The Book of Heaven: A Novel (37 page)

The two hurried down the steps, pushing past the women to block them. They called out to the other men to help them pen the escaping Immortals; from below them and above them, a tide of men and boys, curious at first, and then enraged, engulfed the women.

The
Wingless Bird
sailed without them.

The morning of Rain's execution was golden; the tulip trees that had just snowed their blossoms made the world feminine with their perfume. On the five preceding mornings of the last week of her life, she had been forced to witness the death leaps of the five Immortal women who had conspired with her.

Each morning she had been taken to the Cliff of the Condemned to witness an execution, so that her own labor uphill when her day came would be quintupled; she must stagger beneath that knowledge, as if she were carrying the five bodies whose lives she had destroyed.

The night before, the traditional funeral garb was delivered to her cell. The condemned women of the Pensinsula wore a version of a bridal gown to their deaths, a black brocade dress embroidered with axes, ropes, and knives, and a coal-black veil. They carried a bouquet of red roses tied with black silk ribbon as they ascended the cliff to join a different kind of groom at a different kind of marriage altar, overlooking a sheer drop.

Rain had refused to spend her final hours in the company of a prince, as the priests of the Peninsula were called, so a guard delivered the paraphernalia silently, and left her alone. The bouquet was exquisite, lavish with perfect blooms. It seemed to her that there were more than a hundred.

She held it to her cheek; the petals felt like the velvet skin of children's faces. She counted the flowers, for the pleasure of touching them. There were exactly sixty, the number of Immortal children she had shepherded to safety. She caught a glimpse of white deep inside one central rose's heart. It was a scrap of paper, folded into a tiny, perfect square. She delicately dislodged it, unfolded it, and read its message: “In gratitude.”

The ceremony began an hour later than usual, because of the difficulties the climb now presented to General Jarre, who had yet to master walking on even ground with his wooden leg. Madam, too, no longer had the strength for the ascent. In order to spare them further humiliation on this wrenching morning, we arranged to have all the high-ranking government officials carried up in mountain chairs. Jarre, Judge Pekrin and his son, Admiral Annan, Madam, and the triumvirate of administrators who had made the government function while Jarre recovered from his emotional and physical injuries, were in the front rank, along with myself. All wore the insignia of the Angel Flight, the team of birds pulling the three-branched candelabra.

When we arrived at the height, we were startled to see the cliff covered with bouquets of red roses, as if they were growing from the rocks. The faces of the spectators grew pinched; the peaks of flowers were a sure indication of some underground popular support for what Rain had done.

There would be an awkward interruption if we delayed the ceremony to clear them, as we could not even see how far they extended in either direction. Even that small success would be too much to grant to Rain. Jarre angrily ordered me to light the torches in the monumental golden candelabra soldered to the rocks, the signal for the procession to begin.

Rain ascended the hill, flanked by guards in black uniforms, their faces entirely covered with golden mesh, in which the design of the Angel Flight birds harnessed to their candelabra was outlined. This mask prevented executed and executioner from gazing into each other's eyes and being affected by the glance. It ensured that the anonymity of the guards was protected, and that the execution was correctly self-performed and voluntary.

Rain's black veil, twenty feet of it, flowed behind her in the breeze, as if she were being followed by a flock of black birds. When she arrived at the summit, she was made to kneel in front of the officials. A condemned woman had no right to speak, as her eternal fate ordained by God had been revealed, and nothing could mitigate her punishment.

“Woman, damned by God,” Judge Pekrin read out, “obey your Creator. You are condemned to die.” Rain got to her feet unhelped, looked each one of the officials, including her former father, Jarre, deliberately in the face. “You have condemned me to die,” she said, and, characteristically, made her last words a question. “But will I?”

She walked to the edge of the cliff. Her face was drawn and her eyes wide, though her dancer's movements were as disciplined as ever. She could now count the very breaths that were left to her. The guards followed her, and took up positions, three on either side, drawing their weapons, kicking masses of red roses over the edge in order to stand close enough to the condemned. If she did not leap obediently, she would be pushed, an ultimate disgrace.

She took a deep breath and made a full dancer's leap, as if she, wingless bird, were flying into a partner's waiting arms. For a moment, it seemed, she hovered suspended in the sky, a sail without a ship. Then she fell like a black rose thrown from a balcony. And we no longer knew anything she knew, no longer knew anything about her.

Jarre never took his eyes off his former daughter. His expression showed the impassive, visionary pride of a man of faith, beatified by doing what is right, as God commands. His eyes glowed as in firelight, bright in his resolute face like semiprecious stones embedded in rock, and his soul was embedded in God.

Jarre felt a cold ecstasy after Rain's execution, the joy so central to his character in doing God's will, the mastery of passion perfected by ethics. There was an impersonal sense of resolution in this justice, as when a mathematical problem is solved correctly. The judges and executioners who stopped heartbeats and stifled breathing according to the law were doing what God did, though man's law made violence comprehensible. The law ensured that no one innocent ever died.

What had to be done was done. She had been an enemy of the state. To execute her was to assent to the world God had made. The indefinable satisfaction he had taken so long ago in making her an Immortal had been God's prophetic spirit working in him. And to tell the truth, to kill a daughter asked less of a man than to kill a son.

Jarre had done justice. But God had not. This great courtier of God was tormented by bewilderment and the rage that God had taken from him all He had given, as if Jarre had fallen from grace. God had snubbed him as if he were a steward who had been dismissed, although he had not departed from God's commands by one jot. Jarre's unquestioning service to the state had sustained him through Rain's trial and execution. But the very clarity of his actions made him even more dissatisfied with the illegibility of God's.

Once again, he began to sit in the rubble of his villa at night, staring out to sea on the half of the balcony that was left. His wife, once mother of three, now mother of none, picked her way nightly through the broken marble columns with his dinner. The gold-flecked fragments of wall mosaic were mixed with the sand deposited by the wave. They lay on the ground like shells, as if the house were still underwater, a sea of broken eyes and mouths, disintegrated dances torn from the scenes that had once decorated the walls.

Jarre ate silently, staring out to sea, as if he were waiting for someone to call. Some of his old friends did stop in to mourn with him and comfort him. They made him impatient, forcing him to attend to their needs when his own were absolute. It was as if the tortured were obliged to provide refreshment for the torturer. In any case, the guest he had invited was God, and God had not accepted.

Judge Pekrin, who had presided at Rain's trial, called from below. He had brought with him his son. “Bring a plate and some wine for Pekrin,” Jarre said to his wife. “And guide him through the debris so that he doesn't bruise himself.”

Jarre's wife fetched Pekrin a chair and sent me off to find him something to eat and drink; he sat down by Jarre, and put his hand on Jarre's shoulder. They were silent for a long time. Pekrin was picking his way through words like rubble, but could not find the means to build a thought. Finally he said, “I can say nothing better to you than this: all of the Peninsula is in mourning. We have all suffered under this terrible wave.”

Jarre answered, “We have all suffered. But I have been ruined not only on earth, but beyond, in Heaven. I have nothing more to bequeath, and no one to bequeath it to.

“Every moment of my life has been God's. You cannot deny it. I rode the crest of God's will like a wave, my will lost in the sea of His magnificence. Why should I be crushed by this one wave? Answer that, Pekrin. We are all mourning, but I have lost everything.”

Pekrin was conscious of his friend's agony. “God is our King. We cannot see the world and our lives in all details as He does. Your loss may be a mark of distinction, may be a sign of some divine honor you can't yet see.”

Jarre shook his head with a convulsive movement of disgust. “I would call that kind if it didn't make me want even more than I do to end my life. Is God honoring me in company with the dead fishermen of the coast, and their barefoot children and their reeking wives? Does a tiger honor a stag when his fangs rip out its throat? God is a predator—whom I still worship, and whom I hate. Whom I adore, and will never trust again.”

His wife said soothingly, “It is not right to question God.” Jarre gave her a treacherous look, and she shrank. “A blasphemy indeed for you, but God gave reason to men, to speak to Him and know His will. Why did he give me a son and take him away? And my daughter dying at her birthday celebration, while an orchestra played. Where is my right leg? Yet the whores survived. Yet the whores survived. Why? If I can't question God with these questions, then He should not have created me. Or he should have made me a woman.”

Admiral Annan, who had entered the villa, and found his own way to the balcony, stood in the shadows listening, before anyone realized he was there. Jarre's wife stood up to bring more food and wine, but he shook his head and thanked her. “I'm not hungry,” he said, clearly strongly affected by Jarre's words.

Pekrin's son, a junior advocate at the stage of a young man's career when his view of the world is shaped by the joyous rightness of his place in it, spoke a shade tactlessly. “God never chastises without a holy purpose, to rescue us from doing wrong. He is like a prosecutor, relentlessly searching for the truth of our actions. I see this wave as an instance of God's terrible, majestic grace. It was an act of Almighty mercy, which we cannot grasp, since the scale of divine mercy is so different from our own.

“It was a disaster, it is true, but for our sake, and for our protection. Without it, we might never have known about the traitorous intentions of your daughter Rain. It is a bitter thanksgiving, but we should praise God in all humility. He has struck us down to renew our country and ourselves in His grace.”

Jarre was pale with fury. “Rain was no longer my daughter the day I made her Immortal. As to her treachery, we do not need God's revelation that there is no honor among prostitutes. We did not need a tidal wave to remind us that we should keep a closer watch on the houses of the perpetual brides. Why was it necessary for the sake of our national revival for me to lose my only son? My health? My fortune?

“We agree that God is of such unutterable power that He can make a wave tall enough to destroy our city, a wave that killed everyone in its path.

“I witness this power. I assent to it. I am a soldier. We kill all in our path when it is necessary.

“Why, then, isn't God less like us? Why can't He make a wave that kills the guilty but spares the innocent? Why can't he make a wave that elects, as He does among men? He has that power, too, all power—the Maker of sharks and doves. You insult him if you think otherwise. You should pray for forgiveness.”

Annan broke in gently, to spare the boy, and make peace between them. “Whether we love God or rail against Him, we cannot fathom Him, any more than we could the tidal wave He sent against us. Even as we talk tonight, we cannot establish whether we have witnessed creation or destruction. Perhaps we cannot even see how many tidal waves we endure. Perhaps there are tidal waves that are not made of water. Age is also a tidal wave.”

He turned to the boy. “I remember what you are living now—my perfect aim, my endless breath, the certainty of my balance. Now I waver when I walk, I am breathless, and my bones are dissolving inside my body. I am not underwater, but I am drowning. I had no more warning of it than we did of the tidal wave. My body is being swept away from me while I am speaking to you. Isn't that a miracle?

“There may be still other tidal waves, tidal waves of ecstasy, in which we are changed as in death, but not killed. The only knowledge I have of God I have found in the unexpected and the unforeseen. We can never guess how or when He will appear. Even if we could, we might not recognize Him. Or ourselves. He makes us weep. But I sometimes wonder whether we ourselves, each one of us, are the tears shed by God.”

Jarre had fallen silent. His wife saw though that his angry face was wet with tears; she made a sign to the guests to depart without ceremony. I stepped from the shadows behind her chair, and lit them out through the remains of the villa.

Men are such creatures that even if the sky fell and the apocalypse were total, the pitiful remnant left would crawl from the shards of the world, search for timber, and lay the foundations of their new houses. As birds must nest in the spring, men are helpless against this instinct. The coast stirred with the work of rebuilding, but Jarre had no heart to join it.

The loss of his children and his prosperity overwhelmed him, but the loss of his leg also incapacitated him bitterly. He resented his loss of mobility, of being forced to hobble and mince as if he were wearing a skirt. Until that moment, everything that had happened to Jarre, it seemed to him, could be reversed or changed to his advantage if he wanted. The tidal wave and all its consequences were Jarre's first experience of the unalterable. The idea of the permanent in relationship to himself came very late to him.