The Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie

  ‘Why you didn’t throw them in the wpb?’ Gibreel howled. Allie, still not fully understanding the size of his rage, continued lightly. She had kept the pictures because she liked them. The first was an old Punch cartoon in which Leonardo da Vinci stood in his atelier, surrounded by pupils, and hurled the Mona Lisa like a frisbee across the room. ‘Mark my words,’ he said in the caption, ‘one day men shall fly to Padua in such as these.’ In the second frame there was a page from Toff, a British boys’ comic dating from World War II. It had been thought necessary in a time when so many children became evacuees to create, by way of explanation, a comic-strip version of events in the adult world. Here, therefore, was one of the weekly encounters between the home team – the Toff (an appalling monocled child in Etonian bum-freezer and pin-striped trousers) and cloth-capped, scuff-kneed Bert – and the dastardly foe, Hawful Hadolf and the Nastiparts (a bunch of thuggish fiends, each of whom had one extremely nasty part, e.g. a steel hook instead of a hand, feet like claws, teeth that could bite through your arm). The British team invariably came out on top. Gibreel, glancing at the framed comic, was scornful. ‘You bloody Angrez. You really think like this; this is what the war was really like for you.’ Allie decided not to mention her father, or to tell Gibreel that one of the Toff artists, a virulently anti-Nazi Berlin man named Wolf, had been arrested one day and led away for internment along with all the other Germans in Britain, and, according to Brunel, his colleagues hadn’t lifted a finger to save him. ‘Heartlessness,’ Jack had reflected. ‘Only thing a cartoonist really needs. What an artist Disney would have been if he hadn’t had a heart. It was his fatal flaw.’ Brunel ran a small animation studio named Scarecrow Productions, after the character in The Wizard of Oz.

  The third frame contained the last drawing from one of the films of the great Japanese animator Yoji Kuri, whose uniquely cynical output perfectly exemplified Brunel’s unsentimental view of the cartoonist’s art. In this film, a man fell off a skyscraper; a fire engine rushed to the scene and positioned itself beneath the falling man. The roof slid back, permitting a huge steel spike to emerge, and, in the still on Allie’s wall, the man arrived head first and the spike rammed into his brain. ‘Sick,’ Gibreel Farishta pronounced.

  These lavish gifts having failed to get results, Brunel was obliged to break cover and show up in person. He presented himself at Allie’s apartment one night, unannounced and already considerably the worse for alcohol, and produced a bottle of dark rum from his battered briefcase. At three the next morning he had drunk the rum but showed no signs of leaving. Allie, going ostentatiously off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, returned to find the animator standing stark naked in the centre of her living-room rug, revealing a surprisingly shapely body covered by an inordinate amount of thick grey hair. When he saw her he spread his arms and cried: ‘Take me! Do what you will!’ She made him dress, as kindly as she could, and put him and his briefcase gently out of the door. He never returned.

  Allie told Gibreel the story, in an open, giggling manner that suggested she was entirely unprepared for the storm it would unleash. It is possible, however (things had been rather strained between them in recent days) that her innocent air was a little disingenuous, that she was almost hoping for him to begin the bad behaviour, so that what followed would be his responsibility, not hers … at any rate, Gibreel blew sky-high, accusing Allie of having falsified the story’s ending, suggesting that poor Brunel was still waiting by his telephone and that she intended to ring him the moment his, Farishta’s, back was turned. Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all. As this terrible emotion took charge of him, he found himself improvising a whole series of lovers for her, imagining them to be waiting around every corner. She had used the Brunel story to taunt him, he shouted, it was a deliberate and cruel threat. ‘You want men down on their knees,’ he screamed, every scrap of his self-control long gone. ‘Me, I do not kneel.’

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Out.’

  His anger redoubled. Clutching his toga around him, he stalked into the bedroom to dress, putting on the only clothes he possessed, including the scarlet-lined gabardine overcoat and grey felt trilby of Don Enrique Diamond; Allie stood in the doorway and watched. ‘Don’t think I’m coming back,’ he yelled, knowing his rage was more than sufficient to get him out of the door, waiting for her to begin to calm him down, to speak softly, to give him a way of staying. But she shrugged and walked away, and it was then, at that precise moment of his greatest wrath, that the boundaries of the earth broke, he heard a noise like the bursting of a dam, and as the spirits of the world of dreams flooded through the breach into the universe of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta saw God.

  For Blake’s Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal indignation; but Gibreel’s vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in the least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses. This was not the Almighty he had expected. ‘Who are you?’ he asked with interest. (Of no interest to him now was Alleluia Cone, who had stopped in her tracks on hearing him begin to talk to himself, and who was now observing him with an expression of genuine panic.)

  ‘Ooparvala,’ the apparition answered. ‘The Fellow Upstairs.’

  ‘How do I know you’re not the other One,’ Gibreel asked craftily, ‘Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?’

  A daring question, eliciting a snappish reply. This Deity might look like a myopic scrivener, but It could certainly mobilize the traditional apparatus of divine rage. Clouds massed outside the window; wind and thunder shook the room. Trees fell in the Fields. ‘We’re losing patience with you, Gibreel Farishta. You’ve doubted Us just about long enough.’ Gibreel hung his head, blasted by the wrath of God. ‘We are not obliged to explain Our nature to you,’ the dressing-down continued. ‘Whether We be multiform, plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay, or whether We be pure, stark, extreme, will not be resolved here.’ The disarranged bed on which his Visitor had rested Its posterior (which, Gibreel now observed, was glowing faintly, like the rest of the Person) was granted a highly disapproving glance. ‘The point is, there will be no more dilly-dallying. You wanted clear signs of Our existence? We sent Revelation to fill your dreams: in which not only Our nature, but yours also, was clarified. But you fought against it, struggling against the very sleep in which We were awakening you. Your fear of the truth has finally obliged Us to expose Ourself, at some personal inconvenience, in this woman’s residence at an advanced hour of the night. It is time, now, to shape up. Did We pluck you from the skies so that you could boff and spat with some (no doubt remarkable) flatfoot blonde? There’s work to be done.’

  ‘I am ready,’ Gibreel said humbly. ‘I was just going, anyway.’

  ‘Look,’ Allie Cone was saying, ‘Gibreel, goddamn it, never mind the fight. Listen: I love you.’

  There were only the two of them in the apartment now. ‘I have to go,’ Gibreel said, quietly. She hung upon his arm. ‘Truly, I don’t think you’re really well.’ He stood upon his dignity. ‘Having commanded my exit, you no longer have jurisdiction re my health.’ He made his escape. Alleluia, trying to follow him, was afflicted by such piercing pains in both feet that, having no option, she fell weeping to the floor: like an actress in a masala movie; or Rekha Merchant on the day Gibreel walked out on her for the last time. Like, anyhow, a character in a story of a kind in which she could never have imagined she belonged.

  The meteorological turbulence engendered by God’s anger with his servant had given way to a clear, balmy night presided over by a fat and creamy moon. Only the fallen trees remained to bear witness to the might of the now-departed Being. Gibreel, trilby jammed down on his head, money-belt firmly around his waist, hands deep in gabardine – the r
ight hand feeling, in there, the shape of a paperback book – was giving silent thanks for his escape. Certain now of his archangelic status, he banished from his thoughts all remorse for his time of doubting, replacing it with a new resolve: to bring this metropolis of the ungodly, this latter-day ‘Ad or Thamoud, back to the knowledge of God, to shower upon it the blessings of the Recitation, the sacred Word. He felt his old self drop from him, and dismissed it with a shrug, but chose to retain, for the time being, his human scale. This was not the time to grow until he filled the sky from horizon to horizon – though that, too, would surely come before long.

  The city’s streets coiled around him, writhing like serpents. London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future. He wandered its streets through that night, and the next day, and the next night, and on until the light and dark ceased to matter. He no longer seemed to need food or rest, but only to move constantly through that tortured metropolis whose fabric was now utterly transformed, the houses in the rich quarters being built of solidified fear, the government buildings partly of vainglory and partly of scorn, and the residences of the poor of confusion and material dreams. When you looked through an angel’s eyes you saw essences instead of surfaces, you saw the decay of the soul blistering and bubbling on the skins of people in the street, you saw the generosity of certain spirits resting on their shoulders in the form of birds. As he roamed the metamorphosed city he saw bat-winged imps sitting on the corners of buildings made of deceits and glimpsed goblins oozing wormily through the broken tilework of public urinals for men. As once the thirteenth-century German monk Richalmus would shut his eyes and instantly see clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth, dancing like dust-specks in the sunlight, so now Gibreel with open eyes and by the light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his adversary, his – to give the old word back its original meaning – shaitan.

  Long before the Flood, he remembered – now that he had reassumed the role of archangel, the full range of archangelic memory and wisdom was apparently being restored to him, little by little – a number of angels (the names Semjaza and Azazel came first to mind) had been flung out of Heaven because they had been lusting after the daughters of men, who in due course gave birth to an evil race of giants. He began to understand the degree of the danger from which he had been saved when he departed from the vicinity of Alleluia Cone. O most false of creatures! O princess of the powers of the air! – When the Prophet, on whose name be peace, had first received the wahi, the Revelation, had he not feared for his sanity? – And who had offered him the reassuring certainty he needed? – Why, Khadija, his wife. She it was who convinced him that he was not some raving crazy but the Messenger of God. – Whereas what had Alleluia done for him? You’re not yourself. I don’t think you’re really well. – O bringer of tribulation, creatrix of strife, of soreness of the heart! Siren, temptress, fiend in human form! That snowlike body with its pale, pale hair: how she had used it to fog his soul, and how hard he had found it, in the weakness of his flesh, to resist … enmeshed by her in the web of a love so complex as to be beyond comprehension, he had come to the very edge of the ultimate Fall. How beneficent, then, the Over-Entity had been to him! – He saw now that the choice was simple: the infernal love of the daughters of men, or the celestial adoration of God. He had found it possible to choose the latter; in the nick of time.

  He drew out of the right-hand pocket of his overcoat the book that had been there ever since his departure from Rosa’s house a millennium ago: the book of the city he had come to save, Proper London, capital of Vilayet, laid out for his benefit in exhaustive detail, the whole bang shoot. He would redeem this city: Geographers’ London, all the way from A to Z.

  On a street corner in a part of town once known for its population of artists, radicals and men in search of prostitutes, and now given over to advertising personnel and minor film producers, the Archangel Gibreel chanced to see a lost soul. It was young, male, tall, and of extreme beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair oiled down and parted in the centre; its teeth were made of gold. The lost soul stood at the very edge of the pavement, its back to the road, leaning forwards at a slight angle and clutching, in its right hand, something it evidently held very dear. Its behaviour was striking: first it would stare fiercely at the thing it held in its hand, and then look around, whipping its head from right to left, scrutinizing with blazing concentration the faces of the passers-by. Reluctant to approach too quickly, Gibreel on a first pass saw that the object the lost soul was clutching was a small passport-sized photograph. On his second pass he went right up to the stranger and offered his help. The other eyed him suspiciously, then thrust the photograph under his nose. ‘This man,’ he said, jabbing at the picture with a long index finger. ‘Do you know this man?’

  When Gibreel saw, staring out of the photograph, a young man of extreme beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair, oiled, with a central parting, he knew that his instincts had been correct, that here, standing on a busy street corner watching the crowd in case he saw himself going by, was a Soul in search of its mislaid body, a spectre in desperate need of its lost physical casing – for it is known to archangels that the soul or ka cannot exist (once the golden cord of light linking it to the body is severed) for more than a night and a day. ‘I can help you,’ he promised, and the young soul looked at him in wild disbelief. Gibreel leaned forward, grasped the ka’s face between his hands, and kissed it firmly upon the mouth, for the spirit that is kissed by an archangel regains, at once, its lost sense of direction, and is set upon the true and righteous path. – The lost soul, however, had a most surprising reaction to being favoured by an archangelic kiss. ‘Sod you,’ it shouted, ‘I may be desperate, mate, but I’m not that desperate,’ – after which, manifesting a solidity most unusual in a disembodied spirit, it struck the Archangel of the Lord a resounding blow upon the nose with the very fist in which its image was clasped; – with disorienting, and bloody, results.

  When his vision cleared, the lost soul had gone but there, floating on her carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his discomfiture. ‘Not such a great start,’ she snorted. ‘Archangel my foot. Gibreel janab, you’re off your head, take it from me. You played too many winged types for your own good. I wouldn’t trust that Deity of yours either, if I were you,’ she added in a more conspiratorial tone, though Gibreel suspected that her intentions remained satirical. ‘He hinted as much himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar-Neechay question like he did. This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam – O, children of Adam, let not the Devil seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them their clothing that he might show them their shame – but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century B C, asks: “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century B C, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’ This speech was one of which the ‘real’ Rekha would plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or, of all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever since he fell from Bostan was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective, psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. – What, then, was she? It would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his
own making – his own accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her ease with the arcana. – But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly, in days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed him? (He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix his thoughts upon his ‘dark age’, that is to say the period during which he had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could make out little more than shadows.) – Or could it be that the material now filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary squat like a toad by Eve’s ear in Eden, using his wiles ‘to reach/The organs of her fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams’, had in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia’s boudoir, and awoken him from his long waking sleep? – Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner, guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.

  His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been able to tolerate pain. ‘Always a cry-baby,’ Rekha laughed in his face. Shaitan had understood more:

  Lives there who loves his pain?

  Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell,

  Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt,

  And boldly venture to whatever place

  Farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change

  Torment with ease …

  He couldn’t have put it better. A person who found himself in an inferno would do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it took to get out … he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose as Rekha, still present on her flying rug, and intuiting his ascent (descent?) into the realm of metaphysical speculation, attempted to get things back on to more familiar ground. ‘You should have stuck with me,’ she opined. ‘You could have loved me, good and proper. I knew how to love. Not everybody has the capacity for it; I do, I mean did. Not like that self-centred blonde bombshell thinking secretly about having a child and not even mentioning same to you. Not like your God, either; it’s not like the old days, when such Persons took proper interest.’