The Tobacco Keeper (32 page)

When Kamal advanced smiling towards Widad, she started to stammer. It made him laugh out loud to see her confusion. He felt no pity or sympathy towards her. She, in contrast, pined for him. Every time she sat in front of him, she felt the pain of longing. She saw him falling prey to weariness without being able to offer him a helping hand.

Infatuated, she watched him as he moved around the living room of her house. She adored everything he touched, from the glass to the ashtray. He, on the other hand, never settled in one spot, moving quickly between the bookcase and the fireplace.
When he sat down, he sat quietly as though it were a dictate of fate. His clothes had a special charm, for he always wore loosely around his neck, like a bohemian, a scarf as red as bull’s blood, gabardine trousers and a black coat that gave him the look of a monk. When leaving the house, he would kiss her on the cheek. The brush of his beard against her cheek excited her; for her this innocent kiss was erotically charged. One day, she decided to seduce him.

I don’t know when this actually happened, but it may have been some time before the second Gulf War, while Amjad was out of the country. One evening, Widad left the Al-Rabat Hall after giving a concert there in the company of Kamal. When she took hold of his hand, he shivered at the touch. She drove him to her house and tried to seduce him there. But Kamal was scared. She held his hand between her palms and sensed his agitation. He didn’t know what to do. But she enjoyed the state of turmoil he was in, for he was like a little sparrow fluttering and trembling in her hands. In a few minutes, his reluctance disappeared and his anxiety vanished. He felt elated to be loved and wanted.

After moments of silence, he leaned towards her and began kissing her with great passion.

Did Amjad Mustafa love Widad for her money? Widad was the pampered favourite of many men, including her late father, the senior presidential official, and her uncle, an Iraqi ambassador to Europe. This uncle was a middle-aged man with a fine nose and good posture thanks to diet, physical exercise and frequent massages. His tanned complexion came from sunbathing. She was also the favourite of her three brothers, who were all close to
political circles in Baghdad. Before Amjad, Widad had been married to an army officer who’d been killed in the first months of the war. She married Amjad a year after the death of her first husband. But her only taste of true love was when she was studying music at the Academy of Fine Arts, with a man twenty years her senior. He was a womanizer who had sex with her in his apartment near the Academy.

Her story with Amjad was both simple and spontaneous. She met him while he was giving a lecture on Bach, and a relationship started. Through her, Amjad established contacts with Baghdad’s high society, which opened its arms to him in spite of his limited financial means. Some people even asked him to introduce them to Saddam Hussein himself. He’d become a famous musician at the National Symphony Orchestra. He harboured a passionate love for Widad, and although his attempts to court her and ask for her hand in marriage were initially unsuccessful, his persistence and resolve finally made her relent.

Such were Amjad’s feelings towards her. But where did Kamal place her within the tapestry of his own life? He was the old, impetuous hedonist, the saintly sinner and the opium keeper. He was Álvaro de Campos, who forced together the traits of all his various personalities. He turned music into a dynamic instrument that could fine-tune his mood and his principles. Wasn’t music, after all, the substitute for real opium? Where did he place Widad, then? Where did the tobacco keeper, who owned a whole warehouse full and not just a shop, place Widad? He was the adventurer who faced the entire universe using all the strategies at his disposal, who carried within his soul the essence of cities as diverse as Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus. He was a legend who, with his manic depression, turned music into a replacement for opium,
and sex into a substitute for tobacco. If he failed to create a utopian identity, he overcame his shortcomings through women and music. All he wanted was a woman’s body and a tobacco shop.

During this period, he became acquainted with an unusual Assyrian Christian woman from Basra called Janet. She was a novice pianist who, after the war, turned to prostitution. She worked at a brothel for young prostitutes in Al-Elweya neighbourhood. She then became a fixture in musical circles. Kamal Medhat got to know her after a concert he gave at the Al-Rabat Hall, where the National Symphony Orchestra played almost every Thursday. It might have been Widad who introduced him to Janet, who was her colleague at the Academy. Janet began to invite Kamal to go out with her. Widad had no idea that Kamal Medhat would like or desire Janet, for she was very thin, malnourished and hysterical. In addition to other undesirable qualities, she was also an alcoholic.

One day, Janet invited the playboy musician with his impressive height and his good looks to her apartment. Having got drunk, she broke the furniture and smashed the windows. She went out of the front door and began to scream so hard that people gathered around. So Kamal Medhat carried her, by force to begin with, back to her apartment. She kept screaming and struggling for a whole hour, after which he took her to hospital. The incident brought their affair out into the open, and aroused Widad’s jealousy immensely.

Widad felt murderously jealous of Janet.

‘How could that wretch, that cockroach, take Kamal?’

In a moment of weakness, Widad approached Nadia al-Amiry and told her of Kamal Medhat’s affair with Janet. Nadia was upset and extremely sad at the news. Although she suffered many
sleepless nights as a result of the affair, she didn’t talk to Kamal directly about it. Instead, she called Janet to her house, took out her chequebook and asked: ‘How much, to leave Kamal?’

Kamal Medhat felt that Nadia al-Amiry’s love for him was excessive and extreme. It was a sick and unnatural kind of love, tainted by the enjoyment of pain, something akin to the delight of saints in suffering. She knew that he was unfaithful to her. But his marital infidelities became for her a kind of sacred rite of purification. He was like a spoilt child, so his infidelities were always forgiven.

Janet, on the other hand, was obsessed with sex. She started her life as a lesbian, but was converted at the hands of a male lover who then abandoned her. She then fell into the arms of Kamal Medhat. One day, Widad slapped him in the face and told him that she was the one who’d introduced Janet to him. She wasn’t his pimp, she screamed at him.

For Kamal Medhat, Janet embodied all human contradictions. She was like one of the sacred prostitutes of the Al-Torah whom he’d desired so much while reading the Holy Book in the company of Gladys. She reminded him of all the sacred harlots whose erotic sighs he’d heard coming out of the yellowed pages of the Al-Torah. She was an angel and a vampire at one and the same time. A politician had fallen in love with pale, anaemic Janet just because she was damaged. He couldn’t put her out of his mind, and sent a warning to Kamal Medhat, who had stolen her mind and stopped her thinking of him.

Janet was a true legend. In spite of her ugliness, she managed to attract a huge number of men with her lewd and whoring attitude. One day, after Kamal had left his house, he was astounded to
see the car of Janet’s lover intercepting his vehicle on the bridge. A sixty-year-old man got out. He had grey hair that was dyed pitch-black, making his head look like fleece. He took a picture out of his pocket. ‘Do you know this person?’ he panted, his eyes sparkling.

Kamal Medhat was silent for a moment and nodded. He realized that the man was hopelessly in love with Janet, for he held the picture with all the tenderness that a mother would show towards her child, even though she knew how ugly it was.

Janet was obsessed with sex. She did many evil things in her life, but men loved her because she opened her legs like an animal and allowed them to do as they pleased, which respectable women never did.

Kamal Medhat wrote to Farida: ‘At times of war, animal instincts are always on the rise. Sex becomes the antonym of death, and not of love. Nobody really thinks about this, but there are forms of sex that reach the height of perversity and irrationality: lesbianism, infidelity, sado-masochism and all types of tenderness and cruelty rolled together. Such is war. It means the sheer insanity of extremists, fools and hysterics. It means people suffering from hallucinations, paranoia, waking dreams and bouts of depression, despair and crying. It is a hunger for blood and a thirst for filth.’

During a hunting trip to Diyala, Janet insisted on coming, along with Widad, Amjad, Kamal and Nadia al-Amiry. As Janet was standing among the palm trees, she was shot in the chest and fell dead, drenched in blood. An hour later, the police arrested a farmer with a gun in the vicinity. Everybody believed that her politician lover had arranged for one of his guards to kill her.

During this period, Kamal Medhat acquired a reputation for loose and dissolute living that paid no attention to custom or form. He regarded Nadia only as a ceremonial wife and had numerous mistresses. He became a walking, talking sex legend, loved by women for his looks, his music, his complex personality and his fretfulness.

He wrote to Farida: ‘Nadia forgives me everything I do. My lapses are naturally quite bad in some respects but they are also fairly simple. I can’t say that I haven’t hurt her, but my relationships with women make me love life more. It’s not something I can get away from. I often think of her and I’m overwhelmed with dread. One word could be the end of me.’

Did he fear her? Was he scared that she might betray him to the authorities? She, after all, was the only one who knew the truth about him. And then, what was the story of his nightmares? Kamal Medhat would often wake up screaming. Two or three times a week he was seized by nightmares. They came randomly: at midnight, at one in the morning or sometimes at five in the morning.

He tossed and turned in bed, then gave a loud scream. It was a sharp, high-pitched noise like the croaking of a man dying a violent death or one committing suicide by jumping off a building. It was the scream of a man hit by a speeding car. The whole house shook with the sound of his screams. Nadia would wake up and sit by his side. Every muscle of his body pulsed and his heartbeat thumped like a drum. He trembled all over and his voice rose high. His hands were cupped on his face. After the screaming had suddenly subsided, he opened his eyes and looked at Nadia with his eyes flashing. He then fell into a mysterious silence and lay back quietly on his pillow. She held onto him to
make sure that he was still breathing and that his heart was pulsing with life.

He once wrote in one of his letters to Farida: ‘How long can a man continue to be afraid? How old should a man be before he eliminates his fears? Here I am at fifty, and until now I’m as scared as I was at ten, or even twenty. How old should I be to be able to sleep without nightmares, tears or fear?’

If this was Kamal Medhat, what was Nadia al-Amiry like?

Nadia al-Amiry was a sick woman who lived a contradiction. On the one hand, there were those who admired and revered her on account of her beauty (or on account of their personal weaknesses), and on the other hand, there were others who did not fall under her spell and felt nothing but contempt for her.

Nadia al-Amiry was a deranged, pretentious woman, who bequeathed her arrogance to her son Omar. Nevertheless, she flattered Kamal as if she were a servant and would never embarrass him. She dedicated her life to raising her son, while Kamal was engrossed in his friendships, affairs and his love of art, while neglecting everything else. But Janet’s murder transformed the lives of the two families entirely.

It’s clear that Widad and Amjad reached a point where they could no longer go on together. Nobody knew whether Kamal was responsible for the rift, but everybody confirmed that Amjad’s relationship with Kamal was not affected. This implies that the breakup happened for other reasons, related to the nature of Widad and Amjad’s relationship. Widad got divorced from Amjad and after a while emigrated to the United States. One day, Widad got in touch with Nadia al-Amiry, who was spending the summer with her son Omar in Beirut, as usual, and suggested they meet in Beirut. It was the summer of 1990. She received Widad’s letter a
week before her departure. Widad actually went to see Nadia at the Hilton Hotel on Al-Hamra Street. Nadia was sitting in the lobby when a woman came up and said hello. Nadia didn’t recognize her, because Widad had become very fat. She’d cut her hair so short that her scalp showed through and her eyes were lacklustre and empty. She confessed that she’d been unfaithful to her husband and committed adultery. But she didn’t deny that her love for Kamal was overpowering and destructive.

When Nadia returned to Baghdad, she was bitterly angry with Kamal. Her anger grew when she saw the huge transformation in Amjad Mustafa. He’d become flabby and was doing the rounds from one nightclub to another, staying up late and drinking too much.

During that time, Baghdad was commemorating its victory over Iran and the celebrations continued for a whole week. Kamal Medhat stood in front of Saddam Hussein for the second time on Victory Day, before the Arch of Triumph that had been erected by Saddam for the anniversary. Near the Arch the helmets of the defeated Iranian soldiers were piled up. Saddam was extremely happy and his eyes gleamed with the joy of victory. It was the first time that Kamal could scrutinize Saddam’s face. His eyes were jaundiced and twinkling, and his dark face had a yellow hue. Everything about him suggested order. When he smiled it was from the left corner of his mouth. The lips parted, revealing a section of his teeth, while his eyes remained fixed on the person in front of him. The place was deathly silent. But Kamal wasn’t afraid of him, even though he knew that this was a man who would stop at nothing. He was a force moving forward and capable of demolishing anything that stood in its way. He wasn’t a mythical creature, but he was strong and had powerful instincts. A
number of artists, playwrights, writers, architects and physicians were among those who were offering their congratulations. At the beginning, Kamal counted down from ten to zero, in order to conceal his confusion. He advanced towards Saddam. Forgetting himself, he bowed his head while shaking hands, as he often did at a musical performance.