Salman Rushdie: I dreamed of the attack two days before it happened
2024-04-15 09:43:36
TiranaPost
In August 2022, two days before the tragic event in Chautauqua, a small town in northern New York, Sir Salman Rushdie had a dream.
As if he were in a Coliseum and spinning on the floor of the stage. A man held a spear in his hand with which he hit him hard, while he himself, Rushdie, tried to avoid the blows. The dream seemed so real that he had struggled in bed and it had been his wife, the novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had woken him from the dream and tried to calm him down.
He told the story in an interview for The Telegraph.
"I was very shocked by this dream and I said to Eliza, I don't want to go. And then you wake up a little more, and you think, it's just a dream, and you're not going to let your life be ruled by something that happened in a dream. And so I thought, I'll go. It's a concert.
There was a significant down payment and the home's air conditioning system needed to be renewed; I needed the money. 1500 people had bought tickets. I couldn't help but show up just because I had a bad dream. I have had some problems with prophets in my life. I don't think I'm cut out for these jobs. So I went," he said.
And then it was August 12.
That he never thought that this event would lead to the book "Knife: Meditations after an attempted murder".
A book he begins: "At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife, shortly after I took the stage in the amphitheater at Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.”
In a frenzied attack that lasted 27 seconds, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times by his assailant, a 24-year-old man called Hadi Matar, 'just savagely slashing and slashing and slashing, the knife going through me like life hers was mine: in the neck, face, body, hand, thigh and, the cruelest blow, in the right eye. The blade went all the way to the optic nerve which meant there would be no chance of saving the sight. He had run away."
Today there are wounds everywhere, on the head, on the neck, behind the ear. Sometimes they cover his hair, sometimes his beard. And no, not sure if he was hit 13 or 14 times.
I didn't count the strokes and the seconds. I only know what the media said. 27 seconds. It's amazing how much damage you can do in 27 seconds if you have a knife in your hand," he says.
"It's impossible to look at that pool of blood and not think you're going to die. It wasn't the fear of death, mostly it was the feeling of loneliness, the sadness of dying away from the people you love. That's what I felt."
