Joseph Anton: A Memoir (44 page)

He was learning that to win a fight like this, it was not enough to know what one was fighting against. That was easy. He was fighting against the view that people could be killed for their ideas, and against the ability of any religion to place a limiting point on thought. But he needed, now, to be clear of what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also skepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee. He would never again flinch from the defense of these things. He had asked himself the question:
As you are fighting a battle that may cost you your life, is the thing for which you are fighting worth losing your life for?
And he had found it possible to answer:
yes
. He was prepared to die, if dying became necessary, for what Carmen Callil had called “a bloody book.”

None of his true friends reacted like the Dismayed Ones. They drew closer than ever and tried to help him through what they could see was a profound trauma of the mind and spirit: an existential crisis. Anthony Barnett called, very concerned. “We need to set up a group of friends and advisers for you,” he said. “You can’t go through this alone.” He explained to Anthony that he had, to be frank, lied when he made his assertion of religious belief. He told Anthony, “When I wrote the
Verses
I was saying,
we have to be able to speak like this about religion, we must be free to criticize and historicize
.” And if he now had to pretend that by
we
he meant only
we Muslims
, then he was stuck with that. For the moment. That was the price of what he had done.

“It’s precisely this kind of well-intentioned misstatement,” Anthony said, “that your friends need to advise you against.”

He needed to get away somewhere and think. He put in a request
to go quietly to France for a brief vacation but the French didn’t want him on their soil. The Americans were still reluctant to have him on theirs. There was no way out of the box. There was one piece of good news, however. The “specific threat” against him was now thought to be a hoax. Mr. Greenup came to tell him, to warn him that the danger was still high—“Iranian-backed elements are still actively looking for you”—and to throw him a bone. He could start looking for a new, permanent home. “Maybe in a few months we will be able to make a more optimistic assessment.” That cheered him up a little.

Gillon called him on February 15. The
fatwa
had been renewed. The British government remained silent.

Bill Buford and Alicja had decided to get married and Bill asked him to be best man. The reception was to be at the Midsummer House restaurant on Midsummer Common in Cambridge. Phil Pitt went to “do an advance” and without talking to Bill or to the owner, Hans, declared the restaurant unsuitable. For the first time he lost his temper with the police and told them it was not for them to decide whether or not he could be best man at his friend’s wedding. So Phil did speak to Bill and discovered he had had the wrong information—the wrong time, the wrong room—and suddenly the venue was suitable after all. “We’re the experts, Joe,” he said. “Trust us.”

Nigella’s sister Thomasina had breast cancer. She had surgery at once. A quadrant of her breast was removed. Radiation therapy would come later. He heard Marianne on BBC Radio Four claiming she loved him but he was so obsessed with “the situation” that there was no room for anyone else, and that was the reason for their split. She described herself as “this brilliant woman.” She was asked how she was dealing with life and she replied, “I’m making it up as I go along.”

The
fatwa
was damaging more than one life. Zafar’s headmaster at the Hall School, Paddy Heazell, was worried about him. “He seems to have a wall around him. Nothing gets through.” A visit to a psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street Hospital might be a good idea. He was a bright, lovely boy, but something in him seemed to be asleep. He was shut away inside himself and thought himself a “failure.” It was agreed
that a female child psychiatrist would see Zafar weekly after school. However, Mr. Heazell was reassuring about Zafar’s chances of getting into their preferred secondary school, Highgate, because Highgate stressed the value of interviewing prospective students, and didn’t simply rely on Common Entrance results. “Zafar would always win an interview,” Mr. Heazell said. But he stressed they needed to bring him out of his present dark place. “He’s in a box,” Mr. Heazell told Clarissa, “and he won’t come out.” That weekend Clarissa got Zafar a dog, a border collie–red setter mixture of a pooch called Bruno. The dog was important, and helped. Zafar was very excited.

He had given up smoking again but his resolve was about to be tested. He was told about new security precautions. For some time now a member of the team had been picking up the mail from Gillon’s office and bringing it back, but now they wanted it to go via Scotland Yard again because it was too risky to have it driven directly from the agency to Wimbledon. Also they were putting a “double divert” on his phone to make it harder for calls to be traced. It felt as if the lid was being screwed on more tightly but he didn’t know why. Then Mr. Greenup came to tell him why. A “team of professionals” had accepted a contract to kill him. Large sums of money were involved. The person behind it was “an Iranian government official outside Iran.” The British were not sure if this was an officially sanctioned plan or a maverick operation but they were worried because of the extreme confidence of the hit squad, which had promised to carry out the assassination within four to six months. “Actually, they believe they can kill you in less than a hundred days.” The Special Branch did not believe the Wimbledon house had been compromised but under the circumstances it would be preferable if he moved almost immediately. Zafar was a “problem,” and a police watch would have to be placed on him. Elizabeth was a “problem” too. It might be necessary to move him onto an army base, to live in an army barracks, for the next half year. If he elected to go to a Security Service safe house he would be sealed away there from all contact with the outside world. However, this did not change the agreement that he could begin to look for a permanent home. Once
they had come through the next few months that would be acceptable.

He refused the army base and the sealed-away safe house. If the Wimbledon place had not been compromised there was no reason not to stay there. Why should he lose months of rent and be sent on his travels again if they did not believe that the house had been “blown”? Mr. Greenup’s face was its usual expressionless mask. “If you want to live,” he said, “you will move.”

“Dad,” Zafar asked on the phone, “when will we have a permanent place to live?”

If he ever lived to tell the tale, he thought, what a tale of loving friendship it would be. Without his friends he would have been locked up on an army base, incommunicado, forgotten, spiraling downward into madness; or else a homeless wanderer, waiting for the assassin’s bullet to find him. The friend who saved him now was James Fenton. “You can have this house,” he said as soon as he was asked, “for a month, anyway.”

After a rich life spent leaping onto the first Vietcong tank to enter Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, and joining the crowds looting the Malacañang Palace to celebrate the fall of Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda of the Shoes (he took some monogrammed towels), investing some of the money he received for working on never-used lyrics for the original production of
Les Misérables
in a prawn farm in the Philippines, and journeying a little traumatically into Borneo with the even more adventurous Redmond O’Hanlon (when O’Hanlon later asked Fenton to go with him to the Amazon, James replied, “I would not go with you to High Wycombe”)—oh, and coming up with some of the best poetry of love and war to be written in his or any generation—the poet Fenton and his partner, the American writer Darryl Pinckney, had settled into Long Leys Farm, a comfortable country property in Cumnor, outside Oxford, and here James had busied himself with creating the most exquisite of formal gardens under the looming shadow of a giant electricity pylon. This was the home he now offered to his
fugitive pal, whose recent Dreadful Mistake he had treated in writing with gentleness and courtesy, describing how when the news of the Mistake was published, “somewhere between six and sixty million newspaper readers around the world set down their coffee cups and said: Oh. But every Oh that was uttered had its own special flavor, its own modifier, its own tinge of meaning.… Oh so they got him in the end! Oh how convenient! Oh what a defeat for secularism! Oh what a shame! Oh Allah be praised. For myself the Oh that escaped my lips began life as a vibrant little cerise cloud of wonderment. For a few seconds, as it hung in the air, I thought I detected in the cloud the broken features of Galileo. I looked again, and Galileo seemed to have turned into Patty Hearst. I thought of Oslo … no, not Oslo, the Stockholm syndrome.” The rest of his long piece, ostensibly a review of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
for
The New York Review of Books
, offered a portrait of the author as a good man—or at least an enjoyable person to talk to—whose unstated purpose was to restore, ever so delicately and without saying he was doing so, that author’s good character in the eyes of the Dismayed Friends. That article had already been ample proof of James’s big heart. To leave his home proved something more: his understanding of the need for solidarity in the middle of a war. One did not desert one’s friends when they were under fire.

Mr. Greenup grudgingly gave his consent to the move to Long Leys Farm. “Mr. Anton” suspected that the police officer would have quite liked to lock him up on an army base to punish him for all the trouble he had caused, all the public expense he had incurred, but instead the little carnival of Operation Malachite had to pack up and abandon London SW19 for the formal gardens of Cumnor beneath their guardian pylon, which bestrode their narrow world like a colossus.

He saw that Elizabeth was distressed. The strain of the latest developments had muted the brilliance of her smile. The image of an assassination squad so sure of reaching its target that it was willing to give a deadline for the deed would have sent many women running, crying, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t my fight.” But Elizabeth bore up bravely. She would go on with her job at Bloomsbury and visit him on weekends. In fact she was considering giving up the job so that they didn’t need
to be separated, and because she wanted to write. She was a poet too, though she was reluctant to show him her work. She had showed him one poem about a man on a unicycle and he thought it pretty good.

He moved to Cumnor and for a time it was impossible to see Zafar or visit any London friends. He was trying to get his head around a new novel provisionally called
The Moor’s Last Sigh
but his thoughts were all over the place and he went down a series of blind alleys. He had an instinct that the novel would somehow combine an Indian family story with the Andalusian tale of the fall of Granada, of the last sultan, Boabdil, leaving the Alhambra and, as the sultan’s mother contemptuously said, “weeping like a woman for what he could not defend like a man” as he watched the sun set on the last day of Arab Spain, but he could not find the connection. He remembered Mijas, to which Clarissa’s mother, Lavinia, had emigrated, and the book he had found there by Ronald Fraser, about the life of Manuel Cortés, mayor of Mijas when the civil war broke out. After the war Cortés returned home and had to be hidden from Franco for
thirty years
until he emerged like Rip van Winkle to witness the tourist ribbon-development devastation of the Costa del Sol. The name of the book was
In Hiding
.

He thought of Picasso and wrote a strange paragraph about the Málaga neighborhood where the great man was born.
In the square the children play, the children with both eyes on the same side of their nose. They play at Harlequin and Pierrot. A bomb like a lightbulb pierces a screaming horse. Newspapers stick to the sides of black guitars. Women turn into flowers. There is fruit. The afternoon is hot. The artist dies. They make him a lopsided coffin, a collage of sky and printed matter. He drinks at his own funeral. His women smile and spit and take his money
.

This artist did not find his way into the novel but in the end understanding came: It would be a novel about artists and the Alhambra of Andalusia would be painted by an Indian woman, standing on top of Malabar Hill in Bombay. The two worlds would meet in art.

He filled a notebook with a Beckettian or perhaps Kafkaesque first-person account written by a man who was regularly beaten, who was kept in a lightless room by unknown captors who entered in the dark to beat him every day. That was not what he wanted to write but
these passages about beatings kept coming. One day there was a glimmer of light and he wrote a comic paragraph in which his narrator tried to describe his parents’ first lovemaking, but was too embarrassed to include any verbs,
so you will not learn from me
, he wrote,
the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that …
This passage would make it into the finished book. Most of the rest was dross.

Valerie Herr had a cancer scare but the biopsy proved nonmalignant.
Thank goodness, Jim
, he thought. Angela Carter was less fortunate. The cancer had her in its grip and though she fought it hard she would not, in the end, defeat it. All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A
fatwa
was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.

Paperback editions of
The Satanic Verses
were published in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Iran held a conference of Muslim scholars that called for the Khomeini death order to be carried out as soon as possible. The 15 Khordad Foundation, the quasi-nongovernmental organization headed by Ayatollah Hassan Sanei that was behind the offers of bounty money, said it would pay $2 million to any friend, relative or neighbor of the author who carried out the threat. (The
bonyads
, or foundations, were originally charitable trusts that, after the Khomeini revolution, made use of the seized assets of the shah and other “enemies of the state” to become gigantic business consortiums headed by senior clerics.) “So many writers are short of money,” he said to Andrew. “Maybe we should take this seriously.”