The Tobacco Keeper (18 page)

In the morning, having surrendered himself to sleep on the bench, hugging his suitcase, umbrella and hat, he felt a hand patting him on the shoulder. The Iranian officer handed him his passport and allowed him to leave the airport for Tehran. Overwhelmed with unspeakable joy, he felt that he’d been born anew. He had a new personality that had erased the old one and its history. He went straight to a third-rate hotel where he decided to stay for some time until he found the address of the Iraqi merchant, Ismail al-Tabtabaei, the one who traded between Iraq and Iran.

The Tehran of those days left a powerful and lasting impression on his imagination. It charmed him with its undulating hills, its solemn, silent forests, its light-filled, rounded peaks and the statue of the poet Al-Firdawsi, who affirmed the potential integration of heaven and earth. During the reign of the Shah, Tehran was a modern city, with impressive avenues and hotels, luxurious palaces and dense forests. Its grey buildings, constructed in the nineteenth century, showed the influence of English architecture on Nasser al-Din Shah, who began to copy Western architectural techniques and designs. This was Haidar’s first vision of this fascinating, oriental city. In his room, which was made of teak wood and lay on the upper floor of the hotel, he wrote a long letter to his wife, Farida. The hotel was a beautiful old building surrounded and shaded by poplar trees. One wintry afternoon he went down to the hotel lounge and found the owner squatting on her knees, dusting the furniture with a feather duster and arranging the books elegantly
on the wooden shelf. A book with a grey cover suddenly fell off the shelf onto the ground. Haidar picked it up, rearranged his scarf and began browsing through it. It was the
Rubaiyat
of the Persian poet Omar al-Khayyam, translated into five languages, including into Arabic by Ahmed al-Safi al-Najafi. Haidar had previously become acquainted with this poet at the Brazilian coffee shop in Baghdad. So he asked the owner to permit him to borrow the book to read it at leisure in his room. He read the book throughout the night as if to protect his silence and solitude from the falling snow. At dawn, before falling asleep, he wrote a long letter to Farida in which he described Tehran’s bazaars and outstanding museums, including the National Museum of Iran, the National Jewellery Museum and the Gulistan Palace. This fortress, built in the Safavid era, had been turned into a late-nineteenth-century Western-style palace by Nasser al-Din Shah, one of the important rulers of the Qajar era. The letter, which included some verses of al-Khayyam, was the very first to carry the signature: Haidar Salman, Hotel Sarjashma, Tehran, 1953.

This means that from his early days in Tehran, Haidar Salman began to discover this huge imperial city, visiting not only the deprived, congested areas to the south, but also the northern aristocratic neighbourhoods. Each morning, he went hurriedly out of Hotel Sarjashma. With his hands in his coat pockets, his hat on his head and his scarf over his face, he began to explore Tehran’s wide streets. He was captivated by the high, snow-capped Elburz Mountains, the long rows of huge, ancient trees and the winding side alleys that seemed to overflow with the secrets of craftsmen and small traders. He sometimes took his violin and sat in a large city square. On sunny winter days the fountain in the middle of the square seemed to whisper as though it were chirping. So he
would play a piece or two on his violin and in the evening would return to the hotel, his ears filled with the sounds of lovers’ whispers mixed with the water that trickled down the mountains and flowed in streams through the streets of the city.

It is certain that Haidar Salman called more than once at Ismail al-Tabtabaei’s address. But he didn’t find him, because the latter was in Baghdad on account of his daughter’s illness. After a few days, when Haidar’s funds began to run out, he contacted Kakeh Hameh in Moscow. He told Hameh that Ismail al-Tabtabaei was not in Tehran and that he was running out of cash. Hameh sent him some money to tide him over until the left-leaning Iraqi merchant returned from Baghdad. During that period, Haidar Salman started to frequent the Khanzad restaurant, which lay at the crossroads of Fakhrabad and Qizard Streets, a few steps away from the main square in Tehran. This was because an Iraqi, Hekmat Aziz, worked at the restaurant. So Haidar Salman often went in the evening and sat by the back door of the restaurant, waiting for Hekmat Aziz to appear with a kebab sandwich wrapped in newspaper, which he would devour at a park nearby.

On the basis of the information that I have, I don’t actually know how Haidar Salman came to know his new friend Hekmat Aziz. Farida sent me a letter in which she thought that Kakeh Hameh was the one who introduced them. But when I questioned Kakeh Hameh about this and told him of Farida’s view, he denied the suggestion, telling me that he only became acquainted with Hekmat Aziz after the 1958 Revolution, when he saw him in Baghdad. Haidar Salman, however, wrote in one of his letters to Farida from Tehran that Hekmat Aziz had gone to Tehran to study
architecture at the university. He had then found a menial job in the kitchen of the Khanzad restaurant. This was when he’d started to cooperate with the Tudeh Party and other revolutionary and leftist forces that opposed the Shah’s regime. During the fifties, Iraqis lived the fever of revolution. Revolutionary parties swarmed with young men and women who dreamed of change and hoped to repeat the revolution of Lenin and his bearded men in their own country.

Haidar and Hekmat’s friendship might have been strengthened by such café conspiracies, where they met with young Iraqis of the type that the right-wing newspapers nicknamed ‘kids of the left’ or ‘revolutionary adolescents’. At Naderi café on Pahlavi Street, they met various groups: Iraqi students studying at Tehran University, some junior clerics from Qom who were influenced by Marxism and later became members of Ali Shariati’s movement, and some migrant Iraqi workers in Iran. When Hekmat Aziz learned of Haidar Salman’s financial difficulties, he offered him the surplus food that the restaurant would otherwise have thrown out.

According to Haidar Salman’s account, Hekmat Aziz was a handsome, pitifully thin young man of twenty. He lived in an old, dilapidated apartment surrounded by rubbish in the Tobkhana district of south Tehran, an area of craftsmen, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and poor Jews. Hekmat Aziz was preparing diligently for the revolution, the great coup d’état that would establish the republic of joy in Baghdad. This idea so dominated the hearts and minds of young people in those days that they travelled far and wide in order to bring it about. But what exactly drummed this fiendish notion into Haidar Salman’s head, an idea that was out of keeping with his first character? Was it the impact
of the second character, one that was based on rebellion and dissent, the character of Ricardo Reis, which was assumed by the character of Haidar Salman? Was it the image of the protestor embodied in Shia Islam? Or was it something else?

Hekmat Aziz actually offered Haidar Salman what might have been the ideal way to enter Iraq once again, for no method was safer or more certain than the conspiratorial activities of the left. The method might have been a little fanciful and rather farfetched, and it required some patience, but there it was all the same. Revolutionary leftists were being smuggled in and out of Iraq, either through Iraqi Kurdistan in the north or via the marshes in the south. The Jewish musician was never in fact as rash or reckless as Hekmat Aziz, who’d broken with the Communist Party and arrived in Tehran two years earlier. He’d received training in guerrilla warfare while Haidar Salman was a petty-bourgeois with no prior clandestine adventures. All he wanted was to return to Iraq, and for him returning to Iraq meant no more than going back to the place where he used to play music in front of the families of Baghdad.

On the final day of his first week in Tehran, Haidar Salman went to look for Ismail al-Tabtabaei’s house, hoping that he might have returned from Baghdad. After asking several people on the street, he managed to locate the house in the aristocratic neighbourhood to the north of Pahlavi Street. He visited it one evening carrying his suitcase, violin, umbrella, hat and black gloves.

The house, hidden by thick trees, was totally isolated.

He stopped in front of the house and knocked on the brass knocker in the middle of the grand door. After a few moments a maid opened the door, wearing a red pinafore over her beautiful clothes. No sooner had he started speaking to her in English than
Ismail al-Tabtabaei came out in person to greet him. He was a handsome, tall, grey-haired, fifty-year-old man in an elegant outfit. He took Haidar straight to a small room upstairs. The room was decorated with strange old drawings and its furniture was faded with age. It was to be his room.

The mere fact of entering the house represented a huge turning point, not only in his whole life but also in his second personality as the protected man, although it was not protected by the first character as in Pessoa’s
Tobacco Shop
. Haidar Salman became in fact the protégé of the great merchant. From the moment they first met, they both realized that their relationship would go way beyond the simple assistance offered by the trader to supporters of the left. Did not the protected man in
Tobacco Shop
also believe in the workings of fate and destiny?

The following morning, when Haidar Salman discovered that Ismail al-Tabtabaei had a sick daughter called Tahira, his conviction grew stronger that his presence in that house was an act of providence. The father spent most of his evenings sitting beside his daughter’s bed.

During the early days of his stay, Haidar Salman spent most of his time in his room. He was always extremely shy, reluctant and uncomfortable with the aristocratic lifestyle. He was daunted by the oppressive stillness and opulence of his host’s house. He therefore preferred to spend his evenings sitting alone in his room, dreaming of music. He confined his passion for music to his wild dreams, and in the morning would explore Tehran’s sidestreets, crowded with workers, voices and passers-by. When he returned at noon, the sun would be high above the windows of the house and, after lunch, its golden beams would fill the dining room and
hall where Haidar would sit for many hours with Ismail al-Tabtabaei and his daughter Tahira.

Everybody stayed in the sunny hall during the winter. Tahira sat with her pale, withered, beautiful face and her golden hair falling down over her shoulders, while Ismail stayed at her beck and call, his gaze unbroken. Haidar Salman looked down shyly and kept quiet. He seemed to be listening to the noises coming through the window, to the vague sounds of winter that kindled his imagination. It was a mysterious space filled with the scent of trees and melting snow. But a dreary atmosphere gradually infiltrated the room. One evening, when Haidar Salman came home late, exhausted from having walked the length of Reza Pahlavi Street, an idea suddenly hit him. He decided to dedicate an hour each day to playing music to the pale, sick girl who was lying in bed and to her poor father who always stayed by her side.

He had no idea how much his short pieces would raise the spirits of the young woman and make her so much more jovial and optimistic. The father became very attached to him, for the young man not only played the violin for the lovely girl, but took her on outings during the day, particularly after she began to feel much better. Instead of the painful headaches she used to suffer from, she had a sensation akin to an ecstatic dizziness, a feeling closer to passionate love than to illness. Tahira was exceptionally sensitive and highly impressionable. She received the young man into her father’s house with a mixture of profound sadness and joy. When she stood in front of him, the muscles of her face twitched painfully and her eyes filled with tears, for she was burning with love. She came to realize that she was desperately attached to him and could never let him go. Although he reciprocated her thoughts and feelings and continued to treat her with a great deal
of tenderness, he tried hard to avoid falling hopelessly in love with her.

[
In a letter to Farida, Haidar Salman expressed his wish to release Farida of her bond to him so that she might be free to remarry. Three days later, he sent her a long letter telling her about his new life with Tahira, who was, he said, his last chance to get back to Baghdad. Although he wasn’t completely happy, he enjoyed his strolls along Tehran’s wide boulevards and his visits to breathtaking parks where ancient cypress trees had provided shade and exuded fragrance since the times of the Qajars. He also admired the magnificent mansions with their large grounds and coloured windows. In another letter, he told Farida about his visits to the most important sights of Tehran, such as the Caravanserai market with its passages and low rows of domes. With Tahira he also visited the peaks of the snow-capped Kallus Mountain and the beautiful resort of Kelardasht and together they swam in hot springs at the coastal resort of Ramsar. They toured the monuments of ancient Masule, strolled through the markets along the Caspian Sea, and visited Persepolis and the inscription at Naqshe Rostam. Then they stood in front of Hafez’s grave, its dome rising high as a symbol of the soul soaring up to heaven
.]

The intimacy between Haidar and Tahira was at its strongest during this period. They would spend whole mornings hanging out on Tehran’s streets, either strolling on foot or cruising in Tahira’s car. The time they spent together allowed Ismail al-Tabtabaei to turn his attention again to his business, instead of being the constant companion of his daughter. Haidar therefore became important not only for the daughter but also for the father’s business. As far as Tahira and Haidar were concerned, their outings represented almost a sacred ritual. They would start their walks from north of Reza Pahlavi Street, with its congested traffic, cars
and motorcycles. They would then move on to the middle section of the street where the statue of the sage, Al-Firdawsi, the writer of the epic Shahnameh, stood. They would walk in front of the great gate to Tehran University which was designed by the French architect Godard as an extension of the Dar al-Funun, itself established by the first Iranian reformer of the nineteenth century, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, in an attempt to import Western science into Iran. They would also go to the Talar-e Rudaki theatre, which was built in the shape of a tulip and named after the Persian poet Abu Abdullah Jafar Rudaki of the fourth century of the Hijra calendar.