The Satanic Verses

or receiving exceptionally generous tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had taken the name of ‘Sawdah’, would tell her visitors – and she had plenty, many of the men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and also grateful charms – the story of how Mahound had married her and Ayesha, on the same day, when Ayesha was just a child. ‘In the two of us,’ she would say, exciting men terribly, ‘he found the two halves of his dead first wife: the child, and the mother, too.’ The whore ‘Hafsah’ grew as hot-tempered as her namesake, and as the twelve entered into the spirit of their roles the alliances in the brothel came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque; ‘Ayesha’ and ‘Hafsah’, for example, engaged in constant, petty rivalries against the two haughtiest whores, who had always been thought a bit stuck-up by the others and who had chosen for themselves the most aristocratic identities, becoming ‘Umm Salamah the Makhzumite’ and, snootiest of all, ‘Ramlah’, whose namesake, the eleventh wife of Mahound, was the daughter of Abu Simbel and Hind. And there was a ‘Zainab bint Jahsh’, and a ‘Juwairiyah’, named after the bride captured on a military expedition, and a ‘Rehana the Jew’, a ‘Safia’ and a ‘Maimunah’, and, most erotic of all the whores, who knew tricksshe refused to teach to competitive ‘Ayesha’: the glamourous Egyptian, ‘Mary the Copt’. Strangest of all was the whore who had taken the name of ‘Zainab bint Khuzaimah’, knowing that this wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia of her lovers, who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this, too, was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.
    By the end of the first year the twelve had grown so skilful in their roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal, more myopic and deafer by the month, saw the shapes of the girls moving past him, their edges blurred, their images somehow doubled, like shadows superimposed on shadows. The girls began to entertain new notions about Baal, too. In that age it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession, to take the kind of husband who wouldn’t give her any trouble – a mountain, maybe, or a fountain, or a bush – so that she could adopt, for form’s sake, the title of a married woman. At The Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the Love Spout in the central courtyard, but now a kind of rebellion was brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than some spurting stone, which was almost idolatrous, after all; and to say that they had decided that they would all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first the Madam tried to talk them out of it, but when she saw that the girls meant business she conceded the point, and told them to send the writer in to see her. With many giggles and nudges the twelve courtesans escorted the shambling poet into the throne room. When Baal heard the plan his heart began to thump so erratically that he lost his balance and fell, and ‘Ayesha’ screamed in her fright: ‘O God, we’re going to be his widows before we even get to be his wives.’
    But he recovered: his heart regained its composure. And, having no option, he agreed to the twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married them all off herself, and in that den ofdegeneracy, that anti-mosque, that labyrinth of profanity, Baal became the husband of the wives of the former businessman, Mahound.
    His wives now made plain to him that they expected him to fulfil his husbandly duties in every particular, and worked out a rota system under which he could spend a day with each of the girls in turn (at The Curtain, day and night were inverted, the night being for business and the day for rest). No sooner had he embarked upon this arduous programme than they called a meeting at which he was told that he ought to start behaving a little more like the ‘real’ husband, that is, Mahound. ‘Why can’t you change your name like the rest of us?’ bad-tempered ‘Hafsah’ demanded, but at this Baal drew the line. ‘It may not be much to be proud of,’ he insisted, ‘but it’s my name. What’s more, I don’t work with the clients here. There’s no business reason