When the news got around Jahilia that the whores of The Curtain had each assumed the identity of one of Mahound’s wives, the clandestine excitement of the city’s males was intense; yet, so afraid were they of discovery, both because they would surely lose their lives if Mahound or his lieutenants ever found out that they had been involved in such irreverences, and because of their desire that the new service at The Curtain be maintained, that the secret was kept from the authorities. In those days Mahound had returned with his wives to Yathrib, preferring the cool oasis climate of the north to Jahilia’s heat. The city had been left in the care of General Khalid, from whom things were easily concealed. For a time Mahound had considered telling Khalid to have all the brothels of Jahilia closed down, but Abu Simbel had advised him against so precipitate an act. ‘Jahilians are new converts,’ he pointed out. ‘Take things slowly.’ Mahound, most pragmatic of Prophets, had agreed to a period of transition. So, in the Prophet’s absence, the men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which experienced a three hundred per cent increase in business. For obvious reasons it was not politic to form a queue in the street, and so on many days a line of men curled around the innermost courtyard of the brothel, rotating about its centrally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims rotated for other reasons around the ancient Black Stone. All customers of The Curtain were issued with masks, and Baal, watching the circling masked figures from a high balcony, was satisfied. There were more ways than one of refusing to Submit.
In the months that followed, the staff of The Curtain warmed to the new task. The fifteen-year-old whore ‘Ayesha’ was the most popular with the paying public, just as her namesake was with Mahound, and like the Ayesha who was living chastely in her apartment in the harem quarters of the great mosque at Yathrib, this Jahilian Ayesha began to be jealous of her preeminent status of Best Beloved. She resented it when any of her ‘sisters’ seemed to be experiencing an increase in visitors, or receiving exceptionally generous tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had taken the name of ‘Sawdah’, would tell her visitors – and she had plenty, many of the men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and also grateful charms – the story of how Mahound had married her and Ayesha, on the same day, when Ayesha was just a child. ‘In the two of us,’ she would say, exciting men terribly, ‘he found the two halves of his dead first wife: the child, and the mother, too.’ The whore ‘Hafsah’ grew as hot-tempered as her namesake, and as the twelve entered into the spirit of their roles the alliances in the brothel came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque; ‘Ayesha’ and ‘Hafsah’, for example, engaged in constant, petty rivalries against the two haughtiest whores, who had always been thought a bit stuck-up by the others and who had chosen for themselves the most aristocratic identities, becoming ‘Umm Salamah the Makhzumite’ and, snootiest of all, ‘Ramlah’, whose namesake, the eleventh wife of Mahound, was the daughter of Abu Simbel and Hind. And there was a ‘Zainab bint Jahsh’, and a ‘Juwairiyah’, named after the bride captured on a military expedition, and a ‘Rehana the Jew’, a ‘Safia’ and a ‘Maimunah’, and, most erotic of all the whores, who knew tricks she refused to teach to competitive ‘Ayesha’: the glamourous Egyptian, ‘Mary the Copt’. Strangest of all was the whore who had taken the name of ‘Zainab bint Khuzaimah’, knowing that this wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia of her lovers, who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this, too, was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.
By the end of the first year the twelve had grown so skilful in their roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal, more myopic and deafer by the month, saw the shapes of the girls moving past him, their edges blurred, their images somehow doubled, like shadows superimposed on shadows. The girls began to entertain new notions about Baal, too. In that age it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession, to take the kind of husband who wouldn’t give her any trouble – a mountain, maybe, or a fountain, or a bush – so that she could adopt, for form’s sake, the title of a married woman. At The Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the Love Spout in the central courtyard, but now a kind of rebellion was brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than some spurting stone, which was almost idolatrous, after all; and to say that they had decided that they would all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first the Madam tried to talk them out of it, but when she saw that the girls meant business she conceded the point, and told them to send the writer in to see her. With many giggles and nudges the twelve courtesans escorted the shambling poet into the throne room. When Baal heard the plan his heart began to thump so erratically that he lost his balance and fell, and ‘Ayesha’ screamed in her fright: ‘O God, we’re going to be his widows before we even get to be his wives.’
But he recovered: his heart regained its composure. And, having no option, he agreed to the twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married them all off herself, and in that den of degeneracy, that anti-mosque, that labyrinth of profanity, Baal became the husband of the wives of the former businessman, Mahound.
His wives now made plain to him that they expected him to fulfil his husbandly duties in every particular, and worked out a rota system under which he could spend a day with each of the girls in turn (at The Curtain, day and night were inverted, the night being for business and the day for rest). No sooner had he embarked upon this arduous programme than they called a meeting at which he was told that he ought to start behaving a little more like the ‘real’ husband, that is, Mahound. ‘Why can’t you change your name like the rest of us?’ bad-tempered ‘Hafsah’ demanded, but at this Baal drew the line. ‘It may not be much to be proud of,’ he insisted, ‘but it’s my name. What’s more, I don’t work with the clients here. There’s no business reason for such a change.’ ‘Well, anyhow,’ the voluptuous ‘Mary the Copt’ shrugged, ‘name or no name, we want you to start acting like him.’
‘I don’t know much about,’ Baal began to protest, but ‘Ayesha’, who really was the most attractive of them all, or so he had commenced to feel of late, made a delightful moue. ‘Honestly, husband,’ she cajoled him. ‘It’s not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss.’
It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of ‘ordinary life’ in which they wanted nothing more than to be the obedient, and – yes – submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of high excitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was to have twelve women competing for his favours, for the beneficence of his smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled his body and danced for him, and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.
It was irresistible. He began to find the confidence to order them about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry. Once when their quarreling irritated him he forswore them all for a month. When he went to see ‘Ayesha’ after twenty-nine nights she teased him for not having been able to stay away. ‘That month was only twenty-nine days long,’ he replied. Once he was caught with ‘Mary the Copt’ by ‘Hafsah’, in ‘Hafsah’s’ quarters and on ‘Ayesha’s’ day. He begged ‘Hafsah’ not to tell ‘Ayesha’, with whom he had fallen in love;
but she told her anyway and Baal had to stay away from ‘Mary’ of the fair skin and curly hair for quite a time after that. In short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming the secret, profane mirror of Mahound; and he had begun, once again, to write.
The poetry that came was the sweetest he had ever written. Sometimes when he was with Ayesha he felt a slowness come over him, a heaviness, and he had to lie down. ‘It’s strange,’ he told her. ‘It is as if I see myself standing beside myself. And I can make him, the standing one, speak; then I get up and write down his verses.’ These artistic slownesses of Baal were much admired by his wives. Once, tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the chambers of ‘Umm Salamah the Makhzumite’. When he woke, hours later, his body ached, his neck and shoulders were full of knots, and he berated Umm Salamah: ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ She answered: ‘I was afraid to, in case the verses were coming to you.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about that. The only woman in whose company the verses come is “Ayesha”, not you.’
Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of Ayesha’s clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin, pantaloons and body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha’s room when the client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: ‘So this is where you got to!’ Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, ‘It’s all right. He won’t make any trouble.’ He invited Salman the Persian to his own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it wasn’t forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule Book.
‘I came because I’m finally leaving this infernal city,’ Salman said, ‘and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit.’ After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old friendship the immigrant had found work as a letter-writer and all-purpose scribe, sitting cross-legged by the roadside in the main street of the financial district. His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun. ‘People write to tell lies,’ he said, drinking quickly. ‘So a professional liar makes an excellent living. My love letters and business correspondence became famous as the best in town because of my gift for inventing beautiful falsehoods that involved only the tiniest departure from the facts. As a result I have managed to save enough for my trip home in just two years. Home! The old country! I’m off tomorrow, and not a minute too soon.’
As the bottle emptied Salman began once again to talk, as Baal had known he would, about the source of all his ills, the Messenger and his message. He told Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting the rumour as if it were incontrovertible fact. ‘That girl couldn’t stomach it that her husband wanted so many other women,’ he said. ‘He talked about necessity, political alliances and so on, but she wasn’t fooled. Who can blame her? Finally he went into – what else – one of his trances, and out he came with a message from the archangel. Gibreel had recited verses giving him full divine support. God’s own permission to fuck as many women as he liked. So there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses of God? You know what she did say? This: “Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.” Well! If it hadn’t been Ayesha, who knows what he’d have done, but none of the others would have dared in the first place.’ Baal let him run on without interruption. The sexual aspects of Submission exercised the Persian a good deal: ‘Unhealthy,’ he pronounced. ‘All this segregation. No good will come of it.’
At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the poet taking Mahound’s side: ‘You can see his point of view,’ Baal reasoned. ‘If families offer him brides and he refuses he creates enemies, – and besides, he’s a special man and one can see the argument for special dispensations, – and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour it would be if anything bad happened to one of them! Listen, if you lived in here, you wouldn’t think a little less sexual freedom was such a bad thing, – for the common people, I mean.’
‘Your brain’s gone,’ Salman said flatly. ‘You’ve been out of the sun too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown.’
Baal was pretty tipsy by this time, and began some hot retort, but Salman raised an unsteady hand. ‘Don’t want to fight,’ he said. ‘Lemme tell you instead. Hottest story in town. Whoo-whoo! And it’s relevant to whatch, whatchyou say.’
Salman’s story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on an expedition to a far-flung village, and on the way back to Yathrib their party had camped in the dunes for the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the last moment Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into a hollow. While she was away her litter-bearers picked up her palanquin and marched off. She was a light woman, and, failing to notice much difference in the weight of that heavy palanquin, they assumed she was inside. Ayesha returned after relieving herself to find herself alone, and who knows what might have befallen her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to pass by on his camel … Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe and sound; at which point tongues began to wag, not least in the harem, where opportunities to weaken Ayesha’s power were eagerly seized by her opponents. The two young people had been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was hinted, more and more loudly, that Safwan was a dashingly handsome fellow, and the Prophet was much older than the young woman, after all, and might she not therefore have been attracted to someone closer to her own age? ‘Quite a scandal,’ Salman commented, happily.
‘What will Mahound do?’ Baal wanted to know.
‘O, he’s done it,’ Salman replied. ‘Same as ever. He saw his pet, the archangel, and then informed one and all that Gibreel had exonerated Ayesha.’ Salman spread his arms in worldly resignation. ‘And this time, mister, the lady didn’t complain about the convenience of the verses.’
Salman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train. When he left Baal at The Curtain, he embraced the poet, kissed him on both cheeks and said: ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s better to keep out of the daylight. I hope it lasts.’ Baal replied: ‘And I hope you find home, and that there is something there to love.’ Salman’s face went blank. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and left.
‘Ayesha’ came to Baal’s room for reassurance. ‘He won’t spill out the secret when he’s drunk?’ she asked, caressing Baal’s hair. ‘He gets through a lot of wine.’
Baal said: ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same again.’ Salman’s visit had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during his years at The Curtain, and he couldn’t go back to sleep.
‘Of course it will,’ Ayesha urged. ‘It will. You’ll see.’
Baal shook his head and made the only prophetic remark of his life. ‘Something big is going to happen,’ he foretold. ‘A man can’t hide behind skirts forever.’
The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came to inform the Madam of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The brothels were to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From behind her drapes, the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an hour in the name of propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was the inexperience of the officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed. The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by a back door. ‘Please apologize to them for the interruption,’ she ordered the eunuchs, ‘and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made.’
They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once, crowded into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat, will we go to jail, what’s to become of us, – until ‘Ayesha’ screwed up her courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and twenty-five years old, no more than three fee
t tall, looking like a big doll, curled up in a cushion-laden wickerwork chair, clutching the empty poison-bottle in her fist.
‘Now that you’ve started,’ Baal said, coming into the room, ‘you may as well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any more.’
The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothel-keeper. ‘Well, if we can’t hang the boss, we’ll just have to make do with the workers,’ he shouted, and ordered his men to place the ‘tarts’ under close arrest, a task the men performed with zeal. The women made a noise and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched without twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: ‘They want the cunts to be put on trial, but I’ve no instructions about you. So if you don’t want to lose your heads as well as your balls, keep out of this.’ Eunuchs failed to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled them to the ground; and among the eunuchs was Baal, of the dyed skin and poetry. Just before the youngest ‘cunt’ or ‘slit’ was gagged, she yelled: ‘Husband, for God’s sake, help us, if you are a man.’ The vice-squad captain was amused. ‘Which of you is her husband?’ he asked, staring carefully into each turban-topped face. ‘Come on, own up. What’s it like to watch the world with your wife?’
Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid ‘Ayesha’s’ glares as well as Umar’s narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. ‘Is it you?’
‘Sir, you understand, it’s just a term,’ Baal lied. ‘They like to joke, the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we …’