Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  India announced it was lifting the ban on his visits. It was on the BBC Six O’Clock News. Vijay Shankardass was triumphant. “Very soon,” he said, “you will have your visa.” When he heard the news his feeling of sadness was at first greater than his joy. “I never thought,” he wrote in his journal, “that I would not anticipate going to India with pleasure, yet that is now the case. I almost dread it. Yet I will go. I will go to reclaim my right to go. I must maintain the connection for my sons’ sake. So that I can show them what I loved and what belongs, also, to them.” And yes, it was a Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government that was letting him in, and inevitably it would be said that his being given a visa was an anti-Muslim act, but he refused to inhabit the role of demon that had been constructed for him. He was a man who still loved the country of his birth in spite of his long exile and the banning of his book. He was a writer for whom India had been the deepest wellspring of his inspiration, and he would take the five-year visa when it was offered.

  His initial melancholic reaction faded. He spoke happily, excitedly, about returning to India at a dinner with a group of writers with whom he had participated in a charity reading organized by Julian Barnes. Louis de Bernières took it upon himself to instruct his excited, happy colleague not to go under any circumstances, because by showing up there he would grievously insult India’s Muslims again. De Bernières then delivered a short lecture on the history of Hindu-Muslim politics to a writer whose entire creative and intellectual life had engaged with that subject and who, just possibly, knew more about it than the author of a novel that had notoriously distorted the history of the Greek Communist resistance to the World War II Italian invasion forces on the island of Cephalonia. It was the closest he ever came to punching another novelist in the nose. Helen Fielding, another member of the party, saw the blood rising in his eyes and leaped to her feet, smiling as gaily as she could. “Well! Lovely evening. Just lovely. I’m off!” she cried, and that saved the day, allowing him to get up and excuse himself too, and Mr. de Bernières’s nose remained smugly unpunched.

  He had a private meeting with Derek Fatchett, who said again, Trust me. All the intelligence coming out of Iran was uniformly positive. All parties had signed on to the agreement, all the dogs had been called off. Sanei was a loose cannon, but he didn’t have the money, anyway. “We will go on working on all the issues,” he said. “It matters now to keep our nerve.” Fatchett said that his own statement calling the agreement “a diplomatic success for Britain” had been a problem in Iran. “As was your statement, ‘It means freedom.’ ”

  He was being asked to do something difficult: to hold his tongue. If he did so, the angry voices would gradually fall silent, and the fatwa would fade away.

  Meanwhile in Tehran, one thousand Hezbollah students were marching, saying they were ready to carry out attacks on the author and his publishers, ready to strap bombs to their bodies, and so on; singing the terrorists’ old, sad song.

  He went to meet Robin Cook at the House of Commons. Cook said he had received confirmation that Khamenei and the whole Expediency Council had “signed up to the New York agreement.” So it should follow that all the killers had been called off. He was certain, he said, about MOIS and Hezbollah-Lebanon. Their assassins had been stood down. As far as the Revolutionary Guards were concerned it was a case of “negative intelligence”: There was no sign that any attack from that quarter was under way. “A guarantee has been received from the Iranian government that it will prevent anyone leaving Iran to attack you. They know that their prestige is on the line.” The symbolic meaning of the Cook-Kharrazi “shoulder to shoulder” appearance had been carefully weighed and had been on TV in every Muslim country in the world, “and if you are killed, frankly, their credibility collapses.” He also said, “This is not finished business for us. We will exert further pressure and we expect further results.”

  Then the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom asked a question that was not easy to answer. “Why do you need a defense campaign against me?” Robin Cook wanted to know. “I’m prepared to offer you full access to me, and regular briefings. I’m fighting on your behalf.”

  He replied, “Because many people think I’m being sold out by you, that a weak agreement is being presented as a strong one, and that I’m being shunted aside for commercial and geopolitical reasons.”

  “Oh,” Cook said scornfully. “They think Peter Mandelson is telling me what to do.” (Mandelson was the trade and industry minister.) “That is not so,” he said, and then, echoing Derek Fatchett, “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  He was silent for a long moment, and Cook made no attempt to hurry his decision. Was he being duped? he asked himself. It was only a few days since he had yelled at Michael Axworthy about being betrayed. But here were two politicians whom he liked and who had fought harder for him than any others had in a decade, and they were asking him to have faith, keep his nerve, and above all, for a while, to keep quiet. “If you attack the Khordad foundation it will be great news for them, because then the Iranian government won’t be able to move against them without seeming to be run by you.”

  He thought and thought. The defense campaign had been started to combat the inertia of governments. Now here was his own government promising to work energetically on his behalf. Maybe this was a new phase: working with the government instead of against it.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

  He went to see Frances D’Souza at Article 19 and asked her to dissolve the defense campaign. Carmel Bedford was in Oslo at a meeting of representatives of several of the defense committees and when he called her to tell her his decision she exploded with rage, blaming Frances for the decision. “She’s short-listed for a job at the Foreign Office! It’s in her interest to wind this up!” Frances and Carmel had stopped getting along. He became certain that he had made the right decision.

  So the Rushdie Defense Campaign ended. “Let us hope,” he wrote in his journal, “I am justified in my decision. But at any rate it is mine. I can’t blame anyone else.”

  IRANIAN VILLAGERS OFFER RUSHDIE BOUNTY Residents of an Iranian village near the Caspian Sea have set a new bounty, including land, a house and carpets, on Salman Rushdie. “Kiyapay village will give 4,500 square metres of farmland, 1,500 square metres of fruit gardens, a house and 10 carpets as a reward,” said a village official. The 2,000 villagers have also opened a bank account to collect donations.

  It wasn’t always easy to keep calm, keep silent, and keep his nerve.

  He went to New York to make a TV film about The Ground Beneath Her Feet for French TV. At once the world opened up. He walked the city streets by himself and did not feel at risk. In London he was trapped by the caution of the British intelligence services, but here in New York his life was in his own hands; he could decide for himself what was sensible and what was dangerous. He could recapture his freedom in America before the British agreed it was time to give it back to him. Freedom is taken, never given. He knew that. He had to act on that knowledge.

  Bill Buford, wearing a Mars Attacks head, took him to a Halloween dinner uptown. He wore a keffiyeh, held a baby’s rattle in one hand and a crusty bread roll in the other, and went as “Sheikh, Rattle and Roll.”

  Back in London, it was Jeanne Moreau’s seventieth birthday and he was invited to a lunch in her honor at the French ambassador’s residence. He sat between Moreau, still glamorous and even sexy at seventy, and the great ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who wanted to come and see the play of Haroun. Moreau turned out to be a terrific raconteuse. Also at the table was an embassy apparatchik whose job was to lob softball questions at her: “Now you mus’ tell ‘ow you meet our great Franch film director François Truffaut” and then she was off and running. “Ah, François. It was at Cannes, you know, and I was there with Louis”—“That is our also great Franch director, Louis Malle …” “Yes, Louis, and we are at the Palais du Cinéma, and François, he come up and greet Louis,
and then for some time they walk together and I am behind with another man, and then afterward I am walking with François, and it is very strange because he will not look me in the face, he look always down at the floor and sometimes quickly up, and then down again, until finally he look at me and he say, ‘Can I have your telephone number?’ ” “And,” said the apparatchik, “you give eet to ’eem.” He took over the questioning himself and asked her about working with Luis Buñuel on Diary of a Chambermaid. “Ah, Don Luis,” she said in her deep, throaty cigarette voice, “I love him. I say to him one day, ‘Oh, Don Luis, if only I was your daughter!’ And he say me, ‘No, my dear, you should not wish it, because if you were my daughter I would lock you up and you would not be in the movies!’ ”

  “I have always loved the song you sing in Jules et Jim,” he told her as they sipped their Château Beychevelle. “ ‘Le Tourbillon.’ Is that an old song or was it written for the movie?” “No,” she said. “It was written for me. It was an old lover, you know, and after we break up he wrote that song. And then when François say he want me to sing I propose the song to him and he agree.” “And now,” he asked, “now that it’s such a famous movie scene, do you still think of it as the song your former lover wrote for you, or is it ‘the song from Jules et Jim’?” “Oh,” she said, shrugging, “now it is the song from the movie.”

  Before he left the résidence the ambassador drew him aside and told him he had been awarded the highest rank, commandeur, in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; an immense honor. The decision was made several years ago, the ambassador said, but the previous French government sat on it. But now there would be a party for him here at the résidence and he would get his medal and ribbon. That was wonderful news, he said, but within days the back-pedaling began. The woman responsible for sending out the invitations said she was “holding fire” because she was “waiting for approval from Paris,” and then oddly neither the ambassador nor the cultural attaché, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, could be reached. After several days of being stonewalled he called Jack Lang, who told him that the president of Iran was scheduled to visit France in ten days and that was why the Quai d’Orsay was stalling. Lang made some calls and that did the trick. Olivier called back. Would it be possible to choose a date on which M. Lang himself could come and do the honors? Yes, he said. Of course.

  Zafar gave a party and wanted him to be there. The protection team hustled him into the nightclub and then tried to turn a blind eye to the things that usually happened in such clubs. He found himself at a table with Damon Albarn and Alex James of Blur, who had heard about his collaboration with U2 and wanted to record a song with him too. Suddenly his services as a lyricist were in demand. Alex had drunk the best part of a bottle of absinthe, which had perhaps been unwise. “I’ve got a fucking great idea,” he said. “I’ll write the words and you write the music.” But, Alex, he said mildly, I don’t write music and I can’t play a musical instrument. “Nothing to it,” Alex said. “I’ll teach you how to play the guitar. It’ll only take half an hour. Fucking nothing to it. Then you write the music and I’ll write the words. It’ll be fucking amazing.” The collaboration with Blur did not take place.

  He met Bob Blake, who was now the head of “A” Squad, at Scotland Yard to talk about the future. A new novel would be published in the new year, he said, and he must be free to promote it properly, with proper announcements of appearances and signings. They had by now done enough of these to be confident that there would not be problems. Also, he wanted to scale the protection back even further. He understood that airlines still felt happier if he was brought to the plane by the protection team, and that public venues also appreciated police involvement in his appearances, but other than that, he and Frank could handle most things. Interestingly Blake seemed open to all his proposals, which suggested that the threat assessment was changing, even if he hadn’t yet been informed of the change. “All right,” Blake said, “let’s see what we can do.” He was worried about India, though. It was the view of Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon that if he were to travel to India in January or early February there was the risk of an Iranian attack. Could he know on what their fears were based? “No.” “Well, anyway, I wasn’t planning to go to India at that time.” When he said that he saw the policeman visibly relax.

  He arrived at the foreign secretary’s office in the House of Commons to find Stephen Lander, the director general of MI5, waiting for him along with Robin Cook, who had bad news to deliver. Intelligence reports had been received, Cook said, of a meeting of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council—just saying that name earned Cook a disapproving look from Lander, but he said it all the same—at which Khatami and Kharrazi had failed to pacify the hard-liners. Khamenei was “not in a position” to call off the Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah. So the danger to his life persisted. But, Cook said, he “personally” and the Foreign Office were committed to resolving the problems, and there was no evidence of any planned attack, except for the worry about India. There was no great likelihood of an attack in any Western country, Lander said. No great likelihood was cold comfort, but that was all he was going to get. “I did let Kharrazi know,” Cook said, “that we knew about the SNSC meeting, and Kharrazi was pretty shocked. He tried to say that the deal was still on. He knows his reputation, and Khatami’s, is at stake.”

  Keep your nerve.

  Nothing was ever perfect, but this was a level of imperfection that was hard to take. Still, he remained resolved. He had to take his life back into his own hands. He couldn’t wait any longer for the “imperfection factor” to drop to a more acceptable level. But when he spoke to Elizabeth about America she wasn’t listening. She was listening to what Isabel Fonseca was saying. “America is a dangerous country, and everyone in it has a gun.” Her antagonism to his New York dream was growing. Sometimes he actually seemed to see a jagged rip or tear between them, getting wider, as if the fabric of the world were a sheet of paper and they were on opposite halves of it, falling apart from each other, as if it was inevitable that sooner or later their stories would continue on separate pages, in spite of the years of love, because when life began to speak in imperatives the living had no choice but to obey. His greatest imperative was liberty, and hers was motherhood, and no doubt it was in part because she was a mother that a life in America without police protection struck her as unsafe and irresponsible, and in part it was because she was English and didn’t want her son to grow up American, and in part it was because she hardly knew America, because her America was not much larger than Bridgehampton, and she feared that in New York she would be isolated and alone. He understood all her fears and doubts, but his own needs were like commands, and he knew that he would do what had to be done.

  Sometimes love was not enough.

  It was his mother’s eighty-second birthday. When he told her on the phone that he had a new book due out in 1999 she said, in Urdu, Is dafa koi achchhi si kitab likhna. “This time, write a nice book.”

  IX

  His Millenarian Illusion

  SOMETIMES LOVE WAS NOT ENOUGH. IN THE YEARS AFTER HER HUSBAND’S death Negin Rushdie discovered that her first husband, the handsome youth who had fallen in love with her when she was pretty young Zohra Butt, was still alive. Theirs had not been an arranged marriage but a true “love match” and they did not fall apart because they had stopped being in love but because he was unable to father children and motherhood was an imperative. The sadness of exchanging the love of a man for the love of her unborn children was so profound that for many years she did not speak his name, and her children, as they arrived and grew, were not even told of his existence, until in the end she blurted it out to Sameen, her eldest daughter. “His name was Shaghil,” she said, and blushed, and wept, as if she were confessing an infidelity. She never mentioned him to her son, never said what he did for a living or in what town he made his home. He was her ghost, the phantom of lost love, and out of loyalty to her husband, her children’s father, she suffe
red the haunting in silence.

  After Anis Rushdie died her brother Mahmood told Negin that Shaghil was still alive, had never remarried, still loved her, and wanted to see her again. Her children encouraged her to get in touch. There was nothing standing between the old lovers. The imperative of motherhood was, obviously, no longer an obstruction. And it would be a foolishness to allow illogical feelings of betraying the dead Anis to stand in her way. It was not required of her to live alone and lonely for the rest of her life—and she lived on for sixteen years after Anis died—when there was the possibility of renewing an old love and allowing it to illuminate her later years. But when they spoke to her in this way she gave a small, mutinous smile and shook her head like a girl. In those years of the fatwa she visited London several times and stayed at Sameen’s house and he visited her when he could. The first husband, Shaghil, was still no more than a name to him. She still refused to discuss him, to say if he was a funny or a serious man, or what he liked to eat, or if he could sing, or whether he was tall like her ramrod brother Mahmood or short like Anis. In Midnight’s Children her son had written about a mother with a first husband who could not give her children, but that sad poet-politician, “Nadir Khan,” was created out of the author’s imagination alone. No trace of Shaghil could be found in him except for the biological problem. But now the real man was writing her letters and when she was not smiling like a foolish girl she was pressing her lips tightly together and shaking her head sharply and refusing to discuss it.