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

only to be married to her, but also to have created her. He was ardent and affectionate with her, but also impatient, severe, even strangely melancholy. He made her memorize prayers that were to accompany each quotidian action, bread-making, planting, washing her hair, even before and after lovemaking. He wanted to rededicate her every moment, to cast her hours in the crucible of God’s will. He would gaze on her for hours by firelight, but insist that she not speak, as if he both adored and regretted her existence. It was as if he had been given a gift he thought magnificent, but in some way hated, because it had come from outside him, and was therefore corrupt.
    She came to find herself, among his people, in a world where her accounts of her own experience were constantly corrected, even by people who had never ventured outside their own walls.
    During the storytelling and song making that was the chief form of entertainment, she found herself incessantly interrupted, even by young children, who would object to her descriptions, or the events of her story, even when it was something she could swear an oath to having seen. “That didn’t happen,” they would say dogmatically, “that does not exist.” Then they would overwhelm the story with a kind of chirping or mewing resembling seagull cries, or shouts of “Don’t tell that. Don’t tell that,” until the teller altered the tale to their satisfaction. Once when she was telling a childhood tale of a boat that traveled under the sea, they stopped the story with the rhythmic chant, “Don’t tell that. Don’t tell that. There was no sea. There was no sea.”
    This was different from anything she knew of the art of story or epic poetry of her own people—here the art of storytelling was a battering collective struggle, where elements were rejected or insisted on until a final version prevailed, which it became taboo to alter.
    A story was judged acceptable when the priests, the Guardians of the Story, called for the great tribal parchment. A red silk cylinder covered with a calligraphy of sacred words wrought in silver wire was brought to them. The Guardians unfurled from it a thick roll of flayed-looking skin, and hovered over it, deliberating. They chanted it aloud, alternating the recitation. If words or sentences were unacceptable, they plucked the metallic script from the scroll, held it up, and crushed it in their fists. These words were never again to be uttered.
    When the redaction was complete, one of them stepped forward, and with a great slab of porous stone, grated what looked like an uncut gem, but was actually a block of solid perfume onto the flames. Thick clouds of incense in a garden of colors flamed upward and diffused through the gathering. Then the Guardian called out the title chosen for the tale, under which it became part of the record, and the audience acclaimed it with shouts of: “God permits! God permits!”
    In this way they created a world suspended from the meshes of their stories. They named themselves after the characters in the stories they accepted; new lives seemed retellings of old stories, proof that the world repeated itself; so that it was as they said it was. Thus they conceived destinies, and were surprised that they came to pass, as a clandestine couple is stunned on the day they realize the woman has fallen pregnant.
    The elderly uttered a strange automata of prescriptions and adages, as if they had been replaced by their own fictions. Even the youngest were shaped here by the tensions over what they were compelled and forbidden to believe. Souraya, in the way of people who kept their own counsel, was told secrets. Eventually, she could have become a living library of discredited tales, prohibited variants, and inadmissible family histories.
    The arts in which they truly excelled were those that concerned themselves with the invisible, or at least the abstract. They were fine scribes, with a keen appreciation of the