The much-postponed meeting with John Major finally took place on May 11 at his office in the House of Commons. He had spoken to Nigella Lawson before he went and her levelheadedness was a great help. “He can’t possibly refuse to back you,” she said. “The bad state of the economy helps you, because if he can’t point to economic success he’s going to have to go for some moral strength.” She also had good news; she was pregnant. He told Elizabeth this, knowing that she very much wanted to be pregnant herself. But how could they think about bringing a child into this nightmare, into their soft prison? And then there was the simple translocated chromosome, which turned pregnancy into biological roulette. A baby didn’t seem like the wisest option for a man who was about to beg the prime minister to help him save his life.
The prime minister was not wearing his trademark nice-guy grin and did not talk about cricket. He seemed closed off, maybe even a little defensive, a man who knew he was going to be asked to do things he might not want to do. He said bluntly that there would be no photographs taken at this meeting because he wanted to “minimize the reaction from Iran and from his own backbenchers.” That was an inauspicious start.
“I’d like to thank you for the four years of protection,” he told Major. “I’m immensely grateful to the men who look after me, risking their own lives.” Major looked shocked. This was not the Rushdie he had expected, the one the Daily Mail described as “bad-mannered, sullen, graceless, silly, curmudgeonly, unattractive, small-minded, arrogant and egocentric.” It immediately became plain that the prime minister had the Daily Mail in his head. (It had printed an editorial opposing this meeting.) “Maybe you should say things like that more often,” he said, “in public, to correct the impression people have of you.” “Prime Minister,” he said, “I say it every time I talk to a journalist.” He nodded vaguely but seemed more relaxed and affable. The meeting went well from then on. It was not the first or last time that people discovered, once he had managed to wipe away the tabloid cartoon-Rushdie from their eyes, that he was actually quite companionable. “You’ve put on weight,” Major suddenly said. “Thanks a lot, Prime Minister,” he replied. “You should do my job,” the prime minister told him, “and you’d lose it in no time.” “Fine,” he answered, “I’ll do your job if you’ll do mine.” After that they were almost pals.
Major expressed his agreement with the high-profile approach. “You should go to Japan and shame them into action,” he said. They discussed getting a resolution from the Commonwealth so that Iran could not characterize the issue as a difference of opinion between East and West. They talked about the International Court of Justice; Major did not want to take the case there because he didn’t want to “paint Iran into a corner.” And they agreed on the value of a meeting with President Clinton. He told the prime minister what the UN hostage negotiator Picco had said. The U.S. is the key. Major nodded and looked at his aides. “Let us see what we can do to help,” he said.
When the news of the meeting was released, along with a statement by the prime minister condemning the fatwa, the Iranian regime’s official newspaper Kayhan reacted angrily. “The author of The Satanic Verses is literally going to get it in the neck.” This was high-stakes poker. He was deliberately trying to up the ante, and so far the Iranians were hanging tough and refusing to fold. But there was only one way to go now. He had to raise again.
Clarissa called him to say there was a lump in her breast, “and it’s four out of five on the cancer probability scale.” She was having the lumpectomy in six days and the result would be available a week later. There was a tremble in her voice but there was her usual stoic courage too. He was very shaken. He called her back a few minutes later and offered to pay for private treatment, whatever she needed. They talked about whether it was possible to avoid a full mastectomy and he passed on such information as he had gleaned from Nigella and Thomasina about the high quality of the breast cancer unit at Guy’s Hospital and the name of the specialist, Mr. Fentiman. There had been a Sunday Times magazine cover story about breast cancer and there was Fentiman again. He thought, She must beat it. She doesn’t deserve it. She will beat it. He and Elizabeth would do whatever they could. But in the face of fatal illness one was always alone. And Zafar would have to face this too; Zafar, who had already spent four years fearing for one parent. The blow had not come from the direction in which he was looking. It was the “safe” parent who was now in danger. He couldn’t help thinking ahead. How could he make a livable life for Zafar if the boy lost his mother? He would have to live in this secret house but what of his school, his friends, his life in the “real” world? How could he help him heal the wound of so terrible a loss?
He said to Elizabeth, it feels as if half your life is a sort of struggle toward the sunlight. Then you get five minutes in the sun and after that you’re dragged down into the darkness again and you die. No sooner had he said it than he heard the character of Flory Zogoiby saying it too, Abraham’s mother in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Were there no limits to the shamelessness of the literary imagination? No. There were no limits.
He told the prot officer Dick Billington about Clarissa and the possibility of cancer, and Dick said, “Oh, women are always getting ill.”
Sameen told him she’d had a long talk with Clarissa, who wanted to reminisce about the old days. She had been brave but said she felt she’d “had her share of bad luck.” Clarissa’s illness had made Sameen think about her own mortality. She wanted to ask him if he would assume guardianship of her daughters if she and their father died.
He said yes, of course, but she should have a backup plan, considering the danger to his own life.
The test results came in from Bart’s—St. Bartholomew’s Hospital—and they were very bad indeed. Clarissa had an invasive ductal carcinoma, and it had been undetected for perhaps eighteen months. Radical surgery would be required. The cancer had “probably” spread to the lymphatic system. She would have to have blood tests, and her lungs, liver and bone marrow would have to be tested too. She was speaking in her most controlled voice but he could hear the terror under the words. Zafar hugged her very tightly, she said, and was close to tears. She had already, with huge strength, accustomed herself to the need for the mastectomy but what would she do, she said, if there was bad news about the liver and the bone marrow? How did one face the inevitability of death?
He called Nigella. There was a man she knew who was trying new techniques with liver cancer and having some success. That was a straw to clutch at, but no more than a straw.
Zafar came to spend the night. He was suppressing his feelings. His mother had always done the same thing in the face of adversity. “How’s Mum?” “Fine.” It was better to let him deal with the news slowly, at his own speed, rather than sit him down and terrify him. Clarissa had spoken to him and used the word “cancer.” He replied, “You told me that already.” But she hadn’t.
The new test results arrived. Clarissa’s blood, lungs, liver and bone were all cancer-free. But it’s a “bad cancer,” she was told. The mastectomy was unavoidable, and ten lymph nodes would also have to be removed. She wanted a second opinion. He wanted her to get one. He would cover all her costs. She went to a highly recommended oncologist named Sikora at Hammersmith Hospital and Sikora didn’t think the mastectomy was necessary. Now that the lump had been removed she could have chemotherapy and radiotherapy and that would handle it. When she heard she could keep her breasts she brightened enormously. She was a beautiful woman and the mutilation of that beauty had been hard for her to bear. Then she had to meet the surgeon who would perform the lumpectomy, a man named Linn, and he turned out to be a creep. Darling, he called her oleaginously, sweetheart, why do you object to this op so much? He told her she should have the mastectomy, directly contradicting the head of oncology, Sikora, wrecking her newfound confidence and removing her justification for having switched to Hammersmith Hospital from Bart’s, where she had had counseling she valued and doctors she actually liked.
She began to panic and was close to hysteria for two days until she could speak to Sikora again. He reassured her that his proposed course of action was the one they would follow. She calmed down, and took Zafar away for a week’s cycling holiday in France.
Sameen said that her friend Kishu, a surgeon in New York, had told her that with an invasive cancer of this sort one shouldn’t mess about but go ahead and have the mastectomy. Yet the no-mastectomy route had lifted Clarissa’s spirits immeasurably. It was so hard to know how to advise her. She did not want his advice.
His lawyer Bernie Simons called. The decree nisi had gone through and the divorce from Marianne would be complete in a few weeks when they received the decree absolute. Oh, yeah, he remembered. I’m still getting divorced.
He received a message from Bernard-Henri Lévy. It was good news: He was to be offered the très important Swiss award, the Prix Colette, the prize of the Geneva Book Fair. He should come to Switzerland the following week and receive the prize at a grand ceremony at the fair. But the Swiss government declared him an unwelcome visitor and said they would refuse to provide police protection for his visit. He thought of Mr. Greenup saying he was endangering the citizenry by reason of his desire for self-aggrandizement. On this occasion the Swiss Greenups had won. There would be no self-aggrandizement. The citizenry of Switzerland would be safe. All he could do was to make a phone call to the room at the Geneva Book Fair in which the prize was being awarded. BHL made a speech saying that the award had been the unanimous decision of the jury. The jury president, Mme Edmonde Charles-Roux, said that the award was faithful to the “spirit of Colette,” who “fought against intolerance.” However, Colette’s heirs were furious about the award, presumably not agreeing with Mme Charles-Roux that to select Salman Rushdie was “in the spirit of Colette.” They expressed their anger by refusing to allow Colette’s name to be used in future. Thus he became the final winner of the Prix Colette.
He had a nosy neighbor to deal with, an elderly gentleman named Bertie Joel. Mr. Joel came to the gate and said, on the intercom, that he wanted someone to come to his house “in the next fifteen minutes.” Elizabeth was out so one of the team had to go around. Everyone was tense; had Mr. Anton’s secret identity been discovered? But it was just a question of a blocked drain that ran between the two properties. The new head of the protection team, Frank Bishop, was an older, well-spoken, cheerful man, and a cricket-mad member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. It turned out that Bertie Joel was a member too and had known Frank’s father. The cricket connection erased all suspicions. “The builders told me that the whole house was being steel plated, so I suspected Mafia connections,” said Bertie Joel, and Frank laughed it off and put him at his ease. When he came back and told everyone what had happened the team was almost hysterical with relief. “Got a result there, Joe,” Frank said. “It’s a result, that is.”
There were other such moments. The electric gates jammed open one day and a man looking exactly like the poet Philip Larkin wandered in and peered around the forecourt. On another day there was a man on the sidewalk with a stepladder, trying to take pictures of the house over the hedge. It turned out he was doing a newspaper story about repossessions of houses on the street. On yet another day there was a man on a motorbike and a Volvo parked across the street containing three men who were “acting strangely.” On such days he thought, Maybe there really are killers in the neighborhood and I really am about to be killed. But all of these were false alarms. The house was not “blown.”
Bernie Simons was suddenly dead; sweet, indispensable Bernie, solicitor to a whole generation of the British left, the wisest and warmest of human beings, who had helped him fight the Muslim cases against him and been an invaluable ally in the battle against Howley and Hammington’s threat to withdraw protection. Bernie was only fifty-two. He had been at a conference in Madrid and had just finished dinner, gone upstairs, had an enormous heart attack and plunged face-first toward the rug. A quick end after a good meal. That, at least, was appropriate. All over London people were calling one another to mourn. He spoke to Robert McCrum, Caroline Michel, Melvyn Bragg. To Robert he said, “It’s so terrible—it makes me want to call Bernie and ask him to fix it.”
It was too early to start finding his contemporaries in the obituary pages but the next day Bernie was there, as Angela had been, and as he feared Clarissa might soon be. And Edward Said had CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and Gita Mehta had a cancer too and was being operated on. The wings, the beating wings. He was the one who was supposed to die but people were dropping all around him.
In early June, Elizabeth drove Clarissa to Hammersmith Hospital for another bout of exploratory surgery. The outcome was hopeful. The surgeon, Mr. Linn, said he could “see no more cancer.” So maybe they had caught it early enough, and she would live. Clarissa was very sure that it was good news. Radiotherapy would zap any cells that remained and since “only one, the smallest one” of the lymph nodes was infected she could do without chemotherapy, she thought. He had his doubts but held his tongue.
Edward Said told him that his white count was going up and he might need chemotherapy soon. “But I’m a walking miracle,” he said. His doctor was the man who had “written the book” on CLL, a Long Island physician of Indian origin named Dr. Kanti Rai; the stages of the illness were known as the “Rai stages” because of his work on defining the nature of the disease. So Edward, who had been something of a hypochondriac until he got really sick, whereupon he immediately became a courageous hero, had the best of all possible doctors and was fighting the illness with all his might. “You’re a walking miracle, too,” he said. “The two of us have no right to be alive but here we are.” He said he had seen an interview with Ayatollah Sanei of the Bounty in The New York Times. “He has a cartoon of you burning in hell on the wall behind his head. He said, The road to Paradise will be easier when Rushdie is dead.” Edward’s huge giggle of a laugh erupted as his arms waved to dismiss the Bountiful One’s remark.
On his forty-sixth birthday he had friends to the house for dinner. By this time there was a list of people the Special Branch approved of, close friends they had come to know over the years, and knew to be closemouthed and trustworthy. Bill Buford brought an excellent Côtes du Rhone and Gillon brought Puligny-Montrachet. There was a hammock from Pauline Melville and a very nice blue linen shirt from Nigella. John Diamond was lucky to be alive after a bus jumped a red light and hit his car at 40 mph right on the driver’s door. Fortunately, the door had held.
Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter brought a limited edition of Harold’s poems. (If Harold had your fax number these poems would arrive from time to time and needed to be praised as soon as possible. One of the poems was named “Len Hutton” after the great England batsman. I saw Len Hutton in his prime / Another time / Another time. That was it. Harold’s great friend and fellow playwright Simon Gray neglected to comment on this piece and Harold called him up to reproach him. “I’m sorry, Harold,” Simon said. “I haven’t had time to finish it.” Mr. Pinter didn’t see the joke.)
The prominent Algerian writer and journalist Tahar Djaout was shot in the head and died, the third major intellectual, after Farag Fouda in Egypt and Ugur Mumcu in Turkey, to be murdered in a year. He tried to draw attention to their cases in the Western media but there was only a little interest. His own campaign seemed to be stalling. Christopher Hitchens had heard from the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Robin Renwick, that any meeting with Clinton would not take place before the autumn at the earliest. Frances and Carmel quarreled often and then they both quarreled with him. He expressed his near-despair to them and insisted that they get their own show back on the road and they rallied.
He made a second trip to Paris to speak at a gathering of the Académie Universelle des Cultures in a grand chamber at the Louvre full of gilt, frescoes, and writers: Elie Wiesel, Wole Soyinka, Yashar Kemal, Adonis, Ismail Kadare, Cynthia Ozick … and Umberto Eco. He had just given Eco’s novel Foucaul
t’s Pendulum the worst review he had ever given any book. Eco bore down upon him and then behaved with immense good grace. He spread his arms and cried, “Rushdie! I am the boolsheet Eco!” After that they were on excellent terms. (In times to come they joined forces with Mario Vargas Llosa to form a literary triple act that Eco named the Three Musketeers, “because first we were enemies and now we are friends.” Vargas Llosa had criticized Salman for being too left-wing, Eco had criticized Mario for being too right-wing, and Salman had criticized Eco’s writing, but when they met they got on famously. The Three Musketeers performed successfully in Paris, London and New York.)
The security arrangements were insanely excessive. The good men of the RAID had forced the Louvre Museum to close for the day. There were vast numbers of men with machine guns everywhere. He was not allowed to stand near a window. And at lunchtime when the writers walked across to the I. M. Pei glass pyramid to go downstairs for lunch the RAID forced him to sit in a car that drove perhaps one hundred yards to the pyramid from the wing of the Louvre where the Académie had met, with armed men in mirrored sunglasses walking all around it, heavy weaponry at the ready. It was worse than crazy; it was embarrassing.
At the end of the day the security forces informed him that the interior minister, Charles Pasqua, had refused him permission to spend the night in France, because it would be too expensive. But, he argued, he had been offered private accommodation at the homes of Bernard-Henri Lévy, Bernard Kouchner and Christine Ockrent, and Jack Lang’s daughter Caroline, so it would cost nothing at all. Well, then, it is because we have identified a specific threat against you so we cannot guarantee your safety. Not even the Special Branch believed that lie. “They would have shared that information with us, Joe,” said Frank Bishop, “and they did not.” Caroline Lang said, “If you want to defy the RAID order we will all squat here in the Louvre with you, and bring in beds and wine and friends.” That was a funny and touching idea but he refused. “If I do that they will never let me enter France again.” Then Christopher Mallaby refused to allow him to stay at the embassy; but someone, the British or the French, managed to persuade British Airways to fly him back to London. So for the first time in four years he flew, without any problems from crew or passengers—many of whom came up to express their friendship, solidarity and sympathy—on a BA plane. After the trip, however, British Airways said that the flight had been agreed to under French pressure “at the local operational level” and they had taken steps “to ensure that it would never happen again.”