The Satanic Verses (14 page)

           
And: "How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long do
you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, the
has-to-be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother-fucking sparks,
yaar, believe don't believe, she said it was static electricity in the carpet
but I've kissed chicks in hotel rooms before and this was a definite first, a
definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump back with
pain."

           
He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express how it
had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet and she
had become its meaning. "You don't see," he gave up. "Maybe you
never met a person for whom you'd cross the world, for whom you'd leave
everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine
thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the top.
You think I can't get on a jumbo-jet for a woman like that?"

           
The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the
mountain-climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the memory
of Pamela, but she wouldn't come. At first it would be Zeeny who visited him,
her shade, and then after a time there was nobody at all. Gibreel's passion
began to drive Chamcha wild with anger and frustration, but Farishta didn't
notice it, slapped him on the back,
cheer up, Spoono, won't be long now
.

           
* * * * *

           
On the hundred and tenth day Tavleen walked up to the little goateed hostage,
Jalandri, and motioned with her finger. Our patience has been exhausted, she
announced, we have sent repeated ultimatums with no response, it is time for
the first sacrifice. She used that word: sacrifice. She looked straight into
Jalandri's eyes and pronounced his death sentence. "You first. Apostate
traitor bastard." She ordered the crew to prepare for take-off, she wasn't
going to risk a storming of the plane after the execution, and with the point
of her gun she pushed Jalandri towards the open door at the front, while he
screamed and begged for mercy. "She's got sharp eyes," Gibreel said
to Chamcha. "He's a cut-sird." Jalandri had become the first target
because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his hair, which made him
a traitor to his faith, a shorn Sirdarji.
Cut-Sird
. A seven-letter
condemnation; no appeal.

           
Jalandri had fallen to his knees, stains were spreading on the seat of his
trousers, she was dragging him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved. Dara Buta
Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was kneeling with his back to the
open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the head, and he
toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door.

           
Man Singh, youngest and jumpiest of the quartet, screamed at her: "Now
where do we go? In any damn place they'll send the commandos in for sure. We're
gone geese now."

           
"Martyrdom is a privilege," she said softly. "We shall be like
stars; like the sun."

           
* * * * *

           
Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming
carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps, France, the
coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened meadowlands. Mr. Saladin
Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The world had rediscovered Flight
A 1-420, the Boeing 747
Bostan
. Radar tracked it; radio messages
crackled.
Do you want permission to land
? But no permission was
requested.
Bostan
circled over England's shore like a gigantic sea-bird.
Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero.

           
When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this
time the three male hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there were no fierce
whispers about the
fuel
about
what the fuck  you're doing
but just a mute stand-off, they wouldn't even talk to one another, as if they
had given up hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her. The
hostages watched the fight to the death, unable to feel involved, because a
curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a kind of
inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. They fell to the floor
and her knife went up through his stomach. That was all, the brevity of it
adding to its seeming unimportance. Then in the instant when she rose up it was
as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really meant business,
she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her hand the
wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her gown, all
those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara rushed at her
she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down.

           
No, not death: birth.

           
Gibreel when he submits to the inevitable, when he slides heavy-lidded towards
visions of his angeling, passes his loving mother who has a different name for
him, Shaitan, she calls him, just like Shaitan, same to same, because he has
been fooling around with the tiffins to be carried into the city for the office
workers' lunch, mischeevious imp, she slices the air with her hand, rascal has
been putting Muslim meat compartments into Hindu non-veg tiffin-carriers,
customers are up in arms. Little devil, she scolds, but then folds him in her
arms, my little farishta, boys will be boys, and he falls past her into sleep,
growing bigger as he falls and the falling begins to feel like flight, his
mother's voice wafts distantly up to him, baba, look how you grew, enor
mouse
,
wah-wah, applause. He is gigantic, wingless, standing with his feet upon the
horizon and his arms around the sun. In the early dreams he sees beginnings, Shaitan
cast down from the sky, making a grab for a branch of the highest Thing, the
lote-tree of the uttermost end that stands beneath the Throne, Shaitan missing,
plummeting, splat. But he lived on, was not couldn't be dead, sang from
heilbelow his soft seductive verses. O the sweet songs that he knew. With his
daughters as his fiendish backing group, yes, the three of them, Lat Manat
Uzza, motherless girls laughing with their Abba, giggling behind their hands at
Gibreel, what a trick we got in store for you, they giggle, for you and for
that businessman on the hill. But before the businessman there are other
stories, here he is, Archangel Gibreel, revealing the spring of Zamzam to Hagar
the Egyptian so that, abandoned by the prophet Ibrahim with their child in the
desert, she might drink the cool spring waters and so live. And later, after
the Jurhum filled up Zamzam with mud and golden gazelles, so that it was lost
for a time, here he is again, pointing it out to that one, Muttalib of the
scarlet tents, father of the child with the silver hair who fathered, in turn,
the businessman. The businessman: here he comes.

           
Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes aware, without the dream, of himself
sleeping, of himself dreaming his own awareness of his dream, and then a panic
begins, O God, he cries out, O allgood allahgod, I've had my bloody chips, me.
Got bugs in the brain, full mad, a looney tune and a gone baboon. Just as he,
the businessman, felt when he first saw the archangel: thought he was cracked,
wanted to throw himself down from a rock, from a high rock, from a rock on
which there grew a stunted lote-tree, a rock as high as the roof of the world.

           
He's coming: making his way up Cone Mountain to the cave. Happy birthday: he's
forty-four today. But though the city behind and below him throngs with
festival, up he climbs, alone. No new birthday suit for him, neatly pressed and
folded at the foot of his bed. A man of ascetic tastes. (What strange manner of
businessman is this?)

           
Question: What is the opposite of faith?

           
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.

           
Doubt.

           
The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and
homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid
muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is
it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed
them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you
will be the instruments of my will on earth, of the salvationdamnation of man,
all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the haloes,
back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and
they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt
anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behind-their-own eyes. Of
what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers. . . angels,
they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to
submit; to dissent.

           
I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.

           
Me?

           
The businessman: looks as he should, high forehead, eaglenose, broad in the shoulders,
narrow in the hip. Average height, brooding, dressed in two pieces of plain
cloth, each four ells in length, one draped around his body, the other over his
shoulder. Large eyes; long lashes like a girl's. His strides can seem too long
for his legs, but he's a light-footed man. Orphans learn to be moving targets,
develop a rapid walk, quick reactions, hold-your-tongue caution. Up through the
thorn-bushes and opobalsam trees he comes, scrabbling on boulders, this is a
fit man, no softbellied usurer he. And yes, to state it again: takes an odd
sort of business wallah to cut off into the wilds, up Mount Cone, sometimes for
a month at a stretch, just to be alone.

           
His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it means
he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won't answer to that here; nor,
though he's well aware of what they call him, to his nickname in Jahilia down
below―
he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-Coney
. Here he is neither
Mahomet nor MocHammered; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis hung
around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all
chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our
mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener,
the Devil's synonym: Mahound.

           
That's him. Mahound the businessman, climbing his hot mountain in the Hijaz.
The mirage of a city shines below him in the sun.

           
* * * * *

           
The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the
desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the
whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of
transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts,―the very
stuff of inconstancy,―the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting,
treachery, lack-of-form,―and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric
of their newly invented permanence. These people are a mere three or four
generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as the
dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home.

           
― Whereas the migrant can do without the journey altogether; it's no more
than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive. ―.

           
Quite recently, then, and like the shrewd businessmen they were, the Jahilians
settled down at the intersection-point of the routes of the great caravans, and
yoked the dunes to their will. Now the sand serves the mighty urban merchants.
Beaten into cobbles, it paves Jahilia's tortuous streets; by night, golden
flames blaze out from braziers of burnished sand. There is glass in the
windows, in the long, slitlike windows set in the infinitely high sand-walls of
the merchant palaces; in the alleys of Jahilia, donkey-carts roll forward on
smooth silicon wheels. I, in my wickedness, sometimes imagine the coming of a
great wave, a high wall of foaming water roaring across the desert, a liquid
catastrophe full of snapping boats and drowning arms, a tidal wave that would
reduce these vain sandcastles to the nothingness, to the grains from which they
came. But there are no waves here. Water is the enemy in Jahilia. Carried in
earthen pots, it must never be spilled (the penal code deals fiercely with offenders),
for where it drops the city erodes alarmingly. Holes appear in roads, houses
tilt and sway. The watercarriers of Jahilia are loathed necessities, pariahs
who cannot be ignored and therefore can never be forgiven. It never rains in
Jahilia; there are no fountains in the silicon gardens. A few palms stand in
enclosed courtyards, their roots travelling far and wide below the earth in
search of moisture. The city's water comes from underground streams and
springs, one such being the fabled Zamzam, at the heart of the concentric sand-
city, next to the House of the Black Stone. Here, at Zamzam, is a beheshti, a
despised water-carrier, drawing up the vital, dangerous fluid. He has a name:
Khalid.