The Satanic Verses (45 page)

           
Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?

           
The creature on the sleeping-bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue from
its pores. The face on every one of the waxwork dummies was the same now,
Gibreel's face with its widow's peak and its long thin saturnine good looks.
The creature bared its teeth and let out a long, foul breath, and the waxworks
dissolved into puddles and empty clothes, all of them, every one. The creature
lay back, satisfied. And. fixed its mind upon its foe.

           
Whereupon it felt within itself the most inexplicable sensations of
compression, suction, withdrawal; it was racked by terrible, squeezing pains,
and emitted piercing squeals that nobody, not even Mishal who was staying with
Hanif in Pinkwalla's apartment above the Club, dared to investigate. The pains
mounted in intensity, and the creature thrashed and tossed around the
dancefloor, wailing most piteously; until, at length, granted respite, it fell
asleep.

           
When Mishal, Hanif and Pinkwalla ventured into the clubroom several hours
later, they observed a scene of frightful devastation, tables sent flying,
chairs broken in half, and, of course, every waxwork―good and
evil―Topsy and Legree―melted like tigers into butter; and at the
centre of the carnage, sleeping like a baby, no mythological creature at all,
no iconic Thing of horns and hellsbreath, but Mr. Saladin Chamcha himself,
apparently restored to his old shape, mother-naked but of entirely human aspect
and proportions,
humanized
―is there any option but to
conclude?―by the fearsome concentration of his hate.

           
He opened his eyes; which still glowed pale and red.

           
1

           
Alleluia Cone, coming down from Everest, saw a city of ice to the west of Camp
Six, across the Rock Band, glittering in the sunlight below the massif of Cho
Oyu.
Shangri-La
, she momentarily thought; however, this was no green
vale of immortality but a metropolis of gigantic ice-needles, thin, sharp and
cold. Her attention was distracted by Sherpa Pemba warning her to maintain her
concentration, and the city had gone when she looked back. She was still at
twenty-seven thousand feet, but the apparition of the impossible city threw her
back across space and time to the Bayswater study of old dark wooden furniture
and heavy velvet curtains in which her father Otto Cone, the art historian and
biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in her fourteenth and his final year
of "the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives",
which was, in his opinion, the idea of the continuum. "Anybody ever tries
to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow
homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all
adds up
,
you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor," he advised her, managing
to give the impression of having visited more planets than one before coming to
his conclusions. "The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga.
Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful
happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can't ask for a wilder
place." Ice cities on the roof of the world wouldn't have fazed Otto. Like
his wife Alicja, Allie's mother, he was a Polish emigre, a survivor of a
wartime prison camp whose name was never mentioned throughout Allie's
childhood. "He wanted to make it as if it had not been," Alicja told
her daughter later. "He was unrealistic in many ways. But a good man; the
best I knew." She smiled an inward smile as she spoke, tolerating him in
memory as she had not always managed to during his life, when he was frequently
appalling. For example: he developed a hatred of communism which drove him to
embarrassing extremes of behaviour, notably at Christmas, when this Jewish man
insisted on celebrating with his Jewish family and others what he described as
"an English rite", as a mark of respect to their new "host
nation"―and then spoiled it all (in his wife's eyes) by bursting
into the salon where the assembled company was relaxing in the glow of log
fire, Christmas tree lights and brandy, got up in pantomime Chinee, with droopy
moustaches and all, crying: "Father Christmas is dead! I have killed him!
I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!" Allie on Everest,
remembering, winced―her mother's wince, she realized, transferred to her
frosted face.

           
The incompatibility of life's elements: in a tent at Camp Four, 27,600 feet,
the idea which seemed at times to be her father's daemon sounded banal, emptied
of meaning, of
atmosphere
, by the altitude. "Everest silences
you," she confessed to Gibreel Farishta in a bed above which parachute
silk formed a canopy of hollow Himalayas. "When you come down, nothing
seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up,
like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. The world rushes in
soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection:
why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels
like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that
certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue." They
spent most of their time in bed during their first weeks together: the appetite
of each for the other seemingly inexhaustible, they made love six or seven
times a day. "You opened me up," she told him. "You with the ham
in your mouth. It was exactly as if you were speaking to me, as if I could read
your thoughts. Not as if," she amended. "I did read them,
right?" He nodded: it was true. "I read your thoughts and the right
words just came out of my mouth," she marvelled. "Just flowed out.
Bingo: love. In the beginning was the word."

           
Her mother took a fatalistic view of this dramatic turn of events in Allie's
life, the return of a lover from beyond the grave. "I'll tell you what I
honestly thought when you gave me the news," she said over lunchtime soup
and kreplach at the Whitechapel Bloom's. "I thought, oh dear, it's grand
passion; poor Allie has to go through this now, the unfortunate child."
Alicja's strategy was to keep her emotions strictly under control. She was a
tall, ample woman with a sensual mouth but, as she put it, "I've never
been a noise-maker." She was frank with Allie about her sexual passivity,
and revealed that Otto had been, "Let's say, otherwise inclined. He had a
weakness for grand passion, but it always made him so miserable I could not get
worked up about it." She had been reassured by her knowledge that the
women with whom her little, bald, jumpy husband consorted were "her
type", big and buxom, "except they were brassy, too: they did what he
wanted, shouting things out to spur him on, pretending for all they were worth;
it was his enthusiasm they responded to, I think, and maybe his chequebook,
too. He was of the old school and gave generous gifts."

           
Otto had called Alleluia his "pearl without price", and dreamed for
her a great future, as maybe a concert pianist or, failing that, a Muse.
"Your sister, frankly, is a disappointment to me," he said three
weeks before his death in that study of Great Books and Picabian
bric-a-brac―a stuffed monkey which he claimed was a "first
draft" of the notorious
Portrait of Cezanne, Portrait of Rembrandt,
Portrait of Renoir
, numerous mechanical contraptions including sexual
stimulators that delivered small electric shocks, and a first edition of
Jarry's
Ubu Roi
. "Elena has wants where she should have
thoughts." He Anglicized the name―Yelyena into Ellaynah -just as it
had been his idea to reduce "Alleluia" to Allie and bowdlerize
himself, Cohen from Warsaw, into Cone. Echoes of the past distressed him; he
read no Polish literature, turning his back on Herbert, on Milosz, on
"younger fellows" like Baranczak, because for him the language was
irredeemably polluted by history. "I am English now," he would say
proudly in his thick East European accent. "Silly mid-off! Pish-Tush!
Widow of Windsor! Bugger all." In spite of his reticences he seemed
content enough being a pantomime member of the English gentry. In retrospect,
though, it looked likely that he'd been only too aware of the fragility of the
performance, keeping the heavy drapes almost permanently drawn in case the
inconsistency of things caused him to see monsters out there, or moonscapes
instead of the familiar Moscow Road.

           
"He was strictly a melting-pot man," Alicja said while attacking a
large helping of tsimmis. "When he changed our name I told him, Otto, it
isn't required, this isn't America, it's London W- two; but he wanted to wipe
the slate clean, even his Jewishness, excuse me but I know. The fights with the
Board of Deputies! All very civilized, parliamentary language throughout, but
bareknuckle stuff none the less." After his death she went straight back
to Cohen, the synagogue, Chanukah and Bloom's. "No more imitation of
life," she munched, and waved a sudden, distracted fork. "That
picture. I was crazy for it. Lana Turner, am I right? And Mahalia Jackson
singing in a church."

           
Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft and died.
Now there was a subject which Alicja, who would readily discuss most taboo
matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor of the camps live forty
years and then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil
eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a
sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it hits the heart?
Or, worse: can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Allie, whose first
response on learning of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions
as these at her mother. Who, stonefaced beneath a wide black hat, said only:
"You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear."

           
After Otto's death Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and gesture
which had been her offering on the altar of his lust for integration, her
attempt to be his Cecil Beaton grande dame. "Phoo," she confided in
Allie, "what a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change." She
now wore her grey hair in a straggly bun, put on a succession of identical
floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a painful set
of false teeth, planted vegetables in what Otto had insisted should be an
English floral garden (neat flowerbeds around the central, symbolic tree, a
"chimeran graft" of laburnum and broom) and gave, instead of dinners
full of cerebral chat, a series of lunches―heavy stews and a minimum of
three outrageous puddings―at which dissident Hungarian poets told
convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if things didn't quite work out)
the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their loaded
plates, and something very like total silence reigned for what felt like weeks.
Allie eventually turned away from these Sunday afternoon rituals, sulking in
her room until she was old enough to move out, with Alicja's ready assent, and
from the path chosen for her by the father whose betrayal of his own act of
survival had angered her so much. She turned towards action; and found she had
mountains to climb.

           
Alicja Cohen, who had found Allie's change of course perfectly comprehensible,
even laudable, and rooted for her all the way, could not (she admitted over
coffee) quite see her daughter's point in the matter of Gibreel Farishta, the
revenant Indian movie star. "To hear you talk, dear, the man's not in your
league," she said, using a phrase she believed to be synonymous with
not
your type
, and which she would have been horrified to hear described as a
racial, or religious, slur: which was inevitably the sense in which her
daughter understood it. "That's just fine by me," Allie riposted with
spirit, and rose. "The fact is, I don't even like my league."

           
Her feet ached, obliging her to limp, rather than storm, from the restaurant.
"Grand passion," she could hear her mother behind her back announcing
loudly to the room at large. "The gift of tongues; means a girl can babble
out any blasted thing."

           
* * * * *

           
Certain aspects of her education had been unaccountably neglected. One Sunday
not long after her father's death she was buying the Sunday papers from the
corner kiosk when the vendor announced: "It's the last week this week.
Twenty-three years I've been on this corner and the Pakis have finally driven
me out of business." She heard the word
p-a-c-h-y
, and had a
bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday
news vendors. "What's a pachy?" she foolishly asked and the reply was
stinging: "A brown Jew." She went on thinking of the proprietors of
the local "C TN" (confectioner-tobacconist- newsagent) as
pachyderms
for quite a while: as people set apart―rendered objectionable―by
the nature of their skin. She told Gibreel this story, too. "Oh," he
responded, crushingly, "an elephant joke." He wasn't an easy man.

           
But there he was in her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could open as
she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and caress her
heart. Not for many years had she entered the sexual arena with such celerity,
and never before had so swift a liaison remained wholly untainted by regret or
self-disgust. His extended silence (she took it for that until she learned that
his name was on the
Bostan's
passenger list) had been sharply painful,
suggesting a difference in his estimation of their encounter; but to have been
mistaken about his desire, about such an abandoned, hurtling thing, was surely
impossible? The news of his death accordingly provoked a double response: on
the one hand, there was a kind of grateful, relieved joy to be had from the
knowledge that he had been racing across the world to surprise her, that he had
given up his entire life in order to construct a new one with her; while, on
the other, there was the hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very
moment of knowing that she truly had been loved. Later, she became aware of a
further, less generous, reaction. What had he thought he was doing, planning to
arrive without a word of warning on her doorstep, assuming that she'd be
waiting with open arms, an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough
apartment for them both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a
spoiled movie actor who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits
into his lap . . . in short, she had felt invaded, or potentially invaded. But
then she had rebuked herself, pushing such notions back down into the pit where
they belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption,
if presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.