by Ali Bader
Abd al-Rahman saw the change of seasons as nihilistic, as he observed trees losing their leaves, soft and shiny flowers falling to the ground at the slightest touch, petals spreading over the pond, and the reflection of their color in the glass window. Each of those natural occurences had a nihilistic dimension that, since he married Germaine and moved with her into this big house overlooking the souk, manifested itself every day in spring. It appeared in the space between the branches and the sky, between the high and the low, and after a light rain.
He considered the catkin the most beautiful flower on earth because of all flowers—roses, white and lavender lilacs, and jasmines—it was only the catkin that helped him experience an even deeper nausea. He had a special affection for catkins and defined them in philosophical terms, “the catkins were existential flowers before existential philosophy itself came to be.” The flower allowed him to perceive the nihilism of existence that emerged along with the appearance of humanity. He used to ask the gardener for a sprig that he would keep in his room to ensure that he would always feel nauseated, even in his dreams. He dreamed his garden was filled with them or that they wrapped around the fence. He would stare at them in his sleep and feel such a strong, painful desire he was moved to shout out loud.
The philosopher liked many things, especially those that enhanced his nausea, such as fresh cream covered with cherry jam. He liked it and ate it almost every day. The combination of the two colors, white and dark red, reminded him of the color of the wine that Jean-Paul Sartre used to drink on Saint-Germaindes-Prés. This delicious similarity contributed to his understanding of Sartre’s mood. It gave him a memory of gluttonous existentialism, suitable for a man who loved food, drink, and good health.
Abd al-Rahman’s existentialism was earthy, organized, and spontaneous. It led to the perfection of the self, not its degradation, to the elevation of the soul, not its destruction. Existentialism provided him with the best in life, a wonderful time, unique moments, and total and complete pleasures. His might be described as a lustful existentialism, whose nausea engendered life, not death and suicide. It led to heavy and delicious meals, crazy nights of drinking, and pulling his mistress’s hair while removing her lace panties. It inspired him to cheer and shout like common people.
Abd al-Rahman’s existentialism was limitless; it transcended all boundaries. His nausea contained an unbelievable sweetness, irresistible desire, and ineffable rejoicing. He acted a bit strange in his nauseated condition: he would slump onto a carriage driver, fall heavily on the seat, roll over into the stagnant water of the sidewalk, or fall from his bed or in the garden. He did not need to be artificially elevated to experience this happiness, which is purer than any joy. He needed a great spontaneity to know this happiness. He believed that there were two types of threats to the mind: external events that might hamper the progress of nausea and internal matters that caused him to forget, even for a second, the nausea.
During a bout of heavy drinking he might forget to express himself and tell those around him that he suffers from what philosophy refers to as nausea. Once he recovered from his drunkenness, most often in his room, and remembered, it would be too late. His mood would darken, and he would become angry with himself because he had failed to detect his nauseated state as it happened and thus had lost it. There were occasions when Abd al-Rahman forgot to express this feeling clearly, and he felt it slip away. In fact, it was the philosopher himself who sometimes neglected this feeling once he became absorbed in and crushed by worldly matters. He allowed himself only a minimum amount of worry about experiencing an anxious, dazed happiness caused by some accidental event. The happiness he experienced was most likely the result of pure nervousness, a condition that made it impossible for him to capture the feeling during moments of intense and total enjoyment. Thus the eternal feeling of nausea became a temporary one, while the philosopher preferred a timeless nausea, as did existential thought. This fleeting, beautiful, nauseating moment melted too fast, like butter in seawater, whereas the philosopher would have liked it to be everlasting, eternal. He often said to Ismail Hadoub, “What if man stayed in a state of nausea from birth to death?” Hadoub was surprised and asked, “How could that be?” and wrote down the philosopher’s reply.
In response to Hadoud’s astonishment, Abd al-Rahman offered a lengthy explanation, “For example, drinking brandy like this excellent vintage, or smoking Dutch tobacco like the fine stuff I have now in my pipe, or resting on the chest of a woman like Dalal (whose breasts protrude like two blown balloons), then experiencing a high and permanent degree of nausea. Drinking, smoking, and resting on a woman’s chest until death would be permanent nausea, a moment fixed in time while the world goes forward. This would mean the actualization of a complete existentialism, and thus one would become the greatest existentialist on earth.”
As he concluded, he shook his head, threw it back in a philosophical manner, and lapsed into a state of anxious silence. His words touched Ismail Hadoub deeply. “This is what escaped Sartre. He didn’t pay attention to it, isn’t that so?”
“No, he did not,” Abd al-Rahman replied, “but I would like to transmit my thoughts to those who worship existentialism. I would like to introduce them to my existential thinking because existentialism is an open pleasure, a general one, not individual or selfish. In other words it is a selfish pleasure made for others to enjoy. We will establish an Arab existentialism with its own character. We want to promulgate it and distinguish it from western existentialism as Sartre defined it.”
Ismail Hadoub rushed to write down these complex comments, words that were incomprehensible to him, puzzling philosophical declarations. They didn’t require proof; they were self-explanatory through their complexity alone. Ismail understood philosophy as something that was impossible to understand, which explained the attractive and fascinating nature of Abd al-Rahman’s words. He used to utter incomprehensible and unknown words that gave him certain superiority over his peers. He was lost in a philosophical fog, and through it was able to achieve success. The situation reassured the philosopher’s parents, but he was concerned with his own personal fate. He knew that his ability to express mysterious ideas gave him the power to control weak characters even if stronger minds denounced him. He masked his position with the excuse that our society was not philosophical.
Ismail Hadoub wrote down everything the philosopher said. He didn’t want to lose a single word. He was the only one convinced that Abd al-Rahman was a giant thinker who deserved to be believed and followed. He was a philosopher, and Ismail was devoid of philosophy; he was wealthy and could spend money, whereas Ismail was poor and couldn’t find anything to eat. Abd al-Rahman resembled Sartre, but Ismail did not; he looked like himself. Abd al-Rahman was married to Sartre’s cousin, but Ismail was a single man hunting for a rich wife.
The differences between the two men were tangible, and both were well aware of them. Philosophy could not erase those social disparities but in fact deepened and strengthened them. Each was aware of his true circumstance, his social status, and each tried to delineate his life according to this contradiction. Abd al-Rahman liked to distance himself from his class. He avoided and disliked his social class and never failed to express his feelings toward it. His attitude constantly called to mind his membership in the elite class, and it reminded those around him of the refinement of his class and its arrogance. For these reasons he sought to climb down the social ladder and become part of the lower classes. Only those who are highly placed want to go down—a natural inclination. Ismail, on the other hand, wanted to climb up the ladder because he was affiliated with the lower stratum of society. Thus the difference between those who climb up the ladder and those who come down is social and not philosophical. It’s an economic difference, if we consider the significance of the matter. It’s the difference between rich and poor, or beggar and donor, regardless of the nature of the donation, whether it’s material or philosophical. This made Abd al-Rahman the donor
and Ismail the beggar, since Abd al-Rahman was the philosopher and Ismail a mere follower.
5
Ismail Hadoub was not pampered or philosophical like Abd al-Rahman, the philosopher. He appeared on the Baghdad scene in the mid-fifties as a salesman selling pornographic photographs. In his early days in Baghdad he did not have anything regular to eat or drink or even a place to sleep. He ate whatever he could lay his hands on, and that meant leftovers and garbage from rich people’s kitchens. He drank the dregs of arrack left in bottles thrown near bars, and he slept wherever he could. He took odd jobs: selling pornography, carrying luggage at modest hotels, cutting glass in al-Jam market, sweeping for the municipality, and sometimes working as a servant in rich people’s homes. He had an inclination for pleasure, amusement, and a vagabond life. He wandered the streets and picked pockets in bus stations. He lived in cheap, dirty, half-derelict hotels in the company of smugglers, pimps, and thieves, painters, bakers, and carriage drivers. He’d sleep anywhere: on a cheap wet sofa, in putrid stables, or on the roof of a crumbling apartment building, sharing the rent with four or five other men. He’d often wander by cinemas, groceries, jewelry shops, or even bars and public squares to sell his photographs, steal purses, hustle counterfeit liquor, and do a bit of smuggling, gambling, and pimping as well.
Ismail used to roam to remote corners of the country, then return with a new look and new clothes and take up work different from what he’d done before. It’s possible he was directed to Mahallet al-Sadriya or to Mahallet Siraj al-Din from the khan near the Abu Dudu district. Ismail spent six years in this airless, unlighted khan, a place known to those who saw it from the outside as a hole or a long labyrinth, opening on a dark space filled with dirt and putrefying substances. His feet led him there usually at night, his knife wrapped in a cloth cinched around his belly. He lay on a mattress as thin as a wooden board and covered himself with a dirty, colorless blanket, long accustomed to its pungent smell. Even in this miserable place he was not always safe, as Abboud, the gangster of Siraj al-Din, would push him away and steal his space on the mattress. Ismail placed the mattress on a platform to protect it. This stony elevation served more than one purpose. It was a cupboard to hide his cooking utensils and other valuables, some stolen pornographic photographs he sold, and even some dry bread. It was his dining table during the day and his bedstead at night, and a place to stretch and rest despite the loud snoring of the other occupants. His sleep was often interrupted by the bedbugs gnawing at his skin. He’d scratch at them endlessly and often fall from the mattress onto the ground, where he’d find himself too tired to get up. When he stayed on the floor, he fell victim to cockroaches and rats. He’d bat them away, eyes closed with exhaustion and fatigue.
A rusty iron wire encased a lamp hanging from the ceiling of the khan. It swayed above the head of the Kurdish carrier who was responsible for lighting and extinguishing it. Three other Kurds from Irbil and two from Basra worked as gutter cleaners. They often fought over this miserable lamp before falling off to sleep and filling the room with their moans and snores. Their moaning was sometimes interrupted by the sound of cracking bones, insults, and swearing. When they came back to this place at night shivering, coughing, and spitting, they would sit in a corner and smoke their cheap cigarettes. They usually hunched on their legs, like balls, their teeth crackling from the cold and their behinds numb from the humidity. Sometimes they brought a prostitute, who was even more miserable than they, paler and smellier, and with her hair all stuck together. She’d often be cross-eyed, stammering, lame, or crazy. They’d sleep with her in the same dirty bed, one at a time, laughing like mad, shaking their hands and their pale faces. Once done, they’d shout and jump like monkeys around her, give her money, then one after another go to take a piss.
At dawn Ismail would leave the khan with those failed, broken creatures, exiting from the mangled wooden door of the hotel. They’d all move watchfully, a pack of people who had known nothing but hardship, grief, and moral depravity, swearing, fighting, and stealing. If the police arrested Ismail—for theft or drunkenness or skipping out on his restaurant bill, teasing a girl, or fighting with a prostitute—he would spend the night at the police station, but the inhabitants of the khan would do their duty toward him. They’d treat him with great kindness and generosity, give him money, and bring him food and drink. When he returned to the khan they’d steal his food, drink, and money, and return to their usual selves—dirty, shabbily dressed, hungry, poor, nasty, and most often unemployed. As soon as one of them found work he’d disappear for a while only to return when he lost his job.
Ismail appeared one day in Mahallet al-Sadriya selling pornographic photographs and pictures of Turkish strippers after having lost his municipal job. He went to Mahallet al-Sadriya every day, in fact, for a particular client who was addicted to this type of photograph. No one paid more money for those photographs than Shaul, though the transactions were never straightforward and were concluded only after lengthy haggling and aggravating delays. Still, he always ended up paying the price Ismail was asking. Lately Ismail had been paying more frequent visits to Shaul’s shop and was spending more time there. He even received money for some photographs he’d brought from one of the Kurds in the khan. The Kurd was a baggage handler at one of Baghdad’s western stations, where he carried the bags of travelers going to Mosul, Basra, or Turkey. Some travelers gave him money, others food, and others gave him dirty photographs to sell. This Kurd was the wealthiest man in the khan. He brought woolen clothes and rare and unique merchandise from Dahuk. He smuggled hash that Ismail ended up getting most of the time, either by raiding his stash at night with Abboud’s help, or by buying it for resale to Shaul.
One day Shaul threw his assistant Salim out of his shop. Salim was a Jew who wore his glasses low on his nose and looked over them at people like a hedgehog. He also spoke through his nose. Salim did not like Ismail. He thought he was a swindler who wanted to take his employer’s money in exchange for worthless paper photographs. This Saturday morning Salim was thrown from the shop and fell on his face in the street. His glasses fell off his nose. Shaul came out behind him steaming with anger. “You betrayed me, Salim! I made you into a human being. Why did you betray me?”
A couple of days later Shaul was wondering who would replace Salim in the shop. He needed another person, but this time things were different. He was free to choose someone he could mold with his own ideas and principles. His wife had imposed Salim on him because he was a relative of hers. Shaul was convinced that only ideas last, that everything else was futile. If he succeeded in imbuing someone with his ideas and principles he would be able to control and subdue him, if not by making him aware of the social difference that separated them then by their shared ideas. He did not want someone with a set way of thinking, someone who would not acknowledge his debt to him; he wanted someone green, a blank page that he could fill with ideas of his choosing and so induce to think the way he wished. One fine day Ismail entered Shaul’s shop with the pornographic photographs deep in the pocket of his shabby, well-worn black jacket. He was disheveled, his hands red from scratching bug bites, and his shirt collar dirty and smelling of cheap arrack. He sat on a clean sofa in a remote corner of the shop filled with shiny new merchandise. He blew his nose in his hand and wore a sad look on his face. Shaul stared at this miserable excuse for a man lurking in the corner. He moved closer until he sat facing him and began to speak softly. Meanwhile Ismail was fingering the smooth photographs in his pocket, trying to judge when might be the right moment to take them out and wondering all the while why Shaul had not asked about them. But Shaul was talking about a totally different subject. He wanted Ismail to understand, he said, that he was a victim of social exploitation, that his adversity was only a temporary situation, and that he would be able to pull him out of it, change him, and provide him with a new appearance. He also told him that nothing in life was permanent, that everything was subject to the vicissitudes of time, a difference
in the availability of money, and one’s ability to make and spend money. He told him that he, Ismail, would be a different person if he filled his pockets with money, if he worked hard and joined the social order.
Shaul was promising Ismail something concrete, something that would happen to him in this life, something he could touch and feel with his own hands. He told him that his poverty was a historical poverty, not caused by him or his family but the result of History. Ismail was shocked when he heard this and immediately pulled a knife out of his pocket and told him, “Show me History and I will rip out his guts.” Shaul smiled and replied, “We have to correct History, not kill it.” He uttered those words then smacked his tongue and wet his lips. His eyes gleamed from behind his thick glasses. They were flat, lifeless eyes, moving left and right like plastic beads, and the thick black plastic frames hid his eyebrows.
Shaul’s words destroyed the sturdy wall behind which Ismail used to hide. Such serious ideas sent him reeling, though he understood nothing from them except that he could overpower people. He understood only the essence of those words, and, according to Ismail, the essence was that he would get rid of the rags he was wearing, become clean and tidy, and acquire importance in society as others had done. He understood that he’d abandon his unruly life and live an organized one. He’d have to give up the freedom that led him only to misery and enter a life of slavery that would eventually make him a master. Since he had already tried the first kind of life, he was willing with all his heart to try a new one. He was filled with a strong desire to be wealthy and famous, meet clean women, and gain false honor— and the one to provide him with all this was, his savior, Shaul.
