Joseph Anton: A Memoir (24 page)

He had been living with the threat of death for one month. There
had been further rallies against
The Satanic Verses
in Paris, New York, Oslo, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Turkey, Germany, Thailand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and West Yorkshire. The toll of injuries and deaths had continued to rise. The novel had by now also been banned in Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Brunei, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and across the Arab world. A Muslim “leader” named Abdul Hussain Chowdhury asked the chief metropolitan magistrate in London to grant him a summons against Salman Rushdie and his publishers, alleging “blasphemous libel and seditious libel,” but the injunction was not granted. Fifth Avenue in New York had to be sealed off because there was a bomb scare in a bookstore. In those days there were still bookstores up and down Fifth Avenue.

The united front of the literary world cracked, and it caused him real pain to see his own world fracturing under the pressure of these events. First the West Berlin Academy of Arts refused to allow a “pro-Rushdie” solidarity rally to take place on its premises because of security concerns. This led Germany’s greatest writer, Günter Grass, and the philosopher Günther Anders, to resign from the academy in protest. Then, in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy, which awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, decided not to issue a formal statement condemning the
fatwa
. The eminent novelist Kerstin Ekman resigned her seat at the table of eighteen academicians. Lars Gyllensten also withdrew from the academy’s deliberations.

He felt awful. “Don’t do it, Günter, Günther, Kerstin, Lars,” he wanted to shout. “Don’t do it on my account.” He didn’t want to split academies, to injure the world of books. That was the opposite of what he wanted. He was trying to defend the book against the burners of books. These small battles of the bookish seemed like tragedies at a time when literary freedom itself was so violently under attack.

On the Ides of March he was flung without warning into the lowest circle of Orwellian hell.
“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
The worst thing in the world was different for every individual. For Winston
Smith in Orwell’s
1984
, it was rats. For himself in a cold Welsh cottage it was an unanswered phone call.

He had established a daily routine with Clarissa. At seven o’clock every evening, without fail, he would call to say hello to Zafar. He was talking to his son as openly as he could about everything that was going on, trying to put an optimistic spin on it, to keep the monsters in his child’s imagination at bay, but keeping him informed. He had quickly learned that as long as Zafar heard the news from him first, the boy was able to handle it. If by some mischance they failed to speak and Zafar heard something shocking from friends in the school playground, he became very upset. It was vital to communicate. Hence the daily call. He had agreed with Clarissa that if for some reason she couldn’t be at home with Zafar at seven she should leave a message on the St. Peter’s Street answering machine telling him when they would be back. He called the Burma Road house. There was no reply. He left a message on Clarissa’s machine and then
interrogated
his own. She had not left a message. Oh, well, he thought, they’re a little late. Fifteen minutes later he called again. Nobody picked up. He called his own machine again: nothing there. Ten minutes later he made a third call. Still nothing. By now he had begun to worry. It was almost 7:45
P.M.
on a school night. Not normal for them to be out so late. He called twice more in the next ten minutes. No response. Now he began to panic.

The day’s events faded away. The Islamic Conference Organization had called him an apostate but had avoided supporting the Iranian death order. Muslims were planning a march in Cardiff. Marianne was upset because her just-published novel
John Dollar
had sold exactly twenty-four copies in the preceding week. None of it mattered. He called Burma Road repeatedly, dialing and redialing like a madman, and his hands began to shake. He was sitting on the floor, wedged up against a wall, with the phone on his lap, dialing, redialing. The prot team had changed over again; Stan and Benny were back with two new drivers, a cheeky-chappie good sort called Keith, a.k.a. “Stumpy,” and a red-haired Welshman named Alan Owen. Stan noticed his “principal’s” agitated phone activity and came to ask if everything was all right.

He said no, it didn’t seem to be. Clarissa and Zafar were by now an hour and a quarter late for their phone appointment with him and had left no word of explanation. Stan’s face was serious. “Is this,” he asked, “a break in routine? That’s one of the things to be concerned about, any unexpected break.” Yes, he said, it was a break in routine. “Okay,” said Stan, “leave it with me. I’ll make some inquiries.” A few minutes later he came back to say he had spoken to “Metpol”—the London Metropolitan Police—and a car would be sent to the address to do a “drive-by.” After that the minutes moved as slowly and coldly as glacial ice and when the report came it froze his heart. “The car drove by the premises just now,” Steve told him, “and the report, I’m sorry to say, is that the front door is open and all the lights are on.” He was unable to reply. “Obviously the officers did not attempt to go up to the house or enter,” Steve said. “In the situation as it is they would not know what they might encounter.”

He saw bodies sprawling on the stairs in the front hall. He saw the brightly lit rag-doll corpses of his son and his first wife drenched in blood. Life was over. He had run away and hidden like a terrified rabbit and his loved ones had paid the price. “Just to inform you on what we’re doing,” said Stan. “We will be going in there, but you’ll have to give us approximately forty minutes. They need to assemble an army.”

Maybe they were not both dead. Maybe his son was alive and taken hostage. “You understand,” he said to Stan, “that if they have him and they want a ransom, they want me to exchange myself for him, then I’m going to do that, and you guys can’t stop me doing it. I just want that to be clear.”

Stan took a slow, dark pause, like a character in a Pinter play. Then he said, “That thing about exchanging hostages, that only happens in the movies. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, if this is a hostile intervention, they are both probably dead already. The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want to die as well.”

The police in the kitchen had fallen silent. Marianne sat facing him, staring at him, unable to offer comfort. He had no more to say. There was only the crazy dialing, every thirty seconds, the dialing and then the ring tone and then Clarissa’s voice asking him to leave a message. That beautiful, long, green-eyed girl. The mother of his gentle,
lively, loving son. There was no message worth leaving.
I’m sorry
didn’t begin to cover it. He hung up and redialed and there was her voice again. And again.

After a very long time Stan came and said quietly, “Won’t be long now. They’re just about ready.” He nodded and waited for reality to deal him what would be a fatal blow. He was not aware of weeping but his face was wet. He went on dialing Zafar’s number. As if the telephone possessed occult powers, as if it was a Ouija board that could put him in touch with the dead.

Then unexpectedly there was a click. Somebody had picked up the receiver at the other end. “Hello?” he said, his voice unsteady. “Dad?” said Zafar’s voice. “What’s going on, Dad? There’s a policeman at the door and he says there are fifteen more on the way.” Relief cascaded over him and momentarily tied his tongue. “Dad? Are you there?” “Yes,” he said, “I’m here. Is your mother all right? Where were you?” They had been at a school drama performance that had run very late. Clarissa came on to the phone and apologized. “I’m sorry, I should have left you a message, I just forgot. I’m sorry.”

The usual aftershock biochemicals ran in his veins and he didn’t know if he was happy or enraged. “But what about the door?” he asked. “Why was the front door open and all the lights left on?” It was Zafar on the other end again. “It wasn’t, Dad,” he said. “We just got back and opened the door and turned the lights on and then the policeman came.”

“It would seem,” said Detective-Sergeant Stan, “that there has been a regrettable error. The car we sent to have a look, looked at the wrong house.”

The wrong house. A police mistake. Just a stupid mistake. Everything was all right. The monsters were back in the broom cupboard and under the floorboards. The world had not exploded. His son was alive. The door of Room 101 swung open. Unlike Winston Smith, he had escaped.

This had been the worst day of his life.

The message on his machine was from the novelist Margaret Drabble. “Do call if you can.” And when he did call she made, in her brisk, efficient,
no-nonsense way, an offer as impossibly generous in its way as Deborah Rogers’s had been. She and her husband, Michael Holroyd, the biographer of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, had been doing up a cottage in Porlock Weir on the Somerset coast. “It’s done now,” she said, “and we were just about to move in, and then I said to Michael, maybe Salman might like it. You could certainly have it for a month or so.” The gift of a month, the chance of being able to stay in one place for that long, was precious beyond words. For one month he would be a person from Porlock. “Thank you,” he said, inadequately.

Porlock Weir sat a little west of the village of Porlock itself, a tiny outcrop of the village that had grown up around the harbor. The cottage was a thatched beauty and quite substantial. A journalist from
The New York Times
, interviewing Drabble there a decade later, thought it “a kind of Bloomsburyian vision of whimsy and cultivation, with rooms painted different colors—mint green, rose, lilac and Tuscan yellow—and faded rugs, books and paintings everywhere you look.” It felt grand to reenter a house of books. He and Marianne were two writers being gifted the home of two other writers and there was something extraordinarily comforting about that. There was enough room for the two protection officers to stay on the premises as well; the drivers rented rooms at a bed-and-breakfast place in the village and pretended to be friends on a walking tour of the region. There was a beautiful garden, and it was as secluded as any invisible man could wish for. He arrived there in the last week of March and, almost happily, settled in.

“The flame of the Enlightenment is waning,” a journalist said to Günter Grass. “But,” he replied, “there is no other source of light.”
The public argument raged on. In private, just days after his arrival at Porlock Weir, he faced a very different crisis. Fire of a sort was also involved.

Marianne went to London for a couple of days (there were no restrictions on her movements) and saw a couple of mutual friends—Dale, an American woman working at Wylie, Aitken & Stone, and his old pal Pauline Melville. He called Pauline to see how things were and found her in a state of horrified shock. “Okay,” she said, “this is so serious that I’m going to tell you what Marianne said, and both Dale and I heard it, and we’re both so stunned that we are
prepared to repeat her words to her face.” Marianne had told them that he and she were fighting constantly and that she, Marianne, had, in Pauline’s words, “beaten him up.” She then said, astonishingly, that he had asked the Special Branch to “fly in Isabelle Adjani.” He had never met or spoken to the French actress, but she had recently made a gesture of support, which he had greatly appreciated. At the César Awards in Paris—the “French Oscars”—she went up to receive the Best Actress César for her performance in the title role of
Camille Claudel
, and had read a short text at the end of which she revealed that it was a quotation from
“Les versets sataniques, de Salman Rushdie.”
She had an Algerian father of Muslim origin, so this was not a small thing to do. He had written to thank her. The rest—Marianne’s allegation—was pure fabrication, and there was worse to come. “He tortures me,” she told Pauline, “by burning me with lighted cigarettes.” When Pauline told him this he burst out laughing at the horror of it. “But,” he cried, “I don’t have any cigarettes—I don’t even smoke!”

When Marianne returned to Porlock from London he confronted her in the beautiful living room with its pink wallpaper and large windows offering a view of the shining waters of the Bristol Channel. At first she flatly denied having said any of it. He called her bluff. “Let’s phone Pauline and Dale and see what they say.” At this she broke down and admitted that yes, she had said those things. He asked her specifically about the worst allegation, the cigarette torture story. “Why did you say such a thing,” he demanded, “when you know it isn’t true?” She looked him boldly in the eye. “It was a metaphor,” she said, “of how unhappy I felt.” That was, in its way, brilliant. Deranged, but brilliant. It deserved applause. He said, “Marianne, that is not a metaphor; it’s a lie. If you can’t tell the difference between the two you are in bad trouble.” She had no more to say to him. She went to the room in which she worked and closed the door.

This was the choice he had to make: to stay with her, even though she was capable of such untruths, or to separate and face what he had to face alone.

He needed a name, the police told him. He needed to choose one “pretty pronto” and then talk to his bank manager and get the bank to
issue checkbooks either bearing the pseudonym or no name at all, and to agree to accept checks signed with the false name, so that he could pay for things without being identified. But the new name was also for the benefit of his protectors. They needed to get used to it, to call him by it at all times, when they were with him and when they weren’t, so they didn’t accidentally let his real name slip when they were walking or running or going to the gym or the supermarket in his immediate neighborhood and blow his cover.

The “prot” had a name: Operation Malachite. He did not know why they had given the job the name of a green stone and neither did they. They were not writers and the reasons for names were not important to them. It was just a name. Now it was his turn to rename himself. His own name was worse than useless, it was a name that could not be spoken, like the name
Voldemort
in the then-unwritten Harry Potter books. He could not rent a house with it, or register to vote, because to vote you needed to provide a home address and that, of course, was impossible. To protect his democratic right of free expression he had to surrender his democratic right to choose his government. “It doesn’t matter what the name is,” Stan said, “but it would be useful to have one in place, sharpish.”