The Satanic Verses

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 issafety. 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