The Satanic Verses

That little Americanizing huh was new: another of her infinite series of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again: down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the situation.) ‘I don't think I can say what I'm capable of forgiving,’ he replied. ‘That particular response seems to be out of my control; it either operates or it doesn't and I find out in due course. So let's say, for the moment, that the jury's out.’ She didn't like that, she wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his problem now. ‘I'm moving back in,’ he said. ‘It's a big house and there's plenty of room. I'll take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom, so I'll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I'm assuming that, as my body was never found, I'm still officially missing-presumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court to have me wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers.’ (Respectively, their lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her posture informing him that she wouldn't be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. ‘After that,’ he concluded, ‘we sell up and you get your divorce.’ He swept out, making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom badoom doodoodoom.

To be born again, first you have to die.

Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they'd both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, ‘that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven's sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye? ‘No,’ said the unforgiving man. – ‘Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – ‘It was the vase,’ he answered, ‘the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. ‘Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, ‘by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.’

Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears in things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it to grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something of the solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the altering of the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an eye, cha

On Gardeners' World he was shown how to achieve something called a ‘chimeran graft’ (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the pride of Otto Cone's garden); and although his inattention caused him to miss the names of the two trees that had been bred into one – Mulberry? Laburnum? Broom? – the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies – the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonization of the planet – he was given this one gift. It was enough. He switched off the set.

Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns, goat-hoofs, etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a cure was in progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not only Gibreel, but everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was irreconcilable with the prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow 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, Brita