Joseph Anton: A Memoir (60 page)

He had, he told his friends, been cursed with an interesting life, which sometimes resembled a bad novel by himself. One of its worst bad-novel characteristics was that major characters who were unconnected to the rest of the story could show up at any moment, without prefiguration, elbowing themselves into the narrative and threatening to hijack it.
May 27 was the date on which, four years later, his second son, Milan, would be born, taking possession of the date for good, but in 1993 it signaled the entry of a very different individual, the Turkish writer, newspaper publisher and provocateur Aziz Nesin.

He had met Nesin just once, seven years earlier, when the Turkish writer was the one in trouble. Harold Pinter invited a group of writers to the Campden Hill Square house to organize a protest because Nesin had been told that Turkey had decided to confiscate his passport. He wondered if Nesin remembered that the future author of
The Satanic Verses
had willingly signed the protest, and suspected he did not. On May 27 he was told that unspecified extracts from
The Satanic Verses
had been published in the leftist newspaper
Aydinlik
, of which Nesin was editor in chief, without any agreement being sought from the author, in a Turkish translation he had not been sent (it was normal practice for translations to be independently read for quality and accuracy before publication), to challenge the ban on the book in Turkey. The headline over the excerpts read
SALMAN RUSHDIE: THINKER OR CHARLATAN?
In the following days there were more extracts, and Nesin’s commentary on those extracts made it clear that he was firmly in the “charlatan” camp. The Wylie Agency wrote to Nesin to tell him that piracy was piracy and, if he had, as he said, fought for the rights of writers for many years, would he be willing to object to Ayatollah Khomeini’s infringement of those rights? Nesin’s reply was as petulant as possible. He printed the agency’s letter in his newspaper, and commented, “Of what concern is Salman Rushdie’s cause to me?” He said he intended to continue publishing, and if Rushdie objected, “you may take us to court.”

Aydinlik
was harassed, its staff arrested, its distribution halted and copies seized. In an Istanbul mosque an imam declared a jihad against the newspaper. The Turkish government, defending Turkey’s secularist principles, decreed that the paper must be distributed, but the controversy continued and the mood remained ugly.

He felt that yet again he and his work had become pawns in somebody else’s game. His friend the Turkish writer Murat Belge said that Nesin had been “childish” but, nevertheless, the forces attacking him could not be allowed to succeed. Most painful of all is
that he, too, was a committed secularist, and might have expected better treatment from secularists in Turkey. A rift in the forces of secularism could only be good news to secularism’s foes. Those foes reacted to the
Aydinlik
excerpts soon afterward, and with extreme violence.

At the beginning of July, Nesin went to a secularist conference in the town of Sivas in Anatolia (Anatolia was the part of Turkey where extreme Islamism had most adherents). They unveiled a statue to Pir Sultan Abdal, a local poet who had been stoned to death for blasphemy in the sixteenth century. Nesin, it was afterward said, made a speech declaring his atheism, and made certain criticisms of the Qur’an. This may or may not have been true. That night the Madimak Hotel, where all the delegates were staying, was surrounded by extremists chanting slogans and threats, and then set on fire. Thirty-seven people died in the flames—writers, cartoonists, actors and dancers. Aziz Nesin was saved, helped out of the building by firemen who did not recognize him. When they realized who he was they began beating him, and a local politician shouted “This is the devil we should really have killed.”

The horror of the Sivas massacre was called, in the world’s press, a “Rushdie riot.” He went on television to denounce the murderers, and wrote angry articles for the
Observer
in London and also for
The New York Times
. That the riot bore his name was unfair, but it wasn’t the point. The killings of Farag Fouda, Ugur Mumcu, Tahar Djaout and the Sivas dead were eloquent proof that the attack on
The Satanic Verses
was no isolated incident, but part of a global Islamic assault on freethinkers. He did everything in his power to demand action, from the Turkish government, from the G7 meeting then taking place in Tokyo, from the world. There was a vicious attempt in, of all places,
The Nation
, to accuse him of “spiteful abuse” of Turkish secularists (written by Alexander Cockburn, one of the great contemporary masters of spiteful abuse), but that didn’t matter either. Aziz Nesin and the author whose work he had stolen and denigrated would never be friends, but in the face of such an attack he stood shoulder to shoulder with all Turkish secularists, including Nesin.

In the Iranian Majlis and press, inevitably, there were speeches supporting the murderers of Sivas. This was the way of that world: to applaud assassins and vilify men who lived (and sometimes died) by the word.

Horrified by the Sivas atrocity, the celebrated German “undercover journalist” Günter Wallraff, who, in his hugely successful book
Lowest of the Low
had impersonated a Turkish guest worker to expose the terrible treatment of those workers by German racists and even by the German state, got in touch and insisted that the Nesin-Rushdie “misunderstanding” had to be put right. Nesin had continued to give interviews attacking the author of
The Satanic Verses
and his dreadful book, and Wallraff and Arne Ruth, the editor of the Swedish daily
Dagens Nyheter
, had been trying hard to stop him. “If I can persuade Nesin to visit me here at home, would you please come also so we can fix this?” asked Wallraff. He replied that that depended on the spirit in which Nesin was willing to approach such a meeting. “So far he has been insulting and dismissive and that would make it hard for me to be there.” “Leave this to me,” Wallraff said. “If he says he will come with a positive attitude, will you do the same?” “Yes, okay.”

He flew from Biggin Hill to Cologne, and at Günter’s home the great journalist and his wife were loud, jovial and welcoming, and Wallraff insisted they play Ping-Pong at once. Wallraff turned out to be a strong player and won most of the games. Aziz Nesin, a small, stocky, silver-haired man, did not come to the Ping-Pong table. He looked like what he was; a badly shaken man who was also unhappy with the company he was in. He sat in a corner and brooded. This was not promising. In the first formal conversation between them, with Wallraff acting as interpreter, Nesin continued to be as scornful as he had been in
Aydinlik
. He had his own fight, against Turkish fanaticism, and didn’t give a damn about this one. Wallraff explained to him that they were the same fight. After Ugur Mumcu was killed it had been said in Turkey that “those who condemned Salman Rushdie have now killed Mumcu.” A defeat in one battle between secularism and religion was a defeat in all such battles. “Salman has supported you in the past, and
he has spoken out everywhere about Sivas,” he said, “so you must support him now.” It was a long day. Nesin’s
amour-propre
seemed to be getting in the way of a reconciliation, because he knew he would have to climb down and admit he had been ungracious. But Wallraff was determined not to let things end badly and in the end Nesin, muttering and grumbling, extended his hand. There was a brief hand clasp followed by an even briefer hug and a photograph in which everyone looked ill at ease and then Wallraff cried, “Good! Now we are all friends!” and took them all for a motorboat ride on the Rhine.

Wallraff’s people had filmed the whole event and put together a news item featuring Nesin and himself in which they jointly denounced religious fanaticism and the weakness of the West’s responses to it. In public at least, the rift was healed. Aziz Nesin and he had no further contact. Nesin lived on for two years, until a heart attack bore him away.

He traveled to Prague to see President Václav Havel and Havel greeted him with immense warmth,
finally, we meet!
and spoke of him
publicly with such generosity that his great rival, the right-wing prime minister, Václav Klaus, “distanced” himself from the meeting, saying it was a “private” encounter and he had had no knowledge of it (though the Czech police had borrowed one of Klaus’s cars for their visitor to use). Klaus said he hoped it would not “hurt” Czech relations with Iran.

He took part in an International PEN conference at Santiago de Compostela—Iberia made no difficulties—and was asked about recent press reports that Prince Charles had attacked him. He replied quoting what Ian McEwan had said to Spanish journalists on a book-publication visit to the country the week before: “Prince Charles costs much more to protect than Rushdie and has never written anything of interest.” He returned to London to find the
Daily Mail
vilifying him for something like treachery because he had dared to make a joke about the heir to the throne. “He is abusing the freedom we are paying for,” their columnist Mary Kenny declared. Five days later
Midnight’s Children
was declared the “Booker of Bookers,” the best book to win the prize in its first twenty-five years. He had barely a day to relish the honor before the pendulum swung, and dreadful calamity struck again.

The morning after getting home to Oslo from the Frankfurt Book Fair, William Nygaard was about to set off for work when he saw that his car had a flat rear tire. He did not know that the tire had been slashed by a gunman hidden in the shrubbery behind the car. The gunman had calculated that William would come toward him to open the trunk and get the spare tire out, and once he was in that position he would be a sitting duck. But William was the head of a big publishing company and had no intention of changing the tire himself. He got out his cellphone and called a car service. That gave the gunman a problem: Should he break cover and show himself in order to get a clear shot at his target, or should he fire from where he was, even though William was not where he wanted him to be? He decided to shoot. William was hit three times and fell to the ground. A group of thirteen-year-old kids saw a man with “dark, bad skin” running away, but the gunman was not caught.

If William had not been an athletic man he would almost certainly have died. But the former skiing ace had remained physically fit and that saved his life. What was more extraordinary was that once William was out of intensive care the doctors were able to say that he would make a full recovery. The trajectories of the bullets through his body, they told him, were the only three paths the bullets could have taken without either killing or paralyzing him. William Nygaard, a great publisher, was also a lucky man.

When he heard that William had been shot he knew that his friend had taken bullets that had been meant for him. He remembered William’s pride on the day of the Aschehoug garden party the year before. William’s hand had been on his shoulder as the publisher shepherded him through the surprised throng, introducing him to this novelist, that opera singer, a business mogul here, a political figure there.
A gesture of freedom
, William had said, and now he lay at death’s door because of it. But, thanks to his unwillingness to change his own flat tire, and then to the miracle of the trajectories, he survived. The day came when the wounded publisher was well enough to speak briefly on the telephone. His colleague Halfdan Freihow of Aschehoug called Carmel to say that William was anxious to speak to Salman and could he call the hospital.
Yes of course
. A male nurse answered the phone and warned that William’s voice was very weak. Then William was put on the phone and even after the warning it was a shock to hear how feeble he sounded; he was gasping for breath, his usually impeccable English faltering, distress in every syllable.

He hadn’t even understood at first that he had been shot, had remained conscious until the police arrived and gave them his son’s telephone number. “I screamed like hell,” he said, “and I rolled over and over down a small hill, and that is what saved me, I think, because I was out of sight.” He would have to stay in the hospital a long time, but, he wheezed, yes, a full recovery was possible. “They missed all the organs.” Then he said, “I just want you to know that I am really proud to be the publisher of
The Satanic Verses
, to be part of the Affair. Maybe now I will have to live something like you, unless they catch the man.”
I’m so sorry, William, I have to tell you that I feel responsible for this.…
William broke into the apology and said, feebly, “Don’t say that. It is not
right that you say that.”
But how can I not feel …
“You know, Salman, I am a grown-up person, and when I agreed to publish
The Satanic Verses
I understood that there were risks, and I took those risks. The fault is not yours. The person to blame is the man who fired the gun.”
Yes, but I …
“One other thing,” said William. “I just ordered a big reprint.” Grace under pressure, Hemingway called it. True courage allied to high principle. A union a bullet could not destroy. And the bullets had been big bastards, .44s, soft-nosed, meant to kill.