The Satanic Verses (19 page)

           
"Thank you."

           
"I don't think you were recognized," she says. "Or you'd be
dead, maybe. You know how the city was last night. People overdo it. My own
brothers haven't come home yet."

           
It comes back to him now, his wild anguished walk in the corrupt city, staring
at the souls he had supposedly saved, looking at the simurgh-effigies, the
devil-masks, the behemoths and hippogriffs. The fatigue of that long day on
which he climbed down from Mount Cone, walked to the town, underwent the strain
of the events in the poetry marquee,―and afterwards, the anger of the
disciples, the doubt,―the whole of it had overwhelmed him. "I
fainted," he remembers.

           
She comes and sits close to him on the bed, extends a finger, finds the gap in
his robe, strokes his chest. "Fainted," she murmurs. "That's
weakness, Mahound. Are you becoming weak?"

           
She places the stroking finger over his lips before he can reply. "Don't
say anything, Mahound. I am the Grandee's wife, and neither of us is your
friend. My husband, however, is a weak man. In Jahilia they think he's cunning,
but I know better. He knows I take lovers and he does nothing about it, because
the temples are in my family's care. Lat's, Uzza's, Manat's. The―shall I
call them
mosques?
―of your new angels." She offers him melon
cubes from a dish, tries to feed him with her fingers. He will not let her put
the fruit into his mouth, takes the pieces with his own hand, eats. She goes
on. "My last lover was the boy, Baal." She sees the rage on his face.
"Yes," she says contentedly. "I heard he had got under your
skin. But he doesn't matter. Neither he nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I
am."

           
"I must go," he says. "Soon enough," she replies, returning
to the window. At the perimeter of the city they are packing away the tents,
the long camel-trains are preparing to depart, convoys of carts are already
heading away across the desert; the carnival is over. She turns to him again.

           
"I am your equal," she repeats, "and also your opposite. I don't
want you to become weak. You shouldn't have done what you did."

           
"But you will profit," Mahound replies bitterly. "There's no
threat now to your temple revenues."

           
"You miss the point," she says softly, coming closer to him, bringing
her face very close to his. "If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And
she doesn't believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is
implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce. And
what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn't the
slightest wish to be his daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours. Ask Baal:
he knows her. As he knows me."

           
"So the Grandee will betray his pledge," Mahound says.

           
"Who knows?" scoffs Hind. "He doesn't even know himself. He has
to work out the odds. Weak, as I told you. But you know I'm telling the truth.
Between Allah and the Three there can be no peace. I don't want it. I want the
fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?"

           
"You are sand and I am water," Mahound says. "Water washes sand
away."

           
"And the desert soaks up water," Hind answers him. "Look around
you."

           
Soon after his departure the wounded men arrive at the Grandee's palace, having
screwed up their courage to inform Hind that old Hamza has killed her brothers.
But by then the Messenger is nowhere to be found; is heading, once again,
slowly towards Mount Cone.

           
* * * * *

           
Gibreel, when he's tired, wants to murder his mother for giving him such a damn
fool nickname,
angel
, what a word, he begs
what? whom?
to be
spared the dream-city of crumbling sandcastles and lions with three-tiered teeth,
no more heart-washing of prophets or instructions to recite or promises of
paradise, let there be an end to revelations, finito, khattam-shud. What he
longs for: black, dreamless sleep. Mother-fucking dreams, cause of all the
trouble in the human race, movies, too, if I was God I'd cut the imagination
right out of people and then maybe poor bastards like me could get a good
night's rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his eyes to stay open,
unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas and sends him blind,
but he's only human, in the end he falls down the rabbit-hole and there he is
again, in Wonderland, up the mountain, and the businessman is waking up, and
once again his wanting, his need, goes to work, not on my jaws and voice this time,
but on my whole body; he diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards
him, his gravitational field is unbelievable, as powerful as a goddamn megastar
. . . and then Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over
and over, in the cave of the fine white sand that rises around them like a
veil.
As if he's learning me, searching me, as if I'm the one undergoing the
test
.

           
In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles
the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you he's getting
in
everywhere
, his tongue in my ear his fist around my balls, there was
never a person with such a rage in him, he has to has to know he has to K N OW
and I have nothing to tell him, he's twice as physically fit as I am and four
times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught ourselves by listening
a lot but as is plaintosee he's even a better listener than me; so we roll kick
scratch, he's getting cut up quite a bit but of course my skin stays smooth as
a baby, you can't snag an angel on a bloody thorn-bush, you can't bruise him on
a rock. And they have an audience, there are djinns and afreets and all sorts
of spooks sitting on the boulders to watch the fight, and in the sky are the
three winged creatures, looking like herons or swans or just women depending on
the tricks of the light . . . Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.

           
After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down beneath
the angel, it's what he wanted, it was his will filling me up and giving me the
strength to hold him down, because archangels can't lose such fights, it
wouldn't be right, it's only devils who get beaten in such circs, so the moment
I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his old trick, forcing
my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out of me once again, made
it pour all over him, like sick.

           
* * * * *

           
At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the Prophet
Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, postrevelatory sleep, but on this
occasion he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes to his senses in
that high wilderness there is nobody to be seen, no winged creatures crouch on
rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news. "It
was the Devil," he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving
it voice. "The last time, it was Shaitan." This is what he has
heard
 in his
listening
, that he has been tricked, that the Devil
came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the
ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic
opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can,
to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them
from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two
unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and
unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera
angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that's a bit of a problem
here, namely that
it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me
.
From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses,
universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got
worked.

           
"First it was the Devil," Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia.
"But this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the
ground."

           
* * * * *

           
The disciples stop him in the ravines near the foot of Mount Cone to warn him
of the fury of Hind, who is wearing white mourning garments and has loosened
her black hair, letting it fly about her like a storm, or trail in the dust,
erasing her footsteps so that she seems like an incarnation of the spirit of
vengeance itself. They have all fled the city, and Hamza, too, is lying low;
but the word is that Abu Simbel has not, as yet, acceded to his wife's pleas
for the blood that washes away blood. He is still calculating the odds in the
matter of Mahound and the goddesses Mahound, against his followers' advice,
returns to Jahilia, going straight to the House of the Black Stone. The
disciples follow him in spite of their fear. A crowd gathers in the hope of
further scandal or dismemberment or some such entertainment. Mahound does not
disappoint them.

           
He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces the abrogation of
the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses are banished from
the true recitation,
al-qur'an
. New verses are thundered in their place.

           
"Shall He have daughters and you sons?" Mahound recites. "That
would be a fine division!

           
"These are but names you have dreamed of, you and your fathers. Allah
vests no authority in them."

           
He leaves the dumbfounded House before it occurs to anybody to pick up, or
throw, the first stone.

           
* * * * *

           
After the repudiation of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Mahound returns home
to find a kind of punishment awaiting him. A kind of vengeance―whose?
Light or dark? Goodguy badguy?―wrought, as is not unusual, upon the
innocent. The Prophet's wife, seventy years old, sits by the foot of a
stone-latticed window, sits upright with her back to the wall, dead.

           
Mahound in the grip of his misery keeps himself to himself, hardly says a word
for weeks. The Grandee of Jahilia institutes a policy of persecution that
advances too slowly for Hind. The name of the new religion is
Submission
;
now Abu Simbel decrees that its adherents must submit to being sequestered in
the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city; to a curfew; to a ban on
employment. And there are many physical assaults, women spat upon in shops, the
manhandling of the faithful by the gangs of young turks whom the Grandee
secretly controls, fire thrown at night through a window to land amongst unwary
sleepers. And, by one of the familiar paradoxes of history, the numbers of the
faithful multiply, like a crop that miraculously flourishes as conditions of
soil and climate grow worse and worse.

           
An offer is received, from the citizens of the oasis-settlement of Yathrib to
the north: Yathrib will shelter those-who-submit, if they wish to leave
Jahilia. Hamza is of the opinion that they must go. "You'll never finish
your Message here, nephew, take my word. Hind won't be happy till she's ripped
out your tongue, to say nothing of my balls, excuse me." Mahound, alone
and full of echoes in the house of his bereavement, gives his consent, and the
faithful depart to make their plans. Khalid the water-carrier hangs back and
the hollow-eyed Prophet waits for him to speak. Awkwardly, he says:
"Messenger, I doubted you. But you were wiser than we knew. First we said,
Mahound will never compromise, and you compromised. Then we said, Mahound has
betrayed us, but you were bringing us a deeper truth. You brought us the Devil
himself, so that we could witness the workings of the Evil One, and his
overthrow by the Right. You have enriched our faith. I am sorry for what I
thought."

           
Mahound moves away from the sunlight falling through the window.
"Yes." Bitterness, cynicism. "It was a wonderful thing I did.
Deeper truth. Bringing you the Devil. Yes, that sounds like me."

           
* * * * *

           
From the peak of Mount Cone, Gibreel watches the faithful escaping Jahilia,
leaving the city of aridity for the place of cool palms and water, water,
water. In small groups, almost empty- handed, they move across the empire of
the sun, on this first day of the first year at the new beginning of Time,
which has itself been born again, as the old dies behind them and the new waits
ahead. And one day Mahound himself slips away. When his escape is discovered,
Baal composes a valedictory ode:

           
What kind of idea

           
does "Submission" seem today?

           
One full of fear.

           
An idea that runs away.

           
Mahound has reached his oasis; Gibreel is not so lucky. Often, now, he finds
himself alone on the summit of Mount Cone, washed by the cold, falling stars,
and then they fall upon him from the night sky, the three winged creatures, Lat
Uzza Manat, flapping around his head, clawing at his eyes, biting, whipping him
with their hair, their wings. He puts up his hands to protect himself, but
their revenge is tireless, continuing whenever he rests, whenever he drops his
guard. He struggles against them, but they are faster, nimbler, winged.