The Tobacco Keeper (30 page)

‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said, out of breath.

‘I’ve never seen such ability or such technical competence. Where did you learn your music?’

‘In Russia,’ he said reluctantly.

‘I studied in Budapest, at the Franz Liszt Conservatory.’ He
stressed the word Liszt, then added, ‘May I give you my phone number? I would love to see you.’

Kamal Medhat placed the scrap of paper in the pocket of his black jacket, adjusted his red bow tie and went back to Maria Ivanova, who was enchanted by the way that he swayed and danced while playing the violin. He wasn’t, in fact, playing music at all. He was dancing and making love to the instrument. He held it gently as though it were a woman, swayed with it as though he were kissing her, rising with her as she responded to him. He would probe deep inside her and mount higher and higher with her until he reached the zenith.

During the interval, Kamal Medhat went with Maria Ivanova to her room upstairs for an hour’s rest before returning to the hall. He stood in front of the low table, opened a bottle of vodka and poured himself a glass. Then he poured another for her in the cut-crystal glass. He turned to her and asked, ‘Would you like a drink?’

With her black hair falling over her shoulders and her soft features, Maria Ivanova stood, beautifully tall, before him. She took off her dress and let it drop to her feet. She stood completely naked in front of him, with her small, firm breasts, her smooth, round, white belly, her long, soft legs and her sparse pubic hair. Choosing erotic words intended to arouse him, she told him in Russian, ‘I want you to play me …’

‘What?’

‘I’ve never felt as jealous of a woman as I have of your violin today. You were making love to it, and I want you to do the same to me.’

Maria Ivanova’s room was like a brothel. There were rugs on the floor and animal furs spread on her bed. The hot air made the
atmosphere intimate and lustful. She discarded her dress and lay naked on top of the fur covers. She made animal-like noises as Kamal Medhat felt her body and passionately sucked her rosy nipples. She took his other hand and led it over the contours of her body.

He wrote to Farida: ‘I’m keenly aware of my carnality. Like an animal, I’m hungry for every sensation, every sexual technique. I kissed her passionately, I bit her lips and groped her legs. I did everything.’

During this period, Kamal Medhat felt that Baghdad’s winter had a sad, grey colour when the rain poured down on the buildings. He was overcome with sadness and reverential awe when he practised a piece by Schönberg every day in the living room. His furry, white cat opened and closed its large loving eyes as it sat on a chair observing him. The green grass of the garden outside the window was wet. During those days in particular he didn’t know why he was reminded so much of Tahira’s death. He was obsessed with the idea that she had wanted to die. The death wish was a real fact that couldn’t be ignored, for it came from within the human soul and not from without. A person willed death and invited it from its eternal space. And death responded and came. The mystical feelings that dominated Kamal’s mind at that time were linked with the mysterious death wish within him. He didn’t fear death, but considered it a kind of flight into the unknown. Tahira might have succeeded in destroying the walls that encircled her. Death might perhaps free him, too, from the persistent images and nightmarish visions that had haunted his dreams and tortured him ever since the Farhoud. Death might destroy the wall that stood between him and his self, the wall that blinkered the narrow
perception of his soul. It was as if he was being sucked in by the whole world, by noises, gentle arms, soft colours, escalating joy and an unbelievable force that pulled him upwards.

It’s clear that it was Amjad Mustafa and his wife Widad who took Kamal Medhat out of his solitude and introduced him to Baghdad society. Widad, in particular, had family connections with the Iraqi political regime. She pushed him to find his rightful place as an artist of genius. For his part, he felt that his life had changed almost overnight. He became more attentive to his clothing and started to wear black suits, Italian gabardine coats and expensive glasses. He spent most of his time outside his home and enjoyed the company of musician friends for the first time. He was invited to the most important concerts in the world and accompanied the most famous orchestras that visited Baghdad. In addition to playing the violin, he began to compose pieces based on the ideas he had developed during his time in Tehran and Damascus. He played the violin in an intricate, highly skilled manner, and his ideas were fresh and plentiful. Those ideas helped him to develop spiritually. They were his first attempts at breaking down barriers, for some of his past compositions had been overly dignified. In brief, he managed to break through the solidified crust and allow the burning lava inside to erupt. But those works, after he’d put them aside and then gone back to them, became utterly nauseating to him.

He wrote to Farida: ‘I use the word “nausea” in the physical sense of the word. Don’t think that I’m exaggerating or using the word simplistically or foolishly. The truth of the matter is that I compose my pieces at amazing speed, by defeating the inner resistance which might stop me. I was like someone moving the radio tuner quickly. But when the notes were ready, I would leave them for a day or two.
And on returning to them, I’d be overcome with horrible nausea. Only aspirin could relieve me of the nausea and the headache.’

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 returning 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.