The Tobacco Keeper

by Ali Bader

  He had an intuitive feeling that his achievement was trivial and worthless. He procrastinated, waiting for the great idea to take shape in his mind. He never tried to capture it in its early stages of formation.

  Amjad Mustafa brought him into the National Symphony Orchestra, which had been formed in Baghdad in the fifties and which performed at the Al-Rabat Hall on Al-Maghreb Street. For decades, the hall had been the venue of concerts almost every Thursday, with a huge audience always in attendance. Kamal Medhat became the first soloist in the orchestra and the most famous and best-known musician, even among ordinary people.

  Kamal Medhat was immensely grateful to Amjad Mustafa, who helped him a great deal to achieve this position. Although Amjad was a much younger man than Kamal, his wide contacts within artistic and official circles made him seem much older than his years. He thus gave Kamal immeasurable help in his work in spite of the fact that everybody spoke of Widad and not Amjad as the prime mover. It was actually Widad who pushed Amjad to be the smokescreen while she was the one who performed the valuable services that put Kamal on the map.

  Faris Hassan collected important information about Amjad Mustafa, who was born in a house with a view of the river in Al-Adhamiyah near the royal cemetery. His father was a mechanical engineer in the army. Amjad wasn’t even five years old when his family moved to the privileged Al-Haretheya area in Baghdad, towards Al-Karkh. He lived in Baghdad until the age of twelve, and then travelled with his family to Britain, where his father had been appointed military attaché at the Iraqi Embassy in London. His memories of London were of lush, green trees, of splendid, cool parks and of large squares where ponies pranced and trotted. He retained his passion for ponies all his life. Amjad never experienced the harshness of life, although he lived through a very difficult historical period, because he was born and lived at an important turning point in the history of the country. His father was a committed Baathist. After a rapid rise up the ladder of the Baath regime, he soon enough fell victim to the politics of terror and was executed while in his mid-forties. At that point Amjad and his mother returned from London, bearing the stigma suffered by families in similar situations. Two years later, Amjad travelled to Budapest to study music at the Franz Liszt Conservatory.

  After his return to Baghdad, he got to know Widad Ahmed, who was studying cello at the Academy of Fine Arts. They met after his return from Budapest, when he gave a lecture about Bach at the Academy. She was the daughter of a senior official at the presidential palace who’d died in mysterious circumstances. Widad secured Amjad a good position in Baghdad, for she belonged to a family of important government officials and had authority, influence and wealth. Her brothers were top-ranking government officials, a category that included ambassadors, ministers and councillors. Thanks to her status, she succeeded in easing the political pressures on Amjad on account of the stigma that was attached to him. Amjad, moreover, took full advantage of his wife’s influence and frequently travelled with her to Brussels, New York and Paris. In Paris, he strolled with her in the alleys and parks, and visited the cafés. Then he decided to stay on for a year to study at a Paris conservatory, where he became acquainted with a famous violinist called Eric Luc and with whom he became close friends.

  In winter, there were always soirées at the house of Widad and Amjad Mustafa, in the roomy, light pink lounge. Huge chandeliers hung from the ceiling and the piano stood in the corner. Drinks were ranged on a shelf, as if in a bar. Friends and their wives all met up, especially on Thursdays, to drink wine and have supper.

  Amjad Mustafa’s friendship was of paramount importance to Kamal Medhat. After meeting him, he didn’t stay at home much. He spent a great deal of his time practising the violin at the Al-Rabat Hall on Al-Maghreb Street; he also gave more and more concerts. He visited Amjad, in whose house he was introduced to artists, writers, intellectuals and painters. Among them were the oud player Munir Bashir, the famous Armenian pianist Beatrice Ohanessian, the sculptor Mohammad Ghani Hekmat, and Khaled Al-Rahhal. Everybody confirmed that Kamal Medhat, who had emerged on the scene out of the blue in 1983, spent most of his evenings talking to the musicians, painters and poets who gathered in Amjad and Widad’s house, where the large window of the lounge looked out over a wooded garden and where birds could be heard chirping and could be seen hopping about. Nothing disturbed the peace and joy of those ambitious artists or hampered their artistic creativity, except the sound of bombs. Iran’s artillery shelled Basra and the cities of the south. Everybody realized that Saddam was slowly giving up his Blitzkrieg tactics. In fact, the war’s toll was heavy and costly, and people despaired of seeing its end. Every evening Baghdad TV showed a programme about the war. This presented images of dead Iranians torn to pieces by fighter planes, their guts strewn over the ground, their heads severed and their smashed faces covered with dust. The programme didn’t relay footage of the battles between the two armies, but only the maimed bodies and scattered limbs of the enemy. The camera moved along rows of laid-out bodies and panned over piles of corpses, zooming in on a burnt face, a severed hand or a half-buried body. Such scenes were the focus of conversations about the war among Amjad’s artist friends.

  The group held different, conflicting views. Kamal Medhat was greatly dismayed by the war, although he didn’t give clear expression to his views. He was surprised by Amjad Mustafa’s ideas and convictions, for he was the only one among the artists to use a racial justification for the war. He would say, as he drank a glass of Scotch on the rocks, ‘The war broke out because of Persian malice towards the Arabs, because Arabs are superior. They’ll never give up waging war against Iraq.’

  Amjad Mustafa gave a racial and ethnic justification, in contrast with the religious justification that Kamal Medhat often heard from Iranians in Tehran. Iranians believed that the war had started because of the Christians among the Baath leadership. These Christians, according to Iranian views, were bent on destroying Muslim unity. Kamal began gradually to understand his friend’s ideas and beliefs, ideas that were common among a particular class of intellectuals and artists. Discussion between them became heated. Kamal didn’t believe in the totalitarian ideas imposed by the state on people, while Amjad’s arguments grew more vehement every time there was a discussion of the war. He stood in the corner, describing the enemy’s dead in the most violent terms. He felt that killing was sometimes justified and necessary, because it involved the survival of the fittest. Kamal, on the other hand, sat quietly in the same corner, near the mantelpiece on which stood some wooden and silver decorative objects. He held a glass of Scotch and quietly stroked his long, greying beard, which enhanced his looks so well. Facing him stood Amjad with his large shaved head and his black drooping moustache. He represented the nationalist image of masculinity that was prevalent in Baghdad at the time. Standing in the corner, he held his glass and attacked Kamal, who didn’t believe in the manifest destiny of nations.

  Amjad believed that the Arab nation had an immortal message, which was the spiritual development of the world. The statement made Kamal burst into laughter. Kamal found it mind-boggling that this talented artist could be a convinced Baathist and an extremist Iraqi, who read Nietzsche and Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, and admired Chamberlain, especially his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Amjad also read the literature of the Baath Party, which was influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s ideas that race and nation were identical. Amjad, in fact, believed that Arabs were surrounded by inferior races who were created for barbarity and savagery. At best, these races were the recipients of civilization and not its makers. These inferior races felt nothing but hatred and envy for the Arabs. He threw a book entitled Iranian Wars Against Iraq, at Kamal an old publication with torn covers and yellowed paper. It was a primitive edition published for the first time in the nineteenth century.

  ‘Read Suleiman Faïq’s book and you’ll find all the information you need there.’

  His fundamental idea was the necessity of ret
urning to history, an idea that nauseated and suffocated Kamal Medhat. Was it possible that anyone could hold such views? Thinking of human history in terms of perpetual conflict would negate all other forms of relations. Kamal Medhat started to read the papers every day in order to follow up on the historical school of thought that Saddam Hussein himself endorsed. This school aimed to prove that the three-thousand-year history of the region was evidence of the unceasing hostility of the Persians, Kurds and Turks towards Arabs. Kamal Medhat believed that this view saw history as controlled by the human will. It was an idea that was intent on highlighting one type of relationship at the expense of all others, negating commercial, cultural and other connections. Was warfare the only connection that existed between Persians and Arabs? The historical school wanted to ignore the conflicts among Semitic peoples and emphasize only the Persian malice against Arabs. This was the view that the regime and its ideologues wished to impose on art. It made Kamal wince in disgust and revulsion.

  Then Amjad got up, took a book from his library and read aloud a text by the Assyrian King Sennacherib: ‘I slaughtered them like sheep and cut their throats with a single strike… And on the battlefield, the entrails and heads of soldiers were covered with dust and the flanks of my horses sank deep in streams of blood.’

  Amjad trembled as he read the passage. A patriotic tremor shook his whole being. The passage filled him with ecstasy at the scenes of killing, destruction and devastation produced by war. It was his joy to achieve overwhelming victory over the enemy.

  On that day, Kamal felt that cruel, sadistic minds were turning Baghdad into a Spartan society, a city built on the ethics of warfare. The citizen was basically a soldier. He was violent, pompous, impulsive and coarse. Military uniforms were the object of pride, something to boast about among young people, and military jargon was widespread among people. Cruelty became the hallmark of that militarized, Spartan society. Military uniform was the wedding suit for officers and soldiers getting married. Kamal frequently saw a soldier in battle gear standing beside his bride in her white wedding dress, while the music played in the background.

  The execution of deserters from the front also became a familiar sight.

  Simple peasant soldiers, who were barely twenty, were driven violently in front of the assembled crowds and placed on top of tall, white columns in public squares. In a short while, other soldiers arrived wearing black masks. They aimed their rifles at them and shot at their heads and chests in an orderly fashion. It was a sacred ceremony of slaughter, where bright red blood streamed from chests and cheeks in full view of the roaring crowds.

  All these displays concealed the bitter anger everywhere and the hidden cruelty that came to the surface from time to time. Kamal felt that the population was clearly suffering from schizophrenia, a split between the false claims of grandeur, superiority and uniqueness, on the one hand, and the dismal realities produced by a despotic regime that crushed, marginalized and humiliated every single individual, on the other. He felt that he was living in a rebellious, introverted nation, one that was characterized by fanaticism and other negative qualities, which it had acquired in such abnormal conditions.

  At the end of 1983, Maestro Walid Gholmieh would lead the National Symphony Orchestra in playing his Martyr Symphony. Among the musicians were Kamal, Amjad and Widad. More than anyone else, Kamal was aware of the noble and pure spirit of the martyr within him. But for him, this martyr was every martyr to war everywhere. Once, at the end of a practice session, the three of them, Kamal, Widad and Amjad, went to a restaurant near Al-Maghreb Street. As soon as they settled at a table, Amjad Mustafa began his talk about martyrdom, pointing out that the Iraqi dead were martyrs while the Iranian dead were no more than harmful insects. Amjad’s talk reminded Kamal Medhat of his time in Iran, when the Iranians believed that the Iraqi dead would go straight to hell, while Iranians would be rewarded with heaven. Amjad Mustafa, however, added a philosophical twist by pointing out that the Iraqi martyr had achieved harmony between life and death. Kamal Medhat felt then that discussions with Amjad were utterly fruitless. So he stopped talking and contented himself with drinking his beer. From time to time, he joked and laughed with Widad. Amjad, in contrast, became very tense as he elaborated on his views. Banging the table with his hand, he told them that the Iraqi martyr had became one with the tragedy of Iraq itself, for the country was in an isolation imposed on it by Arabs. So the Iraqi martyr was a kind of tragic hero whose sacrifice was an expression of the national character.

  Kamal Medhat wasn’t capable of making fun of these ideas because he was scared. But he realized clearly that the nationalist ideology in Baghdad gave the oppressed people a sense of false grandeur and led them to believe that Iraq stood alone and isolated. Of all its neighbours, it was the only country without a coast. It was also the least dependent on commerce, travel and collaboration. Martyrdom therefore was a necessity. The symphony composed by Walid Gholmieh would, therefore, be played by the Iraqi orchestra and broadcast everywhere on the last day of December. Cars and people would stop in their tracks and car horns would blow continuously. Church bells would ring and mosques would praise God as the Martyr Symphony was played.

  Were Iraqis the only martyrs? This was undoubtedly a revolting question for Kamal. After all, what was the difference between being martyred and being killed? But it was Amjad Mustafa’s opinions that forced the question on him. Amjad used specific epithets in his description of Iranian soldiers: they were mercenaries and harmful insects that deserved to die. The discourse was no different from that of the Iranians, who described the Iraqi dead as apostates. On both sides, there were sadistic, political speeches that concentrated on crushed bodies, broken necks and severed heads. In both Iraq and Iran there was a kind of pathological morbidity that revelled in people’s destruction. Kamal realized that discussions and debates about these matters were utterly futile.

  There was another factor in all this: Widad was more attracted to Kamal Medhat’s views than she was to her husband’s. She pushed Kamal Medhat into a brand new area, for she not only introduced him to the National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad, where he soon became the lead soloist, but she also introduced him to the political elite. Using her wide connections and her wealthy family’s contacts in high places, she put him in touch with influential politicians, who encouraged a limited kind of social and cultural modernity in literature and art. They used modernity as a double-edged sword: on the one hand to mobilize people, and on the other as a movement to counter the medieval political power in Iran.

  Widad greatly admired Kamal Medhat. A great intellectual and a peerless musician, this affectionate man in his fifties was a mass of feelings and sensations. Soft-spoken, handsome and impressively tall, with delicate features and attractive, dandyish gestures, he may have inspired more than admiration. She took special care of him and was particularly interested in his welfare. For his part, he was aware of her feelings and had no wish to stop her. This became known to everyone, even his wife, Nadia al-Amiry, who became suspicious when she saw Widad’s excessive concern. But who was it that introduced Kamal Medhat to Saddam Hussein at that time? All the evidence suggests that he was invited to the presidential palace through Widad Ahmed’s highly connected brothers. It was also through Widad’s good offices that he performed several times in front of Saddam Hussein.

  Groups of intellectuals were transported in large coaches to the great presidential palace, which wasn’t easy to reach. With their tinted glass windows, the coaches passed through thick wooded gardens and stopped in front of a towering palace. There were flowerbeds, small artificial ponds, swimming pools and bright green grass. At the various entrances there were armoured vehicles and tanks. In the watchtower were special guards dressed in their uniforms and helmets, holding machine guns. At the entrance to the grand hall there were the latest models of cars, with guards armed to the teeth.

  They entered the palace and waited for a very long time until the president appeared.
Once he’d arrived, Saddam was received with cheers. He was in his khaki military uniform made of high-quality broadcloth and wore no beret. He advanced cautiously, smiling and waving with his right hand to the people standing around. The artists clapped rhythmically and chanted slogans. The waiters in white jackets served glasses of juice from large trays. Saddam gave a long speech on art and its political function. Kamal Medhat, who wasn’t listening to the speech, was awoken from his reveries by the sound of the clapping. At last, everybody stood up and the president shook the hands of each and every guest. Kamal Medhat saw the president at close quarters when he approached, accompanied by his secretary, Abd Hamoud, who noted down everything that happened in a little notebook.

  It was the first time that Kamal had seen Saddam in person, after having seen his photographs everywhere on the streets. He felt that Saddam exercised his power through those photographs, which deputized in his absence. The photographs filled the spaces and absences with images of Saddam smoking, eating watermelon, mending his daughter’s dress, hunting gazelles or eating grilled meat. He was photographed parading in a military uniform, wearing an American cowboy outfit or dressed as an Arab and riding a horse. Now here was Saddam standing in front of him, placing his hand on Kamal Medhat’s shoulder and bursting out laughing, revealing his white teeth and gold crowns. He ordered his secretary to arrange a special meeting with him.

  After the reception, Kamal was called by a man with marked peasant features and a thick Bedouin dialect. The man’s hair fell onto his forehead and his moustache covered his mouth. His head was twice the size of a normal head and he had the profile of a bird of prey. His large, dark eyes looked like two smudges beneath his eyelashes. He spoke slowly, but his hard, stern gaze provoked fear even when he smiled.