Saitanic verses III. Ellowen Deeowen Part 1

III. Ellowen Deeowen I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently. Her name was Rosa Diamond; she was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily through her salt-caked bedroom windows, watching the full moon's sea. And I know what it isn't, too, she nodded further, it isn't a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all _that_ bunkum. What's a ghost? Unfinished business, is what. -- At which the old lady, six feet tall, straight--backed, her hair hacked short as any man's, jerked the corners of her mouth downwards in a satisfied, tragedy-mask pout, -- pulled a knitted blue shawl tight around bony 134 shoulders, -- and closed, for a moment, her sleepless eyes, to pray for the past's return. Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let's have you, Willie-the-Conk. Nine hundred years ago all this was under water, this portioned shore, this private beach, its shingle rising steeply towards the little row of flaky-paint villas with their peeling boathouses crammed full of deckchairs, empty picture frames, ancient tuckboxes stuffed with bundles of letters tied up in ribbons, mothballed silk--and-lace lingerie, the tearstained reading matter of once--young girls, lacrosse sticks, stamp albums, and all the buried treasure--chests of memories and lost time. The coastline had changed, had moved a mile or more out to sea, leaving the first Norman castle stranded far from water, lapped now by marshy land that afflicted with all manner of dank and boggy agues the poor who lived there on their whatstheword _estates_. She, the old lady, saw the castle as the ruin of a fish betrayed by an antique ebbing tide, as a sea-monster petrified by time. Nine hundred years! Nine centuries past, the Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman's home. On clear nights when the moon was full, she waited for its shining, revenant ghost. Best place to see 'em come, she reassured herself, grandstand view. Repetition had become a comfort in her antiquity; the well-worn phrases, _unfinished business, grandstand view_, made her feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to be. -- When the full moon sets, the dark before the dawn, that's their moment. Billow of sail, flash of oars, and the Conqueror himself at the flagship's prow, sailing up the beach between the barnacled wooden breakwaters and a few inverted sculls. -- O, I've seen things in my time, always had the gift, the phantom-sight. -- The Conqueror in his pointy metal-nosed hat, passing through her front door, gliding betwixt the cakestands and antimacassared sofas, like an 135 echo resounding faintly through that house of remembrances and yearnings; then falling silent; _as the grave_. -- Once as a girl on Battle Hill, she was fond of recounting, always in the same time--polished words, -- once as a solitary child, I found myself, quite suddenly and with no sense of strangeness, in the middle of a war. Longbows, maces, pikes. The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down in their sweet youth. Harold Arroweye and William with his mouth full of sand. Yes, always the gift, the phantom-sight. -- The story of the day on which the child Rosa had seen a vision of the battle of Hastings had become, for the old woman, one of the defining landmarks of her being, though it had been told so often that nobody, not even the teller, could confidently swear that it was true. _I long for them sometimes_, ran Rosa's practised thoughts. _Les beaux jours: the dear, dead days_. She closed, once more, her reminiscent eyes. When she opened them, she saw, down by the water's edge, no denying it, something beginning to move. What she said aloud in her excitement: "I don't believe it!" -- "It isn't true!" -- "He's never _here!_" -- On unsteady feet, with bumping chest, Rosa went for her hat, cloak, stick. While, on the winter seashore, Gibreel Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand. Snow. Ptui! Gibreel spat; leapt up, as if propelled by expectorated slush; wished Chamcha -- as has been reported -- many happy returns of the day; and commenced to beat the snow from sodden purple sleeves. "God, yaar," he shouted, hopping from foot to foot, "no wonder these people grow hearts of bloody ice." 136 Then, however, the pure delight of being surrounded by such a quantity of snow quite overcame his first cynicism -- for he was a tropical man -- and he started capering about, saturnine and soggy, making snowballs and hurling them at his prone companion, envisioning a snowman, and singing a wild, swooping rendition of the carol "Jingle Bells". The first hint of light was in the sky, and on this cosy sea-coast danced Lucifer, the morning's star. His breath, it should be mentioned, had somehow or other wholly ceased to smell . . . "Come on, baby," cried invincible Gibreel, in whose behaviour the reader may, not unreasonably, perceive the delirious, dislocating effects of his recent fall. "Rise "n" shine! Let's take this place by storm." Turning his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land. "Spoono," he pleaded, "shift, baba, or are you bloody dead?" Which being uttered brought the speaker to (or at least towards) his senses. He bent over the other's prostrate form, did not dare to touch. "Not now, old Chumch," he urged. "Not when we came so far." Saladin: was not dead, but weeping. The tears of shock freezing on his face. And all his body cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth as glass, like a bad dream come true. In the miasmic semi--consciousness induced by his low body temperature he was possessed by the nightmare-fear of cracking, of seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away with the shards. He was full of questions, did we truly, I mean, with your hands flapping, and then the waters, you don't mean to tell me they _actually_, like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we could, across the ocean--floor, it never happened, couldn't have, but if not then how, or did we in some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids, the sea passing 137 through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes or no, I need to have to.. . but when his eyes opened the questions acquired the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could no longer grasp them, their tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was looking up at the sky, and noticed that it was the wrong colour entirely, blood-orange flecked with green, and the snow was blue as ink. He blinked hard but the colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that he had fallen out of the sky into some wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he considered briefly: Hell? No, no, he reassured himself as unconsciousness threatened, that can't be it, not yet, you aren't dead yet; but dying. Well then: a transit lounge. He began to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that it occurred to him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane. Then nothing existed. He was in a void, and if he were to survive he would have to construct everything from scratch, would have to invent the ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there was no need now to worry about such matters, because here in front of him was the inevitable: the tall, bony figure of Death, in a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a dark cloak flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silverheaded cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots. "What do you imagine yourselves to be doing here?" Death wanted to know. "This is private property. There's a sign." Said in a woman's voice that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled. A few moments later, Death bent over him -- _to kiss me_, he panicked silently. _To suck the breath from my body_. He made small, futile movements of protest. 138 "He's alive all right," Death remarked to, who was it, Gibreel. "But, my dear. His breath: what a pong. When did he last clean his teeth?" One man's breath was sweetened, while another's, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no sideeffects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let's be clear: great falls change people. You think _they_ fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im--. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heavenlight to hellfire. . . under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming new, and at their age at that. What? I should enumerate the changes? Good breath/bad breath. And around the edges of Gibreel Farishta's head, as he stood with his back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that she discerned a faint, but distinctly golden, _glow_. And were those bumps, at Chamcha's temples, under his sodden and still-in-place bowler hat? And, and, and. 139 When she laid eyes on the bizarre, satyrical figure of Gibreel Farishta prancing and dionysiac in the snow, Rosa Diamond did not think of _say it_ angels. Sighting him from her window, through salt--cloudy glass and age--clouded eyes, she felt her heart kick out, twice, so painfully that she feared it might stop; because in that indistinct form she seemed to discern the incarnation of her soul's most deeply buried desire. She forgot the Norman invaders as if they had never been, and struggled down a slope of treacherous pebbles, too quickly for the safety of her not-quitenonagenarian limbs, so that she could pretend to scold the impossible stranger for trespassing on her land. Usually she was implacable in defence of her beloved fragment of the coast, and when summer weekenders strayed above the high tide line she descended upon them _like a wolf on the fold_, her phrase for it, to explain and to demand: -- This is my garden, do you see. -- And if they grew brazen, -- getoutofitsillyoldmoo, itsthesoddingbeach, -- she would return home to bring out a long green garden hose and turn it remorselessly upon their tartan blankets and plastic cricket bats and bottles of sun--tan lotion, she would smash their children's sandcastles and soak their liver-- sausage sandwiches, smiling sweetly all the while: _You won't mind if I fust water my lawn?_ . . . O, she was a One, known in the village, they couldn't lock her away in any old folks' home, sent her whole family packing when they dared to suggest it, never darken her doorstep, she told them, cut the whole lot off without a penny or a by your leave. All on her own now, she was, never a visitor from week to blessed week, not even Dora Shufflebotham who went in and did for her all those years, Dora passed over September last, may she rest, still it's a wonder at her age how the old trout manages, all those stairs, she may be a bit of a bee but give the devil her due, there's many"s'd go barmy being that alone. For Gibreel there was neither a hosepipe nor the _sharp end_ of her tongue. Rosa uttered token words of reproof, held her nostrils while 140 examining the fallen and newly sulphurous Saladin (who had not, at this point, removed his bowler hat), and then, with an access of shyness which she greeted with nostalgic astonishment, stammered an invitation, yyou bbetter bring your ffriend in out of the cccold, and stamped back up the shingle to put the kettle on, grateful to the bite of the winter air for reddening her cheeks and _saving_, in the old comforting phrase, _her blushes_. As a young man Saladin Chamcha had possessed a face of quite exceptional innocence, a face that did not seem ever to have encountered disillusion or evil, with skin as soft and smooth as a princess's palm. It had served him well in his dealings with women, and had, in point of fact, been one of the first reasons his future wife Pamela Lovelace had given for falling in love with him. "So round and cherubic," she marvelled, cupping her hands under his chin. "Like a rubber ball." He was offended. "I've got bones," he protested. "Bone _structure_." "Somewhere in there," she conceded. "Everybody does." After that he was haunted for a time by the notion that he looked like a featureless jellyfish, and it was in large part to assuage this feeling that he set about developing the narrow, haughty demeanour that was now second nature to him. It was, therefore, a matter of some consequence when, on arising from a long slumber racked by a series of intolerable dreams, prominent among which were images of Zeeny Vakil, transformed into a mermaid, singing to him from an iceberg in tones of agonizing sweetness, lamenting her inability to join him on dry land, calling him, calling; -- but when he went to her she shut him up fast in the heart of her ice-mountain, and her song changed to one of triumph and revenge. . . it was, I say, a serious matter when Saladin Chamcha 141 woke up, looked into a mirror framed in blue-and-gold Japonaiserie lacquer, and found that old cherubic face staring out at him once again; while, at his temples, he observed a brace of fearfully discoloured swellings, indications that he must have suffered, at some point in his recent adventures, a couple of mighty blows. Looking into the mirror at his altered face, Chamcha attempted to remind himself of himself. I am a real man, he told the mirror, with a real history and a planned-out future. I am a man to whom certain things are of importance: rigour, self—discipline, reason, the pursuit of what is noble without recourse to that old crutch, God. The ideal of beauty, the possibility of exaltation, the mind. I am: a married man. But in spite of his litany, perverse thoughts insisted on visiting him. As for instance: that the world did not exist beyond that beach down there, and, now, this house. That if he weren't careful, if he rushed matters, he would fall off the edge, into clouds. Things had to be _made_. Or again: that if he were to telephone his home, right now, as he should, if he were to inform his loving wife that he was not dead, not blown to bits in mid-air but right here, on solid ground, if he were to do this eminently sensible thing, the person who answered the phone would not recognize his name. Or thirdly: that the sound of footsteps ringing in his ears, distant footsteps, but coming closer, was not some temporary tinnitus caused by his fall, but the noise of some approaching doom, drawing closer, letter by letter, ellowen, deeowen, London. _Here I am, in Grandmother's house. Her big eyes, hands, teeth_. There was a telephone extension on his bedside table. There, he admonished himself. Pick it up, dial, and your equilibrium will be restored. Such maunderings: they aren't like you, not worthy of you. Think of her grief; call her now. It was night-time. He didn't know the hour. There wasn't a clock in the room and his wristwatch had disappeared somewhere along the line. 142 Should he shouldn't he? -- He dialled the nine numbers. A man's voice answered on the fourth ring. "What the hell?" Sleepy, unidentifiable, familiar. "Sorry," Saladin Chamcha said. "Excuse, please. Wrong number." Staring at the telephone, he found himself remembering a drama production seen in Bombay, based on an English original, a story by, by, he couldn't put his finger on the name, Tennyson? No, no. Somerset Maugham? -- To hell with it. -- In the original and now authorless text, a man, long thought dead, returns after an absence of many years, like a living phantom, to his former haunts. He visits his former home at night, surreptitiously, and looks in through an open window. He finds that his wife, believing herself widowed, has re-married. On the window-sill he sees a child's toy. He spends a period of time standing in the darkness, wrestling with his feelings; then picks the toy off the ledge; and departs forever, without making his presence known. In the Indian version, the story had been rather different. The wife had married her husband's best friend. The returning husband arrived at the door and marched in, expecting nothing. Seeing his wife and his old friend sitting together, he failed to understand that they were married. He thanked his friend for comforting his wife; but he was home now, and so all was well. The married couple did not know how to tell him the truth; it was, finally, a servant who gave the game away. The husband, whose long absence was apparently due to a bout of amnesia, reacted to the news of the marriage by announcing that he, too, must surely have re-married at some point during his long absence from home; unfortunately, however, now that the memory of his former life had returned he had forgotten what had happened during the years of his disappearance. He went off to ask the police to trace his new wife, even though he could remember nothing about her, not her eyes, not the simple fact of her existence. 143 The curtain fell. Saladin Chamcha, alone in an unknown bedroom in unfamiliar red-and- white striped pyjamas, lay face downwards on a narrow bed and wept. "Damn all Indians," he cried into the muffling bedclothes, his fists punching at frilly--edged pillowcases from Harrods in Buenos Aires so fiercely that the fifty-year--old fabric was ripped to shreds. "_What the hell_. The vulgarity of it, the _sod it sod it_ indelicacy. _What the hell_. That bastard, those bastards, their lack of _bastard_ taste." It was at this moment that the police arrived to arrest him. On the night after she had taken the two of them in from the beach, Rosa Diamond stood once again at the nocturnal window of her old woman's insomnia, contemplating the nine-hundredyear--old sea. The smelly one had been sleeping ever since they put him to bed, with hot- water bottles packed in tightly around him, best thing for him, let him get his strength. She had put them upstairs, Chamcha in the spare room and Gibreel in her late husband's old study, and as she watched the great shining plain of the sea she could hear him moving up there, amid the ornithological prints and bird-call whistles of the former Henry Diamond, the bolas and bullwhip and aerial photographs of the Los Alamos estancia far away and long ago, a man's footsteps in that room, how reassuring they felt. Farishta was pacing up and down, avoiding sleep, for reasons of his own. And below his footfall Rosa, looking up at the ceiling, called him in a whisper by a long-unspoken name. Martin she said. His last name the same as that of his country's deadliest snake, the viper. The vibora, _de la Cruz_. At once she saw the shapes moving on the beach, as if the forbidden name had conjured up the dead. Not again, she thought, and went for her opera-glasses. She returned to find the beach full of shadows, and 144 this time she was afraid, because whereas the Norman fleet came sailing, when it came, proudly and openly and without recourse to subterfuge, these shades were sneaky, emitting stifled imprecations and alarming, muted yaps and barks, they seemed headless, crouching, arms and legs a--dangle like giant, unshelled crabs. Scuttling, sidelong, heavy boots crunching on shingle. Lots of them. She saw them reach her boathouse on which the fading image of an eyepatched pirate grinned and brandished a cutlass, and that was too much, _I'm not having it_, she decided, and, stumbling downstairs for warm clothing, she fetched the chosen weapon of her retribution: a long coil of green garden hose. At her front door she called out in a clear voice. "I can see you quite plainly. Come out, come out, whoever you are." They switched on seven suns and blinded her, and then she panicked, illuminated by the seven blue-white floodlights around which, like fireflies or satellites, there buzzed a host of smaller lights: lanterns torches cigarettes. Her head was spinning, and for a moment she lost her ability to distinguish between _then_ and _now_, in her consternation she began to say Put out that light, don't you know there's a blackout, you'll be having Jerry down on us if you carry on so. "I'm raving," she realized disgustedly, and banged the tip of her stick into her doormat. Whereupon, as if by magic, policemen materialized in the dazzling circle of light. It turned out that somebody had reported a suspicious person on the beach, remember when they used to come in fishingboats, the illegals, and thanks to that single anonymous telephone call there were now fifty-seven uniformed constables combing the beach, their flashlights swinging crazily in the dark, constables from as far away as Hastings Eastbourne Bexhill-upon-Sea, even a deputation from Brighton because nobody wanted to miss the fun, the thrill of the chase. Fifty-seven beachcombers were accompanied by thirteen dogs, all sniffing the sea air and lifting excited legs. While up at the house away from the great 145 posse of men and dogs, Rosa Diamond found herself gazing at the five constables guarding the exits, front door, ground-floor windows, scullery door, in case the putative miscreant attempted an alleged escape; and at the three men in plain clothes, plain coats and plain hats with faces to match; and in front of the lot of them, not daring to look her in the eye, young Inspector Lime, shuffling his feet and rubbing his nose and looking older and more bloodshot than his forty years. She tapped him on the chest with the end of her stick, _at this time of night, Frank, u"hat's the meaning of_, but he wasn't going to allow her to boss him around, not tonight, not with the men from the immigration watching his every move, so he drew himself up and pulled in his chins. "Begging your pardon, Mrs. D. -- certain allegations, -- information laid before us, -- reason to believe, -- merit investigation, -- necessary to search your, -- a warrant has been obtained." "Don't be absurd, Frank dear," Rosa began to say, but just then the three men with the plain faces drew themselves up and seemed to stiffen, each of them with one leg slightly raised, like pointer dogs; the first began to emit an unusual hiss of what sounded like pleasure, while a soft moan escaped from the lips of the second, and the third commenced to roll his eyes in an oddly contented way. Then they all pointed past Rosa Diamond, into her floodlit hallway, where Mr. Saladin Chamcha stood, his left hand holding up his pyjamas because a button had come off when he hurled himself on to his bed. With his right hand he was rubbing at an eye. "Bingo," said the hissing man, while the moaner clasped .his hands beneath his chin to indicate that all his prayers had been answered, and the roller of eyes shouldered past Rosa Diamond, without standing on ceremony, except that he did mutter, "Madam, pardon _me_." 146 Then there was a flood, and Rosa was jammed into a corner of her own sitting-room by that bobbing sea of police helmets, so that she could no longer make out Saladin Chamcha or hear what he was saying. She never heard him explain about the detonation of the _Bostan_ -- there's been a mistake, he cried, I'm not one of your fishing-boat sneakers-in, not one of your ugandokenyattas, me. The policemen began to grin, I see, sir, at thirty thousand feet, and then you swam ashore. You have the right to remain silent, they tittered, but quite soon they burst out into uproarious guffaws, we've got a right one here and no mistake. But Rosa couldn't make out Saladin's protests, the laughing policemen got in the way, you've got to believe me, I'm a British, he was saying, with right of abode, too, but when he couldn't produce a passport or any other identifying document they began to weep with mirth, the tears streaming down even the blank faces of the plain-clothes men from the immigration service. Of course, don't tell me, they giggled, they fell out of your jacket during your tumble, or did the mermaids pick your pocket in the sea? Rosa couldn't see, in that laughter-heaving surge of men and dogs, what uniformed arms might be doing to Chamcha's arms, or fists to his stomach, or boots to his shins; nor could she be sure if it was his voice crying out or just the howling of the dogs. But she did, finally, hear his voice rise in a last, despairing shout: "Don't any of you watch TV? Don't you see? I'm Maxim. Maxim Alien." "So you are," said the popeyed officer. "And I am Kermit the Frog." What Saladin Chamcha never said, not even when it was clear that something had gone badly wrong: "Here is a London number," he neglected to inform the arresting policemen. "At the other end of the line you will find, to vouch for me, for the truth of what I'm saying, my lovely, white, English wife." No, sir. _What the hell_. Rosa Diamond gathered her strength. "Just one moment, Frank Lime," she sang out. "You look here," but the three plain men had begun their bizarre routine of hiss moan roll--eye once again, and in the sudden 147 silence of that room the eye-roller pointed a trembling finger at Chamcha and said, "Lady, if it's proof you're after, you couldn't do better than _those_." Saladin Chamcha, following the line of Popeye's pointing finger, raised his hands to his forehead, and then he knew that he had woken into the most fearsome of nightmares, a nightmare that had only just begun, because there at his temples, growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns. Before the army of policemen took Saladin Chamcha away into his new life, there was one more unexpected occurrence. Gibreel Farishta, seeing the blaze of lights and hearing the delirious laughter of the law- enforcement officers, came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and jodhpurs, chosen from Henry Diamond's wardrobe. Smelling faintly of mothballs, he stood on the first-floor landing and observed the proceedings without comment. He stood there unnoticed until Chamcha, handcuffed and on his way out to the Black Maria, barefoot, still clutching his pyjamas, caught sight of him and cried out, "Gibreel, for the love of God tell them what's what." Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel. "And who might this be?" inquired Inspector Lime. "Another skydiver?" But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights were switched off, the order to do so having been given when Chamcha was handcuffed and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it became clear to everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from the direction of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly outwards from a point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never referred to that light again, and if he had 148 been asked about it would have denied ever having seen such a thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century, pull the other one. But at any rate, when Gibreel asked, "What do these men want?", every man there was seized by the desire to answer his question in literal, detailed terms, to reveal their secrets, as if he were, as if, but no, ridiculous, they would shake their heads for weeks, until they had all persuaded themselves that they had done as they did for purely logical reasons, he was Mrs. Diamond's old friend, the two of them had found the rogue Chamcha halfdrowned on the beach and taken him in for humanitarian reasons, no call to harass either Rosa or Mr. Farishta any further, a more reputable looking gentleman you couldn't wish to see, in his smoking jacket and his, his, well, eccentricity never was a crime, anyhow. "Gibreel," said Saladin Chamcha, "help." But Gibreel's eye had been caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her, and could not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt was made to stop him. When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel Farishta, looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa's bedroom, and there wasn't any light shining around the bastard's head. _Kan an ma kan/Fi qadim azzaman_ ... It was so, it was not, in a time long forgot, that there lived in the silver-land of Argentina a certain Don Enrique Diamond, who knew much about birds and little about women, and his wife, Rosa, who knew nothing about men but a good deal about love. One day it so happened that when the sefiora was out riding, sitting sidesaddle and wearing a hat with a feather in it, she 149 arrived at the Diamond estancia's great stone gates, which stood insanely in the middle of the empty pampas, to find an ostrich running at her as hard as it could, running for its life, with all the tricks and variations it could think of; for the ostrich is a crafty bird, difficult to catch. A little way behind the ostrich was a cloud of dust full of the noises of hunting men, and when the ostrich was within six feet of her the cloud sent bolas to wrap around its legs and bring it crashing to the ground at her grey mare's feet. The man who dismounted to kill the bird never took his eyes off Rosa's face. He took a silver-hafted knife from a scabbard at his belt and plunged it into the bird's throat, all the way up to the hilt, and he did it without once looking at the dying ostrich, staring into Rosa Diamond's eyes while he knelt on the wide yellow earth. His name was Martin de la Cruz. After Chamcha had been taken away, Gibreel Farishta often wondered about his own behaviour. In that dreamlike moment when he had been trapped by the eyes of the old Englishwoman it had seemed to him that his will was no longer his own to command, that somebody else's needs were in charge. Owing to the bewildering nature of recent events, and also to his determination to stay awake as much as possjble, it was a few days before he connected what was going on to the world behind his eyelids, and only then did he understand that he had to get away, because the universe of his nightmares had begun to leak into his waking life, and if he was not careful he would never manage to begin again, to be reborn with her, through her, Alleluia, who had seen the roof of the world. He was shocked to realize that he had made no attempt to contact Allie at all; or to help Chamcha in his time of need. Nor had he been at all perturbed by the appearance on Saladin's head of a pair of fine new horns, a thing that should surely have occasioned some concern. He had been in some sort of trance, and when he asked the old dame what she thought of it all she smiled weirdly and told him that there was nothing 150 new under the sun, she had seen things, the apparitions of men with horned helmets, in an ancient land like England there was no room for new stories, every blade of turf had already been walked over a hundred thousand times. For long periods of the day her talk became rambling and confused, but at other times she insisted on cooking him huge heavy meals, shepherd's pies, rhubarb crumble with thick custard, thick--gravied hotpots, all manner of weighty soups. And at all times she wore an air of inexplicable contentment, as if his presence had satisfied her in some deep, unlookedfor way. He went shopping in the village with her; people stared; she ignored them, waving her imperious stick. The days passed. Gibreel did not leave. "Blasted English mame," he told himself. "Some type of extinct species. What the hell am I doing here?" But stayed, held by unseen chains. While she, at every opportunity, sang an old song, in Spanish, he couldn't understand a word. Some sorcery there? Some ancient Morgan Le Fay singing a young Merlin into her crystal cave? Gibreel headed for the door; Rosa piped up; he stopped in his tracks. "Why not, after all," he shrugged. "The old woman needs company. Faded grandeur, I swear! Look what she's come to here. Anyhow, I need the rest. Gather my forces. Just a coupla days." In the evenings they would sit in that drawing-room stuffed with silver ornaments, including on the wall a certain silver-hafted knife, beneath the plaster bust of Henry Diamond that stared down from the top of the corner cabinet, and when the grandfather clock struck six he would pour two glasses of sherry and she would begin to talk, but not before she said, as predictably as clockwork, _Grandfather is always four minutes late, for good manners, he doesn't like to be too punctual_. Then she began without bothering with onceuponatime, and whether it was all true or all false he could see the fierce energy that was going into the telling, the last desperate reserves of her will that she was putting into her story, _the only bright time I can remember_, she told 151 him, so that he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room, and that the silver land of the past was her preferred abode, not this dilapidated house in which she was constantly bumping into things, -- knocking over coffee-tables, bruising herself on doorknobs -- bursting into tears, and crying out: _Everything shrinks_. When she sailed to Argentina in 1935 as the bride of the Anglo- Argentine Don Enrique of Los Alamos, he pointed to the ocean and said, that's the pampa. You can't tell how big it is by looking at it. You have to travel through it, the unchangingness, day after day. In some parts the wind is strong as a fist, but it's completely silent, it'll knock you flat but you'll never hear a thing. No trees is why: not an ombii, not a poplar, nada. And you have to watch out for ombii leaves, by the way. Deadly poison. The wind won't kill you but the leaf-juice can. She clapped her hands like a child: Honestly, Henry, silent winds, poisonous leaves. You make it sound like a fairy-story. Henry, fairhaired, soft- bodied, wide-eyed and ponderous, looked appalled. _Oh, no_, he said. _It's not so bad as that_. She arrived in that immensity, beneath that infinite blue vault of sky, because Henry popped the question and she gave the only answer that a forty-year-old spinster could. But when she arrived she asked herself a bigger question: of what was she capable in all that space? What did she have the courage for, how could she _expand?_ To be good or bad, she told herself: but to be _new_. Our neighbour Doctor Jorge Babington, she told Gibreel, never liked me, you know, he would tell me tales of the British in South America, always such gay blades, he said contemptuously, spies and brigands and looters. _Are you such exotics in your cold England?_ he asked her, and answered his own question, _sefiora, I don't think so. Crammed into that coffin of an island, you must find wider horizons to express these secret selves_. 152 Rosa Diamond's secret was a capacity for love so great that it soon became plain that her poor prosaic Henry would never fulfil it, because whatever romance there was in that jellied frame was reserved for birds. Marsh hawks, screamers, snipe. In a small rowing boat on the local lagunas he spent his happiest days amid the buirushes with his field- glasses to his eyes. Once on the train to Buenos Aires he embarrassed Rosa by demonstrating his favourite bird-calls in the dining-car, cupping his hands around his mouth: sleepyhead bird, vanduria ibis, trupial. Why can't you love me this way, she wanted to ask. But never did, because for Henry she was a good sort, and passion was an eccentricity of other races. She became the generalissimo of the homestead, and tried to stifle her wicked longings. At night she took to walking out into the pampa and lying on her back to look at the galaxy above, and sometimes, under the influence of that bright flow of beauty, she would begin to tremble all over, to shudder with a deep delight, and to hum an unknown tune, and this star-music was as close as she came to joy. Gibreel Farishta: felt her stories winding round him like a web, holding him in that lost world where _fifty sat down to dinner every day, what men they were, our gauchos, nothing servile there, very fierce and proud, very. Pure carnivores; you can see it in the pictures_. During the long nights of their insomnia she told him about the heat-haze that would come over the pampa so that the few trees stood out like islands and a rider looked like a mythological being, galloping across the surface of the ocean. _It was like the ghost of the sea_. She told him campfire stories, for example about the atheist gaucho who disproved Paradise, when his mother died, by calling upon her spirit to return, every night for seven nights. On the eighth night he announced that she had obviously not heard him, or she would certainly have come to console her beloved son; therefore, death must be the end. She snared him in descriptiSns of the days when the Peron people came in their white suits and slicked down hair and the peons chased them off, she 153 cold him how the railroads were built by the Anglos to service their estancias, and the dams, too, the story, for example, of her friend Claudette, "a real heartbreaker, my dear, married an engineer chap name of Granger, disappointed half the Hurlingham. Off they went to some dam he was building, and next thing they heard, the rebels were coming to blow it up. Granger went with the men to guard the dam, leaving Claudette alone with the maid, and wouldn't you know, a few hours later, the maid came running, senora, ees one hombre at the door, ees as beeg as a house. What else? A rebel captain. -- "And your spouse, madame?" -- "Waiting for you at the dam, as he should be." -- "Then since he has not seen fit to protect you, the revolution will." And he left guards outside the house, my dear, quite a thing. But in the fighting both men were killed, husband and captain and Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by side into the ground, mourned for them both. After that we knew she was a dangerous lot, _trop fatale_, eh? What? _Trop_ jolly _fatale_." In the tall story of the beautiful Clau-- dette, Gibreel heard the music of Rosa's own longings. At such moments he would catch sight of her looking at him from the corners of her eyes, and he would feel a tugging in the region of his navel, as if something were trying to come out. Then she looked away, and the sensation faded. Perhaps it was only a sideeffect of stress. He asked her one night if she had seen the horns growing on Chamcha's head, but she went deaf and, instead of answering, told him how she would sit on a camp stool by the galpon or bull-pen at Los Alamos and the prize bulls would come up and lay their horned heads in her lap. One afternoon a girl named Aurora del Sol, who was the fiancee of Martin de la Cruz, let fall a saucy remark: I thought they only did that in the laps of virgins, she stage-whispered to her giggling friends, and Rosa turned to her sweetly and replied, Then perhaps, my dear, you would like to try? From that time Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at the 154 estancia and the most desirable oi all the peon women, became the deadly enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman from over the sea. "You look just like him," Rosa Diamond said as they stood at her night- time window, side by side, looking out to sea. "His double. Martin de la Cruz." At the mention of the cowboy's name Gibreel felt so violent a pain in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. Rosa Diamond appeared not to hear. "Look," she cried happily, "over there." Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the holiday camp, -- running along the water's edge so that the incoming tide washed away its footprints, -- swerving and feinting, running for its life, there came a fullgrown, large--as--life ostrich. Down the beach it fled, and Gibreel's eyes followed it in wonder, until he could no longer make it out in the dark. The next thing that happened took place in the village. They had gone into town to collect a cake and a bottle of champagne, because Rosa had remembered that it was her eighty-ninth birthday. Her family had been expelled from her life, so there had been no cards or telephone calls. Gibreel insisted that they should hold some sort of celebration, and showed her the secret inside his shirt, a fat money-belt full of pounds sterling acquired on the black market before leaving Bombay. "Also credit cards galore," he said. "I am no indigent fellow. Come, let us go. My treat." He was now so deeply in thrall to Rosa's narrative sorcery that he hardly remembered from day to day that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise by the simple fact of his being alive, or any such thing. Trailing behind her meekly, he carried Mrs. Diamond's shopping-bags. 155 He was loafing around on a Street corner while Rosa chatted to the baker when he felt, once again, that dragging hook in his stomach, and he fell against a lamp--post and gasped for air. He heard a clip-clopping hoise, and then around the corner came an archaic pony-trap, full of young people in what seemed at first sight to be fancy dress: the men in tight black trousers studded at the calf with silver buttons, their white shirts open almost to the waist; the women in wide skirts of frills and layers and bright colours, scarlet, emerald, gold. They were Singing in a foreign language and their gaiety made the street look dim and tawdry, but Gibreel realized that something weird was afoot, because nobody else in the street took the slightest notice of the ponytrap. Then Rosa emerged from the baker's with the cake-box dangling by its ribbon from the index finger of her left hand, and exclaimed: "Oh, there they are, arriving for the dance. We always had dances, you know, they like it, it's in their blood." And, after a pause: "That was the dance at which he killed the vulture." That was the dance at which a certain Juan Julia, nicknamed The Vulture on account of his cadaverous appearance, drank too much and insulted the honour of Aurora del Sol, and didn't stop until Martin had no option but to fight, _hey Martin, why you enjoy fi4cking with this one, I thought she was pretty dull_. "Let us go away from the dancing," Martin said, and in the darkness, silhouetted against the fairy-lights hung from the trees around the dance-floor, the two men wrapped ponchas around their forearms, drew their knives, circled, fought. Juan died. Martin de la Cruz picked up the dead man's hat and threw it at the feet of Aurora del Sol. She picked up the hat and watched him walk away. Rosa Diamond at eighty-nine in a long silver sheath dress with a cigarette holder in one gloved hand and a silver turban on her head drank gin-and-sin from a green glass triangle and told stories of the 156 good old days. "I want to dance," she announced suddenly. "It's my birthday and I haven't danced once." The exertions of that night on which Rosa and Gibreel danced until dawn proved too much for the old lady, who collapsed into bed the next day with a low fever that induced ever more delirious apparitions: Gibreel saw Martin de la Cruz and Aurora del Sol dancing flamenco on the tiled and gabled roof of the Diamond house, and Peronistas in white suits stood on the boathouse to address a gathering of peons about the future: "Under Peron these lands will be expropriated and distributed among the people. The British railroads also will become the property of the state. Let's chuck them out, these brigands, these privateers ..." The plaster bust of Henry Diamond hung in mid-air, observing the scene, and a white--suited agitator pointed a finger at him and cried, That's him, your oppressor; there is the enemy. Gibreel's stomach ached so badly that he feared for his life, but at the very moment that his rational mind was considering the possibility of an ulcer or appendicitis, the rest of his brain whispered the truth, which was that he was being held prisoner and manipulated by the force of Rosa's will, just as the Angel Gibreel had been obliged to speak by the overwhelming need of the Prophet, Mahound. "She's dying," he realized. "Not long to go, either." Tossing in her bed in the fever's grip Rosa Diamond muttered about ombii poison and the enmity of her neighbour Doctor Babington, who asked Henry, is your wife perhaps quiet enough for the pastoral life, and who gave her (as a present for recovering from typhus) a copy of Amerigo Vespucci's account of his voyages. "The man was a notorious fantasist, of course," Babington smiled, "but fantasy can be stronger than fact; after all, he had continents named after him." As she grew weaker she poured more and more of her remaining strength into her own dream of Argentina, and Gibreel's navel felt as if it had been set on fire. He lay slumped in 157 an armchair at her bedside and the apparitions multiplied by the hour. Woodwind music filled the air, and, most wonderful of all, a small white island appeared just off the shore, bobbing on the waves like a raft; it was white as snow, with white sand sloping up to a clump of albino trees, which were white, chalk--white, paper--white, to the very tips of their leaves. After the arrival of the white island Gibreel was overcome by a deep lethargy. Slumped in an armchair in the bedroom of the dying woman, his eyelids drooping, he felt the weight of his body increase until all movement became impossible. Then he was in another bedroom, in tight black trousers, with silver buttons along the calves and a heavy silver buckle at the waist. _You sent for me, Don Enrique_, he was saying to the soft, heavy man with a face like a white plaster bust, but he knew who had asked for him, and he never took his eyes from her face, even when he saw the colour rising from the white frill around her neck. Henry Diamond had refused to permit the authorities to become involved in the matter of Martin de la Cruz, _these people are my responsibility_, he told Rosa, _it is a question of honour_. Instead he had gone to some lengths to demonstrate his continuing trust in the killer, de la Cruz, for example by making him the captain of the estancia polo team. But Don Enrique was never really the same once Martin had killed the Vulture. He was more and more easily exhausted, and became listless, uninterested even in birds. Things began to come apart at Los Alamos, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously. The men in the white suits returned and were not chased away. When Rosa Diamond contracted typhus, there were many at the estancia who took it for an allegory of the old estate's decline. _What am I doing here_, Gibreel thought in great alarm, as he stood before Don Enrique in the rancher's study, while Dona Rosa blushed in the background, _this is someone else's place_. -- Great confidence in 158 you, Henry was saying, not in English but Gibreel could still understand. -- My wife is to undertake a motor tour, for her convalescence, and you will accompany . . . Responsibilities at Los Alamos prevent me from going along. _Now I must speak, what to say_, but when his mouth opened the alien words emerged, it will be my honour, Don Enrique, click of heels, swivel, exit. Rosa Diamond in her eighty-nine-year-old weakness had begun to dream her story of stories, which she had guarded for more than half a century, and Gibreel was on a horse behind her Hispano-Suiza, driving from estancia to estancia, through a wood of arayana trees, beneath the high cordillera, arriving at grotesque homesteads built in the style of Scottish castles or Indian palaces, visiting the land of Mr. Cadwallader Evans, he of the seven wives who were happy enough to have only one night of duty each per week, and the territory of the notorious MacSween who had become enamoured of the ideas arriving in Argentina from Germany, and had started flying, from his estancia's flagpole, a red flag at whose heart a crooked black cross danced in a white circle. It was on the MacSween estancia that they came across the lagoon, and Rosa saw for the first time the white island of her fate, and insisted on rowing out for a picnic luncheon, accompanied neither by maid nor by chauffeur, taking only Martin de la Cruz to row the boat and to spread a scarlet cloth upon the white sand and to serve her with meat and wine. _As white as snow and as red as blood and as black as ebony_. As she reclined in black skirt and white blouse, lying upon scarlet which itself lay over white, while he (also wearing black and white) poured red wine into the glass in her white-gloved hand, -- and then, to his own astonishment, _bloody goddamn_, as he caught at her hand and began to kiss, -- something happened, the scene grew blurred, one minute they were lying on the scarlet cloth, rolling all over it so that cheeses and cold cuts and salads and pates were crushed beneath the weight of their 159 desire, and when they returned to the Hispano-Suiza it was impossible to conceal anything from chauffeur or maid on account of the foodstains all over their clothes, -- while the next minute she was recoiling from him, not cruelly but in sadness, drawing her hand away and making a tiny gesture of the head, no, and he stood, bowed, retreated, leaving her with virtue and lunch intact, -- the two possibilities kept alternating, while dying Rosa tossed on her bed, did- she-didn't-she, making the last version of the story of her life, unable to decide what she wanted to be true. "I'm going crazy," Gibreel thought. "She's dying, but I'm losing my mind." The moon was out, and Rosa's breathing was the only sound in the room: snoring as she breathed in and exhaling heavily, with small grunting noises. Gibreel tried to rise from his chair, and found he could not. Even in these intervals between the visions his body remained impossibly heavy. As if a boulder had been placed upon his chest. And the images, when they came, continued to be confused, so that at one moment he was in a hayloft at Los Alamos, making love to her while she murmured his name, over and over, _Martin of the Cross_, -- and the next moment she was ignoring him in broad daylight beneath the watching eyes of a certain Aurora del Sol, -- so that it was not possible to distinguish memory from wishes, or guilty reconstructions from confessional truths, -- because even on her deathbed Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye. Moonlight streamed into the room. As it struck Rosa's face it appeared to pass right through her, and indeed Gibreel was beginning to be able to make out the pattern of the lace embroidery on her pillowcase. Then he saw Don Enrique and his friend, the puritanical and disapproving Dr. Babington, standing on the balcony, as solid as you could wish. It occurred to him that as the apparitions increased in clarity Rosa grew fainter and fainter, fading away, exchanging places, one might say, with 160 the ghosts. And because he had also understood that the manifestations depended on him, his stomach--ache, his stone--like weightiness, he began to fear for his own life as well. "You wanted me to falsify Juan Julia's death certificate," Dr. Babington was saying. "I did so out of our old friendship. But it was wrong to do so; and I see the result before me. You have sheltered a killer and it is, perhaps, your conscience that is eating you away. Go home, Enrique. Go home, and take that wife of yours, before something worse happens." "I am home," Henry Diamond said. "And I take exception to your mention of my wife." "Wherever the English settle, they never leave England," Dr. Babington said as he faded into the moonlight. "Unless, like Dona Rosa, they fall in love." A cloud passed across the moonlight, and now that the balcony was empty Gibreel Farishta finally managed to force himself out of the chair and on to his feet. Walking was like dragging a ball and chain across the floor, but he reached the window. In every direction, and as far as he could see, there were giant thistles waving in the breeze. Where the sea had been there was now an ocean of thistles, extending as far as the horizon, thistles as high as a full-grown man. He heard the disembodied voice of Dr. Babington mutter in his ear: "The first plague of thistles for fifty years. The past, it seems, returns." He saw a woman running through the thick, rippling growth, barefoot, with loose dark hair. "She did it," Rosa's voice said clearly behind him. "After betraying him with the Vulture and making him into a murderer. He wouldn't look at her after that. Oh, she did it all right. Very dangerous one, that one. Very." Gibreel lost sight of Aurora del Sol in the thistles; one mirage obscured another. 161 He felt something grab him from behind, spin him around and fling him flat on his back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand that she had given up hope of clinging on to life, and needed him to help her complete the last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt helpless, ignorant . . . she seemed to know, however, how to draw the images from him. Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord. Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his horse to drink, and she came riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing her, loosening her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now she was whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he spoke comforting words. Now she rose, dressed, rode away, while he remained there, his body languid and warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman's hand stole out of the thistles and took hold of his silver--hafted knife. . . No! No! No, this way! Now she rode up to him by the pond, and the moment she dismounted, looking nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn't bear her rejections any longer, they fell to the ground together, she screamed, he tore at her clothes, and her hands, clawing at his body, came upon the handle of a knife... No! No, never, no! This way: here! Now the two of them were making love, tenderly, with many slow caresses; and now a third rider entered the clearing by the pool, and the lovers rushed apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his rival's heart, --. 162 -- and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is for Juan, and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English whore, --. -- and he felt his victim's knife entering his heart, as Rosa stabbed him, once, twice, and again, --. -- and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead man's knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound. Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point. When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to herself, so softly that he could barely make out the words. "The pampero came, the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they found him, or was it before." The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in Rosa Diamond's face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged that nobody was to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique took Dona Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the train at the Los Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the platform, wearing borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once the train had started moving, Rosa Diamond opened the holdall on the seat beside her, and said defiantly, _I brought something. A little souvenir_. And unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife. "Henry died the first winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The end." She paused. "To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It isn't to be borne." And, after a further silence: "Everything shrinks." There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling. Rosa Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on the 163 patchwork counterpane. She looked: _normal_. Gibreel realized that there was nothing to prevent him from walking out of the door. He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady; found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond, and the grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique's name had been sewn by his wife's own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got outside a wind snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He chased it, caught it, jammed it back on. _London shareef, here I come_. He had the city in his pocket: Geographers' London, the whole dog-eared metropolis, A to Z. "What to do?" he was thinking. "Phone or not phone? No, just turn up, ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your bed, takes more than a plane crash to keep me away from you. -- Okay, maybe not quite, but words to that effect. -- Yes. Surprise is the best policy. Allie Bibi, boo to you." Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boathouse with the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was familiar, although a little different, less quavery; _younger_. The boathouse door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards the song. "Take your coat off," she said. She was dressed as she had been on the day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless. He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing in the confined, moonlit space. She lay down amid the random clutter of an English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side. "How can you like me?" she murmured. "I am so much older than you." 164 When they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha broke down for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to giggle hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing hilarity of his captors. The three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits, and it was one of these -- the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was Stein -- who had "de— bagged" Saladin with a merry cry of, "Opening time, Packy; let's see what you're made of!" Red-and-white stripes were dragged off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with two stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable's boot placed firmly upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general mirthful din. His horns kept banging against things, the wheel--arch, the uncarpeted floor or a policeman's shin -- on these last occasions he was soundly buffeted about the face by the understandably irate law—enforcement officer -- and he was, in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth. His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy. Below the knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven hoofs, such as one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. "What's this, then?" joked Novak -- the former "Hisser" -- giving it a playful tweak. "Fancy one of us, maybe?" Whereupon the "moaning" immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted, "Nah, that ain't it. Seems 165 like we really got his goat." "I get it," Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. "Hey! Hey!" howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. "Listen, here's an even better ... no wonder he's so fucking _horny_." At which the three of them, repeating many times "Got his goat. . . horny.. ." fell into one another's arms and howled with delight. Chamcha wanted to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into goat--bleats, and, besides, the policeman's boot had begun to press harder than ever on his chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled Chamcha was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and unprecedented -- that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp -- was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine. "This isn't England," he thought, not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-- sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and that everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were the case, his long—standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look pretty foolish. -- But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being, whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which every schoolboy knew? -- Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually perished in the _Bostan_ disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some hospital ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him, not least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call, and a man's voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget . . . He felt a sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him doubt the truth of all such hallucination-theories. He returned his attention to the actual, to this present comprising a sealed 166 police van containing three immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the moment at any rate, all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of fear. Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. "Animal," Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in: "You're all the same. Can't expect animals to observe civilized standards. Eh?" And Novak took up the thread: "We're talking about fucking personal hygiene here, you little fuck." Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft, pellety objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes were goatish now. The humiliation of it! He was -- had gone to some lengths to become -- a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle- repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth! "My good fellows," he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, "my good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it's too late." Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. "What's that? What was that noise?" he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, "Search me." "Tell you what it sounded like," Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: "Maaaa-aa!" Then the three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, by this macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold. 167 The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. "In this country," he informed Saladin, "we clean up our messes." The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling position. "That's right," said Novak, "clean it up." Joe Bruno placed a large hand behind Chamcha's neck and pushed his head down towards the pellet-littered floor. "Off you go," he said, in a conversational voice. "Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off." Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, -- or, to put it another way, as the circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and outre -- Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his colleagues called "Mack" or "Jockey", turned out to be a large, burly man with a thick roller--coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired, was exaggeratedly Scottish. "Tha's the ticket," he remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. "An actor, was it? I'm partial to watchin" a guid man perform." This observation prompted Officer Novak -- that is, "Kim" -- who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television soap--opera stars and gameshow hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting dramatically with the darker hair on his head, -- Bruno, the youngest of the three, asked lasciviously, what about 168 watchin" girls, then, that's my game. This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the constables in their places. "Little children," Mr. Stein admonished them, "should be seen an" no hearrud." By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself not to vomit, knowing that such an error would only prolong his misery. He was crawling about on the floor of the van, seeking out the pellets of his torture as they rolled from side to side, and the policemen, needing an outlet for the frustration engendered by the immigration officer's rebuke, began to abuse Saladin roundly and pull the hair on his rump to increase both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five policemen defiantly started up their own version of the immigration officers' conversation, and set to analysing the merits of divers movie stars, darts players, professional wrestlers and the like; but because they had been put into a bad humour by the loftiness of "Jockey" Stein, they were unable to maintain the abstract and intellectual tone of their superiors, and fell to quarrelling over the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur "double" team of the early 1960s and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, -- in which the Liverpool supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the great Danny Blanchflower was a "luxury" player, a cream puff, fldwer by name, pansy by nature; -- whereupon the offended claque responded by shouting that in the case of Liverpool it was the supporters who were the bum-boys, the Spurs mob could take them apart with their arms tied behind their backs. Of course all the constables were familiar with the techniques of football hooligans, having spent many Saturdays with their backs to the game watching the spectators in the various stadiums up and down the country, and as their argument grew heated they reached the point of wishing to demonstrate, to their opposing colleagues, exactly what they meant by "tearing apart", " bollocking", 169 "bottling" and the like. The angry factions glared at one another and then, all together, they turned to gaze upon the person of Saladin Chamcha. Well, the ruckus in that police van grew noisier and noisier, -- and it's true to say that Chamcha was partly to blame, because he had started squealing like a pig, -- and the young bobbies were thumping and gouging various parts of his anatomy, using him both as a guinea-pig and a safety-valve, remaining careful, in spite of their excitation, to confine their blows to his softer, more fleshy parts, to minimize the risk of breakages and bruises; and when Jockey, Kim and Joey saw what their juniors were getting up to, they chose to be tolerant, because boys would have their fun. Besides, all this talk of watching had brought Stein, Bruno and Novak round to an examination of weightier matters, and now, with solemn faces and judicious voices, they were speaking of the need, in this day and age, for an increase in observation, not merely in the sense of "spectating", but in that of "watchfulness", and "surveillance". The young constables' experience was extremely relevant, Stein intoned: watch the crowd, not the game. "Eternal vigilance is the price o" liberty," he proclaimed. "Eek," cried Chamcha, unable to avoid interrupting. "Aargh, unnhh, owoo." After a time a curious mood of detachment fell upon Saladin. He no longer had any idea of how long they had been travelling in the Black Maria of his hard fall from grace, nor could he have hazarded a guess as to the proximity of their ultimate destination, even though the tinnitus in his ears was growing gradually louder, those phantasmal grandmother's footsteps, ellowen, deeowen, London. The blows raining 170 down on him now felt as soft as a lover's caresses; the grotesque sight of his own metamorphosed body no longer appalled him; even the last pellets of goatexcrement failed to stir his much--abused stomach. Numbly, he crouched down in his little world, trying to make himself smaller and smaller, in the hope that he might eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom. The talk of surveillance techniques had reunited immigration officers and policemen, healing the breach caused by Jockey Stein's words of puritanical reproof. Chamcha, the insect on the floor of the van, heard, as if through a telephone scrambler, the faraway voices of his captors speaking eagerly of the need for more video equipment at public events and of the benefits of computerized information, and, in what appeared to be a complete contradiction, of the efficacy of placing too rich a mixture in the nosebags of police horses on the night before a big match, because when equine stomach--upsets led to the marchers being showered with shit it always provoked them into violence, _an" then we can really get amongst them, can't we just_. Unable to find a way of making this universe of soap operas, matchoftheday, cloaks and daggers cohere into any recognizable whole, Chamcha closed his ears to the chatter and listened to the footsteps in his ears. Then the penny dropped. "Ask the Computer!" Three immigration officers and five policemen fell silent as the foul-- smelling creature sat up and hollered at them. "What's he on about?" asked the youngest policeman -- one of the Tottenham supporters, as it happened -- doubtfully. "Shall I fetch him another whack?" "My name is Salahuddin Chamchawala, professional name Saladin Chamcha," the demi-goat gibbered. "I am a member of Actors' Equity, 171 the Automobile Association and the Garrick Club. My car registration number is suchandsuch. Ask the Computer. Please." "Who're you trying to kid?" inquired one of the Liverpool fans, but he, too, sounded uncertain. "Look at yourself. You're a fucking Packy billy. Sally-who? -- What kind of name is that for an Englishman?" Chamcha found a scrap of anger from somewhere. "And what about them?" he demanded, jerking his head at the immigration officers. "They don't sound so Anglo-Saxon to me." For a moment it seemed that they might all fall upon him and tear him limb from limb for such temerity, but at length the skull-faced Officer Novak merely slapped his face a few times while replying, "I'm from Weybridge, you cunt. Get it straight: Weybridge, where the fucking _Beatles_ used to live." Stein said: "Better check him out." Three and a half minutes later the Black Maria came to a halt and three immigration officers, five constables and one police driver held a crisis conference -- _here's a pretty effing pickle_ -- and Chamcha noted that in their new mood all nine had begun to look alike, rendered equal and identical by their tension and fear. Nor was it long before he understood that the call to the Police National Computer, which had promptly identified him as a British Citizen first class, had not improved his situation, but had placed him, if anything, in greater danger than before. -- We could say, -- one of the nine suggested, -- that he was lying unconscious on the beach. -- Won't work, -- came the reply, on account of the old lady and the other geezer. -- Then he resisted arrest and turned nasty and in the ensuing altercation he kind of fainted. -- Or the old bag was ga-ga, made no sense to any of us, and the other guy wossname never spoke up, and as for this bugger, you only have to clock the bleeder, looks like the very devil, what were we supposed to 172 chink? -- And then he went and passed out on us, so what could we do, in all fairness, I ask you, your honour, but bring him in to the medical facility at the Detention Centre, for proper care followed by observation and questioning, using our reason-to-believe guidelines; what do you reckon on something of that nature? -- It's nine against one, but the old biddy and the second bloke make it a bit of a bastard. -- Look, we can fix the tale later, first thing like I keep saying is to get him unconscious. -- Right. Chamcha woke up in a hospital bed with green slime coming up from his lungs. His bones felt as if somebody had put them in the icebox for a long while. He began to cough, and when the fit ended nineteen and a half minutes later he fell back into a shallow, sickly sleep without having taken in any aspect of his present whereabouts. When he surfaced again a friendly woman's face was looking down at him, smiling reassuringly. "You goin to be fine," she said, patting him on the shoulder. "A lickle pneumonia is all you got." She introduced herself as his physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. And added, "I never judge a person by appearances. No, sir. Don't you go thinking I do." With that, she rolled him over on to his side, placed a small cardboard box by his lips, hitched up her white housecoat, kicked off her shoes, and leaped athletically on to the bed to sit astride him, for all the world as if he were a horse that she meant to ride right through the screens surrounding his bed and out into goodness knew what manner of transmogrified landscape. "Doctor's orders," she explained. "Thirty-- minute sessions, twice a day." Without further preamble, she began pummelling him briskly about the middle body, with fightly clenched, but evidently expert, fists. For poor Saladin, fresh from his beating in the police van, this new assault was the last straw. He began to struggle beneath her pounding 173 fists, crying loudly, "Let me out of here; has anybody informed my wife?" The effort of shouting out induced a second coughing spasm that lasted seventeen and three--quarter minutes and earned him a telling off from the physiotherapist, Hyacinth. "You wastin my time," she said. "I should be done with your right lung by now and instead I hardly get started. You go behave or not?" She had remained on the bed, straddling him, bouncing up and down as his body convulsed, like a rodeo rider hanging on for the nine-second bell. He subsided in defeat, and allowed her to beat the green fluid out of his inflamed lungs. When she finished he was obliged to admit that he felt a good deal better. She removed the little box which was now half-full of slime and said cheerily, "You be standin up firm in no time," and then, colouring in confusion, apologized, "Excuse _me_," and fled without remembering to pull back the encircling screens. "Time to take stock of the situation," he told himself. A quick physical examination informed him that his new, mutant condition had remained unchanged. This cast his spirits down, and he realized that he had been half-hoping that the nightmare would have ended while he slept. He was dressed in a new pair of alien pyjamas, this time of an undifferentiated pale green colour, which matched both the fabric of the screens and what he could see of the walls and ceiling of that cryptic and anonymous ward. His legs still ended in those distressing hoofs, and the horns on his head were as sharp as before ... he was distracted from this morose inventory by a man's voice from nearby, crying out in heart-rending distress: "Oh, if ever a body suffered ... !" "What on earth?" Chamcha thought, and determined to investigate. But now he was becoming aware of many other sounds, as unsettling as the first. It seemed to him that he could hear all sorts of animal noises: the snorting of bulls, the chattering of monkeys, even the pretty--polly mimic-squawks of parrots or talking budgerigars. Then, from another direction, he heard a woman grunting and shrieking, at what sounded 174 like the end of a painful labour; followed by the yowling of a new-born baby. However, the woman's cries did not subside when the baby's began; if anything, they redoubled in their intensity, and perhaps fifteen minutes later Chamcha distinctly heard a second infant's voice joining the first. Still the woman's birth-agony refused to end, and at intervals ranging from fifteen to thirty minutes for what seemed like an endless time she continued to add new babies to the already improbable numbers marching, like conquering armies, from her womb. His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called itself, was also beginning to stink to the heavens; jungle and farmyard odours mingled with a rich aroma similar to that of exotic spices sizzling in clarified butter -- coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves. "This is too much," he thought firmly. "Time to get a few things sorted out." He swung his legs out of bed, tried to stand up, and promptly fell to the floor, being utterly unaccustomed to his new legs. It took him around an hour to overcome this problem -- learning to walk by holding on to the bed and stumbling around it until his confidence grew. At length, and not a little unsteadily, he made his way to the nearest screen; whereupon the face of the immigration officer Stein appeared, Cheshire-Cat--like, between two of the screens to his left, followed rapidly by the rest of the fellow, who drew the screens together behind him with suspicious rapidity. "Doing all right?" Stein asked, his smile remaining wide. "When can I see the doctor? When can I go to the toilet? When can I leave?" Chamcha asked in a rush. Stein answered equably: the doctor would be round presently; Nurse Phillips would bring him a bedpan; he could leave as soon as he was well. "Damn decent of you to come down with the lung thing," Stein added, with the gratitude of an author whose character had unexpectedly solved a ticklish technical problem. "Makes the story much more convincing. Seems you were that sick, you did pass out on us after all. Nine of us remember it well. Thanks." 175 Chamcha could not find any words. "And another thing," Stein went on. "The old burd, Mrs. Diamond. Turns out to be dead in her bed, cold as mutton, and the other gentleman vanished clear away. The possibility of foul play has no as yet been eliminated." "In conclusion," he said before disappearing forever from Saladin's new life, "I suggest, Mr. Citizen Saladin, that you dinna trouble with a complaint. You'll forgive me for speaking plain, but with your wee horns and your great hoofs you wouldna look the most reliable of witnesses. Good day to you now." Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and when he opened them his tormentor had turned into the nurse and physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. "Why you wan go walking?" she asked. "Whatever your heart desires, you jus ask me, Hyacinth, and we'll see what we can fix." "Ssst." That night, in the greeny light of the mysterious institution, Saladin was awakened by a hiss out of an Indian bazaar. "Ssst. You, Beelzebub. Wake up." Standing in front of him was a figure so impossible that Chamcha wanted to bury his head under the sheets; yet could not, for was not he himself. . . ? "That's right," the creature said. "You see, you're not alone." It had an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger, with three rows of teeth. "The night guards often doze off," it explained. "That's how we manage to get to talk."