Joseph Anton: A Memoir (41 page)

Two years of attacks by Muslim and non-Muslim adversaries had affected him more than he knew. He had never forgotten the day they brought him a copy of
The Guardian
and he saw that the novelist and critic John Berger was writing about him. He had met Berger and
admired, in particular, his essay books
Ways of Seeing
and
About Looking
, and felt that they were on friendly terms. He turned eagerly to the op-ed page to read him. The shock of what he found, Berger’s bitter attack on his work and motives, was very great. They had many mutual friends, Anthony Barnett of Charter 88, for example, and over the months and years that followed Berger would be asked by these intermediaries why he had written so hostile a piece. He invariably refused to answer the question.

No woman’s love could easily assuage the pain of so many “black arrows.” There was probably not enough love in the world to heal him at that moment. His new book had been published and on the same day the British government had climbed back into bed with his would-be assassins. He was being praised on the book pages and reviled in the news. At night he heard
I love you
but the days were shouting
Die
.

Elizabeth received no police protection but, to ensure her safety, it was important to keep her out of the public eye. His friends never mentioned her name, or even her existence, outside the “charmed circle.” But inevitably the press found out. No photographs of her were available, and none were made available, but that didn’t stop the tabloids from speculating why a beautiful young woman might wish to be with a novelist fourteen years her senior with the mark of death on his brow. He saw a photograph of himself in the paper captioned
RUSHDIE: UGLY
. Inevitably it was assumed that she was there for low motives, for his money, perhaps, or, in the opinion of a “psychologist” who felt able to judge her without ever having met her, because a certain kind of young woman was turned on by the scent of danger.

Now that the secret was out the police grew more concerned for her safety, and for his. They became uneasy about her cycle route being followed and insisted that she meet them at prearranged locations and be “dry-cleaned.” They also issued a notice to the press, warning them off her, because to publicize her would increase the probability of a crime being committed. In all the years that followed the press helped to protect her. No photograph of her was ever taken
or printed. Whenever he appeared in public she would be brought to the location separately and taken away afterward in a separate car. He would tell the press photographers that he was happy for them to take his picture and ask, in return, that they leave her alone; and, amazingly, they did. Everyone knew that the
fatwa
was a serious matter, and everyone took it seriously. Even five years later, when his novel
The Moor’s Last Sigh
was short-listed for the Booker and he went with Elizabeth to the ceremony, there were no pictures of her. The Booker dinner was live on BBC2 but the cameras were instructed not to look at her, and not a single image of her face was transmitted. As a result of this exceptional restraint she was able, throughout the
fatwa
years, to move around the city freely, as a private person, attracting no attention, friendly or unfriendly. She was intensely private by nature, and this suited her very well.

In mid-October he sat down with Mike Wallace at a hotel to the west of London to be interviewed for
60 Minutes
, and near the top of the interview Wallace mentioned the end of his marriage to Marianne and then asked, “What do you do for companionship? Do you have to lead a celibate life?” He was caught off guard by the question, and could obviously not tell Wallace the truth about his newfound love; he floundered for a second and then as if by a miracle he found the right words. “It’s nice,” he said, “to have a break.” Mike Wallace looked so shocked by this answer that he had to add, “No, I’m not being serious.”
Just kidding, Mike
.

Marianne called. She was back from America again. He wanted to talk to her about lawyers and formalizing their divorce but she had something else to discuss. There was a lump in her breast that was thought to be “precancerous.” She was very angry with her GP, who should have diagnosed it “six months ago.” But there it was. She needed him, she said. She still loved him. Three days later she had worse news. The cancer was there: Burkitt’s lymphoma, one of the non-Hodgkin’s group of cancers. She was seeing a specialist at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, a Dr. Abdul-Ahad. In the weeks that followed she told him she was receiving radiotherapy. He didn’t know what to say to her.

Pauline Melville had won the Guardian Fiction Prize for
Shape-shifter
. He called her to congratulate her but she wanted to talk about Marianne. She, Pauline, had repeatedly offered to accompany Marianne to the hospital on treatment days. The offer had invariably been refused. She called back some days later and said, “I think you should call this Dr. Abdul-Ahad and speak to him yourself.”

The oncologist Dr. Abdul-Ahad had never heard of Marianne, nor, he said, would he treat a cancer such as the one in question. He was a specialist in quite different cancers, primarily in children. This was baffling. Were there other Dr. Abdul-Ahads? Was he talking to the wrong one?

It was the day Marianne had said she was to begin treatment at the Royal Marsden. There were two Royal Marsdens, one on Fulham Road and the other in Sutton. He called them both. They did not know who she was. More bafflement. Perhaps she was using an assumed name. Perhaps she had a Joseph Anton–like pseudonym, too. He had wanted to help, but he had run into a dead end.

He called her GP and asked if she would speak to him. He told her he knew about doctor-patient confidentiality but the oncologist he had spoken to had suggested they talk. “I’m glad you called,” the doctor said. “I’ve lost touch with Marianne—can you give me an address and phone number? I obviously need to speak to her.” He was surprised to hear that. The doctor had not seen Marianne for over a year, and added that Marianne had never discussed having cancer with her.

Marianne stopped returning his calls. He never knew if she had been contacted by the doctor or not, never knew if she had moved on to another GP, never knew anything about any of it. They hardly spoke again after that. She agreed to the divorce and made few financial demands, asking for a modest lump sum to help her restart her life. She left London, and moved to Washington, D.C. He never heard anything further about illness, or medical treatment. She continued to live, and to write. Her books were highly regarded and nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He had always thought her a fine writer of high quality and wished her well. Their lives went down separate paths, and did not touch again.

No: That wasn’t correct. They touched just once more. He was
about to make himself vulnerable to attack, and she took the opportunity, and had her revenge.

He read a novel by the Chilean writer José Donoso about the demolition of the self,
The Obscene Bird of Night
. In his vulnerable state of mind it was probably not the best choice of reading. The title was taken from a letter written by Henry James, Sr., to his sons Henry and William that served as the novel’s epigraph: “Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”

He lay awake watching Elizabeth sleeping and in his room the unsubdued forest grew and grew, like that other forest in Sendak’s great book, the forest beyond which lay the ocean beyond which lay the place where the wild things were, and here was a private boat for him to sail in, and waiting on the beach in the place where the wild things were was a dentist. Maybe the wisdom teeth had been an omen after all. Maybe there were omens and auguries and portents and prophecies, and all the things he didn’t believe in were more real than the things he knew. Maybe if there were bat-winged monsters and bug-eyed ghouls … maybe if there were demons and devils … there could also be a god. Yes, and maybe he was losing his mind. The crazy, stupid, and, finally, dead fish is the one that goes looking for the hook.

The fisherman who caught the crazy fish, the siren who led his private boat onto the rocks was the “holistic dentist” from Harley Street, Hesham el-Essawy. (Maybe he should have listened to the wisdom of the teeth.) Essawy was unlikely casting for the role in spite of his passing resemblance to a fleshier Peter Sellers, but the desperate fish, caught in its tank for two long years, its spirits low, its sense of self-worth badly battered, was hunting for a way out, any way out, and mistook the fisherman’s wriggling worm for the key.

He had another meeting with Duncan Slater in Knightsbridge and this time there was another man in the room, the Foreign Office highflier David Gore-Booth. Gore-Booth had been present at the conversations with the Iranians in New York and had agreed to debrief him personally. He was haughty, smart, tough and direct and gave the impression, like the Arabist he was, that his sympathies in this matter lay not with the writer but with his critics. Ever since Lawrence of Arabia the FCO had “tilted” toward the Muslim world (Gore-Booth would become an unpopular figure in Israel) and its grandees often exuded a genuine irritation at the difficulties in Britain’s relations with that world caused by, of all people, a novelist. However, Gore-Booth said that the assurances received from Iran were “real.” They would not seek to carry out the death order. What mattered now was to bring the temperature down at home. If the British Muslims could be persuaded to call off the dogs then things could revert to normal pretty swiftly. “That side of it,” he said, “is really up to you.”

Frances D’Souza was excitedly optimistic when he called to tell her about the Gore-Booth meeting. “I think we could have a deal!” she said. But the meeting had left him feeling very low because of Gore-Booth’s barely disguised contempt for what he had supposedly done.
That side of it is really up to you
. Principle was being recast as obstinacy. His attempt to hold the line, to insist that he was the victim, not the perpetrator, of a great wrong was being received as arrogance. So much was being done for him; why was he being so inflexible? He had started this: He needed to finish it, too.

The weight of such attitudes, which were becoming general, lay heavily upon him, making it progressively harder to believe that he was acting for the best. Some sort of dialogue with British Muslims was perhaps inescapable. Frances told him that Essawy had contacted Article 19 and offered to mediate. Essawy was not very intellectually impressive but he was, she believed, well-meaning, even kindly. This route seemed vital to her now. The defense campaign was short of funds. She needed to raise £6,000 urgently. It was becoming difficult to persuade Article 19 to continue to fund the campaigning work on this issue. They need to show that progress was being made.

He called Essawy. The dentist was courteous toward him, spoke
gently, claiming to sympathize with the unpleasantness of his life. He could see that he was being coddled, almost baby-talked toward some sort of acquiescence, but he stayed on the line. Essawy claimed he wanted to help. He could arrange a conference of “very heavyweight” Muslim intellectuals and use that to start a campaign across the Arab world, and even in Iran. “I’m your best bet,” he said. “I want you to be a Ghazali figure and return to the faith.” Muhammad al-Ghazali, the conservative Muslim thinker, was the author of the celebrated
Incoherence of the Philosophers
, in which he denounced as unbelievers and traducers of the true faith both the great Greeks Aristotle and Socrates, and the Muslim scholars such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who had sought to learn from them. Ghazali had been answered by Ibn Rushd (Averroës), the Aristotelian from whom Anis Rushdie had derived the family name, in the equally celebrated work
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
. He himself had always thought of himself as a member of the Ibn Rushd team, not the Ghazalians, but he understood that Essawy was not referring to Ghazali’s philosophy itself but to the moment when Ghazali suffered a personal crisis of belief that was overcome by “a light which God Most High cast into my breast.” He thought it improbable that his breast would be receiving the light of God Most High anytime soon, but Essawy pressed on. “I don’t believe in your god-shaped hole that you wrote about,” he said. “You’re an intelligent man.” As if intelligence and disbelief could not coexist in a single mind. The significance of this alleged god-shaped hole, he was being told, was not just that it was a cavity to be filled up by art and love, as he had written, but that it was
in the shape of God
. Now he should look not into the void, but at that framing shape.