Joseph Anton: A Memoir: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  The protection team, when faced with the unexpected, sometimes developed headless-chicken behavioral traits. Um, Joe, what’s the story we’re telling again? In whose name is the house rented? Joseph Anton, right? Oh, not Joseph Anton? Oh, that’s right. Rea who? How do you spell that? Who are we saying he is? Oh, he actually is a publisher? Oh, okay. And, Joe, what is Fitz’s full name? Okay, somebody had better answer the door. He said, “You guys have to get better at this.” Later that day he wrote out the narrative and pinned it to their sitting-room door.

  The bailiffs had showed up because the Bulsaras had defaulted on a monthly payment of just £500. Fitz took charge, calling the Bulsaras’s lawyer, who faxed a letter to the bailiffs saying the check was in the mail. So in theory the bailiffs could show up every month? And they could be back tomorrow if the check turned out not to be in the mail? What was wrong with the Bulsaras’ finances? This was awful; his solid-seeming house could melt away because of the landlord’s money troubles, and in the months that would be needed to get the new place ready he would be homeless yet again. Fitz was unfazed. “I’ll speak to them,” he said. The bailiffs never returned.

  There was the question of health and the related question of fear. He went to the doctor—a Dr. Bevan of St. John’s Wood, known to the Special Branch, who had treated people receiving protection before—and his heart, blood pressure and other vital signs were all in excellent shape, surprising even the physician. His physiology had apparently not noticed that he was living in stressful circumstances. It was doing just fine, and the usual guardian angels of the stress sufferer, Ambien, Valium, Zoloft and Xanax—were not called upon. He had no explanation for his good health (and he was sleeping well, too) except that the soft machine of his body had somehow come to terms with what had happened. He had begun to write The Moor’s Last Sigh, whose central character was a man aging at twice the normal speed. “Moor” Zogoiby’s life was going by too fast and so death was approaching more swiftly than it should. The character’s life relationship with fear was also his author’s. I’ll tell you a secret about fear, said the Moor. It’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with “courage.” It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn’t have seconds to spare for funk.

  He didn’t have time to sit in a corner and quake. Of course there was much to be afraid of, and he could feel the gremlin of fear stalking him, the bat-winged fear monster sitting on his shoulder nibbling eagerly at his neck, but he had understood that if he was to function he had to find a way of shaking the beasties off. He imagined himself trapping the gremlins in a small box and putting the locked box in a corner of the room. Once that was done, and sometimes it had to be done more than once a day, it was possible to proceed.

  Elizabeth dealt with fear more simply. As long as the Special Branch teams were with them, she told herself, they would be safe. She never gave any sign of being afraid until the very end of the protection. It was freedom that made her fearful. Inside the bubble of the protection, she felt, for the most part, fine.

  He was offered the chance to buy a newer, more comfortable car than the aging Jaguars and Range Rovers in the police fleet. It was an armored BMW sedan whose previous owner was the rag-trade millionaire Sir Ralph Halpern, the founder of Topshop, but better known as “five-times-a-night Ralph,” after a young lover sold her story to the tabloids. “Who knows what happened in that backseat,” mused Dennis the Horse. “But it’s quite a catch, Sir Ralph’s bimbomobile.” It was worth £140,000 but was being offered for £35,000, “a steal,” Dennis the Horse declared. It might even be permissible, the police hinted, if they were out of London and driving down country roads, for him to be allowed to drive the car himself. And the bulletproof windows could open, unlike the windows in the police Jaguars. Fresh air could, when it was deemed safe, be breathed.

  He bought the car.

  The first time he was driven anywhere in it was when he was taken to Spy Central. The headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), familiar to fans of James Bond movies, sat across the Thames looking toward Random House as if it were an author in need of a good publisher. John le Carré in his Smiley books called SIS “the Circus” because its offices were supposedly at Cambridge Circus, which meant the spooks would have being looking out at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Palace Theatre. In parts of the Civil Service the SIS was called “Box 850,” a PO box address once used by MI6. At the heart of Spyland sat the person who was not, in real life, called M. The head of MI6—this was no longer a secret—was called C. On those rare occasions when Mr. Anton of Hampstead Lane and later of 9 Bishop’s Avenue was allowed to pass through those heavily guarded doors he never made it to the spider’s lair, never met C. He was dealt with by officers from elsewhere in the alphabet, lowercase officers, one might say; though he did just once address a gathering of many of the service’s capital letters. And he did, twice, meet the heads of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller and Stephen Lander.

  On this first occasion, he was taken into a room that might have been a conference room in any London hotel to be given good news. The “specific threat” against him had been “downgraded.” So the deadline for the assassination no longer stood? It did not. The operation, he was told, had been “frustrated.” That was an odd and interesting word. He wanted to ask about this “frustration.” Then he thought, Don’t ask. Then he asked anyway. “Since this is my life we’re talking about,” he said, “I think you should tell me a bit more about why things are better now.” The young executive across the shiny wooden table leaned forward with a friendly expression. “No,” he said. That was the end of the discussion. Well, no was a clear answer, at least, he thought, unexpectedly amused. Source protection was an absolute priority in the SIS. He would be told only what his case officer believed necessary. Beyond that lay the Land of No.

  The “frustration” of his enemies made him, for a moment, light-headed with delight, but back at Hampstead Lane, Mr. Greenup brought him down to earth. The threat level was still high. Certain restrictions would continue. He would not, for example, allow Zafar to be brought to the house.

  He received an invitation to speak at an event at Columbia University, in the Low Memorial Library, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights. He had to start accepting such invitations, he thought; he had to emerge from invisibility and reclaim his voice. He talked to Frances D’Souza about trying to get Václav Havel to invite him to Prague so that the meeting the British had made impossible in London could take place on Havel’s own turf. If Her Majesty’s Government was giving up on the case they would have to internationalize the defense campaign and embarrass Thatcher and Hurd into making an effort. He would use any platforms that were offered to point out that his case was by no means unique, that writers and intellectuals across the Islamic world were being accused of exactly the same thought crimes as himself, blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, insult and offense, which meant that either the best and most independent creative minds in the Muslim world were degenerates, or else that the accusations masked the accusers’ real project: the stifling of heterodoxy and dissent. To say this was not, as some people hinted, special pleading to attract more sympathy to his own case, or to justify his “outrages.” It was just the truth. To make this argument effectively, he told Frances, he would also have to un-say what he had said, to un-make his Great Mistake, and he needed to un-say it loudly on the most visible platforms, at the best-reported events. Frances had strong protective feelings for him and worried that to do that might be to worsen his situation. No, he said, it would be worse to remain in the false situation he had created for himself.
He was learning the hard way that the world was not a compassionate place, but there was no reason to expect it to be otherwise. Life was ungenerous to most people and second chances were hard to find. The comedian Peter Cook in the classic sixties revue Beyond the Fringe had advised people that the best thing to do in the event of a nuclear attack “was to be out of the area where the attack is about to occur. Keep right out of that area,” he warned, “because that’s the danger area, where the bombs are dropping.” The way to avoid the world’s lack of compassion for one’s errors was to avoid making the errors in the first place. But he had made his error. He would do whatever it took to make that right.

  “There will be repercussions even if it means death,” said the spokesman of the Bradford Council of Mosques. “In sentencing the author of The Satanic Verses to death the judgment of the imam was flawless,” said the garden gnome. Meanwhile in Paris a death squad entered the home of the exiled ex-president of Iran, Shapur Bakhtiar, an opponent of the ayatollahs’ regime, and murdered him and an aide with knives in what was described as a “ritual killing.”

  There was a coup in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev and for three days he was under house arrest. When he was freed and flew back to Moscow there were reporters waiting by the plane to ask him if he would now abolish the Communist Party. He looked horrified by the question and at that moment, precisely then, history (in the form of Boris Yeltsin) rushed by him and left him trailing in its wake. Yet he, not Yeltsin or Reagan or Thatcher, was the man who changed the world by forbidding the Red Army to fire on demonstrators in Leipzig and elsewhere. Many years later the formerly invisible man would meet Mikhail Gorbachev at a fund-raising event in London. “Rushdie!” cried Gorbachev. “I totally support all your positions.” There was even a small hug. What, all of them? he asked the man with the map of Antarctica tattooed on his forehead. “Yes,” said Gorbachev, through his interpreter. “Total support.”

  He was writing a monograph about the film The Wizard of Oz for his friend Colin MacCabe at the British Film Institute. The two great themes of the film were home and friendship and he had never felt the need for both more strongly. He had friends every bit as loyal as Dorothy’s companions on the Yellow Brick Road, and he was about to have a permanent home again, after three years on the road. He wrote a dystopian short story, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” as a companion piece to the essay. The slippers that could take you home whenever you wanted them to: What was the value of such things in a violent science-fiction future in which everything was for sale and home had become a “scattered, damaged” concept? The essay pleased Bob Gottlieb at The New Yorker and he published a large piece of it before the BFI booklet was published. The actor who played the Munchkin coroner, Meinhardt Raabe, read it in a retirement home in Fort Lauderdale and sent in a fan letter, accompanied by a gift: a color photograph of his big scene from the movie. He stood on the steps of the Munchkin town hall holding up the long scroll, at the top of which were the large Gothic letters reading CERTIFICATE OF DEATH. Under that legend Raabe, using a blue ballpoint pen, had carefully inscribed the words Salman Rushdie. When he saw his name on the Munchkin death certificate his first thought was, How funny is that, really? But then he thought, No, I get it, Mr. Raabe in his retirement home shoots letters off to people all over America, all over the world, he’s another Herzog blasting his words into empty space, except that he also has a big stack of these pictures by his bedside and sends one of them with every letter. It’s his calling card. He doesn’t think, Oh, but this particular guy actually has a death order out on him, maybe I should be a little more sensitive. He writes, signs, mails. That’s what he does.

  After the booklet was published Colin MacCabe told him that many people at the BFI had been terrified to be associated with a book by the notorious Mr. Rushdie. Colin had managed to assuage at least some of their fears. The book came out and there were no rivers of blood. It was just a little book about an old movie. But he had understood that before he could be free again he would have to overcome other people’s fears as well as his own.

  The British hostage John McCarthy was released in Lebanon.

  The “A” Squad chiefs decided it was time to allow Zafar to visit his father at Hampstead Lane. Mr. Greenup at first suggested that the boy should be blindfolded so that the location was not compromised but that was out of the question and Greenup did not press the point. That afternoon Zafar was brought to the house and his happiness lit up its ugly interior and made it beautiful.

  Frances called him, excited. She had been asked to tell him in confidence that Haroun and the Sea of Stories had won a Writers’ Guild Award for the best children’s book of the year. “They would love it if you could somehow come to collect your prize.” Yes, he told her, he too would very much like to be there. He went to see Michael Foot who said, “Good. The mood has changed. We have to see Hurd again and be much tougher in our demands.” He loved Michael’s appetite for the fight, undiminished by his advancing years. That, and his head for whiskey, only rivaled by that of Christopher Hitchens. When drinking with Michael it had more than once been necessary to pour his Scotch surreptitiously into a potted plant.

  He told the police about the Writers’ Guild Award. The ceremony would be at the Dorchester Hotel on September 15. The protection team made sharp-intake-of-breath noises of demurral. “Don’t know how that’ll go down at the office, Joe,” said Benny Winters, looking, in his sharp tan leather jacket, a little like Lenny Kravitz with shorter hair. “But we’ll run it by them for sure.” The result of running it by them was a visit from Mr. Greenup at his grimmest, accompanied by another senior police officer, a woman, Helen Hammington, who didn’t say much at first.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” said Mr. Greenup. “I can’t allow that.”

  “You won’t allow me to go to Park Lane to collect my literary award,” he replied, slowly. “You won’t allow this even though only one person, the event organizer, would have to know in advance, and we could arrive after people are seated for dinner, be there perhaps ten minutes before the award ceremony, collect the prize and then leave before the ceremony ends. This is what you won’t allow.”

  “For security reasons,” Mr. Greenup said, setting his jaw. “It’s most unwise.”

  He inhaled deeply. (His reward for giving up smoking was the arrival of late-onset asthma, so he was sometimes short of breath.) “You see,” he said, “I was under the impression that I am a free citizen of a free country, and it’s not really for you to allow or not allow me to do anything.”

  Mr. Greenup lost his composure. “It is my view,” he said, “that you are endangering the citizenry of London by reason of your desire for self-aggrandizement.” This was an astonishingly composed sentence—citizenry, by reason of, self-aggrandizement—and he never forgot it. A pivotal moment—what Henri Cartier-Bresson had called le moment décisif—had arrived.

  “You see,” he said, “here’s the thing. I know where the Dorchester Hotel is and as it happens I have the money to pay for a taxi. So the question is not whether or not I’m going to the awards. I am going to the awards. The only question you have to answer is, are you coming with me?”

  Helen Hammington joined the conversation and told him that she was replacing Mr. Greenup as the senior case officer at the Yard. This was extraordinarily good news. She then said to Mr. Greenup, “I think we can probably handle this.” Greenup went bright pink but said nothing. “It has been decided,” Hammington went on, “that we should probably allow you to go out a bit more.”

  Two days later he was at the Dorchester in the bosom of the book world and received his award, a glass inkwell on a wooden plinth. He thanked the people in the room for their solidarity and apologized for materializing and dematerializing in the middle of dinner. “In this free country,” he said, “I am not a free man.” The standing ovation actually brought tears to his eyes, and he was not a man who cried easily. He waved at the audience and as he left the room he heard John Cleese a
t the mike saying, “Oh, great. I’m supposed to follow that.” It had been a harmless little bit of self-aggrandizement after all. The citizenry of London were safe in their tuxedos, their homes, their beds. And he never saw Mr. Greenup again.

  The angel of death never seemed to be far away in those strange days. Liz called: Angela Carter had been told she had no more than six months to live. Zafar called him in tears. “Hattie is dead,” he said. Hattie was May Jewell, Clarissa’s Anglo-Argentine grandmother, a fan of wide-brimmed hats and the model for the character of Rosa Diamond in The Satanic Verses, outside whose house in Pevensey Bay, Sussex, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha had landed on sand after falling out of an exploding jumbo jet, and lived. Some of May Jewell’s favorite stories—in London, in Chester Square Mews, she had once seen the ghost of a stableboy who looked as if he was walking on his knees until she realized that he was walking on the old, lower street level and so was visible only from the knees up; in Pevensey Bay the invading fleet of the Norman Conquest would have sailed through her living room, because the coastline had changed since 1066; in Argentina the bulls at her estancia of Las Petacas would come and lay their heads in her lap as if they were unicorns and she a virgin, neither of which was the case—had found their way into his pages. He had been very fond of her stories, of her hats, and of her.

  Helen Hammington came to see him again to tell him what the police felt would be all right for him to do under the new, liberalized rules. They could take him, by arrangement, to shop for clothes and books after hours. Perhaps he would like to make a shopping expedition out of London, to somewhere like Bath, for example, in which case he could even go when the shops were open. If he wanted to do book signings that might be possible as long as they too were away from London. His friend Professor Chris Bigsby had invited him to read at the University of East Anglia, and perhaps he could accept invitations of that sort. Occasional outings to the Covent Garden Opera House or the English National Opera, or to the National Theatre, could be made to work. She knew that Ruthie Rogers, co-owner of the River Café in Hammersmith, was his close friend, so maybe he could go to dinner there, or at the Ivy, where the owners, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, would also be helpful. Oh: and Zafar would now be allowed not only to visit, but also to spend the night at Hampstead Lane. Mr. Greenup’s departure had certainly altered things.