In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  Thanks to the faint glimmer of light I could see that I was amongst the dodoes. With their great layers of fat they looked well prepared for bad times. The sounds they made had changed. They held their heads at an angle, making them look as if they were questioning one another, or deliberating about what they ought to do in this confined space with not a branch or a stone around. They did not move out of my way when I tried as quickly as possible to get back inside my small but safe sleeping hutch. We had survived the storm together, and they looked at me as if I were one of them. Because of the wild tossing around of the past night, dozens of splinters had lodged in my arms.

  The light became stronger, and I could hear voices. Someone approached, lugging tubs, putting them down, opening pens, throwing fodder inside, and latching them again. The dodoes were restless, hacking into the planks with their beaks as if they expected seeds to jump out of them. My arms trembled from the exertion it took, but I managed to see how the door of the dodoes’ pen was opened. The hand threw fruit inside, which the dodoes gobbled up. Briefly, the gallery remained quiet. The door of the pen did not close again, but opened wider. Moving rapidly, someone slipped inside, without any sound of weight on wood, without a groan of exertion.

  It was Ham. He carried more fruit, which he quickly threw into my hutch. He hardly bent forward, and there was not enough light to get a proper look at him: All I could see were his eyes like hollows in his face. “My brothers are nearby. I can’t talk. I’ll come as soon as I can,” he said.

  “Wait!” I whispered. “Come back!” My voice was hoarse from the cold I had suffered. I had not been able to warm myself in the mud-soaked clothes that had enveloped me for so long and that had saturated the wood underneath me. Outside an unceasing call was coming from the water. It was a high, wailing voice I did not recognize.

  “Who is that calling?” I asked.

  “An old man has sewn cork into his clothes. My father will not allow him to be pulled from the water.” Swiftly, he vanished from the pen and shut it behind him. The light faded and disappeared.

  The waiting started again. The rain kept coming, I heard it lashing the bow. In fits and starts, I realized I had escaped death. I had to stay motionless because on this ship there was no compassion. Sleeping in the ark hurts one’s limbs, that was the first thing I learned.

  48

  My Father

  They returned much later, after I had already fallen asleep several times, and perhaps a whole day had passed. Once more I heard the sound of water in drinking troughs. Again I heard the voices and the footsteps. The feeding proceeded faster than the first time; the various actions went more smoothly and there was less shouting.

  This time I did not crawl into my hutch. Quiet as a mouse I sat amongst the birds. I saw Shem and Japheth moving quickly through the pens, Shem with a small monkey on his shoulder and Japheth with his beard and hair tied back with string. The cloaks they used to wear had gone. They now wore, right against their skin, thin undershirts that could be washed in little water and did not offer much shelter for lice. Ham entered the pen and closed the grating behind him. I did not move until after he had opened the sleeping hutch.

  A shock went through his body when he noticed me behind him. “Aah,” he said, closing his eyes, when he recognized me. He looked tired. The skin of his face was damaged in several places. Along his hairline there were traces of clotted blood, the result of fights with refractory animals. I saw instantly what needed to be done, where the wounds could be bathed and what oils would reduce the bruising. I just wanted to look, but before I realized, we were holding each other’s hands, our fingers entangled like ancient knots that could not be unraveled.

  “We made it,” I said. “We’re alive,” and I kissed the bruises on his face.

  He pushed me away, pressing close to the wall where it was really dark. At every sound in the passage I could feel him stiffening and huddling closer up against the wall.

  “You must stay in the hutch. It could have been someone else instead of me. Then we would be thrown overboard, you as well as me.”

  “The hutch is so small. Let me sit here when nobody is near.”

  “There are snakes on board. We’ve found two flat baskets from which they’ve escaped. They can wriggle through the gratings. You’re safer in the hutch.” Ham too was wearing just an undershirt, apparently designed specially for the journey. He had a hood against the dust, but because there was no sun here, they had skimped on the material. Hence it was so ill-fitting it was embarrassing.

  “A snake is not enough to keep my father inside a small hutch. He is not afraid of them. You must have something a bit bigger for us, where we would all fit, including Put?”

  He scrambled up and turned away from me. His brothers had moved on, darkness had returned and that should have calmed him. But it did not. His body trembled, and when I touched him I could feel the cold sweat on his skin.

  “Is he far from here?” I asked. “Not too far, I guess, because I heard him being brought in.”

  He pushed me toward the hutch by my shoulders. I appreciated that I had to get into it again; with snakes about, it would really be safer, and he had to get back into the passage before his brothers would return to see what was keeping him. “Do not ask me such questions, Re Jana,” he said with a sob in his voice. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “What is the matter then?” I asked as I slid obediently into the hutch, which smelled mostly of me. I took up the same cramped position as before so that I could at least see some of him as he spoke to me from the opening at the end.

  “Did you watch the disaster? It was a hundred times greater than the violence we expected. I could not get through it. Your father stayed behind in the flood.”

  The force of his words knocked my elbows from under me. “And Put?” I asked.

  “Neelata tied him onto the back of the dromedary. He is on board but does not show himself. He is a fearful child, he will need time to get used to it.”

  “Take me to Neelata then,” I said, managing to stay calm just a little longer.

  “Keep Neelata out of this. Do you want my father’s curse to hit her?”

  I fell backward, stretched out in that hutch that was too small to hit your head hard against the wall. A sound came from my throat, something like the sound the dodoes made. He must have left me, though I do not know when. I paid no attention to him.

  I made a din, but not with my voice, because that had broken down. I turned over and pounded the wall with my feet. It was a feeble noise, barely audible above the stamping of the hundreds of animals. My body fell into a violent kind of shivering that set the boards around me shaking. In my mouth, tastes came that I did not recognize. My teeth rattled, my chest went up and down as fast as a finch’s. How had it been when my father drowned? He was a good swimmer, even though he hardly ever did. A boat builder did not swim, he went by boat. If there was no boat available, he would rather tie two planks together than have to swim. More than once it happened that the floats of such a punt would come apart. On those occasions I had seen how fast he was, how powerful the stoke of his arms trained by rowing. Never would he let go of his catch, he dragged the net after him through the silt. The thought that he would have kept swimming for a long time made the pressure on my chest worse. It made my body jerk like a fish on the shore of a lake. What was left for me on this ark? If Put was on board, was he not, more than ever, the child who had blabbed, who had caused my father’s death? My fingers clawed, I scratched fibers from the planks because life itself seemed to have forgotten me. I hurt myself and let the drops of blood fall around me like petals.

  Ham brought me food, but I did not eat. He said, “You must make yourself get over your grief. You must think of both of us now. Your noise will give us away. Stop it. My brothers ask me which animal is so restless in this corner of the ship. They ask me for a plan of the ship, because they think some animal is groaning with hunger.”

  I managed only very sl
owly. My arms and my legs were like tentacles that did not really belong to me. At best, I could keep them still when the dodoes were being fed. But afterward, the shaking and banging came back until it made the dodoes uneasy, and I kept still for their sake.

  49

  The Papyrus Boat

  For days on end, I did not eat, it seemed pointless. For a while, I was concerned about the cuts in my skin. Briefly, I felt hungry, but that too passed. I lay in my own excrement for so long I stopped longing for water. Now and then I changed my position. I turned over and moved Neelata’s cushion. I made the time, which I no longer valued, pass by sleeping.

  After days, I was woken by a sound behind the wall. I felt someone open the panel by my head and recognized the hands that dragged me by my shoulders out of my hollow.

  I was not sure I was not dreaming. I felt sick. Because feeling the warmth of his body was so immediate, so real, I knew I was not dreaming. Being upright again, once more feeling my proper relation to the ground, made the blood sing in my ears. I really wanted to stand up, stretch my back, and hold up my head, but my legs were not up to it. I fell, limp, against the man who had lifted me up.

  He caught me. He picked me up and carried me out of the pen into the passage. Every sigh, every cough from a cow, the scuttling of the armadillo, the flap of a bat’s wing, stopped him moving. He progressed by feel. Luminous eyes of nocturnal animals in stacked cages turned toward us. The man lifted his knees up high, he was carrying me up steps or a slope. After a while I felt, to my amazement, wind and rain on my face. We were on the deck.

  The air brought me to my senses. The pale-skinned man next to me wore a nose ring. There was a scent around him I recognized, the scent of dread, but also of cassia. He put me down on my feet without letting go of me. The wind coming off the water, full of eddies and whirlpools, was cold. On the ship’s roof sat birds, small ones, but also cranes, herons, and eagles. They were dead tired from flying and jostled for space on the edge of the water barrels.

  I breathed shallowly so as not to cause myself pain. I shivered with fever. Ham felt it, but he did not take me to a warmer spot. Excitedly, he stayed right there, and I realized there must be something I should see. “There, just look!” he said, pointing forcefully at the dark expanse of water. There were so many things floating in the water. I looked at the glittering surface, the play of black on black, and the moonless sky that was like an inverted sea, and I could only wonder where the shipyard was and the hills. Where were the Rrattika with their tents and their children?

  But then there was a shape I recognized. I saw a papyrus gondola, like the ones on which the marsh people buried their dead. I grabbed Ham’s arm, I looked and looked until I was certain: It was my mother’s papyrus boat. All other vessels had perished, only this one had stayed afloat, the one that was meant to be burned! Nobody had bothered to smash a leak in this little craft because no Rrattika believed it would float. I pressed my nails, grown long from lack of use, deep into Ham’s skin.

  “Why are you showing me this? Don’t torture me like this!” I groaned. I felt feverish and cold, I could not cope with the memory of the loss of my mother, not now that I also had to constantly think of the loss of my father.

  But he pointed again. “Look! Why don’t you look?!” he said.

  I peered. When I moved closer to the edge, Ham’s grip on me stiffened. There was a movement on the little vessel. A human shape was visible. Someone, during the storm, had run to the thick-fingered bushes to take cover on the papyrus boat. Someone had piloted the vessel unscathed through the storm. On a pole hung, like a large flag, a cloth I recognized. It was my mother’s seamless cloak, which my father had carried with him up to the end, even long after he had given all his other belongings away. And so I became convinced: The papyrus boat carried my father like a swan her young. So far-sighted my mother had been before she died: She had foreseen the discovery, perhaps even the destruction, of our truss-boat and taken care that a second vessel would be ready for us.

  “Do you see?” Ham asked, enraptured. “It is him, he lives, he has survived.” He hopped from one foot onto the other, while I could only stare. He lifted me up and took me away from the deck. We went along the shaft my father had designed to bring food to the animals on the level below. Afraid of waking anyone, Ham moved cautiously, but I could sense his excitement, his relief at the news he had brought me.

  But I could not feel any joy. What will he live on, I wondered. What will he eat when the three loaves I baked for him on a small fire just before the flood are finished? Will he fish all the time? Will he drink the floodwater? It will make him ill, being polluted with drowned lives.

  50

  The Bath

  I assumed that Ham was taking me back to my hiding place, but I was wrong. Along a succession of passages and ladders he carried me to the heart of the ark, the place where the game of shovelboard was set up and where, on a layer of sand, the fire was kept burning. Now I could see, I was finally in a place where there was light. We were surrounded by rows of amphoras. They contained sloshing water, some of which had splashed onto the ground. Provisions enough for a journey of many months were stacked up here. They still cooked on dried dung, I noticed, although they had brought much brushwood and could have spared all those on board the suffocating fumes. Ham handed me a beaker and watched as I drank its contents.

  Once my thirst had been slaked, Ham carried me to another corner of the space. To the side stood my father’s bathtub, three-quarters filled with clear water, next to it on the ground a small cloth, a sponge, and oil.

  Ham dipped a corner of the cloth in the water and wrapped it around his fingers. He did what he had always seen me do. He said, “Abstinence, my father has said. We must abstain. From each other, but from water too. It is to be used only for drinking, not for washing. And that while there has never been so much water!”

  On his knees he approached me. He carried the flask of oil in his left hand. I raised my hand to take the cloth and the oil; I thought I knew what was expected of me.

  I was mistaken. He did not remove the cloth from his fingers. He bent over me and washed my forehead. He brushed back my hair and looked at my face by the flickering light of the fire. He washed the red rain from my hands and arms, doing it the way I had done it for him many times. The water was exactly the right temperature. There was no sand in it, it did not sting my wounds. When he had finished, he threw herbs into the water in the tub. He laid me down in it. For the first time since I had been on the ark, I felt no pain.

  “We will get food to your father,” he said while the water lightened my body and my fever went down. “We’ll get him salt and oil. Perhaps even some of Neelata’s nuts, I expect they will float.”

  The water nourished me like bread. After a while, I had enough strength to raise myself in the bath. Ham helped me stand. I looked at myself; my hips were a complex web of carmine pink, purple, and thunder-sky blue. My legs were covered in burst veins that resembled underwater plants, and garlands hung over my shoulders. In the reflection in the water under me I saw that my hair was one tangled knot, standing up cheerily like that of a young badger that had fallen in shallow water.

  “Food is not needed,” I said. “We’ll pick him up tonight. We’ll hide together.”

  Ham put my damp dress back over my shoulders. My hair was heavy with moisture. He shook his head. “Then he must get closer. He will not do that except to rebuke and lecture us.”

  51

  Desire

  Every night changed into the next night, the sky seemed permanently dark. It rained unceasingly. When it became quiet and only the nocturnal animals were still moving, Ham came to me. He brought me straw and reeds, which I wove into a basket. I melted pitch from the side of the ship and smeared it over the basket. On top of the victuals Ham had gotten I placed an oil lamp with a flax wick, and over it all I constructed a roof. Then he launched it onto the water at the end of a long rope. We knew how well my father could s
teer a boat. Even in a floating box, he would be able to follow a flame.

  Every day we prepared a new bundle. But as time went on, the stock of oil lamps ran out; I had to convert basins and hope the sea would stay calm. They did really float, the nuts with the sweet juice and the flesh whiter than shells. Ham threw them, one by one, into the water, where they formed a long, gently bobbing string of pearls.

  When the occupants of the ark were awake, I kept quiet as a mouse. In my hutch, I listened to the muttering sound of drops against the side of the ship. It was as if you could hear it, the fermenting of the droppings in the cages and the rotting of the roof above, slowly eroded by the steady rain. I got used to the smell of garlic and olives, of the melon peels and date pips on the floor, of wet wool and animal fodder flavored with sorrel. I thought of my father, sleeping out there in his small hold, and could only wait till silence returned to the ship and Ham came to me.

  Ham was not the only one to wander through the ship in the still hours. He heard Taneses and Zedebab, near the air funnel, tell about luminous fishes swimming around the ship. They mentioned a reed gondola too, which just did not seem to sink and carried a human. “The Unnameable will decide whether he lives,” they said resignedly. A tension was building in their limbs, he noticed. Both of them longed for their husbands. There was no peace in their abstinence, in complete contrast to the dodoes: These built a nest where they happily deposited pea-green, unfertilized eggs, which I plundered to put in my father’s basket. The flood was taking so much longer than the women had expected. None of them understood this continuing rain. Every time they woke, they expected it to have stopped. Their bleeding told them that more than a month had passed. What was the sense of this excess? A death by drowning takes a few minutes, a couple of hours for good swimmers. Was there a doubt, perhaps, that everything had been wiped out thoroughly and for good?