In the Shadow of the Ark (24 page)

To achieve a cure, Ham, carried by his two brothers, went to confess to his father what everybody knew by then — that he had built a niche. “For the dwarf,” he declared, but the lie made him cough until he nearly suffocated. The Builder ordered him to go back to his sickbed and stop worrying about what he had done. “The dwarf inspired us to do things we do not understand,” he said. “For me too the temptation to admit him onto the ark was great. But he is dead. He was a messenger, and will remain that, although in a guise unknown to us.”

It was around that time I saw Put talking to Zedebab. A second woman was with them, her twin sister, who was her spitting image. I saw that they offered Put a bag of dried manure, excellent fuel for the fire in which we were no longer permitted to burn wood. I walked toward them to see what had earned him this gift.

“We are offering him this,” said Zedebab — or was it her sister? — “and we will offer you twice as much again if you will tell us where the niche is that the boat builder has constructed.” They were both small and thin, they wore many rings in their ears, and they had the same way of moving.

Put and I looked at them disbelievingly. Never had we seen two people who were so alike, who seemed to say and think the same things. Yet after a brief remark on my part, they got into a furious argument, both going spotty-faced so they no longer looked at all alike, as if they had decided they no longer wanted to. The remark I made that touched off their quarrel was “What use is the niche to you? Whoever hides there will be found immediately.”

T
here was to be a feast. The women made headdresses and tunics. The feathers were carefully chosen for their color and shape. They used the feathers of the toucan, the trogon, and the crane. They collected them in the evening and fixed them to the fabrics with thread. Because it was raining, the forecourt remained empty and everyone crowded into the red tent. The foremen sat in a circle on the ground beating drums. The Builder had wine brought in. And because he was now familiar with the delights of bathing and oiling, he asked me to wash everyone’s arms and feet and rub them with oil.

The tent was too small for so many people. Legs were stretched out to me, which I oiled without knowing to whom they belonged. The fellows enjoyed their turns. They made all the jokes that Rrattika usually come up with when a young woman oils a man. The more they drank, the louder they sang. My father filled his beaker many times. To my surprise, he knew not only every foreman, but every warrior by name. He was proud of the construction, he allowed the others to slap his shoulders and congratulate him. He insisted that I drink too. “Relax, Re Jana,” he whispered to me. “The rain is just a shower. It will take weeks for this land to flood.”

It was not until long after midnight that I could pack up my equipment. I had done everything they had asked. The wine had not made me cheerful, only dizzy. Ham noticed. He took no part in the feast. He had pulled up his tent’s curtain and watched feverishly from his quarters. I had offered him wine to relieve the pain, but his stomach would not let him consume anything except the water I fetched for him. When I got ready to go, he said, “What are you dragging your mother around for? Leave her here, we’ll look after her. She won’t suffer thirst or cold.” My mother eagerly blinked her eye when she heard his proposal, and so I left her behind with Ham.

Deep in the night, I woke up with an uneasy feeling. How could I have done this, left this beautiful woman behind in a tent where there was a feast going on? My father snored noisily next to me, his sleep a stupor I had not seen him in for a long time. I got up and went to the red tent. I stood close to the tent, about where I knew she had been. Her breathing was clearly audible. She was asleep. Around her, all was quiet. I felt reassured.

When I returned the next morning to fetch her, she had been combed and washed. There were not many people left in the tent, only Shem, slumped full length in a chair; even feverish Ham had finally left his mat.

“Who has groomed her?” I asked with the same uneasy feeling I had had during the night.

“Not me,” said Shem.

“So who did?” I asked the girls near the partition behind the women’s tent.

“None of us,” they said. In the forecourt, the warriors lay
among the puddles. I prodded them until they opened their eyes and asked them who had washed my mother.

“That gorgeous thing in the corner? That willing little woman who blows without scratching? We did not really wash her, no.” They roared with laughter.

I stood over my mother. She smelled of the oil I had left with Ham. When I asked what had happened to her, she answered by turning her eye away, like a bird that spins from being hit by an arrow in the back rather than the heart.

M
y father could not comfort her. Nor could he calm her anger. She thought the dwarf had chosen the right way. We uttered our suspicion only in whispers, we did not want her to hear. We said it while around us the almond powder blew about, scooped from my mortar by the wind. We pretended we were talking about nothing in particular, just the nuisance of the wind, but we said, “She wants to prove she still has a will: the will to die.”

My father and mother talked together for days. In their turn, they kept what they said a secret from me, me who had so often been their mouthpiece, who had always done my best to keep them close. When, on sultry afternoons, my father’s restlessness became too great and he leaned against her in despair, I had lain on her other side, stretching my arms out to him across her. With his eyes closed, he had the illusion that my fingers and hands were hers. Then he would groan at the touch until the groans turned to sobs.

She asked my father to build a papyrus boat, a long, narrow one with high bow and stern, like a gondola, the kind on which we burn the dead. He took me with him to the stores where he made his choice from the stocks of reeds. There were bundles of flexible ones for covering pens and dividing spaces, thin stems
suitable for birds’ perches, but also bamboo thick as an arm, for making cages for large, dangerous species. My father built a boat from papyrus as he had done a few times already in his life: one for his mother, one for his two brothers who perished together, and one for my little brother who died at the edge of the water. He only took cover when it rained and went back to work as soon as the sun broke through.

People surrounded his structure. They did not know about the carrying power of reeds and laughed at what he was doing. Some thought it was an act of rebellion and that he was ridiculing the Builder and his warriors. But when the papyrus boat was finished, they looked at it full of admiration. None of them, seeing the gondola, thought of death.

My father asked Put and me to help him carry the boat far into the hills, near where the thick-fingered bushes grew. He had chosen the spot and prepared it. He had gathered bundles of branches and hidden a large jug of oil in the shrubs.

For the first time in his life, Put, that poor little boy who had no idea what was going on, killed a duck in flight with his slingshot. Away from people, we cooked it, keeping the lid tight on the pot so the scent would not escape. We ground the meat into a mush, adding salt and herbs.

My father held my mother close and fed her one mouthful after another. “Do you remember,” he asked, “how your ducklings took to the water?” She blinked. I had experienced it. When the ducklings she had bred were ready for the water, she got into her boat and made them come after her. The ducklings followed her into the water. My father always thought it a lovely moment, and
he invariably clapped his hands. But we children had our hearts in our mouths. We knew some of the ducklings could not swim at all. Sometimes one of them would tip over. Then the awkward little thing would float upside down in the water. The eldest amongst us could handle a raft, and even if it was late and cold already, we would clamor to be allowed to go to the rescue. But my mother forbade it. She needed to know the strength of the young birds. Sometimes one of them would manage to turn itself right side up. To our great relief, its head would reappear above the water, and it would swim a little faster to catch up with its siblings. But frequently, we had to watch its efforts slow down, see the movements of its wings and legs become stiff and change into useless splashing as if something inside it had broken. Then the duckling became still, and the fish came to claim it.

Put cried when my father spoke about the past, and so did I. We plucked at our girdles, pulled our legs up high, and rested our chins on our knees. My mother settled a few more matters. She made it clear to my father that I was to have her divining rod, which was the most precious thing she owned. I dug my hands into the earth. I knew that I was waiting for a pain that went deeper than I could fathom and felt my fear rising. While waiting like that, it was hard not to repeat the old arguments: We still had my father’s truss-boat; we could manage to live in close proximity; the water might not even come.

But whenever we mentioned the water or the truss-boat in the field, even in a whisper so she would not hear, my mother’s eye would fill with fear. The rising springs, the overflowing ponds, the stones that became more and more slippery, and the
hills that were so much greener than before caused her to look around anxiously. She had come here so she would never again have to be at the waterline. She had suffered the journey so she would never again be carried onto a vessel. If the whole world flooded, how could she escape? Making her wait for the waters to rise would be too cruel, and so was carrying her onto a boat or an ark.

That was why, after a long afternoon of eating and talking and silence, my father took her to the spot in the hills where he had prepared the papyrus boat. I stayed behind with Put, who stuck close to me, speechless. It was an endless wait before we saw the column of smoke rise. Wild ducks and all sorts of water birds passed, flying around the smoke in a wide arc. And the next morning, after an exhausting sleep under a ramshackle shelter, with nothing but dreams of my mother, we saw long, glistening threads hanging all over the encampment. They linked boards to rocks and palisades to trowels. They were the threads of the silkworms that my father had thrown to the wind.

“It is perfectly built,” my father said later on. “It is the most beautiful papyrus boat my hands have ever produced.” Yet my mother had not wanted to be carried on it. Never again on a boat, she had made clear, not in life and not in death. He had had to lay her directly onto the pyre.

Here I did not know any places for grieving. At home in the marshes, I had places; I knew where I wanted to sit down when I learned that my grandmother was dead, and my uncles, who had died just one day apart from the injuries inflicted on them by wild boars. We each had our own spot, and we spread out knowing
we would not get in each other’s way. In the Builder’s shipyard, I did not know where to go, it was so busy everywhere, and in the hills there were wild animals, and so I went to sit underneath the silkworms’ cage.

Neelata came to me almost immediately. The shrubs were low, they did not provide cover for someone tall, and so I knew she was approaching long before she found me. She carried a cushion on which she was embroidering a design of roses. She asked me if I liked it. It would be for me, she said, later, once it was finished.

She continued embroidering while I spoke about my mother. I leaned against her stretcher, which I dragged behind me out of habit. You could still see her shape, worn into it after so many years. Neelata did not look up from her task as I spoke to her. That was good: Her not looking made talking easier. I spoke about my mother’s life and what had happened to her. I said, “She blamed it all on her lack of will. She thought that, if only she had had the will, she could have stepped out of that boat to get my little brother.” Neelata let the threads slide through her fingers. I bent over, gently biting the skin on the back of my hand, and talked to my mother. I cried for her to come back.

Neelata had only just disappeared behind the shrubs when I saw Ham approach. He brought me a blanket, a comforting piece of woolen cloth, which he wrapped around me. The wool chafed my cheeks, which were wet and taut.

“Do not cry,” he said. “She has protected you from a much greater loss.”

“What loss could be greater than this?”

“A death against her will. A death that comes slowly like rising water.” The fever had left a red edge around his lips. He looked away from me as I told him about her. I knew it had been he who had washed her after that long night in the tent. He had done his best to remove the traces the warriors had left on her. He bore no guilt; the warriors had taken her away from him while he slept.

We made a memorial. Ham searched the area for a suitable stone, lifted it, and carried it to the spot I showed him. He carved a tern onto it, my mother’s lucky bird.

He took me with him into the hills. He wanted to get away from the silkworm cage, he insisted, as far as possible. Far from all our familiar spots, he erected a column of stones; there were no feathered warriors to help him. He said, “I have taken Neelata as my wife because she belongs with me. She comes from a lineage that has made our people great.” He stood behind me and wrapped his arms around me, his elbow on my breast and his hand on my neck. “But are you not my rightful wife? Have I not lain down with you long before Neelata?” He pointed at the column. “It is for you I am erecting this.” His shoulder was touching my back, but I moved away from him.

I wandered in the hills and found nothing but shy animals who looked at me indifferently. Near the thick-fingered bushes, the papyrus boat still stood, decked out, ready for the journey to the underworld, but not burned because of my mother’s will. Nowhere in the wide-reaching hills did I find a good place for grieving.

A
fter my mother’s death, my father changed into a man I no longer recognized. He mingled with the Rrattika. Warriors came to see him, men I knew had been there that night with my mother, but my father did not reach for his dagger to take revenge; by the glow of the fire under his teapot he exchanged quiet words with them. His behavior disturbed me. I thought he had lost his mind. To my alarm, he began to like the things they ate.