The Satanic Verses

woman, his enemy, his other: he keeps her close. Just as, far away in the palaces of her omnipotence she will be clutching his portrait beneath her royal cloak or hiding it in a locket at her throat. She is the Empress, and her name is – what else? – Ayesha. On this island, the exiled Imam, and at home in Desh, She. They plot each other’s deaths.
    The curtains, thick golden velvet, are kept shut all day, because otherwise the evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreignness, Abroad, the alien nation. The harsh fact that he is here and not There, upon which all his thoughts are fixed. On those rare occasions when the Imam goes out to take the Kensington air, at the centre of a square formed by eight young men in sunglasses and bulging suits, he folds his hands before him and fixes his gazeupon them, so that no element or particle of this hated city, – this sink of iniquities which humiliates him by giving him sanctuary, so that he must be beholden to it in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity of its ways, – can lodge itself, like a dust-speck, in his eyes. When he leaves this loathed exile to return in triumph to that other city beneath the postcard-mountain, it will be a point of pride to be able to say that he remained in complete ignorance of the Sodom in which he had been obliged to wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure.
    And another reason for the drawn curtains is that of course there are eyes and ears around him, not all of them friendly. The orange buildings are not neutral. Somewhere across the street there will be zoom lenses, video equipment, jumbo mikes; and always the risk of snipers. Above and below and beside the Imam are the safe apartments occupied by his guards, who stroll the Kensington streets disguised as women in shrouds and silvery beaks; but it is as well to be too careful. Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite of survival.
    A fable, which he heard from one of his favourites, the American convert, formerly a successful singer, now known as Bilal X. In a certain nightclub to which the Imam is in the habit of sending his lieutenants to listen in to certain other persons belonging to certain opposed factions, Bilal met a young man from Desh, also a singer of sorts, so they fell to talking. It turned out that this Mahmood was a badly scared individual. He had recently
shacked up
with a gori, a long red woman with a big figure, and then it turned out that the previous lover of his beloved Renata was the exiled boss of the SAVAK torture organization of the Shah of Iran. The number one Grand Panjandrum himself, not some minor sadist with a talent for extracting toenails or setting fire to eyelids, but the great haramzada in person. The day after Mahmood and Renata moved into their new apartment a letter arrived for Mahmood.
Okay, shit-eater, you’re fucking my woman, I just wanted to say hello
. The next day a second letter arrived.
By the way, prick, I forgot to mention, here is your new telephone number
. At that point Mahmood and Renata had asked foran ex-directory listing but had not as yet been given their new number by the telephone company. When it came through two days later and was exactly the same as the one on the letter, Mahmood’s hair fell out all at once. Then, seeing it lying on the pillow, he joined his hands together in front of Renata and begged, ‘Baby, I love you, but you’re too hot for me, please go somewhere, far far.’ When the Imam was told this story he shook his head and said, that whore, who will touch her now, in spite of her lust-creating body? She put a stain on herself worse than leprosy; thus do human beings mutilate themselves. But the true moral of the fable was the need for eternal vigilance. London was a city in which the ex-boss of SAVAK had great connections in the telephone company and the Shah’s ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in Hounslow. Such a welcoming city, such a refuge, they take all types. Keep the curtains drawn.
    Floors three to five of this block of mansion flats are, for the moment, all the homeland the Imam possesses. Here there are rifles and short-wave radios and rooms in which the sharp young men in suits sit and speak urgently into several telephones. There is no alcohol here, nor are playing cards or dice anywhere in evidence, and the only woman is the one hanging on the old man’s bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the insomniac saint thinks of as his waiting-room or