The Satanic Verses (24 page)

           
He felt something grab him from behind, spin him around and fling him flat on
his back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting bolt
upright in bed, staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand that she had
given up hope of clinging on to life, and needed him to help her complete the
last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt helpless,
ignorant . . . she seemed to know, however, how to draw the images from him.
Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord.

           
Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his horse to
drink, and she came riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing her, loosening
her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now she was
whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he spoke
comforting words.

           
Now she rose, dressed, rode away, while he remained there, his body languid and
warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman's hand stole out of the
thistles and took hold of his silver-hafted knife. . .

           
No! No! No, this way!

           
Now she rode up to him by the pond, and the moment she dismounted, looking
nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn't bear her rejections
any longer, they fell to the ground together, she screamed, he tore at her
clothes, and her hands, clawing at his body, came upon the handle of a knife...

           
No! No, never, no! This way: here!

           
Now the two of them were making love, tenderly, with many slow caresses; and
now a third rider entered the clearing by the pool, and the lovers rushed
apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his rival's heart, -.

           
- and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is for
Juan, and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English whore,
-.

           
- and he felt his victim's knife entering his heart, as Rosa stabbed him, once,
twice, and again, -.

           
- and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead man's
knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.

           
Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.

           
When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to herself,
so softly that he could barely make out the words. "The pampero came, the
south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they found him, or was it
before." The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in Rosa Diamond's
face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged that nobody was
to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique took Do–a Rosa and
returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the train at the Los
Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the platform, wearing
borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once the train had started
moving, Rosa Diamond opened the hold-all on the seat beside her, and said
defiantly,
I brought something. A little souvenir
. And unwrapped a cloth
bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife.

           
"Henry died the first winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The
end." She paused. "To diminish into this, after being in that
vastness. It isn't to be borne." And, after a further silence:
"Everything shrinks."

           
There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting from
him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling. Rosa
Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on the patchwork counterpane.
She looked:
normal
. Gibreel realized that there was nothing to prevent
him from walking out of the door.

           
He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady; found
the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond, and the
grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique's name had been sewn by his wife's
own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got outside a wind
snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He chased it, caught it,
jammed it back on.
London shareef, here I come
. He had the city in his
pocket: Geographers' London, the whole dog-eared metropolis, A to Z.

           
"What to do?" he was thinking. "Phone or not phone? No, just
turn up, ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your
bed, takes more than a plane crash to keep me away from you.―Okay, maybe
not quite, but words to that effect.―Yes. Surprise is the best policy.
Allie Bibi, boo to you."

           
Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boathouse with the
one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but familiar:
a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was familiar,
although a little different, less quavery;
younger
. The boathouse door
was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards the song.

           
"Take your coat off," she said. She was dressed as she had been on
the day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless.
He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing in
the confined, moonlit space. She lay down amid the random clutter of an English
life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding table,
trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.

           
"How can you like me?" she murmured. "I am so much older than
you."

           
3

           
When they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he saw the
thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha broke down
for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to giggle
hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing hilarity of his captors. The
three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits, and it was one of
these―the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was Stein―who
had "de- bagged" Saladin with a merry cry of, "Opening time,
Packy; let's see what you're made of!" Red-and-white stripes were dragged
off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with two
stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable's boot placed firmly
upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general mirthful din.
His horns kept banging against things, the wheel-arch, the uncarpeted floor or
a policeman's shin―on these last occasions he was soundly buffeted about
the face by the understandably irate law-enforcement officer―and he was,
in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could recall. Nevertheless, when he
saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he could not prevent that
disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.

           
His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy. Below the
knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into tough, bony,
almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven hoofs, such as
one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of
his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had
the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. "What's this,
then?" joked Novak―the former "Hisser"―giving it a playful
tweak. "Fancy one of us, maybe?" Whereupon the "moaning"
immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and
shouted, "Nah, that ain't it. Seems like we really got his goat."
"I get it," Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched
Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. "Hey! Hey!" howled Stein,
with tears in his eyes. "Listen, here's an even better . . . no wonder
he's so fucking
horny
."

           
At which the three of them, repeating many times "Got his goat. . . horny.
. ." fell into one another's arms and howled with delight. Chamcha wanted
to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into goat-bleats,
and, besides, the policeman's boot had begun to press harder than ever on his
chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled Chamcha was that a
circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and
unprecedented―that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural
imp―was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and
familiar matter they could imagine. "This isn't England," he thought,
not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that
moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose
interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced
towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and
that everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were
the case, his long-standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look
pretty foolish.―But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being,
whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this
place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which
every schoolboy knew?―Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually
perished in the
Bostan
disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some
hospital ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him,
not least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call,
and a man's voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget . . . He felt a
sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him doubt the
truth of all such hallucination-theories. He returned his attention to the
actual, to this present comprising a sealed police van containing three
immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the moment at any rate,
all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of fear.

           
Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. "Animal,"
Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in:
"You're all the same. Can't expect animals to observe civilized standards.
Eh?" And Novak took up the thread: "We're talking about fucking
personal hygiene here, you little fuck."

           
Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft, pellety
objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt consumed by
bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes were goatish
now. The humiliation of it! He was―had gone to some lengths to
become―a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for
riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala,
but he was cut from different cloth! "My good fellows," he began,
attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that
undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft
tumble of his own excrement all about him, "my good fellows, you had best
understand your mistake before it's too late."

           
Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. "What's that? What was that
noise?" he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, "Search
me." "Tell you what it sounded like," Joe Bruno volunteered, and
with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: "Maaaa-aa!" Then the
three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if
they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected,
as he feared, by this macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the
slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.

           
The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least
the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse
rolling around the floor of the moving van. "In this country," he
informed Saladin, "we clean up our messes."

           
The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling position.
"That's right," said Novak, "clean it up." Joe Bruno placed
a large hand behind Chamcha's neck and pushed his head down towards the
pellet-littered floor. "Off you go," he said, in a conversational
voice. "Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off."

           
* * * * *

           
Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of
his unwarranted humiliation,―or, to put it another way, as the
circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and
outre―Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers
no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they
no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his
colleagues called "Mack" or "Jockey", turned out to be a
large, burly man with a thick roller-coaster of a nose; his accent, it now
transpired, was exaggeratedly Scottish. "Tha's the ticket," he
remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. "An actor, was it?
I'm partial to watchin' a guid man perform."

           
This observation prompted Officer Novak―that is,
"Kim"―who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an
ascetically bony face that reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown
suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his
favourite television soap-opera stars and gameshow hosts, while Officer Bruno,
who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his
hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting
dramatically with the darker hair on his head,―Bruno, the youngest of the
three, asked lasciviously, what about watchin' girls, then, that's my game.
This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed
anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five
policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the
constables in their places. "Little children," Mr. Stein admonished
them, "should be seen an' no hearrud."