In the Shadow of the Ark (25 page)

He became an adviser unlike any the Rrattika had ever known. He encouraged them to hatch a plan. “It is important that most people go on thinking there will be enough room for everybody,” he said. “It will need muscle power and skill to conquer a place. That is what you must prepare for.”

Only much later did I comprehend what he was up to. He had not gone mad. He deliberately allowed them to cultivate him. He did what he had not done before: He penetrated these people’s world, not because he sought company, but because he was working on a solution. He was trying to save our lives. And he was plotting revenge.

The water in the pond rose, more tents had to be moved, travelers arrived with news of flooding in faraway regions. The hills filled with water; they resembled huge sponges from which you could
press fluid by simply putting your foot on them. Around us, people started hoarding anything that would float. They made rafts. They trekked long distances to gather branches, bind them together, and fit canvas around them. Others started to arm themselves excessively. They formed small militias and trained in the fields. They were the most dynamic amongst the Rrattika, people of enterprise with the courage to buck the established order. They knew that they had all undoubtedly done something that made it far from certain they would get a place on the ship.

But my father also mixed with those who did not bear arms or wear battle dress. To them he gave advice of a very different kind. He became a member of secret societies. They held meetings late at night. Together with men and women of varying backgrounds, he waxed indignant about the people who slept and slept and slept so they would not have to see the rain. We are so tired, they said, we have been working so hard. He was conspicuous with his dark skin; before long he could not cross the shipyard without being accosted ten, fifteen times. He encouraged people to sleep only during the hours of darkness. He called them to action. “Save yourselves. Do not blindly accept this fate. Be too smart for the Unnameable and force a second chance from him. Build a boat and lay in supplies.”

Even now that the ark was completed, very few understood how to do this. They still started by building a hull out of many small pieces and adding ribs and thwarts later. My father showed them it was necessary to first build the strengthening keel and that the superstructure should be fixed onto that. For the first time in his life he enjoyed the luxury of building boats from the
hardest and most expensive varieties of timber, varieties he had never handled before, brought here by caravans at the orders of prominent warriors in exchange for much money and silver. He got help, lots of help, from woodworkers who, now that the ark was finished, had nothing to do. When a boat was finished, it was carried under cover of darkness to a secret place in the hills. The buyers acted discreetly. They were afraid of what the mob would do once the water came.

And my father set the example in showing contrition. He was amongst the first to don sackcloth and get rid of his last belongings. He only kept the things he had plans for: a hook, his large fyke-net, ropes, four jugs, my mother’s seamless cloak, and a funnel. But his yoke, the chest, the spears, even the pouch with the big cats’ talons, he got rid of. Some of the people in the shipyard listened to his advice and followed his example. What else could they do? Their own wise men were not much use to them. The wise men of the Rrattika, those know-it-alls, who had previously accepted valuable items in exchange for their counsel, no longer ventured out. They hid like mice creeping into their hollows and did not move. The Rrattika found support from my father because he was the only one who still spoke. They shaved their heads and put their hair into a large pile, the plaits, the frizzy hair, and the lank tresses all mixed together. Onto another pile went all their clothes, onto yet another one their footwear. The way they stood there, their thin legs sticking out from under the hair blankets, all with the same shaven skulls, they looked almost appealing, and you could not imagine that they had called a calamity down upon themselves.

The Builder witnessed the display of penance and said, “What you are doing does not show genuine contrition. You are sacrificing, you are doing what you have always done for your old gods. If you were really contrite, you would not only cut off your hair, but also change your hearts. But you only cut off your hair.”

There was sadness in the singing of the workers early in the morning. They caught each other’s tones and complemented them. It was as if the hills themselves were singing plaintively. It was so beautiful I felt jealousy toward this people who, because of their common language and customs, their sense of unity and their adaptability, could survive anywhere in the world: They would always find themselves amongst their own sort and would always be at home. But their brotherliness had not done them much good. They gained no respite from the god they had chosen.

My father said, “I have worked with the Builder, but his god I am working against. I build boats for the warriors so they will survive, completely against his will. The boats are not big, but the important thing is they float. The calamity will not achieve its purpose, Re Jana, and that will be my doing.”

Ham too did penance. He renounced his place in the red tent. He no longer went to eat or sleep there, but lived like us, without a house, with only a fence to shelter against the rain and a stone to rest his head on. “I’ve come to finish the truss-boat,” he said to my father when he arrived with his pack. He provided us with as much timber as we needed.

S
hem and Japheth got wind of the fact that all over the hills boats were being built secretly. How could it be otherwise, it was practically impossible not to hear the banging of the hammers. The first to be suspected was, of course, my father. We were not surprised when, one morning, the two brothers were standing next to the truss-boat. They walked around it, examining every detail. Four cages had been constructed, two on each side. The face of the person sleeping inside and the top of the cage were less than an arm’s length apart.

“This will have to be destroyed,” said Shem. “How will the Unnameable’s plan succeed if we allow this?”

“They are free people,” replied Ham, his mouth still full of nails. “They can build a boat if they want to. The Unnameable has not ordered us to destroy other people’s boats.”

“But their work does not make sense,” said Shem with the fixed stare of someone whose eyelashes have been singed. “This is a stony desert. If people build a boat here, it can only be in order to escape the wrath of the Unnameable. They ape His commands. They ridicule Him. This is a trick by that boat builder from the marshes, can’t you see? First he persuades our old father that everybody has to be warned. Only if you do that do you
give people time to repent, he says. And now that everyone knows what is coming, instead of being penitent, they go and build boats! You know what will happen: When the flood comes, the Nefilim will rush onto these boats. In no time at all, they’ll populate the new world and the divine plan will be undermined, for the gestation time for the children they beget is not forty weeks but forty days.”

Even the cliff had become sodden the last few days. You did not climb up the path for fun, it was far too slippery. So Shem’s argument was dead serious, he was covered in mud, and he had no understanding whatever of a brother who was involved in this enterprise. He nodded at Japheth. Japheth looked around, went to Ham’s tool basket, and took up the ax that had long since been used to cut down the last tree in the area.

Ham was the first to realize what he intended. He dived for his brother to try and stop him. He stood between him and the boat, spread out his arms, and said, “Do not touch the boat that will be my deliverance. If you make that leak, I too will drown: I am not going on our father’s ark.” Ham’s greyhound whined. Japheth lowered the ax until its head touched the ground.

“Don’t carry on like that,” Shem said angrily. His shoes were not made for this sort of weather. They soaked up the water and sagged crookedly over his instep.

But Ham was not joking. Even to me this only became clear when he said, “The ark is doomed. How can I believe in my brothers’ righteousness if they allow a crippled woman to be abused in their tent? Some of us will be blessed, others cursed, the oracle said. I will earn the blessing. I am going on this boat.”

My father and I were speechless. The greyhound barked. Shem and Japheth left the field. Japheth had not spoken one word, but that was not unusual for him. Shem said no more either, which should have warned us. But we were so moved by Ham’s decision that we missed some of what was going on.

That evening Ham had a nose ring put in, shaped like a snake swallowing its tail. “The symbol of my determination,” he claimed. Going with us instead of with his father seemed a logical decision. He was convinced that, if the Unnameable wanted him to live, He would spare the truss-boat. In a touching way, he was certain that now nothing else could go wrong. “Our boat is just as good as theirs,” he said. It was better, he considered a bit later, more maneuverable, better arranged, easier to steer. To which my father, with the emphasis of someone who has chewed too many herbs, replied, “If not, we will await death with all our strength.”

Shem and Japheth did not order our boat to be confiscated. Of course, some accord was reached, though I had no idea what, but I could see that my father was shackled like a prisoner to an agreement. Suddenly he no longer talked to everybody, and he was not seen in the shipyard anymore.

Shem, Ham, and Japheth went and begged their mother, “Make Father bless us. Don’t let him wait until we are on the ship. There will not be enough time then.” They wanted the blessing for all three together, so he could not curse anyone.

“There is plenty of time for the blessing, I am not dead yet,” replied the Builder, and sent Zaza back to her sons.

Neelata knew of Ham’s intention to go on the truss-boat when the water came.

“That is good,” she said. “It is a good plan.”

“But we won’t be together,” I said.

“I’ll keep Put, you take Ham.”

“Put belongs with us, he is our child.”

“Leave Put with me. I have a large store of honey and dates. He is better off with me than with you.”

We were convinced that our separation would only be temporary. We had an unreasonably strong belief in our chance of survival. Yet we suffered the sort of sadness that does not leave you at night. The only thing that could make us forget it was the beauty of the ark: It was flawless, it was perfect. Its dimensions complied with divine proportions. It was not a ship, but a heavenly image of one. Looking at it was true comfort.

W
e had to move once again. My father and I were used to dealing with rising water levels. How often had we spent the night in our boats in the marshes because there had been heavy rain? We dug channels and, if necessary, cleared them every day. But after a while, despite all our precautions, it became too muddy in the quarry. It became so cold that we had to wear two hair shirts. We lived in a constant dilemma: Do we wash the mud out of our clothes, and if so, how do we get them dry? Supplies went bad, tools rusted, and wounds would not heal. Whoever still lived in the valley packed up their belongings and moved into the hills. Naturally, we went back to our field.

More people had come to live on the slope, like little Camia and her blind mother. Her eyes had been taken out, which made us suspicious, because we were aware that, for some of the peoples we knew, putting out the eyes was the punishment for treason; but she was so warm and affectionate with the child that she soon won our friendship. She seemed to have found a strange kind of reassurance in the fact that the same fate awaited everyone. She dispelled her daughter’s fear by making up a story about a beautiful blue river that would carry all people with it; all you needed to do was shut your eyes and let yourself float, and not be afraid
when the water closed above you, because that was the way it should be. Underwater you traveled faster. It was quiet there. You became lighter, and your hair moved in the current. The blind woman made gestures to go with her story, she threw Camia’s hair up and slowly let it come down again.

For Put, the girl was a playmate. They knew each other’s rhymes; the words were different, but the cadences were the same. The little girl seemed to thrive in our wet surroundings. Like her mother, she constantly sniffed the air; they were still getting used to the scent of moisture and the winds blowing from a different direction than they used to. She visited us, soaked but elegant, to shout words that made us laugh because even Put did not understand them. It was strange to experience how differently you see people when you know they are going to die soon.

P
laces you could once easily run across were now slippery and inaccessible. You couldn’t rely on rocks and boulders for support, because they had been loosened. All around, people were digging ditches as fast as they could, but to my surprise nobody built any footbridges. In the marshes, we’d had footbridges linking everything to everything. Here all you’d find was the occasional platform that soon sank into the mud. Everybody took to sleeping on platforms. Out of bamboo and scarce boards, stilt villages were constructed. Because the water was now running off the hillsides in streams, people moved back toward the ark: It didn’t matter much where you lived, you were going to get wet. We woke up with swollen throats. The little ones caught colds, their ears ran with pus, and they cried through the night. My father waded across the plots where his millet was rotting.

The wet did not come from the rain alone. It came from under us and from around us, it rose from everything. The earth slid away beneath us. Mosses grew in the fireplaces. Lakes and streams formed. Flowers bloomed in places where we had never seen any green before. The refuse that had been heaped up began to ferment, food scraps, excrement, everything became one big mash. The flies stung. In the hills, the swallows seemed to hit the
ground in full flight. The blackbirds huddled in the trees, smoothing their feathers. The chickens scrabbled in the mud. The cattle stood at one end of the enclosure, their heads into the wind. Sometimes the rain caught us in the middle of the night. Then we lay curled up, soaked, waiting for morning. And when it dawned, it always was like a betrayal: All it meant was yet more dampness we couldn’t bear.