Joseph Anton: A Memoir

  He had begun to lead two lives: the public life of the controversy, and what remained of his old private life. January 23, 1989, was his and Marianne’s first wedding anniversary. She took him to the opera to see Madama Butterfly. She had booked excellent seats in the front row of the grand tier and as the lights went down Princess Diana came in and sat down next to him. He wondered what she thought of the opera’s story, about a woman promised love by a man who left her and eventually returned, having married another woman, to break her heart.

  At the Whitbread Book of the Year awards the next day, his novel, winner of the Best Novel category, was up against four other category winners, including A. N. Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy and a first novel by a former staff nurse in a psychiatric hospital, Paul Sayer’s The Comforts of Madness. He ran into Sayer in the men’s toilets. The young man was feeling physically ill with nerves and he tried to comfort him. An hour later Sayer won the award. When news of the jury’s deliberations leaked out it was plain that two of the judges, the Tory cabinet minister Douglas Hurd, the home secretary, and the conservative journalist Max Hastings, had scuppered The Satanic Verses for reasons that were not wholly literary. The noise of the demonstrations had, so to speak, reached the jury chamber, and made its point.

  He had his first quarrel with Peter Mayer and Peter Carson at Viking Penguin, because they were unwilling to contest the Indian ban on his novel in the courts.

  He was invited to lunch by Graham Greene, who was interested to meet London-based writers of non-British origin. He went to the Reform Club for lunch along with Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, Hanan al-Shaykh, Wally Mongane Serote and a few others, including Marianne. When he arrived, Greene’s long form was folded into a deep armchair, but the great man sprang to his feet and cried, “Rushdie! Come and sit here and tell me how you managed to make so much trouble! I never made nearly as much trouble as that!” This was oddly comforting. He understood how heavy his heart had grown and how much he needed such a moment of lightness and support. He sat beside the great man and told him as much as he could and Greene listened with great attention, and then, without offering any judgment at all, clapped his hands and cried, “Right. Lunch.” At lunch he ate almost nothing but drank liberal quantities of wine. “I only eat,” he said, “because it allows me to drink a little more.” After lunch a photograph was taken on the steps of the club, Greene beaming in the center of the picture in a short brown coat, looking like Gulliver in Lilliput.

  Several weeks later he showed this photograph to one of the Special Branch officers on his protection team. “This is Graham Greene,” he said, “the great British novelist.” “Oh, yeah,” said the policeman reflectively. “He used to be one of ours.”

  The book was getting excellent reviews in the United States but on February 8 he received a mixed one from his wife, who told him she was leaving him; however, she still wanted him to come to the publication dinner for her novel John Dollar. Four days later the strange interregnum between publication and calamity came to an end.

  Two thousand protesters was a small crowd in Pakistan. Even the most modestly potent politico could put many more thousands on the streets just by clapping his hands. That only two thousand “fundamentalists” could be found to storm the U.S. Information Center in the heart of Islamabad was, in a way, a good sign. It meant the protests hadn’t really caught fire. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was out of the country at the time, on a state visit to China, and it was speculated that destabilizing her administration had been the demonstrators’ real aim. Religious extremists had long suspected her of being guilty of the crime of secularism, and they wanted to put her on the spot. Not for the last time, The Satanic Verses was being used as a football in a political game that had little or nothing to do with it.

  Objects were thrown at the security forces, bricks and stones, and there were screams of American dogs and Hang Salman Rushdie, the usual stuff. None of this fully explained the police response, which was to open fire and still fail to prevent some demonstrators from storming the building. The moment the first bullet hit its human target the story changed. The police used rifles, semiautomatic weapons and pump-action shotguns, and the confrontation lasted for three hours, and in spite of all that weaponry the demonstrators reached the roof of the building and the U.S. flag was burned and so were effigies of “the United States” and himself. On another day he might have asked himself where the factory was that supplied the thousands of American flags that were burned each year around the world. On this day everything else that happened was dwarfed by a single fact.

  Five people were shot dead.

  Rushdie you are dead, the demonstrators shouted, and for the first time he thought they might be right. Violence begat violence. The next day there was another riot in Kashmir—his beloved Kashmir, his family’s original home—and another man was killed.

  Blood will have blood, he thought.

  Here was a mortally ill old man lying in a darkened room. Here was his son telling him about Muslims shot dead in India and Pakistan. There is a book that caused this, the son told the old man, a book that is against Islam. A few hours later the son arrived at the offices of Iranian television with a document in his hand. A fatwa or edict was usually a formal document, signed and witnessed and given under seal, but this was just a piece of paper bearing a typewritten text. Nobody ever saw the formal document, if one existed, but the son of the mortally ill old man said this was his father’s edict and nobody was disposed to argue with him. The piece of paper was handed to the station newsreader and he began to read.

  It was Valentine’s Day.

  III

  Year Zero

  THE SPECIAL BRANCH OFFICER WAS WILSON AND THE INTELLIGENCE officer was Wilton and they both answered to the name of Will. Will Wilson and Will Wilton: It was like a music-hall joke except that there was nothing funny about anything that day. He was told that as the threat against him was considered to be extremely serious—it was at “level two,” which meant he was considered to be in more danger than anyone in the country except, perhaps, the queen—and as he was being menaced by a foreign power, he was entitled to the protection of the British state. Protection was formally offered and accepted. It was explained to him that he would be allocated two protection officers, two drivers and two cars. The second car was in case the first one broke down. He was to understand that because of the unique nature of the assignment and the imponderable risks involved all the officers protecting him were volunteers. Nobody on this job was here against his will. He was introduced to his first “prot” team: Stanley Doll and Ben Winters. Stanley was one of the best tennis players in the police force. Benny was one of the few black officers in the Branch and wore a chic tan leather jacket. They were both strikingly handsome and packing heat. The Branch were the stars of the Metropolitan Police, the double-0 elite. He had never before met anyone who actually was licensed to kill, and Stan and Benny were presently licensed to do so on his behalf.

  They wore their weapons at waist level, clipped to the backs of their trouser belts. American detectives used holsters under their jackets but, as Stan and Benny demonstrated, this was less desirable, because if you had to draw your weapon from that holster it had to move through an arc of maybe as much as ninety degrees before it was pointing at its target. The risk of firing slightly too soon or too late and hitting the wrong person was considerable. If you drew from the hip your weapon came up in line with the target and your level of accuracy increased. But there was a different sort of risk. If you squeezed the trigger too early you shot yourself in the behind.

  Regarding the matter in hand, Benny and Stan were reassuring. “It can’t be allowed,” Stan said. “Threatening a British citizen. It’s not on. It’ll get sorted. You just need to lie low for a couple of days and let the politicians sort it out.” “You can’t go home, obviously,” Benny said. “That wouldn’t be too kosher. Is there anywhere you’d like to go for a few days?” “Pick somewhere nice,” said Stan, “
and we’ll just whiz you off there for a stretch until you’re in the clear.” He wanted to believe in their optimism. Maybe the Cotswolds, he said. Maybe somewhere in that picture-postcard region of rolling hills and houses of golden stone. There was a famous country inn in the Cotswold village of Broadway called the Lygon Arms. He had often wanted to go there for a weekend but had never made it. Would the Lygon Arms be a possibility? Stan and Benny looked at each other and something passed between them. “I don’t see why not,” Stan said. “We’ll look into it.”

  For most of that day Marianne and he stayed in the basement apartment at 38 Lonsdale Square. Benny stayed with them while Stan looked into things. He wanted to see his son again before diving for cover, he said, and he’d like to see his sister, too, and even though they warned him that those might be locations the “bad guys” would expect him to visit, they agreed to “set it up.” Once it was dark he was driven to Burma Road in an armored Jaguar. The armor plating was so thick that the headroom was much less than it should have been. Tall politicians like Douglas Hurd found these cars impossibly uncomfortable. The doors were so heavy that if they swung shut accidentally and hit you they could injure you quite seriously. If the car was parked on a tilt it was almost impossible to pull the door toward you. The fuel consumption of an armored Jaguar was around six miles to the gallon. It weighed as much as a small tank. He was given this information by his first Special Branch driver, Dennis “the Horse” Chevalier, a big, cheerful, jowly, thick-lipped man, “one of the older fellows,” he said. “Do you know the technical term for us Special Branch drivers?” Dennis the Horse asked him. He did not know. “The term is OFDs,” said Dennis. “That’s us.” And what did OFD stand for? Dennis laughed a big, throaty, slightly wheezing laugh. “Only Fucking Drivers,” he said. He would grow accustomed to police humor. One of his other drivers was known throughout the Branch as the king of Spain, because he had once left his Jag unlocked while he went to the tobacconist’s and had returned to find that it had been stolen. Hence the nickname, because the king of Spain’s name was—you had to say it slowly—Juan Car-los.

  The bad guys were not lying in wait for him at Burma Road. He told Zafar and Clarissa what the prot team had said. “It will be over in a few days.” Zafar looked immensely relieved. On Clarissa’s face were all the doubts he was trying to pretend he didn’t feel. Zafar asked when they could see each other again and he didn’t know the answer. Clarissa said they might go for the weekend to her friends the Hoffmans’ home in Oxfordshire. He said, “Okay, maybe there, if I can make it.” He hugged his son tightly and left.

  (Neither Zafar nor Clarissa were offered police protection at any time. It was not thought, the police told him, that they were in danger. That failed to reassure him, and his fear for them both preyed on him every day. But Clarissa and he decided that it would be best if Zafar continued to lead as normal a life as possible. She made it her business to give him that normal life; which was more than brave.)

  It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten all day. On the way to Wembley to see Sameen they stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through and he discovered that the thick windows of the Jaguar didn’t open. There were other armored cars, Mercedes and BMWs, that could be custom-made with opening windows, but they were more expensive and not British and so were not part of the police fleet. Stan, sitting in the front passenger seat, had to get out to order and then walk to the pickup point to collect the food. When they finished eating, the Jaguar would not start. They had to leave Dennis the Horse swearing blue murder at his broken-down vehicle and get into the backup car, a Range Rover known as the Beast, driven by another gentle, smiling giant called Mickey Crocker, another of the “older fellows.” The Beast was very old too, and very heavy and a beast to steer. It would get stuck in mud and would sometimes be incapable of getting to the top of an icy hill road. This was mid-February, the coldest, iciest time of the year. “Sorry about this, mate,” Mick Crocker said. “It’s not the best vehicle in the garridge.” He sat in the back of the Beast and hoped the men protecting him worked better than their cars.

  Sameen, a qualified lawyer (though no longer practicing—she worked in adult education now), had always had a sharp political mind and had a lot to say about what was going on. The Iranian Revolution had been shaky ever since Khomeini had been forced, in his own words, to “eat poison” and accept the unsuccessful end of his Iraq war, which had left a generation of young Iranians dead or maimed. The fatwa was his way of regaining political momentum, reenergizing the faithful. It was her brother’s bad luck to be the dying man’s last stand. As for the British Muslim “leaders,” who exactly did they lead? They were leaders without followers, mountebanks trying to make careers out of her brother’s misfortune. For a generation the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist. This was the mosques’ way of destroying that project and getting religion into the driving seat. British “Asians” had never splintered into Hindu, Muslim and Sikh factions before (though there had been splinterings of a different sort; during the Bangladesh war, a bitter British-Pakistani and British-Bangladeshi schism had developed). Somebody needed to answer these people who were driving a communalist, sectarian wedge through the community, she said, these mullahs and so-called leaders, to name them as the hypocrites and opportunists that they were. She was ready to be that person, and he knew that, as articulate and skilled in advocacy as she was, she would make a formidable representative.

  But he asked her not to do it. Her daughter Maya was less than a year old. If she became his public spokesman the media would camp outside her house and there would be no escape from the glare of publicity; her private life, her daughter’s young life, would become a thing of klieg lights and microphones. Also, it was impossible to know what danger it might draw toward her. He didn’t want her to be at risk because of him. And there was another problem: If she were to be very publicly identified as his “voice,” then, the prot team said, it would become much harder for him to be brought to her home to visit her. He understood that he needed to divide the people he knew into “private” and “public” camps. He needed her, he said, as a private supporter more than as a public champion. Reluctantly, she agreed.

  One of the unforeseen consequences of this decision was that as the “affair” blazed on, he himself was obliged to be mostly invisible, because the police urged him not to speak out and further inflame the situation, advice he accepted for a time, until he refused to be silent any longer; and in his absence there was nobody who loved him speaking for him, not his wife, not his sister, not his closest friends—the ones he wanted to continue to be able to see. He became, in the media, a man whom nobody loved but many people hated. “Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him,” said Mr. Iqbal Sacranie of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs. “His mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness from Almighty Allah.” In 2005, this same Sacranie was knighted at the recommendation of the Blair government for his services to community relations.

  On the way to the Cotswolds the car stopped to fill up with gas. He needed to go to the toilet and opened the door and got out. Every single person in the gas station turned their heads in unison to stare at him. He was on the front page of every newspaper—Martin Amis said, memorably, that he had “vanished into the front page”—and had overnight become one of the most recognizable men in the country. The faces looked friendly—a man waved, another gave the thumbs-up sign—but it was alarming to be so intensely visible at exactly the moment that he was being asked to lie low. When he set foot on the village streets of Broadway the reaction was the same. A woman came up to him in the street and said, “Good luck.” In the hotel the highly trained staff could not prevent themselves from gawping. He had become a freak show and he and Marianne were both relieved when they reached the privacy of their beautiful old-world room. He was given a “panic button” to press if he was worried about anything. He tested the panic button. It didn’t work.


  They were given a small private room to eat their meals in. The hotel had warned Stan and Benny of a possible difficulty. One of their other guests was a journalist from the Daily Mirror, who had taken a neighboring room for a few days with a lady who was not his wife. As it turned out this did not become a problem. The lady was clearly possessed of powerful charms, because the man from the Mirror did not emerge from their room for several days, and so, at that moment when the tabloid press had employed teams of snoops to find out where the author of The Satanic Verses had gone to ground, the tabloid journalist in the room next door to his own missed his scoop.

  On his second day at the Lygon Arms, Stan and Benny came to see him with a piece of paper in their hands. President Ali Khamenei of Iran had hinted that if he apologized “this wretched man might yet be spared.” “It’s felt,” Stan said, “that you should do something to lower the temperature.” “Yeah,” Benny assented, “that’s the thinking. The right statement from you could be of assistance.” Felt by whom, he wanted to know; whose thinking was this? “It’s the general opinion,” Stan said opaquely, “upstairs.” Was it a police opinion or a government opinion? “They’ve taken the liberty of preparing a text,” said Stan. “By all means read it through.” “By all means make alterations if the style isn’t pleasing,” said Ben. “You’re the writer.” “I should say, in fairness,” said Stan, “that the text has been approved.”

  The text he was handed was unacceptable: craven, self-abasing. To sign it would be a defeat. Could it really be that this was the deal he was being offered: that he would only receive government support and police protection if, abandoning his principles and the defense of his book, he fell to his knees and groveled? Stan and Ben looked extremely uncomfortable. “As I say,” said Benny, “you’re free to make alterations.” “Then we’ll see how they play,” said Stan. And supposing he chose not to make a statement at all at this time? “It’s thought to be a good idea,” Stan said. “There are high-level negotiations taking place on your behalf. And then there are the Lebanon hostages to consider and Mr. Roger Cooper in jail in Tehran. Their situation is worse than yours. You’re asked to do your bit.” (In the 1980s the Lebanese Hezbollah group, wholly funded from Tehran, used a number of different pseudonyms to capture ninety-six foreign nationals from twenty-one countries, including several Americans and Britons. In addition Mr. Cooper, a British businessman, was seized and imprisoned in Iran.)