The Satanic Verses (72 page)

Jumpy wasn’t there.

Nor, apparently, had Mishal Sufyan patched things up with her mother; Mishal and Hanif were absent, and neither Anahita nor her mother gave Chamcha a greeting that could be described as warm. Only Haji Sufyan was welcoming: ‘Come, come, sit; you’re looking good.’ The café was oddly empty, and even Gibreel’s presence failed to create much of a stir. It took Chamcha a few seconds to understand what was up; then he saw the quartet of white youths sitting at a corner table, spoiling for a fight.

The young Bengali waiter (whom Hind had been obliged to employ after her elder daughter’s departure) came over and took their order – aubergines, sikh kababs, rice – while staring angrily in the direction of the troublesome quartet, who were, as Saladin now perceived, very drunk indeed. The waiter, Amin, was as annoyed with Sufyan as the drunks. ‘Should never have let them sit,’ he mumbled to Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘Now I’m obliged to serve. It’s okay for the seth; he’s not the front line, see.’

The drunks got their food at the same time as Chamcha and Gibreel. When they started complaining about the cooking, the atmosphere in the room grew even more highly charged. Finally they stood up. ‘We’re not eating this shit, you cunts,’ yelled the leader, a tiny, runty fellow with sandy hair, a pale thin face, and spots. ‘It’s
shit
. You can go fuck yourselves, fucking cunts.’ His three companions, giggling and swearing, left the café. The leader lingered for a moment. ‘Enjoying your food?’ he screamed at Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘It’s fucking shit. Is that what you eat at home, is it? Cunts.’ Gibreel was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this is what the British, that great nation of conquerors, have become in the end. He did not respond. The little rat-faced speaker came over. ‘I asked you a fucking question,’ he
said. ‘I said. Are you fucking enjoying your fucking
shit dinner
?’ And Saladin Chamcha, perhaps out of his annoyance that Gibreel had not been confronted by the man he’d all but killed – catching him off guard from behind, the coward’s way – found himself answering: ‘We would be, if it wasn’t for you.’ Ratboy, swaying on his feet, digested this information; and then did a very surprising thing. Taking a deep breath, he drew himself up to his full five foot five; then leaned forward, and spat violently and copiously all over the food.

‘Baba, if that’s in your top ten,’ Gibreel said in the taxi home, ‘don’t take me to the places you don’t like so much.’

‘ “Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,” ’ Chamcha replied. ‘It means, “My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.” Nabokov.’

‘Him again,’ Gibreel complained. ‘What bloody language?’

‘He made it up. It’s what Kinbote’s Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In
Pale Fire
.’

‘Perndirstan,’
Farishta repeated. ‘Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?’

They were almost back at Allie’s flat overlooking Brickhall Fields. ‘The playwright Strindberg,’ Chamcha said, absently, as if following some profound train of thought, ‘after two unhappy marriages, wedded a famous and lovely twenty-year-old actress called Harriet Bosse. In the
Dream
she was a great Puck. He wrote for her, too: the part of Eleanora in
Easter
. An “angel of peace”. The young men went crazy for her, and Strindberg, well, he got so jealous he almost lost his mind. He tried to keep her locked up at home, far from the eyes of men. She wanted to travel; he brought her travel books. It was like the old Cliff Richard song:
Gonna lock her up in a trunk/so no big hunk/can steal her away from me
.’

Farishta’s heavy head nodded in recognition. He had fallen into a kind of reverie. ‘What happened?’ he inquired as they reached their destination. ‘She left him,’ Chamcha innocently declared. ‘She said she could not reconcile him with the human race.’

Alleluia Cone read, as she walked home from the Tube, her mother’s deliriously happy letter from Stanford, Calif. ‘If people tell you happiness is unattainable,’ Alicja wrote in large, looping, back-leaning, left-handed letters, ‘kindly point them in my direction. I’ll put them straight. I found it twice, the first time with your father, as you know, the second with this kind, broad man whose face is the exact colour of the oranges that grow all over these parts. Contentment, Allie. It beats excitement. Try it, you’ll like it.’ When she looked up, Allie saw Maurice Wilson’s ghost sitting atop a large copper beech-tree in his usual woollen attire – tam-o’-shanter, diamond-pattern Pringle jersey, plus-fours – looking uncomfortably overdressed in the heat. ‘I’ve no time for you now,’ she told him, and he shrugged.
I can wait
. Her feet were bad again. She set her jaw and marched on.

Saladin Chamcha, concealed behind the very copper beech from which Maurice Wilson’s ghost was surveying Allie’s painful progress, observed Gibreel Farishta bursting out of the front door of the block of flats in which he’d been waiting impatiently for her return; observed him red-eyed and raving. The demons of jealousy were sitting on his shoulders, and he was screaming out the same old song, wherethehell whothe whatthe dontthinkyoucanpullthewool howdareyou bitchbitchbitch. It appeared that Strindberg had succeeded where Jumpy (because absent) had failed.

The watcher in the upper branches dematerialized; the other, with a satisfied nod, strolled away down an avenue of shady, spreading trees.

The telephone calls which now began to be received, first at their London residence and subsequently at a remote address in Dumfries and Galloway, by both Allie and Gibreel, were not too frequent; then again, they could not be termed infrequent. Nor were there too many voices to be plausible; then again, there were quite
enough. These were not brief calls, such as those made by heavy breathers and other abusers of the telephone network, but, conversely, they never lasted long enough for the police, eavesdropping, to track them to their source. Nor did the whole unsavoury episode last very long – a mere matter of three and a half weeks, after which the callers desisted forever; but it might also be mentioned that it went on exactly as long as it needed to, that is, until it had driven Gibreel Farishta to do to Allie Cone what he had previously done to Saladin – namely, the Unforgivable Thing.

It should be said that nobody, not Allie, not Gibreel, not even the professional phone-tappers they brought in, ever suspected the calls of being a single man’s work; but for Saladin Chamcha, once renowned (if only in somewhat specialist circles) as the Man of a Thousand Voices, such a deception was a simple matter, entirely lacking in effort or risk. In all, he was obliged to select (from his thousand voices and a voice) a total of no more than thirty-nine.

When Allie answered, she heard unknown men murmuring intimate secrets in her ear, strangers who seemed to know her body’s most remote recesses, faceless beings who gave evidence of having learned, by experience, her choicest preferences among the myriad forms of love; and once the attempts at tracing the calls had begun her humiliation grew, because now she was unable simply to replace the receiver, but had to stand and listen, hot in the face and cold along the spine, making attempts (which didn’t work) actually to prolong the calls.

Gibreel also got his share of voices: superb Byronic aristocrats boasting of having ‘conquered Everest’, sneering guttersnipes, unctuous best-friend voices mingling warning and mock-commiseration,
a word to the wise, how stupid can you, don’t you know yet what she’s, anything in trousers, you poor moron, take it from a pal
. But one voice stood out from the rest, the high soulful voice of a poet, one of the first voices Gibreel heard and the one that got deepest under his skin; a voice that spoke exclusively in rhyme, reciting doggerel verses of an understated naïvety, even innocence, which contrasted so greatly with the masturbatory
coarseness of most of the other callers that Gibreel soon came to think of it as the most insidiously menacing of all.

Tell her that
, the voice swooned, and rang off. Another day it returned with another jingle:

Give her that message, too; if you’d be so kind
. There was something demonic, Gibreel decided, something profoundly immoral about cloaking corruption in this greetings-card tum-ti-tum.

A … l … l …
Gibreel, in disgust and fear, banged down the receiver; and trembled. After that the versifier stopped calling for a while; but his was the voice Gibreel started waiting for, dreading its reappearance, having perhaps accepted, at some level deeper than consciousness, that this infernal, childlike evil was what would finish him off for good.

But O how easy it all turned out to be! How comfortably evil lodged in those supple, infinitely flexible vocal cords, those puppetmaster’s strings! How surely it stepped out along the high wires of the telephone system, poised as a barefoot acrobat; how confidently it entered the victims’ presence, as certain of its effect as a handsome man in a perfectly tailored suit! And how carefully it bided its time, sending forth every voice but the voice that would deliver the coup de grâce – for Saladin, too, had understood the
doggerel’s special potency – deep voices and squeaky voices, slow ones, quick ones, sad and cheerful, aggression-laden and shy. One by one, they dripped into Gibreel’s ears, weakening his hold on the real world, drawing him little by little into their deceitful web, so that little by little their obscene, invented women began to coat the real woman like a viscous, green film, and in spite of his protestations to the contrary he started slipping away from her; and then it was time for the return of the little, satanic verses that made him mad.