The Book of Heaven: A Novel (31 page)

She thought, calmly, about finding an outcrop to make a fatal leap, but she had already been killed so much that day that she lacked the will to act. She could only absorb the day's death—she had been General Jarre's privileged daughter in the morning, but now, after the passage of hours, was some other kind of being. She was uncertain what she was now, except that it was the kind of being that was not a child. She was now the kind of being who had gained the first dreadful inkling of what an hour is and what it might contain.

Instead of dying, she found a terrace in the vineyards with a view down to that moment's glittering sunset sea. To the left of the vines there was a ruined stone pagan chapel, with the fragments over the door of the carved wheat sheaf and grapes that identified such buildings. Two untended rose bushes flanked the door on either side.

This place, for years to come, would provide the space in which she lived freely in the fragments of time that were hers alone. For what one experiences is not the whole of one's life. One can give birth to a child and bring it up, yet still fail to become its mother.

Here she thought about what had happened to her, and moved through it like the birds through the interstices of the stone chapel. She did there what we call living through what happened to her. She tasted this view of the sea every day, in its nuances and variations of mist, snow, star, storm, clouds, and currents of air—it was a place that was like a marriage to her.

Afraid to linger further, she returned to the path to climb to the dining hall.

There she was given dinner by herself in a room lined with couches on which one reclined to eat, in the old monarchy style. She was hungry and tired and so drank too much of the wine they gave her, though she would have fallen unconscious even without the overindulgence, thanks to the ample dose of sleeping drug mixed with the wine.

She was still drowsy when she woke in the dark without her clothes on, as one of the boys from the second courtyard put his hand over her mouth and raped her, as was the custom on a girl's first night as a perpetual bride.

After it was done, Madam, who had been working on her household accounts book outside the room, thanked the boy for his service with the traditional tip of a gold coin, and sent him away to his lodging. Then she went inside, carrying a blanket, and helped Rain, silent, lying doubled over on her side, to rise and walk back to her own quarters.

Efficiently, she put the girl to bed in the dark. Madam leaned over Rain, who was lying on her back as if paralyzed, her eyes open and blank. Rain had been brought to the place where there was nothing that could not be done to her. She would live in that place where every day was a new kind of dying.

“Is there anything else you need to help you sleep?” Madam asked. She was an expert apothecary; many of her charges needed and valued her skills.

Rain stared up at her. “You are damned, Madam,” she said, hoarse with hate. “You are damned.”

Madam smiled solicitously, and answered her in a soothing voice. “All women are. And so are you, little girl.” She brought her face down to Rain's and kissed her maternally, consecratingly, on the forehead, and then full on the lips, kisses that were like the sealing stone of a tomb. “So now you know. Now you are a dedicated Immortal.”

The violence of the boy had been only one dimension of rape—Madam, too, raped, but incorporeally. Madam murdered the last remnant of her hope of life, with her poisoned tenderness. Virginity in itself is nothing, unless its loss ends the power to love. Madam completed Rain's education, showing her that all the gestures of love can be ridiculed or perverted.

“You'll feel much more at home tomorrow,” she said, and closed the door, leaving her in darkness. For the first time since childhood, that tearless girl at last wept as women are ordained to.

She had lived the rigorously disciplined life of women on the Peninsula, who lived as soldiers, soldiers who do not kill, but form the iron militia who endure life. But she had failed so far in the feminine discipline of sorrow.

Rape is a kind of physics, steadily obeying laws of action and reaction. The rapist suffers from his own violence. His only relief is to transmit it to the object he is determined to harm as well as have; when he has replaced love in her with terror, and the lust to kill, he is satisfied. He has then raped in self-defense.

Now, for the first time in her life, Rain felt desire; a passion to murder. She would murder Madam first, because she was to hand. And her death would be the doorway through which Rain could escape.

She imagined then shedding the blood of her sacred father, Jarre. She allowed herself to imagine tearing a piece of his dead flesh from his shoulder with her teeth, and then spitting it to the ground, stuff too contemptible even to eat.

The first blood-dark tide of hatred lapping at her feet was almost comforting in its warmth. She did not know how quickly it would rise or where it would carry her.

In the morning, Madam herself brought a breakfast tray, with luxurious fruits and breads too tempting to refuse. She saw to it that the brides were always well fed and well dressed.

“You must be feeling much better now, I think?” she said.

“I feel better,” Rain said, echoing the answer implicit in Madam's question. She tested Madam's acuity, with the newfound feminine cunning that the Peninsulan men so abhorred.

Madam looked at her with genuine relief, pleased to receive her own answer to her own question. She was so accustomed to these necessary cruelties that she oversaw them as a doctor does surgery. She disliked being the object of lengthy resentment by the girls. It made her dislike them, and that interfered with her management of the house.

Rain did not meet her eyes. Madam found her modesty correct, even touching. Long years of mercantile experience had accustomed her to weighing the potential value of all the material of a girl, from the slimness of her wrists to the distinctive features of her temperament. Her own reactions to a girl guided her in choosing the clients whom she would best suit.

Shame was a precious delicacy whose flavor diminished over time. Madam quickly summoned an inner catalog of clients she imagined would pay generously for such a luxury. She thought of the money translated into repaired tiles, new kitchen copper, seed for winter wheat, and the endless installments of taxes she paid to the state.

Rain was, though, looking at Madam's throat, her eyes averted not in shame, but in rage. She wondered if her hands were strong enough to choke the governess. Her own throat burned and constricted with the feeling of the murder she was bringing to life. The murder would concentrate all that she had suffered, all that would be transformed, if she ceased to be a person and became fate itself. She was suffocating with her longing to kill; crucified on it.

Madam circulated the news that there was a new bride in the house, waiting to present Rain until she had stirred up the greatest excitement. It was a period she always enjoyed, this time when a newcomer was as completely in her own possession as a doll.

She even chose the new bride's clothes, trying different colors and styles to see the range of moods and fantasies the new body would yield. She made the brides walk up and down, lift their arms, turn, stand still, posing in effective light. She treated their bodies as she treated her compound: all were locked away from the world outside, but no locks were permitted on internal doors. Only Madam held the keys.

She cut the hair of the newly arrived Immortals, if she disapproved of their coiffures. If they resisted, having once been pampered with girlish freedoms, she menaced them with the scissors.

She applied their cosmetics herself, turning their heads right and left, tilting them up and down, threatening slaps if the girls were slow in absorbing and reflecting the features she designed for them, the magnified lips, exaggerated lashes, eyes ringed with black pearls when she wanted to emphasize a bride's expression of fear.

The obedience yielded in these sessions gave Madam a devotional sense of peace and security; she was doing sacred work, erasing the individual from the bride so that she might become Immortal.

(I have often reflected that the Peninsulans, like many other peoples, would do well to observe their nurseries more objectively. Their image of their children was so often a matter of belief, not of description—the classical evocation of the boy, like a god surrounded with the miniature fallen soldiers he had commanded and doomed, the girl helplessly tender as an apple blossom on a bough, compulsively rocking some sort of infant in any form of rag or wax. Yet the way of a girl with her dolls can be as fatal as the way of a boy with his army. I see these things clearly perhaps, because of my childlessness. Parents look into children as into mirrors, whereas all children remain opaque and mysterious to me.)

For the time being, Madam determined to withhold Rain—she would perform only as a dancer, until she had built a following, an audience among whom there would be wild competition to possess her. She did not want her in company with the other brides for the moment, either, frightened by rumors and quarrels. Rain was kept isolated. Madam thought the enforced solitude would sharpen her appetite for company when it would be useful.

She was sent to dance rehearsals in the morning and afternoon, supervised by a former principal dancer who had recently had a child, and was nursing it in the House of Immortal Children.

Rain's body was used as a blank canvas for the invention of new steps and new roles. She transformed her body into the world she was not permitted to live in. She was menageries, gemstones, architectures, oceans, landscapes—she danced them into the sequestered courtyard, she danced them into life.

If Rain could find an hour, she went to sit at the old pagan chapel overlooking the sea. She looked at the ships coming and going, and strained with all her imagination to leave on board one of them, but there she encountered, instead of freedom, the limits of dreams. Human imagination imports well, but exports with less success.

Madam permitted her these absences, recognizing an artist's needs. In the evenings, Rain sat alone in the gallery above the theater watching the performances, hidden by the carved wooden screens that enclosed the galleries. She almost panted under the weight of her hatred as she watched Madam at work, managing her domain. The sight of her was an unending torture, as if Madam was a malignant cancer inside Rain herself.

Rain's only relief was an odd ritual. At night, she would unwrap her wingless toy bird and stroke it, overcome with pity for this bit of broken clay. She felt her tenderness unfold inside her, like a pair of wings she might offer to the bird. To do this kept her human in some way.

Madam moved tirelessly back and forth during the evenings, inspecting the brides as they descended the staircases to the public salons, sharing a glass of wine with clients in one courtyard, attending some of the dances in the third courtyard, flanked always by men she selected to distinguish with her attention. She gave the selected ones conversation, jests, refreshments, the honor of good seats near the stage, as if she were offering hospitality, rather than calculating payment due to the house.

She was not given to praise of her girls and boys. “You were particularly graceless tonight,” Rain overheard her say curtly and publicly to a bride who had danced a brilliant solo in a folk ballet about a hunted deer.

Madam turned her back on the dancer and walked away, but after a short time, as if Madam had conjured him, a robust man wearing large gold rings who had been sitting close to the stage approached the girl. He took off one of his rings, handed it to her with a gesture both placating and demanding, and led her away.

During the morning choreography next day, Rain and Azura, the choreographer, worked together on shaping steps based on the phases of the moon. (These later diffused themselves throughout the world as the five basic positions of what is known as ballet, in which the dancer emerges from invisibility through each phase until the culminating full moon of the fifth. Thus this soldierly society, with its harsh theological teachings about women, became known for its association with the most feminine of all styles of dance.)

Rain described Madam's display of contempt at the performance. Azura's reaction was surprising. Her posture changed. Her face, which glowed with the involuntary radiance of someone who has been dancing, became stern. She bent her neck, as if to a yoke, and looked as if she had lost a full head of her height. “Madam's judgments are always costly,” she said.

Then she adjusted Rain's arms, and stood back to analyze how the pose would appear from a distance. Rain broke free from the pose, tormented by the image of Madam. “Let me dance,” she said. “Let me dance tonight.”

“No,” Azura answered with authority. “The longer before you make your debut, the better off you are. Besides, you want to tell the truth. You want to tell what happened to you. But nothing will be worse for you than to find out onstage that the audience doesn't care. It doesn't matter to them. You are underwater to them. They can see you, but not hear you.

“I've learned—and you must realize—that nothing is more dangerous to you here than an audience you have shown something they don't want to imagine about themselves. It will enrage them. Everything for you depends on what you make them dream.”

Rain suddenly thought of her sister, Dolphin, trapped too in the life that had been assigned to her. “You want to dance them to death,” Azura said. “But that will only make them imagine killing.”

Azura put her arm around Rain, the first gesture of affection that Rain had known for months. She took the opportunity of the closeness to whisper to Rain to meet her at the pagan chapel in the afternoon. Then she quickly returned to drilling Rain, making her practice the boring repetitive movements of the feet, like sharpening knives, that would enable her steps to gleam with precision onstage.