Joseph Anton: A Memoir (27 page)

He was offered Kevlar bulletproof vests to wear. He refused them. And when he walked from the door of a car to the door of a building or back again, he consciously slowed down. He would not scuttle. He would try to walk with his head held high.

“If you succumb to the security description of the world,” he told himself, “then you will be its creature forever, its prisoner.” The security worldview was based on the so-called worst-case analysis. But the worst-case analysis of crossing a road is that there was a chance you would be hit by a truck, and therefore you should not cross the road. But people crossed roads every day and were not hit by trucks. This was a thing he would have to remember.
There were only varying degrees of insecurity
. He had to go on crossing roads.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said Joyce’s Dedalus, but what did little Stephen Hero know about nightmares? The most nightmarish thing that ever happened to him was getting drunk in Nighttown and going home with Poldy to build the New Bloomusalem and maybe be pimped out by the cuckold Bloom to service randy Molly.
This
was a nightmare—bloodthirsty priests shooting arrows of retribution and an effigy of himself in a demonstration with that arrow through his head—and he was already awake. In Pakistan one of his uncles, married to his mother’s sister, put an ad in the paper essentially saying
Don’t blame us, we never liked him anyway
, while his aunt told my mother, who was still in Wembley with Sameen, that Pakistanis didn’t want her in the country. This wasn’t true. It was probably the aunt and uncle who were embarrassed by their kin and didn’t want her close. She went anyway and nobody attacked her. Sometimes in the bazaar people would ask if her son was all right and sympathized with her,
such a terrible thing
. So some civility remained in the midst of the bloodthirsty riots. Meanwhile he was in the care of police officers nicknamed Piggy and Stumpy and Fat Jack and Horse—he was getting used to the nicknames and the rotation of personnel—and trying to find a place to move to when he had to leave Porlock Weir (the Holroyds had generously allowed him to stay an extra six weeks, but time was almost up). Suitable houses were proving hard to find especially
when he had to do all the looking by proxy. He didn’t exist. Only Joseph Anton existed; and he could not be seen.

The world of books continued to send him messages. Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise wrote from America to tell him that people were making
I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE
button badges and proudly wearing them as a sign of their solidarity. He wanted one of those badges. Maybe Joseph Anton could wear a badge in solidarity with the person he both was and was not. Gita Mehta told him by telephone, a little waspishly, that “
The Satanic Verses
is not your
Lear. Shame
is your
Lear
.” Blake Morrison said, “Many writers are feeling paralyzed by the affair. Writing feels like fiddling while Rome burns.” Tariq Ali unkindly described him as being “a dead man on leave” and sent him the text of a play he had written with Howard Brenton that was to be staged at the Royal Court Theatre.
Iranian Nights
. It struck him as a shoddy, hurried, slapstick thing, which included the gibes at his work that were by now becoming conventional. “It was a book that no-one could read” was a sort of leitmotif. Among the subjects the play did not explore were: religion as political repression and as international terrorism; the need for blasphemy (the writers of the French Enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the church to set limiting points on thought); religion as the enemy of the intellect. Those were the themes he might have treated if it had been his play, but it was not. He was only its subject, the author of the unreadable book.

When he was able to visit people he noticed that they were more excited by the security precautions—the dry-cleaning, the curtains being drawn, the exploration of their homes by handsome men with guns—than by his visit. Afterward his friends’ most vivid memories of those days were invariably memories of the Special Branch. An improbable friendship was deepening between the London literary world and the British secret police. The protection officers liked his friends, who would make them welcome, make sure they were comfortable, and feed them. “You have no idea,” he was told, “how we get treated elsewhere.” Political grandees and their wives often treated these good men like the help.

Sometimes people were too excited. He was once invited to visit
Edward Said, who was staying in London at the Mayfair home of a Kuwaiti friend. When he arrived the Indian maid, wide-eyed, recognized him at once and became overwrought. She telephoned Said’s host’s household back in Kuwait and shouted incoherently down the line, “Rushdie! Here! Rushdie here!” Nobody in Kuwait could understand why the invisible man had manifested himself in their London base: Why was he taking refuge there? Edward had to explain that he had merely invited his friend to dinner. No long-term residence was envisaged.

He slowly came to understand that the protection looked
glamorous
. Men arrived in advance of his own coming, everything was made ready, a sleek Jaguar stopped at the door, there was the moment of maximum risk between car door and front door, then he was whisked inside. It looked like VIP treatment. It looked like
too much
. It made people ask,
Who does he think he is? Why does he deserve to be treated like a king?
His friends didn’t ask this but maybe one or two of them wondered too: Was all of this really necessary? The longer it lasted, the longer he went without being killed, the easier it was for people to believe that nobody was trying to kill him, and that he wanted the protection around him to satisfy his vanity, his insufferable self-importance. It was hard to convince people that from where he was standing the protection didn’t feel like movie-stardom. It felt like jail.

Meanwhile rumors swirled in the press. The Abu Nidal organization was training a hit team who would enter the United Kingdom “dressed as businessmen, in Westernized clothes.” Another assassination squad was supposedly being prepared in the Central African Republic. And as well as these lethal whispers, the ugliness was still blaring from every radio, television and newspaper front page. The Tory minister John Patten eloquently debated the pro-Muslim Keith Vaz, MP, on TV. Kalim Siddiqui was on TV, just back from Iran, saying menacingly, “He will not die in Britain,” implying that a kidnapping plot was being hatched. The former pop singer Cat Stevens, recently reincarnated as the born-again Muslim “leader” Yusuf Islam, was on TV, too, hoping for his death and stating that he would be prepared to call in the hit squads if he learned the blasphemer’s whereabouts.

He telephoned Jatinder Verma of the Tara Arts theater group and was told of “heavy intimidation [of British Muslims by the campaign organizers] going on at the grass roots” and “political pressure by the Council of Mosques.” As depressing as the Islamic campaign were the attacks from the left. John Berger denounced him in
The Guardian
. And the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy, author of
There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
, the nearest thing the United Kingdom had to a figure like Cornel West in America, accused him of having “misjudged the people” and therefore of having created his own tragedy. Surreally, Gilroy compared him to the boxer Frank Bruno, who evidently knew how not to “misjudge the people,” and was therefore loved. It was not possible, in the thinking of socialist intellectuals like Berger and Gilroy, that the people had misjudged him. The people could not be wrong.

The house problem was becoming acute. Then Deborah Rogers came to the rescue for the second time and offered a solution: a spacious house she knew of in the village of Bucknell in Shropshire that was available for a year. The police checked it out. Yes, it was a possibility. His spirits rose. A home for a year sounded like an unthinkable luxury. He agreed: Joseph Anton would rent it.

One day he asked the protection officer called Piggy: “What would you have done if
The Satanic Verses
had been, say, a poem, or a radio play, and had not been able to generate the income that allows me to rent these places? What would you have done if I had been too poor?” Piggy shrugged. “Fortunately, as it happens,” he said, “we don’t have to answer that question, do we.”

Michael Foot and his wife, Jill Craigie, had persuaded his successor as leader of the opposition, Neil Kinnock, and his wife, Glenys, to meet him for dinner at their house in Pilgrims Lane, Hampstead. The writer and barrister John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, and his wife, Penny, would also be there. He was driven to London and found himself stuck in a traffic jam right outside the Regent’s Park Mosque while the faithful poured out of Friday prayers, having just heard a sermon reviling him. He had to open
The Daily Telegraph
and bury his face in it. After a while he asked, “I assume the doors are
locked?” There was a click and a clearing of the throat and Stumpy said, “They are now.” He could not help feeling how awful it was to be so segregated from “his” people. When he said this to Sameen she scolded him.

“These mullah-ridden mobs were never your people,” she said. “You’d always have opposed them, and been opposed by them, in India or Pakistan also.”

At the Foots’ house, Neil Kinnock was amazingly friendly, sympathetic and supportive. But he was also worried that it would “get out” that he had been there and that could cause him political problems. He could not have been nicer, but it was a secret niceness. Kinnock was opposed, he said at one point, to state subsidies being given to segregated Muslim schools, but what could he do, he cried, it was Labour Party policy. It was not possible to conceive of his adversary, the formidable Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, feebly throwing up her arms like that.

Michael himself had become a passionate ally and friend. Their only disagreement was about Indira Gandhi, whom Michael had known well, and whose years of quasi-dictatorship during the “emergency” of the mid-1970s he was disposed to excuse. When Michael adopted you as a friend, he took the view that you could do no wrong.

Also at the dinner was the poet Tony Harrison, who had made a film-poem for BBC TV called
The Blasphemers’ Banquet
, in which he dined in a restaurant in Bradford with Voltaire, Molière, Omar Khayyám and Byron. One chair was left empty.
“That’s Salman Rushdie’s chair.”
They talked about blasphemy being at the very root of Western culture. The trials of Socrates, Jesus Christ and Galileo had all been blasphemy trials and yet the history of philosophy, Christianity and science owed them a mighty debt. “I’m keeping your chair for you,” Harrison said. “Just let me know when you can take delivery.”

He was driven away into the night. His wisdom teeth exploded.

They had chosen a hospital near Bristol and made all the arrangements. He was smuggled in for examinations and X-rays and had to spend the night before the operation in the morning. Both lower wisdom
teeth were impacted and a general anesthetic would be required. The police were concerned that if news of his presence there got out a hostile crowd could gather outside the hospital. They had a plan to cover that eventuality. They had a hearse standing by and would drive it into a hospital bay and bring him out anaesthetized, zipped up in a body bag. This proved to be an unnecessary stratagem.

When he regained consciousness Marianne was holding his hand. He was in a happy morphine haze and the headache, jaw ache and neck ache didn’t feel so bad. There was a heated pillow under his neck and Marianne was being very nice to him. There were twenty or thirty thousand Muslims assembling in Hyde Park to demand whatever they were demanding but the morphine made it okay. They had threatened the biggest ever rally in Britain, five hundred thousand people, so twenty thousand felt piffling. Morphine was wonderful. If only he could stay on it all the time he would feel just fine.

Later he had a row with Clarissa because she had allowed Zafar to watch the demonstration on TV. “How could you have done that?” he demanded. “It just happened,” she said, adding that he was obviously upset by the demonstration and shouldn’t take it out on her. Zafar came on the phone and said that he had seen an effigy with an arrow through its head. He had seen twenty thousand men and boys marching through the streets, not of Tehran, but his own hometown, demanding his father’s death. He told Zafar: “People show off for the TV, they think it looks smart.” “But it doesn’t,” Zafar said. “It looks stupid.” He could be an astonishing boy.

He spoke to his computer geek friend Gurmukh Singh, who had a brilliant idea: Why didn’t he get himself a “cellphone”? There were these “cellphones” now. You charged their batteries and then you carried them around wherever you went and nobody knew where you were calling from. If he had one of these new phones then he would be able to give out a number to family and friends and business colleagues without compromising his location. What a brainwave, he said, that sounds wonderful, almost unbelievable. “I’m going to look into it,” Gurmukh told him.

The cellphone—ridiculously bulky, a brick with an antenna—arrived not long afterward and his excitement knew no bounds. He called people and gave them the number and they kept calling him back—Sameen, Pauline, and, several times, his friend Michael Herr, author of the Vietnam War classic
Dispatches
, who was living in London and had been obsessing about him more than anyone else, and who was, if anything, more afraid and paranoid on his behalf than he was himself. Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel
The Remains of the Day
was just out and enjoying a great triumph, called to say that he thought
The Satanic Verses
should be rereviewed everywhere, this time by novelists, to turn the focus back toward literature. Clarissa called him to make peace. An Irish author represented by A. P. Watt, where she worked, had told her a story about Irish builders he knew in Birmingham who had been working on the foundations of a big new mosque. When nobody was looking they had dropped a copy of
The Satanic Verses
into the wet cement. “So that mosque is being built on your book,” Clarissa said.