In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  I recognized his loss; I missed my mother. I wanted to say to him, “The fire has not consumed your wife. The water has claimed her because she sought it,” but what man needs the truth in his grief? I said, “Your Unnameable god does not seem to know that the dead stay alive. They move into the next life.”

  “He has made us out of clay. He breathed life into that clay, life that can be snuffed out. When it is extinguished, everything is gone. We return to our original state.”

  “But it is that breath, that sigh, that wind that lives on. It leaves the throat and goes elsewhere. I should know, I saw it happen when my mother fell into her boat. The cry that escaped her contained her will, not all of her will, but a part of it, a part large enough to make her decoy ducks fly despite their clipped wings.”

  “He has never said anything to me about that. All I know is that this life passes. The living know they are going to die, but the dead know nothing. That is why a living dog is better than a dead lion, and in death, man is equal to the beasts.”

  “Then why are we here, if life is so temporary?” I asked.

  “To worship and to sacrifice.”

  “Then the Unnameable has regard only for himself. People will turn against him and soon forget him. Is your Unnameable a good god?”

  “He is a good god.”

  “Then he must console. Then he must spare his people meaninglessness and offer some prospect.”

  “Consolation there is already,” he said dryly, pointing at the vats of wine.

  “It will need to be more than that. He will have to offer what cannot be found anywhere else: the promise not to wipe us out, the hope for a better place, and the certainty that our suffering is not meaningless. A new life in paradise for those who deserve it. That is what some alabaster gods say. Is that not beautiful? Is that not something for the Unnameable, he who is so fond of good commandments?”

  “Yes,” he said, staring for a long time at the beams in the ceiling. And then again, “Yes, you are right. It would be beautiful to believe that Zaza’s breath floats about. That she is going away to a place that is better for her than here. That is what I shall do, that is how I will think of it.” When, quite a while later, he opened his eyes again, he said, “I know who you are. You are the dwarf in a new shape. I knew it when you showed us the water in the cave. You disappear and reappear, just like him.”

  I knelt next to his bed. I bent my head because I hardly dared look up, particularly not when he said, “Give me your message. Tell me the commandments of the Unnameable.”

  In a conversation I had with him a few days later, I made up a hereafter that seemed fair to me, with a place for the righteous inhabited by nothing but pure, snow-white beings. But I was not thinking of that now, because something else altogether was worrying me.

  “The man who moved you to tears in the cave now sits in a little papyrus boat,” I said. “He is floating about all alone on this sea.”

  “Is that so?” asked the Builder. He looked at me, his irises no longer trembling but looking fixedly at me. “Then we must help him.” He asked me to take him onto the deck. He was not heavy, hardly heavier than my mother whom I had lifted so often. He hung on tightly to the railing when I put him down. On his feet, he was wearing my father’s rabbit-fur boots. He looked out over the water, lifted up his free hand, and muttered a few prayers I did not understand.

  “I bless the man in the papyrus boat,” he said finally. “May the Unnameable assist him in all that he undertakes.”

  “And Ham?” I asked when he opened his eyes again. “Can you bless him too?”

  “Ham will have to earn his blessing,” he replied. “Just like his brothers.” He put his hand on the railing again. I carried him back into the hold and stayed with him till dark.

  61

  Hunger

  After the fire came the scarcity. My gums became swollen, my nails tore. Hunger makes you resentful. Someone has to take the blame for the emptiness in your belly that makes you think you are being eaten away from inside, that something is gnawing at you. I had to survive on the shriveled almonds and the moldy biscuits Japheth handed me. On top of that, we had to cope unexpectedly with the death’s-head monkeys, who would wander about us and snatch out of our hands anything we lifted to our mouths and disappear with it like lightning. Their fur, which had been smooth and shiny when we embarked, became dirty and scruffy, and their once-shining faces looked dull.

  I took over Taneses’s tasks. The animals in the pens reacted with resentment to having to get used to a new voice and new movements. Every evening, I went off on my own to Taneses’s room, which smelled of smoke and sooty dampness. Occasionally the ark still smelled of something edible, but such days were becoming rare.

  Because Neelata’s hut had been burned out, she shared Zedebab’s. But although that hut was opposite mine, I rarely caught a glimpse of her. Like all of us, she became very turned in on herself. Her stocks of honey and raisins shrank rapidly. Her dates she had been sharing with me, but not the rest, because she saw that I sacrificed part of what she handed me to the Unnameable. She no longer entered my smelly hut. We met while we were feeding the animals, and she asked, “Why am I more worried about myself than about you?”

  I said, “The soul knows many ways of fleeing,” but her face remained unyielding as the night.

  She replied, “I am not worried about you because you persist. You should have married Ham, my presence here is a mistake. I cannot honor the Unnameable. He is no more than the collected fear and sickness of all that moves in this ark. Anything the boys and their father cannot understand they’ve called the Unnameable. I cannot afford to waste my dates on a god like this.”

  I squeezed her hand to reassure her. “It’s better not to worry about me,” I lied. “I’m fine.”

  “I still share with Put. He collects anything I put out for him. But how much longer can I go on sharing if I’m starving?”

  “Not much longer,” I said. “Starving we do on our own.”

  She smiled, and with steps that dragged more than they used to, she went on with her work.

  More even than with eating, we were preoccupied with sleeping. We slept more often and for longer periods. We spent hours arranging and rearranging our sheets and sewing larger, softer pillows to lie on; feathers there were aplenty, the birds were molting. We avoided the sun because it made us hungry. We loved the moon because night after night it brought us the sleep we longed for.

  The animals became ill. The cold, the damp, and the smoke had left them unscathed, but the hunger exhausted them, except for the hibernators, who seemed unconcerned because they did as we did: They shut their eyes and no longer left their nests.

  And we were thirsty. The little water that was left had become tainted. You could not taste any difference between what came out of the amphoras and the dregs from the sinkhole. The cattle collapsed. We had to pour water down their nostrils to bring them around.

  The shortages were harder for me to bear than for the others. They had been brought up in the Rrattikan belief that eating very little did not kill you. As children, they had been trained to put up with the feeling of gnawing hunger. Privation was never more than an inconvenience. They baked bread from thistles and pressed water out of cactuses. Because there were no thistles on the ark, they used sorrel and hay. But my stomach could not cope with their inventive bakery, and my bowels stopped functioning. If occasionally something decent was found, I was not included in the distribution, an omen of the way I would be treated later. I had to scrape together my own food, and so I stole what I could find, afraid of being caught, but not so afraid that I did not realize that dying of starvation was more terrible than anything they could do to me. I dried the flesh of animals that perished. I had to do it fast, or it would rot within a day. Because I did not have enough salt, I cut the meat in thin slices and dried it over the fire. The last piece I threaded onto my stick was the arm and fist of a small monkey. I saved it and hung it on a nail i
n a dark corner. Of course, it disappeared in no time, presumably snatched away by monkeys of the same breed, and I was left with nothing.

  The days passed. By that time, no one was counting the weeks anymore, and as deprivation got worse, the ark became quieter. Shem and Japheth passed the days sleeping, Zedebab and Neelata tried making soup out of nut shells. Now and then I took something to the Builder. I had almost nothing left to put into the broth, no more than a couple of drops of oil, half a sprig of thyme, and a pinch of salt.

  One evening after work, I returned, exhausted, to my scorched hut. Before I had even shut the door, I felt the presence of something alive in the corner. The snake, I thought, but whatever sat in the corner was bulky, and it made wheezing sounds. I did not have a lamp, I had no need of one to sleep, so I stood, petrified, waiting for the creature to move.

  “Shut the door properly,” someone whispered, and I recognized the hoarse, throaty voice of Taneses. I did as she told me.

  “The fire was my fault, I know,” she said without stirring in her corner. “I pretended to walk into the fire to escape the Unnameable’s eye. That, I think, I succeeded in, but now it seems this whole ship is going to perish from hunger.”

  I moved closer to see her. I saw the three alabaster statues on the floor next to her. They gleamed in the darkness from the fat she had rubbed them with, these were probably the only things on the ship that still looked cared for. I touched them and felt they were warm, she had brought them here under her clothes. The scent they gave off reminded me of the small temples in the marsh country, where priestesses lived, like Taneses, women of substance who cherished their statues like children.

  “Even the little boy is weak with hunger,” she continued. “We must do something, Re Jana. If we don’t start something, we’ll all perish, even the animals.”

  I pulled back my hand. It was difficult to keep up my squatting posture. I was dizzy, and my belly was taut. “Little boy?” I asked, breathing deeply.

  “I found that child that used to hang around with you.”

  “Put?”

  “I let him do things for me. How did you think I have survived all this time?”

  “Why does he listen to you?”

  “I was surprised at how easy it was to make him obey. I did not have to hold him over the side of the ship, just threatening to was enough.”

  I half fell to one side. The floor, I thought, the fire has made the planks as thin as wafers, I’m going to go clean through it. But I fell no farther than against her.

  She stretched out her arms to support me. “Are you all right? You’re not feeling ill, are you?” she asked. Her head was right next to mine. She said in a whisper, “I do not want to exploit that child. I am not a bad person. But it is not always easy when your gods are demanding.”

  I shuddered again. I could smell that she had eaten more recently than I. “Is it your gods who prevent the waters receding?”

  She helped me up without too much noise. “I think so,” she said dully.

  “I know what we can do,” I said when I was on my feet again. I was still staggering, but thanks to her support I stayed upright. “We’ll make a special offering to your gods. We’ll kill the most precious bird in this ship for them.”

  That evening I went as usual into the Builder’s hut. I lit his lamp and applied ointment to the ulcers in his groin. The Builder was in a good mood. He smelled of wine and said he had practically no pain anymore. That was thanks to me, he said, and my soft hands. As I was leaving, I took the messy dove from its cage and clutched it under my dress.

  “Has the time come already? Is it time to look for an olive branch?” the Builder asked when he saw what I was doing.

  I sidled to the door as quickly as I could. “This creature is our last hope,” I said and went back to Taneses’s hut. There I did what I thought was the right thing to do. I killed the dove, plucked its feathers, and laid it before the alabaster statues while Taneses watched.

  “And now the child,” I said when I had finished. “Show me where he is.”

  “Not so fast,” she replied with her eyes on the statues. “First we’ll see if this sacrifice bears fruit.”

  62

  Return to Ham

  Ham looked up when I came in. He had his hands in a basin full of fat that he was trying to spread over his skin with unfeeling fingers. “You are not supposed to come here,” he said and continued rubbing.

  “I know,” I said. “There are so many things I’m not supposed to do.”

  All that time he had mourned. I could tell from the hairs that lay all over the floor, like a fur he had shed.

  I shut the door behind me and walked into his hut. But I did not get far. I moved my foot and collapsed. I fell flat on the floor and all I can remember is the boards.

  Ham lifted me up, his arms under my armpits, put me down on his bed and covered me.

  “When I started this journey, I was strong,” I said hoarsely. “But everything has been taken from me. I was not to be allowed onto this ship. There was no room for me, but see, my presence was immediately accepted by everybody. I understand why: I am here for the benefit of all of you.”

  Ham briefly closed his eyes but said nothing. With his stumps wrapped in rags, he boiled water for me. Day and night I stayed lying on his mat. I could no longer raise myself to drink, but he kept my lips moist. Every morning again I gave myself up for lost, but every morning again it was he who called me back to life.

  He told me things I had heard his father tell: that he would bring me to a garden, a place free of cactuses, thistles, and rocks, in its center a tree that would enlarge the mind. I watched him preparing to go to sleep. He tried to clean his feet. When I saw how dirty the cloth was that he was using, I struggled up. I knelt before him and offered him my hair. He lifted me up and gently pushed me down beside him. With all the movement inside my belly, all I could do was lie against him at an angle, my leg over his to carry the weight. We pretended tenderness to forget the earlier violence between us. He lifted his arms, but his movement led to nothing. His hands were bandaged and the skin of his forearms was without sensation: He could only imitate a caress with his elbows. No longer could he scratch me with those serrated fingernails of his.

  I did have my hands. Full of regret, I moved them over his neck and shoulders, and he did not push me away. Perhaps he no longer had the strength.

  “See,” we said to each other. “The ark that was to save us is closing over us like a coffin.”

  The animals no longer cried for food, some had lain down, others stood dumbly on their legs as if they had not learned how to collapse. Barely anything moved. And so we lay amongst the scrolls, the carpets, the mosaics, and the fabrics Ham had stacked in his hut. He had barely left enough room for himself because he had been certain he would go on the truss-boat. Here I thought I would meet my end, after many wanderings, back with the pale-skinned boy. In a state of paralysis and lack of will, like my mother. We held each other. Together we listened to the splashing of the waves against the bow.

  63

  Call over the Water

  When the ship had become so still that it was as if, in an unguarded moment, everyone had abandoned it, a call sounded over the water.

  “Re Jana! Re Jana!”

  At first, I thought I was dreaming. I opened my eyes and closed them again. But the call sounded again.

  I got to my feet. The ship was rocking more than you would expect from a vessel in quiet waters, but perhaps it only seemed like that because I was so dizzy. I climbed the ladders, went on deck, and leaned on the storm-battered railing. For a while, I stood and wondered at the restlessness of the water. All carcasses and tree trunks, everything that floated, had sunk or been washed over the edge of the world. Now there was life in the water, and not just predator fish. From glitterings in the water and rapidly disappearing little cross currents, I recognized shoals of edible fish. Eels with toothed jaws swam around the keel and, slowly behind them, a
string of flat fish, which, in the marsh country, we called alpoes, an excellent type of fish, white and flaky when cooked.

  Again, my name echoed. I went to the side of the ship the sound came from and bent over the railing. Below me, close up against the ark, I saw a whirling of water birds’ wings, among them many terns, my mother’s lucky bird. Dozens, maybe hundreds of birds circled around a floating object of which only the tip of the prow was visible. I recognized my father’s papyrus boat and its white shroud.

  “Re Jana,” I heard again. “Throw down a rope and gather your strength to pull it up again.”

  Of my father I could not see much, only his hands, which appeared from under the sun shelter now and then. He made rapid movements with a rope he was pulling from the water.

  Zedebab and Neelata came out of their hut. Shem, Japheth, and Ham shuffled onto the deck. They had all heard the call.

  “He wants a rope,” I said. “We have to pull.” It was impossible to suppress the joy in my voice. He was alive, this man, he was safe and sound.

  Shem and Japheth threw out a rope and laboriously hauled it back up. Its end reached the deck, and with a smack, my father’s heavy fyke-net fell on board. Fish thrashed about on the boards. The voyagers looked at it with amazement.

  I saw the revulsion in their eyes and said, “They are very good when you roast them. They are not warm-blooded. Your Unnameable god allows their consumption.” Again I looked over the railing at the papyrus boat at the bow. My father waved. “Go on, you know what to do,” he called.

  I cut off the heads, removed the guts, and baked them over a low fire. Nobody wondered if the fish tasted good. Myself, I had never thought I would be eating alpo this way, without the tart fruits and the bread that should go with it. But the voyagers licked their bowls clean. It did not even occur to them to ask the Builder’s permission. The broth I prepared was taken to him. Shem and Japheth threw the net and the rope overboard again. “Perhaps there’s more to come,” they said. They laughed for the first time in a long while.