Joseph Anton: A Memoir (39 page)

Ruthie Rogers, co-owner of London’s River Café, gave a birthday party for him. A dozen of his closest friends gathered under the watchful eyes of nine of Andy Warhol’s
Mao
screen prints in the huge living room of the Rogers house on Royal Avenue, that brilliantly lit white space with its high curtainless windows that was a Special Branch nightmare. Ruthie and her husband, the architect Richard Rogers, had been no more than friendly acquaintances of his before the
fatwa
but it was in their loving natures to draw closer to friends in time of trouble and do much more than was called for. He was a man in need of hugs and embraces and that evening he received plenty of them. He was glad his friends were huggers and kissers. But he saw himself reflected in their eyes and understood that he was in bad shape.

He was learning the limitations of language. He had always believed in its omnipotence, in the power of the tongue. But language would not get him out of this. “In Good Faith” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” had changed nothing. A Pakistani friend, Omar Noman, wanted to assemble a group of people from “our part of the world” to explain to the Iranians that “they had got the wrong man.” An Indian friend, the distinguished attorney Vijay Shankardass, saw a role for Indian Muslims in resolving the affair. Vijay undertook to speak to some leaders, including Syed Shahabuddin, who had managed to get
The Satanic Verses
banned in India, and Salman Khurshid, the “wrong Salman,” whom Imam Bukhari of the Delhi Juma Masjid had mistakenly condemned at Friday prayers.

He doubted that reason or argument, the methods of language people, would be very successful. He was battling a greater—or, to use the vocabulary of the godly, a
higher
power, one that scoffed at the
merely rational, and commanded a language that far outranked the tongues of mortal men. And this god was not a god of love.

He left Hermitage Lane forever and was driven, with Zafar, to Deborah and Michael’s farm in Powys, where they spent a precious weekend together kicking a soccer ball, playing cricket and throwing a Frisbee around a field. Clarissa had wanted the weekend to herself because of a new man she was seeing but that weekend he broke up with her, unwilling to deal with her share of the
fatwa
fallout. She was handling it very strongly. He wished she could be happy.

After the weekend he slipped unnoticed into the Wimbledon house, but then there was trouble. The owner, Mrs. Cindy Pasarell, called several times with nosy questions. Fortunately one of the female protection officers, Rachel Clooney, was on duty, and because a woman’s voice was a more reassuring thing to hear than a man’s Mrs. Pasarell’s curiosity was somewhat assuaged. Then Mr. Devon Pasarell called, apparently unaware of Mrs. Pasarell’s calls, saying he needed some things from the garage. Maybe they were separated? The next day a “business associate” of Mrs. Pasarell’s showed up at the door for no good reason. Then Cindy Pasarell called again, sounding sterner. She would like to meet the new tenants to satisfy herself that they were “appropriate.”

He called Pauline to ask for help. She had played parts in everything from
Far from the Madding Crowd
to
The Young Ones
, and knew all about improv, so she could certainly handle this role. He briefed her on her character and she agreed to spend a day at the house and meet the inquisitive Cindy. The situation was both absurd and fraught. He told Bob Major that he couldn’t do this anymore, all this deception and lurking. Some other arrangement would have to be made. Bob made sympathetic, noncommittal noises. He was a foot soldier. A decision like that wasn’t his to make.

In the next two days Mr. Pasarell came round again without warning, to “pick up his stuff from the garage,” and then
again
, “to drop the garage key through the front door.” Rachel Clooney, a tall, elegant blonde with a soft Scottish burr and a big smile, spoke gently to him,
but he remained in his black Granada outside the property for quite a while, watching. In an attempt to calm things down, Pauline, as the lady of the house, called Mrs. Pasarell and invited her to tea, but although she accepted the invitation she didn’t show up; instead the Pasarells jointly sent a letter of complaint to Gillon’s office, protesting about what they called the “multiple occupancy” of the house. The fear of discovery was paralyzing. Would it be Little Bardfield all over again—would he have to move out at once and lose all the rent he had paid and contracted to pay? “This is horrible,” he said to Gillon. “It has to end.”

It was Gillon who solved the problem. “They’re being ridiculous,” he said in his haughtiest, most contemptuous tone. “They’re getting a great deal of money from you. We need to slap them down a little. Leave it to me, my dear.” He faxed them what he called a “fuck-off letter.” Soon after he called back, tickled pink. “My dear, I think it worked. They have faxed me back, and agreed to fuck off.” The Pasarells had indeed agreed that in return for the excellent amount of rent they were receiving they would cease to bother their tenants. They may even have apologized. And that, for several months, was that.

Nadine Gordimer was collecting the signatures of eminent Europeans on an “appeal to the government of Iran.” At the Pinters’ home he dined with Carlos and Silvia Fuentes and the great Mexican novelist offered to “round up Latin American heads of state.” Meanwhile the garden gnome Siddiqui continued to make his unpleasant gnomic statements, which were echoed in louder voices by the grander gnomes of Qom and Tehran. There had been a huge earthquake near the city of Rasht and forty thousand people had died, and half a million more were homeless, but that did not change the subject. The
fatwa
stood.

Zafar would be away for three whole weeks. He was off to holiday camp with two school friends, and after that Clarissa was taking him to France with Liz Calder and Louis Baum and Louis’s son Simon. In his absence, there were Pakistani guerrillas to be dealt with.

The Pakistani film
International Gorillay
(International guerrillas), produced by Sajjad Gul, told the story of a group of local heroes—of
the type that would, in the language of a later age, come to be known as jihadis or terrorists—who vowed to find and kill an author called “Salman Rushdie.” The quest for “Rushdie” formed the main action of the film and “his” death was the film’s version of a happy ending.

“Rushdie” himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle of liquor, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim “leader” Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. “Rushdie” was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously colored safari suits—vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits—and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film’s popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing “Rushdie” became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding.

At a certain point in the film one of the
international gorillay
was captured by the Israeli army and tied to a tree in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that “Rushdie” could have his evil way with him. Once “Rushdie” had finished drinking from his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man’s body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli soldiers and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. “Take him away,” he cried, “and read to him from
The Satanic Verses
all night!” Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely.
Not that, anything but that
, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away.

At the end of the film “Rushdie” was indeed killed—not by the
international gorillay
, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed
by three large Qur’ans hanging in the sky over his head, which reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: There was dignity in that.

On July 22, 1990, the British Board of Film Classification refused
International Gorillay
a certificate, on the fairly self-evident grounds that it was libelous (and because the BBFC feared that if it were to license the film and the real Rushdie were to sue for defamation, the board could be accused of having become party to the libel, and could therefore be sued for damages as well). This placed the real Rushdie in something of a quandary. He was fighting a battle for free speech and yet he was being defended, in this case, by an act of censorship. On the other hand the film was a nasty piece of work. In the end he wrote a letter to the BBFC formally giving up his right of legal recourse, assuring the board that he would pursue neither the filmmaker nor the board itself in the courts, and that he did not wish to be accorded “the dubious protection of censorship.” The film should be shown so that it could be seen for the “distorted, incompetent piece of trash that it is.” On August 17, as a direct result of his intervention, the board unanimously voted to license the film; whereupon, in spite of all the producer’s efforts to promote it, it immediately sank without trace,
because it was a rotten movie
, and no matter what its intended audience may have thought about “Rushdie” or even Rushdie, they were too wise to throw their money away on tickets for a dreadful film.

It was, for him, an object lesson in the importance of the “better out than in” free speech argument—that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad. If
International Gorillay
had been banned, it would have become the hottest of hot videos and in the parlors of Bradford and Whitechapel young Muslim men would have gathered behind closed drapes to rejoice in the frying of the apostate. Out in the open, subjected to the judgment of the market, it shriveled like a vampire in sunlight, and was gone.

The events of the great world echoed in his Wimbledon redoubt. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and as war with Iraq approached the British Foreign Office began to rush to repair relations with Iran. The British and American military buildup progressed at speed. Suddenly nobody on the British or Iranian side was mentioning the “Rushdie case” at all and Frances D’Souza called to say she was very worried that he would be “bypassed.” He called Michael Foot, who said he would find out more. The next day Michael said he had been “reassured,” but that didn’t sound reassuring. His man at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Duncan Slater, asked him to write yet another “mollifying statement” for the FCO to hold and use “when it seemed most useful.” It was hard to know, he said, how Iran would “jump.” They might use the international crisis as a moment to “solve their problems” with the British, or they might think that they could now push to restore relations without making concessions.

A public library in Rochdale, Lancashire, was firebombed.

He had arranged with Liz Calder to borrow her London apartment while she was on holiday with Clarissa and Zafar, to meet with an American journalist and other friends. She said that a colleague of hers, an editor at Bloomsbury called Elizabeth West, would be visiting the apartment from time to time to feed the parrot, Juju.

“Maybe you should touch base with her before you go,” Liz said, “so that nobody gets any nasty surprises.” He called Elizabeth and told her his plans. They spoke on the phone for a surprisingly long time and laughed a good deal, and in the end he suggested he could stay on at Liz’s place after the journalist left and they could meet there for some quiet parrot maintenance. The police went to a wine store for him and bought, on his instructions, three bottles of wine, including one of the rich Tuscan red Tignanello. And then under the parrot’s eye there was dinner by candlelight, salmon, and a salad of nasturtiums, and much too much red wine.

Love never came at you from the direction you were looking in. It crept up on you and whacked you behind the ear. In the months since Marianne’s exit there had been some flirtatious telephone calls and, very occasionally, meetings with women, most of whom, he was fairly certain, were moved more by pity than attraction. Zafar’s latest
au pair,
an attractive Norwegian girl, said
you can call me if you like
. Most unexpected of all was a clear demonstration of sexual interest from a liberal Muslim journalist. These were the straws he had been grasping at to save himself from drowning. Then he met Elizabeth West and the thing happened that could never be foreseen: the connection, the spark. Life was not ruled by fate, but by chance. If it had not been for a thirsty parrot, he might never have met the future mother of his second son.