The Tobacco Keeper

by Ali Bader

  I went to Chad immediately after the failed coup in the nineties and to Rwanda following the civil war. I went to the Western Sahara, where the political situation was deteriorating. During that same period, I also witnessed the dramatic changes that were overtaking Eastern Europe, the radical transformations wrought by political revolutions and the total rejection of communism. From there I wrote about the war in Bosnia Herzegovina. I also wrote major pieces for US Today News on Iraqi communists in Africa, especially those who’d fled to Addis Ababa after the ascension of Mengistu in the eighties. They had escaped there from the hell of Saddam Hussein, and their aim was to spark revolution against Western interests in Africa. I found them frustrated and disappointed now that the illusion of revolution had entirely vanished from their lives. I travelled to report on Fascist jails in Portugal and Spain, comparing them with Middle Eastern jails. I was also witness to the major transformations in Afghanistan, especially following 9/11, and the international invasion of Kabul and the end of the Taliban era. In fact, I witnessed major changes taking place throughout the world: brutal civil wars, horrific atrocities of every description and cruel scenes of homelessness and deprivation. In Africa I saw things I could never have seen anywhere else: strange animals, birds with huge wings and crocodiles threatened with extinction. Awake all night, I also saw the blue minarets of Tehran piercing the sky and flocks of sharp-eyed birds flapping their wings on the domes of the mosques.

  My relationship with Aida didn’t last. She was too moody and demanding. Her moods also had an adverse effect on me. But this situation soon changed when she introduced me to an American reporter of Palestinian origin called Nancy Awdeh – I’m not sure whether this was an oversight on her part. We saw Nancy for the first time at a bar in Beirut. From that first meeting, Nancy and I were attracted to each other. The more deeply I got involved with Nancy Awdeh, the more complicated became my relationship with Aida Shahin. I tried desperately to explain to Aida that we should separate. It was even harder to tell her that I was going to live with Nancy. But in the end she realized that we couldn’t possibly go on. When I moved into Nancy’s apartment in Al-Ashrafeya, Aida gave me a beautiful memento: the blouse that she’d worn on the first occasion we’d met. This embarrassed me and made me sluggish.

  Foreign reporters came to Beirut because it was a volcanic mass of contradictions, the place where all the conflicts of the Middle East were fought out. It was a permanent warzone where international and regional plans and strategies were executed. At the heart of an intricate web of contradictions and conflicts stood this coastal city, hovering over the dividing line between East and West but lying open to all. This was its distinguishing feature, and it was a permanent hotspot for foreign correspondents interested in the Middle East. They streamed to Beirut, preferring it to all other Middle Eastern cities. It offered so many attractions, including the huge number of bars, cafés and salons that made their lives comfortable.

  It was also strange that reporters and journalists in Beirut were classified by the type of bar they frequented. The bars were categorized according to the political affiliations of their journalist patrons and given various satirical nicknames. There was the War Criminals’ bar, the Terrorists’ bar and the Lady Killers’ bar. The bar I often went to with Nancy was no better named than any of these.

  At that time, Nancy was working as a correspondent for a major American network. She had studied journalism in New York and worked as an extra at a radio station in Boston, so she had strong connections with the media there. She managed to get me a fair few assignments and commissioned me more than once herself. Although these jobs, for a variety of reasons, were not long term, they did help me a great deal with my living expenses and kept me in close contact with press circles. My relationship with Nancy reached its high point at this time. She was an irresistible paragon of femininity and desire. She had the figure of a model: tall, dark, slim and delicate. I was attracted to her soft features and shapely figure beneath her elegant outfits. Nancy had been married at twenty-three but had got a divorce from her husband, who was a well-known broadcaster at BDR New York.

  Nonetheless, this love story didn’t last long. We had many problems and rows and finally we decided to split up. I moved to Damascus to work with an Italian director on a documentary about Iraqis exiled in Syria. She went to New York. When I returned to Beirut two months later, she was back, having returned the previous month. Although she was in a relationship with José Paz, the famous Brazilian journalist who’d been working in Beirut for a long time, a vague connection remained between us via our work. Throughout this period, we continued to be close friends and met from time to time in Beirut and elsewhere. She tried hard to find me some work to help me earn a living. But I was still in a dismal state, having been unemployed for more than three months, with no real work either in journalism or television.

  My situation began to worsen rapidly, for my savings from the Damascus documentary were gradually running out. Although at the time I believed that my move to Beirut would launch my career as an Arabic writer, my hopes were soon dashed. All my contacts had been with European and American journalists, which had made it easier to write for the press outside the Arab world, but I was an unknown in terms of the Arabic press. I had never had any contact with Arab journalists, writers or publishers, and they were the only conduit to a job. It was strange that work for me was always connected with a love affair or relationship of some kind. At that point in time, my affair with Nancy was virtually over, and since my journalistic work depended entirely on such relationships, I found myself isolated and lonely.

  I knew that if I failed to form a relationship, I would probably remain unemployed. However, while seeking a relationship with a woman within Arabic media circles, I started to write the outline of a novel set in Baghdad. Being unable to finish it increased my sense of failure. I then met Nancy and her boyfriend at the Lady Killers’ bar. We stood and talked for a long time. She was so genuinely distressed at my state that she invited me to Damascus to meet Jacqueline Mugharib, a Levantine woman well-connected with the Arab and foreign press and media. I went back to Syria, and at Jacqueline Mugharib’s I was introduced to an Iraqi director working for a TV channel. I started helping him with his work, which was by no means extensive, as he only produced brief news reports that he sold to various channels. On top of that, my collaboration with him was short-lived and fairly erratic, because it depended on a fast news turnover and last-minute assignments by the channels. I felt very unsettled. In order to finish my Arabic writing project, I decided to move to Amman, where I arrived feeling completely dejected. I rented a small, very cheap apartment, or studio, to be precise. I was completely cut off from everyone, moving only between the library and the studio. I started visiting the offices of the daily papers, where I got to know Salih, who was the culture editor for one of them. He asked me to write some literary articles, especially on foreign literature. I also translated chapters from modern novels and wrote some critical articles that he occasionally commissioned for the same paper. These were all pretty routine jobs that I took no great pleasure in.

  Boring Amman afforded me plenty of time to read, watch movies and attend concerts, which helped me while away the time but filled me with little enthusiasm. So I didn’t stay long, and soon moved to Damascus. Actually, I moved to Damascus at the invitation of a friend of mine who was working for a film company there. He commissioned me to script a film on behalf of an Iraqi cultural institution set up by Iraqi communists after the massacre they’d suffered in 1980. I stayed in Damascus for several months writing the script. After finishing the task and securing some funds, I decided to stay on. I rented a room in a very strange hotel in the Sarouja quarter of Damascus. It was a small and cheap hostel, with mostly foreign guests and an excellent library that contained books in every language. From my little room in this weird hotel, I started dispatching reports on cinema and theatre to a French newspaper that was interested in such events fr
om around the world. All these jobs, however, were of short-lived interest and quickly faded away.

  During those difficult days, Nancy called to tell me that she had found me a job as a copywriter for trailers and commercials at one of the Arab TV studios, without needing to leave Damascus. From the comfort of my hotel room I wrote amusing adverts, coming up with exciting and attention-grabbing catch-phrases for washing-up liquid, car tyres, rubber products and other stuff. This simple work in fact helped me move from the cheap hotel to a small apartment or studio in Bab Touma, near Jacqueline and Hanna Mugharib’s house.

  I remained like this until 2003. The occupation of Baghdad by the Marines and the toppling of Saddam’s regime represented a real sea change in my life as a reporter. From that moment on, that Middle Eastern city became the focus for reporters, correspondents and documentary-makers from around the world; not just because of the war, but also because of a real transformation in international politics that, on the one hand, reasserted imperialist discourse and, on the other, represented an opportunity for change throughout the Middle East. There were global, and media, expectations that Baghdad would be a turning point for the whole world. It was expected to become a modern city: politically, economically and socially. However, instead of becoming, as anticipated, a city safe for politicians and reporters, it turned into the most violent and dangerous place in the world. This created two contradictory perceptions of a city that was hovering on the brink of civil war. On the one hand, its media value rose to unprecedented heights, while on the other, it became dangerous and completely off limits to journalists. What were reporters supposed to do? They had to leave Baghdad for neighbouring capitals: Amman, Damascus and Beirut in particular were relatively close. Because these cities were safe, journalists could establish contacts there, acquire information and get reports and news about Baghdad. This was how my career as a ghost writer began, or ‘black writer’ as Nancy Awdeh used to say whenever she saw me. I’d see her sitting, with her sturdy build and full breasts, like a long-legged blaze of lust, and as soon as she saw me, she’d call out, ‘Hi, black writer!’

  It was thanks to Nancy that I got so many ghost-writing assignments as well as countless privileges. Through her, I became known to many newspapers and TV channels, and she introduced me to a large number of foreign and Arab news agencies, for whom I wrote reports and made documentaries about Iraq. I’ll always be thankful to her for introducing me to so many famous international reporters and journalists. I’ll never forget that it was she who introduced me to Robert Fisk, Pierre-Jean Luizard, Tariq Ali and others.

  Nancy was everybody’s best friend and she took her moral responsibilities towards her friends quite seriously. She was actually very different from anybody else I got to know at that time, for other correspondents seemed no more than brightly coloured bubbles. Most of them were proud, vain and worthless, while she was the total opposite. I became well known by the name that she had coined for me.

  The fact is, no foreign reporter dared to enter Iraq during that period, so I was the one who wrote the news, reports and features for most of the major European newspapers. The names of their senior writers adorned their pages while they themselves sat in the bars and cafés of Amman, Damascus or Beirut, sipping cold beer and eating tasty mezzas. Their work was not unduly demanding. All they had to do was call and ask me to go to Baghdad, Basra, Al-Ramadi or Mosul to write their reports. In the meantime, they kept watch from a safe distance and, occasionally, directed reports to the destinations of their choosing. I moved from one hazardous area to another, time after time escaping death in order to write the reports and receive my cash.

  In order to explain the dimensions of my new assignment on Kamal Medhat, I need first to describe my relationship with Jacqueline Mugharib, who played a great part in this.

  Jacqueline Mugharib

  Jacqueline Mugharib was a Syrian woman who lived on the upper floor of a small house in the Christian neighbourhood of Bab Touma in Damascus. The building was very old. On the ground floor at the front was a small bakery owned by a Lebanese Shiite man called Jaafar, who’d come to Damascus from south Lebanon some thirty years earlier. An elderly man, he employed five young Syrian bakers from Al-Saleheya City in addition to Iraqi immigrants who prepared the bread in the Najaf style. At the bakery, he also sold hot Lebanese-style pastries, whose aroma one could smell from far away. Next to the bakery was an olive-skinned Druze barber called Nabil. He had a very pretty red and green parrot with an extraordinarily long tail, which he said his uncle had brought him from the Caribbean.

  The parrot perched on a long rope in the doorway, greeting passers-by in Spanish and Arabic. There was also a small, ancient-looking bar owned by a Christian from the Boutros family who lived in Wadi al-Nasara in Homs. This family had once been renowned for preparing and distilling arak, aniseed-flavoured liqueur. Posters of Hollywood actresses plastered the walls. This strange bar occupied a small part of the left side of the house. As for me, I lived just one street away from Jacqueline Mugharib’s house, in a big guesthouse in the middle of which was a small fountain. We called it ‘Katania House’, which derived from the name of the woman who was in charge. Katiana was thirty years old, pretty, olive-skinned and rather plump, and wore the veil in the Syrian style. Her clothes were modest and for ten years she’d managed the house on behalf of its Syrian Christian owner who lived in New York. She called herself Katiana, a Christian name, to make the woman overseas believe that she was also Christian. The owner would contact her manager only by phone and receive the rents remotely through her lawyer. She was therefore under the impression that the manager of her hotel in Damascus was a Christian like herself.

  I was in love with Bab Touma. My time there reminded me of some lost moments of my life in Baghdad because of the similarities between this neighbourhood and Al-Karradah in Baghdad, particularly the constant presence of foreigners, the bars and the round-the-clock noise. There was also a rowdy, typically Middle Eastern chaos that resulted from the presence, side by side, of mismatched businesses: ladies’ hairdressers, cheap bars and modest restaurants. At a short distance from the house there were various shops and grocers: shops selling cakes and local sweets, Iranian and Arab bakers, shoemakers, tailors, small bookshops, a modern-looking church and a dental clinic. There was also the ever-changing flow of guests, particularly foreign students from the United States, France, Italy and even Asia. In this neighbourhood lived Christian artisans, junior clerks of all denominations, carpenters, tailors and poor Jews. There were also Syrian painters who’d turned their homes into elegant museums, which every evening attracted the cream of expatriate Iraqi and Syrian society. In the midst of this international anarchy there were Iraqi artists: painters, journalists, movie directors, novelists, photographers, dancers, musicians and actors, all living in old, semi-dilapidated houses in various parts of this cosmopolitan neighbourhood.

  The house I lived in consisted of seven rooms, or eight, because the storeroom could be turned into a guestroom and one room was sometimes turned into two. These changes were purely logistical, undertaken during the tourist season with the arrival of Iraqi groups or for various other reasons. The permanent arrangement, however, was three rooms on the lower floor and three rooms on the upper, in addition to the courtyard facing the fountain at the centre of the house. There were always large couches for the benefit of anyone wishing to sleep out in the open and enjoy Damascus’ refreshing summer breeze. There was also a tiny kitchen with simple cooking utensils. I would often bump into the other guests coming out of the shared bathrooms, especially in the morning.

  The first room was occupied by two Iraqi film directors, Nazar and Adel. Next to them lived two sisters from Latakia who worked for a dress-making company in Damascus. They were extremely pretty and elegant. The lodgers called the first one ‘the Romantic’ because she always sat distractedly at the window or on the large couch in the courtyard in front of the fountain, reading a book. In contrast, her sister was c
alled ‘the Symbolist’, following Adel’s innovative appellation.

  On the upper floor lived an eccentric Iraqi young man who was rumoured to have worked for Iraqi – that is, Saddam’s, – intelligence. His first name was Helmi but we didn’t know his second name, for he didn’t speak much to the other lodgers. He would often stand in front of the outside mirror near the fountain in the centre of the courtyard, combing his hair for hours on end.

  The first of the other two rooms was occupied by Shirley Mendes, an American photographer and journalist, while the second was occupied by Karim, an Italian man of Syrian descent who worked for non-governmental organizations providing aid to Iraqi artists, particularly film-makers.

  During this period I was a frequent visitor to the apartment of Jacqueline and her husband Hanna Mugharib. He was a Syrian physician who, though not at all rich, was very hospitable. He never refused his wife’s wishes, for he was deeply in love with her. According to Nancy’s gossip, however, he was also having an affair that his wife knew nothing about, with a young actress who’d once lived at Katania House. Still, he met all the demands of his Marxist intellectual wife without fail.

  Like Nancy Awdeh, I became one of the regulars at Jacqueline Mugharib’s salons and a fixture at her apartment on Thursdays. In fact I became one of her favourites. So, in addition to the regular Thursday evening sessions with a large number of foreign and Syrian intellectuals, I also met her almost every Sunday evening at a bar located at the intersection of Bab Touma and Bab Sharqi. At other times I would smoke the hookah with her and her husband on the pavement of the popular Dominoes café, near the police station in the main square of Bab Touma. At the end of our evening out, we would often go for supper at the pizzeria close by.