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.
In Britain a gaggle of self-appointed “leaders” and “spokesmen” continued to clamber to fame by sticking knives in his back and then skipping up the ladder of blades. The most outspoken and dangerous of these was a silver-bearded garden gnome called Kalim Siddiqui, who emphatically defended and justified the fatwa on several television programs, and who, in a series of public meetings (including some attended by members of Parliament) called for a show of hands to demonstrate the unanimous desire in the community that the blasphemer and apostate should be killed. Every hand flew up into the air. Nobody was prosecuted. Siddiqui’s Muslim Institute was a paltry thing but he was being given the red carpet treatment by the ayatollahs of Iran, visiting frequently and meeting all the most senior figures, demanding that they keep the pressure on. On a British TV show Siddiqui said what he thought Muslims were like. “We hit back,” he said. “Sometimes we hit back first.”
More bookstores were firebombed—Collet’s and Dillons in London, Abbey’s in Sydney, Australia. More libraries refused to stock the book, more chains refused to carry it, a dozen printers in France refused to print the French edition, and more threats were made against publishers, for example against his Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard of H. Aschehoug & Co., who had to be given a police guard. But most people working at the offices of his novel’s publishers around the world received no protection. He could easily imagine the tension they felt at work and at home, for their families and themselves. Not enough attention was paid to the courage with which these “ordinary people,” who revealed themselves every day to be extraordinary, continued to do their work, to defend the principles of freedom, to hold the front line.
Muslims began to be killed by other Muslims if they expressed non-bloodthirsty opinions. In Belgium the mullah who was said to be the “spiritual leader” of the country’s Muslims, the Saudi national Abdullah Ahdal, and his Tunisian deputy Salim Bahri were killed for saying that, whatever Khomeini had said for Iranian consumption, in Europe there was freedom of expression.
“I am gagged and imprisoned,” he wrote in his journal, “I can’t even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.” Friends who saw him in those days were shocked by his physical deterioration, his increase in weight, the way he had let his beard grow out into an ugly bulbous mass, his sunken stance. He looked like a beaten man.
In a very short time he had grown extremely fond of his protectors but Marianne found the invasion of her space harder to take and kept her distance. He appreciated the way they tried to be constantly upbeat and cheerful in his company to raise his spirits, and their efforts at self-effacement also. They knew it was hard for “principals” to have policemen in the kitchen, leaving their footprints in the butter. They tried very hard and without any rancor to give him as much space as they could. And most of them, he quickly understood, found the confinement of this particular prot harder, in some ways, than he did. These were men of action, their needs the opposite of a sedentary novelist trying to hold on to what remained of the inner life, the life of the mind. He could sit still and think in a room for hours and be content. They went stir-crazy if they had to stay indoors for any length of time. On the other hand they could go home after two weeks and have a break. Several of them said to him, with worried respect, “We couldn’t do what you’re doing,” and that knowledge earned him their sympathy.
Many of them said that this was the wrong way to run a prot. Every other “principal” had a “dedicated team” that looked after that individual alone. He could not have a dedicated team because the undercover work was too much for the officers to bear on a full-time basis. So his team was patched together from other teams. It wasn’t right, his protectors said. Everyone else they protected went about his or her normal and professional life and they took care of the protection while shifts of uniformed officers protected the principal’s home. At night the Special Branch officers brought the principal home and then went home themselves while the uniformed officers remained on guard. “What we have to do on Malachite isn’t proper protection,” they told him. “We weren’t trained to hide people. This isn’t our job.” But a normal protection was more expensive, because the shifts of uniformed officers cost a lot of money. And if the principal had more than one home then the cost increased. The higher-ups at the Yard weren’t prepared to spend that sort of money on Operation Malachite. It was cheaper to hide the principal and pay the prot teams overtime to stay with him around the clock. There was a view among the senior officers, he was learning, that the Malachite principal didn’t “deserve” the full protection services of the British police.
He quickly learned that there was a wide gulf between the officers in the field and the higher-ups at the Yard. Few of the higher-ups had earned the lads’ respect. In the years that followed he very rarely had any difficulty with the members of the teams sent to look after him, and many of them became friends. The senior officers—it was entirely wrong, he was told, to call them “superior officers,” because “they may be senior to us, but they’re not superior”—were a different matter. There would be more than one censorious Mr. Greenup in the days ahead.
They broke the rules to help him. At a time when they had been forbidden to take him into any public spaces they took him to the movies, going in after the lights went down, taking him out before they went up again, no problem. At a time when the senior officers said he should not be brought to London, they brought him to his friends’ houses so that he could meet his son. And they did what they could to assist his work as a father. They took him and Zafar to police sports grounds and formed impromptu rugby teams so that he could run with them and pass the ball. On bank holidays they sometimes took him and Zafar to amusement parks. One day at such a park Zafar saw a soft toy being offered as a prize at a shooting gallery and decided he wanted it. One of the protection officers, known to one and all as Fat Jack, heard him. “You fancy that, do you?” he said, and pursed his lips. “Mmm hmm.” He went up to the booth and put down his money. The carny handed him the usual pistol with deformed gunsights and Fat Jack nodded gravely. “Mmm hmm,” he said, inspecting the weapon, “all right then.” He began to shoot. Boom boom boom boom, the targets fell one by one while the carny watched with gold-toothed mouth hanging wide. “Yes, that should do nicely,” said Fat Jack, putting down the weapon and pointing at the soft toy. “We’ll have that, thanks.” Some months later Zafar was watching the happy scenes on television of Nelson Mandela arriving at Wembley Stadium to take a bow at the rock concert being staged there to celebrate his freedom. When Zafar saw Mandela coming down the tunnel from
the changing rooms to the field he pointed and said, “Look, Dad, there’s Fat Jack.” And there indeed was Fat Jack, right behind Mandela’s left shoulder, pursing his lips and probably saying Mmm hmm.
He learned a lot from the lads about security—how to enter a room, for example, where to look, what to look for. “Cops and criminals,” Dev Stonehouse told him. “You can always tell ’em. They stand in the doorway and scope out the scene before coming in, how many exits, who’s standing where, all of that.” He learned, too, that the police force was in the end just another department of the civil service. It was an office, and it had office politics. There was much jealousy and envy aimed at the Branch, and there were people who wanted to shut it down. There would be moments when they came to him for help, asking him to write letters in support of the work done by “A” Squad, and he was happy to be able to do a little in return for all they did for him. What made him happiest is that none of those men who were there because they were prepared to take a bullet for him ever had to do so.
There were not many women on “A” Squad, six or seven at most, and in all the years of the prot only two of them were ever part of his team: a tall handsome woman named Rachel Clooney, who ended up being one of Margaret Thatcher’s dedicated team, and a small, compact, businesslike blond called Julie Remmick, who eventually had to leave the team because her shooting didn’t come up to standard. Everyone on prot duty had to take regular tests of marksmanship in a police shooting gallery, shooting off balance, against moving targets, in poor visibility, and the acceptable score was somewhere over 90 percent. If they dropped below that score they had to surrender their weapon instantly and do a desk job instead. He was told they could arrange for him to be given shooting lessons. He would be taught by the best instructors and maybe it was a skill he should learn. He thought about it long and hard and said no, he wouldn’t do that, thanks all the same. He knew that if he owned a gun and the bad guys were to attack it would be taken from him and turned against him. Better to live without it and hope the bad guys wouldn’t get that close.
Sometimes they cooked for him but mostly they kept the domestic arrangements separate. They would do his supermarket shopping when they did their own. They each used the kitchen at different, agreed-upon times. In the evenings the policemen stayed in one room and watched TV, athletes obliged by circumstances to behave like couch potatoes. How miserable they must have been!
They were fit and handsome and girls liked them. Many of them became friendly with women they met through him in the world of publishing. There was a particular team, Rob and Ernie, who were reckoned to be major heartthrobs. Another officer had an affair with a friend’s nanny, then dumped her and broke her heart. And lots of them had extramarital affairs, the job’s secrecy offering the perfect camouflage. One of them, a golden-haired youth named Sammy, turned out to be a bigamist, with two wives whom he called by the same nicknames, and two lots of children who were also identically named. He was caught because the costs of bigamy were too great for a policeman’s salary and he fell deeply into debt. These were interesting fellows.
Dev Stonehouse, it turned out, did have a drinking problem, and was eventually taken off the team after he became drunk and indiscreet in a pub, and sent to work in Siberia, otherwise known as Heathrow Airport. There were a couple of protection officers who wanted to play devil’s advocate and, taking the Muslim side, argue the case for “respect,” but their colleagues led them gently and thoughtfully away.
There was one high-handed officer who treated him more like a prisoner than a principal and he objected to that. And there was Siegfried, the British-German lad who was built like a tank and just once, when he asked to be taken for a walk in a park, squared up to him and said he was endangering the team. He saw Siegfried’s hands turning into fists but he stood his ground and stared him down. Siegfried was led away and never returned. Fear made good men do bad things.
That was the sum total of problems he had with the protection teams. Many years later a disaffected driver, Ron Evans, fired from the police force for embezzlement, published lurid untruths in a British tabloid claiming, among other things, that the protection teams had disliked this particular principal so much that they would lock him in a closet and go off to the pub to drink. The moment the allegations were published he was contacted by several members of his old teams. These officers were disgusted by the lies, by the failure of the senior officers at the Yard to defend him, and perhaps most of all by the sacked driver’s breach of the Branch’s almost Sicilian code of omertà, silence. They took pride in the fact that nobody in the Branch leaked or gossiped or planted or fabricated stories in the media—unlike, as many of them said, those leaky fellows in the (separate) Royal Protection Squad—and that pride had taken a bad blow. Many of them told him they were prepared to testify in his defense. When the driver apologized in the High Court and admitted his lies, the old prot team celebrated, sending triumphant congratulatory emails to the man they were supposed to have loathed.
The driver was not the only liar. Perhaps the most unfair of the defamations leveled against him was that he was “ungrateful” for what was being done for him. This was a part of the “arrogant,” “unpleasant” persona that was carefully constructed for him by much of the British tabloid press, to diminish him in the public eye and damage his ability to speak with credibility. The fact was that of course he was grateful, he was grateful every day for nine years, and he said so repeatedly to anyone who would listen. The men who guarded him and became his friends, and those of his friends who were “inside the circle,” all knew the truth.
There was a documentary about Ronald Reagan on television and he sat with the team and watched John Hinckley, Jr., shoot the president. “Look at the security team,” Stan told him. “Everyone is in the right place. Nobody is out of position. Everyone’s reaction times are terrific. Nobody failed. Everyone did their job to the highest standards. And the president still got shot.” The most dangerous zone, the zone that could never be sanitized 100 percent, was the space between the exit door of a building and the door of the car. “The Israeli,” said Benny, meaning the ambassador, “he knows that all right. He puts his head down and runs.” That was the zone in which Hinckley hit the president. But there was a more general truth here. The finest protection officers in the United States, all of them highly experienced and heavily armed, had performed to the very best of their abilities and yet the gunman got through. POTUS was down. There was no such thing as absolute security. There were only varying degrees of insecurity. He would have to learn to live with that.
He was offered Kevlar bulletproof vests to wear. He refused them. And when he walked from the door of a car to the door of a building or back again, he consciously slowed down. He would not scuttle. He would try to walk with his head held high.
“If you succumb to the security description of the world,” he told himself, “then you will be its creature forever, its prisoner.” The security worldview was based on the so-called worst-case analysis. But the worst-case analysis of crossing a road is that there was a chance you would be hit by a truck, and therefore you should not cross the road. But people crossed roads every day and were not hit by trucks. This was a thing he would have to remember. There were only varying degrees of insecurity. He had to go on crossing roads.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said Joyce’s Dedalus, but what did little Stephen Hero know about nightmares? The most nightmarish thing that ever happened to him was getting drunk in Nighttown and going home with Poldy to build the New Bloomusalem and maybe be pimped out by the cuckold Bloom to service randy Molly. This was a nightmare—bloodthirsty priests shooting arrows of retribution and an effigy of himself in a demonstration with that arrow through his head—and he was already awake. In Pakistan one of his uncles, married to his mother’s sister, put an ad in the paper essentially saying Don’t blame us, we never liked him anyway, while his aunt told my mother, who was still in Wembley
with Sameen, that Pakistanis didn’t want her in the country. This wasn’t true. It was probably the aunt and uncle who were embarrassed by their kin and didn’t want her close. She went anyway and nobody attacked her. Sometimes in the bazaar people would ask if her son was all right and sympathized with her, such a terrible thing. So some civility remained in the midst of the bloodthirsty riots. Meanwhile he was in the care of police officers nicknamed Piggy and Stumpy and Fat Jack and Horse—he was getting used to the nicknames and the rotation of personnel—and trying to find a place to move to when he had to leave Porlock Weir (the Holroyds had generously allowed him to stay an extra six weeks, but time was almost up). Suitable houses were proving hard to find especially when he had to do all the looking by proxy. He didn’t exist. Only Joseph Anton existed; and he could not be seen.
The world of books continued to send him messages. Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise wrote from America to tell him that people were making I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE button badges and proudly wearing them as a sign of their solidarity. He wanted one of those badges. Maybe Joseph Anton could wear a badge in solidarity with the person he both was and was not. Gita Mehta told him by telephone, a little waspishly, that “The Satanic Verses is not your Lear. Shame is your Lear.” Blake Morrison said, “Many writers are feeling paralyzed by the affair. Writing feels like fiddling while Rome burns.” Tariq Ali unkindly described him as being “a dead man on leave” and sent him the text of a play he had written with Howard Brenton that was to be staged at the Royal Court Theatre. Iranian Nights. It struck him as a shoddy, hurried, slapstick thing, which included the gibes at his work that were by now becoming conventional. “It was a book that no-one could read” was a sort of leitmotif. Among the subjects the play did not explore were: religion as political repression and as international terrorism; the need for blasphemy (the writers of the French Enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the church to set limiting points on thought); religion as the enemy of the intellect. Those were the themes he might have treated if it had been his play, but it was not. He was only its subject, the author of the unreadable book.
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