Alicja Cohen, who had found Allie’s change of course perfectly comprehensible, even laudable, and rooted for her all the way, could not (she admitted over coffee) quite see her daughter’s point in the matter of Gibreel Farishta, the revenant Indian movie star. ‘To hear you talk, dear, the man’s not in your league,’ she said, using a phrase she believed to be synonymous with not your type, and which she would have been horrified to hear described as a racial, or religious, slur: which was inevitably the sense in which her daughter understood it. ‘That’s just fine by me,’ Allie riposted with spirit, and rose. ‘The fact is, I don’t even like my league.’
Her feet ached, obliging her to limp, rather than storm, from the restaurant. ‘Grand passion,’ she could hear her mother behind her back announcing loudly to the room at large. ‘The gift of tongues; means a girl can babble out any blasted thing.’
Certain aspects of her education had been unaccountably neglected. One Sunday not long after her father’s death she was buying the Sunday papers from the corner kiosk when the vendor announced: ‘It’s the last week this week. Twenty-three years I’ve been on this corner and the Pakis have finally driven me out of business.’ She heard the word p-a-c-h-y, and had a bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news vendors. ‘What’s a pachy?’ she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging: ‘A brown Jew.’ She went on thinking of the proprietors of the local ‘CTN’ (confectioner-tobacconist-newsagent) as pachyderms for quite a while: as people set apart – rendered objectionable – by the nature of their skin. She told Gibreel this story, too. ‘Oh,’ he responded, crushingly, ‘an elephant joke.’ He wasn’t an easy man.
But there he was in her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could open as she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and caress her heart. Not for many years had she entered the sexual arena with such celerity, and never before had so swift a liaison remained wholly untainted by regret or self-disgust. His extended silence (she took it for that until she learned that his name was on the Bostan’s passenger list) had been sharply painful, suggesting a difference in his estimation of their encounter; but to have been mistaken about his desire, about such an abandoned, hurtling thing, was surely impossible? The news of his death accordingly provoked a double response: on the one hand, there was a kind of grateful, relieved joy to be had from the knowledge that he had been racing across the world to surprise her, that he had given up his entire life in order to construct a new one with her; while, on the other, there was the hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very moment of knowing that she truly had been loved. Later, she became aware of a further, less generous, reaction. What had he thought he was doing, planning to arrive without a word of warning on her doorstep, assuming that she’d be waiting with open arms, an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough apartment for them both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spoiled movie actor who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits into his lap … in short, she had felt invaded, or potentially invaded. But then she had rebuked herself, pushing such notions back down into the pit where they belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption, if presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.
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 François 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 th
e 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. Archbish. 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.
She heard about her sister’s end from a newsstand billboard, MODEL’S ‘ACID BATH’ DEATH. You’re not even safe from pun
s when you die, was her first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.
‘I kept seeing her in magazines for months,’ she told Gibreel. ‘On account of the glossies’ long lead times.’ Elena’s corpse danced across Moroccan deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils; or it was sighted in the Sea of Shadows on the moon, naked except for spaceman’s helmet and half a dozen silk ties knotted around breasts and groin. Allie took to drawing moustaches on the pictures, to the outrage of newsagents; she ripped her late sister out of the journals of her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her up. Haunted by Elena’s periodical ghost, Allie reflected on the dangers of attempting to fly; what flaming falls, what macabre hells were reserved for such Icarus types! She came to think of Elena as a soul in torment, to believe that this captivity in an immobile world of girlie calendars in which she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her own; of pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages printed across her navel, was no less than Elena’s personal hell. Allie began to see the scream in her sister’s eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion spreads. Elena was being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she couldn’t even move … after a time Allie had to avoid the shops in which her sister could be found staring from the racks. She lost the ability to open magazines, and hid all the pictures of Elena she owned. ‘Goodbye, Yel,’ she told her sister’s memory, using her old nursery name. ‘I’ve got to look away from you.’