The Satanic Verses

he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to
thin air
, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And toprove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city’s most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.
    He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.
    ‘Don’t you get it?’ he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. ‘No thunderbolt. That’s the point.’
    She came back to stand in front of him. ‘You’re alive,’ she told him. ‘You got your life back.
That’s
the point.’
    He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge,
change your life, or did you get it back for nothing
, I couldn’t resist.
    ‘You and your reincarnation junk,’ Rekha cajoled him. ‘Such a nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death’s door, and it goes to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?’
    No need, he said. He left Rekha’s apartment (its mistress wept, face-down, on the floor); and never entered it again.
    Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not-disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im-, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he’d lost his belief it didn’t mean he couldn’t do his job, and in spite of thescandal of the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work.
    And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but
Bostan
. ‘To be born again,’ Gibreel Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much later, ‘first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?’
    Why did he leave?
    Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become.
    And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.

3

    O nce the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a nonsmoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care – it had taken him several years to get it just right – and for many more years now he had thought of