“Rushdie” himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle of liquor, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim “leader” Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. “Rushdie” was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously colored safari suits—vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits—and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film’s popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing “Rushdie” became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding.
At a certain point in the film one of the international gorillay was captured by the Israeli army and tied to a tree in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that “Rushdie” could have his evil way with him. Once “Rushdie” had finished drinking from his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man’s body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli soldiers and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. “Take him away,” he cried, “and read to him from The Satanic Verses all night!” Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely. Not that, anything but that, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away.
At the end of the film “Rushdie” was indeed killed—not by the international gorillay, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed by three large Qur’ans hanging in the sky over his head, which reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: There was dignity in that.
On July 22, 1990, the British Board of Film Classification refused International Gorillay a certificate, on the fairly self-evident grounds that it was libelous (and because the BBFC feared that if it were to license the film and the real Rushdie were to sue for defamation, the board could be accused of having become party to the libel, and could therefore be sued for damages as well). This placed the real Rushdie in something of a quandary. He was fighting a battle for free speech and yet he was being defended, in this case, by an act of censorship. On the other hand the film was a nasty piece of work. In the end he wrote a letter to the BBFC formally giving up his right of legal recourse, assuring the board that he would pursue neither the filmmaker nor the board itself in the courts, and that he did not wish to be accorded “the dubious protection of censorship.” The film should be shown so that it could be seen for the “distorted, incompetent piece of trash that it is.” On August 17, as a direct result of his intervention, the board unanimously voted to license the film; whereupon, in spite of all the producer’s efforts to promote it, it immediately sank without trace, because it was a rotten movie, and no matter what its intended audience may have thought about “Rushdie” or even Rushdie, they were too wise to throw their money away on tickets for a dreadful film.
It was, for him, an object lesson in the importance of the “better out than in” free speech argument—that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad. If International Gorillay had been banned, it would have become the hottest of hot videos and in the parlors of Bradford and Whitechapel young Muslim men would have gathered behind closed drapes to rejoice in the frying of the apostate. Out in the open, subjected to the judgment of the market, it shriveled like a vampire in sunlight, and was gone.
The events of the great world echoed in his Wimbledon redoubt. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and as war with Iraq approached the British Foreign Office began to rush to repair relations with Iran. The British and American military buildup progressed at speed. Suddenly nobody on the British or Iranian side was mentioning the “Rushdie case” at all and Frances D’Souza called to say she was very worried that he would be “bypassed.” He called Michael Foot, who said he would find out more. The next day Michael said he had been “reassured,” but that didn’t sound reassuring. His man at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Duncan Slater, asked him to write yet another “mollifying statement” for the FCO to hold and use “when it seemed most useful.” It was hard to know, he said, how Iran would “jump.” They might use the international crisis as a moment to “solve their problems” with the British, or they might think that they could now push to restore relations without making concessions.
A public library in Rochdale, Lancashire, was firebombed.
He had arranged with Liz Calder to borrow her London apartment while she was on holiday with Clarissa and Zafar, to meet with an American journalist and other friends. She said that a colleague of hers, an editor at Bloomsbury called Elizabeth West, would be visiting the apartment from time to time to feed the parrot, Juju.
“Maybe you should touch base with her before you go,” Liz said, “so that nobody gets any nasty surprises.” He called Elizabeth and told her his plans. They spoke on the phone for a surprisingly long time and laughed a good deal, and in the end he suggested he could stay on at Liz’s place after the journalist left and they could meet there for some quiet parrot maintenance. The police went to a wine store for him and bought, on his instructions, three bottles of wine, including one of the rich Tuscan red Tignanello. And then under the parrot’s eye there was dinner by candlelight, salmon, and a salad of nasturtiums, and much too much red wine.
Love never came at you from the direction you were looking in. It crept up on you and whacked you behind the ear. In the months since Marianne’s exit there had been some flirtatious telephone calls and, very occasionally, meetings with women, most of whom, he was fairly certain, were moved more by pity than attraction. Zafar’s latest au pair, an attractive Norwegian girl, said you can call me if you like. Most unexpected of all was a clear demonstration of sexual interest from a liberal Muslim journalist. These were the straws he had been grasping at to save himself from drowning. Then he met Elizabeth West and the thing happened that could never be foreseen: the connection, the spark. Life was not ruled by fate, but by chance. If it had not been for a thirsty parrot, he might never have met the future mother of his second son.
By the end of their first evening he knew he wanted to see her again as soon as possible. Was she free the next day, he asked her, and she said yes, she was. They would meet at Liz’s apartment again at 8 P.M. and he was shocked by how deep his feelings for her already were. She had long, rich chestnut hair and a brilliant and carefree smile and she bicycled into his life as if there were nothing to it, as if the whole smothering apparatus of fear and protection and restraint simply didn’t exist. This was true and exceptional courage: the ability to act normally in an abnormal situation. She was fourteen years younger than he but there was a seriousness beneath the freewheeling exterior that spoke of experience, hinting at the kind of knowledge that comes only from pain. It would have been absurd not to be smitten by her. They quickly discovered a strange coincidence: that he had arrived in England for the first time, accompanied by his father, on his way to Rugby School, on the day that she was born. So in fact they had both arrived on the same day. It felt like an omen, though obviously he did not believe in the ominous. “It was a sunny day,” he told her. “And cold.” He told her about the Cumberland Hotel and watching television for the first time—The Flintstones and then the incomprehensible-to-him northern soap
opera Coronation Street featuring the ferocious busybody Ena Sharples glowering in her hairnet. He described the chocolate milk shakes at Lyons Corner House and the rotisserie chicken at the Kardomah takeout and he told her what the advertising billboards said, UNZIP A BANANA for Fyffes, and, for Schweppes, TONIC WATER BY SCHHH … YOU-KNOW-WHO. She said, “Can you come back again on Monday? I’ll cook dinner.”
The police were concerned about a third visit in four days to the same address but he put his foot down and they gave in. That evening she told him something about her life though she was guarded about much of it and he sensed again the pain of her childhood, the lost mother, the aging father, the strange Cinderella life with the relatives who took her in. There was a woman she would not name, who had been unkind to her, whom she referred to only as the woman who looked after me then. In the end she had found happiness with an older cousin named Carol Knibb, who had become a second mother to her. She had gone to Warwick University and studied literature. And she liked his books. There were long hours of talk and then they were holding hands and then kissing. When he looked at his watch it was three-thirty in the morning, long past pumpkin time, he told her, and in the other room were some extremely grouchy and tired policemen. “Very interested,” he wrote in his journal. “She’s bright, gentle, vulnerable, beautiful and loving.” Her interest in him was unfathomable and mysterious. It was always women who chose, he thought, and men’s role was to thank their lucky stars.
She had to go to see her cousin Carol in Derbyshire and then there was a long-planned holiday with a girlfriend, so they couldn’t meet again for a couple of weeks. She called from the airport to say goodbye and he wished she wasn’t going. He began to tell his friends—Bill Buford, Gillon Aitken—about her, and he told the prot officer Dick Billington that he wanted her added to “the list” so that she could visit him in Wimbledon. As he said the words he knew he had made a big decision about her. “She will have to be vetted, Joe,” Dick Billington said. Negative vetting was a quicker procedure than positive vetting. Checks would be run on her background and as long as no red flags came up she would be cleared. Positive vetting took much longer; people had to be interviewed. Legwork was involved. “That won’t be necessary in this case,” Dick said. Twenty-four hours later Elizabeth had passed the test; there were, apparently, no shady types, no Iranian or Mossad agents, in her past. He called her to tell her. “I want this,” he said. “That’s wonderful,” she replied, and so it began. Two days later she had a drink with Liz Calder (who was back from holiday) to tell her what had happened and then rode her bike up to the front door of the Wimbledon house and stayed the night. That weekend she stayed for two nights. They went to Angela Carter and Mark Pearce’s house in Clapham for dinner and Angela, not an easy woman to please, also approved. Zafar was back in London too and he came to stay and he and Elizabeth seemed to hit it off easily.
There was so much to talk about. On her third night at the Wimbledon house they stayed awake until five in the morning, telling each other stories, snoozing, making love. He couldn’t remember ever having had a night like it. Something good had begun. His heart was full. Elizabeth had filled it up.
Haroun was going over well among its early readers. This little book, written to keep a promise to a child, might prove to be perhaps his most well-loved work of fiction. Both his emotional and working life had turned a corner, he felt; which made the ridiculous way he was obliged to live feel somehow worse. Zafar said he wanted to go skiing. “Maybe you could go with your mum and I’ll pay for it,” he said. “But I want to go with you,” said his son. The words tore at his heart.
The mail arrived. In it were the first finished copies of Haroun. That cheered things up. He signed a dozen personalized copies for Zafar’s friends. In Elizabeth’s copy he wrote, “Thank you for the return of joy.”
It was becoming increasingly acceptable to believe that the “Rushdie case” wasn’t worth the trouble it had caused, because the man himself was an unworthy specimen. Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest political allies, wrote in The Independent that the author of The Satanic Verses was “an outstanding villain … [whose] public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality.” The celebrated historian, Tory peer and “authenticator” of the fraudulent “Hitler Diaries,” Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper) had wiped the egg off his face and declared, also in the Indy, “I wonder how Salman Rushdie is faring these days under the benevolent protection of British law and British police, about whom he has been so rude. Not too comfortably I hope.… I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer.”
The novelist John le Carré had said, “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity,” and, on another occasion, “Again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers and, with dignity, withdraw his book until a calmer time has come. It seems to me he has nothing more to prove except his own insensitivity.” Le Carré also disapproved of the “literary merit” argument: “Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp? Such elitism does not help Rushdie’s cause, whatever that cause has now become.” He did not say whether he would also have been against the use of “literary merit” in defense of, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses or D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary and “novelist,” was asked in the Evening Standard: “What was your most painful moment in government?” He replied, “Reading The Satanic Verses.”
In early September he met Duncan Slater at Slater’s Knightsbridge home. The many Indian pictures and artifacts revealed Slater as an unsuspected Indophile, which perhaps explained his sympathy for the invisible man. “You should use all your media connections,” Slater said. “You need positive pieces.” Nadine Gordimer had amassed an impressive list of signatories to her appeal to Iran, including Václav Havel, the French minister of culture and many other writers, academics and politicians, and Slater suggested this could be used to prompt a sympathetic editorial in, say, The Times. The Gordimer letter was published and made a small stir. Nothing changed. The Independent reported that it had received 160 letters criticizing the Tebbit statement, and two in support of it. That was something, at least.
A few days later the Italian foreign minister, Gianni de Michelis, announced that Europe and Iran were “close” to an exchange of letters that would “lift the fatwa” and make it possible to normalize relations. Slater said that the report was “a little ahead of the news,” but yes, the European Community “troika” of foreign ministers was planning to talk to Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, in the next few days.
Elizabeth had begun to tell her closest friends about her new relationship. For his part, he spoke to Isabel Fonseca and told her about Elizabeth. Then he heard that Marianne was returning to London.
On the publication day of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, September 27, 1990, Iran and the United Kingdom renewed partial diplomatic relations. Duncan Slater called from New York to say that “assurances had been received.” Iran would do nothing to implement the fatwa. However it would not be canceled and the offer of millions of dollars in bounty money (Ayatollah Sanei, who had made the original offer, kept raising the figure) would remain in place because it was “nothing to do with the government.” Slater tried to present this as a positive step but it felt like a sellout. Any deal made on his behalf by Douglas Hurd was not a deal he could trust.
The intelligence services and the Special Branch seemed to feel the same way. There was no change in the threat assessment. He would remain at level two, one step behind the queen. There would be no change in the protection arrangements. The house on St. Peter’s Street woul
d remain locked and shuttered. He would not be allowed to go home again.
But he had made a new beginning. Just then, that was what counted most. Haroun was doing well and Sonny Mehta’s nightmare scenario remained firmly in the country of his bad dreams. Kashmiris did not rise up, incensed by the name of a talking mechanical hoopoe. There was no trace of blood in the streets. Sonny had been running from shadows and now that daylight had come his bogeymen were exposed as the empty night terrors they were.
He was allowed to surface briefly, and unannounced, at a London bookstore, Waterstone’s in Hampstead, to sign copies of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Zafar came too and “helped,” passing him the books to be signed, and Bill Buford was a benign, grinning presence. For an hour he felt like an author of books again. But there was no escaping the nervousness in the eyes of the protection team. Not for the first time he understood that they, too, were afraid.
At home there was Elizabeth. They were becoming closer by the day. “I’m scared,” she told him, “because I’ve become too vulnerable to you.” He did his best to reassure her. I love you like mad and I’m not going to let you go. She feared that he was only with her faute de mieux, that when the threats ended he would go to America and abandon her. He had told her of his love of New York City and his dream of living there in freedom one day. He, whose life had been a series of uprootings (which he would try to redefine as “multiple rootings”), did not understand how profoundly English she was, how deep her roots went. From those earliest days she felt she was in competition with New York. You’ll bugger off there and leave me behind. When they had a few glasses of wine this kind of scratchiness developed between them. Neither of them thought these occasional irritations were important. Most of the time they were happy with each other. I am deeply in love, he wrote, conscious of how astonishing it was to be able to write those words. His was a heavily guarded life and he himself would not have expected love to find a way past the border controls of his strange internal exile. Yet here it was, most evenings and weekends, bicycling gaily toward him across the Thames.
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