Dovid's Bathsheva (a story of grace)

Dovid's Bathsheva

(a story of grace)

19 November 2010

23:30

She took one look in the mirror and turned, a quarter of a circle to pick up the string of pearls that lay on the table. Her first husband bought her that, three years before. It was his last present to her.

She rarely went out of the palace these days. She didn't need to, for one. She had no desire to either.  Worse, there were the women groups that dispersed when she came around, their disapproving glances. She understood their stand and no longer minded. She had looked deep in herself, and deep in Dovid's God and found peace, but not without price. She let herself walk down the path again, the path that led a simple young wife to adultery, early widowhood, to burying her own child. It hadn't started with just her public bath, contrary to public opinion. That could have been any woman washing off the last of her menstrum in a four walled bathroom. That could have been any attractive woman who received the royal summons. A simple lust would have ended there. She had walked into the palace, hurriedly dressed in the first robe she could find. It was an orange dress with a flared skirt , a cinched waist and long flared sleeves. She had on the single string of pearls and no make- up, her hair still damp.

She had never seen her husband's revered boss so close and was shocked at his youth, his freshfaced-ness, the genuineness of his smile. She had dropped to one knee, embarrassed to have looked her King in the face so boldly but not before she saw the shadows behind the eyes, the burden of things thought but not said. She dipped her head in respect and greeted gently.

'My husband hasn't done anything wrong has he? You look tired, my Lord'

He had laughed and squatted beside her.

'In one moment you are as much the perfect wife looking after her husband's interest as you are the loyal subject, looking after mine. I have shed much blood, my child', he said cupping one side of her face with his palm.

'But not like Cain', my Lord, she said.

He shrugged, ' I thought, perhaps a season away from more bloodshed would ease the nightmares'.

'Peace is a choice', she ventured.

'Peace is a gift', he countered and smiled again. 'Come sit with me a while'.

He got up and pulled her up with him with a gentleness that surprised her. He walked first to the foot of the bed and picked up the harp then led her into the study. ‘My guards are everywhere else, we may have peace here’. They sank into a sheep-skin rug near the hearth, he held the harp to her. ‘How did you know?’ she asked. ‘The King must know, everything’, he said simply. She picked it up, and slowly ran her fingers through the chords testing the weight of the tune against the evening's quiet. She played him a psalm, a psalm he wrote, picking out the haunting refrain from memory. She stopped just short of the last note, suddenly. He looked up with one eyebrow raised, where he stood beside her.

‘Why?, he asked simply.

'I was afraid', she said, 'of you, my Lord'

He took her hand and he talked simply, told her when he wrote the psalm she had just finished playing. She listened to the shepherd, she listened to the King, she heard the thoughts of the man who was both and none of these things. She told him her fears for her fertility what with her husband away so much- how that her own mother had difficulty conceiving her, her difficulty with understanding her highly motivated and practical husband, her frustrations with herself- her total distaste for conventionally feminine things, her forbidden passions for poetry and prose and music. She could even read, her father's greatest legacy to her.

She read to him daily then, and each day played a psalm on his harp. They talked about everything, except the thing that gradually weighed heavier than the business of the end of the war, on her mind at least. He was like a man reborn, and she watched with fearful joy each evening his eyes light up when she walked in, knowing her eyes lit up as well.  She had crossed a river bank dry, carefully mapped her way back with sticks and stones. The landmarks were still there, only the river was now in flood- and one night there was no returning. They made love with tenderness and passion and she could swear she knew the minute life formed within her at the peak of an ecstatic climax. He laughed when she told him afterward, and then held her tenderly while she cried all night.

There was no moon the next month.

And then she lived through the stories. Her lover had her husband brutally murdered. He never told her but she saw it in his eyes when he told her of Urias' death. Even before the Prophet’s rebuke, and Elohe’s judgement. Those were terrible times while they waited in grief for judgement, waited for the child to die, mourning apart. Their friendship had somehow survived and love with it. That was Elohe's gift of beauty for their ashes. That and this child she was carrying. Not everyone was so blessed, she knew...




Postscript : this story is a purely fictional rendition scaffolded on the biblical account of David and Bathsheba in 2nd Samuel chapters 11 and 12.