The Satanic Verses (63 page)

           
In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing a smart
brown suit, a camel coat with a silk collar, and a rather natty brown homburg
hat. "Where are you off to?" Pamela, in turban, army-surplus leather
jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed the incipient thickening of her
middle, wanted to know. "Bloody Ascot?" "I believe I was invited
to a meeting," Saladin answered in his least combative manner, and Pamela
freaked. "You want to be careful," she warned him. "The way you
look, you'll probably get fucking mugged."

           
* * * * *

           
What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose existence he
had so long denied?―What, or rather who, forced him by the simple fact of
its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon-den in which he was
being―or so he believed―restored to his former self, and plunge
once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of
himself? "I'll be able to fit in the meeting," Jumpy Joshi had told
Saladin, "before my karate class."―Where his star pupil waited:
long, rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth
birthday.―Not knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same
illicit longings, Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.

           
* * * * *

           
He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back room somewhere full
of suspicious types looking and talking like clones of Malcolm X (Chamcha could
remember finding funny a TV comic's joke―"Then there's the one about
the black man who changed his name to Mr. X and sued the
News of the World
for libel"―and provoking one of the worst quarrels of his marriage),
with maybe a few angry-looking women as well; he had pictured much
fist-clenching and righteousness. What he found was a large hall, the Brickhall
Friends Meeting House, packed wall-to-wall with every conceivable sort of
person―old, wide women and uniformed schoolchildren, Rastas and
restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in Plassey
Street, soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as well as blacks;
the mood of the crowd was far from the kind of evangelical hysteria he'd
imagined; it was quiet, worried, wanting to know what could be done. There was
a young black woman standing near him who gave his attire an amused once-over;
he stared back at her, and she laughed: "Okay, sorry, no offence."
She was wearing a lenticular badge, the sort that changed its message as you
moved. At some angles it read,
Uhuru for the Simba
; at others,
Freedom
for the Lion
. "It's on account of the meaning of his chosen
name," she explained redundantly. "In African." Which language?
Saladin wanted to know. She shrugged, and turned away to listen to the
speakers. It was African: born, by the sound of her, in Lewisham or Deptford or
New Cross, that was all she needed to know . . . Pamela hissed into his ear. "I
see you finally found somebody to feel superior to." She could still read
him like a book.

           
A minute woman in her middle seventies was led up on to the stage at the far
end of the hail by a wiry man who, Chamcha was almost reassured to observe,
really did look like an American Black Power leader, the young Stokely
Carmichael, in fact―the same intense spectacles―and who was acting
as a sort of compere. He turned out to be Dr. Simba's kid brother Walcott
Roberts, and the tiny lady was their mother, Antoinette. "God knows how
anything as big as Simba ever came out of her," Jumpy whispered, and
Pamela frowned angrily, out of a new feeling of solidarity with all pregnant
women, past as well as present. When Antoinette Roberts spoke, however, her voice
was big enough to fill the room on lung-power alone. She wanted to talk about
her son's day in court, at the committal proceedings, and she was quite a
performer. Hers was what Chamcha thought of as an educated voice; she spoke in
the B B C accents of one who learned her English diction from the World
Service, but there was gospel in there, too, and hellfire sermonizing. "My
son filled that dock," she told the silent room. "Lord, he filled it
up. Sylvester―you will pardon me if I use the name I gave him, not
meaning to belittle the warrior's name he took for himself, but only out of
ingrained habit―Sylvester, he burst upwards from that dock like Leviathan
from the waves. I want you to know how he spoke: he spoke loud, and he spoke
clear. He spoke looking his adversary in the eye, and could that prosecutor
stare him down? Never in a month of Sundays. And I want you to know what he
said: 'I stand here,' my son declared, 'because I have chosen to occupy the old
and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been
willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude.' He was a colossus
among the dwarfs. 'Make no mistake,' he said in that court, 'we are here to
change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African,
Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than
what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and
fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better
life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also
be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We
shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our
turn now.' I wish you to think on what my son, Sylvester Roberts, Dr. Uhuru
Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it while we decide what we must
do."

           
Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage amid cheers and chants; she nodded
judiciously in the direction of the noise. Less charismatic speeches followed.
Hanif Johnson, Simba's lawyer, made a series of suggestions―the visitors'
gallery must be packed, the dispensers of justice must know that they were
being watched; the court must be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there
was the need for a financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: "Nobody
mentions his history of sexual aggression." Jumpy shrugged. "Some of
the women he's attacked are in this room. Mishal, for example, is over there,
look, in the corner by the stage. But this isn't the time or place for that.
Simba's bull craziness is, you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have
here is trouble with the Man." In other circumstances, Saladin would have
had a good deal to say in response to such a statement.―He would have
objected, for one thing, that a man's record of violence could not be set aside
so easily when he was accused of murder.―Also that he didn't like the use
of such American terms as "the Man" in the very different British
situation, where there was no history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to
borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt
about the organizers' decision to punctuate the speeches with such
meaning-loaded songs as
We Shall Overcome
, and even, for Pete's sake,
Nkosi
Sikelel' iAfrika
. As if all causes were the same, all histories
interchangeable.―But he said none of these things, because his head had
begun to spin and his senses to reel, owing to his having been given, for the
first time in his life, a stupefying premonition of his death.

           
- Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech.
As Dr. Simba has written, newness
will enter this society by collective, not individual, actions
. He was
quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus's most popular slogans.
The
passage from speech to moral action
, Hanif was saying,
has a name: to
become human
.―And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a
slightly-too-bulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob
Dylan's song,
I Pity the Poor Immigrant
. Another false and imported
note, this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though
there were lines that struck chords, about the immigrant's visions shattering
like glass, about how he was obliged to "build his town with blood".
Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image of the
rivers of blood, would appreciate that.―All these things Saladin
experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance.―What had
happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan's presence at the
Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a blazing
fire burning in the centre of her forehead; and felt, in the same moment, the
beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings.―He experienced
the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to look into two
worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but
the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel,
was swooping towards him, and a girl's forehead could burn with ominous
flames.―
She's death to me, that's what it means
, Chamcha thought
in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to be foolish;
the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges that had latterly
grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted with fluorescent
paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk jewellery.―But
his other self took over again,
she's off limits to you
, it said,
not
all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its
rim
.―Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom, boomba,
dabadoom.

           
Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing
concern. "I'm the one with the bun in the oven," she said with a
gruff remnant of affection. "What business have you got to pass out?"
Jumpy insisted: "You'd best come with me to my class; just sit quietly,
and afterwards I'll take you home."―But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor
was required.
No, no, I'll go with Jumpy, I'll be fine. It was just hot in
there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing
.

           
There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a
movie poster. The film was
Mephisto
, the story of an actor seduced into
a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor―played by the
German star Klaus Maria Brandauer―was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face
white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from
Faust
stood
above his head:

           
--Who art thou, then?

           
--Part of that Power, not understood,

           
Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good
.

           
* * * * *

           
At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal's
direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the
class.)―Although she was all over him,
you came back, I bet it was to
see me, isn't that nice
, he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask
were
you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your
, because she wasn't
now, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black
leotard.―Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all
confusion and injured pride.

           
"Our other star hasn't turned up today," Jumpy mentioned to Saladin
during a break in the exercises. "Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed
Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she's
apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor of
the crash."

           
Things are closing in on me
. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like
India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto-continent, it
floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were
coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force
would hurl up Himalayas.―What is a mountain? An obstacle; a
transcendence; above all, an
effect
.

           
"Where are you going?" Jumpy was calling. "I thought I was
giving you a lift. Are you okay?"

           
I'm fine. I need to walk, that's all
.

           
"Okay, but only if you're sure."

           
Sure
. Walk away fast, without catching Mishal's aggrieved eye.

           
. . . In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this
underworld.―God: no escape. Here's a shop-front, a store selling musical
instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what's the name?―
Fair Winds
,
and here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent
return of, that's right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation of
the earth.
Walk. Walk away fast
.

           
. . . Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in
squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking
and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh
taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn't fancy a mouthful of my own
buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard.
Got some funny ideas.

           
Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his
new, buttocky tongue.
The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and
American surgical techniques knew better
. These gaps were the creationist's
main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the
random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster-children, the
deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses
there.
No point arguing with these geezers
, the cabbie said.
I don't
hold with God myself
. No point, one small part of Chamcha's consciousness
agreed. No point suggesting that "the fossil record" wasn't some sort
of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since
Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in
the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical
leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress―the very English
middleclass progress―Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent,
a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more
revolution than evolution.―I've heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene
Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music.
Ave atque
vale
.