Read In the Shadow of the Ark Online
Authors: Anne Provoost
In the Shadow of the Ark
In the
Shadow
of
the Ark
ANNE PROVOOST
T
RANSLATED BY
J
OHN
N
IEUWENHUIZEN
The story of Neelata’s mother is based on the story of Darivs I, told by Herodotus in the third book of his Histories.
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
— Genesis 6:5-8
2: The People Building the Ark
14: The Animals Come, in Ever-Growing Numbers
16: The Ban on the Eating of Meat
21: A Conversation in the Tent
22: The Fall of the Pitch Workers
28: The Message of Doom Is Forgotten
31: The Betrayal of the Spring
40: The Feast of the Foremen and Warriors
43: The Discovery of the Truss-Boat
46: The Windows of the Heavens Are Opened
65: The Receding of the Waters
66: Our Arrival in What Was Said to Be Paradise
We left our land because the marshes where we used to fish were flooding. The tide line was getting ever closer to the slopes where we dried our catches. For years we did our best to move up with it, but in the end it became impossible. The waters threatened our houses, children drowned, harvests and catches rotted. We decided to go away, a long way to the East, to the place where, according to the wandering Rrattika, there lived shipbuilders who were constructing the largest ship of all time and who were looking for workers. We bought a donkey and a tent of animal hide. With great difficulty, we learned to handle the tent. Then we traveled inland, away from the marshes and the duck ponds where we had lived for generations. My father had asked brothers and cousins to provide lights for our departure. One last time he gazed at the many boats he had built; side by side they lay at the edge of the water. As we left, he sang, but if you listened carefully, you could hear that he was uttering curses.
When we looked back from the first hill, we saw, far behind us, the torches fanning out, everyone disappearing into their own houses. I knew what they were saying to one another around their hammocks. That the rising water was not the real reason for our leaving Canaan. That my father had caved in to my mother’s will. That we would be sorry and would be back before the change of season.
I had no need of the torches and the polite farewell wishes. I would much rather have left without anyone noticing. Yet I let out a shout from the top of that hill, “It is going to be good out there, much better than here! You will hear about us in songs and stories!” My voice broke, I was so hoarse from the hard work of the last few days. I was straining so hard that the jars hanging off my yoke shook and knocked into one another. I was about to shout something else, but kept my words back because I thought I saw a light appear in a doorway. Was someone coming out with a new plea, the deciding one that would keep us here? I rested one end of the yoke on the ground. One single slope we had climbed, and already I felt the need to sit down.
Nobody came out. In anticipation of daylight, small oil lamps were being lit from the fire of the torches, and the torches were being extinguished. My father said, “Don’t bellow like that and look after your things, Re Jana. Don’t flaunt your good fortune if you do not want to draw the attention of everything that is intent on thwarting us.” I took up my yoke and walked on. There was no good fortune to flaunt, he knew that as well as I. There was only the dull, thoughtless carrying out of my mother’s plan.
A strange caravan we made. At the head walked Alem-the-ragged, a tracker who was not related to us, but who journeyed with us to show the way. He was a Rrattika. Like all Rrattika, he was shabby, lived from hand to mouth, and did not ask how we were when he greeted us. We called him “the ragged” because of his long mustache, his drooping shoulders, and his clothes, which were gray like the mud in which they were washed. He did not smell of oil, like us, but of fat. The fact that my father had engaged him had to do with his talent. From tiny impressions in the ground and almost invisible scraps of fleece caught in thornbushes, he could tell which way the animals we were following had gone. He taught us how to “half-look.” As long as you were just looking, all you saw was the little dimples the rain had made in the sand. By half-looking out of the corner of your eye, quickly turning your eyeball away, or by squinting through your eyelashes, you could see a line in the landscape, the track you had lost.
He had his son with him, a young child not half my age, named Put. The child was as dark as I am, so even the Rrattika we met thought he was one of us. He was an intent child. His father wanted him to look at the ground and at the horizon, drawing his attention to the small creases in the landscape that indicated the presence of rocks or water, but the child had no eye for these things. His attention focused on us. He was always the first to notice an ulcer growing under someone’s nail or the sun scorching particular parts of our skin. Then he would call out, “Father, I’m tired as a dog,” but he himself kept ceaselessly running back and forth, even long after we had sat down, sometimes even after we had fallen asleep.
Behind Alem came the donkey. It was young and very willing during the day, but at night it was so beset by whips and prods in its dreams that it brayed constantly and kept us awake. Its shoulders were covered with blankets to prevent chafing. It pulled the reed sled on which my mother lay. The sled was supported on the donkey’s flanks with a bracket, the other end was flat and dragged along the ground. If anyone wanted to follow us, all they had to do was look for the deep furrow left on the hills by the weight of my mother’s body. She was wrapped in the same dried grass–filled blankets as the donkey. Not that it was much help: After only a few days, her back was blue from the bumps and the rubbing, and the back of her head practically bald. We stopped more often to change her position than to drink.
Then there was me, Re Jana. I had nearly reached the end of my growing years. The rate at which my arms and legs were getting longer was slowing down. I was nearly as tall as my father and for my yoke I could use the ropes he had made to fit himself. I carried the jars of oils and scents. If I stumbled, they all knocked together and I sounded like a boisterous little band. Close to my body, up against my shoulders, I carried my store of water. To get used to living on land, I drank gourds-f; Alem insisted that would help. Just like dry bread stops you feeling sick on a boat, fluid in your stomach was supposed to protect you against the anxiety and oppressiveness of being on land. I accepted every word out of Alem’s mouth as the truth. He was a wanderer, he had seen the world! I had never quite been able to hide my fascination with his people, with their swarms of children, with the way they shook the clothes they had slept in of a morning, like wading birds shaking their feathers, and with the way they would, from one moment to the next, string all their belongings together and throw them onto their animals’ backs, hoist their children onto their hips, and disappear. They could go without food for days on end; even as children they learned to get used to the feeling of gnawing hunger. Privation was a mere inconvenience.
Last came my father. He assumed that a Rrattika could only rarely be right, and paid the price for it: He refused to drink unheated drinks, and often the only thing he would take in before nighfall would be the sun-warmed drops from blackberry flowers. And so the land made him sick. He plowed up the ground with his stick as if it were an oar rather than a support. He was not used to walking far; in all of his life he had rarely covered any distance greater than a few times the length of his fishing boat. He had great strength in his arms, but hardly any in his legs. Yet he never stumbled, his attention to the unevenness of the path never slackened. His balance was important, because he carried the silkworm cage, which had been specially designed for the journey. The small mulberry bush had its roots in water, so the silkworms were constantly threatened with death by drowning. And he carried the brazier, that glowing escape from hunger and cold. But above all, he was fulfilling my mother’s dream: He was taking her away from the water. He was making good his promise to go and live in the stony desert, to find other work and another place to live, away from the marshes with their nerve-racking tides.