Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Ali Bader

  I had to establish the relation between these locations and the important personalities who played a role in the life of the philosopher. The list included Ismail Hadoub, who lived for a while in the fifties in the khan adjacent to Siraj al-Din Mosque. There was Shaul, the Lawi family, Nadia Khaddouri, who used to work in Mackenzie’s bookshop on al-Rashid Street, and Edmond al-Qushli, who was nicknamed ‘Trotsky’ in the sixties. The philosopher met him at the Waqwaq café in Bab al-Muadham where he used to sit with people like Desmond Stewart and groups such as the sentries of al-Sadriya, One-Eyed Jaseb, Dalal Masabni the dancer, Rujina the maid, Husniya the washerwoman, Saadun the horse valet, Atiya the gardener, and others.

  The research, mapping out of the important locations, and the identification of the places that influenced the philosopher’s life took at least two months. I had to identify the public places where the philosopher was a frequent visitor, places such as the Grief Adab nightclub owned by Dalal Masabni, who had also been the philosopher’s mistress for a time, and a group of other dancers who adopted his philosophy. There was also the Swiss café on al-Rashid Street, where the philosopher met regularly with literary figures, people such as Ismail Hadoub, Edmond al-Qushli, and others. I then moved to Orient Express café on al-Rashid Street, where the philosopher used to meet Nadia Khaddouri during his visits to Baghdad. He used to go to the Qadri al-Ardarumli cinema for the French movie evenings, to the Roxy cinema’s foyer, where he met close family friends, and the Royal cinema’s foyer. He also frequented Mackenzie’s bookstore, where he bought the latest books on existentialism. Finally, I went to Nadi al-Alawiya, the club where he usually met his relatives, some childhood friends, and political figures who knew his father.

  The more I learned about important aspects of the philosopher’s life, the more entranced I became. I mean that I enjoyed the simple comments that shed light on an obscure or ambiguous period in his life, since I was well aware that gathering those remarks and reconstructing them to write the biography of a man now reduced to ashes was by no means an easy task. Every now and then I had to subject myself to a terrible process of deceit by people who would exaggerate every simple matter to give it importance, motivated by their ability to dramatize an ordinary event and surround it with a halo of sanctity.

  I met people who admired all those who had departed us and would provide wondrous information, so distorted that it was impossible to trace their fantasies back to the original reality. I had to sift through this information, clean it, and keep track of the simple and temporary changes it underwent. When I met Rujina the maid, now an old, poor, and broken woman, who was shabbily dressed, she did not reveal the slightest information about the philosopher’s childhood and teenage years. She looked beyond all his mistakes and stupidities and never admitted to any scandal. She elaborated on the magnanimity of his family and their honor, the great generosity of his parents, and their dignity and virtuousness. So I found myself gathering information that was heavy in virtue but light in vice. I needed to be constantly aware of my informants’ linguistic tricks and examine closely their unlimited support and compassion for a man whom they despised during his lifetime and for whose tragic end they might possibly have been responsible.

  I was given some letters and checks—information that did not lack a touch of caricature—but in hindsight I am convinced that the philosopher’s personality was ultimately destroyed by liars who soft-pedaled certain matters, and by other people who in most instances exaggerated matters beyond what was acceptable and appropriate. While searching for information about his private life, I encountered his weaknesses and denials and his attachment to beliefs and ideas. They distorted his image and ended up giving him, in a complex way, distinctive traits that were much harsher than those he naturally possessed. I must admit that the information I received from Hanna Yusif and Nunu Behar was not so bad when stacked up against the conversations of the people who talked about him, the intellectuals who were his contemporaries, in particular. They spoke of him in an unfocused way, and even in a five- or six-hour interview they didn’t provide much information at all.

  I had met one of them on a Friday at the Saraya market as he sat squatting, looking for old books among the volumes spread out on the floor. I approached him and told him I’d like to get information about the philosopher. As soon as I spoke he stood up holding several books under his arm. He looked like a pasha’s deputy: his black velvet headgear slightly bent, a straight mustache that looked like a ribbon with straight edges, his vest buttoned snugly over his round belly. He stood up straight, facing me and standing among books that were spread all over the floor. It was a comical scene of a man standing in the middle of a crowd, jostled to left and right, his voice mixed with the shouts of the papermakers, booksellers, and the horns of the cars in the narrow, crowded street.

  He replied with a lengthy narrative, “The late philosopher was a great man; he married Sartre’s cousin. He taught the sixties generation about the absurd and about nausea. Suhail Idris, the existentialist of the time, had great admiration for the philosopher. It was an important philosophy in our time. All this is gone now, unfortunately, and our generation was the only one that read Les chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom), La nausée (Nausea), and L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness). Our nihilism was real. It wasn’t phony. We fought the spies and the collaborators because we were aware of the essence of existence.”

  Every time I put my finger on something, he eluded it. I had the impression I was trying to get hold of an imaginary bottle, a mirage. Though it might be difficult for me to remember those ideas and images, which have disappeared for good, it was very hard for me, as I listened to the words of his contemporaries, to find any truth in them. There was nothing but the remnants of dust. I am almost convinced that those stupid guys were truly crazy.

  It was incumbent upon me to collect everything; I went after anything I could get. I gathered documents from everybody, whether they contained insults or praise, from common gardeners, uncouth citizens, flattering hypocrites, frivolous men, noble servants, politicians, and saints. Using my intuition I would sketch the background of each based on their names and manners, and then interpret them. Later I would study the feelings stirred up in evoking the memory of the philosopher. I benefited from the documents that Hanna Yusif gave me, especially the documents with narratives, the memoirs, and the photographs and diaries of the philosopher, his father, and others. I eliminated the documents containing comments, which were nothing more than directives inserted by Hanna Yusif and Nunu Behar meant to distort facts and mislead me. They were vulgar and filled with lies and were easy to identify because they were written in a different hand and with various pens. Though they did not contradict the documents I found in other places, I excluded them because they were a contemporary interpretation of past events. I finally realized that the truly important papers were in the hands of two individuals. One was the lawyer Butrus Samhiri, who was in possession of official documents that traced the key episodes in the philosopher’s life and which contained important details. I had to reconstitute them in order to provide a clear image of the philosopher’s public life. The other person was the merchant Sadeq Zadeh, an Iraqi who traded in art objects, carpets, and antiques. The documents in his possession covered an important period in the life of the philosopher, his thinking, and his secret relationships with dancers, prostitutes, and public figures. Those would help me depict the inner feelings of the philosopher, his intimate life, and his psychological profile.

  I went to see Butrus Samhiri late one morning accompanied by Jawad. His office was located in Ras al-Qaryeh on the top floor of a building at the entrance to the quarter, on al-Rashid Street. Jawad looked funny, with a camera hanging around his neck and a straw summer hat tilted to one side on his head. I could not help laughing at the sight, but he responded to my laughter with a smile that seemed to say that he was feeling important for the first time in his life, or that he was proud to be under
taking an important task. I smiled back at him. I walked beside him, without looking at him, and asked, “What were you doing before working with me, Jawad?”

  “I worked with my uncle Hanna,” he replied, keeping pace, his back slightly bent.

  “What exactly did you do with your uncle Hanna?” I inquired as we crossed the bridge heading toward al-Mustansir Street. Jawad said, “He trusted me to do everything.” We busied ourselves looking at the jewelry shops. We saw Sabian jewelers in long gray beards holding torches with strong flames to gold rings with precious stones. There were also shops selling watches, perfumes, western clothes, and quality shoes. We took a slight turn down a narrow street toward a building with a faded red tile roof from which water dripped onto the bars of the upper windows. A huge pomegranate tree grew in the middle of the sidewalk. Its branches had damaged the telephone lines. This alley was given the name al-Adliya Street in the forties because of the large number of attorneys who had their offices in the surrounding buildings. A very tall policeman with a wide leather belt stood rigidly on the corner. His trousers were tight and pegged to the cuffs. He wore a revolver on his left side, and he held a thick billy club made of striped walnut. He stared straight ahead. When Jawad spied him from a distance he stopped short, his thick neck sinking between his shoulders, his arms and legs shaking. He opened his mouth so wide that I could see all his crooked back teeth. His eyes turned red and he breathed with difficulty. I was so surprised by his alarm that I couldn’t help but confront him, asking in a low voice, “Jawad, Jawad, what happened to you? Are you afraid of the policeman?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, hiding behind me like someone ready to bolt. I held him firmly by the hand and asked, “Why, Jawad? Have you done something wrong?”

  “No, but I deserted the army.” His mustache was shaking, and he tried to lower his hat over his face as we passed the policeman, who didn’t pay any attention to us but continued to look straight ahead. We entered the vast hall of the building, where a servant was holding a bucket and mopping the marble stairs. We asked where the attorney Butrus Samhiri’s office was, and he pointed one flight up. When we reached the second floor we saw the lawyer’s nameplate before us. The office door was wide open.

  The strong odor of whiskey wafted lazily through the open door. An old gramophone sat atop a square box on a dark wooden commode with elaborate old Indian designs. Old black records were piled on top of each other in an attractive way, reaching the tip of the long-necked copper horn that extended from the record player.

  We were met by a plump woman of moderate beauty, perhaps in her forties. She was calm in a sort of fatalistic manner. Her face was desiccated, her body was soft in a scandalous way, and her heavy breasts swung when she moved from one spot to another. She obviously excited Jawad, who was watching her fixedly and smiled at her with his wrinkled dark face and yellowed equine teeth.

  “We came to see Mr. Butrus, the attorney,” I said, bowing my head appropriately. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. Her eyes moved from Jawad to me. “We do not have an appointment,” I said, “but tell him that Hanna Yusif sent us.” She smiled and welcomed us warmly. Her features changed, and it was clear that she knew Hanna Yusif very well—or at least the mere mention of the scoundrel’s name erased any expression of fear.

  She sat us down in the comfortable armchairs in the waiting room, went into the office, and, returning with her beautiful smile, escorted us to Mr. Butrus’s office. She closed the door behind us, but Jawad could not take his eyes off the movement of her large hips. We sat facing a wall covered from top to bottom with yellow and red tiles. The other walls in the office were covered with thick mahogany panels. There was also a large, half-round balcony with colored marble at the edges. Butrus was sitting behind his desk and, due to his small size, only his head was visible. He jumped up from behind the desk to greet us, a thin, tiny man wearing a worn-out suit.

  “Ahlan, Ahlan wa marhaba.” He had a speech defect, mispronouncing his rs and mixing up some words. We sat in front of him, and he looked at us with sad eyes set in a stony face. He had a pencil behind his ear like a carpenter. I said, “I came for the documents,” but he interrupted me and did not let me finish. “Yes, Hanna told me. All the documents are ready.” He turned toward the library, which was filled with files, pushed some papers aside, and placed the documents on his tidy desk. They were simple: old official documents, bank checks, and photographs that had belonged to the philosopher and his family and friends. They included two photographs of him with his friend Nadia Khaddouri, one taken in Mackenzie’s bookstore, and the other at the Orient Express café.

  “Did you ever meet the philosopher?” I asked. He was staring at the half-open door of a small room from which the strong whiskey smell emanated. “Yes, I used to be his father’s agent, may his soul rest in peace. He belonged to an aristocratic family, and although the revolution brought them down, it didn’t change their standards. But Abd al-Rahman revolted against his family, even before the revolution.”

  “Did you know him well?” I asked. Butrus Samhiri stared at me with a piercing look.

  “Yes I did, I did. I met him more than once, but those were casual encounters. We never discussed serious topics when we met, and as a result we did not really connect.” He was silent for a moment, then continued as if he had just remembered, “I was a minor employee, a clerk, as they say. Existentialism was meaningless to me. I was more inclined toward the left, and I found Edmond al-Qushli, the Trotskyite of our time, more to my liking than the philosopher of al-Sadriya. I was not able to understand Sartre’s complicated philosophy, and I didn’t like him.”

  “Did you find his philosophy complicated?” I asked.

  “I don’t think that anyone in my generation understood the things he used to read. Those who said they did are liars. You can ask Salman and Abbas, if you wish. He used to meet with them in the Café Brazil.”

  “But could you understand Trotsky?” I asked. Jawad was trying to take a picture, but I dissuaded him.

  “Trotskyism is not a philosophy the way existentialism is. It has a practical side.” He felt uncomfortable now, and it was clear that he didn’t want to go on. He stood up and handed me the documents. “Examine these papers and if you need anything else contact me.”

  I stood up. So did Jawad, who, burdened by the camera hanging around his neck, almost tripped and fell onto the sofa. “Where can I find Abbas and Salman?” I asked.

  “You’ll find them in al-Camp market. Ask around; everybody there knows them. Just ask for Abbas Philosophy; they’ll direct you to them.” He turned to Jawad and asked, “Hey, Jawad, do you still catch birds on people’s roofs?” Jawad blushed and laughed maliciously. I asked Butrus how he knew Jawad.

  “I know him because Hanna asked me to represent him in a few cases.” He laughed loudly, shaking his head like a devil. We left and immediately headed for the Adhamiya quarter to meet two of the philosopher’s old friends who had become merchants in Camp Raghiba Khatun market.

  Jawad hurried along behind me, his eyes deep in their sockets. The weather was refreshingly humid. The cool air hit my face, and the sun was warm, especially when we walked on the bright side of the street. We were walking on al-Rashid Street, where the many groceries displayed boxes of toffee, sweets, and all kinds of confections. Boutiques, tailor shops, watch shops, and jewelry stores lined the street, and people crowded into the restaurants for cheap sandwiches.

  I was thinking about the philosopher’s companions from the sixties who had turned to selling fruit at al-Camp market after becoming involved in philosophy. I had to see them, to get something from them that I could use—or at least obtain their photographs to include in the book. We walked toward the square and caught a taxi after Jawad bought a pack of cigarettes and lit one up. We arrived as the clock of al-Imam al-A‘dham was on its third ring. The place was crowded with buyers and salesmen. In the fruit market we inquired about the two men and were told that they were in the resta
urant at the end of the main street.

  The market was humid and stuffy, the ground was muddy, and water seeped from the badly paved street. The restaurant was located at one end of the market, a small place with a low ceiling, painted a cheap white and with a dirty glass facade. All kinds of people pressed together inside—fruit and spice merchants wearing their white dishdashas with belts tied around plump bellies, young men wearing western clothes, policemen in khaki uniforms and boots, their thick walnut billy clubs on the table, and women in black abayas. A large grill at the entrance of the restaurant filled the air with the smell of coal and grilled meat. The servers were rushing about, wearing white aprons and caps bearing the restaurant’s name. We were greeted by the sounds of orders being shouted across the restaurant—kebab, salad without vinegar, bread—the metallic sound of spoons and plates dropped onto the sticky tables, and the clamor of the dishwashers echoing on the wet brick floor.

  We inquired about Abbas Philosophy and Salman. They didn’t look like philosophers at all, more like fruit merchants. They were middle-aged men with huge bellies that hit the edge of the table whenever they moved. Their table was filled with all kinds of grilled meat, bread, pickles, grilled onions, and vegetables. They welcomed me and Jawad very warmly and were extremely surprised to learn that someone, finally, had remembered them. One of them said, “You’ve finally remembered the great men of the country. We were afraid to die for fear that our memory and that of the greatest Arab philosopher, the philosopher of al-Sadriya, would be lost forever.”