The Book of Heaven: A Novel (11 page)

Souraya could hardly bear the dread of those days, with their atmosphere of tense mutual suspicion and old scores waiting to be settled. She spent hours in agonized prayer, begging that the boy would not be found out, while Ivat acted, for her sake, as if he were oblivious to his danger. He would only admit that he sorely regretted his lost work, and that he was frustrated by the incessant liturgies of expiation that left him no opportunity to practice making pictures.

This morning's sickle of the new moon, surrounded by a crop of pale stars, held the sky, but not for long. Soon the light would come that made every night seem an illusion until it was replaced again by the dark that made a dream of the lost brilliance of the day. The boy felt his father's great slab of hand rest gently on his shoulder. “Blessed is God who shrouds the world in darkness and adorns it with light. It is the hour of sacrifice. Dress yourself and join me outside.”

It was a time of day the boy loved, and longed to paint, though he thought that would be impossible. This was the time when day was an impulse, a promise, destined but not born; if one could tell the adventures of a hero in his mother's womb, or a love story before the lovers had met, then one could paint this. Even though leaving sleep so early was a struggle for him, and his secrets made the daily sacrifices troubling to him, being abroad at this time of day gave him a sense of a mysterious and tender blessing passing over the world, like a hand caressing a cheek.

The thought made him want to perform just that gesture; he washed and dressed, then went quietly into his mother's alcove, and brushed his hand against her cheek. His fingers were so alive with his craft that he felt as if he painted a caress on her flesh. Painting was the first way he had understood cherishing; through it, he found he looked as long and intently and passionately at the world as the young husbands did at their new wives.

His mother stirred, as if she remained in some relation to him, even in her sleep, and he backed away, not wanting his presence to force her into consciousness before it returned to her naturally. He joined his father outside, where a servant was holding two saddled horses. They rode outside the gates, which were barred behind them. Ivat had never been beyond the settlement with his father's knowledge or permission, though he had enjoyed a few undisclosed boys' adventures beyond the gates.

“Where are we going, Father?” he asked.

“To the Eye of God, to make our sacrifice,” his father answered. “Today we will promise again to see only what God commands us to see.”

The Eye of God was sacred territory; it was a large lake on a mountaintop, flanked by three peaks. It was there that the first iconoclasts had seen God, and had sworn to the deity to blind themselves to all but the Divine. It was not far from the settlement, but only priests and elders, and by dispensation, shepherds, were permitted to climb it unaccompanied; the rest of the tribe, though not the children, joined them there for twice-yearly rituals of penitence, thanksgiving, and the renewal of the ancient oath to purify the world until it mirrored nothing but God. These feasts they prepared for months in advance, fattening the lambs whose spitted corpses dotted the slopes of the mountain, crowning it with smoke and fragrance delectable to God at the culmination of these festivals.

Ivat was awed. He was deeply moved by the significant honor his father was conferring, a powerful acknowledgement of the bond between father and son, that had paradoxically become more public, and also more personal, during these months of purification and rededication within the tribe, during which father and son had gained their first direct knowledge of each other.

He was also anguished by his secret knowledge that he was the hidden motivation for the purification—that he had come to hope, even to believe, that he could serve God best in seeing as much as creation would reveal to him. If his father had uttered an intimate word, Ivat would have confessed the truth. But his father was too overcome with the emotion of his son's first journey to the Eye of God to speak. Ivat heard him chanting to himself the prayers of pilgrimage, and joined in the ones that boys were allowed to learn.

He drank the wonderfully cool dawn air as they rode up the labyrinth of paths, air that for the boy irrationally had a color: dark green. They greeted a shepherd, driving his lambs toward a high valley for grazing. Wisps of silvery mist drifted upward from the trees' leaves. Ivat felt, for the first time, one of the ancient forms of joy, the sublime physical joy of ascent. Trees were no more than balconies to him. He had never climbed to the top of a mountain.

At the summit was the fathomless blue-black Eye of God, ringed with four enormous altars. They dismounted, tied their mounts, and walked to the edge of the water. Adon instructed the boy to remove his outer garments, so that he could be dedicated to God within the waters. Ivat had the cricket-slimness of boys, as if his flesh were not yet fully fitted to his bones. His young shoulder and rib bones were of a shell-like delicacy; Adon took his hand for fear he would be washed away during the ritual by some sudden current.

They waded together into the waters, which chattered and glittered as the sun rose, until they were high over the boy's head. Then Adon raised him on high, cradled the boy in his arms, and plunged him deeply into the waters, once, twice, a third time, muttering unintelligible prayers in the secret prayer language of men, which had its own grammar and alphabet, to protect the sacred words from the profane tongues of the uninitiated.

Then they returned to the shore to gather wood and kindling for the fire to roast God's lamb. Ivat wandered the nearby slopes and woods, searching for the choicest, driest pieces. He worked doubly hard, because his father seemed swept with one of the sudden sovereign exhaustions of old age, and sat down heavily under a tree, his face gray and his eyes closed, with a nauseated expression.

It was impossible for Ivat to touch these varieties of wood, and not regret the finest, with the smoothest grain, as foundations for his painting. He completed his elegant pyramid, and stood back to look at it, to make sure it was above criticism. A boy his age was supposed to have mastered to perfection the making of a fire for roasting.

He judged his work vulnerable, with too many pieces of green or still damp wood, which he would need to conceal artfully among the sticks and logs that were above reproach. He bent over the mound, quietly, so that his father would not realize he was disguising his poorly chosen wood. He was engineering a building designed to disappear without a trace, making a palace for flame.

A powerful blow just above his kidneys knocked him to the ground, where he knelt, panting.

A coarse, thick rope was bound around him twice, and then doubled over his hands. Ivat screamed for his father. He was flung, hard, on his back on his carefully arranged mound of wood. His father was twisting the ends of the rope beneath the stone altar, and looped them around him again. Ivat screamed for his father again; but his father was with him, had never left him, was lighting the kindling that would set the wood ablaze. “You hurt me, Father,” Ivat said, and cried in pure fear, without dignity, like a much smaller boy. “Why are you hurting me?”

“Son, you have come to the hour of your death. God speaks in me. For our sins, God demands your death. Only the death of my son will cleanse the filth of images from the pure face of our nation. Only the death of my son—my own image—will please God. I do this for the love of God.” His father seemed to have found an unearthly strength; his father's face shone, raised toward Heaven. His father had not spoken his name.

He drew the knife that Souraya's father had forged for him long ago, as the centerpiece of her bridal dowry, and leaned close to the boy, as a father leans over a child's bed to kiss it at bedtime, and draw the covers over it against a night chill. The knife seemed as big as a new moon, as inevitable a fact of creation. It hovered flush with the boy's eyes, as his father sought to calibrate its cutting edge with the mortal angle of the child's thin throat.

The child looked for his father's eyes to find the human being there. But it was his own eyes he saw, in the fragments of blade not covered by patterns and calligraphy; blue-green, like his mother's. And his hair, the earthy color of oak bark. “Father, I see my face in your knife!” he cried out, as stunned at the first glimpse of his own face as if he had witnessed his own birth. “I see my image!”

At these words, his father's demonically radiant face took on an expression of rapture; at this sight, the boy, like all children who are frightened to death, and all adults who are dying, lost control of his bladder, and soaked the smoking wood of the pyre with his waste. A flash of anger intensified the ecstasy on his father's face, as a local bolt of lightning does the dark immensity of a storm. His face turned an explosive red, dark with unshed blood. Then he collapsed, as if he had had a stroke.

It was not, though, a stroke that had felled him. It was his wife, Souraya, who leapt out of a thicket, and with the full weight, both of her body and of the unexpected shock, knocked him to the ground. She must have had a kind of intimation that became a panicked conviction. Perhaps she remembered how her husband had risked her life when she set out on a journey with him. Perhaps she trusted him no more than she trusted herself. In whatever form, by whatever means the knowledge came to her, she was there.

“Will you?” she whispered, trembling so convulsively that more words were impossible. “Will we kill another child?” She snatched the knife, her bridal dowry knife, shaped to Adon's hand, from her husband, and flung it away, so far, or so deep, or so high that it was never found.

She too held a knife, a kitchen knife covered with prayers to accompany the preparation of food; she cut swiftly through the cords that bound the boy, and swept him off the altar, onto his feet. She did not allow herself to hold him, because there was no time. “Live,” she said. She pushed him away, brusquely and urgently, toward a slope. He stared at her, as if he longed for something, some other world in which a prayer like hers was not ambiguous.

“Run,” she cried out, and her husband was upon her, enraged at her blasphemous interference. She struggled with him, but his hand was a carnivore's. God had asked for blood from him, and he was God's lion, voracious in his obedience to lay down some hallowed kill at the foot of God's throne. Nothing could deflect him from giving a death to God, the death his Holy One craved.

His wife looked him full in the eyes, a gaze that seemed suspended and timeless, though it must have lasted no more than a moment. It was a look of lucid and perfect knowledge. “God permits,” she said. It was not clear whether what she meant then was her rescue of the boy, or her own murder.

Then her husband dragged her onto the altar where he had tied down their son, and killed his wife. He killed her with her own household knife, so much an element of her body, her life, and her work every day, that he could feel she died by her own hand. Which was the way her death was told, crafted as divine punishment, a retribution for her act of rash faithlessness, before God revealed her child would not be slaughtered.

I did not see my father cut my mother's throat. I have heard the story painstakingly arrived at by the Guardians, their ingenious, intricate panoply of prescribed responses, designed to justify murder if it is for God; it is a basilica grandly architected, a building in which only some doors may open, and others remain permanently bolted against either entrance or exit. The Guardians of the Story say it was an angel of God who rescued me, who stayed my father's hand. But it was a human who performed that awful miracle. The sacrifice that day was hers, and it was herself.

I saw that day what I can never forget; I did not see the moment of my mother's death in blood, but I saw my mother die. Just before she cut me from my bonds, her face took on an eerie youthfulness, mixed with an expression of agonized regret. I believe she was remembering then my brother and his mother, who had suffered at her hand what she was experiencing now.

And then a new face seemed to grow from the existing features, as if one could actually see the precise moment a blossom comes to exist as a fruit. Her renewed face showed passionate fear, and, astonishingly, an equally passionate resolve. It was her face of death, when she had taken the measure of what she was doing, and knew that in saving me, she would lose everything. Then she gave me life.

Who was filled with God that day? Was it the parent who rushed to kill with trickery for God's sake a child who trusted him, or was God in the parent who said, “Take my life instead of this child's”? What does God's voice sound like?

There was more than one death that day. My mother was killed, but my father died too; he died to me. I have never seen him again. If he sent a thousand embassies with a thousand offers of reconciliation, I would not risk them. After such treachery, how could I trust he had not had some new divine revelation concerning me, or that he was not still determined to fulfill the old one? How often I have since heard unruly children threatened in this way by their fathers: “I shall make a sacrifice of you, unless…”

And I myself died. No child whose own father has tortured him has not died, has not seen Hell itself. A child whose father has trussed him on a pyre, who has looked up and seen a gleaming blade in the hand of a father absolutely determined to destroy him, has been killed. I outlived that death, with the grace of the life my mother gave me. There was enough life to survive, to form a new self. But even the story the Guardians tell cannot conceal that death. In their version, there are three voices you do not hear, three faces you will never see: mine, my mother's, and my brother's. They obliterate us with their story.

But here is mine. In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.