Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  He went to south London to play table tennis with the painter Tom Phillips at his studio. It seemed like the right thing to do. Tom had begun to paint his portrait—he told Tom he looked too gloomy in it, but Tom said, “Gloomy? What do you mean? I call it Mr. Chirpy”—so he sat for that for two hours before losing at Ping-Pong. He did not enjoy losing at Ping-Pong.

  That day the 15 Khordad Foundation announced that it would soon begin to send assassination teams to the United Kingdom to carry out the fatwa. Losing at Ping-Pong was bad, but he was trying not to lose his mind.

  Zafar left the Hall School for the last time—the Hall, which had done so much to shield him from the worst of what was happening to his father, the teachers and boys allowing him, without the sentiment ever being expressed in words, to have a normal childhood in the midst of the insanity. Zafar’s parents had much to be grateful to the school for. It was to be hoped that the new school would look after him as lovingly as the old one.

  Highgate was mostly a day school but there were houses for weekly boarders and Zafar had been keen to board. Within days, however, he discovered he hated boarding. At thirteen, he was a boy who liked his private space and in a boys’ boardinghouse there wasn’t any. So he was immediately miserable. Both his parents agreed he should stop boarding and the school accepted their decision. Zafar immediately began to radiate happiness and started to love the school. And now his father had a home near Highgate so he could come and stay on school nights and their relationship could regain what it had lost for four years: intimacy, continuity, and something like ease. Zafar had his own room in the new house and asked for it to be furnished entirely in black and white. He couldn’t bring his friends around, but understood why, and said he didn’t mind. Even without visits from other boys, it was a big improvement over boarding. He had a home with his father once again.

  In India, extremist Hindus destroyed one of the oldest mosques in India, the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built by the first Mughal emperor. The destroyers claimed that the mosque was built over the ruins of a Hindu temple marking the Ramjanmabhoomi, the birthplace of Lord Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu. Mayhem was not the prerogative of Islam alone. When he heard the news of the destruction of the Babri Masjid he was possessed by a complex grief. He was sad that religion had again revealed that its power for destruction far exceeded its power for good, that a series of unprovable propositions—that the modern Ayodhya was the same place as the Ayodhya of the Ramayana, where Rama was king at an unknowable date in the remote past; that the alleged birthplace was the true birthplace; that gods and their avatars actually existed—had resulted in the vandalization of an actual and beautiful building whose misfortune was to have been constructed in a country that passed no strong laws to protect its heritage, and in which it was possible to ignore such laws as did exist if you were sufficiently numerous and claimed to be acting in the name of a god. He was sad, too, because he still had feelings of affection for the same Muslim culture of India that was preventing Mushirul Hasan from going to work, and preventing him from being given a visa to visit the country of his birth. The history of Muslim India was inescapably his history too. One day he would write a novel about Babar’s grandson Akbar the Great, who tried to make peace between the many gods of India and their followers, and who, for a time, succeeded.

  The wounds inflicted by India were the deepest. There was no question, he was told, of his being given a visa to visit the country of his birth and deepest inspiration. He was not even welcome at the Indian cultural center in London because, according to the center’s director (and grandson of the Mahatma) Gopal Gandhi, his presence there would be seen as anti-Muslim and would prejudice the center’s secular credentials. He set his jaw and went back to work. The Moor’s Last Sigh was as secular as a novel could be but its author was thought of as a divisive sectarian in the country about which he was writing. The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his bloody-mindedness was equal to the pain, that his sentences could still form, his imagination still spark. He would not allow the rejections to break his art.

  He became, having no alternative, in part an ambassador for himself. But politicking did not come easily to him. He made his speeches and argued his cause and asked the world’s dignitaries to set their faces against this new “remote-control terrorism,” this pointing of a lethal finger across the world, Him, you see him? Kill him, the bald one holding the book; and to understand that if terrorism-by-fatwa was not defeated it would surely be repeated. But often the words sounded stale in his own ears. In Finland, after he spoke at a meeting of the Nordic Council, resolutions were passed, subcommittees were created, promises of support were given; but he couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing substantial was being gained. He was more delighted by the beauty of the autumn woodland outside the window, and he had a chance to walk in it with Elizabeth, and breathe the crisp air, and feel briefly at peace; and that, to his mind, at that moment, was a greater blessing than all the resolutions in the world.

  With the help of Elizabeth’s gentle encouragement, his disillusion faded. He was finding his voice again, she told him, and his Mistake was fading into the past, though he would have to go on unsaying it for years. He was being listened to with respect, and that undeniably felt good after so many people’s ugly dismissals of his character and work. Gradually he became more practiced at making his case. During the worst excesses of Soviet Communism, he argued, Western Marxists had tried to distance “actually existing Socialism” from the True Faith, Karl Marx’s vision of equality and justice. But when the USSR collapsed, and it became plain that “actually existing Socialism” had fatally polluted Marxism in the eyes of all those who had helped bring the despots down, it was no longer possible to believe in a True Faith untainted by the crimes of the real world. Now, as Islamic states forged new tyrannies, and justified many horrors in the name of God, a similar separation was being made by Muslims; so there was the “actually existing Islam” of the bloody theocracies and then there was the True Faith of peace and love.

  He found this hard to swallow, and tried to find the right words to say why. He could easily understand the defenders of Muslim culture; when the Babri Masjid fell it hurt him as it did them. And he too was moved by the many kindnesses of Muslim society, its charitable spirit, the beauty of its architecture, painting and poetry, its contributions to philosophy and science, its arabesques, its mystics, and the gentle wisdom of open-minded Muslims like his grandfather, his mother’s father, Dr. Ataullah Butt. Dr. Butt of Aligarh, who worked as a family physician and was also involved with the Tibbya College of Aligarh Muslim University, where Western medicine was studied side by side with traditional Indian herbal treatments, went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, said his prayers five times a day every day of his life—and was one of the most tolerant men his grandson ever met, gruffly good-natured, open to every sort of childish and adolescent rebellious thought, even to the idea of the nonexistence of God, a damn fool idea, he would say, but one that should be talked through. If Islam was what Dr. Butt believed, there wasn’t much wrong with that.

  But something was eating away at the faith of his grandfather, corroding and corrupting it, making it an ideology of narrowness and intolerance, banning books, persecuting thinkers, erecting absolutisms, turning dogma into a weapon with which to beat the undogmatic. That thing needed to be fought and to fight it one had to name it and the only name that fit was Islam. Actually existing Islam had become its own poison and Muslims were dying of it and that needed to be said, in Finland, Spain, America, Denmark, Norway and everywhere else. He would say it, if nobody else would. He wanted to speak, too, for the idea that liberty was everyone’s heritage and not, as Samuel Huntington argued, a Western notion alien to the cultures of the East. As “respect for Islam,” which was fear of Islamist violence cloaked in Tartuffe-like hypocrisy, gained legitimacy in the West, the cancer of cultural relativism had begun to eat away at the rich multicultures of the modern world, and down th
at slippery slope they might all slide toward the Slough of Despond, John Bunyan’s swamp of despair.

  As he struggled from country to country, hammering on the doors of the mighty and trying to find small moments of freedom in the clutches of this or that security force, he tried to find the words he needed to be not only an advocate for himself but also of what he stood for, or wanted to stand for from now on.

  One “small moment of freedom” came when he was invited to a U2 concert at Earls Court. This was during the Achtung Baby tour with its pendant psychedelic Trabants. The police said yes at once when he told them: Finally, something they wanted to do! It turned out that Bono had read The Jaguar Smile and, as he had visited Nicaragua at about the same time, was interested to meet its author. (He never ran into Bono in Nicaragua but one day his shining-eyed blond interpreter Margarita, a Jayne Mansfield look-alike, had cried excitedly, “Bono’s coming! Bono’s in Nicaragua!” and then, without any change in vocal inflection or any dimming of the eyes, had added, “Who is Bono?”) And so there he was at Earls Court, standing in the shadows, listening. Backstage, after the show, he was shown into a trailer full of sandwiches and children. There were no groupies at U2 gigs; just crèches. Bono came in and was instantly festooned with daughters. He was keen to talk politics—Nicaragua, an upcoming protest against unsafe nuclear waste disposal at Sellafield in northern England, his support for the cause of The Satanic Verses. They didn’t spend long together, but a friendship was born.

  Nigella Lawson and John Diamond got married in Venice. Like all her friends he was made very happy by the news. Where John was there would always be laughter. At the party they gave at the Groucho Club to celebrate their wedding, the cake was made by Ruthie Rogers and designed, Ruthie said, by her husband, the great architect himself. John said, innocently, “Surely not? If it’s a Richard Rogers design, shouldn’t all the ingredients be on the outside?”

  Germany was Iran’s largest trading partner. He had to go there. A tiny, fierce member of the German Bundestag named Thea Bock intended, she said, to make sure he saw “everybody.” But first he had to get to Bonn, and he could not fly Lufthansa or British Airways. Thea Bock came up with a small private aircraft, bright red, like something out of a World War I story: “Biggles and the Fatwa.” The plane was so small and old-fashioned that the windows opened. It flew so low that he feared they might bump into a hill, or a steeple. It was like riding an Indian scooter-rickshaw through the sky. Fortunately the weather was good, a sunny, calm day, and his pilot was able to fly his little phut-phut uneventfully to the German capital, where the meetings went so well, thanks to the efforts of Thea Bock, that the Iranians got badly rattled, because here, all of a sudden, was Rushdie being greeted warmly by Björn Engholm, the leader of the Social Democrats, and by Rita Süssmuth, the Speaker of the German Parliament, and by many of the most prominent German MPs; and, in the absence abroad of Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, here was Rushdie at the German Foreign Ministry being received by the head of its cultural section, Dr. Schirmer. The Iranian ambassador spoke angrily on German television and said he was certain that Germany would not jeopardize its relations with Iran on account of this man. He also said that American or Israeli assassins might be about to assassinate the apostate, pretending to be Muslim killers, just to make Iran look bad.

  Ambassador Hossein Musavian was hauled into the German Foreign Ministry the next day. “We will protect Mr. Rushdie,” said the deputy foreign minister. “After our very frank exchange, he [the Iranian ambassador] knows this is the case.” The suggestions about a killing by U.S. or Israeli intelligence were called “absurd.” Ambassador Musavian said that his remarks had been “misquoted.”

  So there was momentum, as Frances said; but had critical mass (one of her favorite terms) been achieved? Not yet. The Bradford Council of Mosques made another nasty statement alleging that the campaign was making things worse and that the author should not expect any “reprieve” from the Muslim community. The council’s president, Liaquat Hussein, clearly believed he was an important man saying an important thing. But he sounded like a voice from the past. His fifteen minutes of fame were up.

  He was in Stockholm to receive the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, given to writers resisting persecution, and to address the Swedish Academy. Iran condemned the award, of course. The Iranian chief justice spoke up, and so did the bountiful Ayatollah Sanei. Dear Chief Injustice, he began, but then abandoned the imaginary letter. Some people did not deserve to be written to, not even in the imagination. My dear Sanei of the Bounty, may I draw your attention to the possibility of a mutiny? Maybe you and your pals will end up as Bligh spirits, adrift in a small boat, hoping for the coast of Timor.

  The Swedish Academy met in a beautiful rococo room on the upper floor of the old Stockholm Stock Exchange Building. Around a long table were nineteen chairs upholstered in pale blue silk. One was for the king, just in case he showed up; it stood empty if he did not, which was always. On the backs of the other chairs were Roman numerals from I to XVIII. When an academician died a new member was elected to fill his chair and sat in that chair until he or she moved on to the greater academy in the sky. He thought at once of G. K. Chesterton’s lively thriller The Man Who Was Thursday, about an anarchist cell whose seven leaders were code-named after the days of the week. He was not, however, in the presence of anarchists. He had been granted permission to enter literature’s holy of holies, the room in which the Nobel Prize was awarded, to address a gravely friendly gathering of gray eminences. Lars Gyllensten (XIV) and Kerstin Ekman (XV), the academicians who had withdrawn from this table to protest their colleagues’ pusillanimous lack of response to the fatwa, did not attend. Their chairs were a vacant rebuke. That saddened him; he had hoped to bring about a reconciliation. The academy’s invitation had been offered as a way of compensating for their earlier silence. His presence among them indicated their support. A twentieth, numeral-free chair was drawn up to the table next to the empty seat of the king, and he sat in it and spoke and answered questions until the academicians were satisfied. Elizabeth, Frances and Carmel were allowed to watch, seated in other chairs lined up against a wall.

  At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told? For everyone lived by and inside stories, the so-called grand narratives. The nation was a story, and the family was another, and religion was a third. As a creative artist he knew that the only answer to the question was: Everyone and anyone has, or should have that power. We should all be free to take the grand narratives to task, to argue with them, satirize them, and insist that they change to reflect the changing times. We should speak of them reverently, irreverently, passionately, caustically, or however we chose. That was our right as members of an open society. In fact, one could say that our ability to re-tell and re-make the story of our culture was the best proof that our societies were indeed free. In a free society the argument over the grand narratives never ceased. It was the argument itself that mattered. The argument was freedom. But in a closed society those who possessed political or ideological power invariably tried to shut down these debates. We will tell you the story, they said, and we will tell you what it means. We will tell you how the story is to be told and we forbid you to tell it in any other way. If you do not like the way we tell the story then you are an enemy of the state or a traitor to the faith. You have no rights. Woe betide you! We will come after you and teach you the meaning of your refusal.

  The storytelling animal must be free to tell his tales.

  At the end of the meeting he received a gift. Across the way from this room was a well-known restaurant, Den Gyldene Freden (The Golden Peace), owned by the academy. At the end of their weekly meetings the Eighteen, or however many of them had showed up, re
tired to a private room at the Golden Peace for dinner. Each of them paid, on arrival, with a silver coin bearing the academy’s motto, Snille och smak. Talent and taste. When they left the restaurant the coins were returned to them. These coins were never given out to the general public, but he left the academy that day with one in his pocket.

  In New York, this time, there was no motorcade waiting, no Lieutenant Bob worrying about what Elizabeth might do with a fork. (He had flown on Scandinavian Airlines, taking the long way round, via Oslo.) There were security personnel to guide him through the airport, but that was all. There was no public appearance planned and so the American police were willing to leave him largely to his own devices. He was allowed to have a few days of near-freedom, the closest to it he’d come in almost four years. He stayed in Andrew Wylie’s apartment and the NYPD remained in their cars in the street below. During those days he made peace with Sonny Mehta. And he had dinner with Thomas Pynchon.

  One of Andrew’s best qualities was his unwillingness to bear a grudge. “You and Sonny should patch things up,” he said. “You’ve been friends too long. It’s the right thing to do.” And there were good business reasons for offering an olive branch. In the long term, Random House was the most likely publisher to take over the paperback publication of The Satanic Verses. Penguin would never do it, and as Penguin was the distributor of Granta Books that made a long-term relationship with Granta difficult to contemplate, in spite of Bill’s extraordinary friendship and heroism. “We can’t lose sight of the goal,” Andrew said, “and the goal is normal publication for all your books, including the Verses.” Now that the Consortium edition had leaped the paperback hurdle it would be possible, he believed, to persuade Sonny to take on new books without fear, and also to accept long-term responsibility for the backlist. “Not right away,” Andrew said, “but maybe after they have published the next novel. I really think they will do it. And that’s what should be done.” He and Gillon had gone ahead and negotiated a deal with Sonny and Knopf for The Moor’s Last Sigh. They had also placated Bill, who had been very upset when he was told their plan. But Bill was a friend first and a publisher second and he had a big enough heart to see Andrew’s point. He had saved Haroun from Sonny and now agreed to surrender Moor back to him without rancor.