The Satanic Verses (30 page)

           
The train emerged from the tunnel. Gibreel took a decision. "Stand,
six-toed John," he intoned in his best Hindi movie manner. "Maslama,
arise."

           
The other scrambled to his feet and stood pulling at his fingers, his head
bowed. "What I want to know, sir," he mumbled, "is, which is it
to be? Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?"

           
Gibreel thought rapidly. "It is for judging," he finally answered.
"Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given pro and contra. Here
it is the human race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a
rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be made.
For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due course. In the
meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital security reasons."
He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with himself.

           
Maslama was nodding furiously. "You can depend on me," he promised.
"I'm a man who respects a person's privacy. Mum"―for the second
time!―"is the word."

           
Gibreel fled the compartment with the lunatic's hymns in hot pursuit. As he
rushed to the far end of the train Maslama's paeans remained faintly audible
behind him. "Alleluia! Alleluia!" Apparently his new disciple had
launched into selections from Handel's
Messiah
.

           
However: Gibreel wasn't followed, and there was, fortunately, a first-class
carriage at the rear of the train, too. This one was of open-plan design, with
comfortable orange seats arranged in fours around tables, and Gibreel settled
down by a window, staring towards London, with his chest thumping and his hat
jammed down on his head. He was trying to come to terms with the undeniable
fact of the halo, and failing to do so, because what with the derangement of
John Maslama behind him and the excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard
to get his thoughts straight. Then to his despair Mrs. Rekha Merchant floated
up alongside his window, sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to
the snowstorm that was building up out there and making England look like a
television set after the day's programmes end. She gave him a little wave and
he felt hope ebbing from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his
eyes and concentrated on trying not to shake.

           
* * * * *

           
"I know what a ghost is," Allie Cone said to a classroom of teenage
girls whose faces were illuminated by the soft inner light of worship. "In
the high Himalayas it is often the case that climbers find themselves being
accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder,
but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only to
perish on the way down."

           
Outside, in the Fields, the snow was settling on the high, bare trees, and on
the flat expanse of the park. Between the low, dark snow-clouds and the
white-carpeted city the light was a dirty yellow colour, a narrow, foggy light
that dulled the heart and made it impossible to dream. Up
there
, Allie
remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity
that it seemed to resonate, to sing, like music. Here on the flat earth the
light, too, was flat and earthbound. Here nothing flew, the sedge was withered,
and no birds sang. Soon it would be dark.

           
"Ms Cone?" The girls' hands, waving in the air, drew her back into
the classroom. "Ghosts, miss? Straight up?" "You're pulling our
legs, right?" Scepticism wrestled with adoration in their faces. She knew
the question they really wanted to ask, and probably would not: the question of
the miracle of her skin. She had heard them whispering excitedly as she entered
the classroom, 's true, look, how
pale
, 's incredible. Alleluia Cone,
whose iciness could resist the heat of the eight-thousand-metre sun. Allie the
snow maiden, the icequeen.
Miss, how come you never get a tan?
When she
went up Everest with the triumphant Collingwood expedition, the papers called
them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though she was no Disneyish cutie, her
full lips pale rather than rose-red, her hair ice-blonde instead of black, her
eyes not innocently wide but narrowed, out of habit, against the high
snowglare. A memory of Gibreel Farishta welled up, catching her unawares:
Gibreel at some point during their three and a half days, booming with his usual
foot-in-mouth lack of restraint, "Baby, you're no iceberg, whatever they
say. You're a passionate lady, bibi. Hot, like a kachori." He had
pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis:
O,
too hot. O, throw water
. Gibreel Farishta. She controlled herself: Hi ho,
it's off to work.

           
"Ghosts," she repeated firmly. "On the Everest climb, after I
came through the ice-fall, I saw a man sitting on an outcrop in the lotus
position, with his eyes shut and a tartan tam-o'-shanter on his head, chanting
the old mantra: om mani padme hum." She had guessed at once, from his
archaic clothing and surprising behaviour, that this was the spectre of Maurice
Wilson, the yogi who had prepared for a solo ascent of Everest, back in 1934,
by starving himself for three weeks in order to cement so deep a union between
his body and soul that the mountain would be too weak to tear them apart. He
had gone up in a light aircraft as high as it would take him, crash-landed
deliberately in a snowfield, headed upwards, and never returned. Wilson opened
his eyes as Allie approached, and nodded lightly in greeting. He strolled
beside her for the rest of that day, or hung in the air while she worked her
way up a face. Once he belly-flopped into the snow of a sharp incline and
glided upwards as if he were riding on an invisible anti-gravity toboggan.
Allie had found herself behaving quite naturally, as if she'd just bumped into
an old acquaintance, for reasons afterwards obscure to her.

           
Wilson chattered on a fair bit―"Don't get a lot of company these
days, one way and another"―and expressed, among other things, his
deep irritation at having had his body discovered by the Chinese expedition of
1960. "Little yellow buggers actually had the gall, the sheer face, to
film my corpse." Alleluia Cone was struck by the bright, yellow-and-black
tartan of his immaculate knickerbockers. All this she told the girls at
Brickhall Fields Girls' School, who had written so many letters pleading for
her to address them that she had not been able to refuse. "You've got
to," they pleaded in writing. "You even live here." From the
window of the classroom she could see her flat across the park, just visible
through the thickening fall of snow.

           
What she did not tell the class was this: as Maurice Wilson's ghost described,
in patient detail, his own ascent, and also his posthumous discoveries, for
example the slow, circuitous, infinitely delicate and invariably unproductive
mating ritual of the yeti, which he had witnessed recently on the South
Col,―so it occurred to her that her vision of the eccentric of 1934, the
first human being ever to attempt to scale Everest on his own, a sort of
abominable snowman himself, had been no accident, but a kind of signpost, a
declaration of kinship. A prophecy of the future, perhaps, for it was at that
moment that her secret dream was born, the impossible thing: the dream of the
unaccompanied climb. It was possible, also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel
of her death.

           
"I wanted to talk about ghosts," she was saying, "because most
mountaineers, when they come down from the peaks, grow embarrassed and leave
these stories out of their accounts. But they do exist, I have to admit it,
even though I'm the type who's always kept her feet on solid ground."

           
That was a laugh. Her feet. Even before the ascent of Everest she had begun to
suffer from shooting pains, and was informed by her general practitioner, a
no-nonsense Bombay woman called Dr. Mistry, that she was suffering from fallen
arches. "In common parlance, flat feet." Her arches, always weak, had
been further weakened by years of wearing sneakers and other unsuitable shoes.
Dr. Mistry couldn't recommend much: toe-clenching exercises, running upstairs
barefoot, sensible footwear. "You're young enough," she said.
"If you take care, you'll live. If not, you'll be a cripple at
forty." When Gibreel―damn it!―heard that she had climbed
Everest with spears in her feet he took to calling her his silkie. He had read
a Bumper Book of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the sea-woman who
left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man she loved. She
had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an agony, as if she were
walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking, forward, away from the sea
and over land. You did it for a bloody mountain, he said. Would you do it for a
man?

           
She had concealed her foot-ache from her fellow-mountaineers because the lure
of Everest had been so overwhelming. But these days the pain was still there,
and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness, was proving to
be her footbinder. Adventure's end, Allie thought; betrayed by my feet. The
image of footbinding stayed with her.
Goddamn Chinese
, she mused,
echoing Wilson's ghost.

           
"Life is so easy for some people," she had wept into Gibreel
Farishta's arms. "Why don't
their
blasted feet give out?" He
had kissed her forehead. "For you, it may always be a struggle," he
said. "You want it too damn much."

           
The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of
phantoms. They wanted
the
story, her story. They wanted to stand on the
mountain-top.
Do you know how it feels
, she wanted to ask them,
to
have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long? Do
you know what it's like when the only direction is down?
"I was in the
second pair with Sherpa Pemba," she said. "The weather was perfect,
perfect. So clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever
lay beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to
Pemba. Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a
change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to the
summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without oxygen, but
when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It was a stupid
whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a woman sitting on
top of that bastard mountain, a human being, not a breathing machine. Pemba
said, Allie Bibi, don't do, but I just started up. In a while we passed the
others coming down and I could see the wonderful thing in their eyes. They were
so high, possessed of such an exaltation, that they didn't even notice I wasn't
wearing the oxygen equipment. Be careful, they shouted over to us, Look out for
the angels. Pemba had fallen into a good breathing pattern and I fell into step
with it, breathing in with his in, out with his out. I could feel something
lifting off the top of my head and I was grinning, just grinning from ear to
ear, and when Pemba looked my way I could see he was doing the same. It looked
like a grimace, like pain, but it was just foolish joy." She was a woman
who had been brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by the hard
physical labour of hauling herself up an icebound height of rock. "At that
moment," she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every step of
the way, "I believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can
lift a veil and see the face of God, everything. I saw the Himalayas stretching
below me and that was God's face, too. Pemba must have seen something in my
expression that bothered him because he called across, Look out, Allie Bibi,
the height. I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top,
and then we were there, with the ground falling away on every side. Such light;
the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and let it
soak into my skin." Not a titter from the class; they were dancing naked
with her on the roof of the world. "Then the visions began, the rainbows
looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a waterfall from
the sun, and there were angels, the others hadn't been joking. I saw them and
so did Sherpa Pemba. We were on our knees by then. His pupils looked pure white
and so did mine, I'm sure. We would probably have died there, I'm sure,
snow-blind and mountain-foolish, but then I heard a noise, a loud, sharp
report, like a gun. That snapped me out of it. I had to yell at Pem until he,
too, shook himself and we started down. The weather was changing rapidly; a
blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now, heaviness instead of that
light, that lightness. We just made it to the meeting point and the four of us
piled into the little tent at Camp Six, twenty-seven thousand feet. You don't
talk much up there. We all had our Everests to re-climb, over and over, all
night. But at some point I asked: "What was that noise? Did anyone fire a
gun?" They looked at me as if I was touched. Who'd do such a damnfool
thing at this altitude, they said, and anyway, Allie, you know damn well there
isn't a gun anywhere on the mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard
it, I know that much: wham bam, shot and echo. That's it," she ended
abruptly. "The end. Story of my life." She picked up a silver-headed
cane and prepared to depart. The teacher, Mrs. Bury, came forward to utter the
usual platitudes. But the girls were not to be denied. "So what was it,
then, Allie?" they insisted; and she, looking suddenly ten years older
than her thirty-three, shrugged. "Can't say," she told them.
"Maybe it was Maurice Wilson's ghost."