The Satanic Verses (62 page)

The girls of The Curtain – it was only by convention that they were referred to as ‘girls’, as the eldest was a woman well into her fifties, while the youngest, at fifteen, was more experienced than many fifty-year-olds – had grown fond of this shambling Baal, and in point of fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-who-wasn’t, so that out of working hours they would tease him deliciously, flaunting their bodies before him, placing their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing one another passionately
just an inch away from his face, until the ashy writer was hopelessly aroused; whereupon they would laugh at his stiffness and mock him into blushing, quivering detumescence; or, very occasionally, and when he had given up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they had awakened. In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the poet passed his days, laying his head in women’s laps, brooding on death and revenge, unable to say whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive.

It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. ‘That one!’ she said. ‘He’s got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet’s wives. He’s so annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning their names. He tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and she’s His Nibs’s favourite, as all are aware. So there.’

The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. ‘Listen, those women in that harem, the men don’t talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it’s only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can’t see.’

Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book the women dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex, and not just the talk, either.

He said to the youngest whore: ‘Why don’t you pretend for him?’

‘Who?’

‘Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private and personal Ayesha?’

‘God,’ the girl said. ‘If they heard you say that they’d boil your balls in butter.’

How many wives? Twelve, and one old lady, long dead. How many whores behind The Curtain? Twelve again; and, secret on
her black-tented throne, the ancient Madam, still defying death. Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. Baal told the Madam of his idea; she settled matters in her voice of a laryngitic frog. ‘It is very dangerous,’ she pronounced, ‘but it could be damn good for business. We will go carefully; but we will go.’

The fifteen-year-old whispered something in the grocer’s ear. At once a light began to shine in his eyes. ‘Tell me everything,’ he begged. ‘Your childhood, your favourite toys, Solomon’s-horses and the rest, tell me how you played the tambourine and the Prophet came to watch.’ She told him, and then he asked about her deflowering at the age of twelve, and she told him that, and afterwards he paid double the normal fee, because ‘it’s been the best time of my life’. ‘We’ll have to be careful of heart conditions,’ the Madam said to Baal.

When the news got around Jahilia that the whores of The Curtain had each assumed the identity of one of Mahound’s wives, the clandestine excitement of the city’s males was intense; yet, so afraid were they of discovery, both because they would surely lose their lives if Mahound or his lieutenants ever found out that they had been involved in such irreverences, and because of their desire that the new service at The Curtain be maintained, that the secret was kept from the authorities. In those days Mahound had returned with his wives to Yathrib, preferring the cool oasis climate of the north to Jahilia’s heat. The city had been left in the care of General Khalid, from whom things were easily concealed. For a time Mahound had considered telling Khalid to have all the brothels of Jahilia closed down, but Abu Simbel had advised him against so precipitate an act. ‘Jahilians are new converts,’ he pointed out. ‘Take things slowly.’ Mahound, most pragmatic of Prophets, had agreed to a period of transition. So, in the Prophet’s absence, the men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which experienced a three hundred per cent increase in business. For obvious
reasons it was not politic to form a queue in the street, and so on many days a line of men curled around the innermost courtyard of the brothel, rotating about its centrally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims rotated for other reasons around the ancient Black Stone. All customers of The Curtain were issued with masks, and Baal, watching the circling masked figures from a high balcony, was satisfied. There were more ways than one of refusing to Submit.

In the months that followed, the staff of The Curtain warmed to the new task. The fifteen-year-old whore ‘Ayesha’ was the most popular with the paying public, just as her namesake was with Mahound, and like the Ayesha who was living chastely in her apartment in the harem quarters of the great mosque at Yathrib, this Jahilian Ayesha began to be jealous of her preeminent status of Best Beloved. She resented it when any of her ‘sisters’ seemed to be experiencing an increase in visitors, or receiving exceptionally generous tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had taken the name of ‘Sawdah’, would tell her visitors – and she had plenty, many of the men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and also grateful charms – the story of how Mahound had married her and Ayesha, on the same day, when Ayesha was just a child. ‘In the two of us,’ she would say, exciting men terribly, ‘he found the two halves of his dead first wife: the child, and the mother, too.’ The whore ‘Hafsah’ grew as hot-tempered as her namesake, and as the twelve entered into the spirit of their roles the alliances in the brothel came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque; ‘Ayesha’ and ‘Hafsah’, for example, engaged in constant, petty rivalries against the two haughtiest whores, who had always been thought a bit stuck-up by the others and who had chosen for themselves the most aristocratic identities, becoming ‘Umm Salamah the Makhzumite’ and, snootiest of all, ‘Ramlah’, whose namesake, the eleventh wife of Mahound, was the daughter of Abu Simbel and Hind. And there was a ‘Zainab bint Jahsh’, and a ‘Juwairiyah’, named after the bride captured on a military expedition, and a ‘Rehana the Jew’, a ‘Safia’ and a ‘Maimunah’, and, most erotic of all the whores, who knew tricks
she refused to teach to competitive ‘Ayesha’: the glamourous Egyptian, ‘Mary the Copt’. Strangest of all was the whore who had taken the name of ‘Zainab bint Khuzaimah’, knowing that this wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia of her lovers, who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this, too, was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.

By the end of the first year the twelve had grown so skilful in their roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal, more myopic and deafer by the month, saw the shapes of the girls moving past him, their edges blurred, their images somehow doubled, like shadows superimposed on shadows. The girls began to entertain new notions about Baal, too. In that age it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession, to take the kind of husband who wouldn’t give her any trouble – a mountain, maybe, or a fountain, or a bush – so that she could adopt, for form’s sake, the title of a married woman. At The Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the Love Spout in the central courtyard, but now a kind of rebellion was brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than some spurting stone, which was almost idolatrous, after all; and to say that they had decided that they would all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first the Madam tried to talk them out of it, but when she saw that the girls meant business she conceded the point, and told them to send the writer in to see her. With many giggles and nudges the twelve courtesans escorted the shambling poet into the throne room. When Baal heard the plan his heart began to thump so erratically that he lost his balance and fell, and ‘Ayesha’ screamed in her fright: ‘O God, we’re going to be his widows before we even get to be his wives.’

But he recovered: his heart regained its composure. And, having no option, he agreed to the twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married them all off herself, and in that den of
degeneracy, that anti-mosque, that labyrinth of profanity, Baal became the husband of the wives of the former businessman, Mahound.

His wives now made plain to him that they expected him to fulfil his husbandly duties in every particular, and worked out a rota system under which he could spend a day with each of the girls in turn (at The Curtain, day and night were inverted, the night being for business and the day for rest). No sooner had he embarked upon this arduous programme than they called a meeting at which he was told that he ought to start behaving a little more like the ‘real’ husband, that is, Mahound. ‘Why can’t you change your name like the rest of us?’ bad-tempered ‘Hafsah’ demanded, but at this Baal drew the line. ‘It may not be much to be proud of,’ he insisted, ‘but it’s my name. What’s more, I don’t work with the clients here. There’s no business reason for such a change.’ ‘Well, anyhow,’ the voluptuous ‘Mary the Copt’ shrugged, ‘name or no name, we want you to start acting like him.’

‘I don’t know much about,’ Baal began to protest, but ‘Ayesha’, who really was the most attractive of them all, or so he had commenced to feel of late, made a delightful moue. ‘Honestly, husband,’ she cajoled him. ‘It’s not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss.’

It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of ‘ordinary life’ in which they wanted nothing more than to be the obedient, and – yes – submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of high
excitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was to have twelve women competing for his favours, for the beneficence of his smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled his body and danced for him, and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.

It was irresistible. He began to find the confidence to order them about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry. Once when their quarreling irritated him he forswore them all for a month. When he went to see ‘Ayesha’ after twenty-nine nights she teased him for not having been able to stay away. ‘That month was only twenty-nine days long,’ he replied. Once he was caught with ‘Mary the Copt’ by ‘Hafsah’, in ‘Hafsah’s’ quarters and on ‘Ayesha’s’ day. He begged ‘Hafsah’ not to tell ‘Ayesha’, with whom he had fallen in love; but she told her anyway and Baal had to stay away from ‘Mary’ of the fair skin and curly hair for quite a time after that. In short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming the secret, profane mirror of Mahound; and he had begun, once again, to write.

The poetry that came was the sweetest he had ever written. Sometimes when he was with Ayesha he felt a slowness come over him, a heaviness, and he had to lie down. ‘It’s strange,’ he told her. ‘It is as if I see myself standing beside myself. And I can make him, the standing one, speak; then I get up and write down his verses.’ These artistic slownesses of Baal were much admired by his wives. Once, tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the chambers of ‘Umm Salamah the Makhzumite’. When he woke, hours later, his body ached, his neck and shoulders were full of knots, and he berated Umm Salamah: ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ She answered: ‘I was afraid to, in case the verses were coming to you.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about that. The only woman in whose company the verses come is “Ayesha”, not you.’