The Tobacco Keeper

by Ali Bader

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said to Kamal, ‘we want you at a private party, to play music for us at the presidential palace in celebration of Victory Day.’

  ‘With pleasure, Sir,’ he said, smiling.

  He later explained to Farida the exchange between him and the president, making the following remark: ‘I looked at the president, who was flushed with the victory he’d achieved. His eyes sparkled and his face was cheerful. He must have been extremely happy because he’d crushed his adversary, while Khomeini, who’d been defeated, had to swallow poison. I ask myself what happiness means. Those politicians always follow their instinctive feelings. They enjoy the pleasures of life to the utmost and take ruthless revenge for the slightest offence. Their anger is bitter and their demolition of their enemies is brutal. As far as I’m concerned, I feel nothing. Music gives me a kind of comfortable oblivion that drives away all the fear and anxiety I have felt throughout my life.

  ‘You may ask me about the person who caused Tahira’s death and the disappearance of my son, Hussein, the person responsible for destroying my whole life. Do I have a sense of malice towards him? Do I want revenge? Never. I have no such feelings. All my feelings can be summed up by the Iraqi song that you loved so much: “If I cannot take revenge myself, God can.”’

  Kamal Medhat pushed the violin under his chin and held it with a supple arm. He looked at the bright sun and the swimming pool in the presidential palace. He was tempted to remove his clothes and take a dip in the water.

  The president laughed with his guests, while Kamal felt some pain in his fingers as he pressed on the strings. The spirit of music was gone from the instrument and it seemed to produce an unfeeling moan. Mozart was no doubt turning in his grave because the musician didn’t feel the music but was obliged to continue producing the notes nonetheless. Nobody paid any attention to Kamal. All he had to do was to play louder. He thought of Mozart, who played music for the king in the morning and in the afternoon sat at the servants’ table and played for them at the orders of the chef, the king of the kitchen.

  When Kamal Medhat performed in front of an audience, he soared with the sounds until he became totally oblivious to everything around him. His body, however, remained firmly on the ground like a dead shell. At the end of his performance, he felt that his music had washed his soul clean. But at the presidential palace, he felt absolutely nothing. He had just one desire, to take off his clothes in front of the guests and jump into the swimming pool.

  In a letter he sent to Farida, he told her that he was the person who’d advised Saddam Hussein to invite the architect Venturi to take part in the competition to build a mosque in Baghdad. Venturi was the indisputable master of architectural kitsch.

  What made him give Saddam this advice?

  The only reason was that Kamal Medhat realized, both intuitively and rationally, that Saddam Hussein, whose tastes were so populist in nature, would admire the work of the most brilliant architect in the world. Venturi was an artist who endowed vulgarity, populism and earthiness with a high aesthetic value. Kamal Medhat might have realized, too, that the grand design that Venturi created for San Francisco’s cafés was not the model likely to attract the president’s attention. But the popular touch that he might add to the mosque would undoubtedly make the design attractive to Saddam Hussein, whose taste by that time was very cheap. The mosque would be a place of worship in the first place, but it would also be a Western work that appealed to popular taste. It would become a place combining modern, Western and popular cultures, a place where more than thirty thousand worshippers would pray. It would represent an architectural leap forward along the lines of the president’s desires and dreams.

  Venturi entered the hall of the presidential palace.

  The president stood at the centre, a huge bookcase behind him. A large chandelier hung from the high ceiling. There were luxurious sets of upholstered and high-backed chairs. Special guards without berets stood around. Thick, black moustaches covered the mouths of the guests. Venturi stood in the middle of a large circle of architects that included the Spaniard Ricardo Bofill and Jean Pondo, and behind him was a group of Iraqi architects and painters as well as Kamal Medhat in his black suit and bow tie. The model for Venturi’s mosque was on display in front of the president.

  It had a high, decorative dome that was borrowed from classical Islamic architecture and a pastiche of Orientalist images taken from Hollywood movies and novels about Baghdad. The dome looked like a huge tree standing in a courtyard. It was bright and airy, providing shade to the prayer area and the worshippers beneath. The new mosque was a colossal structure that looked like a casino. It paid tribute to popular taste while downplaying the stark solemnity of the traditional mosque. Entry into the mosque was meant to be as joyous as stepping into a restaurant or a nightclub.

  After the end of the Iraq–Iran war, Kamal Medhat wrote many letters to Farida. Life in Baghdad, he told her, was not only quiet but almost dead. He believed that tranquillity in the Middle East was a most dangerous sign. As soon as the country enjoyed a degree of prosperity, the situation would explode once again. He also told her of other family news: in summary, Nadia’s illness, Widad’s emigration, Janet’s murder and Amjad Mustafa’s alcoholism and addiction. Kamal never stopped giving concerts or accepting invitations. But he felt that the post-war years were a time of uncertainty and apprehension. The lifeline of the regime in Baghdad was action and initiative. It couldn’t wait behind the scenes for long. Kamal Medhat felt certain that the regime would have to resort to violence sooner or later as the ultimate way out, for it couldn’t tolerate stagnation. It feared and dreaded inaction. He was sure that the country was suffering from a psychological disorder after all the revolutions, wars, cruelty and violence. A deadly despair had taken hold of people. The people had become a single mass and the class system had collapsed completely. No real distinctions existed, for all were in the same boat. People were united by fear, poverty and humiliation. Kamal Medhat no longer had faith in the existence of rational judgement. The Middle East was a simmering pot of anger, cruelty and hate. Its politics were based on chauvinism and prejudice. Society was dominated by degenerate values that didn’t differentiate between political and gangster ethics. The citizens of the country had finally become the mob.

  Everyone was leaving the country or trying to escape. Nadia stood on crutches in front of him, wearing her blue dressing gown. Her face looked withered and sick and her lips trembled. ‘Omar can’t stay here,’ she told him, ‘I don’t want him to see the atrocities of war. I’ll send him to my sister in Egypt.’

  Just one day after this conversation between Kamal and Nadia, he bade goodbye to his son, and went back home. He sat in a chair near the window, enjoying once again the sight of trees and flowers. He thought of the fates of his three sons: Meir in the States, Omar in Cairo and Hussein in Tehran.

  He trembled to think of their destinies. He shivered to think of a country that held so many closely guarded secrets. A new obsession loomed in the air, a new romanticized notion to blow away minds and thoughts. A deep sense of defeat and malice predominated. Political confrontations abounded, guided only by the unquestioning glorification of nihilism, rebellion and irrationality. The regime exalted the mysterious powers of instincts and blood. Saddam Hussein himself was part of the legacy of nihilism. He was moved by the spirit of the rabble and by malicious, vengeful calculations. His madness came into its own only through the creation of permanent, eternal enemies: first the communists, then the Iranians and then the West. Iraq’s existence was defined by the existence of the enemies around it. The country therefore became a marching army that kept moving forward, but heading nowhere in particular, a force avalanching blindly and inevitably towards destruction. Pushed by the West, it rolled with insane speed. It went from one battle to another and from one invasion to the next, to establish the empire of malice and the republic of the mob. The country was in a state of disorder, insanity, limitless violence and unst
oppable actions.

  The dominant romantic idea was that Iraq acquired its identity from its tragic fate as a country located at the extreme edge of the map, on the one hand, and as a country deprived of access to the sea, on the other. According to nationalist notions, Iraq the saviour was itself Iraq the victim. Iraq was, in fact, being punished for its heroic, prophetic role, for it was a nation with a prophetic mission existing outside human calculations and values. Saddam would come out in his khaki suit, screaming out loud that poor Iraq was surrounded by enemies. Iraq was like Joseph among his brothers. But poor Joseph, who submitted and eventually won the hearts of his father, mother and brothers, was very different from Iraq, which lashed out with all its might.

  Kamal woke up in the morning panting with fear, his heart beating like a drum. The radio announced that the Iraqi army had marched into Kuwait and annexed it. He looked at Nadia sleeping in bed, her pulse growing weaker. Medicine bottles, pills, sedatives and a glass of water were placed on the table beside her and her young maid, Fawzeya, sat nearby. International forces had blocked all the routes to Iraq. In a matter of hours, the shops were emptied of goods and closed. The cats began to eat grass when they couldn’t find the remains of food in rubbish dumps or homes. The carcasses of starved animals filled the streets.

  What was happening to the country?

  It was as unbelievable as it was unbearable. Kamal felt a kind of lethal despair and apathy, for he could do nothing except read the papers and listen to the radio carrying political statements.

  Years later, he wrote to Farida: ‘Those were the worst days of my life. The street was at a boiling point and everybody looked thoroughly miserable. The horizon foretold nothing but an enormous explosion. Everything happened extremely fast. Saddam held on to Kuwait and the Allied fighter planes came to bomb Baghdad and destroy it completely. They didn’t leave a bridge, a street, a factory or a palace standing intact. Even the viaducts leading from one village to another were all bombed. In a matter of days, Baghdad became just a village. People transported water by donkey as they did in the past. Primitive instincts bared their teeth and life lost its taste. My sole ambition was to die in peace.’

  The little he knew about life outside came from the badly narrated reports of Fawzeya. She often told him things that made him laugh out loud at her inability to fully understand what was going on. Fawzeya had appeared in his life two years earlier, when she was brought to the house by one of Nadia’s relatives. She was a beautiful girl with a clear, dark complexion, beautiful large eyes and a fringe of hair neatly styled on her forehead. The day she arrived, she stood holding a bundle of clothes and looking wary and anxious. She wore a green shirt with black buttons whose sleeves were rolled up, revealing her lovely wrists, a tatty pair of trousers and a pair of blue socks. Her shoes were badly polished.

  Kamal found Fawzeya stunning. He was astounded by her soft, clear skin and the sparkle of her eyes. He loved the vitality of the bright face, the timid curl of the lips, the high eyebrows and the clear, surprised look at the sight of the house and its master standing before her.

  It was love at first sight. He fell in love with her primitive, rural soul. She was made up of pure instincts and innocent emotions as direct as an arrow. Though illiterate and oppressed, she enjoyed the pleasures of life to the full. It was with complete sensual abandon that she ate her meals. Her sensuality swept him off his feet. She had a soul that was in harmony with nature in all its severity, rawness and wonder. Even her peasant dialect sounded deliciously exciting to his ears. Her instinctive behaviour pulsed with the richness of her spirit. Her sexual urge was also strong.

  He wrote to Farida: ‘I loved this girl with all my heart. No other woman impressed and astounded me as much as she did. I didn’t know how ignorant I was of life until I met her. She had an instinctive kind of knowledge, even in sex, that hadn’t been spoiled by civilized existence. This illiterate woman taught me the meaning of life afresh.’

  Everybody knew that they were having an affair in ‘secret’, including Nadia, who was on her deathbed.

  At that time, Nadia stopped consulting doctors, for the painkillers were no longer effective. There was nothing she could do to relieve the pain that was concentrated in the middle of her head. No drug could alleviate the pain that gnawed between her temples, bored through her eyes and thumped in her brain to the point of nausea. She lay in bed and the sweat trickled slowly down the sides of her face. She longed for death to relieve her of the excruciating pain. During the bombing of Baghdad, Nadia died. Suddenly, on her bed, she was lifeless. Kamal Medhat let out a scream of pain and hurled himself on her body. Only Fawzeya was with him and together they carried her to her grave. After the burial, he stood at her open grave and cried bitterly.

  Kamal Medhat spent the days of the bombing sitting in complete darkness in front of a thick book and a transistor radio. The bare, plastered room had the pungent smell of bleach. He listened with great interest to the news and learned that the army had been defeated by Allied Forces and had signed the terms of surrender. The masses rose up in the north and south and all news was cut off. The masses began to loot, burn and destroy everything that lay in their path. In response to this rebellion, the state began to strike cities with rockets and artillery.

  Kamal’s body hurt throughout those days and he couldn’t think clearly. As Fawzeya sat in the rocking chair in front of him, he made a silent comparison between two images that haunted his mind in those days: the idyllic and the brutal images of the masses. He loved Fawzeya’s illiteracy and her primitive and instinctive nature. He was enamoured of her transparent, pastoral attitude. He realized that governments damaged the masses’ natural, poetic instincts by crushing and humiliating them. But Kamal Medhat also had immense fear, contempt and loathing for mob culture. More than anything, he feared the anger of the unruly masses and their instinctive capacity for violence and destruction. The mob swarmed like a horde of locusts devouring everything in front of them. Their basic instinct was to kill, loot and terrorize.

  He also believed that the political tendency to uphold mob culture completely destroyed the elite class. The regime, with its vulgarity, cruelty and barbarity, did not only create and nurture the culture of the mob, but it, too, harboured populist and demagogic tendencies. The populace and the government thus stood in headlong confrontation and competed to see which of them could kill and destroy the most. The government elevated belief in murder to a spiritual ecstasy that spread among people like a contagious disease. The people let out their screams against each other in a form of self-destruction that gave them renewed ecstasy. They felt a kind of morbidity, the love of bruised, severed bodies. They were in love with spilt blood, which infused life into their feelings.

  The ghostly presence who sat in the chair looking at the garden out of the window was drunk that day with the sight of Fawzeya. He wanted to share the laughter of this helpless peasant woman who’d walked miles that day to bring him some milk. She sat in front of him, telling him of the soldiers returning from the front.

  Dark blue circles had appeared under his eyes, from exhaustion, and his eyes were black with pain. He felt that the country was in the grip of mass hysteria that needed to find an outlet. He wanted to express his release from its grip through music, for it alone was capable of making the walls, barriers and darkness disappear. Music alone was able to bring light and a kaleidoscopic sparkle, and to relax his nerves. He stopped for a moment, placed his bow and violin on the stand and began to watch Fawzeya.

  Her eyes were full of secrets, radiating light as though from the depths of a cave.

  Music and women relieved his sorrows and made him tremble in harmony with the music of the whole universe.

  The following day, he went out onto the street. There were soldiers hurrying everywhere and men dressed in traditional gowns as though they belonged to a past era. Faces were tired and angry.

  He went straight home. He sat in front of his musical score, thinking wit
h astonishment of the vulgarity that dominated both the regime and the people. People had an instinctive veneration for excrement and blood and an adoration of chaos and confusion. It was the horrifying feeling of living in an anti-world, a world of ferocious claws.

  A passage from another letter stated: ‘All my friends are gone. Nadia’s dead, Amjad’s ill, Widad has left, Janet’s been murdered and my son Omar is in Egypt with his aunt. I have pain in my joints and the hospitals have no medicine. The streets are dusty, the shops have run out of goods; poverty and crime are everywhere. The people have turned into the masses. The class system and social strata are all gone. There’s nothing but a political class that rules with unlimited violence. Only vulgar music and martial songs praising the victories of the regime can be heard. The nationalist movement is gradually becoming Islamist. Saddam prays. He believes that what happened was the will of God. People live in abject poverty and deadly despair, which they try to ease by going back to the fold of religion.’