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 remarked. ‘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 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.
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 in Jahilia 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 i
t. 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, all-wise. 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 I 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, are 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 to Jahilia. 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.’
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 boy-wonder, 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; Baal, 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, Baal 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.
The Satanic Verses: A Novel Page 40
