In the Shadow of the Ark (27 page)

Full of fear, we closed the hold. We huddled together and waited. So we sat for a long time, my father’s heart beating against my shoulder. He muttered prayers I had never heard. We listened to the tumult outside, the screams of humans and animals, and the pounding of the storm.

Suddenly something battered against the hull. It sounded like splintering wood. Broken branches, we thought, or something else floating around. Briefly, we hoped it might be Ham, but we did not see his face appear at the hatch. We had heard so many noises, this seemed no worse or more ominous than the others.

Not long after, we finally heard Ham, his voice hoarse and distorted. We unfastened the bolt to let him in. But he did not come into the hold. He grabbled through the opening and gripped my hand, shouting again. I tried to understand him, but it was impossible with all the clamor around us. “What?” I shouted, but already he was silent. His fingers around my wrist like claws, he hauled me out of the hold. He threw my arm around his neck and lifted me up. I heard the sucking noise of his feet in the mud. I did not understand what he wanted, I wriggled loose, but he gripped me even more firmly and threw me over his shoulder.

“Look! Just look!” he yelled, pointing at the hull of the truss-boat, in which there was a wide, gaping hole. Next to it lay a tool, only its handle visible in the mud, but I could see it was an ax. “Shem did that! To stop me going separately. Now I have to go on my father’s ark!”

The pelting rain, the seething winds and the deafening roar, the thundering of rocks rolling down the hills was everywhere around us. Through all this violence, he carried me to the ship. It rained stones, they scraped my shoulders and calves. The earth rumbled. But it was as nothing compared to what was going on farther away. There were moments when everything was lit up, more brightly than by lightning: The stars were falling from the
sky. Under the onslaught of the heavenly bodies, Ham threw himself on the ground. Craters opened and were immediately wiped out by the impact of yet more celestial objects. Before Ham could get up again, blood poured down. Its drops burned our skin like scorpion bites. But he did not let go of me. Despite all my extra weight of mud and water, he heaved me even more firmly over his shoulder.

I saw how my father jumped from his boat into the ooze to go and inspect the hole in the hull. I shouted, but he neither saw nor heard me. Around us, groups of dromedaries, camels, donkeys, and deer raged in a frenzy. They swung their heads wildly trying to make progress in the mud. During one flash, I saw their wide nostrils and their moist eyes, gleaming dark green. The ark was the only place left now that the end of the world had come, now that the fury of the Builder’s god seemed irreversible. Large chunks of earth broke off the hillsides, boulders tumbled, columns erected by human hands fell down their full length, bushes were washed away. When we arrived at the gangplank, Ham let go of me, ripped off his cloak, and threw it over my head and face. The warriors were still defending the entrance. If one of the Rrattika managed to hoist himself out of the mud and find the gangplank, he would immediately be forced back by whips and spears. The warriors administered the kinds of blows you can only deal if you feel yourself superior to everyone. But they did not stop Ham. I was so limp in his arms that I must have looked like some dead animal, or a bale of cloth.

The entrance to the ark was a gaping hole lit by neither lamps nor torches. There was a penetrating smell of excrement, the
fear-scent of the skunk stronger than all the rest. Here you no longer felt the stinging rain, but the noises were fearsome and in their own way painful. I heard the stamping of hooves and shrieks like children’s that must have come from cats, apes, or birds. I heard the sputtering of lizards, the snorting of pelicans, the whining of foxes and dingoes. And I heard Shem’s voice in the distance: He was trying to calm down the animals but could not control his own desperation. Ham moved fast; someone called out his name but he did not turn around. Deep in the gallery he uncovered my face, but it was so dark in the ship that I still could see nothing. He climbed some stairs or a ladder: I could feel him lift his legs up high, groaning with the effort. He moved through long corridors. He could have put me down and made me walk, but he did not; he held me firmly like something precious.

As soon as it was possible to raise my voice above the sounds around me, I cried, “What about my father?”

“Wait. I’m going to get him,” he shouted back. He went into a side passage, and when we came to the third or fourth pen, he put me down on my feet so he could open it. The bamboo-barred door swung away from us and I realized I had to bend over. There were animals in the pen I entered, although I could not see what they were; I made out their dark shapes against the wall. They seemed fearful and tired. I could hear them making clucking, coughlike noises in their throats, as if they were reassuring one another. Ham came into the pen after me. He forced them out of his way with a
ksss
sound. In the middle stood a hutch that seemed intended for animals to sleep in. He put his hand on the
side panel. There was a click of wood on wood. He tugged at me, and I understood what he wanted. Feet first, I slid into the sleeping hutch. I fit exactly, as if in a coffin. Then I heard his footsteps receding in the gallery.

The cage had been built by an amateur. There were plenty of gaps for me to look through. The animals alongside me went back to their places. They made gobbling sounds like turkeys. Their fear of the tempest helped them forget I was there, so close to them. A cushion lay beside me; I reached for it and could feel that it was Neelata’s, there were roses embroidered on it. The uproar in the ship continued. I could hear how places were allotted, how animals were chased out of one pen and into another. Outside there was shouting from the workmen who had helped with the dragging of timber, the lashing of scaffolding and the stirring of the pitch. They realized what the Builder had intended all along, what he needed his ark for, and why there had been such demands for speed toward the end. All this time, the warriors were busy repelling the people trying to storm the gangplank. They did it with skill and efficiency, determination showing on their faces. When my father handled his moths for the first time, he did not know one had to hold them by their lower wings. Instead he had pressed on their bodies and killed them, but did that mean he was bad? The warriors were just as ignorant about the workmen they beat off the railings. They knew only that they were doing what they were supposed to do.

For an improbably long time, the walking back and forth went on. I waited, full of tension. Then the time came: I heard
Ham enter a pen not far from me and talk to someone.
Another pen with a sleeping hutch,
I thought, noticing that for the first time in a long while, I was breathing steadily.

And what had to happen happened. With a few slashes at the ropes, the gangplank was cast off. It scraped along the bow, I heard it fall, and the screaming of the warriors shook me out of the stupor I had been in throughout the embarkation. With a strength I had not suspected was in me, I kicked the front panel of my cage loose. In his hurry, Ham had not shut the barred door of the pen properly, and it swung open as soon as I pushed against it. I searched for a way up. I climbed stairs and ramps. I got to the deck via one of the trapdoors, probably not the normal way, but the ship was shaking too much to look for anything else. I could barely stay upright out there, the wind tugged at my body, and I had to use both hands to hang on to the edge of barrels full of rainwater.

Under the gangplank lay warriors. Many had been killed by the fall. Of those who had stood below, some died because the storm hurled rocks against their heads or drove sharp pieces of wood through their bodies. They were the lucky ones: They perished quickly and from a cause they could, in their final moments, comprehend. Those who were still alive now were gripped by despair. The notable, the distinguished, the warriors, the tradesmen, they all rushed the ark. They hit its sides with their fists, they shouted curses that could be heard deep inside the ship, they pressed against the bow like dogs. And the children, all those boys and girls who used to hang around the ship hoping to be given a pitch doll, they screeched like animals.

When the ship was lifted off the ground, the hold resounded, even more than before, with the screams of creatures in terror of death. Never before had they felt the ground move under their legs. They were not used to their bleating, bellowing, barking, and twittering reverberating against the inner wall of the ship. And the thunderclaps now followed one another so rapidly they were like their own echoes. The wake of the ark caused small boats to break their moorings and drift. They either took in water or capsized. All around floated rafts with people hanging on.

The Builder shouted at them, “The Unnameable, who knows no regret, has been driven to regret. He regrets that it had to come to this.” And the hatch closed.

Then the god of the Builder opened the floodgates of the heavens. The land that he had divided from the water when he created the world was now joined to it once more. The water came from the east and the west, from the south and the north. Whirlpools and eddies formed, there were clouds of spume, masses of silt and foam rolled toward us. The air became briny. Far away, tempestuously rising rivers broke their banks. The water smashed stones and rocks. The sea came rolling inland. The ark yawed and listed. The people were washed off the cliff. Everything that was outside the ship disappeared.

I could not see anything anymore because I was enclosed by spume. I knew that another tidal wave would wash me off the deck. I had to go back. I did not have time to go down the ladder, and plunged into the depths through the well hole. Crawling on my belly, I reached the pen. I wanted to get back inside the hutch;
it was, all things considered, the best place. But the ark was pitching and yawing so hard that I found it impossible to get through the small opening. As soon as I attempted to, I rolled against my fellow inmates, who screeched and beat their wings tumultuously and wounded me with their beaks and claws.
If only I had the cushion,
I thought, but I could not reach it. My head and shoulders hit the wall, now to starboard, now to port.

The tempest went on endlessly. Whenever the roar subsided momentarily, there was still a continuous dull rumbling. Then you could hear people shouting, “Here! Over here!” They all drowned, those people who thought they would fare differently, who did not realize that exceptions are not always possible. No matter how talented, how skilled, how determined in their thinking, they drowned. I managed to get a firm hold by hooking my hands and arms in the bars. The water smashed against the hull, shaking the planks of its outer skin. With my feet braced against a rafter, I experienced the way the water gathered its force, exhausted it, gathered it again and exhausted it again, in a rhythm of effortless patience.

The rumbling and the lightning ceased. A shaken silence remained, together with the sour smell of vomit. I heard nothing but the raging of the wind and the thundering of the waves against the bow. My first sorrow was not for my father or Put. I was convinced they were in the ark. My first sorrow was for Camia, the little dancing girl who now floated somewhere in the water. With much pain and effort, I got up and went back to the deck. It was night, but because burning particles were still falling
out of the sky, I was able to see. There were animals that could swim and followed the ship for a long time: dogs, beavers, geese, hippopotamuses, crocodiles. Of people able to swim there were none, there were only those who had got a hold on the small boats that floated here and there. The rich had the best boats. They were made out of sound timber and had partitions to stop the water streaming in. They were leaking all the same, and sink they did in the end. The parents jumped overboard to save the children. But even that weight was too much for the boats. And so the last ones to float on the surface of the water were mainly children, wearing well-made woolen clothes and pearl ornaments around their wrists.

I
dreamed Ham was standing next to me. He had a torch in his hand, which blinded me. He looked like someone who urgently needed help. He was covered in blood and animal droppings.

“Did the varan hurt you?” I asked him. I knew it was not his own blood. It was that of the people he had beaten off with a pitchfork to get to the ropes of the gangplank. He insisted that I should wash it away as soon as possible.

“And my father?” I asked, but he had already gone, and I woke once more from a brief, restless sleep.

After long hours I noticed a faint glow. I could hardly call it light, it was no more than a slight break in the darkness, a faint suspicion that up above, outside, the night was past, that a dawning turned the sky almost imperceptibly paler. It did not come through the wall of the ship, because that was covered with pitch that had crusted over the cracks; if I was not careful, my hair stuck to it. It came from a different direction. My father had explained to me how he planned to bring light and air into the ship. He had, along the length of the ship, left gaps under the edge of the roof. When necessary, wooden panels could be slid across them. No doubt, this had been done, it had been necessary! Had
someone now removed the panels? Was that not a bit premature, as nobody could be sure the storm would not come back?

Apart from what I could see through the bars, I only had my ears to discover what was going on. I listened to every sound. It was tiring; I had to work out which came from people and which from animals. There was a horse, somewhere, or some other hoofed animal, stamping on the plank flooring. It sounded like a human with a crutch. The Builder with his staff? One of the brothers who had hurt his leg in last night’s tumult? Thanks to the sounds, I learned that the faint light was not dawn. The glow I had seen came from torches that were coming closer. The sloshing sounds no longer came only from the waves outside, but also from buckets that were being emptied into drinking troughs, I supposed, and presumably only humans did things like that. The sound did not give me any sense of relief. To me, who had spent so much time on boats, and who as a baby, so my father said, could only sleep with the rocking of water below me, this rescue felt like imprisonment, like a trial or a trick.