Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:

For when the head of the Messenger began to ache as never before, he knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:

Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and afterward asked to choose between this world and the next:

So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:

And he said unto Ayesha, ‘I have been offered and made my Choice, and I have chosen the kingdom of God.’

Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even though when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning upon its stand:

‘Who's there?’ he called out. ‘Is it Thou, Azraeel?’

But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a woman's, make reply: ‘No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel.’

And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: ‘Is this sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?’

And she said: ‘It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them cut a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave.’

Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more into a great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, ‘Still, I thank Thee, Al-Lat, for this gift.’

Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began mightily to lament:

But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: ‘If there be any here who worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive.’

It was the end of the dream.

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 glass 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 English-speaking 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 with Shylock 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 had enjoyed 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 self-congratulatory 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 for anybody 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, 1980$ – 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.