The Book of Heaven: A Novel (9 page)

But earth was and is not Heaven. The laughter of one mother and son brought sorrow to the other mother and her son, in the way a brilliant sunrise in one city is a sign of nightfall somewhere else, in the way the freshest, most flourishing, and joyful infant born brings news to its mother of the smile waiting inside her, to be released, at the child's maturity, onto her skull, its fatal coquetry the last of all her facial expressions.

Ivat's entrance into the household displaced Pelerin astonishingly; he became instantly negligible, as expendable as if he had been a girl. It was the first time either Souraya or Roucoul had ever witnessed a boy experience by accident what a girl experiences inevitably.

This plunge into the condition of womanhood had the effect of strengthening the child's bond with Roucoul, but for the rest of the household, above all its men and the boy's father, it made of the boy an object of almost superstitious fear, a creature to be avoided. The discomfort of the men with the transformed older boy meant that he remained in the world of babies and women, a fixture in the nursery for longer than he would have been under normal circumstances.

Even there, his misfortune was apparent. Before Ivat was born, the women, even Souraya herself, had been preoccupied with him alone; now they flooded Ivat with concern, admiration, and attention. It was assumed that the younger boy must do excellently all that he attempted, which functioned not only as a demand, but an encouragement, and a confidence. It was now assumed that the older boy's excellence would be to do as he was told. It was the difference in upbringing between master and servant, boy and girl.

Pelerin absorbed this, as children do, with a sense of physical threat, since as the teachings have it, a child's body and soul do not separate until the child reaches the age of seven. Pelerin perceived his change in status as if he were being destroyed; the great heroic purpose of his existence, protecting his mother, was compromised, almost impossible, now that he had been, above all, separated from himself.

His reaction was to defend himself from this annihilation. Now he made himself a nuisance, seized by unpredictable frenzies of kicking, striking, biting; his rage was not local, but universal, and took for its object not only persons but furniture, dishes, even food. He entered into combat with all the forces of domestic life.

He crushed eggs and murdered melons, mixing together praying and killing, in an eerie imitation of the slaughter rituals practiced on the community's herd animals. He pretended his hands were knives, decapitating onions and garlic from their stalks whenever he could intercept them before they reached the cooks. He was a soldier fighting in an invisible war.

It was as if he were acting in a kind of theater that represented over and over varieties of destruction of the vulnerable. With a kind of angry genius, he was violating the most cherished prohibition of the iconoclasts. Unobserved by any of the censors, he had found a way to make images; many people who saw the boy at this time kept vivid memories of his wildness and suffering throughout their lives, permanently imprinted in their memories, down to the length of his hair, as detailed as an artist's murals. All that he showed them made him a living blasphemy. It could not be long before he was judged not only a nuisance, but also a danger.

Nevertheless, it was not the boy, whose fury betrayed a kind of ethic, in that the only animate creatures he attacked were adults more powerful than himself, well able to control him, who was the object of Souraya's fear. It was his mother.

Souraya winced every time her former protégée approached the younger boy, and froze with fear if she took him in her arms, as if her embrace would prove mortal. Just by existing, she compromised Souraya's own maternity, distorted her affection, transformed her caresses into embattled gestures. What was a miracle for Souraya was the very source of Roucoul's own magical new power—her intimate knowledge that this boy would be Souraya's only child meant that he would always be at risk from her.

She had done nothing threatening yet, but Souraya was exhausting herself through her surveillance of both Ivat and Roucoul. The name she had given her son seemed darkly prophetic, since she felt him surrounded by danger, his life haunted with threat. She judged Roucoul by herself—she found herself, through love, so far from love. She found herself a woman whose passion for her own child would allow her to harm another's.

She began to confide an artful version of her fear to her husband. The link that must be broken was not his bond to his older son, for that was fragile. He had come very quickly to consider Pelerin an outsider, perhaps a burden. The bond that needed to fray was Adon's own sense of self, his sense of what was permitted in relation to a child he had already betrayed.

She launched her campaign with telling true stories, of Pelerin's violent fits of temper. She had observed that what was most unbearable for this man, and for many others, was a sense of his own wrongdoing. This caused such poisoning pain that each one would search for elaborate stratagems to disguise, justify, or forget his guilt. There was no more certain path to violence than this needing to uproot something in oneself. She could almost believe she had seen entire peoples in the grip of this.

Adon was uncomfortably aware of the injustice of his altered treatment of Pelerin; there was even more he did not want to know. She would graft that anesthetizing will to ignorance to her own will to blot out its source, the son whose shadow lay on her son. She was so consumed by her lust for her son's future that she forgot how much she, too, wanted to forget.

It was as if she had given herself a sleeping drug, and carried out her actions both deliberately and unconsciously, lost in a self-induced sleepwalker's torpor. In the end, the lie she told to rid herself of Roucoul and Pelerin was so convincing because it was true as well as false, like all exemplary lies. Her tale was not true in fact, but it was absolutely true in dream.

The world changes through this mysterious alchemy, when dreams, splendid or cruel, are brought to life in it. These dreams re-create the world. When they are splendid, people say, “My dream came true.” When they are cruel, people say, “My nightmare became real.” For in this world there is always a difference between what is true and what is real; those who live greatly find the art of joining them, becoming loci where they embrace.

Souraya told her husband the story of an imaginary scene that tormented her, as if it had really happened. The mystery was that when she transferred her terrible dream into the world, it became real, in a grotesque, deformed way. That is to say the people who died in the world were not the people who died in the dream. And the house she lived in, so full of movement and sound, turned to stone, and her own flesh became fire.

She made her husband see a winter afternoon, with the strange peace of winter, its cold timelessness, and the feeling of safety of a mother and child's afternoon nap near the warmth of an abundant fire. They lay together like a word and a comma, asleep within an unfinished sentence. She made her husband see, and it was exactly what she saw, a door open noiselessly. She made him feel the chilling violation of some unknown gaze above surveying the pair in their sweet sleep; it must be like what the drowsy dead sense when they feel the weight of the living heavy on their graves. The door that was opened closes. And the mother and son wake inside a new room, a room made entirely of flames, no longer a shelter, but a room with an appetite for them, a room determined to consume them.

The nap, the fire, the leap through flames with the promised child gripped hastily and passionately, to the point of suffocation, in her arms, were real. Her accusation that the boy Pelerin had set the fire, according to his mother's instructions, was her dream, a dream repeated many times. Untamed fire is especially dangerous because it takes swift, unpredictable, marauding paths, which is why it is the element of soldiers, and their true language. This fire was driven from the room, and from her sleep, but it leapt out of the dream and out of the room, and invisibly entered Souraya, to scorch Roucoul and her son, Pelerin.

Adon, like all iconoclast men, was God in his household. It was his right to judge its members, and his right to allocate exonerations, warnings, penalties, divorces, and death sentences. He chose a traditional punishment for an attempted murder.

“You who tried to execute God's power will live only with God's help. You who tried to seal the fate of another will be delivered to an unknown fate. You who have made a child a demon will dwell with the children of wolves. You who tried to destroy a house will be released into the wilderness. If there is mercy in the wild, let it sustain you. Whatever awaits you, God permits.” He remained implacable despite Roucoul's protestations of innocence, and unmoved by her pleas for clemency. She and their son would be given a supply of food and water, escorted beyond the city walls, and given to destiny, set adrift in the desert.

Roucoul turned as they led her out, her boy's hand in hers. “You will not see what happens to us, but your blindness will be criminal. Innocence is here, in your own son. Look at him well. For the innocence of a child is in not knowing what he does, but the innocence of a man is precisely in that knowledge. This is the last hour of your innocence.” The soldiers moved to silence her, but her speech was ripped apart by her tears, like the garment of someone in the passion of bereavement.

It was a little after Souraya had succeeded in driving Roucoul and her child from the household that the dreams began. Though she kept a full jug of cold water by her bedside, she would wake parched, with tears streaming down her face. It was as if water could not quench her thirst anymore, her body could make use of it only for the purpose of grief.

Her small son, sleeping on his pallet near her, would wake and try to comfort his mother. As he grew older, his expectation of her nightmares would wake him before they woke her. The dreams were persistent, occurring close to the same hour every night, the same pattern of racking thirst, and unquenchable tears, a season of grief, as if someone were speaking to her, saying the same thing again and again.

Gradually, she began to grow, not more fragile, but thinner, as if the dreams were eating what she ate, taking her nourishment and using it to re-create themselves even more vividly. She acquired the terrible insatiable look of the very thin, the appearance of one who could under no circumstances be satisfied, in contrast to the plump, who look overwhelmed by a satisfaction that demands that they perpetually satisfy their appetites, their flesh incorporating a fused mother and ever-suckling infant.

When her son had reached that moment of boyhood when they no longer shared a language and talking to her was not precisely like talking to himself, he asked her, “What do you see at night that makes you cry?”

She was grateful then for the years she had had to prepare her answer to his question and that she had not succeeded in pretending it would not be asked. She had waited for this to come, and it came. She took him then to a corner of the garden she had been tending since she was first married to his father, one of the gardens that provided a household's food and was called, in their language, paradise. They sat down in paradise, in the shade of one of her oldest and most fertile fruit trees.

She reached up and handed him one of its near ripe golden fruits. “I am going to tell you what I see at night. But first tell me what you see in your hand.”

“A quince from one of your trees,” he said.

“Yes, it is that,” she said, “but it is also a world in itself, a fragment of this world and an emblem of it. What you are holding is not merely a single fruit, but water, light, leaf, craft, work, knowledge, time, filth, and luck. It is thousands of other things, too, most of which I don't know. If you eat it, it will become you, and a part of you will be quince. What you do and what you are gradually become the same thing, and are identical when you die. And what you have done to another person becomes a part of your substance as surely as a fruit you have eaten.

“What I am telling you is that the world is made of thousands and thousands of marriages, visible and invisible, thousands and thousands of filaments of kinship, bonds of love, and bonds of harm, which are as intimate as those of love, and breed with a fertility of their own.

“My dream is one of those filaments; it is my half of a bond with another person I can no longer see. It is my bond”—she threw back her head and closed her eyes, as if suffering physically—“with a person I have harmed. I know she must have the missing half of my dream. We are forbidden mirrors here, so as not to look away from God, but the prohibition is futile, my heart: our lives are bright mirrors; our reflections outlive us, they show the truth of what we have made of our world, and of the world of ourselves.

“Do you remember a woman and an older boy who lived with us when you were very young?”

He felt the memory as much as saw it, at first, but it was there, especially of the boy, of being carried on his shoulders, and also of furious battles with stones, blood on both their cheeks, mixed images of love and hate. And parallel memories of his mother with the other woman, each with serious faces, sharing the burden of carrying a full grain basket together, and later, in some other room, a nightmarish, ugly memory of his mother's murderous, distorted face, as she slapped the other woman viciously. He had assumed until then that his mother was only capable of loving.

“Now you know who I see in the dream. I see this woman and her son. They are in the desert with no water left. She carries him on her back through Hell. He is unconscious. She lays him down beside a dry well, and walks away. She cannot bear to hear her son's last breath, does what otherwise she would never do, abandons him.

“And they are there, because in a frenzy of jealousy and ambition for you, I drove them from the house, Roucoul and her son, who is your brother.