The Book of Heaven: A Novel Read online

  “Each is gripped by an appetite that must be satisfied immediately, and can never be satisfied,” Rain said. “Watch. New faces are formed as soon as a new lust is conceived.” I moved toward it, to peer more closely at the creatures, some of whom seemed strangely familiar. One face looked charmingly at me, and beckoned me forward, eager to tell me an urgent secret. When I was face-to-face with it, its human eyes altered shockingly; it clamped its jaws on my arm, and dragged me toward the altar. I was in a death roll, gripped by a crocodile.

  Rain hurried toward it, and forcefully hit it under the jaw. Its mouth, suddenly oddly weak, opened, and she pulled me away from the creatures, embracing me protectively. “These are the damned,” she said. “They destroy whatever they yearn for most deeply. They will kill what they love in order to have it.” One of the creatures wailed for water, complaining of thirst.

  “Watch,” Rain said. She poured a cup of water for the creature, and gave it to her. The creature took the cup, and suddenly spat the water at Rain, throwing the cup at her. Rain looked at her with grave sorrow. “You can do nothing right for a soul in Hell. She herself will thwart any effort to satisfy her desire—that is how you recognize them. This means their desires are never fulfilled, and so they never know the rapture of gratitude, never having been satisfied. Nor do they have a lasting capacity for happiness; their lusts are so overwhelming that each satisfaction can only be temporary. And as they can sustain no contentment, they can sustain no suffering. Those who cannot bear suffering cannot bear blessing.” As she spoke, the thirsty creature disappeared, replaced by another racked with another lust.

  I suddenly realized that I did recognize these creatures. “This is the Hydra,” I said. “I saw this in the Heaven I left.” Rain nodded. “Then that other Heaven is also here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “it is also here.”

  “Then the souls of the damned are in Heaven?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “but they don’t know it.”

  She led me from Hell back to Heaven. “For those tormented ones, the story always ends the same way. They do not realize that God is unforeseeable, not a Queen or a King, or Highness or Holiness, Mother or Father, or any other of these ambivalent titles. They do not know that it is presumptuous or sycophantic to imagine that God has any relation to any notion they have of power. God has no title more absolute than ‘Beloved.’”

  When Rain 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 death,” she said gravely. “If you become human, you must eat this fruit without fail. The mercy of death is given so that no cruelty is infinite, no suffering everlasting.”

  I climbed on the back of the wingless bird, and made the wings of desire. Rain pointed toward a magnificent constellation formed of stars and moons that looked like a triple strand of iridescent pearls of every color. “You must pass through it to reach the fourth constellation, the Lovers’ Cluster. These are the tears of those who suffer with those who suffer. We could see nothing in Heaven were it not for the light they give.”

  Now we approached a constellation formed by countless double stars that revolved around each other like lovers in each other’s arms. “This is the constellation of the one who lost everything and gained everything. She is waiting to tell you her story.” The cover of her book was a mosaic of a thousand jewels, which constantly rearranged themselves.

  “I am Sheba,” she said, “lady of loving. I will tell you my story, but it is a story in which you are already a character. It is for you to continue it, if you choose, and to ensure that it never comes to an end. My story is of the unfinished work of love, the bringing of the day when we will be as capable of loving as we are of killing, when to confess to love will have more impact than the confession of wrongdoing, when the sentence ‘I love him’ will be more final than the sentence, ‘I killed him.’

  “Before I begin, there is something I want you to see.” She took me to the edge of Heaven, and gestured across the constellations in the direction of a marvelous garden, where a magnificent person, looking a bit imprisoned in his impressive musculature, and already disconsolate in Paradise, sat alone. “He is very beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “he is very beautiful, and so is that earth on which he sits, and of which he is made. That is why he has the power to destroy the earth. You, on the other hand, were made in Heaven, and like all creatures of Heaven, you have the capacity to destroy, not the earth, but human happiness.”

  When Sheba 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 love,” she said. “If you become human, you must eat this fruit without fail, or you will never have existed, either on earth or in Heaven.”

  She led me again to the edge of Heaven for another look at the earth where the magnificent other one seemed so alone. “Will you go there?” she asked. “Each human must invent human love, a chance that will be given to you in becoming human. And for all the atrocity they have done and will do, it is still through human love, and no other, that appetite, desire, and pleasure themselves become the source of ethics, which knowledge makes inseparable from love.”

  I was tempted to remain in Heaven. But I also wanted to taste knowledge, memory, death, and love, and to meet that person I could see in his splendor.

  I lifted the first apple, and tasted knowledge. I tasted memory. I tasted death. I tasted love. Tears fell from my eyes. There was a moment of absolute stillness, as if I had stepped across the threshold of forever. Then the frame of Heaven began to shake around me, and I saw fragments falling, tesserae I would later recognize in paintings of Paradise.

  I heard a voice saying,

  “I have made Heaven, and earth, and you.

  Now this is my gift.

  It is for you to create the world.

  That will be the work of humans.

  Go now and begin.”

  Heaven was disappearing, as I drifted weightlessly toward the Earthly Paradise. I looked for as long as there was a trace of Heaven.

  “I will miss you,” I said. Then I drew my first breath. I shaped my first human question.

  “Where is Heaven?” I asked.

  I

  THE BOOK OF SOURAYA

  THE KNIFE:

  THE FIRST CONSTELLATION

  The world was created with a knife and a prayer. The Knife you can see well, especially in the late summer nights. Look up after dark; you will see its jade-green hilt, the sickle of brilliants that forms the curve of the scimitar’s blade, and the field of red stars sprayed around it, the drops of blood. It is the topmost section of the constellation called the Murder, though decrees have been issued, as yet with no success, to change its name by compulsion to the Sacrifice. Nevertheless, the true name of this group of stars is the Murder, and there the Knife quivers unmistakably at night, lodged where it was flung back into the heart of Heaven. Whatever human beings would suppress or refuse to see, the heavens record their true acts and encode their true dreams in the ineradicable testament of stars.

  The knife was forged as carefully as a sculpture as part of the dowry of a bride on her way to the household of an iconoclast husband she had never met. She was not to bring any images of animal or human creatures, none of the clay birds or babies that had been her girlhood toys, no paintings illustrating the cycles of legends she loved, no image of the house of her childhood, or of any guardian spirit. Souraya was being married into a household intensely concerned with what it was permitted to see. But the attention to physical form is a powerful instinct and often becomes a talent, and will turn elsewhere if diverted. And among iconoclasts, the impulse found its satisfaction in the intensely anatomical forms of all their domestic goods, saddles, ewers, farm implements, spoons, knives, forks, ladles, and bowls, those grand analogues to the womb. It is obvious what each of these forms can be made to suggest.

  Above all, iconoclasts were exac
ting and seduced by the forms of weapons. These they commissioned with the kind of extravagant detail and ardent willingness to spend money that iconophiles devoted to images, specifying elaborate metal traceries, intricate gemmed patterns on hilts, and even incised calligraphy on the blades themselves. These ornaments created a web of meaning inscribed on the weapons, gave them voices, which are acceptable to iconoclasts as images are not. The ornaments knit hands and weapons together, made them inseparable, and, in a sense, helpless in their power, both hand and weapon bound together and absolved by a common pattern. The weapon ornament became a symbol of destiny, as did the self-inflicted wounds of the iconoclasts, tribal markings attributed to the appetite of the Divine for wounds. These weapons, and these wounds, were the jewelry of men.

  After the contract for their marriage was negotiated, and the final catalog of dowry gifts agreed on, chief among the gifts, more costly even than the plantation of twenty shade trees and twenty fruit trees that Souraya was to bring with her, was the knife. Adon’s emissary arrived with elaborate verbal instructions for its design, since for them to make a sketch of it was forbidden. The emissary, though, spoke in such vivid detail that Souraya’s mother was able to make a discreet sketch of the knife, to assist her husband in realizing the design accurately, from the hilt set with emeralds, jade, and diamonds down to the inscription, “God’s Servant,” to be traced on the blade. Finally, before accepting their entertainment after his journey, the emissary drew from his luggage a massive clay hand. It was modeled on Adon’s. “Fit the knife to this,” he said. “Then shatter it.” That disembodied hand, palm ambitiously upward on her father’s worktable, was Souraya’s first glimpse of her husband. It dominated the workshop while it was there; its openness, attached to nothing, made it seem charged with absolute desire. It reached for everything. There was nothing it did not want, as if it, and not her father’s and mother’s modest finite living hands, were the source of all the objects and tools around it; that it was joined to no visible body or face made space itself seem to flow from it.

  Late at night, Souraya went noiselessly to the workshop, to make herself acquainted with her husband. The monumental hand was resting on the worktable, in the shadows, as if it had just created darkness.

  She went up to it, and reaching her own hand out tentatively, stroked it, her slender fingers touching the monument soothingly, as if to appease and tame it. She picked it up. An even more colossal hand of shadow smoothed the floor, then gripped and grappled with the wall.

  She strained to lift the hand to her breast, seeing an image of her wedding night, her breast cupped for the first time by a husband’s hand. The clay hand lay across her flesh like a boulder, with a profound heaviness, a world reposing on her breast. But she was so young that the effect on her of its weight was not exhaustion, but a pooling of courage, a concentrated courage.

  An energy suffused the sure muscles of her legs, traveling through the strong, solid, cypresses of her thighs, the unshatterable cup of her abdomen, up through her head, poised on the bones and tendons of her neck. The power and heroism of a young body is as helpless as the invincible frailty of an old one. She felt ready. She was as clean and plumb and deep with life as a well. She imagined a cup of water as it poured through the lips of a parched drinker. She trembled like the offered water as it shared the drinker’s ecstasy in quenching his thirst. Let the world be heavy; she would shelter it. Let the world lie on her; she would sustain it. Let the world fill itself with her. This was her body’s prayer.

  When the knife was ready at last, so was the marriage. Souraya’s dowry gifts and personal belongings were securely packed, and her clay birds and clay boys and girls given away to her cousins’ children. She threaded the bridegroom’s gifts of jewelry through her hair and around her neck. A special leather bag was set aside for the remnants of the clay hand; the iconoclasts were strict in demanding proof that the model had been destroyed, as if they were possessed by some fear that they themselves might be destroyed by their own despised images.

  They danced all night, the night before she left, cycles of ribald dances, joyous dances, with figures of joined hands pledging that love requites everything, tender dances, then the openly tragic dances, with their mute declarations that all love is unrequited, the cresting movements of the dancers’ arms like waves beating against cliffs.

  They sang old songs, drinking wedding wine and eating indulgently from what seemed a supply of perpetual roast meat and a traditional wedding confection known as bride’s tears, made of honey mixed with the resinous tears exuded by local pines, a symbol of the bittersweet nature of marriage.

  Everyone, from children to old men, embraced the precious bride, touched her dress, smoothed her hair, clung to her as if she were each one’s ebbing life. Some dandled her four-year-old sister, who was also getting married to a five-year-old cousin. It was a common arrangement. Small sisters would share in the dower of the older bride, and the family would have married all its daughters at the expense of one wedding. The younger girls would return to their playthings and household tasks, and would discover when they had grown up that they had been married all their lives, as if they were assuming a life previously lived, but unremembered.

  The meat and dancing and singing and wine made a wild joy of loss. The sense of mourning someone who was departing from their circle was transformed into a blissful oblivion. The festival of an absence would not be revealed as painful until tomorrow, after she would be gone forever.

  Someone fetched the model of Adon’s hand, and brought it to the fireside, offering it to Souraya’s father to destroy, as commanded. He shook his head dourly, regretting the end of his workmanship. “Do your husband’s will, Souraya,” he said. Souraya’s lips were stained with red wine, she was just becoming drunk.

  She picked up a log and with all her strength brought it down onto the center of the earthen palm. The guests cheered as the object shattered, and Souraya smashed the clay fingers, knuckles, and wrist into smaller and smaller fragments knit with splintering embers, overcome with the manic joy of destruction. She half-remembered the childhood pleasure of building cities in the sand, and joining with all the other children, after the fashioning of intricate domes, tunnels, and towers, in the ecstatic destruction of their own creations. In their annihilating dances, those children outlived the world.

  A man poured her another cup of wine, and she lifted it high, in a mocking toast: No one could criticize her tonight. The singing ensured that exemption, in all gatherings, sacred or profane; it gently enforced a consent on the company, so that on those occasions, they would not settle old scores, either by boast or by insult.

  “Drink to the unseen,” she cried out, laughing recklessly at her own daring, exulting in a moment of freedom in her severely disciplined life. Tomorrow, she would have to be impeccable, eyes lowered, wordlessly graceful, inscrutable in the face of sorrow, relief, bewilderment, disgust, or fear. She needed to indulge herself in bravado tonight, for a virgin goes to marriage with an unseen man as a soldier goes into battle, uncertain of survival, risking death. Who would protect her if she did not please? And she had no more idea than a soldier in first combat does of what she would experience physically.

  Like a soldier, she had to give herself over to an experience that she had been schooled to defend herself from her entire life. She now unnaturally had to permit a man what she had previously utterly forbidden to the point of death.

  She had heard she would be wounded. Perhaps the man would be as well? But there was no clear story about how the blood on that sheet was purchased. Did the man enjoy the pain? Would she? Was it forgotten afterward, or always remembered? And in any case she must be the loyal companion, the faithful servant, the clairvoyant fulfillment of the man, whether or not she liked him, even whether or not she loathed him. As a soldier must guard and obey his commander, regardless of the nature of their personal feelings toward each other.

  Tonight, though, the brides were exempt. Ev
en though she had a long journey to make, she drank more wine, and danced until late, on the carpet that would be the last of the dowry gifts to be packed and the first to be set in place in her new household. Its pattern of squares, lozenges, and arches in blue and contrasting silver silk threads had been devised uniquely for Souraya. The design was impeccably abstract enough to satisfy the iconoclast examiners, yet the figures represented the shapes of windows through which the bride could see the shining light of her former home.

  Her exhaustion as they set out next day was merciful. Souraya slept through most of the day, her slight nausea a useful tranquilizer, like the layer of ash judiciously applied to fire to damp down its flames. Adon’s entourage was waiting to meet them after they crossed over the river nearest his compound.

  There, after ceremonious addresses and formal greetings, something strange occurred. Instead of proceeding directly through the gates of the compound, to the sounds of drums and harps and songs, the party was halted, barred from advancing further by a line of guards, each with a heavily ornamented knife in his belt. They could see the musicians, poised on the walls of the compound, each holding a silent instrument poised for song, as if they were paralyzed by some magic. Then a pair of guards surrounded the mounds of luggage Souraya’s party had brought, and began to unpack it.

  Souraya’s father, masking his fear of banditry, perhaps even the possibility that these were not in fact Adon’s men, approached the soldier directing the pillage. They were searching the luggage for images, the soldier explained to him. It was forbidden for images to be transported into the compound, or across any threshold occupied by a kinsman. Any images that were discovered would be taken back across the river and quarantined there in a guarded post, unless they belonged to the bride.