Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (23 page)

On the last night I patrolled the set with Paul Sammon. We quizzed and banished a lady 'onlooker' with a four-foot lens on her camera. The street audience had already gathered for the night's viewing ('They're going to blow
that
one'). All around, monitoring the set, was the city's superstructure and its real personnel: real firemen, real cops.

And beyond them, meanwhile, on the higher ramps, the young rollerskaters loop and glide, remote and self-possessed. Ironically, these incurious youths are themselves much talked about and widely celebrated; magazine articles have been written about them. They exude calm and indifference and silent
esprit de corps:
immaculately affectless. They are the audience of the future. They will watch the
RoboCop
double bill with no response at all — without a tremor, without a smile, without a flinch of recognition.

Premiere, 1990

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Salman Rushdie, the author of a much-discussed novel called
The Satanic Verses,
is still with us. One feels the need to emphasise this fact: that he is still around. He is caught up in a trap or a travesty; he is condemned to enact his own fictional themes of exile, ostracism, disjuncture, personal reinvention; he occupies a kind of shadowland; but he is formidably alive. The Rushdie Debate has reached a chokepoint where no one seems to be able to speak naturally. In that sense the forces of humourlessness have already triumphed. Rushdie's life has been permanently distorted. I hereby assert, then, that his humanity is unimpaired and entire.

Direct encounters with the man remain infrequent, and tortuous. If you want to meet up with the Minotaur, you have to enter the labyrinth of his security arrangements. Yet various glimpses and sightings are always current among his friends: Rushdie, at midnight, proposing to recite the Complete Works of Bob Dylan; or watching the World Cup on television last summer (with his remorseless parodies of the sportscasters); or falling over while demonstrating an ambitiously low-slung version of the Twist; or eating pizza and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Rushdie's situation is truly Manichaean, but he is neither a god nor a devil; he is just
a writer -
comical and protean, ironical and ardent.

To bear this out, Rushdie has now produced a defiantly high-spirited and chivalrous novel, a children's book for adults called
Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
There are times when Rushdie's predicament feels like a meaningless divagation, a chaotic accident; there are other times when it feels rivetingly central and exemplary. Rushdie's friends, I imagine, think about him every day. But his writer friends, I suspect, think about him every half hour. He is still with us. And we are with him.

'When I first heard the news, I thought: I'm a dead man. You know: that's it. One day. Two days.' This interview took place in September, at a Mystery Location. We had joined up via something that
Haroun
would call a P2C2E: a Process Too Complicated To Explain. 'At such moments you think all the corny things. You think about not being able to watch your children growing up. Not being able to do the work you want to do. Oddly it's those things that hurt more than the physical idea of being dead. In a way you can't grasp that reality.'

Reality seemed to be generally elusive on that day, 14 February 1989 — the day of Khomeini's
fatwa.
Even the sky, I remember, was preternaturally radiant. Rushdie first heard the news when a radio station rang him up — to ask for his response. 'How do you feel about being sentenced to death by the Ayatollah? What about a quote?' He managed the quote ('God knows what I said'), and then ran around the house drawing the curtains and shutting the shutters. Next, he sleepwalked through an interview for the CBS morning show, and proceeded to what would be his last public appearance: the church service for his close friend Bruce Chatwin.

The church was Greek Orthodox, sombre, dusty, big-domed, and full of writers. Rushdie entered promptly with his then wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. 'I was in shock,' he now says. He looked excitable. We were all excitable. Saul Bellow calls it 'event glamor'. 'Salman,' I said, as we hugged (he likes to hug his friends, and never routinely, always meaningly), 'we're
worried
about you.' And he said,
'I'm
worried about me.' The Rushdies sat down beside me and my wife. I had a shameful impulse to recommend all those nice empty pews at the far end of the church. Rushdie kept glancing over his shoulder: representatives of the press were being kept at bay by his agent, Gillon Aitken. 'Salman!' called out Paul Theroux, boyishly. 'Next week we'll be back here for you!'

Appropriately, the service was a torment, a torment in its own right, with much incomprehensible yodelling and entreating. I found that my thoughts were all mildly but stubbornly blasphemous. The robed clerics waved their fuming caskets in the air, like Greek waiters removing incendiary ashtrays. This, I concluded, was Bruce Chatwin's last joke on his friends and loved ones: his heterodox theism had finally homed in on a religion that no one he knew could understand or respond to. We sat down and stood up, stood up and sat down, trying not to subvert with sigh or yawn the dull theatre of an alien faith. When it was over, Salman and Marianne ducked past the waiting journalists and were driven off in a friend's limousine. Rushdie would spend the day searching for his son Zafar — searching too, I suppose, for a way to say goodbye to him, as he prepared to take up his new life.

I briefly attended the post-service reception. In normal circumstances we would have taken the chance to air our preoccupation with the mourned friend. But no one was thinking and talking about Bruce. Everyone was thinking and talking about Salman: his danger, his drastic elevation. As I went home I did about half-a-dozen things that Salman Rushdie was no longer free to do. I visited a bookshop, a toyshop, a snack bar; I went home. On the way I bought an evening paper. Its banner headline read: EXECUTE RUSHDIE ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH, Salman had disappeared into the world of block caps. He had vanished into the front page.

*

His case is of course unique. It is an embarrassment of uniquenesses. The terms of the
fatwa
(it is, at once, a death sentence and a life sentence); the size of the bounty (three times the reputed fee for the Lockerbie crash); the nature of the exile, which removes the novelist both from his subject (society) and from his object (sober literary consideration): in his own phrase, Rushdie is firmly 'handcuffed to history'. His uniqueness is the measure of his isolation. Perhaps, too, it is the measure of his stoicism. Because no one else - certainly no other writer — could have survived so well.

I often tell him this. I often tell him that if the Rushdie Affair were, for instance, the Amis Affair, then I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquillised 300-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs, and covered in blotches and burns from various misadventures with the syringe and the crackpipe. He has gained a little weight ('no exercise') and has resumed a very moderate cigarette habit; for a while he developed a kind of stress asthma. But Rushdie is unchanged: the rosy complexion, the lateral crinkle in his upper lip when he smiles (which gives an impression of babyishly short incisors), the eyes so exotically hooded that he has long foreseen minor surgery to prevent the lids from engulfing the irises. His urgently humorous presence is undiminished, undiluted. Sometimes, when you call him, his 'Oh I'm fine' lacks total conviction. Otherwise, he is a miracle of equanimity.

How is this? Unquestionably Rushdie has a great deal of natural ballast. He knows about exile, its deracinations, its surprising opportunities for expansion, how it can make you feel both naked and invisible, as in a dream. There has always been something Olympian about Salman Rushdie. His belief in his own powers, however (unlike other kinds of belief), is not monolithic and therefore precarious. It is agile, capricious and droll. The first time I met him, seven years ago, he mentioned to me that he had recently played football for a Writers' Eleven in a historic fixture in Finland.

'Really?' I said. 'How did you do?' I expected the usual kind of comedy (sprained ankle, heart attack, incompetence, disgrace). But I was given another kind of comedy, out of left field.

He said, 'I, uh, scored a hat-trick, actually.'

'You're kidding. I suppose you just stuck your leg out. You scrambled them home.'

'Goal number one was a first-time hip-high volley from twenty yards out. For the second, I beat two men at the edge of the box and curled the ball into the top corner with the outside of my left foot.'

'And the third goal, Salman? A tap-in. A fluke.'

'No. The third goal was a
power header.'

Even if you don't know the game, you'll probably get the idea. This is Rushdie's style. He is always daring you to decide whether or not to take him literally.

Well, certain contemporary forces have made
their
decision, and they have duly arrived at a literalist's verdict: eternal remainderdom. Rushdie can take the weight of the anathema, and the vastly generalised animus, I think, because he has long been in training for it. He has skirmished with world leaders before, after all: in
Shame
with General Zia (the book was of course banned in Pakistan), and in
Midnight's Children
with Mrs Gandhi (who sued him for libel). But then came the intensive training, which began on 26 September 1988, the day
The Satanic Verses
was published. Bannings and burnings, petitions and demonstrations, rioting in Islamabad (six killed), rioting in Kashmir (one killed, 100 injured). Rushdie maintained at the time that these deaths were 'not on [his] conscience'; but by this stage he was feeling, he says, 'completely horrible. It was the most shocking thing - until the
other
most shocking thing.' The riots took place on consecutive days. On the third day the
fatwa
was announced. Rushdie knew by then that his book had raised mortal questions. He had no choice; he was obliged to become world-historical.

*

'At first, I found it more or less impossible to switch off, to turn away. Before the Ayatollah made his move, I saw myself as being part of a debate. Now the debate went on, but I was excluded from it.'

Another dreamlike state: Rushdie was a ghostly spectator at his own trial. And he found it was a full-time job keeping abreast of developments. His day began with
Breakfast News
at 6:30 and ended with
Newsnight
at 10:45. At that point the Rushdie story was at least three pages deep in every national newspaper; and for odd moments in between there was always the
Bradford Telegraph and Argus,
the South African
Weekly Mail,
the
Osservatore Romano,
the
Salzburg Kronen Zeitung, Al Ahram, Al-Noor,
the
Muslim Voice
and
India Today.
Everywhere he looked he saw torched hardbacks and writhing moustaches.

Question: What's got long blonde hair, big tits, and lives in an igloo in Iceland? Answer: Salman Rushdie . . . Such jokes, current in every pub and at every bus-stop, were relayed to Rushdie by his Special Branch bodyguards; he also became a staple for TV comedians, as a type for the hunted, the marked, the evanescent. Rushdie found some Rushdie jokes funnier than others. But what disturbed him was the sudden promiscuity of his fame. 'I kept thinking, What the hell am I
doing
here? What the hell am I doing in a TV sitcom? What the hell am I doing in the Jasper Carrot show?' In a sense, though, the
fatwa
itself is a Rushdie joke. The blasphemy issue is at least debatable (and Rushdie wants to continue that debate); but what can you make of Khomeini's ravings, which portrayed Rushdie as a literary dog of war, hired by world Jewry to soften up Islam for a neocolonialist blitzkrieg? Now that really
is
funny. When you write, when you try to instruct and entertain, you want the world to sit up and take notice. But not literally. And here on the evening news are the pulsing flashpoints on the colour-coded worldmap, Bombay, Los Angeles, Brussels, riot, fire and murder. What's the story?

You are the story; your book is the story. And now another chapter of crossed lines, ungot ironies, atrocious misunderstandings.

To scrutinise him is to jeopardise him, but a little can be said about the way he lives now. He lives like a secret agent; he is both nomad and recluse. 'An average day? I don't have average days, because there's always the possibility of having to move. I read a lot. I talk on the telephone a lot — two or three hours a day. I play computer games. Chess. Supermario. I am a
master
of Supermarios I
and
II. Otherwise I do what I'd do anyway. I start work at 10:30, I never eat lunch, and I knock off around four.' A writer is, on the whole, most alive when alone. You can then get on with the business of imagining other people. But there is normally a gregarious murmur behind the solitude - a murmur which Rushdie no longer hears. 'The strange part is not being able to go out in the evening. Or indeed in the afternoon. Or in the morning. To clear your head out.'

It comes as no surprise to learn that a death sentence
doesn't
concentrate the mind wonderfully.
Haroun and the Sea of Stones
is the result of unprecedented struggle. 'The distractions were internal rather than external. When I write, I sink into the bit of myself where the novel comes from. But I had to fight my way past all this other stuff: the crisis. And by the time I got there I'd be wrecked.'
Haroun
began as a series of bedtime stories which Rushdie told to his son Zafar — 'or bathtime stories. He would lie in the bath and listen, or sit wrapped in towels.' When Rushdie was close to finishing
The Satanic Verses,
Zafar made his father promise to forget about grown-ups for a while and write a book for children. 'I
couldn't
have written a grown-up novel. I didn't have the distance, the calm. I had to keep this promise to Zafar because it was the only thing I
could
keep to him. That was the whip I used to beat myself.