Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

As if from a great distance he heard a shocked cry escape the woman's lips, a gasp in which disbelief, joy and a strange resentment were all mixed up, and just before his senses left him he understood that Rekha had permitted him, for the time being, to reach the illusion of a safe haven, so that her triumph over him could be the sweeter when it came at the last.

‘You're alive,’ the woman said, repeating the first words she had ever spoken to his face. ‘You got your life back. That's the point.’

Smiling, he fell asleep at Allie's flat feet in the falling snow.

Even the serial visions have migrated now; they know the city better than he. And in the aftermath of Rosa and Rekha the dream-worlds of his archangelic other self begin to seem as tangible as the shifting realities he inhabits while he's awake. This, for instance, has started coming: a mansion block built in the Dutch style in a part of London which he will subsequently identify as Kensington, to which the dream flies him at high speed past Barkers department store and the small grey house with double bay windows where Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair and the square with the convent where the little girls in uniform are always going in, but never come out, and the house where Talleyrand lived in his old age when after a thousand and one chameleon changes of allegiance and principle he took on the outward form of the French ambassador to London, and arrives at a seven-storey corner block with green wrought-iron balconies up to the fourth, and now the dream rushes him up the outer wall of the house and on the fourth floor it pushes aside the heavy curtains at the living-room window and finally there he sits, unsleeping as usual, eyes wide in the dim yellow light, staring into the future, the bearded and turbaned Imam.

Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own. These are the things the Imam thinks. His home is a rented flat. It is a waiting-room, a photograph, air.

The thick wallpaper, olive stripes on a cream ground, has faded a little, enough to emphasize the brighter rectangles and ovals that indicate where pictures used to hang. The Imam is the enemy of images. When he moved in the pictures slid noiselessly from the walls and slunk from the room, removing themselves from the rage of his unspoken disapproval. Some representations, however, are permitted to remain. On the mantelpiece he keeps a small group of postcards bearing conventional images of his homeland, which he calls simply Desh: a mountain looming over a city; a picturesque village scene beneath a mighty tree; a mosque. But in his bedroom, on the wall facing the hard cot where he lies, there hangs a more potent icon, the portrait of a woman of exceptional force, famous for her profile of a Grecian statue and the black hair that is as long as she is high. A powerful woman, his enemy, his other: he keeps her close. Just as, far away in the palaces of her omnipotence she will be clutching his portrait beneath her royal cloak or hiding it in a locket at her throat. She is the Empress, and her name is – what else? – Ayesha. On this island, the exiled Imam, and at home in Desh, She. They plot each other's deaths.

The curtains, thick golden velvet, are kept shut all day, because otherwise the evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreign-ness, Abroad, the alien nation. The harsh fact that he is here and not There, upon which all his thoughts are fixed. On those rare occasions when the Imam goes out to take the Kensington air, at the centre of a square formed by eight young men in sunglasses and bulging suits, he folds his hands before him and fixes his gaze upon them, so that no element or particle of this hated city, – this sink of iniquities which humiliates him by giving him sanctuary, so that he must be beholden to it in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity of its ways, – can lodge itself, like a dust-speck, in his eyes. When he leaves this loathed exile to return in triumph to that other city beneath the postcard-mountain, it will be a point of pride to be able to say that he remained in complete ignorance of the Sodom in which he had been obliged to wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure.

And another reason for the drawn curtains is that of course there are eyes and ears around him, not all of them friendly. The orange buildings are not neutral. Somewhere across the street there will be zoom lenses, video equipment, jumbo mikes; and always the risk of snipers. Above and below and beside the Imam are the safe apartments occupied by his guards, who stroll the Kensington streets disguised as women in shrouds and silvery beaks; but it is as well to be too careful. Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite of survival.

A fable, which he heard from one of his favourites, the American convert, formerly a successful singer, now known as Bilal X. In a certain nightclub to which the Imam is in the habit of sending his lieutenants to listen in to certain other persons belonging to certain opposed factions, Bilal met a young man from Desh, also a singer of sorts, so they fell to talking. It turned out that this Mahmood was a badly scared individual. He had recently shacked up with a gori, a long red woman with a big figure, and then it turned out that the previous lover of his beloved Renata was the exiled boss of the SAVAKtorture organization of the Shah of Iran. The number one Grand Panjandrum himself, not some minor sadist with a talent for extracting toenails or setting fire to eyelids, but the great haramzada in person. The day after Mahmood and Renata moved in to their new apartment a letter arrived for Mahmood. Okay, shit-eater, you're fucking my woman, I just wanted to say hello . The next day a second letter arrived. By the way, prick, I forgot to mention, here is your new telephone number . At that point Mahmood and Renata had asked for an ex-directory listing but had not as yet been given their new number by the telephone company. When it came through two days later and was exactly the same as the one on the letter, Mahmood's hair fell out all at once. Then, seeing it lying on the pillow, he joined his hands together in front of Renata and begged, ‘Baby, I love you, but you're too hot for me, please go somewhere, far far.’ When the Imam was told this story he shook his head and said, that whore, who will touch her now, in spite of her lust-creating body? She put a stain on herself worse than leprosy; thus do human beings mutilate themselves. But the true moral of the fable was the need for eternal vigilance. London was a city in which the ex-boss of SAVAKhad great connections in the telephone company and the Shah's ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in Hounslow. Such a welcoming city, such a refuge, they take all types. Keep the curtains drawn.

Floors three to five of this block of mansion flats are, for the moment, all the homeland the Imam possesses. Here there are rifles and short-wave radios and rooms in which the sharp young men in suits sit and speak urgently into several telephones. There is no alcohol here, nor are playing cards or dice anywhere in evidence, and the only woman is the one hanging on the old man's bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the insomniac saint thinks of as his waiting-room or transit lounge, the central heating is at full blast night and day, and the windows are tightly shut. The exile cannot forget, and must therefore simulate, the dry heat of Desh, the once and future land where even the moon is hot and dripping like a fresh, buttered chapati. O that longed-for part of the world where the sun and moon are male but their hot sweet light is named with female names. At night the exile parts his curtains and the alien moonlight sidles into the room, its coldness striking his eyeballs like a nail. He winces, narrows his eyes. Loose-robed, frowning, ominous, awake: this is the Imam.