Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  After the ceremony his publisher Johannes Riis suggested that they go with a few friends to a nice Copenhagen bar for a drink, and while they were in the bar the “Christmas beer” arrived. Men wearing red Santa hats came in bearing cases of the traditional winter ale, and he was given one of the first bottles, as well as one of the Santa hats, which he put on. Somebody took a photograph: the man who had been thought too dangerous to allow into Denmark sitting like anyone else in an ordinary bar, drinking a beer and wearing a party hat. This defiantly unthreatened picture almost brought down the Danish government when it was on every front page the next morning. The prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, had to apologize publicly for his earlier veto. Then there was a meeting with Rasmussen, who congratulated him on his little victory. “I just decided to fight,” he told the confounded prime minister. “Yes,” said Rasmussen shamefacedly, “and you did it very well.”

  He wanted to think about other things. As he entered the year in which he would turn fifty and become a father for the second time he knew that he was sick of fighting for seats on airplanes, of being upset by name-calling in the newspapers, of policemen sleeping in his house, of lobbying politicians, and of secret Mr. Mornings and Mr. Afternoons speaking of assassination. His new book was alive in his head and new life had stirred in Elizabeth’s womb. For the book he was reading Rilke, listening to Gluck, watching on blurry VHS the great Brazilian movie Orfeu Negro, and being happy to discover, in Hindu mythology, an Orpheus myth in reverse: the love god Kama slain by Shiva in a moment of anger and brought back to life only because of his wife Rati’s entreaties, Eurydice rescuing Orpheus. A triangle was rotating slowly in his mind’s eye, at whose three points were art, love and death. Could art, fueled by love, transcend death? Or must death, in spite of art, inevitably consume love? Or perhaps art, meditating on love and death, could become greater than them both. He had singers and songwriters on the brain because in the Orpheus myth the arts of music and poetry were united. But the quotidian could not be kept at bay. He worried constantly about what sort of life he could offer to the boy who was coming to see them, entering this world out of the void of unbeing to find … what? Helen Hammington and her troops dogging his every move? It was unthinkable. Yet he had to think it. His imagination wanted to soar but he had lead weights tied to his ankles. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, Hamlet alleged, but Hamlet hadn’t tried living with the Special Branch. If you were bounded in a nutshell along with four sleeping policemen then, for sure, O Prince of Denmark, you would have bad dreams.

  In August 1997 it would be the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, and he had been asked to edit an anthology of Indian writing to mark the occasion. He asked Elizabeth to help him. It would be something they could do together, something to think about together other than the difficulties of their lives.

  He had been talking to the police about changing the system. Elizabeth and he needed to prepare a room for the baby and perhaps also find a live-in nanny. They could no longer offer accommodation to four police officers a night, and anyway, how much good were they if they were all asleep? For once he found the Yard receptive to his ideas. It was agreed that police officers would no longer sleep at his residence. He would have a daytime team and then a night shift of two officers who would remain in the “police living room,” awake, monitoring their array of video screens. Under this arrangement, he was told, he could finally have a “dedicated team,” not made up of part-timers from other teams but allocated to himself alone, and that should simplify his life. The new deal was in place by early January 1997 and he noticed that all the protection officers were glum and grumpy. Oh, he thought in a lightbulb moment, it’s because of the overtime.

  One of the great benefits of being on a “covert prot” like Operation Malachite, and living with the principal twenty-four hours a day, was that the overtime was terrific. On all other, “overt” prots the protection teams went home at night and the principal’s residence was protected by uniformed officers. Now all of a sudden their nocturnal overtime payments had vanished. No wonder they were a bit cheesed off, to be honest with you, Joe, and no wonder the bigwigs at the Yard had so quickly acceded to his suggestion. He had saved them a pile of cash.

  The very next weekend he discovered that the “extra convenience of a dedicated team” was a fiction. He had been invited to Oxford to Ian McEwan’s home but was abruptly informed by Hammington’s deputy Dick Stark, whose self-satisfaction had begun to be a constant irritation, that no drivers were available, so he would have to stay indoors all weekend. There was a “manpower shortage,” though “obviously,” if Elizabeth needed to go to hospital, they would find a way. From now on there would “always be more difficulty at weekends.” He would need to tell them by Tuesday if he wanted any “movements” on Saturday or Sunday. The Oxford trip seemed, he was told, like “a lot of manpower for not very much.”

  He tried to argue his case. There were now three officers at his house all day, so if he wanted to go to a private event like a dinner at a friend’s house they needed to find only one more driver—was that really so difficult? But as usual, at Scotland Yard, there was only a minimal desire to be helpful to him. There was a general election coming, he thought, and if the Labour Party won it he would have friendlier people in high places. He had to get guarantees that he would be assisted to lead a livable life. He would not accept imprisonment, with outings at the police’s pleasure.

  Meanwhile Elizabeth had become obsessed by secrecy. She didn’t want anyone outside their inner circle to know she was pregnant until the baby was born. He did not know how to keep such secrets anymore. He wanted to be allowed to live an honest life with his family. He even spoke to her about marriage but when he mentioned a prenup the conversation became a quarrel. He tried to speak about the greater ease of being in America and the quarrel got worse. They were going crazy, he thought. Locked up and insane. Two people who loved each other were being smashed by the stresses imposed on them by the police, the government, and Iran.

  The Daily Insult carried a story on its women’s page about a German psychologist who said that ugly men did well with pretty women because they were more attentive. “That must be welcome information in Salman Rushdie’s hideout,” the Insult hypothesized.

  He spoke to Frances D’Souza about setting up a group of sympathetic MPs to take up his cause, and maybe even adding a couple of friendly lords like Richard Rogers. (He had no constituency MP of his own because his location could not be disclosed.) She thought it was a good idea. A week later Mark Fisher, Labour’s arts spokesman, invited him to the House of Commons to have a drink with Derek Fatchett, the deputy to Robin Cook, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman and the probable foreign secretary in a Labour government. Fatchett heard him out with mounting rage and said, “I promise you, when we come to power, it will be a high priority for us to sort this out.” Mark promised to stay on every aspect of the case. Why, he wondered as he left, kicking himself, didn’t I think of this adopt-an-MP scheme before?

  He went to the annual “A” Squad party, in a bad mood with the senior officers, and left as soon as was polite. Afterward he was allowed to have dinner with Caroline Michel and Susan Sontag in a restaurant. He told Susan about the baby and she asked if they were going to get married. Um, he stumbled, we’re doing fine, lots of people don’t get married these days. “Marry her, you bastard!” Susan shouted. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to you!” And Caroline agreed. “Yeah! What are you waiting for?” Elizabeth seemed very interested in his answer to that question. When he got home he stood in the kitchen leaning against the Aga range, and said, wryly, “We’d better get married, then.” The next morning Elizabeth asked him as soon as he woke up, “Do you remember what you did last night?” He found that he was feeling good about it, which amazed him. After the Wiggins catastrophe he had thought he would never risk another marriage. But here he went again, as the song had it, taking
a chance on love.

  She didn’t want to be married looking pregnant. So maybe they would do it in the summer, after the baby arrived, in America. A few weeks earlier they had been allowed, as a sort of Christmas treat, to accept Richard Eyre’s invitation to see his production of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre, and now Elizabeth could spend a few months in the role of Adelaide, “the well-known fiancée.” No sooner had he made this joke than the person developed a cold.

  BBC TV was trying to adapt Midnight’s Children as a five-part miniseries but the project had run into script difficulties. The writer Ken Taylor, who had so successfully adapted Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, was finding the very different Midnight’s Children a harder task. Alan Yentob called to say, “If you want this series to be made I’m afraid you’re going to have to step in.” Kevin Loader, the series producer, promised to give Ken Taylor the bad news but never did so, and Ken, not surprisingly, was angry when he found out. However the new scripts had been drafted and the director, Tristram Powell, told him that Mark Thompson, the new controller of BBC2, was delighted with them and was now “100 percent behind the project.” That was good. But the real problems this project would face would not come from within the BBC.

  Rab Connolly came to see him, in a conciliatory frame of mind. He denied that Labour MPs had been putting any pressure on Scotland Yard, but it seemed probable. “I think we can say that you won’t have problems about things like the McEwan visit again,” he said.

  It was the week of the fatwa anniversary and the “super-secret” information he had been given by Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon was all over the papers. “Security had been stepped up” around him, The Guardian reported, which wasn’t true, “because MI5 knows of a specific threat,” which was. Meanwhile Sanei of the Bounty had increased the money by another half a million dollars. The Times made the bounty offer its lead story and, in an editorial, demanded that Britain lead the EU in taking a new, tougher line with Iran. He himself wrote a piece that was widely published around the world, and did interviews with CNN and the BBC to back it up, suggesting that if such an attack had been launched against someone thought to be “important”—Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Archer—the world community would not have sat on its hands for eight years, bleating impotently. The lack of a solution therefore reflected a widespread belief that some people’s lives—the lives of troublesome writers, for example—were worth less than others’.

  But he was more worried about Zafar than Iran. Zafar had passed his driving test and had been bought a small car but adulthood seemed some distance away. The thrill of the car was encouraging some wild behavior. There was a girl, Evie Dalton, and Zafar was playing truant. He left home early saying that his whole class had been called in for extra English to go through coursework—what a fluent liar he had become! This was the fatwa’s damage, and if it proved to be long-term damage that would be unbearable. A girl had called the school pretending to be Clarissa, to say he had a doctor’s appointment and would be in later. The school, smelling a rat, called Clarissa to check, and the lie was discovered. Clarissa spoke to Evie’s mother, Mehra, and of course that nice Indian lady was deeply shocked.

  Zafar turned up at school at lunchtime and was in a good deal of trouble. His parents grounded him, and he would not have the use of the car for quite some time. That he could simply disappear, knowing the panic it would unleash in his father about his safety, was a sign of how far off the rails he was getting. He had always been a kind and thoughtful boy. But he was a teenager now.

  He took Zafar out for dinner, just the two of them, and that helped. He understood it was important to do this regularly and felt foolish not to have understood that before. Zafar was worried on his new brother’s behalf, he said. You’re an older parent, Dad, and as he grows up he will have a very strange life, like me. He wanted very much to bring his Evie to the Bishop’s Avenue house. But two weeks later he was heartbroken. Evie, to whom he felt so close because they were both half-Indian, had left him for his best friend, Tom. “But I can’t stay angry with anyone for more than a few hours,” he said, movingly. He was trying to remain friends with them both (and he succeeded; Evie and Tom remained two of his very closest pals). But the situation preyed on his mind and seriously affected his schoolwork. He had to buckle down. A levels would be upon him very soon.

  Two weeks later Zafar was given permission to use his car again and almost at once had an accident. He called at a quarter past nine in the morning; the accident had happened just around the corner from Bishop’s Avenue on Winnington Road, but his jailbird father wasn’t allowed to do what any father would do—to rush to the scene and make sure his son was all right. Instead he had to stay in his jail, fretting, while Elizabeth went to find Zafar. The young fellow had been lucky: a nosebleed and a cut lip, no whiplash injuries or broken bones. The accident had been his fault. He had tried to overtake a car that had indicated it was turning right, and he hit the car and then demolished a low garden wall. The local police told him he could have killed someone and that he might be prosecuted for unsafe driving (though in the end he wasn’t). Meanwhile, at the Bishop’s Avenue house, his father’s protectors were saying helpfully, “Well, he has been driving too fast; he was an accident waiting to happen.”

  He called Clarissa and she called the school. Then he called the badly shaken Zafar and tried to give him love and support on the phone, telling him all the usual things about learning from it, becoming a better driver as a result, and so on. “It will probably be all over school by the time I get there,” he said gloomily. “Some guys drove past and saw me.” He was a chastened fellow that weekend, and wrote a nice letter to the lady whose garden wall he had knocked down, and for whose repair his dad, inevitably, would pay.

  Zafar’s “mock A-level” results came in and his performance in this important dummy run was very poor. Two C grades and a D in English. He told Zafar, furiously, “If you don’t do something about this right now you aren’t going to any university. You’re going down the drain.”

  The Indian anthology was done. He had written an introduction that he knew would be argued with in India because it was so politically incorrect, arguing that the most interesting writing being done by Indian writers was now being done in English. He had spent an evening with Anita and Kiran Desai wondering if this was true. They had been looking, they said, for a contemporary Hindi text to translate into English, and hadn’t found anything worth doing. Others he spoke to said, of course there are some people, Nirmal Verma, Mahasveta Devi, in the south maybe O. V. Vijayan and Anantha Moorthy, but in general it’s not a rich moment for literature in the Indian bhashas. So maybe his point was valid, or at least worth offering up as a debating point, but he suspected it would be attacked; and it was.

  Two days after Elizabeth and he delivered the anthology, the police almost killed someone.

  He was working in his study on The Ground Beneath Her Feet when he heard a very, very loud noise and ran downstairs to find all the protection team in the entrance hall looking shocked and, it had to be said, guilty. One of the nicest of the present bunch of prot officers, a gray-haired, well-spoken beanpole of a fellow called Mike Merrill, had fired his gun by mistake. He had been cleaning the weapon and hadn’t noticed that there was a bullet in the magazine. The bullet had crossed the police living room, blasted a hole in the closed door, rocketed across the entrance hall and made quite a mess of the wall on the far side. It was the purest good luck that nobody had been there at the time. The Special Branch–approved cleaning lady Beryl (who was also, he discovered, Dick Stark’s lover; he was married, too, of course) wasn’t there; it wasn’t one of her days. And Elizabeth had gone out, and Zafar was at school. So everyone was safe. But the incident changed something for him. What if Elizabeth or Zafar had been passing by? There was going to be a new baby in this house in a few months and there were bullets flying around it. His friends visited him here. This could have happened at any time. “Thes
e guns,” he said aloud, “have to get out of my house.”

  Mike was mortified and apologized over and over again. He was taken off the protection and never reappeared, and that was a loss. One of the other new protection officers, Mark Edwards, said, in an attempt at reassurance, “In the future, the cleaning and checking procedure will take place against the far wall of the house, never near the inner door. What was done was against regulations.” Oh, he said, so the next time you’ll blow a hole in the side of the house and perhaps kill one of the neighbors? No, thank you. He had been so trusting that he had never even dreamed of such an error, but now it had happened and his trust would not easily be renewed. “The simple fact is,” he said, “that I can no longer have armed men in my home.” There was a new bigwig on his case at Scotland Yard, Detective Superintendent Frank Armstrong (who would later become Tony Blair’s personal protection officer and then temporary assistant commissioner “in charge of the operations portfolio,” which meant, essentially, that he would be the person running the Metropolitan Police). A meeting with Armstrong had been scheduled in a month’s time. “I can’t wait that long,” he told his shamefaced team. “I want that meeting now.”

  He got Rab Connolly, who came up to the house to make his official report. He told Rab he had no wish to make a complaint against Mike or anyone else but the event had created a new imperative for him. The guns had to leave the house, and that had to happen right away. Rab gave him the usual line about what would happen if the house became known, the “very heavy uniform operation,” the whole street closed to traffic, and there would be no protection anymore because “everyone would refuse to do it.” Then he said, “If someone else had been in charge at the beginning, and had taken a proper decision, you wouldn’t have had to hide at all, and you’d be in a completely different situation now.” Well, that made him feel a lot better. This was how the police talked to him. If he wanted this, they wouldn’t do that. If he wanted that, then they would get tough about this. Oh, and if this whole thing had been done right from the get-go then it wouldn’t be wrong now, but because it was wrong it couldn’t be put right.