In the Shadow of the Ark (33 page)

“Stay with him and do all that is needed,” said Shem. He left me behind in the hut that resembled the Builder’s tent in the shipyard. Inside, the same chaos reigned, and it was permeated by the same resiny smell of ointment. Attached to the wall with bronze screws was a small, square, acacia-wood altar with four horns. In the incessant commotion during the early part of the journey, he had no doubt spoken with his god here, but now the illness exhausted him, no Unnameable could do anything about that. Beside his bed stood the cage with the messy dove and the little bells, and on a stand a few nondescript little plants with brown, serrated leaves in moist soil. On the shelf below, jugs, a press and sieves, covered with ash from the fire. I opened all the
pots I could find and sniffed them. I found mugs with dregs of wine, but also the pots of ointment I was looking for. I boiled up an herb broth, which I fed him spoonful by spoonful.

I took care of him every day. He was restless in his sleep because the lumps on his belly and in his groin itched.

“What do you dream about?” I asked him when, on the third day, he looked at me. His irises trembled constantly, the whites around them were bloodshot, and stale-looking tears filled the corners of his eyes.

“About the newborn children,” he said. “The animals have been saved, but not the newborn children. Someone needs to explain that to me.” Crumbs of dried ear wax lay on his pillow. I brushed them onto the floor or blew them away.

“I had a conversation once, with a man,” he continued. “We were deep inside a cave full of the dead.”

“That man was my father.”

“His words touched me deep in my heart. He was speaking about showing remorse. What happens if remorse is not genuine?”

“Then calamity follows.”

“That is right. Calamity follows. But what if the calamity comes first? If it comes so fast and unexpectedly that there is no time for a request, for a question, an expression of remorse? Zaza disappeared so fast. She died too soon, and in the wrong way. On this ark, life does not turn into ashes, it turns into foam. Foam is what we must become.”

I recognized his loss; I missed my mother. I wanted to say to him, “The fire has not consumed your wife. The water has claimed
her because she sought it,” but what man needs the truth in his grief? I said, “Your Unnameable god does not seem to know that the dead stay alive. They move into the next life.”

“He has made us out of clay. He breathed life into that clay, life that can be snuffed out. When it is extinguished, everything is gone. We return to our original state.”

“But it is that breath, that sigh, that wind that lives on. It leaves the throat and goes elsewhere. I should know, I saw it happen when my mother fell into her boat. The cry that escaped her contained her will, not all of her will, but a part of it, a part large enough to make her decoy ducks fly despite their clipped wings.”

“He has never said anything to me about that. All I know is that this life passes. The living know they are going to die, but the dead know nothing. That is why a living dog is better than a dead lion, and in death, man is equal to the beasts.”

“Then why are we here, if life is so temporary?” I asked.

“To worship and to sacrifice.”

“Then the Unnameable has regard only for himself. People will turn against him and soon forget him. Is your Unnameable a good god?”

“He is a good god.”

“Then he must console. Then he must spare his people meaninglessness and offer some prospect.”

“Consolation there is already,” he said dryly, pointing at the vats of wine.

“It will need to be more than that. He will have to offer what cannot be found anywhere else: the promise not to wipe us out,
the hope for a better place, and the certainty that our suffering is not meaningless. A new life in paradise for those who deserve it. That is what some alabaster gods say. Is that not beautiful? Is that not something for the Unnameable, he who is so fond of good commandments?”

“Yes,” he said, staring for a long time at the beams in the ceiling. And then again, “Yes, you are right. It would be beautiful to believe that Zaza’s breath floats about. That she is going away to a place that is better for her than here. That is what I shall do, that is how I will think of it.” When, quite a while later, he opened his eyes again, he said, “I know who you are. You are the dwarf in a new shape. I knew it when you showed us the water in the cave. You disappear and reappear, just like him.”

I knelt next to his bed. I bent my head because I hardly dared look up, particularly not when he said, “Give me your message. Tell me the commandments of the Unnameable.”

In a conversation I had with him a few days later, I made up a hereafter that seemed fair to me, with a place for the righteous inhabited by nothing but pure, snow-white beings. But I was not thinking of that now, because something else altogether was worrying me.

“The man who moved you to tears in the cave now sits in a little papyrus boat,” I said. “He is floating about all alone on this sea.”

“Is that so?” asked the Builder. He looked at me, his irises no longer trembling but looking fixedly at me. “Then we must help him.” He asked me to take him onto the deck. He was not heavy, hardly heavier than my mother whom I had lifted so often. He
hung on tightly to the railing when I put him down. On his feet, he was wearing my father’s rabbit-fur boots. He looked out over the water, lifted up his free hand, and muttered a few prayers I did not understand.

“I bless the man in the papyrus boat,” he said finally. “May the Unnameable assist him in all that he undertakes.”

“And Ham?” I asked when he opened his eyes again. “Can you bless him too?”

“Ham will have to earn his blessing,” he replied. “Just like his brothers.” He put his hand on the railing again. I carried him back into the hold and stayed with him till dark.

A
fter the fire came the scarcity. My gums became swollen, my nails tore. Hunger makes you resentful. Someone has to take the blame for the emptiness in your belly that makes you think you are being eaten away from inside, that something is gnawing at you. I had to survive on the shriveled almonds and the moldy biscuits Japheth handed me. On top of that, we had to cope unexpectedly with the death’s-head monkeys, who would wander about us and snatch out of our hands anything we lifted to our mouths and disappear with it like lightning. Their fur, which had been smooth and shiny when we embarked, became dirty and scruffy, and their once-shining faces looked dull.

I took over Taneses’s tasks. The animals in the pens reacted with resentment to having to get used to a new voice and new movements. Every evening, I went off on my own to Taneses’s room, which smelled of smoke and sooty dampness. Occasionally the ark still smelled of something edible, but such days were becoming rare.

Because Neelata’s hut had been burned out, she shared Zedebab’s. But although that hut was opposite mine, I rarely caught a glimpse of her. Like all of us, she became very turned in on herself. Her stocks of honey and raisins shrank rapidly. Her
dates she had been sharing with me, but not the rest, because she saw that I sacrificed part of what she handed me to the Unnameable. She no longer entered my smelly hut. We met while we were feeding the animals, and she asked, “Why am I more worried about myself than about you?”

I said, “The soul knows many ways of fleeing,” but her face remained unyielding as the night.

She replied, “I am not worried about you because you persist. You should have married Ham, my presence here is a mistake. I cannot honor the Unnameable. He is no more than the collected fear and sickness of all that moves in this ark. Anything the boys and their father cannot understand they’ve called the Unnameable. I cannot afford to waste my dates on a god like this.”

I squeezed her hand to reassure her. “It’s better not to worry about me,” I lied. “I’m fine.”

“I still share with Put. He collects anything I put out for him. But how much longer can I go on sharing if I’m starving?”

“Not much longer,” I said. “Starving we do on our own.”

She smiled, and with steps that dragged more than they used to, she went on with her work.

More even than with eating, we were preoccupied with sleeping. We slept more often and for longer periods. We spent hours arranging and rearranging our sheets and sewing larger, softer pillows to lie on; feathers there were aplenty, the birds were molting. We avoided the sun because it made us hungry. We loved the moon because night after night it brought us the sleep we longed for.

The animals became ill. The cold, the damp, and the smoke
had left them unscathed, but the hunger exhausted them, except for the hibernators, who seemed unconcerned because they did as we did: They shut their eyes and no longer left their nests.

And we were thirsty. The little water that was left had become tainted. You could not taste any difference between what came out of the amphoras and the dregs from the sinkhole. The cattle collapsed. We had to pour water down their nostrils to bring them around.

The shortages were harder for me to bear than for the others. They had been brought up in the Rrattikan belief that eating very little did not kill you. As children, they had been trained to put up with the feeling of gnawing hunger. Privation was never more than an inconvenience. They baked bread from thistles and pressed water out of cactuses. Because there were no thistles on the ark, they used sorrel and hay. But my stomach could not cope with their inventive bakery, and my bowels stopped functioning. If occasionally something decent was found, I was not included in the distribution, an omen of the way I would be treated later. I had to scrape together my own food, and so I stole what I could find, afraid of being caught, but not so afraid that I did not realize that dying of starvation was more terrible than anything they could do to me. I dried the flesh of animals that perished. I had to do it fast, or it would rot within a day. Because I did not have enough salt, I cut the meat in thin slices and dried it over the fire. The last piece I threaded onto my stick was the arm and fist of a small monkey. I saved it and hung it on a nail in a dark corner. Of course, it disappeared in no time, presumably snatched away by monkeys of the same breed, and I was left with nothing.

The days passed. By that time, no one was counting the weeks anymore, and as deprivation got worse, the ark became quieter. Shem and Japheth passed the days sleeping, Zedebab and Neelata tried making soup out of nut shells. Now and then I took something to the Builder. I had almost nothing left to put into the broth, no more than a couple of drops of oil, half a sprig of thyme, and a pinch of salt.

One evening after work, I returned, exhausted, to my scorched hut. Before I had even shut the door, I felt the presence of something alive in the corner.
The snake,
I thought, but whatever sat in the corner was bulky, and it made wheezing sounds. I did not have a lamp, I had no need of one to sleep, so I stood, petrified, waiting for the creature to move.

“Shut the door properly,” someone whispered, and I recognized the hoarse, throaty voice of Taneses. I did as she told me.

“The fire was my fault, I know,” she said without stirring in her corner. “I pretended to walk into the fire to escape the Unnameable’s eye. That, I think, I succeeded in, but now it seems this whole ship is going to perish from hunger.”

I moved closer to see her. I saw the three alabaster statues on the floor next to her. They gleamed in the darkness from the fat she had rubbed them with, these were probably the only things on the ship that still looked cared for. I touched them and felt they were warm, she had brought them here under her clothes. The scent they gave off reminded me of the small temples in the marsh country, where priestesses lived, like Taneses, women of substance who cherished their statues like children.

“Even the little boy is weak with hunger,” she continued. “We must do something, Re Jana. If we don’t start something, we’ll all perish, even the animals.”

I pulled back my hand. It was difficult to keep up my squatting posture. I was dizzy, and my belly was taut. “Little boy?” I asked, breathing deeply.

“I found that child that used to hang around with you.”

“Put?”

“I let him do things for me. How did you think I have survived all this time?”

“Why does he listen to you?”

“I was surprised at how easy it was to make him obey. I did not have to hold him over the side of the ship, just threatening to was enough.”

I half fell to one side.
The floor
, I thought,
the fire has made the planks as thin as wafers, I’m going to go clean through it.
But I fell no farther than against her.

She stretched out her arms to support me. “Are you all right? You’re not feeling ill, are you?” she asked. Her head was right next to mine. She said in a whisper, “I do not want to exploit that child. I am not a bad person. But it is not always easy when your gods are demanding.”

I shuddered again. I could smell that she had eaten more recently than I. “Is it your gods who prevent the waters receding?”

She helped me up without too much noise. “I think so,” she said dully.

“I know what we can do,” I said when I was on my feet again. I was still staggering, but thanks to her support I stayed upright.
“We’ll make a special offering to your gods. We’ll kill the most precious bird in this ship for them.”

That evening I went as usual into the Builder’s hut. I lit his lamp and applied ointment to the ulcers in his groin. The Builder was in a good mood. He smelled of wine and said he had practically no pain anymore. That was thanks to me, he said, and my soft hands. As I was leaving, I took the messy dove from its cage and clutched it under my dress.

“Has the time come already? Is it time to look for an olive branch?” the Builder asked when he saw what I was doing.

I sidled to the door as quickly as I could. “This creature is our last hope,” I said and went back to Taneses’s hut. There I did what I thought was the right thing to do. I killed the dove, plucked its feathers, and laid it before the alabaster statues while Taneses watched.