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

and then changed it. Her thoughts, as always, sometimes to her guilt and annoyance, bubbled unquenchably to the surface, like artesian wells. The woman was one of those helpless saints of honesty, so many of whom come to doom.
    As they climbed into boats, and set off on reed-fringed waters in the moonlight to approach a legendary settlement scattered on a thousand islands, she knew she had reached a moment that would never end for her. It would end in the world, but not in her memory.
    It was as if she were entering into a superb world-sized brocade, somewhat like the kind her own people had made, of nocturnal landscapes emerging from silver, blue, and purple threads. The sounds of the paddles of the guides weaving through the water was the sound of her own figure being woven into a corner of a scene of moving through glistening reeds and water at night.
    She had a feeling of being present at her own creation, a moment of premonition. She would never not see herself here. It was, she knew, a deathbed heaven, as her own people called such visions—the place a dying person would imagine himself returning to at the moment of his death.
    One of the thoughts came to Souraya that she disliked, that made her feel disturbingly isolated within which what was now supposed to be her clan, her hearth circle. If it was ordered not to fashion images, then it was ordered to destroy the mind, which could not blind itself. Then the great scroll of thoughts and memories that was her mind was sinful. Then even this present moment in which she saw her own figure in the moonlight was forbidden. Then it was ordered not to dream. Dreams, though, flow through living minds as blood through veins, and the loss of them is mortal, too.
    A dream came to her now. The heightened feeling she had, the sense that she was unexpectedly part of something permanent, made her think something would happen to her here, something that would itself be permanent. There are moments when one can indeed know the future truly, though never infallibly.
    As they neared the island where they were to be received by the chief of this region, one of the guides took what she thought had been an urn, turned it upside down, and began drumming on it with his palms.
    The boat laced its way through a labyrinth of reeds, and the moment it struck ground, lights sprang up around them, torches crowned with countless flames, that made them look like the petals of burning white roses. The reeds had camouflaged hundreds of boats, which were now clearly visible, their forms heightened as sculptures in the burst of light. The whole island was alive with light now, as if it had just sprung into being out of darkness. It was as if a new kind of time had been achieved on this fragment of earth, in which day and night were inextricably joined together.
    They passed through a pergola that seemed to be formed of flowers that flickered and glowed as if they had bloomed with lit candles inside them. Souraya stared at them surreptitiously as she passed through the fragrant gallery. The luminescence of the flowers was owing to restless fireflies that had somehow been coaxed into their hearts.
    Men and women, too, stood on borders of the path to the guesthouse, each supporting a torch planted in the ground like the stone caryatids bearing baskets of flame that she had seen in several cities along their route. The forms of those pillars, she realized, could only have been basalt and granite translations of what some embassy had seen here and remembered. So it was that a form took new life from place to place, from version to version, as a child’s features interpreted his ancestors’.
    Souraya, as she had been trained since her marriage, met no one’s gaze directly. When they crossed the threshold of the guesthouse, she expertly used her lids and lashes as a veil, taking her impressions obliquely and without entering into or inviting any relations, any exchange of mutual knowledge, with any person