The Satanic Verses (55 page)

           
Even the Grandee himself had acquired a threadbare 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
dispatches? 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 the 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.