Naamah Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Blake Schoenholtz

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Blake, Sarah (Poet), author.

  Title: Naamah : a novel / Sarah Blake.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025679 (print) | LCCN 2018050436 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525536352 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525536338 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Noah’s ark--Fiction. | Noah’s wife (Biblical figure)--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Religious. | GSAFD: Parables.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.L3485 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.L3485 N33 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025679

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket design: Stephen Brayda & Grace Han

  Jacket art: Detail from Circe, 1885 (oil on canvas) by John Collier (1850–1934) / Private Collection / Photo © Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images

  Version_1

  And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.

  This may have been true. And if He’d told them that, they might have understood more. They might have learned that what ran through each of them, what they all felt, could in fact be named.

  And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.

  And while God would act harshly, He would not act impulsively. And between His deciding to destroy all things and the act of doing so, He came to know Noah.

  Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

  With Naamah. Naamah was the first one to know Noah to be a just man and perfect in his generations. Naamah married him before God ever spoke to him.

  Naamah bore Japheth first. Then Shem. Then Ham. Though at some point Shem fell into the position of the baby of the family, spoiled and watched over. And Noah’s walks with God continued, every afternoon, and sometimes into the night, as Naamah raised the boys.

  When Noah brought home God’s command to build the ark, Naamah helped him to make a model of the ark out of stalks of grass. “How can we do this?” Noah asked. And though neither of them could answer, they began the work of it.

  And every thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant.

  They hurried their boys to marry, and they did without difficulty. Japheth married Adata; Ham, Neela; Shem, Sadie. Then there were eight of them to build. They worked for years. At night, they left and ate with their families, they played with children in the dirt. It was impossible for them to envision the destruction of the world. And why should they?

  Noah and Naamah shook with their imaginings.

  Two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

  “How can we do this?” Noah asked Naamah again.

  “If we don’t, we’ll die,” she answered. They were sitting on their bed.

  “Maybe we should die,” he said, “if every one of us is wicked.”

  “No,” she said, and she took him in her arms because he had begun to cry. “If I am sure of anything, I am sure that you and our children should not die.”

  He did not say anything.

  “I need you to be sure of it, too, Noah.” She pushed him away from herself. “I need for you, when you look at me, to be overwhelmed with the feeling that I should not die.”

  He looked at her and nodded slowly.

  “You don’t feel it,” she said.

  “I want to.”

  “What about our sons? Do you want them to die?”

  He shook his head.

  “But you think that maybe they should?”

  He nodded and she stormed around their bed, keeping her eyes up so he could see how she did not look at him.

  “Is it not love?” he shouted at her.

  She stopped and put her face very close to his. “Love is protecting them.”

  Neither of them said anything for a long time. They stayed in that position as if she could pin the thought into his head with her eyes.

  “Are you with me?” he asked her.

  “I am always with you,” she said.

  And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark.

  When the rains began, Noah’s doubt left him.

  When the rains continued, his guilt left him.

  When the waters were high enough to lift the ark from the earth, he and all the family were asleep.

  When they woke, they were adrift.

  And what was remarkable, to them all, was that they could not feel the difference between the earth covered with life and the earth barren of it. They each had thought they’d feel it somewhere in their bodies—their chest or gut or bones—but none of them did.

  And the waters prevailed upon the earth.

  There was a time, then, when God forgot about the ark on the floodwaters. It was not a long time for God, but it was a long time. Enough that the family began to feel as if they had always been adrift. The waking to water, every day, flat and blue and everywhere. When someone dies and you forget how they look or how they laughed, that is how they forgot the land.

  But only Naamah mourned it. The rest of them were merely eager to see it again.

  Naamah sometimes imagined the water was land. That she could stand on it and face the boat, which she refused to call an ark anymore, disenchanted with it and these weeks with the animals, rowdy and foul.

  From the surface of the water, the side of the boat seemed insurmountable, too big to be real. But given time and tools, she thought, she could climb it. She could solve it.

  Naamah knew that the true difficulty was in her own position, on the boat.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENT
Y-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  Naamah is watching the horizon, hoping something will interrupt it and distract her, pull her eye to it, a moment of focus. She is humbled by the flood, but how long can someone reasonably be asked to experience humility?

  She hears Noah’s steps behind her and turns to him. “You scared me,” she says.

  “Sorry. I came to find you.”

  If she positioned Noah just right, along the railing, if she backed away from him, maybe his dark body would be tall enough to break the horizon. “I don’t feel well,” she says.

  “Sick?” He puts his arms around her waist.

  There are chickens and other animals wandering the deck. She can hear them, but she can’t see them.

  “No,” she says. “Tired.”

  “Go tend to an animal.”

  She sways her body in a loose no.

  “Let one nuzzle into your hand.”

  He’s right. That used to cheer her up. “I can’t see them anymore,” she admits.

  “You can’t see them?” He comes around beside her, looks at her.

  “No,” she says. She states it so plainly she surprises herself.

  The chickens are around their feet now, knowing Noah often has grain in his pocket. She feels one brush her leg and her body jumps; she hadn’t realized how close they were. She doesn’t know why she can’t see them, but she’s almost happy to be free of them, in this one way.

  “Maybe you’ll be able to see them again tomorrow,” Noah says.

  But that makes her feel worse. She squeezes her eyes shut.

  Noah puts his hand on hers. “Come to bed, won’t you?”

  “It smells down there,” she says.

  “Then we’ll sleep up here tonight. I’ll get blankets.”

  “Okay,” she agrees, and he is already off with purpose in his quick step.

  * * *

  • • •

  SLEEPING ON THE DECK IS COLD, even under the blankets and folded into Noah, against his large, flat stomach. She remembers nights in the desert, in the tent, sleeping in this same position, but warm. They started so near to home; now, she can’t say where they are. She thinks that air must get cooler as it crosses the water. She thinks of the air traveling with such freedom across the earth, and she falls asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  HER OLDEST SON, Japheth, often stands with her, looking out over the water. He’s not much taller than she is. She doesn’t have to raise her head to look him in the eye when he speaks. He tries to keep conversation light, tries to keep her happy, as if her unease depends on whether he can make her laugh. But sometimes he lets her lead the conversation where she’d like.

  “Do you think about how many animals died?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think about how many people died?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Do you think about the little things? Like what clothes they were wearing?”

  “No.”

  “Only the big things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like how terrible it would be to drown?”

  “Yeah.”

  She turns even further to the water. “It’s all I can think about.” She opens her shoulders to the floodwaters, which she wants to call the sea. “When do you think it will go down?”

  “Soon. I have to think it’s soon.”

  “Yes,” Naamah says.

  * * *

  • • •

  HER FIRST LABOR, with Japheth, had been the most difficult. She had cramps through the night, then the mucus fell out, bloody and thick, then the pain, then the water, then, eventually, Japheth. They saw his head so many times, with each push, before she could get him out. But she did. And then her next sons came easily, as if Japheth had broken something that never needed to be set right again.

  When Japheth was a teenager, he noticed that one of his teeth still had a ragged top, as all his teeth had when they first tore through his gums. He ran his fingernail over it again and again. It made a small click only he could hear. He asked Naamah if it would ever flatten, but she didn’t know.

  As soon as she birthed him, she knew that his body would be the most unpredictable thing in her life. It should have been obvious. Noah’s body was not hers. No one’s body was hers but her own. But after growing Japheth, after seeing the shape of his head through her skin, she felt deeply that his body was hers. And that feeling never passed. Later, as she had her other sons, the feeling grew less distinct and gave the illusion of passing, but then something would happen—say, a skin tag growing at an alarming rate near the crease of his elbow—and she would feel it again. How he belonged to her. And how separate they were.

  She also began to feel separate from her own body. During that first labor, she had developed a hemorrhoid, which she didn’t notice until weeks later, when it was no longer filled with blood, just a fold of skin that refused to retreat. If she gathered it up and pushed it down, it felt like a soft, round button. Otherwise it sagged. Her body made less and less sense to her as it seemed to reject itself.

  But she loved to think of that first labor, holding on to that memory more vividly than others, than normal, happy times, eating dinner, playing games with the boys, telling them stories. She wanted to remember those times, but what could she do? Now she revisits her body in full contraction, covered in sweat. She can see the color of the sand beside her. She can feel the desert air rush through the tent, opened in the back and front, to cool her. She can no longer smell it, but the rest is enough.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH LAYS OUT LUNCH on a blanket on the deck. Bowls of hummus, flatbread, dried figs, water to pass around. Noah and Japheth come to the deck first, followed by the younger sons, Shem and Ham, and then each of her sons’ wives, as if they’d been speaking somewhere, privately.

  “Good morning,” Noah says, beaming at his children.

  They all say their good mornings, first to Noah and then to each other, nodding little nods, smiling, sitting down in spots that have become theirs in the weeks since the rains stopped.

  They eat quietly. They seem to pause to smell the wind off the sea, but it is not the sea; the smell is not salty but cool and crisp and not unpleasant.

  Shem shoos away two goats that Naamah cannot see. Ham’s wife, Neela, tosses a bit of bread in their direction. Naamah watches the bread land, then watches it disappear. She can picture the animal so clearly: its bent neck, its lips and teeth. She doesn’t need to see it.

  “Don’t do that,” Naamah says.

  Neela looks embarrassed until Ham places his hand on her hand, and Neela remembers she doesn’t need to mind Naamah.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS, they had to stay below deck. One time, Naamah undressed and snuck up. The rain hurt her skin as it fell on her, as she watched it beat the deck and then rush off the sides through the bars of the railing. The boat rocked, but not enough to worry her, just enough to let the water show how it could move together, just enough that one could imagine how waves form.

  When she couldn’t take it any longer, she returned to her room with Noah, her brown skin beaten pink. Noah rushed to her with a blanket and held her, dried her, warmed her, and she hid how much it hurt her, to be held then. The next day it was easy enough to avoid anyone’s touch. And the day after that her skin had calmed.

  She had wanted to try going out again, to test the feeling, but she was overwhelmed by her new understanding of the deaths of the people God no longer wanted.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOW, AFTER LUNCH, Naamah sits on the deck with a mallet and chi
sel, some rope, and a piece of wood, slightly longer than the width of her. She hammers holes into the wood and threads the rope through. Once the rope is in place, running along the underside of the wood and splaying out of the other side like two tentacles, she sits down on the wood and pulls the ends of the rope up around herself.

  She raises her arms above her head, trying to imagine the safest way to position the rope if she were deadweight. She lets herself slowly feel out the differences in the rope, higher and lower, with her head hung and with it raised. The rope is rough and reminds her of a braid of hair.

  When everything feels right, she readjusts the lengths of rope on either side of her and ties a square knot, securing it. She tests it again, her hands above her, her head leaning into the softness of her own upper arm.

  She’s so near to completing the swing that she fills with excitement. She has been building it in her mind for days and has to remind herself not to rush now.

  Finally, she adds another rope to the end of her first with a sheet bend knot. She uses two half hitches to tie it to the railing by the stairs. In her eagerness, she pulls on it harder than necessary, to make sure it holds. Her hands are burned. Where they were already chapped, they bleed.

  Blood marks the wood of the seat when she grabs it and throws it over the side. She closes her eyes to listen, to hear if the rope is long enough to reach the water. It is. She hears it splash. She takes a few deep breaths, reveling in this small glory. Then she pulls the seat back up, leaves it to mark the deck a shade darker with its wetness, for as long as the sun will allow.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN THE BOYS WERE YOUNG, they would walk quite far to the river for water. The boys would get their feet wet in the shallows and run away from the muddy bank, as fast as they could, hoping their feet would stay wet long enough to make footprints when they reached the sand. Shem’s small feet were somehow always dry when he got there; Ham left only heel prints because he’d run on tiptoe through the softer dirt. Japheth teased them both.