In the Shadow of the Ark

by Anne Provoost

  Then my father stood next to us. I saw his movements, but they were too fast for me to remember them. I asked him, “If I can see your little boat, you must surely have seen ours? Surely you knew what was eating my heart?”

  He replied, “What did you expect? That I should let myself be humiliated again by that scum? Did you think I would bow down in the mud after all that time? Have you not known me always as a man who takes the honorable way out? You need me no longer, I am what has to be forgotten. Your son is your future, make sure he is brought up amongst other boys.”

  Neelata wrapped the child in cloth. At first, I did not look at it. I lay next to it, panting, my eyes closed. It asked for nothing and I slept to the sounds of animals that were already miles away, but which I could not keep out of my dreams, particularly those of the howler monkeys, they sounded the most gruesome. Neelata’s constant walking back and forth aroused my fear of the carnivores that I had seen leaving the ark: Were they far enough away, had they all really gone, were there none hiding in the pens and cages?

  Only after a long time did I manage to open my eyes. The child was much darker than Ham and much lighter than me. I licked it the way I had seen the cattle do. My father was no longer there, but Ham was. He put amulets around the child.

  I said, “Name him Canaan, I beg of you. Name him after the land of the marshes.”

  “Canaan will be his name,” said Ham, laying his hand on the little head.

  Every time Canaan pouted his lips against my nipple, my breasts started flowing. His smacking calmed my restless heart. I could not help feeling that it was not I who had given the child life, but it me. I watched the little hands that wriggled, kneading my breast. I listened to the rumbling of his belly while he drank. The thread of saliva that linked me with him, the little, black-edged nails with which he scratched his own face, the haughty look in his eyes and his air of here-I-am-look-after-me made me forget the desolation outside. His thirst woke me several times during the night. In his haste he bit at my breast through my clothes. As you put your forehead against a piece of alabaster when you have a headache, so I lay my forehead against little Canaan.

  Ham felt Canaan with his nose and chin instead of with his fingers. He said, “My child will not grow up on this wreck. On my arm he will enter the temple my father will build.”

  A few times, I tried to explain to Neelata that Put was in the papyrus boat. It was difficult to persuade her that I was speaking the truth. Like me, she could not believe that Put had turned his back on us. But eventually she ordered Ham to not leave my side. She baked bread for him and for me. She cut his meat because he could not do it himself, and when everything was ready, set off for the papyrus boat.

  69

  The Curse

  “It would be better if we did not build permanent houses,” said Ham. “If we do not roam the land, we will stop working together. We will fight over a piece of land. We will form single families instead of wider clans and rise against one another.” But his brothers stacked stones into walls. They were afraid of the rumbling noises in the distance and the clouds that were piling up. The occasional appearance of a rainbow could make no difference to that. And the spot was lonely. Like mine, their gaze kept focusing on the horizon. Sooner or later we expected old acquaintances to appear there: Zedebab’s twin sister, the pitch workers and the carpenters, the warriors and the foremen. Camia and her mother. My father. But no one came, not even a couple of Nefilim to break the solitude.

  One afternoon, eight days after Canaan’s birth, I heard someone move about on the ark. At first, I thought of an animal that had come looking for its old pen. Or was it Put, his fear overcome, returning to us? Put it was not, nor an animal. It was the Builder, who was approaching me with gently shuffling steps over the crumbling dung. “Why are you hiding?” he asked when he saw me lying in the hay. “I have looked everywhere for you. I have been in every pen in the ark. Why do you keep me searching?” His cloak was lighter in color than when we were on the water. Zedebab must have taken it to one of the ponds, it was no longer stiff with stains as it had been. He smelled differently than he had during the journey too. He walked without difficulty. Obviously, the illness was leaving him in peace for a while before striking again.

  I had a sheet over me to protect me and the child from the flies. The sudden appearance of the Builder had made me dive under it. I was still not strong. I did not know what to say to the man who sat so close to me while I was still bleeding.

  He examined the condition I was in and said, “Do not doubt yourself. You are the only one who can be exonerated of everything. You are unblemished, pure as the water from the cave full of bones. You are the only who has never raised yourself above the others by saying, I am chosen.” He bent his head, his chin on his chest. He wept, like that time in the cave.

  Not much later, Canaan must have made a sound under the sheet.

  The Builder gasped. With his staff, he lifted a corner of the sheet. “Here!” he said. And again, “Here!” He did not immediately pick up the child; first he touched it as if he wanted to know what to expect. But then he did pick it up. He held it close and laid his dry lips on the soft skin. “This is no place for you and my grandson. Your place is in my house,” he said.

  I tried to pay attention to what he was saying. Did he mention a place? Was that not exactly what prevented me sleeping: that no place had been provided for me in this world?

  But the Builder did not wait for my answer and walked onto the gallery with the child, out of the ark.

  He took us to his hurriedly constructed abode. The place was untidy, the house of a man on his own. There was a smell of fire and fermenting fruit.

  “Sit down and make this your home,” he said.

  I did as he said. I could not do otherwise. The walk had exhausted me and I had to lie down.

  As if there was something urgent that he might forget to do, he picked up the child and went outside with it.

  I closed my eyes, but not for long. Outside, not far from me, I heard Canaan crying. His pain resounded across the landscape like the announcement of great sorrow. I jumped up instantly. I ran outside and saw how the Builder held Canaan on the altar stone. On his little loincloth were bloodstains that had not come from me.

  “Hear him,” said the Builder, holding my child’s foreskin in his hand. “My grandson weeps because he does not understand how great a service I do him.”

  I could not answer, my throat was as dry as a pot shard.

  He wiped the knife clean on his gown and put the skin into the purse around his neck.

  Is this the price, I thought, of becoming one of them? Does this change my little one from a stowaway into a voyager on the ark? What sort of people is this to which we now belong, who live in isolation yet stay faithful to their god? A world had perished, and now it was perishing again, and I had the same feeling as the first time: This was what my life would be like, permeated with just one thing, with but one quality: aloneness. This was how it would feel, being forever recognized by the color of your skin and knowing that that color is the reason why you listen, why you conform, wherever you go.

  I walked to the altar stone. I lifted up my child, he felt like wood, stiff with fear and distress.

  “Let us hope he will manage to make something of this land!” said the Builder, but already I was walking away from him.

  No more than two marks in the landscape, Ham and Neelata returned from the papyrus boat. But they did not have Put with them. “Not with sweets, not with a whip, not with a rope can we get him here,” they said when they saw me.

  I was unable to walk, I was stumbling. I fell, the child under me, and that brought the others running. They had seen me walking and heard me crying. Shem was collecting stones, Japheth driftwood. They approached to see what was happening.

  “Could he not have offered a lock of hair or a piece of fingernail?” called Ham when he saw the bloodstains on Canaan’s loincloth.

  All together we
returned to the Builder’s house, Ham and Neelata out of anger, Japheth and Shem out of curiosity.

  The Builder was asleep. The short cloak he had worn on the ship had become even shorter from being washed. So he lay on his bed, his legs spread out, his cloak rucked up to his waist, the scars in his loins red from scratching.

  “Look at him naked and drunk,” called Ham when he entered.

  Shem and Japheth hurriedly went to the bed. With eyes averted, they pulled the sheet out from under him and covered his nakedness. “Do not talk like that,” Shem said to Ham. “You know he drinks to dull his pain.”

  “He drinks so he does not have to see what he has brought about,” said Ham, not even trying to lower his voice. “When the drinking water ran out on the ark, he kept the vats of wine hidden from us.”

  “You cannot say that, Ham!” said Shem.

  “I can say that, brother. He will not curse me. He has blessed me.”

  The women too came into the dwelling, Taneses’s face sweaty, Zedebab’s big, dark eyes full of surprise. I saw them come in and looked at them as if this were the first time I saw them. This was them, the chosen, the beginning of the new humanity. No one had changed. Taneses was as greedy as ever, Zedebab still vacuous, Neelata just as full of hatred for her mother, Shem still fanatical, and Japheth still persuaded of his own inferiority. They watched as the Builder opened his eyes. They all waited to hear what he would say.

  The Builder looked at his youngest son with an open mouth; he may have thought he was dreaming when Shem and Japheth told him what had just occurred. “Go away then, Ham. Disappear from this place,” he said.

  Neelata raised her arms and said, “Do not send him away, not with those hands.”

  “He has feet,” replied the Builder. “No more is needed to go away.”

  Ham regarded his father vacantly. He was standing, the Builder sitting. I observed the space between them, the way they faced each other, the trilling of the air that separated them. From under the sheet, the Builder’s body odor rose, unexpectedly strong.

  “The dark girl and her child you will leave here,” the old man continued. “Her child is the first of my new people, she the First Mother. With you, she is no more than a servant. Anything you cannot lift with those hands of yours, you will make her give to you.”

  Ham strode to the door. He did not turn when he said, “Your paradise you can keep, but not this woman. She is more precious to me than anything and anyone that was on the ship.” Suddenly all eyes were directed at me. I had already sat down because I felt so exhausted. But now I stood up, holding the child close. I went to stand next to Ham in the doorway.

  Tiredly, the Builder passed his eyes over everything low on the ground: the stones, the empty sacks, the shards of pots that had been broken during the unloading. He said, “Yes, just go. You will see what good it does you. Your child will be a servant of servants.”

  So here it was, the curse predicted by the oracle. Of all people still living, it hit the most innocent, the child who had done nothing to anyone yet, who had lived for only eight days and already had to recover from the fear of the knife. The curse was tied to the blessing. The blessing was the chance to leave, to part with the settlement that held no promise for me. It was raising your lips to bare your teeth, it was turning around and saying, “Good, I’m going.” The resoluteness had a refreshing effect; for the first time I did not have the feeling that the sunlight that fell on me through the doorway was too much to bear.

  Not that I did not waver. I could remember how light the Builder was when I carried him onto the deck. I could still feel the pressure of his frame when, sick as he was, he blessed my father. Soon, he would start feeling worse again, the periods of recovery would become shorter and shorter, the fevers more intense. The feelings of abandonment would afflict him just as much; he obviously had never blessed himself.

  But my doubts were wiped away by other memories. “Then I will have what every mother longs for,” I said. I spoke with my chin raised, and with very small, even elegant gestures, exactly how I imagined my mother must have spoken in the marsh land.

  Now the Builder looked at me, squinting. Just possibly, he understood what was happening, and how people escape from under a curse through small actions.

  “Huh?” was the only sound he uttered.

  “An untameable child,” I said, and walked into the sunshine, following Ham.

  70

  Canaan, the Land

  The Builder requested us to leave the donkeys and horses behind. But the unclean camels we could have, they would take us farthest. I gathered the things I wanted to take: Neelata’s black earrings, a bowl, a basket, and a couple of spoons, twisted in the fire. As soon as the camels had been loaded up, Ham came to the ark. He did not ask anything, he watched me on the gangplank in the sun. Awkwardly with his bandages, he helped me onto the smaller of the two camels, the female. Neelata sat on the other one, Canaan tied onto her belly. I saw that the little one did not move; he was asleep, exhausted by what he had been through.

  We traveled past the new encampment. The Builder did not emerge from his tent. Shem stood in the small field he had laid out, his silver-tailed monkey on his shoulder. With one hand he pressed the scarce seeds the rats had not found in the course of the journey into the soil, filling the furrow with the other. Japheth was planting the small, limp vines I had seen in the Builder’s hut. Neither had what he was doing in his fingers; never before had they cultivated plants. They very carefully did as they had been taught by experts from faraway countries before their departure: They sowed wheat, black cumin, millet, and barley, with spelt between them. They did their best to love their new land. I had heard them say to each other, “Let us build something large again, even larger than the ark. Let us build a tower reaching up to the Unnameable!”

  Zedebab and Taneses stood leaning against each other, almost unrecognizable in their new cloaks that protected them from the sun. They poked the fire to keep it burning. They reminded me of what we used to do on the ark: spin endless yarn, mixing particular colors, burning incense to dispel the stench of dung. Later they would weave mats to keep the drafts out of the houses. They would crush the grain and beat the cumin with sticks. They would boil milk. They would have children. Snakes of all sorts would keep them from sleeping.

  That is how I left the ark behind, that coffin, which, though hardly changed, had preserved none of its original beauty. First we went to the papyrus boat. I had hoped that Put would come and sit on the camel with me. But he shook his head. He rucked his cloak up with his girdle, seized a stick and walked ahead of us like a tracker. At the last pond, the camels drank until their bellies were swollen. Then, rocking like ships, we traveled westward, following my father’s footsteps, which you could only see if you half-looked.

  Postscript

  The sons of Japheth were Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. The sons of Gomer were Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. The sons of Javan were Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim, and the Rodanim. From them descended all those who spread over the islands. These are the sons of Japheth, separated into their own countries, each with their own language, family by family, nation by nation.

  Shem too had children. He was the ancestor of all the sons of Eber. And their land stretched from Mesha all the way to Sephar, the mountainous land in the east.

  Ham’s sons were Canaan, Put, Cush, and Mizraim. Put was the child of wanderers, found by chance and taken along. The other three were children of his concubine, not his wife, whose womb had been closed by the Unnameable. For his wife’s heart did not go out to him; she had sworn never to bear children for him, but warmth she found, like him, in the concubine’s tent. Canaan became a singer, famous far beyond the marshes, untroubled by the curse that had been laid on him at an early age. Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first powerful ruler on earth. He was a mighty hunter. Hence the saying, “Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Unnameable.” The beginning of his kingdom
was in Babel. He built Nineveh. From impudent Mizraim descended the Philistines, who later fought determinedly with the descendants of Shem. Put did not procreate. He died before he grew up, during a game with his brothers.

  Canaan was the father of Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth. From them descended the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hemathites. Afterward, the families of the Canaanites spread abroad. The border of the Canaanites was from Sidon through Gerar up to Gaza, and then toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboyim. They became famous for their skill with wood. Famed carpenters they produced, and immortal boat builders.

  Those are the families of the Builder’s sons, after their generations: From them have descended all the peoples who spread over the earth after the flood. The flood did not wipe out evil. To this day, the fight between the Semites and the descendants of Canaan continues.

  About the Author

  Anne Provoost was born in Belgium in 1964 and studied literature at the University of Leuven. She is the author of four novels: My Aunt Is a Pilot Whale (Mijn tante is een grindewal); Falling (Vallen), which was made into an English-language feature film; The Rose and the Swine (De Roos en het Zwijn); and In the Shadow of the Ark (De Arkvaarders). Together they have been translated into ten languages and have received many major Dutch literary prizes, as well as several international honors. Asked what message she hopes to convey with her writing, Provoost says simply, “If you have to talk about a message, than I would like to limit myself to one thing: stretching the reader’s empathic abilities.” And she adds, “I want to write books that, if they had hands, would grab you by the throat.”