Knife: On The Outline Of The Divisible World
By B.P.
I’d managed to find my particular copy of Knife, the Random House Large Print edition, lodged between two dictionaries in the bargain bin outside the Harvard Square Bookstore. I had been on my way to a cafe to get some work done, and among the thick throng of students, I saw it, leaning against the windowsill, unattended.
The book had just been sitting there, untouched. Had I not tied my shoes so hastily that morning, I would have missed it entirely. Had I not bent down to pull up my socks, cautiously watching the eyes of passerby pushing past, I would not have seen it, and my life would have invariably gone another way. Isn’t it strange how things can just drift into your life, without warning, activated only by a passing gaze, or an offhand thought?
My eyes nearly popped out of my skull when I saw the name of the author. It was a new one, wasn’t it? And only for two dollars? I felt the keen sense that I was getting away with something devious. I counted out all my change on the curb and hurried inside. I didn’t know it then, but more than anything, I was in desperate need of distraction.
Two months ago, I received a piece of ransomware in my inbox, nestled between two literary newsletters I had subscribed to. Opening it, I found a blurred image, attached with a caption:
You should have expected this.
The email mentioned nothing specific. Five words and a picture, probably sent out to a mailing list counting in the thousands, But even so, I couldn’t help but fill in the blanks with violent, targeted imagery. I must have done something. I deleted the message immediately, but those words lingered in the back of my mind, like a damning, formless mantra. You should have expected this. It was embarrassing the extent that those words had infected my life. I just couldn’t sleep.
Over coffee that morning, I leafed through the book. I sat at the back of the cafe, far from the windows and the eyes of passersby. I didn’t know much about the man, but I knew of the controversy, knew of the intense persecution. In a vain, conceited way, I suppose I felt a connection to him. Maybe he would have the answers I needed.
Using my hands, I covered his name on the book as I read, feet pulled to my chest, far from the sunlight, by the cafe bathroom. I thought of how it had been jutting out of the rack, its spine and text in an impossibly large font like a bullseye, reading that special, momentous name – Salman Rushdie.
***
I finished the whole thing in about two days, carrying it around in my back pocket. I took it to bed, and when the birds outside my window signaled the early morning, I lay back, rubbing my eyes. I wasn’t going to be doing any sleeping anyway.
It was perhaps the most non-memoir memoir I had ever read.
Mr. Rushdie, to me, writes in that typical, silly old guy way that memoirists often speak with. The memoir is filled to the brim with self-referential humor, silly jokes, and that signature, wizened intimate-but-distant voice. There is a specific way I feel memoirists often dress up a subject, putting on the conceits, name-dropping, and making monoliths of specific events where one could say, “ah, and this was when his life turned around,” but, surprisingly, it works wonderfully here, considering the memoir revolves around the dissonance between fiction and reality – the knife, both real and a metaphor.
Normally, with this sort of style, I’d get a chuckle or two out of the book and put it down, forgetting it (A-la-Miracle Man), but Mr. Rushdie is just so wonderfully articulate. So little remains on the page in terms of fat, and yet the sentences, bare and simple as they are, flow from one page to the next. How someone can wrangle so much rhythm out of the occasional paragraph of flairless, end-stopped sentences was mind-boggling.
Where does power sit? In my opinion this is the central question surrounding Knife. Does it rest in the hand that wields a knife or gun, or is it in the soul? The interaction between the would-be-assassin (‘A’) and his victim, Mr. Rushdie, is tenuous, and investigated at length. It was fiction that drove A’s real blade into Rushdie’s body, and it was fiction that pulled its spiritual intrusion out, long after the implement had been removed by doctors. Is it in the physical pain that wracks Mr. Rushdie’s body, which cuts his vision literally in half, or the mental toil incurred afterward from wondering why?
Mr. Rushdie, however, doesn’t seem so concerned with such things for the majority of the book. Most of it takes place in hospital rooms or memories, detailing his day-to-day recovery. Trapped in bed, completely powerless, he describes his weakened self with a depressingly casual level of description:
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.
My eye was hanging out of my socket, like a half soft-boiled egg.
Dear reader, if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact…Let me just say that the noises coming out of my mouth during the procedure were sounds I had never heard before. It was my penis begging for mercy.
In my reality, I’ve come to realize that there is very little that triumphs over physical pain and injury – and, to believe that one can overcome it with such meager things as words might be a foolish notion. It just so happened that my body, even if it had not suffered an awful attack like Salman’s had, was weak. It seemed for the majority of the book, that notion is mirrored by him, and that frustrated me. I mean, what solace is there to be found in that? I’d come to this novel expecting visions of grandeur, righteousness, a meteoric rise from the bottom, et cetera.
So often these kinds of memoirs try to come away with some kind of moral imperative or mantra to be applied, to make more of reality, but the reality is, at least for people like me, these flowery lessons fall apart under the scrutiny of reality.
It is why this narrative stuck with me: it is apparent from the very first page that, for Mr. Rushdie, there is no such relief. He never gets an opportunity to meet his assailant, nor does he recover any proper sense of normalcy, having lost use of one of his eyes. He never gets to understand that fundamental thing that memorists need, that writers, above all else, seek – an answer to why? It is a question that only a god can answer – and, in Mr. Rushdie’s atheist reality, there is no such thing.
Thus, all the while, Mr. Rushdie asks himself:
Was I wrong to make this new, carefree life for myself? With hindsight, shouldn’t I have been more cautious, less open, more aware of the danger lurking in the shadows?...
In other words–as so many people had said all along–was it my own fault?
I thought of the mantra of my enemy, echoing through my head: You should have expected this. In a way, I had asked that same question, to both him and myself:
In other words – was it my own fault?
***
In the latter half of the memoir, Mr. Rushdie constructs a fictional prison cell in which he interrogates his almost assassin, A, for answers. Of course, this cell is not real – nor does Mr. Rushdie know anything about A that truly matters – but still, he does so. Over the course of A’s interrogation, Mr. Rushdie, even in his own mental construct, is given nothing. A curses, spits, screams, but provides no real insight into his own reasoning. That fundamental question: Why? seems to be useless to A. He is so subsumed by the objective reality taught to him that logic and empathy hold no credence. Ironically, he is the man who believes in no afterlife or god is more loving and composed.
I wanted to murder him because he was disingenuous’ would be an unconvincing motive if one were to use it in crime fiction, and my strongest feeling, after reading his remarks, was that his decision to kill me seemed undermotivated…I wanted to meet him… I wanted him to look me in my (one remaining) eye and tell me the truth.
This decision to mostly disengage with larger, more existential discourse, contrary to what one would expect, lends strength to his stance. Mr. Rushdie refuses to give power to his assailant and his cause by inverting the stereotypical memoir form by focusing on the day-to-day, on the small and seemingly insignificant thoughts and moments, those simple free-association thoughts.
After about ten days, I walked out of the room!
By struggling and consequently failing to understand his assailant or the injustices done to him, by refusing to make more out of his experiences and their relation to the shallow image placed upon him by those who presume to know him, Mr. Rushdie refuses the world the shallow symbol imposed on him by forcing his own physical and spiritual reality in our face. He is not silly just because he is silly – he remains silly in spite of everything.
I recalled thinking back then that there were two ways in which the fatwa could derail me, destroy me as an artist: if I started writing ‘frightened’ books, or if I started writing ‘revenge’ books. Both options would destroy my individuality and make me no more than a creature of the fatwa. It would own me, and I would no longer be myself.
Maybe that was where my discomfort began. I’d much rather live in books than in reality. There is solace in the certainty that everything will make sense by the end, in the certainty that my life will resolve in any meaningful way. But maybe that’s why I get such cruddy sleep. All it takes is one mistake for that illusion to shatter, to make way for a world with no answers, no true meanings, no god, no salvation – in which one can be stabbed, murdered, raped, threatened, for no reason at all…
But maybe it’s as he says:
To regret what your life has been is the true folly…because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.
Maybe the act of trying to take control – to understand everything with certainty – is the same as becoming something akin to a knife itself, splitting reality into what it is and isn’t. Rest assured, we can say that A himself, hurtling towards the stage, righteous, singular, feeling overcoming him, came to his conclusion via a similar means as I. And what would that say about me?
Closing the book, I am left with that image in my head of a knife hurtling towards me, and I, unable to move, facing it head-on…
How had Mr. Rushdie managed to get to that point in which he could, with confidence and seeming ignorance, say to “A”:
“I don’t forgive you. I don’t not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me”?
After some thought, I may have developed an inkling of understanding. It was in something I noticed only after the fact, as I was compiling quotes for this essay. I thought of Mr. Rushdie’s choice to defer so much of his own story to the lives of others.
I thought of his wife Eliza restlessly sleeping by his cot and holding his hand as he underwent surgery. Of his sons, halfway across the ocean, fighting their way over the Pacific Ocean to reach him before he was expected to die. Of friends and strangers, organizing speeches and events, and broadcasting to the world what he could not say himself. Of those passing doctors, security teams, and strangers, who gave him faith that the world had not changed for the worse.
I thought of how even in his loneliest moments, in those first nights in the ER, hanging on by a thread to life, he was never alone – for the worlds and characters and memories of his favorite stories and people clung to his chest, keeping him warm, passages, recounted from memory, pulling him from the darkness. Was that his answer? Was it that fundamental faith in people that saved him?
I still don’t have the resolve to meet the world as freely as you have, Mr. Rushdie: But I do know this: I’m sorry for covering your name while reading your book. At the very least, I've come to understand that violence, the most brutal kind, can be as simple as covering the name on a book.
***
It’s been a few weeks since I finished Knife. Coming to the book with the selfish goal of feeling vindicated or righteous, I’d say that I didn’t find much in the way of relief. In fact, I feel as if I’ve become even more aware of the chains binding me to fear. But I will say this: For a short while, reading about his small, human triumphs and pains, I couldn’t help but feel, on some level, closer to finding my own solace with the impossible violence of existing. Smirking at his every joke and off-hand remark, thinking of him, I was reminded that I wasn’t alone. Just as easily as malice had entered my life, he had too. And that’s gotta count for something.
These days, I find myself repeating a stray line from the book, like a mantra, in my head, over and over and over. It’s stuck in there – I couldn’t forget it if I tried.
One has to find life, I said. One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.
Lying in bed, I reach for the curtains and yank them open.
Man, I gotta find life!
***
Twenty-year-old B.P. is a rising Junior currently residing in the New England area. He served as a Cheuse Center intern and helped organize and curate the inaugural Cheuse Center Busboys and Poets Lecture, delivered by Azar Nafisi in April 2023, at the Sherwood Community Center in Fairfax, Virginia.
Other Essays from B.P.