The Satanic Verses (32 page)

           
Floors three to five of this block of mansion flats are, for the moment, all
the homeland the Imam possesses. Here there are rifles and short-wave radios
and rooms in which the sharp young men in suits sit and speak urgently into
several telephones. There is no alcohol here, nor are playing cards or dice
anywhere in evidence, and the only woman is the one hanging on the old man's
bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the insomniac saint thinks of
as his waiting-room or transit lounge, the central heating is at full blast
night and day, and the windows are tightly shut. The exile cannot forget, and
must therefore simulate, the dry heat of Desh, the once and future land where
even the moon is hot and dripping like a fresh, buttered chapati. O that
longed-for part of the world where the sun and moon are male but their hot
sweet light is named with female names. At night the exile parts his curtains
and the alien moonlight sidles into the room, its coldness striking his
eyeballs like a nail. He winces, narrows his eyes. Loose-robed, frowning,
ominous, awake: this is the Imam.

           
Exile is a soulless country. In exile, the furniture is ugly, expensive, all
bought at the same time in the same store and in too much of a hurry: shiny
silver sofas with fins like old Buicks DeSotos Oldsmobiles, glass-fronted
bookcases containing not books but clippings files. In exile the shower goes
scalding hot whenever anybody turns on a kitchen tap, so that when the Imam
goes to bathe his entire retinue must remember not to fill a kettle or rinse a
dirty plate, and when the Imam goes to the toilet his disciples leap scalded
from the shower. In exile no food is ever cooked; the dark-spectacled
bodyguards go out for takeaway. In exile all attempts to put down roots look
like treason: they are admissions of defeat.

           
The Imam is the centre of a wheel.

           
Movement radiates from him, around the clock. His son, Khalid, enters his
sanctum bearing a glass of water, holding it in his right hand with his left
palm under the glass. The Imam drinks water constantly, one glass every five
minutes, to keep himself clean; the water itself is cleansed of impurities,
before he sips, in an American filtration machine. All the young men
surrounding him are well aware of his famous Monograph on Water, whose purity,
the Imam believes, communicates itself to the drinker, its thinness and
simplicity, the ascetic pleasures of its taste. "The Empress," he
points out, "drinks wine." Burgundies, clarets, hocks mingle their
intoxicating corruptions within that body both fair and foul. The sin is enough
to condemn her for all time without hope of redemption. The picture on his
bedroom wall shows the Empress Ayesha holding, in both hands, a human skull
filled with a dark red fluid. The Empress drinks blood, but the Imam is a water
man. "Not for nothing do the peoples of our hot lands offer it
reverence," the Monograph proclaims. "Water, preserver of life. No
civilized individual can refuse it to another. A grandmother, be her limbs ever
so arthritically stiff, will rise at once and go to the tap if a small child
should come to her and ask, pani, nani. Beware all those who blaspheme against
it. Who pollutes it, dilutes his soul."

           
The Imam has often vented his rage upon the memory of the late Aga Khan, as a
result of being shown the text of an interview in which the head of the
Ismailis was observed drinking vintage champagne.
O, sir, this champagne is
only for outward show. The instant it touches my lips, it turns to water
.
Fiend, the Imam is wont to thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud. When the
future comes such individuals will be judged, he tells his men. Water will have
its day and blood will flow like wine. Such is the miraculous nature of the
future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated
apartment becomes the fate of nations. Who has not dreamed this dream, of being
a king for a day?―But the Imam dreams of more than a day; feels,
emanating from his fingertips, the arachnid strings with which he will control
the movement of history.

           
No: not history.

           
His is a stranger dream.

           
* * * * *

           
His son, water-carrying Khalid, bows before his father like a pilgrim at a
shrine, informs him that the guard on duty outside the sanctum is Salman Farsi.
Bilal is at the radio transmitter, broadcasting the day's message, on the
agreed frequency, to Desh.

           
The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His great
gnarled hands, granite-grey, rest heavily on the wings of his high-backed
chair. His head, looking too large for the body beneath, lolls ponderously on
the surprisingly scrawny neck that can be glimpsed through the grey-black wisps
of beard. The Imam's eyes are clouded; his lips do not move. He is pure force,
an elemental being; he moves without motion, acts without doing, speaks without
uttering a sound. He is the conjurer and history is his trick.

           
No, not history: something stranger.

           
The explanation of this conundrum is to be heard, at this very moment, on
certain surreptitious radio waves, on which the voice of the American convert
Bilal is singing the Imam's holy song. Bilal the muezzin: his voice enters a
ham radio in Kensington and emerges in dreamed-of Desh, transmuted into the
thunderous speech of the Imam himself. Beginning with ritual abuse of the
Empress, with lists of her crimes, murders, bribes, sexual relations with
lizards, and so on, he proceeds eventually to issue in ringing tones the Imam's
nightly call to his people to rise up against the evil of her State. "We
will make a revolution," the Imam proclaims through him, "that is a
revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history." For there is an
enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood-wine that
must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of
the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies―progress,
science, rights―against which the Imam has set his face. History is a
deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge
was complete on the day AlLah finished his revelation to Mahound. "We will
unmake the veil of history," Bilal declaims into the listening night,
"and when it is unravelled, we will see Paradise standing there, in all
its glory and light." The Imam chose Bilal for this task on account of the
beauty of his voice, which in its previous incarnation succeeded in climbing
the Everest of the hit parade, not once but a dozen times, to the very top. The
voice is rich and authoritative, a voice in the habit of being listened to;
well-nourished, highly trained, the voice of American confidence, a weapon of
the West turned against its makers, whose might upholds the Empress and her
tyranny. In the early days Bilal X protested at such a description of his voice.
He, too, belonged to an oppressed people, he insisted, so that it was unjust to
equate him with the Yankee imperialists. The Imam answered, not without
gentleness: Bilal, your suffering is ours as well. But to be raised in the
house of power is to learn its ways, to soak them up, through that very skin
that is the cause of your oppression. The habit of power, its timbre, its
posture, its way of being with others. It is a disease, Bilal, infecting all
who come too near it. If the powerful trample over you, you are infected by the
soles of their feet.

           
Bilal continues to address the darkness. "Death to the tyranny of the
Empress Ayesha, of calendars, of America, of time! We seek the eternity, the
timelessness, of God. His still waters, not her flowing wines." Burn the
books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word, as it was
revealed by the Angel Gibreel to the Messenger Mahound and explicated by your
interpreter and Imam. "Ameen," Bilal said, concluding the night's
proceedings. While, in his sanctum, the Imam sends a message of his own: and
summons, conjures up, the archangel, Gibreel.

           
* * * * *

           
He sees himself in the dream: no angel to look at, just a man in his ordinary
street clothes, Henry Diamond's posthumous hand-me-downs: gabardine and trilby
over outsize trousers held up by braces, a fisherman's woollen pullover,
billowy white shirt. This dream-Gibreel, so like the waking one, stands quaking
in the sanctum of the Imam, whose eyes are white as clouds.

           
Gibreel speaks querulously, to hide his fear.

           
"Why insist on archangels? Those days, you should know, are gone."

           
The Imam closes his eyes, sighs. The carpet extrudes long hairy tendrils, which
wrap themselves around Gibreel, holding him fast.

           
"You don't need me," Gibreel emphasizes. "The revelation is
complete. Let me go."

           
The other shakes his head, and speaks, except that his lips do not move, and it
is Bilal's voice that fills Gibreel's ears, even though the broadcaster is
nowhere to be seen,
tonight's the night
, the voice says,
and you must
fly me to Jerusalem
.

           
Then the apartment dissolves and they are standing on the roof beside the
water-tank, because the Imam, when he wishes to move, can remain still and move
the world around him. His beard is blowing in the wind. It is longer now; if it
were not for the wind that catches at it as if it were a flowing chiffon scarf,
it would touch the ground by his feet; he has red eyes, and his voice hangs
around him in the sky. Take me. Gibreel argues, Seems you can do it easily by
yourself: but the Imam, in a single movement of astonishing rapidity, slings
his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his skirts to reveal two spindly legs
with an almost monstrous covering of hair, and leaps high into the night air,
twirls himself about, and settles on Gibreel's shoulders, clutching on to him
with fingernails that have grown into long, curved claws. Gibreel feels himself
rising into the sky, bearing the old man of the sea, the Imam with hair that
grows longer by the minute, streaming in every direction, his eyebrows like
pennants in the wind.

           
Jerusalem, he wonders, which way is that?―And then, it's a slippery word,
Jerusalem, it can be an idea as well as a place: a goal, an exaltation. Where
is the Imam's Jerusalem? "The fall of the harlot," the disembodied
voice resounds in his ears. "Her crash, the Babylonian whore."

           
They zoom through the night. The moon is heating up, beginning to bubble like
cheese under a grill; he, Gibreel, sees pieces of it falling off from time to
time, moon-drips that hiss and bubble on the sizzling griddle of the sky. Land
appears below them. The heat grows intense.

           
It is an immense landscape, reddish, with flat-topped trees. They fly over
mountains that are also flat-topped; even the stones, here, are flattened by
the heat. Then they come to a high mountain of almost perfectly conical
dimensions, a mountain that also sits postcarded on a mantelpiece far away; and
in the shadow of the mountain, a city, sprawling at its feet like a supplicant,
and on the mountain's lower slopes, a palace, the palace, her place: the
Empress, whom radio messages have unmade. This is a revolution of radio hams.

           
Gibreel, with the Imam riding him like a carpet, swoops lower, and in the
steaming night it looks as if the streets are alive, they seem to be writhing,
like snakes; while in front of the palace of the Empress's defeat a new hill
seems to be growing,
while we watch, baba, what's going on here?
The
Imam's voice hangs in the sky: "Come down. I will show you Love."

           
They are at rooftop-level when Gibreel realizes that the streets are swarming
with people. Human beings, packed so densely into those snaking paths that they
have blended into a larger, composite entity, relentless, serpentine. The
people move slowly, at an even pace, down alleys into lanes, down lanes into
side streets, down side streets into highways, all of them converging upon the
grand avenue, twelve lanes wide and lined with giant eucalyptus trees, that
leads to the palace gates. The avenue is packed with humanity; it is the
central organ of the new, many-headed being. Seventy abreast, the people walk
gravely towards the Empress's gates. In front of which her household guards are
waiting in three ranks, lying, kneeling and standing, with machine-guns at the
ready. The people are walking up the slope towards the guns; seventy at a time,
they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy
climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of
the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In
the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing
their beloved sons into the parade,
go, be a martyr, do the needful, die
.
"You see how they love me," says the disembodied voice. "No
tyranny on earth can withstand the power of this slow, walking love."

           
"This isn't love," Gibreel, weeping, replies. "It's hate. She
has driven them into your arms." The explanation sounds thin, superficial.

           
"They love me," the Imam's voice says, "because I am water. I am
fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human
beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of
His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless
time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She
is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day and is
terrorized by the idea of age, of time passing. Thus she is the prisoner of her
own nature; she, too, is in the chains of Time. After the revolution there will
be no clocks; we'll smash the lot. The word
clock
will be expunged from
our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all
be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty
God."