“What I saw is not a scale model. It is a truss-boat, with a roof. It is built from beautiful, sound planks. Enough timber, maybe, to complete the Builder’s ship.”
My eyes had not yet adapted to the darkness sufficiently to distinguish her expression. I mainly saw the feathers moving around her head.
“I have talked to her,” she continued. “I have asked her where your good water comes from.”
My mother no longer bothered trying to look at me, her eye was like a pearl sewn onto her face.
“Did she tell you?” I asked.
“I think so,” Neelata answered. “But I can’t yet understand her properly. It takes a little getting used to a woman who talks with her eyelid. But I suspect we have come to an agreement.” She put my mother carefully but clumsily into my arms. “Here, you do it. Show her your boat and tell her what is going to happen. You are her daughter, not me.” She walked out of the door, feathers flying from her hair.
With my arms far too low on my mother’s back, I sat motionless. Her head hung so far back that the ends of her hair touched the ground. Her breathing was speeding up, she swallowed fitfully, and in her agitation she managed to make her vocal cords pop. But I looked straight ahead and thought: Just say it. Just ask what you want to know and do not get all worked up.
Of course, she became heavy after a while. This was not a good position, for me or for her, my back and shoulders were aching. I held her until my father returned with bags full of mulberry leaves, and spitting with indignation, he shouted, “Why are you holding her like that?” and took her from me.
I went to watch the wedding. I wanted to see slender Neelata standing beside gentle, sensitive, torn Ham. I made a headdress of feathers, not because I liked that, but so as not to be conspicuous. I put color on my face and drew lines around my eyes to make myself unrecognizable. I took nuts to lay on the table. I was not alone. Hundreds of people were gathering in the yard. The rich came with gifts for the Builder, contributions to an enterprise so grand it made them dream. Never have I seen so much food, so many plates and beakers at a feast. Things were broken, but nobody uttered an upset cry, everything was instantly replaced by something new.
Neelata was wearing her ordinary dress, the same one she had worn when she came to our hiding place. She relied on her beauty and knew that a robe of expensive material would contribute nothing to it. Ham wore a cloak almost as white as the flesh of that nut with the hard, hairy shell. He had more of a beard than when I had last rubbed him with oil, and his Adam’s apple stood out more sharply under his skin. I could see someone had made an attempt at washing him for the occasion; he had a rash in spots where they had been too vigorous. The warriors, carrying their daggers, helped him stack rocks into a column. It became a grand, impressive structure, in line with the columns Japheth and Shem had erected when they married. It was said that he had widened his quarters in the tent and lengthened the ropes. He had spread out the carpets from his largest sanctuary to receive his wife. That is how he looked when I saw him in the place where the ceremony was to take place, standing next to his stack of rocks, devoted but covered in spots, his hair combed flat against his head and wearing brand-new, tight-fitting clothes, the seams obviously chafing his skin. I looked at him from a distance, and could only think about how, in the darkness of his tent, he would undo his girdle and instruct me to sit astride him.
Neelata’s uncle was there, his wrists heavy with bracelets. He took no part in the masquerade and did not wear festive clothes, but he did dance. He had brought the wine that was poured. To the side, there were many, many vats, whose contents the servants transferred, quickly and without spilling any, into jugs.
I drank as much as I could get hold of. I was planning to sneak into the women’s quarters very late and spend the night there, close to the revelers, but before I had a chance to do so, I bumped into people I knew, Put first of all. He had been dressed up by Neelata and his face was sticky with figs. He carried a bowl that was far too full for him. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him behind the shrubs with me.
He started sobbing when he recognized me under the feathers. “I’m sorry,” he kept repeating. “She is so nice. She is so lovely. She gives me bread and honey, no one else does.”
“What more did she give you? What has she promised you to betray us?”
“Nothing, nothing at all,” he continued crying, but his glance kept darting about so he did not have to look at me. A false light shimmered around him; it came from the torches standing here and there on sticks pushed into the ground, which threw moving shadows. He took a deep breath before saying, “The dwarf came to see her. If she does not seal this marriage with good water, he will raise suspicions about her. He will tell the Builder that her heart does not go out to Ham, and she will have to return home with her uncle.” His forehead was no longer smooth, the way I had known it. There was a frown there that I had never observed before and that softened my feelings.
“But you betrayed us, Put.”
“I wanted you to help Neelata. And she you, for you were unhappy there on the cliff, I could see it.”
Revelers stumbled around us, some standing up, some rolling on the ground. Their noise scared Put even more. I moved so I was between him and the rowdies, which calmed him down a bit. I did not have to talk to him for long to see how sincerely sorry he was. He sat smearing his millet porridge around his bowl without eating any. He resembled Alem, the way he looked up, the same lack of understanding of what was happening showed on his face. I wanted to take him with me, far away from those others who confused him with their own interests. But before I could say anything, a large hand grabbed me by the neck. I did not need much light to see that it was my father, even though he too was covered in feathers. He dragged me along, which gave Put the chance to slip away.
“I’ve been looking for you half the night. I can’t leave your mother alone any more, she actually screams if I leave. What’s happened to upset her like that?”
Amongst the bushes stood the stretcher with my mother. She was lying in such a tensed-up position you could almost believe the strength in her muscles had returned.
“That wasn’t my doing, but Neelata’s, with tales about a truss-boat,” I said. “I told her the boat is a scale model, but she won’t believe me!”
My father sighed. He looked over his shoulder at the merrymakers farther along, his eyes half closed as if what he saw blinded him. Then he let the air out of his lungs again in a series of long, despairing sighs. He understood, of course, what had happened: The truss-boat, our secret, had been betrayed to my mother by Neelata. Now the talking would begin, the nagging and the soothing. He said, “Take up the stretcher and come home. You don’t belong here. You wanted to get away from these people, so don’t go and drink their wine now.”
I went with him, out of fear for his voice, the noise he was making and the chance that someone would recognize him with that stretcher by his feet. The trip back gave him the opportunity to walk ahead of my mother, with his back to her, and think about what he would say to her, later, in the quiet of the house on the cliff.
As we escaped from the festivities we witnessed something that was not meant for our eyes. From one of the sheds, servants were carrying bowls and bamboo stands. In the open plain behind the hills, the bowls were put into the stands. Dozens of them were there already, and hundreds more lay on the path, waiting to be put up. Servants walked back and forth with torches, carrying out their task quickly and silently. We thought of a sacrifice, but then saw that, except for some dust and grit, the bowls were empty. “What is this for?” we asked the servants, who, with their flapping clothes, looked like bats.
“Orders from the dwarf. Now that Ham has a wife, the rain will come,” they replied. “The first rain will be for drinking, the rest for drowning.”
At this rather nasty reply, my mother opened her eye wide. Her eyeball glittered, and not just because the light of the servants’ torches was reflected
in it.
My father tugged roughly at the stretcher. Without him having to utter a word, I understood how fast we had to get away from there.
31
The Betrayal of the Spring
We told my mother that what the Builder was waiting for was not just ordinary rain, but a different kind, coming from much farther away, and not sent by the gods we were familiar with. Ordinary rain came to make the soil fertile, to keep the boats afloat and allow fish to spawn, but the purpose of this rain was to cleanse. It would wash the dust off our bodies, refresh the grasses, and return all things to their original colors! We had been told of green fields, of forests even. A new world would arise from it, containing only righteous people.
After our explanations, she half closed her eye but did not go to sleep. I slept because of the wine I had been drinking. My father slept out of sheer exhaustion after listening for hours to my mother’s agitation. And so we did not notice that, in the middle of the night, she was lifted from her stretcher and silently carried outside. I was just vaguely aware of hoofbeats. The feeling that someone came into our house, with clothes rustling, and took my mother became a seamless part of a dream. I had to stretch my hand toward her sleeping place to believe that she was gone.
Instinctively, I went to the field where the truss-boat was. That is where I found her. She was lying on the ground, and Neelata, the newlywed, was bending over her. Neelata was still wearing her festive beads but was barefoot, having left her husband’s quarters just like that. Not far from her, with a jug hanging on each flank, stood her black horse, its eyes glittering, its tail up, its mane raised like a banner. In the windblown landscape she and her mount moved so effortlessly it was as if they had come specially to show up their difference from us, from my mother in particular, from that limp body with its uselessly blinking eyelid. I heard her talking to my mother, softly asking her things. In the early morning light I could see that what she had in her hand was a divining rod.
“Her language is very simple,” Neelata said when I approached. “We understand each other like mother and daughter. Why don’t you sit down?”
I did not sit down, I remained standing in the one spot where, as it turned out, all the ants wanted to be too.
Neelata held the divining rod and pointed it ahead. Taken aback, I realized it was my mother’s.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She lowered her arms. “This thing doesn’t do anything,” she said. “I wish I knew how to handle it. You know where to find water, but what use is it to you, it hasn’t earned you a place on the ark. Such a pity, because you really love Ham.”
“The divining rod is my mother’s. Tie it back onto her girdle. Don’t abuse her helplessness.”
As if she had not heard, she said, “Ham doesn’t know you’re still here. I’ll tell him. I want you to receive him every evening. Sit across him the way he likes. Make his hair shine again. Make his eyes brighten and don’t hide yourself from him.”
“What are you up to, Neelata? You could have taken my mother’s divining rod from her inside the house. Why did you bring her outside, to this spot, and so furtively?”
It cannot have been very hard for my mother to see that what we were building was much more than a scale model. The sides had been nailed onto the stem and the stern with braces, and they had already been cut to the right width.
Neelata looked at the rod in her hand, not at me, as she said, “I told you we’ve come to an agreement. I have told her the world will be flooded. As thanks for my sincerity, she wants to tell me where the spring is.”
I could not answer. I was trying to keep the ants off my legs.
She smiled amiably, almost like a friend, as she continued imperturbably, “Otherwise, how can I keep this lovely structure a secret, this little ship that will actually hold people? Where will I get the strength? And if it doesn’t stay a secret, you and your family will drown with the rest.”
I knew she was right. In fear-filled nights, I had imagined strong men claiming our boat in the hour of truth. What would we be able to do against people in fear of death, with nothing to lose?
I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go back to our little house and shut my eyes and forget what my mother had found out. In the marshes we had understood her fear, the nightmares she woke up from and her constant gasping. Now she knew we had kept the truth from her. From tonight on, that eye would again close not from sleepiness, but only from exhaustion. And we would have to reckon with her fury. Not that this fury was easy to see, it was seated in a remote spot, deep in her eye, just where her pupil dilated and contracted. I was already aware of her rage at that moment, from the way in which she dominated everything that would happen that early morning. It was she who led the conversation we were having in the field. In a sense, that was reassuring. It showed that the ducks had not taken away all of her will; she had enough left to make me speak for her. She looked at me, and when she shut her eye, it was as if she bolted it against me. Her eye did not tremble for even a moment, and she forced her will to its limit to make me say, “I’ll show you where the water is.”
Neelata smiled at me in a motherly way and said, “Very good!” She stood up and brought her horse closer. She wanted to lift up my mother to take her back to her stretcher in the house, but I said, “Leave her here. My father will find her when he wakes up. He must not think I have taken you to the spring of my own free will.”
Small nocturnal animals scurried past, they had skinny little heads and short legs. If any eyes lit up at all in the gloaming, they were close to the ground, belonging to creatures intending no harm. We covered my mother’s body with leaves.
I sighed as I mounted the horse. My despair became worse when Neelata sat up behind me, put her arms around my waist, and said, “It was hard for you to keep the origin of your good water a secret, I could see that, it tormented you every day. The thought that you were keeping something to yourself that belonged to all of us pained you, it made you stumble and spill the water. It brought tears to my eyes.”
In the cave, bats from all over the world had nestled. Some had a wingspan many cubits wide, they were wider than vultures. Our arrival drove them, screeching, from their shelters. Neelata held on to me by my girdle when she followed me into the chill space with the high walls. I do not know if she realized they were skeletons, those hollow, angular objects she tripped over. We went through the funnel-like passageway that led to the next cave. We crossed all the spaces.
Neelata constantly trod on my heels. She was too scared to let go of my girdle, and I did nothing to reassure her. Finally we reached the fold in the rock and the narrow passage. We squeezed through to get to the last cave. There we heard the dripping of water.
The coolness of what awaited us came streaming toward us. Because I had drawn water only infrequently during the last few weeks, the basin had filled and overflowed. The whole cave was wet, the water trickled everywhere in rivulets.
“Here is what you are looking for,” I said to Neelata, who was still holding on to my girdle. I turned to hand her the jug.
Did she step aside to give me more room? Did she overbalance when she took the jug from me? Possibly she simply hurried; she saw the sparkle of water and wanted to get to it. First I felt a tug on my girdle, then the groping of her arms. Then there was the sound of a scream and a dull thud. It came from deep down, from the well next to the stack of bones I had always warned Put about.
See what happens, I thought, see what happens when you force me. I had never been in the cave so early in the morning, and I had never experienced it so cold. I should have warned her. If I really had wanted to help her, I would have told her to bring a torch. Now she had fallen, into a well whose depth I did not know. For the first time since I had left my bed I became calm, and I called her name. “Neelata?” And again, “Neelata?”
What state was she in now, that beautiful, slender woman? It remained silent in the cave, so silent that the bats returned to their perc
hes one by one. I kept trying to hear something, a groan or a breath, but there was nothing. With Gentan and his men, I had seen what a bad fall could do. Yet I kept calling her name. I could not believe she was no longer there, that her beauty had become useless, like a drowned dog’s thick pelt.
It took a while before I began to see the possibilities her death might open up for me. I could become Ham’s wife without arousing Neelata’s uncle’s anger.
I sat down. The skulls supported my back and my shoulders; it felt like sitting on a throne. As I slowly grew cold and hungry, I wondered what I should do. My head was full of plans, but also of feelings of guilt and fear for myself. Had I caused this, or did it just happen? I did not know how to answer that.
“I fell,” I suddenly heard. The voice was coming from deep down and far away, as if it reached me from the realm of shadows. It was like the echo of words spoken in the past, or of a voice coming from me rather than from her. It would have been easy to pretend not to hear it, it could have been my imagination, the delusion of someone who is tired and disappointed. I heard her stumbling around. Her dress got her into difficulties. She tried to stand up, but there was water around her, or mud, and stones kept rolling about, probably because of her own movements. I heard her fall again and again.
I knew that the water she was standing in was cold, colder than any marsh I have ever been in. Thinking of it, I started shivering. I had been taken unawares by her arrival in the night and all I was wearing was a loincloth. It would have been better the other way around. Better if I had been wearing Neelata’s dress, it would have kept me warm. And better if she had been wearing no clothes, it would have made it easier for her to drag herself out of the mud. But I did nothing to help her. I picked up something that lay close by my hand, a piece of rock, a pebble, a bone, I do not know which, dropped it into the well, and listened.
“You’re hurting me,” she shouted.
In the Shadow of the Ark Page 14