The Tobacco Keeper (3 page)

I was unaware, at that time, of the huge numbers of people who were dying as a result of torture, poverty or politics. I was totally engrossed in myself, in my friend’s parties, in the women I got to know, and in the priceless stories I wanted to write. By pure chance, however, I was introduced at one of those wild parties to a German activist of Iraqi descent called Katrina Hassoun. She was a reporter for the well-known German-language Swiss newspaper from Zurich, the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
. She was also working as a researcher for human rights organizations and was a regular visitor to Baghdad in the nineties.

That evening at my friend’s house, we stood together drinking white wine beneath a small green-glassed arched window. The music soared and the river breeze was fresh and soothing while Katrina spoke to me about the demands of her work in Baghdad, and particularly her dealings with the authorities. I wasn’t really listening or showing much interest; I was just pretending to listen, for in those days I couldn’t have cared less about such things. I didn’t even pay attention to the news that was published or broadcast every day, although I was fully aware of the ever-deteriorating political situation in Baghdad. But the most significant turning point in this whole little episode occurred when Katrina Hassoun, whose Arabic wasn’t very good, offered me a paid job as her interpreter. Seeing as I had no work at the time and my novel was at a standstill, I accepted her offer. My objective was, first and foremost, monetary.

At the house that she was renting on Al-Saadoun Street, I met groups of disabled veterans, former communists who’d been jailed and tortured, women who’d lost their husbands and mothers
who’d lost their sons either in war or in prison. Their stories hardly made an impression on me. I listened to them as though they’d taken place in some faraway land. None of this was really my concern, for I was only the interpreter. I stood by the window, watching silently until the last visitor left.

One day, on my way back from work, I was arrested by the secret police. They asked me for the names of people who’d visited the activist and what they’d talked about. All of a sudden, I found myself implicated in affairs that I’d tried all my life to steer clear of. My understanding of the situation in my country was fairly poor at the time, for I was too busy drinking wine, smoking a variety of cigarettes and getting to know women of every sort to really bother about people’s suffering. From that point onwards, however, I began to take a real interest in what was going on and wrote press reports for this activist under various pseudonyms. I chose foreign names, naturally, in order to be above suspicion.

It was from Katrina Hassoun that I heard for the first time about Fernando Pessoa’s
Tobacco Shop
, the poem written by the third of Pessoa’s characters. Katrina even suggested that I use ‘the Tobacconist’ as my pseudonym. As I was beginning to lose all my rights, both moral and financial, she then proposed that I work as a ghost writer, which meant I would write important stories on Iraq to be published under the name of a well-known journalist, while I would be paid handsomely.

For me the distinction between the tobacconist and the ghost writer is clear. Regarding the tobacconist, as Fernando Pessoa has said, two creatures co-exist in the soul of each one of us. The first is real, appearing in our visions and dreams, while the second is false, appearing in our external image, discourses, actions and
writings. The ghost writer, in contrast, is a kind of negation, an abstraction. He represents a form of colonial discourse that is based on appropriation and rejection.

Months before she left Baghdad, Katrina Hassoun had introduced me to a correspondent for
US Today News
, a woman of Lebanese descent called Aida Shahin who became a close friend at the time. She commissioned me to write features that were off-beat, or at least unfamiliar and unusual, and I produced a great number of excellent stories for her. Among these, a piece on the English detective novelist Agatha Christie’s time in Baghdad got noticed. She had visited and lived in the city in the forties and fifties. I tracked down the houses she’d rented and the guest-houses she’d stayed in with her husband, Max Mallowan, the famous archaeologist. I described the streets she’d written about in her novel
They Came to Baghdad
, the trains she’d ridden on her trips to Aleppo or Turkey and the places of entertainment in the Rusafa neighbourhood where she’d spent long summer evenings. This story encouraged the paper to give me further assignments, particularly about the foreign artists, writers and Orientalists who’d visited Baghdad and about the homes on the Tigris built by those Westerners during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

So I continued to work in secret for this newspaper, as well as for other foreign papers, until I got to know Françoise Lony, a well-known French journalist and correspondent who also directed documentary films. I made her acquaintance in Baghdad during the period of the sanctions, when Baghdad was making headlines and attracting reporters from all over the world. They were all drawn by sympathy for a nation that was suffering from the violence of the regime as well as from international sanctions.
I worked with Françoise on a number of documentaries while continuing to use an assumed name at her request. Our work included a film that we produced together on ancient Iraqi monuments. We were harassed in all sorts of ways by the authorities, in spite of the fact that my publicly acknowledged work with Françoise had absolutely nothing to do with politics. Our films were concerned with the antiquities of Babylon, ancient crafts of the Middle East or Babylonian musical instruments. During this period she always called me by my assumed name, and I almost forgot my real name, which I never used.

After a while, Françoise began to feel threatened in Baghdad and was in fear of her life and of mine. So she asked me to accompany her on a trip to Tripoli to shoot a film about Libyan monuments, entitled
Treasures of the Coast
. For six months we travelled together and worked continuously between Tobruk and Zawara. For two more years we shuttled between Damascus, Beirut and Casablanca. Those trips were as much for love as for work. I spent the best times of my life with Françoise Lony.

Françoise was a truly exceptional woman who radiated charm and sexiness. All the men of the media were greatly attracted to her. She was a natural in the art of seduction and was never reluctant to embark on a stormy love affair. Sexual pleasure, passion and the pursuit of society had far greater appeal for her than the romantic yearnings to which I was prone in those days.

Instead of concentrating on our work or the films we were producing in various locations, Françoise dragged me into a whole new world. We’d already made a substantial amount of cash from a hugely successful film called
Street Women
, about prostitution in the Middle East. It was shown at many big film festivals and aired on
several European TV channels. It was then that she took me on a wild, stormy trip to Morocco. It was early summer and we went to the coastal resorts. I cannot explain the madness that overcame us. We felt that the Moroccan cities we were visiting had thrown open their gates to us, welcoming two carefree young people who longed to live in complete hedonistic abandon. Our next stop was Casablanca which, at that time, was on the verge of turning into an erotic myth: Sodom, as Françoise once described it in one of her reports, a home to vice and depravity. We were both on the brink of an abyss, as day after day we immersed ourselves completely in sensuality, pleasure and amusement. We haunted theatres, bars and swimming pools, and wallowed in sex, alcohol and evenings that lasted until the small hours.

As so often happens in collaborations founded on amorous relationships, my work with the French journalist came to an end when the love ended. We separated quickly. She returned to Paris; I no longer had any idea where to go. Travelling back to Baghdad was impossible, and I had no work or friends in Casablanca. Suddenly Aida Shahin came forcefully back into my life. Having learned that she was back in Beirut, I wrote a long letter to her address there, asking her to find me a job and a place to live. Her work was outstanding and she was still working as a reporter for
US Today News
.

Two weeks after arriving in Beirut, I moved into Aida Shahin’s apartment on Al-Hamra Street. She was an exceptionally gifted photographer but a mediocre reporter. Her most prominent trait was her kindness, although this soon faded in the face of other, negative, qualities. She talked a lot, was always complaining, and had a penchant for criticizing and nitpicking. A rocky, on-off relationship developed between us. I should also mention one of the
positive things she did for me, which was to get me more work at her newspaper. She also arranged a job for me at one of the Gulf TV companies, which gave me the opportunity to travel to many places around the world as a news analyst.

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.