The Satanic Verses (49 page)

           
* * * * *

           
The meteorological turbulence engendered by God's anger with his servant had
given way to a clear, balmy night presided over by a fat and creamy moon. Only
the fallen trees remained to bear witness to the might of the now-departed
Being. Gibreel, trilby jammed down on his head, money-belt firmly around his
waist, hands deep in gabardine―the right hand feeling, in there, the
shape of a paperback book―was giving silent thanks for his escape.
Certain now of his archangelic status, he banished from his thoughts all
remorse for his time of doubting, replacing it with a new resolve: to bring this
metropolis of the ungodly, this latter-day "Ad or Thamoud, back to the
knowledge of God, to shower upon it the blessings of the Recitation, the sacred
Word. He felt his old self drop from him, and dismissed it with a shrug, but
chose to retain, for the time being, his human scale. This was not the time to
grow until he filled the sky from horizon to horizon―though that, too,
would surely come before long.

           
The city's streets coiled around him, writhing like serpents. London had grown
unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its
anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly,
in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled
and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into
the bleakness of its impoverished future. He wandered its streets through that
night, and the next day, and the next night, and on until the light and dark
ceased to matter. He no longer seemed to need food or rest, but only to move
constantly through that tortured metropolis whose fabric was now utterly
transformed, the houses in the rich quarters being built of solidified fear,
the government buildings partly of vainglory and partly of scorn, and the
residences of the poor of confusion and material dreams. When you looked
through an angel's eyes you saw essences instead of surfaces, you saw the decay
of the soul blistering and bubbling on the skins of people in the street, you
saw the generosity of certain spirits resting on their shoulders in the form of
birds. As he roamed the metamorphosed city he saw bat-winged imps sitting on
the corners of buildings made of deceits and glimpsed goblins oozing wormily
through the broken tilework of public urinals for men. As once the
thirteenth-century German monk Richalmus would shut his eyes and instantly see
clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth, dancing
like dust-specks in the sunlight, so now Gibreel with open eyes and by the
light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his
adversary, his―to give the old word back its original meaning―
shaitan
.

           
Long before the Flood, he remembered―now that he had reassumed the role
of archangel, the full range of archangelic memory and wisdom was apparently
being restored to him, little by little―a number of angels (the names
Semjaza and Azazel came first to mind) had been flung out of Heaven because
they had been
lusting after the daughters of men
, who in due course gave
birth to an evil race of giants. He began to understand the degree of the
danger from which he had been saved when he departed from the vicinity of
Alleluia Cone. O most false of creatures! O princess of the powers of the
air!―When the Prophet, on whose name be peace, had first received the
wahi, the Revelation, had he not feared for his sanity?―And who had
offered him the reassuring certainty he needed?―Why, Khadija, his wife.
She it was who convinced him that he was not some raving crazy but the Messenger
of God.―Whereas what had Alleluia done for him?
You're not yourself. I
don't think you're really well
.―O bringer of tribulation, creatrix of
strife, of soreness of the heart! Siren, temptress, fiend in human form! That
snowlike body with its pale, pale hair: how she had used it to fog his soul,
and how hard he had found it, in the weakness of his flesh, to resist . . .
enmeshed by her in the web of a love so complex as to be beyond comprehension,
he had come to the very edge of the ultimate Fall. How beneficent, then, the
Over-Entity had been to him!―He saw now that the choice was simple: the
infernal love of the daughters of men, or the celestial adoration of God. He
had found it possible to choose the latter; in the nick of time.

           
He drew out of the right-hand pocket of his overcoat the book that had been
there ever since his departure from Rosa's house a millennium ago: the book of
the city he had come to save, Proper London, capital of Vilayet, laid out for
his benefit in exhaustive detail, the whole bang shoot. He would redeem this
city: Geographers' London, all the way from A to Z.

           
* * * * *

           
On a street corner in a part of town once known for its population of artists,
radicals and men in search of prostitutes, and now given over to advertising
personnel and minor film producers, the Archangel Gibreel chanced to see a lost
soul. It was young, male, tall, and of extreme beauty, with a strikingly
aquiline nose and longish black hair oiled down and parted in the centre; its
teeth were made of gold. The lost soul stood at the very edge of the pavement,
its back to the road, leaning forwards at a slight angle and clutching, in its
right hand, something it evidently held very dear. Its behaviour was striking:
first it would stare fiercely at the thing it held in its hand, and then look
around, whipping its head from right to left, scrutinizing with blazing
concentration the faces of the passers-by. Reluctant to approach too quickly,
Gibreel on a first pass saw that the object the lost soul was clutching was a
small passport-sized photograph. On his second pass he went right up to the
stranger and offered his help. The other eyed him suspiciously, then thrust the
photograph under his nose. "This man," he said, jabbing at the
picture with a long index finger. "Do you know this man?"

           
When Gibreel saw, staring out of the photograph, a young man of extreme beauty,
with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair, oiled, with a central
parting, he knew that his instincts had been correct, that here, standing on a
busy street corner watching the crowd in case he saw himself going by, was a
Soul in search of its mislaid body, a spectre in desperate need of its lost
physical casing―for it is known to archangels that the soul or ka cannot
exist (once the golden cord of light linking it to the body is severed) for
more than a night and a day. "I can help you," he promised, and the
young soul looked at him in wild disbelief. Gibreel leaned forward, grasped the
ka's face between his hands, and kissed it firmly upon the mouth, for the
spirit that is kissed by an archangel regains, at once, its lost sense of
direction, and is set upon the true and righteous path.―The lost soul,
however, had a most surprising reaction to being favoured by an archangelic
kiss. "Sod you," it shouted, "I may be desperate, mate, but I'm
not that desperate,"―after which, manifesting a solidity most
unusual in a disembodied spirit, it struck the Archangel of the Lord a
resounding blow upon the nose with the very fist in which its image was
clasped;―with disorienting, and bloody, results.

           
When his vision cleared, the lost soul had gone but there, floating on her
carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his discomfiture.
"Not such a great start," she snorted. "Archangel my foot.
Gibreel janab, you're off your head, take it from me. You played too many
winged types for your own good. I wouldn't trust that Deity of yours either, if
I were you," she added in a more conspiratorial tone, though Gibreel
suspected that her intentions remained satirical. "He hinted as much
himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar-Neechay question like he did. This
notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be
straightforward enough in Islam―
O, children of Adam, let not the Devil
seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them
their clothing that he might show them their shame
―but go back a bit
and you see that it's a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century BC,
asks: 'Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?' Also
Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: 'I form the
light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all
these things.' It isn't until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC,
that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of
God." This speech was one of which the "real" Rekha would
plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition
and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or, of
all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever since
he fell from
Bostan
was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective,
psychologically or corporeally consistent manner.―What, then, was she? It
would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his own making―his own
accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her case with the
arcana.―But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly, in
days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed him?
(He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix his
thoughts upon his "dark age", that is to say the period during which
he had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a
thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could make
out little more than shadows.)―Or could it be that the material now
filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his
lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary
squat like a
toad
by Eve's ear in Eden, using his wiles "to reach/The organs of her
fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams",
had in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that
Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia's boudoir, and
awoken him from his long waking sleep?―Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an
emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner,
guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.

           
His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been able to tolerate
pain. "Always a cry-baby," Rekha laughed in his face. Shaitan had
understood more:

           
Lives there who loves his pain?

           
Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell,

           
Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt,

           
And boldly venture to whatever place

           
Farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change

           
Torment with ease . . .

           
He couldn't have put it better. A person who found himself in an inferno would
do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it took to get out .
. . he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose as Rekha, still present on her flying
rug, and intuiting his ascent (descent?) into the realm of metaphysical
speculation, attempted to get things back on to more familiar ground. "You
should have stuck with me," she opined. "You could have loved me,
good and proper. I knew how to love. Not everybody has the capacity for it; I
do, I mean did. Not like that self-centred blonde bombshell thinking secretly
about having a child and not even mentioning same to you. Not like your God,
either; it's not like the old days, when such Persons took proper
interest."

           
This needed contesting on several grounds. "You were married, start to
finish," he replied. "Ball-bearings. I was your side dish. Nor will
I, who waited so long for Him to manifest Himself, now speak poorly of Him post
facto, after the personal appearance. Finally, what's all this baby-talk?
You'll go to any extreme, seems like."

           
"You don't know what hell is," she snapped back, dropping the mask of
her imperturbability. "But, buster, you sure will. If you'd ever said, I'd
have thrown over that ball-bearings bore in two secs, but you kept mum. Now
I'll see you down there: Neechayvala's Hotel."

           
"You'd never have left your children," he insisted. "Poor
fellows, you even threw them down first when you jumped." That set her
off. "Don't you talk! To dare to talk! Mister, I'll cook your goose! I'll
fry your heart and eat it up on toast!―And as to your Snow White
princess, she is of the opinion that a child is a mother's property only,
because men may come and men may go but she goes on forever, isn't it? You're
only the seed, excuse me, she is the garden. Who asks a seed permission to
plant? What do you know, damn fool Bombay boy messing with the modern ideas of
mames."

           
"And you," he came back strongly. "Did you, for example, ask
their Daddyji's permission before you threw his kiddies off the roof?"

           
She vanished in fury and yellow smoke, with an explosion that made him stagger
and knocked the hat off his head (it lay upturned on the pavement at his feet).
She unleashed, too, an olfactory effect of such nauseous potency as to make
them gag and retch. Emptily: for he was perfectly void of all foodstuffs and
liquids, having partaken of no nourishment for many days. Ah, immortality, he
thought: ah, noble release from the tyranny of the body. He noticed that there
were two individuals watching him curiously, one a violent-looking youth in
studs and―leather, with a rainbow Mohican haircut and a streak of
face-paint lightning zig-zagging down his nose, the other a kindly middle-aged
woman in a headscarf. Very well then: seize the day. "Repent," he
cried passionately. "For I am the Archangel of the Lord."