The Tobacco Keeper (21 page)

Haidar’s friends in turn would flare up in his face as they defended the people’s art and the crowds, except for Nahida. Her ideas were close to his and she often defended the views he expressed at the meetings held at Hekmat Aziz’s house.

It was probably Nahida al-Said’s defence of his views that attracted him to her. A new sensation was impelling him. As she approached him with her pure, fair complexion, her clear eyes and slim arms, he was in flames. Looking into her eyes or smelling her scent, he was overcome with both terror and infatuation. He felt completely numb in front of her. Were they involved in a relationship at that time?

All the evidence points to the fact that the composer spent most of his day at her apartment. He also spent most of his nights with her when his wife Tahira travelled to Moscow. The only surviving piece of evidence for this relationship is the painting that she produced of the composer. He is completely naked and holding his violin in his arms like a woman. The warm colours and technique of the painting represent the playing of music as a kind of sexual encounter. These were naturally Haidar Salman’s views of music. In one of his letters to Farida, he described the half-naked Nahida painting in her studio while he lay on the couch drinking vodka.

Almost everyone knew of their affair. Haidar Salman even felt that his sick wife tolerated the relationship. This was what most of the people that we met confirmed, particularly those who knew the two of them at that time. But what we were looking for was
the reason behind Haidar’s admiration for Nahida al-Said. Was he attracted to her anti-revolutionary ideas or the way she was influenced, like him, by bourgeois aesthetics? In fact, all events point to differences in their views regarding the revolution. All those whom we asked about Nahida al-Said and her life confirmed that to some extent she believed in the revolution. But her thoughts were vague and inconsistent (incidentally, Nahida al-Said was a committed communist). Haidar’s own ideas were clear. In his view, revolution destroyed harmony. It was a violent blow that disturbed peace and serenity. No fruitful or consistent change could possibly happen in the midst of overriding chaos. He thought of revolution as the serum to cure us of a minor illness. Instead, it destroyed the harmony between our bodies and nature, leaving our bodies weak and exhausted. We should point out, however, that Haidar Salman never completely broke with the Communist Party, unlike Al-Sayyab, who abandoned the Party altogether and attacked it. The Party preferred at that time to keep Haidar within reach, even when his ideological stand was different from theirs. That was deemed much safer than engaging in a headlong confrontation with him, as happened with Badr Shaker al-Sayyab, who opened fire on the Party and published a series of articles entitled ‘I was a communist’.

Did Haidar Salman intuitively understand certain things that others didn’t? The events of the evening preceding the 1963 coup suggest that he did. All the guests who attended Hekmat Aziz’s party at his house in Al-Adhamiya that night agreed that Haidar’s behaviour was very strange. It was February and the cold had descended on the wet trees in the garden, while the warmth of the living room inside the house made the artists who were sitting in a circle around the fireplace woozy. None of those who were
present knew anything about what the next day would bring. Haidar stood near the fireguard with a glass in his hand, while Nahida al-Said stood beside him, also drinking. When he came too close to her, a horrified scream flew out from Nahida’s mouth as he flung the wine at her face and clothes.

There was a blazing row between Nahida and Haidar, which disturbed all the guests. In a little while, at the request of Hekmat and his wife Widad, they both went upstairs to resolve their problems quietly. Almost an hour later, a tearful Nahida ran down the stairs, but none of the guests were aware of her leaving until she slammed the front door behind her. When he rejoined his friends Haidar was totally drunk. Everybody was in high spirits that night. They roasted lamb cutlets on the fire, sang loudly and danced; at one table, there was a card game going on. Then Haidar screamed. It was hard for those present to understand the meaning of this scream until he told them that Baghdad stood on the edge of a precipice: a volcano of burning lava was erupting and the city was concealing a new weapon, ready for a new day and a new era.

So how did Haidar Salman know about the coup? Who told him that the following day would usher in a huge turning point in the history of the country and that there would be an unstoppable eruption? Did Haidar have any contacts with the insurgents? That was impossible. Everyone who knew him confirmed that his name was on the list of people to be liquidated by the coup.

Nevertheless, Haidar Salman awoke the next day to the clarion call of the coup. He had a hangover and a splitting headache. He was stunned to see the tanks of the nationalists and the Baathists on the streets. He trembled to see the populist trend in Baghdad at its most extreme. The winter sun was casting its slanting rays on
the wall opposite, and a deathly hush had filled the house. Tahira was still in Moscow and Hussein was with his grandfather, Ismail al-Tabtabaei. At that moment, Haidar felt a vague anxiety. He had a strong sense of déjà vu as horrific images passed through his head. The country he was longing to return to reminded him once again of the events of 1941 when he was a child.

The phone rang. He ran to pick up the receiver. Hekmat’s voice came over the line, warning him against staying in Baghdad, for the nationalists and the Baathists had issued statements vowing to crush all communists. Orders were given to the youngsters carrying machine guns and wearing National Guard armbands to kill and hang the communists. He hung up, his hand trembling. He couldn’t get any detailed information from Hekmat because the whole country was under curfew. What he could hear was the sound of bullets going from house to house and street to street. Two images haunted his mind and would not be dispelled. He saw Nahida’s face, tearful at his behaviour the previous night, and he saw her coming out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. As she changed her clothes, he looked at her beautiful body, totally entranced by its grace and firm roundness.

The phone in the corridor rang. He raced to it, his heart beating fast. It was Ismail al-Tabtabaei informing him that he had sent him a car to take him away from Baghdad for his own safety. His name was on the list of communists to be liquidated that was being distributed by the insurgents. He felt disturbed and shaken by all the terrifying images around him. He heard constant screams and shouts, and he could not stop trembling and moaning. It was almost ironic that the insurgents wanted him dead while a day earlier he’d been criticising the revolution. The whole thing had no connection with ideologies or ideas, but
only with bloodlust and mob mentality. He wasn’t wide of the mark, for as soon as he arrived at his father-in-law’s house, he heard of the massacres and violence that was being carried out against the communists. On his way, he saw military personnel leading blindfolded, handcuffed young men in pyjamas. They were taking them on large trucks out to the desert where they would be executed and buried. After darkness fell, he found Ismail al-Tabtabaei standing in front of the door. ‘Haidar,’ he said, ‘I know about your affair with that artist!’ He spoke in a firm, unwavering voice as he looked downwards.

His father-in-law pointed to a black Chevrolet that was standing outside the house. A bald chauffeur wearing glasses stood beside the car. A second tall, dark man put Hussein in the back, while Haidar sat in the front. The car headed to Tehran in the darkness of the night.

Why did Ismail make this remark to Haidar at that particular moment? Ought he not to have mentioned it at another time and place? Why did he make it clear that he had known all about the affair with Nahida al-Said and had kept quiet about it? Although he could have easily left Haidar to his fate, he had reached out and saved him from the insurgents’ bullets. Did that important merchant who had supported the left and was well-connected with government circles always behave in such a way or was this behaviour inconsistent? If Ismail was simple, decent and tolerant with his daughter, was he the same with other people?

In his childhood, Ismail al-Tabtabaei had tasted all kinds of cruelty and humiliation. His life history provides ample evidence of this. These inconsistencies were the result of a confused, and also inconsistent, upbringing. His father had been a poor Arab
from the Al-Mukhayam neighbourhood of Karbala. He had worked as a market porter for Iranian merchants at Bab al-Murad. His mother was from a very wealthy Iranian family in Karbala market. That was Ismail’s first scar. He felt humiliated and disgraced by his father. At the same time, he was excessively proud and boastful of his mother’s elevated origins. He tried to compensate for this conflicting and confused background through his work. He worked hard and doggedly despite all the frustrations that led him to a few failed attempts at suicide. As a result, he immigrated to Iran to find work at the bazaar, but came back equally frustrated when no merchant at the Tehran bazaar in those days was willing to employ a poor Arab living on aubergines. It is clear that his sense of superiority towards others was the result of the ethnic marginalization he had suffered during his stay in Iran. In his dealings with women he became an example of selfishness, emotional tyranny and sadism. His torture of his wife Jehan, Tahira’s mother, led to her death after she had given him his sickly daughter. He loved his daughter in a humiliating, confused way that made him lead a life full of guilt, regret and self-torture. Not because she was the only thing he loved in life, but because he constantly felt that he was the cause of her tragedy, particularly after the death of her mother.

Jehan, his first wife, had come from a well-known, wealthy family of traders who worked at Al-Isterbadi market in Al-Kazemeya. She had got to know him when he was working as an accountant for her uncle. From that time, he had shown a unique competence in his work. She had fallen in love with him and written him letters that overflowed with love. She defied her family’s will by marrying him. Their relationship, however, soon deteriorated because of Ismail’s complex and contradictory
personality, for he was both loving and full of hate and spite. He was the helpful, generous man as well as the person who sometimes cut a worker’s wages just to degrade and humiliate him. He was the civilized intellectual who was at the same time attracted to all kinds of filth. On the political level, he symbolised all contradictions. He was a wealthy merchant who vehemently supported socialism against the comparador class in the third world. In his capacity as a red millionaire, he had strong connections with important political personalities in the socialist states. But at the same time, he had equally strong connections with capitalists known for their contacts with Western intelligence agencies. The same contradiction was clear in his relationship with his wife, Jehan, whom he undoubtedly loved but who, at the same time, he abused and scolded through no fault of her own. He wanted her to be respected by people but at the same time he also wished to humiliate her. He was bent on taking revenge for the old and forgotten abuses he had suffered in the past.

Jehan was therefore always confused and tense in front of him, for she had no idea how to deal with him. But she later understood that the man was truly sick, and not just with her. He was a bundle of contradictions and fantasies. Jehan later learned that her respectable husband liked to sleep with prostitutes and had never felt that sex was in any way connected with love. Only prostitutes could arouse him. During this period, Ismail made the acquaintance of an Armenian prostitute in Al-Karkh called Beatrice. She found happiness in being his slave and in submitting to his whims and his desire to dominate. In turn, he found enhanced erotic pleasure in her submissiveness. The things he loved most about her were her stupidity, her sensuality and her lust for sex, drink and food. For him she represented pure carnal pleasure. Everybody
knew that he used to beat her so hard that his hands would be bruised. The following day, Beatrice would walk on the street with the cuts and bruises he had inflicted on her. She became pregnant several times and each time he asked her with the utmost indifference to have an abortion.

Hurting Beatrice wasn’t enough for Ismail. He also went to great lengths to wound his wife, Jehan, by letting her know of his relationship with the Armenian prostitute. He made fun of her and humiliated her in front of his guests. He even threatened to leave her for the whore. At night, though, he cried at her feet and implored her like a child to comfort him.

So much for Ismail, Haidar Salman’s father-in-law, and his diverse affairs and contradictions. Were the people around him not right, then, to wonder where Haidar Salman had learned of the date of the coup? Could Ismail have been the source of the warning? Due to his wide contacts with merchants related to various international intelligence agencies, he must have known of the date of the coup. Or we could say that Haidar, with his marked analytical abilities, had simply predicted the event? He had always stated that if we gave legitimacy to arms, the bloodshed would not stop. Could we say also that the second character in
Tobacco Shop
had outstanding intuitive abilities?

Haidar Salman was once again in Tehran.

He couldn’t stay long inside the stone house with its wooden façade and poplar trees. He couldn’t stay in the beautiful house located in north Tehran, where he’d met Tahira for the first time a few years earlier. It was bitterly cold on that February day. Tehran was completely covered with snow and he felt moody and confused. What could he possibly do? At noon, Tahira called him.
Her faint, sickly voice entreated him to travel to Moscow. She seemed to be in the depths of desperation as her tone of voice, her tears and entreaties indicated. She was overwhelmed by despair because she hadn’t received any reassuring letters from him. ‘You didn’t even call me when you arrived in Tehran,’ she complained tearfully.