by Ali Bader
But was his love in vain?
Not at all. For without love, he would not have played with such intensity, with such feeling, with every fibre of his being. He struggled hard to become a great musician. He willingly gave up all the choices and pleasures that life offered him, for he wanted only to be a musician. In Moscow, he stood for the first time in his life in front of the greatest conductor in the world: a thin man with a long beard and a face as red as wine, who wore a black suit and a crimson bowtie. He advised Yousef to find artistic inspiration from his own people and nowhere else.
The conductor stood there with his thick coat and wine-red face. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘From Iraq,’ answered Yousef, his palms sweating.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘try to find a scene from your country and your people to turn into music.’
The conductor gave him this piece of advice without really knowing where Iraq was located on the map. After his return from Moscow, Yousef consoled himself with the thought that he would compose a piece of music inspired by local sights: the loud calls of the radish-seller, whose voice filled the lane; the coachman who drove his carriage through the streets, tooting his horn; the sight of Hamadi, the peddler, who walked with his stubborn, scabby mule tied to a colourfully decorated cart, carrying turnips from Sayed Hassan’s farm; the music of a Kurdish beggarwoman singing in a melodious voice, imploring people to give her crusts of dry bread that she could sell in bulk to the bran-sellers. Or he might find inspiration in his love for his cousin Gladys, in the pleasure of eating kebab with Persian-made silver cutlery at home, or in the sight of his beloved Gladys sitting on the sofa and reading the Holy Book.
That day, when he got up from his seat, he felt that he had hit on an idea. The Russian conductor’s advice might well be applied to Gladys’s image, the indescribable joy he felt on accompanying his mother on her visits to his aunt Massouda Dalal in Al-Karradah and eating kebab, while his sisters Daisy, Rachel and Saida stayed at home. At his aunt’s house, he would hear the grownups discussing grave and important matters for the very first time. It was there that he first heard names that never entirely disappeared from his life: Hitler, Mussolini, Nazism, the Axis, the Allies, the Boy Scouts and the Youth Brigades.
His cousin Gladys sat beside him and together they read the Holy Book. With her beautiful hands she lifted a jug that stood on the table, allowing him to see her smooth, white armpits. Their lovely fragrance made him feel intoxicated and entranced. He looked at her face that was encircled by a halo of henna-coloured hair, at the breathtaking beauty that never left his mind, even in his dreams. He looked at this girl who was prettier and more graceful than any other girl in the community, as well as being the most unassailable, even though she liked him and was friendly enough to him. Her full lips parted in a pleasing smile as she placed her hand on his shoulder.
She had once taken him and sat him on the red-brick wall of the house, where they’d been surrounded by a vast expanse of green grass. Then she had led him by the hand to a spot beneath a palm tree. They had stood and looked up at the thick bunches of dates beneath the branches that swayed in the breeze. As he watched the hens pecking and picking the grains from beneath the palms and around the red-brick wall he was blissfully happy. Gladys was wearing her gossamer white dress. Her arms were bare and her neck was like a swan’s. That evening she had let him enter the house where she had hung the tebit lamp in celebration of the Jewish New Year. On the table, she had placed a chicken stuffed with spices, chickpeas and meat.
Yousef was surprised when Gladys put down the Holy Book and picked up her favourite book, the French Syllabaire that she had studied at the Alliance School. She ran off, singing a beautiful song with a sweet voice and a lively rhythm as she picked up the fallen dates. Listening to the French lyrics flowing so smoothly from her lips, Yousef felt assaulted by the ruthless, incomprehensible foreign words that hurt his ears like the cries of huge birds of prey. It was at that time that Yousef discovered the wild roses that bloomed in a little mud pond near the brick wall and the flowers that blossomed in the spring in the lovely, small garden. When the family were away visiting any of the synagogues nearby, such as Abu Saleh, Massouda Shemtov or Sami Twaiq, Gladys would sit beside him, reading to him from the Syllabaire, while together they looked at the old tree, its bark covered with lichen.
Yousef realized that he was the only male that his cousin paid attention to. One day she took him into a little room in the yard and lay with him on a rusty iron bed. The bed had been abandoned in a room on the upper floor, but her mother had brought it down in the hope that Bahiza, the daughter of the Muslim farmers who owned a pen and two cows near the grove, might come to work for them and sleep in it.
Gladys dragged shy Yousef by the hand, undressed him and made him lie down on the bed. She started to fondle him. When she asked him to suck her nipples, he obeyed. With his quivering lips, he began to suck the ardent, rosy nipples. He looked with expectation at the passion in her sparkling eyes. He heard the huskiness of her voice and saw the redness of her cheeks. The scent of her clean, white clothes was irresistible. There on the bed he could smell her arousal, as she breathed in the masculine charm that was impossible for an adolescent girl to resist. She drew him to her with with one arm and extended the other beneath her knickers until delirium overcame her whole body and she began to tremble as she hugged and kissed him. When she gasped, he was terrified that she might be in pain or dying.
This was the first time Yousef had experienced moments of intimacy, and been alone with a woman. It was not an easy experience at all. It was the first time he had actually seen a woman’s breasts, white as coffee cups. It was the first time his lips had touched a real, rosy nipple after years and years of imagining it. He feared it might dissolve between his lips. For days afterwards, he had a devastating headache and his whole being was in a state of turmoil. His body throbbed and his mind wandered. He felt a similar kind of throbbing when his first long Mozart piece was aired on the radio. The presenter described him as the most gifted violinist in the country, the first to excel in classical music. This last description remained with him as an inspiration. It might even have erased the memory of his trembling, throbbing body, his headache and his obsession with the young Gladys. But how?
It was not, in fact, easy for Yousef to forget those moments, which distracted him for days on end. When he met Gladys days after the event, he was taken aback that she behaved so normally. He tried to avoid her gaze whenever her eyes happened to meet his. In contrast, she paid little attention to the whole thing and behaved quite naturally, as though nothing had ever happened between them. For his part, he kept repeating the radio presenter’s words in his head in order to erase the memory of this experience and to relieve the pangs of conscience that began to torture him. He hoped that the presenter’s words might wipe the scene from his mind. It was a strange scene that attracted and repelled him at the same time. Not a day passed without him dreaming about it or losing sleep because of it. It deprived him of the beauty of solitude and of clear thinking and meditation. The reason was that as a romantic he believed that sex was far more sublime than this image of animal passion. Sex was like music, with its variations, crescendos and mystic sublimation. It was not smells, secretions, gasps, or shameful moaning. It was a kind of soaring upwards, not bodies lying prostrate or lips shouting, ‘Suck! Suck!’ Gladys’s angelic face at home was the exact opposite of her image during those intimate moments: her dishevelled hair, red eyes, sweaty face, trembling lips and hoarse, moaning voice.
So every time he remembered the erotic gasps and moans, he repeated to himself the words of the radio presenter, although he was not sure if the man even knew the meaning of classical music. The man’s words seemed to him to contrast with the Russian conductor’s advice to him to return to his native roots for inspiration.
Yousef had been urged to find inspiration in the morning splendour of Al-Rashid Street, the city squares with their
insane congestion and the noise produced by the black leather carriages with their golden lamps. It meant that he had to find inspiration in large shops, in goldsmiths’ and in the many cafés, on the pavement of the station where the vendors of chickpeas and grilled meat gathered, among the squatting workers and soldiers and the vendors selling single cigarettes. His music had to be drawn from cinema entrances and brothel doorways, from the sight of prostitutes strutting coquettishly in scandalous dresses beneath their black abayas, lifting their hems and walking slowly, noisily chewing gum. He had to find inspiration in Baghdad’s twilight, when thieves, drug addicts and gamblers would gather discreetly in cafés by the river, in mortal fear of khaki-dressed mounted policemen, who wore wide leather belts and hats that looked like knights’ helmets, and who carried black truncheons studded with nails.
Was this what the Russian conductor meant? If it wasn’t, what had he meant by the statement that Yousef should find inspiration among his own people? He continued for days to raise his hands like an axeman and scream in the mirror: What did this Russian conductor with his wine-red face mean by this statement, when he had never been to this country nor seen its people? And what did the Muslim presenter with his dark complexion and Jewish looks mean by the word ‘classical’?
Did it mean that he should represent Baghdad, through musical notes, as a raucous city filled with the noise of workers, craftsmen, rubbish collectors, porters and police?
Or should he distance himself and offer abstractions unconnected with this world or any other?
Yousef never experienced any difficulty in finding inspiration for his music in the simple lives of the people, among his siblings or the image of his little brother, who had died of meningitis at the age of two. He was inspired by the wooden buses on Al-Rashid Street, the sight of dirty Jews in neighbourhoods such as Al-Torah, Abu Dudu and Abu Seifein. He was inspired by people’s talk about the war and about the English artillery that had bombarded Baghdad, by recollections of evening walks by the Tigris, by ruins, by ghosts, by his early years when he was discovering the world, by times of awe and of ineradicable pain. But was that what the Russian musician had meant, who had never seen Iraq nor even knew where it was, when he’d said that a musician should be inspired by his people?
How should he interpret this, when all he wanted was to write sketches, exercises, études and more?
Two images suggested themselves to his mind. The first, conjured up by the Russian conductor, was of music being popular and local, while the second, suggested by the local radio presenter, was of music as a classical art form. The second concept was akin to Alberto Caeiro’s idea in Tobacco Shop, which saw music as expressing nothing and everything at the same time, patterns not ideas, sounds emanating from the essence of existence and not from existence itself. In expressing essence, it had no palpable forms. He had to create music that would force existence to lie prostrate on a table, where he would contemplate it with no fixed ideas; to create a body that did not fade because music does not fade; to create ethereal, eternal feelings, because it is only feelings that cannot disappear; to create music that was like a leap into the unknown, music that was elevated and spiritual. This was the type of music that the radio presenter referred to without understanding what he was saying.
But more importantly…
How could he continue to live in this stifling community? How could he develop and grow in a society that encased him like a hard shell, like a thick, impenetrable skin? First there was the thick layer of family. Then there were the barriers created by the Jewish community in Baghdad during the thirties. Finally there was the fortress built by the Muslim community around the Jewish community.
But without him realising its importance at the time, something momentous happened that was to change his life, transforming the course of his existence once and for all. This was his family’s move, in 1945, out of the self-contained Al-Torah neighbourhood to Al-Rashid Street in Hassan Pasha district.
This was, in fact, the real turning point in his life, and in his personality, defining the nature of his existence in the years to come. But how did it happen?
Yousef moved from the small ghetto to the wide world outside, leaving the anxieties of the closed Jewish neighbourhood behind him. He broke through its thick skin and reached for the sun. It wasn’t easy for him at the beginning, for it was an existential test in the full sense of the word, a test he would remember all his life. He would often try to imagine, with fear in his heart, what it would have been like if he had stayed his whole life in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a ghetto.
Moving out of the neighbourhood represented a significant leap in Yousef’s life. On the one hand, he left the ghetto as a fully formed human being. On the other hand, he left his childhood behind him and was on the threshold of manhood. He no longer wore shorts, as he had done in the old house in the Jewish neighbourhood. He no longer ate the pieces of sugar that his mother brought out of the family cupboard. This was an extremely significant development in his life. For although the Jewish neighbourhood had given him a sense of security, as he mentioned in one of his letters to Farida, it had also instilled the fear of the outside world in his heart. Living in a heterogeneous community was a new test for him. The new environment removed his fear of the outside world and the terror he’d felt living within the confines of the Jewish neighbourhood. In his new home, Yousef learned many things that prepared him to stand on his own two feet. First, he could no longer bear to stay at home for long periods, because it was a sign of being a child. Second, he had to walk proudly and steadily to avoid being regarded as a cowardly Jew; now that he was a broad-chested young man, he walked slowly and proudly. Third, he no longer accompanied his father with his thick cane on his walks on Al-Rashid Street. Gradually he began to feel that he was part of the neighbourhood. He felt that he had taken root in this community and that he was not just a passing visitor. He would invite his Muslim friends to his home, and his mother would rush happily to the kitchen to make coffee in the silver-plated cups that she would take out of the ancient cupboard. Yousef saw with his own eyes how his mother sparkled and her face lit up as she heard him chattering loudly about their Muslim women neighbours.
His new residence also placed him in the middle of the action. It allowed him to see the world, to be among those who witnessed the bands that played on Al-Rashid Street to mark the establishment of the kingdom that year. He saw the military brass bands as they marched up and down the streets. In one of his letters to Farida, dated 1956, he mentioned another band made up of twelve musicians who used to liven up small dance parties at the English Club carnivals and the Laura Khedouri Club. It was the first year that national contests for dabka dancing were organized in the royal gardens. These carnivals were hugely successful despite the threats by clerics to ban them. Muslim alleys competed against each other in traditional wrestling while Christian alleys competed in the manufacture of arak and the organization of bellydancing parties. That year, there were at least three Jewish dancers, as well as two Muslims and one Armenian. For the first time in his life Yousef wooed a Kurdish girl, who lived on Al-Rashid Street. To the surprise of the whole neighbourhood the girl, called Dina, responded to his advances. Yousef, who had never performed live before, conquered his shyness and played the violin in front of an audience. For some reason, there was a shift in inter-communal relations that year. A Muslim officer got engaged to and married a Jewish woman who worked at the Khedouri Sassoon schools. A Christian man married a Jewish woman, while a well-known Jewish man fell in love with his Muslim maid and contemplated suicide when his family rejected his proposal of marriage.
It was a kind of emotional unrest that struck the neighbourhood of Al-Rashid Street in the forties, a widespread turmoil that took some people very much by surprise.
But what became of Gladys? Where was she now? And what had happened to his love for her? She was his first love and perhaps his last. In spite of all the relationships he had in those years,
he never forgot her. It wasn’t that he just couldn’t forget her; it was in Gladys’ nature to be unforgettable.
Gladys had clearly left an indelible mark on his life, especially after she married a physician called Fawzi. Her escapades and scandals were not only the concern of her family, but were also the talk of the whole of Baghdad. Every evening during the daily ritual of tea and biscuits that brought the family together and lasted until very late at night, Yousef would listen attentively to the details of her adventures. He was intrigued by the stories but could not forget his love and admiration for her. Although they all resented her, criticised her, condemned her conduct, and hated and insulted her, Yousef was captivated by her wild life, which swung between extreme luxury and numerous infidelities. Gladys had married a handsome, wealthy physician of her own free will. She lived her life between her opulent home and her trips to Europe, torn between her new love – her husband’s Muslim driver – a husband who loved her, and a third lover who pursued her like a shadow.
It was well known that her surgeon husband, Dr Fawzi, had been equally notorious for his own womanizing. But he, after his marriage to Gladys, had become a respectable family man. Rumour had it that it was he who had saved her life when she’d had a car accident while out driving one day, during the heaviest rainfall in Baghdad’s history. Gladys was his beautiful, indifferent patient. He had fallen in love with her at first sight and spared no effort to convince her to marry him. But she was not faithful to him, and in no time at all, rumours began to circulate about her. Everybody knew that she’d fallen for his Muslim driver.
In a long letter, Yousef described how he’d listen greedily to the stories about this unfaithful woman, full of admiration. He loved to hear news of her. At that time she was pregnant, but she cared neither for her husband nor her baby. With real anxiety Yousef realized that love brought incredible pleasure and knowledge, and might also rescue people from loneliness and loss; but it could sometimes be painful, as with Gladys and her husband.
