Joseph Anton: A Memoir (66 page)

The police had planned a special treat for him and Elizabeth. They were taken to the legendary Black Museum in Scotland Yard, which was not normally open to the public. The temperature in the museum was kept very low so he shivered as he went inside. The curator, John Ross, who oversaw this bizarre collection of actual murder weapons and other true-crime memorabilia, said he wished that the British police were allowed to kill people. Perhaps his long proximity to these instruments of death had affected his thinking. In the Black Museum there were many disguised weapons—umbrella guns, truncheons that were guns, knives that shot bullets. All the fantasy weapons of crime novels and spy movies were here, laid out on tables, and every weapon on display had killed a man or woman. “We use this to train young officers,” Mr. Ross said. “Just so they understand, you see, that anything can be a gun.” Here was the gun used by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England, to kill her lover David Blakely. Here was the gun with which, at Caxton Hall in Westminster in 1940, the Sikh assassin Udham Singh had murdered Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the former governor of the Punjab, to avenge the Indians shot down in the Amritsar massacre twenty-one years earlier, on April 13, 1919. Here was the cooker and bath in which the serial killer John Reginald
Christie had boiled and filleted his victims at 10 Rillington Place in west London. And here was Heinrich Himmler’s death mask.

Dennis Nilsen had served briefly in the police force, Mr. Ross said, but was kicked out after a year for being a homosexual. “We couldn’t do that now, could we,” reflected Mr. Ross. “Ho no, we could not.”

In a pickle jar was a pair of human arms severed at the elbow. They belonged to a British killer who had been shot dead when on the run in Germany. Scotland Yard had asked their German colleagues to send them the corpse’s fingerprints so that they could formally identify it and close the case. The Germans sent over the killer’s arms instead. “
‘You
take der fingerprints,’ ” Mr. Ross said, affecting an accent. “Spot of the old German sense of humor there.” And he was a man whom people were trying to kill, and so he had been invited into the world of murder as a special treat. Spot of the old British sense of humor there, he thought. Ho yes.

That night, with images of the Black Museum still vivid in his imagination, he took part at the Royal Court Theatre in a memorial reading for Anthony Burgess, along with John Walsh, Melvyn Bragg, D. J. Enright and Lorna Sage. He read the part of
A Clockwork Orange
in which Alex and his droogs attack the author of a book called
A Clockwork Orange
. He had been thinking a good deal about what Burgess called “ultraviolence” (including violence against authors); about the glamour of terrorism, and how it made lost, hopeless young men feel powerful and consequential. The Russian-based slang Burgess had created for his book had defined that kind of violence, glorified it and anaesthetized responses to it, so that it became a brilliant metaphor of what made violence hip. To read
A Clockwork Orange
was to gain a better understanding of the enemies of
The Satanic Verses
.

He had finished “The Courter,” so the
East, West
collection was complete. He had also finished part one of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
, “A House Divided,” about forty thousand words long. The block had been broken at last. He was deeply inside the dream. He was no longer in Cochin. Now in his mind’s eye he saw the city of his youth, which had been forced to adopt a false name, just as he had.
Midnight’s Children
had been his novel of Bombay. This would be the book of a darker, more corrupt, more violent place, seen not through the eyes of childhood but using adulthood’s more jaundiced gaze. A novel of Mumbai.

He had begun to fight a court case in India to recover a piece of ancestral property, his grandfather’s summer cottage at Solan in the Shimla Hills, which had been seized illegally by the state government of Himachal Pradesh. When this news reached London the
Daily Mail
ran an editorial suggesting that if he would like to go and live in Solan his passage there could be paid for by public subscription because it would be so much cheaper than continuing the protection. If any other Indian immigrant to Britain had been told to go back where he came from it would be called racism, but it was apparently permissible to speak of this particular immigrant any way one chose.

At the end of June he traveled to Norway to meet William Nygaard, who was recovering well, but slowly, from his wounds, and gave him a hug. In July he wrote the first of a series of open letters to the beleaguered Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen for the Berlin daily
Die Tageszeitung
. After him came Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz and many others. On August 7 the
fatwa
had been in place for two thousand days. On August 9 Taslima Nasreen arrived in Stockholm with the help of Gabi Gleichmann of Swedish PEN, and was given asylum by the Swedish government. Nine days later she received the Kurt Tucholsky Prize. So she was safe; exiled, deprived of her language, her country and her culture, but alive. “Exile,” he had written in
The Satanic Verses
, “is a dream of glorious return.” He had been writing about the exile of a Khomeini-like imam, but the line boomeranged back and described its author, and now Taslima as well. He could not return to India, and Taslima could not go back to Bangladesh; they could only dream.

Slowly, carefully, he had arranged for a few weeks of escape. He, Elizabeth and Zafar went by night train to Scotland and were met by the prot vehicles, which had been driven up the day before. On the small
private island of Eriska near Oban there was a quiet hotel and they spent a week’s holiday there doing ordinary holiday things—island walks, skeet shooting, mini-golf—that felt unutterably luxurious. They visited Iona and in the graveyard where the ancient kings of Scotland lay at rest—where Macbeth himself was interred—they saw a fresh grave, the earth upon it still moist, in which John Smith, the Labour leader, had recently been buried. He had met Smith once and admired him. He stood by the grave and bowed his head.

And after Scotland came the real escape. Elizabeth and Zafar flew from London to New York. He had to go the long way around again. He flew to Oslo, waited, then caught the Scandinavian Airlines flight to JFK and arrived in pouring rain. The U.S. authorities had asked him to stay on board and after all the other passengers had deplaned they came aboard and went through all the immigration formalities. He was taken off the aircraft and driven off the airfield to the appointed meeting place with Andrew Wylie. Then he was in Andrew’s car, and the world of security retreated and set him free. No protection had been asked for and none had been offered or insisted upon. The promise of the statue in the harbor had been kept.

Freedom! Freedom! He felt a hundred pounds lighter and in the mood to sing. Zafar and Elizabeth were waiting at Andrew’s place and that evening Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, Susan Sontag and David Rieff stopped by, all of them filled with happy disbelief at seeing him free of his chains. He took Elizabeth and Zafar on a helicopter ride around the city with Andrew Wylie and Elizabeth and Andrew screamed with terror—Andrew loudly, Elizabeth silently—the whole time. After the ride they rented a car at Hertz. The round pink face of the blond Hertz girl, Debi, showed no flicker of recognition as she typed his name into the computer. Then they had a Lincoln Town Car of their own! He felt like a child with the keys to the toy store. They went out to eat with Jay McInerney and Erroll McDonald of Random House. Everything felt intensely exciting. Willie Nelson was there! And Matthew Modine! The maître d’ looked concerned, but so what. Zafar, fifteen now, was at his grown-up best. Jay treated him like a man, talked to him about girls, and Zafar loved it. He went to bed grinning and woke up with the grin still in place.

They were going to Cazenovia, New York, to stay with Michael
and Valerie Herr. They had been sent elaborate directions, but he called Michael before setting off, just to be clear. “The only bit I’m not sure of,” he said, “is how to get out of New York.” With perfect comic timing Michael drawled, “Yeah, people have been trying to work that out for years, Salman.”

Every instant was a gift. Driving up the interstate felt like space travel, past the Albany galactic cluster and the Schenectady nebula toward the constellation of Syracuse. They paused in Chittenango, which had been turned into an Oz theme park: yellow brick sidewalks, Aunt Em’s Coffee Shop, awful. They pressed on to Cazenovia and then Michael was blinking at them from behind his little pebble glasses and smiling his ironic lopsided smile and Valerie was looking vaguely beatific and
well
. They were in the world of Jim and Jim. The Herrs’ daughters were home and there was a corgi called Pablo who came and laid its head in his lap and would not be moved. Behind the ample wooden house a pond was surrounded by wilderness. They took a night walk below a big old moon. In the morning there was a dead deer in the pond.

He learned to pronounce “Skaneateles” on the way to the Finger Lake where the writer Tobias Wolff owned a cabin. They ate in a fish bar, walked out to the end of the pier,
behaved normally
, felt abnormally light-headed with joy. In the evening they stopped by a bookstore and he was recognized instantly. That made Michael nervous but nobody made a fuss and he reassured Michael, “I’ll just stay away from the bookstore tomorrow.” On Sunday they stayed home with the Herrs and Toby Wolff came to lunch and he and Michael swapped stories of Vietnam.

The drive to John Irving’s place in Vermont was about three hours long. They stopped near the state line for lunch. The restaurant was run by an Algerian named Rouchdy, who inevitably grew very excited. “Rushdie! We have the same name! I always getting mistaken for you! I say, no, no, I am much better looking!” (On another visit to America an Egyptian maître d’ at Harry Cipriani in midtown New York waxed similarly lyrical. “Rushdie! I like you! That book, your book, I read it! Rushdie, I like your book, that book! I am from Egypt! Egypt! In Egypt, that book is banned! Your book! It is
totally banned
! But everyone has read it!”)

John and Janet Irving lived in a long house on a hillside above the town of Dorset. John said, “When we talked to the architect we just put napkin squares down in a line, some of them set at angles, like this. We told him, build it this way, and he did.” There was a
New York Times
bestseller list framed on a wall, with
The Satanic Verses
one place above John’s book. There were other framed bestseller lists and in all of them John stood at number one. Local writers came for dinner and there were shouts and arguments and drinks. He recalled that when he first met John he had had the temerity to ask him, “Why all the bears in your books? Were there bears that were important in your life?” No, John answered, and anyway—this was after
The Hotel New Hampshire—
he was done with bears now. He was writing the book for a ballet for Baryshnikov, he added, and there was only one problem. “What problem?” “Baryshnikov doesn’t want to wear the bear suit.”

They went to a state fair and failed dismally to guess the weight of the pig.
Some pig
, he said, and Elizabeth answered,
Radiant
. They looked at each other, finding it hard to believe that all this was really happening. After two days he bundled Elizabeth and Zafar into the Lincoln Town Car and drove to New London to get the ferry to Orient Point on the North Fork of Long Island. As the ferry left New London a black nuclear submarine like a giant blind cetacean was coming into harbor. That night they reached Andrew’s house in Water Mill. The simplest things brought them close to ecstasy. He horsed around in Andrew’s pool with Zafar and had rarely seen his teenage son so happy. Zafar Rollerbladed down the leafy lanes and he followed on a borrowed bike. They went to the beach. Zafar and Andrew’s daughter Erica got Chevy Chase’s autograph in a restaurant. Elizabeth bought summer dresses in Southampton. Then the spell broke and it was time to go home. Elizabeth and Zafar flew home on one of the many airlines that were forbidden to him. He flew to Oslo and changed planes.
We are going to do this again, for much longer
, he promised himself. America had given him back his liberty for a few precious days. There was no sweeter narcotic, and, like any addict, he immediately wanted more.

His new contact at the Foreign Office was an Arabist called Andrew Green, but when Green offered him a meeting, he and Frances agreed to decline it because Green had nothing new to discuss. “Is Salman very depressed?” Green asked Frances. “Is this an analytical or an emotional response?” No, he’s actually not depressed, Mr. Green, he’s just tired of being jerked around.

Frances had written to Klaus Kinkel, who now held the rotating presidency of the European Union. Kinkel sent back a stonewalling reply. No, no, no. And a member of the conservative German Christian Democratic Union was the new head of the human rights committee of the European Parliament, which was bad news too. The Germans sometimes felt very like Iran’s agents in Europe. They had their brooms out and were sweeping him under the carpet once again.