Joseph Anton: A Memoir (35 page)

“In Good Faith” ran on Sunday, February 4, 1990. The junior minister at the Foreign Office, William Waldegrave, called Harold Pinter to say that it had made him cry. The first Muslim responses were predictably negative, but he detected, perhaps wishfully, a slight change of tone in what Shabbir Akhtar and his sidekick Tariq Modood had to say. There was one piece of bad news: The families of the British hostages in Lebanon planned to issue a statement opposing the
Verses
paperback. Then on Tuesday, February 6, Harold stood up at the ICA and read “Is Nothing Sacred?” The lecture was televised on the BBC
Late Show
. He felt an immense sense of relief. He had said his piece. The storm had been raging for a year, and he had felt that his voice had been too small to be heard above all the other voices bellowing from every corner of the globe, above the howling of the winds of bigotry and history. Now he had proved himself wrong. He wrote in his journal, “The reaction to both IGF and INS? has cheered me immensely. It seems a real shift has taken place. Demonization is in retreat and the attackers seem confused.” Friends called, describing the mood at the ICA as “loving,” “electric,” “exciting.” Marianne offered a dissenting view. The atmosphere had been “sterile.” She was feeling, she added, “unloved.”

Three days after the Read lecture, Ayatollah Khamenei, at Friday prayers, renewed the Iranian mullocracy’s death order. It was becoming a familiar pattern in the year-old “Rushdie Affair”: An apparent lightening of the clouds, a moment of hope, was followed by a sickening blow—an escalation, an upping of the ante. “Well,” he wrote defiantly in his journal, “they haven’t got me yet.”

Nelson Mandela walked out of the shadows into the sunlight, a free man, and the twelve months of atrocity and wonder acquired another exclamatory moment of joy. He watched Mandela reappear from his long invisibility and understood how little he himself had suffered in comparison. Enough, he told himself. Get back to work.

But Valentine’s Day was upon him again. Clarissa sweetly called to wish him well for the anniversary. Harold called. He had met the new Czech president, the playwright and human rights hero Václav Havel, in Prague “and his first question was about you. He wants to do something big.” There were more threats, from the Speaker of the Majlis—the Iranian parliament—Mehdi Karroubi (twenty years later an unlikely leader of the opposition to President Ahmadinejad alongside Mir Hossein Moussavi, another enthusiastic supporter of the
fatwa
) and from the “acting commander in chief” of the Revolutionary Guard. Ayatollah Yazdi, Iran’s chief justice, said all Muslims with “resources” had a duty to implement the threat, and in London, the garden gnome was having fun, leading a large gathering in “approval” of the threat but adding that its fulfillment was “nothing to do with British Muslims.” This was emerging as a new party line. Liaquat Hussain of the Bradford Council of Mosques said that “Is Nothing Sacred?” was a “publicity stunt,” and that Rushdie did not need to remain invisible, because he was in no danger from British Muslims—he was just doing so, Hussain said, to keep the controversy going and make more money.

A
New York Times
editorial criticized publishers and politicians for their vacillations and equivocations and supported him for “defending every author’s right to publish books that ask troubling questions and open doors to the mind.” As the pressure mounted, such sympathetic words had come to mean a great deal.

British Muslim attempts to indict him for blasphemy and under the public order act were heard in court. Geoffrey Robertson argued
his case, making the simple point that the consequences of violence were the moral responsibility of those who committed the acts of violence; if people were killed, the fault lay with their killers, not with a faraway novelist. It did not help these Muslims’ cause that on the third day of the judicial review the judge started receiving threatening letters. In the end neither of the legal attacks succeeded. This was greeted with “anger” by Muslim leaders, though the “Islamic Party of Great Britain” went so far as to ask for the
fatwa
to be lifted because the author had been “mad” when he wrote the book, quoting as “evidence” the published statement by the director of the mental health charity SANE that
The Satanic Verses
contained one of the best descriptions of schizophrenia she had ever read. Meanwhile, Keith Vaz, who had so enthusiastically joined the Muslim demonstrators a year earlier, now wrote to
The Guardian
to describe the death threat as “odious” and to say that lifting it was now the priority.

A “celebration” dinner was arranged at Jane Wellesley’s apartment and Sameen, Bill, Pauline (whose birthday it was), Gillon, Michael and Valerie Herr joined him and Marianne to toast a year of continued life. He was happy to escape the Hermitage Lane house for an evening; he had come to loathe it, for its damp walls, its leaky roof, its low-grade carpentry, above all its lack of furniture. It was expensive and he had never felt so thoroughly ripped off; and he had had to accept it for the sake of being in London and because of its internal garage. The next day Zafar was brought to spend the day at that depressing place and as he watched his son struggle with geometry homework he wished, bitterly, that he could be a proper father again and not miss the boy’s childhood. This was the greatest loss.

Marianne came around and scolded him for playing video games. Thanks to Zafar, he had grown fond of Mario the plumber and his brother Luigi, and sometimes Super Mario World felt like a happy alternative to the one he lived in the rest of the time. “Read a good book,” his wife told him scornfully. “Give it up.” He lost his temper. “Don’t tell me how to live my life,” he exploded, and she made a grand exit.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
had begun to flow. His notebooks contained many fragments—rhymes, jokes, a floating gardener made out of tough, gnarly roots and vegetables like a painting by Arcimboldo singing
you can chop suey / but you can’t chop me
, and a sore-throated warrior whose coughs and throat clearings sounded like novelists,
kafkafka!, gogogol!
, and some that didn’t make the final cut,
gogh!, waugh!
, and (after the unpronounceable narrator of Italo Calvino’s
Cosmicomics
)
qfwfq!
Also finally coming to life was the hideous and tone-deaf Princess Batcheat and her caterwauling song about her beloved (and asinine) Prince Bolo,
he don’t play polo, he can’t fly solo
, all of which could now find their place in that happy current. The magic-lamp creature called Genie Come Lately—“some sort of arriviste upstart”—was discarded, along with her sister, the Genie with the Light Brown Hair. This was fun. It pleased him, then and forever afterward, that in the darkest moments of his life he wrote his brightest and most cheerful book, a book with the genuine, bona fide, well-earned happy ending he had wanted, the first he had ever come up with. As the Walrus told Haroun, such conclusions were not easy to engineer.

Václav Havel was coming to London. It would be his first official trip since assuming the presidency and, Harold Pinter said, he intended to use it to make a major public gesture of support for the author of the
Verses
who, coincidentally, had been wondering if he could put together a pressure group of global eminences led by Havel and perhaps the great Peruvian novelist (and defeated presidential candidate) Mario Vargas Llosa. The idea was to assemble a delegation that the Iranians could say “yes” to: a group of such distinction that agreeing with them would look like a dignified act rather than a retreat.

Sameen had been pushing him to come up with creative options like this. “You have to take charge,” she said, “and think of everything you can.” Now Havel was coming to London, wanting to be his champion. Maybe there would be an opportunity to meet him and talk things through. “He wants to be photographed with you and have a joint press conference,” Harold said. “I’m calling William Waldegrave.”

Everyone who knew and loved Harold Pinter knew that he was a good man to have on your side in a scrap. Those who had had the unenviable experience of “being Pintered” knew that the rough edge of Harold’s tongue was to be avoided if at all possible. The rage and suppressed violence that burned through his greatest plays were also there in the man, visible in the set of his jaw, the intensity of his gaze, the glittering menace of his smile. Those were qualities you wanted in an ally, not in an opponent. The day after the
fatwa
Harold led a group of writers to Downing Street to demand action. His instant agreement to deliver the Read lecture had given ample proof of his personal courage. If he was calling William Waldegrave, William Waldegrave would know he had been called.

Sure enough, the next day, Harold called back. “It’s on.” The Havel meeting, which was, Harold said, “the most important thing on Havel’s agenda after meeting Thatcher,” had been put in the hands of the security team arranging the Czech president’s state visit. It felt like—it was—a breakthrough moment; the first time the leader of any government had endorsed him so openly. The British government had been reluctant to allow any minister to meet him, for fear of sending “the wrong messages.” Now Havel was going to do what Thatcher would not.

But he was still fortune’s fool, and “Joseph Anton” had a bad seven days. Troubles were multiplying at the shoddy house on Hermitage Lane. The central heating had stopped working and a plumber had to come to the house. He had to hide in the bathroom for several hours, drenched in the now habitual sweat of shame. Then the agent for the property arrived to inspect it, and it was back to the bathroom. Finally a builder showed up to repair damp patches in the walls and to replace an area of the ceiling where water leaks had caused serious damage. This time there was nowhere to hide and so, while the builder was working in the living room, poor Joseph Anton had to scurry down the stairs to the garage, protected from discovery by no more than a closed interior door, and be driven hurriedly away. The Jaguar circled the city aimlessly, lost in space, with Dennis the Horse telling him bad jokes until he received word that it was safe to return.

This was what it was like to be invisible. One moment he was talking
on the phone to Peter Weidhaas, organizer of the Frankfurt Book Fair, who had just informed Iran that its publishers would not be welcome at the Fair until the
fatwa
was canceled. The next he was hiding from a ceiling repairer. He was an author completing a children’s book (and preparing for publication a collection of essays, to be called
Imaginary Homelands
after a piece he had once written about the displaced writer’s relationship to place)—and he was also a fugitive cowering in a locked bathroom, fearing discovery by a West Indian plumber.

The day after the close shave with the builder, he finished a good draft of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, and his friend John Forrester, a fellow of King’s, Cambridge, called to suggest the possibility of an honorary degree, “like the one they gave Morgan Forster long ago.” The idea of sharing an honor with the author of
A Passage to India
was very moving. He said he would be delighted if that were to happen. Several months later John called him to say that it would not happen. Too many people at the college were too afraid.

A crisis had arisen at St. Peter’s Street. His old home was locked up and uninhabited and things were going wrong. The local police were saying the property was not “secure.” There had been a report of a gas leak and the man from the gas board had had to break in. Also, he was told, water was flooding the basement. Somebody needed to go in and take a look. Marianne and he had hardly spoken since their quarrel about the Mario Brothers but she said she would go. The problems turned out to be minor. The gas man had put a ladder up and entered through an unlocked upstairs window so there was no damage to the front door. There had been no gas leak. The water in the basement reported by the gas man turned out not to be a flood but a small drip, easily repaired. Marianne came away from St. Peter’s Street in a foul mood and on the phone later she blazed at him about everything. “I bet,” she shouted, “you haven’t even made the bed.”

That evening he was taken to see Edward and Mariam Said at a house on Eton Road in Swiss Cottage. At that time Edward’s diagnosis with chronic lymphocytic leukemia was still a year away and he was in the full handsome bloom of health, an expansive talker, a laugher and gesturer, a polymath, flirt, and hypochondriac. In those days if Edward had a cough he feared the onset of serious bronchitis, and if he
felt a twinge he was certain his appendix was about to collapse. Amazingly, when he actually did fall ill, he became a hero, rarely complaining, fighting the CLL with all his might and, with the aid of his brilliant physician Dr. Kanti Rai, breaking all records by living for a dozen years after the cancer’s first appearance. Edward was a dandy, a little vain about his good looks, and once, years later, they lunched near Columbia University after the end of the
fatwa
business, happy to be meeting in plain sight, without attendant policemen to draw the curtains and do the “dry-cleaning.” The cancer was in partial remission and Edward was less gaunt than had sadly become usual. “Edward,” said the no-longer-Joseph-Anton, “you’re looking healthy again! You’ve put on weight!” Edward bristled. “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not fat, Salman.”