The Book of Heaven: A Novel Read online

  They amassed a small, indiscriminate pile of clay figurines, winged angels, painted medallions, golden eyes, and a pair of earrings in the shape of swimming dolphins. Among Souraya’s dowry gifts, there were cooking pans with handles in the shape of nymphs, which, though they were exquisitely crafted and valuable, were destroyed. No treasure was prized above the great holy laws.

  The soldiers turned their attention to her personal belongings. Packed with her perfumes and cosmetics were a group of mirrors in graduated sizes. The guards seized them, and began to smash them. Souraya pleaded to keep just one, for the sake of her husband, so she could make herself presentable for him. “These objects collect and contain images,” the soldiers said, unmoved.

  She looked at her father, but he kept his eyes on the ground, not looking at what the soldiers were doing, and for the first time, not meeting the mirror of his daughter’s gaze. Suddenly there was a commotion near the baggage, and a soldier rushed forward, embracing a dress covered in a magnificent, intricate design of sequins, which glittered scarlet in the light of the sunset. He had never seen such a garment. It was Souraya’s wedding dress. The commander examined it closely, narrowing his eyes. Then without hesitation, he ripped it from bodice to hem, and tossed it to the soldiers to finish shredding. “These reflect,” he said to Souraya. “They are image-givers.” The soldiers set on the dress, and quickly destroyed the sequin-covered sleeves it had taken months to design and then to sew, hands moving to the rhythms of the marriage mantras. She covered her own eyes then.

  The commander made some gesture afterward indicating to the compound that the search was successfully completed. Then a torrent of music opened out over the landscape, and the wedding party was swept inside the walls, where hundreds of torches were lit at the same moment, and the rhythmic clapping of the families of the community welcomed them. A gaggle of children rushed forward to touch Souraya when, from the whispers and gestures, they realized she was the bride. Souraya didn’t smile at them or respond to them, though as a rule, she was lavish in her smiles with children, and could, with a still, steady gaze in which a small flame of smile flickered, bring the smiling willingness to be adored out of nearly any child, even one determined to wail.

  But the violence that had been done to her wedding dress made her feel both hostile and anxious. The fabric had been set to her body as words to music, as the knife to her husband’s clay hand. It was a dress in which she felt as certain as a goddess must, absolutely sure in her movements, perfect in her shape with the ancient perfection of a sheaf of wheat, perfect enough to pass into archetype, and become immortal, which was the purpose of all ornament.

  It is a strange fact that a dress can safeguard a woman, its elegant design or fine color functioning as a counterweight at the moment she risks stepping off a precipice. It is a strange fact that a few lengths of cloth can bring a woman to life. But water, if it is to be drunk deeply enough to satisfy thirst, needs a cup, as an idea needs a sentence. And the strangest fact of all is that what we ourselves make gives us life. Souraya had a wild thought of running from them, these madmen who would dismember a dress. Her confidence in her new people had been shaken, as her confidence in herself.

  She had not known ideas could be violent, had never seen anyone destroy something beautiful for an idea. If these people were haters of beauty, then they would surely hate her, too. And she would hate them in return, with her own red terrifying capacity for savagery. But the worst of her fears was beyond impersonal. She had glimpsed an implacable demand that something she thought of as lovely, harmless, and lawful must be destroyed. What else that was precious to her sight must not exist? She passed through the crowd toward the nuptial lodging.

  Later, she would remember this progress as blind; she could not distinguish a single face in memory until she saw Adon’s, the face that belonged to the right hand she already knew and had held. And looking at the angular planes of that face, set on the colossal height of Adon’s body, she found her balance.

  Adon’s features were set on the scaffolding of his bone as if riveted there; they expressed a force that seemed almost metallic. When he turned to look at her, his eyes gleamed, not only with obvious pleasure in her beauty, but with a kind of will to friendship, even though his mouth stayed stern. It was like having a shield smile at her. The kindly look relieved her of the burden of violent hatred she had been feeling after the mutilation of her wedding dress. Her flood of relief and gratitude at not hating her husband on sight was so strong that her great willingness to love felt akin to love itself. It was as if the blood inside her turned to wine.

  With the help of two kinswomen, she chose a costume to be married in. They helped her dress, and after the priest had joined the couple’s hands and given them wine to drink together, the women helped her again, to undress. One of them gave her a small hand mirror that she had smuggled past the soldiers, and then they left her to wait for her husband. She could hear drumbeats beginning outside, establishing a steady regular rhythm, even as they built in intensity.

  She knew what they were for. If there was pleasure, it would remain inaudible; if there was pain, that too, would remain inaudible. The percussion also served to muffle the footsteps of her husband. She did not hear him as she fretfully changed the position of the small mirror, trying to catch a whole glimpse of herself in its turning orbit. But the light in the room altered, and she realized that Adon stood behind her. It was as if her body held a reunion with its wandering shadow, a shadow that was now the stronger of the two. Her husband reached for the mirror, not unkindly, but authoritatively.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I am anxious for you to be pleased with my appearance, and I do not know how to appraise myself without a mirror.” Adon raised his arm and shattered the mirror on the threshold. “Images are forbidden to us,” he explained patiently. “We are forbidden to gaze anywhere but at God. You will never see your face again.”

  It was at that moment that Souraya understood the depth of his power over her. She understood through the easy, despotic violence of his gesture, the self-multiplication of his “we,” the perfect repose of his tone. He was not simply explaining unfamiliar customs to her, he was telling her the life she would live, feelings he expected her to have, her future, as if he were a seer with the power to make his prophecies come true. In the moment when he deprived her of her mirror, she saw clearly.

  If she were to have any power over herself again, it would only be through exaggerated, even competitive, obedience to the laws of her husband’s God. Her only power would be in her embrace. She must embrace him—and his God—to survive. It was at that moment that she truly lost her virginity, when she understood, as a girl does not, that the marriage was not only her vocation; it was a matter of life or death. And that God would be in her bed.

  “Are you going to blind me?” she asked, with the kind of frankness that absolute fear produces.

  “I am going to transform you,” he answered. “I am going to help you to see with truth and clarity you have never known. Here is how you will see yourself from now on.” He smiled radiantly, and touched with his index and third finger the dark pouches under his own eyes. “If you are beautiful in my eyes, you are beautiful. Look here.” He gestured again toward his face, and frowned with disgust. “And if I look like this, this is how you will see yourself. But I feel sure,” he said, “that I will more often look at you with the delight I do now.” He held out his right hand, the living model of the clay one, and caressed her hair, with an almost priestly gesture of benediction. “I chose you and I believe I have chosen well. I am going to make a nation inside your body. I am going to make a world out of you.”

  She never forgot, although it did not spoil her pleasure in love-making later, the intense pain of her wedding night, when she was ripped apart like her own dress. And afterward, shocked and wounded as she was, enduring the violation of displaying the sheet, the public evidence of their intimacy, with the imprints of their bodies ap
parent on the cloth, the whole community crying out its triumph in its collective possession of her. The brief but unforgettable intensity of the pain, the particular sense of agonizing vulnerability it gave her, the sensation of being stabbed or raped, even though Adon had treated her with exquisite care, was frightening. It gave her a doubt about the nature of the world that it was so ordered that the initiation into lovemaking for her sex began with an inevitable cruelty. But the shrilling and shouts of the crowd when they saw the sheet stained with her blood aroused in her a disgust she had to conceal for years, especially when she was a guest at other wedding feasts. They had massed outside waiting, exulting in the sight of her wedding blood as if it were the trophy of an enemy brought down.

  It was a mystery to her later, that although she would come to know years of confident pleasure in her marriage bed, she never remembered her first night without shuddering, that she could recall specific details of her physical agony and the gross exhibition of both her virginity and her husband’s capacity.

  In the morning, when they brought a basin of water for her to wash in, she saw that its interior was lined with black stone, so she could not see her face reflected in the water. Its surface was covered with exquisite incised calligraphy. This was true of their plates, trays, ewers, and cups. She could never catch a glimpse of herself even when she eventually undertook the preparation of food for fifty in a vast metal cauldron. She saw occasionally a fragment of lip, or a triangle of her eye, but never her whole face, fissured as it was in a shining web of prayers.

  She missed herself sharply that first morning—if she could have seen her face, she would at least have had the comfort of seeing someone she knew well. But as she began receiving the wedding visits, and assuming the domestic command of her household, she felt the contrast between herself and the men and women around her, many of whom had never even caught a glimpse of themselves or seen any kind of representation of the world outside them. To themselves, they were the seers, never the visible.

  It had a strange effect on them physically, and even verbally. They somehow lacked the self-consciousness of those who have been seen. In ordinary conversation, with both strangers and family, they narrated their digestive, sexual, and health preoccupations with acute and intimate detail, as if all were members of one vast body, all flesh held in common. Without hesitation, they took one inside the theater of their intestines, or seated one inside their chests to listen to the thunderous ovations of their heartbeats. On their visits, they sprawled, unaware of how much space they occupied, forgetful that they shared it, unable to sense boundaries. Or they sat blindly slack-jawed or gesturing strangely while conversations flowed around them, without any sense of physical decorum, taking their features and movements as absolutely as they would a dawn or nightfall.

  Often when Souraya walked in narrow passages or alleys, she found herself having to leap out of the way of someone who, although he saw her, continued to possess the path obliviously, unable to gauge the distance between his body and her own. They had a tendency, too, to stand only inches from whomever they were talking to, never dropping their eyes, but gazing intently and deeply into the other’s eyes, as if they were seeking out their reflections there. A casual acquaintance would reach over and absently finger Souraya’s jewelry or cheek during an encounter, in the way someone would forgetfully touch his own face or hair, rub his own chin.

  It was strange; the severe restrictions they imposed on themselves seemed to have an opposite effect, deeply enclosed as they were in their customs and beliefs, the more they seemed to feel they knew the world absolutely with a knowledge that could not be challenged.

  Somehow, this prohibition against seeing themselves was also an expression of an intense desire not to see other people, to be free of their existence except as ghostly presences. Even more, the refusal to look out at the world overlay a never-acknowledged ambition to determine and control what was there, to tell the whole world its story, rather than to hear it tell its own.

  She would come to experience this in her daily life, most intimately with Adon; it took a strange authoritative form socially, a prescriptive insistence, as if he really wanted not only to be married to her, but also to have created her. He was ardent and affectionate with her, but also impatient, severe, even strangely melancholy. He made her memorize prayers that were to accompany each quotidian action, bread-making, planting, washing her hair, even before and after lovemaking. He wanted to rededicate her every moment, to cast her hours in the crucible of God’s will. He would gaze on her for hours by firelight, but insist that she not speak, as if he both adored and regretted her existence. It was as if he had been given a gift he thought magnificent, but in some way hated, because it had come from outside him, and was therefore corrupt.

  She came to find herself, among his people, in a world where her accounts of her own experience were constantly corrected, even by people who had never ventured outside their own walls.

  During the storytelling and song making that was the chief form of entertainment, she found herself incessantly interrupted, even by young children, who would object to her descriptions, or the events of her story, even when it was something she could swear an oath to having seen. “That didn’t happen,” they would say dogmatically, “that does not exist.” Then they would overwhelm the story with a kind of chirping or mewing resembling seagull cries, or shouts of “Don’t tell that. Don’t tell that,” until the teller altered the tale to their satisfaction. Once when she was telling a childhood tale of a boat that traveled under the sea, they stopped the story with the rhythmic chant, “Don’t tell that. Don’t tell that. There was no sea. There was no sea.”

  This was different from anything she knew of the art of story or epic poetry of her own people—here the art of storytelling was a battering collective struggle, where elements were rejected or insisted on until a final version prevailed, which it became taboo to alter.

  A story was judged acceptable when the priests, the Guardians of the Story, called for the great tribal parchment. A red silk cylinder covered with a calligraphy of sacred words wrought in silver wire was brought to them. The Guardians unfurled from it a thick roll of flayed-looking skin, and hovered over it, deliberating. They chanted it aloud, alternating the recitation. If words or sentences were unacceptable, they plucked the metallic script from the scroll, held it up, and crushed it in their fists. These words were never again to be uttered.

  When the redaction was complete, one of them stepped forward, and with a great slab of porous stone, grated what looked like an uncut gem, but was actually a block of solid perfume onto the flames. Thick clouds of incense in a garden of colors flamed upward and diffused through the gathering. Then the Guardian called out the title chosen for the tale, under which it became part of the record, and the audience acclaimed it with shouts of: “God permits! God permits!”

  In this way they created a world suspended from the meshes of their stories. They named themselves after the characters in the stories they accepted; new lives seemed retellings of old stories, proof that the world repeated itself; so that it was as they said it was. Thus they conceived destinies, and were surprised that they came to pass, as a clandestine couple is stunned on the day they realize the woman has fallen pregnant.

  The elderly uttered a strange automata of prescriptions and adages, as if they had been replaced by their own fictions. Even the youngest were shaped here by the tensions over what they were compelled and forbidden to believe. Souraya, in the way of people who kept their own counsel, was told secrets. Eventually, she could have become a living library of discredited tales, prohibited variants, and inadmissible family histories.

  The arts in which they truly excelled were those that concerned themselves with the invisible, or at least the abstract. They were fine scribes, with a keen appreciation of the abstract patterns of script. They were skilled in medicine, in comprehending the invisible workings of the body. For that reason they were also excellent navigat
ors, at home in an element whose territory was nearly entirely concealed from them.

  In war, they were experts in espionage, so skilled that opposing tribes competed to make mercenaries of them. They understood how to shape tales subtly and aggressively to their own ends. They understood how not to be seen. They were marvelous hunters, and they were the originators of the use of camouflage in military operations. And they made magnificent jewelry whose forms were not based on flowers, or fruits, or mythological figures, but on light itself. They took bleak dead stones, and revealed the light and brilliant colors inside them. These were remarkable; it was as if they had gone into catacombs and brought back life out of inertia and death. The women, the children, and the men themselves all wore these splendid ornaments, and they were a steady source of trade for the community.

  Souraya knew of other communities where both the men and women wore garments that concealed their bodies, but here it seemed the air itself veiled the people. Now she would go daily to examine the state of the gardens, paradises, as they were known, that Adon owned, which were now her work to oversee. This gave her the right to be called a human being, literally, because those who worked with the soil were called that, human beings, children of the earth.

  And the gardens were considered as the realm of women, because they produced food, but also, perhaps, because no one experiences sheer misfortune more intimately than gardeners, farmers, and women. All that is planted in the earth is subject to caprice—hailstorms, freezes, predators, drought, disease—while women give birth to dead infants and girls. Even overabundance could be dangerous, its own kind of emergency, which required the mother to deprive her too numerous children, or the gardener to arrange for many expensive hands to harvest and preserve a surprise of success.