Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

She was a competent woman, formidable in many ways: very much the professional sportswoman of the 1980s, a client of the giant MacMurray public relations agency, sponsored to the gills. Nowadays she, too, appeared in advertisements, promoting her own range of outdoor products and leisurewear, aimed at holidaymakers and amateurs more than pro climbers, to maximize what Hal Valance would have called the universe. She was the golden girl from the roof of the world, the survivor of ‘my Teutonic twosome’, as Otto Cone had been fond of calling his daughters. Once again, Yel, I follow in your footsteps . To be an attractive woman in a sport dominated by, well, hairy men was to be saleable, and the ‘icequeen’ image didn't hurt either. There was money in it, and now that she was old enough to compromise her old, fiery ideals with no more than a shrug and a laugh, she was ready to make it, ready, even, to appear on T V talk-shows to fend off, with risque hints, the inevitable and unchanging questions about life with the boys at twenty-odd thousand feet. Such high-profile capers sat uneasily alongside the view of herself to which she still fiercely clung: the idea that she was a natural solitary, the most private of women, and that the demands of her business life were ripping her in half. She had her first fight with Gibreel over this, because he said, in his unvarnished way: ‘I guess it's okay to run from the cameras as long as you know they're chasing after you. But suppose they stop? My guess is you'd turn and run the other way.’ Later, when they'd made up, she teased him with her growing stardom (since she became the first sexually attractive blonde to conquer Everest, the noise had increased considerably, she received photographs of gorgeous hunks in the mail, also invitations to high life soirees and a quantity of insane abuse): ‘I could be in movies myself now that you've retired. Who knows? Maybe I will.’ To which he responded, shocking her by the force of his words, ‘Over my goddamn dead body.’

In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted waters of the real and swim in the general direction of the current, she never lost the sense that some awful disaster was lurking just around the corner – a legacy, this, of her father's and sister's sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck prickliness had made her a cautious climber, a ‘real percentage man’, as the lads would have it, and as admired friends died on various mountains her caution increased. Away from mountaineering, it gave her, at times, an unrelaxed look, a jumpiness; she acquired the heavily defended air of a fortress preparing for an inevitable assault. This added to her reputation as a frosty berg of a woman; people kept their distance, and, to hear her tell it, she accepted loneliness as the price of solitude. – But there were more contradictions here, for she had, after all, only recently thrown caution overboard when she chose to make the final assault on Everest without oxygen. ‘Aside from all the other implications,’ the agency assured her in its formal letter of congratulations, ‘this humanizes you, it shows you've got that what-the-hell streak, and that's a positive new dimension.’ They were working on it. In the meantime, Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel in tired encouragement as he slipped down towards her lower depths, There's now you. Almost a total stranger and here you've gone and moved right in. God, I even carried you across the threshold, near as makes no difference. Can't blame you for accepting the lift.

He wasn't housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used tea-bags where they fell. Worse: he dropped them, actually let them fall where they would need picking up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he was doing, he went on proving to himself that he, the poor boy from the streets, no longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn't the only thing about him that drove her crazy. She'd pour glasses of wine; he'd drink his fast and then, when she wasn't looking, grab hers, placating her with an angelic-faced, ultra-innocent ‘Plenty more, isn't it?’ His bad behaviour around the house. He liked to fart. He complained – actually complained, after she'd literally scooped him out of the snow! – about the smallness of the accommodations. ‘Every time I take two steps my face hits a wall.’ He was rude to telephone callers, really rude, without bothering to find out who they were: automatically, the way film stars were in Bombay when, by some chance, there wasn't a flunkey available to protect them from such intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): ‘Excuse me for mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case.’

‘A case, mother?’ This drew out Alicja's grandest voice. She was still capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her post-Otto decision to disguise herself as a bag-lady. ‘A case,’ she announced, taking into consideration the fact that Gibreel was an Indian import, ‘of cashew and monkey nuts.’

Allie didn't argue with her mother, being by no means certain that she could continue to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even if he had fallen from the sky. The long term was hard to predict; even the medium term looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get to know this man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love of her life, with a lack of doubt that meant he was either right or off his head. There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he knew, what she could take for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a way of explaining by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of impending catastrophe (which had to do not with recurring patterns but with the inescapability of the unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he'd never heard of the writer, let alone The Defence . Conversely, he surprised her by asking, out of the blue, ‘Why Picabia?’ Adding that it was peculiar, was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the terror camps, to go in for all that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute power, dehu-manization glorified. ‘Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,’ he added, ‘and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.’ Where did you find out about, she began, and faltered because she didn't like the patronizing note she was striking, but he answered without vanity. The first time he'd heard about Marinetti, he said, he'd got the wrong end of the stick and thought Futurism was something to do with puppets. ‘Marionettes, kathputli, at that time I was keen to use advanced puppetry techniques in a picture, maybe to depict demons or other supernormal beings. So I got a book.’ I got a book : Gibreel the autodidact made it sound like an injection. To a girl from a house that revered books – her father had made them all kiss any volume that fell by chance to the floor – and who had reacted by treating them badly, ripping out pages she wanted or didn't like, scribbling and scratching at them to show them who was boss, Gibreel's form of irreverence, non-abusive, taking books for what they offered without feeling the need to genuflect or destroy, was something new; and, she accepted, pleasing. She learned from him. He, however, seemed impervious to any wisdom she might wish to impart, about, for example, the correct place in which to dispose of dirty socks. When she attempted to suggest he ‘did his share’, he went into a profound, injured sulk, expecting to be cajoled back into a good humour. Which, to her disgust, she found herself willing, for the moment at any rate, to do.