The Book of Heaven: A Novel (28 page)

He greeted no one else, and did not even seem to see the Indigenous child from the ring villages that had survived the Angelic massacre, and was now Savour's apprentice.

Savour stepped across the threshold and took him in her arms, embracing him with infinite delicacy as hands cup a flame.

“Are you hungry—my…dear?” she asked him. Salt smiled. Never during their entire acquaintance had Savour spoken an endearment; the language of attachment was a presumption forbidden to Invisibles; it was pruned from their vocabulary. She had almost winced with the effort of the tender phrase.

“I'm as weak as a newborn,” he said. “All the way here I dreamed of eating bread from your hands.”

They went inside and sat down at the table she had prepared for him. He ate slowly and attentively, as if he were an explorer approaching the shore of a new country. Savour noticed that he kept his left hand cupped tenderly over a round dome of bread, as if it were a child's head, or a woman's breast, even as he ate with his right hand.

“There is more,” she said to him, but he moved closer to her, and rested his head on her breast, in luxuriant peace, delivered of the need to keep vigil.

No one ever saw him again. The next day he was gone. When I asked Savour where the Indigenous man was who had eaten with her yesterday, she replied, “In Paradise.”

“He left for the city?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “In the true Paradise.”

“He died?” I asked. “And you buried him alone?”

“No,” she said. “He was dead when he came to me.” She had prepared for him the Twelfth of her Twelve feasts: the Feast of the Living and the Dead.

“Those who have mastered the art of the Twelfth can call someone beloved back to life, like a smoldering ember. They can briefly clasp hands between earth and Heaven. At that moment, the living and the dead can exchange a gift. But not for long.”

There were those who believed her and those who did not. I saw him—I thought. But I was a child, and she was the adult who made the world for me. Such adults have always a magical power to instill their beliefs in the children apprenticed to them.

But what I did see, without illusion, was the constellation that appeared in the heavens some fifteen years later, after Savour had departed at her own request, to cook for a governor across the border in the country of the Saints.

She gave me most of the magnificent tureens inscribed to her by the teachers of her youth, though she would not part with her knives and three leather pouches she kept as close to her as if they were three infants. They were seeds she intended to have planted across the border—the heritage of the Indigenes, she said, that would outlive their ruined land.

They say that the constellation of the Cauldron appeared when these seeds took root throughout the territory of the Saints, as if the seeds also took root in the form of stars. Whatever the truth of that, I know that the constellation exists, and can be seen by others in the night skies of summer.

The men who made the heavens for us to see have filled them with gods, warriors, heroes, and victors, swords, stallions, and crowns. They have even arranged our eyes, so that these beings are what we find in the patterns of the stars. We see what we believe the heavens show us.

We might just as well trace the outlines of other objects, other creatures. You will be told the constellation of the Cauldron does not exist—but they also declared Savour at her own birth to be Invisible.

Savour had been born under the constellation of the Knife, the star of those unrecognized on earth, whose life stories are told falsely. Her own constellation, the Cauldron, is the star that guides us to question the tales told us about the heavens themselves. There is more to see than we have been permitted; there are heavens unseen behind the heavens of our perceptions.

Savour was a slave, a woman, and a cook. She was not a hero. You must say that she failed.

She saved few lives, though her great yearning was to save all.

She was able to bring only one of her dead back to life, and then only for a few hours.

She did manage to preserve the roots, rices, and wheats of the Indigenes. When the wind inclines the blond stalks of grain on summer afternoons, parents tell their children that it is kneeling like a bridegroom before Lady Savour.

But she was no messiah. She did not feed the entire earth, or wipe the tears from the eyes of all the starving. The world is still a world of beggars, who dream of dishes that they will never taste. But Savour is in Heaven, hungering to feed them—and only in Heaven can dreams be eaten.

If by any chance she is not in Heaven, then you and I will never be. If there is no room among the stars for mortals—for slaves and beggars, and the ones who yearn to feed them, the ones whose passion to feed the world remains unrequited—then there is no hope for you or for me.

Savour pours and pours her stars of grain over the earth, and we lift up our hands to share in that glittering, imagined abundance that we have yet to taste. They say that some of those stars take root on earth when they fall. They are the seeds of what we call miracles. They become the food without which our hearts die. They are the source of Heaven's weightless fruit—justice, mercy, love. We are the only soil in which they grow. Through us they become bread in reality. Feast on these, precious souls, and rejoice.

The entire world can be seen within a kitchen bowl.

There are no truly childless women; there are no truly childless men.

Is there treachery greater than that of the host whose guests do not survive his dinner?

The wise anticipate at every dinner table the guest who will alter their fates.

The way food tastes is the first language: the primal alphabet of life and death.

All gods exist for their believers.

To insist that God is one is an arrogant underestimation of the divine.

Even one God metamorphoses.

Today's God of mercy is tomorrow's God of genocide.

The proper reply to the divine “I Am” is “What?”

All the elements of the universe—fire, earth, air, and water—are assembled in a loaf of bread.

The good hunter always remembers that he himself is edible.

The great hunter is the one who knows how to keep an animal alive.

The gift of brilliance in cookery flows from those who have never tasted mother's milk.

The great cook is the one whose food tastes not only of nature, but of human nature. And of divine glory.

A people's cuisine is its imagination of the world.

What a people eats is what it lives by—its economy in the mouth, made edible.

Cookery is a morality.

The table is the bed where dozens take their pleasure together.

A superb dinner is both a description of this world, and a message from the gods, a taste of paradise.

A seed is the emblem of the world to come.

The habitual expression on a man's face shows what he tastes like to himself.

There are five vocations that must be forbidden to those who have a taste for killing: butcher, soldier, hunter, king, mother.

The soul of a child persisting out of season within an adult is the source of all the world's tyranny.

The good mother is the one who does not destroy as much life as she gave.

The structure of a face is founded on the language a person speaks.

What we taste is the vocabulary of our first language.

The strangest of all desires, stranger even than the love of killing, is the lust to be hated.

We can recognize truth in our encounters with what we cannot create.

One can range the wide world within a skillet.

TO THE MEMORY OF SAMUEL PLIMSALL

The principle involved here is that the centre of power is identical with the centre of truth.

—VÁCLAV HAVEL

O
nce someone has tilted your head back and poised it at the right angle, you can plainly see the constellations of the Knife and the Cauldron in the seasons when they are bright. The Paradise Nebula, though, is a constellation that disappears and reappears, as the generations orbit through the ages. If you live at the wrong moment, or on the wrong fragment of the earth, you will not see these stars of fortune. They change position; they change eras; and their outline is so distinctive, that the entire cluster of stars seems, paradoxically, an illusion.

First, a group of stars appears, in the shape of a bird with a woman's head, its body made of night, its head and wings of stars. It moves swiftly across the sky, wheels, and hovers. A trembling rose of stars appears in the sky. And then a stem, diamond by diamond, and then a bush covered with sparkling blooms—and finally, on the cluster's outer rims, an orchard rich with what resembles fruit. The shimmering bird plummets into this celestial garden, and disappears.

Those fruits and these roses are not like the ones known here on earth. A terrestrial rosebush or cherry tree is a phenomenon of archetypal beauty, beautiful in ensemble. There each bloom or fruit shares the form and pattern of the other. In Heaven's garden, though, each single flower and fruit has individual features, as unrepeatable as human faces.

It is as if they have reached some new level of creation, some superabundance of existence. For an hour after this garden has formed in Heaven in all the colors of the spectrum, its fruit falls, a rain of jewel-colored starry leaves, and petals, and brilliant fruits, as you might see in the glass of a kaleidoscope. And then they float softly upward, in new configurations, and create a paradise utterly unlike the one that fell. This continues for an hour, until there occurs a spectacular rain of blue and gold stars. Then the constellation disappears, as if washed away, except from the minds of those who have seen it; they, in their turn, put it into the minds of those who have not.

Those who have not seen it, out of luck in time and space, deny that it exists. I can assure you though, in all honesty, that I have seen it, both with my own eyes, and with the eyes of others. It happened that during my time on the Peninsula the Paradise Nebula was visible.

I was employed there in the household of the man who became the most famous of the Peninsula's thirteen governors. This was Governor General Jarre. I was an eyewitness to the dramatic events that are the backdrop of his legend, a story that now periodically vanishes and reappears, like the Paradise Nebula.

The people of the Peninsula had successfully revolted, generations before, against their king, who ruled by divine right. But though they were strong, they were only a faction, and although they had killed the old king, they could not prevail against their loyalist fellow subjects, who preferred their traditional government, and enthroned a fresh king to maintain it.

The Peninsulans were driven across the border to the land they now inhabit. There, the decrease in the area of land they could inhabit and defend was compensated for by two superb deepwater ports, which shaped the Peninsulans as a trading people, and increased the yearning for the tantalizing worlds that lay beyond their own. For while no man wants to die, no one wants to live in a land he cannot ever leave. The contours of their new land gave them rich forests, fine grazing lands, and, as is so often the case, a new religion.

I am a traveler, having never settled in one land. I have had many opportunities to observe the rich variety of forms through which men perceive the sacred. I remember the holy liturgy in a country inhabited by former slaves in which the worshippers were kidnapped by God, and as they ritually struggled, screamed, and writhed, were imbued both with the horror of abduction, and with a power far greater than the merchants who sold them and the masters who held them in captivity could ever have possessed.

In another land, I participated in the cycle of festivities of a people who were possessed by a single god, a divinity who bitterly resented and persecuted all the gods who preceded him in this people's reverence. I saw bloody celebrations at which many of these helpless people, entangled by all the gods competing for their share of worship, were killed during the theomachies.

In yet another country, where by custom each woman was the property of up to five husbands, the devout were, oddly, mostly women. In their temples, God floated above them in starry domes, as if He were the first being they glimpsed upon waking. There, the face of God was that of the most tender, gentle husband imaginable, His arms outstretched in an embrace.

Do not mistake me, I am a believer absolute, but there is something undeniably singular in the ways God is revealed to men. The God of the Peninsulans, too, had his own characteristics and peculiarities of worship.

The Peninsulans were a group, who in their former country, formed almost a caste, of businessmen, craftsmen, tradesmen, but also at the lower reaches, peasants, peddlers, and thieves. They were never admitted into the aristocracy, either through their efforts, or through carefully wrought marriages. God, though, at the moment of his choosing, revealed himself to them as a king, infinitely more powerful than his earthly symbol, and with a much more exclusive court in the form of his church.

It was the monarch God who chose knights, the knights of perfect faith, whose royal souls were ennobled for all eternity. For the Peninsulans, there could be no cliques or factions, for their titles were granted by the King of Kings.

They proved they were truly of his elect by submitting to the body of Holy Peers a kind of spiritual patent, outlining not family ancestry, but spiritual ancestry, a description of the moment of election, and an account of all the examples and proofs of God's conversation and the favor that had followed. They too in their turn acquired the right to judge the authenticity of the marks of God's royalty.

Their King was so much greater than the mortal sovereign that they came to despise the earthly king, his presumption to grant privileges, and all his potentates.

They abandoned, too, the special consideration given to women at the old court, where birth could make a destiny. They realized that it was God who granted estates, God Omnipotent who instituted rank, stature that could never be challenged or altered, made before ancestry, before the creation of humanity itself, utterly outside of time. They came to scorn monarchy and all its trappings with an almost reflexive contempt. The most venerable monarchy was no more than arriviste in their conception.

Governor Jarre had all the attributes of one who had received God's crown. He had been given wealth with which to honor God, in the form of property, a son, and two daughters to devote to God's service, and in himself, those peculiarly magnetic facial features, a golden air of merited success, that made him look like a vision God had had of mankind.

He was a man so perfect in his faith, so at one with God's plan for the world, that at the famous border battle of Saldava, he smiled in unearthly exaltation during combat. His face, they said, was both grave and radiant when he had the first reports of the enemy casualties. Even when he received the news of the heavy losses of his own troops, he said with an exultant air, “Hallowed be thy name! Maker of War and of Peace! The living do praise Him and also the dead! There will be souls in Heaven today!”

After arrangements were made for the prisoners, and the ceremony of surrender had taken place, Jarre gave instructions for the burial of the dead. He himself walked the battlefield to pay his respects. I was with him as he walked reflectively among the corpses, many of whom might have been his own sons. It was moving to see his face as he gravely and compassionately absorbed the sense of these men's fates. His expression could only be described as fatherly. “Many souls,” he said, “have this day been delivered from their fear of death.” He was a man who knew nothing of despair.

He was well rewarded for his victory at Saldava. He was given a site on a bluff where he built a stone house nearly in Heaven, and lived as if he had always lived there. It was surrounded by terraced vineyards, and he bred there the renowned race horses of the Peninsulans, the Peninsulan Smaraldians.

His service was also recognized with the gift of a marble villa on the seashore, with a perfect view of the summer boat races known as the Angel Flights, when the graceful Peninsulan schooners race against specially trained birds.

The end of those races is memorable for the sight of the fifty schooners returning to harbor at dusk, while overhead, the birds, laced together with the thinnest gold and silver chains, fly in the formation of a three-branched candelabra. They rise toward Heaven, returning the light to God that He granted the world. It is a marvelous celebration of man's perpetual task to yoke nature in glory to the spirit of God.

Little delighted Jarre more than those races; during the season, he would host parties, pouring wine from his own vineyards for his guests, gesturing from the great marble veranda with a poignant intensity of attention, as if he were in some kind of race himself. He and his dear friend and former comrade-in-arms, Admiral Annan, watched the contests together, leaning out over the water, their elbows on the balustrade, rapt as schoolboys drinking in the prowess of the men they hoped to become.

The women of the Peninsulans in those days were as obedient as it is possible to make women be. I do not know if it is still so, since I have not lived among that people for many years.

The Peninsulans held that the world had been inhabited only by men and creatures of the natural world until one man was seduced by a serpent and metamorphosed in his ecstasy into a woman. Hence their physical inferiority, an emblem of their inability to govern themselves—and the shape of their sex, bifurcate as a serpent's tongue, emblem of their duplicity.

They could achieve salvation only through the men who governed them, through the holy influence of their lost masculinity. For the sake of their salvation, they must suffer as God willed; it was forbidden even to alleviate their pain in childbirth. In any case, that God had ordained these terrible childbirths that killed so many of them, as well as so many of the babies struggling to be born, was proof of how far beyond God's kingdom they were.

Harsh justice was administered to women who defied God's decree with satanic opiates. The people of the Peninsula still talked in hushed tones of the case of Lark Inchin, a woman who was discovered to have brewed syrups against pain in labor, cunningly leaving bundles of mixed herbs for the concoction in a vineyard so she could not identify the women who used these drugs. She was sentenced to death, by a means specific to punishment of this crime.

The usual death penalties on the Peninsula were beheading for men, as a sign that they had betrayed God's gift to them of reason. Women were forced to leap from a cliff so that dying itself became a submission to the commands of men, and thus restored them to the obedience they had flouted. Lark Inchin, though, and other criminals of her ilk, was saddled and bridled, and ridden to the port, where she was hung from the leather bridle she wore.

The more talented among women had preserved in themselves a splinter of their original manhood. Even those, though, were empty vessels. The matchless Peninsulan doctors and scientists had determined that men were like the Smaraldian stallions they had studied. Males contained in their seed the invisible bodies and souls of the children the females received of them. Hence the description at races of colts as “by” the father, “out of” the mother. Only the childishly irrational attempted to contradict them, more out of a jealousy of the stature of the learned scholars than from any real intellectual dissent.

I am an avid student of anthropology, and have been fortunate to pursue my interests in many countries. I observed a curiosity on the Peninsula, similar to a phenomenon I have seen in other societies where women are fully governed by men.

It is this: that the most desirable women come to look like some creature or plant or even local craft that is highly prized, as if they are a kind of supreme incarnation of the national economy. Thus, among the Vanians, whose lands retain much of their primeval forest, and who make their houses and ships of that wood, the women look like trees, astoundingly tall, with thick leafy hair, and the balance that makes them famous dancers. Among the Roques, those great herders and cheese makers, nothing is more sought after than a woman with a dairy beauty, with creamy skin and lush breasts. The ceramicists of arid Buntu markedly prefer women with small waists and enormous hips, exactly like water jars.

This happens naturally, it seems, as the ruling men choose women who by accident evoke what they value, and after several generations, a pool of these women is bred for these qualities and marries intricately with other men in the aristocratic circles.

As for the Peninsulans, their standard of beauty for women was equine. The beauties among them looked like the fine Smaraldian racehorses, with long curving jaws, shining hair, and huge long-lashed dark eyes.

Jarre's wife had the Smaraldian looks, though she was not of a distinguished family. She had never lived in the fishing villages by the docks, but carried the honking accent of some grandmother who had.

In repose, her face was beautiful. Her carriage was perfect, even under the weight of the crown all Peninsulan wives wore to symbolize that they were princesses of God's court. But her nasal snarl and coarse vowels when she was speaking shaped her face into a sneer so that even when uttering endearments, she appeared to curse. Still, it was often the case that a woman with that physiognomy would find herself stabled, as it were, with her betters.