The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace Page A

in her, however blindly. Besides, the suffering of this previously stoic woman moved him; and he did not want to be maneuvered into putting her away for her barrenness, leaving himself and his property a target for a strategic marriage engineered by an ambitious clan.
    In the end, in the face of Souraya’s surprising relentlessness, the female equivalent of muscular strength, Adon could not endure, and agreed to take a wife of her choosing. The strange symmetry of circumstance did not go unobserved by either of them; he had twice given her to strange men. Now she would deliver him to another woman. “God permits,” he told her.
    It was easy enough to arrange a “harvest” marriage, as they were called, a temporary marriage for the purposes of begetting a child, if the reigning wife had means, and knew a family vulnerably burdened with girls, those creatures who had to be given birth twice, once as infants, once as brides. Souraya selected a daughter who was a pivot between three older sisters, and three younger sisters. She hoped the mother’s fertility was prophetic.
    It was Souraya who negotiated for the girl, and paid for her, using her own jewelry for the purchase. She felt a momentary shame when she realized how easy it had been for her to buy a woman, she who had been bought and sold herself. She wondered if the girl’s docility was an affectation. Her own had been. Souraya suddenly saw the girl’s entrapment was hers, too.
    Their inferior position destroyed their integrity at the outset; if the girl rebelled, her life would be broken. But her calm acceptance of herself as merchandise, her eager embrace of the preference for boys, made her suspect. The priests who gave women tongue-lashings for being the source of faithlessness, or of evil, were secure on this scaffolding, that women must be either deceived or deceivers. For if women loved a God who had this contempt for them, they were either mad, therefore truly inferior, or if not, their love for this God was a frightening display of untrustworthiness, of calculating collaboration.
    After the transaction had been completed, the girl, whose name was Roucoul, meaning the cooing of doves, shyly approached her.
    “Do you remember me, madam?” the girl asked her. Souraya looked at her keenly, but no scene including this face reappeared in her memory.
    “I only wondered if you might,” the girl said. “When you were a bride, I thought you were so beautiful, so unlike anyone I had ever seen, that I tried to draw your face in the orchard grounds. The stick I used was as big as I was, and I remember drawing with it was like poling a boat—it took my whole body to navigate. I made your face as big as a lake, or a full moon, and I circled it and circled the world of your face with my oar. My mother beat me for it, and you tried to stop her. I always remember how you tried to rescue me when I was a little girl, and you were a newcomer. I shall try to serve your household well. I shall try my best, with God, to give you a boy.”
    It was Souraya who led the girl, their maker of soldiers, to Adon’s bedroom, and who arranged her diet, and bought talismans from the priests when she conceived, to ensure that the child would be a son.
    She treated the girl with passionate, but untender, attention to her physical welfare. She saw to it that the girl lacked for nothing, even judiciously indulged her, but with expertise, not kindness. Souraya knew her care for the girl was not only practical, but also aggressive—a way of exorcising the intense jealousy she felt of the girl’s fertile effortless success. She would control her resentment by translating it into governance over the girl. For Souraya, she was little more than a canal. Through cups of fresh milk and plates of ripe fruit, prayers of petition and prayers of thanksgiving, ordained repose, arranging visits of musicians who played the traditional songs that created boys, Souraya possessed the girl’s advancing