Read Joseph Anton: A Memoir Online
Authors: Salman Rushdie
Joseph Anton: A Memoir (82 page)
But the world’s unkindness was never far away. “There is no question of Rushdie being allowed to visit India in the foreseeable future,” said an Indian government official. The world had become a place in which his arrival in a land that he loved
could lead to a political crisis
. He thought of the boy Kay in Hans Christian Andersen’s story
The Snow Queen
who has cold splinters of a devil’s mirror in his eye and heart. His sadness was that splinter and he feared it would change his personality and make him see the world as a place full of hatefulness filled with people to scorn and loathe. Sometimes he met such people. At a birthday party for his friend Nigella he had just absorbed the unbearable news that her husband, John, had a new lump, and that the signs looked bad, when he was confronted by a journalist whose name he could not bring himself to write down even a dozen years later, who, having had perhaps a glass of wine too many, began to abuse him in language so extreme that in the end he had to leave Nigella’s party. For days after
that encounter he was unable to function, unable to write, unable to go into other rooms in which a man might come up to him and call him names, and he canceled engagements and stayed home and felt the splinter of the cold mirror in his heart. Two of his journalist friends, Jon Snow and Francis Wheen, told him that the same journalist had abused them too, and in very similar language, and because misery loved company he cheered up when he heard that. But for another week he was unable to work.
Maybe it was because he was losing faith in the world he was obliged to live in, or in his ability to find joy in it, that he introduced into his novel the idea of a parallel world, a world in which fictions were real while their creators didn’t exist, in which Alexander Portnoy was real and not Philip Roth, in which Don Quixote had once lived but not Cervantes; and of a variant to that world in which Jesse Presley had been the twin that survived while Elvis died; in which Lou Reed was a woman and Laurie Anderson was a man. As he wrote the novel the act of inhabiting an imagined world seemed somehow nobler than the tawdry business of living in the real one. But down that road lay the madness of Don Quixote. He had never believed in the novel as a place to escape into. He must not begin to believe in escapist literature now. No, he would write about worlds in collision, about quarreling realities fighting for the same segment of space-time. It was an age in which incompatible realities frequently collided with one another, just as Otto Cone had said in
The Satanic Verses
. Israel and Palestine, for example. Also, the reality in which he was a decent, honorable man and a good writer had collided with another reality in which he was a devil creature and a worthless scribe. It was not clear that both realities could coexist. Maybe one of them would crowd the other one out.
It was the night of the “A” Squad party at Peelers, the Secret Policemen’s Ball, and this year Tony Blair was there and the police brought them together. He spoke to the prime minister and made his pitch and Blair was friendly but noncommittal. After that Francis Wheen did him a great favor. He wrote a piece in
The Guardian
attacking Blair for his passivity in the Rushdie case, his refusal to stand beside the writer and show support. Almost at once there was a call from Fiona Millar, Cherie Blair’s right-hand person, who sounded very
apologetic and invited him and Elizabeth to dinner at Chequers on the ninth anniversary of the
fatwa
. And yes, it would be okay to bring Milan too, it would be an informal family-and-friends occasion. Milan, to celebrate his invitation, learned how to wave.
Dear Mr. Blair
,
Thanks for dinner. And Chequers! Thanks for letting us have a look at it. Nelson’s diary, Cromwell’s death mask—I was a history student, so I liked all that. Elizabeth loves gardens so she was delighted by the beech trees etc. To me all trees are “trees” and all flowers are “flowers,” but yeah, I liked the flowers and trees. I liked it, too, that the furnishings were just slightly faded, faintly genteel-dowdy, which made the place look like a house people actually lived in and not a small country-house hotel. I liked it that the staff were dressed up so much more smartly than the guests. I’d bet Margaret Thatcher never wore blue jeans when entertaining
.
I remember meeting you and Cherie for dinner at Geoffrey Robertson’s house not long after you became party leader. Boy, were you tense! I thought: Here’s a fellow who knows that if he blows the next election his entire party may very well disappear down the plug-hole. Meanwhile, Cherie was relaxed, confident, cultured, every inch the successful QC with broad artistic interests. (This was the night you admitted you didn’t go to the theater or read for pleasure.) Well, what a difference getting the job makes! At Chequers your grin was almost natural, your body language comfortable, your whole self at ease. Cherie, on the other hand, looked like a nervous wreck. As she showed us around the house—“and this of course is the famous Long Room, and here, do just have a look, is the famous blah, and hanging on that wall is the famous blah blah blah”—we got the feeling that she’d rather hang herself than do this good-wife second-fiddle châtelaine-of-Chequers shtick for the next five or ten years. It was as if you’d exchanged characters. So interesting
.
And at dinner your family was delightful and Gordon Brown and his Sarah, and Alastair Campbell and his Fiona, very pleasant indeed. And Cameron Mackintosh! And Mick Hucknall! And Mick’s hot girlfriend what’s-her-name! We couldn’t have asked for more. It cheered us up no end, I can tell you, because we’d had a bit of a tough day, Elizabeth and I, absorbing the annual felicities coming our way from Iran. Sanei of the Bounty offered a bonus if I was killed in the United States, “because everybody hates
America.” And the chief prosecutor Morteza Moqtadaie announcing “the shedding of this man’s blood is obligatory,” and state-run Tehran radio speculating that “the destruction of this man’s worthless life could breathe new life into Islam.” A little upsetting, you know? I’m sure you can understand if my mood was a little off
.
But I’m getting very fond, I must say, of Robin Cook and Derek Fatchett. It meant a lot on this unwished-for anniversary to hear the foreign secretary demand the end of the
fatwa,
demand that Iran open a dialogue about canceling it. There have been foreign secretaries, let me tell you!, who … but it’s best not to dwell on the past. Just wanted to say I felt grateful for the new management and its willingness to battle religious fanaticism
.
Oh, I hear you’re both devoutly religious by the way, yourself and Cherie. Congratulations on doing a really excellent job of hiding that
.
I remember one striking moment at dinner. Well, two. I remember you dandling little Milan on your knee. That was kind. And then, as I recall, you began to talk about freedom and I thought, I’m interested in that, so I turned away from Mick Hucknall’s hot girlfriend to listen to you, and there you were talking about the freedom of the market as if that was what you meant by liberty, which couldn’t have been true, because you’re a Labour prime minister, aren’t you?, so I must have misunderstood, or perhaps this was a New Labour thing, freedom
=
market freedom, a new concept, perhaps. Anyway, quite the surprise
.
And then we were leaving and the staff were cooing over Milan and saying how nice it was for them to have little children in the house, because prime ministers had tended to be older and their children to be grown up, but now there was the frequent patter of the little feet of the younger Blairs and it brought the old house to life. We liked that, Elizabeth and I, and we liked seeing the enormous teddy bear in the front hall, a gift from a foreign head of state, the president, perhaps, of Darkest Peru, “What’s it called,” I asked, and Cherie said you hadn’t thought of a name yet, and without pausing to think I said, “You should call it Tony Bear.” Which I admit may not have been brilliant, but it was quick, at least, so perhaps it merited just a tiny smile?, but no, your face was stone and you said, “No, I don’t think that’s a good name at all,” and I left thinking, Oh, no, the prime minister doesn’t have a sense of humor
.
But I didn’t care. Your government was on my side and that meant the
small jarring notes could be ignored, and even later in your premiership, when the jarring notes became louder and more discordant and it really was hard not to pay attention to them, I always had a soft spot for you, I could never hate you the way so many people began to hate you, because you, or at least your Mr. Cook and Mr. Fatchett, set out sincerely to change my life for the better. And, in the end, they succeeded. Which may not quite cancel out the invasion of Iraq, but it weighed in my personal scales, that’s for sure
.
Thanks again for a lovely evening
.
On the day after the Chequers dinner—the day the news of it was released—Iran announced that it was “surprised” by Robin Cook’s call for the end of the
fatwa
. “It will last for ten thousand years,” the Iranian statement asserted, and he thought,
Well, if I get to live for ten thousand years, that will do just fine
.
And on the day after that, in the Ambassadors Waiting Room at the Foreign Office, he and Robin Cook stood side by side and faced the press and photographers, and Cook made a number of tough, uncompromising remarks, and another loud, clear message was sent to the Khatami government in Iran. His protection officer Keith Williams murmured to him as they left the building, “They’ve done you proud, sir.”
The newly assertive British government position seemed to be having some effect.
Mary Robinson, the ex-president of Ireland and the new UN commissioner for human rights, went to Tehran and met high-ranking officials and announced after her visit that Iran “in no way supported” carrying out the
fatwa
. The UN special
rapporteur
on Iran was told there “might be some progress possible on the
fatwa
.” And Italy’s foreign minister, Lamberto Dini, met with his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, and was told that Iran was “completely prepared to cooperate with Europe to solve existing political problems.”
Now they had a family home. One of the policemen’s bedrooms was being turned into Milan’s room, and their “living room,” where the
furniture was all but worn out, could be a playroom, and then there were two spare bedrooms. “If the house is blown it will be a huge problem,” they were constantly told, but the truth was this:
The house was never blown
. It never became known, never got into the newspapers, never became a security problem, never required the threatened “colossal” expenditure on security equipment and man-hours. That didn’t happen, and one of the reasons, he came to believe, was the good nature of ordinary people. He remained certain that the builders who had worked on the house knew whose house they were working on, and didn’t buy the “Joseph Anton” story; and not long after the police moved out and Frank started working for him there was a problem with the garage door—a suspiciously heavy wooden door with steel plating hidden inside, whose weight meant its opening mechanism often developed a fault—and the company that had installed the door sent a mechanic over, who chattily said to Frank as he went to work, “You know whose house this used to be, don’t you? It was that Mr. Rushdie. Poor bastard.” So people had known who “shouldn’t” have known. But nobody gossiped, nobody went to the papers. Everyone knew it was serious. Nobody talked.
And for the first time in nine years he had a “dedicated team” of protection officers for his “public” adventures (meals in restaurants, walks on Hampstead Heath, the occasional movie, and every so often a literary event—a reading, a book signing, a lecture). Bob Lowe and Bernie Lindsey, the handsome devils who became the heartthrobs of the London literary scene, alternating with Charles Richards and Keith Williams, who didn’t. And the OFDs, Russell and Nigel alternating with Ian and Paul. These officers were not just “dedicated” in the sense of working only on Malachite and on no other prot. They were also committed to his cause, totally on his side, ready to fight his battles. “We all admire your endurance,” Bob told him. “We really do.” They took the view that there was no reason why he shouldn’t have as rich a life as he wanted to have, and that it was their job to make it possible. They persuaded the security chiefs of several reluctant airlines, who had been put off by the continued British Airways refusal to fly him, that they should not follow BA’s lead. They wanted his life to get better, and they were ready to help. He would never forget, or cease to value, their friendship and support.
They remained on their guard. Paul Topper, the team’s supervisor at the Yard, said that intelligence reports indicated “activity.” It was not a time to be careless.
There was some sad news: Phil Pitt—the officer known to his colleagues as “Rambo”—had been forced into retirement by a degenerative disease of the spine, and might end up in a wheelchair. There was something very shocking about the fall of one of these large, fit, strong, active men. And these men were professional protectors. It was their job to make sure other people were all right. They weren’t supposed to crumble. It was the wrong way around.
Elizabeth wanted another child, and she wanted it right away. His heart sank. Milan was such a great gift, such a great joy, but he did not want to take any more spins on the roulette wheel of genetics. He had two beautiful sons and they were more than enough. But Elizabeth was a determined woman when there was something she really wanted—one might even use the word “mulish”—and he feared he would lose her, and with her Milan, if he refused. His own need was not for another baby. It was for freedom. That need might never be met.
This time she conceived quickly, while she was still breast-feeding Milan. But this time they were not lucky. Two weeks after the pregnancy was confirmed the chromosomal tragedy of the early miscarriage occurred.
