Letters from London (40 page)

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

13
Five Years of the Fatwa

L
ast 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 his 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:

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.