The Book of Heaven: A Novel (8 page)

Now she realized how close she was coming to a precipice in this settlement, for a childless woman had no political and little economic value. A woman's possessions consisted of her jewelry and her children.

The consequences were brutally visible everywhere, in the snubs of Adon's kin when they were guests at her table, and their hints at divorce, the theatrical pity prominent secure mothers displayed toward her at public rituals. Now bands of beggars sang traditional taunting songs—“She without jewels will wear no jewels”—when they crossed her path, and beat on drums, their hollow thuds evoking barren wombs. These beggars had lived their songs; they were mostly childless women.

Above all, she felt the danger of Adon's increasing indifference to her thoughts, a dust of casual contempt for her advice. A woman with a collection of children had some authority—in a conflict with her husband, she could show him her offspring like a mouthful of bared teeth. Children were a woman's strongest link to the world of men.

It no longer mattered if Souraya hoped or dreamed for a child. Now she must get one, by any means. Without one, she risked being transformed from wife into servant, or worse. Now her longing for a child felt corrupted. It had become an ambition, like Adon's—it held a willingness to destroy, a cancerous mass attached to the dream of creating. This mythically selfless act had become instead as calculating as a merchant's creation of a profit. For her, a child was no longer a motive for living, but a means of staying alive.

She began to surround the trunks of her fruit trees with banners embroidered with prayers, and buy illuminated prayers to hang on their leaves, the remedy suggested by the priests. She hated to do it, because it publicized her growing desperation. She had a cannibal's need for this infant meat, a vulture's for the eggs of another bird. She was revolted with herself.

For the first time, she was truly relieved at the absence of mirrors. She did not want to see her eyes now, their former soft brilliance turned metallic, her body changed, as feeling has the power to change the shape of all bodies, by her ruthless need. So riven was she by this need that it seemed to have made her a new soul, in the way a new tree will grow between the two halves of a dead tree, split by some accident.

Now when she passed mothers holding a young child or baby, she saw herself pushing the mother aside, reaching to take the child, so forcefully, so finally, in the calmest indifference of cruelty, that she sometimes believed this was what she had actually done. She was horrified to recognize that this new self of hers, in a female way, had something of the character of a rapist.

It was, however, this ugly fantasy itself, which led her, after suffering it for years, to the lawful solution of her dilemma. It was not the child she would sweep up and out of its mother's arms, Souraya determined. It was the woman alone.

If she could find a woman to bring into the household for Adon, a child was bound to follow. And as the architect of this new household, she herself would rule both the child and the woman. As soon as its cord was cut, the child would be placed upon her knees. It would be she who would set its name upon it, she who would be its God. The name she chose would be traced in honey on a ceramic plaque, then she would bend down to touch her lips to the honey, and whispering the name, set her lips on the infant's, transferring the name to him, recalling the birth of speech, the honey dropped from the kiss God gave the world.

An unexpected struggle with Adon became the most difficult element of her plan to execute. God had revealed nothing to him of a child he would have with a woman he had not chosen for himself. Souraya was his in a way no other woman could ever be, almost as if he had at last succeeded in creating her.

He had bought her from abroad, and he himself made an iconoclast of her; he had twice catapulted her beyond him, as in stories of heroes shooting arrows into space untold distances, arrows that inexplicably returned encircled by a hundred diamond rings and slid in silken homecoming into the hero's quiver.

Like those legendary arrows, she had returned to him as through resurrection, and through her returns, had enriched him a hundredfold. These things made a miracle of Souraya for him. She was a woman of destiny for him, God's will at work in her, however blindly. Besides, the suffering of this previously stoic woman moved him; and he did not want to be maneuvered into putting her away for her barrenness, leaving himself and his property a target for a strategic marriage engineered by an ambitious clan.

In the end, in the face of Souraya's surprising relentlessness, the female equivalent of muscular strength, Adon could not endure, and agreed to take a wife of her choosing. The strange symmetry of circumstance did not go unobserved by either of them; he had twice given her to strange men. Now she would deliver him to another woman. “God permits,” he told her.

It was easy enough to arrange a “harvest” marriage, as they were called, a temporary marriage for the purposes of begetting a child, if the reigning wife had means, and knew a family vulnerably burdened with girls, those creatures who had to be given birth twice, once as infants, once as brides. Souraya selected a daughter who was a pivot between three older sisters, and three younger sisters. She hoped the mother's fertility was prophetic.

It was Souraya who negotiated for the girl, and paid for her, using her own jewelry for the purchase. She felt a momentary shame when she realized how easy it had been for her to buy a woman, she who had been bought and sold herself. She wondered if the girl's docility was an affectation. Her own had been. Souraya suddenly saw the girl's entrapment was hers, too.

Their inferior position destroyed their integrity at the outset; if the girl rebelled, her life would be broken. But her calm acceptance of herself as merchandise, her eager embrace of the preference for boys, made her suspect. The priests who gave women tongue-lashings for being the source of faithlessness, or of evil, were secure on this scaffolding, that women must be either deceived or deceivers. For if women loved a God who had this contempt for them, they were either mad, therefore truly inferior, or if not, their love for this God was a frightening display of untrustworthiness, of calculating collaboration.

After the transaction had been completed, the girl, whose name was Roucoul, meaning the cooing of doves, shyly approached her.

“Do you remember me, madam?” the girl asked her. Souraya looked at her keenly, but no scene including this face reappeared in her memory.

“I only wondered if you might,” the girl said. “When you were a bride, I thought you were so beautiful, so unlike anyone I had ever seen, that I tried to draw your face in the orchard grounds. The stick I used was as big as I was, and I remember drawing with it was like poling a boat—it took my whole body to navigate. I made your face as big as a lake, or a full moon, and I circled it and circled the world of your face with my oar. My mother beat me for it, and you tried to stop her. I always remember how you tried to rescue me when I was a little girl, and you were a newcomer. I shall try to serve your household well. I shall try my best, with God, to give you a boy.”

It was Souraya who led the girl, their maker of soldiers, to Adon's bedroom, and who arranged her diet, and bought talismans from the priests when she conceived, to ensure that the child would be a son.

She treated the girl with passionate, but untender, attention to her physical welfare. She saw to it that the girl lacked for nothing, even judiciously indulged her, but with expertise, not kindness. Souraya knew her care for the girl was not only practical, but also aggressive—a way of exorcising the intense jealousy she felt of the girl's fertile effortless success. She would control her resentment by translating it into governance over the girl. For Souraya, she was little more than a canal. Through cups of fresh milk and plates of ripe fruit, prayers of petition and prayers of thanksgiving, ordained repose, arranging visits of musicians who played the traditional songs that created boys, Souraya possessed the girl's advancing pregnancy.

As she had envisioned, and had demanded, the child was put into her arms as soon as the cord was cut. She sat down with the nearly weightless creature on her knees, observing the beseeching movements of his unmuscled arms, the tiny fingers like fistfuls of fresh herbs, the bewildered, already human face. She called for the plaque and the honey, and wrote down his name. Then she kissed his name onto his lips. “Pelerin,” she sent the name into his body. “Pilgrim.”

The midwife, concerned to have the child fed, disentangled him from Souraya's arms. She did not want to let him go. She cursed herself for not being able to feed him. It dismayed her to see him at his mother's breast. He fit there like a star within a constellation. Souraya had named him—she was his fate. But Roucoul, she saw, as her milk went into the child like rain into the soil, was his existence. And nothing could change that.

This was why the priests insisted that each conception was an act of God's, and surrounded each birth so densely with ritual, prayer, and custom. These were exorcisms of the mother, a seeking of protection of the child from some other, not maternal, source. Otherwise, in the beginning, it might seem that the woman, the birthgiver, had absolute power over life. It was she who gave each life, and thus, terrifyingly, it was also the woman who had the power to take it away, as Souraya had herself seen a number of times, effected simply by a subtle withdrawal from the child, who wilted like a parched plant. There were mothers who simply selected one child to sponsor, and another to neglect. And as a rule, their infants obeyed them to death. Even law could do little to change that power.

Adon was eased by the child's solution of his dilemma, as everyone who had expected to inherit from a rich man without an heir was not. He was quite indifferent to Roucoul, as long as she had served her purpose, and continued to serve it. Her abject misery would have been of concern to him; her happiness was not. The child, for him, was born of Souraya's thought, and another proof of the providence she was for him.

For Souraya, though, the household was unbalanced. Her husband preferred her, and that was as it should be. But the household's child preferred its mother, grew to resemble her, spoke almost a private language with her.

Pelerin dropped his voice to a whisper before Souraya, rarely smiled in her presence, and made her feel an intruder in her own home. It was almost as if he had absorbed the way Souraya had dealt with his mother while he formed in her womb, and now refracted her own behavior back to her; he treated Souraya with perfected, pragmatic, affectionless obedience, unless he felt his mother was being maltreated. He displayed an odd assumption of equality with Souraya, as if he were uncannily aware that he was the guarantor of her marriage. Souraya had called his mother a soldier maker; he was a childlike caricature of a soldier.

Twice, though, he had lost that martial obedience, and attacked Souraya, on the two occasions she had slapped his mother. It was almost irresistible to Roucoul as the two women struggled over the boy, to assert her motherhood over him by finding a way to refer to Souraya's childlessness. Though Souraya was disgusted with herself for striking the girl, the taunts touched her where she was wounded to death.

It happened again on a day when Souraya was beginning to teach the child to count. He could hardly force himself to attend to her, and followed his mother with his eyes, as she did the cleaning; heavy household tasks were now almost wholly hers. Souraya had made the boy sit close by her side, though he never stopped tapping his feet, as if he were running away from her, even though the rest of him stayed still. Roucoul, proud to be his favorite, began to hum one of the folk songs about childless women.

A fury surged up in Souraya, a burning energy of anger. She felt as if she could tear a building down with this force. She called Roucoul over, and with this strange invincible energy alone, and no other restraint, made her stand still, and slapped her hard, four times, alternating the blows with her right and her left hand. Instantly the boy began to kick Souraya; as if her body as well as her soul was oppressed beyond endurance by her exile within her household, she began to laugh uncontrollably, and fainted. Two weeks later, the household heard her racked with laughter again, but this time the tone of her laughter changed from hysterical to ecstatic. Her invincible energy was not only the result of an irrepressible hatred, but also a cresting wave of life. She had realized that she was unmistakably, miraculously, with child.

A generation of servants and relatives had never seen her laugh. It seemed to her that she had not laughed since her husband had bestowed her on Am, and then had her abducted from his islands. Her perpetually severe husband took her uncharacteristic mirth as a freakishness of this miraculous pregnancy. As a way to keep his thanksgiving always in the ear of the Lord, he paid a pair of priests for prayers to be chanted throughout the day and night until the child's first birthday had passed. Adon, it was said, was such a favorite of God, that he received the gift of communications from the Lord even through his wife, the rarest of distinctions.

Souraya, overhearing this form of congratulation, overflowed with laughter, which for her, in her fulfillment, was not irreverence, but prayer itself. Then she begged forgiveness of her unborn child for not loving its father, reflecting that God's ways were so subtle that even the child of a lawful marriage could be illegitimate.

When the time came for her to deliver the child, the midwives told a marvelous story they had witnessed of her labor, which circulated through the settlements and beyond. They had never seen a woman in the grip of her throes bend double in tears, then straighten, and throw her head back, laughing as if an angel lifted her in his arms, soaring high above suffering. As powerful as the agony was, her joy was stronger.

She raised herself up when the child was put into her arms, and called for the honey and the plaque. She wrote her son's name in honey, and kissed the name into him: Ivat, “he will live.” Her lips were rich with honey, but as she transferred the name to him, her kiss was adamant. Then she laughed again, as he swallowed the sweet wine of his own name.