In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  He said, “Every net has its holes, as the child of fishermen you know that,” but I did not listen. Now I understood that he could not do anything for me. He did not know it, but I was taking leave of him. All I could do was wonder if there was enough time to flee.

  “How many sleeping places did you build?” I asked. Speaking was difficult, my teeth were clamped together like a trap.

  “I don’t know,” he said dazedly. “The ship is large.”

  “You know exactly. Eight of them you’ve built, and not one more.”

  He coughed, dry and hoarse. I knew where in his lungs the phlegm sat, I could have brought it up with gentle tapping, but I did not.

  I said, “You know I have good water. Wine seems more precious to you people. But wine won’t take the place of water. Don’t forget: The source is well hidden.”

  It was not only his face that was flushed with agitation. His neck and chest too were red. He said, “None of our women has the talent needed to find it. We are counting on you, on your uprightness.”

  With a sharp knife I had loosened the fibers of the top end of a small stick. I pushed it into his mouth and started scouring his teeth to make him stop speaking. “Uprightness has done nothing for me,” I said, turning to the light. “I know where to find the herbs I need. The spring will be poisoned long before your women have reached it.”

  My words demanded vengeance. Naturally, a man makes much noise in such a moment. And because he is cursing, others will come running.

  It was Japheth who ripped the curtain aside to see what was going on. He recognized me, of course. He said, “Is the masquerade finished?” I looked at him as if he were not speaking my language. He was dirty, he needed grooming. He went on, “Or is it just starting?”

  “I disguised myself,” I answered wearily. “I have a well, but I am going to make it unusable.”

  Shem joined Japheth. Japheth leered, Shem looked at me as if he were full of pity. Perhaps they were simply amazed at the fact that I would slip from one skin into another, change sex like clothes.

  “If you are not a man, we’ll beat you because you have deceived us. If you are, we’ll beat you because you keep your water from us.” Sweat beaded on Japheth’s upper lip. He was forceful and solidly built, but not fluent in language, often stumbling in his reasoning.

  I turned to the wheezing man in the chair, the only one who was clever enough, so clever that even I had not seen through his intention. “You’ve made me into a boy,” I spat at him. “That has weakened me. Only as a woman did I have the right to keep my well secret. By making me a man you took away my power over the water.”

  Ham was now sitting completely bent forward, his head deep between his shoulders. “It is true,” he said. “We had you followed. But none of your pursuers has returned. Did they see something they wanted to run away from forever? Or was the way so dangerous they perished? We can only guess.” With a swift movement he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes to block his welling tears. “It was not my idea, but my brothers’.”

  Shem and Japheth dragged me out of the tent. They beat me in a detached, polite manner, as if to prove they had learned to punish instead of taking vengeance. Shem pulled the blue dress from my back; Japheth held up the scourge, a bundle of thin, flexible straps meant to hurt without causing injuries. Of course, it was Japheth who hit me; he was always the one who was least troubled afterward by what he had brought about. He asked me to squat and put my arms around my knees so the skin of my back would be stretched good and tight. He struck sixteen times. He struck me because I had disguised myself, and because, no matter how hard I denied it, I had lured my pursuers into an ambush.

  It went on for an eternity. I tried not to think of him and his whip. I thought of home, of water and marshes, of the turf huts, of the cutting table where my mother scrubbed the fish and discussed with other women exactly how much salt was needed to pickle a fish the size of a hand without making it inedible; we children organized a mosquito hunt, there were prizes to be won, we kept the insects in empty snail shells we held closed tightly with our thumbs. I thought of swimming, of going so deep that all you can hear is the rising of air bubbles. But it was no help. The straps hurt. With every stroke, I became more convinced that my father was right. The Rrattika were scum. I despised them and their customs, I did not wish to be amongst them for another moment. I vaguely heard Ham coughing behind the goat’s-hair curtain. He called out something, but I did not understand what he said.

  When Japheth indicated that I could go, I hurried, without saying another word, away from the red tent. The blue dress on my body was ripped at the seam, my back was burning, but I did not scream. Put came after me. He did not stop shouting, “They mustn’t hit you. Let them try again and I’ll hit back. I’ll smash Japheth’s eyes with my slingshot. Shem I’ll beat till he bleeds.”

  “Shush now,” I said. “Keep quiet. Everybody can hear you, everyone can see us going, and I don’t want them to.”

  But my admonition helped not one bit. He only cried all the harder, “I can scream if I want to. When the water comes, the Builder will slam his ship’s hatch shut and sail away. I can’t swim, you can. How long will the trees we’ll climb hold us? How long will it be before the water goes down?”

  My father was in the house. I could not believe he was sitting there so quietly. After the Builder’s speech I was expecting my father to start doing something, go to see the Builder or pack our belongings, not to meekly accept this humiliation. They called themselves the pure, the righteous, and let us kill a badly hurt man like Gentan so they could keep their own hands undefiled.

  “These people have been hit with madness,” he said, deadly calm. “They have never seen more water than the contents of the buckets they lug about.”

  “I want to get away from here, Father.”

  He inspected the welts on my back. “Our gods have not given orders,” he said, gently putting his fingers on the sore spots.

  “Perhaps our gods are unaware of their god’s plan.”

  “My task in the ark is nearly completed, but not quite….”

  “I want to get away from here. I want to take the secret of the spring with me and make them tear their mantles in remorse.”

  My father removed a small flask from his belt and let a few drops drip onto his fingers. The oil cooled my skin, which was glowing as if it had been touched by fire. “Why did they beat you?”

  “I threatened them. I said I would poison the water.”

  “Re Jana, you dumb child,” he scolded. “Did you want to kill innocent people? Did you want to do what you blame their god for and play the Unnameable yourself?”

  I turned my back away from him. I held on to the door jamb. His hand stayed suspended in the air.

  “Is that what the elders did, generation after generation?” I asked, pretending calm. “Know that war is coming, know that drought is coming or disaster, decipher all the writing on the wall, talk about it, spell out the images of doom, but not act accordingly? Rather stay petrified with fear and talk about ordinary things — Is there enough water to cook the millet? Can we undo the bolt on the door? — than face the situation? If what we know means we should harness a horse, hire a tracker, and journey far away, then that is what we do, isn’t it?”

  My father interrupted me with an expressive cough. He put a shiny finger to his lips and pointed at the spot where my mother lay. “Spare her our doubts,” he said, bending toward me. “If you must talk, do it away from her ears.” Silently, he waited till she was asleep. Then he stood up to go outside, where darkness was falling. He went to the back of the house; I followed. Bending, he lifted a stack of planks from the ground. I recognized the planks, they came from the house. In the back of the shed where we kept our stores, a hole gaped. The boards had been carefully removed. He put them in my arms.

  “I have my own solution,” he said and walked ahead of me. He led me out of the quarry, past the shrubs where we normally uri
nated. “If the Builder is right, the flood will be violent,” he said. “It is intended to kill, to wash away the wickedness of the world. Can you blame their god? He is sick of looking at the Rrattika. He is fed up with this roaming people, who are not evil, but hardly show any progress. There is so much that is new in the world, there is so much knowledge of justice, trade, and cultivation.

  They do nothing with all that, they wander and keep wandering as if time stands still and as if these new insights mean nothing. Their behavior makes one wish for a catastrophe. It makes one hope for a purification. Only it is a pity that people who have nothing to do with it will be hit just as hard. Moving away makes no sense if everything is flooded. In which direction were you planning to go? We don’t know from which quarter the disaster will strike. If we flee, we may be going toward it. And is this something we want to face on our own? No, we must stay with the others.”

  He walked ahead of me into the dark. He did not move fast; it was almost as if he carried another load apart from the planks. He went past the ash field, where for a long time waste was burned, but that now lay abandoned. Beyond the ash field, nobody lived, there were only the shrubs and the cliff. “Only those who are righteous will be spared, the Builder said. I have been wondering what that means for us. Have we not cared for your mother all that time? Have we not taken in an orphan child, the child of nomads, with no manners? Are we not hardworking people who are content with what we get for our work? And all those other men, the tradesmen who use their utmost skill, the artists who put their very soul into every vault, into every arch they polish and every image they carve? I have wondered what we would have to do to be well regarded by the god who is going to send the water, but Shem and Japheth give me no hope. It is a god just for them. He has chosen them, and they him. As outsiders, we don’t stand a chance.”

  He started the climb up the cliff. I was panting. I could not believe that he wanted to take these planks up there, along this steep path, on this moonlit evening full of insects and vermin.

  But he did not go all the way to the top. Along the winding path, halfway up the cliff, there was a smooth, uncultivated terrace where the scent of mulberry trees was in the air. He crossed the terrace and put the planks down in the farthest corner. The field where we stood was flat and open. It was naturally screened by shrubs. In the center, there lay a carefully cut wooden platform. Now that I stood next to it, I could see that battens and tie-beams had been nailed onto it. The joins had been sealed with hemp and tar. Planks lay around it at right angles, like fish bones.

  Without taking any notice of my amazement at this isolated construction site, my father said, “What we need is a boat for everyone, a fleet for those who have thought, who are provident and can figure things. Isn’t a new world with people of insight and intelligence to be preferred to a world with only those who are righteous? We’ll build our own boat, a truss-boat that can take a bit of a storm. That is what I am doing, my girl, that is my defense.”

  I put down my planks. As I bent, I must have brushed against his back. He flinched and groaned. I could not see his skin very well in the dark, but I could guess what was wrong.

  “Has Japheth been to see you too?” I asked. I whispered my question, not because I thought someone would overhear us, but to avoid recalling the memory of the pain.

  “Gentan’s wife told him I put the rope around her man’s neck.”

  I closed my eyes for a few moments. “We don’t have to go back, Father,” I said when I opened them again. I heard him release a deep breath. He walked away from me. He went back to the terrace from where you could see the whole shipyard. There he stopped. He looked at the lights shining here and there from the hundreds of tents and dwellings below us, with the dozens of paths linking everything with everything. He stood there for a long time.

  “We’ll demolish the house in the quarry for the timber,” he said at last. “We’ll build a new one here. We’ll no longer work for them. We’ll hide in this place here, halfway up the cliff, where they won’t look for us, close to our boat. And when the calamity comes, we’ll be able to see from here what the ark builders do. And if we do as they do, we too will survive.”

  We built a modest house, not half as big as our first one, on the terrace that looked out over the shipyard but kept us hidden from view with bushes. Quite a way from there, so far that my mother could not hear the knocking of the hammer, my father continued building the boat. Day and night he worked; he did not return to Ham. Two whole seasons my father had worked for Ham and his brothers. Now, with the end of construction in sight, he hid from them. Deep in the night, we stole clothes from clotheslines. We did what we could to look like Rrattika. Put thought it was exciting, he had not expected us to ever get dressed up like him.

  My mother did not understand what was going on, she expressed her surprise but we made up excuses and stories. She begged me for explanations, but what could I say? I had lots of questions myself: If that god wanted to destroy people, why did he not opt for a quick death, a death by fire or the thrust of a spear? Why that gruesome water, which inspires so much fear in those who cannot swim, and pointlessly extends the death agony of those who can?

  “This …” said my father after he had watched me being grimly silent with my mother, “is what will happen to her if you tell her what you know.” He held up a rabbit by the skin of its neck. Put watched with trembling lips. He had found the creature. He had wrapped it in his mantle and brought it to us. Life had almost deserted it, although it showed no signs of injury. It offered no resistance when my father moved it in our faces. Its legs hung limp. It neither scratched nor bit, it was resigned to dying. Put hoped my father would shorten its pain, but he did not. He waved it around and said, “Her mother did it, and her mother’s mother. They decided it was enough. They died because they wanted to die. That was their rebellion, their reproach to us men, whom they blamed for the things that happened. If you talk too much, she will follow in her mother’s footsteps.” He threw the rabbit into the scrub without once looking back to it.

  He stretched out the measuring rope, made drawings with red ocher, and twirled his compasses; he made this boat stronger than any of the boats he had built before, and the timber we had earned was beginning to run out. With my hood pulled down over my eyes I went to the woodworkers’ yard to search among the wood shavings for boards that could be put to use. Sometimes Put came with me. He was more bony than ever — he would only eat if we could persuade him that he was hungry — and he spoke little. My father’s decision to build a truss-boat spurred him to work like one possessed. He wanted to be part of every single moment of its building. He never took breaks. If we rested or drank tea, he went away. He wandered about amongst the tents, took boards from Ham’s workshop, and brought them to us. I stole the nails, my father the tools. If anyone caught us and tried to stop us, we threatened them. Thieves and liars we were; in a very short time we quite belonged to the depraved people for whom the Unnameable’s doom was intended.

  26

  Living Apart

  I rapidly became accustomed to my life as a Rrattika girl, though it took me a while to learn to manage those wide sleeves and skirts, which were actually quite handy for spiriting away tools. Our life in isolation was simpler and less tiring than it had been when we lived in the quarry. Our crops flourished fairly well, milk and eggs we could obtain for a small payment, there were antlers and horns aplenty to be found in the hills to make ornaments and coins; anyone dexterous did not have to go short of anything. It seemed unlikely that we would suffer hardship by no longer working for the Builder and his sons. And there was time. Every nail my father bent, he could afford to carefully straighten. No one urged us to hurry. The sky was as bright blue as it had always been; it was hard to imagine that there would ever be rain.

  Our view was panoramic. From our shelter I saw how a system of ropes and beams was used to hoist the amphoras on board the ark. The big urns looked like well-rounded women’s tors
os, one handle on each hip. I counted six men for each amphora, plus a seventh to direct the operation, and in a shady spot I discerned the figure of the Builder, flanked by the dwarf. A little later, a few women came from the hills with ordinary jugs on their hips or their heads, they came from ponds half a day’s walk away and carried the best water they had been able to find. They went to where, with tubes and containers, a filter had been built to remove twigs, leaves, grit, and especially larvae, and then other women carried the purified water onto the ship and poured it into the amphoras that were waiting in their frames. The distant rasping and squeaking of the tools could be heard all the way to where we were.

  Occasionally, my father went to observe the works from the shrubwood. The boat he was building in our little field was steadily taking shape, but what was a little truss-boat like that compared to the construction down below? And in the field, he was alone. My father longed for the cheerful company of the woodworkers and their music. Wherever they went they took their boxes containing not only their carefully maintained tools, but also their musical instruments, their lutes and flutes, which were invariably brought out after work. I got worried whenever he stayed out longer than expected. He was always so loud, and I did not know if he would be able to restrain himself when he heard them talking about the work. I was terrified that they would unmask him and claim him again, or banish him because of Gentan. Then who would build our boat?