Joseph Anton: A Memoir

  All the seats at Waterstone’s were sold by lunchtime. “Imagine if we’d advertised on Monday as planned,” said the Hampstead branch manager, Paul Bagley. “We’d have sold thousands.” Hampstead High Street was swarming with uniformed police officers, and there wasn’t a single demonstrator in sight. Not a single gentleman with a beard, placard and righteously outraged expression. Not one. Where were the suits and mobile phones, the “thousand violent fanatics” of the Hizb ut-Tahrir? Not there, that was where. If it hadn’t been for the hordes of police in the street it would have looked like a completely ordinary literary event.

  It wasn’t, of course. It was his first preannounced public reading in almost seven years. It was the publication day of his first adult novel since The Satanic Verses. The Waterstone’s people told Caroline Michel afterward that it was the best reading they had ever heard, which was nice; for the reader himself it felt like a miracle. He was with his own audience again, after so very long. To hear their laughter, to feel that they were moved: extraordinary. He read the opening of the novel, and the bit about the Lenins, and the “Mother India” passage. Afterward hundreds of copies of the book rushed out into the London night, held in happy hands. And not a single demonstrator ever showed up.

  He had crossed his Rubicon. There could be no turning back. The Cambridge Waterstone’s people had been there and wanted to go ahead with their event, this time with two days’ prior advertising. Dick Wood said that “everyone at the office was very pleased.” He wondered if that included Commander Howley. One day, then two days, then more. Step by step, back toward his real life. Away from Joseph Anton, in the direction of his own name.

  He sent bottles of champagne to the officers who had fought for him against the bigwigs of Scotland Yard.

  The noise about the “French initiative” was getting louder by the day. The Independent reported that the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s European-based cells of hit men had written to Khamenei complaining that he had been ordered to call all his dogs off, a straw in the wind that hinted both that the dogs were indeed being called off and that Khamenei might not be opposed to their kenneling. Then Arne Ruth of Dagens Nyheter reported a “very exciting” meeting in Stockholm. Along with other Swedish journalists he had met the Iranian minister, Larijani, who had said, extraordinarily, that he wanted articles written stressing Iran’s “admiration for Salman Rushdie’s work” because they wanted to “change the psychological attitudes.” Even more astounding was Larijani’s on-the-record statement that the fatwa did not need to be enforced as it was not in Iran’s best interests. This was the same Larijani who had frequently demanded Mr. Rushdie’s death. On the matter of Sanei of the Bounty, however, Larijani did not budge. The government couldn’t do anything about that. Then, a witticism. Why didn’t Mr. Rushdie sue Sanei under Iranian law? Oh, werry good, he thought, lapsing briefly into Dickensian vowels. Werry werry good indeed.

  The wind was swirling. The straws were blowing in many directions. If there was an answer blowing in that wind, he had no idea what it was.

  Elizabeth was upset that there were no signs of a pregnancy. She told him he should have a “sperm test.” There were these moments of strain between them. It worried them both.

  Caroline Michel said, “Yes, media excitement is at a great height, and it can be used to make a better life for you.” He did not want to remain forever trapped in a shadow world of diplomats, intelligence spooks, terrorists and counterterrorists. If he gave up his own portrait of the world and accepted this one then he would never escape. He was trying to understand how to think and act in response to what might be about to happen. It would be quite a tightrope act. If the Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson was right about the need for a positive response in the media then he should perhaps say that things were better but not over; that it was the beginning of the end, but not the end; a cease-fire, but not yet a final peace. Ayatollah Meshkini had recently said that any fatwa could be annulled, and many had been. Should he mention that? Probably not. The Iranians would probably not be thrilled if he quoted their ayatollahs back at them.

  Andrew Green of the Foreign Office called to brief him about what was planned. The Iranian text would take the form of “a letter from Foreign Minister Velayati stating that his deputy Va’ezi was authorized to give the Iranian view,” which would not be stated in Velayati’s letter, but in an “annexe” to it, and which would also be published in the Iranian press. Was that acceptable to him or not, Green wanted to know. It sounded as if the Foreign Office thought it wasn’t enough. This was a long way from Rafsanjani’s signature, after all.

  Larry Robinson called from the U.S. embassy. He felt that the Europeans were pushing for acceptance, but the United States and United Kingdom did not want to. He was worried that Iran was setting up a “deniable assassination.” (Elizabeth, too, felt he might be killed at one of his hard-won readings, but Rab Connolly said that the “spies” were saying that the “bad guys” weren’t planning to do that.)

  What to do? He really didn’t know. What on earth should he do?

  The media were treating this moment as if it was the end of the fatwa story, but maybe it wasn’t, in which case he would lose everyone’s attention, but the danger would remain. Or, alternatively, by going for it, by bouncing things forward, perhaps he could use the media to create an atmosphere in which the threat really would come to an end.

  If the EU rejected the Iranian reply to the démarche, it could allow Iran to accuse the EU of bad faith and hairsplitting, and to suggest that the West did not want to solve the fatwa problem—that he was being used by the West as a pawn in a larger game. And maybe he was. The U.S. administration and, to an extent, the British government wanted to tighten the political screws on Iran and in that effort the fatwa was useful to them, no doubt of it. But if he accepted the Iranian reply then the defense campaign would fizzle, and the fatwa and bounty offer would remain in place. He felt out of his depth.

  The day of the Iranian reply was also the day of the Cambridge reading. Two days’ notice had created an enormous audience, and of course the shop was nervous, he was told he had to come in the back door, if he tried to walk in the front door the event would be canceled. But it was happening, and once again there was no sign of a demonstration. His own instinct, backed by his conversations with artists and journalists in the British Asian community, was that the energy had long gone out of the British Muslim protests. That phase was over.

  At 12:45 P.M. there was shocking and unexpected news. The deputy foreign minister, Va’ezi, had told IRNA, the Iranian news agency, that Iran had rejected the European démarche, and the French initiative was dead. That very morning Iran had been briefing the media that Va’ezi’s piece of paper would satisfy all the EU’s demands, and now here he was saying that no written guarantee had been given, and none would be.

  Just like that.

  It was impossible to know what had happened in Tehran. Somebody had lost a fight and someone else had won it.

  Elizabeth burst into tears. He became oddly calm. He must use the planned press conference to go back onto the attack. By refusing to say that they would not engage in terrorism, the Iranians had revealed that they might well do so. The collapse of this initiative left Iran naked in the bright light of the world’s attention. This was what he had to say, as loudly as he could.

  Strangely he was not afraid for himself, but he did not know how to talk to those who loved him, how to tell Zafar the disappointing news, what to say to Sameen. He did not know how to give weeping Elizabeth strength, or where to find hope. It felt as if there might not be any hope. But he knew that he had to—that he would—continue, taking his lead from Beckett’s mighty Unnamable. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

  And of course life did go on. One thing had become clearer than ever: He had to take his freedom where he could get it. An “official” end was no longer looking possible, but America beckoned him for another summer break. The uninterest of U.S. policeme
n in his protection was just fine, in fact it was a real boon. That year Elizabeth, Zafar and he were able to have twenty-five happy summer days of American freedom. Zafar and Elizabeth flew out together on a direct flight; he used Rudolf Scholten’s friends at Austrian Airlines to bring him to JFK via Vienna: a very long way around, but no matter, he was there! And Andrew was there! And they drove straight out to Water Mill for nine wonderful days on Gibson Beach, and at friends’ homes, doing nothing and everything. The simplicity of it—and the contrast with his sequestered British life—brought tears to his eyes. And after Water Mill they went by car and ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, where they would be the guests of Doris Lockhart Saatchi on her Chilmark property for eight days more. His main memory of that trip would be of William Styron’s genitalia. Elizabeth and he visited the Styrons at their Vineyard Haven home and there on the porch was the great writer in khaki shorts, sitting with his legs splayed and wearing no underpants, his treasures generously and fully on display. This was more than he had ever hoped to know about the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, but all information was useful, he supposed, and he duly filed it away for later use.

  Then three nights at the Irvings’, and three at the Herrs’, and three more at the Wylie place on Park Avenue. Zafar got his GCSE results on their last night and they were, thank goodness, good. In the years that followed he often wondered how he would have survived without these annual American safety-valve journeys, when they could pretend to be normal literary folk going about their normal business unaccompanied by men with guns, and it didn’t seem that hard. He became certain, very quickly, that when the day came it would be America that would make it easiest for him to reclaim his freedom. When he said this to Elizabeth she frowned and became irritable.

  In the darkness that followed the collapse of the French initiative there was one unexpected shaft of light. Lufthansa cracked under public pressure. There was a lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Lufthansa, CEO Jürgen Weber und frau. Frau Weber turned out to be a big fan, or so she told him. And, yes, they were delighted to carry him, her husband said. They were proud to do it. It was just as easy as that. After over six years of refusals—pouf!—they’d love to have him on their planes, any time. They admired him so much. “Thank you,” he said, and everyone looked very pleased, and of course there were many books to be autographed.

  The BBC made a documentary about The Moor’s Last Sigh and commissioned his friend the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar to paint his portrait for the film. It was a novel about painters and painting and his friendships with a generation of gifted Indian artists—with Bhupen himself above all—had allowed him to think of writing it. They had first met in the early 1980s and each of them had at once seen himself in the other and they had quickly become friends. Soon after their first meeting he went to Bhupen’s show at the Kasmin Knoedler gallery in London. In his pocket was a check for a story he had just sold to The Atlantic Monthly. At the show he fell in love with Bhupen’s Second Class Railway Compartment and when he discovered that the price tag was exactly the same as the figure on the check in his pocket (Indian art was cheaper then) he had happily turned his story into his friend’s painting, and it had remained one of his most prized possessions ever since. It was hard for contemporary Indian artists to escape the influence of the West (in an earlier generation M. F. Husain’s famous horses had leaped straight out of Picasso’s Guernica, and the work of many of the other big names—Souza, Raza, Gaitonde—was too deeply indebted for his liking to modernism and Western developments in abstraction). Finding an Indian idiom that was neither folkloric nor derivative had not been easy, and Bhupen had been one of the first to succeed, looking at the street art of India, the movie posters, the painted shop fronts, and at the figurative and narrative traditions of Indian painting, and creating out of that visual environment an oeuvre of idiosyncrasy, originality and wit.

  At the heart of The Moor’s Last Sigh was the idea of the palimpsest, a picture concealed beneath another picture, a world hidden beneath another world. Before he was born his parents had hired a young Bombay painter to decorate his future nursery with fairy-tale and cartoon animals and the impoverished artist Krishen Khanna had accepted the commission. He had also painted a portrait of the unborn Salman’s beautiful young mother, Negin, but her husband, Anis, hadn’t liked it and refused to buy it. Khanna stored his rejected canvas at his friend Husain’s studio and one day Husain painted a picture of his own over it, and sold it. So somewhere in Bombay there was a portrait of Negin Rushdie by Krishen, who of course grew up to be one of the leading artists of his generation, concealed beneath a picture by Husain. Krishen said, “Husain knows where every picture of his has ended up, but he won’t say.” The BBC tried to get him to say, but the old man angrily tapped his cane on the floor and denied that the story was true. “Of course it’s true,” Krishen said. “He’s just worried that you want to destroy his painting to find your mother’s portrait, and he’s offended that you’re looking for my picture and you don’t care about his.” In the end he had come to think that the portrait was more evocative lost than found—lost, it was a beautiful mystery; found, it might have proved that Anis Rushdie’s artistic judgment had been correct, and that the then apprentice Khanna hadn’t done a very good job—and he called off the search.

  He sat for Bhupen in a studio in Edwardes Square, Kensington, and told him the story of the lost picture. Bhupen giggled delightedly and worked away. His portrait was being painted in profile in the tradition of Indian court portraits, and like a good nawab he wore a see-through shirt, only his, as painted by Bhupen, looked more like nylon than sheer cotton. Bhupen began by drawing, in a single movement, a charcoal profile that caught an exact likeness with effortless skill. The painting that covered this single charcoal line looked in some ways less like its subject and more like the character of Moor Zogoiby in the novel. “It’s a painting of you both,” Bhupen said. “You as the Moor and the Moor as you.” So there was a lost portrait beneath this portrait too.

  The completed painting was eventually acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and Bhupen became the first Indian artist to have a work hanging there. Bhupen died on August 8, 2003, on the same day as Negin Rushdie. There was no escape from coincidence, though the meaning of such synchronicity remained elusive. He lost a friend and a mother on the same day. That was meaning enough.

  The novel was published. He continued to push out his boundaries. He took part in his largest pre-announced appearance yet, at the Times Writers’ Forum in Central Hall Westminster, along with Martin Amis, Fay Weldon and Melvyn Bragg. He read a passage from The Moor’s Last Sigh and thanked the audience for being at his “little coming-out party.” Yes, there was security, and yes, he had to come and go by the back door in an armored car, but he was publishing his book. And no, there were no demonstrations, and the police bigwigs at the Yard began, at last, to relax.

  He was planning something very ambitious. His South American publishers asked if he would visit Chile, Mexico and Argentina in December, and he decided he could do that and then go on to New Zealand and Australia. It would be a mammoth journey and he became determined to pull it off. Many airlines had to be spoken to, but now that he had Lufthansa as well as Iberia, Air France, Austrian and Scandinavian Airlines on his side, it was easier to make the case. Slowly the route was worked out, approvals sought and received; the Mexican ambassador in London, Andrés Rozental, met him with Carlos Fuentes and helped to arrange the Mexican leg of the journey; and then, amazingly, improbably, the plans were set. They were cleared to go.

  They went to Oslo for the Norwegian publication of The Moor’s Last Sigh and he read in the great hall of Oslo University, the Aula, with murals by Edvard Munch. It was the first pre-announced reading outside the United Kingdom and both he and William Nygaard felt that they had taken a big step forward. A victory over our oppressors, William said, and we have done it together. William was still a little slowed by his injuries, still
a little in pain, but full of life. That night in Oslo, to everyone’s amazement, the northern lights filled the sky. They were rarely seen in Oslo, which was too far south, or in October, which was too early, but there they were, the green aurora showing up “in honor,” William said, “of your Aurora.” The heroine of The Moor’s Last Sigh was Aurora Zogoiby, and it was as if she was up there, dancing in the sky, somewhere among the giant green curtains that arced and rippled wildly from horizon to horizon. Everyone in Oslo was calling their friends, saying go outside, look up, it’s amazing. The aurora was in the sky for an hour or more, and it felt like a sign of better times.

  Robert McCrum had had a stroke in the house at 41 St. Peter’s Street. He and Sarah Lyall had been married for just two months and while she was away he had almost died. Robert had survived, but an arm was paralyzed, he could walk only a couple of steps at a time, and it was impossible to say how bad the long-term damage might be. He was improving a little and both he and Sarah clung to that as a sign of hope. The Curse of St. Peter’s Street had struck again.

  He went with Christopher Hitchens to see Robert and Sarah and, in a way, to apologize for the Curse. It was strange to be back in his old home, where he had been when, as he had begun to say, the excrement hit the ventilation system. Various ghosts flitted in and out of the room as he and Hitch talked to their stricken friend. They didn’t stay long. Robert needed to rest.

  In the snapshots his memory kept of his life in those years, the police were often absent, erased from history’s photos like the Communist leader Clementis at the beginning of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. To help him get through the days, he tried to make himself forget he was always surrounded by security and that security considerations loomed so large in his daily life. He forgot the small daily privations. He could not get his own mail or pick up his morning paper from the forecourt of his home. There were pajamaed collisions in the kitchen that never stopped feeling embarrassing. There was Joe, the increasingly hated pseudonym. (Was it really necessary to avoid calling him by his own name in his own house?) There was the loss of all spontaneity. I’d like to go for a walk, please. Okay, Joe, give us an hour to set it up. But in an hour I won’t want to go for a walk. And every time he did go out they took him to a “changeover point” and made him get out of one car, the car associated with the house, and into another, the car associated with his public appearances. For the rest of his life he would hate these changeover points, Nutley Terrace, Park Village East, he would wince inwardly every time he passed them, but at the time he made himself not experience them, he detached himself from the body of the man scuttling from vehicle to vehicle, and when he reached his destination he refused to think about the prot, he was just out with his friends, being himself.