Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read Free

rituals were ornately Byzantine. Blah blah blah Bruce Chatwin, intoned the priests, blah blah Chatwin blah blah. They stood up, they sat down, they knelt, they stood and then sat again. The air was full of the stink of holy smoke. He remembered his father taking him, as a child in Bombay, to pray on the day of Eid-ul-Fitr. There at the Idgah, the praying field, it was all Arabic, and a good deal of up-down forehead bumping, and standing up with your palms held in front of you like a book, and much mumbling of unknown words in a language he didn’t speak. “Just do what I do,” his father said. They were not a religious family and hardly ever went to such ceremonies. He never learned the prayers or their meanings. This occasional prayer by imitation and mumbled rote was all he knew. Consequently, the meaningless ceremony in the church on Moscow Road felt familiar. Marianne and he were seated next to MartinAmis and his wife, Antonia Phillips. “We’re worried about you,” Martin said, embracing him. “
I’m
worried about me,” he replied. Blah Chatwin blah Bruce blah. The novelist Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew behind him. “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he said.
    There had been a couple of photographers on the sidewalk outside when he arrived. Writers didn’t usually draw a crowd of paparazzi. As the service progressed, however, journalists began to enter the church. One incomprehensible religion was playing host to a news story generated by another religion’s incomprehensibly violent assault.
One of the worst aspects of what happened
, he wrote later,
was that the incomprehensible became comprehensible, the unimaginable became imaginable
.
    The service ended and the journalists pushed their way toward him. Gillon, Marianne and Martin tried to run interference. One persistent gray fellow (gray suit, gray hair, gray face, gray voice) got through the crowd, shoved a tape recorder toward him and asked the obvious questions. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “I’m here for my friend’s memorial service. It’s not appropriate to do interviews.” “You don’t understand,” the gray fellow said, sounding puzzled. “I’m from
The Daily Telegraph
. They’ve sent me down
specially
.”
    “Gillon, I need your help,” he said.
    Gillon leaned down toward the reporter from his immense height and said, firmly, and in his grandest accent,
“Fuck off.”
    “You can’t talk to me like that,” said the man from the
Telegraph
. “I’ve been to public school.”
    After that there was no more comedy. When he got out onto Moscow Road there were journalists swarming like drones in pursuit of their queen, photographers climbing on one another’s backs to form tottering hillocks bursting with flashlight. He stood there blinking and directionless, momentarily at a loss to know what to do.
    There didn’t seem to be any escape. There was no possibility of walking to the car, which was parked a hundred yards down the road, without being followed by cameras and microphones and men who had been to various kinds of school, and who had been sent down specially. He was rescued by his friend Alan Yentob of the BBC, the filmmaker and senior executive whom he had first met eight yearsearlier, when Alan was making an
Arena
documentary about a young writer who had just published a well-received novel called
Midnight’s Children
. Alan had a twin brother but people often said, “Salman’s the one who looks like your twin.” They both disagreed with this view but it persisted. And today might not be the best day for Alan to be mistaken for his not-twin.
    Alan’s BBC car pulled up in front of the church. “Get in,” he said, and then they were driving away from the shouting journalists. They circled around Notting Hill for a while until the crowd outside the church dispersed and then went back to where the Saab was parked.
    He got into his car with Marianne and suddenly they were alone and the silence