/ 2 October 1998

My friend Rushdie – free at last!

Robert McCrum talks to his long-time friend Salman Rushdie as he emerges from the shadow of the fatwa

`I didn’t expect to survive,” says Salman Rushdie. “I didn’t expect to live.” We are sitting alone in the office of anti-censorship group Article 19’s director, Frances D’Souza, in the aftermath of a sweaty press conference at which the world’s media have cross- questioned the author of The Satanic Verses about the end of what history may describe as “the Rushdie affair”.

As it happens, we are half a mile from St Peter’s Street, where Rushdie was living when Ayatollah Khomeini issued that infamous edict, the fatwa, against the writer on St Valentine’s Day 1989.

As Rushdie reminisces about the first days of his life on the run (dodging, in disguise, from safe house to safe house) and recalls how “shocked and off- balanced” the fatwa had made him in the beginning, I find a compilation-tape of memories of him during these 10 years unreeling in my mind: Salman escorted by friendly Special Branch officers (more like university lecturers than latterday James Bonds); Salman working the phone to keep the press on his side; Salman somehow managing to get all the latest books and albums; Salman on stage at Wembley Stadium with U2; Salman the irrepressible, tireless, exasperating, energising, magnetic, non-stop one-man- band – the inveterate survivor. I don’t think many of us ever thought he wouldn’t make it. And now he has.

Many people know Salman Ahmed Rushdie far better than I do. But I came to know him in an unusual and intimate way. For five years I lived in his house, from which he fled in fear of his life in February 1989. If you buy a man’s house, you know things that others cannot know.

In the months after he left St Peter’s Street, Rushdie had tried to offload the property, but the estate agents were understandably nervous. If he was going to sell it, he would have to do it privately. We knew each other then, but not at all well. I was looking to move. Was I interested?

The day I arrived to look the place over, it was quite empty. I remember looking up and down the street and wondering who was watching.

Inside it was gloomy, brown and dank. The hall light didn’t work, but once I got the shutters open, you could see the potential. It was obvious Rushdie had left in a hurry. Books, clothes, an empty wine glass. Half-open wardrobes with his then wife Marianne Wiggins’s clothes. A 40th birthday cake decoration rusting by the back door. The weeds in the garden growing wild. In the kitchen, a herb rack with curry spices. On the top floor, a wonderful writing room, filled with sunshine.

For a few months after I moved in I wondered anxiously about the likelihood of an assault on the house by an Iranian hit-squad, though the Special Branch had given every assurance that the property was safe. Every day, mail would come for Salman A Rushdie, including, on one hilarious occasion, a Time Out London celebrity questionnaire -“Dear Salman Rushdie, How long have you lived in London? What is your favourite restaurant?” etc.

We shall never know what threat Rushdie’s life was under during these 10 years, but at least one person (his Japanese translator) died from his link with The Satanic Verses. Two others were injured; several died in riots associated with the book in India and Pakistan. Bookshops were firebombed, copies of the book burnt on the streets of Bradford.

“One of the most worrying things around me in these years,” says Rushdie, “has been the climate of fear. I have been inhibited by other people’s fear. In situations where I believed there was nothing to be afraid of, other people would be alarmed.”

Rushdie told me he had enjoyed “Level Two Protection”, one notch below the highest level of personal security enjoyed by prime ministers and royalty. For the moment, he is waiting to see “what [new] measure of security will be decided”. He seems philosophical about this, but must be impatient to get back to ordinary life.

After years of Special Branch protection, I wondered how he would adjust to normality. Rushdie has no doubts about this. “I had a life before,” he says. “I know how to do it.”

I’m inclined to believe him. Even in hiding, he has managed to sustain the semblance of normality, albeit at an exalted CEO-type level. While living at the centre of what he calls “the hottest literary story of the 20th century” (understatement was never his forte) he has managed to remain extraordinarily human, exceptionally himself.

He became, privately and without fuss, a terrific champion of those in distress. I shall never forget the time he visited me in hospital, braving a lobbyful of robed Arabs to hold my hand and read aloud from his latest book. Friends will confirm that the Rushdie who emerges into the world at the end of the Nineties is a more mature, more generous, more thoughtful version of the self-styled literary megastar, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children.

It is the measure of Rushdie’s exceptional courage that he has managed to keep writing with verve and imagination, first with Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the fable he wrote for his son Zafar; then with East West, a sequence of lush exotic tales about India, the place of his birth that even now refuses to grant him a visa; then with The Moor’s Last Sigh, and now with The Ground Beneath Her Feet, due for publication next year.

It may be the last fiction he writes for a while. To me, Rushdie repeated what he’d said at the press conference. He intended, he said, to write his own account of these 10 extraordinary years. “I want,” he said, “to tell how it was.” Now the threat has been lifted, he can write without inhibition.

To help him with this, he has the sporadic journal he has kept these past 10 years, his notes from the underground. Some things, he says, were funnier and stranger than you might imagine. For example, there was the time when, hiding in a Cotswold hotel, he discovered that the next- door room was occupied by a tabloid journalist on a romantic weekend with a woman not his wife. The hack missed the scoop of the century.

Throughout these years, while an extraordinary army of friends and supporters, led by Article 19, badgered the British Foreign Office to do battle with the authorities in Tehran, there were so many false alarms, false dawns, breakthroughs that turned out to be false, thaws that were followed by a deeper frost.

The arrival of New Labour in government was a vital turning point. Publicly and privately, Rushdie is full of praise for the determination with which the new prime minister and foreign minister took up his case with the Iranian government.

“Some incredibly important things,” he said at last week’s press conference, “were being fought for here. A thing that is important to me – the art of the novel. Beyond that, the freedom of the imagination, the great, overwhelming, overarching issue of freedom of speech. The right of human beings to walk down the street of their own country without fear.”

Afterwards, in D’Souza’s office, he spoke of the unpublished story that would underpin whatever he wrote about his years on the run. “It’s about love,” he said. “It’s about the extraordinary thing Elizabeth [his new wife] has done for me.” The thought seemed to grow in his mind. “Yes,” he said, “It will be a kind of love story.”

It’s often said that long-term prisoners find it hard to adjust to freedom. So I asked: How will you ever shake off what’s happened? How will you get past it in your new life?

“We all have to move on,” he replied. “The Iranian government has drawn a line under the fatwa. Writing the book of what happened will be my way of drawing a line, too.”