The Satanic Verses (57 page)

           
Gibreel dreamed a temple:

           
By the open gates of Jahilia stood the temple of Uzza. And Mahound spake unto
Khalid who had been a carrier of water before, and now bore greater weights:
"Go thou and cleanse that place." So Khalid with a force of men
descended upon the temple, for Mahound was loth to enter the city while such
abominations stood at its gates.

           
When the guardian of the temple, who was of the tribe of Shark, saw the approach
of Khalid with a great host of warriors, he took up his sword and went to the
idol of the goddess. After making his final prayers he hung his sword about her
neck, saying, "If thou be truly a goddess, Uzza, defend thyself and thy
servant against the coming of Mahound." Then Khalid entered the temple,
and when the goddess did not move the guardian said, "Now verily do I know
that the God of Mahound is the true God, and this stone but a stone." Then
Khalid broke the temple and the idol and returned to Mahound in his tent. And
the Prophet asked: "What didst thou see?" Khalid spread his arms.
"Nothing," said he. "Then thou hast not destroyed her," the
Prophet cried. "Go again, and complete thy work." So Khalid returned
to the fallen temple, and there an enormous woman, all black but for her long
scarlet tongue, came running at him, naked from head to foot, her black hair
flowing to her ankles from her head. Nearing him, she halted, and recited in
her terrible voice of sulphur and hellfire: "Have you heard of Lat, and
Manat, and Uzza, the Third, the Other? They are the Exalted Birds . . ."
But Khalid interrupted her, saying, "Uzza, those are the Devil's verses,
and you the Devil's daughter, a creature not to be worshipped, but
denied." So he drew his sword and cut her down.

           
And he returned to Mahound in his tent and said what he had seen. And the
Prophet said, "Now may we come into Jahilia," and they arose, and
came into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the
Destroyer of Men.

           
* * * * *

           
How many idols in the House of the Black Stone? Don't forget: three hundred and
sixty. Sun-god, eagle, rainbow. The colossus of Hubal. Three hundred and sixty
wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And are not: but let's not
waste time there. Statues fall; stone breaks; what's to be done is done.

           
Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his tent or the old
fairground. The people crowd around the tent, embracing the victorious faith.
The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and need not be lingered
over.

           
While Jahilians bow before him, mumbling their life-saving sentences,
there
is no God but Al-Lah
, Mahound whispers to Khalid. Somebody has not come to
kneel before him; somebody long awaited. "Salman," the Prophet wishes
to know. "Has he been found?"

           
"Not yet. He's hiding; but it won't be long."

           
There is a distraction. A veiled woman kneels before him, kissing his feet.
"You must stop," he enjoins. "It is only God who must be
worshipped." But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by toe, joint by joint,
the woman licks, kisses, sucks. And Mahound, unnerved, repeats: "Stop.
This is incorrect." Now, however, the woman is attending to the soles of
his feet, cupping her hands beneath his heel . . . he kicks out, in his
confusion, and catches her in the throat. She falls, coughs, then prostrates
herself before him, and says firmly: "There is no God but Al-Lah, and
Mahound is his Prophet." Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends a
hand. "No harm will come to you," he assures her. "All who
Submit are spared." But there is a strange confusion in him, and now he
understands why, understands the anger, the bitter irony in her overwhelming,
excessive, sensual adoration of his feet. The woman throws off her veil: Hind.

           
"The wife of Abu Simbel," she announces clearly, and a hush falls.
"Hind," Mahound says. "I had not forgotten."

           
But, after a long instant, he nods. "You have Submitted. And are welcome
in my tents."

           
The next day, amid the continuing conversions, Salman the Persian is dragged
into the Prophet's presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding a knife at
his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the takht.
"I found him, where else, with a whore, who was screeching at him because
he didn't have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol."

           
"Salman Farsi," the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of
death, but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: "La ilaha ilallah! La
ilaha!"

           
Mahound shakes his head. "Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. Did
you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against the Words of
God."

           
Scribe, ditch-digger, condemned man: unable to muster the smallest scrap of
dignity, he blubbers whimpers pleads beats his breast abases himself repents.
Khalid says: "This noise is unbearable, Messenger. Can I not cut off his
head?" At which the noise increases sharply. Salman swears renewed
loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope, makes an
offer. "I can show you where your true enemies are." This earns him a
few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head. Khalid pulls the kneeling Salman's
head back by the hair: "What enemies?" And Salman says a name.
Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns.

           
"Baal," he says, and repeats, twice: "Baal, Baal."

           
Much to Khalid's disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to death.
Bilal intercedes for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere, concedes: yes,
yes, let the wretched fellow live. O generosity of Submission! Hind has been
spared; and Salman; and in all of Jahilia not a door has been smashed down, not
an old foe dragged out to have his gizzard slit like a chicken's in the dust.
This is Mahound's answer to the second question:
What happens when you win?
But one name haunts Mahound, leaps around him, young, sharp, pointing a long
painted finger, singing verses whose cruel brilliance ensures their
painfulness. That night, when the supplicants have gone, Khalid asks Mahound:
"You're still thinking about him?" The Messenger nods, but will not
speak. Khalid says: "I made Salman take me to his room, a hovel, but he
isn't there, he's hiding out." Again, the nod, but no speech. Khalid
presses on: "You want me to dig him out? Wouldn't take much doing. What
d'you want done with him? This? This?" Khalid's finger moves first across
his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into his navel. Mahound loses his temper.
"You're a fool," he shouts at the former water-carrier who is now his
military chief of staff. "Can't you ever work things out without my
help?"

           
Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of dealing
with bad moods.

           
* * * * *

           
But Khalid, Mahound's general, could not find Baal. In spite of door-to-door
searches, proclamations, turnings of stones, the poet proved impossible to nab.
And Mahound's lips remained closed, would not part to allow his wishes to
emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave up the search.
"Just let that bastard show his face, just once, any time," he vowed
in the Prophet's tent of softnesses and shadows. "I'll slice him so thin
you'll be able to see right through each piece."

           
It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low light of
the tent it was impossible to be sure.

           
* * * * *

           
Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a day, no
alcohol, the locking up of wives. Hind herself retired to her quarters . . .
but where was Baal?

           
Gibreel dreamed a curtain:

           
The Curtain,
Hijab
, was the name of the most popular brothel in Jahilia,
an enormous palazzo of date-palms in water-tinkling courtyards, surrounded by
chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns, permeated by
labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to look alike,
each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love, each carpeted
with identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned against a wall.
None of The Curtain's clients could ever find their way, without help, either into
the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back again to the street. In this way
the girls were protected from unwanted guests and the business ensured payment
before departure. Large Circassian eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion
of lamp-genies, escorted the visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes
with the help of balls of string. It was a soft windowless universe of
draperies, ruled over by the ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose
guttural utterances from the secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had
acquired, over the years, something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her
clients were able to disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the
profane antithesis of Mahound's sacred utterances in a larger, more easily
penetrable tent not so very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal
prostrated himself before her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and
save his life as an act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth
he had once been was accepted without question; and when Khalid's guards
arrived to search the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around
that overground catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the
soldiers' heads were spinning, and after looking inside thirty-nine stone urns
and finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never
suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been
taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the quivering,
pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.

           
After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet's skin until it was
blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and turban
of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his lack of
condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn't tone up fast.

           
* * * * *

           
Baal's sojourn "behind The Curtain" by no means deprived him of
information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact, because in the
course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the pleasure-chambers and
heard the customers' gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues,
induced by the gay abandon of the whores' caresses and by the clients' knowledge
that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet, myopic and hard
of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary affairs than he could
possibly have gained if he'd still been free to wander the newly puritanical
streets of the town. The deafness was a problem sometimes; it meant that there
were gaps in his knowledge, because the customers frequently lowered their
voices and whispered; but it also minimized the prurient element in his
listenings-in, since he was unable to hear the murmurings that accompanied
fornication, except, of course, at such moments in which ecstatic clients or
feigning workers raised their voices in cries of real or synthetic joy.

           
What Baal learned at The Curtain:

           
From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the new ban
on pork the skin-deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back door to buy
the forbidden meat in secret, "sales are up," he murmured while
mounting his chosen lady, "black pork prices are high; but damn it, these
new rules have made my work eough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter in
secret, without noise," and thereupon he began some squealing of his own,
for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain.―And the
grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain's horizontal staff that the
old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening he
still said a prayer or two to "my lifelong favourite, Manat, and
sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can't beat a female goddess, they've
got attributes the boys can't match," after which he, too, fell upon the
earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that faded,
fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute, no victory
complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.

           
Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of the great temple of
Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of the covert
pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because even in the
high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been genuine,
perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the hollowness
of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of stone that
couldn't fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been dulled, Baal
became convinced that Al-Lat's fall meant that his own end was not far away. He
lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired
in him; but the returning knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery
followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him
afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated cowardice he found to his great surprise
that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the
sweetness of life, and he wondered at the paradox of having his eyes opened to
such a truth in that house of costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that
Al-Lat was dead―had never lived―but that didn't make Mahound a
prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to
move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rules, and to perceive that his
story was so mixed up with Mahound's that some great resolution was necessary. That
this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor
bothered him overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the
twelve wives" of the Prophet,
one rule for him, another for us
,
Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to
take.