The Satanic Verses (31 page)

           
She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick.

           
* * * * *

           
The city―Proper London, yaar, no bloody less!―was dressed in white,
like a mourner at a funeral.―Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel
Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody hope and trust. When the
train pulled into Victoria station he plunged out without waiting for it to
come to a complete halt, turned his ankle and went sprawling beneath the
baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners, clinging, as he fell, on
to his increasingly battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen, and
seizing the moment Gibreel ran through the scattering crowd like a man
possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her
carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.

           
"What do you want," he burst out, "what's your business with
me?" "To watch you fall," she instantly replied. "Look
around," she added, "I've already made you look like a pretty big
fool."

           
People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize
overcoat and trampy hat,
that man's talking to himself
, a child's voice
said, and its mother answered
shh, dear, it's wicked to mock the afflicted
.
Welcome to London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading down
towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.

           
But when he arrived in a great rush at the northbound platform of the Victoria
Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a 48-sheet advertising
poster on the wall across the track, advertising the merits of the
international direct-dialling system.
Send your voice on a magic-carpet ride
to India,
she advised.
No djinns or lamps required
. He gave a loud
cry, once again causing his fellow-travellers to doubt his sanity, and fled
over to the southbound platform, where a train was just pulling in. He leapt
aboard, and there was Rekha Merchant facing him with her carpet rolled up and
lying across her knees. The doors closed behind him with a bang.

           
That day Gibreel Farishta fled in every direction around the Underground of the
city of London and Rekha Merchant found him wherever he went; she sat beside
him on the endless up-escalator at Oxford Circus and in the tightly packed
elevators of Tufnell Park she rubbed up against him from behind in a manner
that she would have thought quite outrageous during her lifetime. On the outer
reaches of the Metropolitan Line she hurled the phantoms of her children from
the tops of claw-like trees, and when he came up for air outside the Bank of
England she flung herself histrionically from the apex of its neo-classical
pediment. And even though he did not have any idea of the true shape of that
most protean and chameleon of cities he grew convinced that it kept changing
shape as he ran around beneath it, so that the stations on the Underground
changed lines and followed one another in apparently random sequence. More than
once he emerged, suffocating, from that subterranean world in which the laws of
space and time had ceased to operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one was
willing to stop, however, so he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish
maze, that labyrinth without a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last,
exhausted beyond hope, he surrendered to the fatal logic of his insanity and
got out arbitrarily at what he conceded must be the last, meaningless station
of his prolonged and futile journey in search of the chimera of renewal. He
came out into the heartbreaking indifference of a litter-blown street by a
lorry-infested roundabout. Darkness had already fallen as he walked unsteadily,
using the last reserves of his optimism, into an unknown park made spectral by
the ectoplasmic quality of the tungsten lamps. As he sank to his knees in the
isolation of the winter night he saw the figure of a woman moving slowly
towards him across the snow-shrouded grass, and surmised that it must be his
nemesis, Rekha Merchant, coming to deliver her death-kiss, to drag him down
into a deeper underworld than the one in which she had broken his wounded
spirit. He no longer cared, and by the time the woman reached him he had fallen
forward on to his forearms, his coat dangling loosely about him and giving him
the look of a large, dying beetle who was wearing, for obscure reasons, a dirty
grey trilby hat.

           
As if from a great distance he heard a shocked cry escape the woman's lips, a
gasp in which disbelief, joy and a strange resentment were all mixed up, and
just before his senses left him he understood that Rekha had permitted him, for
the time being, to reach the illusion of a safe haven, so that her triumph over
him could be the sweeter when it came at the last.

           
"You're alive," the woman said, repeating the first words she had ever
spoken to his face. "You got your life back. That's the point.,

           
Smiling, he fell asleep at Allie's flat feet in the falling snow.

           
Even the serial visions have migrated now; they know the city better than he.
And in the aftermath of Rosa and Rekha the dream-worlds of his archangelic
other self begin to seem as tangible as the shifting realities he inhabits
while he's awake. This, for instance, has started coming: a mansion block built
in the Dutch style in a part of London which he will subsequently identify as
Kensington, to which the dream flies him at high speed past Barkers department
store and the small grey house with double bay windows where Thackeray wrote
Vanity
Fair
and the square with the convent where the little girls in uniform are
always going in, but never come out, and the house where Talleyrand lived in
his old age when after a thousand and one chameleon changes of allegiance and
principle he took on the outward form of the French ambassador to London, and
arrives at a seven-storey corner block with green wrought-iron balconies up to
the fourth, and now the dream rushes him up the outer wall of the house and on
the fourth floor it pushes aside the heavy curtains at the living-room window
and finally there he sits, unsleeping as usual, eyes wide in the dim yellow
light, staring into the future, the bearded and turbaned Imam.

           
Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all
the other words that people throw around: emigre, expatriate, refugee,
immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a
vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking
forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion,
suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at
which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own. These
are the things the Imam thinks. His home is a rented flat. It is a waiting-
room, a photograph, air.

           
The thick wallpaper, olive stripes on a cream ground, has faded a little,
enough to emphasize the brighter rectangles and ovals that indicate where
pictures used to hang. The Imam is the enemy of images. When he moved in the
pictures slid noiselessly from the walls and slunk from the room, removing
themselves from the rage of his unspoken disapproval. Some representations,
however, are permitted to remain. On the mantelpiece he keeps a small group of
postcards bearing conventional images of his homeland, which he calls simply
Desh: a mountain looming over a city; a picturesque village scene beneath a
mighty tree; a mosque. But in his bedroom, on the wall facing the hard cot
where he lies, there hangs a more potent icon, the portrait of a woman of
exceptional force, famous for her profile of a Grecian statue and the black
hair that is as long as she is high. A powerful woman, his enemy, his other: he
keeps her close. Just as, far away in the palaces of her omnipotence she will
be clutching his portrait beneath her royal cloak or hiding it in a locket at
her throat. She is the Empress, and her name is―what else?―Ayesha.
On this island, the exiled Imam, and at home in Desh, She. They plot each
other's deaths.

           
The curtains, thick golden velvet, are kept shut all day, because otherwise the
evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreignness, Abroad, the alien nation.
The harsh fact that he is here and not There, upon which all his thoughts are
fixed. On those rare occasions when the Imam goes out to take the Kensington
air, at the centre of a square formed by eight young men in sunglasses and
bulging suits, he folds his hands before him and fixes his gaze upon them, so
that no element or particle of this hated city,―this sink of iniquities
which humiliates him by giving him sanctuary, so that he must be beholden to it
in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity of its ways,―can lodge
itself, like a dust-speck, in his eyes. When he leaves this loathed exile to
return in triumph to that other city beneath the postcard-mountain, it will be
a point of pride to be able to say that he remained in complete ignorance of the
Sodom in which he had been obliged to wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied,
unaltered, pure.

           
And another reason for the drawn curtains is that of course there are eyes and
ears around him, not all of them friendly. The orange buildings are not
neutral. Somewhere across the street there will be zoom lenses, video
equipment, jumbo mikes; and always the risk of snipers. Above and below and
beside the Imam are the safe apartments occupied by his guards, who stroll the
Kensington streets disguised as women in shrouds and silvery beaks; but it is
as well to be too careful. Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite of
survival.

           
A fable, which he heard from one of his favourites, the American convert,
formerly a successful singer, now known as Bilal X. In a certain nightclub to
which the Imam is in the habit of sending his lieutenants to listen in to
certain other persons belonging to certain opposed factions, Bilal met a young
man from Desh, also a singer of sorts, so they fell to talking. It turned out
that this Mahmood was a badly scared individual. He had recently
shacked up
with a gori, a long red woman with a big figure, and then it turned out that
the previous lover of his beloved Renata was the exiled boss of the S A V A K
torture organization of the Shah of Iran. The number one Grand Panjandrum
himself, not some minor sadist with a talent for extracting toenails or setting
fire to eyelids, but the great haramzada in person. The day after Mahmood and
Renata moved in to their new apartment a letter arrived for Mahmood.
Okay,
shit-eater, you're fucking my woman, I just wanted to say hello
. The next
day a second letter arrived.
By the way, prick, I forgot to mention, here is
your new telephone number
. At that point Mahmood and Renata had asked for
an exdirectory listing but had not as yet been given their new number by the
telephone company. When it came through two days later and was exactly the same
as the one on the letter, Mahmood's hair fell out all at once. Then, seeing it
lying on the pillow, he joined his hands together in front of Renata and
begged, "Baby, I love you, but you're too hot for me, please go somewhere,
far far." When the Imam was told this story he shook his head and said,
that whore, who will touch her now, in spite of her lust creating body? She put
a stain on herself worse than leprosy; thus do human beings mutilate
themselves. But the true moral of the fable was the need for eternal vigilance.
London was a city in which the ex-boss of S A V A K had great connections in
the telephone company and the Shah's ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in
Hounslow. Such a welcoming city, such a refuge, they take all types. Keep the
curtains drawn.