The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace

songs—“She without jewels will wear no jewels”—when they crossed her path, and beat on drums, their hollow thuds evoking barren wombs. These beggars had lived their songs; they were mostly childless women.
    Above all, she felt the danger of Adon’s increasing indifference to her thoughts, a dust of casual contempt for her advice. A woman with a collection of children had some authority—in a conflict with her husband, she could show him her offspring like a mouthful of bared teeth. Children were a woman’s strongest link to the world of men.
    It no longer mattered if Souraya hoped or dreamed for a child. Now she must get one, by any means. Without one, she risked being transformed from wife into servant, or worse. Now her longing for a child felt corrupted. It had become an ambition, like Adon’s—it held a willingness to destroy, a cancerous mass attached to the dream of creating. This mythically selfless act had become instead as calculating as a merchant’s creation of a profit. For her, a child was no longer a motive for living, but a means of staying alive.
    She began to surround the trunks of her fruit trees with banners embroidered with prayers, and buy illuminated prayers to hang on their leaves, the remedy suggested by the priests. She hated to do it, because it publicized her growing desperation. She had a cannibal’s need for this infant meat, a vulture’s for the eggs of another bird. She was revolted with herself.
    For the first time, she was truly relieved at the absence of mirrors. She did not want to see her eyes now, their former soft brilliance turned metallic, her body changed, as feeling has the power to change the shape of all bodies, by her ruthless need. So riven was she by this need that it seemed to have made her a new soul, in the way a new tree will grow between the two halves of a dead tree, split by some accident.
    Now when she passed mothers holding a young child or baby, she saw herself pushing the mother aside, reaching to take the child, so forcefully, so finally, in the calmest indifference of cruelty, that she sometimes believed this was what she had actually done. She was horrified to recognize that this new self of hers, in a female way, had something of the character of a rapist.
    It was, however, this ugly fantasy itself, which led her, after suffering it for years, to the lawful solution of her dilemma. It was not the child she would sweep up and out of its mother’s arms, Souraya determined. It was the woman alone.
    If she could find a woman to bring into the household for Adon, a child was bound to follow. And as the architect of this new household, she herself would rule both the child and the woman. As soon as its cord was cut, the child would be placed upon her knees. It would be she who would set its name upon it, she who would be its God. The name she chose would be traced in honey on a ceramic plaque, then she would bend down to touch her lips to the honey, and whispering the name, set her lips on the infant’s, transferring the name to him, recalling the birth of speech, the honey dropped from the kiss God gave the world.
    An unexpected struggle with Adon became the most difficult element of her plan to execute. God had revealed nothing to him of a child he would have with a woman he had not chosen for himself. Souraya was his in a way no other woman could ever be, almost as if he had at last succeeded in creating her.
    He had bought her from abroad, and he himself made an iconoclast of her; he had twice catapulted her beyond him, as in stories of heroes shooting arrows into space untold distances, arrows that inexplicably returned encircled by a hundred diamond rings and slid in silken homecoming into the hero’s quiver.
    Like those legendary arrows, she had returned to him as through resurrection, and through her returns, had enriched him a hundredfold. These things made a miracle of Souraya for him. She was a woman of destiny for him, God’s will at work