Joseph Anton: A Memoir

  No screenplay was ever sent to him. The film was never made.

  One other thing happened in Paris. Caroline Lang, Jack Lang’s brilliant and beautiful daughter, came to keep him company at the Hôtel de l’Abbaye one afternoon, and because of her beauty, and the wine, and the difficulties with Elizabeth, they became lovers; and immediately afterward decided not to do that again, but to remain friends. After their few hours together he had to appear live on TV, on Bernard Pivot’s Bouillon de Culture, and felt that the emotional upheaval caused by his infidelity meant that he gave a poor account of himself.

  Andrew Wylie and Gillon had come to the end of the road and had decided to end their association. Andrew came to the house, very upset, raging a little, but mainly grieving. “It became plain to me,” Andrew said, at once sorrowful and outraged, “that Gillon has never been my partner. Brian Stone is Gillon’s partner.” Brian was their associate, the agent who controlled the Agatha Christie estate. “The nameplate at the London agency,” Andrew said bitterly, “still reads Atken and Stone.” Their fight had been about money, but also about their different visions. Andrew had grand, expansionist dreams; Gillon was cautious and, always, financially prudent. It had not been a pleasant split; an ugly divorce, like most divorces. Andrew was like a jilted lover, simultaneously contemptuous and in despair.

  He was deeply troubled by his agents’ split-up. Gillon and Andrew had been twin pillars of strength in the past years, and he had relied on them absolutely. Neither of them had flinched for a moment in the face of the Islamic attack, and their courage had shamed many publishers into being braver than they might otherwise have been. He couldn’t imagine doing without either of them, but now he would have to choose, although Gillon gracefully made the choice easier by calling the next day to say, “My dear, it’s obvious you must go with Andrew. He was your agent first, he brought you to me, and of course you must stay with him, that’s absolutely right.”

  They had gone through so much, done so much together. Their relationship had deepened far beyond the normal author-agent cordiality. They had become close friends. And yet now he would have to lose Gillon. He had never imagined such a day, had always thought that both Gillon and Andrew would be his agents forever. “Okay,” he said to Gillon. “Thank you. But as far as I’m concerned nothing has changed between us.”

  “We’ll have lunch soon,” said Gillon, and that was that.

  Italy had assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union and was in the process of persuading all EU member states to accept a letter, to be signed by the EU and Iran jointly, that accepted that the fatwa was eternally valid, in return for a short statement from Iran that it would not carry it out. Frances D’Souza’s sources told her that the EU troika of foreign ministers was going to Tehran to discuss terrorism, and was refusing even to bring up the fatwa unless this text was agreed to—which means, she said, agreed to by him. The British government was holding out, but was worried about its isolation. He asked Frances to inform her sources that he had not fought for seven years to have the European Union agree on the validity of an extraterritorial murder order. He would not agree to such a statement in a million years. “Fuck them, the expedient bastards,” he said. He would not collaborate in this hideous piece of amorality.

  The “Italian letter” was never signed or sent.

  He spoke to Gail Rebuck at Random House about getting her to take over paperback publication of The Satanic Verses. She said that Alberto Vitale now seemed “receptive” but she needed some reassurances about security. He suggested to Gail and to Caroline Michel that they get reports from all European publishers of the Verses paperback in translation, and from Central Books, the Consortium’s UK distributors, about their security measures, if any, and arrange a meeting with Helen Hammington, Dick Wood and Rab Connolly to get their view. Inch by inch, he thought. We’ll get there, but it’s so painfully slow.

  Elizabeth heard that Carol Knibb, her cousin who had raised her after her mother died, was suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the same CLL that Edward Said was fighting in New York. Elizabeth was overwhelmed by the news. Carol was the closest thing she had to a family. He, too, was profoundly saddened. Carol was a sweet, kind woman. “It’s a fightable cancer,” he said to Elizabeth. “We can help her fight. She should talk to Edward’s doctor Kanti Rai on Long Island.”

  Death came indiscriminately to the sweet and the sour. Two weeks after hearing about Carol’s cancer he had news of a death he could not mourn. The malevolent gnome Kalim Siddiqui had issued his last threat. He had been attending a conference in Pretoria, South Africa, when a heart attack killed him. It emerged that he had recently had bypass surgery but had gone on ranting and raving when a wiser man would have opted for a quieter life. So he could be said to have chosen his end. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer man, he thought, but made no public comment.

  Michael Foot called, very pleased. “What’s the name of the Muslim God? Their God, what’s the fellow called?” Allah, Michael. “Oh yes, Allah, of course that’s right. Well, he’s clearly not on old Siddiqui’s side, eh? Eh?” Come in Dr. Siddiqui your time is up.

  Elizabeth had gone to visit Carol in Derbyshire. When she came back she was happy to hear of Siddiqui’s last exit. She also read the just-completed twenty-page synopsis of the new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and loved it so much that the gulf between them closed and was forgotten. And the next day—the universe didn’t like him to be happy for too long—he was taken to Spy Central to be told some genuinely frightening news.

  It was never comforting to approach the large sand-colored fortress on the river, even if it was improbably decorated with Christmas trees; he never came here to be cheered up. Today in an anonymous boardroom he was faced with the afternoon and the morning, Mr. P—— M—— and Mr. A—— M——, the head of counterterrorism for the Middle East and the man on the Iran desk. Rab Connolly and Dick Wood were there too, in a “listening capacity.” “The security services now know,” AM said, “that Iran, by which we mean Khamenei the supreme leader and intelligence minister Fallahian, have set in motion a long-term plan to find and assassinate you. They are prepared to take a long time and spend a lot of money. The plan may have been in place for as long as two years already, but we have only become sure of its existence in the last few months.” “It is our duty to tell you this,” said PM. “This is why we are meeting you today under our real names.”

  While he was receiving the bad news from Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon, he was waiting tensely for them to say that his home had been located by the enemy. But that was not the case. However, if it did become known, Mr. Morning said, that would be very alarming. At the very least it would require him to receive police protection for the rest of his life.

  He expressed his fears for Zafar, Elizabeth, Sameen, his mother in Karachi. “There is no evidence that any of your family or friends have been targeted,” said Mr. Afternoon. “Not even as a route to you. You, however, remain target number one.”

  “Deniability is considered to be of paramount importance by the Iranians,” Mr. Morning said. “This is because of the political flak they’ve been getting after attacks of recent years.” Shapur Bakhtiar, the Mykonos killings. “They would probably not use Iranian personnel.” “But,” Mr. Afternoon said, to make him feel a little better, “the stage of them sending weapons through the diplomatic mail, or sending people into the country, is still months or even years away.”

  It was the worst thing he had feared, a long-term Bakhtiar-style assault. Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon could not say what effect a political settlement with Iran might have on such a plot. They believed the Iranian Foreign Ministry might be unaware of its existence. “It’s being kept to a very small group inside the Ministry of Information,” Mr. Morning said. “There may even be others in the ministry who would wish to thwart such a plan,” said Mr. Afternoon, “but Fallahian and Khamenei seem determined to carry out the fatwa, and Rafsanjani probably know
s too.”

  The good news was that he had not been located, and that, in the opinion of Afternoon and Morning, the threat from the “community at large” had evaporated. “And now,” said Mr. Morning, revealing a flash of steel under his courteous manner, “we can do our level best to disrupt the plot—to put a bloody great fist into the middle of it. To disrupt it with such heavy political fallout that it will be impossible to set up such a scheme again.”

  Maybe he’s just trying to make me feel better, he thought, but it’s working. I like the thought of that fist.

  As far as the wider world was concerned, the fatwa story was fading away. It wasn’t in the papers anymore, and he himself was being seen here and there, visiting his friends, eating in the occasional restaurant, cropping up in various countries to promote his new book. It was obvious to most people that the threat had receded, and it seemed likely to many commentators that the protection was continuing only because he was insisting on it—insisting not because it was necessary but to satisfy his monumental egotism. And at this moment, when whatever little shred of public sympathy still existed was blowing away in the wind, he was being told that the danger was greater than it had ever been, the attack on his life more serious than any that had previously been identified. And he couldn’t even say so. Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon had been very clear about that.

  Andrew had found him a Long Island house to rent, very secluded, on Little Noyac Path in the hills above Bridgehampton. It would be rented in Elizabeth’s name and they could have it for two months. Yes, he said, let’s go ahead. He had decided to continue with his plan of retrieving his freedom piece by piece. To behave as if he had not heard what he had heard in the Christmas tree fortress. The only alternative was to go back to being a prisoner, and he wasn’t prepared to do that. So: Yes, please, Andrew. Let’s do the deal. A few days later Rab Connolly told him that Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon now believed that the assassins had decided he was too well protected in the United Kingdom, so they might try to kill him while he was on a foreign trip. And he was planning to spend two months on Long Island without protection, and was bringing Elizabeth and Zafar with him. He felt, once again, like the driver of that Holden, being hit by a truckload of shit and heading straight for a tree, with the people he loved most in the car beside him. He talked to Elizabeth. She still wanted to go. So, damn it, they would do it, and by doing it prove that it could be done.

  He went to make a speech in Barcelona. He flew to America and delivered the commencement address at Bard College. Nobody tried to kill him. However, an Iranian dissident in exile, Reza Mazlouman, an ex–minister of education from the days of the shah, who had been living quietly in the Parisian suburb of Créteil, was found dead. Two shots to the head and one to the chest. The world, which had briefly brightened when The Moor’s Last Sigh was published, darkened again. In his imagination he kept trying to write a happy ending to his own story, but couldn’t come up with one. Maybe there wasn’t going to be one. Two shots to the head and one to the chest. There was that possible ending, too.

  Elizabeth wasn’t pregnant and the tension between them grew again. If she didn’t get pregnant soon she was insisting on trying the in vitro fertilization route even though his chromosome problem greatly reduced the chances of success. If she did get pregnant it was probable that her closely protected anonymity would be lost, and that the location of the Bishop’s Avenue house would become public knowledge. That would turn the place into an armed camp; and, anyway, how were they to bring up a child in the nightmare they were obliged to inhabit? What kind of life would such a child have? But against all logical arguments she set her overwhelming need, and he his determination that they should be able to lead a real life, and so they would go ahead, they would keep trying, they would do whatever they had to do.

  Vijay Shankardass called from India to give him hopeful news. The new Indian government’s foreign minister, Inder Gujral, was in favor of allowing him to visit India again, and the home affairs minister agreed. So there was a possibility that his long exile could soon end.

  Andrew was showing around his synopsis of The Ground Beneath Her Feet and it was going over well with his publishers, but the issue of the long-term paperback publication of The Satanic Verses still needed to be resolved, and Andrew wanted to make it a condition of any English-language deal that the publisher should take on the Verses as well. There were paperbacks in print everywhere else by now, and the Consortium edition was still available in English, but that was essentially a form of self-publication and couldn’t be the long-term answer. In England, Gail Rebuck and Random House UK were moving toward agreeing to republish the paperback as a Vintage book, but in America the Random House boss, Alberto Vitale, was not inclined to do so. The solution, Andrew suggested, might be Holtzbrinck, whose German arm, Kindler Verlag, had already published the German-language paperback without difficulties, and whose American house, Henry Holt, under the leadership of the flamboyant publisher Michael Naumann, seemed ready to do the same. He told Andrew he would like to stay with Random House in the United Kingdom, and Andrew said he had come to the same view, so they were “on the same page.”

  At the end of the last ice age the glaciers retreated from Long Island leaving behind the terminal moraine that created the wooded hills in which he and Elizabeth spent that summer. The low, roomy white house was owned by an elderly couple named Milton and Patricia Grobow, whom he was not at first able to meet, since he theoretically didn’t exist, and Elizabeth was there for the summer by herself “to write and see friends.” Afterward, when the Grobows worked out what was going on, they were genuinely happy to be providing him with a summer refuge. They were fine, ethical, liberal people with a daughter working at The Nation and they were proud, they said, to be able to help. But even before he was revealed he was happy there, in a place where the biggest danger they had to face was Lyme disease. They told their closest friends where they were staying, kept away from the Hamptons “scene,” walked on the beach at sunset, and he felt, as he always felt in America, the slow rebirth of his true self. He began to write his new novel and the Grobow house, surrounded by fields and woods, turned out to be a perfect place to work. The book, which he was beginning to understand would be a long one, began slowly to unfold. Elizabeth was a keen gardener and spent happy hours tending the Grobows’ plants. Zafar went to Greece with his mother and then came out to join them and loved the place and for a while they could just be a family summering together by the sea. They shopped in the stores and ate in the restaurants and if people recognized him they were too discreet to intrude on his privacy. One evening Andrew and Camie Wylie took them to Nick & Toni’s for dinner and the artist Eric Fischl, stopping by their table on his way out to say hello to Andrew, turned to him and asked, “Should we all be scared because you’re in here with us?” All he could think of to say was, “Well, you don’t need to be, because you’re leaving anyway.” He knew Fischl meant no harm, it was just a joke, but in these special months when he escaped from the bubble of his unreal real life he didn’t like being reminded that the bubble was still there, waiting for him to return.

  They went back to London in early September and soon after their return Elizabeth’s dearest wish came true. She was pregnant. He at once began to fear the worst. If one of his faulty chromosomes had been selected then the fetus would not form and she would miscarry very soon, probably at the end of the next menstrual cycle. But she was joyfully confident that everything was fine, and her instincts were right. There was no early miscarriage, and soon enough they could see an ultrasound image of their living, healthy child.

  “We’re going to have a son,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “we’re going to have a son.”

  It was as if the whole world was singing.

  The Moor’s Last Sigh had been awarded the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature along with the Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Morbus Kitahara, but the Danish government anno
unced that he would not be allowed to attend the awards ceremony in Copenhagen on November 14, 1996, for security reasons. They claimed to be aware of a “specific threat” to his life, but the Special Branch told him they were not aware of any such threat, and if there had been one, the Danes would have been obliged to inform them. So it was just a pretext. As usual his first feeling was of humiliation, but his second feeling was of outrage, and he decided that this time he would not stand for it. He issued a statement through Article 19. “It is scandalous that Copenhagen, the present EU ‘capital of culture,’ refuses to permit the winner of the EU’s own literature prize to attend the award ceremony. It is a cowardly decision which is exactly the opposite of what one should do in the face of threats such as the Iranian fatwa. If one wishes to ensure that such threats are not repeated, it is important to demonstrate that they are not effective.” Danish politicians of all parties, including the ruling party, attacked the decision, and the Danish government gave in. On November 13 he flew to Denmark and the award ceremony took place at the new Arken Museum of Modern Art, which was ringed by armed policemen and looked like a prison camp, except that all the inmates were in full evening dress.