![]() I asked him if he has ever regretted going into hiding, if he ever thinks he should have taken precautions, but remained, so to speak, above ground. He has even attended several dinner parties, but he won't discuss these rare ventures out from what he tends to refer to as his "hole" or his "hell". It is known that Rushdie does receive guests on a fairly regular basis, most of the visitors being his writer friends or those involved in publishing his books. ![]() At those times the sense of isolation." His voice trailed off, as it would from time to time. ![]() "I've become something of a telephone addict," he said." And I would say the most difficult times for me have been when I have not had easy access to a phone. He reads the papers and the mail that can be gotten to him and watches too much television. He has reread a number of his favourite novels. You learn to develop antennae - to sense when those living around you are getting too curious." Eventually, no matter how well set up a place is, there is a problem. "What I can tell you is that England is a small place and like all small places it is a nosy place. When I asked him for his own current tally he said it was not something he could talk about. He is said to have been moved 56 times in the first five months alone. Mostly when Rushdie has ventured out of doors during the last 21 months it has been to move on to another safe house. Obvious reasons-you have to know beforehand exactly what it is you wantįor dinner three nights from now, which you cannot know." Gotten for me - and I don't want to get into the details of this, for Neither drive (a passion of his), nor go to the movies (another), nor My response is that people should not go about advising others to get killed." "I've heard people say I should have remained in public, that if I got killed - well, people get killed all the time for what they believe in. I've simply decided I'm going to let myself smoke." He laughed a little. He lit a cigarette and dragged on it deeply.' 'For seven years I quit. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. One feels how the solitude is not of one's own making. "Still, some days there simply is not the energy. Now, as then, when I consider the best of days is when the work is going well, when I am writing until I can work no more and then wake up the next day and pick up right where I left off. "Now, as then, I spend much of each day writing and reading. He poured some red wine for me and then for himself from a nearly spent bottle on a small coffee-table between us. We tried to make small talk about new books, mutual friends but we could not. He had on a blue-and-white-striped thick cotton shirt, black jeans, the vest from a pin-striped suit, red socks, English tan wing-tips. Rushdie and I sat down opposite each other in stuffed chairs. Light fell from a single overhead fixture, the white walls were empty, the hardwood floor bare. The windowless room where we met did not seem lived in, but arranged. I was driven around long enough to assure all concerned that a New Yorker could say no more about where he had been than that he had been taken somewhere in the dark, far from central London. I was told I could describe neither the place of our meeting nor the men and methods employed to keep Rushdie safe and hidden. I was told I would have only two hours with him. I was told I would not be going to the safe house where Rushdie was actually living. "I'm afraid this is going to be a little cloak-and-daggerish," he said, referring to the arrangements Special Branch had made to bring us together. ![]() On the morning of the day we were to meet he phoned me at my London hotel. One evening last month I joined him there. ![]() Rushdie, along with his wife of 13 months, the novelist Marianne Wiggins, went into hiding the following day, under the round-the-clock protection of Scotland Yard's Special Branch. I wonder sometimes what a person who was not a writer would do in such a situation." It requires an enormous amount of energy each day to keep yourself going. And I do not feel habituated to it at all. news was to begin, in a broadcast on Radio Teheran, the station's announcer read an astonishing fatwa, or edict, from the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini Khomeini went on to urge all "zealous Muslims" to execute Rushdie quickly. On February 14, exactly two weeks after our conversation and just before the 2 p.m. Over the next few months I continued to speak regularly with him by telephone - the last time being on Tuesday, January 31,1989, when he nervously described for me a Hyde Park rally that had been held three days before, a rally at which more than 8,000 Muslims burned copies of The Satanic Verses and called for its withdrawal from Britain's bookshops. ![]()
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