The Satanic Verses (70 page)

           
What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel's brain? Verses.
What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.

           
The trumpet, Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket:
Pick me up!
Yesyesyes: the Trump. To hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff up
your cheeks and root y-toot-toot. Come on, it's party time
.

           
How hot it is: steamy, close, intolerable. This is no Proper London: not this
improper city. Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville. He wanders through a
confusion of languages. Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian
"babilu". "The gate of God." Babylondon.

           
Where's this?

           
- Yes.―He meanders, one night, behind the cathedrals of the Industrial
Revolution, the railway termini of north London. Anonymous King's Cross, the
bat-like menace of the St Pancras tower, the red-and-black gas-holders
inflating and deflating like giant iron lungs. Where once in battle Queen
Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.

           
The Goodsway:―but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under
tungsten lamps, what delicacies are on offer in that way!―Swinging
handbags, calling out, silver-skirted, wearing fish-net tights: these are not
only young goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They have
short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all have
been thrown out of their homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of them are
white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent of their earnings. Goods are only
goods, after all, especially when they're trash.

           
- Gibreel Farishta in the Goodsway is hailed from shadows and lamps; and
quickens, at first, his pace.
What's this to do with me? Bloody
pussies-galore
. But then he slows and stops, hearing something else calling
to him from lamps and shadows, some need, some wordless plea, hidden just under
the tinny voices of tenpound tarts. His footsteps slow down, then halt. He is
held by their desires.
For what?
They are moving towards him now, drawn
to him like fishes on unseen hooks. As they near him their walks change, their
hips lose their swagger, their faces start looking their age, in spite of all
the make-up. When they reach him, they kneel.
Who do you say that I am?
he asks, and wants to add:
I know your names. I met you once before,
elsewhere, behind a curtain: Twelve of you then as now. Ayesha, Hafsah, Ramlah,
Sawdah, Zainab, Zainab, Maimunah, Safia, Juwairiyah, Umm Salamah the
Makhzumite, Rehana the Jew, and the beautiful Mary the Copt
. Silently, they
remain on their knees. Their wishes are made known to him without words.
What
is an archangel but a puppet? Kathputli, marionette. The faithful bend us to
their will. We are forces of nature and they, our masters. Mistresses, too
.
The heaviness in his limbs, the heat, and in his ears a buzzing like bees on
summer afternoons. It would be easy to faint.

           
He does not faint.

           
He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.

           
And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to his lips, his unquiet
horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.

           
* * * * *

           
After the stream of fire has emerged from the mouth of his golden trumpet and
consumed the approaching men, wrapping them in a cocoon of flame, unmaking them
so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling on the sidewalk,
Gibreel understands.

           
He is walking again, leaving behind him the gratitude of the whores, heading in
the direction of the borough of Brickhall, Azraeel once more in his capacious
pocket. Things are becoming clear.

           
He is the Archangel Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, with the power of
revelation in his hands. He can reach into the breasts of men and women, pick
out the desires of their inmost hearts, and make them real. He is the quencher
of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He is the genie of
the lamp, and his master is the Roc.

           
What desires, what imperatives are in the midnight air? He breathes them
in.―And nods, so be it, yes.―Let it be fire. This is a city that
has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.

           
Fire, falling fire. "This is the judgment of God in his wrath,"
Gibreel Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, "that men be granted
their heart's desires, and that they be by them consumed."

           
Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him.
Nigger eat white man's shit
,
suggest the unoriginal walls. The buildings have names:
"Isandhlwana", "Rorke's Drift". But a revisionist
enterprise is underway, for two of the four towers have been renamed, and bear,
now, the names "Mandela" and "Toussaint
l'Ouverture".―The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete
formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual wind,
and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards
of broken doors, dolls' legs, vegetable refuse extracted from plastic disposal
bags by hungry cats and dogs, fastfood packets, rolling cans, shattered job
prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated
bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. He stands motionless while small
groups of residents rush past in different directions. Some (not all) are
carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All of the groups contain white
youngsters as well as black. He raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to
play.

           
Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps
of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it burns
greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of
them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance
upon the concrete, needing neither combustible materials nor roots. Here, a
pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a silver rose.―And now the
buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides
of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbours, forming hedges of
multicoloured flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth
accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming
overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined
chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang
up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.

           
But here, there is no beauty, sleeping within. There is Gibreel Farishta,
walking in a world of fire. In the High Street he sees houses built of flame,
with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains hanging at the
windows.―And there are men and women with fiery skins strolling, running,
milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The Street has become red hot,
molten, a river the colour of blood.―All, all is ablaze as he toots his
merry horn,
giving the people what they want
, the hair and teeth of the
citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns, and birds fly overhead on blazing
wings.

           
The adversary is very close. The adversary is a magnet, is a whirlpool's eye,
is the irresistible centre of a black hole, his gravitational force creating an
event horizon from which neither Gibreel, nor light, can escape.
This way
,
the adversary calls.
I'm over here
.

           
Not a palace, but only a cafe. And in the rooms above, a bed and breakfast
joint. No sleeping princess, but a disappointed woman, overpowered by smoke,
lies unconscious here; and beside her, on the floor beside their bed, and
likewise unconscious, her husband, the Mecca-returned ex-schoolteacher,
Sufyan.―While, elsewhere in the burning Shaandaar, faceless persons stand
at windows waving piteously for help, being unable (no mouths) to scream.

           
The adversary: there he blows!

           
Silhouetted against the backdrop of the ignited Shaandaar Cafe, see, that's the
very fellow!

           
Azraeel leaps unbidden into Farishta's hand.

           
Even an archangel may experience a revelation, and when Gibreel catches, for
the most fleeting of instants, Saladin Chamcha's eye,―then in that
fractional and infinite moment the veils are ripped away from his
sight,―he sees himself walking with Chamcha in Brickhall Fields, lost in
a rhapsody, revealing the most intimate secrets of his lovemaking with Alleluia
Cone,―those same secrets which afterwards were whispered into telephones
by a host of evil voices,―beneath all of which Gibreel now discerns the
unifying talent of the adversary, who could be guttural and high, who insulted
and ingratiated, who was both insistent and shy, who was
prosaic,―yes!―and versifying, too.―And now, at last, Gibreel
Farishta recognizes for the first time that the adversary has not simply
adopted Chamcha's features as a disguise;―nor is this any case of
paranormal possession, of body-snatching by an invader up from Hell; that, in
short, the evil is not external to Saladin, but springs from some recess of his
own true nature, that it has been spreading through his selfhood like a cancer,
erasing what was good in him, wiping out his spirit,―and doing so with
many deceptive feints and dodges, seeming at times to recede; while, in fact,
during the illusion of remission, under cover of it, so to speak, it continued
perniciously to spread;―and now, no doubt, it has filled him up; now
there is nothing left of Saladin but this, the dark fire of evil in his soul,
consuming him as wholly as the other fire, multicoloured and engulfing, is
devouring the screaming city. Truly these are "most horrid, malicious,
bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire".

           
The fire is an arch across the sky. Saladin Chamcha, the adversary, who is also
Spoono, my old Chumch
, has disappeared into the doorway of the Shaandaar
Cafe. This is the maw of the black hole; the horizon closes around it, all
other possibilities fade, the universe shrinks to this solitary and irresistible
point. Blowing a great blast on his trumpet, Gibreel plunges through the open
door.

           
* * * * *

           
The building occupied by the Brickhall community relations council was a
single-storey monster in purple brick with bulletproof windows, a bunker-like
creation of the 1960s, when such lines were considered sleek. It was not an
easy building to enter; the door had been fitted with an entryphone and opened
on to a narrow alley down one side of the building which ended at a second, also
security-locked, door. There was also a burglar alarm.

           
This alarm, it afterwards transpired, had been switched off, probably by the
two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the
assistance of a key. It was officially suggested that these persons had been
bent on an act of sabotage, an "inside job", since one of them, the
dead woman, had in fact been an employee of the organization whose offices
these were. The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the miscreants
had perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that they would ever come to light.
An "own goal" remained, however, the most probable explanation.

           
A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant.

           
Inspector Stephen Kinch, issuing the statement in which these facts were
stated, made a "linkage" between the fire at the Brickhall CRC and
that at the Shaandaar Cafe, where the second dead person, the male, had been a
semi-permanent resident. It was possible that the man had been the real firebug
and the woman, who was his mistress although married to and still cohabiting
with another man, had been no more than his dupe. Political motives―both
parties were well known for their radical views―could not be discounted,
though such was the muddiness of the water in the far-left groupuscules they
frequented that it would be hard ever to get a clear picture of what such
motives might have been. It was also possible that the two crimes, even if
committed by the same man, could have had different motivations. Possibly the
man was simply the hired criminal, burning down the Shaandaar for the insurance
money at the behest of the now-deceased owners, and torching the CRC at the
behest of his lover, perhaps on account of some intra-office vendetta?

           
That the burning of the CRC was an act of arson was beyond doubt. Quantities of
petrol had been poured over desks, papers, curtains. "Many people do not
understand how quickly a petrol fire spreads," Inspector Kinch stated to
scribbling journalists. The corpses, which had been so badly burned that dental
records had been required for identification purposes, had been found in the
photocopying room. "That's all we have." The end.

           
I have more.

           
I have certain questions, anyhow.―About, for instance, an unmarked blue
Mercedes panel van, which followed Walcott Roberts's pick-up truck, and then
Pamela Chamcha's MG.―About the men who emerged from this van, their faces
behind Hallowe'en masks, and forced their way into the CRC offices just as
Pamela unlocked the outer door.―About what really happened inside those
offices, because purple brick and bulletproof glass cannot easily be penetrated
by the human eye.―And about, finally, the whereabouts of a red plastic
briefcase, and the documents it contains.