The Satanic Verses

love.’ Salman’s face went blank. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and left.
    ‘Ayesha’ came to Baal’s room for reassurance. ‘He won’t spill out the secret when he’s drunk?’ she asked, caressing Baal’s hair. ‘He gets through a lot of wine.’
    Baal said: ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same again.’ Salman’s visit had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during his years at The Curtain, and he couldn’t go back to sleep.
    ‘Of course it will,’ Ayesha urged. ‘It will. You’ll see.’
    Baal shook his head and made the only prophetic remark of his life. ‘Something big is going to happen,’ he foretold. ‘A man can’t hide behind skirts forever.’
    The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came toinform the Madam of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The brothels were to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From behind her drapes, the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an hour in the name of propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was the inexperience of the officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed. The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by a back door. ‘Please apologize to them for the interruption,’ she ordered the eunuchs, ‘and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made.’
    They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once, crowded into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat, will we go to jail, what’s to become of us, – until ‘Ayesha’ screwed up her courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and twenty-five years old, no more than three feet tall, looking like a big doll, curled up in a cushion-laden wickerwork chair, clutching the empty poison-bottle in her fist.
    ‘Now that you’ve started,’ Baal said, coming into the room, ‘you may as well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any more.’

    The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothel-keeper. ‘Well, if we can’t hang the boss, we’ll just have to make do with the workers,’ he shouted, and ordered his men to place the ‘tarts’ under close arrest, a task the men performed with zeal. The women made a noise and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched without twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: ‘They want the cunts to be put on trial, but I’ve no instructions about you. So if you don’t want to lose your heads as well as your balls, keep outof this.’ Eunuchs failed to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled them to the ground; and among the eunuchs was Baal, of the dyed skin and poetry. Just before the youngest ‘cunt’ or ‘slit’ was gagged, she yelled: ‘Husband, for God’s sake, help us, if you are a man.’ The vice-squad captain was amused. ‘Which of you is her husband?’ he asked, staring carefully into each turban-topped face. ‘Come on, own up. What’s it like to watch the world with your wife?’
    Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid ‘Ayesha’s’ glares as well as Umar’s narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. ‘Is it you?’
    ‘Sir, you understand, it’s just a term,’ Baal lied. ‘They like to joke, the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we …’
    Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. ‘Because you can’t be,’ he said. ‘Husbands, eh. Not bad.’
    When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. ‘Get lost,’ he suggested. ‘Tomorrow I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running.’
    When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down and wept uncontrollably by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame, did not cry.

    Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:
    The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had grown so accustomed to their new names that they couldn’t remember the old ones. They were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titles, and as a result were unable to give any names at all. After a