Once the descent had been accomplished, the cavalcade started moving more quietly. There were animals amongst them without riders, their bits attached to the animal in front of them, carrying sloshing jars on their flanks. The best-equipped man was a merchant, a gentleman with snow-white hair wearing a shiny robe, but we only had eyes for the young Neelata, whose appearance moved me, and who caused Put to burst into a heartwarming poem of welcome. She rode at the end of the file; her horse laid back its ears as it passed us. The caravan made its way amongst the tents, and we followed, past the scaffold and the ship under construction, straight up to the red tent.
The first one to come out was the dwarf. I had never before seen him so excited, he jumped up and down uttering cries like the monkeys in the hills.
The merchant was Neelata’s uncle. He was visiting the Builder in order to leave his niece there. Why he did this, I only found out much later, when from a deep hole in the cave, she told me to leave her to perish; but it was obvious that the request he made was very considerable.
One after the other, the men dismounted. They entered the tent. Neelata was asked to wait. She let her horse wander toward the pond. She wore a dress in a blue that is no longer made, and her eyelashes were coated in mineral. It had been months since I had seen anyone with made-up eyes. She seemed like a giantess, she was slender as a memorial pillar and wore clinking beads around her ankles. She walked up and down for a while and finally sat down, her legs pulled up, her feet uncovered. After slaking their thirst, the horses stood still with drooping heads.
We saw everything, Put and I, hidden amongst the stacks of finished planks. Put was shuffling his feet so much he threw up the dust.
“Go ask her why she is here,” I whispered.
“I don’t dare,” he said. “You’re not a real boy, you go and ask.”
He poked his little fingers into my side, and I left the spot where we stood.
I wasn’t any braver or less shy than him. I had almost forgotten how to start a conversation. Since being here, I had made several efforts to talk to people in the shipyard, but had found their minds very limited; when they were not working, they usually just sat staring into space, and the number of words they used was very restricted because, in the little world they lived in, they could manage with very few. But this woman was different, I’d realized that the moment I saw her: She looked at me, followed my movements, and questioned me with her eyes. I made sure to look back. I couldn’t get enough of looking at her eyes. They were almond-shaped, the outer corners pointing up slightly. Looking at her, at those lashes and those lips that shone in the early sunlight, filled me with regret. Here was I, who loved finery and beautiful colors, wearing the male emblem on my forehead.
I kept hesitating, and Put was getting impatient. He left his hiding place and went up close to the horse she had been riding. He put his arm around its leg so he could feel its belly. He took a deep breath and said, “If I had a horse, I’d run away from this place as fast as I could.” He spoke to me, but loud enough for her to be able to hear him. I knew what he was thinking. The horse was large. Whoever sat on it was safe. The animal moved smartly and fast, he could imagine escaping from a tiger on it.
Neelata shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand so she could see Put. When she saw that he met her glance, she smiled and gestured behind her, in the direction of the animal enclosures.
I thought she meant that there were plenty of cattle there, so many it no longer mattered who owned them, there was plenty of milk for every thirsty person in the camp, so there was no need to run away, and there was no reason why you shouldn’t take a mount if you had to go somewhere. But that’s not what she meant. In her hand, she held a small pumice stone, such as I had always wanted to have. With it, she indicated the whole world. “It would be lovely to be able to believe that you can save yourself on horseback.” Her speech was different from the local people’s. Her tongue seemed to explore the language she used, word for word, as if the sounds were brand new, unfamiliar to the mouth that had to shape them. “But a horse will not save you, little boy. Nothing will save you from the catastrophe these people are expecting.”
Put followed the movement of her hand attentively. He stayed right next to the horse as if it were his.
Neelata clacked her tongue to reassure the animal and continued. “Although it is perhaps better this way. Perhaps it is not a bad thing to be able to believe you can escape this place if you decide to.” I needed to hear no more to realize that what she said was more about herself than about us. Her uncle left her in the shipyard. The jars that had been brought on the horses’ backs stayed here and were guarded day and night. She moved into a tent with decorated borders that her uncle had put up for her, and which also housed the six lady’s maids. Like us, she was not accustomed to tents; the impermanence of the structure made her nervous and uncertain. But she was not going to leave before the catastrophe struck. She was going to become Ham’s wife.
I was asked to resume the daily grooming of Shem and Japheth. With someone like Neelata around, there was a greater need for cleanliness and body care. She would come into Ham’s part of the tent while I was working on him and ignore my presence. She was not suspicious, she had no reason to suspect that, like her, I was a marriageable woman who was ready for a man. Sometimes she hugged him, and I heard her say, “Take me as your wife.”
Ham glanced at me and shook his head.
“Aren’t you pleased with what I have brought?” she asked.
She was older than Ham. And she was tall. In her arms, he looked like a child. What was she doing here? A young lady from a merchant’s family belonged in markets, in stone bathhouses, or at the wells where the travelers gathered.
I tried to worm out of Ham under what conditions she had come. But he avoided my question by rolling two enormous round nuts, hairy as rats, from a basket. Their bumpy movement, coming straight at him, made Put jump back in fright.
“Look at what she has brought,” said Ham. He picked up one of the nuts and tossed it from one hand into the other. A sloshing sound came from it. He took a sharp stone and cracked the shell with it. Juice spurted from it. The inside was of a color I had never seen. Inside the tent, it just seemed white, but the next morning, when we were on our way to the shipyard and Ham, after much asking, opened another one for Put and me, I realized that the white was of a purity I would never see again. It was whiter than milk, whiter than the first teeth of a baby, whiter than the shells in my mother’s nets so long ago.
Ham held the cup-shaped nut to our mouths and asked us to take a sip, Put first. The little boy tasted it and uttered a sigh.
“What is it?” we asked.
“Food and drink,” said Ham. “Nuts that stay good forever. We keep them against difficult times.” About the contents of the jars he said not a word.
Neelata’s proposal of marriage did not make me feel concerned. Whenever I rubbed Ham’s chest with oil, the beating of his heart told me of his affection. He asked me to lower the tent flap. I knew Zedebab, Shem’s wife, was keeping an eye on me, and Taneses, Japheth’s wife, even more so. Their total insensitivity to the scents of a body made me reckless: Even when I was bleeding, I’d walk into the red tent. In her moon face, Taneses had tiny little eyes, which she sometimes turned away so you’d think she was blind; but she wasn’t, she saw more than most of the others. She looked at me suspiciously when I carried my clear water into the men’s tent. I’d make my movements more angular, but no reassurance showed on her face. Did it show? Did she suspect I was leading them up the garden path with my tunic covered in gently clinking shells? Did she notice that there were grooming sessions for which Ham carefully prepared? He let down the tent flap and stretched out on the ground.
When I’d finished my work, I regularly walked past the decorated tent. I wanted to look at Neelata’s powdered lashes and the ornaments she wore. But very soon, I no longer got to see her face. She was enveloped in an ocher dress with a hood.
Occasionally her hands or ankles showed, otherwise all I could see was her outline. Too late, I saw that Neelata and the wives of Shem and Japheth made a threesome, and that a marriage between Ham and Neelata was the logical outcome of their solidarity. And too late, I noticed that Ham was attracted to her. He sat watching her from the bushes, the way he had watched me months ago. I washed him daily. He blinked his left eye and asked to be treated like one paralyzed. He let me rub him until his skin was taut over his bones. Then he entwined his fingers with mine and pulled me down over him. But with Neelata, he did the same. And I did not see it.
19
The Song of the Dwarf
As the ship grew taller, the atmosphere in the red tent became more excited. The dwarf composed a long, involved song that he performed with a great show of tricky dance steps for the Builder’s sons one evening during the grooming session. It was a song in which he offered his services, and I listened carefully.
“You should organize a little hammock for me,” he sang, “from which I can survey your hold. If any animals, against your father’s orders, are having a roll in the hay, I’ll abuse them so thoroughly they’ll die of embarrassment. I’ll do this in a manner that so entertains the elect that they’ll actually hope the animals will start all over again! And I cost you nothing, just the weight I carry, and believe me, that is slight, and will only become less.”
The brothers slapped their thighs laughing. The dwarf was in the habit of pretending to live on air and water. Every time the sons had a meal, he would scream loudly as if in disgust at whatever the women had prepared. This amused the sons no end, if only because it infuriated the women so much that the less tolerant amongst them would pick up a sandal to beat the dwarf with as soon as he appeared. We all knew that as soon as the brothers had had enough, he scraped out the pots in the servants’ area, but everybody kept insisting that the dwarf was surviving without food.
While the dwarf was holding forth, I was doing Japheth’s hair, plaiting it in a checkerboard pattern. I gently tugged at tufts of hair to stimulate the circulation. But I was listening so intently that at times I forgot to go on working.
“The time will be long, an endless tedium of half sleep. I will have to remind the elect of their manhood to prevent their members shriveling before the goal is reached.”
“We’ll think about it!” the brothers shouted when his song was finished. The dwarf completed his dance and left the tent. As always, he left behind a smell of fermenting fruit. I tried to carry on plaiting quietly, but had trouble controlling my movements and not tugging too hard and hurting Japheth. Here was talk about a lifetime on the ship. The dwarf’s song was about people! He was saying things about members shriveling! Was this a form of self-sacrifice, like the gestures of atonement we had seen the Rrattika make on our journey here, in places where the sun had driven the river underground? They left men without any disability, injury, or insanity — in other words perfectly healthy men, capable of work — behind in a dry well, on occasion even on a cross. These men died slowly. They attempted by their own deaths to avert the deaths of many, and they did this because they had been chosen for it. Was this what they were planning, these uncultured wanderers, who with this structure were so intent on raising themselves above those around them? Was this ship in the wilderness an exercise in endurance, a test of fortitude, a slow starving of a group of people and animals who would, little by little, lose their strength and sink into the half sleep that precedes death, and in doing so save all those who stayed behind? More than once, Ham had said to me, “I will save you.” Was he going onto the ark himself? Did I want to be saved at the cost of his life? Would they one day pull up the gangplank and go and die in that gigantic cocoon, while we, the workers, the ones who had wrought this insanity, would stand around it, and hear, day after day, the sounds from inside the belly of the ship becoming weaker? Had I worked to make their skin spotless and supple, their hair clean and their fingernails shiny, only to have to watch them willfully letting it all shrivel and dry and wither in the belly of a gigantic coffin?
I must have misunderstood, it could not be possible, this must have been an old song that was about someone or something else.
But I could see in Put’s face that I had not misunderstood. He sat next to my mother, his mouth open, motionless with amazement.
I think I must have dropped the comb. Getting up, I knocked over the bowl of water. It made the dust, sand, and grit of the floor bubble up, turning it dark like skin. I left the tent, following the dwarf. He was in the adjoining servants’ area, where the leftovers of the meal had been taken. He sat bent over the pots like a vulture, unable to speak. His hands shook so hard that the contents of his spoon dribbled down his chin and breast.
20
Entering the Ark
I did not return to the Builder’s sons but walked to the ark. The base of the scaffold that led to the upper deck had been closed up for the night with reed matting and many ropes. In front of it, the greyhound lay in the dust. When I approached, it stood up and sniffed the air around me. I walked away, went to the back of the structure where the still-steaming pitch vats stood, and joined the children who were pestering the workers, exhausted after the day’s work, for pitch dolls.
There was a little boy with a big head who stood smack in front of one of the workers, watching intently how the ears of his doll were modeled. “Finished?” he nagged constantly, until the man with the sticky, pitch-blackened hands lost his patience, pulled the ears off the doll, and squashed its head down into its body. The boy muttered that it was all right, he would wait. When finally, clutching the doll in his little fists, he went off with a satisfied sigh, I followed him stealthily. Uttering gentle sounds, the child made his toy walk through the air. It was a while before his interest in his prize slackened and he stopped holding it with both hands. To my relief, his attention was drawn to a stick in the sand. As soon as he was only holding his doll loosely in one hand so he could reach for the stick with the other, I snatched it from him and ran off through the tents and screens. The child howled, but I did not look back. I went back to the entrance of the ship, kneading the pitch until it once again became warm, releasing its smell.
As if offering it a treat, I held out the black lump to the greyhound. The animal sniffed, but stiffened at the smell and reared back. I approached it once more, pushing the pitch against its nose. It pulled back even farther.
Squatting, I hooked my fingers behind the ropes, pulling them loose. I forced myself through the gap as fast as I could. The dog stormed at me, barking. I shoved the reed mat against the opening. The animal pushed its nose against the gap with a high-pitched squeal. I kept following its snout with the soft ball, distracting it until I had finally pushed all of the matting back in place. After securing it with a few quick knots, I started running up the sloping planks of the scaffold. My footsteps made a shocking amount of noise. The planks bounced in their mortises, but the more racket I caused, the faster I ran, and the more the boards rattled. I could not believe how high the upper deck was, and I was convinced that down in the yard everybody was already watching me. Any moment I expected the grim blare of bugles.
The upper deck was not yet finished. A wide edge running from the prow to the stern still needed to be covered. It would have made a quick way in if it had not looked so deep and dark that I did not dare to poke my legs through. The real gateway, the entrance for all those who would embark, and for everything that would be brought on board over the next few weeks, was closed off with a hatch set in a sloping wall rising from the deck like a lean-to. I managed to open it through a small hole just large enough for my hand. I entered the ship and pulled the hatch down behind me.
My eyes had to adjust. It was not only dark, but the air was full of dust and grit. Under my feet, I felt a layer of shavings and splinters; obviously nobody had bothered to sweep up the rubbish and wheel it outside. I imagined it would never be removed, and in time it would be trodden into a carpet o
n the bottom of the ship. It would muffle the sounds of feet and hooves, making all that would happen here soundless.
Through the gap in the unfinished roof and the ventilation holes, some light entered. Though I knew better, I had imagined an empty space, a huge hall of timber and pitch, with just a few booths deep down in the hold. But I found myself in a narrow gallery that led down in a spiral. Dozens of spaces opened onto it. I entered some of those at random and found that they were divided into pens and cages. They had bamboo bars across the front and small doors that stood open but could be secured with wedges. Inside the cages stood food bowls. Some had perches, some did not. Each cage was a different shape and set up differently. They were arranged one behind the other at a slight angle, so that the occupants of different cages could not see one another.
I do not know how many side passages I entered. It was eerily quiet around me; all I could hear was the occasional squawking of the birds who had found a perch for the night on top of the ship, and the dull, low sound of their droppings on the deck. I walked on endlessly, past hundreds of cages, one after the other, and it was as if some insane designer was leading me in circles. Descending deeper and deeper, I came to a level where the compartments became more impressive, with better hatches and doors: This was where larger animals, those with broad flanks and tall shoulders, would be housed. From this point on, the floors were level, and differences in height were spanned by ladders and stairs.
A few side passages were different; there were no bars, but proper doors with latches. The doors were made from good timber and fitted well. There were no holes or cracks; whoever stayed here would not be disturbed by whatever went on in the gallery. The floor in this section had been planed smooth, and torch holders had been fitted to the walls. There were cupboards and wardrobes, rings in the walls and stands for amphoras. I opened a door almost jammed by wood shavings and creaking on its hinges. It gave access to a comfortable hut hung with mats and with straw mattresses stacked against the wall. This hut had been hastily swept, the dust brushed out and left lying by the threshold. I could see my own footprints on the wooden floor. There would be people staying here: Only people lie on straw mattresses and cover themselves with blankets.
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