Joseph Anton

by Salman Rushdie

  He had worried that Zafar would try to lock his grief away, as Clarissa herself might have done, but instead his son talked for days, remembering all the things she and he had done together, the bike rides, the yachting holidays, their time in Mexico. He was wonderfully mature and brave. “I am very proud of my boy,” his father wrote in his journal, “and will enfold him in my love.”

  Clarissa was cremated on Saturday afternoon, November 13, 1999, at Golders Green crematorium. Following the hearse was unbearable. Her mother, Lavinia, seeing her daughter beginning her last journey, broke down completely and he put his arm around her while she cried. They made their way through Clarissa’s London, the London they had lived in together and apart—Highbury, Highgate, Hampstead. Oh, oh, he howled inwardly. There were over two hundred people waiting for her at the crematorium and the grief was on everyone’s face. He spoke by her coffin of their beginnings, how he first saw her bringing tea to Mama Cass Elliot onstage at a charity event, how their friends Connie Carter and Peter Hazell-Smith had arranged a dinner à quatre to introduce them, how he had waited for her for two years. “I fell in love quickly, she slowly,” he said. How their son was born, their greatest treasure, on a Sunday in June. After the birth the midwife had thrown him out while they cleaned and dressed the young mother and he wandered the empty Sunday streets looking for flowers and gave ten pounds to a news vendor for a copy of the Sunday Express just so he could say, “Keep the change, I’ve just had a son.” We never disagreed about you, Zafar, and now she lives in you. I look into your face and see her eyes.

  The months that followed were perhaps Zafar’s lowest time because as well as mourning his mother his home in Burma Road was sold and he had to look for a new place to live. Also, his reason for leaving Exeter, a music tour featuring a pair of DJs called Phats and Smalls that he was promoting, fell apart and his business partner Tony disappeared leaving him responsible for some large-ish debts and his father lost a sum of money bailing him out, so he felt, briefly, that he had lost everything, his mother, his work, his home, his confidence, his hope, and here was his father telling him that he was probably separating from Elizabeth and going to live in America, and, well, that was just great.

  It was good to be able to say, from a dozen or so years in the future, that Zafar went on to prove that his chosen path had been the right one for him, that he worked astonishingly hard at making his way and developed a successful career in the entertainment, PR and event management world, that he was universally liked and respected, and that the time came when people stopped saying to him, “Oh, you’re Salman’s son,” and instead began saying to his father, “Oh, you’re Zafar’s dad.”

  Dear Self, aged 52,

  Really? Your older son is in pieces on the floor with the grief of mother loss and also existential dread of the future, and your younger son is just two years old, and there you are in New York, apartment hunting, and then in Los Angeles chasing your pipe-dream who always dressed as Pocahontas on Halloween, your downfall? That’s who you are? Boy, I’m glad you grew up into me.

  Sincerely,

  Self, aged 65.

  Dear 65,

  You grew up?

  Sincerely,

  52

  “We are the same person,” she said to him, “we want the same things.” He began to introduce her to his New York friends, and to meet hers, when he was in New York with her he knew that a new life in the New World was what he wanted; a life with her. But there was a question that wouldn’t go away: How cruel was he prepared to be in the pursuit of his own happiness?

  There was another question as well. Would people just be too damn afraid of the cloud over his head to sell him a place to live? In his own opinion the cloud was evaporating, but the opinion of others was another matter. There were apartments he liked, in TriBeCa and in Chelsea, which fell through because the buildings’ developers panicked and said that if he moved into the building nobody else would want to live there. Real estate brokers said they saw the developers’ point. He became grimly determined to defeat such objections.

  He flew to Los Angeles to see Padma and on his first night there she provoked a bewildering quarrel. The world could not have told him more clearly that he was in the wrong place with the wrong woman in the wrong city on the wrong continent at the wrong time. He moved out of her apartment into the Bel-Air Hotel, booked an earlier flight back to London, and called Padma to say that the spell had been broken, he had come to his senses, and he was going back to his wife.

  He called Elizabeth and told her that his plans had changed, but within hours Padma was at his hotel door begging for forgiveness. By the end of the week she had turned him around again.

  It was clear to him at the time and afterward that these months of vacillation inflicted greater pain on Elizabeth than anything else. He tried to say goodbye and he choked. He tried to walk away and he stumbled. And as he swung back and forth he hurt her more and more. He went back to London and the Illusion sent him emails of blistering desire. Just wait. I only want to please you. I’m just waiting until I can kill you with happiness.

  Meanwhile, a few days before Christmas, the Bishop’s Avenue house was burgled.

  Beryl the housekeeper arrived to find the front door wide open and one of their suitcases and Zafar’s toolbox standing in the forecourt. All the ground floor interior doors were open, which was unusual also. They were in the habit of locking them at night. She thought she heard movement upstairs, called out, got no reply, got scared, decided not to go inside and called Frank Bishop. Frank called him on his mobile but he was asleep and the call went to voice mail. Then Frank called the landline and woke Elizabeth, who snapped at him, “Get out of bed.” Upper-story windows had been opened too and blinds and curtains as well. He began to rush around the house. He woke Zafar, who had heard nothing. He found another wide-open window. In his study his French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal was gone, and a camera. His laptops, passport, video camera were all untouched. His watch and some U.S. currency had been taken but his American Express card, which had been right next to the cash, was still there. None of Elizabeth’s jewelry was missing; a diamond ring, in plain view, was still in its place. Zafar’s stereo was gone, and some living-room ornaments, a white-metal Ganesh, a carved ivory tusk bought in India in the early 1970s, a silver box, an antique magnifying glass, and a little octagonal illuminated Qur’an given to him by Clarissa’s grandmother May Jewell before their wedding. And in the dining room all their cutlery was gone in its wooden canteen. That was all.

  The master bedroom window was wide open. This had been a skillful cat burglar. He came in through the bedroom window and left muddy footprints on the floor and woke nobody. It was a chilling thought. The man had crept right past them and none of the three of them had opened their eyes. Did the burglar know whose house he had entered, whose medal he had stolen? Did he recognize the sleeper in the bed? Did he know his own danger? If there had still been policemen in the house he would probably have been shot dead.

  Everyone was all right. That was the main thing. But had the house been blown? Frank Bishop arrived, Beryl came inside, and officers came up from the Yard to assess the situation. If this was a Christmas sneak thief, as was most likely, it was extremely improbable that he would disclose the location to Islamic terrorists, or even go to the press, which would be self-incriminating. So, stay put, hope for the best. Yes. That was what they would do.

  Elizabeth took Milan and went to see Carol and he was left with his agonized self-questioning. The millennium celebrations were approaching and he was being torn apart. Oh, and in Iran, it was reported that five hundred “hard-liners” had pledged to sell a kidney each to raise the money for his killing, which might solve the problem. A sure cure for all diseases, as Sir Walter Raleigh had said of the executioner’s ax.

  Joseph Heller died, and a great good humor went with him. Jill Craigie died, and a great kindness left with her.

  On New Year’s Eve the PR guru Matthe
w Freud and his fiancée, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, invited them to the Millennium Dome. He took Elizabeth, Zafar, Martin and Isabel, and Susan the new nanny stayed at the house to babysit Milan. In the dome, Tony Blair stopped by to shake hands with Matthew and Elizabeth and shook his hand as well. When it was time to sing “Auld Lang Syne” the queen had to hold Blair’s hand and the expression on her face was one of faint distaste. Elizabeth held his hand and the expression on her face was of terrible love and anguish. Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, they sang, and then it was midnight and church bells were pealing all across England and the Y2K bug failed to bite and there were no terrorist attacks and the new age dawned and nothing was different. There was no magic in moments. Only human beings could bring about transformations, magnificent or diabolical. Their fate was in their own hands.

  Dear Millennium,

  Anyway, you’re a fake. The 1999/2000 changeover would only be the millennium if there had been a Year Zero A.D. before a Year 0001, and there wasn’t, which means that two thousand years will be completed at the end of the two thousandth year and were not completed at the beginning of it. These bells and fireworks and street parties are all a year early. The real transformative moment is yet to arrive. And, as I’m writing this from my know-it-all place in the future, I can tell you with complete authority that, what with the U.S. election in November 2000 and the well-known subsequent events of September 2001, a year from this faux-millennium was when the change did come.

  On Twelfth Night, just a couple of weeks after Elizabeth took Milan to see his “grandma,” Carol Knibb tried to commit suicide, leaving letters for a number of people including Elizabeth. She said she had no faith in her treatment and preferred to “end it.” She didn’t succeed because she didn’t take enough morphine. Her husband, Brian, woke her up, and though she said that she wished he hadn’t, she would probably have woken up anyway. She was in an isolation ward now because in this condition the slightest infection could bear her away. Her white corpuscle count was down to two (it should have been twelve), and the red count was also very low. The chemotherapy had had a very destructive effect. Brian called Edward Said’s doctor Kanti Rai, who said yes, there were other treatments available in America, but he couldn’t swear that they were better than the attention she was receiving. Elizabeth was badly hit by Carol’s suicide attempt. “She was like a rock to me,” she said, and then added, “But in a way I’ve been my own rock ever since my mother died.” He hugged her to comfort her and she said, “Do you still …” but then broke off and left the room. Something wrenched hard at his heart.

  Then it was her birthday and he took her and Zafar and five of her oldest friends to dinner at the Ivy. But when they came home she confronted him and demanded to know what he was going do. He spoke to her about the destructive effect of the battle between her desire for more babies and his for New York and he uttered for the first time the word “divorce.”

  At the end of a marriage there was no originality. The one who was ending it slowly dragged himself away, while the one who did not want it to end swung between sorrowing love and vengeful anger. There were days when they remembered the people they had always been and found a way to be generous and understanding, but those days became rarer. Then there were lawyers and after that both people were angry and the one who was ending it stopped feeling guilty, you came into my life riding a bicycle and working as a junior editor and living in someone’s attic as their lodger and you want to leave it as a multi-millionairess, and the one who had not wanted it to end did everything she could have sworn she would never do and made it difficult for the one who was ending it to see his son, I will never forgive you, you have ruined his life, I’m not thinking about you, I’m thinking of him, and they had to take that to court and the judge had to tell them that they should not be in his courtroom because they owed it to their child to work it out. These were not the people they truly were. Those people would reemerge in time, after the name-calling and greed and destructiveness had passed, after the one who was being left met the Illusion face-to-face in New York and abused her in a vocabulary nobody had realized she even possessed, after they worked out how to share their son, somewhere in that future after the war was over and the pain had begun to fade they recaptured themselves and remembered that they liked each other and that beyond liking each other they needed to be good parents to their child, and then a little imp of cordiality crept back into the room, and pretty soon they were discussing things like adults, still disagreeing, disagreeing quite a lot, in fact, and still sometimes losing patience with each other, but managing to speak, even to meet, finding their way back not so much to each other as to themselves, and even managing, just sometimes, to smile.

  And what took even longer, but happened in the end, was the return of a friendship, which allowed them to do things as a family once again, to eat in each other’s homes, to go out to dinner and a movie with the boys, even to take vacations together in France, in India, and, yes, in America too. In the end it would be a relationship to be proud of, one that had been broken and stomped on and broken again, but then rebuilt, not easily, not without moments of destructiveness, but slowly, seriously, by the people they truly were, who had reemerged from the science-fiction armor, the wild monster-movie bodysuits, of the people the divorce made them be.

  It would take years for this to happen, and it would require his Illusion to stab him in the heart and vanish from his life, not in a green puff of smoke like the Wicked Witch of the West but in some ancient Scrooge McDuck’s private jet, into his private world at Dismal Downs and other places filled with wretchedness and cash. After eight years during which she had told him once a week on average that he was too old for her she ended up with a duck who was two hundred years older, because Scrooge McDuck could open the enchanted door that allowed her into her own secret dreamworld of infinite entitlement, of life lived with no limits on the Big Rock Candy Mountain with the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees; and because in a private room of a private pleasure dome in Duckburg, USA, there was a swimming pool filled with golden doubloons and they could dive off the low springboard there and swim for hours as Uncle Scrooge liked to swim, in the soothing liquidity of his money; and so what if he was Duck Cheney’s close friend and John McDuck (no relation) would tell him he could have his choice of U.S. ambassadorships after the defeat of Barack Obama?, that didn’t matter, because in the basement of his private castle was the Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and in the cave at the heart of Duck Mountain, which he had bought in a venture-capitalist coup long ago in the Jurassic era when he was just a young duckling of seventy summers or so, his tame tyrannosaurus flanked by his loyal velociraptors guarded from all marauders his fabled dragon hoard, his private uncountable stash.

  Once she had gone away into the world of make-believe where she truly belonged, reality returned. Elizabeth and he did not remarry, nor did they become lovers again, because that would have been unrealistic, but they were able to be better parents, and also the best of friends, and their true characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace they made.

  In the year 2000 that old story, the fatwa, did resurface now and then. He was in Manhattan standing on a Barrow Street sidewalk after looking at a possible place to rent when the British foreign secretary called him on his cellphone. How bizarre this is, he thought. I’m standing here unprotected and going about my everyday life while Robin Cook tells me that his Iranian counterpart, Kharrazi, has promised that everyone in Iran is behind the deal, but British intelligence still isn’t convinced, and by the way Kharrazi says the story about the men selling their kidneys isn’t true, blah blah blah. He had thrown a switch in his head and wasn’t waiting to be given the green light by the British government or Iran anymore, he was building his freedom by himself right here on the sidewalks of New York, and if he could just find a place to live that would really, really help.

  There was an apartment on Six
ty-fifth Street and Madison across the street from the Armani store. The ceilings weren’t high enough and it wasn’t that beautiful but he could afford it and the owner was ready to sell it to him. It was a co-op, so he had to be approved by the co-op board, but the seller was the chairman of that board and promised it would not be a problem, which proved that even chairmen of Upper East Side co-op boards could be ignorant of what people really thought of them, because when it was time for the interview, the hostility of the board toward the candidate could not wholly be explained by the cloud over the candidate’s head. He arrived at a glossy apartment populated by lacquered ladies whose faces didn’t move, as if they were masked characters in a Greek tragedy, and he was ordered to take off his shoes to protect the fluffy white rug on the floor. There followed an interview so perfunctory that it could only mean one of two things: the masked goddesses had already decided to say yes, or they had already decided to say no. At the end of the appointment he said he would be grateful for a quick decision, at which the grandest of the grande dames shrugged eloquently and said through the Oresteian immobility of her face that the decision would happen when it happened, and then added, “New York’s a very tough town, Mr. Rushdie, and I’m sure you understand why.” “No?” he wanted to say. “No, as a matter of fact I don’t understand, Mrs. Sophocles, could you explain that?” But he knew what she was really saying. “No. Over my dead Botoxed liposucked rib-removed colonically irrigated body. Never in a million years.”