The Tobacco Keeper (28 page)

He felt hungry when he woke up, so he went out to look for something to eat. On the stairs, he met Umm Tony’s daughter, a pencil-thin, teenage girl with long, slender legs called Aida. In the courtyard, he saw her other daughter, also a teenager with boyish buttocks and round breasts, called Dalia. Umm Tony lived on the lower floor with her two daughters and her son Tony, who was a schizophrenic. The other four rooms were rented by two Iraqis, an Algerian and a Syrian. This was what the Iraqi living next door told him when he met him on his way out to the courtyard.

The man’s name was Saadoun. He was good-looking and elegant and, in his loud voice, spoke a dialect that was a mixture of Iraqi and Syrian dialects. He stood in the yard flattering Umm Tony’s daughters, who were having a good laugh at his silly jokes in front of their mother. On the rug near the fireplace two cats were purring. He turned to Kamal and said, ‘I’ll come
with you. I know a restaurant nearby.’ And they went out together.

Kamal looked at the street as though he were in a trance, while Saadoun was cheerful and in high spirits. Saadoun, who was an architect, was highly cultured and exceptionally elegant. He had the superior air of an aristocrat. He was a fugitive communist who’d escaped from Baghdad two years earlier, after Saddam’s crackdown on communists in the late seventies. He earned his living publishing well-written articles in newspapers for which he was paid badly. He ate at a cheap restaurant for students near Seven Seas Square.

They went into the restaurant. Kamal saw the mixture of colours in the onion slices and the green of the rocket and the parsley. He saw the rusty colour of plates piled with liver, the crimson of shrimp heads and their white undersides. Cold beer was also served. He drank two bottles, ate a plateful of liver and felt somewhat full and happy.

Saadoun asked him about his work. He told him he was a violinist.

‘I know a nightclub in need of musicians. You might find work there,’ Saadoun told him.

Kamal didn’t know how to respond. Work at a nightclub when he hadn’t accepted the Iranian musician Shahin’s offer in Tehran to play with the largest orchestra in the Middle East?

He felt the pain of an old wound being rubbed. His rectangular face was pale and sallow. Was it really
his
face? Then the colours disappeared once again. He got up and went to the toilet. He crossed the crowded restaurant and the light-filled floor and climbed the stone staircase. The toilet door was at the end of the corridor. He slid slowly into the darkness and, for one moment,
silence seemed to have descended on him. There was absolutely no movement. He felt only the accelerating beat of his heart. Then he threw up in the sink. He washed his face and went back.

The following day, Saadoun took him to the Al-Rawda café. It was a large café with a big, planted terrace and numerous tables. Mint tea was served, along with hookahs with aromatic tobacco. It was the meeting place of Iraqi refugees, especially journalists and writers who’d fled Iraq in the seventies. With so many people, faces and questions, the noise was unbearable. Everyone he met there bombarded him with questions ranging from the political to the personal. Saadoun told him he had to get used to such questions, because Iraqis mistrusted one another and suspected each other of being Secret Service agents sent by Iraqi intelligence to penetrate the opposition. The place was rife with anger and filled with highly strung faces, constant questions and suspicions. Their mistrust appeared not only on their lips but in their eyes as well. He couldn’t stay in that place for long, where he felt suffocated and tense. Above all else, he was troubled by everyone’s curiosity.

The same day, Saadoun took him to Al-Tahouna nightclub near the Russian consulate. They sat beneath a blue lamp and the music was truly mediocre. The semi-naked dancers danced in a lewd fashion. Facing the nightclub was a garden where cats slept beneath benches. Some of the people sitting there were stoned on hashish, staring vacantly in a cheap daydream. Others sat with their backs against the wall, gazing at the horizon. After drinking several beers, he thought hard about how he might stay in this country. Saadoun asked him how he felt about working as a violinist.

‘I want to go back to Baghdad.’

‘Go back?’ he asked him.

‘Yes, I want to go back there. I have no life here.’

‘What’s your real story?’

‘No story! I was in Iran and I don’t want the Iraqi authorities to know I was in Iran.’

Kamal Medhat learned a few important things from Saadoun. First, he found out that Umm Tony, who hailed from Wadi al-Nasara in Homs, was in the business of forging passports, or at least in the business of handling them. Her husband, Abu Tony, was most probably the chief forger, or perhaps the contractor in charge of handling identities and passports. It was by pure chance that Umm Tony sold passports to some individuals who were later discovered to belong to the Muslim Brotherhood and who were being hunted by the authorities. Although they managed to flee the country, one of them by the name of Khaled al-Shami got arrested. He was the one who secured the contacts between Islamist leaders and some army officers that were planning a coup. Umm Tony was arrested and received a prison sentence of seven years at Tadmor Prison. Her husband managed to get away with it and flee the country. After she’d spent one year in prison, the authorities had released her with the proviso that she worked with them as an informant.

‘Can she help me?’ asked Kamal.

‘Don’t even try, she’s an informant. But we can use her later.’

Afterwards, a girl of twenty called Noosa appeared. She was dressed indecently. Her back was completely bare and her transparent dress revealed her breasts and her red knickers. Her eyes were very large and intensely dark. She wore heavy makeup and puffed smoke in their faces, which came out mixed with the smell
of cheap whisky. She sat at their table and ordered a Scotch on their bill. She was either drunk or high and laughed out loud. After she’d got up to continue her performance, Saadoun told him that she was the wife of the driver, Emad, who’d given him the lift to Umm Tony’s guesthouse.

Although Kamal needed money to continue his stay in Damascus, he didn’t have the slightest desire to work at that joint. He felt so repelled by the idea that thinking about it made him queasy and brought tears to his eyes. When he went back to the guesthouse, he lay in bed and thought hard. How could he stay in the country if he didn’t have a job? He felt that he could use part of his musical talent, though not at that type of nightclub. So he decided to look for a place where he could work as a musician. The next day, in the morning, he left the guesthouse to look for work. But he had no idea that a secret war was going on in Damascus.

He walked along Baghdad Street, which stretched from Seven Seas Square to Al-Sadat Square. Then he went to Murshed Khater Street in the Al-Azbakeya neighbourhood, which extended from Al-Qasaa area to Al-Sabaa. It was around half-past eleven when he suddenly heard the sound of shooting on Murshed Khater Street. A minute later, there was a huge explosion. He saw everything around him fly up into the air. The screams of women and the sound of cars blowing up were deafening. There was complete chaos everywhere. A coach on the Duma-Damascus line stood parallel to the blown-up car. A charred part of a human back landed on the street. Kamal also saw burnt and crushed limbs on the pavement. All the pedestrians on the street had been seriously injured. Faces had been mangled by flying glass and the windows of the houses on the street had splintered over the residents.

The perpetrator of the operation ran in the direction of the traffic lights some fifty metres away. He was followed by a policeman dressed in khaki and carrying a heavy revolver. As soon as the perpetrator entered a sidestreet connecting Murshed Khater to Baghdad Street, the policeman shot him and he fell, drenched in blood. Kamal Medhat came closer and looked at his face. The man writhed and his head fell on the pavement. He was dead. Kamal Medhat passed by the body, his legs shaking.

Did Kamal Medhat have any options? None whatsoever. Damascus was tense and had no need for his talent. So he decided to look for Nadia al-Amiry, or at least get as much information about her as possible. He knew that she lived in Bab Touma, this much was was documented on the card given to him by the man who’d secured his passport in Tehran.

One day, he woke up in his room on Hamdan Street in Al-Bahsa, went out of the boarding house in a hurry without anyone seeing him and walked along several criss-crossing streets leading to Bab Touma. When he arrived at the place, he fell in love with it straight away. The old neighbourhood was the site of many historical events. The white statue in the middle of the square facing the police station seemed to him like the garrison of the city. It was like a minaret that shot up to heaven. When he walked further on, he was amazed to see the walls of the old church with their iron drainpipes that jutted out to the edge of the pavement and its round stone towers that rose high. The neighbourhood was full of winding streets that seemed dormant and forgotten. Along both sides of the streets were old houses, thick trees and hundred-year-old bars. There were squares immersed in mist and lofty drawing rooms with unlit chandeliers.

The dome of the church attracted his attention most of all. He walked on a little, gazing at the houses, and then took a few steps up to a shop. He asked the assistant about Nadia al-Amiry’s house. The man’s moustache was crooked and his paunch protruding. He pointed to a tall, one-storey house, whose black, iron gate stood open. Two large windows looked out onto the street. When he went through the gate, he saw a fountain and a small, well-tended garden filled with leafy buckthorn trees with intertwining branches and thick trunks. A beautiful woman sat on a chair, her face pretty and round, her eyes large.

Feeling confused, he turned away and went back to the market. A butcher’s shop with Kashani tiles stood near the house. The walls of the shop had been scrubbed with shampoo, and the slaughtered animals dangled from hooks, their bellies open.

He took the first bus that he found in the square and returned to the boarding house. When he went in, he saw Umm Tony’s plump body as she smiled at him. He said hello and she told him that someone was waiting for him in his room. Opening the door to his room, he found Noosa sprawled in bed and looking quite different from the drunken girl he’d seen before at the nightclub. Her round face now openly exhibited her lustfulness. Her thighs were full and her hair was black. She walked barefoot around his room, her two small feet looking very beautiful. She went to the table and poured herself a glass of water. She took an aspirin out of her bag, put it in her mouth and downed it with the water.

The conversation between them was brief.

When he asked her why she’d come, she didn’t answer. At the beginning, he thought she was part of a conspiracy against him. But he soon dismissed that idea. He was intrigued by the way a
woman became attracted to a man. He knew that she fancied him, without any particular reason. He also fancied her himself. In a few moments, he took off his shirt and trousers and took her in his arms. She soon melted between them.

Noosa in fact stayed in his bed until the evening. She talked to him about herself and told him that she’d married Emad three years earlier and had a child that she rarely saw. She’d spent five years in prison for circulating counterfeit notes and prostitution. Her first sexual experience had been at the age of fifteen, with a man she had loved. But after sleeping with her, he’d vanished. Afterwards, she’d begun to frequent the shop of an elderly man, who offered her everything for free in return for sleeping with her in a small room behind the shop. Although the room was originally intended as a storeroom, it had a bed. Her poor, large family forced her to marry Emad. When he proposed to her, he wasn’t a driver but did a little bit of everything: smuggling, robbery, dealing in counterfeit notes and more. Two months after their marriage, he came to her one evening and told her that he was no longer able to pay the rent or the costs of the child. He also told her that he’d found suitable work for her. Important guests were going to visit them a few days later and she had to look after them. And so she started to work as a currency trafficker in the morning and a prostitute at night. She was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. There, she became acquainted with Umm Tony, who gave her a job when she came out.

Kamal Medhat spent those days in Damascus hearing the sounds of explosions and watching people rushing around everywhere.
Security guards and foot patrols filled the streets, especially after the Russian advisors’ building was blown up by a booby-trapped car. The explosions continued for days and the security patrols frequently clashed with the extremists. In the midst of the chaos, Kamal Medhat managed to contact Nadia al-Amiry. But how did he manage that? How did he tell her about the reality of his situation and convince her that he might be the substitute for her dead husband? What if she thought that
he
had killed her husband in order to replace him? He never mentioned any of that in his letters or his diary, which he sent to Farida after his departure for Baghdad.

All the evidence suggests that Jacqueline Mugharib had introduced Kamal to Nadia. Jacqueline. arranged a meeting for Kamal and Nadia at a family cocktail party given especially for young people. At the time, they couldn’t have been introduced in any other way. Although the party was given for Jacqueline’s young relatives, among the guests were Kamal Medhat and Nadia al-Amiry.

Kamal couldn’t resist Nadia al-Amiry’s voice. Before meeting her, he wouldn’t have believed that he would become so enraptured by her.

He mentioned in a letter to Farida the effect that their first meeting at that cocktail party had had on him. Walking towards the buffet, Nadia al-Amiry stopped in her tracks when she heard someone calling out to Kamal Medhat. She went up to him and asked, ‘Iraqi?’

‘Yes.’

He heard her lovely voice for the first time when they were standing at the corner of a long corridor, near the foot of the
inner staircase. He was captivated from the first instant. Her angelic face and beautiful voice charmed him. She, too, was infatuated by him from the first moment. The first syllable that he uttered elicited an expression of satisfaction on her face. They seemed to be on the same wavelength from the start, for both their hearts were filled with unspeakable sorrow. They’d both lived through difficult times. Kamal Medhat, she felt, was a bright man, whose intelligence was carved into his face. But she detected in him an underlying bewilderment as well as a silent, intense passion. It was his charming smile, however, that quickly won her over. For his part, he felt that this seemingly ageless woman had indescribable charm. With her well-groomed hair and beautiful scent, she was extraordinarily elegant. He also noticed that she was as flattering to him as a young servant. Although she possessed great wealth, she was also the victim of circumstances.