Letters From London

  In the commentators’ box a bored, end-of-term facetiousness reigned. Cathy Forbes began speculating on Short’s awkward body position, wondering if it was because no one had told him to pee before the game. We were all waiting for queens to come off and glutinous drawdom to arrive. Short later gave two slightly different explanations of why this didn’t happen. At his press conference, he said, “I was a little bit too ashamed to offer a draw and I think he was too ashamed, too.” Later, he suggested, “I was too lazy to offer a draw and so was he.” Given that the match had virtually been decided, and the two players were now business partners popularizing a sport, shame was the likelier motive. And there was also perhaps a familiar unspoken subtext as the rival queens stared at each other in a proposed suicide pact. Go on, you offer the draw. No, you offer it. After you, Claude. No, after you, Cecil. I’m not taking the blame. Well, you’re six points down, it’s up to you to do something. Kasparov appeared to be playing simply to stay equal, at one point rather futilely retreating his bishop to a8 rather than proffer a whisper of an attack. The commentary team interpreted Ba8 like this: “‘I’m not going to offer a draw, English swine’—that’s what that move says.”

  The tournament director at Linares seeks to discourage quick, crowd-displeasing draws by making contestants play at least as far as the forty-move time control. One effect of this is that seemingly drawn positions may come to life again, like some bonfire you think you have terminally damped down by piling on a mound of sodden leaves. All of a sudden there is a thin spiral of smoke, and then, before you know it, a warning crackle. This is what happened in Game 16. Short called off the queen swap and fiddled around with a queenside knight, while Kasparov put his own queen imperiously in the center of the board. Things began to stir, not just on the queenside but also on the kingside and in the center. In just a few moves, a great woof of flame went through Kasparov’s position, leaving it gutted. The champion shook hands, declined any on-board postmortem, and stalked off. It was his first defeat in eighteen months. Short acknowledged applause fit for a diva with an unoperatic, soft, semiclenched fist (oddly, or Englishly, a very similar salute to that of Glenda Jackson on being elected an MP), then disappeared. This being a theater, the audience worked to exact a second curtain call; but chess has not yet gone that thespian.

  Afterward, at his victory press conference, Short was engagingly modest and thoughtful, keeping his result in perspective. What had been his strongest move? “I thought I played the middle game quite well.” (This is the diminishing British-English “quite.”) He admitted to having been “rather shaken” by his loss in the previous game and so “didn’t want to do anything drastic.” He acknowledged that after a seven-year gap he had almost “forgotten what it was like to beat Kasparov,” and gently contrasted his own style with that of Karpov, who tended to play “like a vegetarian against the Sicilian.” The visceral response to victory was time-delayed. Dominic Lawson later described Nigel’s touching behavior over the dinner table that night: “He jumped up repeatedly from the table, almost between mouthfuls, and clenched his fists together in front of his chest, like a footballer after scoring a goal. ‘Wurgh! Wurgh!’”

  After this brief interruption to normal service, Kasparov drew the next four games without much inconvenience, to come out the winner by Asked which was his favorite game, Kasparov replied, “I don’t know, because unfortunately I made mistakes in every game.” This may be read as an indication either of modesty or of arrogance, or as an early strike at whoever emerges as his next contender. But beyond this, it reminds us that the best chess contains a striving not just for victory but for something beyond: for an ideal, harmonious state that produces a perfect mixture of creativity, beauty, and power. So it’s not surprising if God comes into the chess player’s equation at some point, even if only as a linguistic reference. “I’m looking for the best move. I’m not playing against Karpov, I’m playing against God,” Kasparov said during his 1990 world-title match. Nigel Short, after winning his eighth game against Karpov, was even more hubristic: “I played like God.”

  However, the Englishman’s relationship to the Almighty is not just one of emulation but also (as befits a prospective Tory MP) one of negotiation. Cathy Forbes has revealed that part of Short’s buildup to important games was “to visit churches, even though he is an atheist.” An odd habit, which seemed even odder when Short explained it during his match against Karpov in Linares: “At first I said, ‘Please God let me win this game,’ but I realized this was asking too much. So instead I asked, ‘Please God give me the strength to beat this shit-head.’” In the course of his subsequent match with Timman, Short elaborated on his atheistic prayers. Yes, he was an unbeliever, he admitted, but “I am also an opportunist.” We shouldn’t be too hard on him for this—it is only a rougher version of the Pascalian bet as to God’s existence. After his sole and splendid victory in Game 16, amid a flurry of proper questions (“But what if f5 b6 cxd4 Nd8 Bc2 then can’t he get a draw by perpetual check?” and the like), I asked Short if he had continued his churchgoing habit during the final. He gave the sort of strangulated, glottal pause that tends to precede his answers to nonchess questions, and replied, “No.” But he had done so in earlier rounds? Short looked a little puzzled, as if some nutter had infiltrated the press corps and in his moment of incandescence was calling him a traitor to the Almighty. “Perhaps I should,” he added politely.

  Perhaps he should. Losing at sport releases a swarm of if-onlys, among which (Jod is (as always) the most elusive. If only Short had saved a few more seconds on his clock in the opening game and/or accepted Kasparov’s offer of a draw. If only there hadn’t been that upsetting ruckus with his coach, which also led to the loss of his database. If only he’d clinched Game 10 when even a blindfold patzer might have secured it. If only he’d been able to hold his score with black to a reasonable percentage. If only he’d had a cold more often, as he did when winning Game 16. All of which boils down to the main, the cruelest if-only: if only he hadn’t been playing the strongest, the most competitive, the most undermining, the most carnivorous chess player in the world. What happened to Nigel Short during his autumn season at the Savoy Theatre can best be left in his own words: trapped, dominated, fucked.

  December 1993

  Short’s game has not yet recovered from this defeat: in the next world championship cycle, he was routed 5½–1½ by Gata Kamsky. Grandmaster Daniel King subsequently appeared in double-page adverts for the Audi A6: “Neither moves without thinking.” But whereas a mere chess grandmaster “takes several minutes thinking of his next move, the Audi A6 takes just 0.006 seconds.”

  13

  Five Years of the Fatwa

  Last month, I took part in a fund-raiser for a cash-strapped Oxford college: two poets, two prose writers, and two musicians were the evenings entertainment. The six of us filed into the hall and sat unidentifiably in the front row. The organizer began by apologizing for the fact that my advertised fellow novelist was at the last minute unavoidably unable to make it (he had unavoidably gone skiing, but the fictioneers’ freemasonry does not permit me to finger him). Instead, she announced, his place had been taken at short notice by Salman Rushdie. There was, at that point, an example of speaking applause. It wasn’t cheerleader stuff (this was England), or even the standing ovation he frequently receives (this was Oxford). It was considered, thoughtful applause, extensive but not self-congratulatory. It simply said: Yes, good, and we are on your side; keep going.

  Rushdie has kept going. On February 14, he celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. The verb in that sentence may seem uneasy, but it fits. It is a matter for celebration that he has survived five years with a million-dollar price on his head; equally, he has survived vilification, demonization, burning in effigy, attacks from a vengeful clerisy abroad, and shameful denunciations from fellow Britons at home. Better, he has continued to exist as a writer, and has been able to inject sporadic normality into hi
s life. He has lost a little hair, put on a little weight, started to suffer from asthma, but is impressively much the same character who, five years ago, was setting off for the memorial service of his friend Bruce Chatwin when news came through from Teheran of his own planned funeral. The fortitude, intelligence, imagination, and humor that took him into trouble in the first place have helped sustain him so far. And at the political level there are now, perhaps for the first time, mild grounds for optimism: the inactivity and glacial indifference of the Bush and Thatcher administrations have been replaced by the comparatively more sympathetic presences of Clinton and Major.

  On November 24, 1993, Rushdie met President Clinton at the White House for a few minutes. It was a rare historic moment: Presidents on the whole tend not to entertain foreign nationals condemned to death by the ecclesiastical authorities of yet a third country. Clinton’s brief political blessing (which came in the context of Rushdie’s hour-long meeting with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and others) was the culminating point of a two-year profile-raising campaign organized by the London-based International Rushdie Defence Committee. It also emblematically returned the case to the widest political arena, which is where it had begun. For this was never just a story of an elderly cleric’s venture into literary criticism, or one in which America might intervene at some late stage as untainted peace broker. It has been universal business from the start, and Americans, in case they have forgotten, are World Devourers. Here are a few extracts from the Ayatollah Khomeini’s follow-up speech of 3 Esfand 1367, or February 22, 1989:

  The issue of the book The Satanic Verses is that it is a calculated move aimed at rooting out religion and religiousness, aimed above all at Islam and its clergy. Certainly, if the World Devourers could, they would have burnt out the roots and the title of the clergy. But God has always been the guardian

  of this sacred torch and, God willing, he will continue to be so—on condition that we recognize the tricks, ploys, and deceptions of the World Devourers…. The issue for them [the Western powers] is not that of defending an individual, the issue for them is to support an anti-Islamic current, masterminded by those institutions—belonging to Zionism, Britain, and the USA—which, through their ignorance and haste, have placed themselves against the Islamic world….

  God wanted this blasphemous book, The Satanic Verses, to be published now, so that the world of conceit, of arrogance, and of barbarism, would bare its true face in its long-held enmity to Islam; to bring us out of our simplicity and to prevent us from attributing everything just to blunder, bad management, and lack of experience; to realize fully that this issue is not our mistake, but part of the effort of the World Devourers to annihilate Islam and Muslims. Otherwise, the issue of Salman Rushdie would not be so important to them as to put the whole of Zionism and arrogance behind it.

  If the Rushdie case were a fiction, how would we judge it? Dark, melodramatic, remorseless, and distinctly lacking in jokes—though Vice President Quayle’s venture into the world of Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling was a fine conceit. We should vote the story unput-downable; but we should also, if we prefer traditional narrative, complain about all the postmodern loops and digressions we have had to put up with. British readers have been particularly thrown by this, and over the past five years have often seemed to lose concentration on the central story. Elsewhere in the West, the main themes have always been clear: freedom of expression, and religious (or state) terrorism. In Britain, there have been too many subplots for the local taste: minority communities, their rights, vulnerability, and leadership; electoral votes, and MPs’ fear of losing their seats; trade, and the potential loss of overseas customers; racism and antiracism; the intelligentsia’s lack of political muscle; victim blaming (disguised as the academic thesis “Hero or Antihero?”); plus, finally, the eternal national quest for a quiet time. Every so often over the last five years, as the story has swirled and shimmied like a dust storm, the British reader has been obliged to give the head a good shake and say: Hang on—do you mind if we go back to the beginning? Can we go back to the single vicious plot hook: the idea that a man, a British subject, may publish a novel here in full freedom, committing no vestige of offense under British law, and yet be obliged to go into hiding, protected round the clock by the Special Branch, as the result of an extraterritorial decree of assassination from a far country? Can we get back to that, please?

  And when we do, when we now flip to the start of the story, what seems astounding is the lack of outrage in government circles at this historically unparalleled event. When the fatwa was announced, the Foreign Office summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires, had him pointedly received by “only an under-secretary,” and told him that the death sentence was “totally unacceptable.” As the columnist Simon Jenkins, no parlor pinko, wrote at the time, “I gather this is fairly strong stuff, well up on the Richter scale from ‘regret’ and leaving ‘concern’ far behind. Concern, you may recall, was what the Foreign Office said we felt about the Iraqis gassing the Kurds.” Outrage was conceded to the Iranians from the beginning; so was principle.

  The official British attitude was almost entirely reactive; and that reaction one of conciliatory passivity. Here, for instance, is the sheepish Foreign Secretary of the time, Geoffrey Howe, groveling on the BBC World Service: “I do emphasize that we are not upholding the right of freedom to speak because we like the book, because we agree with the book. The British Government, the British people, don’t have any affection for the book. The book is extremely critical, rude about us. It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany.” It doesn’t, of course, do any such thing, and when I talked to Rushdie after the Oxford reading, he reckoned he might have a nice day out in the libel courts over that last remark, if he didn’t have troubles enough already. Still, what sticks in the throat more is those words “the British Government, the British people.” I can remember no referendum or even opinion poll on the literary merits of The Satanic Verses in early 1989, though it had by this time won the Whitbread Prize for the best novel of the year and been short-listed for the Booker Prize.

  Geoffrey Howe went to Brussels shortly after the fatwa was issued for a meeting with his European colleagues, and was surprised to find himself briefly kicked into a semi-nonspineless stance. Britain, “diplomatic sources” admitted afterward, was unprepared for the zeal of France and West Germany in the matter, and Howe found himself carried along by a “spontaneous upsurge of feeling that something tough had to be agreed.” This “something tough” was the recall of EC ambassadors from Teheran and the expulsion of the Iranian chargé d’affaires in London. Thereafter, for the next four years, official Britain lay like a sleeping hog in the sun, heedless of the potatoes regularly being thrown at it. There was the death sentence and the bounty; the frequent endorsing of the sentence; the raising of the bounty; the grotesque addition of expenses to go with the bounty (imagine the finance-department quibbles back in Eşfahşn: “Five nights at the Dorchester? Three rocket launchers?”); the sight and sound of domestic Muslim leaders inciting Rushdie’s murder; the own goal of a terrorist who sat on his bomb in a Paddington hotel; the deportation of Iranian students suspected of plotting murder; the expulsion of Iranian Embassy employees on the same ground; the diplomatic halting of the trial of an Iranian for arson and firebombing despite evidence the judge called “formidable;” and finally, almost comically, the 3,600 percent increase in the cost of a visa for a British citizen to enter Iran. In the last five years, diplomatic relations between the two countries have been officially broken off and officially restored—broken off by the Iranians, restored by the British.

  Britain is a medium-ranked trading nation with memories of great wealth and a fear of future poverty: the latest European Commission survey placed us eighth among the twelve members of the Union in terms of average gross domestic product per capita (ahead of only Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece). We also used to have a reputation as a libertarian haven: Voltaire and Zola each took
refuge here when things were hotting up for them in France. But perhaps principles go best with either being rich or being poor. It would, of course, be extremely embarrassing to the British Government if Rushdie were assassinated; and he was awarded immediate Special Branch protection. But, beyond this, for the first four of the last five years the Government snoozed. They did initially have one very good excuse, or at least something that could be played as an excuse: the fact that there were British hostages in Lebanon. The Iranians themselves never made any official linkage between the two cases (and, had they wanted to, it wouldn’t have been difficult to think one up: hand over Rushdie or we’ll have the hostages topped). But this didn’t affect the argument: it was nod-and-wink time, and if-you-knew-what-we-knew. Rushdie was told to pipe down: don’t rock the boat or you might kill Terry Waite. This blackmail, or wise diplomatic inducement, worked: for instance, a planned mass vigil at Westminster’s Central Hall on the thousandth day of the fatwa was deemed potentially provocative by the Foreign Office and forcibly dwindled into a bookshop reading. As Rushdie himself put it: “Until the day Terry Waite was released, I was a sort of hostage to the hostages.” Then, one fine day, the last of the captives was free. So, presumably, I asked Rushdie, it was at this point that the Foreign Office approached you with thanks and fresh plans? “No, we approached them.” “But did you,” I pressed pedantically, “give them time to approach you?” “Well, yes,” he replied, with a still disbelieving chuckle. “I mean, they knew where I was.”

  And so it has continued. There has been one major and continuing success to the story, and it is one that Rushdie, not surprisingly, appreciates: “What the British have had to do is the bottom line—which is keep me alive. The security forces around the world are really impressed by what the British security forces have done. The Americans said, ‘We couldn’t have done it.’” But more often the latest plot wrinkle has tended to be dismaying. Last September, for instance, it emerged that British Airways had banned Rushdie from all its flights, arguing, inter alia, that staff would walk off any plane he walked onto. Unfortunately for the airline, Rushdie had managed to evade the ban on one occasion, flying BA from Paris to London: the staff, far from walking off, asked him for his autograph. British Airways happily—indeed, proudly—flies politicians and royals with a similarly high level of threat against them. And what is the Government’s position in all this? According to Rushdie, the Government has on three occasions asked its national carrier to fly this particular endangered citizen, and on three occasions BA has refused. A government that can’t even get tough with its own airline is hardly likely to make Teheran break into a sweat.