(What he was not allowed to do: to live publicly, to move freely, to pursue the ordinary life of a writer or of a free man in his forties. His life was like a severe diet regime: Everything that was not expressly allowed was forbidden.)
On November 11 it would be one thousand days since Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service and the declaration of the fatwa. He talked to Frances and Carmel about how to use the moment politically. They agreed to hold a twenty-four-hour “vigil” in Central Hall Westminster. When news of this was published he was called by Duncan Slater. Douglas Hurd, Slater said, was asking for the vigil to be canceled and threatening that if it was not, the Rushdie defense campaign would be blamed—perhaps even by the government—for delaying the release of the British hostage Terry Waite. Michael Foot was furious when he was told this. “Giving in to threats encourages hostage taking,” he said. But in the end the event was canceled at the fatwa victim’s request. Terry Waite’s human rights had to be given precedence over his own.
The head of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Peter Weidhaas, had wanted to reinvite Iranian publishers, but uproar in Germany prevented him from doing so.
The thousandth day arrived. He completed an essay, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” to mark its arrival. PEN American Center held a rally and delivered a protest letter to the United Nations. His British friends, their vigil canceled, read letters of support at a bookstore on Charing Cross Road. However, The Independent newspaper, which was becoming a sort of house journal for British Islam, carried an article by the “writer” Ziauddin Sardar, who said, “The best course for Mr. Rushdie and his supporters is to shut up. A fly caught in a cobweb does not draw attention to itself.” The fly in question called the editor of that newspaper to tell him that he would no longer write reviews for its books pages.
On November 18 Terry Waite was freed by his captors. There were no more British hostages in Lebanon. How, he wondered, would the authorities try to silence him now? He had his answer soon enough. On November 22, the archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, decided to attack The Satanic Verses and its author. The novel, Carey said, was an “outrageous slur” on the Prophet Muhammad. “We must be more tolerant of Muslim anger,” the archbishop declared.
He fought back in a radio interview, and the British press came down heavily against the archbishop. Carey backed down and apologized and invited the man whose work he had condemned to tea. The invisible man was driven to Lambeth Palace and there was the prim figure of the archbishop and a dog asleep in front of a fire and here was a cup of tea: one cup and, disappointingly, no cucumber sandwiches. Carey was clumsy and stumbling and didn’t have much to say. When asked if he would try to intercede with Khamenei to have the fatwa revoked, as one man of the cloth to another, he replied feebly, “I don’t think he would pay much attention to me.” The purpose of the tea was no more than damage limitation. It was soon over.
And there were rumors that the British were preparing to exchange ambassadors with Iran and resume full diplomatic relations. He needed a public platform urgently. The date of the event at Columbia University was fast approaching and it seemed very important indeed that he be there, that his voice be heard. But there were still two American hostages in Lebanon and it was not clear that he would be allowed to enter the United States. And how would he travel? No commercial airline was willing to have him as a passenger. The police told him that there were military passenger planes flying between the United Kingdom and the United States most weeks. Maybe he could get a seat on that. They made inquiries and yes, he would be allowed to travel on a military flight. But it was still not clear that he could make the trip.
Duncan Slater called to apologize for the “confrontation” over the thousandth-day vigil and said there was “no hurry” to exchange ambassadors. He was being sent on a posting abroad, he said, and David Gore-Booth would take his place as the FCO’s liaison man. He had liked Slater and felt supported by him. Gore-Booth was a very different proposition: darker, brusquer, more abrasive.
Joseph Cicippio was freed on December 1 and the last American hostage, Terry Anderson, was released a week later. The Americans kept their word and lifted their embargo on his journey. The trip to the Low Library was on.
He would cross the ocean on a Royal Air Force flight to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. A private plane, belonging, he was told, to the head of Time Warner, would be made available for his journey to New York and back. In New York he would be met by an NYPD security detail. As the date of his departure approached these plans kept altering, agonizingly. The private plane from D.C. to Manhattan turned into a car, then a helicopter, and then became a plane again. Andrew had planned a dinner at which he could meet influential New Yorkers, and an “arts lunch” with, perhaps, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Robert De Niro. It sounded too fanciful, and it was. He was told he would not be allowed to leave his hotel at all except to speak at Columbia. He would not be allowed to join the diners in the Low Library, but would go there to make his speech and then immediately leave. He would fly back to D.C. that same night and take the RAF flight back to the United Kingdom. U.S. embassies worldwide had been put on high alert and had taken on extra security in case there were Islamic reprisals against America for allowing him into the country. Everyone he or Andrew spoke to was very, very nervous—the RAF, the Ministry of Defence, the U.S. embassy, the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, the NYPD. He said to Larry Robinson on the phone, “It’s easier to get into the Garden of Eden than the United States. To enter Paradise all you need to do is be good.”
As the date approached the United States kept pushing back the departure hour. Finally, on Tuesday, December 10, International Human Rights Day, and the day before his speech at Columbia, he boarded the RAF transport and, with his back to the direction of travel, left British soil for the first time in three years.
He was met on the tarmac at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey by a nine-car motorcade with motorcycle outriders. The central car was an armored white stretch limo. That was his car. In charge of the very large number of NYPD officers involved was Lieutenant Bob Kennedy, known, for the day, as “Hudson Commander.” Lieutenant Bob introduced himself and explained the “scenario,” often breaking off to speak into his sleeve. Roger Hudson Lookout this is Hudson Commander over. Roger that. Over and out. Policemen nowadays spoke the way they had seen policemen speak on TV. Lieutenant Bob, it was clear, thought he was in a major movie. “We’ll be moving you through the city to the hotel in this vehicle right here,” he said redundantly as the motorcade set off.
“Lieutenant Bob,” he said, “this is a lot. The nine vehicles, the motorbikes, the sirens, the flashing lights, all of these officers. Wouldn’t it actually be safer just to drive me through the backstreets in a used Buick?”
Lieutenant Bob looked at him with the pitying look people reserve for the chronically stupid or insane. “No, sir, it would not,” he replied.
“Who else would you do something on this scale for, Lieutenant Bob?”
“Sir, this right here is what we’d do for Arafat.” It was something of a shock to be bracketed with the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
“Lieutenant Bob, if I was the president, how much more would you do?”
“Sir, if you were the president of these United States, we’d close down a whole bunch of these side streets here, and, sir, we’d have snipers on the rooftops along the route, but in your case we didn’t think that was necessary because it would look too conspicuous.”
The inconspicuous nine-vehicle motorcade rolled toward Manhattan with motorcycle sirens blaring and lights flashing, attracting no attention at all.
Andrew was waiting for him at the hotel. In the presidential suite there were bulletproof padded mattresses covering all the windows even though they were on the top floor, and there were perhaps two dozen men holding gigantic science-fiction weapons scattered through the rooms. Andrew had arranged for him to have
two visitors. Susan Sontag came first to hug him and tell him everything that PEN American Center had done and would do on his behalf. Then Allen Ginsberg arrived at one door and Susan had to be shown out through another so that the two American giants did not meet. He was not sure why this was necessary, but Andrew said it would be for the best, so the clash of literary egos was avoided, and when Ginsberg came in wearing sandals and carrying a little rucksack he sized up the situation and said firmly, “Okay, we’re going to meditate now.” He began pulling cushions off the sofas and putting them on the floor. The Indian writer thought, This is unusual, here’s an American teaching me how to say om shantih om. Aloud he said, to be mischievous, “I’m not meditating unless Andrew Wylie meditates as well.” And then there they were all sitting cross-legged on the floor chanting about shantih, peace, while the army of men with science-fiction weaponry looked on and the bulletproof padding shut out the cold December sun. When he had finished his meditation session Ginsberg handed out several booklets about Buddhism and left.
A little while later Elizabeth arrived unannounced and Lieutenant Bob brought her in to see him, surrounded by armed men. “It’s okay, Lieutenant Bob,” he said. “Elizabeth’s cool. Elizabeth’s with me.”
Kennedy narrowed his eyes. “If I wanted to kill you, sir,” he said insanely, wearing his best Crazy Jack Nicholson look, “she’s exactly who I’d send.”
“How so, Lieutenant Bob?”
Kennedy gestured toward a table on which there was an arrangement of fruits and cheeses as well as cutlery and plates. “Sir, if she were to take one of those forks there and stab you in the neck, I’d lose my job. Sir.”
Andrew Wylie was finding it difficult to keep a straight face and Elizabeth was known as the Mad Forkist for the rest of the trip.
That evening they were in the armored white stretch limo in the middle of the nine-vehicle motorcade with the motorcycle outriders and the sirens and flashing lights, zooming down 125th Street toward the Columbia campus at sixty miles an hour with the whole of Harlem out on the sidewalk watching the low-profile operation ghost almost imperceptibly by, and Andrew was screaming with delight at the outrageousness of it all, “This is the best day of my life!”
Then the fun, the slightly hysterical, black-comedy fun, was over. He was concealed behind a curtain at the Low Library and when his name was announced there was a shocked gasp and he moved forward, out of invisibility into the light. Then there was welcoming, affectionate applause. The lights were in his eyes and he couldn’t see the room, he had no idea who was out there, but he had his speech to make, his one thousand days in a balloon to describe. He asked his audience to think about religious persecution, and the question of what a single human life was worth, and he began the long business of unmaking his Mistake, unsaying what he had said, restoring himself to the ranks of the advocates of liberty and leaving God behind. He would have to unsay the Mistake over and over again for many years but that night when he admitted his error to the distinguished audience at Columbia and stood up again for what he most passionately believed—free speech is the whole ball game, he said, free speech is life itself—he felt cleaner, and in the audience’s sympathetic response he heard compassion. If he had been a religious man he would have said he felt shriven, absolved of his sins. But he was not religious and would never again feign religiosity. He was a proudly irreligious man. Don’t pray for me, he had said to his mother. Don’t you get it? That’s not our team.
Once the speech was over America unceremoniously threw him out. There was no time to say goodbye to Andrew or Elizabeth. Lieutenant Bob sat in the front of the white limo while it rushed through the night to MacArthur Airport at Islip on Long Island and there was the plane waiting to take him to Dulles, where he boarded the RAF transport along with all the military personnel and then he was back in his cage. But he had traveled, and he had spoken. The first time was the hardest, and all the difficulties had been overcome, and ahead of him lay the second time, and the third, and the fourth. There might not be light at the end of the tunnel yet, but at least he was in the tunnel now.
The “Balloon” essay replaced the “conversion” text in the paperback edition of Imaginary Homelands and at last he could stop cringing every time he saw a copy of that book. At last, he thought when the paperback arrived. This is the real book. Its author is the real me. His burden felt less heavy. He made his break with the dentist Essawy and left those well-manicured toenails behind forever.
Dear Religion,
Can I raise the question of first principles? Because, strangely, or not so strangely, the religious and nonreligious can’t agree on what these are. To the reasonable Greek man approaching the question of truth, first principles were starting points (arche) and we perceived them because we possessed awareness / consciousness (nous). By the use of pure reason, and relying on our sensory perception of the world, Descartes and Spinoza believed that we could arrive at a description of truth that we recognized as true. Religious thinkers, on the other hand—Aquinas, Ibn Rushd—maintained that reason existed outside human consciousness, that it hung out there in space like the northern lights or the asteroid belt, waiting to be discovered. Once discovered it was fixed and immutable, because it was preexisting, see, it didn’t rely on us to exist, it just was. This idea of disembodied reason, absolute reason, is a little hard to swallow, especially when you, Religion, join it to the idea of revelation. Because then thinking is over, isn’t it? Everything that needs to be thought has been revealed and we’re stuck with that, eternally, absolutely, without hope of appeal. God, one might well cry, help us. I’m with the other team, which believes that unless first principles of this type can be challenged by first principles of the other type—by finding new starting points, applying our consciousness and sensory awareness of what-is to those starting points, and so coming up with new conclusions—we’re done for, our brains will rot, and men in turbans and long beards (or men in frocks pretending to be celibate while molesting young boys) will inherit the earth. However, and this may confuse you, in cultural matters I am not a relativist and I do believe in universals. Human rights, for example, human freedoms, human nature and what it wants and deserves. Consequently I do not agree with Professor S. Huntington’s notion that reason belongs to the West and obscurantism to the East. The heart is what it is and knows nothing of compass points. The need for liberty, like the inevitability of death, is a universal. It may not preexist, being a consequence of our essential humanity, but it is not negotiable. I understand, Religion, that this may confuse you, but I am perfectly clear about it. I asked my nous and it gave me the thumbs-up. Discuss. By all means. Discuss. Oh. P.S. What’s up with those Pakistani official forms (all of them, for everything) that insist you state your religion, and won’t accept “none” for an answer? “None” is considered as “spoiling” the form and you have to fill out another one or risk the consequences, which might well be dire. I don’t know if this is the case in other Muslim countries but I kind of suspect it might be. That’s a little extreme, Religion, don’t you think? Borderline fascistic, even? What sort of club is it that makes it compulsory to be a member? I thought the best clubs were exclusive and tried their damnedest to keep the riffraff out.
Discuss this also. Please.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for your kind words about my work. May I make the elementary point that the freedom to write is closely related to the freedom to read, and not have your reading selected, vetted and censored for you by any priesthood or Outraged Community? Since when was a work of art defined by the people who didn’t like it? The value of art lies in the love it engenders, not the hatred. It’s love that makes books last. Please keep reading.
He made new year’s resolutions. To lose weight, to get his divorce, to write his novel, to have The Satanic Verses published in paperback, and to get the fatwa canceled. He knew that he would be unable to keep all these promises to himself. But three or four out of five would be good. He lost fif
teen pounds in the next six weeks. That was a good start. He bought his first computer. Like many old-technology people he worried that it might change his writing. Many years earlier he and Fay Weldon had done a joint reading in Kentish Town and during the Q & A a woman had asked, “When you’re typing and you x-x-x out a sentence, do you go on writing, or do you take the sheet of paper out of the typewriter and start the page all over again?” Both he and Fay had answered that they took the paper out and started all over again, obviously. Like many writers he had a fetish for clean copy, and the ease of “cleaning up” a page on this miraculous gadget was enough to convince him of its value. The less time he spent on retyping, the more time he would have for doing the actual writing. The Moor’s Last Sigh would be the first novel he wrote on a computer.
The house at St. Peter’s Street needed to be sold. His expenses were huge and the money would be very useful. While the tabloid press continued to complain that he was costing the United Kingdom too much money, his own resources were near breaking point. He had bought (and was refurbishing) a large house, where he and the protection team could live happily ever after, and a bulletproof bimbomobile. He was buying a two-bedroom flat in Hampstead so that Elizabeth could have a “public” home address, buying it in her name as a gift. Fortunately, Robert McCrum of Faber and Faber wanted to buy the Islington house and they quickly agreed terms. But the sale stalled when the sale of Robert’s existing home fell through. He said there were other people interested, however, and hoped to be able to go ahead soon.