And after Scotland came the real escape. Elizabeth and Zafar flew from London to New York. He had to go the long way around again. He flew to Oslo, waited, then caught the Scandinavian Airlines flight to JFK and arrived in pouring rain. The U.S. authorities had asked him to stay on board and after all the other passengers had deplaned they came aboard and went through all the immigration formalities. He was taken off the aircraft and driven off the airfield to the appointed meeting place with Andrew Wylie. Then he was in Andrew’s car, and the world of security retreated and set him free. No protection had been asked for and none had been offered or insisted upon. The promise of the statue in the harbor had been kept.
Freedom! Freedom! He felt a hundred pounds lighter and in the mood to sing. Zafar and Elizabeth were waiting at Andrew’s place and that evening Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, Susan Sontag and David Rieff stopped by, all of them filled with happy disbelief at seeing him free of his chains. He took Elizabeth and Zafar on a helicopter ride around the city with Andrew Wylie and Elizabeth and Andrew screamed with terror—Andrew loudly, Elizabeth silently—the whole time. After the ride they rented a car at Hertz. The round pink face of the blond Hertz girl, Debi, showed no flicker of recognition as she typed his name into the computer. Then they had a Lincoln Town Car of their own! He felt like a child with the keys to the toy store. They went out to eat with Jay McInerney and Erroll McDonald of Random House. Everything felt intensely exciting. Willie Nelson was there! And Matthew Modine! The maître d’ looked concerned, but so what. Zafar, fifteen now, was at his grown-up best. Jay treated him like a man, talked to him about girls, and Zafar loved it. He went to bed grinning and woke up with the grin still in place.
They were going to Cazenovia, New York, to stay with Michael and Valerie Herr. They had been sent elaborate directions, but he called Michael before setting off, just to be clear. “The only bit I’m not sure of,” he said, “is how to get out of New York.” With perfect comic timing Michael drawled, “Yeah, people have been trying to work that out for years, Salman.”
Every instant was a gift. Driving up the interstate felt like space travel, past the Albany galactic cluster and the Schenectady nebula toward the constellation of Syracuse. They paused in Chittenango, which had been turned into an Oz theme park: yellow brick sidewalks, Aunt Em’s Coffee Shop, awful. They pressed on to Cazenovia and then Michael was blinking at them from behind his little pebble glasses and smiling his ironic lopsided smile and Valerie was looking vaguely beatific and well. They were in the world of Jim and Jim. The Herrs’ daughters were home and there was a corgi called Pablo who came and laid its head in his lap and would not be moved. Behind the ample wooden house a pond was surrounded by wilderness. They took a night walk below a big old moon. In the morning there was a dead deer in the pond.
He learned to pronounce “Skaneateles” on the way to the Finger Lake where the writer Tobias Wolff owned a cabin. They ate in a fish bar, walked out to the end of the pier, behaved normally, felt abnormally light-headed with joy. In the evening they stopped by a bookstore and he was recognized instantly. That made Michael nervous but nobody made a fuss and he reassured Michael, “I’ll just stay away from the bookstore tomorrow.” On Sunday they stayed home with the Herrs and Toby Wolff came to lunch and he and Michael swapped stories of Vietnam.
The drive to John Irving’s place in Vermont was about three hours long. They stopped near the state line for lunch. The restaurant was run by an Algerian named Rouchdy, who inevitably grew very excited. “Rushdie! We have the same name! I always getting mistaken for you! I say, no, no, I am much better looking!” (On another visit to America an Egyptian maître d’ at Harry Cipriani in midtown New York waxed similarly lyrical. “Rushdie! I like you! That book, your book, I read it! Rushdie, I like your book, that book! I am from Egypt! Egypt! In Egypt, that book is banned! Your book! It is totally banned! But everyone has read it!”)
John and Janet Irving lived in a long house on a hillside above the town of Dorset. John said, “When we talked to the architect we just put napkin squares down in a line, some of them set at angles, like this. We told him, build it this way, and he did.” There was a New York Times bestseller list framed on a wall, with The Satanic Verses one place above John’s book. There were other framed bestseller lists and in all of them John stood at number one. Local writers came for dinner and there were shouts and arguments and drinks. He recalled that when he first met John he had had the temerity to ask him, “Why all the bears in your books? Were there bears that were important in your life?” No, John answered, and anyway—this was after The Hotel New Hampshire—he was done with bears now. He was writing the book for a ballet for Baryshnikov, he added, and there was only one problem. “What problem?” “Baryshnikov doesn’t want to wear the bear suit.”
They went to a state fair and failed dismally to guess the weight of the pig. Some pig, he said, and Elizabeth answered, Radiant. They looked at each other, finding it hard to believe that all this was really happening. After two days he bundled Elizabeth and Zafar into the Lincoln Town Car and drove to New London to get the ferry to Orient Point on the North Fork of Long Island. As the ferry left New London a black nuclear submarine like a giant blind cetacean was coming into harbor. That night they reached Andrew’s house in Water Mill. The simplest things brought them close to ecstasy. He horsed around in Andrew’s pool with Zafar and had rarely seen his teenage son so happy. Zafar Rollerbladed down the leafy lanes and he followed on a borrowed bike. They went to the beach. Zafar and Andrew’s daughter Erica got Chevy Chase’s autograph in a restaurant. Elizabeth bought summer dresses in Southampton. Then the spell broke and it was time to go home. Elizabeth and Zafar flew home on one of the many airlines that were forbidden to him. He flew to Oslo and changed planes. We are going to do this again, for much longer, he promised himself. America had given him back his liberty for a few precious days. There was no sweeter narcotic, and, like any addict, he immediately wanted more.
His new contact at the Foreign Office was an Arabist called Andrew Green, but when Green offered him a meeting, he and Frances agreed to decline it because Green had nothing new to discuss. “Is Salman very depressed?” Green asked Frances. “Is this an analytical or an emotional response?” No, he’s actually not depressed, Mr. Green, he’s just tired of being jerked around.
Frances had written to Klaus Kinkel, who now held the rotating presidency of the European Union. Kinkel sent back a stonewalling reply. No, no, no. And a member of the conservative German Christian Democratic Union was the new head of the human rights committee of the European Parliament, which was bad news too. The Germans sometimes felt very like Iran’s agents in Europe. They had their brooms out and were sweeping him under the carpet once again.
His nine stories were finding favor. Michael Dibdin in The Independent on Sunday wrote that this book did him more good and won him more friends than any number of speeches or statements, and that sounded right. Then Cat Stevens—Yusuf Islam—bubbled up in The Guardian like a fart in a bathtub, still demanding that Rushdie withdraw his book and “repent,” and claiming that his support of the fatwa was in line with the Ten Commandments. (In later years he would pretend that he had never said any of these things, never called for anyone’s murder, never justified it on the basis of his religion’s “law,” never appeared on TV or spoken to the papers to spout his uneducated bloodthirsty garbage, knowing he lived in an age in which nobody had a memory. Repeated denials could establish a new truth that erased the old one.)
Dick Wood’s new sidekick Rab Connolly, a sharp, fiery, slightly dangerous red-haired man who was taking a degree course in postcolonial literature in his spare time, called to panic about a cartoon in The Guardian showing an “establishment network” with lines connecting Mr. Anton to Alan Yentob, Melvyn Bragg, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Richard and Ruthie Rogers, and the River Café. “All those people visit you at your residence and this could prejudice the covert nature of the prot.” He pointed out that the media
in London had known for a long time who his friends were, so this was nothing new, and after a while Connolly agreed that his friends would still be allowed to visit him in spite of the cartoon. He sometimes felt he was caught in a trap of perceptions. If he tried to come out of his hole and be more visible, the press concluded he was no longer in danger, and acted accordingly, sometimes (as in the case of the Guardian cartoon) making the police feel that they had increased the risk to the Malachite principal. Then he was pushed back into the hole. On this occasion, at least, Rab Connolly did not lose his nerve. “I don’t want to stop you from going anywhere,” he said.
Out of the blue Marianne sent him a note, which was faxed to him by Gillon. “Against my will I watched you on Face to Face tonight, and I’m glad I did. There you were, as I once knew you—sweet and good and honest, discoursing about Love. Let’s bury what we made together, please.” On letterhead paper, and unsigned. He wrote to her saying he would be happy to bury the hatchet if she would just return his photographs. She did not reply.
At home, there were many tiny irritations caused by cohabiting with four policemen. Two teenagers in the street stared at the house and the police at once decided that Zafar must have told his school friends where it was. (He had not, and the teenagers were not from Highgate School.) More and more electronic security systems were brought into the house and fought with one another. When they set the alarms the police radios didn’t work and when they used the radios they jammed the alarms. They put an “outer rim” perimeter alarm system around the edges of the garden and every squirrel that ran by, every leaf that fell, triggered the alarm. “It’s like the Keystone Cops around here sometimes,” he said to Elizabeth, whose smile was forced, because the pregnancy she longed for had not happened. Tension rose in their bedroom. That did not help.
Elizabeth and he had dinner with Hitch, Carol, Martin and Isabel after a London Review of Books party and Martin was at his most emphatic. “Of course Dostoyevsky’s no fucking good.” “Of course Beckett’s no fucking good at all.” Too much wine and whiskey had been drunk and he began to argue fiercely with his friend. As their voices rose Isabel tried to intervene and he turned to her and said, “Oh, fuck off, Isabel.” He hadn’t meant to say that but the drink let it out. At once Martin bridled. “You can’t talk to my girlfriend like that. Apologize.” He said, “I’ve known her twice as long as you, and she isn’t even offended. Are you offended, Isabel?” Isabel said, “Of course I’m not offended,” but Martin had become dogged: “Apologize.”
“Or what? Or else what, Martin? Or else we go outside?” Isabel and Elizabeth both intervened to put a stop to the idiocy but Christopher said, “Let it play itself out.” “All right,” he said, “I apologize. Isabel, I apologize. Now, Martin, there’s something you have to do for me.” “What’s that?” “You have to never speak to me again as long as you live.”
The next day he felt awful and did not feel better until he had spoken to Martin and put the quarrel away, agreeing with him that such things could happen from time to time and did not affect the love they felt for each other. He told Martin that there had built up inside him a huge unscreamed scream and last night a bit of it had come out in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
In November he went to Strasbourg to the meeting of the Parliament of Writers. The men of the RAID had taken over the entire top floor of the Hotel Regent Contades to protect him. They were tense because the trial of the murderers of Shapur Bakhtiar was in progress, and the subject of the conference was the tense situation with the Islamists of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, and his presence in the city cranked up the volume considerably.
He met Jacques Derrida, who made him think of Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian, walking through life with an invisible wind machine permanently ruffling his hair. He soon realized that he and Derrida would not agree about anything. In the Algeria session he made his argument that Islam itself, Actually Existing Islam, could not be exonerated from the crimes done in its name. Derrida disagreed. The “rage of Islam” was driven not by Islam but by the misdeeds of the West. Ideology had nothing to do with it. It was a question of power.
The RAID people were getting twitchier by the hour. They announced a bomb scare at the opera house, where the writers were meeting. There was a suspicious canister and they carried out a controlled explosion. It was a fire extinguisher. The bang happened during Günter Wallraff’s speech and unnerved him for a moment. He had been ill with hepatitis and had made a special effort to come to Strasbourg “to be with you.”
That night on Arte he was asked to take the Proust questionnaire. What was his favorite word? “Comedy.” And his least favorite? “Religion.”
On the flight back, a German woman, quite young, had hysterics when he boarded the Air France flight, and left the plane, white and weeping. An announcement was made to calm things down. The passenger had left because she was not feeling well. Whereupon a mousy Englishman stood up and roared. “Oh, well, none of us are feeling well. I’m not feeling well myself. Let’s all get off.” He and his wife, a bottle blonde with big hair, an electric blue Chanel suit and much gold jewelry, got off the plane like Mr. and Mrs. Moses leading the Exodus. Fortunately, nobody followed them. And Air France agreed to go on flying him.
Ayatollah Jannati said in Tehran that the fatwa “sticks in the throats of the enemies of Islam but it cannot be revoked until that man dies.”
Clarissa was feeling better. On Christmas Day she insisted on having Zafar to herself. He and Elizabeth went to Graham and Candice’s and, in the evening, visited Jill Craigie and Michael Foot, who had been in the hospital with something unmentionable but made a big effort to make light of it. Finally Jill admitted he had had a hernia in the bowel. He had been throwing up, couldn’t eat, and they had feared cancer, so the hernia was a huge relief. “All his organs are okay,” she said, though of course at his age the operation was a major setback. “He kept telling me what to do if he was no more and of course I wouldn’t listen,” Jill said in her best no-nonsense voice. (Nobody could then have guessed that he would outlive her by eleven years.)
Michael had presents for them both, a second edition of Hazlitt’s Lives of the Poets for Elizabeth and a first edition of Lectures on the English Comic Writers for him. Michael and Jill treated them both with great love and he thought, “If I had had my choice of parents these would have been the finest I could imagine having.”
His own mother was well and safe and far away and seventy-eight years old, and he missed her.
My darling Amma,
Another year is on its last legs but we, I’m happy to say, are not. Speaking of legs, how’s your “arthur-itis”? When I was at Rugby your letters to me always began with the question “Are you fat or are you thin?” Thin meant they weren’t feeding your boy properly. Fat was good. Well, I’m getting thinner, but you should be happy. Thin is better, on the whole. In my letters from school I always tried to conceal how unhappy I was there. They were my first fictions, those letters, “scored 24 runs at cricket,” “having a great time,” “I am well and happy.” When you found out how miserable I’d been you were horrified, of course, but by then I was on my way to college. That was thirty-nine years ago. We have always concealed bad news from one another. You did it too. You’d tell Sameen everything and then say, “Don’t tell Salman, it would upset him.” What a pair we are. Anyway, the house we live in has “settled down,” to use the police parlance. It isn’t attracting any attention from the neighbors. We seem to have pulled it off, and inside this cocoon things sometimes feel almost calm, and I’m able to work. The book is going well and I can see the finish line. When a book is going well everything else in life feels tolerable; even in this strange life. I’ve been taking stock of the year. In the “minus” column, I’ve developed “late-onset” asthma, a little reward from the universe for having broken my cigarette habit. Still, at least I can never smoke again now. Inhaling smoke is plain impossible. “Late-onset” asthma is usually pret
ty mild, but it’s also incurable. Incurabubble, to paraphrase my old ad campaign. And as you always taught us, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” Among the “plusses”: the new leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, said some nice things in an interview with Julian Barnes. “I absolutely one hundred percent support him.… You can’t muck around with something like this at all.” Absolutely one hundred percent is good, na, Amma? Let’s hope the percentage doesn’t drop as and when he becomes PM. European Muslims seem to be getting almost as sick of the fatwa as I am. Dutch Muslims and French Muslims have come out against it. The French Muslims actually supported free speech and freedom of conscience! In Britain of course we still have Sacranie and Siddiqui and the Bradford clowns, so there are plenty of laughs. And in Kuwait an imam wants to ban the “blasphemous” Barbie doll. Would you ever have thought that poor Barbie and I would be guilty of the same offense? An Egyptian magazine published parts of The Satanic Verses alongside banned work by Naguib Mahfouz and demanded that religious authorities be deprived of the right to say what may or may not be read in Egypt. By the way, Tantawi, the grand mufti of Egypt, has come out against the fatwa. And in his opening address to the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting in Casablanca, King Hassan of Morocco said nobody had the right to declare people infidels or launch fatwas or jihads against them. This is good, I think. The fundamental things apply as time goes by. Be well. Come and see me soon. I love you.
Joseph Anton Page 50