The Satanic Verses (49 page)

Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft and died. Now there was a subject which Alicja, who would readily discuss most taboo matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor of the camps live forty years and then complete the job the monsters didn’t get done? Does great evil eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man’s death be incompatible with his life? Allie, whose first response on learning of her father’s death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother. Who,
stonefaced beneath a wide black hat, said only: ‘You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear.’

After Otto’s death Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and gesture which had been her offering on the altar of his lust for integration, her attempt to be his Cecil Beaton grande dame. ‘Phoo,’ she confided in Allie, ‘what a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change.’ She now wore her grey hair in a straggly bun, put on a succession of identical floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a painful set of false teeth, planted vegetables in what Otto had insisted should be an English floral garden (neat flowerbeds around the central, symbolic tree, a ‘chimeran graft’ of laburnum and broom) and gave, instead of dinners full of cerebral chat, a series of lunches – heavy stews and a minimum of three outrageous puddings – at which dissident Hungarian poets told convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if things didn’t quite work out) the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their loaded plates, and something very like total silence reigned for what felt like weeks. Allie eventually turned away from these Sunday afternoon rituals, sulking in her room until she was old enough to move out, with Alicja’s ready assent, and from the path chosen for her by the father whose betrayal of his own act of survival had angered her so much. She turned towards action; and found she had mountains to climb.

Alicja Cohen, who had found Allie’s change of course perfectly comprehensible, even laudable, and rooted for her all the way, could not (she admitted over coffee) quite see her daughter’s point in the matter of Gibreel Farishta, the revenant Indian movie star. ‘To hear you talk, dear, the man’s not in your league,’ she said, using a phrase she believed to be synonymous with
not your type
, and which she would have been horrified to hear described as a racial, or religious, slur: which was inevitably the sense in which her daughter understood it. ‘That’s just fine by me,’ Allie riposted with spirit, and rose. ‘The fact is, I don’t even
like
my league.’

Her feet ached, obliging her to limp, rather than storm, from
the restaurant. ‘Grand passion,’ she could hear her mother behind her back announcing loudly to the room at large. ‘The gift of tongues; means a girl can babble out any blasted thing.’

Certain aspects of her education had been unaccountably neglected. One Sunday not long after her father’s death she was buying the Sunday papers from the corner kiosk when the vendor announced: ‘It’s the last week this week. Twenty-three years I’ve been on this corner and the Pakis have finally driven me out of business.’ She heard the word
p-a-c-h-y
, and had a bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news vendors. ‘What’s a pachy?’ she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging: ‘A brown Jew.’ She went on thinking of the proprietors of the local ‘CTN’ (confectioner-tobacconist-newsagent) as
pachyderms
for quite a while: as people set apart – rendered objectionable – by the nature of their skin. She told Gibreel this story, too. ‘Oh,’ he responded, crushingly, ‘an elephant joke.’ He wasn’t an easy man.

But there he was in her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could open as she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and caress her heart. Not for many years had she entered the sexual arena with such celerity, and never before had so swift a liaison remained wholly untainted by regret or self-disgust. His extended silence (she took it for that until she learned that his name was on the
Bostan’s
passenger list) had been sharply painful, suggesting a difference in his estimation of their encounter; but to have been mistaken about his desire, about such an abandoned, hurtling thing, was surely impossible? The news of his death accordingly provoked a double response: on the one hand, there was a kind of grateful, relieved joy to be had from the knowledge that he had been racing across the world to surprise her, that he had given up his entire life in order to construct a new one with her; while, on the other, there was the hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very moment of knowing that she truly had been loved. Later, she became aware of a further, less
generous, reaction. What had he thought he was doing, planning to arrive without a word of warning on her doorstep, assuming that she’d be waiting with open arms, an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough apartment for them both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spoiled movie actor who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits into his lap … in short, she had felt invaded, or potentially invaded. But then she had rebuked herself, pushing such notions back down into the pit where they belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption, if presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Then there he lay at her feet, unconscious in the snow, taking her breath away with the impossibility of his being there at all, leading her momentarily to wonder if he might not be another in the series of visual aberrations – she preferred the neutral phrase to the more loaded
visions –
by which she’d been plagued ever since her decision to scorn oxygen cylinders and conquer Chomolungma on lung power alone. The effort of raising him, slinging his arm around her shoulders and half-carrying him to her flat – more than half, if the truth be told – fully persuaded her that he was no chimera, but heavy flesh and blood. Her feet stung her all the way home, and the pain reawakened all the resentments she’d stifled when she thought him dead. What was she supposed to do with him now, the lummox, sprawled out across her bed? God, but she’d forgotten what a sprawler the man was, how during the night he colonized your side of the bed and denuded you entirely of bedclothes. But other sentiments, too, had re-emerged, and these won the day; for here he was, sleeping beneath her protection, the abandoned hope: at long last, love.

He slept almost round the clock for a week, waking up only to satisfy the minimum requirements of hunger and hygiene, saying almost nothing. His sleep was tormented: he thrashed about the bed, and words occasionally escaped his lips:
Jahilia, Al-Lat, Hind
. In his waking moments he appeared to wish to resist sleep, but it claimed him, waves of it rolling over him and drowning him while he, almost piteously, waved a feeble arm. She was unable to
guess what traumatic events might have given rise to such behaviour, and, feeling a little alarmed, telephoned her mother. Alicja arrived to inspect the sleeping Gibreel, pursed her lips, and pronounced: ‘He’s a man possessed.’ She had receded more and more into a kind of Singer Brothers dybbukery, and her mysticism never failed to exasperate her pragmatic, mountain-climbing daughter. ‘Use maybe a suction pump on his ear,’ Alicja recommended. ‘That’s the exit these creatures prefer.’ Allie shepherded her mother out of the door. ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know.’

On the seventh day he came wide awake, eyes popping open like a doll’s, and instantly reached for her. The crudity of the approach made her laugh almost as much as its unexpectedness, but once again there was that feeling of naturalness, of rightness; she grinned, ‘Okay, you asked for it,’ and slipped out of the baggy, elasticated maroon pantaloons and loose jacket – she disliked clothes that revealed the contours of her body – and that was the beginning of the sexual marathon that left them both sore, happy and exhausted when it finally ground to a halt.

He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father’s faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. ‘Okay,’ she said, exhaling. ‘I’ll buy it. Just don’t tell my mother, all right?’ The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut’s movie
L’Argent du Poche
 … She focused her thoughts. ‘Sometimes,’ she decided to say, ‘wonderful things happen to me, too.’

She told him then what she had never told any living being: about the visions on Everest, the angels and the ice-city. ‘It wasn’t
only on Everest, either,’ she said, and continued after a hesitation. When she got back to London, she went for a walk along the Embankment to try and get him, as well as the mountain, out of her blood. It was early in the morning and there was the ghost of a mist and the thick snow made everything vague. Then the icebergs came.

There were ten of them, moving in stately single file upriver. The mist was thicker around them, so it wasn’t until they sailed right up to her that she understood their shapes, the precisely miniaturized configurations of the ten highest mountains in the world, in ascending order, with her mountain,
the
mountain bringing up the rear. She was trying to work out how the icebergs had managed to pass under the bridges across the river when the mist thickened, and then, a few instants later, dissolved entirely, taking the icebergs with it. ‘But they were there,’ she insisted to Gibreel. ‘Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri, Xixabangma Feng.’ He didn’t argue. ‘If you say it, then I know it truly was so.’

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land’s attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated – nearly – into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. Her apartment was full of Himalayas. Representations of Everest in cork, in plastic, in tile, stone, acrylics, brick jostled for space; there was even one sculpted entirely out of ice, a tiny berg which she kept in the freezer and brought out from time to time to show off to friends. Why so many?
Because –
no other possible answer –
they were there
. ‘Look,’ she said, stretching out a hand without leaving the bed and picking up, from her bedside table, her newest acquisition, a simple Everest in weathered pine. ‘A gift from the sherpas of Namche Bazar.’ Gibreel took it, turned it in his hands. Pemba had offered it to her shyly when they said goodbye, insisting it was from all the sherpas as a group, although it was evident that he’d whittled it himself. It was a detailed model, complete with the ice fall and the Hillary Step that is the last great obstacle on the way to the top, and the route they had
taken to the summit was scored deeply into the wood. When Gibreel turned it upside down he found a message, scratched into the base in painstaking English.
To Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again
.

What Allie did not tell Gibreel was that the sherpa’s prohibition had scared her, convincing her that if she ever set her foot again upon the goddess-mountain, she would surely die, because it is not permitted to mortals to look more than once upon the face of the divine; but the mountain was diabolic as well as transcendent, or, rather, its diabolism and its transcendence were one, so that even the contemplation of Pemba’s ban made her feel a pang of need so deep that it made her groan aloud, as if in sexual ecstasy or despair. ‘The Himalayas,’ she told Gibreel so as not to say what was really on her mind, ‘are emotional peaks as well as physical ones: like opera. That’s what makes them so awesome. Nothing but the giddiest heights. A hard trick to pull off, though.’ Allie had a way of switching from the concrete to the abstract, a trope so casually achieved as to leave the listener half-wondering if she knew the difference between the two; or, very often, unsure as to whether, finally, such a difference could be said to exist.

Allie kept to herself the knowledge that she must placate the mountain or die, that in spite of the flat feet which made any serious mountaineering out of the question she was still infected by Everest, and that in her heart of hearts she kept hidden an impossible scheme, the fatal vision of Maurice Wilson, never achieved to this day. That is: the solo ascent.

What she did not confess: that she had seen Maurice Wilson since her return to London, sitting among the chimneypots, a beckoning goblin in plus-fours and tam-o’-shanter hat. – Nor did Gibreel Farishta tell her about his pursuit by the spectre of Rekha Merchant. There were still closed doors between them for all their physical intimacy: each kept secret a dangerous ghost. – And Gibreel, on hearing of Allie’s other visions, concealed a great agitation behind his neutral words –
if you say it, then I know –
an agitation born of this further evidence that the world of dreams was leaking into that of the waking hours, that the seals dividing
the two were breaking, and that at any moment the two firmaments could be joined, – that is to say, the end of all things was near. One morning Allie, awaking from spent and dreamless sleep, found him immersed in her long-unopened copy of Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, in which her younger self, disrespectful of books, had made a number of marks: underlinings, ticks in the margins, exclamations, multiple queries. Seeing that she had awoken, he read out a selection of these passages with a wicked grin. ‘From the Proverbs of Hell,’ he began.
‘The lust of the goat is the bounty of God
.’ She blushed furiously. ‘And what is more,’ he continued,
‘The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell
. Then, lower down the page:
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment
. Tell me, who is this? I found her pressed in the pages.’ He handed her a dead woman’s photograph: her sister, Elena, buried here and forgotten. Another addict of visions; and a casualty of the habit. ‘We don’t talk about her much.’ She was kneeling unclothed on the bed, her pale hair hiding her face. ‘Put her back where you found her.’