Joseph Anton

by Salman Rushdie

  Porlock Weir sat a little west of the village of Porlock itself, a tiny outcrop of the village that had grown up around the harbor. The cottage was a thatched beauty and quite substantial. A journalist from The New York Times, interviewing Drabble there a decade later, thought it “a kind of Bloomsburyian vision of whimsy and cultivation, with rooms painted different colors—mint green, rose, lilac and Tuscan yellow—and faded rugs, books and paintings everywhere you look.” It felt grand to reenter a house of books. He and Marianne were two writers being gifted the home of two other writers and there was something extraordinarily comforting about that. There was enough room for the two protection officers to stay on the premises as well; the drivers rented rooms at a bed-and-breakfast place in the village and pretended to be friends on a walking tour of the region. There was a beautiful garden, and it was as secluded as any invisible man could wish for. He arrived there in the last week of March and, almost happily, settled in.

  “The flame of the Enlightenment is waning,” a journalist said to Günter Grass. “But,” he replied, “there is no other source of light.” The public argument raged on. In private, just days after his arrival at Porlock Weir, he faced a very different crisis. Fire of a sort was also involved.

  Marianne went to London for a couple of days (there were no restrictions on her movements) and saw a couple of mutual friends—Dale, an American woman working at Wylie, Aitken & Stone, and his old pal Pauline Melville. He called Pauline to see how things were and found her in a state of horrified shock. “Okay,” she said, “this is so serious that I’m going to tell you what Marianne said, and both Dale and I heard it, and we’re both so stunned that we are prepared to repeat her words to her face.” Marianne had told them that he and she were fighting constantly and that she, Marianne, had, in Pauline’s words, “beaten him up.” She then said, astonishingly, that he had asked the Special Branch to “fly in Isabelle Adjani.” He had never met or spoken to the French actress, but she had recently made a gesture of support, which he had greatly appreciated. At the César Awards in Paris—the “French Oscars”—she went up to receive the Best Actress César for her performance in the title role of Camille Claudel, and had read a short text at the end of which she revealed that it was a quotation from “Les versets sataniques, de Salman Rushdie.” She had an Algerian father of Muslim origin, so this was not a small thing to do. He had written to thank her. The rest—Marianne’s allegation—was pure fabrication, and there was worse to come. “He tortures me,” she told Pauline, “by burning me with lighted cigarettes.” When Pauline told him this he burst out laughing at the horror of it. “But,” he cried, “I don’t have any cigarettes—I don’t even smoke!”

  When Marianne returned to Porlock from London he confronted her in the beautiful living room with its pink wallpaper and large windows offering a view of the shining waters of the Bristol Channel. At first she flatly denied having said any of it. He called her bluff. “Let’s phone Pauline and Dale and see what they say.” At this she broke down and admitted that yes, she had said those things. He asked her specifically about the worst allegation, the cigarette torture story. “Why did you say such a thing,” he demanded, “when you know it isn’t true?” She looked him boldly in the eye. “It was a metaphor,” she said, “of how unhappy I felt.” That was, in its way, brilliant. Deranged, but brilliant. It deserved applause. He said, “Marianne, that is not a metaphor; it’s a lie. If you can’t tell the difference between the two you are in bad trouble.” She had no more to say to him. She went to the room in which she worked and closed the door.

  This was the choice he had to make: to stay with her, even though she was capable of such untruths, or to separate and face what he had to face alone.

  He needed a name, the police told him. He needed to choose one “pretty pronto” and then talk to his bank manager and get the bank to issue checkbooks either bearing the pseudonym or no name at all, and to agree to accept checks signed with the false name, so that he could pay for things without being identified. But the new name was also for the benefit of his protectors. They needed to get used to it, to call him by it at all times, when they were with him and when they weren’t, so they didn’t accidentally let his real name slip when they were walking or running or going to the gym or the supermarket in his immediate neighborhood and blow his cover.

  The “prot” had a name: Operation Malachite. He did not know why they had given the job the name of a green stone and neither did they. They were not writers and the reasons for names were not important to them. It was just a name. Now it was his turn to rename himself. His own name was worse than useless, it was a name that could not be spoken, like the name Voldemort in the then-unwritten Harry Potter books. He could not rent a house with it, or register to vote, because to vote you needed to provide a home address and that, of course, was impossible. To protect his democratic right of free expression he had to surrender his democratic right to choose his government. “It doesn’t matter what the name is,” Stan said, “but it would be useful to have one in place, sharpish.”

  To be asked to give up your name was not a small thing. “Probably better not to make it an Asian name,” said Stan. “People put two and two together sometimes.” So he was to give up his race as well. He would be an invisible man in a whiteface mask.

  He had a fragment of a character in a notebook, called Mr. Mamouli. Mr. Mamouli was a benighted, even cursed, Everyman figure whose literary relatives were Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. His full name was Ajeeb Mamouli—Ajeeb, like the Bradford councilor, whose name meant “odd.” Mamouli meant “ordinary.” He was Mr. Odd Ordinary, Mr. Strange Normal, Mr. Peculiar Everyday: an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. He had written a fragment in which Mr. Mamouli was obliged to carry a giant inverted pyramid on his head, with the tip resting on his bald head and grievously irritating his scalp.

  Mr. Mamouli had come into being the first time he felt that his name had been stolen from him, or half his name, anyway, when Rushdie detached itself from Salman and went spiraling off into the headlines, into newsprint, into the video-heavy ether, becoming a slogan, a rallying cry, a term of abuse, or anything else that other people wanted it to be. He had lost control over his name then and so it felt better to slip into Mr. Mamouli’s shoes. Mr. Ajeeb Mamouli was a novelist too, his very name a contradiction, as befitted a novelist’s name. Mr. Mamouli thought of himself as an ordinary man but his life was decidedly odd. When he drew doodles of Mamouli’s face they looked like the famous Common Man created by the cartoonist R. K. Laxman in The Times of India: innocent, bemused, bald, with tufts of graying hair spraying out over his ears.

  There was a character in The Satanic Verses called Mimi Mamoulian, a plump actress obsessed by the acquisition of real estate. Mr. Mamouli was her relative, or perhaps her antithesis, an anti-Mimi whose problem was the opposite of hers: that he had no home he could call his own. This was also, he was well aware, the fate of the fallen Lucifer. So Mr. Ajeeb Mamouli was the name of the devil he had been turned into by others, the horned metamorphic being like his Saladin Chamcha, to whom his demonic transformation is explained thus: “They have the power of description, and we succumb.”

  They didn’t like the name. Mamouli, Ajeeb: These words were a bit of a mouthful, too hard to remember, and far too “Asian.” He was asked to think again. Mr. Mamouli receded, then faded, and eventually found a room in the dilapidated rooming house reserved for unused ideas, the Hotel California of the imagination, and was lost.

  He thought of writers he loved and tried combinations of their names. Vladimir Joyce. Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne. He made lists of such combinations and all of them sounded ridiculous. Then he found one that did not. He wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years.

  “Joseph Anton.”

  “Jolly good,” said Stan. “You won’t mind if we call you Joe.”

  In fact he did mi
nd. He soon discovered he detested the abbreviation for reasons he did not fully understand—after all why was Joe so much worse than Joseph? He was neither one, and both should strike him as equally phony or equally suitable. But “Joe” grated on him almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, that monosyllable was what the protection officers found easiest to master, and remember, and avoid getting wrong in public places. So, as far as they were concerned, Joe it had to be.

  “Joseph Anton.” He was trying to get used to what he had invented. He had spent his life naming fictional characters. Now by naming himself he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well. “Conrad Chekhov” wouldn’t have worked. But “Joseph Anton” was someone who might exist. Who now did exist.

  Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers, lost and not lost, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame; and Chekhov, the master of loneliness and melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in the cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new; Chekhov, whose Three Sisters believed that real life was elsewhere and yearned eternally for a Moscow to which they could not return: These were his godfathers now. It was Conrad who gave him the motto to which he clung as if to a lifeline in the long years that would follow. In his now-unacceptably-titled The Nigger of the Narcissus, the title character, a sailor named James Wait, stricken down by tuberculosis on a long sea voyage, was asked by a fellow sailor why he came aboard, knowing, as he must have known, that he was unwell. “I must live until I die, mustn’t I?” Wait replied. So must we all, he had thought when he read the book, but in his present circumstances the sentence’s power felt like a command.

  “Joseph Anton,” he told himself, “you must live until you die.”

  It had never occurred to him before the attack to stop writing, to be something else, to become not a writer. To have become a writer—to discover that he was able to do the thing he had most wanted to do—had been one of his greatest joys. The reception of The Satanic Verses had, for the moment at least, robbed him of that joy, not because of fear but on account of a deep disappointment. If one spent five years of one’s life struggling with a large and complex project, trying to wrestle it to the ground, to bring it under control, and give it all the shapely beauty his talent allowed—and if, when it came out, it was received in this distorted, ugly way, then maybe the effort wasn’t worth it. If that was what he got for making his best effort, then he should perhaps try doing something else. He should be a bus conductor, a bellhop, a busker tap-dancing for change in a subway tunnel in winter. All those professions sounded nobler than his.

  To stave off such thoughts he began to write book reviews. Before the fatwa his friend Blake Morrison, at the Observer’s book pages, had asked him to review Philip Roth’s memoir The Facts. He wrote the piece and sent it off. It could not be mailed from anywhere nearby, and he had no fax machine, so a protection officer agreed to mail it in London when he went off duty. He added a covering note apologizing for the review’s late delivery. When the newspaper ran his review they published a facsimile of his handwritten note on page one. He had become so unreal to so many people so quickly that this proof of his existence was treated as front-page news.

  He asked Blake if he could continue reviewing for him and after that, every few weeks, he managed to deliver eight hundred words or so. They didn’t come easily—like pulling teeth, he thought, the cliché feeling apt because his wisdom teeth were aching quite often now, and the protection team was looking for a “solution”—but they represented his first awkward steps back toward himself, away from Rushdie and back toward Salman, toward literature again and away from the bleak, defeated idea of becoming not a writer.

  It was Zafar who finally brought him back to himself, Zafar whom he worked constantly to see—the police drove back and forth, “dry-cleaning” father and son, making these intermittent meetings possible—in London at Sue and Gurmukh’s house on Patshull Road in Kentish Town, at the Pinters’ in Campden Hill Square, at Liz Calder’s place in Archway and once, wonderfully, for a weekend in Cornwall at the home of Clarissa’s oldest friend, Rosanne, a farmhouse with goats and chickens and geese deep in a valley near Liskeard. They played soccer—he showed promise as a goalie, diving eagerly this way and that—and computer games. They put together model train sets and model cars. They did ordinary, everyday, father-and-son things and it felt like a miracle. Meanwhile Rosanne’s little daughter Georgie persuaded the police to dress up in princess crowns and feather boas from her dressing-up box.

  Marianne had not come for the weekend so he and Zafar shared a bedroom. And it was Zafar who reminded him of his promise: “Dad, what about my book?”

  It was the only time in his working life that he knew almost the whole plot from the beginning. The story dropped into his head like a gift. He had told Zafar stories while the boy took his evening bath, bath-time stories instead of bedtime ones. There were little sandalwood animals and shikara boats from Kashmir floating in the bathwater and the sea of stories was born there, or perhaps reborn. The original sea was to be found in the title of an old Sanskrit book. In Kashmir in the eleventh century A.D., a Shaivite Brahman named Somadeva had assembled a gigantic compendium of tales called the Kathasaritsagara. Katha meant story, sarit was streams and sagara was the sea or ocean; thus, Kathasaritsagara, the story-stream sea, usually rendered in English as the Ocean of the Streams of Story. In Somadeva’s huge book there wasn’t actually a sea. But suppose there was such a sea, where all the stories ever invented flowed in intertwining streams? While Zafar was bathing, his dad would take a mug and dip it into his son’s bathwater and pretend to sip, and to find a story to tell, a story-stream flowing through the bath of stories.

  And now in Zafar’s book he would visit the ocean itself. There would be a storyteller in the story, who lost the Gift of the Gab after his wife left him, and his son would travel to the source of all stories to find out how to renew his father’s gift. The only part of his original vision that changed in the telling was the ending. At first he had thought this could be a “modern” book, in which the broken family stayed broken, and the boy got used to it, dealt with it, as children had to do in the real world, as his own son was doing. But the shape of the story demanded that what was broken at the beginning was made whole at the end. A happy ending had to be found and he agreed with himself that he was ready to find one. He had of late become extremely interested in happy endings.

  Many years earlier, after reading the Travels of Ibn Battuta, he had written a short story called “The Princess Khamosh.” Ibn Battuta was a fourteenth-century Moroccan scholar with itchy feet whose account of his quarter century of journeys throughout the Arab world and beyond, to India, Southeast Asia and China, made Marco Polo sound like a stay-at-home lazybones. “The Princess Khamosh” was an imaginary fragment of the Travels, a few lost pages from the manuscript of Battuta’s book. In it the Moroccan traveler comes to a divided country in which two tribes are at war, the Guppees, a chatterbox people, and the Chupwalas, among whom a cult of silence has grown up, and who worship a stone deity called Bezaban, that is, without a tongue. When the Chupwalas capture the Guppee princess and threaten to sew her lips shut as an offering to their god, war breaks out between the lands of Gup and Chup.

  He had been dissatisfied with the story when he wrote it; the missing-pages conceit didn’t really come off, and he had put it away and forgotten it. Now he realized that this little tale about a war between language and silence could be given a meaning that was not only linguistic; that hidden inside it was a parable about freedom and tyranny whose potential he finally understood. The story had been ahead of him, so to speak, and now his life had caught up with it. By some miracle he remembered in which desk drawer he had put the folder containing the story, and asked Pauline to go into the St. Peter’s Street house and get it for him. By this time there were no longer reporters watching t
he building, so she was able to go in quietly and bring the pages out. When he read them again he became excited. Reshaped, stripped of the redundant Battuta element, they would give his book its dramatic heart.

  At first the book was called “Zafar and the Sea of Stories,” but he soon felt the need to place a little fictive distance between the boy in the book and the one in the bath. Haroun was Zafar’s middle name. The change felt like an improvement as soon as it was made. At first Zafar was disappointed. It was his book, he said, so it should be about him. But he, too, changed his mind. He understood that Haroun both was and was not him, and that was better.

  They returned to Porlock Weir from the blessed weekend with Zafar in Cornwall and when they neared the front door they could hear noises inside the house. The police officers at once shielded him and drew their weapons and then one of them opened the door. There were clear signs that the house had been disturbed: scattered papers, a fallen vase. Then another noise: like the beating of frightened wings. “It’s a bird,” he said, his voice made much too loud by his relief. “There’s a bird in there.” Tension drained from the team as well. Panic over. A bird had fallen down the chimney and was now perched on a curtain rod in the living room, terrified. A blackbird, he thought. Ristle-te, rostle-te, mo, mo, mo. A window was opened and the bird flew out to freedom. He began to tidy up the house and songs about birds filled his head. Take these broken wings and learn to fly. And the old Caribbean song about that bird “up high in banana tree.” You can fly away / in the sky away / you more lucky than me.

  The book did not immediately begin to flow, even though he had the story. The noise of the storm outside the windows of the cottage was too loud, and his wisdom teeth hurt, and the book’s language proved hard to find. He made false starts—too childish, too grown-up—and the tone of voice he needed eluded him. It would be some months before he wrote the words that unlocked the mystery. “There was once, in the country of Alif bay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish …” Joseph Heller had once told him that his books grew out of sentences. The sentences “I get the willies when I see closed doors” and “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid” had been the genesis of his great novel Something Happened, and Catch-22 too sprang from its opening sentences. He understood what Heller meant. There were sentences that one knew, when one wrote them, contained or made possible dozens or perhaps even hundreds of other sentences. Midnight’s Children had revealed its secrets, after much struggle, only when he sat down one day and wrote I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. And so it was with Haroun. The moment he had the sad city and the glumfish he knew how the book had to go. He may even have leaped to his feet and clapped his hands. But that moment was months in the future. For now there was only the struggle and the storm.