Joseph Anton: A Memoir (85 page)

Then a meeting at Scotland Yard at which there was much police sympathy for his anger. Richard Bones, the Special Branch officer who had been at the meeting with the intelligence scervices, sitting quietly in the background, said, “You’ve been treated terribly. Your analysis is
spot-on. I will bear witness for you if you ever need it.” The police agreed that they would continue his protection as before until the situation had been clarified. And as he calmed down it did occur to him that things in Iran might settle down after the initial shock of the deal. So far the senior mullahs had not condemned the agreement. Maybe he just needed to give it time, and by Christmas he would be free.

In the morning Robin Cook called to reassure him of the government’s commitment to making sure the problem was solved. “I’m disappointed in the security analysis you were given,” he said. “I’ve asked for an SIS reading by the end of the week.” Cook agreed with him that there could, should, be a positive result by Christmas: in three months’ time.

More than three years would elapse before Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon started feeling positive.

The backlash against the Cook-Kharrazi declaration became more and more severe. Half the Iranian Majlis signed a petition calling for the
fatwa
to be carried out. A mysterious new group of “radical students” offered a new £190,000 bounty for his death. (This turned out to be an error; the actual figure was £19,000.) The Khordad
bonyad
, or foundation, run by Sanei of the Bounty increased its offer by about $300,000. The Iranian
chargé d’affaires
, Ansari, was brought into the Foreign Office to receive a British protest, and blamed British press coverage and statements by British ministers and by Rushdie, which had “put the ministry of foreign affairs in Tehran under a lot of pressure—they hadn’t expected the news to be so big.” But he did renew Iran’s commitment to the New York agreement. Whatever that meant.

Clarissa was worried. Two “Muslim-looking men” had come to the house asking for Zafar by name, but he was away in Exeter, of course. She thought it might be because he was now on the electoral roll.

Alun Evans, the British Airways executive who had been asked to liaise with him, and who was very much “on his side,” called to say that he believed BA was “on its way to change,” and that after a few “comparatively minor” matters were resolved they should be able to
make a positive decision. “In a few weeks.” And he was right. A few weeks later, after nine and a half years of being banned from flying on the national carrier, he was welcomed back on board.

The play of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
opened, and it was an exceptional production, in which a suitably magical atmosphere was created at minimal expense, the sea made of billowing silk scarves, the actors all performing small magic tricks as they went about their business; and at the climactic moment when Haroun discovered the source of all stories, a torch played on the faces of the audience and identified it, the audience itself, as that treasured source. Once again, as had happened at the Hampstead book signing about which Commander Howley had made such a fuss, there were no demonstrations or security problems. It was just a good night out at the theater.

He had sent the typescript of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
to Bono to see what he thought of it, and to point out any obvious music-industry howlers that needed correcting. What happened was entirely unexpected. Bono telephoned to say that he had taken some of the lyrics from the text of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
and written “a couple of melodies.” “One of them is very beautiful,” he said. “The one from the title track in the book. It’s one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever done.” He grinned. He hadn’t known, he said, that novels had title tracks, but yeah, he knew which song Bono meant.
All my life I worshipped her, / Her golden voice, her beauty’s beat
. Bono wanted him to go to Dublin so he could play it for him. This was a novel about the permeable borderline between the imaginary and the real worlds, and here was one of its imaginary songs crossing that borderline and becoming a real song. A few weeks later he did go to Ireland and at Paul McGuinness’s place in Annamoe, County Wicklow, Bono made him go and sit in his car and listen to the demo CD there. The sound system in Bono’s car was not like the sound system in anyone else’s car. It was a major sound system. Bono played the track three times. He liked it the first time. It was nothing like the tune he had imagined in his head but it was a haunting ballad, and U2 was good at haunting ballads. He said he liked it but Bono kept playing it to make sure he wasn’t bullshitting, and when at last he was sure he said, “Let’s go in the house and play it to everyone else.”

India announced it was lifting the ban on his visits. It was on the BBC
Six O’Clock News
. Vijay Shankardass was triumphant. “Very soon,” he said, “you will have your visa.” When he heard the news his feeling of sadness was at first greater than his joy. “I never thought,” he wrote in his journal, “that I would not anticipate going to India with pleasure, yet that is now the case. I almost dread it. Yet I will go. I will go to reclaim my right to go. I must maintain the connection for my sons’ sake. So that I can show them what I loved and what belongs, also, to them.” And yes, it was a Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government that was letting him in, and inevitably it would be said that his being given a visa was an anti-Muslim act, but he refused to inhabit the role of demon that had been constructed for him. He was a man who still loved the country of his birth in spite of his long exile and the banning of his book. He was a writer for whom India had been the deepest wellspring of his inspiration, and he would take the five-year visa when it was offered.

His initial melancholic reaction faded. He spoke happily, excitedly, about returning to India at a dinner with a group of writers with whom he had participated in a charity reading organized by Julian Barnes. Louis de Bernières took it upon himself to instruct his excited, happy colleague not to go under any circumstances, because by showing up there he would grievously insult India’s Muslims again. De Bernières then delivered a short lecture on the history of Hindu-Muslim politics to a writer whose entire creative and intellectual life had engaged with that subject and who, just possibly, knew more about it than the author of a novel that had notoriously distorted the history of the Greek Communist resistance to the World War II Italian invasion forces on the island of Cephalonia. It was the closest he ever came to punching another novelist in the nose. Helen Fielding, another member of the party, saw the blood rising in his eyes and leaped to her feet, smiling as gaily as she could. “Well!
Lovely
evening. Just
lovely
. I’m off!” she cried, and that saved the day, allowing him to get up and excuse himself too, and Mr. de Bernières’s nose remained smugly unpunched.

He had a private meeting with Derek Fatchett, who said again,
Trust me
. All the intelligence coming out of Iran was uniformly positive. All parties had signed on to the agreement, all the dogs had been called off. Sanei was a loose cannon, but he didn’t have the money, anyway. “We will go on working on all the issues,” he said. “It matters now to keep our nerve.” Fatchett said that his own statement calling the agreement “a diplomatic success for Britain” had been a problem in Iran. “As was your statement, ‘It means freedom.’ ”

He was being asked to do something difficult: to hold his tongue. If he did so, the angry voices would gradually fall silent, and the
fatwa
would fade away.

Meanwhile in Tehran, one thousand Hezbollah students were marching, saying they were ready to carry out attacks on the author and his publishers, ready to strap bombs to their bodies, and so on; singing the terrorists’ old, sad song.

He went to meet Robin Cook at the House of Commons. Cook said he had received confirmation that Khamenei and the whole Expediency Council had “signed up to the New York agreement.” So it should follow that all the killers had been called off. He was certain, he said, about MOIS and Hezbollah-Lebanon. Their assassins had been stood down. As far as the Revolutionary Guards were concerned it was a case of “negative intelligence”: There was no sign that any attack from that quarter was under way. “A guarantee has been received from the Iranian government that it will prevent anyone leaving Iran to attack you. They know that their prestige is on the line.” The symbolic meaning of the Cook-Kharrazi “shoulder to shoulder” appearance had been carefully weighed and had been on TV in every Muslim country in the world, “and if you are killed, frankly, their credibility collapses.” He also said, “This is not finished business for us. We will exert further pressure and we expect further results.”

Then the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom asked a question that was not easy to answer. “Why do you need a defense campaign against me?” Robin Cook wanted to know. “I’m prepared to offer you full access to me, and regular briefings. I’m fighting on your behalf.”

He replied, “Because many people think I’m being sold out by
you, that a weak agreement is being presented as a strong one, and that I’m being shunted aside for commercial and geopolitical reasons.”

“Oh,” Cook said scornfully. “They think Peter Mandelson is telling me what to do.” (Mandelson was the trade and industry minister.) “That is not so,” he said, and then, echoing Derek Fatchett, “You’re going to have to trust me.”

He was silent for a long moment, and Cook made no attempt to hurry his decision. Was he being duped? he asked himself. It was only a few days since he had yelled at Michael Axworthy about being betrayed. But here were two politicians whom he liked and who had fought harder for him than any others had in a decade, and they were asking him to have faith, keep his nerve, and above all, for a while, to keep quiet. “If you attack the Khordad foundation it will be great news for them, because then the Iranian government won’t be able to move against them without seeming to be run by you.”

He thought and thought. The defense campaign had been started to combat the inertia of governments. Now here was his own government promising to work energetically on his behalf. Maybe this was a new phase: working with the government instead of against it.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

He went to see Frances D’Souza at Article 19 and asked her to dissolve the defense campaign. Carmel Bedford was in Oslo at a meeting of representatives of several of the defense committees and when he called her to tell her his decision she exploded with rage, blaming Frances for the decision. “She’s short-listed for a job at the Foreign Office! It’s in her interest to wind this up!” Frances and Carmel had stopped getting along. He became certain that he had made the right decision.

So the Rushdie Defense Campaign ended. “Let us hope,” he wrote in his journal, “I am justified in my decision. But at any rate it is mine. I can’t blame anyone else.”

It wasn’t always easy to keep calm, keep silent, and keep his nerve.

He went to New York to make a TV film about
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
for French TV. At once the world opened up. He walked the city streets by himself and did not feel at risk. In London he was trapped by the caution of the British intelligence services, but here in New York his life was in his own hands; he could decide for himself what was sensible and what was dangerous. He could recapture his freedom in America before the British agreed it was time to give it back to him.
Freedom is taken, never given
. He knew that. He had to act on that knowledge.

Bill Buford, wearing a
Mars Attacks
head, took him to a Halloween dinner uptown. He wore a
keffiyeh
, held a baby’s rattle in one hand and a crusty bread roll in the other, and went as “Sheikh, Rattle and Roll.”

Back in London, it was Jeanne Moreau’s seventieth birthday and he was invited to a lunch in her honor at the French ambassador’s residence. He sat between Moreau, still glamorous and even sexy at seventy, and the great ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who wanted to come and see the play of
Haroun
. Moreau turned out to be a terrific
raconteuse
. Also at the table was an embassy apparatchik whose job was to lob softball questions at her: “Now you mus’ tell ‘ow you meet our great Franch film director François Truffaut” and then she was off and running. “Ah, François. It was at Cannes, you know, and I was there with Louis”—“That is our also great Franch director, Louis Malle …” “Yes, Louis, and we are at the Palais du Cinéma, and François, he come up and greet Louis, and then for some time they walk together and I am behind with another man, and then afterward I am walking with François, and it is very strange because he will not look me in the face, he look always down at the floor and sometimes quickly up, and then down again, until finally he look at me and he say, ‘Can I have
your telephone number?’ ” “And,” said the apparatchik, “you give eet to ’eem.” He took over the questioning himself and asked her about working with Luis Buñuel on
Diary of a Chambermaid
. “Ah, Don Luis,” she said in her deep, throaty cigarette voice, “I love him. I say to him one day, ‘Oh, Don Luis, if only I was your daughter!’ And he say me, ‘No, my dear, you should not wish it, because if you were my daughter I would lock you up and you would not be in the movies!’ ”