The Tobacco Keeper (13 page)

Was this what the Russian conductor meant? If it wasn’t, what had he meant by the statement that Yousef should find inspiration among his own people? He continued for days to raise his hands like an axeman and scream in the mirror: What did this Russian conductor with his wine-red face mean by this statement, when he had never been to this country nor seen its people? And what did the Muslim presenter with his dark complexion and Jewish looks mean by the word ‘classical’?

Did it mean that he should represent Baghdad, through musical notes, as a raucous city filled with the noise of workers, craftsmen, rubbish collectors, porters and police?

Or should he distance himself and offer abstractions unconnected with this world or any other?

Yousef never experienced any difficulty in finding inspiration for his music in the simple lives of the people, among his siblings or the image of his little brother, who had died of meningitis at the age of two. He was inspired by the wooden buses on Al-Rashid Street, the sight of dirty Jews in neighbourhoods such as Al-Torah, Abu Dudu and Abu Seifein. He was inspired by people’s talk about the war and about the English artillery that had bombarded Baghdad, by recollections of evening walks by the Tigris, by ruins, by ghosts, by his early years when he was discovering the world, by times of awe and of ineradicable pain. But was that what the Russian musician had meant, who had never seen Iraq nor even knew where it was, when he’d said that a musician should be inspired by his people?

How should he interpret this, when all he wanted was to write sketches, exercises, études and more?

Two images suggested themselves to his mind. The first, conjured up by the Russian conductor, was of music being popular and local, while the second, suggested by the local radio presenter, was of music as a classical art form. The second concept was akin to Alberto Caeiro’s idea in
Tobacco Shop
, which saw music as expressing nothing and everything at the same time, patterns not ideas, sounds emanating from the essence of existence and not from existence itself. In expressing essence, it had no palpable forms. He had to create music that would force existence to lie prostrate on a table, where he would contemplate it with no fixed ideas; to create a body that did not fade because music does not fade; to create ethereal, eternal feelings, because it is only feelings that cannot disappear; to create music that was like a leap into the unknown, music that was elevated and spiritual. This was the type of music that the radio presenter referred to without understanding what he was saying.

But more importantly…

How could he continue to live in this stifling community? How could he develop and grow in a society that encased him like a hard shell, like a thick, impenetrable skin? First there was the thick layer of family. Then there were the barriers created by the Jewish community in Baghdad during the thirties. Finally there was the fortress built by the Muslim community around the Jewish community.

But without him realising its importance at the time, something momentous happened that was to change his life, transforming the course of his existence once and for all. This was his family’s move, in 1945, out of the self-contained Al-Torah neighbourhood to Al-Rashid Street in Hassan Pasha district.

This was, in fact, the real turning point in his life, and in his personality, defining the nature of his existence in the years to come. But how did it happen?

Yousef moved from the small ghetto to the wide world outside, leaving the anxieties of the closed Jewish neighbourhood behind him. He broke through its thick skin and reached for the sun. It wasn’t easy for him at the beginning, for it was an existential test in the full sense of the word, a test he would remember all his life. He would often try to imagine, with fear in his heart, what it would have been like if he had stayed his whole life in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a ghetto.

Moving out of the neighbourhood represented a significant leap in Yousef’s life. On the one hand, he left the ghetto as a fully formed human being. On the other hand, he left his childhood behind him and was on the threshold of manhood. He no longer wore shorts, as he had done in the old house in the Jewish neighbourhood. He no longer ate the pieces of sugar that his mother brought out of the family cupboard. This was an extremely significant development in his life. For although the Jewish neighbourhood had given him a sense of security, as he mentioned in one of his letters to Farida, it had also instilled the fear of the outside world in his heart. Living in a heterogeneous community was a new test for him. The new environment removed his fear of the outside world and the terror he’d felt living within the confines of the Jewish neighbourhood. In his new home, Yousef learned many things that prepared him to stand on his own two feet. First, he could no longer bear to stay at home for long periods, because it was a sign of being a child. Second, he had to walk proudly and steadily to avoid being regarded as a cowardly Jew; now that he was a broad-chested young man, he walked slowly
and proudly. Third, he no longer accompanied his father with his thick cane on his walks on Al-Rashid Street. Gradually he began to feel that he was part of the neighbourhood. He felt that he had taken root in this community and that he was not just a passing visitor. He would invite his Muslim friends to his home, and his mother would rush happily to the kitchen to make coffee in the silver-plated cups that she would take out of the ancient cupboard. Yousef saw with his own eyes how his mother sparkled and her face lit up as she heard him chattering loudly about their Muslim women neighbours.

His new residence also placed him in the middle of the action. It allowed him to see the world, to be among those who witnessed the bands that played on Al-Rashid Street to mark the establishment of the kingdom that year. He saw the military brass bands as they marched up and down the streets. In one of his letters to Farida, dated 1956, he mentioned another band made up of twelve musicians who used to liven up small dance parties at the English Club carnivals and the Laura Khedouri Club. It was the first year that national contests for
dabka
dancing were organized in the royal gardens. These carnivals were hugely successful despite the threats by clerics to ban them. Muslim alleys competed against each other in traditional wrestling while Christian alleys competed in the manufacture of
arak
and the organization of bellydancing parties. That year, there were at least three Jewish dancers, as well as two Muslims and one Armenian. For the first time in his life Yousef wooed a Kurdish girl, who lived on Al-Rashid Street. To the surprise of the whole neighbourhood the girl, called Dina, responded to his advances. Yousef, who had never performed live before, conquered his shyness and played the violin in front of an audience. For some reason, there was a shift in inter-communal
relations that year. A Muslim officer got engaged to and married a Jewish woman who worked at the Khedouri Sassoon schools. A Christian man married a Jewish woman, while a well-known Jewish man fell in love with his Muslim maid and contemplated suicide when his family rejected his proposal of marriage.

It was a kind of emotional unrest that struck the neighbourhood of Al-Rashid Street in the forties, a widespread turmoil that took some people very much by surprise.

But what became of Gladys? Where was she now? And what had happened to his love for her? She was his first love and perhaps his last. In spite of all the relationships he had in those years, he never forgot her. It wasn’t that he just couldn’t forget her; it was in Gladys’ nature to be unforgettable.

Gladys had clearly left an indelible mark on his life, especially after she married a physician called Fawzi. Her escapades and scandals were not only the concern of her family, but were also the talk of the whole of Baghdad. Every evening during the daily ritual of tea and biscuits that brought the family together and lasted until very late at night, Yousef would listen attentively to the details of her adventures. He was intrigued by the stories but could not forget his love and admiration for her. Although they all resented her, criticised her, condemned her conduct, and hated and insulted her, Yousef was captivated by her wild life, which swung between extreme luxury and numerous infidelities. Gladys had married a handsome, wealthy physician of her own free will. She lived her life between her opulent home and her trips to Europe, torn between her new love – her husband’s Muslim driver – a husband who loved her, and a third lover who pursued her like a shadow.

It was well known that her surgeon husband, Dr Fawzi, had been equally notorious for his own womanizing. But he, after his marriage to Gladys, had become a respectable family man. Rumour had it that it was he who had saved her life when she’d had a car accident while out driving one day, during the heaviest rainfall in Baghdad’s history. Gladys was his beautiful, indifferent patient. He had fallen in love with her at first sight and spared no effort to convince her to marry him. But she was not faithful to him, and in no time at all, rumours began to circulate about her. Everybody knew that she’d fallen for his Muslim driver.

In a long letter, Yousef described how he’d listen greedily to the stories about this unfaithful woman, full of admiration. He loved to hear news of her. At that time she was pregnant, but she cared neither for her husband nor her baby. With real anxiety Yousef realized that love brought incredible pleasure and knowledge, and might also rescue people from loneliness and loss; but it could sometimes be painful, as with Gladys and her husband.

In the same year as Gladys’ scandals, he met the famous Russian violinist, Michel Boricenco, in front of whom he gave his first solo violin performance. In a small auditorium at the English Club in Baghdad he played Bach, Paganini and Ysaÿe. As a tribute to his virtuosity, Boricenco presented him with a fine violin and bow. That May, the Iraqi-British war broke out, accompanied by a national uprising inspired by Nazism. There was wholesale anarchy throughout the country. The Jewish community were victims of assaults, looting and murder. Massouda Dalal – Yousef Sami Saleh’s aunt and Gladys’ mother – was burnt alive before his very eyes and her property looted.

In writing Yousef Sami Saleh’s biography, or at least in documenting him by means of his era, his life, his thoughts and his youth, which were all similar or to a great extent comparable to the character of the keeper of flocks in the poetry collection
Tobacco Shop
, I have referred to the two phases of his life in Baghdad as outlined in his letters to Farida Reuben. The first extended from his childhood in Baghdad up to the Farhoud Incident in May 1941, which followed the rise of the Nazi organizations in Iraq and which saw the death of hundreds of Jewish victims in Baghdad. The second covered his life from the time they moved into their new home in the Hassan Pasha neighbourhood until his emigration to Israel in 1950. The Farhoud Incident, following the May 1941 revolution, occurred at the same time that everybody was busy talking about Gladys’s adventures. The burning of Massouda Dalal, Gladys’ mother, during the incident had a devastating effect on Yousef’s life and destroyed Gladys completely.

The incident changed the life of everyone in Baghdad. It can be described as a real turning point in the history of this society, being the first attack of its kind against its own citizens, and opening the door to civil conflict. Although historians have devoted little attention to it and have done nothing to address our collective amnesia, we can safely say that all the subsequent civil strife in Baghdad may be traced back to what happened on that fateful day in 1941.

Was this incident like any other in Yousef Sami Saleh’s life? Can it be considered as just one of those things that happen to people, whether or not they are violinists, whether they’re like the hero of
Tobacco Shop
, and whether or not they’re Jewish? But this was no ordinary incident. It instilled terror and humiliation in Yousef’s heart and marked the end of the family’s evening rituals, when Yousef had listened to the stories of Gladys while eating cakes and drinking tea. The beautiful stories of love and infidelity that had so captivated the family were now replaced by the news of Hitler’s victories and the voice of the Iraqi Younis Bahri, whose ‘Hail to the Arabs’, broadcast on the Nazi radio from the Italian city of Bari, incited the people against the Jews. Instead of the accounts of Gladys’ amorous pursuits, Yousef heard Younis Bahri’s voice speaking enthusiastically about the victories of the Axis on all fronts and predicting an all-out defeat for the Allies at El-Alamein in North Africa. In those early days, Yousef had no interest in this kind of news, the news of things happening elsewhere in a very remote place. He was far more interested in what Gladys was doing with her three lovers: the husband, the driver and the third man who followed her like a shadow. What he wanted most of all was simply to recreate her in his wet dreams. He was more eager to imagine her desires, moans and lustings than to hear about Hitler’s offensive, or any other, for that matter. That is, until the zero hour, the moment when the massacre happened before his very eyes. It was an incident that induced horrific images in his dreams instead of Gladys’ naked body. He began to see figures that seemed to come out of a Breughel or Bosch painting, with huge noses, deformed bodies, frightening smiles and cloven feet.

How did he witness the Farhoud Incident?

When Yousef woke up that morning, he tried out a tune or two on his violin as usual. He then placed the violin on the table and went to wash his face. With his hands still slightly wet, he dressed his lean, dark body in white shorts and a large shirt. He flattened his hair with his hands, gazing into the mirror with thoughtful eyes and a bleak face. Suddenly he heard a high-pitched scream. He turned towards the window, but there were only the carriages going down the street, the sunbeams coming through the glass and the sounds of nightingales echoing in the house. Then there was another scream from next door. He emerged from his reveries and went to open the window.