Joseph Anton: A Memoir: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  Oh, P.S.: That woman Taslima is causing a lot of trouble for Gabi G. in Sweden, denouncing him (for what?) and saying she has nothing good to say about him. She’s quite a piece of work, I’m afraid, and has been alienating her defenders all over Europe. Poor Gabi did as much as anyone to get her out of danger. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.

  Happy new year!

  I am well and happy.

  He had finished his novel. Seven years had passed since Saladin Chamcha turned away from the window looking out upon the Arabian Sea; it was five years since Haroun Khalifa’s mother, Soraya, began to sing again. Those were endings he had had to discover during the writing process, but he had had the end of The Moor’s Last Sigh almost from the beginning. Moor Zogoiby’s graveyard requiem for himself: I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to my family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time. It had been helpful to know the last notes of the music, to know the target toward which all the book’s arrows—narrative, thematic, comic, symbolic—were flying. Outside the pages of books the question of a satisfying ending was mostly unanswerable. Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why. Yet with the passage of time he became more and more determined to shape his story toward the ending everyone refused to believe in, in which he and his loved ones could move beyond a discourse of risk and safety into a future free of danger in which “risk” became once again a word for creative daring and “safe” was the way you felt when you were surrounded by love.

  He had always been post-something according to that mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath—postcolonial, postmodern, postsecular, postintellectual, postliterate. Now he would add his own category, post-fatwa, to that dusty post-office, and would end up not just po-co and po-mo but po-fa as well. He had been interested in reclamation ever since he wrote Midnight’s Children to reclaim his Indian heritage for himself, and even before that, in fact, for was he not a Bombay boy, and was that megalopolis not itself a city built on land reclaimed from the sea? Now once again he would set out to reclaim lost ground. His completed novel would be published, and with that act he would reclaim his place in the world of books. And he would plan an American summer, and negotiate little increments of liberty with the police chiefs, and yes, he would continue to think about political pressure, about the defense campaign, but he didn’t have time to wait for a political solution, he needed to start grabbing those fragments of freedom that were within his reach, to start moving toward the happy ending he was determined to write for himself, step by lightening step.

  Andrew on the phone talking about The Moor was almost moved to tears. Gillon’s upper lip was stiffer but he, too, was moved. He was happy to hear their excitement, even if he was already beginning to feel that the ending needed work, that the character of the villain of the final act, Vasco Miranda, wasn’t quite there yet. Elizabeth finished it and was happy about the dedication, For E.J.W., and full of much praise and some sharp editorial commentary, but she also imagined that the Japanese woman in the book’s last movement, Aoi Uë, her name all vowels, contained a bit of her, and Moor Zogoiby’s comparison of her with his previous, deranged lover, Uma—he called Aoi “a better woman whom he loved less”—was really a comparison of herself and Marianne. He had to talk for an hour to persuade her that this was not so, that if she wanted to find herself in the novel she should look at the writing, at the tenderness and lovingness there, which was what he had learned from being with her, and which was her true mark on the book.

  He was telling the truth. But when he had told it he felt that he had diminished the novel, because he had once again been forced to explain his work and its motives. The joy of finishing was a little dimmed, and he began to fear that people would be able to read the book only as a coded version of his life.

  That evening they met Graham Swift and Caryl Phillips at Julie’s restaurant in Notting Hill and Dick Wood, who had come out with the protection team for once, and who didn’t like staying out late, sent him a note at midnight ordering him to leave because the drivers were tired. He had done this once before, at Billy Connolly’s birthday party, and this time an angry altercation took place, with the Malachite principal pointing out that he would not have sent such an infantilizing note to any other principal, and that grown-ups did sometimes dine until after the witching hour. Dick changed his tune, saying that the real reason for the note had been that a waiter had been making a suspicious, whispered phone call. Caz Phillips investigated—the restaurant was a favorite haunt of his—and reported that the waiter had been calling his girlfriend, but none of the protection team, not even Dick’s sidekick Rab, had believed the waiter story anyway. “Oh, we all know it was nothing to do with the phone call,” Rab said with a laugh. “Dick was tired, that’s all.” Rab offered him a “group apology on behalf of the whole team” and promised it would not happen again. But he felt, gloomily, that his hopes for an increasingly “ordinary” social life had been dashed. Dick, after all, had been the one who had told him that he had been treated too harshly by the police, who had limited his freedom of movement unnecessarily.

  Helen Hammington came to see him to try to set things right, and a day later Dick came, too, entering with the words “I don’t expect you to apologize,” which made matters considerably worse. During their meeting, however, it was agreed that greater “flexibility” was needed. Dick blamed the departed Tony Dunblane for the old rigidities. “Now that he’s gone you’ll find the people you have will be more amenable.” But Mr. Anton had liked Dunblane and always found him helpful.

  He received two pieces of hate mail, a photograph of otters with an added speech balloon inside which were the words YOU SHOULDN’T “OTTER” DONE IT, and a greetings card that said HAPPY FATWAH—SEE YOU SOON—ISLAMIC JIHAD. On the same day Peter Temple-Morris of the “anti-Rushdie” Tory group made a speech at a seminar on Iran at the School of Oriental and African Studies in which he said in the approving presence of the Iranian chargé d’affaires, Ansari, that Mr. Rushdie was to blame for the whole affair and should now keep silent, because “silence is golden.” This was an interlingual pun: In Iran the author of The Satanic Verses had sometimes been called a “golden man,” which was a Farsi idiom for a dishonest person, a shyster. Also on the same day, Frances called to say that Article 19 had spent £60,000 on the defense campaign in 1994 but had only raised £30,000 in funding for it, so from now on they would have to cut their efforts in half.

  At the annual “A” Squad party he was touched to discover that the Malachite prot team was feeling decidedly proprietorial about his new novel and were resolved that it “must” win the Booker Prize. “Okay,” he told the lads, “we’ll be in touch with the jury and let them know that quite a few heavily armed men have a strong interest in the result.” After that he and Elizabeth were allowed to have dinner at the Ivy. (The prot team sat at a table near the door and people-watched like everyone else.) He was feeling very emotional, he told her, because the completion of The Moor’s Last Sigh, even more than Haroun and the Sea of Stories, felt like his victory over the forces of darkness. Even if they killed him now they could not defeat him. He had not been silenced. He had continued.

  There were paparazzi outside and they all knew who Elizabeth was; but when he came out of the restaurant he said, “You can have me but not her, please,” and every one of them respected the request.

  Clarissa was well again. The words “full remission” were heard for the first time. There was a broader smile on Zafar’s face than his father had seen there for some time. She was also up for a new job as literature officer of the Arts Council, a job he had encouraged her to try for. He called Michael Holroyd, who was on the interviewing panel, and made a passionate pitch for h
er. The difficulty might be her age, Michael said; the Arts Council might prefer someone younger. He said, She’s only forty-six, Michael, and she’s perfectly suited for the job. She went for her interview and performed impressively. A few days later the job was hers.

  The Moor’s Last Sigh was making new friends every day. His French editor, Ivan Nabokov, wrote enthusiastically from Paris. Sonny Mehta, characteristically uncommunicative, hadn’t read the book yet. “Yes,” his assistant told Andrew, “he’s been worrying about that.” The nightmare scenario was that Sonny might panic over the book’s portrait of a Bombay political party called “Mumbai’s Axis,” a satirical portrait of the thuggish Shiv Sena, and that, consequently, Random House would cancel their contract, as they had at the time of Haroun. But eventually, after long anxious days in which, after receiving a message that Sonny “wants you to call him,” he was repeatedly told that the great man was not available, they finally spoke, and Sonny said he liked the book. There would be no contract-ripping moment this time around. Another small step forward.

  And then a bigger step. After long discussions between himself and Scotland Yard, Rab Connolly told him that when The Moor’s Last Sigh was published he would be allowed to do public readings and signings, and that these could be advertised six days in advance, avoiding Fridays, so that the Muslim opposition couldn’t use Friday prayer meetings to organize. “Announcement on Saturday, event the following Thursday,” Rab said. “That has been agreed.” It was a breakthrough. His editor, Frances Coady, and Caroline Michel, who was in charge of publicity, were thrilled.

  The step backward, when it came, took him completely by surprise. Clarissa was healthier by the day, and excited about her new job, and Zafar’s schoolwork was improving with his mother’s health, and his confidence grew every week. Then in mid-March she called to say that she had been thinking, and had also been advised, that she needed more money. (When they divorced he had lacked the funds to make a clean-break settlement, and had been paying her a mixture of alimony and child support for ten years.) Her lawyers had told her she could get huge amounts, she said, admitting for the first time that lawyers were involved, but she would accept £150,000. “Okay,” he said. “You win. £150,000. Okay.” It was a lot of money, but that wasn’t it. Hostility, like love, came at you from the direction you weren’t looking in. He had not expected her to pursue him after all these years, after his immense concern for her during her illness, after his behind-the-scenes efforts on her behalf at A. P. Watt and the Arts Council. (In fairness, she didn’t know about those phone calls.) There was no concealing from Zafar the sudden strain between his mother and father. The boy was very worried, but insisted on knowing what was going on. Zafar was almost sixteen, and watching both his parents fiercely. It was impossible to keep the truth from him.

  The Iranian deputy foreign minister, Mahmud Va’ezi, was contradicting himself, promising in Denmark that Iran would send no assassins to carry out the death order, and then, in Paris the next day, affirming “the need for the implementation” of that order. The policy of “critical dialogue” between the EU and Iran, initiated in 1992 to improve Iran’s record on human rights, support for terrorism and the fatwa, was exposed as an utter failure. It wasn’t critical enough, and as the Iranians weren’t interested in it, there was no dialogue.

  After Va’ezi’s remarks in Paris, this was what the British government said: nothing. Other countries protested, but from the United Kingdom, there wasn’t a peep. He spent some days fuming about Va’ezi’s forked tongue, and then he had an idea. He suggested to Frances D’Souza that if they were to take Va’ezi’s Danish statement as a sort of “cease-fire” declaration they might be able to get the French to push Iran to disown the minister’s subsequent remarks in Paris and agree to a public promise of non-implementation of the fatwa, which would have to be closely monitored by the EU for a stipulated period, et cetera et cetera, before any upgrade of relations to full ambassadorial level could occur. The idea of a “French initiative” excited Frances. She had been depressed by her recent meeting with Douglas Hogg, at which he had told her that nothing could be done except to continue with the protection; Khamenei was in charge and so Iranian terrorism continued. Hogg said to Frances that he had been told by the Iranians eighteen months earlier that they would not carry out the fatwa in Britain but had felt no need to mention the fact because it “meant nothing.” So HMG’s policy was inertia as usual. Frances agreed to try to rouse their French allies. She contacted Jack Lang and Bernard-Henri Lévy and they began to plan. He himself even called Jacques Derrida, who wanted him to be photographed with French parliamentarians and warned him, “Whoever you meet with will be interpreted as a political sign, and you should be careful of certain persons.” Derrida meant BHL, no doubt, a divisive figure in France. But Bernard had been staunch in his support and he would not disown so loyal a friend.

  On March 19, 1995, he took the Eurostar to Paris, was immediately devoured by the RAID and taken to see a group of the courageous French Muslims who had signed a declaration in his support. The next day he met all the leading French political figures sauf Mitterrand: the president-in-waiting Jacques Chirac, big, shambling, comfortable in his body, with a killer’s dead eyes; the prime minister, Édouard Balladur, a man with a little pursed mouth of whose stiff-backed demeanor the French liked to say that il a avalé son parapluie, he has swallowed his umbrella; Alain Juppé, the foreign minister, a quick, clever little bald guy who later joined the list of politicians of the era who were convicted of a crime (mishandling public funds); the Socialist Lionel Jospin, who felt like Calvino’s cavaliere inesistente, an empty space in a loose suit. Frances and he proposed the “cease-fire plan” and they all went for it. Juppé guaranteed to put the idea on the agenda of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting, Balladur gave a press conference announcing “their” initiative, Chirac said he had spoken to Douglas Hurd and Hurd was “for it.” He himself gave a press conference at the National Assembly and went home believing that something might just have begun to move. Douglas Hogg sent a message wanting a meeting in the next few days. “I guess he will say that if HMG follows the ‘French initiative’ there will be enormous pressure from Tory backbenchers to end the protection if the initiative succeeds,” he wrote in his journal. “I must therefore be absolutely clear in my mind what I want, and must make HMG accept the language of ‘cease-fire’ and ‘monitoring’ that we have sold to the French. And he must promise to break the BA ban.” Rab Connolly said: “Hogg is going to tell you that the threat remains very high and so the French initiative is useless.” Well, he thought, that remains to be seen.

  He went to meet Hogg with the history of the Foreign Office’s mixture of inertia and hostility at the ready, and in no mood to be mollified. He and his work had both been attacked by two foreign secretaries, Howe and Hurd; then there had been the period of years when no diplomat or politician was prepared to meet him, followed by the equally unsatisfactory period of secret, “deniable” meetings with Slater and Gore-Booth. He had had to create pressure from other governments to “wake up” the Brits, and even then their backing had been halfhearted: John Major had allowed no photograph to be taken of their meeting, and although he had promised a “high-profile campaign” no such campaign had materialized. Hogg himself had made clear that the only British policy was to wait for “regime change” in Iran, which wasn’t a probability. Who, he would ask, was telling the British media that there was a “high cost” to the British when he went abroad, when in fact there was no cost at all? Why were the constant falsehoods about costs never corrected or denied?

  Douglas Hogg gave him a sympathetic hearing. He was prepared to “go along” with the “French initiative” or “cease-fire plan” but said, “I have to tell you that there is still a very real risk to your safety. We believe the Iranians are still actively trying to find you. And if we go down this route the French and Germans will improve links with Iran fast and so, eventually, will HMG. The political
pressure will end. Also, I will have to send you a pompous letter so that I can say afterward that you were warned of the dangers.”

  Afterward. Meaning, after he was murdered.

  “We are trying to improve the language of the démarche,” he said. “It should include your associates, that is, all those threatened by the fatwa, translators, publishers, booksellers and so on. And we want Balladur to send this straight to Rafsanjani and get Rafsanjani’s own signature on it if possible, because the higher the signature the greater the chances that they will actually call the dogs off.”

  That night he wrote in his journal: “Am I committing suicide?”

  Larry Robinson, the contact man at the U.S. embassy, called Carmel Bedford to find out what was going on. He was worried. “You can’t trust the Iranians,” he said. “It would wreck our whole strategy.” Carmel responded outspokenly. “What have you done for us? Is there a strategy? If there is, tell us what it is, make us an offer. If we get a deal through the EU, we’ll take it, after six and a half years of nobody lifting a finger to help.” Larry Robinson said, “I’ll get back to you.”

  On April 10, the crucial day of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting, Hogg’s assistant Andy Ashcroft called to say that Hurd and Major were now both “on side,” and that the French initiative was now British government policy. Mr. Anton stressed the need for the monitoring period, to make sure the Iranians were doing what they promised to do, and Ashcroft said, “That is certainly how we will play it.” When he got off the phone he called the editor of The Times, Peter Stothard, and the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, and told them to expect developments. He called Larry Robinson and said, “This isn’t an alternative to canceling the fatwa. Nor is it intended to create a ‘fatwa-free zone,’ ring-fencing Europe and the USA; it’s a frontierless agreement.” Robinson voiced the sensible reservations. “It could let Iran off the hook.” But he hadn’t yet heard from D.C., so didn’t know if the administration was, on balance, “pro or anti.” He himself felt that the bounty-hunter risk had faded, but the threat from the regime had not.