Joseph Anton: A Memoir (47 page)

“There will be repercussions even if it means death,” said the spokesman of the Bradford Council of Mosques. “In sentencing the author of
The Satanic Verses
to death the judgment of the imam was flawless,” said the garden gnome. Meanwhile in Paris a death squad entered the home of the exiled ex-president of Iran, Shapur Bakhtiar, an opponent of the ayatollahs’ regime, and murdered him and an aide with knives in what was described as a “ritual killing.”

There was a coup in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev and for three days he was under house arrest. When he was freed and flew back to Moscow there were reporters waiting by the plane to ask him if he would now abolish the Communist Party. He looked horrified by the question and at that moment, precisely then, history (in the form of Boris Yeltsin) rushed by him and left him trailing in its wake. Yet he, not Yeltsin or Reagan or Thatcher, was the man who changed the world by forbidding the Red Army to fire on demonstrators in Leipzig and elsewhere. Many years later the formerly invisible man would meet Mikhail Gorbachev at a fund-raising event in London. “Rushdie!” cried Gorbachev. “I totally support all your positions.” There was even a small hug.
What, all of them?
he asked the man with the map of Antarctica tattooed on his forehead. “Yes,” said Gorbachev, through his interpreter. “Total support.”

He was writing a monograph about the film
The Wizard of Oz
for his friend Colin MacCabe at the British Film Institute. The two great themes of the film were home and friendship and he had never felt the need for both more strongly. He had friends every bit as loyal as Dorothy’s companions on the Yellow Brick Road, and he was about to have a permanent home again, after three years on the road. He wrote a dystopian short story, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” as a companion piece to the essay. The slippers that could take you home whenever you wanted them to: What was the value of such things in a violent science-fiction future in which everything was for sale and home had become a “scattered, damaged” concept? The essay pleased Bob Gottlieb at
The New Yorker
and he published a large piece of it before the BFI booklet was published. The actor who played the Munchkin coroner, Meinhardt Raabe, read it in a retirement home in Fort Lauderdale and sent in a fan letter, accompanied by a gift: a color photograph of his big scene from the movie. He stood on the steps of the Munchkin town hall holding up the long scroll, at the top of which were the large Gothic letters reading
CERTIFICATE OF DEATH
. Under that legend Raabe, using a blue ballpoint pen, had carefully inscribed the words
Salman Rushdie
. When he saw his name on the Munchkin death certificate his first thought was,
How funny is that, really?
But then he thought,
No, I get it, Mr. Raabe in his retirement home shoots letters off to people all over America, all over the world, he’s another Herzog blasting his words into empty space, except that he also has a big stack of these pictures by his bedside and sends one of them with every letter. It’s his calling card. He doesn’t think, Oh, but this particular guy actually has a death order out on him, maybe I should be a little more sensitive. He writes, signs, mails. That’s what he does
.

After the booklet was published Colin MacCabe told him that many people at the BFI had been terrified to be associated with a book by the notorious Mr. Rushdie. Colin had managed to assuage at least some of their fears. The book came out and there were no rivers of blood. It was just a little book about an old movie. But he had understood that before he could be free again he would have to overcome other people’s fears as well as his own.

The British hostage John McCarthy was released in Lebanon.

The “A” Squad chiefs decided it was time to
allow
Zafar to visit his father at Hampstead Lane. Mr. Greenup at first suggested that the boy should be blindfolded so that the location was not compromised but that was out of the question and Greenup did not press the point. That afternoon Zafar was brought to the house and his happiness lit up its ugly interior and made it beautiful.

Frances called him, excited. She had been asked to tell him in confidence that
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
had won a Writers’ Guild Award for the best children’s book of the year. “They would love it if you could somehow come to collect your prize.” Yes, he told her, he too would very much like to be there. He went to see Michael Foot who said, “Good. The mood has changed. We have to see Hurd again and be much tougher in our demands.” He loved Michael’s appetite for the fight, undiminished by his advancing years. That, and his head for whiskey, only rivaled by that of Christopher Hitchens. When drinking with Michael it had more than once been necessary to pour his Scotch surreptitiously into a potted plant.

He told the police about the Writers’ Guild Award. The ceremony would be at the Dorchester Hotel on September 15. The protection team made sharp-intake-of-breath noises of demurral. “Don’t know how that’ll go down at the office, Joe,” said Benny Winters, looking, in his sharp tan leather jacket, a little like Lenny Kravitz with shorter hair. “But we’ll run it by them for sure.” The result of running it by them was a visit from Mr. Greenup at his grimmest, accompanied by another senior police officer, a woman, Helen Hammington, who didn’t say much at first.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” said Mr. Greenup. “I can’t
allow
that.”

“You won’t
allow
me to go to Park Lane to collect my literary award,” he replied, slowly. “You won’t
allow
this even though only one person, the event organizer, would have to know in advance, and we could arrive after people are seated for dinner, be there perhaps ten minutes before the award ceremony, collect the prize and then leave before the ceremony ends. This is what you won’t
allow
.”

“For security reasons,” Mr. Greenup said, setting his jaw. “It’s most unwise.”

He inhaled deeply. (His reward for giving up smoking was the arrival of late-onset asthma, so he was sometimes short of breath.) “You see,” he said, “I was under the impression that I am a free citizen of a free country, and it’s not really for you to
allow
or not
allow
me to do anything.”

Mr. Greenup lost his composure. “It is my view,” he said, “that you are endangering the citizenry of London by reason of your desire for self-aggrandizement.” This was an astonishingly composed sentence—
citizenry, by reason of, self-aggrandizement
—and he never forgot it. A pivotal moment—what Henri Cartier-Bresson had called
le moment décisif
—had arrived.

“You see,” he said, “here’s the thing. I know where the Dorchester Hotel is and as it happens I have the money to pay for a taxi. So the question is not whether or not I’m going to the awards. I
am
going to the awards. The only question you have to answer is, are you coming with me?”

Helen Hammington joined the conversation and told him that she was replacing Mr. Greenup as the senior case officer at the Yard. This was extraordinarily good news. She then said to Mr. Greenup, “I think we can probably handle this.” Greenup went bright pink but said nothing. “It has been decided,” Hammington went on, “that we should probably
allow
you to go out a bit more.”

Two days later he was at the Dorchester in the bosom of the book world and received his award, a glass inkwell on a wooden plinth. He thanked the people in the room for their solidarity and apologized for materializing and dematerializing in the middle of dinner. “In this free country,” he said, “I am not a free man.” The standing ovation actually brought tears to his eyes, and he was not a man who cried easily. He waved at the audience and as he left the room he heard John Cleese at the mike saying, “Oh,
great
. I’m supposed to follow
that
.” It had been a harmless little bit of self-aggrandizement after all. The citizenry of London were safe in their tuxedos, their homes, their beds. And he never saw Mr. Greenup again.

The angel of death never seemed to be far away in those strange days. Liz called: Angela Carter had been told she had no more than six
months to live. Zafar called him in tears. “Hattie is dead,” he said. Hattie was May Jewell, Clarissa’s Anglo-Argentine grandmother, a fan of wide-brimmed hats and the model for the character of Rosa Diamond in
The Satanic Verses
, outside whose house in Pevensey Bay, Sussex, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha had landed on sand after falling out of an exploding jumbo jet, and lived. Some of May Jewell’s favorite stories—in London, in Chester Square Mews, she had once seen the ghost of a stableboy who looked as if he was walking on his knees until she realized that he was walking on the old, lower street level and so was visible only from the knees up; in Pevensey Bay the invading fleet of the Norman Conquest would have sailed through her living room, because the coastline had changed since 1066; in Argentina the bulls at her
estancia
of Las Petacas would come and lay their heads in her lap as if they were unicorns and she a virgin, neither of which was the case—had found their way into his pages. He had been very fond of her stories, of her hats, and of her.

Helen Hammington came to see him again to tell him what the police felt would be all right for him to do under the new, liberalized rules. They could take him, by arrangement, to shop for clothes and books after hours. Perhaps he would like to make a shopping expedition out of London, to somewhere like Bath, for example, in which case he could even go when the shops were open. If he wanted to do book signings that might be possible as long as they too were away from London. His friend Professor Chris Bigsby had invited him to read at the University of East Anglia, and perhaps he could accept invitations of that sort. Occasional outings to the Covent Garden Opera House or the English National Opera, or to the National Theatre, could be made to work. She knew that Ruthie Rogers, co-owner of the River Café in Hammersmith, was his close friend, so maybe he could go to dinner there, or at the Ivy, where the owners, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, would also be helpful. Oh: and Zafar would now be
allowed
not only to visit, but also to spend the night at Hampstead Lane. Mr. Greenup’s departure had certainly altered things.

(What he was
not allowed
to do: to live publicly, to move freely, to pursue the ordinary life of a writer or of a free man in his forties. His life was like a severe diet regime: Everything that was not expressly
allowed
was forbidden.)

On November 11 it would be one thousand days since Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service and the declaration of the
fatwa
. He talked to Frances and Carmel about how to use the moment politically. They agreed to hold a twenty-four-hour “vigil” in Central Hall Westminster. When news of this was published he was called by Duncan Slater. Douglas Hurd, Slater said, was asking for the vigil to be canceled and threatening that if it was not, the Rushdie defense campaign would be blamed—perhaps even by the government—for delaying the release of the British hostage Terry Waite. Michael Foot was furious when he was told this. “Giving in to threats encourages hostage taking,” he said. But in the end the event was canceled at the
fatwa
victim’s request. Terry Waite’s human rights had to be given precedence over his own.

The head of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Peter Weidhaas, had wanted to reinvite Iranian publishers, but uproar in Germany prevented him from doing so.

The thousandth day arrived. He completed an essay, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” to mark its arrival. PEN American Center held a rally and delivered a protest letter to the United Nations. His British friends, their vigil canceled, read letters of support at a bookstore on Charing Cross Road. However,
The Independent
newspaper, which was becoming a sort of house journal for British Islam, carried an article by the “writer” Ziauddin Sardar, who said, “The best course for Mr. Rushdie and his supporters is to shut up. A fly caught in a cobweb does not draw attention to itself.” The fly in question called the editor of that newspaper to tell him that he would no longer write reviews for its books pages.

On November 18 Terry Waite was freed by his captors. There were no more British hostages in Lebanon. How, he wondered, would the authorities try to silence him now? He had his answer soon enough. On November 22, the archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, decided to attack
The Satanic Verses
and its author. The novel, Carey said, was an “outrageous slur” on the Prophet Muhammad. “We must be more tolerant of Muslim anger,” the archbishop declared.

He fought back in a radio interview, and the British press came down heavily against the archbishop. Carey backed down and apologized and invited the man whose work he had condemned to tea. The invisible man was driven to Lambeth Palace and there was the prim
figure of the archbishop and a dog asleep in front of a fire and here was a cup of tea: one cup and, disappointingly, no cucumber sandwiches. Carey was clumsy and stumbling and didn’t have much to say. When asked if he would try to intercede with Khamenei to have the
fatwa
revoked, as one man of the cloth to another, he replied feebly, “I don’t think he would pay much attention to me.” The purpose of the tea was no more than damage limitation. It was soon over.