I wish for the rain to drown everything out once more.
***
By the time Father and Uncle Ham return, Aunt Zeda has wrestled up more bread and water. She says eating will make us feel better, but I think she just relishes the chance to order the rest of us around. I only manage a few bites before my stomach rebels, and the water tastes like old metal and something rancid—or perhaps that’s just the taste permanently lodged at the back of my throat.
At least Father tells me the animals are all right. Frightened and distressed, but all right.
***
As darkness begins to creep its way back into the ark, we women go back to the room where we slept last night. We make our way on hands and knees, like animals ourselves—all of us except Aunt Zeda, that is, who appears to have a stomach made of metal. I wonder why we bothered to move in the first place.
When I’ve managed another trip to the bucket in the corner and collapsed on my blanket, I decide I won’t make the mistake of moving again.
Chapter Seven
I’ve been enclosed within these four cedar-wood walls for an eternity. A lifetime. Lifetimes. I think what’s worst of all is being able to hear and feel what’s going on outside, but not to see it, not to know. It’s like walking around with a thick, itchy wool cloth pressed tight against my eyes. Except I’m still not doing much walking.
I’d swear my ears have grown more sensitive, though, and out of the cacophony of birdcalls from the room beside us, one in particular seems to pierce though me. It’s a low cooing, smooth and hollow and somehow unbearably sad, that sounds a bit like the reed pipes Derya’s father used to play. Even through the higher, more demanding chirps and squeals, I recognize that call: a dove’s song.
Kenaan’s been feeding the birds since he recovered a bit from his sickness, and I’ve been staying away as much to avoid him as the reptiles. But right now Kenaan is with his parents, grumbling about his stomach again, and I decide I must find that dove. I can’t ignore its cries of distress any longer.
I rise slowly, painfully, with one hand against the wall to brace myself, and as I move toward the bird room I keep my hand on the wood. If I let go I would surely fall, for the floor still tips in all directions. It’s mainly just a slight rocking, but every few steps I take, an alarming lurch threatens to send me sprawling across the ark. Then I have to stop, leaning both hands against the wall, as I wait for my spinning head and stomach to recover.
It seems to take hours, but at last I’m close enough to the bird room to make out a new sound: a dull, repetitive thud that echoes inside me, as if my bones are knocking against each other. I force myself to move faster, but then I hear a shrill voice call, “Slow down!”
I turn my head to find Shai following behind me. “Wait for me,” she cries, trailing one hand against the wall like I’ve been doing as she tiptoes forward. I’m tempted to tell her walking on her toes will only make her feel worse, but her brow is furrowed in such intense concentration, I don’t want to distract her. She looks almost like a phantom, her limbs twig-like and bony, face pale and bloodless and nearly yellow; her hair is half plaited, half just a bird’s nest of knots, and her shift is dirty and torn. The sight of her makes something wrench inside me, but I know I look much the same. We all do.
We head together into the bird room, where I’m relieved to see the reptile cages are all against one wall and easily avoided. Clearly Noah hasn’t visited here, or we’d have heard his grumblings: I doubt Kenaan’s rounded up every type of snake and lizard in our village, much less in the world. And I count very few insects among the paltry row of cages. No butterflies, of course, for how could Kenaan catch a creature so delicate? I have a sudden longing to see one of those beautiful, pale blue butterflies that flock around the red azalea bushes in the spring. It would flit through the ark, graceful and sure and free of the sickness that plagues us earthbound creatures, its wings the color of a cloudless summer sky—
But I’m forgetting why I’m here. And the thud, thud that accompanies the dove’s cooing grows ever more insistent. The birdcages are scattered through the room in a jumbled mess, most of them far from any wall that might keep them from slipping and sliding with the pitch of the ark. No wonder the birds are so frightened.
Shai and I have to let go of the wall ourselves to pick through the cages—no hawks or eagles, I notice, despite Kenaan’s bragging that he’d trap one—until we reach the source of all the racket, and I suck in a sharp breath. One of the doves is flinging itself against the bars of its cage, over and over, though its left wing droops at an awkward angle and it must be in terrible pain. Its mate sits at the back of the cage, head tucked to its breast, seemingly indifferent.
I kneel and open the cage, but when I reach inside the dove’s frenzy increases. She—I have no way of knowing, but it seems like a she—does her best to flee my hand, scooting backward and trying to lift herself on her injured wing. She only makes it a hand’s breadth from the ground before falling again. I take a deep breath before grabbing the bird around her middle and pulling her from the cage. I’m shocked by the warmth of her body and the strength of her rabid heartbeat, hitting against the barrier of her bones again and again the same way she threw her entire body against the bars.
I lower myself all the way to the floor and sit with crossed legs, placing the dove on my lap, and she calms a bit—until I try to examine her injured wing. Then her cries become higher and even more panicked, her entire body shakes, and she tries to flee me again. “We have to bind her wing,” I tell Shai, “or it will never heal, with the way she keeps struggling. Can you get me some cloth—a blanket, maybe?”
Shai nods, wide eyed, and hurries off as though the rocking floor no longer bothers her. I realize I too have forgotten my own tender stomach, now that I’m focused on the dove. Still, it seems far too long before Shai returns, clutching a drooping wool blanket and breathing hard. I hand Shai the bird and she sits, stroking the dove’s white and brown-dappled feathers, as I set to tearing strips off the blanket. But my arms are weak—I’ve barely eaten these past few days, after all—and the fabric is unyielding. Well, what else could I have expected from a blanket Zeda wove?
I glance around to make sure no one else has wandered in, and then I pull my carving knife from beneath my now very bedraggled blue cloth belt, where I’ve kept it since I first stepped onto the ark. I couldn’t exactly tuck it under my blanket at night, after all, unless I wanted to risk it sliding its way across the ark.
Shai gasps when she catches sight of the bronze blade, gleaming even in this dull, muted light. “Where did you—”
“Shh,” I shush her, “don’t tell your parents, all right?”
“I won’t.” She bites her lip and looks down at the dove again, her dark eyes serious and tender.
With the help of my sharp blade, the fabric parts easily as a fallen leaf in a child’s hand. Strangely, I have the urge to dig the knife into something harder, to form the dove’s shape out of wood and see if I can capture the soft slope of her feathers. Surely there could not be a worse time or place to practice my carving, and besides, I’ve given up that pointless habit. But my thoughts are not so sensible.
My thoughts don’t rule my actions, though, and I set aside my foolish desire as I focus on tearing the blanket into even strips. I take the dove from Shai and wrap the cloth gently but firmly around her injured wing, hoping it will hold the fragile bones in place. “Shh, shh,” I soothe her, trying to convince myself as well as the bird that I know what I’m doing. When I lift my hands for a moment, I see she can still move the muscles where her wing connects to her body—in fact, she’s frantically twitching there, trying to lift the wing and fly. So I wrap another strip of cloth over the wing and then under the dove’s belly, over her back, twice, three times, till I’ve reached the end of the strip and tied it to the other pieces of cloth. Now she’s not able to move that wing at all, and her shrill coos have dulled to a whimper. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, a
nd hesitate before adding, “I’m sorry, Aliye.” The name means “high one,” and I mean it as a promise, or at least a hope, that one day she’ll fly high again.
I ask Shai to open the cage door so I can return Aliye, but as soon as I’ve closed the door behind her, the bird lets out the most woeful, pitiful, pathetic cry of a coo you could ever imagine. “She wants out!” Shai says. “She wants to be held!”
“She didn’t seem so happy to be held before,” I grumble. “I think she’s just too smart, and she knows now she has a name she can demand special treatment.”
Even before I’ve finished speaking, Aliye has begun throwing her body against the bars once more. She may not be able to move her wing any longer, but it will never heal if she keeps abusing it like that. “Too smart,” I mutter again. I reach for the dove once more, and she quiets. Already she seems to be growing used to my arms—or perhaps she just prefers them to the cage.
Still, navigating the ark proves much more difficult while holding an injured bird, and I’d swear the floor’s swaying has grown even stronger. By the time I’ve made it back to my blanket, I’m so dizzy and exhausted that I nearly collapse onto the floor.
***
I wake from a dream of blue butterflies and white birds to my father’s gruff voice. “Daughter,” he says, “has your stomach settled?” I open my eyes to find him peering down at me, his own eyes wide with hope even as his mouth closes tight, the taut curve of it grim and worried and perhaps even resentful. As I wake fully I realize my mother’s sitting upright beside me, her own expression stern. Please your father, that look says.
So I sit up and answer, “Yes, Father, I am much better,” though my gut sends up a wave of protest at the lie.
“Good.” He sighs, his gaze straying to the dove perched in her own nest of a blanket beside me. I know he sees the bird, but he makes no comment, saying only, “Nahala, my wife, and Neima, my daughter”—Why is he being so formal? He’s procrastinating, I decide, putting off what he doesn’t want to say—“I know you are—have been—ill, and I hate to ask this of you. But we need your help. There are too many animals to care for, and the smell below has become unbearable. If we could just clean up some of that animal waste—”
“Of course, Father,” I say, with a twinge of guilt that I’ve been neglecting my duties and, if I hadn’t been prodded, would have continued to do so.
But Father shakes his head, puts a hand up to stop me, and goes on, “I never thought I’d have to ask my wife and daughter to work when you’re unwell, but—”
I sigh. He is so good, and it only makes me feel worse.
“—but your uncles and grandfather and I must spend our time working on the ark itself, checking the walls and shoring up the weak spots. Even the smallest leak could be devastating. I’m sorry—”
Now I’m perplexed. “Surely we could deal with one little leak. And how can there be weak spots, with all the work you’ve done?” Father’s face turns harder, and, unaccountably, my heart beats faster. “In any case, in a few days the waters will recede, right?” I’m rambling, but I can’t stop. “And we’ll be able to leave—”
“Neima!” my mother says sharply, “don’t question your father.”
I barely hear her, though, for Father’s face has gone harder still, and paler, till it resembles a weathered stone: he’s realized he’s said too much. My body feels heavy, as though the ark really has sprung a leak and it’s sinking, fast, and pulling me down with it. Without a word, I stand and head for the room next door, for the ladder to the deck house, fighting to keep my steps sure and steady.
“Neima, what are you—” Mother calls at the same moment as Father says, “I don’t think that’s a good id—”
But then Arisi and Shai, both of whom have been listening to our entire exchange, rise to follow me, and chaos erupts. “Arisi, you can’t!” Japheth calls, while Aunt Zeda flies in like a whirlwind from the far corner of the room and yanks Shai back.
“I want to see!” Shai whines, and I turn back toward her. As Zeda hangs impatiently above us, I kneel so my eyes are level with Shai and whisper so only she can hear me:
“I need you to stay here and watch Aliye, all right? She’ll be scared if we both leave.” Shai narrows her eyes almost shrewdly—she knows I’m putting her off. But after chewing her lip for a moment, she turns back toward the dove.
Arisi and Japheth are still bickering as we near the ladder, and my earlier guilt and fear is turning to frustration. What are the men keeping from us, and what makes them think they have the right to do so? “You would treat your wife like a child,” I ask Japheth, “when she is carrying your own babe even now?”
“I’m only trying to keep her safe!” Japheth says as Arisi pushes past both of us.
“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here,” she snaps, grabbing the ladder with tightly clenched hands.
“Shem,” Japheth asks my father, “will you allow this?”
“They’ll have to know eventually.” Father’s voice is defeated, but I refuse to look at him. He’s right: I have to know.
Japheth shoots me a glare as he helps Arisi up the ladder and I follow behind. “Well,” I mutter under my breath, “it’s not like one trip up a ladder will make her lose the baby.”
I’m relieved that neither Mother nor Father climbs the ladder, but I’m equally relieved—though I won’t let Japheth know so—that I’m not up here alone. Inside the deck house, the windows are still too high for me to see much, so I throw open the door and step out into the rain and the wind. The sudden chill rolls through me, refreshing at first, but as I draw closer to the edge of the deck the drop in temperature feels increasingly sinister.
And then I’m at the railing, clutching the wood barrier so tight the flesh of my palms burns, but still I’m falling, or maybe floating—certainly I’m not on solid ground any longer, for there is no solid ground and the world is upside down. The sky is below us, a thick liquid swirl that’s not blue or black or gray, green or brown or white, but somehow all of these colors at once. Mostly it’s just one dark mass that blends seamlessly into the clouds and falling rain above it, so that there seems to be no distinction between what is overhead and what is beneath us. But I know, in the churning pit of my stomach, that what’s below is not a cloudy sky but water, water that extends in all directions, farther than the eye can see, water with no end and no bottom, water that my mind rejects as impossible even as my eyes insist it is there before me.
Japheth and Arisi approach the railing beside me, but I barely register their presence, for I’ve begun to make out the things in the water, tossing and turning on the endless waves, adding the glints of colors within the blue-gray. I see branches with a few bedraggled leaves still hanging on, entire tree trunks, and even, at the end of one trunk, a mass of roots that must have been torn forcibly from the ground. I see glints of straw atop mud-brick slabs that must once have been roofs, or walls. I see broken clay pots and wooden barrels, long, torn strips of leather that might once have covered tents, and bloated masses of fur that I fear are—were—animals, though I’m loathe to look too close.
And then something drifts close to the ark, something that looks like a tangled clump of long black hair…and then, when the water tosses the dark strands to one side, an unnaturally white, thick column that might be a neck…a neck connecting to a shoulder and down a bloated arm to the monstrously swollen, ravaged extremity that was once a hand and fingers. And then I close my eyes.
I want to retch, to expel the mass of fear and confusion and revulsion that has gathered inside me, but my body won’t allow me that relief. Eyes still closed, I hear Japheth say, in a voice so quiet it’s a wonder I can hear him over the rain, “We’ve drifted far from our village. The homes and possessions and—and bodies you see do not belong to anyone we know.”
But what Japheth says doesn’t matter, for whether I can see their bodies or not, I know they’re all dead. Jorin. Derya. Old Hannah, whose house wa
s the first to collapse in the storm. All the women who used to gossip about our family at the river. All the children who laughed and danced in the first raindrops. Munzir, even. But most of all, Jorin. Derya. Derya. When the last thing I said to her— The last thing she said to me—
I snip off that train of thought and immediately confront another, almost equally horrifying one: all this—the storm, the flood, the death—means Noah’s one God is real. Doesn’t it? How else could my grandfather have predicted this disaster? But no…I can’t believe it. For how could one God cause so much destruction? How could one God hold mastery over the clouds and rain, wind and thunder, over the lives of every living creature upon the earth, both animal and human? And if a God did create all this, did control the world’s fate, why would he choose to destroy it?
Evil, something whispers within my mind. Noah said God wanted to rid the world of evil, of man’s wickedness. Wickedness like that of the bandits who attacked and stole from Grandfather, who left Grandmother Nemzar violated and bleeding. But not all people are wicked. Surely not those children who rejoiced in the falling rain, who took pleasure in and gave thanks for the earth’s bounty. Surely not Derya, who stood up for me so many times, and not mischievous but kind, kind Jorin. And even those members of our village who could be cruel, or petty, or power thirsty, like Munzir and his followers…not even they deserved to die.
My eyes are open now, but I stare into the gray expanse without seeing; the world is only a reflection of my own dark, whirling thoughts. For if this vengeful God does exist—and I’m still not sure he does, despite all the evidence before me—why would he choose to save our family and no other? We are not so pure, so different from those who have perished. I myself have wished Noah dead, have wished that my mother were kinder, that Ham had chosen a different wife and that Kenaan were not my cousin…