The King’s Daughter

by Tala Bar

Table of Contents
Synopsis
Chapter 8, part 1 appears
in this issue.

Chapter Eight: Palti Ben Lyish

part 2 of 2

From behind the screen of tears I saw him nodding his head, but he said nothing. He sat down in a chair opposite me and remained silent. I later learned that Palti had a kind of natural wisdom, an understanding of people. His very silence when sitting in the room affected me more than any action. His presence made me ashamed of my tears; I released myself from my nurse’s arms, took hold of the spindle and returned to my automatic fingering, my eyes lowered all the time. Naama opened a natural conversation with Palti, as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

Having seen the way he looked, I could now hear his voice. And, like his appearance, which was ordinary but pleasant, his voice was also pleasant; a low, soft masculine sound alternated with my nurse’s familiar voice, slightly hoarse from so much scolding of the children under her care. It was an agreeable minoric music, which lulled my senses, and for the first time since I parted from my beloved I was able to let my spirit out of its body, rise and hover in the distances with a sense of freedom. It helped me achieve a release from the compulsion of emotions and desires.

* * *

Just before he left us, Palti turned to me for the first time to welcome me to his home; he went out without waiting for an answer. Only then I mustered courage to ask Naama directly, for the first time, to tell me about him.

“I should appreciate him being such a good man; you are uncommonly lucky,” she remarked.

“I don’t think Maakha would give me into the hands of a bad man,” I replied; “but what does it mean, a good man?”

I thought of my father Sha’ul with his bravery and strong sense of justice; of my half-brother Yonatan with his loving heart; of my husband David with his enchanting personality. Could any of the men I had loved with all my heart be called ‘a good man’? I was not so sure.

“Palti is a really good man, a man to whom the needs of others are sometimes more important than his own,” Naama asserted.

“Tell me about his first marriage,” I demanded, finding refuge from the present in the past. “How did his wife die?”

So, for the first time, I heard the life story of the man I was married to. Palti had been happy in his first marriage, my nurse told me, and he loved his wife very much. When she died, he had no intention of taking another; he did not want to forget her, but devote his life to taking care of the three children she had left him, two daughters and a son.

“When did she die?” I asked, curiosity awakening in my heart.

“When her youngest daughter was born.”

“And how old is the child now?”

“She is now about five years old.”

I did not tell Naama that I had met Palti’s little daughter while looking after the sheep, as well as her older brother. “So why did he want me for a wife, then?” I continued to ask, encouraged by a growing curiosity.

“You must know that in our family it is not so easy to object to Maakha’s command,” the nurse said to me.

Maakha! How long was she going to rule my life? I reflected, resentfully, forgetting the most important action in which I had defied her: marrying David. It took me some time before I learned to appreciate Maakha’s action rightly.

“Who was Maakha thinking about when she issued that edict of marrying me to Palti? Me or him?” I asked Naama, looking at her obliquely.

“Don’t try to be cunning, Mikhal, you are not very good at it,” she chided me. “I suppose she thought of both of you, of the good you could do to each other.” I could ask her no more after that.

“Anyway,” she continued, “it may be well that Palti had not thought until now that he needed a new wife. It was not so hard for him to leave you alone, as you can see.”

I acknowledged the truth of her words; but the young blood started rebelling, in an absurd way I felt offended. Did he really not want me? Didn’t I look attractive enough for him? “Tell me about his wife, his family, Naama.”

“There was nothing special about his wife, but everyone said they loved each other dearly. She was a nice woman, and so are the children; they are quiet people, beneficial for their environment, easygoing with others. You will be happy with them.”

At that time I did not know how important it was for me ‘to be happy with them’. The children I had met out in the pasture, five-year-old Yaala and eight-year-old Nahir, were certainly ‘nice’. I could see they were well behaved, not wild as I used to be at their age. The boy took good care of his little sister, who listened and obayed him without rebelion. I found I could talk to him about the animals, plants and rocks in the field, and about the blowing wind and the running clouds in the sky, much as my father used to talk to me.

Yaala seemed young for her age and did not take part in our talks, only accompanied us listening with an open mouth. Sometimes I taught them the games I used to play with the boys in the surroundings of Giv’at Sha’ul, and the two would forget for a moment about being ‘good’ or ‘nice’ and would get a little wild as children sometimes need to be. After such a game the girl, bursting with laughter, would fall on me hugging and kissing, and I enjoyed lifting her in my arms and give it back to her. It was some outlet for the love frozen in my heart, and the ties between us tightened. All this had happened before I met their father.

After his first visit, Palti repeated it occasionally; he came any time he was free of his regular business when it rained outside, to see me at the workroom where I spent those wet days. He never found me alone, because I was always accompanied by Naama, the maids of the house who did spinning and weaving, and Tzilla, who was forever busy with the housework.

* * *

One day he brought the children with him. The young ones, when they saw me in that company in the house, discovered for the first time that I belonged to the family, that I was actually their new mother. For Yaala, it was a new revelation, for she never had a mother; she naturally ran up to me, climbing on my knees, disturbing the yarn. Nahir, who, at his age, could still recall his mother vaguely as a distant, pleasant memory, was only able to relate to me as a friend; it took him a few days to overcome his first shyness in face of that new situation.

I insisted on allowing him enough time to get used to the idea of having a new mother, and after a few weeks, following the example of his younger sister, he fell naturally into the habit of regarding me as such. When Palti saw the three of us behaving on equal terms rather than as an adult with children, he fell into the habit of seeing me as one of them; in this way our strangeness turned into an acquaintance.

A few weeks later, Palti’s eldest daughter, Alma, who had been sitting silently when she had come with her father, came to visit me on her own. She was my junior by only a few years, and at that time betrothed to a young man two years her senior. I found out that she loved her father very much, and since her mother’s death she had taken on herself to see to all his needs. Having sat in a corner for a while barely talking, she surprised me by saying suddenly, with no previous warning: “I hope you’ll be a good wife for Father.” Her voice was soft and quiet, and she kept her eyes lowered and did not look at me.

I looked at her. Only Naama was in the room with me, and perhaps that was why Alma dared speak to me, saying what she did. “Do you want me to be his wife?” I asked her frankly.

She raised her eyes then, looking at me in wonder. “Yes,” she said after a pause, “you seem to me a nice person.”

“You know nothing about me,” I said harshly, “I am not a nice person at all.”

“From what I heard from Yaala and Nahir I think you are,” she replied, daringly.

“But after your mother’s death, do you want someone else to take her place?” I wondered.

“A man needs a woman,” she answered quietly but without hesitation. Yes, I thought, and as such you cannot take your mother’s place.

Suddenly, my heart felt warmed up and I smiled at her. “I think you are, at least, a nice person, and I hope I should not disappoint you. But it will not be very soon.”

My eyes filled with tears, as they did often when anyone was talking about marriage. At once she was crouching at my feet, holding my waist, putting her head on my knees. “Please, don’t weep!” she cried; “it’s so sad when you weep.”

“Life is sad sometimes,” I said, wiping my tears. I stroked her chestnut hair, just like Palti’s; the whole family had that shade of shining, wavy hair. She hugged me, our heads lying on each other’s shoulder. At that moment we became bosom friends; I could never regard Alma as a stepdaughter because she was too close to me in her age, but she was the first woman friend I had ever had.

* * *

Palti Ben Lyish and his children did not have any outstanding features; they actually seemed mediocre in any way. Or rather, they had a quality of moderation to which I was unused, which was a positive feature in its lack of extreme. They were not strikingly good-looking in the way Sha’ul and Yonatan had been, nor particularly ugly like Ishbaal. None of them was uncommonly self-sacrificing like Ritzpah, nor particularly ungenerous and certainly not wicked; they were not as clever as Re’uma used to be before her illness, nor stupid to any degree. But they were all nice, in a way that I had never seen in the house of Kish; nice-looking with their shiny chestnut hair and warm brown eyes, they all had a pleasant, mild temperament.

In my previous life at Sha’ul’s house, everyone was always distinguished in some way or another: good or wicked, handsome or revolting, clever or utterly stupid, brave or coward; before I came to Galim, I had never met anyone who was as nice as the members of Palti’s family.

In Palti himself I met with a personal sensitivity which I could only compare to that of Yonatan’s. When my new husband saw that I was attracted to the children’s company, he left us alone, watching us from a distance. The children’s company enabled me to behave naturally, to forget the pain devouring at my heart. Because I was able to identify with them, I began to see Palti as a father figure; thus, when he naturally hugged his children, I let him hug me in the same way, recalling Sha’ul’s embrace before David’s love had captured my body and my soul...

I prefer not to recall those days. I was torn from them by force, by an evil hand, which could never be avanged for its crimes. The abyss, which opened between my short-lived happiness in Galim — fulfilling Devora’s prophecy to the letter — and what came afterwards, can never be bridged.

* * *

When I let Palti embrace me in the company of his children, I found I liked his touch. The body acts on its own; I was not a child any more, I had experienced the love of a man, and Palti was a man without a woman. His touch was warm and pleasant, I began to look forward to it. When he once kissed his children in my presence, he kissed me as well on my cheek, without any objection on my part. A pleasant shiver ran through my body, my cheek burned and my face blushed.

It was merely a physical reaction. My mind was still shut, my emotions frozen inside me. Most of my actions were mechanical, instinctive; that was how I joined the children in their games, that was how I let Palti get close to me, treat me with affection.

One evening we sat together. For some reason Palti stayed in the room unusually late, after the kids had gone to bed. Naama did not feel well and went to her own room; only Tzilla was left, busy in her own doings. I sat in a corner, weaving — having recovered somewhat from my depression, I found spinning too boring and transferred to a more creative work; weaving used to be the one ‘feminine’ job I learned and did sometimes at Giv’at Sha’ul.

On that evening, I was busy with a new scheme of colors of my own invention. Once, I rose from my seat to fetch another skein of wool, and as my eyes were still on the cloth, I did not notice that Palti had also got up at the same moment to go to his own separate room. As I turned, we collided in the middle of the room, and touching, we at once took hold of each other — like two persons drowning taking hold of a beam of wood floating in the middle of the sea. Both of us must have been ready for it, because we were at once gripped in a hot, mad embrace.

More than two years had passed since I came to Galim before I at last reached Palti’s bed. It was a night of magic, the like of which I had never had with David. There was in Palti a sort of gentle ferver accompanied by a deep affection. I had been deeply in love with David, but, as I had learned, he was not a great lover: even in bed he looked mainly for his own pleasure and his own satisfaction.

Palti was a man who habitually considered other people’s well-being, in bed as well as out of it; in his treatment of me, all his wish was to maky me happy. In consequence, my greatest pleasure had become to make him happy. My relations with Palti passed from indifference to constant affection and love, without my ever being in love with him.

* * *

It took a few more years before I conceived. Naama explained to me that I was still a child in my heart, needing a parent rather than a husband and not quite ready to be a mother myself. These were days of deep, peaceful happiness for me, like a clear pool of water drenched in sunlight. As a faraway dream I remembered the madness of the first days of my marriage to David, which until then had been the best time of my life.

Those days were not repeated in my love for Palti. But in the home of my second husband I received what had been always lacking from my life: a real, constant love. I was surrounded by overflowing love from the children, from my husband, from my nurse and even the maids; we spun together threads of wool and words, weaved colorful cloths and stories of wisdom and jest. All these instilled in me a sense of calm and security. The realization of Devora’s prophecy seemed to me as the most important sign for the beginning of a new life.

With the first signs of pregnancy, the feeling of approaching motherhood compensated me for the lack of mother in my childhood. The memory of David had grown faint, dispersing at last in those golden mists, which seem to me today like a glimmering delusion. In Galim I learned the way of a different love, a sane one rather than insane.

Even when I was taken by labor, which was hard and laced with constant pain, I was not alone. Beside the experienced midwife of Palti’s family, I had by my side my old nurse Naama with all the members of my new family, and a host of maids whose sole function was to see to my comfort. A day and a night and another day I labored, my life almost flying away together with the child’s, until at last I heard the sound of his voice, and was able to rest...

Enough! These memories sicken me!

To be continued...