Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. ‘Because you can’t be,’ he said. ‘Husbands, eh. Not bad.’
When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. ‘Get lost,’ he suggested. ‘Tomorrow I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running.’
When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down and wept uncontrollably by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame, did not cry.
Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:
The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had grown so accustomed to their new names that they couldn’t remember the old ones. They were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titles, and as a result were unable to give any names at all. After a good deal of shouting and a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by numbers, as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients, terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores had been up to, also remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody would have found out if the poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to the walls of the city jail.
Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and pimps, whose numbers had increased considerably during the two years in which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired that many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town riff-raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution under the new immorality laws, in order to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those painted ladies whom they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the suitors at their barred gates. On the third day, however, there appeared among these lovelorn fools a peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and pantaloons, with dark skin that was beginning to look decidedly blotchy. Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when he began to sing his verses the sniggering stopped at once. Jahilians had always been connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of the odes being sung by the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal sang his love poems, and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who allowed Baal to speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible to see for the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went forward to nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes running with tears, made no move to stop him.
Every evening after that, the strange fellow would reappear and recite a new poem, and each set of verses sounded lovelier than the last. It was perhaps this surfeit of loveliness which prevented anybody from noticing, until the twelfth evening, when he completed his twelfth and final set of verses, each of which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of his twelve ‘wives’ were the same as those of another group of twelve.
But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that had taken to gathering to hear Baal read changed its mood. Feelings of outrage replaced those of exaltation, and Baal was surrounded by angry men demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults. At this point Baal took off his absurd turban. ‘I am Baal,’ he announced. ‘I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen Muses.’
Guards seized him.
The General, Khalid, had wanted to have Baal executed at once, but Mahound asked that the poet be brought to trial immediately following the whores. So when Baal’s twelve wives, who had divorced stone to marry him, had been sentenced to death by stoning to punish them for the immorality of their lives, Baal stood face to face with the Prophet, mirror facing image, dark facing light. Khalid, sitting at Mahound’s right hand, offered Baal a last chance to explain his vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay at The Curtain, using the simplest language, concealing nothing, not even his final cowardice, for which everything he had done since had been an attempt at reparation. But now an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed into that tent of judgment, knowing that this was after all the famous satirist Baal, in his day the owner of the sharpest tongue and keenest wit in Jahilia, began (no matter how hard it tried not to) to laugh. The more honestly and simply Baal described his marriages to the twelve ‘wives of the Prophet’, the more uncontrollable became the horrified mirth of the audience. By the end of his speech the good folk of Jahilia were literally weeping with laughter, unable to restrain themselves even when soldiers with bullwhips and scimitars threatened them with instant death.
‘I’m not kidding!’ Baal screeched at the crowd, which hooted yelled slapped its thighs in response. ‘It’s no joke!’ Ha ha ha. Until, at last, silence returned; the Prophet had risen to his feet.
‘In the old days you mocked the Recitation,’ Mahound said in the hush. ‘Then, too, these people enjoyed your mockery. Now you return to dishonour my house, and it seems that once again you succeed in bringing the worst out of the people.’
Baal said, ‘I’ve finished. Do what you want.’
So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of the tent towards the killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder: ‘Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.’
Mahound replied, ‘Writers and whores. I see no difference here.’
Once upon a time there was a woman who did not change.
After the treachery of Abu Simbel handed Jahilia to Mahound on a plate and replaced the idea of the city’s greatness with the reality of Mahound’s, Hind sucked toes, recited the La-ilaha, and then retreated to a high tower of her palace, where news reached her of the destruction of the Al-Lat temple at Taif, and of all the statues of the goddess that were known to exist. She locked herself into her tower room with a collection of ancient books written in scripts which no other human being in Jahilia could decipher; and for two years and two months she remained there, studying her occult texts in secret, asking that a plate of simple food be left outside her door once a day and that her chamberpot be emptied at the same time. For two years and two months she saw no other living being. Then she entered her husband’s bedroom at dawn, dressed in all her finery, with jewels glittering at her wrists, ankles, toes, ears and throat. ‘Wake up,’ she commanded, flinging back his curtains. ‘It’s a day for celebrations.’ He saw that she hadn’t aged by so much as a day since he last saw her; if anything, she looked younger than ever, which gave credence to the rumours which suggested that her witchcraft had persuaded time to run backwards for her within the confines of her tower room. ‘What have we got to celebrate?’ the former Grandee of Jahilia asked, coughing up his usual morning blood. Hind replied: ‘I may not be able to reverse the flow of history, but revenge, at least, is sweet.’
Within an hour the news arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen into a fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha’s bed with his head thumping as if it had been filled up with demons. Hind continued to make calm preparations for a banquet, sending servants to every corner of the city to invite guests. But of course nobody would come to a party on that day. In the evening Hind sat alone in the great hall of her home, amid the golden plates and crystal glasses of her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous while surrounded by glistening, steaming, aromatic dishes of every imaginable type. Abu Simbel had refused to join her, calling her eating an obscenity. ‘You ate his uncle’s heart,’ Simbel cried, ‘and now you would eat his.’ She laughed in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed them, too, and sat in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange shadows across her absolute, uncompromising face.
Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:
For when the head of the Messenger began to ache as never before, he knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:
Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and afterward asked to choose
between this world and the next:
So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha’s lap, he closed his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:
And he said unto Ayesha, ‘I have been offered and made my Choice, and I have chosen the kingdom of God.’
Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even though when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning upon its stand:
‘Who’s there?’ he called out. ‘Is it Thou, Azraeel?’
But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a woman’s, make reply: ‘No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel.’
And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: ‘Is this sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?’
And she said: ‘It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them cut a camel’s hamstrings and set it on your grave.’
Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more into a great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, ‘Still, I thank Thee, Al-Lat, for this gift.’
Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began mightily to lament:
But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: ‘If there be any here who worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive.’
It was the end of the dream.
1
It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love, the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto for Carmen – one of the prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he’d assembled in lighter days, and which included among its winged metaphors the Sweet (of youth), the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyám—FitzGerald’s adjectiveless Bird of Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and the Obscene; this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons … ‘Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.’ Take that, kids. – And in a separate but proximate glass display-case of the younger, happier Chamcha’s fancy there fluttered a captive from a piece of hit-parade bubblegum music, the Bright Elusive Butterfly, which shared l’amour with the oiseau rebelle.
Love, a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling a human (as opposed to robotic, Skinnerian-android) body of experience could afford to shut down operations, did you down, no question about it, and very probably did you in as well. It even warned you in advance. ‘Love is an infant of Bohemia,’ sings Carmen, herself the very Idea of the Beloved, its perfect pattern, eternal and divine, ‘and if I love you, look out for you.’ You couldn’t ask for fairer. For his own part, Saladin in his time had loved widely, and was now (he had come to believe) suffering Love’s revenges upon the foolish lover. Of the things of the mind, he had most loved the protean, inexhaustible culture of the English-speaking peoples; had said, when courting Pamela, that Othello, ‘just that one play’, was worth the total output of any other dramatist in any other language, and though he was conscious of hyperbole, he didn’t think the exaggeration very great. (Pamela, of course, made incessant efforts to betray her class and race, and so, predictably, professed herself horrified, bracketing Othello with Shylock and beating the racist Shakespeare over the head with the brace of them.) He had been striving, like the Bengali writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, before him – though without any of that impish, colonial intelligence’s urge to be seen as an enfant terrible – to be worthy of the challenge represented by the phrase Civis Britannicus sum. Empire was no more, but still he knew ‘all that was good and living within him’ to have been ‘made, shaped and quickened’ by his encounter with this islet of sensibility, surrounded by the cool sense of the sea. – Of material things, he had given his love to this city, London, preferring it to the city of his birth or to any other; had been creeping up on it, stealthily, with mounting excitement, freezing into a statue when it looked in his direction, dreaming of being the one to possess it and so, in a sense, become it, as when in the game of grandmother’s footsteps the child who touches the one who’s it (‘on it’, today’s young Londoners would say) takes over that cherished identity; as, also, in the myth of the Golden Bough. London, its conglomerate nature mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant geese. Its hospitality – yes! – in spite of immigration laws, and his own recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in Wembley, a stone’s throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial echoes – Empire Way, the Empire Pool – of more than a hundred delegates, all tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village. – ‘We Londoners can be proud of our hospitality,’ he’d told Pamela, and she, giggling helplessly, took him to see the Buster Keaton movie of that name, in which the comedian, arriving at the end of an absurd railway line, gets a murderous reception. In those days they had enjoyed such oppositions, and after hot disputes had ended up in bed … He returned his wandering thoughts to the subject of the metropolis. Its – he repeated stubbornly to himself – long history as a refuge, a role it maintained in spite of the recalcitrant ingratitude of the refugees’ children; and without any of the self-congratulatory huddled-masses rhetoric of the ‘nation of immigrants’ across the ocean, itself far from perfectly open-armed. Would the United States, with its are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have permitted Ho Chi Minh to cook in its hotel kitchens? What would its McCarran–Walter Act have to say about a latter-day Karl Marx, standing bushy-bearded at its gates, waiting to cross its yellow lines? O Proper London! Dull would he truly be of soul who did not prefer its faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the hot certainties of that transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms … London, in spite of an increase in excrescences such as the NatWest Tower – a corporate logo extruded into the third dimension – preserved the human scale. Viva! Zindabad!
Pamela had always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. ‘These are museum-values,’ she used to tell him. ‘Sanctified, hanging in golden frames on honorific walls.’ She had never had any time for what endured. Change everything! Rip it up! He said: ‘If you succeed you will make it impossible for anybody like you, in one or two generations’ time, to come along.’ She celebrated this vision of her own obsolescence. If she ended up like the dodo – a stuffed relic, Class Traitor, 1980s – that would, she said, certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged to differ, but by this time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an improvement, so he conceded the other point.
(One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums, and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw this, Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man counter-protest. Didn’t these people know what the stuff inside was worth? There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more per packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural heritage … Pamela put her foot down. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said. She held the then-correct view: that the museums were too valuable to charge for. So: ‘Don’t you dare,’ and to his surprise he foun
d he did not. He had not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have given, maybe, in the right circumstances, his life for what was in those museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended position.)
– And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you. —
Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the parcel-rack over the rear wheel. Then he released it, and the boy (not knowing himself to be unsupported) kept going: balance came like a gift of flight, and the two of them were gliding down the avenue, Chamcha running, the boy pedalling harder and harder. ‘You did it!’ Saladin rejoiced, and the equally elated child shouted back: ‘Look at me! See how quickly I learned! Aren’t you pleased with me? Aren’t you pleased?’ It was a dream to weep at; for when he awoke, there was no bicycle and no child.
‘What will you do now?’ Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the Hot Wax nightclub, and he’d answered, too lightly: ‘Me? I think I’ll come back to life.’ Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had rewarded his love of a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman, with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college friend; his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan heights; and his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled, humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he was whole again, and there was, too, the example of Niccolò Machiavelli to consider (a wronged man, his name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? – enough, at any rate, to make most men confess to raping their grandmothers, or anything else, just to make the pain go away; – yet he had confessed to nothing, having committed no crimes while serving the Florentine republic, that all-too-brief interruption in the power of the Medici family); if Niccolò could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes literature then so much in vogue, Il Principe, following it with the magisterial Discorsi, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from the cave’s dark mouth, and to hell with the legal problems.