Knife, p.7
Knife, page 7
Fluid was inexplicably gathering under my right lung. It needed to be drained. I was taken out of my room to an operating theater on a lower floor. I had to lie on my side, a local anesthetic was applied, and then there was a needle, and the draining began.
“Don’t worry. I’m the champion at draining fluids,” the doctor told me. Oh, I thought (but did not say), I didn’t know there was a championship? A World Series of fluid draining? A Super Bowl of fluid draining? Who would perform the halftime show? Muddy Waters? Aqua? Shut up, Salman. It will be over soon. It took longer than I’d thought it would and there was a lot of fluid. Over nine hundred cc’s! The champion held up his trophy, a plastic bag full of a bright pinkish-reddish substance. “I hadn’t realized it would be so colorful,” I said. That’s because I hadn’t thought that there would be blood mixed up with whatever that fluid was. But of course there was blood.
* * *
While I was out of the room, Eliza turned the camera on herself and let her feelings out, the ones she refused to let me see, the grief, the fear, the bewilderment, the sense of having come loose from what she had thought to be her life, and, and above all, her fury at the man “who came to Chautauqua and chose violence. He chose violence.” But, she said, “I’m okay, I’ll be okay, because he didn’t die. My husband lived.”
It was a long time before she allowed me to watch the recording of her soliloquy, her rant. When I did see it, I was overwhelmed by the evidence of her suffering and understood even more deeply the immense effort she had made to hide it, and smile, and care for me with love. She had to recover from that. She had been wounded almost as badly as I had.
* * *
My tongue had a deep cut in it, on the left side. When I fell at the amphitheater I must have accidentally bitten it. Stitches were required. Eliza said that watching me holding my mouth open while a doctor took a threaded needle and sewed up my tongue was the second-worst thing she had to watch. The stitches were self-dissolving and would be gone in less than two weeks, I was told. Until then I would be on a soft diet—soup, puréed potatoes, not much else. I consoled myself with the thought that at least my teeth seemed fine; they hadn’t fallen out, as I had been sure they would after the first blow.
Gradually, on the predicted schedule, my tongue healed, and the stitches fell away.
* * *
The worst thing Eliza had to watch was my eye. A nurse had to come in every hour to moisten it with saline solution, because it was so distended, bulging out so far, that it was impossible for the eyelid to close, so the eye couldn’t moisturize itself. There was plenty to cry about, but there were no tears.
When the bandages were removed, the eye was a monstrosity. Doctors came to test it to see if there was any vision left at all. I was told to put my uninjured right hand over my left eye, and then they shone a light into the right eye. There was one time when, with great excitement, I said I could see the light at the edge of my right eye’s field of vision. The doctors got excited too, but it was a false hope. I just hadn’t covered up my left eye well enough, and that was the eye that could see the light, around the edge of my hand.
The eye was lost. I was trying to come to terms with that. The optic nerve had been damaged, and that was that. He didn’t get me, the A., but he got my eye. Even now, writing this, I still haven’t come to terms with the loss. It’s difficult physically—to be unable to see a whole quadrant of one’s normal field of vision is hard to handle, also to lose two-eyed perspective, so that when I try to pour water into a glass it’s easy to miss the glass—but it’s even more difficult emotionally. To accept that this is how it’s going to be for the rest of my life…it’s depressing. But, as Saleem Sinai’s parents repeatedly told him during his childhood in Midnight’s Children (and as mine told me), “What can’t be cured must be endured.”
The day came when the doctors told me their short-term plan for the eye. No final decision could be made about its long-term future until the swelling had gone down, they said. The swelling was going down, but there was a long way to go. However, in a few days it might be possible to pull the eyelid down over the eye, and once that was possible, there was a way of easing its difficulties and protecting it better. They proposed to lower the eyelid and then stitch it shut. After that the tear ducts would start working again and the eye wouldn’t need the hourly saline moisturization. And the eye would be safe from further harm. (What further harm could there be, I wondered, but, once again, forbore to ask.)
“That sounds really painful,” I said.
“We’ll use a strong local anesthetic,” I was assured.
“Okay,” I said. “Because I’m really not very good about pain.”
The procedure followed a couple of days later. I saw the approach of the needle and said, fearfully, “What about the anesthetic?” I was told it was in the needle. All I can say about what followed is that, if that was true, I can’t begin to imagine how painful the procedure would have been if it wasn’t. Eliza was in the room, so she heard my loud noises of anguish, and saw my body stiffen. Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader: if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut…avoid it. It really, really hurts.
It was “successful,” as medical folks say. It’s not the word I would have chosen myself. It was the closest thing to unbearable pain I had ever experienced—yes, including the knife blows; I was in so much shock during the attack that I didn’t experience that pain as pain, even though those witnesses I mentioned reported that I had been “wailing.” After this “successful” procedure I thought of lines from Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero / No Limit,” which my friend Steve sang to me on the night of my birthday in Sardinia in June: “…there’s no success like failure / and that failure’s no success at all.”
It would be seven weeks before the stitches could be cut away.
* * *
On Day Seven at 11 a.m., Eliza’s laptop was set in front of me so that I could watch friends and allies gathering on the steps of the New York Public Library to declare their solidarity. Exactly one week earlier, I had been lying on the floor at the Chautauqua amphitheater, thinking about dying, trying not to die. Now here were hundreds of people gathered on Fifth Avenue “standing with Salman.” Here was my friend the wonderful novelist Colum McCann saying of me, “Je suis Salman,” just as I and many others had said, after the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists on January 7, 2015, “Je suis Charlie.” How moving it felt, but also strange, to become the slogan.
Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the writers’ organization of which I was an ex-president, made passionate opening remarks. “When a would-be murderer plunged a knife into Salman Rushdie’s neck, he pierced more than just the flesh of a renowned writer. He sliced through time, jolting all of us to recognize that horrors of the past were hauntingly present. He infiltrated across borders, enabling the long arm of a vengeful government to reach into a peaceful haven. He punctured our calm, leaving us lying awake at night contemplating the sheer terror of those moments on stage at Chautauqua. And he shattered our comfort, forcing us to contemplate the frailty of our own freedom.” This speech, and all that followed, brought me close to tears, but I also thought, Don’t give him so much power, Suzanne. We aren’t so easily shattered. Don’t make him sound like an angel of doom. He’s just a dumb clown who got lucky.
Over a dozen speakers, including dear friends—Kiran Desai, Paul Auster, A. M. Homes, Francesco Clemente. Emotion overwhelmed me. It was hard to speak. But afterward Eliza turned on her camera and asked me about it.
How did you feel, darling, seeing everyone gathered there for you on a beautiful sunny day in New York.
My voice was frail and my breath uneven. I spoke in broken phrases.
I felt…grateful…I was moved…to know…that my life…meant…meant so much…to people. And I was…happy…to hear my work…read out.
After the event at the library there were meetings in my support everywhere, or so it seemed—in England, Canada, and all over Europe. I thought again that love was a real force, a healing force. I have no doubt at all that the love coming toward me—the love of strangers as well as family and friends—did a great deal to help me come through.
In the beginning…back then…after the fatwa…there was quite a lot of hostility, even from the literary world…I have the feeling…that maybe now…people like me…a little bit.
All I’ve ever tried to do…is good work…and the right thing. That’s all I’ve ever…
Later that day, I needed to tell Eliza how grateful I was to her, too. “You’re really going the extra fucking mile.”
She told me I didn’t need to thank her.
“But I feel deep gratitude…I want you to know…that I feel it.”
She changed the subject, and asked about a Belafonte calypso she had heard me humming.
“Jackass Song,” I said. “ ‘Now I tell you in a positive way / Don’t tie me donkey down there.’ ”
She asked me to sing it. I can’t sing at the best of times, but I sang for her in my faint, broken voice. “Now me donkey gone mad they say / Don’t tie me donkey down there / ’Cause he high on a bale of hay / Don’t tie me donkey down there!”
Makes me happy, I told her, talking to you about silly things.
* * *
The event on the library steps gave me a big energy boost, better than any medicine. I talked to Eliza about how we had to get our life back.
One has to find life, I said. One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.
* * *
I am trying to remember if I ever felt angry in those days. I was in the extreme-trauma ward at Hamot for eighteen days—eighteen of the longest days of my life—and as I try to put myself back in that room I can recall feeling weak, determined, exhausted, depressed, stunned, sick, groggy, and, in the company of Eliza, Zafar, and Sameen, also loving and loved. I don’t remember anger. I think that anger felt like a wasteful luxury to me. It wasn’t useful, and I had more important matters to attend to. I didn’t think very much about the man whose actions had put me in this place, or about the men whose murderous ideology inspired him to act as he did. I thought only about survival, by which I meant not only staying alive, but getting my life back, the free life I had so carefully built over the last twenty years.
My battered body was doing quite well, all things considered. I learned a lot in those days about the astonishing ability of the human body to repair itself. The human animal is capable of many damaging (and a few noble) actions, but when its existence is threatened a powerful instinct kicks in and takes charge. It was that survival instinct that had whispered in my ear as I lay bleeding in Chautauqua. Live. Live. It was still whispering to me in my hospital bed.
As for the rest of it—getting my old life back—I knew that would have to wait. This would be a long journey, and before I could go down that road I had to learn to walk.
There was an armchair next to the bed. The first step was to feel able to sit in that chair. I found that at first I needed help moving my legs around, help sitting up, help sitting down. But it was good to be more upright, and every day it became just a little easier to move myself toward the chair. Every day I was a little more able to do things for myself. The day I was able to make it to the toilet, do my good-patient business of emptying my bowels, and then clean myself without a nurse’s help—well, that felt like a liberation. I had been terrified that I would be the kind of invalid who needs someone to wipe him, to wash him, to treat him like a baby. I began, just a little, to think I might soon be a grown-up once again.
There was no mirror in the bathroom. I still hadn’t seen my face.
After about ten days, I walked out of the room! There was a nurse by my side and I had, that first time, a walking frame—what the British call a Zimmer frame—but I managed to make it halfway down the hotel corridor and back again. Security guards and hospital staff gave me encouraging thumbs-up signs. And after that, every day I walked a little better.
Being able to do a few simple everyday things for myself lifted my spirits greatly. I had to learn how to hold a toothbrush and squeeze toothpaste onto it, using only one hand. But worrying medical issues remained. There were small bags attached to various parts of my body to catch fluids that were leaking out of me. And one of the knife wounds in my face had damaged the channel by which saliva reached my mouth, and the saliva was oozing out of my cheek. A young doctor came to attend to this. He pushed a strip of absorbent fabric into my face and would visit twice a day to press hard on the wound to pull some of the strip out, soaked in saliva. Slowly the leak dried up. The procedure was extremely uncomfortable, and I began to call him Dr. Pain. But it worked, and by the time I left Hamot the saliva wasn’t dripping out of my face anymore.
My left hand was being held immobile in its splint. It was too early to begin any physical therapy; the tendons needed to repair themselves first. Along with my blinded right eye, this crippled hand was the most unavoidable evidence of my new reality. More than one person tried to reassure me by saying, “At least you’re right-handed,” but that well-meaning thought didn’t really comfort me. My main source of comfort was the presence by my side of Eliza, Zafar, and Sameen.
Zafar had been nine years old at the time of the fatwa and had had to grow up with that menace hovering over his father’s head. Then, just as things seemed to be improving, his beloved mother, Clarissa, died of a savagely aggressive recurrence of breast cancer after over five years’ remission. He was nineteen. He had come through the ordeal of such a childhood with grace and poise, and it was just too bad, I thought, that after more than twenty years the past should come back to haunt him and bring him from London to this faraway place where his father lay fighting for his life. I was by no means the only person whose days had been deformed by the terrorist threat. He was a victim too.
* * *
Sameen and I had been the closest of allies ever since the day she first showed up in Bombay, one year and two weeks after I did. Nobody had been closer to me during childhood. She fought with people for me if she thought they were being mean, and I got her out of trouble with our parents. One day when we were perhaps eight and nine years old the doorbell rang. An irate parent stood there and raised his voice at my father. “Your daughter just beat up my son!” My father started laughing. “Shh,” he replied. “Don’t say that so loud.”
We had remained close all our lives. And now this. I told her over and over how much I loved her and how much it meant to me—how much it was helping me—that she had come. After a few days she said, “This is confusing. You’ve never been so nice to me.” This was our way—teasing, joking, sending each other up, knowing that our love didn’t need to be stated sentimentally in order to exist. And here I was being tearfully sentimental. She was right to be confused: it was totally out of character.
“I’m always nice to you,” I protested.
“No, you’re not,” she said, happily. “Not like this.”
Before Sameen arrived at Hamot, Eliza had shown her my wiggling toes on her iPhone, to reassure her that my brain was functioning. When she arrived, she began doing for me what we had both done for our mother when we were young and she lay tired in bed in the afternoon: she kneaded my feet (and massaged those talkative toes) to soothe me. “Dabao,” I said to her in Urdu, echoing our mother’s old command. “Press.” For a week our lifelong intimacy brought me, if not joy, then at least the memory of joy. Then, on Day Eight, she went back to London, finding it hard to leave, angry at herself for not having booked a more distant departure date. On Day Nine, Zafar went home too. After that it was just Eliza and me, and there were nine more days to go.
* * *
When he heard the news about me, Milan’s only thought was to get to my bedside as fast as he could. However, the Atlantic Ocean stood in his way, and at twenty-five he was in the grip of an acute fear of flying. He hadn’t been able to get on a plane for almost six years. All that day, August 12, he was stuck, painfully, on the horns of this dilemma. I confess that I didn’t entirely understand the source of his fear, because for much of his young life he’d flown everywhere, both to me in New York and with me to, for instance, India, Cyprus, and Rome. Spending time with him had always been one of my highest priorities, and until the fear arrived we had alternated between my visits to London and his trips to America. But then the fear arrived as if from nowhere, and after that, for a long time, I was the one who had done all the traveling. And now the attack was asking him a question he didn’t know how to answer. Yes, he would fly immediately!—No, he couldn’t do it.—Yes, he would make himself do it.—No, he would get to the airport but he wouldn’t be able to board the plane.
His mother, Elizabeth—Elizabeth West, Lady Berkeley, now happily married to the composer Michael Berkeley, and still a good friend—came to the rescue. She bought him a transatlantic passage on the Queen Mary 2, the one remaining passenger liner crisscrossing the ocean. It would sail from Southampton on a seven-day journey to New York and would arrive at the end of August. It was lucky she moved so swiftly and so generously, understanding (as Eliza had understood when she paid for the private flight to Erie) that there are moments in life when you don’t calculate, you just do it. Twenty-four hours after she got Milan his berth, the voyage had sold out.
