Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  “Well, it’s a risk,” he told Larry. “But then, what isn’t?”

  He talked to Richard Norton-Taylor at The Guardian. There was a draft text and the EU would ask Iran to sign it. It would contain an absolute guarantee of non-implementation and could be a step on the way to canceling the fatwa later.

  The foreign ministers’ meeting had gone well, Andy Ashcroft told him. The reference to “associates” had not been added to the text but the French had agreed that the foreign ministers’ troika would discuss it with the Iranians orally. He agreed that it was important to talk to the press and emphasize the important points.

  They had managed to get people’s attention. The story was on the front page in every newspaper. The Times wanted to do a follow-up story. Why had HMG not thought of anything like this before? It was being understood that he had had to come up with this initiative himself and had sold it to the French without much effort by the British Foreign Office. Okay, he thought, good.

  A statement on Tehran radio said, It is illogical for the EU to ask for a formal guarantee of non-implementation as the Iranian government has never said it will implement the fatwa. That sounded halfway to a guarantee. Then on April 19, at 10:30 in the morning (London time), the troika ambassadors in Tehran (French, German and Spanish) together with the British chargé d’affaires, Jeffrey James, presented the European Union’s demands to the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  The démarche had been made, and the news was on the wire services at once. The head of the Iranian judiciary, Yazdi, derided the initiative and Sanei of the Bounty said, “It will only ensure that the fatwa is carried out sooner,” and maybe he was right. But Richard Norton-Taylor at The Guardian’s foreign desk told Carmel that Rafsanjani, at the end of his visit to India, had said at a press conference that Iran would not implement the fatwa.

  Zafar wanted to know what was going on. When he was told, he said, “Excellent. Excellent.” His eyes lit up with hope, and his father thought, If the démarche is signed we will have to try and make it mean what it says.

  The “French initiative” was making its way through the labyrinthine intestines of the Iranian mullocracy, being digested and absorbed according to the slow mysteries of that arcane organism. Every so often there would be pronouncements of some sort, positive or negative. These he came to think of as flatulence. They were odorous but they were not the point. Even a loud, shocking rumor—the head of Iranian intelligence has defected, bringing with him documents that prove the regime’s involvement in international terrorism—was no more than a belch rising from the stomach of this many-headed ecclesiastical Gargantua to roar briefly through one of its many and contradictory mouths. (This rumor unsurprisingly turned out to be untrue; a gassy nothing.) The full, official response would come at its own pace.

  In the meantime he again went with Elizabeth to Austria for a few days at the invitation of Christine and the minister of culture, Rudolf Scholten, who were quickly becoming their good friends and wanted to give them a few days “out of the cage.” When they arrived they found themselves in the midst of family tragedy.

  Rudolf’s father had been run down by a car that morning and killed. “We shouldn’t stay,” he said at once, but Rudolf insisted they should. “It will help to have you here.” Christine, too, said, “Really, you should stay.” Once again he learned from others a lesson in grace and strength.

  They had dinner at the art-filled home of Scholten’s close friend André (“Franzi”) Heller, the polymathic writer, actor, musician, producer, and above all the creator of extraordinary public installations and spectacular art-theater events around the world. Heller was excited about the great rally, the Fest für Freiheit or Freedom Festival, that he was staging at the Heldenplatz in two days’ time. It was in the Heldenplatz in 1938 that Adolf Hitler had announced the Anschluss of Austria. To hold an anti-Nazi rally in that same place was to perform an act of reclamation, cleansing the Heldenplatz of the stain of the Nazi memory, and by doing so to strike a blow against the rising neo-Nazism of the present. Nazi undertones were always there in Austria, and the neo-Nazi right, led by Jörg Haider, was growing in popularity. The Austrian left knew its adversary was strong, and became more progressive and passionate in response. “You must stay,” Franzi Heller suddenly said. “You must be there, it’s very important that you speak from that stage about liberty.” He was reluctant at first, not sure if it was right to insert himself into other people’s narratives, but he saw that Heller was adamant. So he scribbled a brief text in English and Rudolf and Franzi translated it and he had to practice, over and over, parrot-fashion, speaking words in a language he did not know.

  On the day of the Heldenplatz rally the heavens opened and a flood fell upon Vienna, giving rise to the thought that if there was any sort of God he was probably a neo-Nazi like Jörg Haider. Or perhaps Haider had some kind of quasi-Wagnerian access to the Nordic weather-god Freyr and had asked him in operatic prayer for this world-destroying Ragnarok-rain. Franzi Heller was very concerned. If the crowd was small it would be a catastrophe, a propaganda gift to Haider and his followers. He need not have worried. As the morning hours passed the square began to fill. The crowd was young, wrapped in plastic and carrying inadequate umbrellas, or simply surrendering with a shrug to the irrelevant monsoon. Fifty thousand and more of them packed the wicked old square with their hopes for a better future. On the stage there were people making music and speeches but the crowd was the star of the evening, the soaked, undimmed, magnificent crowd. He said his few sentences of German and the soaked crowd cheered. His chief security officer, Wolfgang Bachler, was gleeful, too. “This is just the way to attack Haider,” he exulted.

  Across the border at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the eminent Islamic scholar Annemarie Schimmel was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and to widespread dismay spoke in enthusiastic support of the fatwa against the author of The Satanic Verses, a book she had previously denounced. In the resulting uproar she tried the “Cat Stevens defense”—she said hadn’t said it—but then, as many people told the press they were prepared to swear affidavits confirming that they had heard her say it, she briefly said she wanted to apologize for saying it, but then declined to apologize. She was undoubtedly a great scholar and a grande dame of seventy-three but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a member of the Cat Stevens Stupid Party.

  Article 19 had arranged a trip to Denmark to meet the prime minister and foreign minister and in spite of his growing feeling that such meetings were useless, he went. His soft-spoken, kindly, principled publisher Johannes Riis was with him, and William Nygaard came from Oslo, too. They were allowed to walk in the Copenhagen streets and at night, amazingly, to visit the Tivoli Gardens, where they rode the bumper cars for a few blissful, carefree minutes, shouting and smashing into one another like little boys. He watched William and Johannes driving their bumper cars maniacally around the Tivoli track and thought, I have been given a lesson, in these years, in the worst of human nature, but also in the best of it, a lesson in courage, principle, selflessness, determination and honor, and in the end that’s what I want to remember: that I was at the center of a group of people behaving as well, as nobly, as human beings can behave, and beyond that group at the center of a larger narrative filled with people I didn’t know, would never know, people as determined as my bumper-car friends not to allow the darkness to prevail.

  All of a sudden the “French initiative” came to life. Jill Craigie called in a state of high excitement to say that news of “the Iranians backing down” had been all over the radio. He couldn’t get any confirmation from anyone that evening, but Jill’s excitement was contagious. And the next morning the story was all over the news. Amit Roy, author of The Telegraph’s front-page lead story, told Frances D’Souza privately that he had spent three hours with the Iranian chargé d’affaires, Gholamreza Ansari, who had been saying “incredible things.” We’ll never enforce the fatwa, we will withdraw the bounty money. He kept calm.
There had been too many false dawns. But Zafar was thrilled. “That’s wonderful,” he kept saying, moving his father almost to tears. In the midst of the media noise they sat together and worked on his school English text, Far from the Madding Crowd, to help him prepare for his GCSE exams. Instead of Khamenei and Rafsanjani they spoke of Bathsheba Everdene, William Boldwood and Gabriel Oak.

  Frances had heard that Western journalists, including five Brits, were on their way to Tehran at the invitation of the regime. Maybe an announcement was imminent. “Keep your hat on,” he told Frances. “The fat mullah isn’t singing yet.” But the next morning there was a big story in The Times. He remained calm. “I know the reality,” he told his journal. “When will I be able to live without policemen? When will airlines carry me, states allow me to visit without RAID-style hysteria? When will I be able to go back to being a person? Not yet awhile, I suspect. The ‘secondary fatwas’ imposed by other people’s fears are harder to overturn than the mullahs’.” But he also found himself asking, Can it be that I have moved this fucking mountain?

  Andy Ashcroft called from Hogg’s office to say that the Foreign Office had been “completely surprised” by the media hoo-hah. “Maybe the Iranians are engaged in a softening-up process.” Ashcroft thought the official response would not come for another month. The “critical dialogue” meeting between Iran and the EU was on June 22 and that was when they expected to hear the official reply to the démarche.

  On May 30, after the EU foreign ministers’ meeting, the Danish government said it was “confident” that Iran would “make a satisfactory answer to the démarche before the end of the French EU presidency.” The French were pressing hard, the Iranians were taking the matter seriously, pushing for concessions in return, but the EU was standing firm. “It is coming,” he wrote in his journal. “It is coming.”

  Peter Temple-Morris, MP, said on BBC Radio, “Rushdie has been behaving himself for a while, keeping his mouth shut, and that’s why improvements are possible.” But Robert Fisk’s interview with the Iranian foreign minister, Velayati, was full of the old garbage, can’t cancel the fatwa, the bounty offer is “free speech,” all of that. Belches and flatulence. For reality, he had to wait.

  The police were losing their nerve about the publication of The Moor’s Last Sigh. A reading had been arranged at Waterstone’s in Hampstead but now Scotland Yard was reneging on its agreement to allow it to be publicized. The deputy assistant commissioner was “jumpy,” said Helen Hammington, and the local “uniforms” would be jumpier. She feared they would “over-police” the event but she also said the public order “experts” feared a violent demonstration by a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, whom Helen described as “wearing suits” and “talking on mobile phones” and being smart and fast enough to organize a rapid-response attack. Rab Connolly came to see him and said, “There are people in the force who are very hostile toward you and want the reading to go wrong.” He also said that in conversations with Cathay Pacific Airways about the proposed Australasian book tour he heard that at meetings of airline operators British Airways had been “proselytizing their ban” and encouraging other airlines to back it.

  As the publication day of The Moor’s Last Sigh approached the battle between himself and the senior officers at Scotland Yard, which increasingly embarrassed the Malachite team, burst into open war. Rab Connolly called to say that Commander Howley was out of the office, and in his absence another ranking officer, Commander Moss, had sided with the “jumpy” local deputy assistant commissioner, Skeete, against him. The police were backing out of their agreement to allow advertised readings, Connolly said, because it’s you. Margaret Thatcher was going on a book tour too and all her events would automatically receive the police’s maximum efforts because—the old Greenup line again—she had performed a service to the state; but Mr. Rushdie was a troublemaker and didn’t merit their assistance. The officers who dealt with him most frequently—Connolly, Dick Wood, and Helen Hammington (who was at home nursing a broken leg)—were all on his side but their bosses were adamant. “If he goes to that bookshop,” Moss said, “he goes alone.” Howley was back after the weekend, Rab Connolly said, and, “talking out of school,” he added, “I have asked to see him. If he does not back me I will resign from the prot and probably be returned to uniform duties.” That simple statement was a heartbreaker.

  He told Frances Coady and Caroline Michel, who were stunned. They had planned the book launch on the basis of the agreement with the police that was now, at the last minute, being broken. He told Frances D’Souza also. “I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. “I won’t put up with this anymore.” If he was to receive protection it could not be of this judgmental, ungenerous kind. If this diktat was confirmed he would go to war in public. The tabloids would vilify him, but they did that anyway. Let England decide.

  He was at war with policemen who believed he had done nothing of value in his life. Perhaps not all of Scotland Yard thought this way, however. Dick Wood reported that Assistant Commissioner David Veness, the most senior officer to enter the story so far, had “green-lighted” the Hampstead reading, saying he would “tell the fussers to calm down.” Rab Connolly was at home, perhaps brooding about losing his job when he delivered his ultimatum. But in the end there was no ultimatum. On Monday Howley ordered Connolly to cancel the event and Connolly called the bookstore and did so without telling either the publishers or the author himself.

  This was no longer just a battle that could be won using conventional weapons. It was about to go thermonuclear. He demanded a meeting at Scotland Yard the next morning and took Frances Coady and Caroline Michel with him to represent Random House, to point out that their publishing plan was being severely damaged by the police. They met the shamefaced members of the Malachite team—Helen Hammington had come in on her broken leg, and Dick Wood and Rab Connolly were there, all of them raw and aggrieved because they had been fighting with their boss, who wasn’t accustomed to such insubordination, and the results had not been pretty. They were senior officers, but Howley had “shouted at them.” The commander’s decision, Helen said, her face grim and set below her close-cropped hair, was “absolute.” The meeting was over.

  This was when he, in a calculated strategy, deliberately went off the deep end and began to shout. He knew nobody in this office was to blame for what was happening, and that, in fact, they had laid their careers on the line for him; but if he couldn’t get past them, he had lost, and he had just decided not to lose. So cold-bloodedly, knowing it was his only chance, he blew his stack. If Helen couldn’t change the decision, he yelled, then she had bloody well better get him into a room with somebody who could, because Random House and he had acted strictly in accordance with what the police had said was possible, months ago, and this last-minute high-handedness just damn well wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do at all, and if he didn’t get into that room right now he would go public in the loudest and most aggressive way, so get me in there, Helen, or else. Or fucking else. Five minutes later he was alone in an office with Commander John Howley.

  If he had been fire with Helen, now he would be ice. Howley was giving him his best cold stare but he could out-freeze him. The policeman spoke first. “Because of your renewed high profile,” Howley said—meaning the démarche—“we believe that the news media will pick up the story of the reading and put it on the main news.” And after that there would be screaming hordes of Muslims outside the store. “That can’t be allowed.” He kept his voice low as he replied. “The decision is unacceptable,” he said. “I do not believe your public-order argument. You are also being discriminatory. On the same page of today’s Times that has a story about the possible Iranian thaw is an advertisement for a Thatcher book-related event, and you are protecting that. In addition, because Mr. Veness gave the green light just yesterday, everyone at Waterstone’s and Random House knows what’s going on, so this will become public even if I do nothing. And I must tell you that I’m not going to do nothing
. If you don’t reverse your decision I will call a press conference and give interviews to every major newspaper, radio program and TV channel denouncing you. I have never done anything but thank the police up to now, but I can and will change my tune.”

  “If you do that,” Howley said, “you will look very bad.”

  “Probably,” he replied, “but guess what? You will look very bad as well. So here’s the choice. You let the event go ahead, and neither of us looks bad, or you prohibit it, in which case we both do. You choose.”

  “I’ll think about what you’ve said,” Howley said in his gray, clipped voice. “I’ll let you know by the end of the day.”

  Andy Ashcroft called at 1 P.M. The G7 had joined the campaign and agreed to call for an end to the fatwa. The EU was pushing hard for Rafsanjani’s signature and for all the conditions of the French démarche. “You mustn’t settle for just a fatwa-free Europe,” he told Ashcroft. “And the Iranians, in commentary after the announcement, should enjoin Muslims in the West to abide by local laws.” Ashcroft said he was “pretty optimistic.” “I’ve been having a row with the Special Branch,” he told the Foreign Office aide, “and it would be good if you could give things a nudge, because it wouldn’t look good to be having a public row right now.” Ashcroft laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Two and a half hours later Dick Wood called to say that Howley had backed down. The reading was two days away. It wasn’t to be advertised until the morning of the event. That was the compromise being offered.

  He took it.