In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  I was ashamed of my father. He should not have carried on like that at a defenseless old man. I wanted to get closer to give them more light, but Neelata came forward from the dark. She snatched at my torch. She pushed it away from the spring so that the couple sat in darkness. While there was little light, she tugged at my father’s girdle.

  “Do it. Do it quickly in this moment of weakness!” she whispered. But my father pushed her hand away and spat his wad of herbs into one of the wells.

  “The places on the ark are fixed,” the Builder said weakly. “I do not choose, we are chosen.”

  Neelata lost her calm. She stamped her feet and pushed me. I moved away from her. I wanted to see the Builder’s face, and I knew that, despite the blanket, he was cold. The torch would warm him. Above all, I did not want to accidentally touch off the fury that was pent up in her. But she grabbed me before I could get away. She knocked the torch from my hand and threw it in the well. We were all frightened by the fire going out with a hiss.

  “Gentan he killed to end the suffering of one single man,” she whispered with a voice like a knife. “So why not defeat the Unnameable’s plan? Why not kill these two people to prevent the suffering of many?”

  Her outburst startled me. I had seen the Builder walk past the deep wells, and the thought that he might fall in had occurred to me. But not for a moment had I thought about the possibility that he might be pushed. How simple: We would come out and say there had been an accident. The warriors lacked the courage to enter the cave. The couple was old, their death would seem the natural outcome of a reckless walk in a slippery cave. You put off the calamity by disposing of those who had thought of it. What use would the disaster be if the elect could no longer be spared?

  My father held his torch, now our only source of light, high above his head and said, “Get away from here, Neelata. Do not become involved in this. This is a matter for the rejected, you cannot do anything.”

  Neelata backed away. The herbs did not seem to have much effect on her. I could clearly hear her terrified breathing. She was afraid of what would happen, and afraid of going back without a torch. The Builder sat so still it looked as if he had fallen asleep. Even the gentle trembling of his hands had ceased. He stared sadly in front of him.

  Because Neelata did not react, my father said, “Go back to the warriors and say we are waiting for our water jugs to fill.” She shuffled away. When her footsteps had receded, my father threw his torch into the well.

  It was dark in the cave, much darker suddenly than when I had been here before. The realization of what my father intended made me stagger. In the marshes, it happened occasionally that a drowned child floated by. Children fell into the water so easily, they ventured too far into the reeds or missed the edge of their raft. They drowned and floated past our house. My father refused to fish them out of the water. He could not spare a papyrus boat to burn the corpse on; the child came from some village upstream, and we could not expect any return favor from the fishermen there, our children floated in the other direction. My father weighed the bodies down with mud to make them sink. The first time I saw it happen, I gained strength from the horror that overcame me. The thought of the floating hair, the bulging eyes, and the outstretched arms made me careful and gave my father something to remind me of if I became careless on the water. The first drowned child came with a message, an urgent appeal that made me dry my tears. And so I did not notice how efficient my father’s movements were, and how relaxed his voice. But the second and third time such a body floating past made no impression: I had already been warned, I already felt afraid of the marsh. When my father filled a bowl with mud and poled across to the child, I sat in the bow. I watched as he tied the child to his boat with a rope around its foot to haul it some distance farther along so that the putrefying flesh would not contaminate his waters. He went deep into the marsh, and there he quickly and skilfully disposed of the child. It seemed to me then that he threw his heart with it under the mud.

  Now I heard him walk toward the Builder. His movements in the dark were just as efficient, and his voice just as relaxed, as when he made the children’s bodies sink. Not far from him there was a soft sniffling. It was the Builder. Was he still weeping? Perhaps he was leaning on Zaza, her arms around him to support him.

  “What if there was no ship?” my father said softly when he had felt his way to the Builder and his wife. “Or a bad ship that sank? Or half a ship, not finished in time? Or a rudderless ship without a patriarch? Would the calamity still come?”

  The answer that came from the dark was Zaza’s. She spoke for her husband who only managed a cough. “Then all would be lost. Then the insects will take over this world. They will consume everything until all that is left is a steppe and the wind that rages across it. Then no song will ever be heard again, no skin will ever again rub against skin. Then all dreams will perish.”

  We took the Builder and his wife back to the entrance of the cave in the same cumbersome way we had brought them in. Torches we no longer had, so we progressed even more slowly. We walked past deep, cold wells with this man, who had worked for years and years and now saw the end of his task approach, and whose total devotion to his vision we could not break. We brought him back into the sunlight. We carried water that was so cold it was as if it bit you with icy teeth. To keep that chill, we had wrapped the jugs in cloths.

  Neelata waited for us, bewildered. She immediately stumbled toward us, her veil between her teeth, her steps uneven from the tension of waiting for us. “We counted on you to save our people,” she sneered in a whisper. “If only you had killed them, these bringers of disaster, these lunatics who alarm us.”

  But my father shook his head. Like the Builder, he had searched all his life for grand enterprises, for dreams that reach beyond one’s home. What dream could be more beautiful than building a holy ship, a gigantic object of beauty that took its makers beyond the shadow of the everyday? A project such as this is ended by performing an heroic deed, not by pushing an old man standing by a well. And what heroic deed could check what had been begun here? No matter what we tried, we would not be able to break the determination of the elect.

  The Builder pronounced a blessing over the cave as he left it. From now on, all could drink the water from the spring. No one needed to be afraid of the dead who reposed there. Loudly, he thanked the dwarf. We drank and sat down to rest for a while. Neelata did not wait for us. She refused to take in even a mouthful of the spring water and returned to the shipyard with a dry mouth. I asked the Builder, “What will happen to her? Will she be punished?”

  The Builder sat hand in hand with Zaza on the mat the maids had spread out for them. We stood beside it, like servants, like young people who still have everything to learn. “Neelata is not evil,” he said. “She is mad with despair. But she will not be punished: She is Ham’s wife.”

  38

  All Timber Is Confiscated

  After the visit to the cave, the rain came the following night, very gentle rain, the first in a long time, because remote mountaintops usually prevented it coming. The spring had only just been handed over when it already seemed just an extra supply in case the rainfall stopped again. And stop it did, after just a few hours. The bowls in the hills were carefully lifted from their stands and their contents poured into jugs. In no time, the wind had dried the landscape, which, after a few plants appeared briefly in cracks in the rocks, soon looked as barren and tired as before.

  But the memory of it stayed. That turned everything upside down. Suddenly what had been spoken from the small dais in the shipyard was no longer the ranting of an old man but a prophecy. For the first time, there was a clear sign that he had been right. It might have been possible to forget that the Builder had spoken, but not that the rain had come. Once again, there was much speculation. Even the tone of the songs in the shipyard changed. I heard a cadence in them I had not noticed before. The strings of the lutes were plucked more vigorously than before. And the w
ater that was collected, though sweet, haunted the dreams of all who lived in the shipyard.

  Work on the ark went on as never before. No matter how dark it was, the shouting, the drilling, and the sawing could be heard through the night. In various places, the warriors stood and supervised like slave drivers. The Builder called my father to him every day. For hours they discussed the state of things, the caulking and the sealing. The question of whether there should be a rudder, a tiller, or an anchor was raised again, but the Builder dismissed it. They both agreed, though, that the rigging should be tall and elegant.

  Ham no longer came to the caterpillar cage. He was working as intensively as my father. I approached him to ask where he had been, but he was too afraid of what the oracle had predicted to answer me. I sometimes saw him crossing the shipyard. He kept his hands inside his sleeves, and his eyes were feverish. He gave his workers their final instructions. The arrangement of the spaces was now definite, choices that had long been put off were now made, outstanding problems dealt with once and for all.

  The rain returned. At first it fell in a fine mist, absorbing the dust and making it settle soundlessly. Then came the large drops. They whipped up the sand, making pits in it. We listened to its rustling as to the first words of one who has not spoken for a long time.

  Everybody was ordered to hand over any pieces of wood they had.

  “Why are you giving this up?” I asked the people who were carrying planks to the shipyard.

  “The final offering,” they said. “If we do not give it, we cannot be considered righteous.”

  “But don’t you know that the places on the ark have been decided?” I asked, but I had barely spoken when I was surrounded by warriors. They stood close to me without saying a word, their spears raised, their faces fierce. More and more of them arrived, all insisting they were the Builder’s nephews. They carried scourges and whips. They climbed the cliff and stood near our house until my father had removed the nails from it and pulled it down plank by plank. The boat they did not discover, it was well hidden under the bundles of branches in the field.

  We returned to our old spot in the quarry. Those who did not have a tent slept without any protection. At night we felt ash blow over our faces, and in the morning we looked as if we had aged overnight: Our hair was gray, our faces like masks. My mother seemed the least bothered by it. There was plenty of water now, but she asked us not to wash her. For the first time in her life she allowed us to skip her massages. That was disturbing. Since we had left the marshes, she was more beautiful then ever: In the land air she didn’t sweat as much and her sores healed more quickly. Her appearance was more youthful than before we left, her skin glowing and looking well cared for. The shape of her face, her shoulders, her arms were as lovely as ever. Everything about her was trim and clean, I could not understand why she refused to be bathed. Only later did we realize that she was already trying to give us the chance to save ourselves. She wanted us to take the time to think up a plan, a plan in which she wanted no part. She wanted my father to finish the truss-boat.

  “There is time for that, woman, you’ll see.” “How do you know there will be time?” I asked because my mother wanted to know.

  “We earned it in the cave.”

  39

  “Take Care of Him”

  My mother wanted to say something else, but we did not bother listening to her. Everybody was saying so many things in those days, the sound of muttering hung over the shipyard like a muffling curtain. After a while, you no longer understood anyone, everyone had their say, we all spoke at once. That is why we paid no attention to what she said; it was no more than the whisper of her eyelid, at that moment in our lives of no greater significance than the beating of a butterfly’s wing.

  The muttering that hung over the shipyard came out of the new silence. It should have been a beautiful moment. The woodworkers had knocked the last nail into the ark, the last of the wood shavings had fallen, the fires under Japheth’s pitch pots had been extinguished, the grasses that held Shem’s scaffolding together had been cut, and the bamboo poles stacked up. The hammering that had resounded through the valley for years had ceased. The ark was finished.

  There was still activity: People walked back and forth taking goods onto the ship, and all the time there was the slow filling of the amphoras with rainwater and water from my cave. All the tools and any remaining pieces of timber were loaded in case repairs would be needed during the journey. Large quantities of bamboo and grasses, mats and embroidered rugs went up the gangplank. The women rolled presses, nutcrackers, cleats, and files in leaves and stacked them next to their tents. In sealed containers, they carried extract of poppy and resin-rich bark over the gangplank. People carried their belongings to the entrance of the ship. They said things like “I have seven children, these are their sleeping mats. Can we take those on board now? The children are little, and I am worried about them in the crush. We’ll just sleep on the ground for the time being.”

  “Don’t just assume you’re coming,” the warriors at the gangplank replied. “You won’t know whether you’re chosen until the day comes.”

  Rain was never far away. It came and went, making the land greener than we had ever seen it. When his task was completed, Ham fell ill. The exhaustion of months struck and his strength left him. I no longer met him anywhere, he did not even come into the forecourt in the morning sun. I entered the Builder’s quarters, but I was not invited into his son’s.

  Finally, Zaza called me to her. Her quarters were filled with pouches of herbs. With her gout-deformed hands she marked them with black symbols, pinned dried leaves onto them, and packed them in wooden boxes.

  I had been in Zaza’s quarters before. Every time I went in there, I enjoyed the business, all the paraphernalia of someone with a passion, the scent that penetrated through the walls of the tent. I was jealous of the things she had in there. I dreamed about what you could do with it all if you ground the herbs and seeds fine and mixed them with oil. Once or twice I even contemplated making a few of these pouches disappear; she surely would not miss them. But I did not steal from her. She was the sort of woman who taught you self-respect, to not act against your own nature. She asked me to come with her to Ham’s quarters, where he lay on his mats struggling for breath. Sweat pearled on his forehead; he looked gray.

  Zaza’s fingers were so stiff they were no longer capable of stroking. She had made an attempt at tapping his chest, but had not managed to loosen the phlegm. I tapped his chest properly. When he finally calmed down and shut his eyes, Zaza said, “We called him the dark one because he was the darkest when he was born, and now look at him, so pale. He was to be my untameable one. Does not every woman wish for one untameable child? But he became his father’s darling and that tamed him.” She drew my hands toward her and held them. Her fingers were thin, age had made her bones brittle. She said, “He was so small when he was born. In the middle of the night I used to wake up to make sure he was alive. All his life, I have felt him, felt his body constantly to make sure he was putting on enough flesh. Take care of him, Re Jana, every time Neelata doesn’t. Lay your hands on him and check on his condition.”

  Zaza fell silent when Neelata entered. Neelata brought water no one had asked for and knelt by the sickbed like us. She said, “The hard work has nothing to do with his fever. Sick with longing is what he is, nothing else.”

  I knew what was wrong. He tried to make her come to his tent more often, every evening if possible, but she enjoyed her evenings with her maids and did not allow herself to be lured by his promises. Nor would she let him approach her. She scratched like a cat. She was terrified of having to give birth to a child on the ship she had named “the coffin.”

  We put Ham into my father’s bathtub to lower his temperature. Then we rubbed him with ashes to protect him against insects. We did it together, Zaza, Neelata, and I. He did not know it. He wailed and beat us away. In his delirium he took us for wild animals from the hills.
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  To achieve a cure, Ham, carried by his two brothers, went to confess to his father what everybody knew by then — that he had built a niche. “For the dwarf,” he declared, but the lie made him cough until he nearly suffocated. The Builder ordered him to go back to his sickbed and stop worrying about what he had done. “The dwarf inspired us to do things we do not understand,” he said. “For me too the temptation to admit him onto the ark was great. But he is dead. He was a messenger, and will remain that, although in a guise unknown to us.”

  It was around that time I saw Put talking to Zedebab. A second woman was with them, her twin sister, who was her spitting image. I saw that they offered Put a bag of dried manure, excellent fuel for the fire in which we were no longer permitted to burn wood. I walked toward them to see what had earned him this gift.

  “We are offering him this,” said Zedebab — or was it her sister? — “and we will offer you twice as much again if you will tell us where the niche is that the boat builder has constructed.” They were both small and thin, they wore many rings in their ears, and they had the same way of moving.

  Put and I looked at them disbelievingly. Never had we seen two people who were so alike, who seemed to say and think the same things. Yet after a brief remark on my part, they got into a furious argument, both going spotty-faced so they no longer looked at all alike, as if they had decided they no longer wanted to. The remark I made that touched off their quarrel was “What use is the niche to you? Whoever hides there will be found immediately.”

  40

  The Feast of the Foremen and Warriors

  There was to be a feast. The women made headdresses and tunics. The feathers were carefully chosen for their color and shape. They used the feathers of the toucan, the trogon, and the crane. They collected them in the evening and fixed them to the fabrics with thread. Because it was raining, the forecourt remained empty and everyone crowded into the red tent. The foremen sat in a circle on the ground beating drums. The Builder had wine brought in. And because he was now familiar with the delights of bathing and oiling, he asked me to wash everyone’s arms and feet and rub them with oil.