In the Shadow of the Ark (35 page)

“Stand on my shoulder,” she said, helping me up. It was not easy. We were both bulky, and when we finally managed all I found in the air shaft was a snakeskin and a camel-hair sack.

Against my better judgment, I kept searching, in my head the memory of Put sitting in a corner nibbling the burned crusts of bread. He had those huge eyes that always looked innocent, even if he had just tied a knot in your girdle while you were asleep. He was like an attentive, faithful dog, who was always in the right place at the right time: If you were hungry, he would have just picked fruit from the tree, if you were driven mad by insects, he would have already squashed a lot of them with his hands.

But I did not find him then, nor later, when the ark was empty. The joy I had felt when we ran aground turned to sorrow.

H
aving run aground changed everything. The voyagers’ hope revived, they again dreamed of the land that would be lovely, undulating, without cliffs and without rocks, without ravines and caves that could harbor dangerous animals. For days, the ark lay in the water like a beacon. In the distance, the tops of acacias and cypresses became visible. The wind blew the moisture out of the gray crowns of the trees. We saw their branches covered in black seaweed, as if we were eagles soaring above everything. All that time, the Builder sat on a chair in the sun. I sat next to him, my hand under his. We watched the waters going down, which seemed to go on endlessly. What emerged was not beautiful to see. There was only slush and stones overgrown with algae. Slowly it became clear what our abode would be: a miserable little settlement by a string of ponds and lakes. This was no longer the old order, the rolling landscape we remembered. This landscape was repulsive and inhospitable, it was full of ugly outcrops, bulges, and sharp ridges. Ham voiced the questions that plagued us: “Are these the fields full of clover we have been promised? Was there not going to be a tree that bore fruit forever? What shall we eat?”

“Through the waters of death we have journeyed into life. Be grateful, my son,” said the Builder. But Ham coughed as if he wanted to make it impossible to understand his father’s words.

Once the water had gone down sufficiently, the Builder made his sons put down a gangplank, a new one, much wider than the one we had left behind. They used an extravagant number of undamaged planks taken from the roof. The animals stood petrified in the full sun; they squeezed themselves into the dark corners of their cages. For others, however, things did not move fast enough: They smashed the bars and bolts with their horns or their hind legs. The birds stretched their wings and left the ark through the gallery in such numbers that the sky was obscured by them.

When the ship was just about empty, I went back to my hut to help Taneses. We searched for a good spot for the alabaster statues, somewhere deep inside the ship. I took her to the niche my father had built. I found it fairly easily behind the terns’ cage, the obvious spot, selected by my father to save his family. The niche was unused, spacious, and easily locked, a place worthy of images of gods. Shem, Japheth, and Ham knew where it was, but I did not expect them to come looking for anything there now that the journey was over.

Then I took Taneses to the others. They stood watching the procession of the animals, every living creature, all moving animals, all that crawls on the earth. Nobody had expected her appearance.

“Very early on the voyage I found a child,” she said while everyone remained speechless. “A wild boy who would not
speak. I knew it was not permitted, but my mother’s heart spoke; I went into hiding in order to take pity on him.”

Japheth went to her and threw himself at her feet. “I have given your place to someone else,” he said hoarsely.

“I know,” Taneses replied. “And now I take it up again.”

T
he Builder went down the gangplank. The new land was still soggy, but it carried his weight. When he came to a raised area on the rock he called a few words to his sons. They came out with blankets and shade cloths, they set up screens so as not to feel the damp wind and scanned the surroundings for landmarks. Meanwhile, the Builder chose a rock over which he poured oil. “Let us thank the Unnameable,” he said.

A wide-eyed ewe had stopped on the gangplank, and Zedebab led it down. Carrying the animal on his shoulders, Shem waded through the mud. He put it down on the rock and held it down by the wool, the legs folded under the body. Japheth whetted the knife. The Builder took it from him. His thin cloak flapped in the wind. He made a slow, graceful movement. The ewe looked into the Builder’s eyes, right through the gesture. The shudder that went through its body was the only thing that betrayed the pain. The blood ran into the hollow in the rock.

“Now that the flood is over, we may eat the animals. We were promised that,” he said. They seized a second sheep, not for the sacrificial altar, but for themselves.

They asked me to look for something in Zaza’s hut that would soften the taste of the meat. I brought them dried thyme, dill,
and the last bit of salt I could find. Following my instructions, they put the cuts on the fire. Soon after, the scent of roasted meat filled the new air. Taneses was the first to cut a piece from the carcass. She ate, smacking her lips. The others ate hesitantly. As quails flew overhead, they sat with their backs to the fire, hoping to get the dampness out of their clothes. The legs and guts stayed behind on the rock. The ewe’s head turned black quickly, but with its eyes closed and the tip of its tongue hanging from its mouth, it seemed lost in a dream. On the swampy horizon stood a rainbow only the Builder paid attention to.

I
n the ark, that symbol of a death with dignity, I was the only one who stayed behind, together with the hundreds of flies that had settled on the animal droppings, with the parasites, the molds, and the fungi, and with the lingering stench of the badgers, beavers, muskrats, and skunks. The deck offered me views of surroundings where there was little to see. Yet there was something in the empty landscape that drew my attention, a point on the empty horizon, no more than a dot in the deserted plain. I dragged myself toward it. I was so big I could hardly move. The ground under my feet was not nearly as stable as I had hoped: It rocked like a ship.

As I moved away from the ark, I could not help looking quickly, from the corners of my eyes, the way Alem-the-ragged had taught me: This is how it should have been, this ship, this landscape, this small encampment with its fire, the colorless ground, I saw it all the way it had been meant to be without me. Me walking here observing it was not part of the divine plan. I belonged with the others in those perished cities where I had never been. The dot increased in size. I walked straight toward it. I recognized the faded, torn cloak and the blackened prow of the papyrus boat.

I waddled up to it and looked inside. There were traces of life, but life itself seemed to have disappeared. I walked around the boat as if I expected to find double walls or hiding places. I passed my hand over the sunshade and over the fishing net on the side. But there were tracks in the dried-up mud, footprints of someone who had gone away.

Panting from the effort of the walk, I stood for a while. The sun continued on its course. Around me was nothing but vastness.

I’ll follow the tracks,
I thought,
I’ll go after my father, but first I’ll rest a little while.
I had not sat down before I heard a rustling on the deck. I pulled away the smelly net in which dead fish were rotting and expected to discover some animal. But the creature that looked at me round-eyed and with disheveled hair was no animal. It could have been one, its movements were jittery, and it had its hands on the ground as if they were forelegs. It was Put.

I held out my arms to embrace him, but he reared back, uttering a low growl like an angry monkey.

“Did you escape here, little boy? Did the ark frighten you?”

He made no reply. He looked past me nervously, his face twisted.

“Shush, shush, easy,” I said. “Nobody here wants you to die. Taneses just scared you. That time is gone. With me, you’re safe.” But he still would not say a word.

“Did you come too late? Had my father left already when you got here? Was he the only one you still trusted, and have you lost him too now?”

He watered where he sat, I saw the yellow puddle spread by his feet. Every time I tried to put my hand out to him, he cowered
and hissed like a snake. I talked to him for hours. I kept repeating the same phrases. He listened as if he had never before heard the words I used. “You’re my little brother. The world is gone, but you and I are still here.”

I wanted to stay with him. I had already worked out how to make a bed with my mother’s cloak for cover, so I might be with him, slowly regaining his confidence. But I could not. The pain in my belly made me stagger. Water trickled from my body. I had to go back.

M
y child was born in the ark. Neelata was there. I lay in the wet hay. I sang storm songs, rowing songs, and songs for hauling up nets, while inside my body the slow beat of a wave grew. It resembled the swell of the waves we were so familiar with, that sluggish, almost pleasurable pain in my back and thighs.

I’m becoming a spring,
I thought, when my waters broke. The water came as a gift. It was like when you find a stone under which you think there is moisture; I experienced the same release, the same feeling of refreshment. You lift it up and you find sun-warmed water. The flow prevented me bursting apart.

Neelata pulled me down over her. She pressed her fingers so deeply into my arms that blue bruises appeared. It was no longer clear from whom the child was coming. She bore great pain. She called for a woman, her mother, I expect. “Eve!” she shouted. “You cursed slut! It’s your fault I am here, because of you my body is tearing apart!” The child broke out of our body, it gushed out of us as from an inner river, with still more water, as if there was not enough of that in this world already.

Then my father stood next to us. I saw his movements, but they were too fast for me to remember them. I asked him, “If I
can see your little boat, you must surely have seen ours? Surely you knew what was eating my heart?”

He replied, “What did you expect? That I should let myself be humiliated again by that scum? Did you think I would bow down in the mud after all that time? Have you not known me always as a man who takes the honorable way out? You need me no longer, I am what has to be forgotten. Your son is your future, make sure he is brought up amongst other boys.”

Neelata wrapped the child in cloth. At first, I did not look at it. I lay next to it, panting, my eyes closed. It asked for nothing and I slept to the sounds of animals that were already miles away, but which I could not keep out of my dreams, particularly those of the howler monkeys, they sounded the most gruesome. Neelata’s constant walking back and forth aroused my fear of the carnivores that I had seen leaving the ark: Were they far enough away, had they all really gone, were there none hiding in the pens and cages?

Only after a long time did I manage to open my eyes. The child was much darker than Ham and much lighter than me. I licked it the way I had seen the cattle do. My father was no longer there, but Ham was. He put amulets around the child.

I said, “Name him Canaan, I beg of you. Name him after the land of the marshes.”

“Canaan will be his name,” said Ham, laying his hand on the little head.

Every time Canaan pouted his lips against my nipple, my breasts started flowing. His smacking calmed my restless heart. I could not help feeling that it was not I who had given the child
life, but it me. I watched the little hands that wriggled, kneading my breast. I listened to the rumbling of his belly while he drank. The thread of saliva that linked me with him, the little, black-edged nails with which he scratched his own face, the haughty look in his eyes and his air of here-I-am-look-after-me made me forget the desolation outside. His thirst woke me several times during the night. In his haste he bit at my breast through my clothes. As you put your forehead against a piece of alabaster when you have a headache, so I lay my forehead against little Canaan.

Ham felt Canaan with his nose and chin instead of with his fingers. He said, “My child will not grow up on this wreck. On my arm he will enter the temple my father will build.”

A few times, I tried to explain to Neelata that Put was in the papyrus boat. It was difficult to persuade her that I was speaking the truth. Like me, she could not believe that Put had turned his back on us. But eventually she ordered Ham to not leave my side. She baked bread for him and for me. She cut his meat because he could not do it himself, and when everything was ready, set off for the papyrus boat.

“I
t would be better if we did not build permanent houses,” said Ham. “If we do not roam the land, we will stop working together. We will fight over a piece of land. We will form single families instead of wider clans and rise against one another.” But his brothers stacked stones into walls. They were afraid of the rumbling noises in the distance and the clouds that were piling up. The occasional appearance of a rainbow could make no difference to that. And the spot was lonely. Like mine, their gaze kept focusing on the horizon. Sooner or later we expected old acquaintances to appear there: Zedebab’s twin sister, the pitch workers and the carpenters, the warriors and the foremen. Camia and her mother. My father. But no one came, not even a couple of Nefilim to break the solitude.

One afternoon, eight days after Canaan’s birth, I heard someone move about on the ark. At first, I thought of an animal that had come looking for its old pen. Or was it Put, his fear overcome, returning to us? Put it was not, nor an animal. It was the Builder, who was approaching me with gently shuffling steps over the crumbling dung. “Why are you hiding?” he asked when he saw me lying in the hay. “I have looked everywhere for you. I have been in every pen in the ark. Why do you keep me searching?” His cloak
was lighter in color than when we were on the water. Zedebab must have taken it to one of the ponds, it was no longer stiff with stains as it had been. He smelled differently than he had during the journey too. He walked without difficulty. Obviously, the illness was leaving him in peace for a while before striking again.