Joseph Anton: A Memoir (64 page)

It was time for the Special Branch party again. Elizabeth tried to charm John Major but he didn’t pay attention, “gave her no lift,” to use one of Sameen’s favorite phrases. She was upset and said “I feel I’ve failed you,” which was ridiculous, of course. Major did promise Frances D’Souza he would make a statement on February 14, so that was something gained from the evening, at least. And the home secretary, Michael Howard, was friendly too. In the middle of the party
their protectors gave them a tour of the Special Branch floors. They saw the “reserve room,” where the duty officer let him look in the “Cranks Book” and answer a filthy phone call from one Crank. They saw the records office on the nineteenth floor, with a great view of London, and the secret files, which they couldn’t open, and the book containing the current IRA code words that, when used, meant the anonymous caller was warning of a real bomb. It was interesting that in spite of computerization so much was still kept in little box files.

After the party the team took him and Elizabeth for a drink at a favorite police wine bar, the Exchange. He realized they had all become very close. At the end of the evening they warned him that there was “quite a senior rogue” in town, they “wanted to be straight” with him and tell him that they would need to be “extra careful” for a few days. A week after that he heard that the “rogue” had been briefing other rogues on how to kill him, activating them from their roguish sleep. So now there were several rogues actively looking for him, to do to him what rogues were activated to do.

The fifth anniversary of the
fatwa
was approaching. He called Frances and made peace with her and Carmel but had very little appetite, just then, for talk of more campaigning. This year his friends did their best to pick up some of the load. Julian Barnes wrote a terrific piece for
The New Yorker
, witty and well-researched, an analysis of what was happening by someone who knew and liked him. Christopher Hitchens wrote in the
London Review of Books
, and John Diamond wrote in a tabloid paper to fight back against the tabloids’ attempts at character assassination on their own turf. The playwright Ronald Harwood met UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali on his behalf. “Boo-Boo was very sympathetic,” Ronnie told him. “He asked if the Brits have tried back-channel diplomacy through the Indians or the Japanese, because the Iranians pay attention to them.” He didn’t know the answer but he suspected it was
No
. “He said if the Brits want
him
to try then Douglas Hurd will have to request it formally.” He wondered why this had not been done.

Meanwhile, all over Europe, as the anniversary approached, the
coverage was sympathetic. Outside Britain he was seen as likable, funny, brave, talented, and worthy of respect. He was photographed by the great William Klein and afterward Klein mentioned to Caroline Michel how much he enjoyed the shoot: “He’s so nice and funny.” “If I could only meet everyone in the world in small groups,” he said to Caroline, “maybe I can put an end to all the hatred and scorn. There you are—a solution—maybe a little intimate dinner for me, Khamenei and Rafsanjani.” “I’ll work on it right away,” said Caroline.

The International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg had elected him president and asked him to write a sort of declaration of intent. “We [writers] are miners and jewelers,” he wrote, in part, “truth-tellers and liars, jesters and commanders, mongrels and bastards, parents and lovers, architects and demolition men. We are citizens of many countries: the finite and the frontiered country of observable reality and everyday life, the united states of the mind, the celestial and infernal nations of desire, and the unfettered republic of the tongue. Together they comprise a territory far greater than that governed by any worldly power; yet their defenses against that power can seem very weak. The creative spirit is all too frequently treated as an enemy by those mighty or petty potentates who resent our power to build pictures of the world which quarrel with, or undermine, their own simpler and less openhearted views. The best of literature will survive, but we cannot wait for the future to release it from the censor’s chains.”

The Parliament of Writers’ great achievement was the foundation of the International Cities of Refuge Network, which in the next fifteen years would grow to include three dozen cities from Ljubljana to Mexico City by way of Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Las Vegas. Nations often had reasons not to give refuge to persecuted writers—foreign ministries inevitably feared that, say, welcoming a Chinese writer in trouble might derail a trade deal—but at the urban level, mayors often saw this as an initiative with no downside. It didn’t cost much to provide a threatened writer with a small apartment and a basic stipend for a couple of years. He was proud of having been involved in the genesis of the scheme, and there was no doubt that his signature on the
letters the parliament sent out made a difference. He was glad to be able to send his name, which had gained such a strange, dark kind of fame, out to work on behalf of other writers who needed help.

On February 14 his “declaration” appeared in
The Independent
. He had worried that that newspaper, with its track record of Islamic appeasement, would contrive to put some sort of negative spin on the piece, and so it did. He woke up on Valentine’s Day to find his text on page three next to the news story about the anniversary while the entire op-ed page was given over to the egregious Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s piece about how the
fatwa
had led to many good, positive outcomes, allowing the British Muslim community to find an identity and a public voice. “Had it not been for that fateful 14 February 1989,” she wrote, “the world would be hurrying, unchallenged, toward the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald’s hamburgers.” How good of Khomeini to stimulate a new debate about Islamic and Western values, he thought; that was worth turning a few writers into hamburgers for.

“Happy anniversary!” It had become a black-comic tradition that his friends called to congratulate him on his special day. Elizabeth made him an elaborate Valentine’s card intertwining her own face with Frida Kahlo’s. Hanif Kureishi was off to Pakistan and agreed to take a letter to the anniversary boy’s mother in Karachi. Caroline Lang called from Paris to say that the tough-guy interior minister, Charles Pasqua, had been persuaded to agree that M. Rushdie could spend nights in France, not only at private residences but even at hotels. (Pasqua was later found guilty of making illegal arms sales to Angola and received a one-year jail sentence. The Belgian foreign minister, Willy Claes, was convicted for bribery. Such was the political world. Relatively few novelists were ever found guilty of the more lucrative forms of corruption.)

The campaigns of the previous two years bore fruit in the form of declarations by world leaders. This time John Major made a strongly worded statement,
We all want to make clear to the Iranian government that they cannot enjoy full and friendly relations with the rest of the international
community unless and until …
and the leader of the opposition, John Smith, said
I totally condemn … it is intolerable that … I call upon the Iranian government to …
and Ase Kleveland, the Norwegian minister of culture, said
We will intensify our efforts against
and
we demand that the
fatwa
be repealed
and Dick Spring in Ireland said
unacceptable
and
serious violation
and the Canadian foreign minister, André Ouellet, said
the fact that Rushdie has survived is a hope for freedom in the world
.

Half a million copies of the Auster-DeLillo leaflet (for which, in the end, the money had been raised) were distributed that day.
Pour Rushdie
was published in the United States as
For Rushdie
. And Frances and Carmel took Michael Foot, Julian Barnes and others to the Iranian embassy to deliver a letter of protest, but failed to arrange for any journalists to be there. Carmel also told BBC Radio that the
fatwa
had been extended to cover his family and friends. That was a clumsy and inaccurate misstatement that could potentially place the people closest to him at risk. Clarissa was on the phone one minute after it went out on the news to ask what was going on. John Diamond called him next, and he had to work hard for the rest of the day to persuade the BBC to put out a retraction.

Gillon had been trying to set up British printing and distribution for the
Verses
paperback and now reported success. Bill Norris, boss of the distribution company Central Books, of which Troika Books was the literary division, was happy to take on the task, excited about it, and unafraid. Central distributed antifascist literature and, Norris said, was always receiving threats because of that. Their building already had protection. But their interest was in promoting the book, not the scandal. He took a deep breath and said yes.
Let us do this thing. Let us defy the bastards
.

It struck him forcibly that literature was a country he had not inhabited for some time. Almost four years had passed since he finished
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, and his writing was still going badly, he couldn’t focus or concentrate and was beginning to panic. Panic could be a good thing, it had driven him to work before now, but this had been the longest—yes, he would use the term—
writing block
of his life.
It scared him and he knew he must break through it. March would be a make-or-break month. Frances Coady, his UK editor at Random House, had suggested “maybe a wee book of stories to tide people over,” and that could be a way back. What mattered was to write, and he was not writing. Not really. Not at all.

He tried to make himself remember what it was to be a writer, willed himself to rediscover the habits of a lifetime. The inward inquiry, the waiting, the trust in the tale. The slow or quick discovery of how to slice through the body of a fictional world, where to enter it, what journey to make through it, and how to leave. And the magic of concentration, like falling into a deep well or a hole in time. Falling into the page, searching for the ecstasy that came too rarely. And the hard work of self-criticism, the harsh interrogation of his sentences, using what Hemingway had called his “shit detector.” The frustration of bumping up against the limits of talent and understanding. “Open the universe a little more.” Yes; he was Bellow’s dog.

There was strange news: It was revealed that he had been awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature
two years earlier
, but the Austrian government had prevented the information from being released. Now there was a hue and cry in the Austrian media. The Austrian culture minister, Rudolf Scholten, admitted he had been naïve and asked to speak to Dr. Rushdie on the phone. When Dr. Rushdie called him, the minister was friendly and apologetic: It had been a mistake, and all the arrangements would soon be made. The mystery of the “secret” Austrian prize was widely reported all over Europe. No English newspaper thought it worth mentioning, however. But the good old
Independent
ran a piece contrasting Taslima Nasreen’s courageous decision to live “openly” (i.e., she couldn’t go out of her heavily guarded apartment all day, only venturing out under cover of darkness in a car with blackened windows) with
The Satanic Verses’
author’s craven wish to remain “in hiding” (which involved fighting for his freedom against police restraints, and going out nevertheless in broad daylight to public places, while being criticized for doing so).

In the shadow world of the phantom killers the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, was saying the
fatwa
could not be rescinded.
In fact, Velayati was speaking in Vienna, and almost at once the police were telling the
fatwa
’s prime target that his plan to visit that city to receive his State Prize was “too dangerous.” Too many people already knew too much about it. Dick Wood told him that the official Foreign Office view was that he would be foolish to go. But they were leaving the final decision to him, even though they “knew” that “something was being planned.” He said he didn’t want to be scared off, didn’t want to run from shadows, and Dick, speaking personally, said he agreed. “It takes time to set up a hit, and they really haven’t had enough time.”

In Vienna Rudolf Scholten and his wife, Christine, a doctor, greeted them like old friends. The security detail chief said that “certain activities” at the Islamic cultural center were suspicious and so his freedom would unfortunately have to be restricted. They could not walk in the streets, but were shown the city from the roof of the Burgtheater, whose director, Claus Peymann, a burly, bohemian fellow, invited him to come back soon and do an event there. They were driven through the Vienna woods—lovely, dark and deep, like the woods in Robert Frost’s famous “hallucinatory” poem—but he was not allowed to get out of the car, which made the woods feel even more like a hallucination. After dinner Elizabeth stayed at the Scholtens’ but he was taken by helicopter to the headquarters of the Austrian Special Branch, outside Vienna, and had to spend the night there.
Miles to go before I sleep
. A man who had been watching the Scholtens’ apartment building was followed back to the Iraqi, not the Iranian, embassy. So he was probably from the PMOI, whose headquarters were in Iraq. (Saddam Hussein willingly provided a safe haven for his enemy Khomeini’s enemies.) The next day the Austrian police surrounded him in phalanx formation and led him into the hall where the award ceremony was to be held. Police helicopters buzzed in the sky overhead. But everything went off without incident. He received his award and went home.

Back in London, he had a late-night conversation with the American counterterrorism chief Robert Gelbard, who said he had “disturbing and specific” information about continued “efforts” against him by the Iranians, “a sign of their frustration,” he said, “but as this is something new you should hear about it.”
Finish your damn novel, Salman
, he told himself.
You may not have very long left
. The
Observer
ran
a story describing a quarrel between Rafsanjani and Khamenei about the Rushdie case. Rafsanjani wanted to abolish the 15 Khordad Foundation, the power base of Sanei of the Bounty, and to ban the use of death squads. But Khamenei had prevented both moves and reiterated the
fatwa
. Nothing changed.