Joseph Anton: A Memoir (67 page)

His nine stories were finding favor. Michael Dibdin in
The Independent on Sunday
wrote that this book did him more good and won him more friends than any number of speeches or statements, and that sounded right. Then Cat Stevens—Yusuf Islam—bubbled up in
The Guardian
like a fart in a bathtub, still demanding that Rushdie withdraw his book and “repent,” and claiming that his support of the
fatwa
was in line with the Ten Commandments. (In later years he would pretend that he had never said any of these things, never called for anyone’s murder, never justified it on the basis of his religion’s “law,” never appeared on TV or spoken to the papers to spout his uneducated bloodthirsty garbage, knowing he lived in an age in which nobody had a memory. Repeated denials could establish a new truth that erased the old one.)

Dick Wood’s new sidekick Rab Connolly, a sharp, fiery, slightly dangerous red-haired man who was taking a degree course in postcolonial literature in his spare time, called to panic about a cartoon in
The Guardian
showing an “establishment network” with lines connecting Mr. Anton to Alan Yentob, Melvyn Bragg, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Richard and Ruthie Rogers, and the River Café. “All those people visit you at your residence and this could prejudice the covert nature of the prot.” He pointed out that the media in London had known for a long time who his friends were, so this was nothing new, and after a while Connolly agreed that his friends would still be allowed to visit
him in spite of the cartoon. He sometimes felt he was caught in a trap of perceptions. If he tried to come out of his hole and be more visible, the press concluded he was no longer in danger, and acted accordingly, sometimes (as in the case of the
Guardian
cartoon) making the police feel that they had increased the risk to the Malachite principal. Then he was pushed back into the hole. On this occasion, at least, Rab Connolly did not lose his nerve. “I don’t want to stop you from going anywhere,” he said.

Out of the blue Marianne sent him a note, which was faxed to him by Gillon. “Against my will I watched you on
Face to Face
tonight, and I’m glad I did. There you were, as I once knew you—sweet and good and honest, discoursing about Love. Let’s bury what we made together, please.” On letterhead paper, and unsigned. He wrote to her saying he would be happy to bury the hatchet if she would just return his photographs. She did not reply.

At home, there were many tiny irritations caused by cohabiting with four policemen. Two teenagers in the street stared at the house and the police at once decided that Zafar must have told his school friends where it was. (He had not, and the teenagers were not from Highgate School.) More and more electronic security systems were brought into the house and fought with one another. When they set the alarms the police radios didn’t work and when they used the radios they jammed the alarms. They put an “outer rim” perimeter alarm system around the edges of the garden and every squirrel that ran by, every leaf that fell, triggered the alarm. “It’s like the Keystone Cops around here sometimes,” he said to Elizabeth, whose smile was forced, because the pregnancy she longed for had not happened. Tension rose in their bedroom. That did not help.

Elizabeth and he had dinner with Hitch, Carol, Martin and Isabel after a
London Review of Books
party and Martin was at his most emphatic. “Of course Dostoyevsky’s no fucking good.” “Of course Beckett’s no fucking good
at all
.” Too much wine and whiskey had been drunk and he began to argue fiercely with his friend. As their voices rose Isabel tried to intervene and he turned to her and said, “Oh, fuck off, Isabel.” He hadn’t meant to say that but the drink let it out. At once Martin bridled. “You can’t talk to my girlfriend like that. Apologize.”
He said, “I’ve known her twice as long as you, and she isn’t even offended. Are you offended, Isabel?” Isabel said, “Of course I’m not offended,” but Martin had become dogged: “Apologize.”

“Or what? Or else what, Martin? Or else we go outside?” Isabel and Elizabeth both intervened to put a stop to the idiocy but Christopher said, “Let it play itself out.” “All right,” he said, “I apologize. Isabel, I apologize. Now, Martin, there’s something you have to do for me.” “What’s that?” “You have to never speak to me again as long as you live.”

The next day he felt awful and did not feel better until he had spoken to Martin and put the quarrel away, agreeing with him that such things could happen from time to time and did not affect the love they felt for each other. He told Martin that there had built up inside him a huge unscreamed scream and last night a bit of it had come out in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

In November he went to Strasbourg to the meeting of the Parliament of Writers. The men of the RAID had taken over the entire top floor of the Hotel Regent Contades to protect him. They were tense because the trial of the murderers of Shapur Bakhtiar was in progress, and the subject of the conference was the tense situation with the Islamists of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, and his presence in the city cranked up the volume considerably.

He met Jacques Derrida, who made him think of Peter Sellers in
The Magic Christian
, walking through life with an invisible wind machine permanently ruffling his hair. He soon realized that he and Derrida would not agree about anything. In the Algeria session he made his argument that Islam itself, Actually Existing Islam, could not be exonerated from the crimes done in its name. Derrida disagreed. The “rage of Islam” was driven not by Islam but by the misdeeds of the West. Ideology had nothing to do with it. It was a question of power.

The RAID people were getting twitchier by the hour. They announced a bomb scare at the opera house, where the writers were meeting. There was a suspicious canister and they carried out a controlled explosion. It was a fire extinguisher. The bang happened during
Günter Wallraff’s speech and unnerved him for a moment. He had been ill with hepatitis and had made a special effort to come to Strasbourg “to be with you.”

That night on Arte he was asked to take the Proust questionnaire. What was his favorite word? “Comedy.” And his least favorite? “Religion.”

On the flight back, a German woman, quite young, had hysterics when he boarded the Air France flight, and left the plane, white and weeping. An announcement was made to calm things down. The passenger had left because she was not feeling well. Whereupon a mousy Englishman stood up and roared. “Oh, well,
none
of us are feeling
well. I’m
not feeling well
myself
. Let’s
all
get off.” He and his wife, a bottle blonde with big hair, an electric blue Chanel suit and much gold jewelry, got off the plane like Mr. and Mrs. Moses leading the Exodus. Fortunately, nobody followed them. And Air France agreed to go on flying him.

Ayatollah Jannati said in Tehran that the
fatwa
“sticks in the throats of the enemies of Islam but it cannot be revoked until that man dies.”

Clarissa was feeling better. On Christmas Day she insisted on having Zafar to herself. He and Elizabeth went to Graham and Candice’s and, in the evening, visited Jill Craigie and Michael Foot, who had been in the hospital with something unmentionable but made a big effort to make light of it. Finally Jill admitted he had had a hernia in the bowel. He had been throwing up, couldn’t eat, and they had feared cancer, so the hernia was a huge relief. “All his organs are okay,” she said, though of course at his age the operation was a major setback. “He kept telling me what to do if he was
no more
and of course I wouldn’t listen,” Jill said in her best no-nonsense voice. (Nobody could then have guessed that he would outlive her by eleven years.)

Michael had presents for them both, a second edition of Hazlitt’s
Lives of the Poets
for Elizabeth and a first edition of
Lectures on the English Comic Writers
for him. Michael and Jill treated them both with
great love and he thought, “If I had had my choice of parents these would have been the finest I could imagine having.”

His own mother was well and safe and far away and seventy-eight years old, and he missed her.

He had finished his novel. Seven years had passed since Saladin Chamcha turned away from the window looking out upon the Arabian Sea; it was five years since Haroun Khalifa’s mother, Soraya, began to sing again. Those were endings he had had to discover during the writing process, but he had had the end of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
almost from the beginning. Moor Zogoiby’s graveyard requiem for himself:
I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to my family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time
. It had been helpful to know the last notes of the music, to know the target toward which all the book’s arrows—narrative, thematic, comic, symbolic—were flying. Outside the pages of books the question of a satisfying ending was mostly unanswerable. Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence
of the victory of content over form, of
what
and
when
over
how
and
why
. Yet with the passage of time he became more and more determined to shape his story toward the ending everyone refused to believe in, in which he and his loved ones could move beyond a discourse of risk and safety into a future free of danger in which “risk” became once again a word for creative daring and “safe” was the way you felt when you were surrounded by love.

He had always been post-something according to that mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath—postcolonial, postmodern, postsecular, postintellectual, postliterate. Now he would add his own category, post
-fatwa
, to that dusty post-office, and would end up not just po-co and po-mo but po-
fa
as well. He had been interested in reclamation ever since he wrote
Midnight’s Children
to reclaim his Indian heritage for himself, and even before that, in fact, for was he not a Bombay boy, and was that megalopolis not itself a city built on land reclaimed from the sea? Now once again he would set out to reclaim lost ground. His completed novel would be published, and with that act he would reclaim his place in the world of books. And he would plan an American summer, and negotiate little increments of liberty with the police chiefs, and yes, he would continue to think about political pressure, about the defense campaign, but he didn’t have time to wait for a political solution, he needed to start grabbing those fragments of freedom that were within his reach, to start moving toward the happy ending he was determined to write for himself, step by lightening step.