In the Shadow of the Ark (29 page)

On his knees he approached me. He carried the flask of oil in his left hand. I raised my hand to take the cloth and the oil; I thought I knew what was expected of me.

I was mistaken. He did not remove the cloth from his fingers. He bent over me and washed my forehead. He brushed back my hair and looked at my face by the flickering light of the fire. He washed the red rain from my hands and arms, doing it the way I had done it for him many times. The water was exactly the right temperature. There was no sand in it, it did not sting my wounds. When he had finished, he threw herbs into the water in the tub. He laid me down in it. For the first time since I had been on the ark, I felt no pain.

“We will get food to your father,” he said while the water lightened my body and my fever went down. “We’ll get him salt and oil. Perhaps even some of Neelata’s nuts, I expect they will float.”

The water nourished me like bread. After a while, I had enough strength to raise myself in the bath. Ham helped me stand. I looked at myself; my hips were a complex web of carmine pink, purple, and thunder-sky blue. My legs were covered in burst veins that resembled underwater plants, and garlands hung over my shoulders. In the reflection in the water under me I saw that my hair was one tangled knot, standing up cheerily like that of a young badger that had fallen in shallow water.

“Food is not needed,” I said. “We’ll pick him up tonight. We’ll hide together.”

Ham put my damp dress back over my shoulders. My hair was heavy with moisture. He shook his head. “Then he must get closer. He will not do that except to rebuke and lecture us.”

E
very night changed into the next night, the sky seemed permanently dark. It rained unceasingly. When it became quiet and only the nocturnal animals were still moving, Ham came to me. He brought me straw and reeds, which I wove into a basket. I melted pitch from the side of the ship and smeared it over the basket. On top of the victuals Ham had gotten I placed an oil lamp with a flax wick, and over it all I constructed a roof. Then he launched it onto the water at the end of a long rope. We knew how well my father could steer a boat. Even in a floating box, he would be able to follow a flame.

Every day we prepared a new bundle. But as time went on, the stock of oil lamps ran out; I had to convert basins and hope the sea would stay calm. They did really float, the nuts with the sweet juice and the flesh whiter than shells. Ham threw them, one by one, into the water, where they formed a long, gently bobbing string of pearls.

When the occupants of the ark were awake, I kept quiet as a mouse. In my hutch, I listened to the muttering sound of drops against the side of the ship. It was as if you could hear it, the fermenting of the droppings in the cages and the rotting of the roof above, slowly eroded by the steady rain. I got used to the smell of
garlic and olives, of the melon peels and date pips on the floor, of wet wool and animal fodder flavored with sorrel. I thought of my father, sleeping out there in his small hold, and could only wait till silence returned to the ship and Ham came to me.

Ham was not the only one to wander through the ship in the still hours. He heard Taneses and Zedebab, near the air funnel, tell about luminous fishes swimming around the ship. They mentioned a reed gondola too, which just did not seem to sink and carried a human. “The Unnameable will decide whether he lives,” they said resignedly. A tension was building in their limbs, he noticed. Both of them longed for their husbands. There was no peace in their abstinence, in complete contrast to the dodoes: These built a nest where they happily deposited pea-green, unfertilized eggs, which I plundered to put in my father’s basket. The flood was taking so much longer than the women had expected. None of them understood this continuing rain. Every time they woke, they expected it to have stopped. Their bleeding told them that more than a month had passed. What was the sense of this excess? A death by drowning takes a few minutes, a couple of hours for good swimmers. Was there a doubt, perhaps, that everything had been wiped out thoroughly and for good?

Ham seemed tireless. I longed for him constantly, I wanted him next to me as he used to be under the silkworms’ breeding cage. I wanted to stroke his skin till his buttocks felt all silky. I wanted to see him throw back his head.

But he had a pact with his father! Now and then he came to me with water, oil, and a sponge. (It was good water, it had come from my own spring. The water in the containers on deck was
disappointing. It was brown and full of grit that irritated the skin.) I had to lie still like a cripple. As soon as I stretched my arms out to him, he pushed them away. I placed my foot against his, but he moved it aside.

Because he was so implacable, because the pact with his father was apparently much more precious to him than our love, there grew, deep inside me, an ill-natured, tireless argument that was directed at my innermost being. To him I said nothing, because there was nothing I could express in comprehensible language. Being silent was hard for me. I wanted to hear myself say what I thought this journey would become, how I hoped to survive the isolation and the separation from my father. But what could I discuss with him?

My silence made him affectionate. I turned around when he asked me to, held my arms exactly where he liked them, and kept smiling. His breathing was so much clearer now, his skin barely flaked at all in this moist environment. While he caressed me, stroked my hair, and straightened my dress, my feeling of desolation increased. I shot into my hutch and nursed my resentment. When he came to me again, a beaker full of goat’s milk in one hand, figs in the other, I kept what I wanted to say to myself.

F
or fear of the snakes, I did not often venture out of my sleeping hutch. I had already been through this before in the marshes. A girl had once stepped into her boat before daybreak. In the hold lay a fat-bodied snake that instantly bit her foot. She fell and stayed down. We lifted her out of the boat. We tried to tell her to be still above all, to not move, and breathe as slowly as possible. But she screamed and flailed about. Her frenzy made her blood race through her body, and in no time the poison reached her heart. Moments later, her face turned black, and when we held her upright, blood streamed from her nose. The blood kept coming long after she died, it soaked through the rags we kept rinsing in the marsh. The water turning red around our boat had given me a deep fear of snakes. But as the weeks went by, my loneliness became too great. I climbed from my hutch and pushed my arm through the barred door of the pen. I could just reach the bolt that held it closed. It took me a while to get it open, but I managed: The builders had not reckoned with a long-armed dodo.

I went up the passage. I heard the animals snorting, sometimes I felt the warmth of their breath, but I did not see them.
Is it this long-lasting night that keeps them quiet,
I wondered,
and
prepared to abstain although housed close with their own kind?
Feeling my way along the walls, I found the gallery that led upward. I had been here, my grasp of the design saved me, although I had counted on at least some light from the gaps in the decking, and backwater, mud, and wind were the only things coming through. Because of the dirt on the ground, I wished for something on my feet. And for better eyes when nocturnal animals moved suddenly, frightening me excessively.

I knew there was a chance I would be seen. But I was not afraid. My skin was dark; even if someone crossed my path, I could make myself invisible by keeping still. I would surely hear them coming; the voyagers on the ark moved through the hold like cattle. Above all, I was simply not afraid of discovery: I was leaving.

By feel I found a rope ladder that led to the deck and climbed it. A rope as thick as my arm lay on the deck. It was fixed to the railing with a firm loop. I threw it over the side where it uncoiled, dancing down the bow, and then hung a few feet above the water. I slapped my hand in one of the water barrels, waited a little while, and slapped again. When I had done that long enough, I walked up and down near the bow, the skirts of my light-colored cloak flapping like flags.

First I heard the soft sound of oars in the water. Then I saw my father’s little papyrus boat. Barely protected from the rain, he sat next to the shelter on the deck that had been designed to hold my mother’s body. He rowed cautiously, the way he would have stalked a wild boar in the reeds.

When he was below the rope, I lowered myself along it. The
rope was slippery from the rain, and the burning pain of the slide raced from my hands to my shoulders. Apart from a small lamp on the deck of the papyrus boat, there was no light. The rain caused a fine haze above the water. I must have looked like some unearthly being, the top of the rope indistinguishable because of the darkness, my hair and clothes wet through, floating a few feet above him like a tired bird, but my father was in no doubt that it was me. He pulled a strand of papyrus from his boat and held it in the flame of the lamp. The hold was lit up and I could see him: Bony and gaunt he looked, his eyes deep in their sockets. He was wearing a cap with flaps sticking out, made out of feathers and other debris he had found on the water. It protected him from the rain that kept coming down on him ceaselessly. On the deck lay his funnel and jug, and a few nets and hooks. The bow had discolored, but the outer skin had not turned black, which meant the reeds had not soaked up excessive amounts of water. My father held the burning strand as high up as he could and looked me over thoroughly.

“You’re looking well,” he said. His other hand firmly held his barge pole. He controlled every movement of his vessel. No wave would take him by surprise, the trim of his boat was at all times in his hand. “Your legs are plump, your face is chubby. You’re doing well on that ship.”

“Help me, Father. Get me away from here!”

“Why do you want to leave the ark? Doesn’t Ham look after you properly?”

“Ham loves his father better than me. I have thought hard: I too love my father best.”

He bent his head and sighed. Then looked up to me again. “There is no room here for two people.”

“The rope is hurting me. Help me.” There was a cramp in my foot that would not go away when I loosened the grip of my legs on the rope. It was my good luck that there was a knot in the rope that offered me some support. I felt it under my foot and stood on it, which made it easier but did not cure the cramp.

He was not about to free me from my situation. He said, “I do not want you on board with me. What are we two together but a dead end, a lineage that is slowly dying out? It is a choice between my loneliness now or your child’s loneliness later. Just look at yourself. Your body is filling out despite the hardship you endure. Your life after the flood has already begun. You’re carrying a child.”

“But Father,” I said nearly in tears. “I want to be with you. If you do not want me with you on your boat, then come with me on the ark. I am lonely. Ham will not let me near Neelata, and Put keeps himself hidden.”

“If I am to survive, it will be by myself,” he replied. “Not with that animal-tamer who has elevated his own family above all others. Not with Shem, who broke his agreement. Not with Ham, who left me behind out of fear. And least of all with Japheth.” His voice was firm. After all the hardships he had suffered, I had expected him to be hoarse, but he sounded clear, like a singer or a poet.

I was freezing cold. I could not believe that he had pointed out my condition to me, and for the rest, only allowed the drops that slid off my body to fall onto his deck. It was not worthy of a
man who had spent a part of his life looking after a cripple. It was dishonest, it was scandalous, but when I wanted to tell him this, my voice had left my throat like a startled bat.

“Don’t send me your baskets of food anymore,” he continued, unperturbed. “They tempt me, and I can’t resist picking them up. But they make me dependent. The day your supply stops, I starve. I know the rules of scarcity. The first is that you do not help each other. We cannot survive for each other. Help weakens you. Starving happens in solitude.”

He should not steer his boat so close under me,
I thought. If I fell, I would crash onto his deck and overturn his boat.

“Forget your grudge against the ark builders, Father. Use their ark.”

“I must stay in my papyrus boat. That floating coffin you’re on is stable, but gives no certainty. I have said it from the start: To save mankind, you need a fleet, not a single vessel. What sort of god carries all his eggs in one basket?”

I began to understand why he kept steering that boat of his so carefully below me. If he moved away, I could throw myself into the water. He saw that I was desperate enough even to defy the man-eating fish.

“I really don’t need much room. I belong with you. Those others are strangers to me.”

“Think of your child. You are no longer alone.”

“I want it to be the way it was, live with Mother and you by the marshes, build rafts and catch fish.”

“I know, my daughter. This is the time you do not want to go through. Just as unbearable as the thought that after our death
life just goes on, is the knowledge that our lives just go on now that everything has been destroyed. You want this to be past, but you cannot jump, not into the past nor into the future. You must suffer every hour of this punishment.”

“Why are you like this, Father? What has happened to you?”

“Have you seen how powerful their god is? Have you seen a single one of our old gods? They have been swallowed up, Re Jana, now there is only the Unnameable. If I find myself on this papyrus boat, it is thanks to Him. Your being on the Ark is thanks to Him. Do nothing that displeases Him, we cannot stand up to Him. Forget what I have taught you and abide by His wishes.” His voice was as cold as the water that ran down my back. My strength diminished. It became ever harder to hang on.

“But what will you eat, Father? What will you drink?”