The Book of Heaven: A Novel (12 page)

I have said the world was created with a knife and a prayer. The prayer was my mother's word as she went to her death: “Live.” The knife you can see well, especially in the late summer nights. No one had seen this constellation, the Murder, appear in the sky until after my mother was killed and I escaped my father. The astronomers until then had not observed it, or at least had made no record of it. But there, overhead, an image that seems the size of a world formed all at once, larger than any image my father ever succeeded in eradicating. Speech denied will burst its dam and become a flood of song. Stories silenced on earth will catapult into Heaven, visible wherever we turn our faces, glittering irrevocably, forever.

Legend (that is the name the Guardians give to the stories they reject) tells that the flashing knife that trembles in the heavens was the one that my mother tore from my father's hand and flung away. It is suspended there, in the heart of Heaven, they say, poised to slice the night and cut us all to pieces, until the day you can hear my voice. Until you let me tell the truth. Listen. God permits.

The images of gods and saints are mirrors in which we see ourselves praying; they are not idols.

If a painter could make the water in his seascape salty, God would congratulate him.

Unless we see ourselves praying, we cannot know what we pray for.

Monotheism is also polytheism: each believer worships the images of his own God, the God in the many faces of his dreams.

We refuse images in order not to see our own desires clearly.

Every man has prayed at some time in his life to a false God.

Those who will not gaze at others' faces cannot see their own.

Words are more dangerous idols than images; idols we cannot see.

The evil are always insulted at the suggestion that they are not good; the good are never convinced that they are not evil.

God's humans are the creatures who bring themselves to life through what they make.

The man who believes woman was made of him, not of God, has made an idol of himself.

We must pray a thousand ways, with bread, with wine, with falling leaves, with breath, with idols, with thinking, and with kissing.

Is the one true God who saved one boy from sacrifice the one true God who welcomes the sacred killing of ten centuries of girls?

Beware the mother who would sacrifice another's child for her own.

A woman who gives birth has gambled with the life of someone she does not know—which is why the churches are filled with women.

The mother who will do anything for her child will also do anything to it.

A blessing given at another's expense is not from God.

Honor your mother and father, if they have also honored their children.

Blessed is the parent worthy to be mourned.

Blessed is the child who at the parent's grave weeps for his death, not for his life.

What a man refuses to see is the idol that always accompanies him.

Idols are what we will not look at, and will never see.

Idolatry is the failure to observe that we imagine what we see.

Women are the knights without armor, the soldiers without an army.

One can destroy such good as one embodies by lusting for virtue.

Men make laws: God makes miracles.

TO THE MEMORY OF NICOLAI VAVILOV

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

L
ook to the left of the shimmering Sheaf of Wheat undulating in the heavens, and just upward of the cascading Cluster of Grapes, from which the thick black wine of every night is pressed. You will see her standing next to, though higher than, the Cauldron, just to the left of the Great Table. She pours that nocturnal wine, holding a pitcher whose handle is set with planets, from one starry hand. Just above the Cauldron is the small diagonal group of eleven stars, which resemble seed pearls and are known as the Grains of Salt. It is said that the twelfth has already dropped into the Cauldron.

With her other hand, she tips a ladle over the Cauldron; streaming uncountable diamantine grains of starry rice, wheat, corn, and all shapes of edible seeds fall from it. They keep the world from devouring its own body in its hunger.

For the world was created not from clay, but from butter, which can melt like an illusion; from fertile grasses and trees, which may yield no fruit; from meat, which may be the prey of its own mother. For we ourselves are cauldrons, our breaths rising fragrant vapors, our entire span of life an evening's banquet at which God is our guest. And treacherous or generous, what we offer is what we think the nature of our Guest merits.

For it is said we wait for God's judgment in the life to come; but our lives here are our judgments of God.

She was nameless, being an Invisible. With the others of her year, she had been sent naked after her birth to one of the Ghost Houses in the three port cities of her country. These received children whose parents refused them. The children were called by shifting names until a permanent name formed for them, usually a name reflecting a talent or trait, therefore a useful marker to a potential owner.

No name could be given them, as is the convention in families; these children's names had to choose them. Her name found her a little later than average—Savour. This was not only a description of flavor, but was also a kind of spice native to her island. The savours grew on trees like nutmegs, but when their rind was shaved away, and the nut pulverized, it revealed an inner flesh like an iridescent jewel.

The spice emitted a unique perfume of caramel and smoke when it was grated into a dish, as well as adding an almost shocking ornamental beauty. The nuts separated into micalike sheets colored like precious gems; a tray of meat or rice flavored with them glinted with flecks of diamond, sapphire, ruby, silver, and gold, illuminating the faces of the diners as much as lamplight.

The fragrant fragments were not only used for cookery, but also served Ghost artists to make the mosaic pictures of the gods celebrated throughout the region. Savours were so common on the island that they were not particularly prized locally, but elsewhere, they represented the greatest luxury; cities were built on a trade in precious savours, the ships with their cargoes of savours and slaves were blessed by priests as a protection from pirates as they left port.

The Invisibles, also known as the Ghosts, and the Grateful Ones, were nurtured and fed until age seven or so, when they were dexterous and useful enough to be sold, having shown no sign of uncorrectable flaws of physique or character that would determine their future as wandering, rather than household Ghosts.

This was a condition more dreaded than slavery, not only for its insecurity, but because these children racked the countryside, their presence as torturing as questions that could find no answer, their unrequited faces and bodies haunted by their unknown parents, their parents possessed by their unknown children, wandering in fate.

They were never allowed to mourn, and were disciplined for any sign of melancholy, or talk of the lost ones. Their graves could be easily recognized in the cemeteries; instead of identification by relationship to parent, companion, or child, their headstones were carved with their assigned name and, beneath those, the embellished word “Grateful.” Hence, the proverbial threat that all the children of the island heard when misbehaving: “I'll give you something to be grateful for.”

But all the Grateful, even the pretty and endearing ones, made people uneasy. Their parents had not killed them; but in sending them to the Ghost Houses, they delivered their children out of the known world to a region in which anything was permitted to happen to them, anything might be given, anything withheld, anything done. All feared, and some envied, the windswept freedom that paradoxically made their slavery possible.

Above all, the Ghosts came into the world incarnate with knowledge. They lacked the innocence of family children. What they knew was the cruelest of secrets, the one that all parents strove to conceal from their children.

It was this.

They knew from the outset that all relationships are voluntary—even that most primal bond of mother and child. They were the bearers of the fearful knowledge that to commit a being to birth is as grave and fatal an act as to commit murder. Indeed, it was forbidden to sing lullabies to them. Their lives began with their own deaths; to sing them promises of safety as they fell asleep would be contradictory, if not mocking.

Other children seemed to live in a faith of need and fulfillment; the Ghosts were never sure that the sun would agree to rise, the next wave consent to the shore, never sure they would hear another of their own heartbeats.

This was reflected in Savour's laconic manner of speaking, always with a slight hesitation, as if she had to assemble herself from various elements before she replied. This quality could make her seem half-witted, though she was not; but her thoughts often had to traverse a great distance before they could be expressed. Then they poured out in a visionary and sometimes incomprehensible flood. There are people whose thoughts reflect the period of their own lives; but Savour was one of those whose attention is trained on the world as it was before they were born.

In their country, there was a legend of a paradise tree whose magnificent fruit exuded a crimson sap in small droplets like blood. According to the story, this fruit was sacred to the gods, and was forbidden to humans. Anyone who ate of it died. Then those who died revived, and lived afterward in a state of both unbearable knowledge and visionary rapture. It was said the Ghosts were suckled on the blood of this matchless fruit rather than on mother's milk.

The Ghosts were trained, for the most part, as craftsmen who were designed to be masters of a sole occupation, so they would serve perfectly, but remain atomized, never unite to challenge their own masters. They were educated to receive their lives as fate, not accident, never to imagine the world itself and the way they lived in it might be separate phenomena.

Their prayers did not finish with the syllables “amen,” but this phrase, “The way of the world, so be it.” They spoke in proverbs, timeless, insightful, provincial, and believed that the patterns of their lives had been set before time, and would continue until its end. No one had ever returned to their island after being sold, to tell them whether this was true or false.

The Invisible cooks brought particularly high prices; they were often sold apart to private clients rather than at auction. The proverb has it that brilliance in cookery is bestowed on those who have never tasted mother's milk.

The folktales concerning the Grateful Ones also tell us that anyone who displays an unusual gift for cooking is someone who has actually tasted the forbidden fruit of the paradise tree; the taste of paradise, and the mystery of what was known there, will haunt and distinguish the dishes that they prepare.

It was in exchange for that knowledge that they were destined to spend their lives in the heart of the wheeling universe, subjected daily to the elemental forces of fire, earth, wind, and water, the architecture of every kitchen.

It was for that knowledge that their days were poised between nurture and slaughter.

It was for that knowledge that their hands were plunged in carcasses, stained with blood, scarred with the burning flames of cooking. They were condemned to spend their days in the exact center of the world, the crossroads of Hell and Heaven in every shelter. They were indentured to the kitchens, struggling to find paradise within and beyond the killed, evaporated, and uprooted being that lay on their worktables.

Savour, it emerged, had this gift, which is a characteristic talent of those born under the constellation of Souraya, the sign of the Knife. At three, she had proved herself an agile gatherer of the precious spice, the first task of all Ghosts still too young and clumsy for tasks requiring more skill. As she grew older, they thought they might make a trapper of her; she had a passion for amassing provisions, and went about it creatively, like a true Invisible.

Once she was nearly punished for the disappearance of a keg of wine to be served to an important slave trader and his officers, but averted the punishment by leading the house governor to a clearing, where, it turned out, she had ingeniously lured three rare wild boar, now ripe for capture, lying on their sides in sumptuous stupors, and already seasoned, drunk on red wine.

She was an excellent weaver of nets and ropes, which taught her that food could be quarried throughout the firmament, not only in earth, but also in the sea, and in the heavens themselves. Her deft, swift fingers searched out the sweet berries from the bramble thickets that were planted over graves to keep the dead deep inside the earth. She grew expert in trapping the rabbits who fed in cemeteries, and, cooked in cream, were the base of one of the great traditional dishes of the Invisibles, known as Saint's Supper. She was so useful at supplying the house that she was still in residence well after most of her generation had already been sold.

She trapped by learning—not through instinct, or luck, but through acquiring knowledge, the destiny of those who had tasted the fruit of the paradise tree. When she was ordered to capture swans to roast at banquets, she failed and was punished, failed again and was punished again.

When she saw them swimming, she was awed by their absolute grace, their fluent unity with the world itself. She could never be as strong as they were, would always be more awkward. Trying to capture them was like trying to capture the reflections of trees in water—you could not succeed unless you captured the light itself. It was when she saw them walking that she grasped how it was to be accomplished; grasped the tragic principle of trapping.

She had seen swans walking on a frozen riverbank, searching for a fishing hole; they walked like the elderly, hobbling, hunched, unbalanced, unnatural; the curves of their necks distorting their gait. She realized that what had given the swan all its grace was the water. Water joined them to the larger world. Separated from the water, she could see what they were in themselves; they were formed as living fishhooks. So she could capture them out of water, with fish. Knowledge, she discovered, was stronger than strength.

It was then she saw that trapping was breaking the world into its fragile components—separating a creature from what made it fluent in the world, a part of the delicate integrity of the whole. Once it had lost that connection, it became vulnerable. One could snatch it from the world like a child from a mother. When a creature was successfully isolated from its environment, one had arrived at the point at which flesh becomes meat.

After she had caught the swans, she felt the burden of her new knowledge. She went back to the cold riverbank, to find the time and place to endure what she now understood. She wondered what she was formed for, removed from the context of the world. What, for instance, was the underlying, pure purpose of her hands? The fingers complicated everything. They made her able to stack, mold, cut, stir, test, collect. They could be like ten strong ropes to strangle a bird. But none of this was everything. She could use them to turn her hands into cups to drink from. She could not discover what one thing she was shaped to be. There were a thousand things her hands might do.

What she did could better be called searching than hunting; her way of tracking a hidden plantation of spices, a game bird, or prey on foot was to share its life. Their flight from her became her flight toward them, as if they were weights balancing on a scale. She entered into their fear of her by sharing it through her fear of them.

She did not hunt, she discovered. She learned which shelters they valued, what they ate, where they were born. Her pursuit of a creature fitted a frame around it. When she successfully followed tracks or caught a telltale movement through trees, she did so by describing the animal with her own motion, body, breath. The great hunters, she would say later, are not the expert killers, because their appetite to kill is keener than their appetite to hunt, but the ones who know how to keep a creature alive. Above all, she never forgot that she herself was prey.

She was the one on the beach or swimming in lagoons, ever vigilant for the transparent floating creatures, whose touch on skin was pure acid, that turtles fed on. The stinging food led her, though, to the creatures that ate it. She haunted these spots, and when she saw the turtles fused together in the shallow water like copulating stones, or watched for one beginning his hour-long mount on the sand, she would call for rope to secure the mesmerized creature, when it was sure that he had done his life-giving.

She was awarded the shells of her catches to use as cooking and serving vessels. She permitted the other kitchen Ghosts to use all but one of her private collection. This was an amber-colored shell of perfect symmetry, with lightning flashes of iridescent green, violet, and gold, particularly dazzling when the food it held was ornamented with shards of savour. The Lord Governor himself had promised her that she could take her tureen with her when she was sold, a pledge entirely contradicting the usual custom, under which the crafts and possessions of the Grateful were the property of the free citizens of the nation.