When Hind saw her elder daughter on the verge of walking out of her life forever, she understood the price one pays for harbouring the Prince of Darkness under one’s roof. She begged her husband to see reason, to realize that his good-hearted generosity had brought them into this hell, and that if only that devil, Chamcha, could be removed from the premises, then maybe they could become once again the happy and industrious family of old. As she finished speaking, however, the house above her head began to rumble and shake, and there was the noise of something coming down the stairs, growling and – or so it seemed – singing, in a voice so vilely hoarse that it was impossible to understand the words.
It was Mishal who went up to meet him in the end, Mishal with Hanif Johnson holding her hand, while the treacherous Anahita watched from the foot of the stairs. Chamcha had grown to a height of over eight feet, and from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours, yellow from the left, and from the right, black. He was no longer wearing clothes. His bodily hair had grown thick and long, his tail was swishing angrily, his eyes were a pale but luminous red, and he had succeeded in terrifying the entire temporary population of the bed and breakfast establishment to the point of incoherence. Mishal, however, was not too scared to talk. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she asked him. ‘You think you’d last five minutes out there, looking like you do?’ Chamcha paused, looked himself over, observed the sizeable erection emerging from his loins, and shrugged. ‘I am considering action,’ he told her, using her own phrase, although in that voice of lava and thunder it didn’t seem to belong to her any more. ‘There is a person I wish to find.’
‘Hold your horses,’ Mishal told him. ‘We’ll work something out.’
What is to be found here, one mile from the Shaandaar, here where the beat meets the street, at Club Hot Wax, formerly the Blak-An-Tan? On this star-crossed and moonless night, let us follow the figures – some strutting, decked out, hot-to-trot, others surreptitious, shadow-hugging, shy – converging from all quarters of the neighbourhood to dive, abruptly, underground, and through this unmarked door. What’s within? Lights, fluids, powders, bodies shaking themselves, singly, in pairs, in threes, moving towards possibilities. But what, then, are these other figures, obscure in the on-off rainbow brilliance of the space, these forms frozen in their attitudes amid the frenzied dancers? What are these that hip-hop and hindi-pop but never move an inch? – ‘You lookin good, Hot Wax posse!’ Our host speaks: ranter, toaster, deejay nonpareil – the prancing Pinkwalla, his suit of lights blushing to the beat. – Truly, he is exceptional, a seven-foot albino, his hair the palest rose, the whites of his eyes likewise, his features unmistakably Indian, the haughty nose, long thin lips, a face from a Hamza-nama cloth. An Indian who has never seen India, East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star.
Still the motionless figures dance between the shimmying of sisters, the jouncing and bouncing of youth. What are they? – Why, waxworks, nothing more. – Who are they? – History. See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence’s candle; – and, over there!, one Abdul Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was done down by colour-barring ministers. They’re all here, dancing motionlessly in hot wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right; to the left, George IV’s barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the African prince who was sold for six feet of cloth, dances according to his ancient fashion with the slave’s son Ignatius Sancho, who became in 1782 the first African writer to be published in England. – The migrants of the past, as much the living dancers’ ancestors as their own flesh and blood, gyrate stilly while Pinkwalla rants toasts raps up on the stage, Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-dem-make-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation, and from a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light, wax villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local avatars of Legree. And now a murmur begins in the belly of the Club, mounting, becoming a single word, chanted over and over: ‘Meltdown,’ the customers demand. ‘Meltdown, meltdown, melt.’
Pinkwalla takes his cue from the crowd, So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin, after which he turns to the crowd, arms wide, feet with the beat, to ask, Who’s-it-gonna-be? Who-you-wanna-see? Names are shouted, compete, coalesce, until the assembled company is united once more, chanting a single word. Pinkwalla claps his hands. Curtains part behind him, allowing female attendants in shiny pink shorts and singlets to wheel out a fearsome cabinet: man-sized, glass-fronted, internally-illuminated – the microwave oven, complete with Hot Seat, known to Club regulars as: Hell’s Kitchen. ‘All right,’ cries Pinkwalla. ‘Now we really cookin.’
Attendants move towards the tableau of hate-figures, pounce upon the night’s sacrificial offering, the one most often selected, if truth be told; at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure, her pearls, her suit of blue. Maggie-maggie-maggie, bays the crowd. Burn-burn-burn. The doll, – the guy, – is strapped into the Hot Seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness. Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs its ecstasy: done. ‘The fire this time,’ Pinkwalla tells them. Music regains the night.
When Pinkwalla the deejay saw what was climbing under cover of darkness into the back of his panel van, which his friends Hanif and Mishal had persuaded him to bring round the back of the Shaandaar, the fear of obeah filled his heart; but there was also the contrary exhilaration of realizing that the potent hero of his many dreams was a flesh-and-blood actuality. He stood across the street, shivering under a lamp-post though it wasn’t particularly cold, and stayed there for half an hour while Mishal and Hanif spoke urgently to him, he needs somewhere to go, we have to think about his future. Then he shrugged, walked over to the van, and started up the engine. Hanif sat beside him in the cab; Mishal travelled with Saladin, hidden from view.
It was almost four in the morning when they bedded Chamcha down in the empty, locked-up nightclub. Pinkwalla – his real name, Sewsunker, was never used – had unearthed a couple of sleeping-bags from a back room, and they sufficed. Hanif Johnson, saying goodnight to the fearsome entity of whom his lover Mishal seemed entirely unafraid, tried to talk to him seriously, ‘You’ve got to realize how important you could be for us, there’s more at stake here than your personal needs,’ but mutant Saladin only snorted, yellow and black, and Hanif backed quickly away. When he was alone with the waxworks Chamcha was able to fix his thoughts once again on the face that had finally coalesced in his mind’s eye, radiant, the light streaming out around him from a point just behind his head, Mister Perfecto, portrayer of gods, who always landed on his feet, was always, forgiven his sins, loved, praised, adored … the face he had been trying to identify in his dreams, Mr Gibreel Farishta, transformed into the simulacrum of an angel as surely as he was the Devil’s mirror-self.
Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?
The creature on the sleeping-bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue from its pores. The face on every one of the waxwork dummies was the same now, Gibreel’s face with its widow’s peak and its long thin saturnine good looks. The creature bared its teeth and let out a long, foul breath, and the waxworks dissolved into puddles and empty clothes, all of them, every one. The creature lay back, satisfied. And fixed its mind upon its foe.
Whereupon it felt within itself the most inexplicable sensations of compression, suction, withdrawal; it was racked by terrible, squeezing pains, and emitted piercing squeals that nobody, not even Mishal who was staying with Hanif in Pinkwalla’s apartment above the Club, dared to investigate. The pains mounted in intensity, and the creature thrashed and tossed around the dance-floor, wailing most piteously; until, at length, gran
ted respite, it fell asleep.
When Mishal, Hanif and Pinkwalla ventured into the clubroom several hours later, they observed a scene of frightful devastation, tables sent flying, chairs broken in half, and, of course, every waxwork – good and evil – Topsy and Legree – melted like tigers into butter; and at the centre of the carnage, sleeping like a baby, no mythological creature at all, no iconic Thing of horns and hellsbreath, but Mr Saladin Chamcha himself, apparently restored to his old shape, mother-naked but of entirely human aspect and proportions, humanized – is there any option but to conclude? – by the fearsome concentration of his hate.
He opened his eyes; which still glowed pale and red.
2
Alleluia Cone, coming down from Everest, saw a city of ice to the west of Camp Six, across the Rock Band, glittering in the sunlight below the massif of Cho Oyu. Shangri-La, she momentarily thought; however, this was no green vale of immortality but a metropolis of gigantic ice-needles, thin, sharp and cold. Her attention was distracted by Sherpa Pemba warning her to maintain her concentration, and the city had gone when she looked back. She was still at twenty-seven thousand feet, but the apparition of the impossible city threw her back across space and time to the Bayswater study of old dark wooden furniture and heavy velvet curtains in which her father Otto Cone, the art historian and biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in her fourteenth and his final year of ‘the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives’, which was, in his opinion, the idea of the continuum. ‘Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor,’ he advised her, managing to give the impression of having visited more planets than one before coming to his conclusions. ‘The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can’t ask for a wilder place.’ Ice cities on the roof of the world wouldn’t have fazed Otto. Like his wife Alicja, Allie’s mother, he was a Polish émigré, a survivor of a wartime prison camp whose name was never mentioned throughout Allie’s childhood. ‘He wanted to make it as if it had not been,’ Alicja told her daughter later. ‘He was unrealistic in many ways. But a good man; the best I knew.’ She smiled an inward smile as she spoke, tolerating him in memory as she had not always managed to during his life, when he was frequently appalling. For example: he developed a hatred of communism which drove him to embarrassing extremes of behaviour, notably at Christmas, when this Jewish man insisted on celebrating with his Jewish family and others what he described as ‘an English rite’, as a mark of respect to their new ‘host nation’ – and then spoiled it all (in his wife’s eyes) by bursting into the salon where the assembled company was relaxing in the glow of log fire, Christmas tree lights and brandy, got up in pantomime Chinee, with droopy moustaches and all, crying: ‘Father Christmas is dead! I have killed him! I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!’ Allie on Everest, remembering, winced – her mother’s wince, she realized, transferred to her frosted face.
The incompatibility of life’s elements: in a tent at Camp Four, 27,600 feet, the idea which seemed at times to be her father’s daemon sounded banal, emptied of meaning, of atmosphere, by the altitude. ‘Everest silences you,’ she confessed to Gibreel Farishta in a bed above which parachute silk formed a canopy of hollow Himalayas. ‘When you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can’t keep it up, of course. The world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you’ve had of perfection: why speak if you can’t manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you’ve been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you’re to continue.’ They spent most of their time in bed during their first weeks together: the appetite of each for the other seemingly inexhaustible, they made love six or seven times a day. ‘You opened me up,’ she told him. ‘You with the ham in your mouth. It was exactly as if you were speaking to me, as if I could read your thoughts. Not as if,’ she amended. ‘I did read them, right?’ He nodded: it was true. ‘I read your thoughts and the right words just came out of my mouth,’ she marvelled. ‘Just flowed out. Bingo: love. In the beginning was the word.’
Her mother took a fatalistic view of this dramatic turn of events in Allie’s life, the return of a lover from beyond the grave. ‘I’ll tell you what I honestly thought when you gave me the news,’ she said over lunchtime soup and kreplach at the Whitechapel Bloom’s. ‘I thought, oh dear, it’s grand passion; poor Allie has to go through this now, the unfortunate child.’ Alicja’s strategy was to keep her emotions strictly under control. She was a tall, ample woman with a sensual mouth but, as she put it, ‘I’ve never been a noise-maker.’ She was frank with Allie about her sexual passivity, and revealed that Otto had been, ‘Let’s say, otherwise inclined. He had a weakness for grand passion, but it always made him so miserable I could not get worked up about it.’ She had been reassured by her knowledge that the women with whom her little, bald, jumpy husband consorted were ‘her type’, big and buxom, ‘except they were brassy, too: they did what he wanted, shouting things out to spur him on, pretending for all they were worth; it was his enthusiasm they responded to, I think, and maybe his chequebook, too. He was of the old school and gave generous gifts.’
Otto had called Alleluia his ‘pearl without price’, and dreamed for her a great future, as maybe a concert pianist or, failing that, a Muse. ‘Your sister, frankly, is a disappointment to me,’ he said three weeks before his death in that study of Great Books and Picabian bric-à-brac – a stuffed monkey which he claimed was a ‘first draft’ of the notorious Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir, numerous mechanical contraptions including sexual stimulators that delivered small electric shocks, and a first edition of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. ‘Elena has wants where she should have thoughts.’ He Anglicized the name – Yelyena into Ellaynah – just as it had been his idea to reduce ‘Alleluia’ to Allie and bowdlerize himself, Cohen from Warsaw, into Cone. Echoes of the past distressed him; he read no Polish literature, turning his back on Herbert, on Miłosz, on ‘younger fellows’ like Baranczak, because for him the language was irredeemably polluted by history. ‘I am English now,’ he would say proudly in his thick East European accent. ‘Silly mid-off! Pish-Tush! Widow of Windsor! Bugger all.’ In spite of his reticences he seemed content enough being a pantomime member of the English gentry. In retrospect, though, it looked likely that he’d been only too aware of the fragility of the performance, keeping the heavy drapes almost permanently drawn in case the inconsistency of things caused him to see monsters out there, or moonscapes instead of the familiar Moscow Road.
‘He was strictly a melting-pot man,’ Alicja said while attacking a large helping of tsimmis. ‘When he changed our name I told him, Otto, it isn’t required, this isn’t America, it’s London W-two; but he wanted to wipe the slate clean, even his Jewishness, excuse me but I know. The fights with the Board of Deputies! All very civilized, parliamentary language throughout, but bareknuckle stuff none the less.’ After his death she went straight back to Cohen, the synagogue, Chanukah and Bloom’s. ‘No more imitation of life,’ she munched, and waved a sudden, distracted fork. ‘That picture. I was crazy for it. Lana Turner, am I right? And Mahalia Jackson singing in a church.’
Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft and died. Now there was a subject which Alicja, who would readily discuss most taboo matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor of the camps live forty years and then complete the job the monsters didn’t get done? Does great evil eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man’s death be incompatible with
his life? Allie, whose first response on learning of her father’s death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother. Who, stonefaced beneath a wide black hat, said only: ‘You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear.’
After Otto’s death Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and gesture which had been her offering on the altar of his lust for integration, her attempt to be his Cecil Beaton grande dame. ‘Phoo,’ she confided in Allie, ‘what a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change.’ She now wore her grey hair in a straggly bun, put on a succession of identical floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a painful set of false teeth, planted vegetables in what Otto had insisted should be an English floral garden (neat flowerbeds around the central, symbolic tree, a ‘chimeran graft’ of laburnum and broom) and gave, instead of dinners full of cerebral chat, a series of lunches – heavy stews and a minimum of three outrageous puddings – at which dissident Hungarian poets told convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if things didn’t quite work out) the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their loaded plates, and something very like total silence reigned for what felt like weeks. Allie eventually turned away from these Sunday afternoon rituals, sulking in her room until she was old enough to move out, with Alicja’s ready assent, and from the path chosen for her by the father whose betrayal of his own act of survival had angered her so much. She turned towards action; and found she had mountains to climb.