In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  The shock I caused was palpable through the whole space. Zaza jumped up to try and stop me. Zedebab gave a yell, high and piercing, as if trying to chase away a bird of prey. Neelata quickly hid in a dark corner, Taneses following her. Shem and Japheth managed not to move a muscle in their faces and stand motionless, their arms folded. Immediately, when Ham saw me, he began beating his breast. Since he had been on the ark, he had taken to wearing a little cap with a white, orange, and blue design. He yanked it off his head, coughed into it, and put it back on. He rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers, as if he wanted to wipe away my image.

  The only one to stay calm was the Builder. After studying me through his eyelashes, he said, “So it is you who has been doing all that singing lately?”

  I said nothing, but nodded.

  Japheth lowered his arms. He knelt before his father saying, “I hauled her on board. I am sorry, I do not deserve your blessing.”

  Immediately, Shem too fell to his knees. “He thought she was one of the sirens we’ve heard tales about,” he said hurriedly. “He only recognized her when she was already on board, and had too much compassion to throw her back into the water, the best proof that he is a good man, so do not curse him.” The others had sat down with their backs against the wall, as far as they could from the light.

  The Builder looked at me again. He leaned toward me and said, more to his sons than to me, “Is this not the girl who showed us where the water was? She is with child!”

  I replied, “The child was fathered by Ham, long before the flood. He has not failed you. He has kept his pact with you, which I cannot say of your other sons.” I gave him a small bow before I walked backward to the door. I carefully negotiated the threshold, but once I got to the gallery, I ran.

  Of course Ham knew which passages and ladders I usually used. He came after me. He shouted at me through the passages. I did not slow. I raced up onto the deck. There I stood at the railing, almost in the same spot where Japheth had hauled me back on board.

  I heard Ham come panting up the ladder. I dragged myself onto the railing and squatted because there was nothing to hang on to.

  “Re Jana,” Ham begged from the darkness. He did not dare come closer for fear that I would jump. “What has happened? Tell me! Is it what I think? Did you hold Shem and Japheth in your arms the way you used to hold me?”

  I looked at the foaming water below. It was black and dirty. The rain ran inside my collar down my back.

  “Is it true what you said? Are you carrying my child?”

  I gathered my courage to let go of the railing.

  Ham did not approach to stop me. He just said, “Even if it is someone else’s child, it doesn’t make any difference. Stay with us. You are the true chosen one.”

  55

  Neelata

  Ham went back the way he had come and informed the others that I had thrown myself into the sea. He did his best to make the news sound tragic, so the others would observe true sorrow, and it worked. The blessing was canceled. Nor did the Builder pronounce a curse, not even on the snakes he knew lived amongst them.

  And I disappeared into the bowels of the ship once more. For the second time, I became invisible, dead to them. From the deck cabin, I snuck into Neelata’s hut and sat down amongst the embroidered cushions and the chest full of her mother’s clothes. Near the loom and the heaps of yarn and wool I waited for her.

  She must have expected me, she was not in the least perturbed when she saw me. She put her arms around me and held me close.

  “Where is Put?” was the first thing I asked.

  “He is on the ship,” she said. “I tied him onto the dromedary with my own hands. Every day, I put out food for him. He comes to get it, but keeps hidden in the darkness. The child needs to get used to things, give him time.” She put a blanket around my shoulders.

  “How clean you are!” she said when she felt my skin. She was dirty. She spread fodder and mucked out, but was not given water to wash. She pushed me down, I could sit properly once more in these soft surroundings of hers. She put her hand on my stomach to feel the bulge. “How odd,” she said. “Our time stands still, but yours just goes on.” She combed my hair. She put her left hand on the hair roots, stroking with her right.

  She let me comb her hair. Then she even allowed me to rub her with oil. I recognized her scent which, before the flood, I had found so often on Ham. How long was it since I had groomed anyone, how long since my hands last rubbed oil into skin?

  “What did you think of the flood?” she asked. “Was it not magnificent? I so enjoyed the cleansing, the thought that, far away, my mother and her brother, with all their belongings, drowned! I had never expected this, I thought I wanted to save the earth, but seeing the destruction gave me pleasure.” For a few moments, I understood her exactly. How manageable everything seemed suddenly, how easy and clear it seemed to know that the only things you had to take into account were inside this ship. This understanding made me, very briefly, laugh, the first time in a very long while.

  For days on end, I did not leave her hut. Hour after hour she talked to me, and gradually I managed to do what my father had told me to do: I no longer jumped, not into the past, not into the future. I sat out every day of my punishment with painless patience. We had to be so quiet that we learned to communicate with gestures. She made me put on her mother’s dresses, forbidden on the ark. She had a little hidden compartment in her hut where she kept black pearls.

  “Ham’s father wouldn’t allow it,” she said. “Nothing that might seduce the boys! But I couldn’t possibly leave them behind. The world may perish, but not this.” She hung the pearls around my neck and on my ears. She adorned me with the peacock feathers she had gathered on her rounds.

  We talked through half the night. We persuaded each other that there are things worse than loneliness. Unsteady love, for instance, or a love that is not recognized. We listed the things we missed: shells the size of a fist, pebbles under our feet, the scent of the sun on a tent, pomegranates in the bowls next to our beds. We told each other what we were afraid of: that love would grow too big for a heart, that love would burst because the heart gives out. We talked about Put, about the smell of cakes and milk that always hung around him, about the beetles and the shiny pebbles he played with, about the small stains on his teeth.

  “Do you remember how you rescued me?” she asked. She told me she dreamed about it, about how I dragged her out of the well and bruised her ribs. In her dream, she was never unconscious, she kept her eyes open to see my panic and helplessness. In between our talking, we listened to the reassuring noises around us. There was not a sound that did not reach us, from the chirping of the sparrows to the clattering of the cranes. We knew the fears of the animals, the nerves getting tense when the scent from the lions’ enclosure reached the other cages. But we ourselves were not afraid.

  One day, she took off her clothing. When the last garment, a tight undershirt, slipped over her head and arms, she said, “This is only my skin.” She held out her arms to me. She said, “Open me up. Do what Ham can’t do, release me.”

  To what can I compare her touch? I do not know. It was not stroking, rather a soft, unexpected collision of skin against skin. She put her hand on my hip and it was as if I had gone down into the sea: Shoals of silvery fish brushed against my body and sent up a cloud of air bubbles. She must have felt it too, because she nearly squeezed my arm to a pulp. When she lifted her leg to turn to me, she made me shudder. I was breathing very irregularly, but I was breathing. For the first time, the ark seemed to be more than a coffin.

  So we kept guard, the two of us, curled together, around us spider-eating monkeys, which were allowed to roam everywhere to rid us of vermin. We fell asleep with our faces turned toward each other. Time and again, I opened my eyes to look at her, and saw how she too opened her eyes sleepily to look at me. In the half dark, I especially saw the glittering of the moisture on her lips. Her vulnerable throat was turned tow
ard me. She wore nothing but a string of pearls around her neck, a string without pearls around her waist, and two bronze anklets. I did not go to sleep without reaching for her hand. Her thumb she held in her mouth like a child.

  In the morning, I heard how her belly woke up first. The saps in her body started moving, then she began to toss and turn, and finally she opened her eyes. When I looked at her, I was overcome by the feeling that she was immortal, while I was here only briefly. I was allowed with her for a while. After that, I would disappear, a disappearance that was of no importance to her because she had no idea of time. Of all those on board, she was the most lighthearted, she was the only one who had no regrets and felt no guilt.

  I asked her, “Tell me about that god of yours!”

  “He is a god who does things for you, if you behave according to His rules. He holds a hand over your head.”

  Her words did not surprise me. This god had saved them from the flood. Our gods were capricious. They let herds become infertile and rivers break their banks. They did not order boats to be built when they let the water rise, any more than they made it clear that wells should be dug when drought was coming. A god who assisted his people and loved them, that was the sort of god I wanted, that was a god after my heart. Abide by His wishes, my father had said. By this god I wanted to abide.

  She asked, “Are there others, apart from you and Put?”

  “My father.”

  “On the ark?”

  “No, out there, on the edge of the world. He has no one to look after him.”

  She stretched on her mat, touched the wall with her fingertips, and said, “Is the man in the little boat your father? He feeds the waterbirds, did you know? The Unnameable will help him if you ask Him. And if you accept His conditions.”

  56

  Ham

  So I paid the price. I refused to go with Ham when he found us in each other’s arms. I fought like a varan. I hit him in the face.

  He gripped me by the shoulders and shook me. “I have brought you on board. You are mine,” he said. “You slept with Japheth, you slept with Shem. Now you sleep with Neelata. It is enough. You’re coming with me. I’ll find a cage with a bolt, where no one will look for you.”

  I gripped his hand and bit it, and as I bit, a heavenly warmth streamed through me. I spoke to him, the first time in a long while. “Once I found you in your tent. I looked at you and saw that, like me, you were ready for love. I covered your nakedness. We made a pact, but since we’ve been on the ship, you’ve beaten me away from you. You look after me, but if I want to do the same for you, you won’t let me. The new pact, the one with your father, is more precious to you! You draw strength from your abstinence and you think you are doing a good thing, but the reality is that you torment me. You don’t seem to understand that you arouse my desire, and so cause me more pain than you can alleviate with oil and water. Do not come and get me now that I too have decided to obey your god.” He again grasped my hand, but I lashed out with clawed fingers, scratching the skin I had so often cared for.

  Neelata did not stir in her corner. She kept her eyes down, her face turned away. We burst out laughing when he drooped off.

  He tried again the next evening. His footsteps in the passage sounded more determined, his fist on the door more resolute. It must have been audible in the surrounding spaces, he made such a racket. Taneses and Zedebab did not emerge from their hut. They must have thought it was Neelata trying to resist their brother-in-law.

  The door was not locked, we had seen to that. We repeated our fight like an ever-returning enchanting dance, evening after evening, eerily lit by the flickering, almond-shaped flame of the lamp. It became the cause of our happiness. The daily beating was satisfying and addictive because it was an answer to the Unnameable’s instructions, because that way Neelata could dab at my wounds afterward, and I could ask myself in tears who was looking after him like this, who washed him, cared for him?

  We kept it up for many days. Neelata did her work, she fed the animals and mucked out. I waited for her to come back, killing the time spinning and weaving, even though it was much too dark and it ruined my eyes. I washed her and slept in her arms. Ham came to get me, but I did not go with him. My resoluteness seemed to please the Unnameable. The rain outside became more gentle day by day, the drops became smaller and no longer hit the surface of the water like pebbles. It changed into a smooth haze that rustled in our dreams.

  57

  First Light

  There was change coming, you could feel it. Forty days had passed since the ark had floated from the ground. The change did not excite the animals, to the contrary, they became unnaturally quiet. They seemed to prick up their ears. I could hear nothing. Then I realized that that was precisely what they were listening to: the silence, the absence of the rushing sounds. It had stopped raining.

  There was a dawning in the sky, a new day broke, the first in a long time. For the first time since I had hidden there, I left Neelata’s hut and stood on deck. I was cold, but the sun — the sun! — seemed intent on warming me. It was a watery disk, orange in color and still half in the water. The plankton below the surface of the water lit up. I began to get an impression of the extent of this sea. I would be able to look for miles around, later, once the darkness was quite gone and the orange light turned white. I waited, but did not see my father. Was he farther away than the eye could reach? Had he plunged into the abyss at the end of this massive body of water?

  The animals recognized the light. After the silence, their joy erupted. The cock crowed like one possessed. The birds went crazy, they tweeted, they twittered, they warbled. Bumping sounds came from the sleeping quarters. I expected Put; surely he would soon appear now, the camel-hair sack around his body. But it was the others, the Builder and his wife, Shem, Japheth, Ham, and their wives. I heard their footsteps coming up the ladders. They wanted to get outside, onto the deck as quickly as possible to see the sun.

  I raced down the ladders, and when they came past, I stood in the kangaroo cage, quite visible in all that sudden light. Luckily, they were in such a hurry to get on deck they paid no attention to me. It was my father’s ingenious construction that made me so vulnerable. Thanks to his light gallery with its adjustable shutters, the light came in from many sides. It was of no great service to me. All it did was throw light on the hopelessness of my situation. How could I go on hiding if every footmark, every handprint, every shadowy movement could be noticed thanks to the open shutters?

  Scared, I sat in Neelata’s hut, waiting for her to return. She had a room divider, with woven designs in different kinds of reeds, which she had already used in her quarters in the shipyard to give herself privacy. I placed it between me and the door in case someone looked in through the gaps. She was as boisterous as a child when she came in, so excited she just put the screen aside without wondering why it was there. “It’s over, Re Jana,” she exclaimed. “Everything has been destroyed, just a short while and the new world begins!”

  But the end of the rain did not mean that the voyage was finished. The water stayed high, day after day. My skin and my dress became tight around my belly. Neelata altered the dress, she put extra panels in the seams so I could breathe more easily. It did not help. The constriction was not because of the dress, but because of the space I was locked up in. I wanted to move, look around, go on deck, and, now that it was light, help search for Put.

  And I wanted to see how Ham was. My rejecting him had its flip side: He no longer bothered with me. He no longer procured extra helpings, just now that my hunger seemed insatiable. Neelata went foraging, but she was not resourceful. I suspected she mainly looked about for Put and did not pay much attention to edible things. And there was less and less. Fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts, and cheeses were finished. What milk could still be obtained from the cattle did not reach me. My stomach demanded more than Neelata found for me. My appetite became so great that I set out to search in the evening after darkness returned.
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  The ark stank, and it was hard to follow your sense of smell. But when I came near the dodoes I recognized an odor that did not belong to the birds. I opened the hutch I had lived in for so long and discovered that it had been taken over as a storage place. There were bags of raisins and fragrant cheeses. I hid as much as I could carry under my dress for Neelata. The raisins I dropped in front of Ham’s door; he would feel them under his feet when he left his hut.

  Neelata closed her eyes when she took a taste of the cheese. To give her a surprise, I went back to the store the next evening.

  Like the first time, I opened the hutch by sliding away the panel Ham had made for me. It was not easy doing it quietly. Dodoes react grumpily to having their sleep disturbed. They rock their bodies and hit the ground with their broad toes. There suddenly seemed to be so many of them that night, much more than seven. Then I noticed I had been trapped. It was not just dodoes squatting against the wall. There was a woman amongst them, the substantial figure of Taneses.

  With much rustling, she got up and grasped me by the wrists. I dropped the panel. “Neelata?” she asked. “Zedebab?” She dragged me along the passage toward the swans’ cage some way farther along, where her lamp stood.

  “You?” she asked. “But you were in the water. I’ve envied you all this time. I thought you had been spared this doom.”

  I hurriedly shook my head. I must have looked scared, showing my fear of her strong body.

  Her voice became gentle when she looked at me close up, I heard compassion in it. “Shall I throw you in the water so it will all be over?”

  I shook my head again.

  She looked genuinely surprised. “Do you not want to? I would wish for nothing better than that someone would tie me up and push me into the water along the dung slide.” Her grip slackened. She knew I would not run away; my only escape was the water, and she now knew I did not want to go that way. “But you can swim, of course. That makes a difference. That makes a death in the water too slow. And you’re carrying a child.” Her mouth smelled of the cheeses in the hutch. Her waist was wider than mine. She always looked pregnant, regularly had been before the voyage, but her children died, they dropped from her body like onions from her sacks. As women, we knew she kept her losses a secret from Japheth. With her voluminous belly and veined breasts, she had managed to persuade him that she was the best woman for him, and this had saved her life.