In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  My father’s back shone. For the first time since we had left, it was covered in a thin layer of sweat. “The day is nearing its end. It is not long till night falls!” he said. A branch snapped under my foot. All three looked at me. Their glance startled me, because I was not aware that I had moved.

  Alem looked away from me as fast as he could. He seemed to need to swallow something before he could say, “Night is only the disappearance of colors. I have guided you to your goal, I will put the few hours that separate us from the dark to good use.” He held his hand out to my father.

  For a moment, my father stood motionless, but then he gripped the hand and shook it. He opened the case at Put’s feet and paid them with shells and rings. “Take the donkey too,” he said once Alem had folded his wage in his mantle. It was a generous gesture, to give a donkey to a Rrattika; I had never seen anyone in the marshes do anything like it. It seemed an extravagance, but the animal was tired and possibly ill. Alem prostrated himself before my father, but my father failed to notice. From the ledge, he was already staring out over the shipyard again.

  I first embraced Put, the little boy who shuffled his feet in the dust so much it made you cough. The child did not look at me. He kept staring at the ground as though there was something on that spot that demanded all his attention. I pointed at his beads, at the string of small bones and teeth I had threaded for him. He put his hand over it as if it was a sore spot.

  Then I let Alem-the-ragged embrace me. Alem had kept us away from the wild animals. When we set out, he had said, “He who wants to find the builder of the ship must follow the animals. They know the way. But he must not overtake them. They are dangerous, and they are thirsty.” Because of his sharp nose and his ability to guess from a few hairs in a hollow what animal was ahead of us and how far ahead it was, he had guided us safely over the hills. I held him close, and he put his arms around me. He held me for a long while, his hands and fingers moving up and down the small of my back. He was wearing more clothes than I. I only had on a loincloth and around my neck a carefully woven collar. He wore a long mantle that left only his hands and feet uncovered. It made his embrace more like a swaddling, like the wrapping of someone shivering from a fever. He put his mouth close to my ear and said my name. I did not move, giving him time to change his mind. I shut my eyes to recover from the shock of his leaving us.

  “I am not coming, Re Jana,” he whispered. “This place makes me feel bad. I came this far because I did not believe the stories. Now I can see it with my own eyes: a ship without a river, without a lake, without a sea. It really is as mad as it sounded in the songs.” He stood with hips and thighs and knees pressed close to me.

  “You haven’t been to have a look,” I whispered back. “There are things you can’t see from here.”

  “I’ve spoken with the grass cutters. They’re pretending to go to work, but they’re off. The only law that holds good here is that of madness.”

  I looked up at the sky, at the absence of even the smallest cloud that might have made the space around us seem a little less endless. “We haven’t finished yet. There was so much you were going to teach me still,” I said, putting my fingers under the neckline of his shirt and stroking his collarbone. That was something I had been almost addicted to doing ever since I first met him; I picked at the edges of his clothes because that was where his skin began.

  “Go and find yourself a man. Do with him what I have taught you, and you will be happy.” He pressed his lips to my eyes, first the left, then the right. He was much older than I, more than twice my age. For weeks, he had consumed the same food as we, but he still smelled of the things his people ate and of the fat mixed with ash his people rubbed into their skin. He had always drunk all the water from his water bag. Never had he saved part of it to wash himself. His scent had become precious to me, but now, at our parting, he smelled again like the Rrattika who happens to be passing by, who does what you ask of him because you pay him, but who has no idea of what drives you.

  My father said, “We haven’t got all day.” Alem-the-ragged and little Put greeted my mother with a bow. She blinked, at the child too. We followed them with our eyes until they had reached the shrubs farther along. That was the last I saw of Alem. He had taught my father to track. He had taught him the position of the sun and the movement of the stars. And after my father had seen all the stars and was asleep, Alem-the-ragged called me to him. Me, he had taught love.

  2

  The People Building the Ark

  The track to the shipyard was hazardous. We went down in a zigzag. Stones flew out from under our feet. Far below we saw people stop to watch us. We drew attention because of the clatter of all the things we were hauling, the rattling of the stones that rolled away, the slow, cautious sliding of my mother’s stretcher along the slope. Only once did we stop, on a terrace with a small meadow from which we could take a closer look at the shipyard. A little out of breath, my father looked at the activity below. The area looked cluttered, and it was hard to get an idea of the arrangement of the workshops. In a fold in the landscape, dozens of animals stood looking at us. Some were in enclosures surrounded by low stone walls, but most of them wandered about freely and unattended. I expected words of displeasure, but he just breathed in the scent that met us and said, “Mulberry trees, thank god!”

  Once the slope was behind us, all that separated us from the settlement was a depression in the ground, which, judging by the gashes and gouges in its sides, must once have been a quarry. The ground was dusty and soft. My father found a hollow about my mother’s size and removed from it anything that could hurt her. He spread her woolen cloak out over the top, brought the stretcher close, and rolled her into the hollow. He washed her more thoroughly than usual: With finger and thumb, he kneaded the soles of her feet, he turned her on her front and stroked her spine, first with the palm of his hand, then with his fingers. He put infusions on the sores on her lower back and shoulders, dried her, and rolled her back onto the stretcher. He rubbed oil into her skin and tied her loincloth around her hips. He bandaged her heels: They were in the worst state. Her torso shone, the designs on her stomach and shoulders seemed to come to life in the low light. He combed her hair and decked her with shell ornaments. All this time he spoke to her in a low voice, “They will look at you here. Someone as beautiful as you, they cannot have seen before.” I listened to it as to a song.

  When he had finished, and I had made good use of the time by gently rubbing spit into the sore spots on my feet, we left the quarry and moved toward the settlement. We passed dozens of dwellings in front of which teapots bubbled away in stone fireplaces. The people who were busy around there glanced at us, perhaps startled at our appearance and the things we carried, but showing no excessive curiosity. We walked directly toward the construction site. It was not a simple matter to get that far with the stretcher. There was a lot of clutter all around. Planks and stones, tools and other equipment seemed to have been left scattered around haphazardly. Children were running around barefoot amongst it all, dogs and goats walked in and out. A sort of path had been left open, but even that was covered in people’s personal belongings: drinking cups, combs, blankets, spoons and cooking utensils, and I realized that this was only a path by day. At night, it was a sleeping place for many, for workers who slept like dogs under the open sky. Never had I seen so many stacks and bundles of things that did not belong together. You wondered how people here could ever find anything.

  I stopped in amazement, but my father urged me on. He kicked things out of the way to make room for the stretcher. This was no different from what the local people who were lugging things around did; it was the only way to get anywhere. The closer we came to the shipyard, the fewer dwellings and the more people we found. They wore long cloaks and carelessly sewn footwear. They carried tools: planes, chisels, drills, and other woodworking gear. Some carried a stick, as if they’d prefer to beat a path rather than follow one.

  At close range, t
he ship looked even larger than it had from the cliff. The structure was enclosed in scaffolding that gave precarious support to a number of people. Orders were shouted, buckets hoisted up. Without taking any notice of their questioning glances, my father joined the workers. He clambered under the scaffold and disappeared behind the tangle of bamboo and sunscreens. He reached out to the hull and tapped on it, listening to the sound. He reappeared and started to walk around the gigantic structure at a rapid pace. When he reached the bow, he disappeared from sight.

  He was gone for a while. I swatted the flies away from my mother. Already her lips were white and dry again, and I had no water left. But my mother did not ask for anything to drink. Her eye shone. If the ducks had not taken her will away, she would have been able to say it: “Here we are then, this is it. No need to go any farther.”

  I held back my smile until she happened to look my way. The noise of all that activity filled my head, like in my childhood when not only my father, but also his brothers, his cousins, and his friends scraped the layer of tar from their boats and applied a fresh one. Because the noise was so overpowering, and the movements of the workers around me so purposeful and fast, the shipyard seemed to grow and grow. It covered the whole world, and I forgot that there was anything else beyond the horizon. I had no trouble seeing in their gestures the joy that drove the boys with the planks and the nails. This is where the songs we sing are made, I thought, here is the beginning of the stories that will still be told many years hence.

  My father appeared at the stern and came running back to us. He had inspected the whole structure and the sheer size of it took his breath away. He had seen that it would be a sturdy ship, with a shallow draught and a flat bottom, and would ride high on the waves. He squatted next to us and carried on at my mother as if he expected her to contradict him.

  “He’ll lose the bow!” he said. “He’s bent the top end of it the way you break a duck’s neck.” His face was full of color now, he no longer resembled the man who, only a few days ago, singing hoarsely, had cursed the birds passing overhead. “How does this man think he is going to keep a straight course? His ship is going to crack down the middle if he doesn’t bend the ribs up more evenly.” As if he expected her to have the answer, he asked my mother why the Builder was not building in oak. Oak was water resistant and indestructible! It was easy to split! Had there not been enough pine boats that had perished? “What sort of people are we dealing with here?” he asked. “Who are they? Which race do they belong to?”

  My mother blinked her left eye a few times. Then he repeated the question to me, but I shook my head. These people were pale, their bodies were shrouded in long cloaks. The girls were adorned with feathers, the boys had patterns on their forehead, black designs that disappeared into their hairline. They did not resemble any of the wandering people that we had seen trekking past the marshes. Nothing made us suspect then that we had come to a people we knew.

  3

  Good Water

  We hurriedly followed the path that led straight up to the tall, bloodred tent that we had already noticed from the cliff. It stood with its entrance facing the shipyard and was screened from its neighbors by piles of pottery shards on one side and on the other by carelessly stacked but sound timber. The tent was not made of animal hides, but of tightly woven goats’ hair. It was large and seemed to tremble on its poles. Pigeons flapped above its roof. This was the dwelling of the Builder we had heard stories about in the marshes. He was said to be old but vigorous, a man of unshakable will. He was said to have knowledge no one else had, and which he was not prepared to share for pearls or shells.

  We passed the pond where a number of women stood.

  “She is thirsty,” I said to my father, nodding toward my mother, but he kept walking and did not wait for us.

  The women made way for us. “Have your clothes been stolen?” they asked, exchanging rapid glances. They spoke in a strange accent. They used words of which we only recognized parts or which we hadn’t heard in a long time. “And what is the matter with her?” they asked. They turned their heads toward the dark, beautifully made-up woman on the stretcher, her hair dressed in waves, her toenails colored, flower designs on her shoulders and stomach. They looked as if they could not imagine ever being treated with so much respect. They asked one another the question we had heard so many times on the way: “Could she be a queen?”

  My mother looked up at them. I do not think she was disapproving of them. She was curious.

  “She is crippled,” I said.

  “Who beat her too hard?”

  “No one. It just happened.”

  “Why are you dragging her around? Is she looking for work?” The women burst out laughing. They all carried a jug. One of them poured water into a beaker. She was a stocky girl with broken teeth who stoppered her jugs with wads of grass. A piece of gauze covered the cup. Small stones, bits of twigs, and leaves were caught on the gauze. The stream of water made a gentle gurgling sound. But the water had a muddy smell. I did not have to look at my mother to know that her eyelid trembled like a butterfly’s wing.

  I went up to the girl and asked, “Can I have some water?” She picked up the beaker and handed it to me, but I thought she had not understood me and said, “I mean fresh water. Clean water, to drink.”

  She pointed at the jugs around her and said, “That is what we’ve got.”

  “But where is the source?” I insisted. “Where is the lake or the river the ship is going to sail on?”

  “There is no lake and there is no river.”

  “Then where is the well you are going to divert here? Where is the spring that will fill this basin with water to lift the ship?”

  The girl flushed. I could see she was taking offense at my nakedness, my insistence, my language. “I tell you, there isn’t one,” she snapped.

  My mother was blowing and puffing, bubbles appeared at the corner of her mouth. I knelt by her, wiping her mouth clean and said, “You are right. Here there is no water. We won’t need to move away from a tide line, for there isn’t one.” She blew more spit bubbles. She had no other way to express her triumph.

  4

  My Mother

  My mother’s mother was called Enah. Enah was the daughter of Manilada, who lived for another forty-six years after she had her last child. Manilada was the daughter of Elokane, who only lived till the age of twenty-six. She died and was never forgotten. She was the image of her grandmother Kan, who bore nine sons and nine daughters. She had her last child when she was forty-five and lived for another thirty years after that.

  My mother was a fisherwoman, like her mother and grandmother. Her boat was named after the tern. She knew the marshes the way others know a field or a hill. All the time she went out with the fleet she was greatly respected. I can still remember the way she would walk to her boat. Her movements were fast and abrupt. She paid no attention to the way she moved until she was aware of someone looking at her. Then you could feel how she changed. When anyone at all, even a child, was watching her, she began to stride. She contained her strength. It took an effort: She was too impatient for elegance.

  One day she was standing in the water next to her boat. She was using a sieve to lift small fish, no bigger than a child’s hand, out of the water. Suddenly her knees gave way. She grasped the edge of the bow and pulled herself up. For a brief moment, she managed to keep herself upright on the narrow board, then she tumbled into the boat. All I could see was a couple of fingers and the sole of a foot. I heard her scream, the shriek with which I had heard her chase wild boars and snakes. Only just for a second, then almost immediately everything was quiet again. The short boat, which was not really made for sailing, only for putting the catch in, enclosed her like the shell of a nut.

  I was only a little girl, my teeth had not even changed yet. Because I could not swim, I stood in the water as far out as I dared. I was expecting that the little boat would come toward me, that she would step out of it and ask me wh
y I was wailing like that, but it did not come, it drifted away from the edge. Water creatures brushed over my skin, insects landed on my face and my ears. I lowered myself into the water up to my neck. I tried the movements I had seen my mother make. My head went under. I reached up with my little hands. I swallowed water and coughed. I scrabbled around until I could feel the wood of the keel.

  I climbed into the boat along the tow rope. My mother was lying amongst the dead fish. She lived. There was no blood. She looked at me with a clear, questioning look. But she did not reach out her hand. She did not help me to get on board. She blinked her left eye, that is all she did. No one knew we were there, we had left that morning without any plan. Then the sea opened her gullet, and the water started rising.

  5

  Rrattika

  It was not easy to get my mother as far as the red tent now that my father had walked on. It was uphill and the ground was sandy. Although there were a lot of job-seekers standing about, no one offered to help. They were all too busy, speaking to each other in rapid-fire sentences, gesticulating vigorously with hands and arms and keeping their eyes on the entrance to the red tent.

  As I came closer, I could understand snatches of what they were saying:

  “… many people here claim …”

  “… but he is a real …”

  “… boasted he could …”

  I went as close to the tent as I could. I hoped to find my father amongst the waiting men, but realized he was already in the queue inside the forecourt. I left my mother underneath a guy rope, the best place to make sure she wouldn’t be trampled. I went to the side of the red tent. Clambering over stacks of timber, shavings, and pot shards, I found a spot on a heap of cut-up branches where I could squat unseen. As long as those waiting in the shipyard were quiet, I could hear what was being said behind the goat’s-hair cloth.