The Satanic Verses

irrelevant, as even the most stubborn of nightmares will once you’ve splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began to make journeys into the outside world – to those professional advisers, lawyer accountant agent, whom Pamela used to call ‘the Goons’, and when sitting in the panelled, book- and ledger-lined stability of those offices in which miracles could plainly never happen he took to speaking of his ‘breakdown’, – ‘the shock of the accident’, – and so on, explaining his disappearance as though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie
Shree 420
. He made a conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking himself off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses were rather dull; – if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in the state of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art; – then he insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had ‘a bad experience’, and needed a little time.
    In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his familiar objects – the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a cartoonist’s heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp – he congratulated himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was now sure he felt nothing but the most altruistic affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon the smooth glass of the sensitive soul; a mere grease-mark, which disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He was forgotten; he no longer existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.
    Saladin’s optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone: ‘Clientsget funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of unclean: as if they were robbing a grave.’ Charlie, who still sounded in her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the clients’ point of view. ‘Wait it out,’ she advised. ‘They’ll come round. After all, it isn’t as if you were Dracula, for heaven’s sake.’ Thank you, Charlie.
    Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and appropriate revenge, – these were things of the past, aspects of a reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re-establish ordinary life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as
monstrous
. Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world – mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies’ mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the view that ‘monster’ was too – what? –
judgmental
a term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as the casualties. ‘There’s nothing to be done with you,’ she had said in her most patrician voice. ‘You actually do think in cheap debating points.’
    And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils – who needed them? ‘Why demons, when man himself is a demon?’ the Nobel Laureate Singer’s ‘last demon’ asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha’s sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: ‘And why angels, when man is angelic too?’ (If this wasn’t true, how to explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) – But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the