The Satanic Verses (63 page)

Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of Ayesha’s clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin,
pantaloons and body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha’s room when the client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: ‘So this is where you got to!’ Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, ‘It’s all right. He won’t make any trouble.’ He invited Salman the Persian to his own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it wasn’t forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule Book.

‘I came because I’m finally leaving this infernal city,’ Salman said, ‘and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit.’ After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old friendship the immigrant had found work as a letter-writer and all-purpose scribe, sitting cross-legged by the roadside in the main street of the financial district. His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun. ‘People write to tell lies,’ he said, drinking quickly. ‘So a professional liar makes an excellent living. My love letters and business correspondence became famous as the best in town because of my gift for inventing beautiful falsehoods that involved only the tiniest departure from the facts. As a result I have managed to save enough for my trip home in just two years. Home! The old country! I’m off tomorrow, and not a minute too soon.’

As the bottle emptied Salman began once again to talk, as Baal had known he would, about the source of all his ills, the Messenger and his message. He told Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting the rumour as if it were incontrovertible fact. ‘That girl couldn’t stomach it that her husband wanted so many other women,’ he said. ‘He talked about necessity, political alliances and so on, but she wasn’t fooled. Who can blame her? Finally he went into – what else – one of his trances, and out he came with a message from the archangel. Gibreel had recited verses giving him full divine support. God’s own permission to fuck as many women as he liked. So there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses of God? You know what she
did say? This: “Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.” Well! If it hadn’t been Ayesha, who knows what he’d have done, but none of the others would have dared in the first place.’ Baal let him run on without interruption. The sexual aspects of Submission exercised the Persian a good deal: ‘Unhealthy,’ he pronounced. ‘All this segregation. No good will come of it.’

At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the poet taking Mahound’s side: ‘You can see his point of view,’ Baal reasoned. ‘If families offer him brides and he refuses he creates enemies, – and besides, he’s a special man and one can see the argument for special dispensations, – and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour it would be if anything bad happened to one of them! Listen, if you lived in here, you wouldn’t think a little less sexual freedom was such a bad thing, – for the common people, I mean.’

‘Your brain’s gone,’ Salman said flatly. ‘You’ve been out of the sun too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown.’

Baal was pretty tipsy by this time, and began some hot retort, but Salman raised an unsteady hand. ‘Don’t want to fight,’ he said. ‘Lemme tell you instead. Hottest story in town. Whoo-whoo! And it’s relevant to whatch, whatchyou say.’

Salman’s story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on an expedition to a far-flung village, and on the way back to Yathrib their party had camped in the dunes for the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the last moment Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into a hollow. While she was away her litter-bearers picked up her palanquin and marched off. She was a light woman, and, failing to notice much difference in the weight of that heavy palanquin, they assumed she was inside. Ayesha returned after relieving herself to find herself alone, and who knows what might have befallen her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to pass by on his camel … Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe and sound; at which
point tongues began to wag, not least in the harem, where opportunities to weaken Ayesha’s power were eagerly seized by her opponents. The two young people had been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was hinted, more and more loudly, that Safwan was a dashingly handsome fellow, and the Prophet was much older than the young woman, after all, and might she not therefore have been attracted to someone closer to her own age? ‘Quite a scandal,’ Salman commented, happily.

‘What will Mahound do?’ Baal wanted to know.

‘O, he’s done it,’ Salman replied. ‘Same as ever. He saw his pet, the archangel, and then informed one and all that Gibreel had exonerated Ayesha.’ Salman spread his arms in worldly resignation. ‘And this time, mister, the lady didn’t complain about the convenience of the verses.’

Salman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train. When he left Baal at The Curtain, he embraced the poet, kissed him on both cheeks and said: ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s better to keep out of the daylight. I hope it lasts.’ Baal replied: ‘And I hope you find home, and that there is something there to love.’ Salman’s face went blank. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and left.

‘Ayesha’ came to Baal’s room for reassurance. ‘He won’t spill out the secret when he’s drunk?’ she asked, caressing Baal’s hair. ‘He gets through a lot of wine.’

Baal said: ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same again.’ Salman’s visit had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during his years at The Curtain, and he couldn’t go back to sleep.

‘Of course it will,’ Ayesha urged. ‘It will. You’ll see.’

Baal shook his head and made the only prophetic remark of his life. ‘Something big is going to happen,’ he foretold. ‘A man can’t hide behind skirts forever.’

The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came to
inform the Madam of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The brothels were to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From behind her drapes, the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an hour in the name of propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was the inexperience of the officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed. The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by a back door. ‘Please apologize to them for the interruption,’ she ordered the eunuchs, ‘and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made.’

They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once, crowded into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat, will we go to jail, what’s to become of us, – until ‘Ayesha’ screwed up her courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and twenty-five years old, no more than three feet tall, looking like a big doll, curled up in a cushion-laden wickerwork chair, clutching the empty poison-bottle in her fist.

‘Now that you’ve started,’ Baal said, coming into the room, ‘you may as well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any more.’

The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothel-keeper. ‘Well, if we can’t hang the boss, we’ll just have to make do with the workers,’ he shouted, and ordered his men to place the ‘tarts’ under close arrest, a task the men performed with zeal. The women made a noise and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched without twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: ‘They want the cunts to be put on trial, but I’ve no instructions about you. So if you don’t want to lose your heads as well as your balls, keep out
of this.’ Eunuchs failed to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled them to the ground; and among the eunuchs was Baal, of the dyed skin and poetry. Just before the youngest ‘cunt’ or ‘slit’ was gagged, she yelled: ‘Husband, for God’s sake, help us, if you are a man.’ The vice-squad captain was amused. ‘Which of you is her husband?’ he asked, staring carefully into each turban-topped face. ‘Come on, own up. What’s it like to watch the world with your wife?’

Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid ‘Ayesha’s’ glares as well as Umar’s narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. ‘Is it you?’

‘Sir, you understand, it’s just a term,’ Baal lied. ‘They like to joke, the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we …’

Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. ‘Because you can’t be,’ he said. ‘Husbands, eh. Not bad.’

When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. ‘Get lost,’ he suggested. ‘Tomorrow I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running.’

When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down and wept uncontrollably by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame, did not cry.

Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:

The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had grown so accustomed to their new names that they couldn’t remember the old ones. They were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titles, and as a result were unable to give any names at all. After a good deal of shouting and a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by numbers, as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients, terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores had been up to, also remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody would have found out if the poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to the walls of the city jail.

Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and pimps, whose numbers had increased considerably during the two years in which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired that many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town riff-raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution under the new immorality laws, in order to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those painted ladies whom they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the suitors at their barred gates. On the third day, however, there appeared among these lovelorn fools a peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and pantaloons, with dark skin that was beginning to look decidedly blotchy. Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when he began to sing his verses the sniggering stopped at once. Jahilians had always been connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of the odes being sung by the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal sang his love poems, and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who allowed Baal to speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible to see for the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went forward to nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes running with tears, made no move to stop him.