The Book of Heaven: A Novel (6 page)

Nothing was stranger than that it was her husband's opportunism and treachery that had delivered her so inadvertently into love. Adon had said the night of his decision that what he did was God's will. The memory of that phrase made her shiver at her husband's unwitting idiotic blasphemy.

Adon had an ambition for something of God's, wanted their wills fused invincibly. His prayers and prohibitions, his power over what was admissible from the past, his clemencies, seemed designed above all to produce a particular effect—to make Adon feel like God.

Now it seemed to her that God had been jesting with Adon, smiling as he spoke truths without understanding them. It had been perhaps God's will that Adon live, but it had also, it seemed, quite unexpectedly, been God's will that Souraya too would live, that life would mean one thing for Adon and another for his wife. Only this made her marriage to Adon seem something more than a foul accommodation. In the presence of the unforeseeable, she saw God's true image, she heard God's laughter.

Adon was like an oarsman being carried along like a great river of divinity; he looked into the water, and was arrested by his own reflection on the surface, thinking he had found in his own face the true image of God. But that reflection was traveling on currents hidden in the shining depths.

If she knew anything of God, she knew it from her love with a man not her husband. The truth of this feeling was unfathomable, its sweetness stronger than a carnivore at its kill. It was she who had been given a divine gift. She had learned what it was to live in a world without end, like God. Now she felt that it was impossible to know God's will disentangled from one's own, like a mosaic flecked with shining fragments. One could only imagine the divine, not know it, and only through this astonishment of love. She could sense the distance between herself and God by marveling at the distance between what she had been before she knew love, and what she was now. No world had ever been created out of will—but out of revelation.

She was able to divine something more of Am's thoughts not only from his words, but from a gift he brought her. It was the elaborate embroidery she remembered seeing on the night of her arrival.

The scene depicted the arrival of a boat on the same kind of moonlit night that had first brought her here. The curving reeds and blue water rippled in their silk. There was a path lined with torchbearers, just as she remembered, the flames of their torches rendered in golden thread. But Am had commissioned an addition, with her permission. He would not claim even her image without her consent. It was a woman's art on these islands, painting with cloth; she showed the fullness of her assent by apprenticing herself to the weavers.

With them she looked at the world, and at her own face. She shaped the portrait of her journey, woven into the night, passing along the avenue to Am's house, her icon's hair decorated with seed pearls, a tiny replica of a hair ornament he had given her, perpetually moving toward her beloved, who was perpetually waiting for her at the entrance. In making her portrait of herself entering his world, she both kept and returned to him the gift he had given her.

This is a love story, a love story, she would repeat to herself, at work in the herb gardens. Love exists. So what she had heard sung in the poems and epics was not imaginary, had actually been experienced. And yet, only the spray of this great ocean had been described.

Of Adon, she heard nothing. Nor, she realized, as the passing weeks freed her from his presence, did she want to. She had been married without her consent to someone she was grateful not to encounter again.

She had begun to possess her own body within her new world, making the arrangement of furniture in her apartment fit her comfort and her taste. Shy and inexpert, she met with the court's painters, who were its historians, about the schemes for the frescoes ordered for her new rooms. Here, it seemed, such frivolous and trivial matters were taken seriously. Until this moment of her life, she realized, she had never been asked what it was that she might want in the world.

The rooms she chose lay directly on the water, opening onto a small balcony-like wharf, so that from one angle, the suite of rooms was stable, and from another it swayed like a fish tail from side to side. She and the sea gazed at each other.

She could almost set sail carried along in these rooms; at night, she slept freely in breezes blowing off the water, instead of encircled by stone walls. She floated through her dreams at night as if through clear waters. It became her delight, during the last hours of night, to step into a fishing boat from the wharf and watch the brilliant pomegranate of the sun scatter its seeds of scarlet light over the deeper waters beyond the settlement. All the island people, including the women, were accomplished sailors and swimmers.

It was Souraya's embarrassment among these fluent navigators that she was quite unschooled in marine science, and it was Am's pleasure to teach her the rudiments of sailing. He made a gift to her of his knowledge of water and wind; she came to value it more than jewelry. She absorbed their hours on the water adapting to changing light and air and current as an imperceptible, sustaining idea of how to live. The sun, perfume of salt, and cradling motion of the boat in its dialogue with the sea were never lost or stolen from her.

Am delighted her by renaming his boat for her; he painted her name on both sides, with a brilliant pomegranate above her floating name; the boat lay anchored every night at the wharf just outside her suite of rooms, a declaration, even to the sea, of faithful love. On clear evenings, the sun inscribed her name waveringly on the waters themselves.

Souraya thought those days that she knew so many songs about the misery of love because pain kept love within the boundaries of time, and knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon of birth and death; it was like the eternal life the prophets spoke of. A gesture, a kiss, a task, a sentence had a golden elemental endlessness, like the scenes in the murals painted in the island houses.

The water lapped against the wharf at night, and she dreamed that it was whispering to her. It subsided, but immediately had more to say, as lovers do, in the way of Souraya and Am. Another murmuring overrode the water's, repeating her name softly, again and again. She answered peacefully, and before she was fully awake was ripped from her bed and dragged across the floor toward her veranda, a piece of cloth stuffed in her mouth, almost choking her. She turned her head and saw Am stabbed by one man. Two others, with a frenzied childlike joy in the act of desecration, were pissing on the murals that covered the walls. “Idol worshippers,” one of them spat at her portrait. Then mesh after mesh was wound around her, fishnets, and she was carried like cargo onto her own boat.

She could not remember how long they sailed; when they landed, she was taken up by two of them, and carried ashore. Through the thick webs of fishnet they had wound around her when they seized her, she could sense the light and movement of flames. They laid their catch down roughly near what she guessed must be a campfire. She heard its hissing and the cracking sound of the heat breaking fuel apart, and then a confusion of footsteps.

Someone knelt over her; she could feel the motion of a knife working, cutting through the upper rope that bound the fishnet over her head and around her neck. It moved too swiftly for its handler, and she felt it eat a small bit of the skin beneath her right ear, a minor gourmandise, but it got a sip of her blood. The fishnet was rolled back, and she was blinded for a moment by the broad curved knife blade glittering in the firelight in Adon's hand. “I heard the voice of God,” he said. His face was ecstatic. “And then it was revealed to me how I would bring you back to my side. Praise God for our success.”

He freed Souraya from her nets, then brought a plate of food for her, and tenderly fed her with his own hands. As she ate exhaustedly, she saw a wonder, tears coursing down his face, like a steep and barren cliff flowing miraculously with milk. The men who had abducted her were shocked by his remorseful gratitude. They had held her comfort of no regard on the journey to their rendezvous, and kept her bound, thinking they were delivering a body that would soon be a corpse to its vengeful owner.

In the morning, Adon paid off the iconoclast mercenaries he had hired to seize his wife. She overheard the accounts they gave of their struggle to escape the island with her. They did not know themselves whether Am had lived or died. Souraya quietly tormented herself with both possibilities. She was unable to measure which one gave her more pain.

Adon spoke almost passionately to the soldiers of his gratitude for their perfect execution of his plan. He lavished them with a supply of food for their journey, and paid them the previously agreed sum for their services. Despite the extra expenses of her rescue, her husband had not failed to make a handsome profit from the price he received for Souraya's sale, not excluding Am's gifts of jewelry, which he confiscated from her, to free her from shame.

The journey back to Adon's settlement was tragic to her beyond mourning, despite his extraordinary display of solicitude. He could not bear to let her out of his sight; he watched over her with a sour, impassioned adoration. But there was a privacy in her tragedy. She had become invisible to her iconoclast husband. Her love, even her loss of it, gave her an independence, a continuity of a life of freedom, a possession of remembered words, images, and experience over which her husband had no power.

This, she concluded, must be one reason marriages of choice were held so dangerous. The imperfections of the husband were the conditions of marriage; the imperfections of the beloved, by contrast, seemed flowing and mutable, like the verses of an ongoing song. In love, one experienced the beloved, and through him, oneself; but this knowledge destroyed one's subjection to him. Love, then, destroyed innocence. Love, then, was knowledge.

So she lived through the return, indifferent to the cities and settlements they passed through, uninterested in the details of their trading, taciturn during the hospitalities. She felt a pang when Adon financed a purchase of seed and medicines with seven of Am's jewels, but no more than that. The hand that fitted the rings to her fingers and clasped the brilliants around her throat had made them precious. Without it, they were toys. For her, treasure could be nothing but her lover's child, its small face and hands swept inside her by the current of their caresses.

She was shaken by a bitter amusement when she saw the primitive greed and admiration the ornaments excited. Cities and wars were paid for by colored rocks, by the luminous secretions of shellfish, by a subterranean dung of gold. These had no more real value than if military power were based on an inexhaustible supply of toy soldiers. She inwardly mocked the gravity with which the negotiators examined and debated the qualities of the colored rocks, the intensity of the blue, green, and red reflections, for which they would exchange food. Love had made her unfit to live in this world.

They arrived at a famous city she had once desired to see. Now her desire had been fulfilled after it had died. God has many ways to grant our prayers.

This city was built entirely underground in a labyrinth of crystalline salt caves. Visitors could only hope to find their way in and out with the help of expert local guides who led them along sinuous paths, mounted on their special breed of sightless ponies, who shied at nothing. Another relay of guides poled them through a coil of canals. The air of the place was shocking, pure, saline, solid as water—it was if one were breathing as one had before birth, inside the mother.

They were received in a hall built around a great dammed pool of water; the walls and ceiling of the room sparkled with flecks of salt and mica, and a chandelier carved of salt illuminated the room like fireworks. The celebrated acoustics of these underground rooms were unique, producing a sound that seemed to come at once from all directions. Specially trained choirs, during the ceremonies of greeting, sang choral music in parts so that the music moved around the hall, now seeming to pour from above and below them, or most spectacularly, in an effect that made their hearts race, from within the chambers of the listener's own skulls.

They called themselves the Salt of the Earth. Salt was their wealth: the king's musicians played instruments whose strings were encrusted with salt. Salt fell shimmering from the capillary strings, as the song makers' fingers played over them, revealing the music woven inside its tense chrysalis. Even their banquet dishes were of whole fishes, animals, and roots baked in domes of salt. The women of this tribe decorated their faces and skin with mica, salt, and sugar crystals, so their very features, brows, cheekbones, foreheads, chins, seemed a kind of jewelry, their flesh sparkling ore.

It was there that Adon sold her again, for a substantial tonnage of salt. This time he sold her with studied calculation, and a much more assured presentation of her as a beloved sister, with whom such a parting was reluctant but inevitable. He was implacably confident that her loss was temporary, despite watching her escorted disappearance through a maze of glittering tunnels. To him now even the tunnels were a part of the ruse God inspired in him; they were an extension of the tunnels in his own soul. The insatiable divinity of invincibility possessed him.

This time, though, her purchaser was not a king dreaming of philosophy, but a satrap eager to replenish his harem with a fine breeding woman acquired by purchase rather than the more costly method of capture. She was dressed in the costume of the city's women, a voluminous garment made of a material that sparkled, designed to conceal the outline of her body. It made every encounter here between men and women charged; the very volume of the garment directed the imagination to the naked body of the woman inside it. The garment concealed the details of the body, but made explicitly clear the outlines of the fantasies of the gazers. Sugar and salt crystals were applied to her face and hands and body, so she looked like an underworld woman. Thus she was delivered by the man of faith to wait for the lord of the underworld, the salt of the earth.