Joseph Anton: A Memoir (42 page)

In normal circumstances he would not have wasted his time on such a discussion, but the circumstances were far from normal. He talked to Sameen, who was suspicious. “You need to establish exactly what Essawy expects,” his sister said. Essawy had recently written an open letter to Rafsanjani in Iran in which he had referred to “this worthless writer.” (“You’ll forgive me for that, won’t you,” he wheedled disingenuously on the phone.) And he had made one demand that would be a major stumbling block: “You mustn’t defend the book.”

Every time he called Essawy he was aware of being lured further and further into a space from which he would find it hard to withdraw. Yet he continued to call, and Essawy allowed him to take his time, to find his way slowly, at his own speed, with many retreats and evasions, to where the hook waited for his willing mouth. His
South Bank Show
interview had been very helpful, the dentist said. His old stances on Kashmir and Palestine were useful too. They would show Muslims he was not their enemy. He should make a video reiterating his support for Kashmiri and Palestinian aspirations and that could be shown at the Islamic Cultural Center in London, to help change people’s minds about him.
Maybe
, he said.
I’ll think about it
.

He never learned very much about Essawy the man. The dentist said he was happily married and that, in fact, his wife was so attentively loving that she was cutting his toenails for him as he spoke on the phone. That became the image of the dentist that stuck in his mind: a man making phone calls while a woman knelt at his feet.

Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd invited him and Elizabeth down to Porlock Weir for the weekend, along with the playwright Julian Mitchell and his partner, Richard Rosen. They were a merry company but he was in agony, tying his mind in knots, trying to find a way to accommodate his opponents, looking for the words he could say—the words that would be possible for him to say—that might break the impasse. They went for a long walk along the lush green Doone Valley and as they walked he argued with himself. Maybe he could make a statement of belonging to the culture of Islam rather than the faith. There were nonreligious, secular Jews, after all; perhaps he could argue for a kind of secular membership of a Muslim community of tradition and knowledge.

He was after all from an Indian Muslim family. That was the truth. His parents might not have been religious but much of his family had been. He had obviously been profoundly affected by Muslim culture; after all, when he wanted to invent the story of the birth of a fictional religion, he had turned to the story of Islam, because it was what he knew best. And yes, he had argued in essays and interviews for the
rights of Kashmiri Muslims, and in
Midnight’s Children
he had placed a Muslim family, not a Hindu one, at the heart of the story of the birth of independent India. How could he be called an enemy of Islam when that was his record? He was not an enemy. He was a friend. A skeptical, even a dissident friend, but a friend nevertheless.

He spoke to Essawy from Maggie and Michael’s house. The fisherman felt the fish on the line and knew it was time to start reeling it in. “When you speak,” he said, “it must be clear. There cannot be equivocations.”

The police agreed that he could go to Bernardo Bertolucci’s private screening of his new film,
The Sheltering Sky
. After the screening he had no idea what to say to Bernardo. There wasn’t a single thing about the film he had enjoyed. “Ah! Salman!” Bertolucci said. “It is very important for me to know what you think of my picture.” At that moment the right words came into his head, just as other words had been given to him when Mike Wallace asked him about sex. He put his hand on his heart and said, “Bernardo … I can’t talk about it.” Bertolucci nodded understandingly. “A lot of people have this reaction,” he said.

On his way home he hoped for a third miracle, for the right words to come to him at the right moment for a third time, the words that would make British Muslim leaders nod wisely and understand.

He was finalizing his collection of essays,
Imaginary Homelands
, writing the introduction, correcting the proofs, when he was offered an interview on the BBC TV
Late Show
. The interviewer would be his friend Michael Ignatieff, the Russian-Canadian writer and broadcaster, so he was assured of a sympathetic hearing. In this interview he said what he thought everyone wanted to hear.
I am talking with Muslim leaders to try to find common ground
. Nobody wanted to hear about freedom anymore, or about the writer’s inalienable right to express his vision of the world as he saw fit, or about the immorality of book burning and death threats. Those arguments were used up. To restate them now would be obdurate and unhelpful. People wanted to hear him making
peace so that the trouble could stop and he could just go away, off their televisions, out of their newspapers, into well-deserved obscurity, preferably to spend the rest of his life pondering on the evil he had wrought and finding ways to apologize for it and to make up for it. Nobody cared about him or his principles or his wretched book. They needed him to bring the damned thing to an end.
There is a lot of common ground
, he said,
and the point is to try to make it more solid
.

He bit into the juicy worm and when he felt the point of the hook he did not stop.

There was a flurry of responses, as if he had been walking through fallen autumn leaves and kicked them up in the air. Sameen heard on the radio that “moderate Muslim leaders” were asking Iran to annul the
fatwa
. However, British Muslim “leaders” to whom he had not spoken denied that they were negotiating with him. The garden gnome hopped on a flight to Tehran to urge the leadership of that country not to relent, and six days later the minister of Islamic culture and guidance, Mohammad Khatami—the future President Khatami, the great liberal hope of Iran—declared that the
fatwa
was irreversible. When he heard that he called Duncan Slater. “I thought you said that the Iranians were going to let this fade away,” he said. “We’ll get back to you,” Slater replied.

He went on Melvyn Bragg’s Monday morning radio show
Start the Week
and named Essawy as the “major Muslim figure” who had opened up a dialogue with him. He spoke to Ted Koppel on
Nightline
and expressed the hope that things would improve. In Iran the offer of bounty money was raised again: still $1 million for Iranians, but now $3 million if a non-Iranian did the deed. He spoke to Slater. The New York agreement was plainly phony. The British government must act. Slater agreed to pass the message along. The government did not act. He said, on American television, that he was beginning to be “a little disturbed by the lack of reaction on the part of the British government” to these new menaces.

The fisherman began to bring the fish to the net. “There must be a meeting,” Essawy said, “and you must be embraced by Muslims once again.”

He consulted nobody, asked for no one’s advice or guidance. That alone should have told him he was
not in his perfect mind
. Normally he would have talked through any important decision with Sameen, Pauline, Gillon, Andrew, Bill, Frances. He made no calls. He didn’t even discuss it with Elizabeth, not really. “I’m trying to solve this,” he told her. But he didn’t ask her what she thought.

There was no help coming from any other quarter. It was up to him. He had fought for his book and he would not surrender that. His good name had been destroyed anyway. It didn’t matter what people thought of him. They already thought the worst. “Yes,” he said to the ever more glutinous dentist, “set up the meeting. I’ll come.”

Paddington Green station was the most secure police facility in the United Kingdom. Aboveground it was an ordinary cop shop in an ugly office block but the real action was underground. This was where members of the IRA were held and interrogated. And on Christmas Eve, 1990, this was where he was brought to meet Essawy’s people. He had been told that no other location could be approved; that was how nervous everyone was. When he entered Paddington Green with its bombproof doors and endless security locks and checks he began to feel nervous himself. Then he walked into the meeting room and stopped dead. He had expected a roundtable discussion, or for everyone to be informally seated in armchairs, perhaps with tea or coffee. That was how naïve he had been. He now saw that there was to be no informality, and not even a pretense of a discussion. They had not come together as equals to talk through a problem and reach a civilized agreement. He was not to be treated as an equal. He was to be put on trial.

The room had been set up by the Muslim worthies as a courtroom. They sat like six tribunal judges in a straight line behind a long table and facing them was a single upright chair. He stopped in the doorway like a horse balking at the first fence and Essawy approached him whispering urgently, telling him he must come in, these were important gentlemen, they had made time in their schedules, they must not be kept waiting. He should please sit. Everyone was waiting.

He should have turned his back then and gone home, away from degradation, back toward self-respect. Every step forward was a mistake. But he was Essawy’s zombie now. The dentist’s hand gentle on his elbow guided him to the empty chair.

Everyone was introduced to him but he barely registered their names. There were beards and turbans and curious, piercing eyes. He recognized Zaki Badawi, the Egyptian president of the Muslim College in London and a “liberal” who had condemned
The Satanic Verses
but had said that he would shelter its author in his own home. He was introduced to a Mr. Mahgoub, the Egyptian minister of
awqaf
(religious endowments), and to Sheikh Gamal Manna Ali Solaiman of the golden-domed London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park and to Sheikh Gamal’s associate Sheikh Hamed Khalifa. Essawy was of Egyptian origin and he had brought other Egyptians into this room.

They had him now, so they laughed and joked with him at first. They made rude comments about Kalim Siddiqui, the malevolent garden gnome and Iranian lapdog. They promised to launch a worldwide campaign to lay the
fatwa
issue to rest. He tried to explain the origins of his novel and they agreed that the controversy was based on a “tragic misunderstanding.” He was not an enemy of Islam. They wanted to acknowledge him as a member of the Muslim intelligentsia. That was their most earnest desire.
We want to reclaim you for ourselves
. He needed only to make certain gestures of goodwill.

He should distance himself, they said, from the statements made by characters in his novel who attacked or insulted the Prophet or his religion. He said he had frequently pointed out that it was impossible to portray the persecution of a new faith without showing the persecutors doing some persecuting, and it was an obvious injustice to equate his own views with theirs. Well, then, they rejoined, this will be easy for you to say.

He should suspend publication of the paperback edition, they said. He told them that for them to insist on this would be a mistake; they would look like censors. They said a period of time was needed for their reconciliation efforts to work. He needed to create that space. Once the misunderstandings had been cleared up the book would no longer concern anyone and new editions would cease to be a problem.

Finally, he needed to prove his sincerity. He knew what the
shahadah
was, did he not. He had grown up in India calling it the
qalmah
but that was the same thing.
There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet
. That was a statement he needed to make today. That was what would allow them to extend the hand of friendship, forgiveness and understanding.

He said he was willing to express a secular Muslim identity, to say he had grown up in that tradition. They reacted badly to the word “secular.” “Secular” was the devil. That word should not have been used. He needed to speak clearly in the time-honored words. That was the only gesture that Muslims would understand.

They had prepared a document for him to sign. Essawy handed it to him. It was ungrammatical and crude. He could not sign it. “Revise, revise,” they urged him. “You are the great writer and we are not.” In a corner of the room there was a table and another chair. He took the piece of paper there and sat down to study it. “Take your time,” they cried. “You should be happy with what you sign.”

He was not happy. He was trembling with misery. Now he wished he had asked his friends’ advice. What would they have said? What would his father have advised? He saw himself swaying on the edge of a great abyss. But he was also hearing the seductive murmur of hope. If they did what they said … if the quarrel came to an end … if, if, if.

He signed the corrected document and handed it to Essawy. The six “judges” signed it too. There were embraces and congratulations. It was over. He was lost inside a whirlwind, dizzy, blinded by what he had done, and had no idea where the tornado was taking him. He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. The police guided him out of the room and he heard the doors open and shut along the underground corridor. Then a car door, open, shut. He was being driven away. When he got back to Wimbledon Elizabeth was waiting, offering him her love. His insides were churning. He went to the bathroom and was violently sick. His body knew what his mind had done and was expressing its opinion.