Out of Hiding : With Husband Salman Rushdie Still Facing Death Threats, Author Marianne Wiggins Emerges from Exile

“To be reborn, first you have to die.”

--From “The Satanic Verses,” by Salman Rushdie

On the morning her husband was condemned to death, Marianne Wiggins woke up with a terrible hangover. The night before, she had been at a London party celebrating the publication of her latest novel, and the champagne had been flowing freely.

As she returned home at 1 a.m. with her spouse, writer Salman Rushdie, their talk turned to the future and an upcoming joint book tour of the United States. Both looked forward to leaving behind a world of trouble in Britain.

In recent weeks, Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” had triggered international protests by Muslims who said it blasphemed the Islamic faith. The mood was turning ugly in England, where Muslims were demonstrating against the book, but as the couple fell asleep neither had any idea it would be their last night together in the modest north London home.

It was Valentine’s Day, 1989.

“You never really expect anything to happen the way it does,” says Wiggins, looking back. “But here’s how it happens. At 10:30 in the morning, your husband comes running down the stairs because he’s just been called by the BBC. And he tells you that he’s been condemned to death by Iran.

“You’re standing downstairs in your dressing gown, and suddenly this unbelievable thing has taken place,” she adds, laughing bitterly. “And the more you think about it, you realize that your life will never be the same. So of course you run and do something absurd, you rush to shut all the windows.”

Today, 14 months later, Wiggins is curled up on a sofa in a fashionable New York hotel, finally beginning the promotional tour for her novel, “John Dollar,” that was canceled when the storm broke over her husband’s book.

When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini offered a $5.2-million reward for Rushdie’s death, Wiggins and the Indian-born author went into hiding under the protection of the British government. But after five months of isolation, the couple decided it was futile for her to remain underground indefinitely.

They have separated, although their marriage survives. For the last seven months, Wiggins has been living under an assumed name in London, venturing out only rarely. On March 31, the day her plane landed at JFK airport, she began re-emerging as a public person--on her own terms, yet very much alone.

“It is a cold, heartbreaking loss for us,” Wiggins says, staring out the window at a foggy Manhattan landscape. “The danger to him has not lessened after all this time. There are still people who want to kill him, and it was simply going to go on and on. There was no foreseeable end to it.”

Wiggins, an articulate, high-strung woman of 42, brushes a hand across her cheek and then momentarily clenches it into a fist. Outside, a mysterious explosion rocks the neighborhood, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“We decided that we have to live separate lives for as long as it goes on. I must pursue my own voice and my own writing, and that’s something he wanted me to do. But it’s going to be difficult . . . this is a very tough road.”

It may have been a mistake to separate, she says, her voice trembling. In two years, it may prove to be intolerable. Beyond that, who knows?

When the couple announced their decision last August, the initial speculation was that the marriage had ended. But, Wiggins says, it has survived, with obvious limitations. Although she writes Rushdie nearly every night, it takes weeks before the letters reach him, because of security procedures.

While it is technically possible for the author to make phone calls from his hiding place, it is risky for British agents to arrange hookups with Wiggins. When they do speak, she says, it is an upsetting experience.

“Those calls are more painful than pleasurable, because what happens is we would finally get through and then there would be silence half an hour while we listened to each other breathing. Because we miss each other so much.”

The worst thing is that Wiggins has no precise idea where her husband is, apart from the fact that he is in England. The two separated weeks before the news was announced, so security agents could move Rushdie several times.

“They wanted the trail to go cold, so I really wouldn’t know where he is,” she says, adding that agents expressed great concern for her own safety. By keeping her in the dark, Wiggins explains, it diminished the chances that terrorists might kidnap or torture her for information.

During their time in hiding, Wiggins and Rushdie were guarded constantly by men with guns, and had little time to do anything but read, write and watch television. There was no chance to do conventional things, such as going to a movie. “If one even thought of going to a deli on Sunday, you wondered if you should pack a heater. . . . It would not have been glorious or heroic for my husband to have walked into a bullet.”

Meanwhile, the death sentence continues. Although literary figures around the world angrily protested Iran’s actions last year, the issue has begun to fade from the headlines. As with the Lebanese hostages, the story flares up periodically and then disappears.

“It is an outrage that my husband should be subjected to this kind of threat,” Wiggins says, adding that it is essential for Viking-Penguin to issue a paperback edition of “Satanic Verses,” to keep the book in circulation. So far, the publisher has made no such decision.

From his hiding place, Rushdie writes manifestoes defending his book and urges the literary world to resist terrorism. To keep busy, he has written book reviews for several British newspapers and periodically has been spotted around London.

“The fact is, Salman has a forum, he is still able to write and speak out. I don’t have to do that for him,” Wiggins says. “We felt it was completely unfair for this to affect us the same way. I had to get on with who I am.”

Born in Pennsylvania to parents of Greek and Scottish ancestry, Wiggins has lived in Great Britain for the last five years and married Rushdie in January, 1988. She is an intriguing hybrid who begins sentences with a flat American accent and ends them with a Hyde Park flourish.

Critics have praised her novels and short stories as elegant, sometimes quirky snapshots of human relationships, and her career seemed to be taking off with the publication last year of “John Dollar.” Wiggins says she and Rushdie felt they had a tremendous future ahead of them.

“We had both just finished our books, and we looked forward to a honeymoon almost. You know, the books were like children and we would be away from the kids. We met, fell in love and got married when we were writing these books. And then whammo!, the future isn’t what you think it will be.”

Wiggins speaks tensely, almost militantly in recalling the events that have altered her life. She and her husband had brief hopes last year that the death sentence might be revoked, but they were dashed when an expected counterrevolution failed to materialize in Iran.

“The psychopath, fascist maniac (Khomeini) died in June, and we had received reports that once this happened, there might be a major change over there. (President Hashemi) Rafsanjani was making a lot of moderate noises, but it just isn’t going to happen.”

The last remaining hope, she says, is that the hostages in Lebanon will be freed, including British citizens such as Terry Waite. If this occurs, Rushdie would be the only barrier to a resumption of diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran, and “something would be done about this,” Wiggins insists.

Barring that, Rushdie may have to spend the rest of his life in hiding. The crushing finality of this has radicalized his wife.

One of the first things she did after leaving Rushdie’s side, for example, was to visit Berlin when the wall was being torn down. It was important to go, she says, “because I am a writer, and we are living in this incredible age, and I wanted to go and find out about the humanity that was occurring there. I wanted to write (my husband) about that.”

More important, the trauma of the Middle East has invaded her life.

“Suddenly all of this came into my house,” she says. “Lebanon, the Hezbollah, the ayatollah, the PLO. Suddenly my husband has been condemned to death by a religion that is basically without conscience and would be willing to annihilate the world.

“I’ve always had an inkling to take on tough things, in writing, but now I have absolutely no choice. It is completely inappropriate for Marianne Wiggins to publish a volume of limericks next year.”

In fact, Wiggins’ writing had become politicized long before the controversy over “Satanic Verses.” Her latest novel, for example, is a harrowing story of young British girls cast up on an island off the coast of Burma. Using them as a metaphor for Western civilization, the children ultimately go mad and descend into cannibalism.

Although they initially rely on a paralyzed English sailor to save them, he lets them down and provides no guidance. The book has been compared to a female “Lord of the Flies,” but Wiggins says it breaks new ground.

“These are good British girls and they’ve been educated that anything can be solved, that if you fall back on religion or manners or politesse you can get through anything. But they can’t, just like we fall back on government or God, and it fails us again and again.”

In a sense, the girls’ dilemma in “John Dollar” mirrors Wiggins’ own uncertainty as she begins her new life without Rushdie. After months of hiding and secrecy, she is out in the open, reborn but rootless.

“You’re down to existentialism, baby, and you’ve got to make it up as you go along. It’s been hard for me the last six months. There were times when I would have liked to have said, I wish I had a god that I did believe in.”

Wiggins recently finished a new collection of short stories called “Learning Urdu” and she says the stories reflect her new, militant mood. They deal with human loss and, just as “John Dollar” focused on cannibalism, the new book will deal with incest, another taboo.

For now, there are press interviews, room service dinners and the bizarre pleasures of watching American television. Looking exhausted, Wiggins says she plans to spend a quiet night in her room and watch the NCAA basketball finals. Then she might write a letter to Rushdie.

The promotional tour will eventually take her to California, where she will hold readings at Dutton’s Books in Los Angeles and in Berkeley. After it ends, Wiggins plans to vacation in Spain and then return to England.

“I may not know where my husband is, but being near him fills a psychic need,” she says. “I don’t have a home. I don’t even have a temporary home. But my emotional center is very much where I imagine him to be.”