The Satanic Verses (67 page)

           
When he wasn't insulting the English or describing Allie's body from the roots
of her hair to the soft triangle of "the loveplace, 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 Cafe.

           
* * * * *

           
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 cafe 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 cafe. 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 dont thinkyoucanpullthewool 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 mockcommiseration,
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 naivety, 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 grace―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!