The Tobacco Keeper (25 page)

He held Tahira’s hand, trying to encourage her. His eyes were full of tears but his hands were strong. He looked ahead and saw the deep valley lying beneath a blue sky that was overcast with scattered white clouds. After two hours of walking, Tahira felt very ill and had a horrible pain in her legs. So he supported her while she walked beside him, wearing a large scarf on her head as protection from the heat of the sun. She sometimes fell down on the ground out of sheer exhaustion. Her slippers were torn, her eyes red and her face withered and sallow. She felt as though she were in a trance. ‘How can we leave Hussein behind and go?’ she asked him.

He felt that she was dying, but he couldn’t do anything for her. Totally desperate and on the edge of an abyss, he couldn’t fully absorb what was going on. She spoke to him with a voice that seemed to come from the grave. Her closed lips stopped moving and her eyes froze. Other families walked side by side. Tahira said that she wanted to rest by a tree. So he supported her with his shoulder, made her sit down slowly and threw himself beside her. When he looked towards the distant horizon, he saw the crowds still advancing, with tears in their eyes. His mind was paralyzed, but he reflected on the use of the imagination for the purpose of torturing people. Human beings, he thought, were the only creatures on earth with the capacity to torture their fellow creatures and destroy themselves. Their excessive, preternatural imagination allowed them to envision torture. Thousands of men and women were removed forcibly from their homes and countries, and compelled to settle in strange lands. The irony was that most of these refugees could hardly locate Iran on the map.

‘I want you to bury me here,’ Tahira told him. ‘I want to be buried in Iraq and not in Iran.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you to Tehran.’

‘Listen, I’m already dead. Bury me here.’

The expression on her face told him that she was really dying. After half an hour, she fell into a coma. Some of the refugees nearby said she was dead. Some men insisted on staying with him, while the families with children had to continue walking. After an hour, Tahira left this world and became as cold as ice. But her beautiful pale face remained unchanged while the strands of her soft, blonde hair fluttered in the wind.

One of the refugees that we met in Baghdad, Dr Mohammad Ali, reported that Haidar Salman hadn’t shed a single tear in spite of the heaviness in his heart. With the help of some other men he had dug the earth with his bare hands to make a grave for her. It was hard because they had no shovels and no tools. But they succeeded, even though the hole was not deep. They covered her with a black gown and sprinkled dust on top. Everybody offered their condolences. He didn’t say a word or open his mouth, only stared at the others, feeling that the calamity of death was infinite. The absurdity of the situation bordered on the nonsensical. He felt that words could not express anything, they could only multiply as in an absurd play. Everyone who offered their sympathy to him seemed to be playing a role in a play, with set speeches to give and ready gestures to make. People had become marionettes and reality had became fiction. In a parrot-like fashion they repeated the same phrases, the same conformist statements and the same ready-made ideas without fully understanding. He wished they would keep quiet and say nothing, for they had little to say or
share with others. They had no inner existence and nothing but mechanical expressions for such occasions: ‘May she rest in peace’.

He said nothing but felt that his silence unsettled them a little. They didn’t know how to react. At that moment, he had no feelings and didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t just lost Tahira, but his entire existence, his personal world. He became a mere number, a person that might easily be replaced. He was like an empty shell, echoing uselessly. Tahira was gone and Iraq was behind him. Hussein’s destiny was unknown. The environment in which they existed had collapsed. So he prepared himself to become someone else, to become the tobacco keeper.

They walked beneath the cold, winter sun. He suddenly heard the sound of running water and saw trees and farmers’ houses. Men were walking up a grassy hill and the cows were on their way to the fields. Behind him on the left was a pile of wood ready for making charcoal and on the right was a vegetable nursery. There were a few clouds and a flock of birds on the horizon. Life went on, he thought, while Tahira was buried in the dust. Didn’t everyone realize that they would be buried in the same way one day? Nature alone would remain: cruel, silent and constant. It was healing and sorrowful to look at nature, for it alone was eternal and had a monopoly on survival.

Iran emerged on the horizon. The border and the refugee camp appeared. Greenery invaded the earth. The serenity was breathtaking and the cold wind blew from a new land, a land that had to become his new home. Whose decision was it, then? The authorities decided. The director of the play decided. Life was a huge stage where form was often confused with content. Life as he
knew it was made up of actors performing roles. Two days earlier, he had been the Iraqi composer Haidar Salman. Today things were different. The old play was over and he had to find himself a new performance. He was about to enter a new world, a new life.

The previous play had been tedious and its speeches lifeless. He had to find a new role that had no comical or satirical elements and no paradoxes, a role that was much clearer.

After the expulsion, he wrote the following to Farida: ‘We must not forget ourselves entirely, even if we surrender to a role that we’ve invented, even when it is incompatible with our personalities, because we have chosen to play that role. But I see that others, instead of playing their roles, are played by them. I wish I could find myself another role and stop playing myself. We often imagine that we control the game, unaware that it actually controls us. We often imagine that we uphold values contrary to those we were raised to uphold. But in truth we are only surrendering to them.’

When he arrived at the refugee camp, he managed to procure for himself a tattered, dark coat with a worn collar and a shirt with soiled edges. His beard was long, his face was pallid and his hair was a mixture of black and white. He had become so thin that his cheekbones were protruding. He walked with confident steps towards the guards’ tent. The Iranians looked different to him: their faces were surly. They carried machine guns and their beards were long. Photographs of political leaders and revolutionary posters were everywhere.

The camp leader spoke to him through the translator by his side.

‘Mr Haidar, you have friends here in Iran. You know that according to Islamic Shariah we have banned songs and depraved
music, but we’ve retained classical music. Would you be willing to co-operate with us? We would like you to compose music about the revolution, about the leaders of Islam. We’ll give you everything you want, including Iranian nationality.’

‘I won’t lie to you and say yes. What I really want is to be released from this camp. I know Tehran well and I lived there a long time ago, but I can’t live in a refugee camp.’

The man looked straight at Haidar. He was quite perplexed, but he felt it was useless to try arguing with this tall, thin man who had intelligent, confident eyes. He let out a sigh and said: ‘It’s lucky you’re not a prisoner. You can move out whenever you want, on condition that you don’t become involved in politics. When you need anything, we’ll help you.’

Two days later, he received an Iranian ID card on which his name was written: ‘Haidar Salman Merza, of Iraqi affiliation’. He laughed inside himself at this ridiculous comedy. They also gave him enough tomans to last a whole month. Less than two days after his arrival at the camp, he left and headed directly for Tehran, unlike most Iraqis, who went to Jalalabad.

All he thought about was how to get out of this labyrinth. By hook or by crook he had to find papers to allow him to leave Iran. With clarity of vision, he decided not to stay in the country, but to find a way out. He thought about all this as he walked along Wali al-Asr Street, which had been called Reza Pahlavi Street when he’d walked it for the first time. Ismail al-Tabtabaei’s house was located at the end. It was one of the ironies of fate that he should come now, after the al-Tabtabaeis had completely gone. Ismail, in spite of his advanced years, was detained in a Baghdad prison, all his property and wealth confiscated and charged with collaborating with the Shia movement. His brother Saleh had
been executed and his body dumped on the street. Tahira had died during the expulsion. But here he was, at a small café on the main street close to hotel Hazrat Fatima. He examined the waiter who was pouring the tea for him. The man’s beard was long and he looked sullen and morose. Haidar sat, warming his hands with his tea and watching customers as they tossed coins onto the tray of the café owner. They exited onto Joseph Stalin Street, although the name of the street had been changed after the revolution to Sattar Khan, one of the leaders of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. The new names of the streets meant that he got lost a few times. He also decided to brush up his Persian. Since leaving in the fifties and sixties, his command of the language had deteriorated. To practise his language, he decided to buy a Persian book by Ahmad Shamlou, a favourite poet, as well as a dictionary from a large bookshop on Revolution Avenue.

Tehran’s winter was bitterly cold as he looked for somewhere to stay. He placed his hands in his pockets after wrapping the coat tightly around his body. Walking along the street, he saw two fat men in long coats tailing him. They had thick lips and stern eyes. He felt he was being watched by the Pasdar, the revolutionary guard. Nevertheless, he walked on quietly, observing the changes that had occurred in Iranian life, not only in the women’s clothes and the style of life in general, but in political posters too. This was a new feature of life, a kind of collective imagery represented in murals. High walls offered the perfect space for artists to display their graphic skills. It seemed to Haidar Salman that there wasn’t a single wall left without murals, posters or writing covering it. People were being mobilized through the use of ideological and political propaganda that depended on a minimal use of words to produce the maximum effect.

The Iran that he had known well had disappeared without a trace, replaced by a new Iran. The posters showed this clearly. Shia themes of traditional Pardeh-Khani narratives now completely dominated Iranian visual culture. Haidar Salman had seen those old images re-enacting the battle of Karbala since the fifties. Now they were everywhere in Tehran, even in the cafés. They represented epic themes in a primitive form, but were now used to embody the revolution. They combined the Pardeh graphics with new revolutionary propaganda. He later explained this to Farida as follows: ‘What’s happening in Iran seems to me to be a kind of Pardeh-Khani art, where a painter controls a large canvas of five feet by twelve. The painting depicts Karbala, a centuries-old battle in which Hussein, the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson, was killed. The painter begins his dynamic project by taking a large sheet of canvas stuck to the wall or hung between two poles. What he does then is to bring people by force into the circle of pain. Everything here is designed to drive you to tears …’

Haidar Salman realized that this artistic genre was the product of politics but also left a huge impact on it. This art proliferated on coins, stamps and school textbooks, although there was a brief honeymoon between religious groups, on the one hand, and progressive and institutional forces, on the other. Soon enough, Islamic ideologies launched a campaign to reclaim and appropriate the revolution. They organized an army of primitivist and religious artists to mobilize people and defeat their rivals and opponents through visual art.

Only Hotel Azadi remained from the old Tehran. When Haidar walked down Evine Street, he stopped at the hotel. A concierge stood in front of the door in his elegant outfit. Haidar had stayed at this hotel with Tahira during their honeymoon. They’d taken
a large suite with windows looking out over the mountains from one side. On the other side, the windows looked over the city. The suite had a small sitting room with a table in the corner. In the evening, they dined in the panoramic restaurant on the upper floor with a view of the whole city.

What would Haidar Salman do now? I managed to locate everyone that Orhan suggested, especially Dr Khisro. Haidar had known Dr Khisro for a while and would sit with him at Naderi café in Wali al-Asr Street. Everybody confirmed, too, that he’d been involved in a relationship with a girl called Pari. They also suggested that he’d escaped to Syria, either directly or through Turkey, with the help of Farrah Nikdahar and Hassan Qazlaji. So who were all these people and how did he get to know them?

First, who was Pari? What kind of relationship did he have with her? And how did he make her acquaintance?

The Pari story actually goes back a long time and cannot be told here. But we can trace the relationship as far as her father Mohammad Taqi, who worked as an accountant for Ismail al-Tabtabaei in Tehran. Haidar Salman had made his acquaintance before Ismail liquidated all his assets in Tehran. At any rate, Haidar, who no longer had any acquaintances in Tehran, felt that Mohammad Taqi was the only person he could turn to. The revolution had produced drastic changes in lifestyle and in the class system, which had driven most of his father-in-law’s acquaintances to emigrate to Europe. He realized that only the poor stayed behind, whatever the changes, revolutions and coups.

Mohammad Taqi lived in the Hazrat Hussein neighbourhood, the area closest to Hussein Square. On the afternoon of Haidar’s arrival in Tehran, he felt hungry and miserably cold, so he took
the bus from Revolution Avenue and told the driver that he wanted to get off at the point closest to Hazrat Hussein. After about a quarter of an hour, the driver, with his thick moustache and hat, signalled for him to get off. Haidar found himself in front of a number of small shops with high metal shutters. In between was a narrow, paved street that led to a poor neighbourhood. He stopped briefly and took a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it and blew smoke into the air. He walked beside thick wooded gardens that lay in front of a group of houses. He saw a casually veiled young woman in her twenties wearing jeans and standing at the door of a small, two-storey house with a beautiful ceramic façade. He stopped and asked her about Mohammad Taqi’s house. She looked up at him with startled large dark eyes, and told him that this was her house and that Mohammad Taqi was her father.