VII
The Angel Azraeel
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 g!ass 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 you love me, 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 Englishspeaking 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 withShylock 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 hadenjoyed 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 selfcongratulatory 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 foranybody 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 found 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 parcelrack 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 Niccolô 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 Niccolô could survive such tribulation and live to write thatperhaps 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 lega! problems.
Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla -- in whose eyes Chamcha's metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special- effects fantasy-movies (_Labyrinth_, _Legend_,
_Howard the Duck_) entered the Real -- drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the DJ's van; this time, though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. "Good luck," said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. "No, thanks," Saladin replied. "When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but,
as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?" He waved goodbye. "Good for you," Mishal said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: "Fast forward!" His was a generation that believed in skipping life's boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to the next. _Welcome home_, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. "I didn't think people did that any more," he said. "Not since _Dr. Strangelove_." Her pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but confirmed that it was going well. "So far so good." She was naturally off balance; the
offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she "stuck with" her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in point of fact Chamcha felt one down (there had been a period in which he'd been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter's amusing little books) throughout this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied him at least thrice;
but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for Chamcha's discomfiture -- and he had not, let's recall, arrived in this awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood -- was that he had realized, on seeing Pamela, with her too--bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious), her shaven headunder its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he
commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white- haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled
that he'd never really cared for pets.
"I suppose," she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in the spacious kitchen, "that what I did was unforgivable, huh?"
That little Americanizing _huh_ was new: another of her infinite series of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling
violence again: down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the situation.) "I don't think I can say what I'm capable of forgiving," he replied. "That particular response seems to be out of my control; it either operates or it doesn't and I find out in due course. So let's say, for the moment, that the jury's out." She didn't like that, she wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his problem now. "I'm moving back in," he said. "It's a big house and there's plenty of room. I'll take theden, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom, so I'll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I'm assuming that, as my body was never found, I'm
still officially missingpresumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court to have me wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers." (Respectively, their lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened
dumbly, her posture informing him that she wouldn't be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever
he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. "After that," he concluded, "we sell up
and you get your divorce." He swept out, making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his
den just before they hit him. Pamela, downstairs,
would be weeping; he had never found crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom badoom doodoodoom._To be born again, first you have to die_. o o o
Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short--story they'd both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty--first birthday (they were
both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even
though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. "Tell her," he said to the emissaries, "that she never knew how much I valued what she broke." The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in allfairness be blamed? And had she not made
countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven's sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye? "No," said the unforgiving man. -- "Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?" -- "It was the vase," he answered, "the vase, and nothing but." Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. "Nobody can judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size
of the superficial wound, of the hole."
_Sunt lacrimae rerum_, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears in things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it to grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something of the solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the altering of the universe. He watched a
good deal of television with half an eye, channel- hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control culture of the present as much as the piggy boy on the street corner; he, too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the composite video monster hisbutton-pushing brought into being ... what a leveller this remote--control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth century; it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-- shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight; -- and whereas the original
Procrustes, citizen of what could now be termed a "hands-on" culture, had to exercise both brain and brawn, he, Chamcha, could lounge back in his
Parker--Knoll recliner chair and let his fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants -- "Mutts" -- on _Dr. Who_, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred
with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called
_Mutilasians_; children's television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the
misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war. A hospital in Guyana had apparently preserved the body of a fully formed merman, complete with gills and scales. Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish Highlands. The genetic possibility of centaurs was being seriously discussed. A sex--change operation was shown. -- He was reminded of an execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy Joshi had hesitantly shown him at the Shaandaar B and B. Its name, "I Sing the Body Eclectic", was fully representative of the whole. -- But the fellow has a whole body, afterall, Saladin thought bitterly. He made Pamela's baby with no trouble at all: no broken sticks on his damn chromosomes. . . he caught sight of himself in a
rerun of an old _Aliens Show_ "classic". (In the fast-- forward culture, classic status could be achieved in
as little as six months; sometimes even overnight.) The effect of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in what remained of his idea of the normal, average quality of the real; but there were also countervailing forces at work.
On _Gardeners' World_ he was shown how to achieve something called a "chimeran graft" (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the pride of Otto Cone's garden); and although his inattention caused him to miss the names of the two
trees that had been bred into one -- Mulberry? Laburnum? Broom? -- the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the onehis father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies -- the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the
Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca- Colonization of the planet -- he was given this one gift. It was enough. He switched off the set.
Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns, goat-hoofs, etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a cure was in progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not only Gibreel, but everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was irreconcilable with the prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow irrelevant, as even the most stubborn of nightmares will once you've splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began to make journeys into the outside world -- to those professional advisers, lawyer accountant agent, whom Pamela used to call "the Goons", and
when sitting in the panelled, book- and ledgerlined stability of those offices in which miracles could plainly never happen he took to speaking of his "breakdown", -- "the shock of the accident", -- and so on, explaining his disappearance as though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing "Rule, Britannia" while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie _Shree 420_. He made a conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking himself off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses were rather dull; -- if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in thestate of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art; -- then he insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had "a bad experience", and needed a little time.
In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his familiar objects -- the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a cartoonist's heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp -
- he congratulated himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was now sure he felt nothing but the most altruistic affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon the smooth glass of the sensitive
soul; a mere grease-mark, which disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He was forgotten; he nolonger existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.
Saladin's optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone: "Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of unclean: as "if they were robbing a grave." Charlie, who still sounded in her early fifties like a
disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the clients' point of view. "Wait it out," she advised. "They'll come round. After all, it isn't as if you were Dracula, for heaven's
sake." Thank you, Charlie.
Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and appropriate revenge, -- these were things of the past, aspects of a reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re-- establish ordinary life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself
and Gibreel as _monstrous_. Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world -- mass--murdering dictators, childrapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies' mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the view that "monster" was too -- what? -- _judgmental_ a term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties of the age.
Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as the casualties. "There's nothing to be
done with you," she had said in her most patrician voice. "You actually do think in cheap debating points."
And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils -- who needed them? "Why demons, when man himself is a demon?" the Nobel Laureate Singer's "last demon" asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-forand-against reflex, wished to add: "And why angels, when man is angelic too?" (If this wasn't true, how to explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a
powdered wig?) -- But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the circumstances of the age required no diabolic explanations.o o o
I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then
you let them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it's true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. _Ooparvala or Neechayvala_, he wanted to know, and I didn't enlighten him; I certainly don't intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.
I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep. o o o
His reborn, fledgling, still--fallible optimism was hardest to maintain at night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so easily denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started haunting his dreams. The
first -- it was hard to admit this, even to himself-- was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal behind banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif Johnson's lover, Mishal Sufyan.The second -- whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife of his departure sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead -- was Zeeny Vakil.
o o o
The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had returned, in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in Notting Hill, was frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she could say. On the first night -- she had decided not to tell him until they were safely in bed -- he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear of the bed and stood on the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with his thumb stuck in his mouth.
"Come back here and stop being foolish," she commanded, but he shook his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: "But if he's _here!_ In this _house!_ Then how can _I_ . . .
?" -- With which he snatched up his clothes in an untidy bundle, and fled from her presence; she
heard thumps and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself, had fallen down the stairs. "Good," she screamed after him. "Chicken, break your neck."Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced figure of his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through
clamped teeth. "J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says he can't come in unless you say it's okay with you." She had, as usual, been
drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: "What about you, you want him to
come in?" Which Pamela interpreted as his way of rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded with humiliated ferocity.
_Yes_.
So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside -- "Hey, hombre! You're really _well!_" Jumpy greeted him in terror, making as if to slap palms, to conceal his fear -- and
persuaded his wife's lover to share her bed. Then he retreated upstairs, because Jumpy's mortification now prevented him from entering the house until Chamcha was safely out of the way.
"What a man!" Jumpy wept at Pamela. "He's a
_prince_, a _saint!_"
"If you don't pack it in," Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically, "I'll set the fucking dog on you."o o o
Jumpy continued to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him (or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking Chamcha down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray, explaining to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also provocative. "Look what he permits under his own roof! He's a _giant_; least we can do is have good manners." Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to put up with a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. "I'd never have believed
you were so conventional," she fumed, and Jumpy replied: "It's just a question of respect."
In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers and mail; he never failed,
on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He brought Saladin little
presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to puther foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: "We can't behave as if the man's invisible. He's here, isn't he? Then
we must involve him in our lives." Pamela replied sourly: "Why don't you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?" To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: "I didn't think you'd approve."
In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha's residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this unusual way, his predecessor's blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives of love and friendship, he cheered up a
good deal, and found the idea of fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep, the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was running down an avenue of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a bicycle. "Aren't you pleased with me?" the boy cried in his elation.
"Look: aren't you pleased?"
o o o
Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to protest against the arrest of Dr. Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper
Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. "The whole thing's completely trumped- up, based on circumstantial evidence and insinuations. Hanif reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the prosecution case. It's just a straightforward malicious fit--up; the only questionis how far they'll go. They'll verbal him for sure. Maybe there will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly they want to get him. Pretty badly, I'd say; he's been a loud voice around town for some while." Charncha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan's loathing for Simba, he said: "The fellow has -- has
he not? -- a record of violence towards women . . ." Jumpy turned his palms outward. "In his personal life," he owned, "the guy's frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn't mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don't have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you're black." Chamcha let this pass. "The point is, this isn't personal, it's political," Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, "Urn, there's a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you'd like, if you'd be interested, that is, come along if you want."
"You asked him to go with us?" Pamela was incredulous. She had started to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood. "You
actually did that without consulting me?" Jumpy looked crestfallen. "Doesn't matter, anyhow," she let him off the hook. "Catch _him_ going to anythinglike _that_."
In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing a smart brown suit, a camel coat with a silk collar, and a rather natty brown homburg hat. "Where are you off to?" Pamela, in turban,
army--surplus leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed the incipient thickening of her middle, wanted to know. "Bloody Ascot?" "I believe I was invited to a meeting," Saladin answered in his least combative manner, and Pamela freaked. "You want to be careful," she warned him. "The way you look, you'll probably get fucking mugged."
o o o
What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose existence he had so long denied? -- What, or rather who, forced him by the simple fact
of its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon- den in which he was being -- or so he believed -- restored to his former self, and plunge once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of himself? "I'll be able to fit in the meeting," Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin, "before my karate class." -- Where his star pupil waited: long,
rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth birthday. -- Not knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same illicit longings, Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.o o o
He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back room somewhere full of suspicious types looking and talking like clones of Malcolm X (Chamcha could remember finding funny
a TV comic's joke -- "Then there's the one about the black man who changed his name to Mr. X and sued the _News of the World_ for libel" -- and provoking one of the worst quarrels of his marriage), with maybe a few angry-looking women as well; he had pictured much fist-clenching and righteousness.
What he found was a large hall, the Brickhall Friends Meeting House, packed wall-to-wall with every conceivable sort of person -- old, wide women and uniformed schoolchildren, Rastas and restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in Plassey Street, soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as well as blacks; the mood of the crowd was far from the kind of evangelical hysteria he'd imagined; it was quiet, worried, wanting to know what could be done. There was a young black woman standing near him who gave his attire an amused once-over; he stared back at her, and she
laughed: "Okay, sorry, no offence." She waswearing a lenticular badge, the sort that changed its message as you moved. At some angles it read,
_Uhuru for the Simba_; at others, _Freedom for the Lion_. "It's on account of the meaning of his chosen name," she explained redundantly. "In African." Which language? Saladin wanted to know. She shrugged, and turned away to listen to the
speakers. It was African: born, by the sound of her, in Lewisham or Deptford or New Cross, that was all she needed to know . . . Pamela hissed into his ear. "I see you finally found somebody to feel superior to." She could still read him like a book.
A minute woman in her middle seventies was led up on to the stage at the far end of the hail by a wiry man who, Chamcha was almost reassured to observe, really did look like an American Black
Power leader, the young Stokely Carmichael, in fact -
- the same intense spectacles -- and who was acting as a sort of compére. He turned out to be Dr. Simba's kid brother Walcott Roberts, and the tiny lady was their mother, Antoinette. "God knows how anything as big as Simba ever came out of her," Jumpy whispered, and Pamela frowned angrily, out of a new feeling of solidarity with all pregnant women, past as well as present. When Antoinette Roberts spoke, however, her voice was big enough
to fill the room on lung-power alone. She wanted to
talk about her son's day in court, at the committal proceedings, and she was quite a performer. Hers was what Chamcha thought of as an educated voice; she spoke in the B B C accents of one who learned her English diction from the World Service, but there was gospel in there, too, and hellfire sermonizing. "My son filled that dock," she told the silent room. "Lord, he filled it up. Sylvester -- you will pardon me if I use the name I gave him, not meaning to belittle the warrior's name he took for himself, but only out of ingrained habit -- Sylvester, he burst upwards from that dock like Leviathan from the waves. Iwant you to know how he spoke: he spoke loud, and he spoke clear. He spoke looking his adversary in
the eye, and could that prosecutor stare him down? Never in a month of Sundays. And I want you to know what he said: 'I stand here,' my son declared,
'because I have chosen to occupy the old and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude.' He was a colossus among the dwarfs. 'Make no mistake,' he said in
that court, 'we are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their
children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our turn now.' I wish you to think on what my son, Sylvester Roberts, Dr. Uhuru Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it while we decide what we must do."Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage amid cheers and chants; she nodded judiciously in the direction of the noise. Less charismatic speeches followed. Hanif Johnson, Simba's lawyer, made a series of suggestions -- the visitors' gallery must be packed, the dispensers ofjustice must know that they were being watched; the court must be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there was the need for a financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: "Nobody mentions his history of sexual aggression." Jumpy shrugged. "Some of the women he's attacked are in this room. Mishal, for example, is over there, look, in the corner by the stage. But this isn't the time or place for that. Simba's bull craziness is, you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have here is trouble with the Man." In
other circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say in response to such a statement. -- He would have objected, for one thing, that a man's record of violence could not be set aside so easily
when he was accused of murder. -- Also that he didn't like the use of such American terms as "the Man" in the very different British situation, where there was no history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about the organizers' decision to punctuate the speeches with such meaning--loaded songs as _We Shall Overcome_, and even, for Pete's sake, _Nkosi Sikelel" iAfrika_. As if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable. -- But he said none of these things, because his head had begun to spin and his senses to reel, owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying premonition of his death.-- Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech. _As Dr. Simba has written, newness will enter this society by collective, not individual, actions_. He was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus's most popular slogans. _The passage from speech to moral action, Hanif was saying, has a name: to become human_. -- And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a slightly- toobulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob Dylan's song, _I Pity the Poor Immigrant_. Another false and imported note, this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though there were lines that struck
chords, about the immigrant's visions shattering like glass, about how he was obliged to "build his town with blood". Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image of the rivers of blood, would appreciate that. -- All these things Saladin experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance. -- What had happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan's presence at the Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a blazing fire burning in thecentre of her forehead; and felt, in the same moment, the beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. -- He experienced the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl's forehead could burn with ominous flames. -- _She's death to me, that's what it
means_, Chamcha thought in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to be foolish; the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges that had latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted with fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some
piece of space-age junk jewellery. -- But his other self took over again, _she's off limits to you_, it said, _not all possibilities are open to us. The world
is finite; our hopes spill over its rim_. -- Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom, boomba, dabadoom.Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing concern. "I'm the one with the bun in the oven," she said with a gruff remnant of affection. "What business have you got
to pass out?" Jumpy insisted: "You'd best come with me to my class; just sit quietly, and afterwards I'll take you home." -- But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was required. _No, no, I'll go with Jumpy, I'll be fine. It was just hot in there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing_.
There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a movie poster. The film was _Mephisto_, the story of an actor seduced into
a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor -
- played by the German star Klaus Maria Brandauer -
- was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from _Faust_ stood above his head:
--_Who art thou, then?_
--_Part of that Power, not understood_,
_Which always wills the Bad, and always works the
Good_.
o o oAt the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal's direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the class.) -- Although she was all over him, _you came back, I bet it was to see me, isn't that nice_, he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask _were you wearing a luminous something in the middle of
your_, because she wasn't now, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black leotard. -- Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion and injured pride.
"Our other star hasn't turned up today," Jumpy mentioned to Saladin during a break in the exercises. "Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she's apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow--survivor of the crash."
_Things are closing in on me_. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto--continent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. -- What is a
mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an _effect_."Where are you going?" Jumpy was calling. "I
thought I was giving you a lift. Are you okay?"
_I'm fine. I need to walk, that's all_. "Okay, but only if you're sure."
_Sure_. Walk away fast, without catching Mishal's aggrieved eye.
. . . In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this underworld. -- God: no escape. Here's a shop-front, a store selling musical instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what's the name? --
_Fair Winds_, and here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent return of, that's right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and
the salvation of the earth. _Walk. Walk away fast_.
. . . Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking and lost the halfof his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn't fancy a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.
Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his new, buttocky tongue._The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and American surgical techniques knew better_. These gaps were the creationist's main selling--point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster--children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses there. _No point arguing with these
geezers_, the cabbie said. _I don't hold with God myself_. No point, one small part of Chamcha's consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that "the fossil record" wasn't some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-andmiss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress -- the very English middleclass progress -- Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution. -- I've heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music. _Ave atque vale_.
What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was
that he had been living in a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re--create his old existence, this was, he now saw, a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left--hand path.2
The temperature continued to rise; and when the heatwave reached its highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil, -- then Mr. Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned to the metropolis after a period as guests of the penal authority of
New York, announced their "grand coming-out" party. Billy's business connections downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a well-disposed judge; his personal charm had persuaded every one of the wealthy female "marks" from whom he'd extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs. Struwelpeter) to sign a clemency petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction that Mr. Battuta had honestly repented him of his error, and
asked, in the light of his vow to concentrate henceforth on his startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career (whose social usefulness in terms of wealth creation and the provision of employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the court in mitigation of his offences), and his further vow to undergo a full course of psychiatric treatment to help him overcome his weakness for criminal capers, -- that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment than a prison sentence,"the deterrent purpose underlying such incarceration being better served here," in the ladies' opinion, "by a judgment of a more Christian sort". Mimi,
adjudged to be no more than Billy's love-duped underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and a stiff fine, but even this was rendered considerably less severe by the judge's consent to Billy's attorney's plea that his client be allowed to leave the country voluntarily, without having the stigma of a deportation order stamped into his passport, a thing that would do great damage to his many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi were back
in London, whooping it up at Crockford's, and sending out fancy invitation cards to what promised to be _the_ party of that strangely sweltering season. One of these cards found its way, with the assistance of Mr. S. S. Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta; another arrived,
a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha's den, slipped under the door by the solicitous Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela to invite her, adding, with her usual directness: "Any notion where that husband of yours has gotten to?" -- Which Pamela answered, with English awkwardness, _yes er but_. Mimi got the whole story out of her in less than half an hour, which wasn't bad, and concluded triumphantly: "Sounds like your life is looking up, Pam. Bring "em both; bring anyone. It's going to be quite a circus.")The location for the party was another of Sisodia's inexplicable triumphs: the giant sound stage at the Shepperton film studios had been procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to take their pleasures in the huge re- creation of Dickensian London that stood within. A musical adaptation of the great writer's last completed novel, renamed _Friend!_, with book and lyrics by the celebrated genius of the musical stage, Mr. Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some of its scenes; now, accordingly, _The Chums_, as it was known in the business, was receiving the accolade of a big-- budget movie production. "The pipi PR people," Sisodia told Gibreel on the phone, "think that such a fufufuck, _function_, which is to be most ista ista istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their bibuild
up cacampaign."The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.
o o o
Shepperton! -- Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the wings of Pamela's MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of
the fleet of coaches the evening's hosts have made available to those guests wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. -- And someone else, too, -- the one with whom our Saladin fell to earth, -- has come; is wandering within. -- Chamcha enters the arena; and is amazed. -- Here London has been altered -- no,
_condensed_, -- according to the imperatives of
film. -- Why, here's the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those bran-new, spick and span new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle containing various Podsnaps. -- And worse: behold the dustman's mounds of Boffin's Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby's rooms in the Albany, the West End's very heart! -- But the guests are not disposed to
grumble; the reborn city, even rearranged, still
takes the breath away; most particularly in that part
of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam's boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two bridges, one of iron, one of stone. -- Upon its cobbled banks the guests' gay footsteps fall; and there sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note. A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.Society grandees, fashion models, film stars, corporation bigwigs, a brace of minor royal Personages, useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff perspire and mingle in these counterfeit streets with numbers of men and women as sweat-glistened as the "real" guests and as counterfeit as the city:
hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of the movie's leading players. Chamcha, who realizes in the moment of sighting him that this encounter has been the whole purpose of his
journey, -- which fact he has succeeded in keeping from himself until this instant, -- spots Gibreel in the increasingly riotous crowd.
Yes: there, on London Bridge Which Is Of Stone, without a doubt, Gibreel! -- And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone! -- What a distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the left; and how she seems to dote on him -- how everyone adores him: for he is
among the very greatest at the party, Battuta to his
left, Sisodia at Allie's right, and all about a host of faces that would be recognized from Peru to Timbuctoo! -- Chamcha struggles through the crowd, which grows ever more dense as he nears the bridge; -- but he is resolved -- Gibreel, he will reach Gibreel! -- when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up, one of Mr. Bentham's immortal, showstopping tunes, and the crowd parts like the Red Sea before the children of Israel. -- Chamcha, off--balance, staggers back, is crushed by theparting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice -- what else? -- a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while a great singing throng of bosomy ladies in mobcaps and frilly blouses, accompanied by an over-sufficiency of stovepipe- hatted gents, comes rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they're worth.
_What kind of fellow is Our Mutual Friend?_
_What does he intend?_
_Is he the kind of fellow on whom we may depend?_
_etc. etc. etc._
"It's a funny thing," a woman's voice says behind him, "but when we were doing the show at the C-- Theatre, there was an outbreak of lust among the cast; quite unparalleled, in my experience. People
started missing their cues because of the shenanigans in the wings."The speaker, he observes, is young, small, buxom, far from unattractive, damp from the heat, flushed with wine, and evidently in the grip of the libidinous fever of which she speaks. -- The "room" has little light, but he can make out the glint in her eye. "We've got time," she continues matter--of--factly. "After this lot finish there's Mr. Podsnap's solo." Whereupon, arranging herself in an expert parody of the Marine Insurance agent's selfimportant posture, she launches into her own version of the scheduled musical Podsnappery:
_Ours is a Copious Language_,
_A Language Trying to Strangers_;
_Ours is the Favoured Nation_,
_Blest, and Safe from Dangers_ . . .
Now, in Rex-Harrisonian speech-song, she addresses an invisible Foreigner. "And How Do You Like
London? -- 'Aynormaymong rich?' -- Enormously Rich, we say. Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong. -- And Do You Find, Sir, Many Evidences of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World's Metropolis, London, Londres, London? -- I would
say," she adds, still Podsnapping, "that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth."The creature has been approaching Chamcha while delivering herself of these lines; -- unfastening, the while, her blouse; -- and he, mongoose to her cobra, stands there transfixed; while she, exposing a shapely right breast, and offering it to him, points out that she has drawn upon it, -- as an act of civic pride, -- the map of London, no less, in red magic- marker, with the river all in blue. The metropolis summons him; -- but he, giving an entirely Dickensian cry, pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop into the madness of the street.
Gibreel is looking directly at him from London Bridge; their eyes -- or so it seems to Chamcha -- meet. Yes: Gibreel lifts, and waves, an unexcited arm.
o o o
What follows is tragedy. -- Or, at the least the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being
unavailable to modern men and women, so it's said. -
- A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done by heroes
and by kings. -- Well, then, so be it. -- The question that's asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it's born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many- sided human soul. Or, let's say: the enigma of Iago.It's not unknown for literary--theatrical exegetes, defeated by the character, to ascribe his actions to "motiveless malignity". Evil is evil and will do evil, and that's that; the serpent's poison is his very definition. -- Well, such shruggings-off will not pass muster here. My Chamcha may be no Ancient of Venice, my Allie no smothered Desdemona, Farishta no match for the Moor, but they will, at least, be costumed in such explanations as my understanding will allow. -- And so, now, Gibreel waves in greeting; Chamcha approaches; the curtain rises on a darkening stage.
o o o
Let's observe, first, how isolated this Saladin is; his only willing companion an inebriated and cartographically bosomed stranger, he struggles alone through that partying throng in which all persons appear to be (and are not) one another's friends; -- while there on London Bridge stands Farishta, beset by admirers, at the very centre of the crowd;
and, next, let us appreciate the effect on Chamcha, who loved England in the form of his lost English wife, -- of the golden, pale and glacial presence by Farishta's side of Alleluia Cone; he snatches a glass from a passing waiter's tray, drinks the wine fast, takes another; and seems to see, in distant Allie, the entirety of his loss;and in other ways, as well, Gibreel is fast becoming the sum of Saladin's defeats; -- there with him now, at this very moment, is another traitor; mutton dressed as lamb, fifty plus and batting her eyelashes like an eighteen-year--old, is Chamcha's agent, the redoubtable Charlie Sellers; -- you wouldn't liken
him to a Transylvanian bloodsucker, would you, Charlie, the irate watcher inwardly cries; -- and grabs another glass; -- and sees, at its bottom, his own anonymity, the other's equal celebrity, and the great injustice of the division;
most especially -- he bitterly reflects -- because Gibreel, London's conqueror, can see no value in the world now falling at his feet! -- why, the bastard always sneered at the place, Proper London, Vilayet, the English, Spoono, what cold fish they are, I swear; -- Chamcha, moving inexorably towards him through the crowd, seems to see, _right now_, that same sneer upon Farishta's face, that scorn of an inverted Podsnap, for whom all things English are
worthy of derision instead of praise; -- O God, the cruelty of it, that he, Saladin, whose goal and crusade it was to make this town his own, should have to see it kneeling before his contemptuous rival! -- so there is also this: that Chamcha longs to stand in Farishta's shoes, while his own footwear is of no interest whatsoever to Gibreel.What is unforgivable?
Chamcha, looking upon Farishta's face for the first time since their rough parting in Rosa Diamond's hail, seeing the strange blankness in the other's eyes, recalls with overwhelming force the earlier blankness, Gibreel standing on the stairs and doing
nothing while he, Chamcha, horned and captive, was dragged into the night; and feels the return of hatred, feels it filling him bottom--to--top with fresh green bile, _never mind about excuses_, it cries, _to hell with mitigations and what-could-he-have-dones; what's beyond forgiveness is beyond. You can't
judge an internal injury by the size of the hole_.
So: Gibreel Farishta, put on trial by Chamcha, gets a rougher ride than Mimi and Billy in New York, and is declared guilty, for all perpetuity, of the Inexcusable Thing. From which what follows, follows. -- But we may permit ourselves to speculate a while about the true nature of this Ultimate, this Inexpiable Offence.
-- Is it really, can it be, simply his silence on Rosa's stairs? -- Or are there deeper resentments here, gripes for which this so-called Primary Cause is, in truth, no more than a substitute, a front? -- For are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the other's shadow? -- One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires, the other preferring, contemptuously, to transform; one, a hapless fellow who seems to be continually punished for uncommitted crimes, the other, called angelic by one and all, the type of man who gets away with everything. -- We may describe Chamcha as being somewhat less than life--size; but loud, vulgar Gibreel is, without question, a good deallarger than life, a disparity which might easily
inspire neo-Procrustean lusts in Chamcha: to stretch himself by cutting Farishta down to size.
What is unforgivable?
What if not the shivering nakedness of being _wholly known_ to a person one does not trust? -- And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in circumstances -
- hijack, fall, arrest -- in which the secrets of the self were utterly exposed?
Well, then. -- Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these arc two fundamentally" different
_types_ of self? Might we not agree that Gibreel, for
all his stage--name and performances; and in spite of born-again slogans, new beginnings, rnetamorphoses; -- has wished to remain, to a large degree, _continuous_ -- that is, joined to and arising from his past; -- that he chose neither near--fatal illness nor transmuting fall; that, in point of fact, he fears above all things the altered states in which his dreams leak into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic Gibreel he has no desire to be; -- so that his is still a self which, for our present purposes, we may describe as "true" . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of _selected_ dis-- continuities, a _willing_ re--invention; his_preferred_ revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, "false"? And might we
then not go on to say that it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper falsity -- call this "evil" -- and that this is the truth, the door, that was opened in him by his fall? --
While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered "good" by virtue of
_wishing to remain_, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man.
-- But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an intentionalist fallacy? -- Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, "pure", -- an utterly fantastic notion! -- cannot,
must not, suffice. No! Let's rather say an even harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is. -- That, in fact, we fall towards it _naturally_, that is, _not against our natures_. -- And that Saladin Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel Farishta because, finally, it proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road. (And, let us add in conclusion, the later impossibility of return.)Saladin Chamcha, however, insists on a simpler line. "It was his treason at Rosa Diamond's house; his silence, nothing more."
He sets foot upon the counterfeit London Bridge. From a nearby red-and-white-striped puppeteer's booth, Mr. Punch -- whacking Judy -- calls out to him: _That's the way to do it!_ After which Gibreel, too, speaks a greeting, the enthusiasm of the words undone by the incongruous listlessness of the voice: "Spoono, is it you. You bloody devil. There you are, big as life. Come here, you Salad baba, old Chumch."
o o o
This happened:
The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to
Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as _wilderness_,a hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she'd even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?
Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, what he took to be that inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied it, and sought to damage what he envied. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
This happened: Chamcha invented an Allie, and became his fiction's antagonist. . . he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to meet her; and embraced Gibreel. _I follow him to serve my turn upon him_. Allie, suspecting nothing, excused herself. The two of them must have so much to catch up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off, as she put it, to explore. He noticed that she hobbled slightly for a step or two; then paused, and strode off strongly. Among
the things he did not know about her was her pain.Not knowing that the Gibreel standing before him, remote of eye and perfunctory in his greeting, was under the most attentive medical supervision; -- or that he was obliged to take, on a daily basis, certain drugs that dulled his senses, because of the very real possibility of a recurrence of his no--longer-- nameless illness, that is to say, paranoid schizophrenia; -- or that he had long been kept away, at Allie's absolute insistence, from the movie people whom she had come strongly to distrust,
ever since his last rampage; -- or that their presence at the Battuta--Mamoulian party was a thing to which she had been whole-heartedly opposed, acquiescing only after a terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared that he would be kept a prisoner no longer, and that he was determined to make a further effort to re--enter his "real life"; -- or that the effort of looking after a disturbed lover who was capable of seeing small bat-like imps hanging upside down in the refrigerator had worn Allie thin as a worn-out shirt, forcing upon her the roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch -- requiring her, in sum, to act against her own complex and troubled nature; -- not knowing any of this, failing to comprehend that the Gibreel at whom he was looking, and believed he saw, Gibreel the embodiment of all the good fortune that the Fury-
haunted Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the creature of his fancy, as much a fiction, as his invented--resented Allie, that classic drop--dead blonde or femme fatale conjured up by his envious, tormented, Oresteian imagination, -- Saladin in his ignorance nevertheless penetrated, by the merest chance, the chink in Gibreel's (admittedly somewhat quixotic) armour, and understood how his hated Other might most swiftly be unmade.Gibreel's banal question made the opening. Limited by sedatives to small-talk, he asked vaguely: "And how, tell me, is your goodwife?" At which Chamcha, his tongue loosened by alcohol, blurted out: "How? Knocked up. Enceinte. Great with fucking child." Soporific Gibreel missed the violence in this speech, beamed absently, placed an arm around Saladin's shoulders. "Shabash, mubarak," he offered congratulations. "Spoono! Damn speedy work."
"Congratulate her lover," Saladin thickly raged. "My old friend, Jumpy Joshi. Now there, I admit it, is a man. Women go wild, it seems. God knows why. They want his goddamn babies and they don't even wait to ask his leave."
"For instance who?" Gibreel yelled, making heads turn and Chamcha recoil in surprise. "Who who who?" he hooted, causing tipsy giggles. Saladin
Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. "I'lltell you who for instance. My wife for instance, that's who. That is no lady, mister Farishta, Gibreel. Pamela, my nolady wife."
At this very moment, as luck would have it, -- while Saladin in his cups was quite ignorant of the effect his words were having on Gibreel, -- for whom two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory of Rekha Merchant on a flying carpet warning him of Allie's secret wish to have a baby without informing the father, _who asks the seed for permission to plant_, and the second being an envisioning of the body of the martial arts instructor conjoined in high--kicking carnality with the same Miss Alleluia Cone, -- the figure of Jumpy Joshi was seen crossing "Southwark Bridge" in a state of some agitation, -- hunting, in fact, for Pamela, from whom he had become separated during the same rush of singing Dickensians which had pushed Saladin towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman in the Curiosity Shop. "Talk of the devil," Saladin pointed. "There the bastard goes." He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.
Allie Cone reappeared, angry, frantic. "Where is he? Jesus! Can't I even leave him for a fucking
_second?_ Couldn't you have kept your sodding
_eyes_ on him?""Why, what's the matter --?" But now Allie had plunged into the crowd, so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing "Southwark Bridge" she was out of earshot. -- And here was Pamela, demanding: "Have you seen Jumpy?" -- And he pointed, "That way," whereupon she, too, vanished without a word of courtesy; and now Jumpy was seen, crossing "Southwark Bridge" in the opposite direction, curly hair wilder than ever, coathanger shoulders hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to remove, eyes searching, thumb homing in on mouth; -- and, a
little later, Gibreel headed across the simulacrum of that bridge Which Is Of Iron, going the same way as Jumpy went.
In short, events had begun to border on the farcical; but when, some minutes later, the actor playing the role of "Gaffer Hexam", who kept watch over that stretch of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve them of their valuables before handing them over to the police, -- came rowing rapidly down the studio river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled hair standing straight up on end,
the farce was instantly terminated; for there in his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy Joshi in his waterlogged greatcoat. "Knocked cold," the boatman cried, pointing to the huge lump rising
up at the back of Jumpy's skull, "and being unconscious in the water it's a miracle he never drowned."o o o
One week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from Allie Cone, who had tracked him down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi, and who appeared to have defrosted quite a bit, Saladin Chamcha found himself in the passenger seat of a three--year-old silver Citroën station wagon which the future Alicja Boniek had presented to her daughter before leaving for an extended Californian stay. Allie had met him at Carlisle station, repeating her earlier telephonic apologies -- "I'd no right to speak to you like that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well, thank heavens nobody saw the attack, and it seems to have been hushed up, but that poor man, an oar on the head from behind, it's too bad; the point is, we've taken a place up north, friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to get out of range of human beings, and, well, he's been asking for you; you could really help him, I think, and to be frank I could do with the help myself," which left Saladin little the wiser but consumed by curiosity -- and now Scotland was rushing past the Citroën windows at alarming speed: an edge of Hadrian's Wall, the old elopers' haven Gretna Green,
and then inland towards the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock, Elvanfoot. Chamcha tended to think of all non-metropolitan locales as the deeps of interstellar space, and journeys into them as fraught with peril: for tobreak down in such emptiness would surely be to die alone and undiscovered. He had noted warily that one of the Citroën's headlamps was broken, that the fuel gauge was in the red (it turned out to be
broken, too), the daylight was failing, and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at Silverstone on a sunny day. "He can't get far without transport, but you neverknow," she explained grimly. "Three days ago he stole the car keys and they found him
heading the wrong way up an exit road on the Mo, shouting about damnation. _Prepare for the vengeance of the Lord_, he told the motorway cops,
_for I shall soon summon my lieutenant, Azraeel_. They wrote it all down in their little books." Chamcha, his heart still filled with his own vengeful lusts, affected sympathy and shock. "And Jumpy?" he inquired. Allie took both hands off the wheel and spread them in an I-giveup gesture, while the car wobbled terrifyingly across the bendy road. "The doctors say the possessive jealousy could be part of the same thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like a fuse."
She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha
lent her a willing ear. If she trusted him, it was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of damaging that trust. _Once he betrayed my trust; now let him,for a time, have confidence in me_. He was a tyro puppeteer; it was necessary to study the strings, to find out what was connected to what . . . "I can't help it," Allie was saying. "I feel in some obscure way to blame for him. Our life isn't working out and it's my fault. My mother gets angry when I talk like this." Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her daughter at Terminal Three. "I don't understand where you get these notions from," she cried amid backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian mums. "You could say your father's life didn't go according to plan, either. So he should be blamed for the camps? Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean,these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self
doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you." She had returned, without warning, to the grand style of wardrobe preferred by Otto Cone, and, it seemed, to an oratorical manner that suited the big black hats and frilly suits. "Enjoy
California, Mother," Allie said sharply. "One of us is happy," Alicja said. "Why shouldn't it be me?" And before her daughter could answer, she swept off past the passengers--only barrier, flourishingpassport, boarding-pass, ticket, heading for the duty- free bottles of Opium and Gordon's Gin, which were on sale beneath an illuminated sign reading SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS.
In the last light, the road rounded a spur of treeless, heather-covered hills. Long ago, in another country, another twilight, Chamcha had rounded another
such spur and come into sight of the remains of Persepolis. Now, however, he was heading for a human ruin; not to admire, and maybe even (for the decision to do evil is never finally taken until the
very instant of the deed; there is always a last chance to withdraw) to vandalize. To scrawl his name in Gibreel's flesh: _Saladin woz ear_. "Why stay with him?" he asked Allie, and to his surprise she blushed. "Why not spare yourself the pain?"
"I don't really know you, not at all, really," she began, then paused and made a choice. "I'm not proud of the answer, but it's the truth," she said. "It's the sex. We're unbelievable together, perfect, like nothing I've known. Dream lovers. He just seems to, to _know_. To know _me_." She fell silent; the night hid her face. Chamcha's bitterness
surged up again. Dream lovers were all around him; he, dreamless, could only watch. He gritted angry teeth; and bit, by mistake, his tongue.Gibreel and Allie had holed up in Durisdeer, a village so small it didn't have a pub, and were living in a deconsecrated Freekirk converted -- the quasi- religious term sounded strange to Chamcha -- by an architect friend of Allie's who had made a fortune
out of such metamorphoses of the sacred into the profane. It struck Saladin as a gloomy sort of place, for all its white walls, recessed spotlights and wall-to-
-wall shag--pile carpeting. There were gravestones in the garden. As a retreat for a man suffering from paranoid delusions of being the chief archangel of God, Chamcha reflected, it wouldn't have been his own first choice. The Freekirk was set a little apart from the dozen or so other stone--and--tile houses that made up the community: isolated even within this isolation. Gibreel was standing at the door, a shadow against the illuminated hallway, when the
car pulled up. "You got here," he shouted. "Yaar, too good. Welcome to bloody jail."
The drugs made Gibreel clumsy. As the three of them sat around the pitch-pine kitchen table beneath the gentrified pulldown dimmer-switched lighting, he twice knocked over his coffee--cup (he was ostentatiously off booze; Allie, pouring two
generous shots of Scotch, kept Chamcha company), and, cursing, stumbled about the kitchen for paper- towels to mop up the mess. "When I get sick of being this way Ijust cut down without telling her,"he confessed. "And then the shit starts happening. I swear to you, Spoono, I can't bear the bloody idea that it will never stop, that the only choice is drugs or bugs in the brain. I can't bloody bear it. I swear, yaar, if I thought that was it, then, bas, I don't know, I"d, I don't know what."
"Shut your face," Allie softly said. But he shouted out: "Spoono, I even hit her, do you know that? Bloody hell. One day I thought she was some rakshasa type of demon and Ijust went for her. Do you know how strong it is, the strength of madness?"
"Fortunately for me I'd been going to -- oops, eek -- those selfdefence classes," Allie grinned. "He's exaggerating to save face. Actually he was the one who ended up banging his head on the floor." -- "Right here," Gibreel sheepishly assented. The kitchen floor was made of large flagstones. "Painful," Chamcha hazarded. "Damn right," Gibreel roared, strangely cheerful now. "Knocked me bilkul cold."
The Freekirk's interior had been divided into a large twostorey (in estate agent's jargon, "double
volume") reception-room -- the former hall of congregation -- and a more conventional half, with kitchen and utilities downstairs and bedrooms and bathroom above. Unable for some reason to sleep, Chamcha wandered at midnight into the great (and cold: the heatwave might be continuing in the south of England, but there wasn't a ripple of it up here, where the climate was autumnal and chill) living- room, and wandered among the ghost-voices of banished preachers while Gibreel and Allie made high-volume love. _Like Pamela_. He tried to think of Mishal, of Zeeny Vakil, but it didn't work. Stuffing his fingers in his ears, he fought against the sound effects of the copulation of Farishta and Alleluia Cone.Theirs had been a high-risk conjoining from the start, he reflected: first, Gibreel's dramatic abandonment of career and rush across the earth, and now, Allie's uncompromising determination to
_see it through_, to defeat in him this mad, angelic divinity and restore the humanity she loved. No compromises for them; they were going for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had declared himself content to live under the same roof as his wife and her lover boy. Which was the better way? Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
o o oIn the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local "Top". But Allie declined, although it was plain to Chamcha that her return to the countryside had caused her to glow with joy. "Bloody flatfoot mame," Gibreel cursed her lovingly. "Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can show the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar. We go mountain-climbing while she sits here and makes business calls." Saladin's thoughts were racing: he understood, now, that strange hobble at Shepperton; understood, too, that this secluded haven would have to be temporary -- that Allie, by coming here, was sacrificing her own life, and wouldn't be able to go on doing so indefinitely. What should he do? Anything? Nothing? -- If revenge was to be taken, when and how? "Get these boots on," Gibreel commanded. "You think the rain will hold off all fucking day?"
It didn't. By the time they reached the stone cairn at the summit of Gibreel's chosen climb, they were enveloped in a fine drizzle. "Damn good show," Gibreel panted. "Look: there she is, down there, sitting back like the Grand Panjandrum." He pointed down at the Freekirk. Chamcha, his heart pounding, was feeling foolish. He must start behaving like a man with a ticker problem. Where was the glory in
dying of heart failure on this nothing of a Top, for nothing, in the rain? Then Gibreel got out his fieldglasses and started scanning the valley. There were hardly any moving figures to be seen -- two or three men and dogs, some sheep, no more. Gibreel tracked the men with his binoculars. "Now thatwe're alone," he suddenly said, "I can tell you why we really came away to this damn empty hole. It's because of her. Yes, yes; don't be fooled by my act! It's all her bloody beauty. Men, Spoono: they chase her like goddamn flies. I swear! I see them, slobbering and grabbing. It isn't right. She is a very private person, the most private person in the
world. We have to protect her from lust."
This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you really are going off your wretched head at a rate of knots. And, hard on the heels of this thought, a second sentence appeared, as if by magic, in his head: _Don't imagine that means I'll let you off_.
o o o
On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned the depopulation of the countryside. "There's no work," Allie said. "So it's empty. Gibreel says he can't get used to the idea that all this space indicates poverty: says it looks
like luxury to him, after India's crowds." -- "And your work?" Chamcha asked. "What about that?" She smiled at him, the ice-- maiden façade long gone. "You're a nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one day it'll be my life in the middle, taking firstplace. Or, well, although I find it hard to use the first person plural: our life. That sounds better, right?"
"Don't let him cut you off," Saladin advised. "From Jumpy, from your own worlds, whatever." This was the moment at which his campaign could truly be said to have begun; when he set a foot upon that effortless, seductive road on which there was only one way to go. "You're right," Allie was saying. "God, if he only knew. His precious Sisodia, for
example: it's not just sevenfoot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell likes those." -- "He made a pass," Chamcha guessed; and, simultaneously, filed the information away for possible later use. "He's totally shameless," Allie laughed. "It was right under Gibreel's nose. He doesn't mind rejection, though:
he just bows, and murmurs _no offoffoffence_, and that's that. Can you imagine if I told Gibreel?"
Chamcha at the railway station wished Allie luck. "We'll have to be in London for a couple of weeks," she said through the car window. "I've got meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can get together then; this has really done him good."
"Call any time," he waved goodbye, and watched the Citroën until it was out of sight.o o o
That Allie Cone, the third point of a triangle of fictions -- for had not Gibreel and Allie come together very largely by imagining, out of their own needs, an "Allie" and a "Gibreel" with whom each could fall in love; and was not Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his own troubled and disappointed heart? -- was to be the unwitting, innocent agent of Chamcha's revenge, became even plainer to the plotter, Saladin, when he found that Gibreel, with whom he had arranged to spend an equatorial London afternoon, wanted nothing so much as to describe in embarrassing
detail the carnal ecstasy of sharing Allie's bed. What manner of people were these, Saladin wondered
with distaste, who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on non-participating others? As Gibreel (with something like relish) described positions, love-- bites, the secret vocabularies of desire, they strolled in Brickhall Fields among schoolgirls and roller-- skating infants and fathers throwing boomerangs and frisbees incompetently at scornful sons, and picked their way through broiling horizontal secretarial flesh; and Gibreel interrupted his erotic rhapsody to mention, madly, that "I sometimes look
at these pink people and instead of skin, Spoono, what I see is rotting meat; I smell their putrefaction here," he tapped his nostrils fervently, as ifrevealing a mystery, "in my _nose_." Then once again to Allie's inner thighs, her cloudy eyes, the perfect valley of her lower back, the little cries she liked to make. This was a man in imminent danger of coming apart at the seams. The wild energy, the manic particularity of his descriptions suggested to Chamcha that he'd been cutting down on his dosages again, that he was rolling upwards towards
the crest of a deranged high, that condition of febrile excitement that was like blind drunkenness in one respect (according to Allie), namely that Gibreel
could remember nothing of what he said or did when, as was inevitable, he came down to earth. -- On and on went the descriptions, the unusual length of her nipples, her dislike of having her navel interfered with, the sensitivity of her toes. Chamcha told himself that, madness or no madness, what all this sex-talk revealed (because there had been Allie in the Citroën too) was the _weakness_ of their so-- called "grand passion" -- a term which Allie had only half-jokingly employed -- because, in a phrase,
there was nothing else about it that was any good; there was simply no other aspect of their togetherness to rhapsodize about. -- At the same time, however, he felt himself becoming aroused. He began to see himself standing outside her window,
while she stood there naked like an actress on a screen, and a man's hands caressed her in a thousand ways, bringing her closer and closer to ecstasy; he came to see himself as that pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her responses, almost hear her cries. -- He controlled himself. His desire disgusted him. She was unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not succumb to it. -- But the desire Gibreel's revelations had aroused would not go away.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 bhaibhai! 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 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 Exterm inador_. "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 toknjfe_. "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. o o o
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 -- aubergmes, 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 unhappymarriages, 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."
o o o
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, andhe 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. o o oThe 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
naïvety, even innocence, which contrasted sogreatly 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. o o oBut 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.
o o o
_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.
o o o
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 iceEverest 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 u"ere luck. Not to try again_.
She flung open sash windows and screamed abuse at the innocent Fields beneath. "Die slowly! Burn in
hell!"Then, weeping, she rang Saladin Chamcha to tell him the bad news.
o o o
Mr. John Maslama, owner of the Hot Wax nightclub, the record chain of the same name, and of "Fair Winds", the legendary store where you could get yourself the finest horns -- clarinets, saxophones, trombones -- that a person could find to blow in the whole of London town, was a busy man, so he would always ascribe to the intervention of Divine Providence the happy chance that caused him to be present in the trumpet store when the Archangel of God walked in with thunder and lightning sitting like laurels upon his noble brow. Being a practical businessman, Mr. Maslama had up to this point concealed from his employees his extracurricular work as the chief herald of the returned Celestial
and Semi-Godlike Being, sticking posters in his shopwindows only when he was sure he was unobserved, neglecting to sign the display advertisements he bought in newspapers and magazines at considerable personal expense, proclaiming the imminent Glory of the Coming of the Lord. He issued press releases through a public relations subsidiary of the Valance agency, asking
that his own anonymity be guarded carefully. "Our client is in a position to state," these releases -- which enjoyed, for a time, an amused vogue among Fleet Street diarists -- cryptically announced, "that his eyes have seen the Glory referred to above. Gibreel is among us at this moment, somewhere in the inner city of London -- probably in Camden, Brickhall, Tower Hamlets or Hackney -- and he willreveal himself soon, perhaps within days or weeks." -
- All of this was obscure to the three tall, languid, male attendants in the Fair Winds store (Maslama refused to employ women sales assistants here; "my motto," he was fond of saying, "is that nobody
trusts a female to help him with his horn"); which was why none of them could believe their eyes when their hard-nosed employer suddenly underwent a complete change of personality, and rushed over to this wild, unshaven stranger as if he were God Almighty -- with his two-tone patent leather shoes, Armani suit and slicked down Robert de Niro hair above proliferating eyebrows, Maslama didn't look the crawling type, but that's what he was _doing_,
all right, on his goddamn _belly_, pushing his staff aside, _I'll attend to the gentleman myself_, bowing and scraping, walking backwards, would you believe? -- Anyway, the stranger had this _fat money-belt_ under his shirt and started hauling out numbers of high-denomination notes; he pointed at
a trumpet on a high shelf, _that's the one_, just like
that, hardly looked at it, and Mr. Maslama was up the ladder _pronto_, I"ll--get--it--I--said--I"ll--get-- it, and now the truly amazing part, he tried to refuse payment, Maslama!, it was no no _sir_ no charge_sir_, but the stranger paid anyway, stuffing the notes into Maslama's upper jacket-pocket as if he were some sort of _bellhop_, you had to be there, and last of all the customer turns to the whole store and yells at the top of his voice, _I am the right hand of God_. -- Straight up, you wouldn't credit it, the bloody day of judgment was at hand. -- Maslama was right out of it after that, well shaken he was, he actually fell to his actual knees. -- Then the stranger held the trumpet up over his head and shouted _I name this trumpet Azraeel, the Last Trump, the Exterminator of Men!_ -- and we just stood there, I tell you, turned to stone, because all around the fucking insane, _certifiable_ bastard's head there was this bright glow, you know?, streaming out, like, from a point behind his head.
A halo.
_Say what you like_, the three shop-attendants afterwards repeated to anyone who would listen,
_say what you like, but we saw what we saw_.
3
The death of Dr. Uhuru Simba, formerly Sylvester
Roberts, while in custody awaiting trial, was described by the Brickhall constabulary's community liaison officer, a certain Inspector Stephen Kinch, as "a million--to--one shot". It appeared that Dr. Simba had been experiencing a nightmare so terrifying that it had caused him to scream piercingly in his sleep, attracting the immediate attention of the two duty officers. These gentlemen, rushing to his cell,arrived in time to see the still-- sleeping form of the gigantic man literally lift off its bunk under the malign influence of the dream and plunge to the
floor. A loud, snap was heard by both officers; it was the sound of Dr. Uhuru Simba's neck breaking.
Death had been instantaneous.
The dead man's minuscule mother, Antoinette Roberts, standing in a cheap black hat and dress on the back of her younger son's pick-up truck, the veil of mourning pushed defiantly back off her face, was not slow to seize upon Inspector Kinch's words and hurl them back into his florid, loose-chinned, impotent face, whose hangdog expression bore witness to the humiliation of being referred to by his brother officers as _niggerjimmy_ and, worse,
_mushroom_, meaning that he was kept permanently in the dark, and from time to time --
for example in the present regrettable circumstances
-- people threw shit all over him. "I want you to understand," Mrs. Roberts declaimed to the sizeable
crowd that had gathered angrily outside the HighStreet police station, "that these people are
gambling with our lives. They are laying odds on our chances of survival. I want you all to consider what that means in terms of their respect for us as
human beings." And Hanif Johnson, as Uhuru Simba's solicitor, added his own clarification from Walcott Roberts's pick-up truck, pointing out that his client's alleged fatal plunge had been from the lower of the two bunks in his cell; that in an age of
extreme overcrowding in the country's lock--ups it was unusual, to say the least, that the other bunk should have been unoccupied, ensuring that there were no witnesses to the death except for prison officers; and that a nightmare was by no means the only possible explanation for the screams of a black man in the hands of the custodial authorities. In his concluding remarks, afterwards termed "inflammatory and unprofessional" by Inspector Kinch, Hanif linked the community liaison officer's words to those of the notorious racist John Kingsley Read, who had once responded to news of a black man's death with the slogan, "One down; one
million to go." The crowd murmured and bubbled; it was a hot and malicious day. "Stay hot," Simba's brother Walcott cried out to the assembly. "Don't anybody cool off. Maintain your rage."
As Simba had in effect already been tried and
convicted in what he had once called the "rainbow press -- red as rags, yellow as streaks, blue as movies, green as slime", his end struck many white people as rough justice, a murderous monster's retributive fall. But in another court, silent and black, he had received an entirely more favourable judgment, and these differing estimations of the deceased moved, in the aftermath of his death, on to the city streets, and fermented in the unending tropical heat. The "rainbow press" was full of Simba's support for Qazhafi, Khomeini, Louis Farrakhan; while in the streets of Brickhall, young men and women maintained, and fanned, the slow flame of their anger, a shadow-flame, but one capable of blotting out the light.Two nights later, behind the Charringtons Brewery
in Tower Hamlets, the "Granny Ripper" struck again. And the night after that, an old woman was murdered near the adventure playground in Victoria Park, Hackney; once again, the Ripper's hideous "signature" -- the ritual arrangement of the internal organs around the victim's body, whose precise configuration had never been made public -- had been added to the crime. When Inspector Kinch, looking somewhat ragged at the edges, appeared on television to propound the extraordinary theory that a "copycat killer" had somehow discovered the trademark which had been so carefully concealed for
so long, and had therefore taken up the mantlewhich the late Uhuru Simba had let drop, -- then the Commissioner of Police also deemed it wise, as a precautionary measure, to quadruple the police presence on the streets of Brickhall, and to hold
such large numbers of police in reserve that it proved necessary to cancel the capital's football programme for the weekend. And, in truth, tempers were fraying all over Uhuru Simba's old patch; Hanif Johnson issued a statement to the effect that the increased police presence was "provocative and incendiary", and at the Shaandaar and the Pagal Khana there began to assemble groups of young blacks and Asians determined to confront the cruising panda cars. At the Hot Wax, the effigy chosen for _meltdown_ was none other than the perspiring and already deliquescent figure of the community liaison officer. And the temperature continued, inexorably, to rise.
Violent incidents began to occur more frequently: attacks on black families on council estates, harassment of black schoolchildren on their way home, brawls in pubs. At the Pagal Khana a rat- faced youth and three of his cronies spat over many people's food; as a result of the ensuing affray three Bengali waiters were charged with assault and the causing of actual bodily harm; the expectorating quartet was not, however, detained. Stories of
police brutality, of black youths hauled swiftly into unmarked cars and vans belonging to the special patrol groups and flung out, equally discreetly, covered in cuts and bruises, spread throughout the communities. Self-defence patrols of young Sikh, Bengali and Afro-Caribbean males -- described by their political opponents as _vigilante groups_ -- began to roam the borough, on foot and in old Ford Zodiacs and Cortinas, determined not to "take it lying down". Hanif Johnson told his live-in lover, Mishal Sufyan, that in his opinion one more Ripper killing would light the fuse. "That killer's not just crowing about being free," he said. "He's laughing about Simba's death as well, and that's what the people can't stomach."Down these simmering streets, one unseasonally humid night, came Gibreel Farishta, blowing his golden horn.
o o o
At eight o"clock that evening, a Saturday, Pamela Chamcha stood with Jumpy Joshi -- who had refused to let her go unaccompanied -- next to the Photo-Me machine in a corner of the main concourse of Euston station, feeling ridiculously conspiratorial. At eight- fifteen she was approached by a wiry young man
who seemed taller than she remembered him;
following him without a word, she and Jumpy got into his battered blue pick-up truck and were driven to a tiny flat above an off-licence in Railton Road, Brixton, where Walcott Roberts introduced them to his mother, Antoinette. The three men whom Pamela afterwards thought of as Haitians for what she recognized to be stereotypical reasons were not introduced. "Have a glass of ginger wine,"Antoinette Roberts commanded. "Good for the baby, too."
When Walcott had done the honours Mrs. Roberts, looking lost in a voluminous and threadbare armchair (her surprisingly pale legs, matchstick-- thin, emerging from beneath her black dress to end in mutinous, pink ankle--socks and sensible lace-- ups, failed by some distance to reach the floor), got to business. "These gentlemen were colleagues of my boy," she said. "It turns out that the probable
reason for his murder was the work he was doing on a subject which I am told is also of interest to you. We believe the time has come to work more formally, through the channels you represent." Here one of the three silent "Haitians" handed Pamela a red plastic briefcase. "It contains," Mrs. Roberts mildly explained, "extensive evidence of the existence of witches' covens throughout the Metropolitan Police."
Walcott stood up. "We should go now," he said firmly. "Please." Pamela and Jumpy rose. Mrs. Roberts nodded vaguely, absently, cracking the joints of her loose-skinned hands. "Goodbye," Pamela said, and offered conventional regrets. "Girl,don't waste breath," Mrs. Roberts broke in. "Just nail me those warlocks. Nail them through the _heart_."
o o o
Walcott Roberts dropped them in Notting Hill at ten. Jumpy was coughing badly and complaining of the pains in the head that had recurred a number of times since his injuries at Shepperton, but when Pamela admitted to being nervous at possessing the only copy of the explosive documents in the plastic briefcase, Jumpy once again insisted on accompanying her to the Brickhall community relations council's offices, where she planned to make photocopies to distribute to a number of
trusted friends and colleagues. So it was that at ten-- fifteen they were in Pamela's beloved MG, heading east across the city, into the gathering storm. An
old, blue Mercedes panel van followed them, as it
had followed Walcott's pick-up truck; that is, without being noticed.
Fifteen minutes earlier, a patrol group of seven large young Sikhs jammed into a Vauxhall Cavalier had
been driving over the Malaya Crescent canal bridge in southern Brickhall. Hearing a cry from the towpath under the bridge, and hurrying to the scene, they found a bland, pale man of medium height and build, fair hair flopping forward over hazel eyes, leaping to his feet, scalpel in hand, andrushing away from the body of an old woman whose blue wig had fallen off and lay floating like a jellyfish in the canal. The young Sikhs easily caught up with and overpowered the running man.
By eleven pm the news of the mass murderer's capture had penetrated every cranny of the borough, accompanied by a slew of rumours: the police had been reluctant to charge the maniac, the patrol members had been detained for questioning, a coverup was being planned. Crowds began to
gather on street corners, and as the pubs emptied a series of fights broke out. There was some damage to property: three cars had their windows smashed, a video store was looted, a few bricks were thrown. It was at this point, at half--past eleven on a Saturday night, with the clubs and dance-halls beginning to yield up their excited, highly charged populations, that the divisional superintendent of police, in consultation with higher authority,
declared that riot conditions now existed in central Brickhall, and unleashed the full might of the Metropolitan Police against the "rioters".
Also at this point, Saladin Chamcha, who had been dining with Allie Cone at her apartment overlooking Brickhall Fields, keeping up appearances, sympathizing, murmuring encouraging insincerities, emerged into the night; found a _testudo_ of helmeted men with plastic shields at the ready moving towards him across the Fields at a steady, inexorable trot; witnessed the arrival overhead of giant, locust-swarming helicopters from which light was falling like heavy rain; saw the advance of the water cannons; and, obeying an irresistible primal reflex, turned tail and ran, not knowing that he was going the wrong way, running full speed in the direction of the Shaandaar.o o o
Television cameras arrive just in time for the raid on
Club Hot Wax.
This is what a television camera sees: less gifted than the human eye, its night vision is limited to what klieg lights will show. A helicopter hovers over the nightclub, urinating light in long golden streams; the camera understands this image. The machine of state bearing down upon its enemies. -- And now there's a camera in the sky; a news editor somewhere has sanctioned the cost of aerial photography, and from another helicopter a news
team is _shooting down_. No attempt is made to chase this helicopter away. The noise of rotor blades drowns the noise of the crowd. In this respect,again, video recording equipment is less sensitive than, in this case, the human ear.
-- Cut. -- A man lit by a sun-gun speaks rapidly into a microphone. Behind him there is a disorderment of shadows. But between the reporter and the disordered shadow--lands there stands a wall: men
in riot helmets, carrying shields. The reporter speaks gravely; petrolbombs plasticbullets policeinjuries water-- cannon looting, confining himself, of course, to facts. But the camera sees what he does not say. A camera is a thing easily broken or purloined; its fragility makes it fastidious. A camera requires law, order, the thin blue line. Seeking to preserve itself,
it remains behind the shielding wall, observing the shadow-lands from afar, and of course from above: that is, it chooses sides.
-- Cut. -- Sun-guns illuminate a new face, saggy- jowled, flushed. This face is named: sub--titled words appear across his tunic. _Inspector Stephen Kinch_. The camera sees him for what he is: a good man in an impossible job. A father, a man who likes his pint. He speaks: cannot--tolerate--no--go-areas
better-protection--required-for--policemen see--the-- plastic--riot--shields--catching--fire. He refers to
organized crime, political agitators, bomb--factories, drugs. "We understand some of these kids may feel they have grievances but we will not and cannot be the whipping boys of society." Emboldened by the lights and the patient, silent lenses, he goes further. These kids don't know how lucky they are, he suggests. They should consult their kith and kin. Africa, Asia, the Caribbean: now those are places with real problems. Those are places where people might have grievances worth respecting. Things aren't so bad here, not by a long chalk; no slaughters here, no torture, no military coups. People should value what they've got before they lose it. Ours always was a peaceful land, he says. Our industrious island race. -- Behind him, the
camera sees stretchers, ambulances, pain. -- It sees strange humanoid shapes being hauled up from the bowels of the Club Hot Wax, and recognizes the effigies of the mighty. Inspector Kinch explains.
They cook them in an oven down there, they call it fun, I wouldn't call it that myself. -- The camera observes the wax models with distaste. -- Is there not something _witchy_ about them, something cannibalistic, an unwholesome smell? Have _black arts_ been practised here? -- The camera sees broken windows. It sees something burning in the middle distance: a car, a shop. It cannot understand, or demonstrate, what any of this achieves. These people are burning their own
streets.-- Cut. -- Here is a brightly lit video store. Several sets have been left on in the windows; the camera, most delirious of narcissists, watches TV, creating, for an instant, an infinite recession of television sets, diminishing to a point. -- Cut. -- Here is a serious head bathed in light: a studio discussion. The head
is talking about _outlaws_. Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly: these were men who stoodfor as well as _against_. Modern mass-murderers, lacking this heroic dimension, are no more than sick, damaged beings, utterly blank as personalities, their crimes distinguished by an attention to procedure, to methodology -- let's say _ritual_ -- driven, perhaps, by the nonentity's longing to be noticed, to rise out
of the. ruck and become, for a moment, a star. -- Or by a kind of transposed deathwish: to kill the
beloved and so destroy the self. -- _Which is the Granny Ripper?_ a questioner asks. _And what about Jack?_ -- The true outlaw, the head insists, is a dark mirror-image of the hero. -- _These rioters, perhaps?_ comes the challenge. _Aren't you in danger of glamorizing, of "legitimizing"?_ -- The head shakes, laments the materialism of modern
youth. Looting video stores is not what the head has been talking about. -- _But what about the old- timers, then? Butch Cassidy, the James brothers, Captain Moonlight, the Kelly gang. They all robbed --
did they not? -- banks_. -- Cut. -- Later that night, the camera will return to this shop-window. The television sets will be missing.-- From the air, the camera watches the entrance to
Club Hot Wax. Now the police have finished with
wax effigies and are bringing out real human beings. The camera homes in on the arrested persons: a tall albino man; a man in an Armani suit, looking like a dark mirror-image of de Niro; a young girl of -- what? -- fourteen, fifteen? -- a sullen young man of twenty or thereabouts. No names are titled; the camera does not know these faces. Gradually, however, the _facts_ emerge. The club DJ, Sewsunker Ram, known as "Pinkwalla", and its proprietor, Mr. John Maslama, are to be charged
with running a large-scale narcotics operation -- crack, brown sugar, hashish, cocaine. The man arrested with them, an employee at Maslama's nearby "Fair Winds" music store, is the registered owner of a van in which an unspecified quantity of "hard drugs" has been discovered; also numbers of "hot" video recorders. The young girl's name is Anahita Sufyan; she is under-age, is said to have been drinking heavily, and, it is hinted, having sex with at least one of the three arrested men. She is further reported to have a history of truancy and association with known criminal types: a delinquent, clearly. -- An illuminated journalist will offer the
nation these titbits many hours after the event, but the news is already running wild in the streets: Pinkwalla! -- And the _Wax_: they smashed the place up -- _totalled_ it! -- Now it's _war_.This happens, however -- as does a great deal else -- in places which the camera cannot see.
o o o
Gibreel:
moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city without eating or sleeping, with the trumpet named Azraeel tucked safely in a pocket of his greatcoat, he no longer recognizes the distinction between the waking and dreaming
states; -- he understands now something of what omnipresence must be like, because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment at which he will reveal himself, and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him ever closer, leading him towards their final embrace: the subtle, deceiving adversary, who has taken the face of his friend, of Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull him into
lowering his guard. And there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to understandthe will of God.
Is he to be the agent of God's wrath? Or of his love?
Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet remain in his pocket, or should he take it out and blow?
(I'm giving him no instructions. I, too, am interested in his choices -- in the result of his wrestling match. Character vs destiny: a free-style bout. Two falls,
two submissions or a knockout will decide.)
Wrestling, through his many stories, he proceeds. There are times when he aches for her, Alleluia, her
very name an exaltation; but then he remembers the diabolic verses, and turns his thoughts away. The horn in his pocket demands to be blown; but he restrains himself. Now is not the time. Searching for clues -- _what is to be done?_ -- he stalks the city streets.
Somewhere he sees a television set through an evening window. There is a woman's head on the screen, a famous "presenter", being interviewed by
an equally famous, twinkling Irish "host". -- What would be the worst thing you could imagine? -- Oh,I think, I'm sure, it would be, oh, _yes_: to be alone on Christmas Eve. You'd really have to face yourself, wouldn't you, you'd look into a harsh mirror and ask yourself, _is this all there is?_ -- Gibreel, alone, not knowing the date, walks on. In the mirror, the adversary approaches at the same pace as his own, beckoning, stretching out his arms.
The city sends him messages. Here, it says, is where the Dutch king decided to live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this was out of town, a village, set in green English fields. But when the King arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick buildings with Dutch crenellations rising against the sky, so that
his courtiers might have places in which to reside. Not all migrants are powerless, the still-standing edifices whisper. They impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new- found land, imagining it afresh. But look out, the
city warns. Incoherence, too, must have its day. Riding in the parkland in which he'd chosen to live -- which he'd _civilized_ -- William III was thrown by his horse, fell hard against the recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal neck.
Some days he finds himself among walking corpses,
great crowds of the dead, all of them refusing to admit they're done for, corpses mutinously continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, smoking cigarettes. _But you're dead_, he shouts at them. _Zombies, get into your graves_. They ignore him, or laugh, or look embarrassed, or menace him with their fists. He falls silent, and hurries on.The city becomes vague, amorphous. It is becoming impossible to describe the world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists, emerge. As does she: Allie, Al--Lat. _She is the exalted bird. Greatly to be desired_. He remembers now: she told him, long ago, about Jumpy's poetry. _He's trying to make a collection. A book_. The thumb--sucking artist with his infernal views. A book is a product of
a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr. Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.
What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel's brain? Verses. What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.
The trumpet, Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket: _Pick me up! Yesyesyes: the Trump. To hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff up your cheeks and root y-toot-toot. Come on, it's party time_.How hot it is: steamy, close, intolerable. This is no Proper London: not this improper city. Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville. He wanders through a confusion of languages. Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian "babilu". "The gate of God." Babylondon.
Where's this?
-- Yes. -- He meanders, one night, behind the cathedrals of the Industrial Revolution, the railway termini of north London. Anonymous King's Cross,
the bat-like menace of the St Pancras tower, the red- and-black gas-holders inflating and deflating like
giant iron lungs. Where once in battle Queen
Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.
The Goodsway: -- but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under tungsten lamps, what delicacies are on offer in that way! -- Swinging handbags, calling out, silver-skirted, wearing fish- net tights: these are not only young goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They have short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all have been thrown out of their
homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of them are white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent of their earnings. Goods are only goods, after all, especially when they're trash.-- Gibreel Farishta in the Goodsway is hailed from shadows and lamps; and quickens, at first, his pace.
_What's this to do with me? Bloody pussies-galore_. But then he slows and stops, hearing something else calling to him from lamps and shadows, some need, some wordless plea, hidden just under the tinny voices of tenpound tarts. His footsteps slow down, then halt. He is held by their desires. _For what?_ They are moving towards him now, drawn to him
like fishes on unseen hooks. As they near him their walks change, their hips lose their swagger, their faces start looking their age, in spite of all the make-
-up. When they reach him, they kneel. _Who do you say that I am?_ he asks, and wants to add: _I know your names. I met you once before, elsewhere, behind a curtain: Twelve of you then as now. Ayesha, Hafsah, Ram lah, Sawdah, Zainab, Zainab, Maimunah, Safia, Juwairiyah, Umm Salamah the Makhzumite, Rehana the Jew, and the beautiful
Mary the Copt_. Silently, they remain on their
knees. Their wishes are made known to him without words. _What is an archangel but a puppet? Kathputli, marionette. The faithful bend us to their will. We are forces of nature and they, our masters.
Mistresses, too_. The heaviness in his limbs, the heat, and in his ears a buzzing like bees on summer afternoons. It would be easy to faint.He does not faint.
He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.
And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to his lips, his unquiet horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.
o o o
After the stream of fire has emerged from the mouth of his golden trumpet and consumed the approaching men, wrapping them in a cocoon of flame, unmaking them so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling on the sidewalk, Gibreel understands.
He is walking again, leaving behind him the gratitude of the whores, heading in the direction of the borough of Brickhall, Azraeel once more in his capacious pocket. Things are becoming clear.
He is the Archangel Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, with the power of revelation in his hands. He can reach into the breasts of men and women,
pick out the desires of their inmost hearts, and make them real. He is the quencher of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He is the genie of the lamp, and his master is the Roc.What desires, what imperatives are in the midnight air? He breathes them in. -- And nods, so be it, yes. -
- Let it be fire. This is a city that has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.
Fire, falling fire. "This is the judgment of God in his wrath," Gib-- reel Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, "that men be granted their heart's desires, and that they be by them consumed."
Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him. _Nigger eat white man's shit_, suggest the unoriginal walls. The buildings have names: "Isandhlwana", "Rorke's Drift". But a revisionist enterprise is underway, for two of the four towers have been renamed, and bear, now, the names "Mandela" and "Toussaintl"Ouverture". --The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken doors, dolls' legs, vegetable refuse extracted from plastic disposal bags by hungry cats and dogs, fastfood
packets, rolling cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. He stands motionless while small groups of residents rush past in different directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All of the groups contain white youngsters as well as black. He raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to play.Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it
burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a silver rose. -- And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming,
flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of
the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.But here, there is no beauty, sleeping within. There is Gibreel Farishta, walking in a world of fire. In the High Street he sees houses built of flame, with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains hanging at the windows. -- And there are men and women with fiery skins strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The Street has become red hot, molten, a river the colour of blood. -- All, all is ablaze as he toots his merry horn, _giving the
people what they want_, the hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns, and birds fly overhead on blazing wings.
The adversary is very close. The adversary is a magnet, is a whirlpool's eye, is the irresistible centre of a black hole, his gravitational force creating an event horizon from which neither Gibreel, nor light, can escape. _This way_, the adversary calls. _I'm over here_.
Not a palace, but only a café. And in the rooms above, a bed and breakfast joint. No sleeping princess, but a disappointed woman, overpowered
by smoke, lies unconscious here; and beside her, on the floor beside their bed, and likewise unconscious, her husband, the Mecca-returned ex-schoolteacher, Sufyan. -- While, elsewhere in the burning
Shaandaar, faceless persons stand at windows waving piteously for help, being unable (no mouths) to scream.The adversary: there he blows!
Silhouetted against the backdrop of the ignited
Shaandaar Café, see, that's the very fellow!
Azraeel leaps unbidden into Farishta's hand.
Even an archangel may experience a revelation, and when Gibreel catches, for the most fleeting of instants, Saladin Chamcha's eye, -- then in that fractional and infinite moment the veils are ripped away from his sight, -- he sees himself walking with Chamcha in Brickhall Fields, lost in a rhapsody, revealing the most intimate secrets of his lovemaking with Alleluia Cone, -- those same
secrets which afterwards were whispered into telephones by a host of evil voices, -- beneath all of which Gibreel now discerns the unifying talent of the adversary, who could be guttural and high, who insulted and ingratiated, who was both insistent and shy, who was prosaic, -- yes! -- and versifying, too. -
- And now, at last, Gibreel Farishta recognizes for the first time that the adversary has not simply adopted Chamcha's features as a disguise; -- nor is this any case of paranormal possession, of body- snatching by an invader up from Hell; that, in short,
the evil is not external to Saladin, but springs from some recess of his own true nature, that it has been spreading through his selfhood like a cancer, erasing what was good in him, wiping out his spirit, -- and doing so with many deceptive feints and dodges, seeming at times to recede; while, in fact, duringthe illusion of remission, under cover of it, so to speak, it continued perniciously to spread; -- and now, no doubt, it has filled him up; now there is nothing left of Saladin but this, the dark fire of evil in his soul, consuming him as wholly as the other fire, multicoloured and engulfing, is devouring the screaming city. Truly these are "most horrid, malicious, bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire".
The fire is an arch across the sky. Saladin Chamcha, the adversary, who is also _Spoono, my old Chumch_, has disappeared into the doorway of the Shaandaar Café. This is the maw of the black hole; the horizon closes around it, all other possibilities fade, the universe shrinks to this solitary and irresistible point. Blowing a great blast on his trumpet, Gibreel plunges through the open door.
o o o
The building occupied by the Brickhall community relations council was a single--storey monster in
purple brick with bulletproof windows, a bunker-like creation of the 1960s, when such lines were considered sleek. It was not an easy building to enter; the door had been fitted with an entryphone and opened on to a narrow alley down one side of the building which ended at a second, also security- locked, door. There was also a burglar alarm.This alarm, it afterwards transpired, had been switched off, probably by the two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the assistance of a key. It was officially suggested that these persons had been bent on an act of sabotage, an "inside job", since one of them, the dead woman, had in fact been an employee of the organization whose offices these were. The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the
miscreants had perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that they would ever come to light. An "own goal" remained, however, the most probable explanation.
A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant.
Inspector Stephen Kinch, issuing the statement in which these facts were stated, made a "linkage" between the fire at the Brickhall CRC and that at the Shaandaar Café, where the second dead person, the male, had been a semi--permanent resident. It was
possible that the man had been the real firebug and the woman, who was his mistress although married to and still cohabiting with another man, had been no more than his dupe. Political motives -- both parties were well known for their radical views -- could not be discounted, though such was the muddiness of the water in the far-left groupuscules they frequented that it would be hard ever to get a clear picture of what such motives might have been. It was also possible that the two crimes, even if committed by the same man, could have had different motivations. Possibly the man was simply the hired criminal, burning down the Shaandaar for the insurance money at the behest of the now- deceased owners, and torching the CRC at the behest of his lover, perhaps on account of someintra--office vendetta?
That the burning of the CRC was an act of arson was beyond doubt. Quantities of petrol had been poured over desks, papers, curtains. "Many people do not understand how quickly a petrol fire spreads," Inspector Kinch stated to scribbling journalists. The corpses, which had been so badly burned that dental records had been required for identification
purposes, had been found in the photocopying room. "That's all we have." The end.
I have more.
I have certain questions, anyhow. -- About, for instance, an unmarked blue Mercedes panel van, which followed Walcott Roberts's pick-up truck, and then Pamela Chamcha's MG. -- About the men who emerged from this van, their faces behind Hallowe"en masks, and forced their way into theCRC offices just as Pamela unlocked the outer door. -
- About what really happened inside those offices, because purple brick and bulletproof glass cannot easily be penetrated by the human eye. -- And about, finally, the whereabouts of a red plastic briefcase, and the documents it contains.
Inspector Kinch? Are you there?
No. He's gone. He has no answers for me. o o o
Here is Mr. Saladin Chamcha, in the camel coat with the silk collar, running down the High Street like some cheap crook. -- The same, terrible Mr. Chamcha who has just spent his evening in the company of a distraught Alleluia Cone, without feeling a flicker of remorse. -- "I look down towards his feet," Othello said of Iago, "but that's a fable." Nor is Chamcha fabulous any more; his humanity is sufficient form and explanation for his deed. He has destroyed what he is not and cannot be; has taken
revenge, returning treason for treason; and has done so by exploiting his enemy's weakness,bruising his unprotected heel. -- There is satisfaction in this. -- Still, here is Mr. Chamcha, running. The world is full of anger and event. Things hang in the balance. A building burns.
_Boomba_, pounds his heart. _Doomba, boomba, dadoom_.
Now he sees the Shaandaar, on fire; and comes to a skidding halt. He has a constricted chest; --
_badoomba!_ -- and there's a pain in his left arm. He doesn't notice; is staring at the burning building.
And sees Gibreel Farishta. And turns; and runs inside.
"Mishal! Sufyan! Hind!" cries evil Mr. Chamcha. The ground floor is not as yet ablaze. He flings open the door to the stairs, and a scalding, pestilential wind drives him back. _Dragon's breath_, he thinks. The landing is on fire; the flames reach in sheets from floor to ceiling. No possibility of advance.
"Anybody?" screams Saladin Chamcha. "Is anybody there?" But the dragon roars louder than he can shout.
Something invisible kicks him in the chest, sends him toppling backwards, on to the café floor, amid the empty tables. _Doom_, sings his heart. _Take this. And this_.There is a noise above his head like the scurrying of a billion rats, spectral rodents following a ghostly piper. He looks up: the ceiling is on fire. He finds he cannot stand. As he watches, a section of the ceiling detaches itself, and he sees the segment of beam falling towards him. He crosses his arms in feeble self-- defence.
The beam pins him to the floor, breaking both his arms. His chest is full of pain. The world recedes. Breathing is hard. He can't speak. He is the Man of a Thousand Voices, and there isn't one left.
Gibreel Farishta, holding Azraeel, enters the
Shaandaar Café.
o o o
_What happens when you win?_
_When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong_. -- "Spoono," Gibreel nods at the fallen man. "You really fooled me, mister; seriously, you're quite a guy." -- And
Chamcha, seeing what's in Gibreel's eyes, cannot deny the knowledge he sees there. "Wha," he begins, and gives up. _What are you going to do?_Fire is falling all around them now: a sizzle of golden rain. "Why'd you do it?" Gibreel asks, then dismisses the question with a wave of the hand. "Damnfool thing to be asking. Might as well inquire, what possessed you to rush in here? Damnfool thing to
do. People, eh, Spoono? Crazy bastards, that's all."
Now there are pools of fire all around them. Soon they will be encircled, marooned in a temporary island amid this lethal sea. Chamcha is kicked a second time in the chest, and jerks violently. Facing three deaths -- by fire, by "natural causes", and by Gibreel -- he strains desperately, trying to speak, but only croaks emerge. "Fa. Gur. Mmm." _Forgive me_. "Ha. Pa." _Have pity_. The café tables are
burning. More beams fall from above. Gibreel seems to have fallen into a trance. He repeats, vaguely: "Bloody damnfool things."
Is it possible that evil is never total, that its victory, no matter how overwhelming, is never absolute?
Consider this fallen man. He sought without remorse to shatter the mind of a fellow human being; and exploited, to do so, an entirely blameless woman, at least partly owing to his own impossible and
voyeuristic desire for her. Yet this same man has risked death, with scarcely any hesitation, in a foolhardy rescue attempt.What does this mean?
The fire has closed around the two men, and smoke is everywhere. It can only be a matter of seconds before they are overcome. There are more urgent questions to answer than the _damnfool_ ones above.
What choice will Farishta make? Does he have a choice?
Gibreel lets fall his trumpet; stoops; frees Saladin from the prison of the fallen beam; and lifts him in his arms. Chamcha, with broken ribs as well as arms, groans feebly, sounding like the creationist Dumsday before he got a new tongue of choicest rump. "Ta. La." _It's too late_. A little lick of fire catches at the hem of his coat. Acrid black smoke fills all available space, creeping behind his eyes, deafening his ears, clogging his nose and lungs. -- Now, however, Gibreel Farishta begins softly to exhale, a long, continuous exhalation of extraordinary duration, and as his breath blows towards the door it slices through the smoke and fire like a knife; -- and Saladin Chamcha, gasping
and fainting, with a mule inside his chest, seems to see -- but will ever afterwards be unsure if it was truly so -- the fire parting before them like the red sea it has become, and the smoke dividing also, like a curtain or a veil; until there lies before them a clear pathway to the door; -- whereupon GibreelFarishta steps quickly forward, bearing Saladin along the path of forgiveness into the hot night air; so that on a night when the city is at war, a night heavy
with enmity and rage, there is this small redeeming victory for love.
o o o
Conclusions.
Mishal Sufyan is outside the Shaandaar when they emerge, weeping for her parents, being comforted by Hanif. -- It is Gibreel's turn to collapse; still carrying Saladin, he passes out at Mishal's feet.
Now Mishal and Hanif are in an ambulance with the two unconscious men, and while Chamcha has an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth Gibreel, suffering nothing worse than exhaustion, is talking in his sleep: a delirious babble about a magic trumpet and the fire that he blew, like music, from its mouth. -- And Mishal, who remembers Chamcha as a devil, and has come to accept the possibility of many things, wonders: "Do you think -- ?" -- But
Hanif is definite, firm. "Not a chance. This is Gibreel Farishta, the actor, don't you recognize? Poor guy's just playing out some movie scene." Mishal won't let it go. "But, Hanif," -- and he becomes emphatic. Speaking gently, because she has just been orphaned, after all, he absolutely insists. "What has happened here in Brickhall tonight is a socio-- political phenomenon. Let's not fall into the trap of some damn mysticism. We're talking about history: an event in the history of Britain. About the process of change."At once Gibreel's voice changes, and his subject-- matter also. He mentions _pilgrims_, and a _dead baby_, and _like in "The Ten Commandments"_, and a _decaying mansion_, and a _tree_; because in the aftermath of the purifying fire he is dreaming, for
the very last time, one of his serial dreams; -- and Hanif says: "Listen, Mishu, darling. Just make- believe, that's all." He puts his arm around her, kisses her cheek, holding her fast. _Stay with me. The world is real. We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on_.
Just then Gibreel Farishta, still asleep, shouts at the top of his voice.
"Mishal! Come back! Nothing's happening! Mishal, for pity's sake; turn around, come back, come
back." 
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