In the Shadow of the Ark (16 page)

Without taking any notice of my amazement at this isolated construction site, my father said, “What we need is a boat for everyone, a fleet for those who have thought, who are provident and can figure things. Isn’t a new world with people of insight and intelligence to be preferred to a world with only those who are righteous? We’ll build our own boat, a truss-boat that can take a bit of a storm. That is what I am doing, my girl, that is my defense.”

I put down my planks. As I bent, I must have brushed against his back. He flinched and groaned. I could not see his skin very well in the dark, but I could guess what was wrong.

“Has Japheth been to see you too?” I asked. I whispered my question, not because I thought someone would overhear us, but to avoid recalling the memory of the pain.

“Gentan’s wife told him I put the rope around her man’s neck.”

I closed my eyes for a few moments. “We don’t have to go back, Father,” I said when I opened them again. I heard him release a deep breath. He walked away from me. He went back to the terrace from where you could see the whole shipyard. There he stopped. He looked at the lights shining here and there from the hundreds of tents and dwellings below us, with the dozens of paths linking everything with everything. He stood there for a long time.

“We’ll demolish the house in the quarry for the timber,” he said at last. “We’ll build a new one here. We’ll no longer work for them. We’ll hide in this place here, halfway up the cliff, where they won’t look for us, close to our boat. And when the calamity comes, we’ll be able to see from here what the ark builders do. And if we do as they do, we too will survive.”

We built a modest house, not half as big as our first one, on the terrace that looked out over the shipyard but kept us hidden from view with bushes. Quite a way from there, so far that my mother could not hear the knocking of the hammer, my father continued building the boat. Day and night he worked; he did not return to Ham. Two whole seasons my father had worked for Ham and his brothers. Now, with the end of construction in sight, he hid from them. Deep in the night, we stole clothes from clotheslines. We did what we could to look like Rrattika. Put thought it was exciting, he had not expected us to ever get dressed up like him.

My mother did not understand what was going on, she expressed her surprise but we made up excuses and stories. She
begged me for explanations, but what could I say? I had lots of questions myself: If that god wanted to destroy people, why did he not opt for a quick death, a death by fire or the thrust of a spear? Why that gruesome water, which inspires so much fear in those who cannot swim, and pointlessly extends the death agony of those who can?

“This …” said my father after he had watched me being grimly silent with my mother, “is what will happen to her if you tell her what you know.” He held up a rabbit by the skin of its neck. Put watched with trembling lips. He had found the creature. He had wrapped it in his mantle and brought it to us. Life had almost deserted it, although it showed no signs of injury. It offered no resistance when my father moved it in our faces. Its legs hung limp. It neither scratched nor bit, it was resigned to dying. Put hoped my father would shorten its pain, but he did not. He waved it around and said, “Her mother did it, and her mother’s mother. They decided it was enough. They died because they wanted to die. That was their rebellion, their reproach to us men, whom they blamed for the things that happened. If you talk too much, she will follow in her mother’s footsteps.” He threw the rabbit into the scrub without once looking back to it.

He stretched out the measuring rope, made drawings with red ocher, and twirled his compasses; he made this boat stronger than any of the boats he had built before, and the timber we had earned was beginning to run out. With my hood pulled down over my eyes I went to the woodworkers’ yard to search among the wood shavings for boards that could be put to use. Sometimes Put came with me. He was more bony than ever — he
would only eat if we could persuade him that he was hungry — and he spoke little. My father’s decision to build a truss-boat spurred him to work like one possessed. He wanted to be part of every single moment of its building. He never took breaks. If we rested or drank tea, he went away. He wandered about amongst the tents, took boards from Ham’s workshop, and brought them to us. I stole the nails, my father the tools. If anyone caught us and tried to stop us, we threatened them. Thieves and liars we were; in a very short time we quite belonged to the depraved people for whom the Unnameable’s doom was intended.

I
rapidly became accustomed to my life as a Rrattika girl, though it took me a while to learn to manage those wide sleeves and skirts, which were actually quite handy for spiriting away tools. Our life in isolation was simpler and less tiring than it had been when we lived in the quarry. Our crops flourished fairly well, milk and eggs we could obtain for a small payment, there were antlers and horns aplenty to be found in the hills to make ornaments and coins; anyone dexterous did not have to go short of anything. It seemed unlikely that we would suffer hardship by no longer working for the Builder and his sons. And there was time. Every nail my father bent, he could afford to carefully straighten. No one urged us to hurry. The sky was as bright blue as it had always been; it was hard to imagine that there would ever be rain.

Our view was panoramic. From our shelter I saw how a system of ropes and beams was used to hoist the amphoras on board the ark. The big urns looked like well-rounded women’s torsos, one handle on each hip. I counted six men for each amphora, plus a seventh to direct the operation, and in a shady spot I discerned the figure of the Builder, flanked by the dwarf. A little later, a few women came from the hills with ordinary jugs on their hips or their heads, they came from ponds half a day’s walk away and carried
the best water they had been able to find. They went to where, with tubes and containers, a filter had been built to remove twigs, leaves, grit, and especially larvae, and then other women carried the purified water onto the ship and poured it into the amphoras that were waiting in their frames. The distant rasping and squeaking of the tools could be heard all the way to where we were.

Occasionally, my father went to observe the works from the shrubwood. The boat he was building in our little field was steadily taking shape, but what was a little truss-boat like that compared to the construction down below? And in the field, he was alone. My father longed for the cheerful company of the woodworkers and their music. Wherever they went they took their boxes containing not only their carefully maintained tools, but also their musical instruments, their lutes and flutes, which were invariably brought out after work. I got worried whenever he stayed out longer than expected. He was always so loud, and I did not know if he would be able to restrain himself when he heard them talking about the work. I was terrified that they would unmask him and claim him again, or banish him because of Gentan. Then who would build our boat?

But I could not reproach him, I was behaving like him. I sat amongst the shrubs to watch how the Builder’s sons made their toilet the way they used to, by pouring water over their shoulders. I saw how Ham waded thoughtfully through the pond. I kept my gaze on the skin of his back, on his hair that hung sleek from the water, down to his shoulders in strands. I could never get enough of watching the way he would sit down on a rock
after bathing, pull up his leg, and bend up his foot so he could examine the sole.

On occasion, Neelata dried him. And I knew that her heart did not go out to him. The thought that he was not loved was unbearable. I wanted to jump up and go and snatch the towel from her hands, but how could I? All I could do was return to our hiding place. For the rest of a day like that I kept feeling his skin everywhere: in the smooth stones that were to be found all over the cliff, when cutting the bulging flesh of white fruits, and in the evening when I rubbed my mother’s back with oil. I saw his hair in the grass and his nails amongst the pips of melons. None of it was mine, I knew, but my longing could not be soothed.

O
ne day a woman climbed up the cliff. She wore a brightly colored dress and a head scarf to protect herself against the sun. She walked unsteadily, her legs insecure on the ridges and loose stones, and very soon I saw that it was because of her age. She was old, too old to be climbing up a cliff. Grass cutters regularly came up the track to the top, but practically never left it to come onto the terrace. They were in a hurry and on their way down carried heavy loads on their backs. The side of the cliff was not a place to stay around; it was an unavoidable obstacle you scaled and descended rapidly. But this woman was not heading for the ridge. It was the track itself that held her attention. She was looking around, bending over from time to time.

I could not resist going to meet her. When I approached her, she did not seem to hear me. Her body, which had lost its shape so that it was no longer clear where her bosom ended and her belly began, was completely concentrated on something hardly visible amongst the stones. She picked something, smelled it, and that gesture made me realize what she was up to.

“There is thyme here, and mulberry farther along,” I said.

She looked up. I saw her face, her neck with the ornaments
resembling scars, and felt a shock of recognition. It was Zaza, the Builder’s wife, Ham’s mother. I had seen her regularly in the red tent. She would enter the Builder’s quarters and invariably send the dwarf outside.

Fear made my heart miss a beat. For weeks, we had managed to keep ourselves hidden from the ark builders. Now a moment’s carelessness on my part could bring all that effort to naught. Now she would recognize me. She would send her sons here, and yet again our lives would be in chaos.

She carried a small knife and a piece of muslin to put the plants in. The muslin was light as a breath of air, but it was the knife that drew my attention, it glittered in the sun. It looked practical and sharp, and in short bright flashes, reminded me of how unsafe I had been feeling for some time. The constant threat of discovery and impending doom hung over my life and made me feel exhausted. Now I stood before Zaza. I had walked up to her of my own accord. I think I must have smiled at her, invitingly and friendly, hoping that would make her try to remember. I was hoping she would nod at me, say my name, or ask, “Wasn’t it you who used to groom my sons?” But already she was bending over again. “I’m looking for thistles,” she said curtly. “I want every kind there is.”

“What do you want to do with the thistles?”

“To take with us on the ship. The command is for a complete collection.”

“But thistles are a pest.”

“I know it sounds unwise to take them, but once we have
taken a task on ourselves, once we’ve agreed, we must do it and do it well.”

“But not just you alone?” I exclaimed ingenuously. I felt extraordinarily fearful and could not think straight about what I was saying. I knew I should run away, that this conversation posed a real danger to my family and the little truss-boat. But she paid proper attention to my questions. She did not give me the chance to disappear, and I was grateful to her for that.

“I have my three sons; they are too busy to bother with small details. I had more sons, but two of them have gone away. They were restless, they refused to spend years building and staying in one place. It made the commitment of the remaining three even greater. Except for my youngest. For him, it made no difference, for what does a child know? He saw his brothers leaving and did not understand what was happening.”

I felt the hairs on my arms stand up when she said “my youngest.” “Is that the one who is unwed?” I asked. I did not look at her, but kept my eyes fixed on the hard, pale edges of her feet.

“He is about to be married, but grieves over a girl who has gone away,” she said. She kept working as she talked, pushing grasses aside with her feet, constantly comparing stems and leaf forms. “One morning he went to the quarry where she lived and everything was gone. He calls her name every day. When he lifts his head, the ashes he has strewn over his head from sorrow fall from his hair.”

I stood still and nodded. She placed a plant in her muslin cloth, so small I wondered if she would find it when she got back
home. Then she walked past me, and I could smell the coloring mixed with saffron and bone ash she had put on. Grateful for the things she had said, I picked a plant she could not reach and hoisted myself onto an overhanging rock. It seemed wrong, but I was glad that Ham was distressed. And that gladness confused me. It caused me to pick thistles with large prickles, without even thinking about my hands.

M
y mother suffered most from our flight to the field on the slope. In the red tent, she had felt herself to be at the heart of the shipyard. She had stayed near the place she had been accustomed to: the center, the easily found place that people came to for advice and assistance. Now she suffered from the loss of status and from deadly boredom. She had a need of admiring glances. Her adornment had kept her busy every day. Her demands had become even more exacting when more and more warriors visited the red tent. They were the Builder’s nephews, famed for their horsemanship, who decked themselves out with belts and skirts consisting of skeins of wool hanging down in rows. The warriors were needed to prevent an attack by the Nefilim. They had at their disposal the horses that were now arriving in the hills in ever greater numbers. Some of them rode a pony or a mule. They were belligerent, constantly practicing their skills at handling knives and swords. They spoke scathingly about the enemy, but that was not what had made my mother stare at them. They had hands like shovels and voices that would pulverize stone, but mostly they were beautifully built, with broad shoulders and firm thighs that darted out between the skeins of their skirts as they walked. Where we lived now it was rare for a warrior to
pass by, and on the odd occasion when someone approached, Put would frequently throw a well-aimed stone.