The Satanic Verses

to wander the newly puritanical streets of the town. The deafness was a problem sometimes; it meant that there were gaps in his knowledge, because the customers frequently lowered their voices and whispered; but it also minimized the prurient element in his listenings-in, since he was unable to hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in cries of real or synthetic joy.
    What Baal learned at The Curtain:
    From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the new ban on pork the skin-deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back door to buy the forbidden meat in secret, ‘sales are up,’ he murmured while mounting his chosen lady, ‘black pork prices are high; but damn it, these new rules have made my work tough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter in secret, without noise,’ and thereupon he began some squealing of his own, for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain. – And the grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain’s horizontal staff that the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening he still said a prayer or two to ‘my lifelong favourite, Manat, and sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can’t beat a female goddess, they’ve got attributes the boys can’t match,’ after which he, too, fell upon the earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that faded, fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute, no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.
    Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of thegreat temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because even in the high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the hollowness of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of stone that couldn’t fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been dulled, Baal became convinced that Al-Lat’s fall meant that his own end was not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired in him; but the returning knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated cowardice he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered at the paradox of having his eyes opened to such a truth in that house of costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead – had never lived – but that didn’t make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rules, and to perceive that his story was so mixed up with Mahound’s that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the twelve wives of the Prophet,
one rule for him, another for us
, Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.
    The girls of The Curtain – it was only by convention that they were referred to as ‘girls’, as the eldest was a woman well into her fifties, while the youngest, at fifteen, was more experienced than many fifty-year-olds – had grown fond of this shambling Baal, and in point of fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-who-wasn’t, so that out of working hours they would tease him deliciously, flaunting their bodies before him, placing their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing one another passionatelyjust an inch away from his face, until the ashy writer was hopelessly aroused; whereupon they would laugh at his stiffness and mock him into blushing, quivering detumescence; or, very occasionally, and when he had given up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they had awakened. In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the poet passed his days, laying his head in women’s laps, brooding on death and revenge, unable to say whether he was the most