The Book of Heaven: A Novel (4 page)

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.

These customs were the source of a body of foolish, fanciful local legends told to frighten children, about a woman who destroyed the world through harvesting a dangerous fruit in search of some esoteric knowledge. However, legends are like ivy; they will relentlessly seek some crevice in the world, from which to emerge and make themselves come true. Thus these legends gradually became the underpinning for cruel superstitions about women, and later a body of opportunistic laws that deprived them of letters, and of civil and property rights.

As she approached the gate that led into the property, she saw a small child being soundly punished for making a drawing with a stick in the ground. Souraya stopped and came closer, hoping to plead for some leniency for the little girl.

She looked down at what the child had drawn. It was a sketch of Souraya herself; the child had caught the almond shape of her eyes, and had marked out curves with a playful exuberance that represented the wave on wave of her hair. She looked with a pang at her face; it seemed as far away now as a boat receding into the distance as it vanished around a river bend.

It was with a concealed sense of relief and pleasure that Souraya received the news from Adon that she was to prepare to leave with him on a trading journey of indefinite duration. If she were a wife of longer standing, he might well have set off without her. She thanked God she was a new bride.

Although she had adapted to her new life with tact, if not with ease, she had a keen, if untried, appetite for travel, as she had even in her girlhood. She was young, and wanted to see cities and settlements she had heard about in traveler's tales, cities ascending to Heaven on stone, concealed in cliffs and caves, or settlements in marshes, where you leaned out of your floating house to catch a fish for breakfast. If she had submitted her own face to eradication, she could at least look at the faces of others. She wanted to see a world that insisted on itself. She wanted to be in motion in this world where she had not found a home.

And she wanted to give an illusion of holiday to the work of her marriage. It was her work to create an environment of efficiency, productivity, prosperity, and enjoyment for a perfect stranger, to anticipate and provide him with everything he wanted, even if what he wanted was an illusion, even when what he did not know he wanted. It was a strange paradox of marriage that it required her to outwit her husband. It was critical that she know him better than he knew himself.

She woke up charged with energy, each day a day of danger to be outwitted, each day a test for her; her sense of herself was urgent, a runner straining to outpace a capture. She worked to enlace him in a web of services, obligations, delights—to construct a power of life and death over him that would balance the power he was born with over her. She knew her fate depended on not disappointing, at least until she could provide the dynasty that was the obsession of this aging, childless man.

At home, she was owned, a locked house that her husband entered or left at will, a garden whose fruit her husband fed from according to his appetite. She offered herself with ruthless practicality and an increasingly successful forecast of his moods.

The deprivation of images she lived with seemed to have enhanced an intuitive capacity of hers to nearly supernatural levels—she had developed an almost infallible gift for predicting action and analyzing character through observing other people physically. Their bodies told her stories, warned her, confirmed rumors.

A tension in the neck, a slight compression of the lips, the way arms were crossed, had shown her details of business dealings in a way that even impressed her husband. She had only to entertain a potential client or partner to understand their enterprise, like those canny jewelers who offer coffee to clients the better to see the quality of the rings worn on the hand holding the cup. The anticipated journey would give her more scope to demonstrate these skills, and so secure her husband's favor.

At least as travelers she and her husband would be almost equals, equally subject to the unknown, equally engaged in acts of discovery. They would wake up both unsure of what each day would bring, embarked on a common journey at last.

In those days of traveling, she felt the momentum of being alive so powerfully that it contained her unhappiness. She woke early as if she were hungry for the day. She had discovered the odd and unexpected involuntary savor of living—there was an appetite for it, even among the aggrieved, she observed, as when mourners woke ravenous for breakfast on the day of the funeral.

She coursed through the hours of movement, the rhythms of departure and arrival, the overheard conversations, the changing gods and customs so offensive to her marriage tribe, the absorbing entertainments that were part of hospitality, her appreciation of the beautiful invention of trading, its fine transcendence of combat.

And she secretly delighted in the mirrors in the women's quarters, the first since her marriage over which her husband had no power. She did not, as he admonished her, close her eyes, or turn her back on them. She was surprised to see how easily she had forgotten her own features, how she had become a hazy general impression in her own imagination. Her lost features had expanded like a mist; her face had become the size of the world. The mirror's limitations of her imagination of herself came as a relief. Her face again had an accurate compass. But she was also encountering now a world of mirrors—in the faces of the people she was traveling among, she saw her reflection, as they saw theirs in hers.

The journey made those forbidden images for her, images she never forgot, that came to life and then changed it. Her thoughts, as always, sometimes to her guilt and annoyance, bubbled unquenchably to the surface, like artesian wells. The woman was one of those helpless saints of honesty, so many of whom come to doom.

As they climbed into boats, and set off on reed-fringed waters in the moonlight to approach a legendary settlement scattered on a thousand islands, she knew she had reached a moment that would never end for her. It would end in the world, but not in her memory.

It was as if she were entering into a superb world-sized brocade, somewhat like the kind her own people had made, of nocturnal landscapes emerging from silver, blue, and purple threads. The sounds of the paddles of the guides weaving through the water was the sound of her own figure being woven into a corner of a scene of moving through glistening reeds and water at night.

She had a feeling of being present at her own creation, a moment of premonition. She would never not see herself here. It was, she knew, a deathbed heaven, as her own people called such visions—the place a dying person would imagine himself returning to at the moment of his death.

One of the thoughts came to Souraya that she disliked, that made her feel disturbingly isolated within which what was now supposed to be her clan, her hearth circle. If it was ordered not to fashion images, then it was ordered to destroy the mind, which could not blind itself. Then the great scroll of thoughts and memories that was her mind was sinful. Then even this present moment in which she saw her own figure in the moonlight was forbidden. Then it was ordered not to dream. Dreams, though, flow through living minds as blood through veins, and the loss of them is mortal, too.

A dream came to her now. The heightened feeling she had, the sense that she was unexpectedly part of something permanent, made her think something would happen to her here, something that would itself be permanent. There are moments when one can indeed know the future truly, though never infallibly.

As they neared the island where they were to be received by the chief of this region, one of the guides took what she thought had been an urn, turned it upside down, and began drumming on it with his palms.

The boat laced its way through a labyrinth of reeds, and the moment it struck ground, lights sprang up around them, torches crowned with countless flames, that made them look like the petals of burning white roses. The reeds had camouflaged hundreds of boats, which were now clearly visible, their forms heightened as sculptures in the burst of light. The whole island was alive with light now, as if it had just sprung into being out of darkness. It was as if a new kind of time had been achieved on this fragment of earth, in which day and night were inextricably joined together.

They passed through a pergola that seemed to be formed of flowers that flickered and glowed as if they had bloomed with lit candles inside them. Souraya stared at them surreptitiously as she passed through the fragrant gallery. The luminescence of the flowers was owing to restless fireflies that had somehow been coaxed into their hearts.

Men and women, too, stood on borders of the path to the guesthouse, each supporting a torch planted in the ground like the stone caryatids bearing baskets of flame that she had seen in several cities along their route. The forms of those pillars, she realized, could only have been basalt and granite translations of what some embassy had seen here and remembered. So it was that a form took new life from place to place, from version to version, as a child's features interpreted his ancestors'.

Souraya, as she had been trained since her marriage, met no one's gaze directly. When they crossed the threshold of the guesthouse, she expertly used her lids and lashes as a veil, taking her impressions obliquely and without entering into or inviting any relations, any exchange of mutual knowledge, with any person present. It was a matter of theater; one gave the illusion, in a successful performance, of never seeing the audience.

She observed the great wheels of metal laden with extravagant dishes, and that the company was composed both of men and women, an oddity of the island decorum perhaps. As Adon moved forward to greet the chief, she saw him drop his own eyes, much more ostentatiously and awkwardly than someone did who was accustomed to the practice.

She saw him flinch, and furtively traced the trajectory of his gesture, noticing now, as she had not in the first defensive cautions of entering, that the walls of the structure were covered with painted frescoes and with brocades. It was strange to see Adon obliged to assume her own withdrawn posture in the face of these painted scenes. She could make out what looked like men and women having a picnic under flowering trees, another of musicians playing for dancers, and a brocade of the very scene she had just passed through, a boat moving through reed-fringed waters under a full moon. The rest were too shadowy to see from her position.

The chief, whose name was Am, escorted Adon to a place next to his own, and seated him before a small round wooden table, decorated with gleaming metal tracery, identical to the tables set before the other guests. Then, instead of taking his own place, he returned to escort Souraya to a seat of her own, precisely opposite his, where he could take his fill of looking at her throughout the evening, accidental or deliberate.

Adon was more helpless in the face of the subtle laws of hospitality than he was in open combat. Something as subtle as a foreign conception of courtesy had as much power, it seemed, as a conquest did to alter the course of events. The meal was a chess game played with the eyes, each of the three of them pretending not to look and not to see.

Souraya's mastery of inscrutability was put to the test. She struggled not to respond when she heard their host compliment Adon on the beauty of his companion. She arrested her blush, drove back the current of light flooding her eyes in response, kept her natural expressions masked as if underneath a thin sheet of metal.

Nor did she flinch when she glimpsed Adon gesturing toward her, and heard him explain to the chief that he was traveling with his sister. Then, the chief said, with a courtly inclination of his upper body toward Souraya, your family has not only acquired treasure, but also created it.

After the meal was finished, the singers and dancers arrived. Souraya had never witnessed such techniques of storytelling. The singers and dancers began by surrounding one of the frescoes; they narrated the story it told, and danced it in and through the audience, bringing the figures out of their frames into life, and the audience itself into the world of the pictures. The acceptance of the imagery was an acceptance of a changing world. The dancers even gave the illusion that they themselves were the creations of the audience.