The Secret Chord: A Novel (32 page)

She offers the cakes—hot, fragrant—to her brother. Amnon sweeps them to the floor and pulls her down upon the bed. At first, she’s merely indignant. Sheltered, protected from knowledge of her family’s darker acts, she is as innocent of evil as a child of her times can be. Of Amnon’s depravity, she knows nothing. Even Avshalom, who hates Amnon and would delight in smearing his name, has felt it necessary to shield her. So she thinks her older half-brother is playing some strange, rough, unwelcome game.

Only when he throws her on her back and pushes her robe up does she panic and thrash, trying to get free. But he’s astride her now, and so much bigger, so much stronger. She’s a quick-witted girl. Knowing she can’t fight him off, she tries to reason with him. As his hands push between her thighs she pleads. How can he do this thing to her? How can he do it to himself? He’ll be shamed and ruined, just as surely as she will.

He is not hearing her. His jaw is slack with desire. He forces her legs apart. Panicking, she tries a desperate gambit: Ask David, she cries. Ask him for dispensation so that they can marry. “He’ll change the law if he knows how you feel; he will not refuse you. When has he ever refused you?” But her voice is thin and shrill. He silences her with his mouth, the bristles of his beard grazing her face. There’s an aching pressure between her legs. She squirms and flails, trying to resist. It’s no good. A searing pain, the tear of flesh. A few hard thrusts and it’s over: a spasm, a shudder and he falls off her, panting. She rolls away from him, curling in on herself like a dying insect. Her mind is a blur of hurt and shame. She’s keening, retching. But he’s not done. After a few minutes, he reaches out and wraps her hair in his fist, dragging her head back. He pushes her knees down, flips her onto her face and rubs himself against her, trying to get hard. His fingers probe inside her—slippery now with her blood and his seed. He rubs this on himself, but it’s no good. Angry, he pulls her onto her back, glares into her sobbing face. He hits her, open-handed first, then with a closed fist. There is a noise inside her head, a grinding of cartilage against bone. Blood pours from her crushed nose. She spits out a tooth. He takes hold of her head and grinds her face into his groin. She’s a limp sac of pain. She can’t fight him anymore. She has nothing left to fight for. She takes his cock into her bloody mouth and gags as it fills her throat.

By morning, there is nothing he has not done to her. His final act is to push her onto the floor. A hard stream of hot liquid showers her head. She opens her stinging eyes. He is standing over her, shaking the last drips of urine from the tip of his cock.

“Get out.”

She looks up, shakes her head, clasps at the bedpost. “Don’t. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t send me out into the street.” Her voice is distorted by the blood congesting her shattered nose. “If you shame me like that, it will be worse than what you’ve already done.” Amnon steps over her, walks to the door and calls his servant. A single, brutal command: “Get
that
out of here.”

She’s on her knees in the narrow lane outside Amnon’s house as the door bar slams into place behind her. She tugs at her crushed robe. The silk gives easily. She rips away the virgin’s sleeves. On the pale flesh of her upper arm, bruises are already purpling. She grabs handfuls of dirt, rubbing them into her bloody, urine-soaked hair.

The city is waking. In the gray light, a boy comes out to empty a night jar; a girl sets off to fetch water. Their early morning faces crease at the sight of the injured girl, but no one moves to help her. They know very well whose house this is. They have seen such outrages before. Then a woman notices the purple silk of the torn and bloodstained robe. Her eyes widen. Tamar speaks to her, asking the way to the house of her brother, Avshalom. As Tamar struggles to her feet and limps away, the whispers run before her: the king’s daughter. Her own half-brother. By the time she reaches Avshalom’s house, her bright future is a smear of despair.

•   •   •

I lay impotent, drool stringing from my mouth. As Tamar’s sobs faded, my ears rang until, after a time, I could hear the ordinary, early morning sounds of my own house seeping through the noise of vision—the grind of the well chain on stone as Muwat fetched water, the songbirds and the cockerels greeting the sun. I sat up, dizzy and ill, and spoke aloud, to test my voice, and see if the hours of enforced silence were over for me. A strangled cry issued forth. Muwat, coming in with the water, rushed to my side to see if I was well.

I managed to say the word “broth,” and as Muwat went to see to it, a few lingering filaments of vision flickered. Avshalom, scanning his sister’s broken face, her bruised arms. I could feel the rage licking up inside him. As her full brother, her violated honor stained his own. I felt his mind, reaching toward the hot satisfaction of swift revenge. But then I sensed struggle, and a hard-won self-mastery. He realized that Amnon, who judged others by the measure of his own ungirt passions, would be armored against some act of blind anger, some ill-considered violent outburst. Indeed, such a thing might even be what he hoped for. In such a circumstance, in self-defense, Amnon could kill Avshalom, his chief rival for the throne, and if the knife he grabbed were poison-tipped, who would think to inquire? I felt Avshalom’s resolve: the only answer he would give Amnon was silence. He commanded Tamar: Say nothing of this. Then Muwat arrived with my broth, and the threads of vision frayed to wisps and dispersed. I took the cup and struggled to take a sip.

Avshalom expected his father to act. It was natural enough that he should have looked to David for justice, both as father and as king. As a father, David doted on his only daughter. As king, he had every right to be incensed. The state marriage for Tamar, so long anticipated, was now out of the question, and heavy laws had been trampled upon—this, by the crown prince, who was meant to uphold the laws.

Yet David did nothing. If he raged at Amnon, it happened in private. As days passed, it became clear that there would be no public consequences. No punishment. Avshalom, resolute, reacted to this with a steely silence. Only Maacah spoke up.

The daughter of one king, the favored wife of another, she was used to being heard. The day after the rape, she begged to see her husband. As she had her own fine house outside the palace, it was usual for him to come to her. But he did not appear that day, or the one following, sending to say that he was sorry, but grave matters consumed his every moment, and that he would attend on her as soon as he had liberty. I suppose he wanted to wait until her first spate of emotion had ebbed. If so, he misjudged her.

Muwat, who was friendly with Maacah’s principal maidservant, gave me an account of their confrontation. The king arrived at her house on the third day after the rape to find Maacah still prostrate and devastated. He drew a chair, the maidservant reported, and sat down by her couch, taking her hand, offering comfort. When she composed herself enough to speak, she asked what arrangements he had made for the execution of Amnon.

The king recoiled. “Are you mad?” he said. “Execute my firstborn son?”

“Then what punishment do you propose?” asked Maacah, her voice strained.

The king stood and turned away from her, pacing. When at last he spoke, it was in a low tone, as if interrogating himself. “Will punishment of Amnon restore Tamar’s honor? No, it will not do that. Will it fix her disfigured face? No, it will not do that, either. If I punish my son, will it remake my daughter into the fit bride of a king, or indeed the bride of any person of state significance? No, those plans must be set aside now. What good, then, to tear my family apart over this miserable business? Enough that my daughter is ruined. Why also ruin my son and heir? It’s not too late. He can change. He’s only in his twenties. I was still making mistakes—grave mistakes—at a much greater age than that.”

Maacah struggled to her feet, her mouth open. “How can you?” She moved unsteadily toward him. “You cannot propose to leave this rape, this act of incest, unanswered? This crime, for which the punishment is death . . .”

David raised a hand. “Not so. This . . . thing . . . took place within the walls of the city. The law says the woman in such a case must cry out. Yet no witness has come forth to say Tamar cried out . . .”

“It’s you who is mad! What witness would dare accuse your brute of a son? Have you seen her? The bruises on her body, her shattered nose, her missing tooth. You think she did not cry out? Are you saying—you cannot be saying—you cannot think she invited this abomination?”

David opened his hands. “I do not say so. But some might.” Maacah flew at him then, pummeling him in the chest, shrieking. The servant, although she had not been dismissed, withdrew to the anteroom at that point, afraid. She could hear the king, repeating his wife’s name, trying to calm her rage.

“Maacah,” he said. “Think. You cannot want the details of this matter trumpeted about in the hall. Yes, I know; word of the attack is unfortunately abroad in the city. But the less we feed the gossip, the better for everyone. Tamar included. You must see that.”

“I see no such thing! I see weakness, cowardice. You are no fit father if you do not—”

“That’s enough!” David raised his voice. “I will see to it that Tamar is escorted to Avshalom’s farm—it’s a beautiful property, I chose it myself, years ago, in the mountains of Baal-hazor. She can retire there quietly. I’ll see to it she has a household, servants, all that she needs. We will close the door on this, and move on.”

He left then, passing the servant in the anteroom without even noticing her, smoothing the front of his tunic where Maacah had gripped the fabric.

When Muwat told me all of this, I thanked him, and then asked that he leave me. I needed to think. This decision of the king’s was wrong, undoubtedly. I knew what its consequences would be. But my mouth was stoppered. I would have to join the chorus of deafening silence. Or so I thought.

XIX

“M
aacah has asked that you come to her,” said Batsheva unexpectedly. “She knows that I see you. I’m sure I do not have to tell you what it concerns.”

I tilted my face to the golden sunlight and closed my eyes with a sigh. “No,” I said. “You do not.” It was only two months since the rape of Tamar. Amnon, after a brief absence from morning audience, was back in his usual place at the king’s side, where Avshalom pointedly ignored him. David tried to cover the rupture between them with strained attempts at good humor. To foreign visitors and rural supplicants, no doubt the scene looked unremarkable. But like a harp string whose tuning key is forced a turn or two past proper pitch, tempers were pulled to their limits. When I visited the hall, I could feel it there, always: an unbearable tension.

“It wouldn’t be fruitful,” I said. “I can’t give her what she wants.”

Batsheva chose a ripe fig from the silver dish on the table between us. “Nonetheless, it would oblige me if you would see her.” I looked away as her full lips closed on the luscious fig. Even after so many years of continence, it was hard, sometimes, to be so close to a woman as sensual as Batsheva. I don’t know if she was aware of the effect she sometimes had; certainly I tried with every fiber to conceal it. As she finished the fig, she dabbed at her lips with a square of linen. “It’s not easy with Maacah,” she confided. “Our relations are, I could say, correct—but it sits ill with her that David gives me precedence. She’s the only one of us born royal—except of course for Mikhal, but she, as you know, is not . . .” She let the thought trail away. “In any case, Maacah feels any slight, and would be my enemy if I did not take great care to prevent it.”

I had barely seen the two women together. Little by little, I had detached myself from the daily business of the court. There was no purpose in my being there, as the Name had ordained David’s penance, and had sealed my lips from counseling him in any way concerning it. For one whose work has been to speak, the enforced silence came hard, and the thrumming strain between the elder princes exhausted me. It was easier for me to remain at home, counting each waxing moon, teaching Shlomo and waiting for events to unfold as I knew they must.

I made exceptions, of course—I didn’t want my absence to become patent enough to be remarked upon. I served the king as an ordinary adviser, giving opinions on daily matters when they did not touch on what my desert visions had disclosed. Once each week, I would visit Batsheva. We sat on her private terrace. In the courtyard below, Shlomo trained his she-eagle. Batsheva’s newborn slept in a basket at her side, shaded by the fronds of a palm. They had named the new prince Natan. I was honored. David had taken to heart what I had said to him about being childless, and this, along with a free hand in Shlomo’s instruction, was my ample recompense.

Shlomo’s bird had grown enormous—her wingspan more than three cubits, her glare fierce and her strength lethal.

She soared above us all, riding a high thermal. Shlomo gave a single, piercing whistle. She drew herself immediately into a stoop, plummeting toward him. In unison, Batsheva and I gasped. Yet the great bird landed on his slender gloved hand as light and docile as a dove. Shlomo looked up, basking in our smiles of approval.

It still sometimes surprised me, this comfortable friendship between Batsheva and me. We were, of course, united by a passionate devotion to her boy and bound by the shared secret of his destiny. I started meeting with her as any pedagogue might, to discuss my pupil’s progress. And at first, Shlomo was all we did discuss. In truth, each of us could have talked contentedly for hours on that one subject and not tired of it. But as she came to know me, her fear receded, and she began to reveal more of herself. She possessed a quick mind and a sharp intuition. There was also a pragmatic resilience that had allowed her, once she ceased to be consumed by fear for her son, to begin to repair the rotten foundations of her marriage. She was wise enough to know that her own relationship with the king would color his dealings with her son, and that if she had to set aside certain unsavory facts and bitter memories in order to further that, then she would do so. In hints and allusions, she had let me see that this was her object. When I looked at her now, I no longer saw a haunted girl but a mature and confident woman, secure in her precedence with the king.