The Book of Heaven: A Novel (5 page)

She was rapt, though she saw that Adon was barely able to control his displeasure, which rose to what she recognized as an agony of suppressed protest at the climax. It was the story of their own arrival, Adon's and Souraya's, told through the brocade of the moonlit marinescape.

Boats, oars, winds, moving waters, were made out of dancer's legs, hands, hair, and eyes, and then dissolved. With uncanny observations of their faces, voices, and gestures, Adon and Souraya were woven into the brocade with song and dance, forever honored by becoming a flickering part of the community's pilgrimage of experience.

After the entertainment, when their party had been shown to their quarters, Adon seated himself near the entrance. Although the bones of his face looked prominent and stony, his expression, which she always watched as carefully as a sailor watches the fixed star, was unsettled. His eyebrows were both raised, his mouth open, as if he were in the act of asking a question that confused and panicked him.

He had taken the knife forged as part of Souraya's dowry from its sheath, and turned and turned it in his hand, as if he were meditating on its inscription. Souraya watched him cautiously, turning and turning his face in her eyes, wondering what mood was being communicated to the knife.

At last the knife came to rest, its glittering blade still on the flat of his palm, like a snake charmed into sleep. The familiar certainty returned to his face, a characteristic, almost aggressive tranquillity.

Adon invited his wife to sit with him. “I cannot reproach you for impropriety in this case as it was forced on you,” he said, “nor for the beautiful accident of your features, as they were given to you, but your face has brought me into great danger. We are undefended here, except by God.

“You have fascinated our host. It is apparent. His object will now be how best to acquire you for himself. I cannot prevent him. The dilemma now, rather, is in how to maneuver him to earn what he could simply take. This is the art of commerce, how to make a jewel-covered bride of a girl anyone can rape.

“If this lord suspected we were husband and wife, he would simply rid himself of the obstacle of me and take you. You would live, and I would die. I have seen such situations. But God has spoken to me.

“With God's help, I find a stratagem that will protect me, and may yet turn to our profit. You will be my sister. And so Am will make an offer for a sister that would be impossible to make for a wife. I am sure of it. And I will accept it.” He sheathed his knife in the traditional iconoclast gesture that accompanied the sealing of an agreement or the acceptance of a treaty.

“You will join his household until I find the means to bring you back. This is a hard thing to ask of you, I know, but I will not be murdered for your sake. It is not God's will that you should live and I should die. I am God's servant. You are mine. Pack what you will need. Remember at all times that you are my sister. And don't dream they won't come for you. God permits the visions He sends to me.”

For the second time that night, Souraya became an athlete of silence and emptiness. She froze her eyes, her forehead, her mouth, regulated her breathing, this time to conceal her shock and disbelief. She drained herself like a lake, emptying herself of any visible emotion. But inside her self, where images could not be forbidden, she had witnessed a death.

It was as if she had seen the soul of her husband fall and die in front of her, fall from his body as from a cliff, leaving behind not a corpse, but a soulless living body, the body of the man prostituting her, selling her body for his. She, too, had been separated from her body; she had never realized, never understood, how expendable, how provisional a thing it was.

She had imagined herself as under her husband's protection, like a precious coffer filled with his future children. In this vision was the way she had made herself consent to her life with him. But she was as secure in his protection as a fish is under the protection of a fisherman.

She had thought because he loved her body that he cherished it. But now she saw that he took her body to be a dream of his own. It gave him pleasure, it gave him work, it gave him comfort, and profit. It was even more completely his body than his own, since if he needed to, he could discard it. Nothing she had imagined about who she was to him was true. At that moment, she became his widow.

In the morning a messenger did indeed bring an offer from Am, along with a handsome weight of the gold ore that was the iconoclasts' preferred currency, because they abhorred, as blasphemous and polluted, coins impressed with images.

He was followed by a group of men and women bearing slabs of silk and baskets of dried fish: these were the fundamental currency of their own economy. The messenger also set down a basket of fruit, bread, and new eggs for the breakfast of those in Adon's party, and waited for Adon's reply.

Souraya would be escorted into the chief's household when the day's business was done, and Adon would continue his travels of commerce. Adon put the payment for his wife in the locked chest where he kept the other records and earnings of his expedition. At nightfall, she followed Am's servants, on the path to her new stranger master, still stunned at the way Adon had disposed of her, his chosen wife. She, who had only ever experienced living as a daughter and a wife, was sick with fear. She did not look back, at those carrying her luggage, nor did she look forward, at those leading her away. She kept her eyes on the ground, while her heart saw what it saw.

She was led through a courtyard, and then taken into a pavilion with a wooden door, painted with a scene of musicians playing their instruments on a shore to a party of revelers in a boat at sunset. It was a scene of grace and melancholy, much imitated later in the vernacular art of the region—the boating party seemed to be drifting away from the music they were hearing, while the musicians would soon be without any audience to hear their songs. There were more frescoes on the walls of the room, which looked out onto the water and the shore of an island opposite.

Souraya wandered around the room, drawn to the skillfully painted scenes. Any one of them could have taken place in the setting just outside the room, and she suddenly understood the playfulness that had put exterior into interior. The world then was inside the room, and the pictures filled its walls with possible adventures and histories and destinies, with other lives than her own; their presence communicated that what happened inside the room was not negligible, its scope too was the shared world's scope.

She was brought refreshments, and told to expect to be welcomed shortly by Am, who would announce himself unaccompanied. She saw his face with impotent fury and with dread, both emotions as daily and recognizable to her as the taste of water. She prepared herself to understand the new absolute will to which her life would now be chained. Looking at the frescoes had given her moments of repose and freedom, the relief of a voyage into another world. His presence recaptured her for this one.

She concealed the sudden surge of intense irrational hatred she felt for him with a gesture of courtesy, in the ancient practice of women. Every woman had touched her hand to her heart in delicate obeisance at a moment when she wanted to tear out the heart of the person opposite. He seemed younger when she saw him close than he had yesterday, much nearer her age than Adon's. She dropped her eyes, so as not to insult him by gazing at him as if she were his equal.

“Please look at me freely” was the first thing he said. “Look at me without fear. I want to see myself in your eyes, and I want you to see yourself in mine. Be welcome as a guest, not as a prisoner.” She did as he asked, and looked straight up at him, more fully and intensely than she had ever looked at another human being. She was terrified to do it, anticipating a blinding impact in the candid exploration of another's face. A taboo was being broken, and though she could not express it, she was not sure she would survive.

Two joined gazes, she would later say, create a particular reaction, mysteriously generate something together, breed a feeling as palpable as a fruit.

They read each other's look as if each contained the first illuminated page of a story. What their gazes made together, she said, when she could describe it, was a kind of immediate biography, a shared recognition of the integrity of personhood, a mutual sense of the truth of each other's humanity. It was as if they had already shared a life. Their understanding was silent, instantaneous, and moved through the eyes, as real a phenomenon as a sudden storm or a cut apple.

She had grown bitter about the body, that filthy donkey one rode until it died, so it was a marvel to her that the same body was able to accomplish this, this exchange of unsoiled dignities. She felt a physical change; she seemed to herself to achieve a new stature, to step free of her former body as if from a sea.

This look they had exchanged then began to find its form in words. What he said she wanted to believe. “Despite the crude way you have arrived here,” he told her, “I want nothing to happen to you here that you do not permit. What happens to you here must also happen to me. I would take nothing from you that I do not inspire you to give, though I confess there is something I want from you. What I want from you is my own freedom.”

She had never heard speech of this pattern. He was describing the workings of his mind as it lived, studying himself as if he had weather. He spoke as if he had thoughts that were unpredictable and changed. He spoke as if there were things he did not know, things he was not permitted.

“With all the power I have here,” he continued, “and that is obviously considerable, I am not free. Because nothing I have is truly given to me, but mine by custom. My self is no one self. It is a dynasty. Where I live, fear lives—and ambition. I inspire seduction. Obedience. Intrigue. Jealousy. Beseeching.

“I think I feel like God feels, and I do not like it. For a man to feel like God, it would seem, narrows his experience. As a man, a person, I am a kind of virgin. I know I am not God, and do not want to be. I am not in possession of that common ambition. I want someone to talk to me, not pray to me.

“You are smiling, and that confirms what I noticed so strongly when I saw you last night. There was a quality of shrewdness in your obedience, of fine political craftsmanship. I thought, If this is deference, then it is deference conferred. If this is silence, it is filled with speech. I wanted to speak with you. I wanted you to speak with me.

“I want you to choose what you want to give me, even if I risk obtaining nothing. I am not your father, your brother, or your husband. I stand in no relationship of law to you, but only of grace. I want no relationship with you that you do not shape. If you want to return to your brother immediately, I will arrange it this night.”

Then began the only courtship she would ever experience, in which the initial invitation was for her to reject the suitor. It was a courtship devised not only to seduce her, but as much to question her and himself, to divine something about her, to reveal some new capacity of his, to look into the galleries of each other's dreams, to transform knowledge into delight. They became, during this time, connoisseurs of each other, each fresh comprehension an extended caress.

It was a wonder to Souraya that any man could admit himself to be such a particular creature, with personal tastes and fears and thoughts, capable of uncertainty, of humility, and of the playful wit uncertainty made possible. This man had thought about who he might and might not be, and discovered some things he was not.

He deliberately suffered and feared his own power. He dreaded the coming of the day when he would not; he had seen others live that day; when it arrived, old friends were executed without cause, men jailed without trial, wars declared like malignant cancers. Souraya had known men only as monoliths, as fathers, husbands, priests, who affected infallibility, whose power was so certain that it endangered them; they risked being crushed beneath the weight of their own authority. In a way, Am saw her as a witness, a protective talisman against that condition.

Every day Am wordlessly offered to her a power over him that Souraya refused; every day Am relinquished his own power over Souraya. These were the most subtle, never-ending temptations she had ever known, met on both their parts with a moral asceticism that utterly refined their passion for each other.

To accept a power over him would be to determine his response to her, to set it in motion, to plot its trajectory, to create a physics of feeling. They would then be together in a known world, limited but secure in its predictability. But in their steadfast, intricate, reciprocal refusals of that power, was something greater than power, inexhaustible as power cannot be; she would say later that this love beyond power—symbolized by an embrace, in which neither imposed himself physically on the other—must be at the heart of creation, majestic in its perpetuity, and still unknown in its extent and depth. She dared to think now of this as the way of God with the world; a courtship. An offered embrace, which the world had yet to accept.

It was extraordinary, too, her discovery of an unknown aspect of the appetite to live, based on the discovery that there seemed to be such a thing as love. Until now, she had lived like a soldier on bivouac, apprehensive, enduring, keenly observant, always aware of threat but immured to it. Now love had made her, for the first time, fear another's death. For the first time, she feared her own. Through this intricate tenderness, she knew, for the first time, terror.

All the language she had been taught to describe such phenomena—happiness, joy, pleasure, comedy—trivialized it, made it seem like a fleeting interlude, an entertainment. The other range of descriptions, written in blood instead of pastels, made love seem equally trivial, as if it were insubstantial or dull without the glamour of fatality. She needed words that did not yet exist, words that would be both precise and metamorphic in the mouth, in the heart, like wine. It became her conviction that there was no surer sign of corruption than the contempt for human love that winkingly portrayed it as banal confectionery, or as an equally banal torment.