Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  I have come to understand that what is important is precisely not to become accustomed to the intolerable. In our modern world, with its rapid shifts of focus and its short attention span, it is all too easy to lose interest in a particular case, no matter how vivid the story once was. But to do so in this case would be an insult to Professor Igarashi’s memory. It simply can never be acceptable to murder a man in the name of any god or ideology. In such a case, morality is never on the side of the murderers.

  I did not know Professor Igarashi, but he knew me, because he translated my work. Translation is a kind of intimacy, a kind of friendship, and so I mourn his death as I would that of a friend. I do not believe that the people of Japan will find his murder acceptable.

  I have read that there is now evidence linking the murder to Middle Eastern terrorists. I would say this: whoever the murderers were (and we know that many Middle Eastern terrorists have their paymasters in Tehran), it was Khomeini’s fatwa that was the real murderer.

  For this reason, and to do honor to the name of the fallen man, a distinguished scholar and my translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, I call upon the people and government of Japan to demand an end to this terrorist threat. A Japanese citizen has been the first to lose his life to the fatwa. Japan can help ensure that he is also the last.

  [First published on February 7, 1993, under the title “The Last Hostage”]

  Four years. It’s been four years and I’m still here. Strange how that feels simultaneously like a victory and a defeat.

  Why a victory? Because when, on February 14, 1989, I heard the news from Tehran, my instant reaction was: I’m a dead man. I remembered a poem by my friend Raymond Carver about being told by his doctor he had lung cancer.

  He said are you a religious man do you kneel down

  in forest groves and let yourself ask for help . . .

  I said not yet but I intend to start today

  But I’m not a religious man. I didn’t kneel down. I went to do a TV interview and said I wished I’d written a more critical book. Why? Because when the leader of a terrorist state has just announced his intention to murder you in the name of god you can either bluster or gibber. I did not want to gibber. And because when murder is ordered in the name of god you begin to think less well of the name of god.

  Afterward I thought: if there is a god I don’t think he’s very bothered by The Satanic Verses, because he wouldn’t be much of a god if he could be rocked on his throne by a book. Then again, if there isn’t a god, he certainly isn’t bothered. So this quarrel’s not between me and god but between me and those who think—as Bob Dylan once reminded us—they can do any damn thing because they have god on their side.

  The police came to see me and said, stay put, don’t go anywhere, plans are being made. Police officers on short patrol watched over me that night. I lay unsleeping and listened out for the angel of death. One of my favorite films was and is Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. It is a film about people who cannot get out of a room.

  The next afternoon—when the television was roaring with hatred and blood-lust—I was offered Special Branch protection. The officers who came said I should go somewhere for a few days while the politicians sorted things out. Do you remember? Four years ago we all thought this crisis would be solved in a matter of days. That in the late twentieth century a man should be threatened with murder for writing a book, that the leader of a religious-fascist state should threaten the free citizen of a free country far away from his own, was too crazy. It would be stopped. The police thought so. I thought so too.

  So off we went, not to any deep-secret safe house, but to a hotel in the countryside. In the room next door to mine was a reporter from the Daily Mirror who had checked in with a lady who was not his wife. I kept out of his way, not wishing to intrude. And that night, when every journalist in the country was trying to find out where I’d gone, this gentleman—how shall I put this?—missed his scoop.

  It was going to be over in a few days, but four years later, it’s still going on. And I am told the level of threat against my life has not diminished at all. I am told there is nobody protected by the Special Branch whose life is in more danger than mine. So, a victory and a defeat: a victory because I’m alive, in spite of being described by a “friend” as a dead man on leave. A defeat because I’m still in this prison. It goes where I go. It has no walls, no roof, no manacles, but I haven’t found a way out in four years.

  I was under political pressure. I do not think it is generally known how heavy this pressure was. The issue of the British hostages kept cropping up. I was asked to make an apologetic statement: otherwise something might happen to a British hostage and that, it was hinted, would be my fault. The statement that I agreed to make was not even written by me, but by the late John Lyttle, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s man on the hostage case, and by other worthies and eminences. I changed two words, and even that alteration required a bit of a fight. It did no good to anyone. It was done to help the hostages but was portrayed as my first failure to save my wretched neck. Khomeini restated his fatwa. Multi-million-dollar bounties were offered.

  Now there was official pressure on me simply to disappear. The argument was that I’d made enough trouble already. I should not speak up on the issue, I should not defend myself. There was a big enough public-order problem, and since the authorities were doing so much to protect me I should not make life harder for them. Go nowhere, see nobody, say nothing. Be an un-person and be grateful to be alive. Listen to the vilifications, the misrepresentations, the murderous speeches, the appeasements, and shut up.

  For almost a year and a half I had no contact with any member of the British government or any civil servant, in either the Home Office or the Foreign Office. I was in limbo. I have been told that the Home Office vetoed any meeting with me, because this would allegedly be bad for race relations. In the end I telephoned William Waldegrave, at that time a Foreign Office minister, and asked if it might not be a good idea for us to meet. He was not able—not permitted, I think—to meet me. But I did at last have a meeting with a Foreign Office diplomat, and on one occasion with the foreign secretary Douglas Hurd himself. These meetings were held on the basis that they must be kept entirely secret, “so that the hostages should not suffer.”

  Incidentally, I do not recall Tehran or the hostage-holders in Lebanon ever making this linkage. But maybe I am mistaken about this. If I reveal these details now, it is because it is safe to do so. Until the day Terry Waite was released, I was a sort of hostage to the hostages. I accepted that their cases had to be resolved first; that, to an extent, my rights had to be set aside for the sake of theirs. I hoped only that, once they were free, it would be my turn; that the British government and the world community would seek the end of this crisis, too.

  I had a long wait, with many bizarre moments during it. A Pakistani film portraying me as a torturer, murderer, and drunkard wearing an appalling variety of Technicolor safari suits was refused a certificate in Britain. I saw a video of the film; it was awful. It ended with my “execution” by the power of god. The ugliness of those images stayed with me for a while. However, I wrote to the British Board of Film Classification promising them that I would not take legal action against them or the film, and asking them to license it. I told them I did not want the dubious protection of censorship. The film was un-banned and promptly vanished from sight. An attempt to screen it in Bradford was greeted by rows of empty seats. It was a perfect illustration of the argument for free speech: people really can make up their own minds. Still, it was weird to be pleased at the release of a film whose subject was my death.

  Sometimes I stayed in comfortable houses. Sometimes I had no more than a small room in which I could not approach the window lest I be seen from below. Sometimes I was able to get out a bit. At other times I had trouble doing so.

  I tried to visit the USA and France, and the governments of those countries made it impossible for me to enter.

 
; Once I had to go into the hospital to have my wisdom teeth extracted. I learned afterward that the police had made emergency plans to have me removed. I would have been anesthetized and carried out in a body bag, in a hearse.

  I became friendly with my protection teams and learned a good deal about the internal workings of the Branch. I learned how to find out if you’re being followed on a motorway and I grew accustomed to the hardware that was always lying around and I learned the slang of the police force—drivers, for example, are known as OFDs, which stands for Only Fucking Drivers. *17 Motorway police are Black Rats. My own name was never used. I learned to answer to other names. I was “the Principal.”

  I have become familiar with much that was unthinkably strange four years ago, but I have never become used to it. I knew from the start that habituation would be a surrender. What has happened to my life is a grotesque thing. It is a crime. I will never agree that it has become my normal condition.

  “What’s blond, has big tits, and lives in Tasmania? Salman Rushdie.” I got letters, sometimes I still get letters, saying, give up, change your name, have an operation, start a new life. This is the one option I have never considered. It would be worse than death. I don’t want some other person’s life. I want my own.

  The protection officers have shown great understanding and helped me get through the worst times. I will always be grateful to them. These are brave men. They are putting their lives on the line for me. Nobody ever did that for me before.

  Here is a thing that needs saying. I suspect that because I have not been killed, many people think there is nobody trying to kill me. Many people probably think it’s all a bit theoretical. It isn’t. In the early months an Arab terrorist blew himself up in a Paddington hotel. Afterward I was told by a journalist who had visited the Hizbollah redoubts in the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon that she had seen this man’s photograph on an office “wall of martyrs,” with a caption stating that his target had been me. And, at the time of the Gulf War, I heard that the Iranian government had paid out money for a contract killing. After months of extreme caution I was told that the killers had been—to use the euphemistic language of the intelligence services—“frustrated.” I thought it best not to inquire into the causes of their frustration.

  And in 1992 three Iranians were expelled from Britain. Two of them worked at the Iranian mission in London, the third was a “student.” I was told by the Foreign Office that these were spies and they were undoubtedly in Britain on matters related to the fulfillment of the fatwa.

  And the Italian translator of The Satanic Verses was nearly killed, and the Japanese translator was killed. In 1992 the Japanese police announced the results of their twelve-month investigation. In their view the killers were professional Middle Eastern terrorists who had entered from China. Meanwhile, an Iranian hit-squad assassinated former prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris. They cut his head off. Another squad killed a dissident Iranian singer in Germany. They chopped him up and put the bits in a bag.

  Nothing very theoretical about that.

  England is a small country and it is full of people and many of these people are naturally inquisitive. It is not an easy country in which to disappear. Once I was in a building that I needed to leave, but there was a burst central heating pipe just off the hallway, and a plumber had been called in. A police officer had to distract the plumber’s attention so that I could slip past him while his head was turned away. Once I was in a kitchen when a neighbor turned up unexpectedly. I had to dive down behind a kitchen cabinet and remain there, crouching, until he left. Once I was in a traffic jam outside the Regent’s Park mosque just as the faithful were emerging from Eid prayers. I sat in the back of an armored Jaguar with my nose deep in The Daily Telegraph. My protectors joked that it was the first time they had seen me so interested in the Telegraph.

  To live like this is to feel demeaned every day, to feel little twists of humiliation accumulating around your heart. To live like this is to allow people—including your ex-wife—to call you a coward on the front page of the newspapers. Such people would no doubt be prepared to speak well of me at my funeral. But to live, to avoid assassination, is a greater victory than to be murdered. Only fanatics go looking for martyrdom.

  I am forty-five years old, and I can’t leave my places of residence without permission. I do not carry keys. Sometimes there are “bad patches.” During one “bad patch” I slept in thirteen different beds in twenty nights. At such times a great wild jangle fills your body. At such times you begin to come unstuck from your self.

  I have learned to let things go: the anger, the bitterness. They will come back later, I know. When things are better. I’ll deal with them then. Right now my victory lies in not being broken, in not losing my self. It lies in continuing to work. There are no hostages anymore. For the first time in years, I am able to fight my corner without being accused of damaging anyone else’s interests. I have been fighting as hard as I can.

  Like everyone else I rejoiced at the end of the Lebanon hostages’ terrible ordeal. But the people most active in my defense campaign, Frances D’Souza and Carmel Bedford at Article 19, knew that the huge relief we all felt at the closing of that awful chapter was also a danger. Maybe people wouldn’t want to pay attention to someone saying, excuse me, there’s still one more problem. Maybe I’d be seen as a sort of party-pooper. On the other hand there were persistent rumors that the British government was on the verge of normalizing relations with Iran and forgetting the “Rushdie case” entirely. What to do? Shut up and go on relying on “silent diplomacy,” or speak out?

  In my view there was no choice. The hostages’ release had set my tongue free at last. And it would be absurd to fight a war for freedom of speech by remaining silent. We agreed to make the campaign as noisy as possible, to demonstrate to the British government that it couldn’t afford to ignore the case, and to try and rekindle the kind of international support that would demonstrate to the Iranian terror-state that the fatwa was damaging their self-interests as well as mine.

  In December 1991, a few days after the release of the last American hostage, Terry Anderson, I was finally permitted to enter the United States to speak at Columbia University’s celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights. The plans for the trip were a nightmare. I did not know until twenty-four hours before I left that I would be allowed to go. I was given leave to travel in a military aircraft, a great favor for which I was immensely grateful. (This would have remained entirely secret except that a British tabloid saw fit to publish the fact and then blame me for endangering the RAF.)

  The moment of departure was overwhelming. It was my first time out of Britain in almost three years. For a moment, the cage seemed a little bigger. Then, in New York, I was met by an eleven-vehicle motorcade, complete with motorcycle outriders. I was placed in an armored white limo and rushed through Manhattan at high speed. “It’s what we’d do for Arafat,” explained the operation’s leader, known for the day as Hudson Commander. I inquired timidly, “How about the president?” For the president they would close down a lot more side streets, Hudson Commander explained, “but in your case we thought that might be a little too conspicuous.” This entirely without irony. The New York Police Department is very thorough, but it doesn’t make many jokes.

  I spent that day in a fourteenth-floor suite with at least twenty armed men. The windows were blocked by bullet-proof mattresses. Outside the door were more armed men with Schwarzenegger-sized muscles and weaponry. In this suite I had a series of meetings that must remain secret, except, perhaps, for one. I was able to meet with the poet Allen Ginsberg for twenty minutes. The moment he arrived, he pulled cushions off the sofas and set them on the floor. “Take off your shoes and sit down,” he said. “I’m going to teach you some simple meditation exercises. They should help you handle your terrible situation.” Our mutual literary agent, Andrew Wylie, was there, and I made him do it, too, which, squawking somewhat, he did. While we
did our breathing and chanting, I thought how extraordinary it was for an Indian by birth to be taught Buddhism by an American poet sitting cross-legged in a room full of men armed to the gills. There’s nothing like life; you can’t make this stuff up.

  That night the huge motorcade took me to Columbia and I was able to make my contribution. Free speech is life itself, I remember saying. The next day the American press was sympathetic and positive. It was clear that Americans saw the issue, as I did, as one in which an old, taken-for-granted freedom had become a life-and-death affair. Back home it was a different matter. I got back to Britain to be faced by such headlines as RUSHDIE INFLAMES MUSLIM ANGER AGAIN (because I had asked for the publication of a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses).

  During the next year, as I visited more and more countries, this dichotomy became ever more apparent. In the rest of the free world, the “Rushdie case” is about freedom of expression and state terrorism. In Britain, it seems to be about a man who has to be saved from the consequences of his own actions. Elsewhere, people know that the outrage has been committed not by me but against me. In certain quarters of my own country, people take a contrary view.

  The paperback was published in the spring of 1992, not by Penguin, who refused to do so, but by a consortium. I was able to be in Washington for its launch, and at a free-speech conference I produced the first copy. As I did so my emotions assaulted me without warning. It was all I could do to keep back the tears. (I should mention here that the paperback publication of The Satanic Verses passed off without incident, in spite of many people’s forebodings and some people’s chickenings-out. I was reminded, as I have often been reminded, of Roosevelt’s famous saw about fear itself being the thing most to be feared.)

  I had come to Washington mainly to address members of both houses of Congress. On the evening before the meeting, however, I was told that Secretary of State James Baker had personally rung the leaders of both houses to say he did not wish the meeting to take place. The Bush administration made dismissive remarks about my presence. Marlin Fitzwater, explaining the administration’s refusal to meet me, said, “He’s just an author on a book tour.” *18