In the Shadow of the Ark (3 page)

I stopped in amazement, but my father urged me on. He kicked things out of the way to make room for the stretcher. This was no different from what the local people who were lugging things around did; it was the only way to get anywhere. The closer we came to the shipyard, the fewer dwellings and the more people we found. They wore long cloaks and carelessly sewn footwear. They carried tools: planes, chisels, drills, and other woodworking gear. Some carried a stick, as if they’d prefer to beat a path rather than follow one.

At close range, the ship looked even larger than it had from the cliff. The structure was enclosed in scaffolding that gave precarious support to a number of people. Orders were shouted, buckets hoisted up. Without taking any notice of their questioning glances, my father joined the workers. He clambered under the scaffold and disappeared behind the tangle of bamboo and sunscreens. He reached out to the hull and tapped on it, listening to the sound. He reappeared and started to walk around the gigantic structure at a rapid pace. When he reached the bow, he disappeared from sight.

He was gone for a while. I swatted the flies away from my mother. Already her lips were white and dry again, and I had no water left. But my mother did not ask for anything to drink. Her
eye shone. If the ducks had not taken her will away, she would have been able to say it: “Here we are then, this is it. No need to go any farther.”

I held back my smile until she happened to look my way. The noise of all that activity filled my head, like in my childhood when not only my father, but also his brothers, his cousins, and his friends scraped the layer of tar from their boats and applied a fresh one. Because the noise was so overpowering, and the movements of the workers around me so purposeful and fast, the shipyard seemed to grow and grow. It covered the whole world, and I forgot that there was anything else beyond the horizon. I had no trouble seeing in their gestures the joy that drove the boys with the planks and the nails.
This is where the songs we sing are made,
I thought,
here is the beginning of the stories that will still be told many years hence.

My father appeared at the stern and came running back to us. He had inspected the whole structure and the sheer size of it took his breath away. He had seen that it would be a sturdy ship, with a shallow draught and a flat bottom, and would ride high on the waves. He squatted next to us and carried on at my mother as if he expected her to contradict him.

“He’ll lose the bow!” he said. “He’s bent the top end of it the way you break a duck’s neck.” His face was full of color now, he no longer resembled the man who, only a few days ago, singing hoarsely, had cursed the birds passing overhead. “How does this man think he is going to keep a straight course? His ship is going to crack down the middle if he doesn’t bend the ribs up more evenly.” As if he expected her to have the answer, he asked my
mother why the Builder was not building in oak. Oak was water resistant and indestructible! It was easy to split! Had there not been enough pine boats that had perished? “What sort of people are we dealing with here?” he asked. “Who are they? Which race do they belong to?”

My mother blinked her left eye a few times. Then he repeated the question to me, but I shook my head. These people were pale, their bodies were shrouded in long cloaks. The girls were adorned with feathers, the boys had patterns on their forehead, black designs that disappeared into their hairline. They did not resemble any of the wandering people that we had seen trekking past the marshes. Nothing made us suspect then that we had come to a people we knew.

W
e hurriedly followed the path that led straight up to the tall, bloodred tent that we had already noticed from the cliff. It stood with its entrance facing the shipyard and was screened from its neighbors by piles of pottery shards on one side and on the other by carelessly stacked but sound timber. The tent was not made of animal hides, but of tightly woven goats’ hair. It was large and seemed to tremble on its poles. Pigeons flapped above its roof. This was the dwelling of the Builder we had heard stories about in the marshes. He was said to be old but vigorous, a man of unshakable will. He was said to have knowledge no one else had, and which he was not prepared to share for pearls or shells.

We passed the pond where a number of women stood.

“She is thirsty,” I said to my father, nodding toward my mother, but he kept walking and did not wait for us.

The women made way for us. “Have your clothes been stolen?” they asked, exchanging rapid glances. They spoke in a strange accent. They used words of which we only recognized parts or which we hadn’t heard in a long time. “And what is the matter with her?” they asked. They turned their heads toward the dark, beautifully made-up woman on the stretcher, her hair
dressed in waves, her toenails colored, flower designs on her shoulders and stomach. They looked as if they could not imagine ever being treated with so much respect. They asked one another the question we had heard so many times on the way: “Could she be a queen?”

My mother looked up at them. I do not think she was disapproving of them. She was curious.

“She is crippled,” I said.

“Who beat her too hard?”

“No one. It just happened.”

“Why are you dragging her around? Is she looking for work?” The women burst out laughing. They all carried a jug. One of them poured water into a beaker. She was a stocky girl with broken teeth who stoppered her jugs with wads of grass. A piece of gauze covered the cup. Small stones, bits of twigs, and leaves were caught on the gauze. The stream of water made a gentle gurgling sound. But the water had a muddy smell. I did not have to look at my mother to know that her eyelid trembled like a butterfly’s wing.

I went up to the girl and asked, “Can I have some water?” She picked up the beaker and handed it to me, but I thought she had not understood me and said, “I mean fresh water. Clean water, to drink.”

She pointed at the jugs around her and said, “That is what we’ve got.”

“But where is the source?” I insisted. “Where is the lake or the river the ship is going to sail on?”

“There is no lake and there is no river.”

“Then where is the well you are going to divert here? Where is the spring that will fill this basin with water to lift the ship?”

The girl flushed. I could see she was taking offense at my nakedness, my insistence, my language. “I tell you, there isn’t one,” she snapped.

My mother was blowing and puffing, bubbles appeared at the corner of her mouth. I knelt by her, wiping her mouth clean and said, “You are right. Here there is no water. We won’t need to move away from a tide line, for there isn’t one.” She blew more spit bubbles. She had no other way to express her triumph.

M
y mother’s mother was called Enah. Enah was the daughter of Manilada, who lived for another forty-six years after she had her last child. Manilada was the daughter of Elokane, who only lived till the age of twenty-six. She died and was never forgotten. She was the image of her grandmother Kan, who bore nine sons and nine daughters. She had her last child when she was forty-five and lived for another thirty years after that.

My mother was a fisherwoman, like her mother and grandmother. Her boat was named after the tern. She knew the marshes the way others know a field or a hill. All the time she went out with the fleet she was greatly respected. I can still remember the way she would walk to her boat. Her movements were fast and abrupt. She paid no attention to the way she moved until she was aware of someone looking at her. Then you could feel how she changed. When anyone at all, even a child, was watching her, she began to stride. She contained her strength. It took an effort: She was too impatient for elegance.

One day she was standing in the water next to her boat. She was using a sieve to lift small fish, no bigger than a child’s hand, out of the water. Suddenly her knees gave way. She grasped the edge of the bow and pulled herself up. For a brief moment, she
managed to keep herself upright on the narrow board, then she tumbled into the boat. All I could see was a couple of fingers and the sole of a foot. I heard her scream, the shriek with which I had heard her chase wild boars and snakes. Only just for a second, then almost immediately everything was quiet again. The short boat, which was not really made for sailing, only for putting the catch in, enclosed her like the shell of a nut.

I was only a little girl, my teeth had not even changed yet. Because I could not swim, I stood in the water as far out as I dared. I was expecting that the little boat would come toward me, that she would step out of it and ask me why I was wailing like that, but it did not come, it drifted away from the edge. Water creatures brushed over my skin, insects landed on my face and my ears. I lowered myself into the water up to my neck. I tried the movements I had seen my mother make. My head went under. I reached up with my little hands. I swallowed water and coughed. I scrabbled around until I could feel the wood of the keel.

I climbed into the boat along the tow rope. My mother was lying amongst the dead fish. She lived. There was no blood. She looked at me with a clear, questioning look. But she did not reach out her hand. She did not help me to get on board. She blinked her left eye, that is all she did. No one knew we were there, we had left that morning without any plan. Then the sea opened her gullet, and the water started rising.

I
t was not easy to get my mother as far as the red tent now that my father had walked on. It was uphill and the ground was sandy. Although there were a lot of job-seekers standing about, no one offered to help. They were all too busy, speaking to each other in rapid-fire sentences, gesticulating vigorously with hands and arms and keeping their eyes on the entrance to the red tent.

As I came closer, I could understand snatches of what they were saying:

“… many people here claim …”

“… but he is a real …”

“… boasted he could …”

I went as close to the tent as I could. I hoped to find my father amongst the waiting men, but realized he was already in the queue inside the forecourt. I left my mother underneath a guy rope, the best place to make sure she wouldn’t be trampled. I went to the side of the red tent. Clambering over stacks of timber, shavings, and pot shards, I found a spot on a heap of cut-up branches where I could squat unseen. As long as those waiting in the shipyard were quiet, I could hear what was being said behind the goat’s-hair cloth.

“One of them says he is a boat builder,” I heard someone say.
There was the gurgling sound of tea being poured into beakers from large jugs. I imagined there were four or five men, the Builder, his sons, and presumably also a servant who laughed like a monkey and interrupted impudently while serving the tea. One by one, the candidates in the queue were examined. No doubt wearing just loincloths, they showed off the soundness of their limbs. I heard someone question them in a gentle voice about their experience, skills, age, and strength. I recognized a pattern in the assignments: Most people were needed for the scaffolding on which work was going ahead steadily and which was absolutely essential for everything. And then they needed men to handle the pitch. For that, they sought young men who would not complain, who were able to do much and prepared to do anything. The interviews were brief, but because there were many, it was a long wait for my father’s turn.

My father’s voice at first sounded quiet and hesitant amongst the others. Gradually the sound of pouring and slurping stopped. My father chose his words carefully. He spoke about bending ribs, caulking seams, and fitting bulkheads. Gradually his diffidence disappeared. He spoke the way I had been used to him speaking: blunt and convinced he was right. Of course, he knew what he was talking about. He had designed and built large-sized boats, and only very rarely had one of them been wrecked. Although his reputation had not spread to this region, he spoke as if it had.

It worked. Occasionally there was a brief rejoinder, a reply from the gentle voice. Was that the Builder?

When my father had completed his argument, no one spoke.

The pigeons settled down. The men waiting in the front annex too were quiet, and no longer made a clatter with the tools they were carrying.

“I want him with the woodworkers,” I heard someone say behind the canvas. It was a new voice, one I had not heard before. The voice was emphatic but not peremptory. It delighted me, the way finding a smooth stone under a rough one could delight me. Every now and then, a squeak sounded through it. I stood still, holding my breath to listen to it.

To my surprise, there was no rejoinder, only a muttered objection that could not have come from my father. There was a tense silence full of coughing and shuffling. Eventually I heard my father say the words people in the marshes use to take leave, so I quickly got off my stack of branches and hurried back to the front.

My father reached the forecourt before me. He came walking backward through the entrance of the tent. Following him was a young man in a striped shirt. He was no older than me, and unlike all the others I had seen in this shipyard, he was blond. He wore a braided belt around his waist and shoddy footwear.

“You will have a very important post,” I heard him say to my father. “None of us have skills like yours.” I recognized the voice from inside the tent. There was something the matter with his breathing; I could hear that squeak again.

My father pretended not to notice the young man. His hair streaming, his face blotchy from the exertion, he looked around him trying to locate my mother and me.

The young man did not seem to notice and said, “My father is
ill, and we need people who are highly skilled. My brother Shem is doing the scaffold, my brother Japheth the pitch. They both have experts by their side, foremen who help them in their work. I want to have you beside me for the timberwork.”

My father spotted me and came toward me. The young man followed him, nearly brushing past me. Close up, I saw that he was not blond, but that his hair and eyebrows were covered with sawdust. On his forehead he wore the same black design as all young men here. He was bony and had the lightest skin of them all. “Can we come to an agreement? Shall we see each other in the carpentry shop at sunrise?” he continued imperturbably.