The Satanic Verses (59 page)

           
"I came because I'm finally leaving this infernal city," Salman said,
"and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of
shit." After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old
friendship the immigrant had found work as a letterwriter and all-purpose
scribe, sitting cross-legged by the roadside in the main street of the
financial district. His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun.
"People write to tell lies," he said, drinking quickly. "So a
professional liar makes an excellent living. My love letters and business
correspondence became famous as the best in town because of my gift for
inventing beautiful falsehoods that involved only the tiniest departure from
the facts. As a result I have managed to save enough for my trip home in just
two years. Home! The old country! I'm off tomorrow, and not a minute too
soon."

           
As the bottle emptied Salman began once again to talk, as Baal had known he
would, about the source of all his ills, the Messenger and his message. He told
Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting the rumour as if it
were incontrovertible fact. "That girl couldn't stomach it that her
husband wanted so many other women," he said. "He talked about
necessity, political alliances and so on, but she wasn't fooled. Who can blame
her? Finally he went into―what else?―one of his trances, and out he
came with a message from the archangel. Gibreel had recited verses giving him
full divine support. God's own permission to fuck as many women as he liked. So
there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses of God? You know what she
did say? This: 'Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things
up for you.' Well! If it hadn't been Ayesha, who knows what he'd have done, but
none of the others would have dared in the first place." Baal let him run
on without interruption. The sexual aspects of Submission exercised the Persian
a good deal: "Unhealthy," he pronounced. "All this segregation.
No good will come of it."

           
At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the poet
taking Mahound's side: "You can see his point of view," Baal
reasoned. "If families offer him brides and he refuses he creates
enemies,―and besides, he's a special man and one can see the argument for
special dispensations,―and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour
it would be if anything bad happened to one of them! Listen, if you lived in
here, you wouldn't think a little less sexual freedom was such a bad
thing,―for the common people, I mean."

           
"Your brain's gone," Salman said flatly. "You've been out of the
sun too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown."

           
Baal was pretty tipsy by this time, and began some hot retort, but Salman
raised an unsteady hand. "Don't want to fight," he said. "Lemme
tell you instead. Hottest story in town. Whoowhoo! And it's relevant to whatch,
whatchyou say."

           
Salman's story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on an expedition to a far-flung
village, and on the way back to Yathrib their party had camped in the dunes for
the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the last moment
Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into a hollow.
While she was away her litter-bearers picked up her palanquin and marched off.
She was a light woman, and, failing to notice much difference in the weight of
that heavy palanquin, they assumed she was inside. Ayesha returned after
relieving herself to find herself alone, and who knows what might have befallen
her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to pass by on his camel .
. . Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe and sound; at which point
tongues began to wag, not least in the harem, where opportunities to weaken
Ayesha's power were eagerly seized by her opponents. The two young people had
been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was hinted, more and more
loudly, that Safwan was a dashingly handsome fellow, and the Prophet was much
older than the young woman, after all, and might she not therefore have been
attracted to someone closer to her own age? "Quite a scandal," Salman
commented, happily.

           
"What will Mahound do?" Baal wanted to know.

           
"O, he's done it," Salman replied. "Same as ever. He saw his
pet, the archangel, and then informed one and all that Gibreel had exonerated
Ayesha." Salman spread his arms in worldly resignation. "And this
time, mister, the lady didn't complain about the convenience of the
verses."

           
* * * * *

           
Salman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train. When he
left Baal at The Curtain, he embraced the poet, kissed him on both cheeks and
said: "Maybe you're right. Maybe it's better to keep out of the daylight.
I hope it lasts." Baal replied: "And I hope you find home, and that
there is something there to love." Salman's face went blank. He opened his
mouth, shut it again, and left.

           
"Ayesha" came to Baal's room for reassurance. "He won't spill
out the secret when he's drunk?" she asked, caressing Baal's hair.
"He gets through a lot of wine."

           
Baal said: "Nothing is ever going to be the same again." Salman's
visit had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during
his years at The Curtain, and he couldn't go back to sleep.

           
"Of course it will," Ayesha urged. "It will. You'll see."

           
Baal shook his head and made the only prophetic remark of his life.
"Something big is going to happen," he foretold. "A man can't
hide behind skirts forever."

           
The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came to inform the Madam
of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The brothels were
to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From behind her drapes,
the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an hour in the name of
propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was the inexperience of the
officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed. The Madam sent her eunuchs
to inform the girls and escort the clients out by a back door. "Please
apologize to them for the interruption," she ordered the eunuchs,
"and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made."

           
They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once, crowded
into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made no answer
to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat, will we go to
jail, what's to become of us,―until "Ayesha" screwed up her
courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw back
the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a hundred
and twenty-five years old, no more than three feet tall, looking like a big
doll, curled up in a cushionladen wickerwork chair, clutching the empty
poison-bottle in her fist.

           
"Now that you've started," Baal said, coming into the room, "you
may as well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any
more."

           
* * * * *

           
The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather
petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothel-keeper.
"Well, if we can't hang the boss, we'll just have to make do with the
workers," he shouted, and ordered his men to place the "tarts"
under close arrest, a task the men performed with zeal. The women made a noise
and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched without
twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: "They want the cunts to
be put on trial, but I've no instructions about you. So if you don't want to
lose your heads as well as your balls, keep out of this." Eunuchs failed
to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled them to the ground;
and among the eunuchs was Baal, of the dyed skin and poetry. Just before the
youngest "cunt" or "slit" was gagged, she yelled:
"Husband, for God's sake, help us, if you are a man." The vice-squad
captain was amused. "Which of you is her husband?" he asked, staring
carefully into each turban-topped face. "Come on, own up. What's it like
to watch the world with your wife?"

           
Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid "Ayesha's" glares as well as
Umar's narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. "Is it
you?"

           
"Sir, you understand, it's just a term," Baal lied. "They like
to joke, the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we. .

           
Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. "Because
you can't be," he said. "Husbands, eh. Not bad."

           
When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the eunuchs
a word of advice on his way out. "Get lost," he suggested.
"Tomorrow I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days
running."

           
When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down and
wept uncontrollably by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame, did not
cry.

           
* * * * *

           
Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:

           
The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had grown so
accustomed to their new names that they couldn't remember the old ones. They
"were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titlesÓ and as a
result were unable to give any names at all. After a good deal of shouting and
a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by numbers, as
Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients, terrified of the
consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores had been up to, also
remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody would have found out if the
poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to the walls of the city jail.

           
Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and pimps,
whose numbers had increased considerably during the two years in which
Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired that
many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town riff-raff,
to say nothing of possible prosecution under the new immorality laws, in order
to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those painted ladies whom
they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely unimpressed by these
devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the suitors at their barred
gates. On the third day, however, there appeared among these lovelorn fools a
peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and pantaloons, with dark skin that was
beginning to look decidedly blotchy. Many passers-by sniggered at the look of
him, but when he began to sing his verses the sniggering stopped at once.
Jahilians had always been connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of
the odes being sung by the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal
sang his love poems, and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who
allowed Baal to speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible
to see for the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been
drawn there by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went
forward to nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes
running with tears, made no move to stop him.

           
Every evening after that, the strange fellow would reappear and recite a new
poem, and each set of verses sounded lovelier than the last. It was perhaps
this surfeit of loveliness which prevented anybody from noticing, until the
twelfth evening, when he completed his twelfth and final set of verses, each of
which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of his twelve
"wives" were the same as those of another group of twelve.

           
But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that had
taken to gathering to hear Baal read changed its mood. Feelings of outrage replaced
those of exaltation, and Baal was surrounded by angry men demanding to know the
reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults. At this point Baal
took off his absurd turban. "I am Baal," he announced. "I
recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen
Muses."

           
Guards seized him.

           
The General, Khalid, had wanted to have Baal executed at once, but Mahound
asked that the poet be brought to trial immediately following the whores. So
when Baal's twelve wives, who had divorced stone to marry him, had been
sentenced to death by stoning to punish them for the immorality of their lives,
Baal stood face to face with the Prophet, mirror facing image, dark facing
light. Khalid, sitting at Mahound's right hand, offered Baal a last chance to
explain his vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay at The Curtain,
using the simplest language, concealing nothing, not even his final cowardice,
for which everything he had done since had been an attempt at reparation. But
now an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed into that tent of judgment,
knowing that this was after all the famous satirist Baal, in his day the owner
of the sharpest tongue and keenest wit in Jahilia, began (no matter how hard it
tried not to) to laugh. The more honestly and simply Baal described his
marriages to the twelve "wives of the Prophet", the more
uncontrollable became the horrified mirth of the audience. By the end of his
speech the good folk of Jahilia were literally weeping with laughter, unable to
restrain themselves even when soldiers with bullwhips and scimitars threatened
them with instant death.