Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

– and he felt his victim's knife entering his heart, as Rosa stabbed him, once, twice, and again, —

– and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead man's knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.

Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.

When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to herself, so softly that he could barely make out the words. ‘The pampero came, the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they found him, or was it before.’ The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in Rosa Diamond's face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged that nobody was to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique took Dona Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the train at the Los Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the platform, wearing borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once the train had started moving, Rosa Diamond opened the holdall on the seat beside her, and said defiantly, I brought something. A little souvenir . And unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife.

‘Henry died the first winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The end.’ She paused. ‘To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It isn't to be borne.’ And, after a further silence: ‘Everything shrinks.’

There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling. Rosa Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on the patchwork counterpane. She looked: normal . Gibreel realized that there was nothing to prevent him from walking out of the door.

He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady; found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond, and the grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique's name had been sewn by his wife's own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got outside a wind snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He chased it, caught it, jammed it back on. London shareef, here I come . He had the city in his pocket: Geographers’ London, the whole dog-eared metropolis, A to Z.

‘What to do?’ he was thinking. ‘Phone or not phone? No, just turn up, ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your bed, takes more than a plane crash to keep me away from you. – Okay, maybe not quite, but words to that effect. – Yes. Surprise is the best policy. Allie Bibi, boo to you.’

Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boat-house with the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was familiar, although a little different, less quavery; younger . The boathouse door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards the song.

‘Take your coat off,’ she said. She was dressed as she had been on the day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless. He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing in the confined, moonlit space. She lay down amid the random clutter of an English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.

‘How can you like me?’ she murmured. ‘I am so much older than you.’

When they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha broke down for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to giggle hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing hilarity of his captors. The three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits, and it was one of these – the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was Stein – who had ‘de-bagged’ Saladin with a merry cry of, ‘Opening time, Packy; let's see what you're made of!’ Red-and-white stripes were dragged off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with two stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable's boot placed firmly upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general mirthful din. His horns kept banging against things, the wheel-arch, the uncarpeted floor or a policeman's shin – on these last occasions he was soundly buffeted about the face by the understandably irate law-enforcement officer – and he was, in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.

His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy. Below the knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven hoofs, such as one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. ‘What's this, then?’ joked Novak – the former ‘Hisser’ – giving it a playful tweak. ‘Fancy one of us, maybe?’ Whereupon the ‘moaning’ immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted, ‘Nah, that ain't it. Seems like we really got his goat.’

‘I get it,’ Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. ‘Hey! Hey!’ howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. ‘Listen, here's an even better ... no wonder he's so fucking horny .’

At which the three of them, repeating many times ‘Got his goat... horny...’ fell into one another's arms and howled with delight. Chamcha wanted to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into goat-bleats, and, besides, the policeman's boot had begun to press harder than ever on his chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled Chamcha was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and unprecedented – that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp – was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine. ‘This isn't England,’ he thought, not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and that everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were the case, his long-standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look pretty foolish. – But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being, whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which every schoolboy knew? – Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually perished in the Bostan disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some hospital ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him, not least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call, and a man's voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget... He felt a sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him doubt the truth of all such hallucination-theories. He returned his attention to the actual, to this present comprising a sealed police van containing three immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the moment at any rate, all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of fear.