The Satanic Verses (61 page)

And he returned to Mahound in his tent and said what he had
seen. And the Prophet said, ‘Now may we come into Jahilia,’ and they arose, and came into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer of Men.

How many idols in the House of the Black Stone? Don’t forget: three hundred and sixty. Sun-god, eagle, rainbow. The colossus of Hubal. Three hundred and sixty wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And are not: but let’s not waste time there. Statues fall; stone breaks; what’s to be done is done.

Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his tent on the old fairground. The people crowd around the tent, embracing the victorious faith. The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and need not be lingered over.

While Jahilians bow before him, mumbling their life-saving sentences,
there is no God but Al-Lah
, Mahound whispers to Khalid. Somebody has not come to kneel before him; somebody long awaited. ‘Salman,’ the Prophet wishes to know. ‘Has he been found?’

‘Not yet. He’s hiding; but it won’t be long.’

There is a distraction. A veiled woman kneels before him, kissing his feet. ‘You must stop,’ he enjoins. ‘It is only God who must be worshipped.’ But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by toe, joint by joint, the woman licks, kisses, sucks. And Mahound, unnerved, repeats: ‘Stop. This is incorrect.’ Now, however, the woman is attending to the soles of his feet, cupping her hands beneath his heel … he kicks out, in his confusion, and catches her in the throat. She falls, coughs, then prostrates herself before him, and says firmly: ‘There is no God but Al-Lah, and Mahound is his Prophet.’ Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends a hand. ‘No harm will come to you,’ he assures her. ‘All who Submit are spared.’ But there is a strange confusion in him, and now he understands why, understands the anger, the bitter irony in her overwhelming, excessive, sensual adoration of his feet. The woman throws off her veil: Hind.

‘The wife of Abu Simbel,’ she announces clearly, and a hush falls. ‘Hind,’ Mahound says. ‘I had not forgotten.’

But, after a long instant, he nods. ‘You have Submitted. And are welcome in my tents.’

The next day, amid the continuing conversions, Salman the Persian is dragged into the Prophet’s presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding a knife at his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the takht. ‘I found him, where else, with a whore, who was screeching at him because he didn’t have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol.’

‘Salman Farsi,’ the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of death, but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: ‘La ilaha ilallah! La ilaha!’

Mahound shakes his head. ‘Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? To set your words against the Words of God.’

Scribe, ditch-digger, condemned man: unable to muster the smallest scrap of dignity, he blubbers whimpers pleads beats his breast abases himself repents. Khalid says: ‘This noise is unbearable, Messenger. Can I not cut off his head?’ At which the noise increases sharply. Salman swears renewed loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope, makes an offer. ‘I can show you where your true enemies are.’ This earns him a few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head. Khalid pulls the kneeling Salman’s head back by the hair: ‘What enemies?’ And Salman says a name. Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns.

‘Baal,’ he says, and repeats, twice: ‘Baal, Baal.’

Much to Khalid’s disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to death. Bilal intercedes for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere, concedes: yes, yes, let the wretched fellow live. O generosity of Submission! Hind has been spared; and Salman; and in all of Jahilia not a door has been smashed down, not an old foe dragged out to have his gizzard slit like a chicken’s in the dust. This is Mahound’s answer to the second question:
What happens when you win
? But one name haunts Mahound, leaps around him, young, sharp, pointing a long painted finger, singing verses whose cruel brilliance ensures their painfulness. That night, when the
supplicants have gone, Khalid asks Mahound: ‘You’re still thinking about him?’ The Messenger nods, but will not speak. Khalid says: ‘I made Salman take me to his room, a hovel, but he isn’t there, he’s hiding out.’ Again, the nod, but no speech. Khalid presses on: ‘You want me to dig him out? Wouldn’t take much doing. What d’you want done with him? This? This?’ Khalid’s finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into his navel. Mahound loses his temper. ‘You’re a fool,’ he shouts at the former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. ‘Can’t you ever work things out without my help?’

Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of dealing with bad moods.

But Khalid, Mahound’s general, could not find Baal. In spite of door-to-door searches, proclamations, turnings of stones, the poet proved impossible to nab. And Mahound’s lips remained closed, would not part to allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave up the search. ‘Just let that bastard show his face, just once, any time,’ he vowed in the Prophet’s tent of softnesses and shadows. ‘I’ll slice him so thin you’ll be able to see right through each piece.’

It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.

Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a day, no alcohol, the locking up of wives. Hind herself retired to her quarters … but where was Baal?

Gibreel dreamed a curtain:

The Curtain,
Hijab
, was the name of the most popular brothel in Jahilia, an enormous palazzo of date-palms in water-tinkling courtyards, surrounded by chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns, permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to look alike, each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love, each carpeted
with identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned against a wall. None of The Curtain’s clients could ever find their way, without help, either into the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back again to the street. In this way the girls were protected from unwanted guests and the business ensured payment before departure. Large Circassian eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion of lamp-genies, escorted the visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes with the help of balls of string. It was a soft windowless universe of draperies, ruled over by the ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had acquired, over the years, something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were able to disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane antithesis of Mahound’s sacred utterances in a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and save his life as an act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been was accepted without question; and when Khalid’s guards arrived to search the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around that overground catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the soldiers’ heads were spinning, and after looking inside thirty-nine stone urns and finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the quivering, pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.

After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet’s skin until it was blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his lack of condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn’t tone up fast.

Baal’s sojourn ‘behind The Curtain’ by no means deprived him of information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact,
because in the course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the pleasure-chambers and heard the customers’ gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues, induced by the gay abandon of the whores’ caresses and by the clients’ knowledge that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet, myopic and hard of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary affairs than he could possibly have gained if he’d still been free to wander the newly puritanical streets of the town. The deafness was a problem sometimes; it meant that there were gaps in his knowledge, because the customers frequently lowered their voices and whispered; but it also minimized the prurient element in his listenings-in, since he was unable to hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in cries of real or synthetic joy.

What Baal learned at The Curtain:

From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the new ban on pork the skin-deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back door to buy the forbidden meat in secret, ‘sales are up,’ he murmured while mounting his chosen lady, ‘black pork prices are high; but damn it, these new rules have made my work tough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter in secret, without noise,’ and thereupon he began some squealing of his own, for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain. – And the grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain’s horizontal staff that the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening he still said a prayer or two to ‘my lifelong favourite, Manat, and sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can’t beat a female goddess, they’ve got attributes the boys can’t match,’ after which he, too, fell upon the earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that faded, fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute, no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.

Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of the
great temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because even in the high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the hollowness of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of stone that couldn’t fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been dulled, Baal became convinced that Al-Lat’s fall meant that his own end was not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired in him; but the returning knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated cowardice he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered at the paradox of having his eyes opened to such a truth in that house of costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead – had never lived – but that didn’t make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rules, and to perceive that his story was so mixed up with Mahound’s that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the twelve wives of the Prophet,
one rule for him, another for us
, Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.