Joseph Anton: A Memoir (43 page)

In the afternoon he was taken to a press conference and tried to sound positive. There were interviews for radio and television, with Essawy and without him. He did not remember what he said. He knew what he was saying to himself.
You are a liar
, he was saying.
You
are a liar and a coward and a fool
. Sameen called him. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” she shouted at him. “What do you think you are doing?”
Yes, you have taken leave of your senses
, said his inner voice.
And you have no idea what you have done, or are doing, or can now do
. He had survived this long because he could put his hand on his heart and defend every word he had written or said. He had written seriously and with integrity and everything he had said about that had been the truth. Now he had torn his tongue out of his own mouth, had denied himself the ability to use the language and ideas that were natural to him. Until this moment he had been accused of a crime against the beliefs of others. Now he accused himself, and found himself guilty, of having committed a crime against himself.

Then it was Christmas Day.

He was taken to Pauline’s basement apartment in Highbury Hill and Zafar was brought there so that they could spend Christmas morning together. After a couple of hours Zafar went back to his mother’s and he and Elizabeth were driven to Graham Swift and Candice Rodd’s house in Wandsworth. It was their second Christmas together. They were as friendly as ever and tiptoed around the subject of what had just happened so as not to spoil the Christmas mood, but he could see the worry in their eyes just as they, he was certain, could see the confusion in his. The next day was spent at Bill Buford’s little house in Cambridge and Bill had cooked a feast. These moments were islands in the storm. After that his days were busy with journalists and his ears were deafened by the news. He spoke to the British, American and Indian press, and to the BBC World Service’s Persian section, and did phone-ins on British Muslim radio stations. He loathed every word he said. He was twisting on the hook he had so willingly swallowed and he made himself sick. He knew the truth: He was no more religious than he had been a few days earlier. The rest was pure expediency. And it wasn’t even working.

At first it seemed it just might. The grand sheikh of al-Azhar came out in support and “forgave him his sins” and Sibghat Qadri, QC, asked to meet the attorney general to discuss prosecuting Kalim Siddiqui.
But Iran remained intransigent. Khamenei said the
fatwa
would remain in place even “if Rushdie became the most pious man of all time” and a hard-line Tehran newspaper advised him to “prepare for death.” Siddiqui duly parroted these statements. And then the Paddington Green Six began to back away from their agreement. Sheikh Gamal demanded the total withdrawal of
The Satanic Verses
, which he and his colleagues had agreed not to do. Gamal and his colleague Sheikh Hamed Khalifa had been strongly criticized by the congregation at the Regent’s Park Mosque and under the pressure of that criticism were abandoning their positions. The Saudis and Iranians expressed their “anger” at the Egyptian government’s involvement in the peace effort and Mahgoub, in danger of losing his job, also reneged on what he had agreed.

And on January 9, 1991, Elizabeth’s thirtieth birthday, he was visited at noon by Mr. Greenup, who told him grimly, “We believe that the danger to you has now increased. Credible intelligence has been received about a specific threat. We are analyzing this and will let you know in due course.”

He had fallen into the trap of wanting to be loved, had made himself foolish and weak, and now he was paying the price.

I
T WAS
E
LIZABETH’S BIRTHDAY AND HE WAS COOKING AN
I
NDIAN MEAL
for her. Gillon, Bill, Pauline and Jane Wellesley were coming to Wimbledon for this little celebration dinner. He wanted it to be a special evening for her. She was giving him so much and he could give her very little but at least he could cook this meal. He told nobody about what Greenup had said. There would be time for that another day. This day, January 9, was for the woman he loved. They had been together for five months.

After her birthday he fell ill. He ran a high fever for several days and was confined to bed. As he lay there hot and shivering the news, both private and public, seemed to be an aspect of his sickness. Andrew’s assistant Susan had spoken to Marianne, who said she was well, and no doubt she was, but he couldn’t pay attention to that now. The police were telling him that because of the “specific threat” his activities would have to be restricted even further. He had been asked to go on various TV programs,
Wogan, Question Time
, but that would not be
allowed
. He had been asked to speak to a House of Commons group but they didn’t want to take him to the Palace of Westminster. A few private evenings at the homes of friends might be permitted but that was all. He knew he would refuse to accept this but he was too unwell just then to argue. Late at night as he lay fevered in bed the TV brought him news of the start of the Gulf War, the huge aerial attack on Iraq. Then Iraq attacked Israel with Scud missiles, which miraculously killed nobody and, fortunately, were not armed with chemical warheads. He spent the days in a half delirium of sleep, fever and images of precision bombing. There were phone calls, some answered, some not, many bad dreams, and above all his continuing anguish about his declaration that he had “become a Muslim.” Sameen was finding that very hard to take and some of the calls were hers. For two years he had been heading down a road toward the heart of darkness and now he was there, in
hell. He had perplexed all his friends and had obliged himself to stand smiling alongside those who had vilified him and threatened others, people who had acquiesced in the threat of murder made by Iran, which Iqbal Sacranie, for one, had called “his divine retribution.” The “intellectual” Tariq Modood wrote him a letter saying he must no longer talk about the
fatwa
. “Muslims find it repulsive,” Modood said. The West had used the
fatwa
to demonize Muslims, so it would be “repulsive” of him to object to it anymore. This Modood presented himself as a moderate but such hypocrisy made it impossible for him to think in a straight line. And these were the people he could no longer challenge because he had torn out his tongue. Another “moderate,” Akbar Ahmed, called to say that the “hard-liners” may slowly be coming around but he must be “very conciliatory,” a “
sadha
[plain] Muslim.” He replied that there was a very limited amount of shit he was willing to eat.

“Becoming a Muslim” prompted some Foreign Office types to propose that he speak up for a terrorist. He received a message suggesting that he might usefully intervene in the Kokabi trial. Mehrdad Kokabi, a “student,” was charged with arson and causing explosions at bookshops selling
The Satanic Verses
. The prosecution said his fingerprints had been found on the paper wrapping two pipe bombs, and that he had used his credit card to hire cars used in the attacks. Perhaps, it was hinted to him, it would be a nice touch for the author of
The Satanic Verses
to plead for clemency in the case. Outraged by the suggestion, he spoke to Duncan Slater and David Gore-Booth. They both disagreed with the idea. That was faintly reassuring, but two months later all charges against Kokabi were suddenly dropped and he was recommended for deportation to Iran. The government denied that it had twisted the arm of blind Justice. Slater and Gore-Booth said they knew nothing about it. Kokabi returned to Iran, where he was given a hero’s welcome and a new job. It became his responsibility to choose “students” who would receive placements abroad.

The page proofs of his collection of essays
Imaginary Homelands
had arrived. Bill said, “Now that you’ve done this thing maybe we should put your essay into the book.” He had published a piece in the London
Times
trying to justify the concessions he had made at Paddington Green. He hated the piece, was already rethinking everything he had done, but having hung the millstone round his neck he was, for the moment at any rate, unable to get it off. He agreed with Bill and the
essay went in under the title “Why I Am a Muslim.” For the rest of his life he would never see a hardcover copy of
Imaginary Homelands
without feeling a knife of embarrassment and regret.

The war filled everyone’s thoughts and when they were not repeating that he must “withdraw the insult” (cease publication of
The Satanic Verses
) the British Muslim “leaders”—Siddiqui, Sacranie, the Bradford mullahs—were expressing sympathy with Saddam Hussein. The second anniversary of the
fatwa
was approaching and the winter weather was bitter and cold. Fay Weldon had sent him a copy of
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill, perhaps as a rebuke, but its clear, strong words were as inspiring to him as ever. His contempt for the harder-headed of his opponents—for Shabbir Akhtar and his attacks on the nonexistent “liberal inquisition” and his pride in Islam as a religion of “militant wrath”—had been reborn, alongside a new dislike of some of his supposed supporters, who now believed he was not worth supporting. James Fenton wrote a sympathetic piece in
The New York Review of Books
defending him against the phenomenon of the “Dismayed Friends.” If the “dream Salman” in people’s minds had been let down by the actions of the real Salman, these Dismayed Ones were now beginning to think, then, poof!, to the devil with him, he wasn’t worthy of their friendship. Might as well let the assassins have their way.

He was remembering something Günter Grass had once said to him about losing: that it taught you more profound lessons than winning did. The victors believed themselves and their worldviews justified and validated and learned nothing. The losers had to reevaluate everything they had thought to be true and worth fighting for, and so had a chance of learning, the hard way, the deepest lessons life had to teach. The first thing he learned was that
now he knew where the bottom was
. When you hit bottom you knew how deep the water you were in really was. And you knew that you never wanted to be there again.

He was beginning to learn the lesson that would set him free: that to be imprisoned by the need to be loved was to be sealed in a cell in which one experienced an interminable torment and from which there was no escape. He needed to understand that there were people who would never love him. No matter how carefully he explained his
work or clarified his intentions in creating it, they would not love him. The unreasoning mind, driven by the doubt-free absolutes of faith, could not be convinced by reason. Those who had demonized him would never say, “Oh, look, he’s not a demon after all.” He needed to understand that this was
all right
. He didn’t like those people either. As long as he was clear about what he had written and said, as long as he felt good about his own work and public positions, he could stand being disliked. He had just done a thing that had made him feel very bad about himself. He would rectify that thing.