Joseph Anton

by Salman Rushdie

  Haroun and the Sea of Stories had begun to flow. His notebooks contained many fragments—rhymes, jokes, a floating gardener made out of tough, gnarly roots and vegetables like a painting by Arcimboldo singing you can chop suey / but you can’t chop me, and a sore-throated warrior whose coughs and throat clearings sounded like novelists, kafkafka!, gogogol!, and some that didn’t make the final cut, gogh!, waugh!, and (after the unpronounceable narrator of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics) qfwfq! Also finally coming to life was the hideous and tone-deaf Princess Batcheat and her caterwauling song about her beloved (and asinine) Prince Bolo, he don’t play polo, he can’t fly solo, all of which could now find their place in that happy current. The magic-lamp creature called Genie Come Lately—“some sort of arriviste upstart”—was discarded, along with her sister, the Genie with the Light Brown Hair. This was fun. It pleased him, then and forever afterward, that in the darkest moments of his life he wrote his brightest and most cheerful book, a book with the genuine, bona fide, well-earned happy ending he had wanted, the first he had ever come up with. As the Walrus told Haroun, such conclusions were not easy to engineer.

  Václav Havel was coming to London. It would be his first official trip since assuming the presidency and, Harold Pinter said, he intended to use it to make a major public gesture of support for the author of the Verses who, coincidentally, had been wondering if he could put together a pressure group of global eminences led by Havel and perhaps the great Peruvian novelist (and defeated presidential candidate) Mario Vargas Llosa. The idea was to assemble a delegation that the Iranians could say “yes” to: a group of such distinction that agreeing with them would look like a dignified act rather than a retreat.

  Sameen had been pushing him to come up with creative options like this. “You have to take charge,” she said, “and think of everything you can.” Now Havel was coming to London, wanting to be his champion. Maybe there would be an opportunity to meet him and talk things through. “He wants to be photographed with you and have a joint press conference,” Harold said. “I’m calling William Waldegrave.”

  Everyone who knew and loved Harold Pinter knew that he was a good man to have on your side in a scrap. Those who had had the unenviable experience of “being Pintered” knew that the rough edge of Harold’s tongue was to be avoided if at all possible. The rage and suppressed violence that burned through his greatest plays were also there in the man, visible in the set of his jaw, the intensity of his gaze, the glittering menace of his smile. Those were qualities you wanted in an ally, not in an opponent. The day after the fatwa Harold led a group of writers to Downing Street to demand action. His instant agreement to deliver the Read lecture had given ample proof of his personal courage. If he was calling William Waldegrave, William Waldegrave would know he had been called.

  Sure enough, the next day, Harold called back. “It’s on.” The Havel meeting, which was, Harold said, “the most important thing on Havel’s agenda after meeting Thatcher,” had been put in the hands of the security team arranging the Czech president’s state visit. It felt like—it was—a breakthrough moment; the first time the leader of any government had endorsed him so openly. The British government had been reluctant to allow any minister to meet him, for fear of sending “the wrong messages.” Now Havel was going to do what Thatcher would not.

  But he was still fortune’s fool, and “Joseph Anton” had a bad seven days. Troubles were multiplying at the shoddy house on Hermitage Lane. The central heating had stopped working and a plumber had to come to the house. He had to hide in the bathroom for several hours, drenched in the now habitual sweat of shame. Then the agent for the property arrived to inspect it, and it was back to the bathroom. Finally a builder showed up to repair damp patches in the walls and to replace an area of the ceiling where water leaks had caused serious damage. This time there was nowhere to hide and so, while the builder was working in the living room, poor Joseph Anton had to scurry down the stairs to the garage, protected from discovery by no more than a closed interior door, and be driven hurriedly away. The Jaguar circled the city aimlessly, lost in space, with Dennis the Horse telling him bad jokes until he received word that it was safe to return.

  This was what it was like to be invisible. One moment he was talking on the phone to Peter Weidhaas, organizer of the Frankfurt Book Fair, who had just informed Iran that its publishers would not be welcome at the Fair until the fatwa was canceled. The next he was hiding from a ceiling repairer. He was an author completing a children’s book (and preparing for publication a collection of essays, to be called Imaginary Homelands after a piece he had once written about the displaced writer’s relationship to place)—and he was also a fugitive cowering in a locked bathroom, fearing discovery by a West Indian plumber.

  The day after the close shave with the builder, he finished a good draft of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and his friend John Forrester, a fellow of King’s, Cambridge, called to suggest the possibility of an honorary degree, “like the one they gave Morgan Forster long ago.” The idea of sharing an honor with the author of A Passage to India was very moving. He said he would be delighted if that were to happen. Several months later John called him to say that it would not happen. Too many people at the college were too afraid.

  A crisis had arisen at St. Peter’s Street. His old home was locked up and uninhabited and things were going wrong. The local police were saying the property was not “secure.” There had been a report of a gas leak and the man from the gas board had had to break in. Also, he was told, water was flooding the basement. Somebody needed to go in and take a look. Marianne and he had hardly spoken since their quarrel about the Mario Brothers but she said she would go. The problems turned out to be minor. The gas man had put a ladder up and entered through an unlocked upstairs window so there was no damage to the front door. There had been no gas leak. The water in the basement reported by the gas man turned out not to be a flood but a small drip, easily repaired. Marianne came away from St. Peter’s Street in a foul mood and on the phone later she blazed at him about everything. “I bet,” she shouted, “you haven’t even made the bed.”

  That evening he was taken to see Edward and Mariam Said at a house on Eton Road in Swiss Cottage. At that time Edward’s diagnosis with chronic lymphocytic leukemia was still a year away and he was in the full handsome bloom of health, an expansive talker, a laugher and gesturer, a polymath, flirt, and hypochondriac. In those days if Edward had a cough he feared the onset of serious bronchitis, and if he felt a twinge he was certain his appendix was about to collapse. Amazingly, when he actually did fall ill, he became a hero, rarely complaining, fighting the CLL with all his might and, with the aid of his brilliant physician Dr. Kanti Rai, breaking all records by living for a dozen years after the cancer’s first appearance. Edward was a dandy, a little vain about his good looks, and once, years later, they lunched near Columbia University after the end of the fatwa business, happy to be meeting in plain sight, without attendant policemen to draw the curtains and do the “dry-cleaning.” The cancer was in partial remission and Edward was less gaunt than had sadly become usual. “Edward,” said the no-longer-Joseph-Anton, “you’re looking healthy again! You’ve put on weight!” Edward bristled. “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not fat, Salman.”

  He was a Conrad scholar and he knew about the sailor James Wait aboard the Narcissus. He, too, knew that he must live until he died; and he did.

  At Eton Road that night in March 1990 Edward told him he had spoken to Arafat about the case—and for Edward to talk to Yasser Arafat, whom he had disliked for so long because of his personal corruption and his sanctioning of terrorism, was no small thing—and Arafat (who was a secularist and an anti-Islamist as well as being corrupt and a terrorist) had replied, “Of course I support him, but the Muslims in the intifada … what can I do …” “Maybe you should write about the intifada,” Edward suggested. “Yours is a very important voice for us and it should be heard again on these issues.” Yeah, maybe, he repli
ed. They let the subject drop and spoke of books and music and mutual friends. His appetite for nonstop discussion of the fatwa was limited and many of his friends saw that and thoughtfully changed the subject. When he was able to see people it felt like a break from captivity and the last things he wanted to discuss were his chains.

  He was forcing himself to focus and spending hours each day polishing and revising the draft of Haroun. But the week was not going as planned. He was told by the police that the Havel meeting was off—apparently the Czechs had canceled it because of fears for the president’s safety. Instead, he was to telephone Havel’s hotel room at 6 P.M. and they would be able to talk. This was a huge disappointment. He was unable to speak for hours. But at six precisely he called the number he had been given. The phone rang for a long time and then a man’s voice came on the line. “This is Salman Rushdie,” he said. “Am I speaking to President Havel?” The man on the other end of the line actually giggled. “No, no,” he said. “Is not here the president. Is secretary.” “I see,” he said. “But I was told to call at this time to speak to him.” Then, after a brief pause, the secretary replied. “Yes. You must please wait some time. The president is in the bathroom.”

  Now, he thought to himself, I know there has been a revolution in Czechoslovakia. The president had already decreed that his motorcades be composed of cars of many colors, just to cheer things up, and had invited the Rolling Stones to play for him, and given his first American interview to Lou Reed because the Czech Velvet Revolution had taken its name from the Velvet Underground (thus making the Velvets the only band in history to help create a revolution instead of just singing about it like, for example, the Beatles). This was a president worth waiting for while he took his time in the toilet.

  After several minutes he heard footsteps and then Havel was on the line. He had a very different story about the cancelation of the meeting. He had not wanted the meeting to take place at the Czech embassy. “I do not trust that place,” he said. “There are still many people of old regime, many strange people wandering about, many colonels.” The new ambassador, Havel’s man, had only been in post for two days and had not had time to clean the stables. “I will not go in that place,” Havel said. The British had responded by saying that there was nowhere else that they were prepared to allow the meeting to occur. “Imagine this,” Havel said. “There is nowhere in Britain they can make safe for you and me.” It was plain, he said, that the British government did not want the meeting to occur. Perhaps the image of the great Václav Havel embracing a writer whose own prime minister refused to be seen with him would be a little embarrassing? “It is bad,” Havel said. “I have wanted to do this very much.”

  However, he said, at his press conference he had said many things. “I have told them we are in permanent contact,” he said, and laughed. “And maybe it is true, through Harold or such. But I have told them: permanent contact. Also, deep solidarity. I have said this too.”

  He told Havel how much he liked his Letters to Olga, written by the celebrated dissident from prison to his wife, and how much they had to say to him in his present situation. “This book,” Havel replied, “you know, when we wrote to each other at that time, we had to say many things in riddles, in a kind of code. There are parts of it I don’t understand myself. But I have a much better book coming soon.” Havel wanted copies of “Is Nothing Sacred?” and “In Good Faith.” “Permanent contact,” he concluded with another laugh, and said goodbye.

  Marianne was still at war with him the next day. “You’re obsessed by what happens to you,” she blazed, and yes, perhaps that was true. “Every day of your life there’s some drama,” and yes, unfortunately that was all too often true. He was obsessed with himself, she shouted; he couldn’t handle “equality,” and he was an “ugly drunk.” Where did that come from, he wondered, and then she delivered the rest of the blow. “You’re trying to repeat your parents’ marriage.” He was guilty of his father’s alcohol abuse. Yes, of course.

  Meanwhile, at a Muslim Youth Conference in Bradford, a sixteen-year-old girl called for Rushdie to be stoned to death. The media coverage of the “Affair” had become—for the moment, anyway—sympathetic to him, almost pitying. “Poor Salman Rushdie.” “The hapless author.” He did not wish to be poor, hapless, pitiable. He did not want to be merely a victim. There were important intellectual, political and moral issues at stake here. He wanted to be a part of the argument: to be a protagonist.

  Andrew and Gillon came to see him at Hermitage Lane after meeting the Penguin chiefs at the London home of their colleague Brian Stone, the agent for the Agatha Christie estate. They were a formidable negotiating team because they were such an odd couple: the very tall, languid, plummy-voiced Englishman and the aggressive, bullet-headed American with his checkered past, his fringe membership in the Warhol Factory crew, and his laser-beam eyes. They were a classic hard man—soft man duo, and what made them even more effective was that the people they negotiated with made the mistake of assuming that Andrew was the tough guy and Gillon the softie. Actually, Andrew was driven by passion and emotion and was entirely capable of amazing you by bursting into tears. Gillon was the killer.

  Even Gillon and Andrew found Penguin all but impossible to deal with. This latest meeting was, yet again, inconclusive. Mayer said Penguin would hold to the end-of-June deadline for the paperback but would not give a date. They all agreed with Gillon and Andrew that if the book was not published by June 30, they would insist on getting the publication rights back on July 1 so that they could try to make other arrangements. Gillon said, “I think Mayer may be open to that idea.” (Four days later Gillon called to say that Mayer had “half-accepted” the idea of the reversion of rights, but wanted to “negotiate” it—in other words, he wanted money in return. However, his colleague Trevor Glover had said at the meeting with Andrew and Gillon that Penguin’s security costs were so high that they had lost money on the hardcover publication, and publishing the paperback would mean an “increased loss,” so it was hard for Mayer to argue that he needed to be compensated for doing something—giving up the paperback rights—that would, if Glover was to be believed, actually save him money. “We’re pursuing it,” Gillon said. “If we reach the first of July and Mayer hasn’t published and asks for money,” he said, “at that point, I’d go public.”)

  Andrew believed Penguin was underpaying royalties and withholding a large sum of money that should have been paid. Penguin denied this angrily but Andrew sent in an auditor and discovered a very substantial underpayment indeed. Penguin did not apologize.

  The police had suggested a wig. Their best wig man had been to see him and taken a sample of his hair. He was extremely dubious but had been reassured by several of the prot officers that wigs really worked. “You’ll be able to walk down the street without attracting attention,” they said. “Trust us.” He received unexpected confirmation of this from Michael Herr. “In the matter of disguise you don’t have to change much, Salman,” Michael said, speaking slowly and blinking rapidly. “Just the key signs.” The wig was made and arrived in a brown cardboard box looking like a small sleeping animal. When he put it on his head he felt outlandishly stupid. The police said it looked great. “Okay,” he said, dubiously. “Let’s take it for a walk.” They drove him to Sloane Street and parked near Harvey Nichols. When he got out of the car every head turned to stare at him and several people burst into wide grins or even laughter. “Look,” he heard a man’s voice say, “there’s that bastard Rushdie in a wig.” He got back into the Jaguar and never wore the wig again.

  Ambassador Maurice Busby was a man who didn’t officially exist. As America’s head of counterterrorism, his name could not be spoken on radio or television, or printed in any newspaper or magazine. His movements could not be reported and his location was, to use an adjective Vice President Cheney afterward made famous, undisclosed. He was the ghost in the American machine.

  “Joseph Anton” had been thinking of going to Ameri
ca when the Hermitage Lane contract expired, to have a few weeks or months out of the cage. The Special Branch had told him from the beginning that their responsibility for him ended at the British frontier. The rules of the game said that whenever a “principal” left the United Kingdom to visit another country the security forces of that country had to be informed so that they could decide what, if anything, they wanted to do about his visit. When the Americans were told about his plans Mr. Maurice Busby asked for a meeting. It would be a nonexistent man’s encounter with an invisible man: as if Calvino and H. G. Wells had decided to collaborate on a story. He was taken to an anonymous office building on the south bank of the Thames and led into a large room that was entirely empty except for two straight chairs. He and Ambassador Busby sat facing each other and the American got straight to the point. He was welcome in America, the ambassador said, and he should be in no doubt about that. America sympathized with him and he should know that his case was “on the U.S. agenda vis-à-vis Iran.” His wish to visit the United States was in principle approved. However the United States respectfully asked him to consider postponing the trip by “three to four months.” Ambassador Busby had been authorized to tell him in deep confidence that there was real movement regarding the American hostages in Lebanon and it was likely that there could be releases soon. He hoped Mr. Rushdie would appreciate the sensitivity of the situation. Mr. Rushdie did appreciate it. He concealed his deep disappointment and agreed to the nonexistent man’s request. Gloomily he asked Gillon to extend his tenancy at Hermitage Lane.

  Marianne had left to go on her book tour in America. He kept trying to persuade himself that they still loved each other. In his journals he discounted everything that was wrong between them and insisted on their largely imaginary happiness. Such is the need for love. It makes men see visions of paradise and ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears that they are in hell.