Husband and wife stand on their balcony, and the people see them plain. For so long the city has used these two as its mirrors; and because, of late, Jahilians have preferred Hind’s images to the greying Grandee, they are suffering, now, from profound shock. A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness. Now the Grandee has awakened them from that sleep; they stand disoriented, rubbing their eyes, unable to believe at first – if we are so mighty, how then have we fallen so fast, so utterly? – and then belief comes, and shows them how their confidence has been built on clouds, on the passion of Hind’s proclamations and on very little else. They abandon her, and with her, hope. Plunging into despair, the people of Jahilia go home to lock their doors.
She screams at them, pleads, loosens her hair. ‘Come to the House of the Black Stone! Come and make sacrifice to Lat!’ But they have gone. And Hind and the Grandee are alone on their balcony, while throughout Jahilia a great silence falls, a great stillness begins, and Hind leans against the wall of her palace and closes her eyes.
It is the end. The Grandee murmurs softly: ‘Not many of us have as much reason to be scared of Mahound as you. If you eat a man’s favourite uncle’s innards, raw, without so much as salt or garlic, don’t be surprised if he treats you, in turn, like meat.’ Then he leaves her, and goes down into the streets from which even the dogs have vanished, to unlock the city gates.
Gibreel dreamed a temple:
By the open gates of Jahilia stood the temple of Uzza. And Mahound spake unto Khalid who had been a carrier of water before, and now bore greater weights: ‘Go thou and cleanse the place.’ So Khalid with a force of men descended upon the temple, for Mahound was loth to enter the city while such abominations stood at its gates.
When the guardian of the temple, who was of the tribe of Shark, saw the approach of Khalid with a great host of warriors, he took up his sword and went to the idol of the goddess. After making his final prayers he hung his sword about her neck, saying, ‘If thou be truly a goddess, Uzza, defend thyself and thy servant against the coming of Mahound.’ Then Khalid entered the temple, and when the goddess did not move the guardian said, ‘Now verily do I know that the God of Mahound is the true God, and this stone but a stone.’ Then Khalid broke the temple and the idol and returned to Mahound in his tent. And the Prophet asked: ‘What didst thou see?’ Khalid spread his arms. ‘Nothing,’ said he. ‘Then thou hast not destroyed her,’ the Prophet cried. ‘Go again, and complete thy work.’ So Khalid returned to the fallen temple, and there an enormous woman, all black but for her long scarlet tongue, came running at him, naked from head to foot, her black hair flowing to her ankles from her head. Nearing him, she halted, and recited in her terrible voice of sulphur and hellfire: ‘Have you heard of Lat, and Manat, and Uzza, the Third, the Other? They are the Exalted Birds …’ But Khalid interrupted her, saying, ‘Uzza, those are the Devil’s verses, and you the Devil’s daughter, a creature not to be worshipped, but denied.’ So he drew his sword and cut her down.
And he returned to Mahound in his tent and said what he had seen. And the Prophet said, ‘Now may we come into Jahilia,’ and they arose, and came into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer of Men.
How many idols in the House of the Black Stone? Don’t forget: three hundred and sixty. Sun-god, eagle, rainbow. The colossus of Hubal. Three hundred and sixty wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And are not: but let’s not waste time there. Statues fall; stone breaks; what’s to be done is done.
Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his tent on the old fairground. The people crowd around the tent, embracing the victorious faith. The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and need not be lingered over.
While Jahilians bow before him, mumbling their life-saving sentences, there is no God but Al-Lah, Mahound whispers to Khalid. Somebody has not come to kneel before him; somebody long awaited. ‘Salman,’ the Prophet wishes to know. ‘Has he been found?’
‘Not yet. He’s hiding; but it won’t be long.’
There is a distraction. A veiled woman kneels before him, kissing his feet. ‘You must stop,’ he enjoins. ‘It is only God who must be worshipped.’ But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by toe, joint by joint, the woman licks, kisses, sucks. And Mahound, unnerved, repeats: ‘Stop. This is incorrect.’ Now, however, the woman is attending to the soles of his feet, cupping her hands beneath his heel … he kicks out, in his confusion, and catches her in the throat. She falls, coughs, then prostrates herself before him, and says firmly: ‘There is no God but Al-Lah, and Mahound is his Prophet.’ Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends a hand. ‘No harm will come to you,’ he assures her. ‘All who Submit are spared.’ But there is a strange confusion in him, and now he understands why, understands the anger, the bitter irony in her overwhelming, excessive, sensual adoration of his feet. The woman throws off her veil: Hind.
‘The wife of Abu Simbel,’ she announces clearly, and a hush falls. ‘Hind,’ Mahound says. ‘I had not forgotten.’
But, after a long instant, he nods. ‘You have Submitted. And are welcome in my tents.’
The next day, amid the continuing conversions, Salman the Persian is dragged into the Prophet’s presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding a knife at his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the takht. ‘I found him, where else, with a whore, who was screeching at him because he didn’t have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol.’
‘Salman Farsi,’ the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of death, but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: ‘La ilaha ilallah! La ilaha!’
Mahound shakes his head. ‘Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? To set your words against the Words of God.’
Scribe, ditch-digger, condemned man: unable to muster the smallest scrap of dignity, he blubbers whimpers pleads beats his breast abases himself repents. Khalid says: ‘This noise is unbearable, Messenger. Can I not cut off his head?’ At which the noise increases sharply. Salman swears renewed loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope, makes an offer. ‘I can show you where your true enemies are.’ This earns him a few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head. Khalid pulls the kneeling Salman’s head back by the hair: ‘What enemies?’ And Salman says a name. Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns.
‘Baal,’ he says, and repeats, twice: ‘Baal, Baal.’
Much to Khalid’s disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to death. Bilal intercedes for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere, concedes: yes, yes, let the wretched fellow live. O generosity of Submission! Hind has been spared; and Salman; and in all of Jahilia not a door has been smashed down, not an old foe dragged out to have his gizzard slit like a chicken’s in the dust. This is Mahound’s answer to the second question: What happens when you win? But one name haunts Mahound, leaps around him, young, sharp, pointing a long painted finger, singing verses whose cruel brilliance ensures their painfulness. That night, when the supplicants have gone, Khalid asks Mahound: ‘You’re still thinking about him?’ The Messenger nods, but will not speak. Khalid says: ‘I made Salman take me to his room, a hovel, but he isn’t there, he’s hiding out.’ Again, the nod, but no speech. Khalid presses on: ‘You want me to dig him out? Wouldn’t take much doing. What d’you want done with him? This? This?’ Khalid’s finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into his navel. Mahound loses his temper. ‘You’re a fool,’ he shouts at the former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. ‘Can’t you ever work things out without my help?’
Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of dealing with bad moods.
But Khalid, Mahound’s general, could not find Baal. In spite of door-to-door searches, proclamations, turnings
of stones, the poet proved impossible to nab. And Mahound’s lips remained closed, would not part to allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave up the search. ‘Just let that bastard show his face, just once, any time,’ he vowed in the Prophet’s tent of softnesses and shadows. ‘I’ll slice him so thin you’ll be able to see right through each piece.’
It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.
Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a day, no alcohol, the locking up of wives. Hind herself retired to her quarters … but where was Baal?
Gibreel dreamed a curtain:
The Curtain, Hijab, was the name of the most popular brothel in Jahilia, an enormous palazzo of date-palms in water-tinkling courtyards, surrounded by chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns, permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to look alike, each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love, each carpeted with identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned against a wall. None of The Curtain’s clients could ever find their way, without help, either into the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back again to the street. In this way the girls were protected from unwanted guests and the business ensured payment before departure. Large Circassian eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion of lamp-genies, escorted the visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes with the help of balls of string. It was a soft windowless universe of draperies, ruled over by the ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had acquired, over the years, something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were able to disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane antithesis of Mahound’s sacred utterances in a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and save his life as an act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been was accepted without question; and when Khalid’s guards arrived to search the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around that overground catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the soldiers’ heads were spinning, and after looking inside thirty-nine stone urns and finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the quivering, pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.
After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet’s skin until it was blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his lack of condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn’t tone up fast.
Baal’s sojourn ‘behind The Curtain’ by no means deprived him of information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact, because in the course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the pleasure-chambers and heard the customers’ gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues, induced by the gay abandon of the whores’ caresses and by the clients’ knowledge that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet, myopic and hard of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary affairs than he could possibly have gained if he’d still been free to wander the newly puritanical streets of the town. The deafness was a problem sometimes; it meant that there were gaps in his knowledge, because the customers frequently lowered their voices and whispered; but it also minimized the prurient element in his listenings-in, since he was unable to hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in cries of real or synthetic joy.
What Baal learned at The Curtain:
From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the new ban on pork the skin-deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back door to buy the forbidden meat in secret, ‘sales are up,’ he murmured while mounting his chosen lady, ‘black pork prices are high; but damn it, these new rules have made my work tough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter in secret, without noise,’ and thereupon he began some squealing of his own, for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain. – And the grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain’s horizontal staff that the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening he still said a prayer or two to ‘my lifelong favourite, Manat, and sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can’t beat a female goddess, they’ve got attributes the boys can’t match,’ after which he, too, fell upon the earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that faded, fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute, no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.
Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of the great temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because even in the high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the hollowness of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of stone that couldn’t fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been dulled, Baal became convinced that Al-Lat’s fall meant that his own end was not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired in him; but the returning knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated cowardice he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered at the paradox of having his eyes opened to such a truth in that house of costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead – had never lived – but that didn’t make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rules, and to perceive that his story was so mixed up with Mahound’s that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the twelve wives of the Prophet, one rule for him, another for us, Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.
The girls of The Curtain – it was only by convention that they were referred to as ‘girls’, as the eldest was a woman well into her fifties, while the youngest, at fifteen, was more experienced than many fifty-year-olds – had grown fond of this shambling Baal, and in point of fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-who-wasn’t, so that out of working hours they would tease him deliciously, flaunting their bodies before him, placing their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing one another passionately just an inch away from his face, until the ashy writer was hopelessly aroused; whereupon they would laugh at his stiffness and mock him into blushing, quivering detumescence; or, very occasionally, and when he had given up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they had awakened. In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the poet passed his days, laying his head in women’s laps, brooding on death and revenge, unable to say whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive.
It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. ‘That one!’ she said. ‘He’s got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet’s wives. He’s so annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning their names. He tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and she’s His Nibs’s favourite, as all are aware. So there.’
/>
The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. ‘Listen, those women in that harem, the men don’t talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it’s only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can’t see.’
Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book the women dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex, and not just the talk, either.
He said to the youngest whore: ‘Why don’t you pretend for him?’
‘Who?’
‘Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private and personal Ayesha?’
‘God,’ the girl said. ‘If they heard you say that they’d boil your balls in butter.’
How many wives? Twelve, and one old lady, long dead. How many whores behind The Curtain? Twelve again; and, secret on her black-tented throne, the ancient Madam, still defying death. Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. Baal told the Madam of his idea; she settled matters in her voice of a laryngitic frog. ‘It is very dangerous,’ she pronounced, ‘but it could be damn good for business. We will go carefully; but we will go.’
The fifteen-year-old whispered something in the grocer’s ear. At once a light began to shine in his eyes. ‘Tell me everything,’ he begged. ‘Your childhood, your favourite toys, Solomon’s-horses and the rest, tell me how you played the tambourine and the Prophet came to watch.’ She told him, and then he asked about her deflowering at the age of twelve, and she told him that, and afterwards he paid double the normal fee, because ‘it’s been the best time of my life’. ‘We’ll have to be careful of heart conditions,’ the Madam said to Baal.