The official version of what followed, and the one accepted by all the news media, was that Gibreel Farishta had been lifted out of the danger area in the same winch-operated chariot in which he’d descended, and from which he hadn’t had time to emerge; – and that it would therefore have been easy for him to make his escape, from his isolated and unwatched place high above the mêlée. This version proved resilient enough to survive the ‘revelation’ in the Voice that the assistant stage manager in charge of the winch had not, repeat not, set it in motion after it landed; – that, in fact, the chariot remained grounded throughout the riot of the ecstatic film fans; – and that substantial sums of money had been paid to the backstage staff to persuade them to collude in the fabrication of a story which, because totally fictional, was realistic enough for the newspaper-buying public to believe. However, the rumour that Gibreel Farishta had actually levitated away from the Earls Court stage and vanished into the blue under his own steam spread rapidly through the city’s Asian population, and was fed by many accounts of the halo that had been seen streaming out from a point just behind his head. Within days of the second disappearance of Gibreel Farishta, vendors of novelties in Brickhall, Wembley and Brixton were selling as many toy haloes (green fluorescent hoops were the most popular) as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.
He was hovering high over London! – Haha, they couldn’t touch him now, the devils rushing upon him in that Pandemonium! – He looked down upon the city and saw the English. The trouble with the English was that they were English: damn cold fish! – Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of night! – Well: he was here now, the great Transformer, and this time there’d be some changes made – the laws of nature are the laws of its transformation, and he was the very person to utilize the same! – Yes, indeed: this time, clarity.
He would show them – yes! – his power. – These powerless English! – Did they not think their history would return to haunt them? – ‘The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor’ (Fanon). English women no longer bound him; the conspiracy stood exposed! – Then away with all fogs. He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel. – And I’m back!
The face of the adversary hung before him once again, sharpening, clarifying. Moony with a sardonic curl to the lips: but the name still eluded … tcha, like tea? Shah, a king? Or like a (royal? tea?) dance: Shatchacha. – Nearly there. – And the nature of the adversary: self-hating, constructing a false ego, auto-destructive. Fanon again: ‘In this way the individual’ – the Fanonian native – ‘accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm.’ – I’ll give him stony calm! – Native and settler, that old dispute, continuing now upon these soggy streets, with reversed categories. – It occurred to him now that he was forever joined to the adversary, their arms locked around one another’s bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth: when they settled. – As things begin so they continue. – Yes, he was coming closer. – Chichi? Sasa? – My other, my love …
… No! – He floated over parkland and cried out, frightening the birds. – No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these Biblical-Satanic confusions! – Clarity, clarity, at all costs clarity! – This Shaitan was no fallen angel. – Forget those son-of-the-morning fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil. Truth was, he wasn’t an angel at all! – ‘He was of the djinn, so he transgressed.’ – Quran 18:50, there it was as plain as the day. – How much more straightforward this version was! How much more practical, down-to-earth, comprehensible! – Iblis/Shaitan standing for the darkness, Gibreel for the light. – Out, out with these sentimentalities: joining, locking together, love. Seek and destroy: that was all.
… O most slippery, most devilish of cities! – In which such stark, imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys. – How right he’d been, for instance, to banish those Satanico-Biblical doubts of his, – those concerning God’s unwillingness to permit dissent among his lieutenants, – for as Iblis/Shaitan was no angel, so there had been no angelic dissidents for the Divinity to repress; – and those concerning forbidden fruit, and God’s supposed denial of moral choice to his creations; – for nowhere in the entire Recitation was that Tree called (as the Bible had it) the root of the knowledge of good and evil. It was simply a different Tree! Shaitan, tempting the Edenic couple, called it only ‘the Tree of Immortality’ – and as he was a liar, so the truth (discovered by inversion) was that the banned fruit (apples were not specified) hung upon the Death-Tree, no less, the slayer of men’s souls. – What remained now of that morality-fearing God? Where was He to be found? – Only down below, in English hearts. – Which he, Gibreel, had come to transform.
Abracadabra!
Hocus Pocus!
But where should he begin? – Well, then, the trouble with the English was their:
Their:
In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather.
Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. ‘When the day is not warmer than the night,’ he reasoned, ‘when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything – from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs – as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her, a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,’ he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, ‘I am going to tropicalize you.’
Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.; better cricketers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to ‘high workrate’ having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks’ homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.
Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires’ disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.
Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: ‘Let it be.’
Three things happened, fast.
The first was that, as the unimaginably colossal, elemental forces of the transformational process rushed out of his body (for was he not their embodiment?), he was temporarily overcome by a warm, spinning heaviness, a soporific churning (not at all unpleasant) that made him close, just for an instant, his eyes.
The second was that the moment his eyes were shut the horned and goaty features of Mr Saladin Chamcha appeared, on the screen of his mind, as sharp and well-defined as could be; accompanied, as if it were sub-titled there, by the adversary’s name.
And the third thing was that Gibreel Farishta opened his eyes to find himself collapsed, once again, on Alleluia Cone’s doorstep, begging h
er forgiveness, weeping O God, it happened, it really happened again.
She put him to bed; he found himself escaping into sleep, diving headlong into it, away from Proper London and towards Jahilia, because the real terror had crossed the broken boundary wall, and stalked his waking hours.
‘A homing instinct: one crazy heading for another,’ Alicja said when her daughter phoned with the news. ‘You must be putting out a signal, some sort of bleeping thing.’ As usual, she hid her concern beneath wisecracks. Finally she came out with it: ‘This time be sensible, Alleluia, okay? This time the asylum.’
‘We’ll see, mother. He’s asleep right now.’
‘So he isn’t going to wake up?’ Alicja expostulated, then controlled herself. ‘All right, I know, it’s your life. Listen, isn’t this weather something? They say it could last months: “blocked pattern”, I heard on television, rain over Moscow, while here it’s a tropical heatwave. I called Boniek at Stanford and told him: now we have weather in London, too.’
When Baal the poet saw a single teardrop the colour of blood emerging from the corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to Jahilia after an exile of a quarter-century. He belched violently – an affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the body, a slow congealment of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a figure quite unlike his quick young self. Sometimes he felt that the air itself had thickened, resisting him, so that even a shortish walk could leave him panting, with an ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest … and Mahound must have changed, too, returning as he was in splendour and omnipotence to the place whence he fled empty-handed, without so much as a wife. Mahound at sixty-five. Our names meet, separate, and meet again, Baal thought, but the people going by the names do not remain the same. He left Al-Lat to emerge into bright sunlight, and heard from behind his back a little snickering laugh. He turned, weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of a robe vanishing around a corner. These days, down-at-heel Baal often made strangers giggle in the street. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted at the top of his voice, scandalizing the other worshippers in the House. Baal, the decrepit poet, behaving badly again. He shrugged and headed for home.
The city of Jahilia was no longer built of sand. That is to say, the passage of the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon, the forgetfulness of the people and the inevitability of progress had hardened the town, so that it had lost its old, shifting, provisional quality of a mirage in which men could live, and become a prosaic place, quotidian and (like its poets) poor. Mahound’s arm had grown long; his power had encircled Jahilia, cutting off its life-blood, its pilgrims and caravans. The fairs of Jahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold.
Even the Grandee himself had acquired a threadbare look, his white hair as full of gaps as his teeth. His concubines were dying of old age, and he lacked the energy – or, so the rumours murmured in the desultory alleys of the city, the need – to replace them. Some days he forgot to shave, which added to his look of dilapidation and defeat. Only Hind was the same as ever.
She had always had something of a reputation as a witch, who could wish illnesses upon you if you failed to bow down before her litter as it passed, an occultist with the power of transforming men into desert snakes when she had had her fill of them, and then catching them by the tail and having them cooked in their skins for her evening meal. Now that she had reached sixty the legend of her necromancy was being given new substantiation by her extraordinary and unnatural failure to age. While all around her hardened into stagnation, while the old gangs of Sharks grew middle-aged and squatted on street corners playing cards and rolling dice, while the old knot-witches and contortionists starved to death in the gullies, while a generation grew up whose conservatism and unquestioning worship of the material world was born of their knowledge of the probability of unemployment and penury, while the great city lost its sense of itself and even the cult of the dead declined in popularity to the relief of the camels of Jahilia, whose dislike of being left with severed hamstrings on human graves was easy to comprehend … while Jahilia decayed, in short, Hind remained unwrinkled, her body as firm as any young woman’s, her hair as black as crow feathers, her eyes sparkling like knives, her bearing still haughty, her voice still brooking no opposition. Hind, not Simbel, ruled the city now; or so she undeniably believed.
As the Grandee grew into a soft and pursy old age, Hind took to writing a series of admonitory and hortatory epistles or bulls to the people of the city. These were pasted up on every street in town. So it was that Hind and not Abu Simbel came to be thought of by Jahilians as the embodiment of the city, its living avatar, because they found in her physical unchangingness and in the unflinching resolve of her proclamations a description of themselves far more palatable than the picture they saw in the mirror of Simbel’s crumbling face. Hind’s posters were more influential than any poet’s verses. She was still sexually voracious, and had slept with every writer in the city (though it was a long time since Baal had been allowed into her bed); now the writers were used up, discarded, and she was rampant. With sword as well as pen. She was Hind, who had joined the Jahilian army disguised as a man, using sorcery to deflect all spears and swords, seeking out her brothers’ killer through the storm of war. Hind, who butchered the Prophet’s uncle, and ate old Hamza’s liver and his heart.
Who could resist her? For her eternal youth which was also theirs; for her ferocity which gave them the illusion of being invincible; and for her bulls, which were refusals of time, of history, of age, which sang the city’s undimmed magnificence and defied the garbage and decrepitude of the streets, which insisted on greatness, on leadership, on immortality, on the status of Jahilians as custodians of the divine … for these writings the people forgave her her promiscuity, they turned a blind eye to the stories of Hind being weighed in emeralds on her birthday, they ignored rumours of orgies, they laughed when told of the size of her wardrobe, of the five hundred and eighty-one nightgowns made of gold leaf and the four hundred and twenty pairs of ruby slippers. The citizens of Jahilia dragged themselves through their increasingly dangerous streets, in which murder for small change was becoming commonplace, in which old women were being raped and ritually slaughtered, in which the riots of the starving were brutally put down by Hind’s personal police force, the Manticorps; and in spite of the evidence of their eyes, stomachs and wallets, they believed what Hind whispered in their ears: Rule, Jahilia, glory of the world.
Not all of them, of course. Not, for example, Baal. Who looked away from public affairs and wrote poems of unrequited love.
Munching a white radish, he arrived home, passing beneath a dingy archway in a cracking wall. Here there was a small urinous courtyard littered with feathers, vegetable peelings, blood. There was no sign of human life: only flies, shadows, fear. These days it was necessary to be on one’s guard. A sect of murderous hashashin roamed the city. Affluent persons were advised to approach their homes on the opposite side of the street, to make sure that the house was not being watched; when the coast was clear they would rush for the door and shut it behind them before any lurking criminal could push his way in. Baal did not bother with such precautions. Once he had been affluent, but that was a quarter of a century ago. Now there was no demand for satires – the general fear of Mahound had destroyed the market for insults and wit. And with the decline of the cult of the dead had come a sharp drop in orders for epitaphs and triumphal odes of revenge. Times were hard all around.
Dreaming of long-lost banquets, Baal climbed an unsteady wooden staircase to his small upstairs room. What did he have to steal? He wasn’t worth the knife. Opening his door, he began to enter, when a push sent him tumbling to bloody his nose against the far wall. ‘Don’t kill me,’ he squealed blindly. ‘O God, don’t murder me, for pity’s sake, O.’
The other hand closed the door. Baal knew that no matter how loudly he screamed they would remain alone, sealed off from the world in that uncaring room. Nobody would come; he himself, hearing his neighbour shriek, would have pushed his cot against the door.
The intruder’s hooded cloak concealed his face completely. Baal mopped his bleeding nose, kneeling, shaking uncontrollably. ‘I’ve got no money,’ he implored. ‘I’ve got nothing.’ Now the stranger spoke: ‘If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse.’ And then, after a pause: ‘Baal. There’s not much left of you. I had hoped for more.’
Now Baal felt oddly affronted as well as terrified. Was this some kind of demented fan, who would kill him because he no longer lived up to the power of his old work? Still trembling, he attempted self-deprecation. ‘To meet a writer is, usually, to be disappointed,’ he offered. The other ignored this remark. ‘Mahound is coming,’ he said.