The Book of Heaven: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

them gave her a small hand mirror that she had smuggled past the soldiers, and then they left her to wait for her husband. She could hear drumbeats beginning outside, establishing a steady regular rhythm, even as they built in intensity.
    She knew what they were for. If there was pleasure, it would remain inaudible; if there was pain, that too, would remain inaudible. The percussion also served to muffle the footsteps of her husband. She did not hear him as she fretfully changed the position of the small mirror, trying to catch a whole glimpse of herself in its turning orbit. But the light in the room altered, and she realized that Adon stood behind her. It was as if her body held a reunion with its wandering shadow, a shadow that was now the stronger of the two. Her husband reached for the mirror, not unkindly, but authoritatively.
    “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I am anxious for you to be pleased with my appearance, and I do not know how to appraise myself without a mirror.” Adon raised his arm and shattered the mirror on the threshold. “Images are forbidden to us,” he explained patiently. “We are forbidden to gaze anywhere but at God. You will never see your face again.”
    It was at that moment that Souraya understood the depth of his power over her. She understood through the easy, despotic violence of his gesture, the self-multiplication of his “we,” the perfect repose of his tone. He was not simply explaining unfamiliar customs to her, he was telling her the life she would live, feelings he expected her to have, her future, as if he were a seer with the power to make his prophecies come true. In the moment when he deprived her of her mirror, she saw clearly.
    If she were to have any power over herself again, it would only be through exaggerated, even competitive, obedience to the laws of her husband’s God. Her only power would be in her embrace. She must embrace him—and his God—to survive. It was at that moment that she truly lost her virginity, when she understood, as a girl does not, that the marriage was not only her vocation; it was a matter of life or death. And that God would be in her bed.
    “Are you going to blind me?” she asked, with the kind of frankness that absolute fear produces.
    “I am going to transform you,” he answered. “I am going to help you to see with truth and clarity you have never known. Here is how you will see yourself from now on.” He smiled radiantly, and touched with his index and third finger the dark pouches under his own eyes. “If you are beautiful in my eyes, you are beautiful. Look here.” He gestured again toward his face, and frowned with disgust. “And if I look like this, this is how you will see yourself. But I feel sure,” he said, “that I will more often look at you with the delight I do now.” He held out his right hand, the living model of the clay one, and caressed her hair, with an almost priestly gesture of benediction. “I chose you and I believe I have chosen well. I am going to make a nation inside your body. I am going to make a world out of you.”
    She never forgot, although it did not spoil her pleasure in love-making later, the intense pain of her wedding night, when she was ripped apart like her own dress. And afterward, shocked and wounded as she was, enduring the violation of displaying the sheet, the public evidence of their intimacy, with the imprints of their bodies apparent on the cloth, the whole community crying out its triumph in its collective possession of her. The brief but unforgettable intensity of the pain, the particular sense of agonizing vulnerability it gave her, the sensation of being stabbed or raped, even though Adon had treated her with exquisite care, was frightening. It gave her a doubt about the nature of the world that it was so ordered that the initiation into lovemaking for her sex began with an inevitable cruelty. But the shrilling and shouts of the crowd when they saw the sheet stained with