In the Shadow of the Ark (2 page)

For weeks on end we walked. We left the landscape we knew. We crossed riverbeds, filled our water bags, and made our way into a dry region full of limestone rocks that showed through the thin layer of earth. We passed pastures full of sharp grasses, crooked acacia trees, fig trees without fruit, and spent the night under tamarisk trees with ragged bark and leaves soft as down. For every day that passed, my father made a knot in his belt. In the end, the belt became so short it would no longer fit around his thin waist. His face was gray. The emptiness, the boulders, the absence of reeds and mosquitoes made him wretched. Every evening he washed my mother with the water he had saved up. He heated it to the same temperature as her skin. He only allowed himself enough to keep going. All through the journey to the shipbuilders, we begged him to drink. Only after we had passed the cliff from behind which hammer blows could be heard and he could see the gigantic ship we had been told about, did he, without saying a word, grasp the water bag by my shoulder and drink greedily like a small child, until the bag was empty and so limp that it blocked his view of the shipyard.

The wandering Rrattika had not lied. Past the crumbly ridges, in a place where you would expect nothing, or at most a small settlement, a shipyard had been built, which spread like a lake. Apart from a pond, surrounded by scrub, where people came and went constantly, the place was dry as dust and strewn with rocks. The first thing that greeted you was the smell of pitch. Then the sounds. The air was full of the sounds of hammering and planing, and the rattling and grinding of drills reached you right over the top of the ridge. Then, once you had reached the top, you suddenly had a view of something like a city being built. In an area with so few forests, the sight of so many stacks of timber was overwhelming. Wood shavings whirled like mere dust in the wind. In every conceivable spot stood the tents, stone houses, and barracks of the countless workers who were running around, busy as ants. Most conspicuous was the tent on the slope of the hill where all paths seemed to lead. It was red, as if drenched in ox blood. The tent’s opening faced the valley; it looked straight at the heart of the shipyard, at the spot that made our mouths go dry as powder.

Over a wide excavation in the hard ground stood a gigantic scaffold with a boat-shaped structure trapped in a web of vertical and horizontal girders. This was what people in the marshes had been laughing about: the ship in the stony desert. It did not yet reach very high, still showing only its ground plan. Its future scale was visible, but the design revealed the lack of confidence of the builders. Yet the stores of timber and pitch all around revealed its makers’ ambition. That was the first thing we, as people looking for work, sensed: that the project down there was being carried along by something powerful, that it had gone far beyond being just a dream. Quite possibly, that was what made my father reach so thirstily for the water bag.

T
he sun stood at an angle behind us. We could make out the small fires more easily than the women who were doing their cooking on them. We put down our burdens: my father, the cage and the brazier; Put, the case with the ornaments and the shells; I, the yoke; and Alem, the hides that made up the tent. I sat down from sheer exhaustion. More than anything, the wind had tired me, that perpetual tugging at your hair, the dust in your face, the whistling in your ears. Keeping low down to the ground was a help. Then it seemed to forget about you and blow over the top of you in its search for somewhere to hurl itself. I led the donkey so that its large body on short legs might partially shelter my mother. When it stood in the right spot, my mother blinked her left eye rapidly, and immediately little Put came to undo the cloak she was wrapped in. I knew it was time to rub her with oil; it was already much later than usual. She had to eat, and she should sit up for a while, held in my arms. I wanted to gather some of the bits of wood I saw lying about, boil water, and set up the tent so we could sit and watch the activity in the valley from there. Everyone was tired after the long trek, and now that we had arrived, a long rest seemed a proper reward.

But my father kept striding up and down impatiently. Some marram-grass cutters were climbing up, sickles in their hands and baskets on their backs. When they had passed and the way was clear, he stood by the edge of the steep path. It was wide, much wider than the goat trails we had been following earlier, and frequent use had worn steps in it. “Pick up your things,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”

I suppressed a sigh. Put stopped tugging at the cloak. Not that my father’s words surprised us. We knew him, we understood his hurry to get to the construction and its builders. Only Alem-the-ragged seemed not to have heard the order. He followed the grass cutters into the scrub. He asked them questions I couldn’t understand, and they replied breathlessly.

My father called out once more, “We’re not there yet. Make haste, Alem.” His voice sounded a little higher now, sharper and less hoarse thanks to that bag of water. I could guess what he was doing: He was celebrating his arrival. He was deadly tired from the journey, and the only way he had of making it clear to himself that he had reached his goal and that the deprivations were at an end was to speak resolutely and loudly, silence others and see his orders carried out.

Alem calmly turned his head toward us above the shrubs. He didn’t look in order to listen, it was more as if he reacted to an unimportant sound, maybe a dog barking aimlessly.

But because my father stretched himself to his full height and pushed his chin out like a real drover, Alem slowly came toward us. Without looking away, with a flick of his fingers and a sharp sucking in of air through the corner of his mouth, the wanderer
called his son to him. Put obeyed instantly. His knees flashed one after the other from under his little tunic. When the child had come near him, Alem grasped his hand and pulled him close. Put reached no higher than his elbow, yet so close together, they resembled a pair of brothers, one a smaller copy of the other. Already Alem no longer bothered to look at the shipyard. From the corners of his eyes, he was looking at the landscape we had traversed. I noticed the rapid sliding of his eyeballs, and I knew: It is over, he is getting ready for something else.

My father too had noticed that look. Throwing up much more dust than was necessary, he went over to the pair. Alem did not wait until they faced each other close up to say, “Dismiss me here, lord. Let me return to the marshes.” The wind blew up his hood.

My father wore his hair short, and his body was uncovered. He was less bothered by the incessant whistling of the wind in his ears than by the flapping of the wanderer’s mantle and tunic, a form of attire he disdained; like me, he couldn’t understand why anyone would wear things like that. “So soon, Alem?” he asked. “You haven’t seen the shipyard at close range yet.”

“I have seen enough, lord. In Canaan, they are waiting for us. They will not break camp until we are back.”

I heaved a small sigh, which nobody heard. Then another one, to draw Put’s attention, but he stayed motionless under Alem’s arm, as if he were stuck.

My father’s back shone. For the first time since we had left, it was covered in a thin layer of sweat. “The day is nearing its end. It is not long till night falls!” he said. A branch snapped under my
foot. All three looked at me. Their glance startled me, because I was not aware that I had moved.

Alem looked away from me as fast as he could. He seemed to need to swallow something before he could say, “Night is only the disappearance of colors. I have guided you to your goal, I will put the few hours that separate us from the dark to good use.” He held his hand out to my father.

For a moment, my father stood motionless, but then he gripped the hand and shook it. He opened the case at Put’s feet and paid them with shells and rings. “Take the donkey too,” he said once Alem had folded his wage in his mantle. It was a generous gesture, to give a donkey to a Rrattika; I had never seen anyone in the marshes do anything like it. It seemed an extravagance, but the animal was tired and possibly ill. Alem prostrated himself before my father, but my father failed to notice. From the ledge, he was already staring out over the shipyard again.

I first embraced Put, the little boy who shuffled his feet in the dust so much it made you cough. The child did not look at me. He kept staring at the ground as though there was something on that spot that demanded all his attention. I pointed at his beads, at the string of small bones and teeth I had threaded for him. He put his hand over it as if it was a sore spot.

Then I let Alem-the-ragged embrace me. Alem had kept us away from the wild animals. When we set out, he had said, “He who wants to find the builder of the ship must follow the animals. They know the way. But he must not overtake them. They are dangerous, and they are thirsty.” Because of his sharp nose and his ability to guess from a few hairs in a hollow what animal
was ahead of us and how far ahead it was, he had guided us safely over the hills. I held him close, and he put his arms around me. He held me for a long while, his hands and fingers moving up and down the small of my back. He was wearing more clothes than I. I only had on a loincloth and around my neck a carefully woven collar. He wore a long mantle that left only his hands and feet uncovered. It made his embrace more like a swaddling, like the wrapping of someone shivering from a fever. He put his mouth close to my ear and said my name. I did not move, giving him time to change his mind. I shut my eyes to recover from the shock of his leaving us.

“I am not coming, Re Jana,” he whispered. “This place makes me feel bad. I came this far because I did not believe the stories. Now I can see it with my own eyes: a ship without a river, without a lake, without a sea. It really is as mad as it sounded in the songs.” He stood with hips and thighs and knees pressed close to me.

“You haven’t been to have a look,” I whispered back. “There are things you can’t see from here.”

“I’ve spoken with the grass cutters. They’re pretending to go to work, but they’re off. The only law that holds good here is that of madness.”

I looked up at the sky, at the absence of even the smallest cloud that might have made the space around us seem a little less endless. “We haven’t finished yet. There was so much you were going to teach me still,” I said, putting my fingers under the neckline of his shirt and stroking his collarbone. That was something I had been almost addicted to doing ever since I first met him; I
picked at the edges of his clothes because that was where his skin began.

“Go and find yourself a man. Do with him what I have taught you, and you will be happy.” He pressed his lips to my eyes, first the left, then the right. He was much older than I, more than twice my age. For weeks, he had consumed the same food as we, but he still smelled of the things his people ate and of the fat mixed with ash his people rubbed into their skin. He had always drunk all the water from his water bag. Never had he saved part of it to wash himself. His scent had become precious to me, but now, at our parting, he smelled again like the Rrattika who happens to be passing by, who does what you ask of him because you pay him, but who has no idea of what drives you.

My father said, “We haven’t got all day.” Alem-the-ragged and little Put greeted my mother with a bow. She blinked, at the child too. We followed them with our eyes until they had reached the shrubs farther along. That was the last I saw of Alem. He had taught my father to track. He had taught him the position of the sun and the movement of the stars. And after my father had seen all the stars and was asleep, Alem-the-ragged called me to him. Me, he had taught love.

T
he track to the shipyard was hazardous. We went down in a zigzag. Stones flew out from under our feet. Far below we saw people stop to watch us. We drew attention because of the clatter of all the things we were hauling, the rattling of the stones that rolled away, the slow, cautious sliding of my mother’s stretcher along the slope. Only once did we stop, on a terrace with a small meadow from which we could take a closer look at the shipyard. A little out of breath, my father looked at the activity below. The area looked cluttered, and it was hard to get an idea of the arrangement of the workshops. In a fold in the landscape, dozens of animals stood looking at us. Some were in enclosures surrounded by low stone walls, but most of them wandered about freely and unattended. I expected words of displeasure, but he just breathed in the scent that met us and said, “Mulberry trees, thank god!”

Once the slope was behind us, all that separated us from the settlement was a depression in the ground, which, judging by the gashes and gouges in its sides, must once have been a quarry. The ground was dusty and soft. My father found a hollow about my mother’s size and removed from it anything that could hurt her. He spread her woolen cloak out over the top, brought the
stretcher close, and rolled her into the hollow. He washed her more thoroughly than usual: With finger and thumb, he kneaded the soles of her feet, he turned her on her front and stroked her spine, first with the palm of his hand, then with his fingers. He put infusions on the sores on her lower back and shoulders, dried her, and rolled her back onto the stretcher. He rubbed oil into her skin and tied her loincloth around her hips. He bandaged her heels: They were in the worst state. Her torso shone, the designs on her stomach and shoulders seemed to come to life in the low light. He combed her hair and decked her with shell ornaments. All this time he spoke to her in a low voice, “They will look at you here. Someone as beautiful as you, they cannot have seen before.” I listened to it as to a song.

When he had finished, and I had made good use of the time by gently rubbing spit into the sore spots on my feet, we left the quarry and moved toward the settlement. We passed dozens of dwellings in front of which teapots bubbled away in stone fireplaces. The people who were busy around there glanced at us, perhaps startled at our appearance and the things we carried, but showing no excessive curiosity. We walked directly toward the construction site. It was not a simple matter to get that far with the stretcher. There was a lot of clutter all around. Planks and stones, tools and other equipment seemed to have been left scattered around haphazardly. Children were running around barefoot amongst it all, dogs and goats walked in and out. A sort of path had been left open, but even that was covered in people’s personal belongings: drinking cups, combs, blankets, spoons and
cooking utensils, and I realized that this was only a path by day. At night, it was a sleeping place for many, for workers who slept like dogs under the open sky. Never had I seen so many stacks and bundles of things that did not belong together. You wondered how people here could ever find anything.