They decided to institute major sanctions. The account was to be closed, he would have none of the money from it and no more pocket money until he said what was really happening. Half an hour later—who said economic sanctions didn’t work?—Zafar confessed. He had been pilfering the cash from his dad’s desk drawer. The dinghy he wanted had cost much more than he thought, £250 not £150, and there were other expenses, things he needed to have on board the boat, and it would have taken forever to save the money, and he really wanted the boat. He was quite severely punished—there would be no TV, the bank account was closed, he would have to repay £30 a month out of his £50 pocket money, and he couldn’t use the boat (a Mirror dinghy, which he had already bought, as his parents now discovered) until it had been honestly paid for. Clarissa and he hoped that this episode would shock Zafar back into honesty. But he also had to learn that his parents had trusted him completely and now he had to earn back that trust. At the same time he must not doubt their love, which was unconditional. Zafar looked terrified and ashamed. He didn’t argue with the punishment.
Five days later Elizabeth discovered that her most treasured piece of jewelry, a gold charm bracelet that had belonged to her mother, was missing from its hiding place, a box inside another box inside her clothes closet. Nothing else had gone. He asked her to search, but she seemed to have decided that Zafar had taken it. She made a halfhearted search and found nothing. Zafar was asleep in his room and she insisted he be woken up and asked about it. He begged her to turn the house upside down first, but she said she had looked and it wasn’t there. So he had to wake his child and accuse him, even though every instinct he possessed told him this boy of his could not have done this thing, he didn’t even know where Elizabeth kept her jewels, it didn’t make sense. Zafar was very upset and denied having done anything. And when the boy was lying wide awake and wretchedly unhappy in his bed in the middle of the night Elizabeth found the bracelet, which had been there all the time.
Now it was he who was ashamed in front of his son. And between Elizabeth and himself a shadow fell that did not quickly fade.
They were at the home of Ronnie and Natasha Harwood, whose thirty-fifth wedding anniversary it was, and Judge Stephen Tumim, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, a laughing, rubicund gent, whom the IRA had recently promised to kill, was talking about “prot,” and what it was like to be made to leave your home of thirty years by the Special Branch. His wife, Winifred, said she had suffered a nervous collapse. She would go to the house, with a police escort, to collect things they needed, and seeing the beds made up and knowing they would never be slept in again was, she said, like visiting a corpse. They had both been grief-stricken, and the worst part was not knowing when it would end. “It’s the same for lifers,” Judge Tumim said. “When you’re held at Her Majesty’s pleasure you don’t know how long you’ll be in for. This is a life sentence too, or something very like it.” Stephen and Winifred had had to stay in the military barracks on Albany Street near Regent’s Park, which was where he and Elizabeth so nearly got dumped. But things were done for Stephen that had never been offered to them. The state had agreed to value and buy his home from him, because, as the good judge put it, “protected people can’t find anyone foolish enough to buy their homes.” “I did,” he replied, and Ronnie Harwood said, grinning wickedly, “Yes, it’s my publisher, Robert McCrum.”
Tumim was a marvelous talker. He had met the notorious serial killer Dennis Nilsen when doing a prison visit and had been “a bit alarmed” when Nilsen asked to speak to him alone. “But he only wanted to show off how well-read he had become.” Nilsen had been caught when his household drains got blocked with human flesh and entrails. He murdered at least fifteen men and boys and had sex with their dead bodies. Tumim had found Nilsen “very sinister,” which sounded probable. They had shared some protection officers and gossiped about them for a while. “The perfect job for covering up an extramarital affair,” Tumim agreed. “Can’t tell you where I’m going, darling, or when I’ll be back, it’s all top secret, you know. They all have affairs, naturally. We’d probably do the same.” He told Tumim the story of the bigamist protection officer. “They’re very attractive men, you know,” the judge said understandingly.
In the end Tumim had begun to feel safe when the governor of the Maze prison at Long Kesh in Northern Ireland, where the IRA man Bobby Sands had died on hunger strike against conditions in the “H Blocks,” told him that he was off the IRA hit list. He had been on it, but now he had been taken off. “The intelligence people don’t know much, really,” he said. “But if I’d refused to leave home I probably would have been shot. I was in the habit of sitting in a window, looking down toward the river, and just across the river were some bushes, perfect for a sniper. I’d have been a sitting duck. The prot boys told me, Every time you go into the garden you’ll wonder if there’s a gunman in the bushes. But it’s all right now.”
Ronnie told him the next day that the judge made jokes about those days now, but it had been an awful time for him and his family. One of Tumim’s daughters, disliking being in a house full of armed men, starting leaving notes in each room, NO SMOKING, and other instructions. The loss of privacy and spontaneity: These were the hardest things to deal with. It had been very good to talk to someone else who had been through what he was going through, and to hear that such a story could have a happy ending. Elizabeth and Winifred Tumim complained to each other about the weight of the doors of the bulletproof cars. There weren’t many people with whom one could have such a chat. “It makes you much fonder of the police,” said the judge, “and much less tolerant of the bastards. The IRA in my case. You have different bastards to deal with, not all of them Muslim.”
Mr. Anton detected a change in police attitudes toward Operation Malachite. On the one hand, they planned to institute occasional “covert surveillance” of Zafar and Clarissa’s home, and he was glad of that, having always been worried that Burma Road was left entirely unsupervised. Dick Wood said he might have to “change teams” when he went out, even to the cinema, because he didn’t want the faces of people who stayed at the Bishops’ Avenue house to become too well known. On the other hand, a better attitude toward the principal himself was emerging. The protection officer Tony Dunblane confided, “I personally feel that we, the Branch, shouldn’t do the Iranians’ job for them by keeping you locked up.” Soon afterward, his senior officer, Dick Wood, agreed. “I have the impression,” Dick said, “that for more than three years you were treated like a naughty child.” Many of the restrictions Mr. Greenup had insisted on had been unnecessary. Well, now you tell me, he replied. Three years and more of my life made more unpleasant than they had to be because Greenup didn’t like me. I had to fight for every inch of space. “I don’t know how you stood it,” Dick said. “None of us could have.”
Helen Hammington had softened, too, and was prepared to help the Malachite principal have a slightly better life. Perhaps all his meetings with world leaders had helped to change her attitude. Perhaps his own arguments had finally had some effect. He didn’t ask.
In 1982 he had visited the old synagogue in Cochin, Kerala, a small gem tiled in blue ceramics from China (TILES FROM CANTON & NO TWO ARE IDENTICAL, a sign read). The story of the almost-extinct community of Keralan Jews caught his imagination and he approached the synagogue’s tiny caretaker, an elderly gentleman with the fine South Indian name of Jackie Cohen, and peppered him with questions.
After a few minutes Mr. Cohen grew impatient. “Why you asking so much?” the querulous old caretaker demanded. “Well,” he replied, “I’m a writer, and maybe I could write something about this place.” Jackie Cohen waved a bony, dismissive arm. “There is no need,” he said, just a little haughtily. “We already have a leaflet.”
He had kept a journal of his visit to Kerala and some writerly instinct had told him not to waste it. Now that journal, which had been retrieved from St. Peter’s Street, showed him the way back to his work. He por
ed over it day after day, remembering the beauty of Cochin harbor, the pepper warehouses storing the “Black Gold of Malabar,” and the great punkah fans in the church where Vasco da Gama had been buried. As he walked through the streets of the Jewtown district in his mind, the Cochin section of The Moor’s Last Sigh began to come alive. Aurora Zogoiby and her son Moraes the Moor guided him into their world.
His nightmare had been long and literature had been hard to reclaim. He thought every day of William Nygaard and his bullet holes, of Ettore Capriolo kicked and stabbed, of Hitoshi Igarashi dead in a pool of blood by an elevator shaft. Not only he, the shameless author, but the world of books—literature itself—had been vilified, shot, kicked, knifed, killed, and blamed at the same time. Yet the true life of books was profoundly other than this world of violence, and in it he rediscovered the discourse he loved. He emerged from his alien everyday reality and sank into Aurora, her glamour, her bohemian excess, her painterly contemplations of languor and desire, devoured her, like a starving man at a feast.
He had read a story about Lenin hiring look-alikes to travel the Soviet Union to deliver speeches he had no time to give, and thought it would be funny if, in Kerala, where Communism was popular, the local Leninists decided to hire Indian Lenins to do the same thing. The Too-Tall Lenin, the Too-Short Lenin, the Too-Fat Lenin, the Too-Skinny Lenin, the Too-Lame Lenin, the Too-Bald Lenin, and Lenin the Too-thless marched into his pages and with them came lightness and brio. Perhaps he could write a good book, after all. The Moor’s Last Sigh would be his first novel for adults since The Satanic Verses. There was a lot riding on its reception. He tried to put such thoughts out of his mind.
His daily life was less disrupted now than it had been when he wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories but the gift of deep concentration proved harder to recapture. The imperative of his promise to Zafar had driven Haroun forward through all the house moves and uncertainties. Now he had a place to live and a pleasant room to write in but he was distracted. He forced himself back into his old routines. He got up in the morning and went straight to his desk, without showering or dressing for the day, sometimes without even cleaning his teeth, and forced himself to sit there in his pajamas until he had begun the day’s work. “The art of writing,” Hemingway said, “is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Sit down, he ordered himself. Don’t stand up. And slowly, slowly, his old power returned. The world went away. Time stood still. He fell happily toward that deep place where unwritten books wait to be found, like lovers demanding proof of utter devotion before they appear. He was a writer again.
When he wasn’t writing the novel he was revising old stories and thinking of new ones for the collection he was calling East, West—a title in which, he thought, the comma represented himself. He had the three “East” stories and the three “West” stories too and was working on the three tales of cultural crossover that would form the final part of the collection. “Chekov and Zulu” was about Indian diplomats obsessed by Star Trek at the time of Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination, and his friendship with Salman Haidar at the Indian High Commission gave him some useful material. “The Harmony of the Spheres” was an almost-true story based on the suicide of a close Cambridge friend, Jamie Webb, a writer on occult themes who developed acute schizophrenia and eventually shot himself. And the longest story, “The Courter,” was still being written. In the midsixties, when his parents moved from Bombay to Kensington, they brought his old Mangalorean ayah Mary Menezes with them for a time to look after his youngest sister, then just two years old. But Mary grew horribly homesick, her heart breaking with longing for another place. She actually started having heart troubles and in the end returned to India. The moment she got back the heart troubles stopped and never came back. She lived to be well over one hundred years old. The idea that you might actually be in danger of dying from a broken heart was something to write about. He joined Mary’s story to the tale of an Eastern European janitor he once met at the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency in London, an elderly man who could barely speak English and was suffering from the aftereffects of a stroke, but who played chess with a fluency and force that very few opponents could resist. In his story the silenced chess player and the homesick ayah fell in love.
The police had planned a special treat for him and Elizabeth. They were taken to the legendary Black Museum in Scotland Yard, which was not normally open to the public. The temperature in the museum was kept very low so he shivered as he went inside. The curator, John Ross, who oversaw this bizarre collection of actual murder weapons and other true-crime memorabilia, said he wished that the British police were allowed to kill people. Perhaps his long proximity to these instruments of death had affected his thinking. In the Black Museum there were many disguised weapons—umbrella guns, truncheons that were guns, knives that shot bullets. All the fantasy weapons of crime novels and spy movies were here, laid out on tables, and every weapon on display had killed a man or woman. “We use this to train young officers,” Mr. Ross said. “Just so they understand, you see, that anything can be a gun.” Here was the gun used by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England, to kill her lover David Blakely. Here was the gun with which, at Caxton Hall in Westminster in 1940, the Sikh assassin Udham Singh had murdered Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the former governor of the Punjab, to avenge the Indians shot down in the Amritsar massacre twenty-one years earlier, on April 13, 1919. Here was the cooker and bath in which the serial killer John Reginald Christie had boiled and filleted his victims at 10 Rillington Place in west London. And here was Heinrich Himmler’s death mask.
Dennis Nilsen had served briefly in the police force, Mr. Ross said, but was kicked out after a year for being a homosexual. “We couldn’t do that now, could we,” reflected Mr. Ross. “Ho no, we could not.”
In a pickle jar was a pair of human arms severed at the elbow. They belonged to a British killer who had been shot dead when on the run in Germany. Scotland Yard had asked their German colleagues to send them the corpse’s fingerprints so that they could formally identify it and close the case. The Germans sent over the killer’s arms instead. “ ‘You take der fingerprints,’ ” Mr. Ross said, affecting an accent. “Spot of the old German sense of humor there.” And he was a man whom people were trying to kill, and so he had been invited into the world of murder as a special treat. Spot of the old British sense of humor there, he thought. Ho yes.
That night, with images of the Black Museum still vivid in his imagination, he took part at the Royal Court Theatre in a memorial reading for Anthony Burgess, along with John Walsh, Melvyn Bragg, D. J. Enright and Lorna Sage. He read the part of A Clockwork Orange in which Alex and his droogs attack the author of a book called A Clockwork Orange. He had been thinking a good deal about what Burgess called “ultraviolence” (including violence against authors); about the glamour of terrorism, and how it made lost, hopeless young men feel powerful and consequential. The Russian-based slang Burgess had created for his book had defined that kind of violence, glorified it and anaesthetized responses to it, so that it became a brilliant metaphor of what made violence hip. To read A Clockwork Orange was to gain a better understanding of the enemies of The Satanic Verses.
He had finished “The Courter,” so the East, West collection was complete. He had also finished part one of The Moor’s Last Sigh, “A House Divided,” about forty thousand words long. The block had been broken at last. He was deeply inside the dream. He was no longer in Cochin. Now in his mind’s eye he saw the city of his youth, which had been forced to adopt a false name, just as he had. Midnight’s Children had been his novel of Bombay. This would be the book of a darker, more corrupt, more violent place, seen not through the eyes of childhood but using adulthood’s more jaundiced gaze. A novel of Mumbai.
He had begun to fight a court case in India to recover a piece of ancestral property, his grandfather’s summer cottage at Solan in the Shimla Hills, which had been seized illegally by the state government of
Himachal Pradesh. When this news reached London the Daily Mail ran an editorial suggesting that if he would like to go and live in Solan his passage there could be paid for by public subscription because it would be so much cheaper than continuing the protection. If any other Indian immigrant to Britain had been told to go back where he came from it would be called racism, but it was apparently permissible to speak of this particular immigrant any way one chose.
At the end of June he traveled to Norway to meet William Nygaard, who was recovering well, but slowly, from his wounds, and gave him a hug. In July he wrote the first of a series of open letters to the beleaguered Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen for the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung. After him came Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz and many others. On August 7 the fatwa had been in place for two thousand days. On August 9 Taslima Nasreen arrived in Stockholm with the help of Gabi Gleichmann of Swedish PEN, and was given asylum by the Swedish government. Nine days later she received the Kurt Tucholsky Prize. So she was safe; exiled, deprived of her language, her country and her culture, but alive. “Exile,” he had written in The Satanic Verses, “is a dream of glorious return.” He had been writing about the exile of a Khomeini-like imam, but the line boomeranged back and described its author, and now Taslima as well. He could not return to India, and Taslima could not go back to Bangladesh; they could only dream.
Slowly, carefully, he had arranged for a few weeks of escape. He, Elizabeth and Zafar went by night train to Scotland and were met by the prot vehicles, which had been driven up the day before. On the small private island of Eriska near Oban there was a quiet hotel and they spent a week’s holiday there doing ordinary holiday things—island walks, skeet shooting, mini-golf—that felt unutterably luxurious. They visited Iona and in the graveyard where the ancient kings of Scotland lay at rest—where Macbeth himself was interred—they saw a fresh grave, the earth upon it still moist, in which John Smith, the Labour leader, had recently been buried. He had met Smith once and admired him. He stood by the grave and bowed his head.