Joseph Anton: A Memoir: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  “It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

  Negin Rushdie had read neither book but if she had she would not have believed in Fermina and Florentino’s happy reunion, or rather there was a thing in her that was not allowing her to believe in such an ending. She was frozen as Newland Archer had been frozen, the passage of the years had stymied her, and even though an expression of love seized hold of her face every time his name was mentioned she could not act on what she felt. It was more real to her without him than it would be if he returned. So she never responded to his letters, never called him, and never saw him in the sixteen years that remained. She died as her husband’s widow and her children’s mother and could not, or would not, write a new last chapter to her story. Sometimes love was not enough.

  Anis Rushdie had been married once before Negin as well. They were unusual in this, in their class and place and time, that theirs was a second marriage for them both. About Anis’s first wife his children were told only that she was bad-tempered and that they quarreled all the time. (The children knew that their father had a bad temper too.) And they also knew about a great tragedy. Anis and the first wife had had a daughter, their half sister, whose name they were never told. One night the first wife called Anis and said that the girl was very sick and might die, and he thought that she was lying, that she was telling the story as a ruse to draw him back toward her, so he ignored the message, and the little girl died. When he heard that his daughter was dead he rushed to his first wife’s house but she would not let him in, though he beat his fists on the door and wept.

  The marriage of Anis and Negin remained a mystery to their son. To their growing children it looked like an unhappy life, in which his growing disappointment expressed itself in nightly whiskey rages from which she tried to shield her children. More than once the older children Sameen and Salman tried to persuade their parents to divorce, so that they, the children, could enjoy each parent’s company without having to endure the side effects of their unhappiness. Anis and Negin did not take their children’s advice. There was something they both thought of as “love” below the misery of the nights and as they both believed in it, it could be said to have existed. The mystery at the heart of other people’s intimacy, the incomprehensible survival of love at the heart of unlovingness: that was a thing he learned from his parents’ lives.

  Also: If both your parents had been previously divorced, and then lived unhappily “loving” lives, you grew up with a belief in the impermanence of love, a belief that love was a darker, harsher, less comfortable, less comforting emotion than the songs and movies said. And if that was true, then he, with his many broken marriages—what was the lesson he was teaching his sons? A friend of his once said to him that remaining in an unhappy marriage was the tragedy—not the divorce. But the pain he caused to the mothers of his children, the two women who loved him better than anyone else, haunted him. Nor did he blame his parents for setting him a bad example. This was his own doing and his own responsibility. Whatever wounds his life had inflicted on him, the wounds he inflicted on Clarissa and Elizabeth were worse. He had loved them both but his love had not been strong enough.

  He had loved his sisters, and they had all loved one another, but most of those relationships, too, had come apart. Sameen and he had remained very close. When they were children he was the good boy and she the naughty girl. He would get her out of trouble with his parents and she would beat people up for him. Once the father of one of the boys she had punched, a certain Mohan Mathan, came to their home, Windsor Villa, to complain to Anis. “Your daughter knocked down my son!” he cried in outrage and Anis began to laugh. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d lower your voice before everyone in the neighborhood hears that.”

  The bond between them never weakened, but they gradually became aware that their sister Bunno—her real name was Nevid, but she was always Bunno in the family—resented it. She was five years younger than he was, four years younger than Sameen, and her experience of her childhood was of being excluded from the intimacy of her older siblings. In the end she quarreled dreadfully with them, and with her parents, and went to California to be far away from them all. He felt the pain of his “lost sister” often, but then she would explode into his life so violently that he backed away again. At one point she became crazily convinced that he and Sameen had somehow defrauded her of her inheritance, and threatened to expose and denounce him in public. He had to ask lawyers to warn her off and after that they did not speak for a very long time. The youngest of the family, Nabeelah, known as Guljum, began brightly as a great beauty and a gifted structural engineer, but then the mental unbalance that destroyed her work, her marriage, her relationships with her family and eventually her life began to make its presence felt, she began to chew tobacco and to abuse prescription medication and to eat until her beauty was buried under a mountain of fat, and then, shockingly, she was found dead in her bed and that was how it happened that the youngest of them was the one to go first.

  Love, in his family, had usually not been enough.

  It was the tenth anniversary of the Bradford book burning and then the tenth anniversary of the fatwa—Ten years!, he thought, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun—and the usual people were making their usual noises. Mr. Shabbir Akhtar, whom The Independent described as a “brilliant” thinker, said that they wouldn’t burn The Satanic Verses now because they no longer felt “excluded.” (In the years that followed many British Muslims, including some of the most zealously hostile ones, would suggest that the campaign about the novel had been a mistake. Some only meant that it was a mistaken tactic, because it had made its author more famous and increased the book’s sales, but others went so far as to say they had learned the importance of defending freedom of speech.) On Valentine’s Day the Iranian Revolutionary Guards said in Tehran that the fatwa “would be fulfilled” and Sanei of the Bounty confirmed that his “annihilation” was still planned. But there were no marches, no rallies at mosques, no senior ayatollahs delivering bloodthirsty sermons. So it was quieter than he had feared it might have been.

  He continued to press the police for more freedom. Now that Frank Bishop was working for him, on his payroll, surely Frank could take over more of their duties and, by the way, save them a lot of money? He had learned enough about the difference between “threat” and “risk” to know that the risk attached to him turning up unannounced to a private party, restaurant, theater, or cinema, was almost nil. There was no reason for a whole protection team to be involved. Frank could do it. But they were reluctant to scale the protection back. They asked that he leave things as they were until after his summer visit to Long Island, and he reluctantly agreed.

  The first furor of 1999 followed the granting of his Indian visa. At the last minute a visa officer at India House tried to say he could have only a regular six-month visitor visa, and Vijay Shankardass had to go into India House and see the high commissioner, Lalit Mansingh, as well as the foreign minister, who happened to be in London, and they agreed to “do the right thing” and grant the full five-year visa to which persons of Indian origin were entitled. It was also agreed that if he visited India he would be entitled to the protection of the Indian police.

  At once the Indian Muslim “anger” began. Fierce old Imam Bukhari at the Juma Masjid in Delhi (who, ten years earlier, had condemned the “wrong Salman”) raged against the visa decision before a crowd of three thousand believers at Friday prayers. He was “prepared to die,” he said, to prevent a visit by Mr. Rushdie. Two days later the Tehran Times predicted he would be assassinated in India. “Perhaps Providence has decreed that this shameless person will meet his end where he was born.” In India the only non-BJP leader to support the visa decision was the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Mani Shanker Aiyar of Congress said h
is party had been “quite right” to ban The Satanic Verses and its author, and if the BJP had agreed to a visa it must “take the consequences.” But then he added, oddly, that if Mr. Rushdie did come to India “he will be a guest and must be welcomed.” Imam Bukhari said that Muslims would “object according to the Constitution” but if some devout Muslim decided to kill the blasphemer he would have the support of all Muslims. The writer Githa Hariharan sent him a series of didactic, ideological emails that were simply annoying. It was plain that a trip to India would have to wait until tempers cooled.

  Theresa from Bono’s office called. “Hello, Salman? Have you got a copy of the lyrics of yer song, what is it now, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’?” Why, yes, as a matter of fact he did have a copy. “Only could you fax them over to the studio right away, because they’re about to record the vocals, and Bono’s lost them?” Yes, I could do that. Right away. Yes.

  Then for a time it was all illness and doctors and the beating wings of the exterminating angel. Elizabeth’s cousin Carol Knibb and her husband, Brian, came to stay at Bishop’s Avenue for several days and late at night he had his first sight of Carol’s bald chemotherapy head. It reminded him, without his wanting it to, of the scene in Roald Dahl’s The Witches of the witches peeling off their worldly, “humanizing” garb. He was very fond of Carol and was angry with himself for his reaction, which was, to say the least, inglorious. She had been to see Kanti Rai in America, and he was treating her, but she wasn’t reacting to the treatment as well as Edward Said had, and the prognosis wasn’t good. But there were still things to try, she said, determinedly cheerful.

  Iris Murdoch died. He had attended an Arts Council lunch in her honor not long after the publication of her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, a book that had received a critical mauling. Iris had been in low spirits, he recalled, and had told him that she thought she should stop writing. “Surely not because of a few bad reviews,” he said to her. “You’re Iris Murdoch.” “Yes,” she said sadly, “but sometimes people stop liking your work and you run out of ideas and you should perhaps just stop.” Only a few months later the onset of Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed.

  And Derek Fatchett died. He had a sudden heart attack in a pub and that was the end of him. Nobody had worked harder or with more determination to solve the problem of the fatwa. He was only fifty-four years old.

  He was suffering from a condition called ptosis. His eyelids didn’t open properly and the droop was getting worse, particularly in the right lid. It was beginning to interfere with his eyesight. If he didn’t have an operation the day would come when he wouldn’t be able to open his eyes at all. His hooded, Sleepy LaBeef eyes were often used as metaphors of his villainy, but it turned out they were just a medical affliction.

  The top man for ptosis operations was Mr. Richard Collin. He was booked in at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers, “where all the Royal Family goes for its operations,” Mr. Collin told him, but just before he went in he was told that the “matron” had refused to have him as a patient on security grounds. The team went to see her and, fortunately, was able to pacify her, and the operation was on again. It always distressed him to be so much at the mercy of other people’s fear, it felt like being slapped in the face, and he could never slap back. Then the day before the operation Clarissa called. Zafar was determined to drop out of college. He hated it. It was a “shithole.” He had been offered the opportunity to manage a London nightclub, and he hoped to promote concerts and had a friend with whom he thought he could put on an event at Wembley Stadium and that was the life he wanted. He was overdrawn at the bank, too, and that had to be dealt with. They were both very worried that he was living, as Clarissa said, in “cloud cuckoo land,” and their worry brought them close once again. Zafar needed strong, united parents now. They spoke to him and he agreed to give up the Wembley concert idea. He wasn’t happy about it.

  When he regained consciousness after the operation there was a bandage over his eyes. He called out and nobody answered. “Hello?” He called again and then once again and there was no reply. He didn’t know where he was and he was blind and nobody was speaking to him. Maybe something had gone badly wrong. Maybe he had been kidnapped. Or maybe he was in some anteroom of hell waiting for the Devil’s attention. Hello hello hello no reply can you hear me no they couldn’t is anybody here is anybody there well if they were there they weren’t saying so. A few minutes, or weeks, of (literally) blind panic ended when a nurse’s voice said yes, she was there, she was sorry, Elizabeth had just gone home to sleep, it was 3 A.M., and she just had to go to the bathroom. Perfect timing, he thought, I come out of anesthesia exactly when the nurse has to take a leak.

  In the morning the bandage was removed and there was another bizarre moment when his eyelids didn’t respond properly to the commands of his brain, fluttering crazily and independently of each other, and then everything settled down, he hadn’t been blinded by an accidental knife, and they brought him a mirror and his eyes were open wide. Perhaps the right eye a little too wide. “Yes,” said Mr. Collin, “let’s leave it a week and then maybe a small adjustment.”

  His new eyelids made their debut at a sad but determinedly upbeat occasion, a party at Ruthie and Richard Rogers’s house to celebrate Nigella Lawson and John Diamond’s tenth anniversary. The news on John was bad, worse than bad, there was no point in doing any more surgery, chemotherapy might buy him some time, but that was all. His friends gathered to celebrate his life and John made a “speech” by writing it down and having it simultaneously projected onto a high white wall, a speech whose most remarkable characteristic was that it made the assembled company laugh a great deal.

  Meanwhile the new eyelids were having quite an effect on people. Are you wearing new glasses? You look so well! Have you got a suntan? You look so … happy! Later, when the press got hold of the story, The Sunday Times had a piece that was almost apologetic about the way it had seen him over the years. Suddenly the paper understood that his “aloof, arrogant, sinister hoodlum’s gaze” was just the product of a deteriorating eyelid condition. He looked “revitalized, reborn,” said the article. “How the eyes deceive.”

  He had to go to Torino, Italy, to receive an honorary doctorate before Richard Collin had a chance to adjust his excessively starey right eye and in the photographs of that occasion he looked slightly deranged. The trip went well; this time the Italian police were friendly, eager to please, nonobstructive, very different from their colleagues in Mantova. His cohonoree, John Beumer III, was a mouth cancer doctor from UCLA who made a notably grisly speech about new techniques in the treatment of oral carcinomas, tongues being sewn onto cheeks and the like, and while he listened to Beumer he was thinking, “None of that saved my friend.”

  By coincidence President Khatami of Iran was visiting Rome on the same day, and the press were excited by the synchronicity and made a good deal of it. Khatami, inevitably, didn’t believe it was a coincidence, and “strongly criticized” Europe for supporting the novelist. “Support for Rushdie means support for war among civilizations,” he said. “I very much regret that a person who has insulted the sanctities of over one billion Muslims is currently being praised in European countries.” This was a man who said he didn’t want a clash of civilizations but then characterized everything he disliked as “war”; a man who said he was “against terrorism” but exempted such acts of violence as the fatwa by saying that was not terrorism, it was justice. And this was the “moderate” man whose word he had been asked by the British government to rely on.

  The publication date of The Ground Beneath Her Feet was approaching and the U.S. tour was a problem. Most European airlines were now willing to carry him but the American carriers still refused. He could get to New York, and by using Air Canada could make it to the West Coast, but the rest of the country would have to be covered by hiring a private plane. And there would be the additional cost of Jerry Glazebrook’s security services. They somehow had to find $125,000
for a two-week tour, and the publishers were prepared to put in only around $40,000. He spoke to Andrew Wylie and Jerry Glazebrook and they managed to wrangle the security costs down by $10,000, and the various venues were prepared to contribute, in total, around $35,000 in speaking fees plus security costs. If he kicked in the fees he was being paid by The New Yorker for their extract from the book, and the last three or four months of income from his syndicated New York Times columns, they would be able to pay the bills. He was determined that the tour should go ahead and so he told Andrew to agree, even though it meant he was sacrificing around $80,000 in income. The English reviews were in, and they were mostly very positive, and he didn’t want the American publication to suffer.

  There was no point dwelling on what the critics said, they liked the book or they didn’t, but the strange case of James Wood merited a small footnote. Mr. Wood reviewed The Ground Beneath Her Feet in The Guardian, which also published the first UK extract from the book, and his notice was splendid. “His spectacular new novel … a considerable achievement, inventive and complex … this brilliant novel … buoyant, bonhomous, punning, [it] imparts a creative joy, the most generous in such free pleasure since Midnight’s Children. I suspect that it will deservedly become Rushdie’s most enjoyed book.” Well, thank you, James, he thought. When the novel was published in the United States, Mr. Wood delivered a harsher judgment. He wrote another review, in The New Republic, a revised version of the Guardian piece, in which the “deservedly” fell out of his praise. The book was now a “characteristic postmodern defeat,” whose “seductive ribaldry lacks the ground beneath its feet.” The two notices were published just seven weeks apart. A critic who contradicted himself according to the literary predilections of his paymasters had, perhaps, some explaining to do.