The Satanic Verses (33 page)

           
He falls silent, now, because below us the great moment has come: the people
have reached the guns. Which are silenced in their turn, as the endless serpent
of the people, the gigantic python of the risen masses, embraces the guards,
suffocating them, and silences the lethal chuckling of their weapons. The Imam
sighs heavily. "Done."

           
The lights of the palace are extinguished as the people walk towards it, at the
same measured pace as before. Then, from within the darkened palace, there
rises a hideous sound, beginning as a high, thin, piercing wail, then deepening
into a howl, an ululation loud enough to fill every cranny of the city with its
rage. Then the golden dome of the palace bursts open like an egg, and rising
from it, glowing with blackness, is a mythological apparition with vast black
wings, her hair streaming loose, as long and black as the Imam's is long and
white: Al-Lat, Gibreel understands, bursting out of Ayesha's shell.

           
"Kill her," the Imam commands.

           
Gibreel sets him down on the palace's ceremonial balcony, his arms outstretched
to encompass the joy of the people, a sound that drowns even the howls of the
goddess and rises up like a song. And then he is being propelled into the air,
having no option, he is a marionette going to war; and she, seeing him coming,
turns, crouches in air, and, moaning dreadfully, comes at him with all her
might. Gibreel understands that the Imam, fighting by proxy as usual, will
sacrifice him as readily as he did the hill of corpses at the palace gate, that
he is a suicide soldier in the service of the cleric's cause. I am weak, he
thinks, I am no match for her, but she, too, has been weakened by her defeat.
The Imam's strength moves Gibreel, places thunderbolts in his hands, and the
battle is joined; he hurls lightning spears into her feet and she plunges
comets into his groin,
we are killing each other
, he thinks,
we will
die and there will be two new constellations in space: Al-Lat, and Gibreel
.
Like exhausted warriors on a corpse- littered field, they totter and slash.
Both are failing fast.

           
She falls.

           
Down she tumbles, Al-Lat queen of the night; crashes upside-down to earth,
crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her wings
ripped off, by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in a crumpled
heap.―And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam grown
monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the
gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole.

           
The body of Al-Lat has shrivelled on the grass, leaving behind only a dark
stain; and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and
goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one thousand and
one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of
the exile's return, of the victory of water over wine, of the commencement of
the Untime of the Imam.

           
* * * * *

           
When the nocturnal story changes, when, without warning, the progress of events
in Jahilia and Yathrib gives way to the struggle of Imam and Empress, Gibreel
briefly hopes that the curse has ended, that his dreams have been restored to
the random eccentricity of ordinary life; but then, as the new story, too,
falls into the old pattern, continuing each time he drops off from the precise
point at which it was interrupted, and as his own image, translated into an
avatar of the archangel, re-enters the frame, so his hope dies, and he succumbs
once more to the inexorable. Things have reached the point at which some of his
night-sagas seem more bearable than others, and after the apocalypse of the
Imam he feels almost pleased when the next narrative begins, extending his
internal repertory, because at least it suggests that the deity whom he,
Gibreel, has tried unsuccessfully to kill can be a God of love, as well as one
of vengeance, power, duty, rules and hate; and it is, too, a nostalgic sort of
tale, of a lost homeland; it feels like a return to the past . . . what story
is, this? Coming right up. To begin at the beginning: On the morning of his
fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched
his sleeping wife.

           
* * * * *

           
On the fateful morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies,
the zamindar Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched over his sleeping wife, and felt his
heart fill up to the bursting-point with love. He had awoken early for once,
rising before dawn with a bad dream souring his mouth, his recurring dream of
the end of the world, in which the catastrophe was invariably his fault. He had
been reading Nietzsche the night before―"the pitiless end of that
small, overextended species called Man"―and had fallen asleep with
the book resting face downwards on his chest. Waking to the rustle of butterfly
wings in the cool, shadowy bedroom, he was angry with himself for being so
foolish in his choice of bedside reading matter. He was, however, wide awake
now. Getting up quietly, he slipped his feet into chappals and strolled idly
along the verandas of the great mansion, still in darkness on account of their
lowered blinds, and the butterflies bobbed like courtiers at his back. In the
far distance, someone was playing a flute. Mirza Saeed drew up the chick blinds
and fastened their cords. The gardens were deep in mist, through which the
butterfly clouds were swirling, one mist intersecting another. This remote
region had always been renowned for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous
squadrons that filled the air by day and night, butterflies with the gift of
chameleons, whose wings changed colour as they settled on vermilion flowers,
ochre curtains, obsidian goblets or amber finger-rings. In the zamindar's
mansion, and also in the nearby village, the miracle of the butterflies had
become so familiar as to seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned
nineteen years ago, as the servant women would recall. They had been the
familiar spirits, or so the legend ran, of a local saint, the holy woman known
only as Bibiji, who had lived to the age of two hundred and forty-two and whose
grave, until its location was forgotten, had the property of curing impotence
and warts. Since the death of Bibiji one hundred and twenty years ago the
butterflies had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji
herself, so that when they came back exactly one hundred and one years after
their departure it looked, at first, like an omen of some imminent, wonderful
thing. After Bibiji's death―it should quickly be said―the village
had continued to prosper, the potato crops remained plentiful, but there had
been a gap in many hearts, even though the villagers of the present had no
memory of the time of the old saint. So the return of the butterflies lifted
many spirits, but when the expected wonders failed to materialize the locals
sank back, little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-to-day. The name
of the zamindar's mansion,
Peristan
, may have had its origins in the
magical creatures' fairy wings, and the village's name,
Titlipur
,
certainly did. But names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere
sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,
beneath the dust of habit. The human inhabitants of Titlipur, and its butterfly
hordes, moved amongst one another with a kind of mutual disdain. The villagers
and the zamindar's family had long ago abandoned the attempt to exclude the
butterflies from their homes, so that now whenever a trunk was opened, a batch
of wings would fly out of it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as they rose;
there were butterflies under the closed lids of the thunderboxes in the toilets
of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe, and between the pages of books. When
you awoke you found the butterflies sleeping on your cheeks.

           
The commonplace eventually becomes invisible, and Mirza Saeed had not really
noticed the butterflies for a number of years. On the morning of his fortieth
birthday, however, as the first light of dawn touched the house and the
butterflies began instantly to glow, the beauty of the moment took his breath
away. He ran at once to the bedroom in the zenana wing in which his wife Mishal
lay sleeping, veiled in a mosquito-net. The magic butterflies were resting on
her exposed toes, and a mosquito had evidently found its way inside as well,
because there was a line of little bites along the raised edge of her
collar-bone. He wanted to lift the net, crawl inside and kiss the bites until
they faded away. How inflamed they looked! How, when she awoke, they would
itch! But he held himself back, preferring to enjoy the innocence of her
sleeping form. She had soft, red-brown hair, white white skin, and her eyes,
behind the closed lids, were silky grey. Her father was a director of the state
bank, so it had been an irresistible match, an arranged marriage which restored
the fortunes of the Mirza's ancient, decaying family and then ripened, over
time and in spite of their failure to have children, into a union of real love.
Full of emotion, Mirza Saeed watched Mishal sleep and chased the last shreds of
his nightmare from his mind. "How can the world be done for," he
reasoned contentedly to himself, "if it can offer up such instances of
perfection as this lovely dawn?"

           
Continuing down the line of these happy thoughts, he formulated a silent speech
to his resting wife. "Mishal, I'm forty years old and as contented as a
forty-day babe. I see now that I've been falling deeper and deeper into our
love over the years, and now I swim, like some fish, in that warm sea."
How much she gave him, he marvelled; how much he needed her! Their marriage
transcended mere sensuality, was so intimate that a separation was unthinkable.
"Growing old beside you," he told her while she slept, "will be,
Mishal, a privilege." He permitted himself the sentimentality of blowing a
kiss in her direction and then tiptoeing from the room. Out once more on the
main veranda of his private quarters on the mansion's upper storey, he glanced
across to the gardens, which were coming into view as the dawn lifted the mist,
and saw the sight that would destroy his peace of mind forever, smashing it
beyond hope of repair at the very instant in which he had become certain of its
invulnerability to the ravages of fate.

           
A young woman was squatting on the lawn, holding out her left palm. Butterflies
were settling on this surface while, with her right hand, she picked them up
and put them in her mouth. Slowly, methodically, she breakfasted on the
acquiescent wings.

           
Her lips, cheeks, chin were heavily stained by the many different colours that
had rubbed off the dying butterflies.

           
When Mirza Saeed Akhtar saw the young woman eating her gossamer breakfast on
his lawn, he felt a surge of lust so powerful that he instantly felt ashamed.
"It's impossible," he scolded himself, "I am not an animal,
after all." The young woman wore a saffron yellow sari wrapped around her
nakedness, after the fashion of the poor women of that region, and as she
stooped over the butterflies the sari, hanging loosely forwards, bared her
small breasts to the gaze of the transfixed zamindar. Mirza Saeed stretched out
his hands to grip the balcony railing, and the slight movement of his white
kurta must have caught her eye, because she lifted her head quickly and looked
right into his face.

           
And did not immediately look down again. Nor did she get up and run away, as he
had half expected.

           
What she did: waited for a few seconds, as though to see if he intended to
speak. When he did not, she simply resumed her strange meal without taking her
eyes from his face. The strangest aspect of it was that the butterflies seemed
to be funnelling downwards from the brightening air, going willingly towards
her outstretched palms and their own deaths. She held them by the wingtips,
threw her head back and flicked them into her mouth with the tip of her narrow
tongue. Once she kept her mouth open, the dark lips parted defiantly, and Mirza
Saeed trembled to see the butterfly fluttering within the dark cavern of its
death, yet making no attempt to escape. When she was satisfied that he had seen
this, she brought her lips together and began to chew. They remained thus,
peasant woman below, landowner above, until her eyes unexpectedly rolled
upwards in their sockets and she fell heavily, twitching violently, on to her
left side.

           
After a few seconds of transfixed panic, the Mirza shouted, "Ohe, house!
Ohe, wake up, emergency!" At the same time he ran towards the stately
mahogany staircase from England, brought here from some unimaginable
Warwickshire, some fantastic location in which, in a damp and lightless priory,
King Charles I had ascended these same steps, before losing his head, in the seventeenth
century of another system of time. Down these stairs hurtled Mirza Saeed
Akhtar, last of his line, trampling over the ghostly impressions of beheaded
feet as he sped towards the lawn.

           
The girl was having convulsions, crushing butterflies beneath her rolling,
kicking body. Mirza Saeed got to her first, although the servants and Mishal,
awakened by his cry, were not far behind. He grasped the girl by the jaw and
forced it open, inserting a nearby twig, which she at once bit in half. Blood
trickled from her cut mouth, and he feared for her tongue, but the sickness
left her just then, she became calm, and slept. Mishal had her carried to her
own bedroom, and now Mirza Saeed was obliged to gaze on a second sleeping
beauty in that bed, and was stricken for a second time by what seemed too rich
and deep a sensation to be called by the crude name,
lust
. He found that
he was at once sickened by his own impure designs and also elated by the
feelings that were coursing within him, fresh feelings whose newness excited
him greatly. Mishal came to stand beside her husband. "Do you know
her?" Saeed asked, and she nodded. "An orphan girl. She makes small
enamel animals and sells them at the trunk road. She has had the falling
sickness since she was very little." Mirza Saeed was awed, not for the
first time, by his wife's gift of involvement with other human beings. He
himself could hardly recognize more than a handful of the villagers, but she
knew each person's pet names, family histories and incomes. They even told her
their dreams, although few of them dreamed more than once a month on account of
being too poor to afford such luxuries. The overflowing fondness he had felt at
dawn returned, and he placed his arm around her shoulders. She leaned her head
against him and said softly: "Happy birthday." He kissed the top of
her hair. They stood embracing, watching the sleeping girl. Ayesha: his wife
told him the name.