Read The Book of Heaven: A Novel for Free Online Page A

face to eradication, she could at least look at the faces of others. She wanted to see a world that insisted on itself. She wanted to be in motion in this world where she had not found a home.
    And she wanted to give an illusion of holiday to the work of her marriage. It was her work to create an environment of efficiency, productivity, prosperity, and enjoyment for a perfect stranger, to anticipate and provide him with everything he wanted, even if what he wanted was an illusion, even when what he did not know he wanted. It was a strange paradox of marriage that it required her to outwit her husband. It was critical that she know him better than he knew himself.
    She woke up charged with energy, each day a day of danger to be outwitted, each day a test for her; her sense of herself was urgent, a runner straining to outpace a capture. She worked to enlace him in a web of services, obligations, delights—to construct a power of life and death over him that would balance the power he was born with over her. She knew her fate depended on not disappointing, at least until she could provide the dynasty that was the obsession of this aging, childless man.
    At home, she was owned, a locked house that her husband entered or left at will, a garden whose fruit her husband fed from according to his appetite. She offered herself with ruthless practicality and an increasingly successful forecast of his moods.
    The deprivation of images she lived with seemed to have enhanced an intuitive capacity of hers to nearly supernatural levels—she had developed an almost infallible gift for predicting action and analyzing character through observing other people physically. Their bodies told her stories, warned her, confirmed rumors.
    A tension in the neck, a slight compression of the lips, the way arms were crossed, had shown her details of business dealings in a way that even impressed her husband. She had only to entertain a potential client or partner to understand their enterprise, like those canny jewelers who offer coffee to clients the better to see the quality of the rings worn on the hand holding the cup. The anticipated journey would give her more scope to demonstrate these skills, and so secure her husband’s favor.
    At least as travelers she and her husband would be almost equals, equally subject to the unknown, equally engaged in acts of discovery. They would wake up both unsure of what each day would bring, embarked on a common journey at last.
    In those days of traveling, she felt the momentum of being alive so powerfully that it contained her unhappiness. She woke early as if she were hungry for the day. She had discovered the odd and unexpected involuntary savor of living—there was an appetite for it, even among the aggrieved, she observed, as when mourners woke ravenous for breakfast on the day of the funeral.
    She coursed through the hours of movement, the rhythms of departure and arrival, the overheard conversations, the changing gods and customs so offensive to her marriage tribe, the absorbing entertainments that were part of hospitality, her appreciation of the beautiful invention of trading, its fine transcendence of combat.
    And she secretly delighted in the mirrors in the women’s quarters, the first since her marriage over which her husband had no power. She did not, as he admonished her, close her eyes, or turn her back on them. She was surprised to see how easily she had forgotten her own features, how she had become a hazy general impression in her own imagination. Her lost features had expanded like a mist; her face had become the size of the world. The mirror’s limitations of her imagination of herself came as a relief. Her face again had an accurate compass. But she was also encountering now a world of mirrors—in the faces of the people she was traveling among, she saw her reflection, as they saw theirs in hers.
    The journey made those forbidden images for her, images she never forgot, that came to life