The Tobacco Keeper (12 page)

‘He’s better and braver than you,’ he replied scornfully. ‘I told him about his miserable life, and he’s decided to join the revolutionary movement.’

When he arrived home, Huri came out of the yard wearing her apron and her round glasses. Her hair was unkempt, and her sallow face looked tired and sickly. When she saw him, she stopped in her tracks, her eyes as wide as they would go and her hands held high as though transfixed. In one hand she held a large wooden spoon that she used for cooking okra.

She screamed in his face. ‘Good God, Sami. What’s that you’re bringing home? Haven’t I got enough with your children?’

‘Huri, did you want me to leave it to die in the rain?’

That was how his father lived. After his father’s death, Yousef never removed his coat from its hanger. He kept his hats, books, umbrellas, raincoats and boots until the day he emigrated in 1950.

(There were many anecdotes about his father. In his letters, Yousef penned a lovely portrait of his childhood in spite of the poverty of the family. This was particularly true of the letters he wrote from Tehran between August 1954 and July 1955. The 1956 letters, in contrast, spoke of his artistic life and how he’d joined the Iranian National Symphony Orchestra.)

The musician was in every way like his mother. Since childhood, he’d been captivated by her: her long fingers, her slender figure and her lovely bosom that showed above the low neckline of her dress. He was enchanted by a vision of her in her bedroom, for he saw in her a woman who never lost her femininity to motherhood.

This was how he saw her:

A large mirror with a teak frame hung prominently on the wall of the room. She was standing in front of it and gazing at her figure before taking him out to a concert. He sensed her beauty
and femininity and marvelled at her lovely clothes. Although his family was not rich, his mother had the demeanour of a great aristocratic lady. She sewed her beautiful clothes on a Singer sewing machine in her room. Ibrahim Naji Shameel, the wealthy co-owner of the Juri pharmacy who had once been in love with her, would provide the tickets for the concerts to which she took her son in all humility and modesty.

Yousef entered the concert hall: his body was diminutive, his legs looking so thin in his blue shorts and his white shirt far too large for him. His eyes had a dream-like quality and his face was peaceful and beautiful. Throughout the time they sat there, he remained silent and solemn. He was more overawed than joyful. This was what his mother noticed. Classical music for him was akin to worship or prayer. He passed the time in silence, his eyes fixedly following the melodies as they intertwined. From the moment the music started he paid no attention to what went on around him. He was hopelessly romantic, for he held on to art as the final thread that attached him to life. It was clear that he would continue his musical education at the Iraqi music conservatory, which at that time was directed by Julien Hertz. Yousef would later help to create the Baghdad Philharmonic Society together with Boutros Hanna, Sandu Albu, Jameel Said and André Thoerè, with whom he continued to work until his emigration to Israel. The greatest and most important turning point in Yousef Sami Saleh’s life was the scholarship he received at the age of fifteen from a wealthy Baghdadi, to travel to Moscow. There he had the chance to listen to orchestral pieces and chamber music at the Bolshoi auditoriums. He also listened to Rachmaninov and visited the Russian Composers’ Society, the Academy of Music and the Opera House in the city of Bryansk. This visit made a great
impression on him; indeed, it influenced his entire life. It was the first time that he’d seen such a large number of musicians and concertgoers. They dazzled him with their looks and their handsome outfits. He admired them so much that he wanted to follow in their footsteps and become one of them. So he bought a coat with large pockets, some elegant round glassses with gold frames, a pair of leather shoes and a crimson bow tie. He was so fascinated with the musicians that he met and their long beards that he wished one day to grow his beard long, too.

Yousef wasn’t particularly handsome. He had high cheekbones, a large mouth, a slightly small nose and an expressive, sad face. His laugh was muted and he didn’t speak much. On his return home, he felt he had grown up and become a man, even though he was barely fifteen. At that time he was overwhelmed by the most profound feeling of love, which struck him like an earthquake, demolishing his defences and leaving him in ruins. This was his love for his cousin Gladys, which woke him up every morning at dawn to the cockadoodledo coming from Moshe’s house, the tailor in Tekeya market, or the chirping of the swallows in the eucalyptus trees. So, from dawn until sunrise, he would lie in his bedroom, awake and alert, thinking. As soon as an idea took hold in his mind, he would pick up his violin and express the thought in musical notes. Yousef realized without any shred of doubt that it was love that made him play with such intensity of feeling. It made him play with true passion and drew melodies from the depths of his heart. He knew that he was in the grip of a true and violent passion. He knew he was descending at full speed to the lowest depths. But he felt that nobody around him cared for his music. His beloved Gladys did not care either. Nor did any other girl that he had undressed in his mind or dreamt of in bed until he gasped in ecstasy.

But was his love in vain?

Not at all. For without love, he would not have played with such intensity, with such feeling, with every fibre of his being. He struggled hard to become a great musician. He willingly gave up all the choices and pleasures that life offered him, for he wanted only to be a musician. In Moscow, he stood for the first time in his life in front of the greatest conductor in the world: a thin man with a long beard and a face as red as wine, who wore a black suit and a crimson bowtie. He advised Yousef to find artistic inspiration from his own people and nowhere else.

The conductor stood there with his thick coat and wine-red face. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

‘From Iraq,’ answered Yousef, his palms sweating.

‘Good,’ he said, ‘try to find a scene from your country and your people to turn into music.’

The conductor gave him this piece of advice without really knowing where Iraq was located on the map. After his return from Moscow, Yousef consoled himself with the thought that he would compose a piece of music inspired by local sights: the loud calls of the radish-seller, whose voice filled the lane; the coachman who drove his carriage through the streets, tooting his horn; the sight of Hamadi, the peddler, who walked with his stubborn, scabby mule tied to a colourfully decorated cart, carrying turnips from Sayed Hassan’s farm; the music of a Kurdish beggarwoman singing in a melodious voice, imploring people to give her crusts of dry bread that she could sell in bulk to the bran-sellers. Or he might find inspiration in his love for his cousin Gladys, in the pleasure of eating kebab with Persian-made silver cutlery at home, or in the sight of his beloved Gladys sitting on the sofa and reading the Holy Book.

That day, when he got up from his seat, he felt that he had hit
on an idea. The Russian conductor’s advice might well be applied to Gladys’s image, the indescribable joy he felt on accompanying his mother on her visits to his aunt Massouda Dalal in Al-Karradah and eating kebab, while his sisters Daisy, Rachel and Saida stayed at home. At his aunt’s house, he would hear the grownups discussing grave and important matters for the very first time. It was there that he first heard names that never entirely disappeared from his life: Hitler, Mussolini, Nazism, the Axis, the Allies, the Boy Scouts and the Youth Brigades.

His cousin Gladys sat beside him and together they read the Holy Book. With her beautiful hands she lifted a jug that stood on the table, allowing him to see her smooth, white armpits. Their lovely fragrance made him feel intoxicated and entranced. He looked at her face that was encircled by a halo of henna-coloured hair, at the breathtaking beauty that never left his mind, even in his dreams. He looked at this girl who was prettier and more graceful than any other girl in the community, as well as being the most unassailable, even though she liked him and was friendly enough to him. Her full lips parted in a pleasing smile as she placed her hand on his shoulder.

She had once taken him and sat him on the red-brick wall of the house, where they’d been surrounded by a vast expanse of green grass. Then she had led him by the hand to a spot beneath a palm tree. They had stood and looked up at the thick bunches of dates beneath the branches that swayed in the breeze. As he watched the hens pecking and picking the grains from beneath the palms and around the red-brick wall he was blissfully happy. Gladys was wearing her gossamer white dress. Her arms were bare and her neck was like a swan’s. That evening she had let him enter the house where she had hung the
tebit
lamp in celebration of the Jewish New Year. On the table, she had placed a chicken stuffed with spices, chickpeas and meat.

Yousef was surprised when Gladys put down the Holy Book and picked up her favourite book, the French
Syllabaire
that she had studied at the Alliance School. She ran off, singing a beautiful song with a sweet voice and a lively rhythm as she picked up the fallen dates. Listening to the French lyrics flowing so smoothly from her lips, Yousef felt assaulted by the ruthless, incomprehensible foreign words that hurt his ears like the cries of huge birds of prey. It was at that time that Yousef discovered the wild roses that bloomed in a little mud pond near the brick wall and the flowers that blossomed in the spring in the lovely, small garden. When the family were away visiting any of the synagogues nearby, such as Abu Saleh, Massouda Shemtov or Sami Twaiq, Gladys would sit beside him, reading to him from the
Syllabaire
, while together they looked at the old tree, its bark covered with lichen.

Yousef realized that he was the only male that his cousin paid attention to. One day she took him into a little room in the yard and lay with him on a rusty iron bed. The bed had been abandoned in a room on the upper floor, but her mother had brought it down in the hope that Bahiza, the daughter of the Muslim farmers who owned a pen and two cows near the grove, might come to work for them and sleep in it.

Gladys dragged shy Yousef by the hand, undressed him and made him lie down on the bed. She started to fondle him. When she asked him to suck her nipples, he obeyed. With his quivering lips, he began to suck the ardent, rosy nipples. He looked with expectation at the passion in her sparkling eyes. He heard the huskiness of her voice and saw the redness of her cheeks. The scent of her clean, white clothes was irresistible. There on the bed he could smell her arousal, as she breathed in the masculine charm that was impossible for an adolescent girl to resist. She drew him
to her with with one arm and extended the other beneath her knickers until delirium overcame her whole body and she began to tremble as she hugged and kissed him. When she gasped, he was terrified that she might be in pain or dying.

This was the first time Yousef had experienced moments of intimacy, and been alone with a woman. It was not an easy experience at all. It was the first time he had actually seen a woman’s breasts, white as coffee cups. It was the first time his lips had touched a real, rosy nipple after years and years of imagining it. He feared it might dissolve between his lips. For days afterwards, he had a devastating headache and his whole being was in a state of turmoil. His body throbbed and his mind wandered. He felt a similar kind of throbbing when his first long Mozart piece was aired on the radio. The presenter described him as the most gifted violinist in the country, the first to excel in classical music. This last description remained with him as an inspiration. It might even have erased the memory of his trembling, throbbing body, his headache and his obsession with the young Gladys. But how?

It was not, in fact, easy for Yousef to forget those moments, which distracted him for days on end. When he met Gladys days after the event, he was taken aback that she behaved so normally. He tried to avoid her gaze whenever her eyes happened to meet his. In contrast, she paid little attention to the whole thing and behaved quite naturally, as though nothing had ever happened between them. For his part, he kept repeating the radio presenter’s words in his head in order to erase the memory of this experience and to relieve the pangs of conscience that began to torture him. He hoped that the presenter’s words might wipe the scene from his mind. It was a strange scene that attracted and repelled him at
the same time. Not a day passed without him dreaming about it or losing sleep because of it. It deprived him of the beauty of solitude and of clear thinking and meditation. The reason was that as a romantic he believed that sex was far more sublime than this image of animal passion. Sex was like music, with its variations, crescendos and mystic sublimation. It was not smells, secretions, gasps, or shameful moaning. It was a kind of soaring upwards, not bodies lying prostrate or lips shouting, ‘Suck! Suck!’ Gladys’s angelic face at home was the exact opposite of her image during those intimate moments: her dishevelled hair, red eyes, sweaty face, trembling lips and hoarse, moaning voice.

So every time he remembered the erotic gasps and moans, he repeated to himself the words of the radio presenter, although he was not sure if the man even knew the meaning of classical music. The man’s words seemed to him to contrast with the Russian conductor’s advice to him to return to his native roots for inspiration.

Yousef had been urged to find inspiration in the morning splendour of Al-Rashid Street, the city squares with their insane congestion and the noise produced by the black leather carriages with their golden lamps. It meant that he had to find inspiration in large shops, in goldsmiths’ and in the many cafés, on the pavement of the station where the vendors of chickpeas and grilled meat gathered, among the squatting workers and soldiers and the vendors selling single cigarettes. His music had to be drawn from cinema entrances and brothel doorways, from the sight of prostitutes strutting coquettishly in scandalous dresses beneath their black abayas, lifting their hems and walking slowly, noisily chewing gum. He had to find inspiration in Baghdad’s twilight, when thieves, drug addicts and gamblers would gather discreetly in cafés
by the river, in mortal fear of khaki-dressed mounted policemen, who wore wide leather belts and hats that looked like knights’ helmets, and who carried black truncheons studded with nails.