The Book of Heaven: A Novel Read Online Free

ready at last, so was the marriage. Souraya’s dowry gifts and personal belongings were securely packed, and her clay birds and clay boys and girls given away to her cousins’ children. She threaded the bridegroom’s gifts of jewelry through her hair and around her neck. A special leather bag was set aside for the remnants of the clay hand; the iconoclasts were strict in demanding proof that the model had been destroyed, as if they were possessed by some fear that they themselves might be destroyed by their own despised images.
    They danced all night, the night before she left, cycles of ribald dances, joyous dances, with figures of joined hands pledging that love requites everything, tender dances, then the openly tragic dances, with their mute declarations that all love is unrequited, the cresting movements of the dancers’ arms like waves beating against cliffs.
    They sang old songs, drinking wedding wine and eating indulgently from what seemed a supply of perpetual roast meat and a traditional wedding confection known as bride’s tears, made of honey mixed with the resinous tears exuded by local pines, a symbol of the bittersweet nature of marriage.
    Everyone, from children to old men, embraced the precious bride, touched her dress, smoothed her hair, clung to her as if she were each one’s ebbing life. Some dandled her four-year-old sister, who was also getting married to a five-year-old cousin. It was a common arrangement. Small sisters would share in the dower of the older bride, and the family would have married all its daughters at the expense of one wedding. The younger girls would return to their playthings and household tasks, and would discover when they had grown up that they had been married all their lives, as if they were assuming a life previously lived, but unremembered.
    The meat and dancing and singing and wine made a wild joy of loss. The sense of mourning someone who was departing from their circle was transformed into a blissful oblivion. The festival of an absence would not be revealed as painful until tomorrow, after she would be gone forever.
    Someone fetched the model of Adon’s hand, and brought it to the fireside, offering it to Souraya’s father to destroy, as commanded. He shook his head dourly, regretting the end of his workmanship. “Do your husband’s will, Souraya,” he said. Souraya’s lips were stained with red wine, she was just becoming drunk.
    She picked up a log and with all her strength brought it down onto the center of the earthen palm. The guests cheered as the object shattered, and Souraya smashed the clay fingers, knuckles, and wrist into smaller and smaller fragments knit with splintering embers, overcome with the manic joy of destruction. She half-remembered the childhood pleasure of building cities in the sand, and joining with all the other children, after the fashioning of intricate domes, tunnels, and towers, in the ecstatic destruction of their own creations. In their annihilating dances, those children outlived the world.
    A man poured her another cup of wine, and she lifted it high, in a mocking toast: No one could criticize her tonight. The singing ensured that exemption, in all gatherings, sacred or profane; it gently enforced a consent on the company, so that on those occasions, they would not settle old scores, either by boast or by insult.
    “Drink to the unseen,” she cried out, laughing recklessly at her own daring, exulting in a moment of freedom in her severely disciplined life. Tomorrow, she would have to be impeccable, eyes lowered, wordlessly graceful, inscrutable in the face of sorrow, relief, bewilderment, disgust, or fear. She needed to indulge herself in bravado tonight, for a virgin goes to marriage with an unseen man as a soldier goes into battle, uncertain of survival, risking death. Who would protect her if she did not please? And she had no more idea than a soldier in first combat does of what she would experience physically.
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