Excerpt of Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie
(Page 6 of 8)
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It was midafternoon and on this day their private difficulties felt
irrelevant. On this day there were crowds marching down the streets of
Tehran carrying posters of his face with the eyes poked out, making
him look like one of the corpses in The Birds, with their blackened,
bloodied, bird-pecked eye sockets. That was the subject today: his unfunny
Valentine from those bearded men, those shrouded women, and
the lethal old man dying in his room, making his last bid for some sort
of dark, murderous glory. After he came to power the imam murdered
many of those who brought him there and everyone else he disliked.
Unionists, feminists, socialists, Communists, homosexuals, whores,
and his own former lieutenants as well. There was a portrait of an
imam like him in The Satanic Verses, an imam grown monstrous, his
gigantic mouth eating his own revolution. The real imam had taken
his country into a useless war with its neighbor, and a generation of
young people had died, hundreds of thousands of his country's young,
before the old man called a halt. He said that accepting peace with Iraq
was like eating poison, but he had eaten it. After that the dead cried
out against the imam and his revolution became unpopular. He needed
a way to rally the faithful and he found it in the form of a book and its
author. The book was the devil's work and the author was the devil
and that gave him the enemy he needed. This author in this basement
flat in Islington huddling with the wife from whom he was half estranged.
This was the necessary devil of the dying imam.
Now that the school day was over he had to see Zafar. He called
Pauline Melville and asked her to keep Marianne company while he
made his visit. She had been his neighbor in Highbury Hill in the early
1980s, a bright-eyed, flamboyantly gesticulating, warmhearted, mixedrace
actress full of stories, about Guyana, where one of her Melville
ancestors had met Evelyn Waugh and shown him around and was
probably, she thought, the model for Mr. Todd, the crazy old coot who
captured Tony Last in the rain forest and forced him to read Dickens
aloud forever in A Handful of Dust; and about rescuing her husband,
Angus, from the Foreign Legion by standing at the gates of the fort and
yelling until they let him out; and about playing Adrian Edmondson's
mum in the hit TV comedy series The Young Ones. She did stand-up
comedy and had invented a male character who "became so dangerous
and frightening that I had to stop playing him," she said. She wrote
down several of her Guyana stories and showed them to him. They
were very, very good, and when they were published in her first book,
Shape-Shifter, were widely praised. She was tough, shrewd and loyal,
and he trusted her completely. She came over at once without any
discussion even though it was her birthday, and in spite of her reservations
about Marianne. He felt relieved to be leaving Marianne behind
in the Lonsdale Square basement and driv ing by himself to Burma
Road. The beautiful sunny day, whose astonishing wintry radiance had
been like a rebuke to the unbeautiful news, was over. London in February
was dark as the children made their way home. When he got to
Clarissa and Zafar's house the police were already there. "There you
are," said a police officer. "We've been wondering where you'd gone."
"What's going on, Dad?" His son had a look on his face that
should never visit the face of a nine-year-old boy. "I've been telling
him," Clarissa brightly said, "that you'll be properly looked after until
this blows over, and it's going to be just fine." Then she hugged him
as she had not hugged him in five years, since their marriage ended.
She was the first woman he had ever loved. He met her on December
26, 1969, five days before the end of the sixties, when he was twenty-two
and she was twenty-one. Clarissa Mary Luard. She had long legs and
green eyes and that day she wore a hippie sheepskin coat and a headband
around her tightly curled russet hair, and there flowed from her a
radiance that lightened every heart. She had friends in the world of
pop music who called her Happily (though, also happily, that name
perished with the fey decade that spawned it) and had a mother who
drank too much, and a father who came home shell-shocked from the
war, in which he had been a Pathfinder pilot, and who leaped off the
top of a building when she was fifteen years old. She had a beagle
called Bauble who pissed on her bed.
Excerpted from Joseph Anton
by Salman Rushdie. Copyright © 2012 by Salman Rushdie.
Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
