The Book of Heaven: A Novel (33 page)

The controversy began after the performance over whether her character was innocent or had deserved to be murdered. A great deal of wine had already been served during the dance: the fighting escalated until an eighteen-year-old boy (who naturally identified with the young lover) from a well-known merchant's family was killed with a knife.

Rain saw the surge of fists and kicks, and heard the punished jagged breath of men giving and receiving blows as she came out to take her bows. And she thought she saw the knife come down, the swift decision that could never be changed; the boy was taken from the house elsewhere, so she did not see him die.

As a consequence, knives were prohibited on the premises, but this was impossible to enforce. The faction who contended that the girl's death in the ballet was justified considered that they had proved their point. Rain had, after all, inadvertently provoked the death of a boy simply by dancing a role written for her. The destructive power of women made even their innocence dangerous. They were fires that for safety's sake should burn only in the hearth.

Rain, during these years, was kept alive by love, hate, and work. It is a strange feature of the soul that each of these elements of human experience can heighten the other. Her dancing was where love and hate met—sometimes, her feet whipped at the ground as if she would tear the earth to pieces, at other times, she lay on the stage with her hands pressed to it as if to a beloved face. Love and hate struggled in her, or married in some necessity, in the way the human heart is bathed in blood.

Her hatred was for the men who bought her, but perhaps above all for Madam, who delivered her and the other girls to them, like the negligible little birds she served for expensive suppers with wine, birds that were eaten, head, delicate bones, and all. She learned to control her reactions to Madam's public insults, but even harder to endure was another technique of Madam's, the public feigning of love, the other sure trigger for a sale.

Madam would call certain brides to her, and seat them at her feet, stroking their hair as if they were lapdogs. Her displays of affection were above all exhibitions of the girls' submissiveness—they could not refuse her caresses or her false intimacies, a promise communicated to the clients. Her touch made Rain remember from childhood the scarred hands of a cook marked by burning sugar she was caramelizing.

Rain's loathing for Madam became irresistible, ardent, an assent to a dizzying world of cruelty without end. She suffered the most terrible, the most polluting of all human lusts—which is not, as commonly supposed, sexual desire, but the desire to kill.

And it was evident that Madam reciprocated her hatred; she hated all the girls she furnished, with an implacable, parental hatred. She hated them whether rebellious or obedient, hated their degradation, hated the way their very existence caused sin they could never be free of, as bodies can never be free of gravity, not even when they die, not even when they decompose. She hated women as they deserved, because they could not rescue her.

There are many worlds, though, within the same small space, and within the same soul.

Rain's hours with Azura and her baby daughter, Ocean, existed in the days, along with the nights passed in humiliation and violence. In their company, she was refreshed as if she had found her way to some hidden paradise, where love could never be exhausted, as unending as the death she knew at night was unending.

She died at night, and was born again each day, shocked by the reality of all she could still feel. Feeling love, that borrowed joy in these lives, made it possible for her to suffer here, unlike many of the others, frozen in the postures of seduction in which their captors had trained them.

Sitting on the soft grasses overlooking the sea, she timidly played with the child, hardly daring to touch it. She had been touched always against her will, and was afraid her touch would magically transmit her violation to the child.

When the laughing toddler threw herself in her arms spontaneously, Rain felt she was someone who had never been cauterized by hatred; again, she had a sense that she had another nature.

She discovered another, utterly unsuspected power, her ecstatic power not to kill. The swarm in the hive of her heart made a wild honey of its savagery.

She held the child in her arms, as if its whole passage through time was in her embrace. Her arms seemed to possess an infinite power, as if there were a thousand of them, muscled with her passion to do no harm. She seemed still, but was not; she was rain returning to Heaven, a celestial ship swift enough to change the order of the world, and hold Ocean as its cargo.

Ocean reinvented dance every time she moved; her prattle was like the poetry of another world that had yet to be translated. She was proof that the world was still being created. A life has signal images, they say, that return at the hour of death. Among Rain's would surely be a summer afternoon exchanging wild strawberries from a basket with a laughing child, fruits given by the little girl with a variety of solemn priestly concern, or riotous laughter followed by a somersault, or with a kiss.

When Rain fed her a strawberry in turn, she threw her head back as if she were floating in a world made of summer fruit; she tasted the fruit so completely that she became it. Then she ran back and forth between Rain and her mother, with strawberries in her hands, spilling over with the glory and generosity of her joy.

Mother and child were some other kind of human pair than she had known. And yet they did not languish in the dreamy mutual swoon of tenderness shown in paintings.

Instead, they cast changing lights and shadows on each other, each seeking some kind of delicate balance that touched Rain profoundly—what she witnessed, she thought, was a perpetual seeking of something greater than justice, an exchange of strengths and weaknesses beyond equality. They were not just in a natural relation to each other but, it seemed to her, in an ethical relation.

She did not just pass time with them, she believed in them. Azura and Ocean had formed this world of grace and trust beyond what Azura had undergone—beyond what Rain herself had undergone.

Paradoxically, it was this experience of human love that drove Rain ever closer to murder. She and Azura forgot, and the child had never suspected, the range of what could be done to them without their consent.

Early morning was the time of day that brought a kind of peace to the house. Tables were set in the courtyard if the weather was fine, for the sated men who had stayed the night to savor the final fillip of their pleasures, to complete the cycle of hungers fed.

They were served a country breakfast by the brides who had passed the age of active service, and were now primarily housekeepers and gardeners who had planted and harvested the corn and fruit for the house. If a guest wanted to be served by the bride with whom he had passed the night, and could pay the additional fee, she attended him.

Azura was often in demand for this service, as she had been a bride for long enough to have acquired a core of regular clients. There was no more envied position in the house; regular clients meant stability, regular and orderly payment, jewels to put aside for taxes, and, the greatest luxury of all, predictable nights, nights in which no unexpected facet of a client's mind would be revealed, and no unexpected danger would be faced. It meant that Azura was unlikely to be one of the women screaming for the guards at night, having been transformed into something hateful, a nightmare image that only the client could see.

Azura served well, even expertly, anticipating the logic of each man's appetite before her clients recognized their own preferences. A slice of cheese, a bowl of steaming milk and honey, a plate of house-smoked ham, a fruit liqueur if that was required by the indulgence of the previous night—she furnished them without her clients' ever sensing the want of them. Having a child had made her divination of others' needs, one of the supreme virtues of Peninsulan women, almost flawless.

At last, having ensured all payments were delivered and recorded, she made her way through the courtyards and turned through the vineyards to catch a glimpse of the ocean on her way to her own Ocean in the House of Immortal Children. She caught Rain's eye in the second courtyard, where she was teaching a class of six-year-olds folk dances; dancing was an important art for both the Immortal girls and boys to master, not least because the children's recitals influenced what they might become when they were of age. What was recreation now might become destiny later.

Rain returned her gaze flushed with helpless enjoyment of the movement and of the children's high spirits. They looked at each other with an almost guilty shared pleasure: they had sometimes spoken of the burden the Immortal children bore, their sometimes frantic efforts to charm, to divert, to invent the only happiness the house knew. The six-year-olds spun and leapt like toys frantically trying to come to life. Azura stroked the hair of a particularly earnest boy, and promised the class that cakes would be waiting to reward them in the afternoon at the House of Immortal Children.

Not more than an hour later, it seemed, Rain heard the pounding of the guards' boots, as a messenger tore through the courtyard to Madam, who was working in the First Circle.

A group of six guards followed him, carrying something in a sack. It was Azura. She had killed herself. The Crowned Ones had requisitioned her little girl, Ocean, and Madam had taken the child during the night to deliver her.

Madam informed the Immortals of Azura's death at an assembly called before the hour when the clients were admitted.

Madam spoke contemptuously of Azura; she was guilty of the rankest blasphemy. Her body would be thrown from the Cliff of the Condemned, like a criminal. Living criminals were executed there, but in cases such as these, symbolic executions of lifeless criminals were held.

“God commands us to be exemplary in the lives He has chosen for us. Let those of you who challenge Him, as Azura did, see how He destroys the arrogant.”

This warning, and the feverish tone in which Madam delivered it, looking into the eyes of Azura's friends in the company, gave rise to the rumor that Azura had not really killed herself, but had been killed in the act of trying to murder Madam.

“Not only was Azura's act sacrilege,” Madam continued, “but it was born of selfishness. Her little daughter, born of who knows what father, is now a child among God's Elect, given to a Crowned family who chose this child for their own.

“That sure and perfect salvation of her child is what Azura died rebelling against. But God has chosen differently. We are helpless to defy Him. When I take a child, I serve you as God does, as God elects. The deaths of men belong to Him, and the children of women. Be grateful to Him.”

She then called the names of those who would be assigned to entertain Azura's clients that evening. The Immortals dispersed, heads bowed, hiding what was in their eyes. In Rain's eyes was a vision of Madam, her skull crushed with a rock. The blood-smeared rock would be the anvil of perfect justice, where the wronged are restored to righteousness without remorse. It is there that knowledge passes into perfection, where questions end only with one answer, the divine command “So Be It.”

“I will kill her—for you, Azura,” she vowed. “She will die for you, Ocean.” She felt a great invincibility, a holy prophetic certainty growing in her, overwhelming her despair. She could not restore Azura and Ocean, but she would rebuild the world on the foundation of Madam's bones. She would sacrifice her own life in an ecstasy of sacred violence.

That night, alone in her room, she took her childhood toy, the brightly colored wingless bird, from its hiding place, and pressed her lips to it for luck. She was like it; she was already broken; all that was left for her was to shatter into glittering dust, and rise incandescent. She was uplifted, purified by hatred; she sought justice.

Vengeance, I have observed, is the first step on the path of hatred; vengeance is always messianic—and its goal, to restore through blood and sacrifice, lost innocence. The vengeful want to re-create the world as it was, fragment by fragment, out of life they shatter. The blood of murder is the blood of resurrection. Many on the path of hatred are destroyed here, at the outset.

Rain was greatly relieved for the time being to be spared contact with Madam, even through a seasonal assignment she usually loathed. Being detached from her deadly rapture would help her plan to kill coldly.

It was her turn to lead the annual troupe of Fiançailles dancers from her house. The dancers were commissioned to illustrate to the newly engaged girls of the capital the secrets of the marriage bed, from which they had so far been carefully guarded.

A festive band of the Ones Who Dance Always went from house to house, in splendid costumes, glittering with the jewelry they had earned, dazzling with their mastery of the profane arts, of song, poetry, and dance; education ended for the girls of the Peninsula when they married, when only knowledge that would be of use to or please their husbands should occupy them, so the savor of knowledge took on a sensual and forbidden air for them.

It was a demanding period not just because of the giggling, frightened, eager girls, but because the dancers of Madam's house were often returning to their childhood homes, not as daughters or sisters, but as perpetual brides.

The Fiançailles also often created conflicts between the perpetual brides and the wives, when husbands' other lives were revealed through the pieces of missing jewelry now sparkling on the dancers' wrists, hair, and necks. It had happened from time to time that brides died during the Fiançailles, poisoned by the traditional pastries, or met with some accident on the way to their quarters and were stripped of their jewelry by bands of thieves.

But there were also moments of keen poignance, the glimpses of childhood neighborhoods and former families for some, the luxury of an entire month without clients, the opportunity to display their exquisite mastery of the forbidden arts, and for Rain, breathing and hearing her beloved sea. She did not think she could have survived being walled inside the house without the view of the sea from the Pagan Chapel.