The Satanic Verses (51 page)

‘A case, mother?’ This drew out Alicja’s grandest voice. She was still capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her post-Otto decision to disguise herself as a bag-lady. ‘A case,’ she announced, taking into consideration the fact that Gibreel was an Indian import, ‘of cashew and monkey nuts.’

Allie didn’t argue with her mother, being by no means certain that she could continue to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even if he had fallen from the sky. The long term was hard to predict; even the medium term looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get to know this man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love of her life, with a lack of doubt that meant he was either right or off his head. There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn’t know what he knew, what she could take for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov’s doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a way of explaining by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of impending catastrophe (which had to do not with recurring patterns but with the inescapability of the unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he’d never heard of the writer, let alone
The Defence
. Conversely, he surprised her by asking, out of the blue, ‘Why Picabia?’ Adding that it was peculiar, was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the terror camps, to go in for all that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute power, dehumanization glorified. ‘Anybody who’s spent any time with machines at all,’ he added, ‘and baby, that’s us all, knows first and foremost there’s only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.’ Where did you find out about, she began, and faltered because she didn’t like the patronizing note she was striking, but
he answered without vanity. The first time he’d heard about Marinetti, he said, he’d got the wrong end of the stick and thought Futurism was something to do with puppets. ‘Marionettes, kathputli, at that time I was keen to use advanced puppetry techniques in a picture, maybe to depict demons or other supernormal beings. So I got a book.’
I got a book
: Gibreel the autodidact made it sound like an injection. To a girl from a house that revered books – her father had made them all kiss any volume that fell by chance to the floor – and who had reacted by treating them badly, ripping out pages she wanted or didn’t like, scribbling and scratching at them to show them who was boss, Gibreel’s form of irreverence, non-abusive, taking books for what they offered without feeling the need to genuflect or destroy, was something new; and, she accepted, pleasing. She learned from him. He, however, seemed impervious to any wisdom she might wish to impart, about, for example, the correct place in which to dispose of dirty socks. When she attempted to suggest he ‘did his share’, he went into a profound, injured sulk, expecting to be cajoled back into a good humour. Which, to her disgust, she found herself willing, for the moment at any rate, to do.

The worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius for thinking himself slighted, belittled, under attack. It became almost impossible to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable, no matter how gently put. ‘Go, go eat air,’ he’d shout, and retire into the tent of his wounded pride. – And the most seductive thing about him was the way he knew instinctively what she wanted, how when he chose he could become the agent of her secret heart. As a result, their sex was literally electric. That first tiny spark, on the occasion of their inaugural kiss, wasn’t any one-off. It went on happening, and sometimes while they made love she was convinced she could hear the crackle of electricity all around them; she felt, at times, her hair standing on end. ‘It reminds me of the electric dildo in my father’s study,’ she told Gibreel, and they laughed. ‘Am I the love of your life?’ she asked quickly, and he answered, just as quickly: ‘Of course.’

She admitted to him early on that the rumours about her unattainability,
even frigidity, had some basis in fact. ‘After Yel died, I took on that side of her as well.’ She hadn’t needed, any more, to hurl lovers into her sister’s face. ‘Plus I really wasn’t enjoying it any more. It was mostly revolutionary socialists at the time, making do with me while they dreamed about the heroic women they’d seen on their three-week trips to Cuba. Never touched
them
, of course; the combat fatigues and ideological purity scared them silly. They came home humming “Guantanamera” and rang me up.’ She opted out. ‘I thought, let the best minds of my generation soliloquize about power over some other poor woman’s body, I’m off.’ She began climbing mountains, she used to say when she began, ‘because I knew they’d never follow me up there. But then I thought, bullshit. I didn’t do it for them; I did it for me.’

For an hour every evening she would run barefoot up and down the stairs to the street, on her toes, for the sake of her fallen arches. Then she’d collapse into a heap of cushions, looking enraged, and he’d flap helplessly around, usually ending up pouring her a stiff drink: Irish whiskey, mostly. She had begun drinking a fair bit as the reality of her foot problem sank in. (‘For Christ’s sake keep the feet quiet,’ a voice from the PR agency told her surreally on the phone. ‘If they get out it’s finito, curtains, sayonara, go home, goodnight.’) On their twenty-first night together, when she had worked her way through five doubles of Jameson’s, she said: ‘Why I really went up there. Don’t laugh: to escape from good and evil.’ He didn’t laugh. ‘Are mountains above morality, in your estimation?’ he asked seriously. ‘This’s what I learned in the revolution,’ she went on. ‘This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can’t say just when; stands to reason, that’s part of the information that got abolsh, abo
lished
. Since then we’ve been living in a fairy-story. Got me? Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven’t a fucking notion what’s going on. So how do we know if it’s right or wrong? We don’t even know what it
is
. So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work it all out, or you can go sit on a mountain, because that’s where all the truth went,
believe it or not, it just upped and ran away from these cities where even the stuff under our feet is all made up, a lie, and it hid up there in the thin thin air where the liars don’t dare come after it in case their brains explode. It’s up there all right. I’ve been there. Ask me.’ She fell asleep; he carried her to the bed.

After the news of his death in the plane crash reached her, she had tormented herself by inventing him: by speculating, that is to say, about her lost lover. He had been the first man she’d slept with in more than five years: no small figure in her life. She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she wasn’t prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet. But she’d never shaken off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly possessed by that archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the blurring of the boundaries of the self, the unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam’s-apple to your crotch: just words, because she didn’t know the thing. Suppose he had come to me, she dreamed. I could have learned him, step by step, climbed him to the very summit. Denied mountains by my weak-boned feet, I’d have looked for the mountain in him: establishing base camp, sussing out routes, negotiating ice-falls, crevasses, overhangs. I’d have assaulted the peak and seen the angels dance. O, but he’s dead, and at the bottom of the sea.

Then she found him. – And maybe he’d invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one’s old life to love. – Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together: or not. It works out or it doesn’t. But to suppose that Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia Cone could have gone along so familiar a path is to make the mistake of thinking their relationship ordinary. It wasn’t; didn’t have so much as a shot at ordinariness.

It was a relationship with serious flaws.

(‘The modern city,’ Otto Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his bored family at table, ‘is the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus. One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant, blinking like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an entirely alien and contradictory continuum is to be found. And as long as that’s all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their hats in some hotel corridor, it’s not so bad. But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.’ – ‘As a matter of fact, dearest,’ Alicja said dryly, ‘I often feel a little incompatible myself.’)

The flaws in the grand passion of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta were as follows: her secret fear of her secret desire, that is, love; – owing to which she was wont to retreat from, even hit violently out at, the very person whose devotion she sought most; – and the deeper the intimacy, the harder she kicked; – so that the other, having been brought to a place of absolute trust, and having lowered all his defences, received the full force of the blow, and was devastated; – which, indeed, is what befell Gibreel Farishta, when after three weeks of the most ecstatic lovemaking either of them had ever known he was told without ceremony that he had better find himself somewhere to live, pretty sharpish, because she, Allie, required more elbow-room than was presently available; –

– and his overweening possessiveness and jealousy, of which he himself had been wholly unaware, owing to his never previously having thought of a woman as a treasure that had to be guarded at all costs against the piratical hordes who would naturally be trying to purloin her; – and of which more will be said almost instantly; –

– and the fatal flaw, namely, Gibreel Farishta’s imminent realization – or, if you will,
insane idea, –
that he truly was nothing less than an archangel in human form, and not just any archangel, but the Angel of the Recitation, the most exalted (now that Shaitan had fallen) of them all.

They had spent their days in such isolation, wrapped up in the sheets of their desires, that his wild, uncontrollable jealousy, which, as Iago warned, ‘doth mock the meat it feeds on,’ did not instantly come to light. It first manifested itself in the absurd matter of the trio of cartoons which Allie had hung in a group by her front door, mounted in cream and framed in old gold, all bearing the same message, scrawled across the lower right-hand corner of the cream mounts:
To A., in hopes, from Brunel
. When Gibreel noticed these inscriptions he demanded an explanation, pointing furiously at the cartoons with fully extended arm, while with his free hand he clutched a bedsheet around him (he was attired in this informal manner because he’d decided the time was ripe for him to make a full inspection of the premises,
can’t spend one’s whole life on one’s back, or even yours
, he’d said); Allie, forgivably, laughed. ‘You look like Brutus, all murder and dignity,’ she teased him. ‘The picture of an honourable man.’ He shocked her by shouting violently: ‘Tell me at once who the bastard is.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. Jack Brunel worked as an animator, was in his late fifties and had known her father. She had never had the faintest interest in him, but he had taken to courting her by the strangulated, wordless method of sending her, from time to time, these graphic gifts.

‘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
.