Joseph Anton: A Memoir (23 page)

The fear that spread through the publishing industry was real because the threat was real. Publishers and translators were threatened by the
fatwa
, too. And yet the world of the book, in which free people made free choices, had to be defended. He thought often that the crisis was like an intense light shining down on everyone’s choices and deeds, creating a world without shadows, a stark unequivocal place of right and wrong action, good and bad choices, yes and no, strength and weakness. In that harsh glare some publishers looked heroic while
others looked spineless. Perhaps the most spineless of all was the head of a European publishing house, whom it would be unkind to name, who had bulletproof glass installed in the second-floor windows of his own office, but not in the first-floor windows through which his employees could be seen; and then brought a screwdriver to work so he could unscrew his company’s nameplate from the front door of the office building. The German publishers, the distinguished house of Kiepenheuer und Witsch, summarily canceled his contract and tried to charge him for their security costs. (In the end the German edition was brought out by a large consortium of publishers and eminent individuals, which was the method also employed in Spain.) The French publisher Christian Bourgois was initially reluctant to bring out his edition and postponed publication a number of times, but was eventually persuaded to do so by the increasingly strident criticisms leveled at him in the French media. Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken were astonishing. They went country by country to coax, cajole, threaten and flatter publishers into doing their job. In many countries the book was only published because of their determined pressure on nervous editors.

In Italy, however, there were local heroes. His Italian publishers, Mondadori, published their edition a couple of days after the
fatwa
. Their proprietors—Silvio Berlusconi’s holding company Fininvest, Carlo De Benedetti’s CIR and the heirs of Arnoldo Mondadori—were wobblier than Viking Penguin’s, and there were doubts expressed about the wisdom of publication, but the determination of the editorial director Giancarlo Bonacina and his staff won the day. The book was published as planned.

While all this and much more was happening the author of
The Satanic Verses
was crouching in shame behind a kitchen counter to avoid being seen by a sheep farmer.

Yes, as well as the screaming headlines there were the private crises, the knot in his stomach created by the constant need to find the next place to live, his fear for his family (his mother had arrived in London to stay with Sameen so that she could be nearer to him, but it would be some time before he could see her), and, of course, there was Marianne, whose daughter, Lara, in several impassioned phone calls, told
her mother that “none of her friends could understand” why her mother was courting such danger. That was a fair point, a point anyone’s daughter might have made. Marianne had found a house to rent and they could have it in a week. That had been a helpful deed, but he was privately certain that she would leave him if the crisis went on much longer. She was finding this new life very hard. Her book tour had been canceled, and if he had been in her position he would probably have left too. In the meanwhile she plunged into something like her normal work process, making copious notes about their location, copying bits of Welsh into her notebook, and beginning, almost at once, to write stories that weren’t really fictions but dramatizations of what they were living through. One of these stories was called “Croeso i Gymru,” which meant “Welcome to Wales,” and began
We were on the lam in Wales
, a sentence that annoyed him because to be on the lam was to be running from the law. They were not criminals, he wanted to say, but did not. She wasn’t in the mood for criticism. She was writing a story called “Learning Urdu.”

The foreign secretary was on television telling lies about him. The British people, Sir Geoffrey Howe said, had no love for this book. It was extremely rude about Britain. It compared Britain, he said, to Hitler’s Germany. The author of the unloved book found himself shouting at the television. “Where? On what page? Show me where I did that.” The television did not reply. Sir Geoffrey’s smug, bland, oddly docile features blinked back at him impassively. He recalled that the former Labour cabinet minister Denis Healey had once compared being attacked by Howe to being “savaged by a dead sheep” and for a quarter of a minute he considered suing the dead sheep for defamation. But that was stupid, of course. In the eyes of the world he himself was the great Defamer and as a result it was permissible to defame him back.

The dead sheep had company. The big unfriendly giant, Roald Dahl, was in the papers saying, “Rushdie is a dangerous opportunist.” A couple of days earlier the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had said that he “understood the Muslims’ feelings.” Soon the pope would understand those feelings too, and the British chief rabbi, and the cardinal of New York. The God squad was lining up its troops. But
Nadine Gordimer wrote in his defense and on the day that he and Marianne left Deb and Michael’s farm and moved into the rented house the so-called World Writers’ Statement was published to support him, signed by thousands of writers. Britain and Iran had severed diplomatic relations. Bizarrely, it was Iran who had broken them off and not the Thatcher government. Apparently the British protection of the apostate renegade was more upsetting to the ayatollahs than the extraterritorial assault on a British citizen was to Britain. Or maybe the Iranians just got their retaliation in first.

The modest white-walled cottage with the pitched slate roof was called Tyn-y-Coed, the house in the woods, a common name for a house in those parts. It was near the village of Pentrefelin in Brecon, not far from the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons. There was a great deal of rain. When they arrived it was cold. The police officers tried to light the stove and after a good deal of clanking and swearing succeeded. He managed to find a small upstairs room where he could shut the door and pretend to work. The house felt bleak, as did the days. Margaret Thatcher was on television, understanding the insult to Islam and sympathizing with the insulted. He spoke to Gillon Aitken and Bill Buford and they both warned that there would be a backlash of public opinion against him for a while. He read the statements of support by the world’s great writers published in
The New York Times Book Review
and took some comfort there. He spoke to Michael Foot on the phone and was uplifted by Foot’s jerky, exclamatory declarations of absolute solidarity. He pictured Michael’s long white hair flapping vehemently and his wife, Jill Craigie, by his side, serenely ferocious. “An outrage. All of it. Jill and I both say so. Yes, indeed.”

There had been a change of protection team. Stan, Benny, Dennis and Mick had gone back to their families and he was now in the care of Dev Stonehouse, a “character” with a face suffused by the color of what looked like a drinking problem, full of scurrilous loose-tongued tales about other “principals” he had taken care of: the night the Irish politician Gerry Fitt drank sixteen gin and tonics, the intolerably high-handed behavior of the minister Tom King toward his prot team, “that chap might get a bullet put in his back one of these days,” and, by contrast, the gentlemanly behavior of the firebrand Ulsterman Ian
Paisley, who remembered everyone’s names, asked about their families, and prayed with his protection officers at the start of every day. In Dev’s team were two more smiling, gentle-natured drivers, Alex and Phil, who turned a deaf ear to Dev “spouting his nonsense,” and a second protection officer, Peter Huddle, who clearly loathed Detective-Sergeant Stonehouse. “He’s like hemorrhoids,” he said loudly in the kitchen, “a royal pain in the arse.”

They took him for a walk in the Black Mountains—the landscape in which Bruce Chatwin had set his best book,
On the Black Hill
—and, out for once in the open air, with countryside and a skyline to look at instead of the interior walls of a house, he felt his spirits lift. This team liked to talk. “I can’t buy my wife presents,” mourned Alex, a lowland Scot. “She dislikes whatever I get her.” Phil had been left to take care of the cars. “He’ll be all right,” said Alex. “OFDs like sitting in their vehicles.” And apropos of nothing Dev announced that he had got laid the previous night. Alex and Peter’s faces acquired expressions of distaste. Then suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his lower jaw. It was his lower wisdom teeth acting up. The pain faded after a while, but it was a warning. He might need to see a dentist.

They had told him they didn’t like the idea of him going to London too often but they also understood that he needed to see his son. His friends made their homes available and he was driven in to meet Zafar there, at the Archway home of his old Cambridge friend Teresa Gleadowe and her husband, the gallerist Tony Stokes, at whose little Covent Garden gallery the launch party for
Midnight’s Children
had been held in another lifetime, or at the Kentish Town home of Sue Moylan and Gurmukh Singh, who had met and fallen in love at his wedding to Clarissa and would never be apart again. They were an ideally suited odd couple: she the judge’s daughter and classic English rose and he the tall, handsome Sikh from Singapore, a pioneer in the nascent science of computer software. (When Gurmukh decided to learn gardening he built a computer program that told him exactly what to do every day of the year. His garden, planted and maintained according to the program’s instructions, thrived mightily.) Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser opened their doors to him and so did many other friends. Bill Buford told him: “Your friends are going to close
around you like an iron circle, and inside that ring you will be able to lead your life.” That was exactly what they did. Their code of silence was unbreakable. Not one of them ever inadvertently let slip any details of his movements, not once. He wouldn’t have survived six months without them. After much initial mistrust, the Special Branch came to rely on his friends, too—to appreciate that these were serious people who understood what needed to be done.

This was what had to happen for him to meet his boy. The team’s “fifth man,” who was based at Scotland Yard, would visit the “venue” in advance, assessing it for security, instructing the homeowners on what they had to do, lock those doors, draw those curtains. Then he would be driven to the venue, always by the most circuitous route, with many countersurveillance tricks being employed, a process known as “dry-cleaning”—making sure they weren’t being followed. (Countersurveillance driving involved, in part, driving as weirdly as possible. On a motorway he was sometimes driven at wildly varying speeds, because, if anyone else did the same thing, it meant they had a tail. Sometimes Alex would get into an exit lane and drive very fast. Anyone following would not know if he was going to leave the motorway or not and would have to drive very fast behind them, thus revealing his presence.) Meanwhile another car would collect Zafar and bring him to the meeting place, also after being “dry-cleaned.” It was a lot, but then he saw the joy in his child’s eyes and that told him everything he needed to know.

He saw Zafar for an hour at the Stokes household. He spent another hour with his mother and Sameen at the Pinters’ home in Campden Hill Square and in his mother’s iron self-control he saw again the woman she had been in the days before and after his father’s death. She hid her fear and worry behind a tight but loving smile, but her fists often clenched. Then, because it was too late to drive all the way back to Wales, he was taken to Ian McEwan’s cottage in the village of Chedworth in Gloucestershire, and was able to spend a night in the company of good and loving friends—Alan Yentob and his partner, Philippa Walker, as well as Ian. In an interview with
The New Yorker
, Ian later said, “I’ll never forget—the next morning we got up early. He had to move on. Terrible time for him. We stood at the
kitchen counter making toast and coffee, listening to the eight o’clock BBC news. He was standing right by my side and he was the lead item on the news. Hezbollah had put its sagacity and weight behind the project to kill him.” Ian’s memory was slightly at fault. The threat on the news that day did not come from the Iranian-financed Hezbollah group in Lebanon but from Ahmad Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command.

Commander John Howley of the Special Branch—the high-flying police officer in charge of “A” Squad, who afterward rose to the rank of deputy assistant commissioner and became the head both of the Special Branch and the antiterrorism work of Scotland Yard—came to see him in Wales, accompanied by Bill Greenup, the officer whom Marianne, in her Welsh story, had renamed “Mr. Browndown.” Mr. Greenup’s attitude toward him was unfriendly. It was plainly his view that they were dealing with a troublemaker who had got more than he bargained for and now good police officers had to risk their necks to save his, to rescue him from the consequences of his own actions. And the troublemaker was a Labour voter too and had criticized the very government, the Thatcher administration, which was now obliged to sanction his protection. There were hints from Mr. Greenup that the Special Branch was thinking of handing over his protection to regular uniformed police, and he could take his chances. It looked now as though he would be at risk for a very considerable time and that was not what the Special Branch had foreseen, or wanted. This was the bad news that Commander Howley, a man of few words, had come all the way to Wales to give him. It was no longer a matter of lying low for a few days to let the politicians sort it out. There was no prospect of his being allowed (
allowed?
) to resume his normal life in the foreseeable future. He could not just decide to go home and take his chances. To do so would be to endanger his neighbors and to place an intolerable burden on police resources, because an entire street, or more than one street, would need to be sealed off and protected. He had to wait until there was a “major political shift.” What did that mean, he asked: Until Khomeini died? Or: Never? Howley did not have an opinion. It was not possible for him to estimate how long.