Joseph Anton: A Memoir (54 page)

You must be at all the platforms
, Giandomenico Picco had said,
so that you are standing there when the train arrives
. But some of the platforms didn’t have any tracks running past them. They were just places to stand.

From the moment they landed in Denver they could see things were going badly wrong. The local police were treating the event as a trailer for World War III, and as he and Elizabeth made their way through the airport there were men brandishing enormous assault weaponry running in several directions, and police officers manhandling members of the public out of his way, and there was shouting, and pointing, and an air of imminent calamity. It scared him, terrified the bystanders, and alienated the airline, which refused to allow him on board any of its planes ever again, because of
his behavior
. The antics of the security forces became “his.”

They were driven to Boulder, where he spoke at a pan-American literary conference along with Oscar Arias, Robert Coover, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen and William Gass. “Latin American writers have known for a long time that literature is a life and death matter,” he said in his speech. “Now I share that knowledge with them.” He lived in an age in which literature’s importance seemed to be fading. He wanted to make it a part of his mission to insist on the vital importance of books and of protecting the freedoms necessary to create them. In his great novel
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
, Italo Calvino said (speaking through his character Arkadian Porphyrich): “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do. What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it?” Which was certainly true of, for example, Cuba. Philip Roth once said, speaking about Soviet-era repression,
“When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.” What was true of police states and Soviet tyranny was also true of Latin American dictatorships, and of the new theocratic fascism that was confronting him and many other writers, but in the United States—in the liberal, if thin, air of Boulder, Colorado—it was not easy for people to feel the lived truth of repression. He had made it his task, he said, to explain the world in which “nothing goes and everything matters” to the world of “everything goes and nothing matters.”

It took the personal intervention of the president of the University of Colorado, Boulder, to persuade another airline to fly him home. After he finished his speech he and Elizabeth were taken immediately back to the Denver airport and almost pushed onto a flight to London. The police operation was not as out of control as it had been when they arrived, but it was still big enough to spook anyone who was watching. He left America feeling that the campaign had just taken a step backward.

Terror was knocking on many doors. In Egypt the leading secularist Farag Fouda had been murdered. In India, Professor Mushirul Hasan, vice chancellor of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University and a distinguished historian, was menaced by “angry Muslims” for daring to oppose the banning of
The Satanic Verses
. He was forced to climb down and condemn the book but the mob demanded that he also approve of the
fatwa
. He refused to do so. As a result he would be unable to return to the university for five long years. In Berlin, four Kurdish-Iranian opposition politicians attending the Socialist International were murdered at the Mykonos restaurant, and the Iranian regime was suspected of being behind the killings. And in London, Elizabeth and he were asleep in their bedroom when there was a very loud explosion and the whole house shook. Policemen rushed into the room with their weapons and dragged the sleepers onto the floor. They remained prone among armed men for what felt like hours until it was confirmed that
the explosion had been some distance away at the Staples Corner roundabout, under the overpass for the North Circular Road. It was the Provisional IRA at work; nothing to do with them. It was a non-Islamic bomb. They were left alone to go back to sleep.

Islamic terror wasn’t far away. Ayatollah Sanei of the 15 Khordad Foundation increased the bounty money to include “expenses.” (Keep your receipts, assassins, you can reclaim that business lunch.) Three Iranians were expelled from the United Kingdom because they had been conspiring to kill him: two embassy employees, Mehdi Sayed Sadeghi and Mahmoud Mehdi Soltani, and a “student,” Gassem Vakhshiteh. Back in Iran, the Majlis—the supposedly “moderate” Majlis elected by voters in the recent Iranian elections!—“petitioned” President Rafsanjani to uphold the
fatwa
, and the pro-Rafsanjani Ayatollah Jannati responded that the “time was right to kill the filthy Rushdie.”

He went to south London to play table tennis with the painter Tom Phillips at his studio. It seemed like the right thing to do. Tom had begun to paint his portrait—he told Tom he looked too gloomy in it, but Tom said, “Gloomy? What do you mean? I call it
Mr. Chirpy
”—so he sat for that for two hours before losing at Ping-Pong. He did not enjoy losing at Ping-Pong.

That day the 15 Khordad Foundation announced that it would soon begin to send assassination teams to the United Kingdom to carry out the
fatwa
. Losing at Ping-Pong was bad, but he was trying not to lose his mind.

Zafar left the Hall School for the last time—the Hall, which had done so much to shield him from the worst of what was happening to his father, the teachers and boys allowing him, without the sentiment ever being expressed in words, to have a normal childhood in the midst of the insanity. Zafar’s parents had much to be grateful to the school for. It was to be hoped that the new school would look after him as lovingly as the old one.

Highgate was mostly a day school but there were houses for weekly boarders and Zafar had been keen to board. Within days, however, he discovered he hated boarding. At thirteen, he was a boy who liked his
private space and in a boys’ boardinghouse there wasn’t any. So he was immediately miserable. Both his parents agreed he should stop boarding and the school accepted their decision. Zafar immediately began to radiate happiness and started to love the school. And now his father had a home near Highgate so he could come and stay on school nights and their relationship could regain what it had lost for four years: intimacy, continuity, and something like ease. Zafar had his own room in the new house and asked for it to be furnished entirely in black and white. He couldn’t bring his friends around, but understood why, and said he didn’t mind. Even without visits from other boys, it was a big improvement over boarding. He had a home with his father once again.

In India, extremist Hindus destroyed one of the oldest mosques in India, the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built by the first Mughal emperor. The destroyers claimed that the mosque was built over the ruins of a Hindu temple marking the
Ramjanmabhoomi
, the birthplace of Lord Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu. Mayhem was not the prerogative of Islam alone. When he heard the news of the destruction of the Babri Masjid he was possessed by a complex grief. He was sad that religion had again revealed that its power for destruction far exceeded its power for good, that a series of unprovable propositions—that the modern Ayodhya was the same place as the Ayodhya of the
Ramayana
, where Rama was king at an unknowable date in the remote past; that the alleged birthplace was the true birthplace; that gods and their avatars actually existed—had resulted in the vandalization of an actual and beautiful building whose misfortune was to have been constructed in a country that passed no strong laws to protect its heritage, and in which it was possible to ignore such laws as did exist if you were sufficiently numerous and claimed to be acting in the name of a god. He was sad, too, because he still had feelings of affection for the same Muslim culture of India that was preventing Mushirul Hasan from going to work, and preventing him from being given a visa to visit the country of his birth. The history of Muslim India was inescapably his history too. One day he would write a novel about Babar’s grandson
Akbar the Great, who tried to make peace between the many gods of India and their followers, and who, for a time, succeeded.

The wounds inflicted by India were the deepest. There was no question, he was told, of his being given a visa to visit the country of his birth and deepest inspiration. He was not even welcome at the Indian cultural center in London because, according to the center’s director (and grandson of the Mahatma) Gopal Gandhi, his presence there would be seen as anti-Muslim and would prejudice the center’s secular credentials. He set his jaw and went back to work.
The Moor’s Last Sigh
was as secular as a novel could be but its author was thought of as a divisive sectarian in the country about which he was writing. The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his bloody-mindedness was equal to the pain, that his sentences could still form, his imagination still spark. He would not allow the rejections to break his art.

He became, having no alternative, in part an ambassador for himself. But politicking did not come easily to him. He made his speeches and argued his cause and asked the world’s dignitaries to set their faces against this new “remote-control terrorism,” this pointing of a lethal finger across the world,
Him, you see him? Kill him, the bald one holding the book;
and to understand that if terrorism-by-
fatwa
was not defeated it would surely be repeated. But often the words sounded stale in his own ears. In Finland, after he spoke at a meeting of the Nordic Council, resolutions were passed, subcommittees were created, promises of support were given; but he couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing substantial was being gained. He was more delighted by the beauty of the autumn woodland outside the window, and he had a chance to walk in it with Elizabeth, and breathe the crisp air, and feel briefly at peace; and that, to his mind, at that moment, was a greater blessing than all the resolutions in the world.

With the help of Elizabeth’s gentle encouragement, his disillusion faded. He was finding his voice again, she told him, and his Mistake was fading into the past, though he would have to go on unsaying it for years. He was being listened to with respect, and that undeniably
felt good after so many people’s ugly dismissals of his character and work. Gradually he became more practiced at making his case. During the worst excesses of Soviet Communism, he argued, Western Marxists had tried to distance “actually existing Socialism” from the True Faith, Karl Marx’s vision of equality and justice. But when the USSR collapsed, and it became plain that “actually existing Socialism” had fatally polluted Marxism in the eyes of all those who had helped bring the despots down, it was no longer possible to believe in a True Faith untainted by the crimes of the real world. Now, as Islamic states forged new tyrannies, and justified many horrors in the name of God, a similar separation was being made by Muslims; so there was the “actually existing Islam” of the bloody theocracies and then there was the True Faith of peace and love.

He found this hard to swallow, and tried to find the right words to say why. He could easily understand the defenders of Muslim culture; when the Babri Masjid fell it hurt him as it did them. And he too was moved by the many kindnesses of Muslim society, its charitable spirit, the beauty of its architecture, painting and poetry, its contributions to philosophy and science, its arabesques, its mystics, and the gentle wisdom of open-minded Muslims like his grandfather, his mother’s father, Dr. Ataullah Butt. Dr. Butt of Aligarh, who worked as a family physician and was also involved with the Tibbya College of Aligarh Muslim University, where Western medicine was studied side by side with traditional Indian herbal treatments, went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, said his prayers five times a day every day of his life—and was one of the most tolerant men his grandson ever met, gruffly good-natured, open to every sort of childish and adolescent rebellious thought, even to the idea of the nonexistence of God, a damn fool idea, he would say, but one that should be talked through. If Islam was what Dr. Butt believed, there wasn’t much wrong with that.

But something was eating away at the faith of his grandfather, corroding and corrupting it, making it an ideology of narrowness and intolerance, banning books, persecuting thinkers, erecting absolutisms, turning dogma into a weapon with which to beat the undogmatic. That thing needed to be fought and to fight it one had to name it and the only name that fit was
Islam
. Actually existing Islam had become its own poison and Muslims were dying of it and that needed to be
said, in Finland, Spain, America, Denmark, Norway and everywhere else. He would say it, if nobody else would. He wanted to speak, too, for the idea that liberty was everyone’s heritage and not, as Samuel Huntington argued, a Western notion alien to the cultures of the East. As “respect for Islam,” which was fear of Islamist violence cloaked in Tartuffe-like hypocrisy, gained legitimacy in the West, the cancer of cultural relativism had begun to eat away at the rich multicultures of the modern world, and down that slippery slope they might all slide toward the Slough of Despond, John Bunyan’s swamp of despair.

As he struggled from country to country, hammering on the doors of the mighty and trying to find small moments of freedom in the clutches of this or that security force, he tried to find the words he needed to be not only an advocate for himself but also of what he stood for, or wanted to stand for from now on.

One “small moment of freedom” came when he was invited to a U2 concert at Earls Court. This was during the
Achtung Baby
tour with its pendant psychedelic Trabants. The police said yes at once when he told them: Finally, something they wanted to do! It turned out that Bono had read
The Jaguar Smile
and, as he had visited Nicaragua at about the same time, was interested to meet its author. (He never ran into Bono in Nicaragua but one day his shining-eyed blond interpreter Margarita, a Jayne Mansfield look-alike, had cried excitedly, “Bono’s coming! Bono’s in Nicaragua!” and then, without any change in vocal inflection or any dimming of the eyes, had added, “Who is Bono?”) And so there he was at Earls Court, standing in the shadows, listening. Backstage, after the show, he was shown into a trailer full of sandwiches and children. There were no groupies at U2 gigs; just crèches. Bono came in and was instantly festooned with daughters. He was keen to talk politics—Nicaragua, an upcoming protest against unsafe nuclear waste disposal at Sellafield in northern England, his support for the cause of
The Satanic Verses
. They didn’t spend long together, but a friendship was born.