In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  Shem and Japheth got undressed first. They sat in the water and made scratching movements over the surface to keep the insects away. The servants were next. They made their toilet in their own way: They scraped the dirt off the backs of their hands with their teeth and poured pond water over their shoulders. They all suffered from itching: You could tell from the way their faces relaxed when they sat down in the water, as if they put out a fire deep inside their bodies. Ham was fiddling with his belt, which was hopelessly tangled and seemed to need all his attention. Even after he stood with his feet in the water, his gaze kept avoiding me. He was only knee deep when he threw himself into the water, as if he had felt a snake brush against his calf, and a moment later he plunged his head underwater.

  As Shem and Japheth came out of the water to put their cloaks back on, they smelled my oils. They stood next to me, their legs spread, examining my jug, the bowl with the water, and the sponge that floated in it like a hunk of bread. “What do you do to her that makes her weak as wax?” they asked.

  I stood up and bowed my head. My shell-covered tunic made soft clicking sounds and hid the rapid rise and fall of my breast under it. “We are marsh people,” I said, fearful that my voice would betray me. “We have a talent for water. With this, I can wash you the way I wash my mother.”

  Shem had a hairy chest, Japheth was hairy just about all over. They looked at each other and smiled. They took the belts their servants held out to them and tied them low and tight around their waists. They walked to the red tent, looking back now and then, and went each into his own part of the tent. Ham went after them, but he did not look back.

  I packed up my gear. I stood in front of the tent, made a greeting, and offered the Builder’s sons a wash and oil treatment. They wanted to stand up, but I told them that was not necessary. I put down my bowl and knelt. I ignored the fact that they had just bathed in the pond, washing them the way it should be done. Because they were not used to me yet, I began with their hands, their arms, their feet, Shem first as he was the eldest. He was a bit giggly and friendly, talking with his brothers, but not with me.

  Next I washed Japheth. His skin was gray. I was generous with the water, letting it drip from the sponge onto the pebbles and grit, something he watched with amazement. He asked me to braid his beard. His reactions were more sensitive than Shem’s, almost irritable. He seemed to find my touch pleasant, but had no patience to enjoy it. He squinted, so I had no idea what he was looking at. I could not relax his tension.

  Last I washed Ham, the same way as the others, no longer or more slowly. As I rubbed his arms, I could feel his pulse beat. He had not dried himself properly after his bath in the pond. Water was dripping from his hair down his neck, and as I wiped the drops with my sponge, I could see him repressing an urge to close his eyes. His breath was not wheezy, he was breathing more freely and lightly than before.

  There was another part to the tent, made from much heavier canvas. Its curtain was down, the gaps plugged up with straw. Sounds came from behind it at times, the knock of stone against stone, low male voices. There the Builder lived; there also lived the dwarf I had seen near the pitch pots. But the Builder could not leave his sickbed, and nobody asked for a boy to bathe him. I could feel Ham grow tense under my hands when the dwarf came and looked at us through the curtain and said, “How curious, a boy who is as particular as a girl. Didn’t you have a sister who is terribly like you?”

  “His sister gets the water. She is away at the spring,” Ham replied quickly, and the dwarf went back.

  From that day on, I was assured of work. They did not ask me to come again, they simply assumed I would. They asked bystanders where he was, this washerboy who dragged his crippled mother along with him. After their daily labors, they waited with sluggish impatience. When they returned, they pushed back the canvas and did not request anything, but their eyes were burning.

  12

  A Righteous Man

  After work I would sit down with my father. One day I noticed small pieces of charcoal lying under his feet: jet-black traces of someone who has been drawing.

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  Nervously he looked away into the shrubs, and I knew that somewhere in there, there were boards with sketches of a vessel. I said, “Father, are you a righteous man?”

  Surprised, he straightened his back. His eyes became clear at my question, he forgot the chaos in the quarry and out there. “I do not know if I am,” he said slowly. “But I strive to be.”

  “Then go to Ham and offer your services. You have promised.”

  13

  A Mark in Time

  My father worked for Ham during the day and, in the evenings, built a house for four with the timber we earned. He placed the house at the end of the quarry, not far from the ash dump where he obtained the charcoal for his sketches for the ship, and far enough away from the tents and barracks not to be bothered by the constant sound of grinding hand mills. He worked fast. It was the desire to sleep in a hammock again, and no longer on the ground like cattle, that made him drive nails into timber long into the night. But every morning, long before I left for the spring, he was already at the scaffolds. Sometimes he would walk up to the red tent even before sunrise, carrying a lantern, avoiding the sleeping bodies of the workers.

  What did he do there? He spoke with Ham. Parts of the ship were demolished, ribs pulled down and set up anew. He was building a genuine ship, not just some structure that looked like one. He knew of the need of ancient peoples to leave behind markers in the landscape, a stone table or a lime-filled furrow in the shape of a snake, and he felt indulgent at the thought that he was contributing to an effort to leave a mark in time. My father made the ship seaworthy without believing it would ever sail. In this region, water was not part of one’s thoughts; if you thought of calamity, it was drought you imagined. He was realizing a dream. What he was building was a ship of ships, so perfect it would be a shame to launch it into the water. It was enough for him to know that in the future famous characters would be linked with the structure, and that in its ruins people would search for the remains of kings and children of the gods.

  The woodworkers worked hard. They secured tree trunks on a frame; one man sat on top of the trunk, another below it, between them a saw that they pulled toward themselves in turn. So they cut plank after plank, day after day. They constructed slipways, lugged slabs of timber onto scaffolds, and at the end of the day whetted their saws. They barely complained at having to start all over after my father arrived; they were well fed, and that seemed to satisfy them. Perhaps they too felt they were working on something that transcended them, a timber masterpiece they would refer to forever. My father measured and made jigs. He drilled mortises and cut dovetail joints; he bent over the drawings and explained them, the pockets on his belt full of nails, and a small purse with animal claws around his neck, a talisman to prevent him being attacked by a wild beast again.

  “What does Ham do inside that ship?” I asked.

  “He’s dividing it.”

  “Is he hot in there?”

  “There isn’t a breath of wind. He’s hot in there.”

  I have often wondered how it was that my father became confident much sooner than I did. The winds rushing through the shipyard did not affect him. Unlike me. The wind came up and dropped. It made tumbleweeds roll about and bent grasses. It whispered of things Ham would not tell us.

  14

  The Animals Come, in Ever-Growing Numbers

  For weeks, I washed and groomed Ham and his brothers. In the cave around the well, I had built a basin, a small dam of rocks, sealed with pitch I scrounged from Japheth. I stood watching how, after a long wait, a shallow layer of water formed at the bottom. I was quite taken with the little stream, it was so small and harmless; I tried to imagine how long it would take for it to flood the shipyard and raise the ship. But when I came the next day, all I had to do to fill my jug was to lower it into the water.

  The
y undressed for me. I stroked their backs, rolled their skin over the second skin, the layer below the outer one, which I never got to see but needed care just as much. The fear I should have felt stood no chance because I was so close to the inventors of the calamity. I became less interested in their secret. What intrigued me was where their muscles were and how their joints turned. I found satisfaction in the certainty that I would be staying with these people for a time. And I listened to their conversations.

  Japheth was talking about the pitch. He had dozens of men helping him. In the evening, they scraped the vats empty and kneaded the leftovers into little dolls they gave to the children. The smell of pitch hung in the valley and made the shipyard into a place you could find blindfolded. Washing him was a lot of work. The creases in his neck were black. His skin was rubbed red by the time I was finished. The pitch was a scourge for his skin. My oil disappeared into it as into sand.

  Shem’s skin, on the contrary, glowed before I even started rubbing it. This man liked my touch, he did not get tense for a moment. He just kept talking, and thought it was pointless to lower the curtain of his part of the tent while he was bathing. He showed no sign of his brother’s crudeness. All through my ministrations he hummed and talked. The scaffolding was his work. His task seemed trivial, but the structure must not move, not even in a storm. Hence he chose safety and good margins. He used twice as many posts as necessary to hold up his scaffold. If I did not stop him, he would pour all my water out over himself.

  Ham took me the longest. He was so hot, the water must have been a shock to his lovely skin.

  “We’re building a labyrinth,” he said to Put when the child asked him.

  “Why a labyrinth?”

  “No one on board must be allowed to escape. It is better they cannot see one another. We are making a unique structure.”

  I tried to involve Put in everything I did. He missed his father. I did not want him to be distressed. I wanted to embrace him, he was still so small and so charming, a relief after all the other children I had known in the marshes, who always had a nasty look about them; they snatched food from your hands and were sickly because of their strange habit of eating earth and baked clay. While I worked, he looked after my mother, who lay in a corner of the red tent. He had often assisted me, and now I could see how much attention he had paid: He carefully moved her arms and legs, gave her water, chewed the bread for her, and talked to her like a shepherd to his sheep. She improved rapidly. On the spots that had grown bald during our trek, downy hair started to grow.

  Shem, Ham, and Japheth did not object to Put’s presence. “He is a boy with more than one heart,” they said, and fed him cakes dipped in syrup.

  Months passed, and we got used to the Rrattika. The trouble was, they did not seem to get used to us. By now they had regularly seen my mother by the pond, had long since studied every detail of her finery, but even so they hurriedly looked away whenever they saw her alert eye directed at them. Not a day passed without remarks about our dark skin, our habits, our language. And there was always the feeling that one day we could just be sent away. There was a lot of talk in the shipyard, but most of it I could not understand. It was mostly exclamations and sounds that went with gestures, and never became the proper conversations I so longed for. They looked at us and we at them, and the distrust in those looks continued being stronger than the curiosity.

  Every day I went to my spring. Thanks to Put’s talent for wandering through unknown landscapes, we could throw any pursuers off the scent by following winding and unpredictable paths. The little boy stayed close to me because I had the spear. He was afraid of the animals that threw up golden clouds of dust every time they moved. Their numbers increased by the day. They came from the four corners of the earth: from the north, white, thick-fleeced beasts with drooping heads and loud breath; from the west, birds that had flown across the seas and landed only to take to the air again immediately, as if they were uncertain of their destination; from the south, slow-moving, shy animals that mainly moved by night, ill at ease because they had never before left the hills where they were born; from the east, the long-distance runners, that stood stamping and pawing on the slope because it was not in their nature to sink down and rest. There were strange creatures amongst them, animals that looked like nothing at all, or rather looked like everything: like a bird as much as a turtle, like a giraffe as much as a gazelle. They were all shapes and sizes, but they all stopped in the hills around the shipyard. They stood grazing unperturbed or lay in the sun. Some were too shy to go inside the enclosure and hid in the bramble. And there were beasts of prey amongst them, slavering or hiding their fearsome fangs behind a friendly-looking muzzle. One day Put recognized the tiger that had devoured his father. He grabbed me, tugging at my shell-studded tunic till it nearly tore, but the tiger seemed to be lastingly sated. It was lying under a tamarind tree, watching the passing calves and deer without the slightest trace of voracity.

  “Why are they here?” I asked a Rrattika who was hauling planks.

  “They want to dwell in the shadow of our tents. They know we are chosen and they are no more stupid than you and your ilk coming here. Like all of us, they long for the paradise that was. No mountain or river will stop them.”

  The more animals gathered in his kraal, the more expensively dressed were the visitors who came to see the Builder. They looked longingly at the dozens, the hundreds of cattle of kinds and sizes they had never seen before. “Do they all give milk?” they asked. “And the birds, are their eggs edible?” The guests brought gifts, they all wanted to contribute to this enterprise they admired.

  No one, not even the highest-ranking visitor in embroidered garments, was allowed inside the building site. I too tried to get in there, but the greyhound growled at me and snapped its jaws.

  15

  A Woman’s Well

  Shem and Japheth each had a wife. They had been chosen not for their youth, not for their beauty, not for their wealth, but for their presumed fertility. Taneses was Japheth’s wife. I saw her from time to time by the pond. She swayed and made a rustling sound as she walked, because she was as heavy as a loaded pregnant donkey. Her dress made the flesh around her armpits bulge. Her breasts were covered in purple veins, and her arms lay against her sides like two separate bodies embracing her. Her smooth calves always bore the imprints of the straps she needed to keep her sandals in place. She groaned under her own weight when she sat down.

  Shem’s wife was Zedebab. She had been chosen because, while being taciturn, she managed to make a promising impression. She looked at children as if they were her own. Her ears were pierced from top to bottom, and she wore earrings with little bells that jingled as she walked, so she would never have to look back when someone called her because all she could hear was her own tinkling.

  You don’t ask a woman about her spring, but because I looked like a boy, Zedebab and Taneses approached me. They stood in the entrance to the servants’ part of the tent and wouldn’t let me leave until I had heard them out. “It is strange that a boy who has come from so far away could win the favor of our men so quickly. They will no longer accept any other water. And how strange that they are suddenly so concerned about their skin. Where does your sister obtain this water?”

  When they wouldn’t leave me alone and kept trying to trap me with their questions, I stayed away from the red tent for awhile. Then Ham came to the quarry to fetch me. “My skin is itchy,” he said. “I’ve been scratching it raw. Come to the tent with your water and your oil.” But he understood my caution. I must not be exposed, for if I were, how would I ever be able to come to him?

  Once the dwarf had come after him. He followed Ham like a troublesome dog, confusing him with his questions and gestures. “You are looking for that sister of his,” I heard him say. “I know it. You think she is lovely, and you want to be near her.” He led Ham back out of the quarry like a small child. I had not even been able to greet him.

  16

&n
bsp; The Ban on the Eating of Meat

  One day a flock of mallards flew over the shipyard. My mother was the first to notice them. Through her breathing, she urged me to go after them. I walked into the hills, to the spot where they had landed. I carried my spear, the one my father had once shaped for my mother. When I approached, the ducks took off again, but they did not get very far. They were exhausted. I decided on the fat drake that reminded me of one of our decoy ducks.

  Put had followed me. He stood watching a bit farther on, his slingshot hanging from his hand. If he had been able to creep up on it, he would have been able to hit the duck. With his slingshot, he could knock a nut out of a tree, and he had killed scorpions in cracks in the rocks. But he would not use it against warm-blooded animals, not even against the tiger that had killed his father.

  I killed the duck quickly and painlessly, to show that it is not the killing itself that is reprehensible, but doing it carelessly and painfully. We baked it and cut it into small pieces, which we then ground up. We added salt and spices and first served my mother. Put was somewhere at a distance, amongst the shrubs; he did not understand why eating the duck made us feel in a festive mood.

  But we enjoyed ourselves. We liked having meat on our menu, and duck was our favorite.

  We had lain down contentedly when a large group of men came into the quarry. They wore long cloaks and carried a sedan chair. Right at the end came the dwarf with his wide nostrils and bulging lips. In the sedan chair, sitting very straight, supported by embroidered cushions, was an old man. In front of our house, he gestured for the group to stop. We watched, genuinely interested in what was going on, unaware of having done anything wrong. The old man surveyed our house, substantial and solidly constructed, like a boat. His irises were so green, I stared at him for seconds before lowering my gaze as I should. The rims of his eyes were red as raw meat, his face was lined and his eyebrows remarkably dark under his white hair. There were spots all over his skin, small creamy-looking lumps, which showed anyone who had an eye for it that he suffered from a serious illness.