The Satanic Verses (60 page)

           
"I'm not kidding!" Baal screeched at the crowd, which hooted yelled
slapped its thighs in response. "It's no joke!" Ha ha ha. Until, at
last, silence returned; the Prophet had risen to his feet.

           
"In the old days you mocked the Recitation," Mahound said in the
hush. "Then, too, these people enjoyed your mockery. Now you return to
dishonour my house, and it seems that once again you succeed in bringing the
worst out of the people."

           
Baal said, "I've finished. Do what you want."

           
So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled
him out of the tent towards the killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder:
"Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."

           
Mahound replied, "Writers and whores. I see no difference here."

           
* * * * *

           
Once upon a time there was a woman who did not change.

           
After the treachery of Abu Simbel handed Jahilia to Mahound on a plate and
replaced the idea of the city's greatness with the reality of Mahound's, Hind
sucked toes, recited the La-ilaha, and then retreated to a high tower of her
palace, where news reached her of the destruction of the Al-Lat temple at Taif,
and of all the statues of the goddess that were known to exist. She locked
herself into her tower room with a collection of ancient books written in
scripts which no other human being in Jahilia could decipher; and for two years
and two months she remained there, studying her occult texts in secret, asking
that a plate of simple food be left outside her door once a day and that her
chamberpot be emptied at the same time. For two years and two months she saw no
other living being. Then she entered her husband's bedroom at dawn, dressed in
all her finery, with jewels glittering at her wrists, ankles, toes, ears and
throat. "Wake up," she commanded, flinging back his curtains.
"It's a day for celebrations." He saw that she hadn't aged by so much
as a day since he last saw her; if anything, she looked younger than ever,
which gave credence to the rumours which suggested that her witchcraft had
persuaded time to run backwards for her within the confines of her tower room.
"What have we got to celebrate?" the former Grandee of Jahilia asked,
coughing up his usual morning blood. Hind replied: "I may not be able to
reverse the flow of history, but revenge, at least, is sweet."

           
Within an hour the news arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen into a
fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha's bed with his head thumping as if it had
been filled up with demons. Hind continued to make calm preparations for a
banquet, sending servants to every corner of the city to invite guests. But of
course nobody would come to a party on that day. In the evening Hind sat alone
in the great hall of her home, amid the golden plates and crystal glasses of
her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous while surrounded by glistening,
steaming, aromatic dishes of every imaginable type. Abu Simbel had refused to
join her, calling her eating an obscenity. "You ate his uncle's
heart," Simbel cried, "and now you would eat his." She laughed
in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed them, too, and sat
in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange shadows across her absolute,
uncompromising face.

           
Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:

           
For when the head of the Messenger began to ache as never before, he knew the
time had come when he would be offered the Choice:

           
Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and afterward asked
to choose between this world and the next:

           
So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed his
eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:

           
And he said unto Ayesha, "I have been offered and made my Choice, and I
have chosen the kingdom of God."

           
Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his eyes
moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even though
when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning upon its
stand:

           
"Who's there?" he called out. "Is it Thou, Azraeel?"

           
But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a woman's, make reply:
"No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel."

           
And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: "Is this
sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?"

           
And she said: "It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them cut
a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave."

           
Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more into a
great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, "Still, I thank Thee,
Al-Lat, for this gift."

           
Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where the
other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began
mightily to lament:

           
But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: "If there be any here who worshipped
the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any here
who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive."

           
It was the end of the dream.

           
It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love, the
refractory bird of Meilhac and Halevy's libretto for
Carmen
―one of
the prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he'd assembled in lighter
days, and which included among its winged metaphors the Sweet (of youth), the
Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyim-FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of Time
(which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and the Obscene;
this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons. . .
"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect
that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and
fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the
essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural
inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest
where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters." Take
that
,
kids.―And in a separate but proximate glass display-case of the younger,
happier Chamcha's fancy there fluttered a captive from a piece of hit-parade
bubblegum music, the Bright Elusive Butterfly, which shared
l'amour
with
the
oiseau rebelle
.

           
Love, a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling a human (as opposed to
robotic, Skinnerian-android) body of experience could afford to shut down
operations, did you down, no question about it, and very probably did you in as
well. It even warned you in advance. "Love is an infant of Bohemia,"
sings Carmen, herself the very Idea of the Beloved, its perfect pattern,
eternal and divine, "and if you love me, look out for you." You
couldn't ask for fairer. For his own part, Saladin in his time had loved
widely, and was now (he had come to believe) suffering Love's revenges upon the
foolish lover. Of the things of the mind, he had most loved the protean,
inexhaustible culture of the Englishspeaking peoples; had said, when courting
Pamela, that
Othello
, "just that one play", was worth the
total output of any other dramatist in any other language, and though he was
conscious of hyperbole, he didn't think the exaggeration very great. (Pamela,
of course, made incessant efforts to betray her class and race, and so,
predictably, professed herself horrified, bracketing Othello with Shylock and
beating the racist Shakespeare over the head with the brace of them.) He had
been striving, like the Bengali writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, before
him―though without any of that impish, colonial intelligence's urge to be
seen as an enfant terrible―to be worthy of the challenge represented by
the phrase
Civis Britannicus sum
. Empire was no more, but still he knew
"all that was good and living within him" to have been "made,
shaped and quickened" by his encounter with this islet of sensibility,
surrounded by the cool sense of the sea.―Of material things, he had given
his love to this city, London, preferring it to the city of his birth or to any
other; had been creeping up on it, stealthily, with mounting excitement,
freezing into a statue when it looked in his direction, dreaming of being the
one to possess it and so, in a sense, become it, as when in the game of
grandmother's footsteps the child who touches the one who's
it
("on
it", today's young Londoners would say) takes over that cherished
identity; as, also, in the myth of the Golden Bough. London, its conglomerate
nature mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly
footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant
geese. Its hospitality―yes!―in spite of immigration laws, and his
own recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect
welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was
attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no
language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in Wembley, a
stone's throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial echoes―Empire
Way, the Empire Pool―of more than a hundred delegates, all tracing their
ancestry back to a single, small Goan village.―"We Londoners can be
proud of our hospitality," he'd told Pamela, and she, giggling helplessly,
took him to see the Buster Keaton movie of that name, in which the comedian,
arriving at the end of an absurd railway line, gets a murderous reception. In
those days they had enjoyed such oppositions, and after hot disputes had ended
up in bed. . . He returned his wandering thoughts to the subject of the
metropolis. Its―he repeated stubbornly to himself―long history as a
refuge, a role it maintained in spite of the recalcitrant ingratitude of the
refugees' children; and without any of the selfcongratulatory huddled-masses
rhetoric of the "nation of immigrants" across the ocean, itself far
from perfectly open-armed. Would the United States, with its
are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have permitted Ho Chi Minh to cook in its
hotel kitchens? What would its McCarran-Walter Act have to say about a latter-
day Karl Marx, standing bushy-bearded at its gates, waiting to cross its yellow
lines? O Proper London! Dull would he truly be of soul who did not prefer its
faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the hot certainties of that
transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which
employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms .
. . London, in spite of an increase in excrescences such as the NatWest
Tower―a corporate logo extruded into the third dimension―preserved
the human scale.
Viva! Zindabad!

           
Pamela had always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. "These are
museum-values," she used to tell him. "Sanctified, hanging in golden
frames on honorific walls." She had never had any time for what endured.
Change everything! Rip it up! He said: "If you succeed you will make it
impossible for anybody like you, in one or two generations' time, to come
along." She celebrated this vision of her own obsolescence. If she ended
up like the dodo―a stuffed relic,
Class Traitor, 1980s
―that
would, she said, certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged to
differ, but by this time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an
improvement, so he conceded the other point.