Joseph Anton: A Memoir (71 page)

Then three nights at the Irvings’, and three at the Herrs’, and three more at the Wylie place on Park Avenue. Zafar got his GCSE results on their last night and they were, thank goodness, good. In the years that followed he often wondered how he would have survived without these annual American safety-valve journeys, when they could pretend to be normal literary folk going about their normal business unaccompanied by men with guns, and it didn’t seem that hard. He became certain, very quickly, that when the day came it would be America that would make it easiest for him to reclaim his freedom. When he said this to Elizabeth she frowned and became irritable.

In the darkness that followed the collapse of the French initiative there was one unexpected shaft of light. Lufthansa cracked under public pressure. There was a lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Lufthansa, CEO Jürgen Weber
und frau
. Frau Weber turned out to be a
big fan
, or so she told him. And, yes, they were
delighted
to carry him, her husband said. They were
proud
to do it. It was just as easy as that. After over six years of refusals—pouf!—they’d
love
to have him on their planes,
any time
. They admired him
so much
. “Thank you,” he said, and everyone looked very pleased, and of course there were many books to be autographed.

The BBC made a documentary about
The Moor’s Last Sigh
and commissioned his friend the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar to paint his portrait for the film. It was a novel about painters and painting and his friendships with a generation of gifted Indian artists—with Bhupen himself above all—had allowed him to think of writing it. They had first met in the early 1980s and each of them had at once seen himself in the other and they had quickly become friends. Soon after their first meeting he went to Bhupen’s show at the Kasmin Knoedler gallery in London. In his pocket was a check for a story he had just sold to
The Atlantic Monthly
. At the show he fell in love with Bhupen’s
Second Class Railway Compartment
and when he discovered that the price tag was exactly the same as the figure on the check in his pocket (Indian art was cheaper then) he had happily turned his story into his friend’s painting, and it had remained one of his most prized possessions ever since. It was hard for contemporary Indian artists to escape the influence of the West (in an earlier generation M. F. Husain’s famous horses had leaped straight out of Picasso’s
Guernica
, and the work of many of the other big names—Souza, Raza, Gaitonde—was too deeply indebted for his liking to modernism and Western developments in abstraction). Finding an Indian idiom that was neither folkloric nor derivative had not been easy, and Bhupen had been one of the first to succeed, looking at the street art of India, the movie posters, the painted shop fronts, and at the figurative and narrative traditions of Indian painting, and creating out of that visual environment an oeuvre of idiosyncrasy, originality and wit.

At the heart of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
was the idea of the palimpsest, a picture concealed beneath another picture, a world hidden beneath another world. Before he was born his parents had hired a young Bombay painter to decorate his future nursery with fairy-tale and cartoon animals and the impoverished artist Krishen Khanna had accepted the commission. He had also painted a portrait of the unborn Salman’s beautiful young mother, Negin, but her husband, Anis, hadn’t liked it and refused to buy it. Khanna stored his rejected canvas at his friend Husain’s studio and one day Husain painted a picture of his own over
it, and sold it. So somewhere in Bombay there was a portrait of Negin Rushdie by Krishen, who of course grew up to be one of the leading artists of his generation, concealed beneath a picture by Husain. Krishen said, “Husain knows where every picture of his has ended up, but he won’t say.” The BBC tried to get him to say, but the old man angrily tapped his cane on the floor and denied that the story was true. “Of course it’s true,” Krishen said. “He’s just worried that you want to destroy his painting to find your mother’s portrait, and he’s offended that you’re looking for my picture and you don’t care about his.” In the end he had come to think that the portrait was more evocative lost than found—lost, it was a beautiful mystery; found, it might have proved that Anis Rushdie’s artistic judgment had been correct, and that the then apprentice Khanna hadn’t done a very good job—and he called off the search.

He sat for Bhupen in a studio in Edwardes Square, Kensington, and told him the story of the lost picture. Bhupen giggled delightedly and worked away. His portrait was being painted in profile in the tradition of Indian court portraits, and like a good
nawab
he wore a see-through shirt, only his, as painted by Bhupen, looked more like nylon than sheer cotton. Bhupen began by drawing, in a single movement, a charcoal profile that caught an exact likeness with effortless skill. The painting that covered this single charcoal line looked in some ways less like its subject and more like the character of Moor Zogoiby in the novel. “It’s a painting of you both,” Bhupen said. “You as the Moor and the Moor as you.” So there was a lost portrait beneath this portrait too.

The completed painting was eventually acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and Bhupen became the first Indian artist to have a work hanging there. Bhupen died on August 8, 2003, on the same day as Negin Rushdie. There was no escape from coincidence, though the meaning of such synchronicity remained elusive. He lost a friend and a mother on the same day. That was meaning enough.

The novel was published. He continued to push out his boundaries. He took part in his largest pre-announced appearance yet, at the
Times
Writers’ Forum in Central Hall Westminster, along with Martin Amis,
Fay Weldon and Melvyn Bragg. He read a passage from
The Moor’s Last Sigh
and thanked the audience for being at his “little coming-out party.” Yes, there was security, and yes, he had to come and go by the back door in an armored car, but he was publishing his book. And no, there were no demonstrations, and the police bigwigs at the Yard began, at last, to relax.

He was planning something very ambitious. His South American publishers asked if he would visit Chile, Mexico and Argentina in December, and he decided he could do that and then go on to New Zealand and Australia. It would be a mammoth journey and he became determined to pull it off. Many airlines had to be spoken to, but now that he had Lufthansa as well as Iberia, Air France, Austrian and Scandinavian Airlines on his side, it was easier to make the case. Slowly the route was worked out, approvals sought and received; the Mexican ambassador in London, Andrés Rozental, met him with Carlos Fuentes and helped to arrange the Mexican leg of the journey; and then, amazingly, improbably, the plans were set. They were cleared to go.

They went to Oslo for the Norwegian publication of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
and he read in the great hall of Oslo University, the Aula, with murals by Edvard Munch. It was the first pre-announced reading outside the United Kingdom and both he and William Nygaard felt that they had taken a big step forward.
A victory over our oppressors
, William said,
and we have done it together
. William was still a little slowed by his injuries, still a little in pain, but full of life. That night in Oslo, to everyone’s amazement, the northern lights filled the sky. They were rarely seen in Oslo, which was too far south, or in October, which was too early, but there they were, the green aurora showing up “in honor,” William said, “of your Aurora.” The heroine of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
was Aurora Zogoiby, and it was as if she was up there, dancing in the sky, somewhere among the giant green curtains that arced and rippled wildly from horizon to horizon. Everyone in Oslo was calling their friends, saying
go outside, look up, it’s amazing
. The aurora was in the sky for an hour or more, and it felt like a sign of better times.

Robert McCrum had had a stroke in the house at 41 St. Peter’s Street. He and Sarah Lyall had been married for just two months and while
she was away he had almost died. Robert had survived, but an arm was paralyzed, he could walk only a couple of steps at a time, and it was impossible to say how bad the long-term damage might be. He was improving a little and both he and Sarah clung to that as a sign of hope. The Curse of St. Peter’s Street had struck again.

He went with Christopher Hitchens to see Robert and Sarah and, in a way, to apologize for the Curse. It was strange to be back in his old home, where he had been when, as he had begun to say, the excrement hit the ventilation system. Various ghosts flitted in and out of the room as he and Hitch talked to their stricken friend. They didn’t stay long. Robert needed to rest.

In the snapshots his memory kept of his life in those years, the police were often absent, erased from history’s photos like the Communist leader Clementis at the beginning of Milan Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
. To help him get through the days, he tried to make himself forget he was always surrounded by security and that security considerations loomed so large in his daily life. He forgot the small daily privations. He could not get his own mail or pick up his morning paper from the forecourt of his home. There were pajamaed collisions in the kitchen that never stopped feeling embarrassing. There was
Joe
, the increasingly hated pseudonym. (Was it really necessary to avoid calling him by his own name in his own house?) There was the loss of all spontaneity.
I’d like to go for a walk, please. Okay, Joe, give us an hour to set it up. But in an hour I won’t want to go for a walk
. And every time he did go out they took him to a “changeover point” and made him get out of one car, the car associated with the house, and into another, the car associated with his public appearances. For the rest of his life he would hate these changeover points, Nutley Terrace, Park Village East, he would wince inwardly every time he passed them, but at the time he made himself
not experience them
, he detached himself from the body of the man scuttling from vehicle to vehicle, and when he reached his destination he refused to think about the prot, he was just out with his friends, being himself.

For his friends it was the opposite, the security was so unusual for
them, so odd and thrilling, that it was just about all they remembered. When he asked them for their memories of those days they gave him memories of policemen,
Do you remember the one who seduced our nanny, Do you remember the two really good-looking guys, everyone had a crush on them
, they remembered drawn curtains and locked garden doors. Even in his friends’ eyes he was becoming a sideshow and the police were the main event. But when he tried to recall those days the police often weren’t there. They had been there, of course, but his memory had decided they weren’t.

But sometimes it was impossible to perform his little mind trick. In the snapshots his memory preserved of his South American trip, the policemen of Chile were right in the center of the frame, frightening, unforgettable,
loud
.

Snapshot of Chile
. There were two different police forces in Chile, the uniformed Carabineros and the plainclothes Policía de Investigaciones, and while he and Elizabeth were in the air, flying to Santiago, these two great institutions quarreled about the decision to allow him into the country. He was supposed to speak at a literary fair, but when they got off the plane on a hot glaring airless day they were surrounded by uniformed police and taken to a stifling shed somewhere on the airport tarmac while people shouted in Spanish all around them. Their passports were taken away. No English speaker was produced to interpret, and when he tried to ask what was going on he was shouted at and ordered, with unmistakable gestures, to back off and shut up.
Welcome to Sudamerica
, he thought, sweating a good deal.

In 1993 Augusto Pinochet was no longer president but he was still commander-in-chief of the armed forces and even in the autumn of the patriarch nobody was in any doubt about his continued power and influence. In Pinochet’s Chile the security forces were omnipotent. Except that in this case the two police systems were in a dogfight, and he was the bone. He was reminded of the passage in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s
The Emperor
in which Kapuscinski described Haile Selassie’s two entirely separate intelligence services, whose chief job was to spy on each other. He also reminded himself, less amusingly, that this was a country in which disappearances and unexplained murders had until recently been commonplace. Had they perhaps been “disappeared”?

After being held in the shed for perhaps two hours they were taken to a police facility described as a hotel. It was not a hotel. The door of their room did not open from the inside. There were armed guards posted outside it. He asked repeatedly for their passports to be returned, for his publisher to be called, and to speak to the British ambassador. The guards shrugged. They did not speak English. More hours ticked by. There was nothing to eat or drink.