The Satanic Verses

will not speak. Khalid says: ‘I made Salman take me to his room, a hovel, but he isn’t there, he’s hiding out.’ Again, the nod, but no speech. Khalid presses on: ‘You want me to dig him out? Wouldn’t take much doing. What d’you want done with him? This? This?’ Khalid’s finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into his navel. Mahound loses his temper. ‘You’re a fool,’ he shouts at the former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. ‘Can’t you ever work things out without my help?’
    Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of dealing with bad moods.

    But Khalid, Mahound’s general, could not find Baal. In spite of door-to-door searches, proclamations, turnings of stones, the poet proved impossible to nab. And Mahound’s lips remained closed, would not part to allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave up the search. ‘Just let that bastard show his face, just once, any time,’ he vowed in the Prophet’s tent of softnesses and shadows. ‘I’ll slice him so thin you’ll be able to see right through each piece.’
    It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.

    Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a day, no alcohol, the locking up of wives. Hind herself retired to her quarters … but where was Baal?
    Gibreel dreamed a curtain:
    The Curtain,
Hijab
, was the name of the most popular brothel in Jahilia, an enormous palazzo of date-palms in water-tinkling courtyards, surrounded by chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns, permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to look alike, each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love, each carpetedwith identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned against a wall. None of The Curtain’s clients could ever find their way, without help, either into the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back again to the street. In this way the girls were protected from unwanted guests and the business ensured payment before departure. Large Circassian eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion of lamp-genies, escorted the visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes with the help of balls of string. It was a soft windowless universe of draperies, ruled over by the ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had acquired, over the years, something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were able to disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane antithesis of Mahound’s sacred utterances in a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and save his life as an act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been was accepted without question; and when Khalid’s guards arrived to search the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around that overground catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the soldiers’ heads were spinning, and after looking inside thirty-nine stone urns and finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the quivering, pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.
    After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet’s skin until it was blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his lack of condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn’t tone up fast.

    Baal’s sojourn ‘behind The Curtain’ by no means deprived him of information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact,because in the course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the pleasure-chambers and heard the customers’ gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues, induced by the gay abandon of the whores’ caresses and by the clients’ knowledge that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet, myopic and hard of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary affairs than he could possibly have gained if he’d still been free