In the Shadow of the Ark (13 page)

Ham had slipped because of the damp and could hardly walk. So we had him to ourselves for once. Put stirred the oil and poured it into my hands, and I applied it generously to the sore foot. So I could tackle the pain from higher up, from his hips and the small of his back, I asked Ham to lie down on a cloth spread on the sand.

“How you loved the water I brought when you first got to
know me,” I said, once I could feel him relaxing. “But Neelata brought a fluid you love even more.” I pinched his skin between thumb and index finger, moving it around, letting go and pinching the next bit of skin, all the way down his leg and his foot, down to the little bump at the end of his toes, which I pressed gently and insistently.

My mother was asleep. There was no servant around. Ham stood up and ordered Put to go away. Put walked outside, carefully closing the tent flap.

“Neelata would be really amused if she heard you call this a fluid,” Ham said once the boy had gone. “Hold still, I’ll show you.”

I put the lid on my bowl. In the corner under the mats stood the jars that Neelata had brought. Ham limped over, opened one, and dipped a beaker. The scent of fruit and yeast met us. I filled my mouth, swallowed, and filled my mouth again. It was as if I was drinking the fresh, sourish smell of flowers. In one draught, I could taste almost everything I loved: figs, cherries, blackberries, and muscat. Never before had I been so precisely aware of the path a liquid followed through my body. This must be the drink pressed from fruit that I had heard my father describe more than once. “Only settled people prepare this. People who wander cannot do it. They are unable to wait for a harvest. Fermentation and ripening are foreign to them. A Rrattika will consume everything immediately; only hunger will induce him to start looking for something edible. So better to give him honey water than wine.”

Ham filled a second beaker. “Give this to our little sentinel
outside,” he said. I pulled the tent flap open a little way. Put was there, his chin on his knees. The child accepted the beaker, and I closed the tent again.

When I sat down, I saw that Ham had already refilled my beaker. I breathed in the scent of the liquid that slaked my thirst yet left my mouth dry. Ham intently watched every expression on my face. “What makes this drink so precious,” he said, “is that water will go bad after a time, but this improves as the months pass.” He lay on his back and beckoned me. He put the beaker on his stomach as if on a tray. I sat astride him, and we drank by turns.

I understood the purpose of the liquid better and better. The animals to be sacrificed needed to be treated with kindness. They must not come to the gangplank in a state of anxiety or in fear of being beaten. They needed to be in a pleasurable mood and to stay that way for quite a time to maintain quiet in the ship. I was being overcome by giddiness and a carefree feeling. I tried to hold this at bay by asking, “What happens to those for whom there is no room in the ark and who are not depraved? Will they be given huts on stilts? Are you building a settlement for them in the hills? You are sailing to a paradise with green meadows for the animals. Are you going to collect the harvest there to bring it here?”

Ham laughed loudly. That was how I wanted to see him: generous, laughing, prepared to tell me what he knew. I laughed too, although where that laugh came from or how it could have started I did not know.

“Don’t be so anxious, my girl. Don’t worry about those
stay-behinds. Your father is my foreman, you are my lover, Put is my friend, your mother my talisman. I won’t leave you behind.”

The servants placed the bread on the plates. It was a different color than usual and had not risen properly because of the thundery weather. Ham covered the jars and rinsed the beakers. By the time Shem and Japheth arrived, Ham was sitting behind his plate, his foot bandaged. He did not look at me. We kept our lips shut to prevent the smell of our breath escaping.

It was during that meal, not long after the boys who served the cooked food had carefully wrapped the vegetables in bread, placing it in the hands of those who were there, that a limping man came to the tent demanding attention. He was admitted. Part of the scaffolding had collapsed, he said. He was looking energetically around him with his little eyes, from us to the food and from the food to the top of the tent. You would have thought he was reporting on a successful enterprise if the traces of a sudden loss of bowel control had not been visible on his legs. The tear in his shirt was probably weeks old, but it made his appearance so discomfiting for us that no one could take another bite without turning our faces away. He did not need to look for words, he had already been shouting them at passersby on his way here: Dozens of pitch workers had crashed down. Young men as well as old. Blood flowed from their ears.

Ham pushed his food away and tried to stand up. I hurried to him. I know how badly a sprained foot suffers under sudden weight. I gripped his arm and supported his elbow with my body.

“Which side?” he asked curtly.

“West, in Gentan’s section.”

“The hollow ground?”

“No, the rocks haven’t shifted. It was the tie-grass.” This was the bluish grass Shem had been using recently to lash the scaffolding. He had persuaded his foreman to stop using the old grass, because the grass cutters could not find a reliable supply of it, and because it was so sharp it caused nasty cuts and inflammations.

“Gentan has fallen, lord,” said the messenger. “Gentan and four of his brothers. And then some ten bearers and binders.” Then he gave a list of foremen and their workers who worked at the tar vats. Now he turned to Japheth, who blinked in horror at every name.

Ham threw one arm around me and the other around Put. Without waiting for him, Shem and Japheth left the tent. As they went ahead, Ham groaned more with every step he managed with our help. The path leading to the shipyard had become smooth from use, but even so we progressed painfully, more because of Put than because of Ham’s sprained foot: Put’s shoulder was too low for Ham, his steps were unsteady because of the wine, and the child was too anxious about what he was going to see to give proper support.

And it was not a pretty sight, that toppled scaffold moving in the wind, the partitions knocked down and the sun shades smashed up. Scores of people stood about, and from the ground came the groaning of the wounded. The bystanders made way when we arrived. Ham limped from one wounded man to another. He tugged at us, he seemed to want to go backward and forward at the same time. He comforted men with broken backs
who waited, motionless, for the pain to become bearable and their legs to lose all feeling. He wiped blood from skulls that had changed shape. He bent over to close eyes.

“The tie-grass is wrong,” he said again and again. “Shem used the wrong grass.”

Suddenly I saw my father. He was standing between the wall of the ship and a tower of brand-new crates, on the slight rise where I had seen him, earlier this week, deliberating with a group of men and asking one of the boys for a tray of tea. Now he stood there again talking, this time with Shem. Shem rolled up his wide sleeves, an unconscious gesture he kept repeating, his three servants behind him like bodyguards. I let go of Ham and went over to them to hear what they were saying.

As I rounded the stack of crates I saw, lying not two feet from the scaffold, Gentan, Japheth’s beloved foreman, the man who, with tar, could seal joints for a lifetime. Lying amongst the tar brushes, he was hardly recognizable: His face was crushed and his arm twisted at an impossible angle under his body.

“Help him,” Shem told my father. My father’s hands rested on Gentan’s shoulder. There was no need for him to kneel, because Gentan was lying on a raised, sloping shelf of rock at eye level, as if ready to start a whispered conversation with anyone passing by. He breathed bubbles of saliva and blood, and when he did that once more, I clearly heard him say, “Kill me!”

“Help him!” Shem said, more emphatically than before. His chin trembled. He knew he would soon find his scaffolders and have to face the loss. “You killed the duck, you know how it is done.”

As Gentan’s pain appeared unbearable, my father bent down. He raked some tie-grass together and twisted it into a rope which he laid around Gentan’s neck. His hands became covered in blood.

“Don’t do that!” shouted Ham, who had limped after me.

“Do it!” Shem hissed. “Give him a good, fast death. This is better than the pain and the death by drowning that awaits him.”

People were moving behind the crates. There was wailing and weeping. My father looked at Ham in doubt. It was Ham he wanted to obey rather than Shem. Ham rolled his shoulders and held his hand out to me. Limp and clammy like a rag, that hand was, there was not the faintest ray of sun to remove his cold sweat. He kept shaking his head: “This man is Japheth’s right hand, his best friend. He does not have to die now nor drown later. Japheth will admit him to the ark.”

Shem turned abruptly toward Ham and laid his hands, almost lovingly, over his face. He took care not to cover his ears. Shem articulated every word carefully as he said, “There is something you still do not seem to understand. Even for a best friend, there is no place. He will drown with the rest.” Ham’s head seemed small under those large hands. There were flies everywhere, already attracted by the scent of blood. Shem shook his head vigorously to chase them. Then he let go of Ham and nudged my father with his knee.

My father arranged the grass rope again, as if that had not been done before. At the level of Gentan’s Adam’s apple, he twisted the ends together. He knew exactly how to do this, he had done it many times to injured animals to prevent them from
bleeding. He held the knot tightly until the heaving of Gentan’s body stopped and the bubbles in the corners of his mouth disappeared. Shem and Ham were waiting, looking at the crates, at me, at the side of the ship next to them, not seeing. Then my father released the noose.

At that moment, Gentan’s wife came running, her dress billowing. Everyone knew her: Although she had a string of children hanging on her skirts, she would stand by him regularly, always ready with some snack and advice. She seemed to be saying something. It was hardly speech, at best a kind of barking of hoarse sounds that, when she saw what had happened, changed to moans.

I went to stand by Ham. His foot was now very swollen. He groaned with every step, and the blue bruising on his instep showed above the bandage. I grabbed him by the arm and led him away. I wanted to talk to him. It is possible that he was too bewildered to speak to me, but I had no time for his bewilderment.

“What is this?” I asked when we stood apart from the others. “What are you planning? Will whoever stays behind die? Is that what it means not to be of the elect? Is being righteous the same as staying alive?”

He stared ahead and said not a word.

“If you were righteous, you would now be giving up your places. You would be giving them up to the children, the lame, and the feebleminded! What do they have to atone for? For the injustice you have created? You choose yourselves a woman and make her righteous. You reject another woman and make her an
outcast. There is not going to be a raised village, no hilltop for those who stay behind. Whoever is not on the ark is doomed to death by drowning!”

He did not immediately reply. He seemed only capable of shaking his head.

“But there is room!” he said finally. “The ark is huge!” His dismay was no different from mine, nor less intense. Just like me, there were things he had not heard, not understood, not noticed. He sank down on a rock to relieve his foot but could not stay sitting. He stood up, sat down again because of the pain, stood up again. His dog approached, but he shooed it away.

For the rest of the afternoon, no more work was done. Everyone walked about, talking together whether they knew one another or not. It was as if they had all fallen off their scaffolding and were wondering where they were. The workers were usually pretty thoughtless, accepting almost anything without surprise, but now their tongues came loose. The masks and mourning cloaks were brought out, the keening came from all around, brothers and cousins of the dead beat their drums.

I asked, “Why this secrecy, Ham? Why does no one know the purpose of the ship?”

“Because otherwise the Nefilim will find out, that is what I’ve always been told.”

The Nefilim were the giants, the men who had sprung from the love of the old gods for earthly women. They towered over everyone but otherwise looked like ordinary mortals, except when they turned around, for then you could see how their
backs were split into two parts held together by their vertebrae as if with meat hooks. The vertebrae were bare and brown, and as there was no skin around them, you would expect there would be pus in the hollows or that you could see raw flesh. But it was not so; all you could see were the cavities that sometimes, after a strong wind, were filled with sand that slowly ran out with every movement. They made holes in their lips through which, when they went to war, they pushed wild pigs’ tusks. Nobody understood why they were still here, they were the supermen of the olden times. They were the instigators of everything that went wrong, they stole each other’s water and dragged others’ belongings from the trees. Because they kept on mating with the most beautiful women to be found, they kept having children, and those children had children, and all of them behaved badly. Their viciousness spread and became the norm. If they received a scratch, they would thrash a child; if they were wounded, they would kill a man.

“What if the water rises and the blond men come here, how will we stop them if they beat on the sides of the ship till the wood cracks?”

I did not say anything. I was certain they did not exist, but whenever people talked about them, their descriptions were so precise that I wondered. In the marshes, I had indeed seen tall, blond men coming past, but they always wore cloaks and I had never had a chance to examine their vertebrae.

“Now I understand why my father and my brothers always warned me about the Nefilim,” Ham went on. “It was an excuse
for keeping everyone in the dark, including the workers in the shipyard.” He looked over his shoulder at the red tent. There was contempt in his look, and distaste.