The Satanic Verses (75 page)

Gibreel:

moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city without eating or sleeping, with the trumpet named Azraeel tucked safely in a pocket of his greatcoat, he no longer recognizes the distinction between the waking and dreaming states; – he understands now something of what omnipresence must be like, because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment at which he will reveal himself, and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him ever closer, leading him towards their final embrace: the subtle, deceiving adversary, who has taken the face of his friend, of Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull him into lowering his guard. And there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to understand the will of God.

Is he to be the agent of God’s wrath?

Or of his love?

Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet remain in his pocket, or should he take it out and blow?

(I’m giving him no instructions. I, too, am interested in his choices – in the result of his wrestling match. Character
vs
destiny: a free-style bout. Two fadlls, two submissions or a knockout will decide.)

Wrestling, through his many stories, he proceeds.

There are times when he aches for her, Alleluia, her very name an exaltation; but then he remembers the diabolic verses, and turns his thoughts away. The horn in his pocket demands to be blown; but he restrains himself. Now is not the time. Searching for clues –
what is to be done? –
he stalks the city streets.

Somewhere he sees a television set through an evening window. There is a woman’s head on the screen, a famous ‘presenter’, being interviewed by an equally famous, twinkling Irish ‘host’. – What would be the worst thing you could imagine? – Oh, I think, I’m sure, it would be, oh,
yes
: to be alone on Christmas Eve. You’d really have to face yourself, wouldn’t you, you’d look into a harsh mirror and ask yourself,
is this all there is? –
Gibreel, alone, not knowing the date, walks on. In the mirror, the adversary approaches at the same pace as his own, beckoning, stretching out his arms.

The city sends him messages. Here, it says, is where the Dutch king decided to live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this was out of town, a village, set in green English fields. But when the King arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick buildings with Dutch crenellations rising against the sky, so that his courtiers might have places in which to reside. Not all migrants are powerless, the still-standing edifices whisper. They impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh. But look out, the city warns. Incoherence, too, must have its day. Riding in the parkland in which he’d chosen to live – which he’d
civilized –
William III was thrown by
his horse, fell hard against the recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal neck.

Some days he finds himself among walking corpses, great crowds of the dead, all of them refusing to admit they’re done for, corpses mutinously continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, smoking cigarettes.
But you’re dead
, he shouts at them.
Zombies, get into your graves
. They ignore him, or laugh, or look embarrassed, or menace him with their fists. He falls silent, and hurries on.

The city becomes vague, amorphous. It is becoming impossible to describe the world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists, emerge. As does she: Allie, Al-Lat.
She is the exalted bird. Greatly to be desired
. He remembers now: she told him, long ago, about Jumpy’s poetry.
He’s trying to make a collection. A book
. The thumb-sucking artist with his infernal views. A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he’d told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he’s lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy’s point) it’s the Devil who wins.

What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel’s brain? Verses. What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.

The trumpet, Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket:
Pick me up! Yesyesyes: the Trump. To hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff up your cheeks and rooty-toot-toot. Come on, it’s party time
.

How hot it is: steamy, close, intolerable. This is no Proper London: not this improper city. Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville. He wanders through a confusion of languages. Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian ‘babilu’. ‘The gate of God.’ Babylondon.

Where’s this?

– Yes. – He meanders, one night, behind the cathedrals of the Industrial Revolution, the railway termini of north London.
Anonymous King’s Cross, the bat-like menace of the St Pancras tower, the red-and-black gas-holders inflating and deflating like giant iron lungs. Where once in battle Queen Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.

The Goodsway: – but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under tungsten lamps, what delicacies are on offer in that way! – Swinging handbags, calling out, silver-skirted, wearing fish-net tights: these are not only young goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They have short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all have been thrown out of their homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of them are white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent of their earnings. Goods are only goods, after all, especially when they’re trash.

– Gibreel Farishta in the Goodsway is hailed from shadows and lamps; and quickens, at first, his pace.
What’s this to do with me? Bloody pussies-galore
. But then he slows and stops, hearing something else calling to him from lamps and shadows, some need, some wordless plea, hidden just under the tinny voices of ten-pound tarts. His footsteps slow down, then halt. He is held by their desires.
For what
? They are moving towards him now, drawn to him like fishes on unseen hooks. As they near him their walks change, their hips lose their swagger, their faces start looking their age, in spite of all the make-up. When they reach him, they kneel.
Who do you say that I am
? he asks, and wants to add:
I know your names. I met you once before, elsewhere, behind a curtain. Twelve of you then as now. Ayesha, Hafsah, Ramlah, Sawdah, Zainab, Zainab, Maimunah, Sofia, Juwairiyah, Umm Salamah the Makhzumite, Rehana the Jew, and the beautiful Mary the Copt
. Silently, they remain on their knees. Their wishes are made known to him without words.
What is an archangel but a puppet? Kathputli, marionette. The faithful bend us to their will. We are forces of nature and they, our masters. Mistresses, too
. The heaviness in his limbs, the heat, and in his ears a buzzing like bees on summer afternoons. It would be easy to faint.

He does not faint.

He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.

And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to his lips, his unquiet horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.

After the stream of fire has emerged from the mouth of his golden trumpet and consumed the approaching men, wrapping them in a cocoon of flame, unmaking them so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling on the sidewalk, Gibreel understands.

He is walking again, leaving behind him the gratitude of the whores, heading in the direction of the borough of Brickhall, Azraeel once more in his capacious pocket. Things are becoming clear.

He is the Archangel Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, with the power of revelation in his hands. He can reach into the breasts of men and women, pick out the desires of their inmost hearts, and make them real. He is the quencher of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He is the genie of the lamp, and his master is the Roc.

What desires, what imperatives are in the midnight air? He breathes them in. – And nods, so be it, yes. – Let it be fire. This is a city that has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.

Fire, falling fire. ‘This is the judgment of God in his wrath,’ Gibreel Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, ‘that men be granted their heart’s desires, and that they be by them consumed.’

Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him.
Nigger eat white man’s shit
, suggest the unoriginal walls. The buildings have names: ‘Isandhlwana’, ‘Rorke’s Drift’. But a revisionist enterprise is underway, for two of the four towers have been renamed, and bear, now, the names ‘Mandela’ and ‘Toussaint l’Ouverture’. – The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken doors, dolls’ legs, vegetable refuse extracted from plastic disposal bags by hungry cats and dogs, fastfood
packets, rolling cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. He stands motionless while small groups of residents rush past in different directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All of the groups contain white youngsters as well as black. He raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to play.

Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a silver rose. – And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.

But here, there is no beauty, sleeping within. There is Gibreel Farishta, walking in a world of fire. In the High Street he sees houses built of flame, with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains hanging at the windows. – And there are men and women with fiery skins strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The street has become red hot, molten, a river the colour of blood. – All, all is ablaze as he toots his merry horn,
giving the people what they want
, the hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns, and birds fly overhead on blazing wings.

The adversary is very close. The adversary is a magnet, is a whirlpool’s eye, is the irresistible centre of a black hole, his
gravitational force creating an event horizon from which neither Gibreel, nor light, can escape.
This way
, the adversary calls.
I’m over here
.

Not a palace, but only a café. And in the rooms above, a bed and breakfast joint. No sleeping princess, but a disappointed woman, overpowered by smoke, lies unconscious here; and beside her, on the floor beside their bed, and likewise unconscious, her husband, the Mecca-returned ex-schoolteacher, Sufyan. – While, elsewhere in the burning Shaandaar, faceless persons stand at windows waving piteously for help, being unable (no mouths) to scream.

The adversary: there he blows!

Silhouetted against the backdrop of the ignited Shaandaar Café, see, that’s the very fellow!

Azraeel leaps unbidden into Farishta’s hand.

Even an archangel may experience a revelation, and when Gibreel catches, for the most fleeting of instants, Saladin Chamcha’s eye, – then in that fractional and infinite moment the veils are ripped away from his sight, – he sees himself walking with Chamcha in Brickhall Fields, lost in a rhapsody, revealing the most intimate secrets of his lovemaking with Alleluia Cone, – those same secrets which afterwards were whispered into telephones by a host of evil voices, – beneath all of which Gibreel now discerns the unifying talent of the adversary, who could be guttural and high, who insulted and ingratiated, who was both insistent and shy, who was prosaic, – yes! – and versifying, too. – And now, at last, Gibreel Farishta recognizes for the first time that the adversary has not simply adopted Chamcha’s features as a disguise; – nor is this any case of paranormal possession, of body-snatching by an invader up from Hell; that, in short, the evil is not external to Saladin, but springs from some recess of his own true nature, that it has been spreading through his selfhood like a cancer, erasing what was good in him, wiping out his spirit, – and doing so with many deceptive feints and dodges, seeming at times to recede; while, in
fact, during the illusion of remission, under cover of it, so to speak, it continued perniciously to spread; – and now, no doubt, it has filled him up; now there is nothing left of Saladin but this, the dark fire of evil in his soul, consuming him as wholly as the other fire, multicoloured and engulfing, is devouring the screaming city. Truly these are ‘most horrid, malicious, bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’.