Read Joseph Anton: A Memoir Online
Authors: Salman Rushdie
Joseph Anton: A Memoir (28 page)
Michael Holroyd called to say that, in his opinion, the effect of the big march had been to create a huge swing of public opinion against the protesters. People who had been on the fence were coming off it, revolted by what they saw on TV, the posters reading
KILL THE DOG
,
DIE RUSHDIE BASTARD
, and
WE’D RATHER DIE THAN SEE HIM LIVE
, and the twelve-year-old boy explaining to the cameras that he was ready to kill the bastard personally. The appearances by Kalim Siddiqui and Cat Stevens had been helpful as well. The press coverage of these events was indeed very much on his side. “I hate,” said a commentator in the London
Times
, “to see a man outnumbered.”
There had been sightings of him everywhere that hot, hot May—in Geneva and Cornwall and all over London, and at an Oxford dinner party picketed by Muslims. The South African writer Christopher Hope told Clarissa’s colleague Caradoc King that he had actually been at a reception in Oxford also attended by the invisible man. Tariq Ali claimed to have dined with him at a remote location. None of these sightings was accurate, unless there really was a phantom Rushdie on
the loose, a runaway shadow like the one in Hans Christian Andersen’s great, scary story, performing party tricks while Joseph Anton stayed home. The runaway shadow first glimpsed on the stage of the Royal Court in
Iranian Nights
did crop up again in the title of a second play, by Brian Clark, author of
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
This new work was elegantly titled
Who Killed Salman Rushdie?
He telephoned Clark to point out that the answer to the question was “Nobody, or not yet, anyway, and let’s hope it doesn’t happen,” and Clark offered to change the title to
Who Killed the Writer?
but the premise would remain the same: a writer killed by Iranian assassins because of a book he wrote. “Fiction?” Sure. Could be anybody. Clark told him he intended to offer the work for production. His life and death were both becoming other people’s property. He was fair game.
Everyone in England was sunbathing but he remained indoors, growing pale and hairy. He was offered a place on the European “ticket” of the Italian center parties—the Republican Party, the Liberal Party and the Radical Party of one Marco Pannella, who was the person making the offer, which reached him through the office of Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the British Liberal Democrats. Gillon said, “Don’t do it; it sounds like a publicity stunt.” But Pannella said he felt Europe should make a concrete gesture of solidarity toward him, and if he became a member of the European Parliament (MEP) any attack on him would be considered an attack on the European Parliament itself, which might dissuade some potential attackers. Scotland Yard, whose senior officers seemed determined to hold him incommunicado, feared that such a move might actually increase the danger to him, acting as a red rag to some Muslims; and it might endanger others too. How would he feel if as a result of his decision some “soft targets in Strasbourg” were attacked? In the end he decided against accepting Signor Pannella’s invitation. He was not a politician. He was a writer. It was as a writer that he wanted to be defended, as a writer that he wanted to defend himself. He thought of Hester Prynne wearing her scarlet letter with pride. He too had been branded with a scarlet
A
now, standing not for “Adulteress” but for “Apostate.” He too, like Hawthorne’s great heroine, must wear the scarlet letter as a badge of honor, in spite of the pain.
He was sent a copy of the American magazine
NPQ
, in which he was glad to find an Islamic scholar writing that
The Satanic Verses
stood within a long Muslim tradition of doubting art, poetry and philosophy. One quiet voice of sanity, striving to be heard above the caterwauling of murderous children.
There was a second meeting with Commander Howley, which took place at the Thornhill Crescent, Islington, home of his friend the raunchy Australian comic novelist Kathy Lette and her husband, his lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC. Howley reminded him of a nutcracker in the shape of a man’s head and arms that his father used to crack walnuts. One placed the nut in the man’s jaws and snapped the arms together and the nut gave way with a satisfying crack. The man had a fearsome jawline that Dick Tracy would have envied, and, when the nutcracker was closed, a thin, grim mouth. Any walnut, sighting Commander Howley, would have quaked in its shell. He was a stern and serious man. But on this occasion he had come to provide hope of a kind. It was plainly unreasonable, he conceded, to force on anyone a permanently peripatetic life, requiring him to rent or borrow homes forever. It had therefore been decided—policemen were fond of the passive voice—that he be allowed (there it was again, that strange
allowed
) to start looking for a permanent home to move into “in the middle of the next year, or thereabouts.” The middle of next year was a year away, which was disheartening, but the idea of being able to have a home again, and to be protected in it like every other “principal,” was cheering, and restorative of his self-respect. How much more dignified that would be than this fretful, scuttling existence! He thanked Commander Howley for that, and added that he hoped he would not be asked to remain buried in the countryside somewhere, far from his family and friends. “No,” Howley said. It would be easier for everyone if the house were to be located within the “DPG area.” The DPG was the Diplomatic Protection Group, which could offer a rapid-response service in case of need. There would have to be a reinforced safe room and a system of panic buttons but that was presumably acceptable. Yes, he said, of course. “Very well then,” Howley said. “We’ll aim at that.” The nutcracker jaw clamped shut.
He was not able to share the news with anyone, not even his hosts
for the day. He had met Kathy Lette in Sydney five years earlier when he was walking near Bondi Beach with Robyn Davidson. There were sounds of a party wafting down from a fourth-floor apartment and when they looked up they saw a woman sitting on the balcony railing with her back to the sea. “I’d recognize that bottom anywhere,” Robyn said. That was how his friendship with Kathy began: from the bottom up. Robyn vanished from his life but Kathy remained. She arrived in England after falling in love with Geoffrey, who broke up with Nigella Lawson to be with her, a decision that improved the lives of everyone concerned, including Nigella’s. In the Thornhill Crescent house, after the police departed, Geoff held forth on the legal attacks on
The Satanic Verses
and why they would fail. His conviction and strength of feeling were both reassuring. He was a valuable ally.
Marianne came back from an outing in the city. She said she had run into Richard Eyre, the director of the National Theatre, on a subway platform, and when he saw her he burst into tears.
So much was being said by so many people, but the police were asking him not to make further inflammatory statements, their assumption being that any statement by him would be inflammatory simply because he was the one making it. He found himself composing a thousand letters in his head and firing them off into the ether like Bellow’s Herzog, half-deranged, obsessive arguments with the world that he could not actually send on their way.
Dear
Sunday Telegraph,
Your plan for me is that I should find a safe, secret haven in, perhaps, Canada, or a remote part of Scotland where the locals, ever alert to the presence of strangers, could see the bad guys coming; and once I had found my new home I should keep my mouth shut for the rest of my days. The notion that I have done nothing wrong and, as an innocent man, deserve to be able to lead my life as I choose has evidently been considered and eliminated from your range of options. Yet, oddly, this is the absurd idea to which I cling. Being a big city boy, I have never liked the countryside (except in short bursts) anyway, and cold weather is another long-standing dislike, which rules out
both Scotland and Canada. I am also not good at keeping my mouth shut. If someone tries to gag a writer, Sirs, would you not—being journalists yourselves—agree that the best reply is not to be gagged? To speak, if anything, louder and more audaciously than before? To sing (if you are able to sing, which I confess I am not) more beautifully and daringly? To be, if anything, more present? If you can’t see it that way, I offer you my apologies in advance. For that is my plan
.
Dear Brian Clark
,
Whose life is it anyway?
Dear Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits
,
I have visited at least one college in which young Jewish men were being taught, rigorously and judiciously, the principles and practices of judicious and rigorous thought. Theirs were some of the most impressive and honed young minds I have ever encountered and I know they would understand the danger and impropriety of making false moral equivalences. It is a shame that a man they might look to as a leader has become neglectful of the proper process of the mind. “Both Mr. Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech,” you say. Thus a novel which, love it or hate it, is in the opinion of at least a few critics and judges a serious work of art is equated with a naked call for murder. This ought to be denounced as a self-evidently ridiculous remark; instead, Chief Rabbi, your colleagues the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope in Rome have said substantially the same thing. You have all called for the prohibition of offenses to the sensibilities of all religions. Now, to an outsider, a person of no religion, it might seem that the various claims to authority and authenticity made by Judaism, Catholicism and the Church of England contradict one another, and are also at odds with the claims made by and on behalf of Islam. If Catholicism is “true” then the Church of England must be “false,” and, indeed, wars were fought because many men—and kings, and popes—believed just that. Islam flatly denies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and many Muslim priests and politicians openly flaunt their anti-Semitic views. Why then this strange unanimity between apparent irreconcilables? Think, Chief Rabbi, of the Rome of the Caesars. As it was with that great clan, so perhaps it is with the great world religions. No matter how much you may detest one another and seek to do one another down, you are
all members of one family, occupants of the single House of God. When you feel that the House itself is threatened by mere outsiders, by the hell-bound armies of the irreligious, or even by a literary novelist, you close ranks with impressive alacrity and zeal. Roman soldiers marching into battle in close formation formed a testudo, or tortoise, the soldiers on the outside creating walls with their shields while those in the middle raised their shields over their heads to make a roof. So you and your colleagues, Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, have formed a tortoise of the faith. You do not care how stupid you look. You care only that the tortoise wall is strong enough to stand
.
Dear Robinson Crusoe
,
Suppose you had four Man Fridays to keep you company, and they were all heavily armed. Would you feel safer, or less safe?
Dear Bernie Grant, MP
,
“Burning books,” you said in the House of Commons exactly one day after the
fatwa,
“is not a big issue for blacks.” The objections to such practices, you claimed, were proof that “the whites wanted to impose their values on the world.” I recall that many black leaders—Dr. Martin Luther King, for example—were murdered for their ideas. To call for the murder of a man for his ideas would therefore appear to the bewildered outsider to be a thing which a black member of Parliament might find horrifying. Yet you do not object. You represent, sir, the unacceptable face of multiculturalism, its deformation into an ideology of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the death of ethical thought, supporting the right of tyrannical priests to tyrannize, of despotic parents to mutilate their daughters, of bigoted individuals to hate homosexuals and Jews, because it is a part of their “culture” to do so. Bigotry, prejudice and violence or the threat of violence are not human “values.” They are proof of the absence of such values. They are not the manifestations of a person’s “culture.” They are indications of a person’s lack of culture. In such crucial matters, sir, to quote the great monochrome philosopher Michael Jackson, it don’t matter if you’re black or white
.
In Tiananmen Square a man holding shopping bags stood in front of a column of tanks, stopping their advance. Half an hour earlier in the
supermarket he could not have been thinking of heroism. Heroism came upon him unbidden. This was on June 5, 1989, the third day of the massacre, so he must have been aware of the danger he was in. Yet he stood there until other civilians came and drew him aside. There are those who say that after his gesture he was taken away and shot. The number of the Tiananmen dead was never revealed and is not known. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez the banana company—headed by Mr. Brown, a name belonging in a Tarantino movie—massacred three thousand striking workers in the main square of Macondo. After the killings there was a cleanup so perfect that the incident could be flatly denied. It never took place, except in the memory of José Arcadio Segundo, who saw it all. Against ruthlessness, remembering was the only defense. The Chinese leadership knew this: that memory was the enemy. It was not enough that the protesters be killed. They had to be falsely remembered as deviants and rogues, not as brave students who gave their lives for freedom. The Chinese authorities worked hard on this false version of the past and eventually it took root. The year that began with the small horror of the
fatwa
had acquired a greater horror to tremble at, whose terribleness would grow with the passing years, as the defeat of memory by lies was added to the protesters’ useless deaths.
It was time to move out of Porlock Weir. A rental cottage had been found for him by the police, back in Brecon, in a place called Talybont. Maggie Drabble and Michael Holroyd came down to reclaim their home and to celebrate Maggie’s fiftieth birthday there. Marianne was not coming to Talybont; she was leaving for America. Lara was graduating from Dartmouth and she naturally wanted to be there. Her departure would be a relief for them both. He could see that she was at the end of her tolerance, more than usually wild-eyed, the tension pouring off her like sweat off a marathon runner. She needed at least a break, probably a way out. He could understand that. She had not bargained for this, and it wasn’t her fight. The cliché,
stand by your man
, insisted she had to stay, but everything in her was screaming
Go
. Maybe it would have been different if they had been more in love. But
she was standing by a man she wasn’t happy to be with. Yes, she needed to go to her daughter’s graduation day.
