The Tobacco Keeper (16 page)

Yousef realized that things had changed forever. Everywhere was turmoil. Angry young men were roaming the streets dressed in various uniforms, their heads shaved at the sides. He realized that new and violent ideas were circulating in society. There were anti-Jewish statements and graffiti on the walls calling for their deaths. It was a complete reversal. Stories that had never been told before were now out in the open. Massouda Sassoon told him that a bomb had gone off at Massouda Shemtov synagogue. Suleiman Chalabi told him that he’d heard from his uncle Yossi about a bomb that had exploded at the Beit Lawi Car Company. One morning, when he’d just woken up and was lying in bed, he tuned in to the news on the radio. His muscles froze as he heard the news of an explosion at the Stanley Shashou Trading Company.

At the same time, Zionist sympathies grew stronger among the Jews. They began to stockpile arms, study Hebrew and promote Zionist propaganda in the Tenoua organizations. But Yousef resisted that trend. He wrote in one of his letters to Farida, ‘Before I could find answers or even ask questions, I’d rejected everything. My rejection was spontaneous and unsupported by any logical reasoning. It was just a profound, mute certainty coming from my heart.’ This was what he wrote in an undated letter to his wife. Discussions became more heated and ideas clashed, while his enthusiasm for music grew. He wondered whether music was
capable of bringing people together from different backgrounds and cultures. He believed that music could become a unifying force for all sects, religions and ethnicities, so each evening he played at the English Club where Muslims, Jews and Christians listened to his music in absolute silence and admiration, with pleasure and with passion. He tried to combine Western music, which he loved, with Iraqi music. He developed his style and ideas, and sometimes wrote articles on music for the newspapers. He believed that music was capable of making human minds more daring and more elevated.

This was how Yousef stood in front of the audience and began, as though in a trance, to produce tunes from his violin. He believed deep in his heart that his music had a magical effect on people, uniting them as human beings in an appreciation of beauty. He heard teachers presenting scientific or pseudo-scientific theories and researches. He read newspapers and was familiar with the public mood. He understood the meaning of sectarianism and realized that a whole movement existed that opposed his presence there. It was very difficult for him to resist or even to prevent himself from being destroyed. He knew without a shred of doubt that dialogue would soon be impossible and that all resistance would be useless. Nevertheless, he withdrew into his inner world, dedicating himself wholeheartedly to music. He wrote dozens of musical scores and filled his notebooks; he analyzed and studied music. He confronted the overwhelming propaganda machine of society with his own personal convictions.

It was in 1950 that Yousef stood in front of the audience at the English Club in Baghdad performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Hundreds of people sat in silent anticipation.
As the tall, slim musician stood holding his violin, the hall became pitch dark except for the spotlight on him. On that day he wore a black tuxedo and patent leather shoes. He raised his violin and after a moment of complete silence he placed the bow on the strings and began to play. He felt himself soaring high as the music flowed from his hands, and his heart almost stopped with joy.

It was a day of historic importance for him, in the company of a hundred and twenty musicians. In the pitch dark of the hall he was close to losing consciousness. Ten violins sang out together. A high note from one of the violins almost snatched away his soul. The sounds of the music rose higher, punctuated by the light rumba rhythm of the tympani and double bass. In a duet with the piano, his emotions reached their peak. Yousef’s soul burned, ethereal and volatile. He felt that he was infusing magic into the hearts of those who longed for love and human harmony. After just an hour, the lights flooded the hall once again and the sounds of cheers and clapping arose. Everyone applauded – lovely girls, society women, men and boys – while he merely bowed, overwhelmed by a sense of holy reverence in the endless recesses of his soul.

Yousef in those days was haunted by a single obsession, an obsession that said: ‘Do not put me in a tight corner, do not place me in a little box. When you treat me like a Jew, you suffocate me.’

His gaunt face, his cold sweat and his great anxiety acquired a different meaning in the game of politics that forced people to wear masks. As a Jew, Yousef was required to play the role of a Jew and wear the Jewish mask, in the same way that Muslims and Christians had to play their respective roles and wear their
respective masks. Masks made it easy for individuals to live in society. Rejecting the mask made the artist an alien forever, even though music, art and beauty refused to narrow the individual into a role.

Yousef was a stranger to everything around him. Everybody urged him to conform to his role. But he wished only to conform to music, for music had no religion. Beauty called for submission to an abstraction, a concept or a god, but not to a military uniform. Yousef refused to wear a specific uniform or to have a specific label stuck to him. He wanted to be neither one type nor another. He wanted to become whatever circumstances required him to be. He wanted to be one individual or another, to be ‘here’ or ‘there’, at the same time.

‘How can I possibly take part in this human farce?’ he asked himself. He had the overwhelming feeling that he didn’t belong to this world at all. But he had to wear a mask, because the mask made it possible for him to regain his self-confidence. It calmed his fears, expelled his demons and quelled the violent cries in the depths of his heart, the depths that told of hell. That was Alberto Caeiro’s feeling in Pessoa’s
Tobacco Shop
, or what Pessoa himself had actually felt. Yousef found infinite joy in playing music. Every evening he ran as fast as he could to the music hall. He wanted to be on stage and to stay there, not only because he loved music, but also because his identity would vanish with the first step that he took on stage. His sense of elation, however, would dissolve and disappear in the morning, under the pressures of everyday life and the stamp of identities. On stage, he didn’t occupy a particular slot, nor did he conform to a particular classification. But in the morning he found himself squeezed against his will into some pigeonhole.

Everything inside him wanted to attain the sublime, the transcendent. He longed to dissolve and vanish into the ethereal. The weight of his identity was too heavy for him to bear. It pushed him towards the past, to vanish into forgetfulness. He wanted to get rid of his identity by fading away, by escaping or hiding. If it wasn’t possible to do that, he had to hide behind another character, a new name and a whole new life.

Had Yousef been thinking of changing his identity at that time? Of acquiring a new name and personality? Or of becoming a member of the
Tobacco Shop
club? This was what the events of his life would reveal.

Yousef’s life was steeped in the identity conflicts of the Middle East. The present, he felt, was dominated by the spectre of war and civil strife. He thought that identities spelled the end of the world. He felt suffocated and almost dead, for the country was like a ship sinking slowly while his fears spiralled. The world around him was receding and collapsing. The country was plagued by successive defeats and being torn to pieces. It was being preyed upon by all-consuming ideologies and dominated by chaos and the total absence of rationality and ethics. His own existence was under constant threat.

Instead of feeling that he was at the centre of things, Yousef was overwhelmed by a deep apprehension. A massive force was pushing him towards a dark abyss. There was degeneration, regression and a sense of defeat and collapse. Eids became depressing and the festive spirit was almost gone. Society was no longer a beautiful presence but an intricate and frightening labyrinth. Everything had become much narrower in scope. As soon as he’d passed through one barrier, his head would bump into another. It was a
new but terrifying world that smelled of blood. It rushed steadily forward, but only towards the precipice.

He was still alive, but without a present or a future. He seemed to be going through a succession of vertical falls into a black, bottomless pit or into nothingness. Since 1941, Yousef had felt that the abyss would swallow up the whole of society. Death would be everywhere, and all his acquaintances would have to emigrate or die. But emigrate where? Emigration was a vague longing, a leap into the unknown. Would emigration tear down the walls? Would it banish the persistent scenes that gave him nightmares? Would it eliminate the Jewish fear of society that had persisted throughout history? Would it end the feeling of alienation and the impulse to go back to the womb? Would it demolish the wall separating the self from others or the ‘here’ from ‘there’? What would lie beyond these borders? Chaos, nothingness or paradise?

Travelling to Israel was never his objective. Although travelling in itself was fairly easy, leaving Iraq seemed to him to be entering a completely alien universe. He knew that visas were being granted to Jews, but would then be retracted and cancelled. Applications would be repeated time and time again, perhaps twenty times. Yet finally, Yousef had to get rid of his music sheets, his violin and his memories. The Jews had to leave for Israel because they’d been stripped of their Iraqi nationality. They would be deported with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. So they put on their most expensive clothes and left for Israel. Inspection procedures at the time were terrifying and took forever.

Eventually he came to a conclusion of sorts. He opened his mouth and in a weak, inaudible voice said, ‘I’ll go to Israel.’

His wife Farida asked him to repeat this statement several times. She stopped reading her book and said in a apprehensive voice, ‘Are you sure? How strange!’ Then she fell silent.

At that moment, Yousef had little to say. The decision was simple and straightforward: All Jews had to leave their homes, furniture, and possessions and travel with nothing but their clothes. So the Jews bought the most expensive outfits, trousers, shirts, suits and shoes. Yousef, whose passion for music didn’t allow him to leave his violin behind, smashed it into pieces.

He told Farida what he’d done. He’d left for the theatre and come back without the violin. When she opened the door for him, with Meir on her arm, she looked at him briefly and felt that in front of her stood a different person. She stared at him with new eyes, while he responded with a tearful, sorrowful look. She controlled her feelings but he could not. His trembling lips expressed the inexpressible. It was a silent dialogue, a kind of brief ritual in which each of them rediscovered the other.

The inspector of emigrants stood by the metal fence. Behind him were two policemen dressed in khaki uniforms with broad leather belts and heavy boots. Huge pistols hung heavily on their right sides.

Yousef stood in the long line with Farida carrying Meir, each with a ‘final exit’ permit and a photograph. The line was made up of Jews wearing their finest clothes. Unable to carry any valuables, they had sold their gold, their furniture, their elegant houses and cars, and had bought hats, tuxedos and starched shirts. The women were wearing elegant skirts and expensive suits. Yousef looked at the line and burst out laughing; it looked more like a queue for a party than for emigration. What a ridiculous sight! They moved slowly forward in front of the inspection officers. The officers
took the clothes out of the suitcases and ordered the Jews to take off their shoes, shirts and jackets. When the man standing in line in front of Yousef took off his clothes, the policemen burst out laughing, for the man was wearing four shirts and three pairs of trousers, one on top of the other.

‘He has to remove his shoes! We need to check he’s not wearing another pair underneath,’ the customs officer shouted.

Neither Yousef nor Farida were wearing anything new or expensive. They went in their ordinary clothes and bought nothing new for Meir. They gave away all their furniture and books to friends. Like two philosophers, they stood with a small suitcase containing essential clothes and items. Neither of them felt any sense of weariness. They felt numbed as they stood in line, watching the other people. As though in a dream, they couldn’t believe what was happening. They gazed with cold detachment as their steel suitcases were inspected, their few clothes spread out, their documents and certificates torn to pieces, their soap bars crushed over the clothes and their shoes inspected to make sure that no gold was being smuggled in.

In two important letters that I received in Baghdad, Farida detailed the history of Yousef’s immigration to Israel and the years he’d spent there. It’s also important to say a few things about Farida.

(Farida Reuben was a woman of average beauty. She was very slim and had large dark eyes. After graduating from Laura Khedouri School in Baghdad, she joined the Women’s College to study Arabic literature. Because she felt that her college education was rather removed from practical life, she embarked on the task of educating herself, especially as she was proficient in English and French, in addition to Hebrew and Arabic. Hoping to become a full-time writer one day, she enrolled at university as soon as she
arrived in Israel. She majored in Arabic literature and continued her studies until she obtained her doctorate. She then started teaching at Jerusalem University.)

Farida related that as soon as the plane landed in Israel, all the passengers shouted, ‘
Shalom Haber!
’. But the Ashkenazim didn’t respond, they just sprayed them with DDT to prevent them from carrying their Iraqi germs into the Promised Land. They were then transported in cattle trucks to the quarantine camp in Shaar Ha-Aliya, the ‘Immigrant Gateway’. They stood in line for vaccination and in food queues for half a boiled egg and five olives each. Two days later, Yousef, Farida and Meir were taken to another camp, with two other families, in a large vehicle designed for transporting cattle. At the camp, Yousef had to learn to stand in line for water, for the toilet and for bread. He had to learn to buy meat, eggs and butter using coupons and to work as a builder.