The Satanic Verses

for such a change.’ ‘Well, anyhow,’ the voluptuous ‘Mary the Copt’ shrugged, ‘name or no name, we want you to start acting like him.’
    ‘I don’t know much about,’ Baal began to protest, but ‘Ayesha’, who really was the most attractive of them all, or so he had commenced to feel of late, made a delightful moue. ‘Honestly, husband,’ she cajoled him. ‘It’s not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss.’
    It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of ‘ordinary life’ in which they wanted nothing more than to be the obedient, and – yes – submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of highexcitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was to have twelve women competing for his favours, for the beneficence of his smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled his body and danced for him, and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.
    It was irresistible. He began to find the confidence to order them about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry. Once when their quarreling irritated him he forswore them all for a month. When he went to see ‘Ayesha’ after twenty-nine nights she teased him for not having been able to stay away. ‘That month was only twenty-nine days long,’ he replied. Once he was caught with ‘Mary the Copt’ by ‘Hafsah’, in ‘Hafsah’s’ quarters and on ‘Ayesha’s’ day. He begged ‘Hafsah’ not to tell ‘Ayesha’, with whom he had fallen in love; but she told her anyway and Baal had to stay away from ‘Mary’ of the fair skin and curly hair for quite a time after that. In short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming the secret, profane mirror of Mahound; and he had begun, once again, to write.
    The poetry that came was the sweetest he had ever written. Sometimes when he was with Ayesha he felt a slowness come over him, a heaviness, and he had to lie down. ‘It’s strange,’ he told her. ‘It is as if I see myself standing beside myself. And I can make him, the standing one, speak; then I get up and write down his verses.’ These artistic slownesses of Baal were much admired by his wives. Once, tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the chambers of ‘Umm Salamah the Makhzumite’. When he woke, hours later, his body ached, his neck and shoulders were full of knots, and he berated Umm Salamah: ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ She answered: ‘I was afraid to, in case the verses were coming to you.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about that. The only woman in whose company the verses come is “Ayesha”, not you.’

    Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of Ayesha’s clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin,pantaloons and body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha’s room when the client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: ‘So this is where you got to!’ Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, ‘It’s all right. He won’t make any trouble.’ He invited Salman the Persian to his own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it wasn’t forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule Book.
    ‘I came because I’m finally leaving this infernal city,’ Salman said, ‘and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit.’ After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old friendship the immigrant had found work as a letter-writer and all-purpose scribe, sitting cross-legged by the roadside in the main street of the financial district. His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun. ‘People write to tell lies,’ he said,