Joseph Anton: A Memoir (37 page)

On April 23 Robert Polhill, a professor at Beirut University, became the first American hostage in Lebanon to be freed by his captors, “Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine,” three years after he was seized. Four days later Frank Reed, who had been a director at the Lebanese International School, was set free by the “Organization of the Islamic Dawn” after four years’ captivity. Ambassador Busby had been telling the truth.

Marianne was a woman of many notebooks, and it was a notebook that ended their marriage. He never knew if she left the notebook at Hermitage Lane intentionally, to trigger the final rupture that she claimed not to want. In Junichiro Tanizaki’s great novel
The Key
, Marianne’s “evil book,” a wife and husband each keep “secret” diaries that may in reality be intended to be found and read. In Tanizaki’s book the diaries serve as an erotic device. In his own life, the notebook he found served a simpler purpose. It told him the truth he had been trying to hide from himself. She had written, during her American tour, that she had no reason to be in England, but he was forcing her to return, knowing she didn’t want to. She had rented a house in America. This was news to him. She knew he could not go to America but she was making plans to leave. She had had enough, which he could very well understand.
Yes, she should go
, he thought,
and let this separation lead gradually to an ending
.

The rest of the journal was darker. She said he feared women.
Yes
, he thought,
at least I am a little afraid of you
. She hated his relationship with his beloved sister Sameen. She made a number of sexual sneers.

She was back in London. He told her he had read the journal and could not continue in the marriage. She became agitated and claimed she did love him and what he had found was her “black journal,” which she used to get rid of her worst thoughts, to discard them by writing them down. That was almost plausible. He himself had used writing in this way, committing his fears, weaknesses, lusts, and fantasies to paper and then throwing them in the trash. But the material in the journal was too categorical, too wide ranging, to be just idle anger or resentment. These were no passing feelings. This was what she really thought. He asked her why she had not told him about renting a house and she began to deny she had done so. But he had spoken to Gillon, who said she had told him about the rental. He said, “I don’t want to fight with you. What’s the point? The war’s over.” Marianne left.

He called Sameen to ask if there was any truth in Marianne’s accusation that he mistreated his sister. She said what he knew: that in the unconditional love they had for each other, nothing could be a problem. He felt disturbed by what he had read, but his main feeling was of relief. This part of his nightmare had come to an end.

The next day the police arranged a treat. Zafar and he were taken on a police speedboat to roar up and down the Thames, all the way to the Barrier and beyond, and then back to River Police HQ at Wapping. Zafar had the time of his life.

Alberto Vitale, the head of Random House, Inc., told Andrew that the last sentence of “Is Nothing Sacred?”—“Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down”—had moved him greatly, and that Random House was once again interested in publishing
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
and Rushdie’s future books as well. Vitale said, however, that he would want an “escape clause” in the contract indemnifying Random House against the possibility of anything being written that “caused danger to his staff.” In spite of this, Andrew and Gillon thought the move to Random and away from Peter Mayer would be a good thing. “I will not sign anything as humiliating as that ‘escape clause,’ ” he told his agents, adding, for emphasis, “Over my dead body.” Andrew felt that this was a point Random House might be willing to concede. Sonny Mehta had finished reading
Haroun
and said he liked it. Within days the deal with Random House was done. But Vitale did not want to announce it. In fact, he wanted to keep it secret as long as possible. But Sonny Mehta and Andrew agreed that a press statement should be drafted.

He was a man without armies obliged to fight constantly on many fronts. There was the private front of his secret life, with its cringings and crouchings, its skulkings and duckings, its fear of plumbers and other repairmen, its fraught search for places of refuge, and its dreadful wigs. Then there was the publishing front, where he could take nothing for granted in spite of all his work. Publication itself was still an issue. It was not certain that he could continue in the life he had chosen, not certain that he would always find willing hands to print and distribute his work. And then there was the harsh and violent world of politics. If he was a soccer ball, he thought, could he be a self-conscious soccer ball and join in the game? Could the soccer ball understand the sport in which it was kicked from end to end? Could the soccer ball
act in its own interest and take itself off the field and out of range of the booted, kicking feet?

Here was a man named Peter Temple-Morris, MP, a man with hair like soft vanilla ice cream swirling above the great tub of his face, a fine and prominent man, a Conservative member of the Anglo-Iranian parliamentary group, a man who did not care for him, and now, as the American hostages in Lebanon were being released, decided that the “moral responsibility” for the fate of the British hostages lay with the author of
The Satanic Verses
, who should refrain from publishing his paperback. There followed an avalanche of criticism. The supporters of the hostage John McCarthy said “Rushdie should apologize.” In the
Daily Mail
, he was blamed by McCarthy’s father, Patrick, for John’s continued captivity. His troubles were called “self-enforced” by the hostage Terry Waite’s brother David, who added, about the paperback, “One can’t always have what one wants.” David believed the paperback should be canceled
and
its author should apologize for the offense he had given. All of this hostility had its effect.
The Daily Telegraph
published the results of a Gallup poll: A majority of the respondents agreed that “Salman Rushdie should apologize for
The Satanic Verses
.” And sources told him, though he never knew if it was true, that William Waldegrave privately told Penguin not to publish the paperback, as to do so would affect the fate of the British hostages and the British businessman Roger Cooper, still in Evin prison in Tehran.

This was where Penguin’s delays had brought them. This, perhaps, was what Mayer had wanted all along: a respectable reason for nonpublication.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, met with Mr. Abdul Quddus of the Bradford Council of Mosques. Quddus told the archbishop that on his recent trip to Iran he had been assured by members of the Iranian Majlis that Terry Waite, the archbishop’s envoy seized by Lebanese hostage takers, was alive, but would be returned only
if Rushdie was extradited to Iran
. His statement was echoed by Hussein Musawi of the Lebanese Shia group Islamic Amal, who said a British hostage could be freed “if Britain deported Rushdie,” and warned that if no action was taken against the author, Terry Waite, John McCarthy and the third British hostage, Jackie Mann, would not come
out. This news, reported on the radio in Karachi, greatly alarmed his mother and Sameen had to console her.

He had been trying to arrange a meeting with William Waldegrave to ask what the government planned to do to resolve the crisis. Now Waldegrave told Harold Pinter that the government—which was to say, Margaret Thatcher—was “alarmed” at the idea of such a meeting, and at the possibility of the news of the meeting leaking out to the press. It was well known that he had not been a supporter of the Thatcher government. Now the government’s position appeared to be,
Okay, we’ll keep him alive, but we don’t have to see him or have a plan of action. We’ll just keep him in his box, and if he objects there are plenty of people ready to call him ungrateful
.

He was suffering from a great weariness, a kind of nervous exhaustion. He was smoking again five years after he quit, angry with himself for doing so, telling himself he must not let this continue for very long, but smoking nevertheless. “I am fighting the drug,” he wrote, “but how powerful it is! I feel the craving all along my arms and in the pit of my stomach.” And then in capital letters: “I WILL DRIVE IT OUT AGAIN.”

Five Arabs were arrested in Scarborough, allegedly because they were plotting to carry out the
fatwa
. Zafar, who was home sick and hadn’t gone to school, saw the report on the lunchtime news and called, pretending not to be worried. The police were saying the story was “media hype” and even though he didn’t believe it he gave Zafar that official line to reassure him.

Marianne wrote him a letter. “You went searching for Doubt, and you found it,” she said. “And you killed us for that.”

“Most of what matters in our lives,” he had written in
Midnight’s Children
, “takes place in our absence.” Death orders, conspiracies to murder, bomb threats, demonstrations, court hearings, and political machinations had not been the things he had in mind, but they had crowded into his own life story to prove his fictional narrator’s point. It was moving to know that his plight was of such concern to so many well-wishing strangers. The American novelist Paul Auster, later to
become a close friend, wrote a “prayer” for him.
When I sat down to write this morning, the first thing I did was think of Salman Rushdie. I have done this every morning.…
And Mike Wallace wanted to help. The legendary
60 Minutes
reporter told a Penguin executive that a “further statement along the lines of ‘In Good Faith,’ or maybe ‘a step or two further’ ”—whatever that meant—could be carried by him personally to Rafsanjani and that might do the trick and get the
fatwa
lifted.

He talked to Andrew, Gillon and Frances D’Souza and asked them to follow up. “I must not get too excited,” he wrote in his journal, “but even the faint possibility of freedom is so exciting that I can’t help myself.” Andrew spoke to Mike Wallace and then to Kaveh Afrasiabi, a research associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Afrasiabi said he had already spoken to the Iranian ambassador at the United Nations, Kamal Kharrazi, and to “sources leading to Khamenei.” He repeated what Wallace had said. If a statement “consistent with your principles” were made then Khamenei would welcome it and cancel the
fatwa
. Iran was looking for a “breaking point” in the crisis and Mike Wallace’s involvement was a bonus, important because Khamenei wanted a good media profile in the United States, to “steal Rafsanjani’s thunder.”

The world always ended up being television.

He was asked to make a statement on video that could be taken by Wallace to Tehran and shown on TV there, and then Khamenei would talk to Wallace on American TV and say what needed to be said. We would be told in a few days, Afrasiabi said, if Iran wanted to go down this route. He had been led to expect a “positive response.” Four days later he called Andrew to say he had received the “green light.” He proposed a meeting with a Mr. Khoosroo, first secretary of Iran’s UN mission, as the next step.

Andrew and Frances spoke to each other and then to him. It was worth going forward cautiously, they decided. Could it be the breakthrough? They did not dare to believe it. And yet they couldn’t help themselves. They did believe it.

Mike Wallace and Afrasiabi met Andrew at the agency. Afrasiabi repeated the Iranian demands for a statement of regret
that would be included as a preface in the paperback edition
(
ugh
, he thought, but on the
other hand they were not objecting to the paperback being published), and the setting up of a fund for the families of those who had died in “anti-Rushdie” rioting. Frances D’Souza was worried. On the one hand, she said, there were “signs” that Iran may have stopped funding Siddiqui’s Muslim Institute and was trying to install a moderate chief imam in the United Kingdom. On the other hand she feared that the Iranians might be playing a “particularly nasty game.” If they canceled the
fatwa
, the protection would end, and then he could be hit by a fundamentalist cell and the Iranians would have acquired “deniability.” At some stage, she said, the British government must be involved, to ask for guarantees against that eventuality. Sameen was also worried that he would be killed if he “came out.” But what was the alternative? Never to “come out”? He felt shaky, disoriented. Too much was happening. It was hard to know what was for the best.

It began to unravel. The Iranians canceled a meeting with Mike Wallace. They wanted to meet Afrasiabi alone to hear what had been agreed at the meeting with Andrew. And then, pop!, like a bubble bursting, the dream died. The Iranian UN mission said it would have to “consult Tehran.” This would take at least two weeks.
It’s not serious
, he realized.
It’s a joke. They just wanted me to make my statement and then trust them to respond. To trust
them.
Yes: It’s a joke
.