Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Baal asked: ‘Why are you sure he will kill you?’

Salman the Persian answered: ‘It's his Word against mine.’

When Salman had slipped into unconsciousness on the floor, Baal lay on his scratchy straw-filled mattress, feeling the steel ring of pain around his forehead, the flutter of warning in his heart. Often his tiredness with his life had made him wish not to grow old, but, as Salman had said, to dream of a thing is very different from being faced with the fact of it. For some time now he had been conscious that the world was closing in around him. He could no longer pretend that his eyes were what they ought to be, and their dimness made his life even more shadowy, harder to grasp. All this blurring and loss of detail: no wonder his poetry had gone down the drain. His ears were getting to be unreliable, too. At this rate he'd soon end up sealed off from everything by the loss of his senses... but maybe he'd never get the chance. Mahound was coming. Maybe he would never kiss another woman. Mahound, Mahound. Why has this chatterbox drunk come to me, he thought angrily. What do I have to do with his treachery? Everyone knows why I wrote those satires years ago; he must know. How the Grandee threatened and bullied. I can't be held responsible. And anyway: who is he, that prancing sneering boy-wonder, Baal of the cutting tongue? I don't recognize him. Look at me: heavy, dull, nearsighted, soon to be deaf. Who do I threaten? Not a soul. He began to shake Salman: wake up, I don't want to be associated with you, you'll get me into trouble.

The Persian snored on, sitting splay-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, his head hanging sideways like a doll's; Baal, racked by headache, fell back on to his cot. His verses, he thought, what had they been? What kind of idea damn it, he couldn't even remember them properly does Submission seem today yes, something like that, after all this time it was scarcely surprising an idea that runs away that was the end anyhow. Mahound, any new idea is asked two questions. When it's weak: will it compromise? We know the answer to that one. And now, Mahound, on your return to Jahilia, time for the second question: How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then? We have all changed: all of us except Hind. Who seems, from what this drunkard says, more like a woman of Yathrib than Jahilia. No wonder the two of you didn't hit it off: she wouldn't be your mother or your child.

As he drifted towards sleep, Baal surveyed his own uselessness, his failed art. Now that he had abdicated all public platforms, his verses were full of loss: of youth, beauty, love, health, innocence, purpose, energy, certainty, hope. Loss of knowledge. Loss of money. The loss of Hind. Figures walked away from him in his odes, and the more passionately he called out to them the faster they moved. The landscape of his poetry was still the desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white sand blowing from their peaks. Soft mountains, uncompleted journeys, the impermanence of tents. How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day? Such questions made his language too abstract, his imagery too fluid, his metre too inconstant. It led him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of classical purity and images of love were constantly degraded by the intrusion of elements of farce. Nobody goes for that stuff, he thought for the thousand and first time, and as unconsciousness arrived he concluded, comfortingly: Nobody remembers me. Oblivion is safety. Then his heart missed a beat and he came wide awake, frightened, cold. Mahound, maybe I'll cheat you of your revenge. He spent the night awake, listening to Salman's rolling, oceanic snores.

Gibreel dreamed campfires:

A famous and unexpected figure walks, one night, between the campfires of Mahound's army. Perhaps on account of the dark, – or it might be because of the improbability of his presence here, – it seems that the Grandee of Jahilia has regained, in this final moment of his power, some of the strength of his earlier days. He has come alone; and is led by Khalid the erstwhile water-carrier and the former slave Bilal to the quarters of Mahound.

Next, Gibreel dreamed the Grandee's return home:

The town is full of rumours and there's a crowd in front of the house. After a time the sound of Hind's voice lifted in rage can be clearly heard. Then at an upper balcony Hind shows herself and demands that the crowd tear her husband into small pieces. The Grandee appears beside her; and receives loud, humiliating smacks on both cheeks from his loving wife. Hind has discovered that in spite of all her efforts she has not been able to prevent the Grandee from surrendering the city to Mahound.

Moreover: Abu Simbel has embraced the faith.

Simbel in his defeat has lost much of his recent wispiness. He permits Hind to strike him, and then speaks calmly to the crowd. He says: Mahound has promised that anyone within the Grandee's walls will be spared. ‘So come in, all of you, and bring your families, too.’

Hind speaks for the angry crowd. ‘You old fool. How many citizens can fit inside a single house, even this one? You've done a deal to save your own neck. Let them rip you up and feed you to the ants.’

Still the Grandee is mild. ‘Mahound also promises that all who are found at home, behind closed doors, will be safe. If you will not come into my home then go to your own; and wait.’

A third time his wife attempts to turn the crowd against him; this is a balcony scene of hatred instead of love. There can be no compromise with Mahound, she shouts, he is not to be trusted, the people must repudiate Abu Simbel and prepare to fight to the last man, the last woman. She herself is prepared to fight beside them and die for the freedom of Jahilia. ‘Will you merely lie down before this false prophet, this Dajjal? Can honour be expected of a man who is preparing to storm the city of his birth? Can compromise be hoped for from the uncompromising, pity from the pitiless? We are the mighty of Jahilia, and our goddesses, glorious in battle, will prevail.’ She commands them to fight in the name of Al-Lat. But the people begin to leave.

Husband and wife stand on their balcony, and the people see them plain. For so long the city has used these two as its mirrors; and because, of late, Jahilians have preferred Hind's images to the greying Grandee, they are suffering, now, from profound shock. A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness. Now the Grandee has awakened them from that sleep; they stand disoriented, rubbing their eyes, unable to believe at first – if we are so mighty, how then have we fallen so fast, so utterly? – and then belief comes, and shows them how their confidence has been built on clouds, on the passion of Hind's proclamations and on very little else. They abandon her, and with her, hope. Plunging into despair, the people of Jahilia go home to lock their doors.

She screams at them, pleads, loosens her hair. ‘Come to the House of the Black Stone! Come and make sacrifice to Lat!’ But they have gone. And Hind and the Grandee are alone on their balcony, while throughout Jahilia a great silence falls, a great stillness begins, and Hind leans against the wall of her palace and closes her eyes.

It is the end. The Grandee murmurs softly: ‘Not many of us have as much reason to be scared of Mahound as you. If you eat a man's favourite uncle's innards, raw, without so much as salt or garlic, don't be surprised if he treats you, in turn, like meat.’ Then he leaves her, and goes down into the streets from which even the dogs have vanished, to unlock the city gates.