Joseph Anton: A Memoir (75 page)

While he was receiving the bad news from Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon, he was waiting tensely for them to say that his home had been located by the enemy. But that was not the case. However, if it did become known, Mr. Morning said, that would be very alarming. At the very least it would require him to receive police protection for the rest of his life.

He expressed his fears for Zafar, Elizabeth, Sameen, his mother in Karachi. “There is no evidence that any of your family or friends have been targeted,” said Mr. Afternoon. “Not even as a route to you. You, however, remain target number one.”

“Deniability is considered to be of paramount importance by the Iranians,” Mr. Morning said. “This is because of the political flak they’ve been getting after attacks of recent years.”
Shapur Bakhtiar, the Mykonos killings
. “They would probably not use Iranian personnel.” “But,” Mr. Afternoon said, to make him feel a little better, “the stage of them sending weapons through the diplomatic mail, or sending people into the country, is still months or even years away.”

It was the worst thing he had feared, a long-term Bakhtiar-style assault. Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon could not say what effect a political settlement with Iran might have on such a plot. They believed the Iranian Foreign Ministry might be unaware of its existence. “It’s being kept to a very small group inside the Ministry of Information,” Mr. Morning said. “There may even be others in the ministry who would wish to thwart such a plan,” said Mr. Afternoon, “but Fallahian and Khamenei seem determined to carry out the
fatwa
, and Rafsanjani probably knows too.”

The good news was that he had not been located, and that, in the
opinion of Afternoon and Morning, the threat from the “community at large” had evaporated. “And now,” said Mr. Morning, revealing a flash of steel under his courteous manner, “we can do our level best to disrupt the plot—to put a bloody great fist into the middle of it. To disrupt it with such heavy political fallout that it will be impossible to set up such a scheme again.”

Maybe he’s just trying to make me feel better
, he thought,
but it’s working. I like the thought of that fist
.

As far as the wider world was concerned, the
fatwa
story was fading away. It wasn’t in the papers anymore, and he himself was being seen here and there, visiting his friends, eating in the occasional restaurant, cropping up in various countries to promote his new book. It was obvious to most people that the threat had receded, and it seemed likely to many commentators that the protection was continuing only because he was insisting on it—insisting not because it was necessary but to satisfy his monumental egotism. And at this moment, when whatever little shred of public sympathy still existed was blowing away in the wind, he was being told that the danger was greater than it had ever been, the attack on his life more serious than any that had previously been identified. And he couldn’t even say so. Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon had been very clear about that.

Andrew had found him a Long Island house to rent, very secluded, on Little Noyac Path in the hills above Bridgehampton. It would be rented in Elizabeth’s name and they could have it for two months. Yes, he said, let’s go ahead. He had decided to continue with his plan of retrieving his freedom piece by piece. To behave as if he had not heard what he had heard in the Christmas tree fortress. The only alternative was to go back to being a prisoner, and he wasn’t prepared to do that. So: Yes, please, Andrew. Let’s do the deal. A few days later Rab Connolly told him that Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon now believed that the assassins had decided he was too well protected in the United Kingdom, so they might try to kill him while he was on a foreign trip. And he was planning to spend two months on Long Island without protection, and was bringing Elizabeth and Zafar with him. He felt,
once again, like the driver of that Holden, being hit by a truckload of shit and heading straight for a tree, with the people he loved most in the car beside him. He talked to Elizabeth. She still wanted to go. So, damn it, they would do it, and by doing it prove that it could be done.

He went to make a speech in Barcelona. He flew to America and delivered the commencement address at Bard College. Nobody tried to kill him. However, an Iranian dissident in exile, Reza Mazlouman, an ex–minister of education from the days of the shah, who had been living quietly in the Parisian suburb of Créteil, was found dead. Two shots to the head and one to the chest. The world, which had briefly brightened when
The Moor’s Last Sigh
was published, darkened again. In his imagination he kept trying to write a happy ending to his own story, but couldn’t come up with one. Maybe there wasn’t going to be one.
Two shots to the head and one to the chest
. There was that possible ending, too.

Elizabeth wasn’t pregnant and the tension between them grew again. If she didn’t get pregnant soon she was insisting on trying the in vitro fertilization route even though his chromosome problem greatly reduced the chances of success. If she did get pregnant it was probable that her closely protected anonymity would be lost, and that the location of the Bishop’s Avenue house would become public knowledge. That would turn the place into an armed camp; and, anyway, how were they to bring up a child in the nightmare they were obliged to inhabit? What kind of life would such a child have? But against all logical arguments she set her overwhelming need, and he his determination that they should be able to lead a real life, and so they would go ahead, they would keep trying, they would do whatever they had to do.

Vijay Shankardass called from India to give him hopeful news. The new Indian government’s foreign minister, Inder Gujral, was in favor of allowing him to visit India again, and the home affairs minister agreed. So there was a possibility that his long exile could soon end.

Andrew was showing around his synopsis of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
and it was going over well with his publishers, but the issue of the long-term paperback publication of
The Satanic Verses
still needed to be resolved, and Andrew wanted to make it a condition of any English-language deal that the publisher should take on the
Verses
as well. There were paperbacks in print everywhere else by now, and the Consortium edition was still available in English, but that was essentially a form of self-publication and couldn’t be the long-term answer. In England, Gail Rebuck and Random House UK were moving toward agreeing to republish the paperback as a Vintage book, but in America the Random House boss, Alberto Vitale, was not inclined to do so. The solution, Andrew suggested, might be Holtzbrinck, whose German arm, Kindler Verlag, had already published the German-language paperback without difficulties, and whose American house, Henry Holt, under the leadership of the flamboyant publisher Michael Naumann, seemed ready to do the same. He told Andrew he would like to stay with Random House in the United Kingdom, and Andrew said he had come to the same view, so they were “on the same page.”

At the end of the last ice age the glaciers retreated from Long Island leaving behind the terminal moraine that created the wooded hills in which he and Elizabeth spent that summer. The low, roomy white house was owned by an elderly couple named Milton and Patricia Grobow, whom he was not at first able to meet, since he theoretically didn’t exist, and Elizabeth was there for the summer by herself “to write and see friends.” Afterward, when the Grobows worked out what was going on, they were genuinely happy to be providing him with a summer refuge. They were fine, ethical, liberal people with a daughter working at
The Nation
and they were proud, they said, to be able to help. But even before he was revealed he was happy there, in a place where the biggest danger they had to face was Lyme disease. They told their closest friends where they were staying, kept away from the Hamptons “scene,” walked on the beach at sunset, and he felt, as he always felt in America, the slow rebirth of his true self. He began to write his new novel and the Grobow house, surrounded by
fields and woods, turned out to be a perfect place to work. The book, which he was beginning to understand would be a long one, began slowly to unfold. Elizabeth was a keen gardener and spent happy hours tending the Grobows’ plants. Zafar went to Greece with his mother and then came out to join them and loved the place and for a while they could just be a family summering together by the sea. They shopped in the stores and ate in the restaurants and if people recognized him they were too discreet to intrude on his privacy. One evening Andrew and Camie Wylie took them to Nick & Toni’s for dinner and the artist Eric Fischl, stopping by their table on his way out to say hello to Andrew, turned to him and asked, “Should we all be scared because you’re in here with us?” All he could think of to say was, “Well, you don’t need to be, because you’re leaving anyway.” He knew Fischl meant no harm, it was just a joke, but in these special months when he escaped from the bubble of his unreal real life he didn’t like being reminded that the bubble was still there, waiting for him to return.

They went back to London in early September and soon after their return Elizabeth’s dearest wish came true. She was pregnant. He at once began to fear the worst. If one of his faulty chromosomes had been selected then the fetus would not form and she would miscarry very soon, probably at the end of the next menstrual cycle. But she was joyfully confident that everything was fine, and her instincts were right. There was no early miscarriage, and soon enough they could see an ultrasound image of their living, healthy child.

“We’re going to have a son,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “we’re going to have a son.”

It was as if the whole world was singing.

The Moor’s Last Sigh
had been awarded the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature along with the Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr’s novel
Morbus Kitahara
, but the Danish government announced that he would not be allowed to attend the awards ceremony in Copenhagen on November 14, 1996, for security reasons. They claimed to be aware of a “specific threat” to his life, but the Special
Branch told him they were not aware of any such threat, and if there had been one, the Danes would have been obliged to inform them. So it was just a pretext. As usual his first feeling was of humiliation, but his second feeling was of outrage, and he decided that this time he would not stand for it. He issued a statement through Article 19. “It is scandalous that Copenhagen, the present EU ‘capital of culture,’ refuses to permit the winner of the EU’s own literature prize to attend the award ceremony. It is a cowardly decision which is exactly the opposite of what one should do in the face of threats such as the Iranian
fatwa
. If one wishes to ensure that such threats are not repeated, it is important to demonstrate that they are not effective.” Danish politicians of all parties, including the ruling party, attacked the decision, and the Danish government gave in. On November 13 he flew to Denmark and the award ceremony took place at the new Arken Museum of Modern Art, which was ringed by armed policemen and looked like a prison camp, except that all the inmates were in full evening dress.

After the ceremony his publisher Johannes Riis suggested that they go with a few friends to a nice Copenhagen bar for a drink, and while they were in the bar the “Christmas beer” arrived. Men wearing red Santa hats came in bearing cases of the traditional winter ale, and he was given one of the first bottles, as well as one of the Santa hats, which he put on. Somebody took a photograph: the man who had been thought too dangerous to allow into Denmark sitting like anyone else in an ordinary bar, drinking a beer and wearing a party hat. This defiantly unthreatened picture almost brought down the Danish government when it was on every front page the next morning. The prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, had to apologize publicly for his earlier veto. Then there was a meeting with Rasmussen, who congratulated him on his little victory. “I just decided to fight,” he told the confounded prime minister. “Yes,” said Rasmussen shamefacedly, “and you did it very well.”

He wanted to think about other things. As he entered the year in which he would turn fifty and become a father for the second time he
knew that he was sick of fighting for seats on airplanes, of being upset by name-calling in the newspapers, of policemen sleeping in his house, of lobbying politicians, and of secret Mr. Mornings and Mr. Afternoons speaking of assassination. His new book was alive in his head and new life had stirred in Elizabeth’s womb. For the book he was reading Rilke, listening to Gluck, watching on blurry VHS the great Brazilian movie
Orfeu Negro
, and being happy to discover, in Hindu mythology, an Orpheus myth in reverse: the love god Kama slain by Shiva in a moment of anger and brought back to life only because of his wife Rati’s entreaties, Eurydice rescuing Orpheus. A triangle was rotating slowly in his mind’s eye, at whose three points were art, love and death. Could art, fueled by love, transcend death? Or must death, in spite of art, inevitably consume love? Or perhaps art, meditating on love and death, could become greater than them both. He had singers and songwriters on the brain because in the Orpheus myth the arts of music and poetry were united. But the quotidian could not be kept at bay. He worried constantly about what sort of life he could offer to the boy who was coming to see them, entering this world out of the void of unbeing to find … what? Helen Hammington and her troops dogging his every move? It was unthinkable. Yet he had to think it. His imagination wanted to soar but he had lead weights tied to his ankles.
I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space
, Hamlet alleged, but Hamlet hadn’t tried living with the Special Branch. If you were bounded in a nutshell along with four sleeping policemen then, for sure, O Prince of Denmark, you would have bad dreams.