The Satanic Verses (17 page)

           
Misery strain fatigue, etched deeply into the Prophet's face. Which Hamza, like
a soldier on a battlefield comforting a wounded friend, cups between his hands.
"We can't sort this out for you, nephew," he says. "Climb the
mountain. Go ask Gibreel."

           
* * * * *

           
Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and
at other moments, spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is always on the
move, he hates static shots, so he's floating up on a high crane looking down
at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he's swooping down to stand
invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he'll try a dolly shot, tracking
along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand-held with the help of a
steadicam he'll probe the secrets of the Grandee's bedchamber. But mostly he
sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia
is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan,
enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises, but there aren't enough girls for
a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn songs? They should have built up
that fairground scene, maybe a cameo role for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent,
wiggling her famous bazooms.

           
And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: "Go ask Gibreel,"
and he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me? I'm supposed to
know the answers here? I'm sitting here watching this picture and now this
actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the bloody
audience of a "theological" to solve the bloody plot?―But as
the dream shifts, it's always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere
spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for taking
too many roles: yes, yes,. he's not just playing the archangel but also him,
the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he comes.
Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of them can
never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to the imagined
incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the missing vision,
with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the help of a
travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.

           
He has understood: that he is afraid of the other, the business-man, isn't it
crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It's true, but: the kind of
fear you feel when you're on a film set for the very first time and there,
about to make his entrance, is one of the living legends of the cinema; you
think, I'll disgrace myself, I'll dry, I'll corpse, you want like mad to be
worthy
.
You will be sucked along in the slipstream of his genius, he can make you look
good, like a high flier, but you will know if you aren't pulling your weight
and even worse so will he Gibreel's fear, the fear of the self his dream
creates, makes him struggle against Mahound's arrival, to try and put it off,
but he's coming now, no quesch, and the archangel holds his breath.

           
Those dreams of being pushed out on stage when you've no business being there,
you don't know the story haven't learned any lines, but there's a full house
watching, watching: feels like that. Or the true story of the white actress
playing a black woman in Shakespeare. She went on stage and then realized she
still had her glasses on, eck, but she had forgotten to blacken her hands so
she couldn't reach up to take the specs off, double eek: like that also.
Mahound
comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist
alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what
the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help
.

           
* * * * *

           
To reach Mount Cone from Jahilia one must walk into dark ravines where the sand
is not white, not the pure sand filtered long ago through the bodies of
sea-cucumbers, but black and dour, sucking light from the sun. Coney crouches
over you like an imaginary beast. You ascend along its spine. Leaving behind
the last trees, white-flowered with thick, milky leaves, you climb among the
boulders, which get larger as you get higher, until they resemble huge walls
and start blotting out the sun. The lizards are blue as shadows. Then you are
on the peak, Jahilia behind you, the featureless desert ahead. You descend on
the desert side, and about five hundred feet down you reach the cave, which is
high enough to stand upright in, and whose floor is covered in miraculous albino
sand. As you climb you hear the desert doves calling your name, and the rocks
greet you, too, in your own language, crying Mahound, Mahound. When you reach
the cave you are tired, you lie down, you fall asleep.

           
* * * * *

           
But when he has rested he enters a different sort of sleep, a sort of
not-sleep, the condition that he calls his
listening
, and he feels a
dragging pain in the gut, like something trying to be born, and now Gibreel,
who has been hovering-above-looking-down, feels a confusion,
who am I
,
in these moments it begins to seem that the archangel is actually
inside the
Prophet
, I am the dragging in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from
the sleeper's navel, I emerge, Gibreel Farishta, while my other self, Mahound,
lies
listening
, entranced, I am bound to him, navel to navel, by a
shining cord of light, not possible to say which of us is dreaming the other.
We flow in both directions along the umbilical cord.

           
Today, as well as the overwhelming intensity of Mahound, Gibreel feels his
despair: his doubts. Also, that he is in great need, but Gibreel still doesn't
know his lines . . . he listens to the listening-which-is-also-an-asking.
Mahound asks: They were shown miracles but they didn't believe. They saw you
come to me, in full view of the city, and open my breast, they saw you wash my
heart in the waters of Zamzam and replace it inside my body. Many of them saw
this, but still they worship stones. And when you came at night and flew me to
Jerusalem and I hovered above the holy city, didn't I return and describe it
exactly as it is, accurate down to the last detail? So that there could be no
doubting the miracle, and still they went to Lat. Haven't I already done my
best to make things simple for them? When you carried me up to the Throne
itself, and Allah laid upon the faithful the great burden of forty prayers a
day. On the return journey I met Moses and he said, the burden is too heavy, go
back and plead for less. Four times I went back, four times Moses said, still
too many, go back again. But by the fourth time Allah had reduced the duty to
five prayers and I refused to return. I felt ashamed to beg any more. In his
bounty he asks for five instead of forty, and still they love Manat, they want
Uzza. What can I do? What shall I recite?

           
Gibreel remains silent, empty of answers, for Pete's sake, bhai, don't go
asking me. Mahound's anguish is awful. He
asks
: is it possible that they
are
angels? Lat, Manat, Uzza . . . can I call them angelic? Gibreel,
have you got sisters? Are these the daughters of God? And he castigates
himself, O my vanity, I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a
dream of power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this
sensible and wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don't even know if the
Grandee is sincere. Does he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he's
strong, the offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to
gain. The souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels?
Is Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human
race?―I don't know anything.―Should God be proud or humble,
majestic or simple, yielding or un-?
What kind of idea is he? What kind am
I?

           
* * * * *

           
Halfway into sleep, or halfway back to wakefulness, Gibreel Farishta is often
filled with resentment by the non-appearance, in his persecuting visions, of
the One who is supposed to have the answers,
He
never turns up, the one
who kept away when I was dying, when I needed needed him. The one it's all
about, Allah lshvar God. Absent as ever while we writhe and suffer in his name.

           
The Supreme Being keeps away; what keeps returning is this scene, the entranced
Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his dual role is
both above-looking-down and below-staring-up. And both of them scared out of
their minds by the transcendence of it. Gibreel feels paralysed by the presence
of the Prophet, by his greatness, thinks I can't make a sound I'd seem such a
goddamn fool. Hamza's advice: never show your fear: archangels need such advice
as well as water-carriers. An archangel must look composed, what would the
Prophet think if God's Exalted began to gibber with stage fright?

           
It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsicep, becomes
rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre. No, no, nothing like
an epileptic fit, it can't be explained away that easily; what epileptic fit
ever caused day to turn to night, caused clouds to mass overhead, caused the
air to thicken into soup while an angel hung, scared silly, in the sky above
the sufferer, held up like a kite on a golden thread? The dragging again the
dragging and now the miracle starts in his my our guts, he is straining with
all his might at something, forcing something, and Gibreel begins to feel that
strength that force, here it is
at my own jaw
working it, opening
shutting; and the power, starting within Mahound, reaching up to
my vocal
cords
and the voice comes.

           
Not my voice
I'd never know such words I'm no classy speaker never was
never will be but this isn't my voice it's a Voice.

           
Mahound's eyes open wide, he's seeing some kind of vision, staring at it, oh,
that's right, Gibreel remembers, me. He's seeing me. My lips moving, being
moved by. What, whom? Don't know, can't say. Nevertheless, here they are,
coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words.

           
Being God's postman is no fun, yaar.

           
Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.

           
God knows whose postman I've been.

           
* * * * *

           
In Jahilia they are waiting for Mahound by the well. Khalid the water-carrier,
as ever the most impatient, runs off to the city gate to keep a look-out.
Hamza, like all old soldiers accustomed to keeping his own company, squats down
in the dust and plays a game with pebbles. There is no sense of urgency;
sometimes he is away for days, even weeks. And today the city is all but
deserted; everybody has gone to the great tents at the fairground to hear the
poets compete. In the silence, there is only the noise of Hamza's pebbles, and
the gurgles of a pair of rock-doves, visitors from Mount Cone. Then they hear
the running feet.

           
Khalid arrives, out of breath, looking unhappy. The Messenger has returned, but
he isn't coming to Zamzam. Now they are all on their feet, perplexed by this
departure from established practice. Those who have been waiting with palm-fronds
and steles ask Hamza: Then there will be no Message? But Khalid, still catching
his breath, shakes his head. "I think there will be. He looks the way he
does when the Word has been given. But he didn't speak to me and walked towards
the fairground instead."

           
Hamza takes command, forestalling discussion, and leads the way. The
disciples―about twenty have gathered―follow him to the fleshpots of
the city, wearing expressions of pious disgust. Hamza alone seems to be looking
forward to the fair.

           
Outside the tents of the Owners of the Dappled Camels they find Mahound,
standing with his eyes closed, steeling himself to the task. They ask anxious
questions; he doesn't answer. After a few moments, he enters the poetry tent.

           
* * * * *

           
Inside the tent, the audience reacts to the arrival of the unpopular Prophet
and his wretched followers with derision. But as Mahound walks forward, his
eyes firmly closed, the boos and catcalls die away and a silence falls. Mahound
does not open his eyes for an instant, but his steps are sure, and he reaches
the stage without stumblings or collisions. He climbs the few steps up into the
light; still his eyes stay shut. The assembled lyric poets, composers of
assassination eulogies, narrative versifiers and satirists―Baal is here,
of course―gaze with amusement, but also with a little unease, at the
sleepwalking Mahound. In the crowd his disciples jostle for room. The scribes
fight to be near him, to take down whatever he might say.

           
The Grandee Abu Simbel rests against bolsters on a silken carpet positioned
beside the stage. With him, resplendent in golden Egyptian neckwear, is his
wife Hind, that famous Grecian profile with the black hair that is as long as
her body. Abu Simbel rises and calls to Mahound, "Welcome." He is all
urbanity. "Welcome, Mahound, the seer, the kahin." It's a public
declaration of respect, and it impresses the assembled crowd. The Prophet's
disciples are no longer shoved aside, but allowed to pass. Bewildered,
half-pleased, they come to the front. Mahound speaks without opening his eyes.