Joseph Anton: A Memoir (86 page)

“I have always loved the song you sing in
Jules et Jim
,” he told her as they sipped their Château Beychevelle. “ ‘Le Tourbillon.’ Is that an old song or was it written for the movie?” “No,” she said. “It was written for me. It was an old lover, you know, and after we break up he wrote that song. And then when François say he want me to sing I propose the song to him and he agree.” “And now,” he asked, “now that it’s such a famous movie scene, do you still think of it as the song your former lover wrote for you, or is it ‘the song from
Jules et Jim
’?” “Oh,” she said, shrugging, “now it is the song from the movie.”

Before he left the
résidence
the ambassador drew him aside and told him he had been awarded the highest rank,
commandeur
, in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; an immense honor. The decision was made several years ago, the ambassador said, but the previous French government sat on it. But now there would be a party for him here at the
résidence
and he would get his medal and ribbon. That was wonderful news, he said, but within days the back-pedaling began. The woman responsible for sending out the invitations said she was “holding fire” because she was “waiting for approval from Paris,” and then oddly neither the ambassador nor the cultural attaché, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, could be reached. After several days of being stonewalled he called Jack Lang, who told him that the president of Iran was scheduled to visit France in ten days and that was why the Quai d’Orsay was stalling. Lang made some calls and that did the trick. Olivier called back. Would it be possible to choose a date on which M. Lang himself could come and do the honors? Yes, he said. Of course.

Zafar gave a party and wanted him to be there. The protection team hustled him into the nightclub and then tried to turn a blind eye to the
things that usually happened in such clubs. He found himself at a table with Damon Albarn and Alex James of Blur, who had heard about his collaboration with U2 and wanted to record a song with him too. Suddenly his services as a lyricist were in demand. Alex had drunk the best part of a bottle of absinthe, which had perhaps been unwise. “I’ve got a fucking great idea,” he said. “I’ll write the words and you write the music.” But, Alex, he said mildly, I don’t write music and I can’t play a musical instrument. “Nothing to it,” Alex said. “I’ll teach you how to play the guitar. It’ll only take half an hour. Fucking nothing to it. Then you write the music and I’ll write the words. It’ll be fucking amazing.” The collaboration with Blur did not take place.

He met Bob Blake, who was now the head of “A” Squad, at Scotland Yard to talk about the future. A new novel would be published in the new year, he said, and he must be free to promote it properly, with proper announcements of appearances and signings. They had by now done enough of these to be confident that there would not be problems. Also, he wanted to scale the protection back even further. He understood that airlines still felt happier if he was brought to the plane by the protection team, and that public venues also appreciated police involvement in his appearances, but other than that, he and Frank could handle most things. Interestingly Blake seemed open to all his proposals, which suggested that the threat assessment was changing, even if he hadn’t yet been informed of the change. “All right,” Blake said, “let’s see what we can do.” He was worried about India, though. It was the view of Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon that if he were to travel to India in January or early February there was the risk of an Iranian attack. Could he know on what their fears were based? “No.” “Well, anyway, I wasn’t planning to go to India at that time.” When he said that he saw the policeman visibly relax.

He arrived at the foreign secretary’s office in the House of Commons to find Stephen Lander, the director general of MI5, waiting for him along with Robin Cook, who had bad news to deliver. Intelligence
reports had been received, Cook said, of a meeting of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council—just saying that name earned Cook a disapproving look from Lander, but he said it all the same—at which Khatami and Kharrazi had failed to pacify the hard-liners. Khamenei was “not in a position” to call off the Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah. So the danger to his life persisted. But, Cook said, he “personally” and the Foreign Office were committed to resolving the problems, and there was no evidence of any planned attack, except for the worry about India. There was no great likelihood of an attack in any Western country, Lander said.
No great likelihood
was cold comfort, but that was all he was going to get. “I did let Kharrazi know,” Cook said, “that we knew about the SNSC meeting, and Kharrazi was pretty shocked. He tried to say that the deal was still on. He knows his reputation, and Khatami’s, is at stake.”

Keep your nerve
.

Nothing was ever perfect, but this was a level of imperfection that was hard to take. Still, he remained resolved. He had to take his life back into his own hands. He couldn’t wait any longer for the “imperfection factor” to drop to a more acceptable level. But when he spoke to Elizabeth about America she wasn’t listening. She was listening to what Isabel Fonseca was saying. “America is a dangerous country, and everyone in it has a gun.” Her antagonism to his New York dream was growing. Sometimes he actually seemed to see a jagged rip or tear between them, getting wider, as if the fabric of the world were a sheet of paper and they were on opposite halves of it, falling apart from each other, as if it was inevitable that sooner or later their stories would continue on separate pages, in spite of the years of love, because when life began to speak in imperatives the living had no choice but to obey. His greatest imperative was liberty, and hers was motherhood, and no doubt it was in part because she was a mother that a life in America without police protection struck her as unsafe and irresponsible, and in part it was because she was English and didn’t want her son to grow up American, and in part it was because she hardly knew America, because her America was not much larger than Bridgehampton, and she
feared that in New York she would be isolated and alone. He understood all her fears and doubts, but his own needs were like commands, and he knew that he would do what had to be done.

Sometimes love was not enough.

It was his mother’s eighty-second birthday. When he told her on the phone that he had a new book due out in 1999 she said, in Urdu,
Is dafa koi achchhi si kitab likhna
. “This time, write a nice book.”

S
OMETIMES LOVE WAS NOT ENOUGH
. I
N THE YEARS AFTER HER HUSBAND’S
death Negin Rushdie discovered that her first husband, the handsome youth who had fallen in love with her when she was pretty young Zohra Butt, was still alive. Theirs had not been an arranged marriage but a true “love match” and they did not fall apart because they had stopped being in love but because he was unable to father children and motherhood was an imperative. The sadness of exchanging the love of a man for the love of her unborn children was so profound that for many years she did not speak his name, and her children, as they arrived and grew, were not even told of his existence, until in the end she blurted it out to Sameen, her eldest daughter. “His name was Shaghil,” she said, and blushed, and wept, as if she were confessing an infidelity. She never mentioned him to her son, never said what he did for a living or in what town he made his home. He was her ghost, the phantom of lost love, and out of loyalty to her husband, her children’s father, she suffered the haunting in silence.

After Anis Rushdie died her brother Mahmood told Negin that Shaghil was still alive, had never remarried, still loved her, and wanted to see her again. Her children encouraged her to get in touch. There was nothing standing between the old lovers. The imperative of motherhood was, obviously, no longer an obstruction. And it would be a foolishness to allow illogical feelings of betraying the dead Anis to stand in her way. It was not required of her to live alone and lonely for the rest of her life—and she lived on for sixteen years after Anis died—when there was the possibility of renewing an old love and allowing it to illuminate her later years. But when they spoke to her in this way she gave a small, mutinous smile and shook her head like a girl. In those years of the
fatwa
she visited London several times and stayed at Sameen’s house and he visited her when he could. The first husband, Shaghil, was still no more than a name to him. She still refused to discuss
him, to say if he was a funny or a serious man, or what he liked to eat, or if he could sing, or whether he was tall like her ramrod brother Mahmood or short like Anis. In
Midnight’s Children
her son had written about a mother with a first husband who could not give her children, but that sad poet-politician, “Nadir Khan,” was created out of the author’s imagination alone. No trace of Shaghil could be found in him except for the biological problem. But now the real man was writing her letters and when she was not smiling like a foolish girl she was pressing her lips tightly together and shaking her head sharply and refusing to discuss it.

In
Love in the Time of Cholera
, the great novel by Gabriel García Márquez, the lovers Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza parted when they were still very young but came together again in the sunset of their lives. Negin Rushdie was being offered just such a sunset love but for reasons she never gave she resisted it. For this resistance, too, there was a literary antecedent, in Edith Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence:
Newland Archer in his later years, accompanied by his adult son, sits paralyzed in a little French square below the awning and balcony of his old love the Countess Olenska’s apartment and unable, after all the lost years, to walk up the stairs to see her. Perhaps he did not want her to see him as an old man. Perhaps he did not want to see her as an old woman. Perhaps the memory of what he had not had the courage to grasp was too overwhelming. Perhaps he had buried it too deep and could no longer exhume it, and the horror of being with Countess Olenska and no longer feeling what he had felt was too much for him to bear.

“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other
.

Negin Rushdie had read neither book but if she had she would not have believed in Fermina and Florentino’s happy reunion, or rather there was a thing in her that was not allowing her to believe in such an ending. She was frozen as Newland Archer had been frozen, the passage of the years had stymied her, and even though an expression of love seized hold of her face every time his name was mentioned she could not act on what she felt. It was more real to her without him
than it would be if he returned. So she never responded to his letters, never called him, and never saw him in the sixteen years that remained. She died as her husband’s widow and her children’s mother and could not, or would not, write a new last chapter to her story. Sometimes love was not enough.

Anis Rushdie had been married once before Negin as well. They were unusual in this, in their class and place and time, that theirs was a second marriage for them both. About Anis’s first wife his children were told only that she was bad-tempered and that they quarreled all the time. (The children knew that their father had a bad temper too.) And they also knew about a great tragedy. Anis and the first wife had had a daughter, their half sister, whose name they were never told. One night the first wife called Anis and said that the girl was very sick and might die, and he thought that she was lying, that she was telling the story as a ruse to draw him back toward her, so he ignored the message, and the little girl died. When he heard that his daughter was dead he rushed to his first wife’s house but she would not let him in, though he beat his fists on the door and wept.

The marriage of Anis and Negin remained a mystery to their son. To their growing children it looked like an unhappy life, in which his growing disappointment expressed itself in nightly whiskey rages from which she tried to shield her children. More than once the older children Sameen and Salman tried to persuade their parents to divorce, so that they, the children, could enjoy each parent’s company without having to endure the side effects of their unhappiness. Anis and Negin did not take their children’s advice. There was something they both thought of as “love” below the misery of the nights and as they both believed in it, it could be said to have existed. The mystery at the heart of other people’s intimacy, the incomprehensible survival of love at the heart of unlovingness: that was a thing he learned from his parents’ lives.

Also: If both your parents had been previously divorced, and then lived unhappily “loving” lives, you grew up with a belief in the impermanence of love, a belief that love was a darker, harsher, less comfortable, less comforting emotion than the songs and movies said. And if that was true, then he, with his many broken marriages—what was the
lesson he was teaching his sons? A friend of his once said to him that remaining in an unhappy marriage was the tragedy—not the divorce. But the pain he caused to the mothers of his children, the two women who loved him better than anyone else, haunted him. Nor did he blame his parents for setting him a bad example. This was his own doing and his own responsibility. Whatever wounds his life had inflicted on him, the wounds he inflicted on Clarissa and Elizabeth were worse. He had loved them both but his love had not been strong enough.