Joseph Anton

by Salman Rushdie

  Dear Brian Clark,

  Whose life is it anyway?

  Dear Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits,

  I have visited at least one college in which young Jewish men were being taught, rigorously and judiciously, the principles and practices of judicious and rigorous thought. Theirs were some of the most impressive and honed young minds I have ever encountered and I know they would understand the danger and impropriety of making false moral equivalences. It is a shame that a man they might look to as a leader has become neglectful of the proper process of the mind. “Both Mr. Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech,” you say. Thus a novel which, love it or hate it, is in the opinion of at least a few critics and judges a serious work of art is equated with a naked call for murder. This ought to be denounced as a self-evidently ridiculous remark; instead, Chief Rabbi, your colleagues the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope in Rome have said substantially the same thing. You have all called for the prohibition of offenses to the sensibilities of all religions. Now, to an outsider, a person of no religion, it might seem that the various claims to authority and authenticity made by Judaism, Catholicism and the Church of England contradict one another, and are also at odds with the claims made by and on behalf of Islam. If Catholicism is “true” then the Church of England must be “false,” and, indeed, wars were fought because many men—and kings, and popes—believed just that. Islam flatly denies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and many Muslim priests and politicians openly flaunt their anti-Semitic views. Why then this strange unanimity between apparent irreconcilables? Think, Chief Rabbi, of the Rome of the Caesars. As it was with that great clan, so perhaps it is with the great world religions. No matter how much you may detest one another and seek to do one another down, you are all members of one family, occupants of the single House of God. When you feel that the House itself is threatened by mere outsiders, by the hell-bound armies of the irreligious, or even by a literary novelist, you close ranks with impressive alacrity and zeal. Roman soldiers marching into battle in close formation formed a testudo, or tortoise, the soldiers on the outside creating walls with their shields while those in the middle raised their shields over their heads to make a roof. So you and your colleagues, Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, have formed a tortoise of the faith. You do not care how stupid you look. You care only that the tortoise wall is strong enough to stand.

  Dear Robinson Crusoe,

  Suppose you had four Man Fridays to keep you company, and they were all heavily armed. Would you feel safer, or less safe?

  Dear Bernie Grant, MP,

  “Burning books,” you said in the House of Commons exactly one day after the fatwa, “is not a big issue for blacks.” The objections to such practices, you claimed, were proof that “the whites wanted to impose their values on the world.” I recall that many black leaders—Dr. Martin Luther King, for example—were murdered for their ideas. To call for the murder of a man for his ideas would therefore appear to the bewildered outsider to be a thing which a black member of Parliament might find horrifying. Yet you do not object. You represent, sir, the unacceptable face of multiculturalism, its deformation into an ideology of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the death of ethical thought, supporting the right of tyrannical priests to tyrannize, of despotic parents to mutilate their daughters, of bigoted individuals to hate homosexuals and Jews, because it is a part of their “culture” to do so. Bigotry, prejudice and violence or the threat of violence are not human “values.” They are proof of the absence of such values. They are not the manifestations of a person’s “culture.” They are indications of a person’s lack of culture. In such crucial matters, sir, to quote the great monochrome philosopher Michael Jackson, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.

  In Tiananmen Square a man holding shopping bags stood in front of a column of tanks, stopping their advance. Half an hour earlier in the supermarket he could not have been thinking of heroism. Heroism came upon him unbidden. This was on June 5, 1989, the third day of the massacre, so he must have been aware of the danger he was in. Yet he stood there until other civilians came and drew him aside. There are those who say that after his gesture he was taken away and shot. The number of the Tiananmen dead was never revealed and is not known. In One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez the banana company—headed by Mr. Brown, a name belonging in a Tarantino movie—massacred three thousand striking workers in the main square of Macondo. After the killings there was a cleanup so perfect that the incident could be flatly denied. It never took place, except in the memory of José Arcadio Segundo, who saw it all. Against ruthlessness, remembering was the only defense. The Chinese leadership knew this: that memory was the enemy. It was not enough that the protesters be killed. They had to be falsely remembered as deviants and rogues, not as brave students who gave their lives for freedom. The Chinese authorities worked hard on this false version of the past and eventually it took root. The year that began with the small horror of the fatwa had acquired a greater horror to tremble at, whose terribleness would grow with the passing years, as the defeat of memory by lies was added to the protesters’ useless deaths.

  It was time to move out of Porlock Weir. A rental cottage had been found for him by the police, back in Brecon, in a place called Talybont. Maggie Drabble and Michael Holroyd came down to reclaim their home and to celebrate Maggie’s fiftieth birthday there. Marianne was not coming to Talybont; she was leaving for America. Lara was graduating from Dartmouth and she naturally wanted to be there. Her departure would be a relief for them both. He could see that she was at the end of her tolerance, more than usually wild-eyed, the tension pouring off her like sweat off a marathon runner. She needed at least a break, probably a way out. He could understand that. She had not bargained for this, and it wasn’t her fight. The cliché, stand by your man, insisted she had to stay, but everything in her was screaming Go. Maybe it would have been different if they had been more in love. But she was standing by a man she wasn’t happy to be with. Yes, she needed to go to her daughter’s graduation day.

  It was a strange dinner the four of them had, half celebratory of Maggie’s fiftieth, half shocked by history. Michael told funny stories of his unusual childhood—his mother enlisting his aid to help her leave her many husbands, at least one of those husbands asking him to write the please-come-back notes that might persuade her not to go. The news preoccupied them all. Tiananmen was on everyone’s lips. And suddenly Ayatollah Khomeini was dead and being carried through the streets of Tehran to his grave. The police in an adjacent room, waiting for their shift change, were making police jokes. It’s POETS day—Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Or, more philosophically: Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread you’ve got, the less shit you eat. But the four of them were watching scenes from far away, the immense crowd flailing around the funeral bier, the uncontainable surge and lurch of that many-headed monster, then the bier tilting, the torn shroud, and all at once the dead man’s frail, white leg exposed for all to see. He knew, as he watched, that this was a thing he did not understand. It was not enough to say that such crowds were brought in by bus and truck, or paid to mourn effusively, or that many of them were in the kind of trancelike delirium found in some Shia ecstatics on the day of Ashura, the tenth of Muharram, who lashed and scarred themselves to commemorate the death of the Prophet’s grandson Hussain ibn-Ali at the battle of Karbala in A.D. 680. It would not do to wonder why a nation whose sons had perished at the dead imam’s bidding in a useless war against Iraq should feel such screaming sorrow at his going, to dismiss the scene as a phony performance, put on by an oppressed and fearful people whose fear of the tyrant had not lessened even after his death: not sufficient to dismiss this as terror masquerading as love. The imam had been, for these people, a direct link to their God. The link had snapped. Who would intercede for them now?

  The next morning Marianne left for America. He was taken to Talybont. The cottage was tiny and the weather dreadful. There
was no privacy to be had here. He and his protectors—affable Fat Jack and a new fellow, highly articulate, clearly an officer with a big future, named Bob Major—would be obliged to live cheek by jowl. Even worse, the cellphone didn’t work. There was no signal to pick up. He would have to be driven several miles once a day to a telephone box in the remote countryside to make calls. Claustrophobia hit him hard. “It’s all USELESS, USELESS,” he wrote in his journal, and then he called Marianne, in Boston, and things got much worse.

  He was in a red telephone booth on a Welsh hillside in the rain with a bag of coins in his hand and her voice in his ear. She had had dinner with Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky and the two Nobel laureates told her they would not have changed their lives as he had. “I would stay home and do exactly as always,” Brodsky had declared, “and let’s see what they could do.” “I explained it to them,” she said on the phone. “I told them, ‘the poor man, he’s afraid for his life.’ ” Thanks a lot, Marianne, he thought. Joseph Brodsky had given her a foot massage, she said. Hearing that made him feel even better. His wife was with the two alpha males of world poetry getting foot rubs and telling them that her husband was too afraid to live as they would, in the open, courageously. She had been wearing saris everywhere, she said. So, not very low profile, then. He was about to say that perhaps the saris were a little obvious when she dropped her bombshell. She had been approached in her Boston hotel lobby by a CIA agent calling himself Stanley Howard. He had asked to speak with her and they had had a cup of coffee together. “They know where we were,” she said in a heightened voice. “They have been inside the house. They took papers from your desk and your wastebasket. They showed them to me as proof that they had entered and looked around. The font and page setup and the work were all definitely yours. The people you live with didn’t even know they’d been there. You can’t trust the people you have with you now. You need to leave at once. You need to come to America. Mr. Howard Stanley wanted to know if our marriage was real, or if you just wanted to use it as a convenience, to get into America. I stood up for you, so he said then that was okay, you would be allowed to enter. You could live in America like a free man.”

  Mr. Stanley Howard, Mr. Howard Stanley. Okay, people misremembered and scrambled names, that proved nothing. The stumble might even be proof that she was telling the truth. Let me be clear, he said. You’re telling me that the CIA came to see you and told you they had penetrated a major British security operation and broken into the safe house and removed material and nobody noticed a thing. “Yes,” she said and then again, “You’re not safe, you need to leave, don’t trust the people you have around you now.” What are you going to do, he asked. She was going to Dartmouth for the graduation ceremony and then going south to visit her sister Johanne in Virginia. Okay, he said, I’ll call again tomorrow. But the next day when he called her she did not pick up the phone.

  Bob Major and Fat Jack listened gravely when he told them what she had said. Then they asked a number of questions. Finally Bob said, “It doesn’t make sense to me.” None of the drivers had reported being followed and they were highly trained. None of the sensors they had placed around and inside the Porlock Weir house had been tripped. There was no evidence of any improper entry. “It doesn’t add up.” But he added, “The trouble is, this is your wife saying this. So we have to take it seriously. It’s your wife.” They would have to report the matter upward, to the top brass back at the Yard, and then decisions would be taken. In the meanwhile, he said, “I’m afraid you can’t stay here. We have to act as if the operation is blown. That means you can’t go anywhere you’ve been or planned to go. We have to change everything. You can’t stay here.”

  “I have to go to London,” he said. “It’s my son’s tenth birthday in a few days.”

  “You’ll have to come up with a place,” Fat Jack said.

  Afterward people sometimes asked him, Didn’t you lose friends in those days? Weren’t people afraid to be seen to be close to you? And he invariably answered, no, in fact, the opposite happened. His good friends proved themselves to be true friends in need, and people who had not been close to him before drew closer, wanting to help, and acted with astonishing generosity, selflessness and courage. He would remember this, the nobility of human beings acting out of their best selves, far more vividly than the hatred—though the hatred was vivid all right—and would always be grateful to have been the recipient of that bounty.

  He had grown close to Jane Wellesley when she produced their documentary The Riddle of Midnight in 1987, and their friendship had deepened ever since. In India her surname had opened many firmly locked doors—“That Wellesley?” people asked, and then began to fawn a little in the presence of a descendant of Arthur Wellesley, who fought at the battle of Seringapatam and later, as Bonaparte’s conqueror, became the first Duke of Wellington, and also of his brother Richard Wellesley, who had become governor-general of India 190 years ago—and she had been more embarrassed than amused. She was a profoundly private woman, sharing her secrets with very few people, and if you told her a secret it would go with her to the grave. She was also a woman of deep feeling, concealed beneath that British reserve. When he called her she instantly offered to move out of her own home, a top-floor apartment in Notting Hill, “for as long as you need it, if you think it will work.” It was the sort of place the Special Branch disliked, an apartment, not a house, with only one way in or out, and on the top floor of a building with one staircase and no elevator. Through police eyes it looked like a trap. But he had to be somewhere and there was nowhere else available at such short notice. He moved in.

  Mr. Greenup came to see him and suggested that Marianne had made the whole story up. “Do you know what it would take to break an operation like this?” he asked. “Maybe only the Americans would have the resources and it would be a stretch even for them. To pursue your car without being noticed they would have to change the follow car maybe every dozen miles or so, and there would have to be more than a dozen cars rotated to fool your drivers. They might have to use helicopters and satellites too. And to enter your house without disturbing any of the security traps would be quite frankly impossible. And even supposing that they did all this, that they found out where you were and got into the building and out again, taking papers from your study, and got around all the traps—why then would they approach your wife and show her the proof? They would know that she would tell you and you would tell us and the moment we knew that they knew we would change everything, so that all their work and expense would be wasted, and they would be back at square one. They would also know that for the CIA to break a highly sensitive British operation of this sort would be considered a hostile act, something very like an act of war against a friendly nation. Why would they tell her? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Mr. Greenup also said that the cellphone was now considered a security risk and could not be used for the time being at least.

  He was smuggled out of the building to make a phone call to Marianne from a phone booth in Hampstead. She sounded distraught. His refusal to accept that he could not trust his protection officers troubled her. She was trying to decide whether to return and if so when.

  On the day before his tenth birthday Zafar came to stay. He had asked Clarissa to buy him a train set, but she somehow forgot to send it along, although she did remember to send the bill. It didn’t matter. He had his son for the night for the first time in months and that was a thing to be treasured. The police went and bought a cake and on June 17, 1989, they celebrated as best they could. His son’s smiling face was the best and most strengthening nourishment in the world. That evening Zafar was taken back to his mother’s house, and the next morning Marianne returned.

  She was met at Heathrow by the stone-faced double-act of Will Wilson and Will Wilton, the senior men from the Branch and British intelligence, and taken away for questioning for several hours. When she finally arrived at Jane’s apartment her face was pale and she was clearly frigh
tened. They didn’t speak very much that night. He didn’t know how to talk to her, or what to believe.

  He wasn’t allowed to stay in the city any longer. The police had found a place: a bed-and-breakfast inn called Dyke House in the village of Gladestry (Glades-tree) in Powys. Back to the Welsh Marches again. Dyke House was a former Edwardian rectory, a modest gabled building with a pretty garden and a little brook babbling nearby, near Offa’s Dyke at the bottom of Hergest Ridge. It was run by a retired police officer, Geoff Tutt, and his wife, Christine, and was therefore considered to be secure. Meanwhile in the wider world the Muslim demand that he be tried for blasphemy won a judicial review, and there was another protest rally against him in Bradford and forty-four arrests were made. The bishop of Bradford asked for such protests to cease. It didn’t seem likely that they would.

  Will Wilson and Will Wilton came to visit him in Gladestry and asked that Marianne not be present at the meeting, which infuriated her. She stomped off for a long walk and they told him that her report had been taken very seriously indeed, that the matter had reached the desks of the British prime minister and the president of the United States, and that after extensive investigation the investigating officers were satisfied that there was no truth in her allegations whatsoever. “I see that this is difficult for you,” said Wilson, “because as your wife she would be someone you would wish to believe.” They explained the way they had gone about interrogating her. It was nothing like the third-degree treatment beloved of the movies. Instead they relied a great deal on repetition and detail. How did she know that Mr. Stanley Howard or Howard Stanley was a CIA officer? Did he show her ID? What did it look like? Was there a photograph on it, or not? Was it signed? Did it look like a credit card, or did it fold? “Lots of things like that,” Will Wilton said. “It’s the little things that help.” They made her repeat her story many times and, they said, “When there is no variation in the story then we are one hundred percent certain it’s a fake.” Human beings telling the truth never told the story quite the same way twice.