2024-04-15 22:03:17
We have suspected for some time that God has a somewhat strange, often terribly dark sense of humor – but we have finally known it since the death sentence that a dying despot named Khomeini handed down to the writer Salman Rushdie on February 14, 1989 (Valentine’s Day!) imposed. Everything about it is twisted, nothing is right. Rushdie is a classic left-wing liberal, a gentle friend of progress; Since the death fatwa, many leftists have hated him because they absolutely want to see him as an ally of Western imperialism.
Rushdie wrote lovingly, almost tenderly, about Muslims in many novels; The book that earned him the fatwa is by no means a polemical general reckoning with Islam, but rather a fantastic novel that deals with the experiences of Muslim immigrants in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, for many, Rushdie became the representative of a comprehensive hostility to everything Islamic. Then this writer is considered by some of his admirers to be a hero of freedom of expression. But as the hero, Salman Rushdie is completely miscast: he is a lovable person who likes to eat well, has a lot of humor and has retained a childlike soul. The fact that Rushdie, who combines the greatest religious virtues – serenity, philanthropy, wonder at creation, imagination – is a die-hard atheist, can be seen as the punch line of God’s dark joke.
Two years ago in August, Salman Rushdie, now a baroque youth of 75, took part in a literary festival in a town in western New York state whose name is difficult to pronounce: Chautauqua. The fatwa against him was almost forgotten. Rushdie had lived a normal middle-class writer’s life in Manhattan for decades. Suddenly a young man in black clothes and a black mask rushed out of the audience onto the stage where Rushdie was sitting. He was holding a knife in his hand.
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He stabbed Rushdie about fifteen times. He stabbed him in the stomach, in the neck, he stuck the blade deep into his right eye, and if brave people hadn’t pulled him away from Rushdie and held him down, he would certainly have stabbed Rushdie even more times. The writer survived, but only barely. He had to be on a ventilator. Friends and readers expected that newspapers would soon publish obituaries.
But Rushdie recovered; Although he lost his right eye, he was eventually able to breathe, walk and tell jokes on his own again. Now Rushdie’s first book since the murder attempt is being published — in many languages at once. It simply means “Knife”. What does it say?
Anyone who was afraid of a political essay in which it is stated for the ixth time that doing good is good and doing evil is evil will be pleasantly surprised: Rushdie doesn’t preach, he tells. He reports how the attack felt for him – how surprised he was, how he was unable to defend himself: Violence, he writes, shatters the image we have of reality. “Suddenly you no longer know the rules… You no longer recognize the external shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by something incomprehensible.”
Rushdie describes how completely idiotic things were on his mind in those first few seconds: his beautiful Ralph Lauren suit was messed up, his credit cards and his house key were in the pockets of his suit jacket, hopefully no one stole them. He later heard that he screamed in pain after the attack, but he doesn’t remember the pain, just lying on the ground with the red juice pouring out of him and he is convinced that these were the last seconds of his life.
He spares us nothing
The reader often feels uncomfortable while reading, because Salman Rushdie doesn’t spare us anything: Having the tube of a respirator down your throat, he writes, feels like you’ve swallowed the tail of an armadillo, and when the tube is pulled, you think Man, the armadillo pulls back its scaly tail. Rushdie was given a drug he calls “rogue mycin” that temporarily made him unable to urinate; a catheter was placed.
“If you have never had a catheter inserted into your sexual organ,” Rushdie advises fatherly, “leave it at that.” He had never heard the noises that came out of his mouth before: “It sounded like as if my penis was begging for mercy.” Rushdie also describes his gouged eye: it had “bulged out of its socket and hung down on my face like a soft-boiled egg.”
When Rushdie is somewhat patched up again and dares to stand in front of a mirror for the first time, something strange happens: he swaps places with the stranger staring back at him from behind the glass – he becomes another Salman. However, this has happened to him a few times in his life: when he came to the UK from India, after the fatwa, after emigrating to the New World.
In the last part of the book, Salman Rushdie attempts a dialogue with his would-be murderer, which he fails in an interesting way. For understandable reasons, Rushdie didn’t feel like having a dialogue in reality, so he tried to have a mental conversation with the assassin, a young American of Lebanese descent from New Jersey.
The problem is that the murderer has nothing to say to his victim, even in his imagination. His argument was his action: brutal, without argument, and terribly stupid. It doesn’t even suffice with the sentence said in 1938 by a pimp who had stuck a knife between Samuel Beckett’s ribs; When Beckett asked him afterwards why he had done that, he replied: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse.” No idea; sorry.
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However, Rushdie’s failed fantasy dialogue is instructive: it shows that there is hardly a greater contrast in the world than the one between humor and humorlessness. Atheists can be friends with deeply religious people, Nazi children with children of Holocaust survivors, communists with conservatives. But never people who like to laugh with people for whom there is nothing but the tight-lipped, stubborn seriousness of life.
Actually, and this is the secret of this slim book, “Knife” is not about the knife attack at all. But about love. On page 43, Rushdie describes a great slapstick scene: He had just met the beautiful, clever, black poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths in a hotel bar. He suggested that she go outside to the terrace to admire the city lights from above. In his infatuation, he doesn’t realize that the glass door he wants to step through is half closed, he slams into the glass at high speed and then lies on the floor like an idiot. The poet is caring and accompanies him home in the taxi.
This is how a love begins that survives even an attempted murder. Kitschy? Oh what. “Don’t be afraid, my little soldier,” it says at the end of “A Raven of Fortune” by Vittorio Segne, one of my favorite books. “Life is stronger than evil.”
Salman Rushdie: KNIFE. Thoughts after an attempted murder. Translated from English by Bernhard Robben. Penguin Verlag, 255 pages, 25 euros.
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