Joseph Anton: A Memoir (25 page)

To be asked to give up your name was not a small thing. “Probably better not to make it an Asian name,” said Stan. “People put two and two together sometimes.” So he was to give up his race as well. He would be an invisible man in a whiteface mask.

He had a fragment of a character in a notebook, called Mr. Mamouli. Mr. Mamouli was a benighted, even cursed, Everyman figure whose literary relatives were Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. His full name was Ajeeb Mamouli—Ajeeb, like the Bradford councilor, whose name meant “odd.” Mamouli meant “ordinary.” He was Mr. Odd Ordinary, Mr. Strange Normal, Mr. Peculiar Everyday: an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. He had written a fragment in which Mr. Mamouli was obliged to carry a giant inverted pyramid on his head, with the tip resting on his bald head and grievously irritating his scalp.

Mr. Mamouli had come into being the first time he felt that his name had been stolen from him, or half his name, anyway, when
Rushdie
detached itself from
Salman
and went spiraling off into the headlines,
into newsprint, into the video-heavy ether, becoming a slogan, a rallying cry, a term of abuse, or anything else that other people wanted it to be. He had lost control over his name then and so it felt better to slip into Mr. Mamouli’s shoes. Mr. Ajeeb Mamouli was a novelist too, his very name a contradiction, as befitted a novelist’s name. Mr. Mamouli thought of himself as an ordinary man but his life was decidedly odd. When he drew doodles of Mamouli’s face they looked like the famous Common Man created by the cartoonist R. K. Laxman in
The Times of India:
innocent, bemused, bald, with tufts of graying hair spraying out over his ears.

There was a character in
The Satanic Verses
called Mimi Mamoulian, a plump actress obsessed by the acquisition of real estate. Mr. Mamouli was her relative, or perhaps her antithesis, an anti-Mimi whose problem was the opposite of hers: that he had no home he could call his own. This was also, he was well aware, the fate of the fallen Lucifer. So Mr. Ajeeb Mamouli was the name of the devil he had been turned into by others, the horned metamorphic being like his Saladin Chamcha, to whom his demonic transformation is explained thus:
“They have the power of description, and we succumb.”

They didn’t like the name. Mamouli, Ajeeb: These words were a bit of a mouthful, too hard to remember, and far too “Asian.” He was asked to think again. Mr. Mamouli receded, then faded, and eventually found a room in the dilapidated rooming house reserved for unused ideas, the Hotel California of the imagination, and was lost.

He thought of writers he loved and tried combinations of their names. Vladimir Joyce. Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne. He made lists of such combinations and all of them sounded ridiculous. Then he found one that did not. He wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years.

“Joseph Anton.”

“Jolly good,” said Stan. “You won’t mind if we call you Joe.”

In fact he did mind. He soon discovered he detested the abbreviation for reasons he did not fully understand—after all why was
Joe
so much worse than
Joseph
? He was neither one, and both should strike him as equally phony or equally suitable. But “Joe” grated on him almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, that monosyllable was what
the protection officers found easiest to master, and remember, and avoid getting wrong in public places. So, as far as they were concerned, Joe it had to be.

“Joseph Anton.” He was trying to get used to what he had invented. He had spent his life naming fictional characters. Now by naming himself he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well. “Conrad Chekhov” wouldn’t have worked. But “Joseph Anton” was someone who might exist. Who now did exist.

Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers, lost and not lost, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame; and Chekhov, the master of loneliness and melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in the cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new; Chekhov, whose
Three Sisters
believed that real life was elsewhere and yearned eternally for a Moscow to which they could not return: These were his godfathers now. It was Conrad who gave him the motto to which he clung as if to a lifeline in the long years that would follow. In his now-unacceptably-titled
The Nigger of the
Narcissus, the title character, a sailor named James Wait, stricken down by tuberculosis on a long sea voyage, was asked by a fellow sailor why he came aboard, knowing, as he must have known, that he was unwell. “I must live until I die, mustn’t I?” Wait replied. So must we all, he had thought when he read the book, but in his present circumstances the sentence’s power felt like a command.

“Joseph Anton,” he told himself, “you must live until you die.”

It had never occurred to him before the attack to stop writing, to be something else, to become
not a writer
. To have become a writer—to discover that he was able to do the thing he had most wanted to do—had been one of his greatest joys. The reception of
The Satanic Verses
had, for the moment at least, robbed him of that joy, not because of fear but on account of a deep disappointment. If one spent five years of one’s life struggling with a large and complex project, trying to wrestle it to the ground, to bring it under control, and give it all the shapely beauty his talent allowed—and if, when it came out, it was
received in this distorted, ugly way, then maybe the effort wasn’t worth it. If that was what he got for making his best effort, then he should perhaps try doing something else. He should be a bus conductor, a bellhop, a busker tap-dancing for change in a subway tunnel in winter. All those professions sounded nobler than his.

To stave off such thoughts he began to write book reviews. Before the
fatwa
his friend Blake Morrison, at the
Observer
’s book pages, had asked him to review Philip Roth’s memoir
The Facts
. He wrote the piece and sent it off. It could not be mailed from anywhere nearby, and he had no fax machine, so a protection officer agreed to mail it in London when he went off duty. He added a covering note apologizing for the review’s late delivery. When the newspaper ran his review they published a facsimile of his handwritten note
on page one
. He had become so unreal to so many people so quickly that this proof of his existence was treated as front-page news.

He asked Blake if he could continue reviewing for him and after that, every few weeks, he managed to deliver eight hundred words or so. They didn’t come easily
—like pulling teeth
, he thought, the cliché feeling apt because his wisdom teeth were aching quite often now, and the protection team was looking for a “solution”—but they represented his first awkward steps back toward himself, away from
Rushdie
and back toward
Salman
, toward literature again and away from the bleak, defeated idea of becoming
not a writer
.

It was Zafar who finally brought him back to himself, Zafar whom he worked constantly to see—the police drove back and forth, “dry-cleaning” father and son, making these intermittent meetings possible—in London at Sue and Gurmukh’s house on Patshull Road in Kentish Town, at the Pinters’ in Campden Hill Square, at Liz Calder’s place in Archway and once, wonderfully, for a weekend in Cornwall at the home of Clarissa’s oldest friend, Rosanne, a farmhouse with goats and chickens and geese deep in a valley near Liskeard. They played soccer—he showed promise as a goalie, diving eagerly this way and that—and computer games. They put together model train sets and model cars. They did ordinary, everyday, father-and-son things and it felt like a miracle. Meanwhile Rosanne’s little daughter Georgie persuaded the police to dress up in princess crowns and feather boas from her dressing-up box.

Marianne had not come for the weekend so he and Zafar shared a bedroom. And it was Zafar who reminded him of his promise: “Dad, what about my book?”

It was the only time in his working life that he knew almost the whole plot from the beginning. The story dropped into his head like a gift. He had told Zafar stories while the boy took his evening bath, bath-time stories instead of bedtime ones. There were little sandalwood animals and shikara boats from Kashmir floating in the bathwater and the sea of stories was born there, or perhaps reborn. The original sea was to be found in the title of an old Sanskrit book. In Kashmir in the eleventh century
A.D.
, a Shaivite Brahman named Somadeva had assembled a gigantic compendium of tales called the
Kathasaritsagara. Katha
meant story,
sarit
was streams and
sagara
was the sea or ocean; thus,
Kathasaritsagara
, the story-stream sea, usually rendered in English as the Ocean of the Streams of Story. In Somadeva’s huge book there wasn’t actually a sea. But suppose there was such a sea, where all the stories ever invented flowed in intertwining streams? While Zafar was bathing, his dad would take a mug and dip it into his son’s bathwater and pretend to sip, and to find a story to tell, a story-stream flowing through the bath of stories.

And now in Zafar’s book he would visit the ocean itself. There would be a storyteller in the story, who lost the Gift of the Gab after his wife left him, and his son would travel to the source of all stories to find out how to renew his father’s gift. The only part of his original vision that changed in the telling was the ending. At first he had thought this could be a “modern” book, in which the broken family stayed broken, and the boy got used to it, dealt with it, as children had to do in the real world, as his own son was doing. But the shape of the story demanded that what was broken at the beginning was made whole at the end. A happy ending had to be found and he agreed with himself that he was ready to find one. He had of late become extremely interested in happy endings.

Many years earlier, after reading the
Travels
of Ibn Battuta, he had written a short story called “The Princess Khamosh.” Ibn Battuta was a fourteenth-century Moroccan scholar with itchy feet whose account of his quarter century of journeys throughout the Arab world and beyond, to India, Southeast Asia and China, made Marco Polo sound like
a stay-at-home lazybones. “The Princess Khamosh” was an imaginary fragment of the
Travels
, a few lost pages from the manuscript of Battuta’s book. In it the Moroccan traveler comes to a divided country in which two tribes are at war, the Guppees, a chatterbox people, and the Chupwalas, among whom a cult of silence has grown up, and who worship a stone deity called Bezaban, that is,
without a tongue
. When the Chupwalas capture the Guppee princess and threaten to sew her lips shut as an offering to their god, war breaks out between the lands of Gup and Chup.

He had been dissatisfied with the story when he wrote it; the missing-pages conceit didn’t really come off, and he had put it away and forgotten it. Now he realized that this little tale about a war between language and silence could be given a meaning that was not only linguistic; that hidden inside it was a parable about freedom and tyranny whose potential he finally understood. The story had been ahead of him, so to speak, and now his life had caught up with it. By some miracle he remembered in which desk drawer he had put the folder containing the story, and asked Pauline to go into the St. Peter’s Street house and get it for him. By this time there were no longer reporters watching the building, so she was able to go in quietly and bring the pages out. When he read them again he became excited. Reshaped, stripped of the redundant Battuta element, they would give his book its dramatic heart.

At first the book was called “Zafar and the Sea of Stories,” but he soon felt the need to place a little fictive distance between the boy in the book and the one in the bath. Haroun was Zafar’s middle name. The change felt like an improvement as soon as it was made. At first Zafar was disappointed. It was his book, he said, so it should be about him. But he, too, changed his mind. He understood that Haroun both was and was not him, and that was better.

They returned to Porlock Weir from the blessed weekend with Zafar in Cornwall and when they neared the front door they could hear noises inside the house. The police officers at once shielded him and drew their weapons and then one of them opened the door. There were clear signs that the house had been disturbed: scattered papers, a fallen vase. Then another noise: like the beating of frightened wings.
“It’s a bird,” he said, his voice made much too loud by his relief. “There’s a bird in there.” Tension drained from the team as well. Panic over. A bird had fallen down the chimney and was now perched on a curtain rod in the living room, terrified. A blackbird, he thought.
Ristle-te, rostle-te, mo, mo, mo
. A window was opened and the bird flew out to freedom. He began to tidy up the house and songs about birds filled his head.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
. And the old Caribbean song about that bird “up high in banana tree.”
You can fly away / in the sky away / you more lucky than me
.

The book did not immediately begin to flow, even though he had the story. The noise of the storm outside the windows of the cottage was too loud, and his wisdom teeth hurt, and the book’s language proved hard to find. He made false starts—too childish, too grown-up—and the tone of voice he needed eluded him. It would be some months before he wrote the words that unlocked the mystery. “There was once, in the country of Alif bay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish …” Joseph Heller had once told him that his books grew out of sentences. The sentences “I get the willies when I see closed doors” and “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid” had been the genesis of his great novel
Something Happened
, and
Catch-22
too sprang from its opening sentences. He understood what Heller meant. There were sentences that one knew, when one wrote them, contained or made possible dozens or perhaps even hundreds of other sentences.
Midnight’s Children
had revealed its secrets, after much struggle, only when he sat down one day and wrote
I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time
. And so it was with
Haroun
. The moment he had the sad city and the glumfish he knew how the book had to go. He may even have leaped to his feet and clapped his hands. But that moment was months in the future. For now there was only the struggle and the storm.