The Satanic Verses (46 page)

           
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 Francois 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."

           
I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses
discover'd the infinite in every thing
. He riffled on through the book, and
replaced Elena Cone next to the image of the Regenerated Man, sitting naked and
splay-legged on a hill with the sun shining out of his rear end.
I have
always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only
wise
. Allie put her hands up and covered her face. Gibreel tried to cheer
her up. "You have written in the flyleaf: 'Creation of world acc.
Arch-bish. Usher, 4004 BC. Estim'd date of apocalypse, ..., 1996.' So time for
improvement of sensual enjoyment still remains." She shook her head: stop.
He stopped. "Tell me," he said, putting away the book.

           
* * * * *

           
Elena at twenty had taken London by storm. Her feral six-foot body winking
through a golden chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself with
uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was her
medium, she could swim in it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one, drowned
in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can one drown
in one's element, Allie had wondered long ago. If fish can drown in water, can
human beings suffocate in air? In those days Allie, eighteen-nineteen, had
envied Elena her certainties. What was her element? In what periodic table of
the spirit could it be found?―Now, flat-footed, Himalayan veteran, she
mourned its loss. When you have earned the high horizon it isn't easy to go
back into your box, into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax. But her
feet were traitors and the mountain would kill.

           
Mythological Elena, the cover girl, wrapped in couture plastics, had been sure
of her immortality. Allie, visiting her in her World's End crashpad, refused a
proffered sugar-lump, mumbled something about brain damage, feeling inadequate,
as usual in Elena's company. Her sister's face, the eyes too wide apart, the
chin too sharp, the effect overwhelming, stared mockingly back. "No
shortage of brain cells," Elena said. "You can spare a few." The
spare capacity of the brain was Elena's capital. She spent her cells like
money, searching for her own heights; trying, in the idiom of the day, to fly.
Death, like life, came to her coated in sugar.

           
She had tried to "improve" the younger Alleluia. "Hey, you're a
great looking kid, why hide it in those dungarees? I mean, God, darling, you've
got all the equipment in there." One night she dressed Allie up, in an
olive-green item composed of frills and absences that barely covered her
body-stockinged groin:
sugaring me like candy
, was Allie's puritanical
thought,
my own sister putting me on display in the shop-window, thanks a
lot
. They went to a gaming club full of ecstatic lordlings, and Allie had
left fast when Elena's attention was elsewhere. A week later, ashamed of
herself for being such a coward, for rejecting her sister's attempt at
intimacy, she sat on a beanbag at World's End and confessed to Elena that she
was no longer a virgin. Whereupon her elder sister slapped her in the mouth and
called her ancient names: tramp, slut, tart. "Elena Cone never allows a
man to lay a
finger
," she yelled, revealing her ability to think of
herself as a third person, "not a goddamn fingernail. I know what I'm
worth, darling, I know how the mystery dies the moment they put their willies
in, I should have known you'd turn out to be a whore. Some fucking communist, I
suppose," she wound down. She had inherited her father's prejudices in
such matters. Allie, as Elena knew, had not.

           
They hadn't met much after that, Elena remaining until her death the virgin
queen of the city―the post-mortem confirmed her as
virgo intacta
―while
Allie gave up wearing underwear, took odd jobs on small, angry magazines, and
because her sister was untouchable she became the other thing, every sexual act
a slap in her sibling's glowering, whitelipped face. Three abortions in two
years and the belated knowledge that her days on the contraceptive pill had put
her, as far as cancer was concerned, in one of the highest-risk categories of
all.