In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  There was no doubt, this was the Builder, the man who spoke with his god as with people, and who had stayed hidden in the innermost part of the tent for months. His cloak, which must have hung on a hook all the weeks he had lain on his bed, sat crookedly on his body. But his glance was bright and his words clear when he said to my father, “I am told you are the person who has been helping my sons during my illness. You have produced good work. You are an expert.”

  My father stood up and bowed. He too had understood who the gentleman was, and said, “My lord, I thank you for coming in spite of your health….”

  “Certain matters take precedence over one’s health,” the old man replied. His speech was not slow, as you might expect from one so ill, but emphatic and compelling, as if he was steeling himself for something that was inevitably going to happen.

  My father bowed and thanked him again.

  The flat-faced dwarf said nothing, he just stared suspiciously at me and at my mother on her stretcher. I hardly dared move. I was terrified he would see I was not a boy. I kept my eyes averted, but my mother looked back at him frankly. Both of them had a look of horror in their eyes, like two demons who recognized each other. He looked inside our pots and jugs and walked to the waste pit where the carcass of the duck lay. “Look!” he said in a thin voice, picking up the bones that had been carefully chewed clean. He took them over to the sedan chair, stretched up, and gave them to the Builder.

  The Builder did not flinch when the bones dropped in his lap. He simply said, “You are not one of us. Your customs and traditions are strange, even repulsive.” Not many of his teeth had survived the ravages of time, which caused spittle to escape his mouth. But the absence of teeth did not make him hard to understand — on the contrary, we would clearly remember every single word he spoke.

  The Unnameable had not granted permission to eat animals, he said, and consequently, whoever did so would be punished. As he spoke, more water birds flew over the shipyard. They disappeared behind the cliff and landed somewhere past the clay pits, deep in the hills. The Builder was not distracted by the sound of their wings. He had a string of pearls in his hand that he passed through his fingers with a clicking sound. “The living creatures were created on the fifth day,” he said. “We on the sixth. We were given dominion over them, but not permission to kill them, except as a sacrifice.”

  My father understood the import of his words much sooner than I did. The old man had not come to thank my father. He hadn’t even come to reprimand us. A much more drastic sentence awaited us, the carrying out of a threat that had been hanging over us all this time. My father could feel it coming. Quickly he went to stand close to the Builder, moving so abruptly that the pieces of wood on his belt rattled, and said, “Do not send us away, lord! We are already being punished! Our being here is our penance!” His voice was hoarse. The cough behind his hand was not to gain time, but a spasm of fear. “We did not kill the duck in order to eat it. This duck deserved to die. He took everything from us. He crippled my wife, and after that we had to move away from the edge of the marshes because she was going mad with fear.”

  The old Builder had not expected a reply from my father. He had come to make an announcement, not to listen. But what my father said seemed to capture his attention. The servants stopped shuffling their feet. There was not a breath of wind, not a cry from an animal or a child to break the silence that followed.

  My father hesitated. Never before had he told my mother’s story, because she did not want him to. She would hold her breath till she went blue in the face, she managed to make her lungs whistle, and with her glance forbade him to say another word. But this time, she was as quiet as a mouse. She listened as to someone else’s story.

  “Before she was paralyzed, she bred mallard ducks,” my father said. “She clipped their wings almost as soon as they had come out of the egg. She would heat up stones that she replaced constantly. She picked up the chicks one by one and pinched off the tips of their wings with a small pair of pincers. She fed them until they were grown.” I remembered how my mother would wake me up when the eggs were ripe and the squeaking coming from them became so intense that we knocked cracks into the shells with our fingernails. “The chicks thought she was their mother. Once they were grown up, she did not kill them. She used them as decoys. She used to laugh at them because they could not fly. She said they stuck to the water like foam. One day, they escaped. Their strong will made them fly. Shortly after, she fell into her boat, and all she could do after that was blink her eye.”

  The Builder sniffed. He poked at the bones as if he hoped life would return to them. My mother lay on her stretcher, breathing deeply. She turned her eye toward my father and blinked, showing her approval of what he had done and permission to go on.

  “We do know that eating them does not help. But killing them is satisfying. They taste good and give strength. And there are so many….”

  The Builder shifted on his cushions. When he planted his fists by his sides to hold up his body, I could see his elbows trembling. The duck bones rolled off his knee onto the floor of the sedan chair and onto the ground. For a sick man who had just left his tent for the first time, his voice was strong when he said, “The animals have been counted, the numbers are very exact. You must not mock them. Whatever you do, whether you take revenge on an animal species or not, do not laugh at them, do not compare them to foam on the water. There will be no mockery on the ark.”

  We were not chased away that day. Possibly, it was my mother’s story that saved us. But I was struck, as if by a lightning flash, by the understanding of the secret Ham was hiding. The Builder was building an altar. There was an epilogue to the prophecy of doom: The disaster could be averted. To that end, a sacrifice was needed, a sacrifice of a magnitude never witnessed before. That was why we saw the enclosures next to the shipyard filling day after day, week after week. These were the sacrificial animals, the carriers of an ardent wish or great remorse. They would be chased onto the ship as a tribute to the Unnameable. They were the grim guests at this feast. The elect were those who made the correct offering, the most perfect animal or the most valuable kind. That was why there were so many different kinds: The Builder’s offering would be accepted above all others. I had seen it before years ago, when after yet another sudden flood, our people decided something had to be done. We pulled down the walls of our most beautiful huts and rolled up our reed mats. We filled our boats with them. We slaughtered our buffalo, the best looking, the fattest first, and put the meat on the mats. My mother offered her ducks. One by one, she chopped off their heads and carried them onto our boat in broad baskets. Our yard that had always been white with duck shit now glittered like a red lake. We carried our winter stocks on board, many jars of rice. We dismantled the huts where the supplies were stored and brought them on board too. Then we untied the boat from the jetty and pushed it into the wetland, toward the lagoon, behind which the sea was waiting. So this was the purpose of the Builder’s ship. It was a purification, a trial by the Rrattikas’ god to test their loyalty.

  The servants lifted the Builder’s sedan chair. All that time, I had stayed unobtrusively near the fence because of the dwarf, but now that I understood why the animals were here, I sprang forward. I moved so suddenly that the sedan carriers stood aside for me. The dwarf snorted loudly through his wide nostrils.

  “Are you going to make a sacrifice?” I asked. “Is this ship the carrier of your intense prayer?”

  The Builder raised himself from the cushions. For the first time I could see all of his head, its proportion to his neck and body. The Rrattika liked to make us believe he was more than five hundred years old, but you can’t expect people who forget their birthplace as easily as their last campsite to be careful at keeping track of the years. He was old, but not as old as they said. He raised his finger at me.

  “Who are you, boy, that you ask me a question like this? Are you not the one who grooms my sons?” He did not wait for my answer.
He looked away from me, raised his other hand, and immediately the servants started moving. They straightened their shoulder cushions and hoisted the sedan chair onto their shoulders. This took them a little while, and the silence became oppressive. The old Builder stared straight ahead. The dwarf rattled the bones at the end of his staff. The secret they hid was greater and darker than their ship.

  My father chewed nuts for my mother. If it seemed to us unreasonable to build a ship in the middle of the desert, it was just as unthinkable not to take animals that were so tame you could practically catch them with your bare hands and break their necks and pluck them. And those stores that grew and grew? People came from far and near carrying sacks and jars. The workers received part of the grain, part went to the animals, and the rest was stored; there was enough food to keep an army going. In the carpentry workshop and the pottery, work was continuous; there were more wood shavings, shards, and splinters heaped up than anywhere in the world. But why the order to make those amphoras, larger than anyone had ever seen, and so heavy they could barely be lifted? They stood in rows at the edge of the shipyard; walking past them was almost like walking through a tunnel, but if you asked what they were for, you only received an empty look in reply.

  “This Builder is not building a ship,” my father said to us. “He is building a box, an ark, a coffin.” He made drawings on leaves, on tent flaps, on planks. How to spread the weight? This Builder’s god seemed to want a living sacrifice, why else all this concern about sufficient air and light in the hold? But we had transported cattle on boats, we knew how long it took for an animal to get used to the rocking and how dangerous it would be if panic broke out in the herd. And how do you embark the animals? You don’t put grazing animals near meat eaters, because the herd would try to get away from them and the load would shift. Wouldn’t it be simpler to slaughter the animals first?

  When I got to the red tent to groom the men that evening, I was stopped at the entrance. Two servants blocked my way. “The Builder has ordered his sons to take care of themselves,” they sneered, pointing at the pond where the goats drank.

  17

  Ham’s Ruse

  The days passed. I was out of work. I hoped Ham would try to do something to meet me, but he did not. Perhaps his skin was becoming scaly, perhaps the itch was getting worse and worse, but he did not make time to let me look after him. Now that the Builder was better, the building of the ship was being hastened more and more. Japheth and his men were working on the pitch harder than ever, coating the ship on the inside as well as the outside, and the scaffolding that carried the pitch workers was larger than ever, stretching all the way up to the bowsprit. A number of workers had to be dismissed because the height made them sick. They were replaced by slaves.

  Ham was working with my father on the layout and the partitions. They bent over and made drawings in the sand. They had no need to look for shadow: They stayed in the shade of their construction. Ham complained. There was not enough space on the ship, the divisions had to be tighter. The spaces had to be taller, with more light. My father’s sketches became more and more elaborate. Ham constantly had to ask for more explanations because the wind wiped out the drawings in the sand. He threw his adze and drill to the ground.

  Two decks with a space of nine cubits between them is what my father designed, with wooden stairs and walkways, and with walls held together with crossbeams. A third deck had to be added. Every attempt to make the interior of the ship more convenient, with more doors and partitions, was accepted by the workers without complaint. Even more, it enthused them; they seemed to assume that a perfect ship would do greater honor to their god, and therefore they would inevitably do well because of it. But they made no connection between their work and the animals that were gathering near the shipyard, and when I talked to them about the disaster that was supposed to be coming, they said, “But isn’t the ship well made, exactly as ordered? So why would there be a disaster? Our obedience will bring us prosperity, not punishment.”

  I had given up all hope of ever being with Ham again when unexpectedly I was summoned by two boys. They were both chewing constantly as they stood in front of our house and said, “You must come with us. This is a matter of life and death. Leave your mother here; this is urgent.” They walked out of the quarry. Taking my things, my bottle of oil on my belt and my water jug on my hip, I followed them.

  They took me to Ham’s part of the tent, and the moment I was inside, they pulled the front flap down. Ham lay on the stretcher in the corner, coughing uncontrollably. I was not surprised. I had known from the start that he was the sort of boy who breathes through his skin instead of through his mouth. I knelt next to him. I tapped him on the chest, gently pounding with balled fists, loosening the phlegm. It was hot and oppressive in his part of the tent. There was good air movement in the tent if all the partitions were up and the outside air could enter freely, but when they were down, it soon became stuffy. Ham liked having them down.

  It took him an intense effort to say, “The dwarf has told me your mother’s story. Now I understand why you are so solicitous. She has already suffered her calamity, she should not have to undergo this a second time; punishment for a punishment is undeserved.”

  He spoke rapidly because he could feel the next coughing fit coming, and when it came it seemed as if he was going to suffocate on his phlegm. “Water, give me some of your good water,” he panted. He drank from my jug and poured the rest over himself. He ordered me to get more and to come back as soon as possible.

  Never before had I walked into the hills so fast, never before did I take so direct a path without worrying about possible pursuers. I hurled myself into the darkness of the cave, kicked skulls and bones aside as if they were mere rubbish, and dunked my jug in the basin. I did not have a spear in case I came across a wild animal. The only thing I thought of was Ham.

  When I came back into the red tent, I no longer heard his coughing behind the partition. The servants admitted me and quickly lowered the flap. It took some time for my eyes to adapt to the half-light, but it was soon obvious that Ham was not moving. I lowered the jug, bent over him, and saw him winking with his left eye.

  My blood turned to sand, my breath to water. Astonishment and fear gripped my heart, as it used to years ago by the marsh.

  It was a suddenly sinking boat, a springing tiger, it was a blinding insight that should have set me screaming but left me voiceless. In a flash it was clear to me: The water of the dead from the cave had struck, the catastrophe was overtaking me.

  When he noticed how much he had scared me, he lifted his head and laughed. He put his hand on my shoulder. He was not paralyzed, he said, he just wanted to be treated as if he were.

  It took me ages to recover from the shock. My hands washed him as before, but I did not feel him.

  He was sorry about his trick, he kept laughing at me affectionately. The coughing fit was genuine, he said, but he knew it would pass, as always. “Wasn’t it a good thing to do to make the dwarf think I was about to die? How else would you have gotten in here?” He asked me to straddle him, the way he had seen me do with my mother.

  I did. I rubbed him like my mother. I massaged him till his stomach was taut and his skin glowed. I no longer avoided his face. I moved slowly, to give myself time to recover.

  He grasped my hands. He entwined our fingers till the bones cracked. My touch made his cheeks flush. He smelled of the milk he’d had with his breakfast. I bent over him and released his body’s juices the way Alem-the-ragged had taught me.

  When I wanted to leave the tent through the servants’ section, the dwarf blocked my way. He said, “From now on, you’ll come and wash Ham again every day with that water of yours. No matter that you’re a meat-eating stranger. Ham will soon have to take a wife, and who would want a scabby, coughing boy whose breath rattles with phlegm?”

  I nodded. It had already happened. I already was his wife. “I’ll take care of it,” I said and left, walking with a
man’s angular movements.

  In the evenings, after work on the ship, my father built a bathtub. “A woman who knows a man must be able to immerse herself,” he said. “And in something better than a cattle pond.”

  I sat down in it. The cold took my breath away. It had been so long since I had been completely underwater. The tub was beautiful, well made, with a polished edge and a base so smooth it felt like skin against mine.

  “I did not know you could do this,” I said.

  “What is a bath but a boat turned inside out?” was his reply.

  I knew the true reason for this gift. Both my mother and he thought I let myself be sullied by the Rrattika. They could not get used to the idea that I lay down with someone who had no home. But they did not stop me. Ham inspired compassion in them, he was precious to them, they already thought of him as a son.

  18

  The Arrival of Neelata

  A short time later Neelata arrived, the slim city girl. Put was the first to see her coming, he let his millet porridge get cold to watch the commotion on the cliff. She came accompanied by ten beautifully dressed men on magnificent horses and six lady’s maids on mules. They had come a long way; that was obvious from the dust on their legs and on the horses’ flanks. They came toward us along the same path we had taken when we arrived. None of the riders dismounted for the descent. I had never seen a horse before. I knew such animals existed and that they looked like donkeys, that they were stronger but less able to bear the heat, but this was the first time I witnessed their nerve. They took the slope like reckless children. Some of them occasionally became so frisky their riders had to rein them in. Like Put, I was used to the deliberate movements of donkeys, and we found this bravery so exciting we forgot about our meal and walked to the bottom of the slope.