Step Across This Line (27 page)

Sometimes I stayed in comfortable houses. Sometimes I had no more than a small room in which I could not approach the window lest I be seen from below. Sometimes I was able to get out a bit. At other times I had trouble doing so.

I tried to visit the USA and France, and the governments of those countries made it impossible for me to enter.

Once I had to go into the hospital to have my wisdom teeth extracted. I learned afterward that the police had made emergency plans to have me removed. I would have been anesthetized and carried out in a body bag, in a hearse.

I became friendly with my protection teams and learned a good deal about the internal workings of the Branch. I learned how to find out if you’re being followed on a motorway and I grew accustomed to the hardware that was always lying around and I learned the slang of the police force—drivers, for example, are known as OFDs, which stands for Only Fucking Drivers.
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Motorway police are Black Rats. My own name was never used. I learned to answer to other names. I was “the Principal.”

I have become familiar with much that was unthinkably strange four years ago, but I have never become used to it. I knew from the start that habituation would be a surrender. What has happened to my life is a grotesque thing. It is a crime. I will never agree that it has become my normal condition.

“What’s blond, has big tits, and lives in Tasmania? Salman Rushdie.” I got letters, sometimes I still get letters, saying, give up, change your name, have an operation, start a new life. This is the one option I have never considered. It would be worse than death. I don’t want some other person’s life. I want my own.

The protection officers have shown great understanding and helped me get through the worst times. I will always be grateful to them. These are brave men. They are putting their lives on the line for me. Nobody ever did that for me before.

Here is a thing that needs saying. I suspect that because I have not been killed, many people think there is nobody trying to kill me. Many people probably think it’s all a bit theoretical. It isn’t. In the early months an Arab terrorist blew himself up in a Paddington hotel. Afterward I was told by a journalist who had visited the Hizbollah redoubts in the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon that she had seen this man’s photograph on an office “wall of martyrs,” with a caption stating that his target had been me. And, at the time of the Gulf War, I heard that the Iranian government had paid out money for a contract killing. After months of extreme caution I was told that the killers had been—to use the euphemistic language of the intelligence services—“frustrated.” I thought it best not to inquire into the causes of their frustration.

And in 1992 three Iranians were expelled from Britain. Two of them worked at the Iranian mission in London, the third was a “student.” I was told by the Foreign Office that these were spies and they were undoubtedly in Britain on matters related to the fulfillment of the fatwa.

And the Italian translator of
The Satanic Verses
was nearly killed, and the Japanese translator
was
killed. In 1992 the Japanese police announced the results of their twelve-month investigation. In their view the killers were professional Middle Eastern terrorists who had entered from China. Meanwhile, an Iranian hit-squad assassinated former prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris. They cut his head off. Another squad killed a dissident Iranian singer in Germany. They chopped him up and put the bits in a bag.

Nothing very theoretical about that.

England is a small country and it is full of people and many of these people are naturally inquisitive. It is not an easy country in which to disappear. Once I was in a building that I needed to leave, but there was a burst central heating pipe just off the hallway, and a plumber had been called in. A police officer had to distract the plumber’s attention so that I could slip past him while his head was turned away. Once I was in a kitchen when a neighbor turned up unexpectedly. I had to dive down behind a kitchen cabinet and remain there, crouching, until he left. Once I was in a traffic jam outside the Regent’s Park mosque just as the faithful were emerging from Eid prayers. I sat in the back of an armored Jaguar with my nose deep in
The Daily Telegraph.
My protectors joked that it was the first time they had seen me so interested in the
Telegraph.

To live like this is to feel demeaned every day, to feel little twists of humiliation accumulating around your heart. To live like this is to allow people—including your ex-wife—to call you a coward on the front page of the newspapers. Such people would no doubt be prepared to speak well of me at my funeral. But to live, to avoid assassination, is a greater victory than to be murdered. Only fanatics go looking for martyrdom.

I am forty-five years old, and I can’t leave my places of residence without permission. I do not carry keys. Sometimes there are “bad patches.” During one “bad patch” I slept in thirteen different beds in twenty nights. At such times a great wild jangle fills your body. At such times you begin to come unstuck from your self.

I have learned to let things go: the anger, the bitterness. They will come back later, I know. When things are better. I’ll deal with them then. Right now my victory lies in not being broken, in not losing my self. It lies in continuing to work. There are no hostages anymore. For the first time in years, I am able to fight my corner without being accused of damaging anyone else’s interests. I have been fighting as hard as I can.

Like everyone else I rejoiced at the end of the Lebanon hostages’ terrible ordeal. But the people most active in my defense campaign, Frances D’Souza and Carmel Bedford at Article 19, knew that the huge relief we all felt at the closing of that awful chapter was also a danger. Maybe people wouldn’t want to pay attention to someone saying, excuse me, there’s still one more problem. Maybe I’d be seen as a sort of party-pooper. On the other hand there were persistent rumors that the British government was on the verge of normalizing relations with Iran and forgetting the “Rushdie case” entirely. What to do? Shut up and go on relying on “silent diplomacy,” or speak out?

In my view there was no choice. The hostages’ release had set my tongue free at last. And it would be absurd to fight a war for freedom of speech by remaining silent. We agreed to make the campaign as noisy as possible, to demonstrate to the British government that it couldn’t afford to ignore the case, and to try and rekindle the kind of international support that would demonstrate to the Iranian terror-state that the fatwa was damaging their self-interests as well as mine.

In December 1991, a few days after the release of the last American hostage, Terry Anderson, I was finally permitted to enter the United States to speak at Columbia University’s celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights. The plans for the trip were a nightmare. I did not know until twenty-four hours before I left that I would be allowed to go. I was given leave to travel in a military aircraft, a great favor for which I was immensely grateful. (This would have remained entirely secret except that a British tabloid saw fit to publish the fact and then blame me for endangering the RAF.)

The moment of departure was overwhelming. It was my first time out of Britain in almost three years. For a moment, the cage seemed a little bigger. Then, in New York, I was met by an eleven-vehicle motorcade, complete with motorcycle outriders. I was placed in an armored white limo and rushed through Manhattan at high speed. “It’s what we’d do for Arafat,” explained the operation’s leader, known for the day as Hudson Commander. I inquired timidly, “How about the president?” For the president they would close down a lot more side streets, Hudson Commander explained, “but in your case we thought that might be a little too conspicuous.” This entirely without irony. The New York Police Department is very thorough, but it doesn’t make many jokes.

I spent that day in a fourteenth-floor suite with at least twenty armed men. The windows were blocked by bullet-proof mattresses. Outside the door were more armed men with Schwarzenegger-sized muscles and weaponry. In this suite I had a series of meetings that must remain secret, except, perhaps, for one. I was able to meet with the poet Allen Ginsberg for twenty minutes. The moment he arrived, he pulled cushions off the sofas and set them on the floor. “Take off your shoes and sit down,” he said. “I’m going to teach you some simple meditation exercises. They should help you handle your terrible situation.” Our mutual literary agent, Andrew Wylie, was there, and I made him do it, too, which, squawking somewhat, he did. While we did our breathing and chanting, I thought how extraordinary it was for an Indian by birth to be taught Buddhism by an American poet sitting cross-legged in a room full of men armed to the gills. There’s nothing like life; you can’t make this stuff up.

That night the huge motorcade took me to Columbia and I was able to make my contribution. Free speech is life itself, I remember saying. The next day the American press was sympathetic and positive. It was clear that Americans saw the issue, as I did, as one in which an old, taken-for-granted freedom had become a life-and-death affair. Back home it was a different matter. I got back to Britain to be faced by such headlines as RUSHDIE INFLAMES MUSLIM ANGER AGAIN (because I had asked for the publication of a paperback edition of
The Satanic Verses
).

During the next year, as I visited more and more countries, this dichotomy became ever more apparent. In the rest of the free world, the “Rushdie case” is about freedom of expression and state terrorism. In Britain, it seems to be about a man who has to be saved from the consequences of his own actions. Elsewhere, people know that the outrage has been committed not by me but against me. In certain quarters of my own country, people take a contrary view.

The paperback was published in the spring of 1992, not by Penguin, who refused to do so, but by a consortium. I was able to be in Washington for its launch, and at a free-speech conference I produced the first copy. As I did so my emotions assaulted me without warning. It was all I could do to keep back the tears. (I should mention here that the paperback publication of
The Satanic Verses
passed off without incident, in spite of many people’s forebodings and some people’s chickenings-out. I was reminded, as I have often been reminded, of Roosevelt’s famous saw about fear itself being the thing most to be feared.)

I had come to Washington mainly to address members of both houses of Congress. On the evening before the meeting, however, I was told that Secretary of State James Baker had personally rung the leaders of both houses to say he did not wish the meeting to take place. The Bush administration made dismissive remarks about my presence. Marlin Fitzwater, explaining the administration’s refusal to meet me, said, “He’s just an author on a book tour.”
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In spite of the Bush people’s best efforts, I did manage to meet a group of U.S. senators—led by New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy—who invited me to lunch at the Capitol and, to my amazement, brought along copies of my books for me to sign. After lunch, at a press conference, Moynihan and others spoke passionately on my behalf. This was a crucial moment. It now became possible to approach parliamentarians and governments all over Europe and the Americas. I was even invited to the British House of Commons to address an all-party group, after which Iran’s Majlis (parliament) instantly demanded that the fatwa be carried out.

In the summer of 1992 it was made possible for me to go to Denmark as the guest of Danish PEN. Once again, the security was very heavy. There was even a small gunboat in Copenhagen harbor that I was told was “ours.” This resulted in many jokes about the need to guard against an attack by the Iranian fleet in the Baltic, or perhaps by fundamentalist frogmen.

During the time in Denmark the government kept away from me (though by enabling my visit and providing protection, they had clearly shown a certain level of support). The risk to Denmark’s feta cheese exports to Iran was cited as one reason for the government’s reticence. However, I was given enthusiastic support by politicians of all other parties, notably Anker Jorgensen, the Labor once-and-probably-future prime minister, with whom I gave a joint press conference aboard a boat in the harbor. Jorgensen promised to hold discussions with the ruling party to develop a policy of all-party support for my case. It was less than I’d hoped for, but it was a step on the road.

I made a brief visit to Spain. (I am glossing over the immense difficulties of organization, but believe me, none of these trips was easy.) There I was made an offer of mediation by Gustavo Villapalos, the rector of Madrid’s Complutense University, a man very close to the Spanish government and also extremely well connected in Iran. Soon he reported to me that he had received encouraging signals from persons high in the Iranian regime: it was an excellent time to resolve this matter, he had been told. Iran knew that this case was the biggest single obstacle to its economic strategies. All sorts of distinguished people were letting it be known that they wanted a solution: the names of Khomeini’s widow and surviving elder brother were mentioned. A few weeks later, however, European newspapers quoted Villapalos as having said that I had agreed to rewrite parts of
The Satanic Verses.
I had said no such thing. Villapalos told me he had been misquoted and asked for a meeting in London. I agreed. Since then I have not heard from him.

A breakthrough came in late summer, in Norway. Once again my hosts were the international writers’ organization, PEN, and my courageous publishers, Aschehoug. Once again, the media and people of the country showed me fantastic warmth and support. And this time I had meetings with the ministers for culture and education, received a message of friendship from the prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and elicited firm promises of government support at the United Nations and in other international forums as well as in bilateral contacts between Norway and Iran.