Gibreel’s sexual obsession, Chamcha reminded himself, actually made things easier. ‘She’s certainly a very attractive woman,’ he murmured by way of an experiment, and was gratified to receive a furious, strung-out glare in return. After which Gibreel, making a show of controlling himself, put his arm around Saladin and boomed: ‘Apologies, Spoono, I’m a bad-tempered bugger where she’s concerned. But you and me! We’re bhai-bhai! Been through the worst and come out smiling; come on now, enough of this little nowhere park. Let’s hit town.’
There is the moment before evil; then the moment of; then the time after, when the step has been taken, and each subsequent stride becomes progressively easier. ‘Fine with me,’ Chamcha replied. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well.’
A boy of six or seven cycled past them on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning his head to follow the boy’s progress, saw that he was moving smoothly away down an avenue of overarching trees, through which the hot sunlight managed here and there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his dream disoriented Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the sour flavour of might-have-beens. Gibreel hailed a taxi; and requested Trafalgar Square.
O, he was in a high good humour that day, rubbishing London and the English with much of his old brio. Where Chamcha saw attractively faded grandeur, Gibreel saw a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances. Under the gaze of stone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: ‘I swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn’t last one day; let’s take one home for dinner.’ Chamcha’s Englished soul cringed for shame. Later, in Covent Garden, he described for Gibreel’s benefit the day the old fruit and vegetable market moved to Nine Elms. The authorities, worried about rats, had sealed the sewers and killed tens of thousands; but hundreds more survived. ‘That day, starving rats swarmed out on to the pavements,’ he recalled. ‘All the way down the Strand and over Waterloo Bridge, in and out of the shops, desperate for food.’ Gibreel snorted. ‘Now I know this is a sinking ship,’ he cried, and Chamcha felt furious at having given him the opening. ‘Even the bloody rats are off.’ And, after a pause: ‘What they needed was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune.’
When he wasn’t insulting the English or describing Allie’s body from the roots of her hair to the soft triangle of ‘the love-place, the goddamn yoni,’ he seemed to wish to make lists: what were Spoono’s ten favourite books, he wanted to know; also movies, female film stars, food. Chamcha offered conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie-list included Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador. ‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ Gibreel scoffed. ‘All this Western art-house crap.’ His top ten of everything came from ‘back home’, and was aggressively lowbrow. Mother India, Mr India, Shree Charsawbees: no Ray, no Mrinal Sen, no Aravindan or Ghatak. ‘Your head’s so full of junk,’ he advised Saladin, ‘you forgot everything worth knowing.’
His mounting excitement, his babbling determination to turn the world into a cluster of hit parades, his fierce walking pace – they must have walked twenty miles by the end of their travels – suggested to Chamcha that it wouldn’t take much, now, to push him over the edge. It seems I turned out to be a confidence man, too, Mimi. The art of the assassin is to draw the victim close; makes him easier to knife. ‘I’m getting hungry,’ Gibreel imperiously announced. ‘Take me to one of your top-ten eateries.’
In the taxicab, Gibreel needled Chamcha, who had not informed him of the destination. ‘Some Frenchy joint, na? Or Japanese, with raw fishes and octopuses. God, why I trust your taste.’
They arrived at the Shaandaar Café.
Jumpy wasn’t there.
Nor, apparently, had Mishal Sufyan patched things up with her mother; Mishal and Hanif were absent, and neither Anahita nor her mother gave Chamcha a greeting that could be described as warm. Only Haji Sufyan was welcoming: ‘Come, come, sit; you’re looking good.’ The café was oddly empty, and even Gibreel’s presence failed to create much of a stir. It took Chamcha a few seconds to understand what was up; then he saw the quartet of white youths sitting at a corner table, spoiling for a fight.
The young Bengali waiter (whom Hind had been obliged to employ after her elder daughter’s departure) came over and took their order – aubergines, sikh kababs, rice – while staring angrily in the direction of the troublesome quartet, who were, as Saladin now perceived, very drunk indeed. The waiter, Amin, was as annoyed with Sufyan as the drunks. ‘Should never have let them sit,’ he mumbled to Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘Now I’m obliged to serve. It’s okay for the seth; he’s not the front line, see.’
The drunks got their food at the same time as Chamcha and Gibreel. When they started complaining about the cooking, the atmosphere in the room grew even more highly charged. Finally they stood up. ‘We’re not eating this shit, you cunts,’ yelled the leader, a tiny, runty fellow with sandy hair, a pale thin face, and spots. ‘It’s shit. You can go fuck yourselves, fucking cunts.’ His three companions, giggling and swearing, left the café. The leader lingered for a moment. ‘Enjoying your food?’ he screamed at Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘It’s fucking shit. Is that what you eat at home, is it? Cunts.’ Gibreel was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this is what the British, that great nation of conquerors, have become in the end. He did not respond. The little rat-faced speaker came over. ‘I asked you a fucking question,’ he said. ‘I said. Are you fucking enjoying your fucking shit dinner?’ And Saladin Chamcha, perhaps out of his annoyance that Gibreel had not been confronted by the man he’d all but killed – catching him off guard from behind, the coward’s way – found himself answering: ‘We would be, if it wasn’t for you.’ Ratboy, swaying on his feet, digested this information; and then did a very surprising thing. Taking a deep breath, he drew himself up to his full five foot five; then leaned forward, and spat violently and copiously all over the food.
‘Baba, if that’s in your top ten,’ Gibreel said in the taxi home, ‘don’t take me to the places you don’t like so much.’
‘ “Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,” ’ Chamcha replied. ‘It means, “My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.” Nabokov.’
‘Him again,’ Gibreel complained. ‘What bloody language?’
‘He made it up. It’s what Kinbote’s Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In Pale Fire.’
‘Perndirstan,’ Farishta repeated. ‘Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?’
They were almost back at Allie’s flat overlooking Brickhall Fields. ‘The playwright Strindberg,’ Chamcha said, absently, as if following some profound train of thought, ‘after two unhappy marriages, wedded a famous and lovely twenty-year-old actress called Harriet Bosse. In the Dream she was a great Puck. He wrote for her, too: the part of Eleanora in Easter. An “angel of peace”. The young men went crazy for her, and Strindberg, well, he got so jealous he almost lost his mind. He tried to keep her locked up at home, far from the eyes of men. She wanted to travel; he brought her travel books. It was like the old Cliff Richard song: Gonna lock her up in a trunk/so no big hunk/can steal her away from me.’
Farishta’s heavy head nodded in recognition. He had fallen into a kind of reverie. ‘What happened?’ he inquired as they reached their destination. ‘She left him,’ Chamcha innocently declared. ‘She said she could not reconcile him with the human race.’
Alleluia Cone read, as she walked home from the Tube, her mother’s deliriously happy letter from Stanford, Calif. ‘If people tell you happiness is unattainable,’ Alicja wrote in large, looping, back-leaning, left-handed letters, ‘kindly point them in my direction. I’ll put them straight. I found it twice, the first time with your father, as you know, the second with this kind, broad man whose face is the exact colour of the oranges that grow all over these parts. Contentment, Allie. It
beats excitement. Try it, you’ll like it.’ When she looked up, Allie saw Maurice Wilson’s ghost sitting atop a large copper beech-tree in his usual woollen attire – tam-o’-shanter, diamond-pattern Pringle jersey, plus-fours – looking uncomfortably overdressed in the heat. ‘I’ve no time for you now,’ she told him, and he shrugged. I can wait. Her feet were bad again. She set her jaw and marched on.
Saladin Chamcha, concealed behind the very copper beech from which Maurice Wilson’s ghost was surveying Allie’s painful progress, observed Gibreel Farishta bursting out of the front door of the block of flats in which he’d been waiting impatiently for her return; observed him red-eyed and raving. The demons of jealousy were sitting on his shoulders, and he was screaming out the same old song, wherethehell whothe whatthe dontthinkyoucanpullthewool howdareyou bitchbitchbitch. It appeared that Strindberg had succeeded where Jumpy (because absent) had failed.
The watcher in the upper branches dematerialized; the other, with a satisfied nod, strolled away down an avenue of shady, spreading trees.
The telephone calls which now began to be received, first at their London residence and subsequently at a remote address in Dumfries and Galloway, by both Allie and Gibreel, were not too frequent; then again, they could not be termed infrequent. Nor were there too many voices to be plausible; then again, there were quite enough. These were not brief calls, such as those made by heavy breathers and other abusers of the telephone network, but, conversely, they never lasted long enough for the police, eavesdropping, to track them to their source. Nor did the whole unsavoury episode last very long – a mere matter of three and a half weeks, after which the callers desisted forever; but it might also be mentioned that it went on exactly as long as it needed to, that is, until it had driven Gibreel Farishta to do to Allie Cone what he had previously done to Saladin – namely, the Unforgivable Thing.
It should be said that nobody, not Allie, not Gibreel, not even the professional phone-tappers they brought in, ever suspected the calls of being a single man’s work; but for Saladin Chamcha, once renowned (if only in somewhat specialist circles) as the Man of a Thousand Voices, such a deception was a simple matter, entirely lacking in effort or risk. In all, he was obliged to select (from his thousand voices and a voice) a total of no more than thirty-nine.
When Allie answered, she heard unknown men murmuring intimate secrets in her ear, strangers who seemed to know her body’s most remote recesses, faceless beings who gave evidence of having learned, by experience, her choicest preferences among the myriad forms of love; and once the attempts at tracing the calls had begun her humiliation grew, because now she was unable simply to replace the receiver, but had to stand and listen, hot in the face and cold along the spine, making attempts (which didn’t work) actually to prolong the calls.
Gibreel also got his share of voices: superb Byronic aristocrats boasting of having ‘conquered Everest’, sneering guttersnipes, unctuous best-friend voices mingling warning and mock-commiseration, a word to the wise, how stupid can you, don’t you know yet what she’s, anything in trousers, you poor moron, take it from a pal. But one voice stood out from the rest, the high soulful voice of a poet, one of the first voices Gibreel heard and the one that got deepest under his skin; a voice that spoke exclusively in rhyme, reciting doggerel verses of an understated naïvety, even innocence, which contrasted so greatly with the masturbatory coarseness of most of the other callers that Gibreel soon came to think of it as the most insidiously menacing of all.
I like coffee, I like tea,
I like things you do with me.
Tell her that, the voice swooned, and rang off. Another day it returned with another jingle:
I like butter, I like toast,
You’re the one I love the most.
Give her that message, too; if you’d be so kind. There was something demonic, Gibreel decided, something profoundly immoral about cloaking corruption in this greetings-card tum-ti-tum.
Rosy apple, lemon tart,
Here’s the name of my sweetheart.
A … l … l … Gibreel, in disgust and fear, banged down the receiver; and trembled. After that the versifier stopped calling for a while; but his was the voice Gibreel started waiting for, dreading its reappearance, having perhaps accepted, at some level deeper than consciousness, that this infernal, childlike evil was what would finish him off for good.
But O how easy it all turned out to be! How comfortably evil lodged in those supple, infinitely flexible vocal cords, those puppetmaster’s strings! How surely it stepped out along the high wires of the telephone system, poised as a barefoot acrobat; how confidently it entered the victims’ presence, as certain of its effect as a handsome man in a perfectly tailored suit! And how carefully it bided its time, sending forth every voice but the voice that would deliver the coup de grâce – for Saladin, too, had understood the doggerel’s special potency – deep voices and squeaky voices, slow ones, quick ones, sad and cheerful, aggression-laden and shy. One by one, they dripped into Gibreel’s ears, weakening his hold on the real world, drawing him little by little into their deceitful web, so that little by little their obscene, invented women began to coat the real woman like a viscous, green film, and in spite of his protestations to the contrary he started slipping away from her; and then it was time for the return of the little, satanic verses that made him mad.
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Sugar never tasted sweet as you.
Pass it on. He returned as innocent as ever, giving birth to a turmoil of butterflies in Gibreel’s knotting stomach. After that the rhymes came thick and fast. They could have the smuttiness of the school playground:
When she’s down at Waterloo
She don’t wear no yes she do
When she’s up at Leicester Square
She don’t wear no underwear;
or, once or twice, the rhythm of a cheerleader’s chant.
Knickerknacker, firecracker,
Sis! Boom! Bah!
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
And lastly, when they had returned to London, and Allie was absent at the ceremonial opening of a freezer food mart in Hounslow, the last rhyme.
Violets are blue, roses are red,
I’ve got her right here in my bed.
Goodbye, sucker.
Dialling tone.
Alleluia Cone returned to find Gibreel gone, and in the vandalized silence of her apartment she determined that this time she would not have him back, no matter in what sorry condition or how wheedlingly he came crawling to her, pleading for forgiveness and for love; because before he left he had wrought a terrible vengeance upon her, destroying every one of the surrogate Himalayas she had collected over the years, thawing the ice-Everest she kept in her freezer, pulling down and ripping to shreds the parachute-silk peaks that rose above her bed, and hacking to pieces (he’d used the small axe she kept with the fire extinguisher in the broom cupboard) the priceless whittled memento of her conquest of Chomolungma, given her by Pemba the sherpa, as a warning as well as a commemoration. To Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.