The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace

a cut apple.
    She had grown bitter about the body, that filthy donkey one rode until it died, so it was a marvel to her that the same body was able to accomplish this, this exchange of unsoiled dignities. She felt a physical change; she seemed to herself to achieve a new stature, to step free of her former body as if from a sea.
    This look they had exchanged then began to find its form in words. What he said she wanted to believe. “Despite the crude way you have arrived here,” he told her, “I want nothing to happen to you here that you do not permit. What happens to you here must also happen to me. I would take nothing from you that I do not inspire you to give, though I confess there is something I want from you. What I want from you is my own freedom.”
    She had never heard speech of this pattern. He was describing the workings of his mind as it lived, studying himself as if he had weather. He spoke as if he had thoughts that were unpredictable and changed. He spoke as if there were things he did not know, things he was not permitted.
    “With all the power I have here,” he continued, “and that is obviously considerable, I am not free. Because nothing I have is truly given to me, but mine by custom. My self is no one self. It is a dynasty. Where I live, fear lives—and ambition. I inspire seduction. Obedience. Intrigue. Jealousy. Beseeching.
    “I think I feel like God feels, and I do not like it. For a man to feel like God, it would seem, narrows his experience. As a man, a person, I am a kind of virgin. I know I am not God, and do not want to be. I am not in possession of that common ambition. I want someone to talk to me, not pray to me.
    “You are smiling, and that confirms what I noticed so strongly when I saw you last night. There was a quality of shrewdness in your obedience, of fine political craftsmanship. I thought, If this is deference, then it is deference conferred. If this is silence, it is filled with speech. I wanted to speak with you. I wanted you to speak with me.
    “I want you to choose what you want to give me, even if I risk obtaining nothing. I am not your father, your brother, or your husband. I stand in no relationship of law to you, but only of grace. I want no relationship with you that you do not shape. If you want to return to your brother immediately, I will arrange it this night.”
    Then began the only courtship she would ever experience, in which the initial invitation was for her to reject the suitor. It was a courtship devised not only to seduce her, but as much to question her and himself, to divine something about her, to reveal some new capacity of his, to look into the galleries of each other’s dreams, to transform knowledge into delight. They became, during this time, connoisseurs of each other, each fresh comprehension an extended caress.
    It was a wonder to Souraya that any man could admit himself to be such a particular creature, with personal tastes and fears and thoughts, capable of uncertainty, of humility, and of the playful wit uncertainty made possible. This man had thought about who he might and might not be, and discovered some things he was not.
    He deliberately suffered and feared his own power. He dreaded the coming of the day when he would not; he had seen others live that day; when it arrived, old friends were executed without cause, men jailed without trial, wars declared like malignant cancers. Souraya had known men only as monoliths, as fathers, husbands, priests, who affected infallibility, whose power was so certain that it endangered them; they risked being crushed beneath the weight of their own authority. In a way, Am saw her as a witness, a protective talisman against that condition.
    Every day Am wordlessly offered to her a power over him that Souraya refused; every day Am relinquished his own power over Souraya. These were the most subtle, never-ending temptations she had ever known, met on both their parts with a moral asceticism that utterly