In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  “One of them says he is a boat builder,” I heard someone say. There was the gurgling sound of tea being poured into beakers from large jugs. I imagined there were four or five men, the Builder, his sons, and presumably also a servant who laughed like a monkey and interrupted impudently while serving the tea. One by one, the candidates in the queue were examined. No doubt wearing just loincloths, they showed off the soundness of their limbs. I heard someone question them in a gentle voice about their experience, skills, age, and strength. I recognized a pattern in the assignments: Most people were needed for the scaffolding on which work was going ahead steadily and which was absolutely essential for everything. And then they needed men to handle the pitch. For that, they sought young men who would not complain, who were able to do much and prepared to do anything. The interviews were brief, but because there were many, it was a long wait for my father’s turn.

  My father’s voice at first sounded quiet and hesitant amongst the others. Gradually the sound of pouring and slurping stopped. My father chose his words carefully. He spoke about bending ribs, caulking seams, and fitting bulkheads. Gradually his diffidence disappeared. He spoke the way I had been used to him speaking: blunt and convinced he was right. Of course, he knew what he was talking about. He had designed and built large-sized boats, and only very rarely had one of them been wrecked. Although his reputation had not spread to this region, he spoke as if it had.

  It worked. Occasionally there was a brief rejoinder, a reply from the gentle voice. Was that the Builder?

  When my father had completed his argument, no one spoke.

  The pigeons settled down. The men waiting in the front annex too were quiet, and no longer made a clatter with the tools they were carrying.

  “I want him with the woodworkers,” I heard someone say behind the canvas. It was a new voice, one I had not heard before. The voice was emphatic but not peremptory. It delighted me, the way finding a smooth stone under a rough one could delight me. Every now and then, a squeak sounded through it. I stood still, holding my breath to listen to it.

  To my surprise, there was no rejoinder, only a muttered objection that could not have come from my father. There was a tense silence full of coughing and shuffling. Eventually I heard my father say the words people in the marshes use to take leave, so I quickly got off my stack of branches and hurried back to the front.

  My father reached the forecourt before me. He came walking backward through the entrance of the tent. Following him was a young man in a striped shirt. He was no older than me, and unlike all the others I had seen in this shipyard, he was blond. He wore a braided belt around his waist and shoddy footwear.

  “You will have a very important post,” I heard him say to my father. “None of us have skills like yours.” I recognized the voice from inside the tent. There was something the matter with his breathing; I could hear that squeak again.

  My father pretended not to notice the young man. His hair streaming, his face blotchy from the exertion, he looked around him trying to locate my mother and me.

  The young man did not seem to notice and said, “My father is ill, and we need people who are highly skilled. My brother Shem is doing the scaffold, my brother Japheth the pitch. They both have experts by their side, foremen who help them in their work. I want to have you beside me for the timberwork.”

  My father spotted me and came toward me. The young man followed him, nearly brushing past me. Close up, I saw that he was not blond, but that his hair and eyebrows were covered with sawdust. On his forehead he wore the same black design as all young men here. He was bony and had the lightest skin of them all. “Can we come to an agreement? Shall we see each other in the carpentry shop at sunrise?” he continued imperturbably.

  My father handed me his stick, shrugged, and muttered a dour “Yes.” “Pick up the stretcher,” he said to me curtly. He took the other end and without giving the young man another look went ahead of me down the path.

  I could not understand what was going on. My mother’s eyelid was trembling. She panted and snorted. My father must have heard her, but did not look back; he kicked the litter on the path out of his way and kept walking. I looked back over one shoulder, then the other, but on a path like this it was hard enough not to stumble, so I made no further effort to see what was going on behind me. I walked on quickly, the way my father wanted.

  Only when we had got behind the stacks of timber did he lower the stretcher. He looked at me and then at my snorting mother. He bent over her. He clenched his fists and held them before his stomach, as if he had been hit below the belt. Very slowly he sank down. He pressed his mouth against the eye that he had stitched closed long ago to protect it from drying out. He said, “I cannot work for them. They are not sound people. They are not trained. They are Rrattika!”

  That was what they were. Rrattika, people who wandered, who turned up occasionally to beg or to plunder the dwellings of people who had settled. They hardly looked like the Rrattika we knew; with their light skin they looked deceptively different, but they had the same manners. They understood nothing about water or about boats. They had no love of home, no matter how hard they tried to stay in one place for a long time. They kept cattle in their own way: They stole herds and drove them along mercilessly for days on end.

  From behind the stack of timber I could see the red tent. There were even more people about now; men had come out of the tent and stood looking around in agitation. It was not clear where the light-skinned young man was. They all wore those outsize cloaks, which kept flapping against their calves. Their clothes were the color of sand, of timber, of the gray water they were washed in. These were the teeming people we knew, who had been our rivals for years and whom my father would not allow us to look at. Now they were looking at us and we stood here, amidst their dwellings, their paths, their households. I found it a lovely sight, but my father was horrified. To be rid of their smell, he breathed through his mouth.

  6

  My father’s Departure

  I had only observed the poor water, but my father worked it out from many things: the shelters with their canvas and pegs, the cooking fires that reappeared in different places, the absence of ovens and wells, the latrines that were no more than shallow pits, the worn-down hooves of the goats, the grain kept in woven bags, not in baskets. Everything showed it: These were wanderers. They carried knives in their belts because they assumed they would always have to fight for a place at the spring. Eaters of roots and nuts they were, they knew nothing about cultivating the land.

  Now we understood how Alem could have found the way so unerringly. He had brought us to his brothers. Had it not been amazing how much he knew about this enterprise? That a man had conceived a grand plan, that his three sons were involved in it, that he was building a ship out of the wood of trees rich in resin, that the ship was to have compartments and should be covered in pitch inside as well as out, that it would be tall, three stories at least, and long, longer than any construction ever designed, and that, as a result, very many workers would be needed, men who knew how to deal with scaffolding, and tar makers, and men who knew about bending and planing ribs. That the plan had not come from the Builder, but had been inspired by a higher power. That compensation would follow the building, a reward if the work fulfilled all the conditions. How had Alem discovered all this? From the stories he had been told during his wanderings?

  We called Alem and his kin “Rrattika,” after the shiny, wormlike insects that you cannot squash because they are already so flat they wriggle out from under your foot. Of course, they also had a proper name: Leave-fire-behind, a name from the time our people did not yet have fire-pots and would wait, fearful of wind and rain, for the wanderers to leave so they could get the glowing coals out of their campfires. They had those remarkable folding tents that, when there was a storm, they would pull down and sit on top of. That in particular made us laugh: In bad weather the tents did not protect the Rrattika, but the Rrattika the tents!
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br />   “Is that what we came all this way for?” said my father. “Did we give up everything to work for vermin?” He said he could not bear to look at it, that indifference to quality, that disorder, that total lack of anything made to last, to stand up to wind and weather. “If it was not for that ship, they would finish off their remaining provisions tomorrow, fold up their tents, and chase their children ahead of them,” he said. We returned to the foot of the cliff from which we had earlier carried my mother with so much trouble. There we saw a group of grass cutters.

  My father asked them to look out for a man with a donkey and a child. Could they ask him to return immediately? Could they inform him that the boat builder and his wife were waiting for him to guide them back to the marshes of Canaan? My mother groaned. With a visible effort, my father turned toward my mother again and took her face between his hands. “I was looking for tradesmanship, but all I find here is ignorance,” he said. “What do these people know about the building of a ship? They tempt us into coming here with their promising stories. From afar, it sounds as if it would be a privilege to work for them. The man who engaged me is still almost a child. Should I work for a child?”

  “You promised the light-skinned young man that you would be there,” I said.

  “That was a feigned promise, Re Jana. His two brothers were in the tent, two big men with wide shoulders. What would you have wanted me to do? Give them the chance to chain me up and force my knowledge from me?”

  “But their construction is beautiful.”

  “It is too big. Its size raises suspicions of insanity, Alem was right about that. If it will float at all, what purpose will it serve? Anyone who has that much to carry would build a fleet.”

  We were standing in the quarry that separated us from the cliff. In the half dark, the expression in his eyes was not easy to see, but the dismay on his face was. He looked around as if he was waking from a terrifying dream. I knew what he did when he decided to stay in a place: He arranged the stones that were lying around in such a way that they offered protection and weren’t a nuisance if one turned over in one’s sleep; he broke up the ground so he could let it run through his fingers, pulling up thistles and sharp-edged grasses by their roots. Now I could see him inspecting the surroundings, working out how he would arrange things. He would spend the night here, and that was my wish. I wanted to be near these people, these brethren of Alem-the-ragged. I loved the hammering and the humming, I recognized Put’s songs; they were the melodies that lulled me to sleep on the way there. Being so close, I imagined I was one of them, that early in the morning I would roll all my belongings in a mat, throw it onto my back, and start the journey, fulfilling the longing of my childhood.

  But all my father felt was revulsion. He felt cheated, by the tellers of tales, by Alem who got away so fast, by the workers on the scaffold, who from afar created the impression they were working from a detailed plan. He pointed out the tongue-shaped hollow where the traces left by people with picks were clearly visible. “Let us wait for the wanderer here,” he said. “Let us put up the tent and spend the night here. That climb we can tackle tomorrow morning.”

  I put down all my gear. “Tomorrow morning” brought nothing before my mind. Our future had been wiped out, a new morning was not conceivable.

  If he had not taken things in hand, I would hardly have moved that evening. He set up the tent. He built a screen out of sticks for my fire. I prepared his tea with water we had bought for many shells from women by their cooking fires. I shelled our last nuts. I did not think about what I was doing. I was acting in bewilderment. I could not believe that we would have to scale again every hill we had climbed, that we would again have to stand and wait for water by the wells like outlaws, that we would again be threatened by adders and scorpions. I could already hear the voices of our kin in the marshes: “They’re back, and the season hasn’t even changed yet.” I did not want to go back. I knew how to find good water; that task would take me less than half a day. And my mother did not want to go back. It was not till after she had eaten that her breathing calmed down.

  She was asleep when the sounds behind us changed: The hammering and planing turned into grinding and stirring. The workers were going home from the bathing place. We watched the coming and going of people with torches, and the workers under their shelters of canvas, sticks, and pieces of string, so exhausted they dozed off during their evening meal, their heads leaning against a post or a stick.

  “Did you notice their little fields before?” my father asked. “They’ve planted the seedlings without preparing the beds. In autumn they will have to chew the stones they left in the soil.”

  I had noticed the fields. They were small and arid, of the kind that need frequent watering.

  “But that is not the worst. They do what Alem does: They let women and children search for water and then claim it for themselves. If they ever wash, it is with the cattle. Their drinking water they keep hidden inside as if it were precious stones. A woman’s quality is judged by the taste of the water she brings. Is that how you want to live, Re Jana? As the slave of a thirsty man?”

  His argument left me cold, I could hardly bear listening to it. I let him talk without interrupting him, I was too exhausted to speak. When I was filling his beaker, I spilt tea on his hand.

  My father slept sitting up that night. The sight of the many workers who had no tents, not even a ground sheet, and just lay amongst the rocks with their tools and water bags beside them, their heads resting on stones, had made him fearful. The drone of so many people breathing, interrupted by the screaming of small children, made him think of flight and famine. How could he be one of them?

  My sleep, by contrast, was full of excitement. I dreamed of the belly of the ship and the steady slap of water. All night I felt close to the lagoon and the sea, even though I was several weeks’ walk away from home. Its very absence made the promise of water seem much more lovely than it would have been beside a well or on the shore of a lake. Toward morning, I was full of feelings of both admiration and mockery. The sounds from the awakening shipyard struck me as unreal. They seemed mainly intended to attract the gullible. But the very madness of the enterprise restored my confidence. Only someone who knew what he was doing could devise a plan on this scale.

  My father got up even before daylight. He did not take the time to wash and drank no tea. “I’m going after Alem,” he said. “I will find him and bring him back here.”

  How could he find Alem? The wanderer had been gone for quite a time, and as was the habit of his people, he always carefully brushed away all traces of his camps with branches. My mother puffed and panted. She blinked her eye and made her breath whistle. But my father girded his loins. To me he said, “You look after her.” And he set off up the steep slope to the cliff.

  7

  The Divining Rod

  It was early, the sun still far away with the gods. I dragged my mother over to the pond. It took me ages to maneuver the stretcher amongst the sleeping bodies. I was panting and sweating, even though the air was still cool. Some women were stirring, but far away, solitary, stealing about, shadowy, without making any sound. If I got to the pool before everybody else, I might find water that had not yet been muddied. I scooped up a handful, but noticed that even without sediment it kept its smell: My mother let it dribble from her mouth when I offered it to her to drink.

  I knew what I had to do. I took her to the gallery where fires were being lit under beams. The beams, planed smooth, lay in their scaffolding like the rib cage of some gigantic animal, each one in its jig heated where it had to bend, some weighted at their ends. Shortly, their curves would be adjusted with struts. The fires and the slow bending of the timber would not be left unattended for a moment.

  Where a fire is kept going, there are people, and people can keep an eye on things. I took the divining rod from my mother’s hip-belt and covered her body with her cloak. I arranged her hair; if I put her head down the right way, you cou
ld not see the bald patches. I put her pendant in the hollow of her neck, and when she was ready I left her in the spot where the truss-benders were working. As I left, I could feel her eye following me.

  I held the divining rod in front of me. It felt familiar, like a finger that had always been there. It pointed toward the rising sun. From Put, I knew how the Rrattika search for water. They knock crusts of sand from rocks, they dig holes in the ground and twist cactuses from their roots. Any little drop satisfies them. Put had demonstrated it to us in detail. When the donkey brayed its thirst, the child would stop and start walking around in circles like an animal that smells trouble. He would hold a cup in one hand, a gourd in the other. He would stop in a particular spot and kneel down. The donkey would stand next to him; it too had smelled water and knew Put would get it out for him. Put would dig with his hands, and when he had gone down an arm’s length, his hands would be wet. He looked so pleased with himself when he did that. The first time my father saw him doing it, he could not have enough of it and called him Put, Digger-of-hollows, a name he would keep for the rest of his life.

  But that sort of water will not do for us. For people like us, the little hand-dug well is only the beginning from which we start looking for a spring. What I wanted to find was the source that filled these little hollows. We daughters of Kan have a talent for water. The marshes where we live are fed by rivers. They run into the lagoon, the lagoon into the sea. The sea is supposed to swallow, but a few times each season her gullet tightens up and she sends us her salty belch that makes fish gasp for air and plants discolor. “The sea is having her time,” people say, and that is when we young women have to move inland.

  We start at a pool. From there, we follow the deep, invisible vein we can feel beating and sometimes foaming. The vein guides us to a cavern, a crack in the earth. There we make camp and lure strong-armed men who dig the wells for us and draw the sweet water.