obedient, fair, judicious, and brave, always the perfect gentleman and intelligent patriarch. But where's the action once you get past Isaac and Hagar? Jacob stands up as narrative in a primitive way, and Joseph is pretty lively ! s the pampered, late-born, bratty favorite of his doting father. But he drops out kind of suddenly as a grown-up, doesn't he? One minute he's dispensing corn and land in Egypt as the pre-eminent agent of the Pharaoh, and just a few paragraphs later he's on his deathbed, breathing his last wish that his bones be carried up from Egypt someday into the land of Canaan. Another headache for Moses, four hundred years later.
Now Moses isn't bad, I have to admit, but he's very,10 very long, and there's a crying need for variation after the exodus from Egypt. The story goes on and on with all those laws. Who could listen to so many laws, even in forty years? Go remember them. Who could write them down? When did he have time for anything else? And he has to pass them on. Keep in mind that Moses was slow of speech. No wonder it took so long. Michelangelo made statues of us both. The one of Moses is better. Mine doesn't look like me at all. Moses has the Ten Commandments, it's true, but I've got much better lines. I've got the poetry and passion, savage violence and the plain raw civilizing grief of human heartbreak. The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places.' That sentence is mine and so is They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.' My psalms last. I could live forever on my famous elegy alone, if I wasn't already dying of old age. I've got wars and ecstatic religious experiences, obscene dances, ghosts, murders, hair-raising escapes, and exciting chase scenes. There were children who died early, T shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.' That's for the one who died in infancy, because of me or God or both--take your pick. I know where I place the blame. On Him. 'My son, my son' was for another, who was struck down in the prime of young manhood. Where in Moses can you find stuff like that? And then, of course, my favorite, that crowning jewel of a triumphal paean that made me grin from ear to ear the first few times I heard it swell to greet me as I strutted along in my youthful exuberance and naivete. That pleasure soured quickly. Soon I was cringing in fright at the sound of the first of those lovely syllables and glancing over my shoulder in horror as though to evade a blow from some lethal weapon descending upon me from behind. How I grew to fear that rousing tribute to me. But as soon as the first of my mortal enemies had been killed, I found myself shamelessly cherishing again that unique accolade. And even now, in my shivering11 decrepitude, I am disposed to glow with pride and thrill with sexual thoughts at the picture of all those bare-legged girls and women in their tossing skirts of brilliant scarlet blue, and purple, kicking up their sun-browned knees as they streamed out jubilantly from one hillside village and city after the next to meet us with tabrets and other instruments of music as we trooped back victorious once more, hailing us gloriously again and again with that exultant, beguiling refrain:
Saul hath slain his thousands,
and David his ten thousands.
In the original it's even better:
hkh shvl blpv vdvd brbbtyv:
Imagine how Saul took to that one. I didn't imagine, and the next thing I knew I was dodging javelins to save my ass and running for my life. You think you've had problems with in-laws? I had a father-in-law who wanted to kill me. Why? Only because I was too good, that's why. Those were the days when butter wouldn't melt in my mouth. I couldn't do a single thing wrong if I tried, I couldn't make a bad impression on anyone if I wanted to--on anyone but Saul. Even his daughter took a shine to me, and turned out a bitter shrew as the first of my thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen wives. Michal saved my life once, it's true, but that hardly justified all the vicious nagging I was subjected to afterward.
Wherever Saul sent me to fight, I went. And the better I was able to serve him in war against the Philistines, the greater grew his envious and furious suspicions that I was slated to replace him and was scheming already to do so. Was that fair? Was it my fault people liked me?
By that time, of course, Saul had been repudiated by Samuel and subjected by God to one of those vast and terrible metaphysical silences that only someone truly almighty and as indispensable as the Lord has the power to inflict. Here I can speak from personal experience; I no longer talk to Him, and He no longer talks to me .
Even my own heart melted with compassion at news of Saul's affecting plaint at Endor on the eve of his death that God would answer him no more. And this was long after I had been anointed privately by Samuel in my father's house in Bethlelem and told--for whatever the intelligence was worth--that I had been chosen by the Lord to be His king in Israel someday. I had a vested interest in his death, certainly, but I swear I was sometimes sorry for him and that my hands were always clean. Never was I engaged in anything more sinister than trying to enlarge the affection and admiration with which-he had first welcomed me into his fold on the day of my killing of Goliath. But his swings of mood were unpredictable and extreme, and there was seldom a clue beforehand as to when our noble, tortured general and first king would change into a raving lunatic once more and try to take my life. There were times, it seemed, when he wanted to kill just about everyone, everyone, even his natural son Jonathan.
Now there's a problem for you, isn't it? A father-in- law who spends the better part of his time and strength seeking your death, who sends assassins to your home at night to murder you in the morning and leads armies of thousands of his best soldiers into the wilderness to run you to earth, instead of using them to drive Philistines back down to the coastal plains where they belonged. He offered his daughter to me only in the furtive hope I would be killed collecting the grotesquely low price he set for her. One hundred Philistine foreskins! Saul suffered the paranoid's delusion that even his daughter and his son were in sympathy with me, and he was thoroughly correct. I learned from this a fact applying to everyone that is probably of no practical use to anyone: there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everybody is capable of everything. There were spooky, tempestuous spells in which killing me was just about the only thing Saul had on his rabid and demented mind, the poor fucking nut. Go figure him out.
I've got all those wars and conquests and rebellions and chases to talk about. I built an empire the size of Maine, and I led the people of Israel out of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age.
I've got a love story and a sex story, with the same woman no less, and both are great, and I've got this ongoing, open-ended Mexican standoff with God, even though He might now be dead. Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use Him no differently anyway. He owes me an apology, but God won't budge so I won't budge. I have my faults, God knows, and I may even be among the first to admit them, but to this very day I know in my bones that I'm a much b
etter person than He is.
Although I never actually walked with God, I did talk with Him a lot and got along with Him in perfect rapport until I offended Him the first time; then He offended me, and later we offended each other. Even then He promised to protect me. And He has. But protect me from what? Old age? The deaths of my children and the rape of my daughter? God gave me long life and many sons to continue my name--although all of them have names of their own--but it's hot as hell today, and muggy as well, and I can't get warm; I get no heat, even with Abishag the Shunammite fondling and licking me and covering me with her sinuous, lithe, beautiful little body. Abishag my Shunammite has a good-sized shapely ass for someone who is small and built on so delicate a scale.
Guess what--I was a hunted criminal once, with the 'man wanted' sign out for me all over Judah, and not many people talk about that. I was a fugitive outlaw, with a motley crew of six hundred weather-beaten crooks and roughnecks at my command. Do you know what an organized band of six hundred battle-hardened men amounts to? A formidable, disciplined striking force any army would welcome, including Achish and his Philistines of Gath as they mobilized for war against Israel and invited us to ally ourselves with them. Blame Saul that we accepted and really did march off to war against Israel; not many people know about that, either, but there we were on the side of the Philistines as they massed for the battle of Gilboa, where Saul was killed. Lucky for me we were sent away by the Philistines before the fighting began.
If ever I stole, plundered, or extorted, with Judeans or Israelites as the victims--and I'm not admitting I did--Saul left me no alternative. How else was I expected to survive after he drove me away from him and turned nearly the whole country against me? The people of Ziph informed against me, the people of Maon told him where I had come to rest. And meanwhile all I longed for was to go on loving him. I thought of Saul as a father.
'My father,' I called from an undergrowth of thickets on the rocky hillside after I'd come upon him sleeping on the floor in the cave of Engedi and had cut a strip from the skirt of his robe to prove I'd been there. 'See, I killed thee not.'
God Knows Page 1