Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read Free Page A

weighed heavily on them both. They didn’t turn on the car radio, knowing the news would be full of hatred. “Where shall we go?” he asked, even though they both knew the answer. Marianne had recently rented a small basement apartment in the southwest corner of Lonsdale Square in Islington, not far from the house on St. Peter’s Street, ostensibly to use as a work space but actually because of the growing strain between them. Very few people knew of this apartment’s existence. It would give them space and time to take stock and make decisions. They drove to Islington in silence. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
    Marianne was a fine writer and a beautiful woman, but he had been discovering things he didn’t like.
    When she had moved into his house she left a message on the answering machine of his friend Bill Buford, the editor of
Granta
magazine, to tell him that her number had changed. “You may recognize the new number,” the message went on, and then, after what Bill thought of as an alarming pause,
“I’ve got him.”
He had asked her to marry him in the highly emotional state that followed his father’s death in November 1987 and things between them had not remained good for very long. His closest friends, Bill Buford, Gillon Aitken and his American colleague Andrew Wylie, the Guyanese actress and writer Pauline Melville, and his sister Sameen, who had always been closer to him than anyone else, had all begun to confess that they didn’t like her, which was what friends did when people were breaking up, of course, and so, he thought, some of that had to be discounted. But he himselfhad caught her in a few lies and that had shaken him. What did she think of him? She often seemed angry and had a way of looking at the air over his shoulder when she spoke to him, as if she were addressing a ghost. He had always been drawn to her intelligence and wit and that was still there, and the physical attraction as well, the falling waves of her auburn hair, her wide, full-lipped American smile. But she had become mysterious to him and sometimes he thought he had married a stranger. A woman in a mask.
    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