The Book of Heaven: A Novel Read online

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

  Copyright © 2014 by Patricia Storace

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Interlink Publishing Group, Inc., for permission to reprint “Thus I Write the History of Women” from On Entering the Sea by Nizar Qabbani. Original Arabic text copyright © 1995 by Nizar Qabbani; English translation copyright © 2013 by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Reprinted by permission of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Storace, Patricia.

  The book of heaven / Patricia Storace.

  pages cm.

  ISBN 9780375408069 (hardback) ISBN 9780307908698 (eBook)

  1. Women—Fiction. 2. Astrology—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T648B66 2013 813'.54—dc23 2013022316

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Linda Huang

  ep_v4.0

  For the Archangel: Michael Anthony Kazmarek

  I want you female as you are.

  I claim no knowledge of woman’s chemistry

  The sources of woman’s nectar

  How the she-gazelle becomes a she-gazelle

  Nor how birds perfect the art of song.

  I want you like the women

  In immortal paintings

  The virgins gracing

  Cathedral ceilings

  Bathing their breasts in moonlight

  I want you female…so the trees will sprout green

  And the misty clouds will gather…so that the rains will come

  *

  I want you female because

  Civilization is female

  Poems are female

  Stalks of wheat

  Vials of fragrance

  Even Paris—is female

  and Beirut—despite her wounds—remains female

  In the name of those who want to write poetry…be a

  woman

  in the name of those who want to make love…be a

  woman

  and in the name of those who want to know God…be

  a woman.

  —NIZAR QABBANI, “Thus I Write the History of Women”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A View From Another Heaven

  Part I

  The Book of Souraya

  The Proverbs of Souraya

  Part II

  The Book of Savour

  The Proverbs of Savour

  Part III

  The Book of Rain

  The Proverbs of Rain

  Part IV

  The Book of Sheba

  The Proverbs of Sheba

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Patricia Storace

  PROLOGUE:

  A VIEW FROM ANOTHER HEAVEN

  We on earth navigate by the stars, so it is no wonder we have gone so far off course—since we have never seen more than a fragment of Heaven. Our knowledge of Hell is more detailed, and at least of certain regions, even thorough; we have spent so much more of our time and resources on the exploration of Hell. Hell is a much easier object of study; though it has endless variations, its nature is repetitive and unchanging. The stories of the damned told there all end the same way.

  Heaven, by contrast, is infinite in a different way, endlessly reconceiving itself as the ocean does. In Heaven, the equinoxes shift; even the pole stars change places, changing what we trust and rely on, believe, what we are sure we know. You look and see, as you expect to, Polaris, now the North Star, the certainty of Heaven; but the brilliant Thuban, five thousand years ago, was once the pole star. At the time the pyramids were built, Thuban was the star that oriented us, and composed in Heaven our sense of where we were.

  We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn’t hear, or wouldn’t believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.

  Heaven is not to be confused with Paradise; I had so little time in Paradise that I cannot tell you much about it. What I know of Paradise, I know through men. But Heaven is my home, and there are things about it I will always remember, however far away from it I am now. That is why I can tell you that I have seen more than I imagined was there, even though I, too, have seen only a fraction of what exists.

  The first Heaven I knew is the one we all know, the one with the constellations we have been taught to see. The sky we have inherited is a sort of celestial attic of the imagination. It contains a razor, fisher’s nets, a tennis racket, and a Polish king’s shield, among much other rubbish.

  It is peopled with the violent and the anguished, warriors, archers, and weeping women. It is not a place for pardon or repentance, as the gods often placed glittering killers in sight of their glittering perpetual victims, so that there was no way for anyone to find a new relationship to anyone else. Little Ganymede, who had been abducted, shivered forever near the eagle that had seized him and brought him here. This was known as immortality. Many were there because they lived tragedies so unbearable that their suffering would have destroyed the earth if they had not been transported into Heaven.

  For the gods of that Heaven had only two powers with regard to suffering. They could inflict it, often tormenting humans as proxy for their private quarrels. Many of the glowing creatures you see in Heaven are set there by way of reward for killing a human on behalf of a God, such as the Scorpion, whom I always avoided. Others are positioned there from petty divine spite, like the Crab, set there to taunt a goddess who tried and failed to have it kill a hero favored by her husband.

  Some pulse with the implacable stellar reminder of the defeat of a passionate human desire. Lyra is the instrument that belonged to Orpheus, who descended to Hell for his bride, and failed to bring her out of it, despite his great love. The one inhabitant of Heaven I truly loved, Ophiuchus the Snake-Tamer, the great doctor who discovered how to resurrect humans, was killed at the request of the God of the Dead. It was a political assassination—the God of the Dead was protecting his borough. Ophiuchus was one of the few Heaven Dwellers who was still concerned with mortals; he trembled, sparkling with the agony of his pent-up will to heal them, but was thwarted by the gods’ other power over suffering.

  Their second power over suffering was, in a sense, to sculpt it—to reveal it in Heaven only as it was seen and felt by them—as ecstasy. In Heaven, tears, sweat, and drops of blood are translated into the brilliance of stars, which form the bodies of the Heaven Dwellers. The gods would not let Ophiuchus tamper with suffering, that radiant and exquisite state of being.

  In Heaven, there was not one pair of happy lovers. There were Perseus and Andromeda, if you count a couple happy who killed a guest at their wedding. Besides, they lived apart in Heaven; and it made me uneasy to see Andromeda, a wife still wearing the glittering chains that had bound her on her rock. There was another pair who truly loved each other, but they were allowed to meet only one day a year, before they were separated to begin another year’s yearning. I felt confined there, and unhappy. What woman wants to live in a Heaven where love can only be tragic, unfulfilled for all eternity?

  I don’t say that Heaven was without passions: in fact, it was through my fleeing Orion that the revelation occurred. I was always afraid of him, knowing what everyone knew about him: that he was empty of all but lust. He had practiced the sexual lynching known as rape on Merope and others, and his last mortal act had been a biocide. He could not control his appetite to kill, and had hunted down every last living thing in a forest where the goddess Artemis refreshed herself from time to time. He piled corpse after corpse outside her lodging. He presumed to kill as if he were a God. For that presumption Artemis had the mortal killed in a display of divine artistry. Yet, the gods awarded him an influential position in Heaven.

  He spent his time in Heaven stalking the Pleiades; one afternoon, he caught sight of me, and decided I would do just as well. I was walking by myself along the shining river Eridanus, lost in my own dreams, hearing and seeing nothing else. Suddenly Orion leapt in front of me, blocking my path. His eyes were narrow and glinting, with the odd fixed gaze of the possessed, who see nothing but what they desire from whatever exists.

  I turned and began to run. I could hear Orion strike out after me, though I dared not turn to look. It was like being pursued by a massive oak tree that could move as swiftly as the wind through its own leaves, and was also carrying a weapon. I knew he would shoot me with his bow and arrows to bring me down. Blinded, wounded, crippled—it wouldn’t matter to him how he took me, or if I s
urvived, as long as he succeeded in attaining his desire.

  I screamed, but the scream metamorphosed in Heaven, and made a trio of the sublime duet that Aphrodite and Eros were singing, charmed at Orion’s ardor, and the lovely patterns my long hair made streaming in flight behind me as I raced for my life. Later, I learned that Aphrodite had sent a dream of this scene to a Macedonian artist, who rendered it in relief on a gold vase, though he altered it to show Orion capturing me, as I screamed mutely and exquisitely in pure gold.

  In the end, though, I escaped. I saw no other course than to fling myself into Eridanus, the flowing river of stars, and let the swift current drown me or take me where it would. Even Orion could not keep up with Eridanus, and I heard his marvelous aria of psychopathic rage as I was swept farther and farther away.

  The river rushed me past constellation after constellation; I closed my eyes, and let myself be carried along, and thought of nothing, not even how I might find some exit from this flood of stars.

  When I opened my eyes again, still submerged in the river of light, I saw a group of strange constellations. I recognized nothing of this zodiac. One cascade of stars formed the Cluster of Grapes, another the Sheaf of Wheat. There was the Hive where Honey Bees swarmed, entering and exiting like the dust of topaz and amber. I saw the Carpenter measuring the Door with a rope of stars. Beside him, the Birthgiver suckled the Newborn with her gemmed milk, while the Cradle swung, lighting the dark.

  Looking up, I saw petal after petal outlined in stars drifting down from the Hundred Roses. I passed the Judge in her Jeweled Caftan holding a pair of scales in one hand, and lifting her luminous hand, patterned with stars like henna, in a gesture of Pardon. The Seven Scholars sat above pages and pages of stars, endlessly unscrolling across the skies. Beyond them were the clusters of Singers and the Storytellers, with stars pouring from their throats. A little farther, the constellation of the Pomegranate pulsed, scattering ruby-colored stars over the darkness. The Breadmaker kneaded her round loaves, which left her hands as floating, golden moons. Stars like tiny diamonds collided inside the Wineglass. The Artist, hands full of constellations, flung them playfully into patterns and images across the skies.

  I gasped. I had been swept into another Heaven. Caught up in the powerful course of the river, I wondered whether I could find a way to enter it, or lose this Heaven, too, unable to find anything to hold on to that would make a place for me in any world? Ahead, I saw another wonder. A wingless bird suspended on a cord of stars descended directly into my path. It had a voice, and spoke to me. If I climbed on its back, the bird promised, it could take me into the surrounding Heaven.

  “How can you do that, since you cannot fly?” I said mistrustfully.

  “Climb on my back, loosen the cord, and open your arms wide. That embrace will create the wings of desire.” I did as the bird described, and became its wings, ascending toward another group of unrecognizable constellations. We passed the Coffin, the Date Palm, and the Cherry Tree. The Guitar Player strummed his instrument: the notes formed stars that circled across the night sky, while the Dancer stamped, leapt, and whirled, his heels flecked with a staccato of stars.

  Now I saw the Knife, with its jade-green hilt, and its fierce curved blade flickering. I was frightened; the bird soared closer and closer to the fatal stars.

  “Don’t be afraid,” it said. “This is the constellation of the one who killed and gave birth.” I saw a woman holding a book with the Knife glittering on its cover. “She is waiting to tell you her story.” It set me down. I sat at her feet, and listened.

  She said to me, “I am Souraya, lady of the question. I will tell you a story about which you can ask as many questions as arise, as many as there are molecules and atoms. The story that cannot be questioned is to be feared; it serves to conceal a story too dangerous to be told. A story that cannot be questioned abducts the soul and drags it toward the Tabula Rasa, which you see just to your right. That is the altar of killing, the bed of torture where questions cease to exist, and become instead interrogations, transformed into the myriad means of inflicting pain.”

  I looked away from the cruel white stars of the table of death. Souraya continued speaking, gently, directing my attention to a garden visible in another plane of Heaven, where men, women, children, and angels walked and talked; thousands of conversations drifted like perfume from that garden. “Questions are the grammar of ethics, and sacred to God, who does not teach by commandment, but through questions. Questions are the very structure of the universe, which is why the waves ask the shore, ‘When? When? When?’ and the winds swirl through the branches of the trees, always murmuring, ‘Why? Why?’

  “The question,” she said, “is even inherent in our bodies, which is why lovemaking always takes the form of a reciprocal perpetual question, perpetually answered. The truth is, each of us, and each one of our lives, is a question asked of the other; we are God’s questions to each other, and through the lattice of our questions, we sometimes catch a glimpse of God.” When she finished her story, she gave me her book, and kissed me on the forehead. She handed me a golden apple. “This is the apple of knowledge. If you become human, you must eat this fruit, without fail, or you will never become human, a shadow in a loveless world.”

  I climbed again onto the back of the wingless bird, and we turned to the right, moving toward the second constellation, a Cauldron as big as an ocean, into which a woman ladled a rice of stars and grains. “This is the constellation of one who killed and preserved life,” the bird told me. “She is waiting to tell you her story.” On the cover of the book she held were all the illuminated grains and fruits of the world.

  I began to sit down, but she took my arm and walked with me.

  She said to me, “I am Savour, lady of creation. My story is part of the work of Heaven, where the acts of creation are ceaseless. You can see as we walk, that Heaven is always being composed; as we walk in it and speak in it, it is changing and taking new forms around us, while you yourself play a part in creating it. In this way, you do not simply live in Heaven—you undertake it. As you describe what you see here, you change it.

  “Think of it as being inside a beautiful painting, except that the landscape you see is not static within the frame, the light changes second by second, the swans in the lower left-hand corner can swim out of the frame and back again to their pool, and you yourself can enter the frame or leave it at will. You can even stay inside and outside simultaneously. There is no ‘either…or’ in Heaven, but ‘both…and.’ Our sentences pause, but do not end.”

  When she finished her story, she gave me her book and kissed me on the forehead. She handed me a golden apple. “This is the apple of memory. If you become human, you must eat this fruit without fail; when you taste it, you will remember that you glimpsed Heaven.”

  She pointed toward the third constellation, the Paradise Nebula, a thousand paradises that rose and fell, in ever-changing configurations.

  I climbed again onto the back of the wingless bird, and made the wings of desire. We rose toward the constellation. “This is the constellation of the one who was murdered and lived. She is waiting to tell you her story.” From the cover of the book she held, stars dropped ceaselessly, small and bright as tears.

  She said to me, “I am Rain, lady of suffering. My story—and I suffer to tell you this—will make you suffer. In order for you to understand my story, you must encounter the damned. I must lead you into Hell.” She took my hand, and without traveling any distance at all, it seemed, we found ourselves in a prison courtyard with walls of stone.

  In the center of the courtyard, there was a throne of granite, and a granite altar, both stained with blood. Chained to the throne was a creature—or creatures—whose writhing lower body was that of a reptile, but above the waist, had countless heads, the faces of men, women, children, animals, and monsters. Some of the faces showed expressions of rage, others of contempt; some of the faces were vicious, others displayed passive misery, or features contorted with anguish. Some of the faces showed expressions of rage, others of contempt; some of the faces were vicious, others displayed passive misery, or features contorted with anguish. Some were not faces at all, but garrulous skulls. There were faces that glowed radiantly, their gazes sublimely fixed blindly elsewhere, their mouths curved with implacable perfection into carnivorous, benevolent smiles.