The Book of Heaven: A Novel (10 page)

“And I think if she lived, she will be dreaming of me, watching me with you in a fur-trimmed coat in my arms as the soldiers marched her beyond the walls into cold twilight, giving the order that the gates be locked. But I know now how flimsy those stone gates are, now that every night I die her death, and I hold her thirsty child in my own arms as he unendingly dies.

“There are no mirrors in our houses, but there are mirrors in the sea, in our eyes, in the eyes of animals, in the drop of rain. In that desert, a woman and a child showed our images as they sank down, not knowing where they might go. There are a thousand mirrors alone in their tears. I look into those mirrors, as in a gallery of looking glass, and through them I see their desert. But the mirrors of tears show the world ahead as well as the world behind, the world inside as well as the world outside; I see my own desert, that tragic labyrinth of the innocent becoming the guilty. I have brought you to the edge of that labyrinth. I do not want you to enter it.”

The boy's face was suddenly as full of lines as a rock that has been thrown hard at something harder and cracked on impact. He had never heard her speak in this way before, as if there were a world beyond him, as if she were translating the language of another world. She spoke as if she would mean what she said even if he did not exist. He discovered at that moment that she was human with exactly the sacred convulsion a convert experiences when he encounters God.

Souraya looked into her son's face and saw him recoil from her. The new fear of her in his eyes was a knife in her heart. Her own child now knew she had done harm to the point of death, that only good fortune might save her from the charge of murder.

But she went on speaking. “You are right to flinch. I have imagined this moment again and again. Sometimes I thought, Surely my beloved son will forgive me; it was my passion for him above all that drove me. He will realize that there is nothing I would not do for him. But then I think, If there is nothing I would not do for him, why should my own child feel safe from me? If there was nothing I would not do for you, then is there nothing I would not do to you?

“If my soul was so frayed in me that I destroyed one child then it might yet give way altogether. So believe beyond a doubt that you are my unutterably beloved son. But remember that I do not deserve your trust. And when you are grown, search for your brother, and, if he lived, beg him to forgive me.”

The boy was utterly quiet for a few minutes, as quiet as a hunter stalking or as prey being stalked. “And was my father standing with you on the walls when this happened?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “He was not there. He was waiting at the great gates to bar them.” Now the boy's eyes looked beyond her as she made him present at a scene he could not remember. She saw his face as she had never seen it, his features racked and aged with pain and fear; it was exactly the expression she had seen on Pelerin's face as he and his mother were escorted to the city gate. She saw now how strongly the two boys resembled each other.

Not only had she failed to protect her son from the rivalry of the other boy, she had inadvertently entrapped him in the other child's suffering, as if what had happened had inevitably happened to them both. She had, perhaps, killed the other boy, and the effect was this: her mercilessness had entombed them both, which must mean, it occurred to her for the first time, that the risk of generosity might have held a power of its own, might have sheltered them both. Her love for her son was a failure. She had taken his life as well. Love was action as surely as combat, she saw too late, and the way it was used and put to use directed its effect.

“Mother,” the boy said to her, “I do want to find my brother. There is a way to begin now to look for him, even here. But I need your help.”

“What can I do to help you?” she asked, suppressing the impulsive urge she had to say she would do anything. She had already done that.

“Tell me, what did he look like? And what do I look like? I need to know how to recognize him. I need to know how he might recognize me. I need you to help me see. I need to make an image of him. And of his mother. And of our father. And of you. I need to learn how to see.”

He was enlisting her help to endanger himself, but her own actions had enforced this on him. She could only hope that this was a necessary peril, and would somehow redeem them. “I will tell you,” she said, “what I see and what I have seen, as clearly as I am able.”

It was time for them to return. The boy's days were filled with the acquisition of skills Adon purposed for him, praying as Adon instructed him, and fulfilling commands Adon gave him. His days were divided between the study of the mercantile and the martial arts, in segments designed to reveal to him the relationship between the two disciplines.

In the late afternoons, he was drilled in the arts of fighting and using weapons, although he was not yet old enough to be given the knife the iconoclasts presented in their coming-of-age ceremony. Only fully initiated men were entrusted with the sacred knives—the merciless reflections emanating from those blades gave enemies their first glimpses of the face of God.

Adon himself was nearly always present at this instruction. He opened the session with a prayer of thanksgiving: “Blessed is God, who formed our souls to strive. All-Powerful, grant that these will do holy violence only, strike only in your service, sacrifice their strength to your righteous causes.”

Then Adon would seat himself in a carved wooden armchair, his eyes glittering with intensity, watching his son, his opponent, and the young man who instructed them, circle each other, deceive each other, and struggle. At the end of the match, Adon would descend, place his hand on each combatant's head, like a priest, and intone a closing prayer: “Praise God, stronger than all, revealed in victory. Praise God, stronger than all, revealed in defeat.”

Adon would find some reward for whichever boy shone, a fine piece of meat, a garment, tool, or coin. He would give these neither coldly, nor smilingly; he gave them not in affection, but in judgment, out of a passionate acknowledgement of the victor. “Here, my son,” he would say, offering the small treasure. “You have served God with a victory this day.”

But this day, and from now on, Ivat had the new thought that his father watched the combat so forcefully, and so often pitted him against other boys in contests of skills, in order to reassure himself he had spared the right son to fulfill his destiny.

But from this day and from now on, Ivat himself knew the true answer to his father's implicit question: he was not the son his father had prayed for. He was, at best, the son his father had been granted.

He was certain he was not, because during the hours spared him from his father's program of education, he was possessed with his efforts to acquire the forbidden ability his father most loathed; he was, with his mother's collusion, learning to draw, to model clay, and to paint. And it had come to seem to him that he enjoyed not only his mother's collusion in this but was undergoing a profound education in the relations between the mortal and the divine.

Since the afternoon his mother had shown him that the charcoal pieces she had gathered up could be sharpened, and then make lines that were like ladders one could climb between earth and Heaven, he had learned, in moving back and forth between the worlds, that even the world in which he existed was both visible and invisible; how much more so the court of God it nearly hypnotized him to imagine. The charcoal incised the paper, like a kind of knife—but a knife that worked not to destroy what it touched, but made it intact.

It seemed to him that God had saturated the world with colors, and had, with what suggested deliberate abundance, supplied that world with the means to paint them. The world around him yielded paints from eggs and cooking oils, from colored stones, from flowers and dung, from fish and insects, fire, water, air, and earth, the botany of a supernatural garden. To refuse them was to refuse creation itself.

And most powerfully of all, his efforts to represent what he saw around him taught him how partial his dazzled vision was, how mortal his hand was in its joyful agon, how each of his sketches showed him he lived in a world he did and did not know. Making art showed him beyond a doubt that he had not created the world; it taught him that his art was to live in a world not made in his image.

No, iconoclasm was meaningless. The dread of images seemed a disguised arrogance, a way of flattering oneself that one's perceptions were greater than they could be; what was terrifying was how little one could actually see. Or perhaps it was simpler, he thought, angrily ripping apart a spoiled sketch of a horse and rider he had drawn with grossly thick lines that contradicted any illusion of motion or speed. Perhaps images were forbidden as a magic because people were so afraid to be erased.

His first work was discouragingly crude. There was his childish lack of coordination to overcome. Worse, he could not ever start a sketch without a paralyzing sense of sacrilege. “God permits, God permits,” he would whisper ritually to himself before he could draw the first line.

Every sketch was like beginning the entire world. His efforts suffered from the void in which they existed; there was no other work to compare his with, no means of learning how other hands approached the drawing problems that perplexed him. And his mother insisted that she would not teach him unless he destroyed without a trace what he had made in each practice session. He obeyed her at first, but eventually, when he began to make drawings that could actually teach him something new, it was beyond him to obliterate what he had worked so hard to do.

In secret, he found a novel solution that both hid him when he was working at his art and preserved at least some of the work. He would shimmy up a tree, gently scrape a flat surface on the underside of a thick, well-concealed branch, and spend an invisible hour there, sketching or painting. When the tree had yielded him every inch of surface it could safely provide for pictures, he would move to another tree to begin a new series, returning to the previous trees to examine what he had accomplished in the older pictures. He lost a fair number of the images. Many faded or dissolved in rain, but over time many trees bore a miraculous and secret fruit.

In the autumn, he had to suspend work on his private orchard of images. It was hunting season, and any creature hidden in a tree risked being cut down by an arrow, or by one of the keen flying knives for which the iconoclasts were famous.

Stories were told all over the region about how these knives seemed almost to seek their prey, floating alongside them: the best marksmen could bring down a stag on the run with a perfectly timed and angled flick of the wrist. During one harvest season a celebrated knife huntsman bagged a figpecker at dawn, with a throw that bisected the delicate bird. Its body fell in two halves at his feet, along with a slender branch sliced off at the moment of the kill. The branch was stained at intervals with three studies of Adon's face.

The hunter had the momentary thought that the tree was infected with some disfiguring disease. He picked up the branch to examine it more closely; his hand trembled when he recognized Adon's portrait. He was as awed and confused as if he had seen God. These were the first images he had ever seen. Never before had he looked Adon directly in the eyes.

He dropped the branch, and with more apprehension than he had felt on any hunt, he swung a leg over the tree as if it were a woman, and slithered up into its crown. There, swaying above him, he saw the sea for the first time, its waves a transparent aquamarine starred with silvery fish, painted in a sequence of miniature panels, according to the description of Souraya, whose son had translated her words into images.

There were houses he knew, animals he had hunted and killed, alive again here in Heaven. Here was a wedding, a coming-of-age ceremony, faces only a bit larger than buds emerging like new fruit on the branches. He recognized the face of his own wife. God seemed to have made a world in the sky corresponding to the one created on earth. The tree was like God's own record of the tribe. Bewildered and frightened, he forgot his kill, and ran back to the settlement with a fierce speed, as if he were chasing a leopard.

He was led into Adon's house, and taken to the master, where he gave a breathless, incoherent account of an ocean in the sky, of a tree of life, where God made pictures that determined the destinies they lived. Adon, sensing a danger that had driven this steady-handed hunter mad, chose two men to meet it with him, took his knife in his hand, and guided by the hunter, followed him to the holy tree in which the world past and the world to come were blooming.

When the hunter handed Adon the fallen branch etched with his portrait, Adon flung the limb to the ground, and raising his knife, chopped it into segments as if it had been a snake he had encountered on the path.

Then he ordered the hunter to shimmy up the tree and hack off its branches one by one. Faces, still lifes, flowers, and animals fell onto the ground.

As if he were at war, Adon attacked each one. A branch with an unusually ample planed section near its leaf end fell to the ground, and Adon froze. The wood was painted with a dreamlike scene of a woman with a small child in her arms; pearls of tears were visible on her face, as she and the child stared back with fixed eyes toward the recognizable gates of their own settlement, as a company of soldiers in helmets barricaded the entrance. Then Adon called for fire.

The men pleaded with Adon to save the orchard; its destruction would be an incalculable loss to the community. Another ran to the sanctuary to fetch the chief priests, hoping they would dissuade Adon, but when they arrived and saw how the trees had been desecrated, they agreed with Adon that whatever fruit they might yield was irrevocably poisoned. They chanted prayers of repentance as Adon put the torch to the garden.

Then began a time of fear, of interrogations, denunciations, and perpetual dawn sacrifices presided over by the men and boys of the community. These were the first months Adon and Ivat had spent a substantial amount of time in each other's company, and the shared ceremonies and ritual rigors created in them a mutual acknowledgment, almost camaraderie.