"A homing instinct: one crazy heading for another," Alicja said when her daughter phoned with the news. "You must be putting out a signal, some sort of bleeping thing." As usual, she hid her concern beneath wisecracks. Finally she came out with it: "This time be sensible, Alleluia, okay? This time the asylum."

"We'll see, mother. He's asleep right now."

"So he isn't going to wake up?" Alicja expostulated, then controlled herself. "All right, I know, it's your life. Listen, isn't this weather something? They say it could last months: 'blocked pattern', I heard on television, rain over Moscow, while here it's a tropical heatwaye. I called Boniek at Stanford and told him: now we have weather in London, too."

VI

 

Return to

 

Jahilia

When Baal the poet saw a single teardrop the colour of blood emerging from the corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to Jahilia after an exile of a quarter-century. He belched violently -- an affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the body, a slow congealment of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a figure quite unlike his quick young self. Sometimes he felt that the air itself had thickened, resisting him, so that even a shortish walk could leave him panting, with an ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest . . . and Mahound must have changed, too, returning as he was in splendour and omnipotence to the place whence he fled emptyhanded, without so much as a wife. Mahound at sixty-five. Our names meet, separate, and meet again, Baal thought, but the people going by the names do not remain the same. He left AlLat to emerge into bright sunlight, and heard from behind his back a little snickering laugh. He turned, weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of a robe vanishing around a corner. These days, down-at--heel Baal often made strangers giggle in the street. "Bastard!" he shouted at the top of his voice, scandalizing the other worshippers in the House. Baal, the decrepit poet, behaving badly again. He shrugged and headed for home.

The city of Jahilia was no longer built of sand. That is to say, the passage of the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon, the forgetfulness of the people and the inevitability of progress had hardened the town, so that it had lost its old, shifting, provisional quality of a mirage in which men could live, and become a prosaic place, quotidian and (like its poets) poor. Mahound's arm had grown long; his power had encircled Jahilia, cutting off its life--blood, its pilgrims and caravans. The fairs of Jahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold.
Even the Grandee himself had acquired a theadbare look, his white hair as full of gaps as his teeth. His concubines were dying of old age, and he lacked the energy -- or, so the rumours murmured in the desultory alleys of the city, the need -- to replace them. Some days he forgot to shave, which added to his look of dilapidation and defeat. Only Hind was the same as ever.

She had always had something of a reputation as a witch, who could wish illnesses upon you if you failed to bow down before her litter as it passed, an occultist with the power of transforming men into desert snakes when she had had her fill of them, and then catching them by the tail and having them cooked in their skins for her evening meal. Now that she had reached sixty the legend of her necromancy was being given new substantiation by her extraordinary and unnatural failure to age. While all around her hardened into stagnation, while the old gangs of Sharks grew middle--aged and squatted on Street corners playing cards and rolling dice, while the old knot--witches and contortionists starved to death in the gullies, while a generation grew up whose conservatism and unquestioning worship of the material world was born of their knowledge of the probability of unemployment and penury, while the great city lost its sense of itself and even the cult of the dead declined in popularity to the relief of the camels of Jahilia, whose dislike of being left with severed hamstrings on human graves was easy to comprehend .. . while Jahilia decayed, in short, Hind remained unwrinkled, her body as firm as any young woman's, her hair as black as crow feathers, her eyes sparkling like knives, her bearing still haughty, her voice still brooking no opposition. Hind, not Simbel, ruled the city now; or so she undeniably believed.

As the Grandee grew into a soft and pursy old age, Hind took to writing a series of admonitory and hortatory epistles or bulls to the people of the city. These were pasted up on every street in town. So it was that Hind and not Abu Simbel came to be thought of by Jahilians as the embodiment of the city, its living avatar, because they found in her physical unchangingness and in the unflinching resolve of her proclamations a description of themselves far more palatable than the picture they saw in the mirror of Simbel's crumbling face. Hind's posters were more influential than any poet's verses. She was still sexually voracious, and had slept with every writer in the city (though it was a long time since Baal had been allowed into her bed); now the writers were used up, discarded, and she was rampant. With sword as well as pen. She was Hind, who had joined the Jahilian army disguised as a man, using sorcery to deflect all spears and swords, seeking out her brothers' killer through the storm of war. Hind, who butchered the Prophet's uncle, and ate old Hamza's liver and his heart.

Who could resist her? For her eternal youth which was also theirs; for her ferocity which gave them the illusion of being invincible; and for her bulls, which were refusals of time, of history, of age, which sang the city's undimmed magnificence and defied the garbage and decrepitude of the streets, which insisted on greatness, on leadership, on immortality, on the status of Jahilians as custodians of the divine . . . for these writings the people forgave her her promiscuity, they turned a blind eye to the stories of Hind being weighed in emeralds on her birthday, they ignored rumours of orgies, they laughed when told of the size of her wardrobe, of the five hundred and eighty-one nightgowns made of gold leaf and the four hundred and twenty pairs of ruby slippers. The citizens of Jahilia dragged themselves through their increasingly dangerous streets, in which murder for small change was becoming commonplace, in which old women were being raped and ritually slaughtered, in which the riots of the starving were brutally put down by Hind's personal police force, the Manticorps; and in spite of the evidence of their eyes, stomachs and wallets, they believed what Hind whispered in their ears: Rule, Jahilia, glory of the world.

Not all of them, of course. Not, for example, Baal. Who looked away from public affairs and wrote poems of unrequited love.

Munching a white radish, he arrived home, passing beneath a dingy archway in a cracking wall. Here there was a small urinous courtyard littered with feathers, vegetable peelings, blood. There was no sign of human life: only flies, shadows, fear. These days it was necessary to be on one's guard. A sect of murderous hashashin roamed the city. Affluent persons were advised to approach their homes on the opposite side of the street, to make sure that the house was not being watched; when the coast was clear they would rush for the door and shut it behind them before any lurking criminal could push his way in. Baal did not bother with such precautions. Once he had been affluent, but that was a quarter of a century ago. Now there was no demand for satires -- the general fear of Mahound had destroyed the market for insults and wit. And with the decline of the cult of the dead had come a sharp drop in orders for epitaphs and triumphal odes of revenge. Times were hard all around.

Dreaming of long-lost banquets, Baal climbed an unsteady wooden staircase to his small upstairs room. What did he have to steal? He wasn't worth the knife. Opening his door, he began to enter, when a push sent him tumbling to bloody his nose against the far wall. "Don't kill me," he squealed blindly. "O God, don't murder me, for pity's sake, O."

The other hand closed the door. Baal knew that no matter how loudly he screamed they would remain alone, sealed off from the world in that uncaring room. Nobody would come; he himself, hearing his neighbour shriek, would have pushed his cot against the door.

The intruder's hooded cloak concealed his face completely. Baal mopped his bleeding nose, kneeling, shaking uncontrollably. "I've got no money," he implored. "I've got nothing." Now the stranger spoke: "If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse." And then, after a pause: "Baal. There's not much left of you. I had hoped for more."

Now Baal felt oddly affronted as well as terrified. Was this some kind of demented fan, who would kill him because he no longer lived up to the power of his old work? Still trembling, he attempted self--deprecation. "To meet a writer is, usually, to be disappointed," he offered. The other ignored this remark. "Mahound is coming," he said.

This flat statement filled Baal with the most profound terror. "What's that got to do with me?" he cried. "What does he want? It was a long time ago
-- a lifetime -- more than a lifetime. What does he want? Are you from, are you sent by him?"

"His memory is as long as his face," the intruder said, pushing back his hood. "No, I am not his messenger. You and I have something in common. We are both afraid of him."

"I know you," Baal said.

 

"Yes." "The way you speak. You're a foreigner."

 

"'A revolution of water--carriers, immigrants and slaves,'" the stranger quoted. "Your words."

"You're the immigrant," Baal remembered. "The Persian. Sulaiman." The Persian smiled his crooked smile. "Salman," he corrected. "Not wise, but peaceful."

"You were one of the closest to him," Baal said, perplexed.

 

"The closer you are to a conjurer," Salman bitterly replied, "the easier to spot the trick."

 

And Gibreel dreamed this:

At the oasis of Yathrib the followers of the new faith of Submission found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they financed themselves by acts of brigandage, attacking the rich camel-trains on their way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal, no qualms about ends and means. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound -- or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? -- should one say Al-Lah? -- became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation -- the _recitation_ -- told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God.

After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound, stating beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a man should ever walk upon the moon, and being equally positive on the transient nature of damnation: even the most evil of doers would eventually be cleansed by hellfire and find their way into the perfumed gardens, Gulistan and Bostan. It would have been different, Salman complained to Baal, if Mahound took up his positions after receiving the revelation from Gibreel; but no, he just laid down the law and the angel would confirm it afterwards; so I began to get a bad smell in my nose, and I thought, this must be the odour of those fabled and legendary unclean creatures, what's their name, prawns.

The fishy smell began to obsess Salman, who was the most highly educated of Mahound's intimates owing to the superior educational system then on offer in Persia. On account of his scholastic advancement Salman was made Mahound's official scribe, so that it fell to him to write down the endlessly proliferating rules. All those revelations of convenience, he told Baal, and the longer I did the job the worse it got. -- For a time, however, his suspicions had to be shelved, because the armies of Jahilia marched on Yathrib, determined to swat the flies who were pestering their camel--trains and interfering with business. What followed is well known, no need for me to repeat, Salman said, but then his immodesty burst out of him and forced him to tell Baal how he personally had saved Yathrib from certain destruction, how he had preserved Mahound's neck with his idea of a ditch. Salman had persuaded the Prophet to have a huge trench dug all the way around the unwalled oasis settlement, making it too wide even for the fabled Arab horses of the famous Jahilian cavalry to leap across. A ditch: with sharpened stakes at the bottom. When the Jahilians saw this foul piece of unsportsmanlike hole-digging their sense of chivalry and honour obliged them to behave as if the ditch had not been dug, and to ride their horses at it, full--tilt. The flower of Jahilia's army, human as well as equine, ended up impaled on the pointed sticks of Salman's Persian deviousness, trust an immigrant not to play the game. -- And after the defeat of Jahilia? Salman lamented to Baal: You'd have thought I'd have been a hero, I'm not a vain man but where were the public honours, where was the gratitude of Mahound, why didn't the archangel mention _me_ in despatches? Nothing, not a syllable, it was as if the faithful thought of my ditch as a cheap trick, too, an outlandish thing, dishonouring, unfair; as if their manhood had been damaged by the thing, as though I'd hurt their pride by saving their skins. I kept my mouth shut and said nothing, but I lost a lot of friends after that, I can tell you, people hate you to do them a good turn.

In spite of thc ditch of Yathrib, the faithful lost a good many men in the war against Jahilia. On their raiding sorties they lost as many lives as they claimed. And after the end of the war, hey presto, there was the Archangel Gibreel instructing the surviving males to marry the widowed women, lest by remarrying outside the faith they be lost to Submission. Oh, such a practical angel, Salman sneered to Baal. By now he had produced a bottle of toddy from the folds of his cloak and the two men were drinking steadily in the failing light. Salman grew ever more garrulous as the yellow liquid in the bottle went down; Baal couldn't recall when he'd last heard anyone talk up such a storm. O, those matter--of-fact revelations, Salman cried, we were even told it didn't matter if we were already married, we could have up to four marriages if we could afford it, well, you can imagine, the lads really went for that.

What finally finished Salman with Mahound: the question of the women; and of the Satanic verses. Listen, I'm no gossip, Salman drunkenly confided, but after his wife's death Mahound was no angel, you understand my meaning. But in Yathrib he almost met his match. Those women up there: they turned his beard half-white in a year. The point about our Prophet, my dear Baal, is that he didn't like his women to answer back, he went for mothers and daughters, think of his first wife and then Ayesha: too old and too young, his two loves. He didn't like to pick on someone his own size. But in Yathrib the women are different, you don't know, here injahilia you're used to ordering your females about but up there they won't put up with it. When a man gets married he goes to live with his wife's people! Imagine! Shocking, isn't it? And throughout the marriage the wife keeps her own tent. If she wants to get rid of her husband she turns the tent round to face in the opposite direction, so that when he comes to her he finds fabric where the door should be, and that's that, he's out, divorced, not a thing he can do about it. Well, our girls were beginning to go for that type of thing, getting who knows what sort of ideas in their heads, so at once, bang, out comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn't do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting at home being wise and waxing their chins. How the women of Yathrib laughed at the faithful, I swear, but that man is a magician, nobody could resist his charm; the faithful women did as he ordered them. They Submitted: he was offering them Paradise, after all.

"Anyway," Salman said near the bottom of the bottle, "finally I decided to test him."

One night the Persian scribe had a dream in which he was hovering above the figure of Mahound at the Prophet's cave on Mount Cone. At first Salman took this to be no more than a nostalgic reverie of the old days in Jahilia, but then it struck him that his point of view, in the dream, had been that of the archangel, and at that moment the memory of the incident of the Satanic verses came back to him as vividly as if the thing had happened the previous day. "Maybe I hadn't dreamed of myself as Gibreel," Salman recounted. "Maybe I was Shaitan." The realization of this possibility gave him his diabolic idea. After that, when he sat at the Prophet's feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.

"Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was described as _all-hearing, all-knowing_, I would write, _all-knowing, allwise_. Here's the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God's own Messenger, then what did that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry? Look, I swear, I was shaken to my soul. It's one thing to be a smart bastard and have half--suspicions about funny business, but it's quite another thing to find out that you're right. Listen: I changed my life for that man. I left my country, crossed the world, settled among people who thought me a slimy foreign coward for saving their, who never appreciated what I, but never mind that. The truth is that what! expected when I made that first tiny change, _all-wise_ instead of _all-hearing_ -- what I _wanted_ --was to read it back to the Prophet, and he'd say, What's the matter with you, Salman, arc you going deaf? And I'd say, Oops, O God, bit of a slip, how could I, and correct myself. But it didn't happen; and now I was writing the Revelation and nobody was noticing, and I didn't have the courage to own up. I was scared silly, I can tell you. Also: I was sadder than I have ever been. So I had to go on doing it. Maybe he'd just missed out once, I thought, anybody can make a mistake. So the next time I changed a bigger thing. He said _Christian_, I wrote down _Jew_. He'd notice that, surely; how could he not? But when I read him the chapter he nodded and thanked me politely, and I went out of his tent with tears in my eyes. After that I knew my days in Yathrib were numbered; but I had to go on doing it. I had to. There is no bitterness like that of a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost. I would fall, I knew, but he would fall with me. So I went on with my devilment, changing verses, until one day I read my lines to him and saw him frown and shake his head as if to clear his mind, and then nod his approval slowly, but with a little doubt. I knew I'd reached the edge, and that the next time I rewrote the Book he'd know everything. That night I lay awake, holding his fate in my hands as well as my own. If I allowed myself to be destroyed I could destroy him, too. I had to choose, on that awful night, whether I preferred death with revenge to life without anything. As you see, I chose: life. Before dawn I left Yathrib on my camel, and made my way, suffering numerous misadventures I shall not trouble to relate, back tojahilia. And now Mahound is coming in triumph; so I shall lose my life after all. And his power has grown too great for me to unmake him now."

Baal asked: "Why are you sure he will kill you?"

 

Salman the Persian answered: "It's his Word against mine."

o o o When Salman had slipped into unconsciousness on the floor, Baal lay on his scratchy straw--filled mattress, feeling the steel ring of pain around his forehead, the flutter of warning in his heart. Often his tiredness with his life had made him wish not to grow old, but, as Salman had said, to dream of a thing is very different from being faced with the fact of it. For some time now he had been conscious that the world was closing in around him. He could no longer pretend that his eyes were what they ought to be, and their dimness made his life even more shadowy, harder to grasp. All this blurring and loss of detail: no wonder his poetry had gone down the drain. His ears were getting to be unreliable, too. At this rate he'd soon end up sealed off from everything by the loss of his senses. . . but maybe he'd never get the chance. Mahound was coming. Maybe he would never kiss another woman. Mahound, Mahound. Why has this chatterbox drunk come to me, he thought angrily. What do I have to do with his treachery? Everyone knows why I wrote those satires years ago; he must know. How the Grandee threatened and bullied. I can't be held responsible. And anyway: who is he, that prancing sneering boywonder, Baal of the cutting tongue? I don't recognize him. Look at me: heavy, dull, nearsighted, soon to be deaf. Who do I threaten? Not a soul. He began to shake Salman: wake up, I don't want to be associated with you, you'll get me into trouble.

The Persian snored on, sitting splay-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, his head hanging sideways like a doll"s; Baa!, racked by headache, fell back on to his cot. His verses, he thought, what had they been? _What kind of idea_ damn it, he couldn't even remember them properly _does Submission seem today_ yes, something like that, after all this time it was scarcely surprising _an idea that runs away_ that was the end anyhow. Mahound, any new idea is asked two questions. When it's weak: will it compromise? We know the answer to that one. And now, Mahound, on your return to Jahilia, time for the second question: How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then? We have all changed: all of us except Hind. Who seems, from what this drunkard says, more like a woman of Yathrib than Jahilia. No wonder the two of you didn't hit it off: she wouldn't be your mother or your child.

As he drifted towards sleep, Baa! surveyed his own uselessness, his failed art. Now that he had abdicated all public platforms, his verses were full of loss: of youth, beauty, love, health, innocence, purpose, energy, certainty, hope. Loss of knowledge. Loss of money. The loss of Hind. Figures walked away from him in his odes, and the more passionately he called out to them the faster they moved. The landscape of his poetry was still the desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white sand blowing from their peaks. Soft mountains, uncompleted journeys, the impermanence of tents. How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day? Such questions made his language too abstract, his imagery too fluid, his metre too inconstant. It led him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of classical purity and images of love were constantly degraded by the intrusion of elements of farce. Nobody goes for that stuff, he thought for the thousand and first time, and as unconsciousness arrived he concluded, comfortingly: Nobody remembers me. Oblivion is safety. Then his heart missed a beat and he came wide awake, frightened, cold. Mahound, maybe I'll cheat you of your revenge. He spent the night awake, listening to Salman's rolling, oceanic snores.

Gibreel dreamed campfires:

A famous and unexpected figure walks, one night, between the campfires of Mahound's army. Perhaps on account of the dark, -- or it might be because of the improbability of his presence here, -- it seems that the Grandee of Jahilia has regained, in this final moment of his power, some of the strength of his earlier days. He has come alone; and is led by Khalid the erstwhile water--carrier and the former slave Bilal to the quarters of Mahound.

Next, Gibreel dreamed the Grandee's return home:

The town is full of rumours and there's a crowd in front of the house. After a time the sound of Hind's voice lifted in rage can be clearly heard. Then at an upper balcony Hind shows herself and demands that the crowd tear her husband into small pieces. The Grandee appears beside her; and receives loud, humiliating smacks on both cheeks from his loving wife. Hind has discovered that in spite of all her efforts she has not been able to prevent the Grandee from surrendering the city to Mahound.

Moreover: Abu Simbel has embraced the faith. Simbel in his defeat has lost much of his recent wispiness. He permits Hind to strike him, and then speaks calmly to the crowd. He says: Mahound has promised that anyone within the Grandee's walls will be spared. "So come in, all of you, and bring your families, too."

Hind speaks for the angry crowd. "You old fool. How many citizens can fit inside a single house, even this one? You've done a deal to save your own neck. Let them rip you up and feed you to the ants."

Still the Grandee is mild. "Mahound also promises that all who are found at home, behind closed doors, will be safe. If you will not come into my home then go to your own; and wait."

A third time his wife attempts to turn the crowd against him; this is a balcony scene of hatred instead of love. There can be no compromise with Mahound, she shouts, he is not to be trusted, the people must repudiate Abu Simbel and prepare to fight to the last man, the last woman. She herself is prepared to fight beside them and die for the freedom of Jahilia. "Will you merely lie down before this false prophet, this Dajjal? Can honour be expected of a man who is preparing to storm the city of his birth? Can compromise be hoped for from the uncompromising, pity from the pitiless? We are the mighty of Jahilia, and our goddesses, glorious in battle, will prevail." She commands them to fight in the name of Al-Lat. But the people begin to leave.

Husband and wife stand on their balcony, and the people see them plain. For so long the city has used these two as its mirrors; and because, of late, Jahilians have preferred Hind's images to the greying Grandee, they are suffering, now, from profound shock. A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness. Now the Grandee has awakened them from that sleep; they stand disoriented, rubbing their eyes, unable to believe at first -- if we are so mighty, how then have we fallen so fast, so utterly?
-- and then belief comes, and shows them how their confidence has been built on clouds, on the passion of Hind's proclamations and on very little else. They abandon her, and with her, hope. Plunging into despair, the people of Jahilia go home to lock their doors.
She screams at them, pleads, loosens her hair. "Come to the House of the Black Stone! Come and make sacrifice to Lat!" But they have gone. And Hind and the Grandee are alone on their balcony, while throughout Jahilia a great silence falls, a great stillness begins, and Hind leans against the wall of her palace and closes her eyes.

It is the end. The Grandee murmurs softly: "Not many of us have as much reason to be scared of Mahound as you. If you eat a man's favourite uncle's innards, raw, without so much as salt or garlic, don't be surprised if he treats you, in turn, like meat." Then he leaves her, and goes down into the streets from which even the dogs have vanished, to unlock the city gates.

Gibreel dreamed a temple:

By the open gates of Jahilia stood the temple of Uzza. And Mahound spake unto Khalid who had been a carrier of water before, and now bore greater weights: "Go thou and cleanse that place." So Khalid with a force of men descended upon the temple, for Mahound was loth to enter the city while such abominations stood at its gates.

When the guardian of the temple, who was of the tribe of Shark, saw the approach of Khalid with a great host of warriors, he took up his sword and went to the idol of the goddess. After making his final prayers he hung his sword about her neck, saying, "If thou be truly a goddess, Uzza, defend thyself and thy servant against the coming of Mahound." Then Khalid entered the temple, and when the goddess did not move the guardian said, "Now verily do I know that the God of Mahound is the true God, and this stone but a stone." Then Khalid broke the temple and the idol and returned to Mahound in his tent. And the Prophet asked: "What didst thou see?" Khalid spread his arms. "Nothing," said he. "Then thou hast not destroyed her," the Prophet cried. "Go again, and complete thy work." So Khalid returned to the fallen temple, and there an enormous woman, all black but for her long scarlet tongue, came running at him, naked from head to foot, her black hair flowing to her ankles from her head. Nearing him, she halted, and recited in her terrible voice of sulphur and hellfire: "Have you heard of Lat, and Manat, and Uzza, the Third, the Other? They are the Exalted Birds . . ." But Khalid interrupted her, saying, "Uzza, those are the Devil's verses, and you the Devil's daughter, a creature not to be worshipped, but denied." So he drew his sword and cut her down.

And he returned to Mahound in his tent and said what he had seen. And the Prophet said, "Now may we come into Jahilia," and they arose, and came into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer of Men.

o o o

How many idols in the House of the Black Stone? Don't forget: three hundred and sixty. Sun-god, eagle, rainbow. The colossus of Hubal. Three hundred and sixty wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And are not: but let's not waste time there. Statues fall; stone breaks; what's to be done is done.

Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his tent or the old fairground. The people crowd around the tent, embracing the victorious faith. The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and need not be lingered over.

While Jahilians bow before him, mumbling their life-saving sentences, _there is no God but Al-Lah_, Mahound whispers to Khalid. Somebody has not come to kneel before him; somebody long awaited. "Salman," the Prophet wishes to know. "Has he been found?"

"Not yet. He's hiding; but it won't be long."

There is a distraction. A veiled woman kneels before him, kissing his feet. "You must stop," he enjoins. "It is only God who must be worshipped." But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by toe, joint by joint, the woman licks, kisses, sucks. And Mahound, unnerved, repeats: "Stop. This is incorrect." Now, however, the woman is attending to the soles of his feet, cupping her hands beneath his heel . . . he kicks out, in his confusion, and catches her in the throat. She falls, coughs, then prostrates herself before him, and says firmly: "There is no God but Al-Lah, and Mahound is his Prophet." Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends a hand. "No harm will come to you," he assures her. "All who Submit are spared." But there is a strange confusion in him, and now he understands why, understands the anger, the bitter irony in her overwhelming, excessive, sensual adoration of his feet. The woman throws off her veil: Hind.
"The wife of Abu Simbel," she announces clearly, and a hush falls. "Hind," Mahound says. "I had not forgotten."

But, after a long instant, he nods. "You have Submitted. And are welcome in my tents."

The next day, amid the continuing conversions, Salman the Persian is dragged into the Prophet's presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding a knife at his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the takht. "I found him, where else, with a whore, who was screeching at him because he didn't have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol."

"Salman Farsi," the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of death, but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: "La ilaha ilallah! La ilaha!"

Mahound shakes his head. "Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against the Words of God."

Scribe, ditch-digger, condemned man: unable to muster the smallest scrap of dignity, he blubbers whimpers pleads beats his breast abases himself repents. Khalid says: "This noise is unbearable, Messenger. Can I not cut off his head?" At which the noise increases sharply. Salman swears renewed loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope, makes an offer. "I can show you where your true enemies are." This earns him a few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head. Khalid pulls the kneeling Salman's head back by the hair: "What enemies?" And Salman says a name. Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns.

"Baal," he says, and repeats, twice: "Baal, Baal."

Much to Khalid's disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to death. Bilal intercedes for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere, concedes: yes, yes, let the wretched fellow live. O generosity of Submission! Hind has been spared; and Salman; and in all of Jahilia not a door has been smashed down, not an old foe dragged out to have his gizzard slit like a chicken's in the dust. This is Mahound's answer to the second question: _What happens when you win?_ But one name haunts Mahound, leaps around him, young, sharp, pointing a long painted finger, singing verses whose cruel brilliance ensures their painfulness. That night, when the supplicants have gone, Khalid asks Mahound: "You're still thinking about him?" The Messenger nods, but will not speak. Khalid says: "I made Salman take me to his room, a hovel, but he isn't there, he's hiding out." Again, the nod, but no speech. Khalid presses on: "You want me to dig him out? Wouldn't take much doing. What d"you want done with him? This? This?" Khalid's finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into his navel. Mahound loses his temper. "You're a fool," he shouts at the former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. "Can't you ever work things out without my help?"

Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of dealing with bad moods.

 

o o o

But Khalid, Mahound's general, could not find Baal. In spite of door--to-door searches, proclamations, turnings of stones, the poet proved impossible to nab. And Mahound's lips remained closed, would not part to allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave up the search. "Just let that bastard show his face, just once, any time," he vowed in the Prophet's tent of softnesses and shadows. "I'll slice him so thin you'll be able to see right through each piece."

It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.

 

o o o

Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a day, no alcohol, the locking up of wives. Hind herself retired to her quarters . . . but where was Baal?

Gibreel dreamed a curtain:

The Curtain, _Hijab_, was the name of the most popular brothel in Jahilia, an enormous palazzo of date--palms in water--tinkling courtyards, surrounded by chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns, permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to look alike, each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love, each carpeted with identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned against a wall. None of The Curtain's clients could ever find their way, without help, either into the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back again to the street. In this way the girls were protected from unwanted guests and the business ensured payment before departure. Large Circassian eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion of lamp--genies, escorted the visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes with the help of balls of string. It was a soft windowless universe of draperies, ruled over by the ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had acquired, over the years, something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were able to disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane antithesis of Mahound's sacred utterances in a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and save his life as an act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been was accepted without question; and when Khalid's guards arrived to search the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around that overground catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the soldiers' heads were spinning, and after looking inside thirty-nine stone urns and finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the quivering, pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.

After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet's skin until it was blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his lack of condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn't tone up fast.

o o o

Baal's sojourn "behind The Curtain" by no means deprived him of information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact, because in the course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the pleasurechambers and heard the customers' gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues, induced by the gay abandon of the whores' caresses and by the clients' knowledge that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet, myopic and hard of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary affairs than he could possibly have gained if he'd still been free to wander the newly puritanical streets of the town. The deafness was a problem sometimes; it meant that there were gaps in his knowledge, because the customers frequently lowered their voices and whispered; but it also minimized the prurient element in his listenings--in, since he was unable to hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in cries of real or synthetic joy.

What Baal learned at The Curtain:

From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the new ban on pork the skin-deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back door to buy the forbidden meat in secret, "sales are up," he murmured while mounting his chosen lady, "black pork prices are high; but damn it, these new rules have made my work eough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter in secret, without noise," and thereupon he began some squealing of his own, for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain. -- And the grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain's horizontal staff that the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening he still said a prayer or two to "my lifelong favourite, Manat, and sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can't beat a female goddess, they've got attributes the boys can't match," after which he, too, fell upon the earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that faded, fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute, no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.

Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of the great temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because even in the high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the hollowness of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of stone that couldn't fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been dulled, Baal became convinced that Al-Lat's fall meant that his own end was not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired in him; but the returning knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated cowardice he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered at the paradox of having his eyes opened to such a truth in that house of costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead -- had never lived -- but that didn't make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rules, and to perceive that his story was so mixed up with Mahound's that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the twelve wives" of the Prophet, _one rule for him, another for us_, Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.

The girls of The Curtain -- it was only by convention that they were referred to as "girls", as the eldest was a woman well into her fifties, while the youngest, at fifteen, was more experienced than many fiftyyear-olds -- had grown fond of this shambling Baal, and in point of fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-whowasn't, so that out of working hours they would tease him deliciously, flaunting their bodies before him, placing their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing one another passionately just an inch away from his face, until the ashy writer was hopelessly aroused; whereupon they would laugh at his stiffness and mock him into blushing, quivering detumescence; or, very occasionally, and when he had given up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they had awakened. In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the poet passed his days, laying his head in women's laps, brooding on death and revenge, unable to say whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive.

It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. "That one!" she said. "He's got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet's wives. He's so annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning their names. He tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and she's His Nibs's favourite, as all are aware. So there."

The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. "Listen, those women in that harem, the men don't talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it's only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can't see."

Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book the women dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex, and not just the talk, either.

He said to the youngest whore: "Why don't you pretend for him?"

 

"Who?"

 

"Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private and personal Ayesha?"

 

"God," the girl said. "If they heard you say that they'd boil your balls in butter."

How many wives? Twelve, and one old lady, long dead. How many whores behind The Curtain? Twelve again; and, secret on her black-tented throne, the ancient Madam, still defying death. Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. Baal told the Madam of his idea; she settled matters in her voice of a laryngitic frog. "It is very dangerous," she pronounced, "but it could be damn good for business. We will go carefully; but we will go."

The fifteen-year-old whispered something in the grocer's ear. At once a light began to shine in his eyes. "Tell me everything," he begged. "Your childhood, your favourite toys, Solomon"s-horses and the rest, tell me how you played the tambourine and the Prophet came to watch." She told him, and then he asked about her deflowering at the age of twelve, and she told him that, and afterwards he paid double the normal fee, because "it's been the best time of my life". "We'll have to be careful of heart conditions," the Madam said to Baa!.
o o o

When the news got around Jahilia that the whores of The Curtain had each assumed the identity of one of Mahound's wives, the clandestine excitement of the city's males was intense; yet, so afraid were they of discovery, both because they would surely lose their lives if Mahound or his lieutenants ever found out that they had been involved in such irreverences, and because of their desire that the new service at The Curtain be maintained, that the secret was kept from the authorities. In those days Mahound had returned with his wives to Yathrib, preferring the cool oasis climate of the north to Jahilia's heat. The city had been left in the care of General Khalid, from whom things were easily concealed. For a time Mahound had considered telling Khalid to have all the brothels of Jahilia closed down, but Abu Simbel had advised him against so precipitate an act. "Jahilians are new converts," he pointed out. "Take things slowly." Mahound, most pragmatic of Prophets, had agreed to a period of transition. So, in the Prophet's absence, the men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which experienced a three hundred per cent increase in business. For obvious reasons it was not politic to form a queue in the street, and so on many days a line of men curled around the innermost courtyard of the brothel, rotating about its centrally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims rotated for other reasons around the ancient Black Stone. All customers of The Curtain were issued with masks, and Baal, watching the circling masked figures from a high balcony, was satisfied. There were more ways than one of refusing to Submit.

In the months that followed, the staff of The Curtain warmed to the new task. The fifteen-year-old whore "Ayesha" was the most popular with the paying public, just as her namesake was with Mahound, and like the Ayesha who was living chastely in her apartment in the harem quarters of the great mosque at Yathrib, this Jahilian Ayesha began to be jealous of her preeminent status of Best Beloved. She resented it when any of her "sisters" seemed to be experiencing an increase in visitors, or receiving exceptionally generous tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had taken the name of "Sawdah", would tell her visitors and she had plenty, many of the men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and also grateful charms -- the story of how Mahound had married her and Ayesha, on the same day, when Ayesha was just a child. "In the two of us," she would say, exciting men terribly, "he found the two halves of his dead first wife: the child, and the mother, too." The whore "Hafsah" grew as hottempered as her namesake, and as the twelve entered into the spirit of their roles the alliances in the brothel came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque; "Ayesha" and "Hafsah", for example, engaged in constant, petty rivalries against the two haughtiest whores, who had always been thought a bit stuck-up by the others and who had chosen for themselves the most aristocratic identities, becoming "Umm Salamah the Makhzumite" and, snootiest of all, "Ramlah", whose namesake, the eleventh wife of Mahound, was the daughter of Abu Simbel and Hind. And there was a "Zainab bint Jahsh", and a "Juwairiyah", named after the bride captured on a military expedition, and a "Rehana the Jew", a "Safia" and a "Maimunah", and, most erotic of all the whores, who knew tricks she refused to teach to competitive "Ayesha": the glamorous Egyptian, "Mary the Copt". Strangest of all was the whore who had taken the name of "Zainab bint Khuzaimah", knowing that this wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia of her lovers, who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this, too, was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.

By the end of the first year the twelve had grown so skilful in their roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal, more myopic and deafer by the month, saw the shapes of the girls moving past him, their edges blurred, their images somehow doubled, like shadows superimposed on shadows. The girls began to entertain new notions about Baal, too. In that age it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession, to take the kind of husband who wouldn't give her any trouble -- a mountain, maybe, or a fountain, or a bush -- so that she could adopt, for form's sake, the title of a married woman. At The Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the Love Spout in the central courtyard, but now a kind of rebellion was brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than some spurting stone, which was almost idolatrous, after all; and to say that they had decided that they would all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first the Madam tried to talk them out of it, but when she saw that the girls meant business she conceded the point, and told them to send the writer in to see her. With many giggles and nudges the twelve courtesans escorted the shambling poet into the throne room. When Baal heard the plan his heart began to thump so erratically that he lost his balance and fell, and "Ayesha" screamed in her fright: "O God, we're going to be his widows before we even get to be his wives."

But he recovered: his heart regained its composure. And, having no option, he agreed to the twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married them all off herself, and in that den of degeneracy, that anti-mosque, that labyrinth of profanity, Baal became the husband of the wives of the former businessman, Mahound.

His wives now made plain to him that they expected him to fulfil his husbandly duties in every particular, and worked out a rota system under which he could spend a day with each of the girls in turn (at The Curtain, day and night were inverted, the night being for business and the day for rest). No sooner had he embarked upon this arduous programme than they called a meeting at which he was told that he ought to start behaving a little more like the "real" husband, that is, Mahound. "Why can't you change your name like the rest of us?" bad-tempered "Hafsah" demanded, but at this Baal drew the line. "It may not be much to be proud of," he insisted, "but it's my name. What's more, I don't work with the clients here. There's no business reason for such a change." "Well, anyhow," the voluptuous "Mary the Copt" shrugged, "name or no name, we want you to start acting like him."

"I don't know much about," Baal began to protest, but "Ayesha", who really was the most attractive of them all, or so he had commenced to feel of late, made a delightful moue. "Honestly, husband," she cajoled him. "It's not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss."

It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of "ordinary life" in which they wanted nothing more than to be the obedient, and -- yes -- submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of high excitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was to have twelve women competing for his favours, for the beneficence of his smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled his body and danced for him, and in a thousand ways enacted the dream--marriage they had never really thought they would have.

It was irresistible. He began to find the confidence to order them about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry. Once when their quarrelling irritated him he forswore them all for a month. When he went to see "Ayesha" after twenty-nine nights she teased him for not having been able to stay away. "That month was only twenty-nine days long," he replied. Once he was caught with "Mary the Copt" by "Hafsah", in "Hafsah's" quarters and on "Ayesha's" day. He begged "Hafsah" not to tell "Ayesha", with whom he had fallen in love; but she told her anyway and Baal had to stay away from "Mary" of the fair skin and curly hair for quite a time after that. In short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming the secret, profane mirror of Mahound; and he had begun, once again, to write.

The poetry that came was the sweetest he had ever written. Sometimes when he was with Ayesha he felt a slowness come over him, a heaviness, and he had to lie down. "It's strange," he told her. "It is as if I see myself standing beside myself. And I can make him, the standing one, speak; then I get up and write down his verses." These artistic slownesses of Baal were much admired by his wives. Once, tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the chambers of "Umm Salamah the Makhzumite". When he woke, hours later, his body ached, his neck and shoulders were full of knots, and he berated Umm Salamah: "Why didn't you wake me?" She answered: "I was afraid to, in case the verses were coming to you." He shook his head. "Don't worry about that. The only woman in whose company the verses come is 'Ayesha', not you."

o o o

Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of Ayesha's clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin, pantaloons and body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha's room when the client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: "So this is where you got to!" Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, "It's all right. He won't make any trouble." He invited Salman the Persian to his own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it wasn't forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule Book.

"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 Baa! 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 luck 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." o o o

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." Baa! 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."

o o o

The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothelkeeper. "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 Baa!, 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.

o o o

 

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 titles,, 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 Baa! 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 Baa! 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 Baa!, 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.

"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."

 

o o o

 

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 injahilia 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.

 

VII

 

The

 

Angel Azraeel

 

1

It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love, the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halévy'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), Khayyám--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 g!ass 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.

(One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums, and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw this, Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man counter-protest. Didn't these people know what the stuff inside was _worth?_ There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more per packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural heritage. . . Pamela put her foot down. "Don't you dare," she said. She held the then--correct view: that the museums were _too valuable_ to charge for. So: "Don't you dare," and to his surprise he found he did not. He had not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have given, maybe, in the right circumstances, his _life_ for what was in those museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended position.)

--_And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you_. --

Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the parcelrack over the rear wheel. Then he released it, and the boy (not knowing himself to be unsupported) kept going: balance came like a gift of flight, and the two of them were gliding down the avenue, Chamcha running, the boy pedalling harder and harder. "You did it!" Saladin rejoiced, and the equally elated child shouted back: "Look at me! See how quickly I learned! Aren't you pleased with me? Aren't you pleased?" It was a dream to weep at; for when he awoke, there was no bicycle and no child.

"What will you do now?" Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the Hot Wax nightclub, and he'd answered, too lightly: "Me? I think I'll come back to life." Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had rewarded his love of a dream--child with childlessness; his love of a woman, with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college friend; his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan heights; and his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled, humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he was whole again, and there was, too, the example of Niccolô Machiavelli to consider (a wronged man, his name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? -- enough, at any rate, to make most men confess to raping their grandmothers, or anything else, just to make the pain go away; -- yet he had confessed to nothing, having committed no crimes while serving the Florentine republic, that all-- too-brief interruption in the power of the Medici family); if Niccolô could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror--of--princes literature then so much in vogue, _Il Principe_, following it with the magisterial _Discorsi_, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from the cave's dark mouth, and to hell with the lega! problems.

Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla -- in whose eyes Chamcha's metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special-effects fantasy-movies (_Labyrinth_, _Legend_, _Howard the Duck_) entered the Real -- drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the DJ's van; this time, though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. "Good luck," said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. "No, thanks," Saladin replied. "When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?" He waved goodbye. "Good for you," Mishal said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One of them, an evillooking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: "Fast forward!" His was a generation that believed in skipping life's boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fastforward from one action-packed climax to the next. _Welcome home_, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.

Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. "I didn't think people did that any more," he said. "Not since _Dr. Strangelove_." Her pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but confirmed that it was going well. "So far so good." She was naturally off balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she "stuck with" her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in point of fact Chamcha felt one down (there had been a period in which he'd been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter's amusing little books) throughout this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for Chamcha's discomfiture -- and he had not, let's recall, arrived in this awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood
- was that he had realized, on seeing Pamela, with her too--bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious), her shaven head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled that he'd never really cared for pets.

"I suppose," she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in the spacious kitchen, "that what I did was unforgivable, huh?" That little Americanizing _huh_ was new: another of her infinite series of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again: down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the situation.) "I don't think I can say what I'm capable of forgiving," he replied. "That particular response seems to be out of my control; it either operates or it doesn't and I find out in due course. So let's say, for the moment, that the jury's out." She didn't like that, she wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his problem now. "I'm moving back in," he said. "It's a big house and there's plenty of room. I'll take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom, so I'll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I'm assuming that, as my body was never found, I'm still officially missingpresumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court to have me wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers." (Respectively, their lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her posture informing him that she wouldn't be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. "After that," he concluded, "we sell up and you get your divorce." He swept out, making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom badoom doodoodoom.

_To be born again, first you have to die_.

 

o o o

Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short--story they'd both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty--first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. "Tell her," he said to the emissaries, "that she never knew how much I valued what she broke." The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven's sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye? "No," said the unforgiving man. -- "Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?" -- "It was the vase," he answered, "the vase, and nothing but." Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. "Nobody can judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole."

_Sunt lacrimae rerum_, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears in things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it to grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something of the solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the altering of the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an eye, channel-hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control culture of the present as much as the piggy boy on the street corner; he, too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the composite video monster his button-pushing brought into being ... what a leveller this remote--control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth century; it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-- shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight; -- and whereas the original Procrustes, citizen of what could now be termed a "hands-on" culture, had to exercise both brain and brawn, he, Chamcha, could lounge back in his Parker--Knoll recliner chair and let his fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants -- "Mutts" -- on _Dr. Who_, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called _Mutilasians_; children's television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war. A hospital in Guyana had apparently preserved the body of a fully formed merman, complete with gills and scales. Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish Highlands. The genetic possibility of centaurs was being seriously discussed. A sex--change operation was shown. -- He was reminded of an execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy Joshi had hesitantly shown him at the Shaandaar B and B. Its name, "I Sing the Body Eclectic", was fully representative of the whole. -- But the fellow has a whole body, after all, Saladin thought bitterly. He made Pamela's baby with no trouble at all: no broken sticks on his damn chromosomes. . . he caught sight of himself in a rerun of an old _Aliens Show_ "classic". (In the fast--forward culture, classic status could be achieved in as little as six months; sometimes even overnight.) The effect of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in what remained of his idea of the normal, average quality of the real; but there were also countervailing forces at work.

On _Gardeners' World_ he was shown how to achieve something called a "chimeran graft" (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the pride of Otto Cone's garden); and although his inattention caused him to miss the names of the two trees that had been bred into one -- Mulberry? Laburnum? Broom? -- the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies -- the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonization of the planet -- he was given this one gift. It was enough. He switched off the set.

Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns, goathoofs, etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a cure was in progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not only Gibreel, but everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was irreconcilable with the prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow irrelevant, as even the most stubborn of nightmares will once you've splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began to make journeys into the outside world -- to those professional advisers, lawyer accountant agent, whom Pamela used to call "the Goons", and when sitting in the panelled, book- and ledgerlined stability of those offices in which miracles could plainly never happen he took to speaking of his "breakdown", -- "the shock of the accident", -- and so on, explaining his disappearance as though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing "Rule, Britannia" while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie _Shree 420_. He made a conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking himself off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses were rather dull; -- if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in the state of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art; -- then he insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had "a bad experience", and needed a little time.

In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his familiar objects -- the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a cartoonist's heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp -- he congratulated himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was now sure he felt nothing but the most altruistic affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon the smooth glass of the sensitive soul; a mere grease-mark, which disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He was forgotten; he no longer existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.

Saladin's optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone: "Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of unclean: as "if they were robbing a grave." Charlie, who still sounded in her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the clients' point of view. "Wait it out," she advised. "They'll come round. After all, it isn't as if you were Dracula, for heaven's sake." Thank you, Charlie.

Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and appropriate revenge, -- these were things of the past, aspects of a reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re--establish ordinary life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as _monstrous_. Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world -- mass--murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies' mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the view that "monster" was too -- what? -- _judgmental_ a term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as the casualties. "There's nothing to be done with you," she had said in her most patrician voice. "You actually do think in cheap debating points."

And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils -- who needed them? "Why demons, when man himself is a demon?" the Nobel Laureate Singer's "last demon" asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-forand-against reflex, wished to add: "And why angels, when man is angelic too?" (If this wasn't true, how to explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) -- But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the circumstances of the age required no diabolic explanations.

o o o

I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it's true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. _Ooparvala or Neechayvala_, he wanted to know, and I didn't enlighten him; I certainly don't intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.

I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep.

 

o o o

His reborn, fledgling, still--fallible optimism was hardest to maintain at night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so easily denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started haunting his dreams. The first -- it was hard to admit this, even to himself-- was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal behind banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif Johnson's lover, Mishal Sufyan.

The second -- whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife of his departure sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead -- was Zeeny Vakil.

o o o

The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had returned, in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in Notting Hill, was frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she could say. On the first night -- she had decided not to tell him until they were safely in bed -- he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear of the bed and stood on the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with his thumb stuck in his mouth.

"Come back here and stop being foolish," she commanded, but he shook his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: "But if he's _here!_ In this _house!_ Then how can _I_ . . . ?" -- With which he snatched up his clothes in an untidy bundle, and fled from her presence; she heard thumps and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself, had fallen down the stairs. "Good," she screamed after him. "Chicken, break your neck."

Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced figure of his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through clamped teeth. "J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says he can't come in unless you say it's okay with you." She had, as usual, been drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: "What about you, you want him to come in?" Which Pamela interpreted as his way of rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded with humiliated ferocity. _Yes_.

So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside -- "Hey, hombre! You're really _well!_" Jumpy greeted him in terror, making as if to slap palms, to conceal his fear -- and persuaded his wife's lover to share her bed. Then he retreated upstairs, because Jumpy's mortification now prevented him from entering the house until Chamcha was safely out of the way.

"What a man!" Jumpy wept at Pamela. "He's a _prince_, a _saint!_"

 

"If you don't pack it in," Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically, "I'll set the fucking dog on you."

 

o o o

Jumpy continued to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him (or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking Chamcha down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray, explaining to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also provocative. "Look what he permits under his own roof! He's a _giant_; least we can do is have good manners." Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to put up with a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. "I'd never have believed you were so conventional," she fumed, and Jumpy replied: "It's just a question of respect."

In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers and mail; he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to put her foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: "We can't behave as if the man's invisible. He's here, isn't he? Then we must involve him in our lives." Pamela replied sourly: "Why don't you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?" To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: "I didn't think you'd approve."

In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha's residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this unusual way, his predecessor's blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives of love and friendship, he cheered up a good deal, and found the idea of fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep, the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was running down an avenue of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a bicycle. "Aren't you pleased with me?" the boy cried in his elation. "Look: aren't you pleased?"

o o o

Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to protest against the arrest of Dr. Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. "The whole thing's completely trumped-up, based on circumstantial evidence and insinuations. Hanif reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the prosecution case. It's just a straightforward malicious fit--up; the only question is how far they'll go. They'll verbal him for sure. Maybe there will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly they want to get him. Pretty badly, I'd say; he's been a loud voice around town for some while." Charncha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan's loathing for Simba, he said: "The fellow has -- has he not? -- a record of violence towards women . . ." Jumpy turned his palms outward. "In his personal life," he owned, "the guy's frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn't mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don't have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you're black." Chamcha let this pass. "The point is, this isn't personal, it's political," Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, "Urn, there's a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you'd like, if you'd be interested, that is, come along if you want."

"You asked him to go with us?" Pamela was incredulous. She had started to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood. "You actually did that without consulting me?" Jumpy looked crestfallen. "Doesn't matter, anyhow," she let him off the hook. "Catch _him_ going to anything like _that_."

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."

o o o

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.

o o o

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 wallto-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 compére. 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 ofjustice 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-toobulbous 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_.

 

o o o

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 halfof 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, hitandmiss 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_.

What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re--create his old existence, this was, he now saw, a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left--hand path.

2

The temperature continued to rise; and when the heatwave reached its highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil, -- then Mr. Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned to the metropolis after a period as guests of the penal authority of New York, announced their "grand coming-out" party. Billy's business connections downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a welldisposed judge; his personal charm had persuaded every one of the wealthy female "marks" from whom he'd extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs. Struwelpeter) to sign a clemency petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction that Mr. Battuta had honestly repented him of his error, and asked, in the light of his vow to concentrate henceforth on his startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career (whose social usefulness in terms of wealth creation and the provision of employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the court in mitigation of his offences), and his further vow to undergo a full course of psychiatric treatment to help him overcome his weakness for criminal capers, -- that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment than a prison sentence, "the deterrent purpose underlying such incarceration being better served here," in the ladies' opinion, "by a judgment of a more Christian sort". Mimi, adjudged to be no more than Billy's love-duped underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and a stiff fine, but even this was rendered considerably less severe by the judge's consent to Billy's attorney's plea that his client be allowed to leave the country voluntarily, without having the stigma of a deportation order stamped into his passport, a thing that would do great damage to his many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi were back in London, whooping it up at Crockford's, and sending out fancy invitation cards to what promised to be _the_ party of that strangely sweltering season. One of these cards found its way, with the assistance of Mr. S. S. Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta; another arrived, a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha's den, slipped under the door by the solicitous Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela to invite her, adding, with her usual directness: "Any notion where that husband of yours has gotten to?" -- Which Pamela answered, with English awkwardness, _yes er but_. Mimi got the whole story out of her in less than half an hour, which wasn't bad, and concluded triumphantly: "Sounds like your life is looking up, Pam. Bring "em both; bring anyone. It's going to be quite a circus.")

The location for the party was another of Sisodia's inexplicable triumphs: the giant sound stage at the Shepperton film studios had been procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to take their pleasures in the huge re-creation of Dickensian London that stood within. A musical adaptation of the great writer's last completed novel, renamed _Friend!_, with book and lyrics by the celebrated genius of the musical stage, Mr. Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some of its scenes; now, accordingly, _The Chums_, as it was known in the business, was receiving the accolade of a big--budget movie production. "The pipi PR people," Sisodia told Gibreel on the phone, "think that such a fufufuck, _function_, which is to be most ista ista istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their bibuild up cacampaign."

The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.

 

o o o

Shepperton! -- Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the wings of Pamela's MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of the fleet of coaches the evening's hosts have made available to those guests wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. -- And someone else, too, -- the one with whom our Saladin fell to earth, -- has come; is wandering within. -- Chamcha enters the arena; and is amazed. -- Here London has been altered -- no, _condensed_, -- according to the imperatives of film. -- Why, here's the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those bran-new, spick and span new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle containing various Podsnaps. -- And worse: behold the dustman's mounds of Boffin's Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby's rooms in the Albany, the West End's very heart! -- But the guests are not disposed to grumble; the reborn city, even rearranged, still takes the breath away; most particularly in that part of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam's boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two bridges, one of iron, one of stone. -- Upon its cobbled banks the guests' gay footsteps fall; and there sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note. A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.

Society grandees, fashion models, film stars, corporation bigwigs, a brace of minor royal Personages, useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff perspire and mingle in these counterfeit streets with numbers of men and women as sweat-glistened as the "real" guests and as counterfeit as the city: hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of the movie's leading players. Chamcha, who realizes in the moment of sighting him that this encounter has been the whole purpose of his journey, -- which fact he has succeeded in keeping from himself until this instant, -- spots Gibreel in the increasingly riotous crowd.

Yes: there, on London Bridge Which Is Of Stone, without a doubt, Gibreel! -- And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone! -- What a distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the left; and how she seems to dote on him -- how everyone adores him: for he is among the very greatest at the party, Battuta to his left, Sisodia at Allie's right, and all about a host of faces that would be recognized from Peru to Timbuctoo! -- Chamcha struggles through the crowd, which grows ever more dense as he nears the bridge; -- but he is resolved -- Gibreel, he will reach Gibreel! -- when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up, one of Mr. Bentham's immortal, showstopping tunes, and the crowd parts like the Red Sea before the children of Israel. -- Chamcha, off--balance, staggers back, is crushed by the parting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice -- what else? -- a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while a great singing throng of bosomy ladies in mobcaps and frilly blouses, accompanied by an over-sufficiency of stovepipe-hatted gents, comes rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they're worth.

_What kind of fellow is Our Mutual Friend?_

 

_What does he intend?_

 

_Is he the kind of fellow on whom we may depend?_

 

_etc. etc. etc._

"It's a funny thing," a woman's voice says behind him, "but when we were doing the show at the C-- Theatre, there was an outbreak of lust among the cast; quite unparalleled, in my experience. People started missing their cues because of the shenanigans in the wings."

The speaker, he observes, is young, small, buxom, far from unattractive, damp from the heat, flushed with wine, and evidently in the grip of the libidinous fever of which she speaks. -- The "room" has little light, but he can make out the glint in her eye. "We've got time," she continues matter
-of--factly. "After this lot finish there's Mr. Podsnap's solo." Whereupon, arranging herself in an expert parody of the Marine Insurance agent's selfimportant posture, she launches into her own version of the scheduled musical Podsnappery:

_Ours is a Copious Language_,

 

_A Language Trying to Strangers_;

 

_Ours is the Favoured Nation_,

 

_Blest, and Safe from Dangers_ . . .

Now, in Rex-Harrisonian speech-song, she addresses an invisible Foreigner. "And How Do You Like London? -- 'Aynormaymong rich?' -- Enormously Rich, we say. Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong.
- And Do You Find, Sir, Many Evidences of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World's Metropolis, London, Londres, London? -- I would say," she adds, still Podsnapping, "that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth."

The creature has been approaching Chamcha while delivering herself of these lines; -- unfastening, the while, her blouse; -- and he, mongoose to her cobra, stands there transfixed; while she, exposing a shapely right breast, and offering it to him, points out that she has drawn upon it, -- as an act of civic pride, -- the map of London, no less, in red magic-marker, with the river all in blue. The metropolis summons him; -- but he, giving an entirely Dickensian cry, pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop into the madness of the street.

Gibreel is looking directly at him from London Bridge; their eyes -- or so it seems to Chamcha -- meet. Yes: Gibreel lifts, and waves, an unexcited arm.

o o o

What follows is tragedy. -- Or, at the least the echo of tragedy, the fullblooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it's said. -- A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns reenact what was first done by heroes and by kings. -- Well, then, so be it.
- The question that's asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it's born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul. Or, let's say: the enigma of Iago.

It's not unknown for literary--theatrical exegetes, defeated by the character, to ascribe his actions to "motiveless malignity". Evil is evil and will do evil, and that's that; the serpent's poison is his very definition. -- Well, such shruggings-off will not pass muster here. My Chamcha may be no Ancient of Venice, my Allie no smothered Desdemona, Farishta no match for the Moor, but they will, at least, be costumed in such explanations as my understanding will allow. -- And so, now, Gibreel waves in greeting; Chamcha approaches; the curtain rises on a darkening stage.

o o o

Let's observe, first, how isolated this Saladin is; his only willing companion an inebriated and cartographically bosomed stranger, he struggles alone through that partying throng in which all persons appear to be (and are not) one another's friends; -- while there on London Bridge stands Farishta, beset by admirers, at the very centre of the crowd;

and, next, let us appreciate the effect on Chamcha, who loved England in the form of his lost English wife, -- of the golden, pale and glacial presence by Farishta's side of Alleluia Cone; he snatches a glass from a passing waiter's tray, drinks the wine fast, takes another; and seems to see, in distant Allie, the entirety of his loss;

and in other ways, as well, Gibreel is fast becoming the sum of Saladin's defeats; -- there with him now, at this very moment, is another traitor; mutton dressed as lamb, fifty plus and batting her eyelashes like an eighteen-year--old, is Chamcha's agent, the redoubtable Charlie Sellers; -- you wouldn't liken him to a Transylvanian bloodsucker, would you, Charlie, the irate watcher inwardly cries; -- and grabs another glass; -- and sees, at its bottom, his own anonymity, the other's equal celebrity, and the great injustice of the division;

most especially -- he bitterly reflects -- because Gibreel, London's conqueror, can see no value in the world now falling at his feet! -- why, the bastard always sneered at the place, Proper London, Vilayet, the English, Spoono, what cold fish they are, I swear; -- Chamcha, moving inexorably towards him through the crowd, seems to see, _right now_, that same sneer upon Farishta's face, that scorn of an inverted Podsnap, for whom all things English are worthy of derision instead of praise; -- O God, the cruelty of it, that he, Saladin, whose goal and crusade it was to make this town his own, should have to see it kneeling before his contemptuous rival! -- so there is also this: that Chamcha longs to stand in Farishta's shoes, while his own footwear is of no interest whatsoever to Gibreel.

What is unforgivable?

Chamcha, looking upon Farishta's face for the first time since their rough parting in Rosa Diamond's hail, seeing the strange blankness in the other's eyes, recalls with overwhelming force the earlier blankness, Gibreel standing on the stairs and doing nothing while he, Chamcha, horned and captive, was dragged into the night; and feels the return of hatred, feels it filling him bottom--to--top with fresh green bile, _never mind about excuses_, it cries, _to hell with mitigations and what-could-hehave-dones; what's beyond forgiveness is beyond. You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole_.

So: Gibreel Farishta, put on trial by Chamcha, gets a rougher ride than Mimi and Billy in New York, and is declared guilty, for all perpetuity, of the Inexcusable Thing. From which what follows, follows. -- But we may permit ourselves to speculate a while about the true nature of this Ultimate, this Inexpiable Offence. -- Is it really, can it be, simply his silence on Rosa's stairs? -- Or are there deeper resentments here, gripes for which this so-called Primary Cause is, in truth, no more than a substitute, a front? -- For are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the other's shadow? -- One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires, the other preferring, contemptuously, to transform; one, a hapless fellow who seems to be continually punished for uncommitted crimes, the other, called angelic by one and all, the type of man who gets away with everything. -- We may describe Chamcha as being somewhat less than life--size; but loud, vulgar Gibreel is, without question, a good deal larger than life, a disparity which might easily inspire neo-Procrustean lusts in Chamcha: to stretch himself by cutting Farishta down to size.

What is unforgivable?

What if not the shivering nakedness of being _wholly known_ to a person one does not trust? -- And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in circumstances -- hijack, fall, arrest -- in which the secrets of the self were utterly exposed?

Well, then. -- Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these arc two fundamentally" different _types_ of self? Might we not agree that Gibreel, for all his stage--name and performances; and in spite of bornagain slogans, new beginnings, rnetamorphoses; -- has wished to remain, to a large degree, _continuous_ -- that is, joined to and arising from his past; -- that he chose neither near--fatal illness nor transmuting fall; that, in point of fact, he fears above all things the altered states in which his dreams leak into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic Gibreel he has no desire to be; -- so that his is still a self which, for our present purposes, we may describe as "true" . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of _selected_ dis-- continuities, a _willing_ re--invention; his _preferred_ revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, "false"? And might we then not go on to say that it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper falsity -- call this "evil" -- and that this is the truth, the door, that was opened in him by his fall? -- While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered "good" by virtue of _wishing to remain_, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man.

-- But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an intentionalist fallacy? -- Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, "pure", -- an utterly fantastic notion! -- cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let's rather say an even harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is. -- That, in fact, we fall towards it _naturally_, that is, _not against our natures_. -- And that Saladin Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel Farishta because, finally, it proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road. (And, let us add in conclusion, the later impossibility of return.)

Saladin Chamcha, however, insists on a simpler line. "It was his treason at Rosa Diamond's house; his silence, nothing more."

He sets foot upon the counterfeit London Bridge. From a nearby red-andwhite-striped puppeteer's booth, Mr. Punch -- whacking Judy -- calls out to him: _That's the way to do it!_ After which Gibreel, too, speaks a greeting, the enthusiasm of the words undone by the incongruous listlessness of the voice: "Spoono, is it you. You bloody devil. There you are, big as life. Come here, you Salad baba, old Chumch."

o o o

 

This happened:

The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero goto-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as _wilderness_, a hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she'd even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?

Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, what he took to be that inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied it, and sought to damage what he envied. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

This happened: Chamcha invented an Allie, and became his fiction's antagonist. . . he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to meet her; and embraced Gibreel. _I follow him to serve my turn upon him_. Allie, suspecting nothing, excused herself. The two of them must have so much to catch up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off, as she put it, to explore. He noticed that she hobbled slightly for a step or two; then paused, and strode off strongly. Among the things he did not know about her was her pain.

Not knowing that the Gibreel standing before him, remote of eye and perfunctory in his greeting, was under the most attentive medical supervision; -- or that he was obliged to take, on a daily basis, certain drugs that dulled his senses, because of the very real possibility of a recurrence of his no--longer--nameless illness, that is to say, paranoid schizophrenia; -- or that he had long been kept away, at Allie's absolute insistence, from the movie people whom she had come strongly to distrust, ever since his last rampage; -- or that their presence at the Battuta--Mamoulian party was a thing to which she had been wholeheartedly opposed, acquiescing only after a terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared that he would be kept a prisoner no longer, and that he was determined to make a further effort to re--enter his "real life"; -- or that the effort of looking after a disturbed lover who was capable of seeing small bat-like imps hanging upside down in the refrigerator had worn Allie thin as a worn-out shirt, forcing upon her the roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch -- requiring her, in sum, to act against her own complex and troubled nature; -- not knowing any of this, failing to comprehend that the Gibreel at whom he was looking, and believed he saw, Gibreel the embodiment of all the good fortune that the Furyhaunted Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the creature of his fancy, as much a fiction, as his invented--resented Allie, that classic drop
-dead blonde or femme fatale conjured up by his envious, tormented, Oresteian imagination, -- Saladin in his ignorance nevertheless penetrated, by the merest chance, the chink in Gibreel's (admittedly somewhat quixotic) armour, and understood how his hated Other might most swiftly be unmade.

Gibreel's banal question made the opening. Limited by sedatives to smalltalk, he asked vaguely: "And how, tell me, is your goodwife?" At which Chamcha, his tongue loosened by alcohol, blurted out: "How? Knocked up. Enceinte. Great with fucking child." Soporific Gibreel missed the violence in this speech, beamed absently, placed an arm around Saladin's shoulders. "Shabash, mubarak," he offered congratulations. "Spoono! Damn speedy work."

"Congratulate her lover," Saladin thickly raged. "My old friend, Jumpy Joshi. Now there, I admit it, is a man. Women go wild, it seems. God knows why. They want his goddamn babies and they don't even wait to ask his leave."

"For instance who?" Gibreel yelled, making heads turn and Chamcha recoil in surprise. "Who who who?" he hooted, causing tipsy giggles. Saladin Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. "I'll tell you who for instance. My wife for instance, that's who. That is no lady, mister Farishta, Gibreel. Pamela, my nolady wife."

At this very moment, as luck would have it, -- while Saladin in his cups was quite ignorant of the effect his words were having on Gibreel, -- for whom two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory of Rekha Merchant on a flying carpet warning him of Allie's secret wish to have a baby without informing the father, _who asks the seed for permission to plant_, and the second being an envisioning of the body of the martial arts instructor conjoined in high--kicking carnality with the same Miss Alleluia Cone, -- the figure of Jumpy Joshi was seen crossing "Southwark Bridge" in a state of some agitation, -- hunting, in fact, for Pamela, from whom he had become separated during the same rush of singing Dickensians which had pushed Saladin towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman in the Curiosity Shop. "Talk of the devil," Saladin pointed. "There the bastard goes." He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.
Allie Cone reappeared, angry, frantic. "Where is he? Jesus! Can't I even leave him for a fucking _second?_ Couldn't you have kept your sodding _eyes_ on him?"

"Why, what's the matter --?" But now Allie had plunged into the crowd, so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing "Southwark Bridge" she was out of earshot. -- And here was Pamela, demanding: "Have you seen Jumpy?" -- And he pointed, "That way," whereupon she, too, vanished without a word of courtesy; and now Jumpy was seen, crossing "Southwark Bridge" in the opposite direction, curly hair wilder than ever, coathanger shoulders hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to remove, eyes searching, thumb homing in on mouth; -- and, a little later, Gibreel headed across the simulacrum of that bridge Which Is Of Iron, going the same way as Jumpy went.

In short, events had begun to border on the farcical; but when, some minutes later, the actor playing the role of "Gaffer Hexam", who kept watch over that stretch of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve them of their valuables before handing them over to the police, -- came rowing rapidly down the studio river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled hair standing straight up on end, the farce was instantly terminated; for there in his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy Joshi in his waterlogged greatcoat. "Knocked cold," the boatman cried, pointing to the huge lump rising up at the back of Jumpy's skull, "and being unconscious in the water it's a miracle he never drowned."

o o o

One week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from Allie Cone, who had tracked him down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi, and who appeared to have defrosted quite a bit, Saladin Chamcha found himself in the passenger seat of a three--year-old silver Citroën station wagon which the future Alicja Boniek had presented to her daughter before leaving for an extended Californian stay. Allie had met him at Carlisle station, repeating her earlier telephonic apologies -- "I'd no right to speak to you like that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well, thank heavens nobody saw the attack, and it seems to have been hushed up, but that poor man, an oar on the head from behind, it's too bad; the point is, we've taken a place up north, friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to get out of range of human beings, and, well, he's been asking for you; you could really help him, I think, and to be frank I could do with the help myself," which left Saladin little the wiser but consumed by curiosity -- and now Scotland was rushing past the Citroën windows at alarming speed: an edge of Hadrian's Wall, the old elopers' haven Gretna Green, and then inland towards the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock, Elvanfoot. Chamcha tended to think of all non-metropolitan locales as the deeps of interstellar space, and journeys into them as fraught with peril: for to break down in such emptiness would surely be to die alone and undiscovered. He had noted warily that one of the Citroën's headlamps was broken, that the fuel gauge was in the red (it turned out to be broken, too), the daylight was failing, and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at Silverstone on a sunny day. "He can't get far without transport, but you neverknow," she explained grimly. "Three days ago he stole the car keys and they found him heading the wrong way up an exit road on the Mo, shouting about damnation. _Prepare for the vengeance of the Lord_, he told the motorway cops, _for I shall soon summon my lieutenant, Azraeel_. They wrote it all down in their little books." Chamcha, his heart still filled with his own vengeful lusts, affected sympathy and shock. "And Jumpy?" he inquired. Allie took both hands off the wheel and spread them in an Igiveup gesture, while the car wobbled terrifyingly across the bendy road. "The doctors say the possessive jealousy could be part of the same thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like a fuse."

She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha lent her a willing ear. If she trusted him, it was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of damaging that trust. _Once he betrayed my trust; now let him,for a time, have confidence in me_. He was a tyro puppeteer; it was necessary to study the strings, to find out what was connected to what . . . "I can't help it," Allie was saying. "I feel in some obscure way to blame for him. Our life isn't working out and it's my fault. My mother gets angry when I talk like this." Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her daughter at Terminal Three. "I don't understand where you get these notions from," she cried amid backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian mums. "You could say your father's life didn't go according to plan, either. So he should be blamed for the camps? Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you." She had returned, without warning, to the grand style of wardrobe preferred by Otto Cone, and, it seemed, to an oratorical manner that suited the big black hats and frilly suits. "Enjoy California, Mother," Allie said sharply. "One of us is happy," Alicja said. "Why shouldn't it be me?" And before her daughter could answer, she swept off past the passengers--only barrier, flourishing passport, boarding-pass, ticket, heading for the duty-free bottles of Opium and Gordon's Gin, which were on sale beneath an illuminated sign reading SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS.

In the last light, the road rounded a spur of treeless, heather-covered hills. Long ago, in another country, another twilight, Chamcha had rounded another such spur and come into sight of the remains of Persepolis. Now, however, he was heading for a human ruin; not to admire, and maybe even (for the decision to do evil is never finally taken until the very instant of the deed; there is always a last chance to withdraw) to vandalize. To scrawl his name in Gibreel's flesh: _Saladin woz ear_. "Why stay with him?" he asked Allie, and to his surprise she blushed. "Why not spare yourself the pain?"

"I don't really know you, not at all, really," she began, then paused and made a choice. "I'm not proud of the answer, but it's the truth," she said. "It's the sex. We're unbelievable together, perfect, like nothing I've known. Dream lovers. He just seems to, to _know_. To know _me_." She fell silent; the night hid her face. Chamcha's bitterness surged up again. Dream lovers were all around him; he, dreamless, could only watch. He gritted angry teeth; and bit, by mistake, his tongue.

Gibreel and Allie had holed up in Durisdeer, a village so small it didn't have a pub, and were living in a deconsecrated Freekirk converted -- the quasi-religious term sounded strange to Chamcha -- by an architect friend of Allie's who had made a fortune out of such metamorphoses of the sacred into the profane. It struck Saladin as a gloomy sort of place, for all its white walls, recessed spotlights and wall-to--wall shag--pile carpeting. There were gravestones in the garden. As a retreat for a man suffering from paranoid delusions of being the chief archangel of God, Chamcha reflected, it wouldn't have been his own first choice. The Freekirk was set a little apart from the dozen or so other stone--and--tile houses that made up the community: isolated even within this isolation. Gibreel was standing at the door, a shadow against the illuminated hallway, when the car pulled up. "You got here," he shouted. "Yaar, too good. Welcome to bloody jail."