‘So the Grandee will betray his pledge,’ Mahound says.
‘Who knows?’ scoffs Hind. ‘He doesn’t even know himself. He has to work out the odds. Weak, as I told you. But you know I’m telling the truth. Between Allah and the Three there can be no peace. I don’t want it. I want the fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?’
‘You are sand and I am water,’ Mahound says. ‘Water washes sand away.’
‘And the desert soaks up water,’ Hind answers him. ‘Look around you.’
Soon after his departure the wounded men arrive at the Grandee’s palace, having screwed up their courage to inform Hind that old Hamza has killed her brothers. But by then the Messenger is nowhere to be found; is heading, once again, slowly towards Mount Cone.
Gibreel, when he’s tired, wants to murder his mother for giving him such a damn fool nickname, angel, what a word, he begs what? whom? to be spared the dream-city of crumbling sandcastles and lions with three-tiered teeth, no more heart-washing of prophets or instructions to recite or promises of paradise, let there be an end to revelations, finito, khattam-shud. What he longs for: black, dreamless sleep. Mother-fucking dreams, cause of all the trouble in the human race, movies, too, if I was God I’d cut the imagination right out of people and then maybe poor bastards like me could get a good night’s rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his eyes to stay open, unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas and sends him blind, but he’s only human, in the end he falls down the rabbit-hole and there he is again, in Wonderland, up the mountain, and the businessman is waking up, and once again his wanting, his need, goes to work, not on my jaws and voice this time, but on my whole body; he diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards him, his gravitational field is unbelievable, as powerful as a goddamn megastar … and then Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over and over, in the cave of the fine white sand that rises around them like a veil. As if he’s learning me, searching me, as if I’m the one undergoing the test.
In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you he’s getting in everywhere, his tongue in my ear his fist around my balls, there was never a person with such a rage in him, he has to has to know he has to K N O W and I have nothing to tell him, he’s twice as physically fit as I am and four times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught ourselves by listening a lot but as is plaintosee he’s even a better listener than me; so we roll kick scratch, he’s getting cut up quite a bit but of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can’t snag an angel on a bloody thorn-bush, you can’t bruise him on a rock. And they have an audience, there are djinns and afreets and all sorts of spooks sitting on the boulders to watch the fight, and in the sky are the three winged creatures, looking like herons or swans or just women depending on the tricks of the light … Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.
After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down beneath the angel, it’s what he wanted, it was his will filling me up and giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels can’t lose such fights, it wouldn’t be right, it’s only devils who get beaten in such circs, so the moment I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out of me once again, made it pour all over him, like sick.
At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the Prophet Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, post-revelatory sleep, but on this occasion he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes to his senses in that high wilderness there is nobody to be seen, no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news. ‘It was the Devil,’ he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. ‘The last time, it was Shaitan.’ This is what he has heard in his listening, that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that’s a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.
‘First it was the Devil,’ Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. ‘But this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground.’
The disciples stop him in the ravines near the foot of Mount Cone to warn him of the fury of Hind, who is wearing white mourning garments and has loosened her black hair, letting it fly about her like a storm, or trail in the dust, erasing her footsteps so that she seems like an incarnation of the spirit of vengeance itself. They have all fled the city, and Hamza, too, is lying low; but the word is that Abu Simbel has not, as yet, acceded to his wife’s pleas for the blood that washes away blood. He is still calculating the odds in the matter of Mahound and the goddesses … Mahound, against his followers’ advice, returns to Jahilia, going straight to the House of the Black Stone. The disciples follow him in spite of their fear. A crowd gathers in the hope of further scandal or dismemberment or some such entertainment. Mahound does not disappoint them.
He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces the abrogation of the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses are banished from the true recitation, al-qur’an. New verses are thundered in their place.
‘Shall He have daughters and you sons?’ Mahound recites. ‘That would be a fine division!
‘These are but names you have dreamed of, you and your fathers. Allah vests no authority in them.’
He leaves the dumbfounded House before it occurs to anybody to pick up, or throw, the first stone.
After the repudiation of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Mahound returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him. A kind of vengeance – whose? Light or dark? Goodguy badguy? – wrought, as is not unusual, upon the innocent. The Prophet’s wife, seventy years old, sits by the foot of a stone-latticed window, sits upright with her back to the wall, dead.
Mahound in the grip of his misery keeps himself to himself, hardly says a word for weeks. The Grandee of Jahilia institutes a policy of persecution that advances too slowly for Hind. The name of the new religion is Submission; now Abu Simbel decrees that its adherents must submit to being sequestered in the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city; to a curfew; to a ban on employment. And there are many physical assaults, women spat upon in shops, the manhandling of the faithful by the gangs of young turks whom the Grandee secretly controls, fire thrown at night through a window to land amongst unwary sleepers. And, by one of the familiar paradoxes of history, the numbers of the faithful multiply, like a crop that miraculously flourishes as conditions of soil and climate grow worse and worse.
An offer is received, from the citizens of the oasis-settlement of Yathrib to the north: Yathrib will shelter those-who-submit, if they wish to leave Jahilia. Hamza is of the opinion that they must go. ‘You’ll never finish your Message here, nephew, take my word. Hind won’t be happy till she’s ripped out your tongue, to say nothing of my balls, excuse me.’ Mahound, alone and full of echoes in the house of his bereavement, gives his consent, and the faithful depart to make their plans. Khalid the water-carrier hangs back and the hollow-eyed Prophet waits for him to speak. Awkwardly, he says: ‘Messenger, I doubted you. But you were wiser than we knew. First we said, Mahound will never compromise, and you compromised. Then we said, Mahound has bet
rayed us, but you were bringing us a deeper truth. You brought us the Devil himself, so that we could witness the workings of the Evil One, and his overthrow by the Right. You have enriched our faith. I am sorry for what I thought.’
Mahound moves away from the sunlight falling through the window. ‘Yes.’ Bitterness, cynicism. ‘It was a wonderful thing I did. Deeper truth. Bringing you the Devil. Yes, that sounds like me.’
From the peak of Mount Cone, Gibreel watches the faithful escaping Jahilia, leaving the city of aridity for the place of cool palms and water, water, water. In small groups, almost empty-handed, they move across the empire of the sun, on this first day of the first year at the new beginning of Time, which has itself been born again, as the old dies behind them and the new waits ahead. And one day Mahound himself slips away. When his escape is discovered, Baal composes a valedictory ode:
What kind of idea
does ‘Submission’ seem today?
One full of fear.
An idea that runs away.
Mahound has reached his oasis; Gibreel is not so lucky. Often, now, he finds himself alone on the summit of Mount Cone, washed by the cold, falling stars, and then they fall upon him from the night sky, the three winged creatures, Lat Uzza Manat, flapping around his head, clawing at his eyes, biting, whipping him with their hair, their wings. He puts up his hands to protect himself, but their revenge is tireless, continuing whenever he rests, whenever he drops his guard. He struggles against them, but they are faster, nimbler, winged.
He has no devil to repudiate. Dreaming, he cannot wish them away.
1
I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently. Her name was Rosa Diamond; she was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily through her salt-caked bedroom windows, watching the full moon’s sea. And I know what it isn’t, too, she nodded further, it isn’t a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all that bunkum. What’s a ghost? Unfinished business, is what. – At which the old lady, six feet tall, straight-backed, her hair hacked short as any man’s, jerked the corners of her mouth downwards in a satisfied, tragedy-mask pout, – pulled a knitted blue shawl tight around bony shoulders, – and closed, for a moment, her sleepless eyes, to pray for the past’s return. Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let’s have you, Willie-the-Conk.
Nine hundred years ago all this was under water, this portioned shore, this private beach, its shingle rising steeply towards the little row of flaky-paint villas with their peeling boathouses crammed full of deckchairs, empty picture frames, ancient tuckboxes stuffed with bundles of letters tied up in ribbons, mothballed silk-and-lace lingerie, the tearstained reading matter of once-young girls, lacrosse sticks, stamp albums, and all the buried treasure-chests of memories and lost time. The coastline had changed, had moved a mile or more out to sea, leaving the first Norman castle stranded far from water, lapped now by marshy land that afflicted with all manner of dank and boggy agues the poor who lived there on their whatstheword estates. She, the old lady, saw the castle as the ruin of a fish betrayed by an antique ebbing tide, as a sea-monster petrified by time. Nine hundred years! Nine centuries past, the Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman’s home. On clear nights when the moon was full, she waited for its shining, revenant ghost.
Best place to see ’em come, she reassured herself, grandstand view. Repetition had become a comfort in her antiquity; the well-worn phrases, unfinished business, grandstand view, made her feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to be. – When the full moon sets, the dark before the dawn, that’s their moment. Billow of sail, flash of oars, and the Conqueror himself at the flagship’s prow, sailing up the beach between the barnacled wooden breakwaters and a few inverted sculls. – O, I’ve seen things in my time, always had the gift, the phantom-sight. – The Conqueror in his pointy metal-nosed hat, passing through her front door, gliding betwixt the cakestands and antimacassared sofas, like an echo resounding faintly through that house of remembrances and yearnings; then falling silent; as the grave.
– Once as a girl on Battle Hill, she was fond of recounting, always in the same time-polished words, – once as a solitary child, I found myself, quite suddenly and with no sense of strangeness, in the middle of a war. Longbows, maces, pikes. The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down in their sweet youth. Harold Arroweye and William with his mouth full of sand. Yes, always the gift, the phantom-sight. – The story of the day on which the child Rosa had seen a vision of the battle of Hastings had become, for the old woman, one of the defining landmarks of her being, though it had been told so often that nobody, not even the teller, could confidently swear that it was true. I long for them sometimes, ran Rosa’s practised thoughts. Les beaux jours: the dear, dead days. She closed, once more, her reminiscent eyes. When she opened them, she saw, down by the water’s edge, no denying it, something beginning to move.
What she said aloud in her excitement: ‘I don’t believe it!’ – ‘It isn’t true!’ – ‘He’s never here!’ – On unsteady feet, with bumping chest, Rosa went for her hat, cloak, stick. While, on the winter seashore, Gibreel Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand.
Snow.
Ptui!
Gibreel spat; leapt up, as if propelled by expectorated slush; wished Chamcha – as has been reported – many happy returns of the day; and commenced to beat the snow from sodden purple sleeves. ‘God, yaar,’ he shouted, hopping from foot to foot, ‘no wonder these people grow hearts of bloody ice.’
Then, however, the pure delight of being surrounded by such a quantity of snow quite overcame his first cynicism – for he was a tropical man – and he started capering about, saturnine and soggy, making snowballs and hurling them at his prone companion, envisioning a snowman, and singing a wild, swooping rendition of the carol ‘Jingle Bells.’ The first hint of light was in the sky, and on this cosy sea-coast danced Lucifer, the morning’s star.
His breath, it should be mentioned, had somehow or other wholly ceased to smell …
‘Come on, baby,’ cried invincible Gibreel, in whose behaviour the reader may, not unreasonably, perceive the delirious, dislocating effects of his recent fall. ‘Rise ’n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm!’ Turning his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land. ‘Spoono,’ he pleaded, ‘shift, baba, or are you bloody dead?’ Which being uttered brought the speaker to (or at least towards) his senses. He bent over the other’s prostrate form, did not dare to touch. ‘Not now, old Chumch,’ he urged. ‘Not when we came so far.’
Saladin: was not dead, but weeping. The tears of shock freezing on his face. And all his body cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth as glass, like a bad dream come true. In the miasmic semiconsciousness induced by his low body temperature he was possessed by the nightmare-fear of cracking, of seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away with the shards. He was full of questions, did we truly, I mean, with your hands flapping, and then the waters, you don’t mean to tell me they actually, like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we could, across the ocean-floor, it never happened, couldn’t have, but if not then how, or did we in some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids, the sea passing through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes or no, I need to have to … but when his eyes opened the questions acquired the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could no longer grasp them, their tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was looking up at the sky, and noticed that it was the wrong colour entirely, blood-orange flecked with green, and the snow was blue as ink. He blinked hard but the colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that he had fallen out of the sky into some wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counterf
eit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he considered briefly: Hell? No, no, he reassured himself as unconsciousness threatened, that can’t be it, not yet, you aren’t dead yet; but dying.
Well then: a transit lounge.
He began to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that it occurred to him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane.
Then nothing existed. He was in a void, and if he were to survive he would have to construct everything from scratch, would have to invent the ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there was no need now to worry about such matters, because here in front of him was the inevitable: the tall, bony figure of Death, in a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a dark cloak flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silver-headed cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots.
‘What do you imagine yourselves to be doing here?’ Death wanted to know. ‘This is private property. There’s a sign.’ Said in a woman’s voice that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled.
A few moments later, Death bent over him – to kiss me, he panicked silently. To suck the breath from my body. He made small, futile movements of protest.
‘He’s alive all right,’ Death remarked to, who was it, Gibreel. ‘But, my dear. His breath: what a pong. When did he last clean his teeth?’
One man’s breath was sweetened, while another’s, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no side-effects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let’s be clear: great falls change people. You think they fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im-. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heaven-light to hellfire … under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming new, and at their age at that.
The Satanic Verses: A Novel Page 14