In the Shadow of the Ark (15 page)

Ham pushed Neelata, carrying Put, in front of his father. “You know I am taking her for my wife.”

“I know it,” said the Builder.

Then Ham grasped me by the shoulder. I was frightened, because I had not expected his movement. “I want to take a second wife, a servant who will aid us. This is the girl of my choice. This way, the earth will become more quickly populated.”

The Builder sat down, leaning so far back that he touched the cage. The dove flapped its wings, shuffled into a corner, and lifted its feathers. I did not move; no muscle in my body seemed capable of it. The Builder said: “In the Unnameable’s mind, everything has its hour. On the ark, we shall abstain. Impregnating our women we will do in the new world. You know what I have said: We have the promise of a land, a fertile land, no longer the dust and the barren territory we know. What has been promised to us is not a rocky hill, not even a chain of hills, but something resembling the paradise we have lost. No longer will we wander. We will stay in one spot and plant seeds. Only then will we populate the earth. Now is not the time for us to be concerned about that. What man will build a house if he does not have the motive of the bed? And if he does not have the motive of the bed, then how will there be children?”

Ham coughed. At every breath, his chest wheezed. “What if one of our women falls ill? Or dies? A camel’s gestation time is one year. A camel drops a foal once in three years. It can have five or eight in its lifetime. So how long does it take before you have a herd? We know how much can go wrong with cattle. The animals get foot rot, the cramps, bloat, bleeding. Who will advise us about the rodents, the beasts of prey, the reptiles? What do we know about their nature, their bad habits? I have seen a guinea pig eat its young. How will the guinea pig spread over the new world if we do not understand why it does this? One species will die out, what if another species then overwhelms us and occupies the paradise? What if every fruit we grow is picked by them, every stalk of wheat chewed up by them before it is dry? ‘…

Of every clean beast by sevens,’ that is clever, but how many men will be needed to tend them and to prevent them from grazing the fields bare? And if the men tend them, who will plow the earth, who will put up fences, and who will explore new places? We must take women and children. How can our god say that the existence of our kind is safe if there is not a child on board, and we do not even have permission to procreate?”

The Builder shook his head. “I cannot allow any exceptions. The Unnameable has said that I may take mine: my wife, my sons, each with his wife. Nothing has been said to me about a concubine.”

I could barely breathe. My hands clasped the collar of the blue dress as if that would protect me from falling. I now had proof that Ham wanted to save me. For the first time I understood his obsession with the procreation of the animals and peoples. He saw the gaps in the plan of the Unnameable, he saw that He could count but not calculate. He knew how things happened with sheep. If the herd was too small and the ram mated with his mother, monsters would result.

I
went with Ham into his quarters and carefully closed the curtain. I asked him to sit down in his usual spot and close his eyes. He was shaking with dismay. I rubbed with the middle fingers of both hands from the base of his nose to his hairline. I moved my fingers along the ridge of his nose, along his eyebrows to his temples. I made quick movements on his upper lip up to his nose. I laid my hands on his face, I laid them on his chin for a few moments, then equally briefly against his cheeks and over his ears. I made these movements several times in sequence, faster each time, until he became calm. I cut his fingernails so they were serrated. When I had finished, I took his hands and scraped the skin of my neck with them. Each finger left many traces.

He said, “Every net has its holes, as the child of fishermen you know that,” but I did not listen. Now I understood that he could not do anything for me. He did not know it, but I was taking leave of him. All I could do was wonder if there was enough time to flee.

“How many sleeping places did you build?” I asked. Speaking was difficult, my teeth were clamped together like a trap.

“I don’t know,” he said dazedly. “The ship is large.”

“You know exactly. Eight of them you’ve built, and not one more.”

He coughed, dry and hoarse. I knew where in his lungs the phlegm sat, I could have brought it up with gentle tapping, but I did not.

I said, “You know I have good water. Wine seems more precious to you people. But wine won’t take the place of water. Don’t forget: The source is well hidden.”

It was not only his face that was flushed with agitation. His neck and chest too were red. He said, “None of our women has the talent needed to find it. We are counting on you, on your uprightness.”

With a sharp knife I had loosened the fibers of the top end of a small stick. I pushed it into his mouth and started scouring his teeth to make him stop speaking. “Uprightness has done nothing for me,” I said, turning to the light. “I know where to find the herbs I need. The spring will be poisoned long before your women have reached it.”

My words demanded vengeance. Naturally, a man makes much noise in such a moment. And because he is cursing, others will come running.

It was Japheth who ripped the curtain aside to see what was going on. He recognized me, of course. He said, “Is the masquerade finished?” I looked at him as if he were not speaking my language. He was dirty, he needed grooming. He went on, “Or is it just starting?”

“I disguised myself,” I answered wearily. “I have a well, but I am going to make it unusable.”

Shem joined Japheth. Japheth leered, Shem looked at me as if he were full of pity. Perhaps they were simply amazed at the fact
that I would slip from one skin into another, change sex like clothes.

“If you are not a man, we’ll beat you because you have deceived us. If you are, we’ll beat you because you keep your water from us.” Sweat beaded on Japheth’s upper lip. He was forceful and solidly built, but not fluent in language, often stumbling in his reasoning.

I turned to the wheezing man in the chair, the only one who was clever enough, so clever that even I had not seen through his intention. “You’ve made me into a boy,” I spat at him. “That has weakened me. Only as a woman did I have the right to keep my well secret. By making me a man you took away my power over the water.”

Ham was now sitting completely bent forward, his head deep between his shoulders. “It is true,” he said. “We had you followed. But none of your pursuers has returned. Did they see something they wanted to run away from forever? Or was the way so dangerous they perished? We can only guess.” With a swift movement he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes to block his welling tears. “It was not my idea, but my brothers’.”

Shem and Japheth dragged me out of the tent. They beat me in a detached, polite manner, as if to prove they had learned to punish instead of taking vengeance. Shem pulled the blue dress from my back; Japheth held up the scourge, a bundle of thin, flexible straps meant to hurt without causing injuries. Of course, it was Japheth who hit me; he was always the one who was least troubled afterward by what he had brought about. He asked me to squat and put my arms around my knees so the skin of my back
would be stretched good and tight. He struck sixteen times. He struck me because I had disguised myself, and because, no matter how hard I denied it, I had lured my pursuers into an ambush.

It went on for an eternity. I tried not to think of him and his whip. I thought of home, of water and marshes, of the turf huts, of the cutting table where my mother scrubbed the fish and discussed with other women exactly how much salt was needed to pickle a fish the size of a hand without making it inedible; we children organized a mosquito hunt, there were prizes to be won, we kept the insects in empty snail shells we held closed tightly with our thumbs. I thought of swimming, of going so deep that all you can hear is the rising of air bubbles. But it was no help. The straps hurt. With every stroke, I became more convinced that my father was right. The Rrattika were scum. I despised them and their customs, I did not wish to be amongst them for another moment. I vaguely heard Ham coughing behind the goat’s-hair curtain. He called out something, but I did not understand what he said.

When Japheth indicated that I could go, I hurried, without saying another word, away from the red tent. The blue dress on my body was ripped at the seam, my back was burning, but I did not scream. Put came after me. He did not stop shouting, “They mustn’t hit you. Let them try again and I’ll hit back. I’ll smash Japheth’s eyes with my slingshot. Shem I’ll beat till he bleeds.”

“Shush now,” I said. “Keep quiet. Everybody can hear you, everyone can see us going, and I don’t want them to.”

But my admonition helped not one bit. He only cried all the harder, “I can scream if I want to. When the water comes, the
Builder will slam his ship’s hatch shut and sail away. I can’t swim, you can. How long will the trees we’ll climb hold us? How long will it be before the water goes down?”

My father was in the house. I could not believe he was sitting there so quietly. After the Builder’s speech I was expecting my father to start doing something, go to see the Builder or pack our belongings, not to meekly accept this humiliation. They called themselves the pure, the righteous, and let us kill a badly hurt man like Gentan so they could keep their own hands undefiled.

“These people have been hit with madness,” he said, deadly calm. “They have never seen more water than the contents of the buckets they lug about.”

“I want to get away from here, Father.”

He inspected the welts on my back. “Our gods have not given orders,” he said, gently putting his fingers on the sore spots.

“Perhaps our gods are unaware of their god’s plan.”

“My task in the ark is nearly completed, but not quite….”

“I want to get away from here. I want to take the secret of the spring with me and make them tear their mantles in remorse.”

My father removed a small flask from his belt and let a few drops drip onto his fingers. The oil cooled my skin, which was glowing as if it had been touched by fire. “Why did they beat you?”

“I threatened them. I said I would poison the water.”

“Re Jana, you dumb child,” he scolded. “Did you want to kill innocent people? Did you want to do what you blame their god for and play the Unnameable yourself?”

I turned my back away from him. I held on to the door jamb. His hand stayed suspended in the air.

“Is that what the elders did, generation after generation?” I asked, pretending calm. “Know that war is coming, know that drought is coming or disaster, decipher all the writing on the wall, talk about it, spell out the images of doom, but not act accordingly? Rather stay petrified with fear and talk about ordinary things — Is there enough water to cook the millet? Can we undo the bolt on the door? — than face the situation? If what we know means we should harness a horse, hire a tracker, and journey far away, then that is what we do, isn’t it?”

My father interrupted me with an expressive cough. He put a shiny finger to his lips and pointed at the spot where my mother lay. “Spare her our doubts,” he said, bending toward me. “If you must talk, do it away from her ears.” Silently, he waited till she was asleep. Then he stood up to go outside, where darkness was falling. He went to the back of the house; I followed. Bending, he lifted a stack of planks from the ground. I recognized the planks, they came from the house. In the back of the shed where we kept our stores, a hole gaped. The boards had been carefully removed. He put them in my arms.

“I have my own solution,” he said and walked ahead of me. He led me out of the quarry, past the shrubs where we normally urinated. “If the Builder is right, the flood will be violent,” he said. “It is intended to kill, to wash away the wickedness of the world. Can you blame their god? He is sick of looking at the Rrattika. He is fed up with this roaming people, who are not evil, but hardly show any progress. There is so much that is new in the world, there is so much knowledge of justice, trade, and cultivation.

They do nothing with all that, they wander and keep wandering as if time stands still and as if these new insights mean nothing. Their behavior makes one wish for a catastrophe. It makes one hope for a purification. Only it is a pity that people who have nothing to do with it will be hit just as hard. Moving away makes no sense if everything is flooded. In which direction were you planning to go? We don’t know from which quarter the disaster will strike. If we flee, we may be going toward it. And is this something we want to face on our own? No, we must stay with the others.”

He walked ahead of me into the dark. He did not move fast; it was almost as if he carried another load apart from the planks. He went past the ash field, where for a long time waste was burned, but that now lay abandoned. Beyond the ash field, nobody lived, there were only the shrubs and the cliff. “Only those who are righteous will be spared, the Builder said. I have been wondering what that means for us. Have we not cared for your mother all that time? Have we not taken in an orphan child, the child of nomads, with no manners? Are we not hardworking people who are content with what we get for our work? And all those other men, the tradesmen who use their utmost skill, the artists who put their very soul into every vault, into every arch they polish and every image they carve? I have wondered what we would have to do to be well regarded by the god who is going to send the water, but Shem and Japheth give me no hope. It is a god just for them. He has chosen them, and they him. As outsiders, we don’t stand a chance.”

He started the climb up the cliff. I was panting. I could not believe that he wanted to take these planks up there, along this steep path, on this moonlit evening full of insects and vermin.

But he did not go all the way to the top. Along the winding path, halfway up the cliff, there was a smooth, uncultivated terrace where the scent of mulberry trees was in the air. He crossed the terrace and put the planks down in the farthest corner. The field where we stood was flat and open. It was naturally screened by shrubs. In the center, there lay a carefully cut wooden platform. Now that I stood next to it, I could see that battens and tie-beams had been nailed onto it. The joins had been sealed with hemp and tar. Planks lay around it at right angles, like fish bones.