The Tobacco Keeper

by Ali Bader

  Yousef naturally did not acknowledge his mistake, for his passion for music was more an act of worship than a profession. He was preparing himself to become a composer, and he knew that composing did not require virtuosity. But his imperfection devastated him nonetheless.

  He broke down in tears in front of her. But she soothed and reassured him, telling him that his musical talent lay in his ability to express himself through music and that he had his own individual language and style.

  Those were Farida’s words, she who later became his muse. They were married before he left for Israel.

  In the late forties rumours circulated that there was a certain group of young Muslims, Christians and Jews who led a life of dissipation and were frequently seen in the Al-Midan Square, which fifty years earlier had been an old haunt of dancers. Even at that time, it was considered one of the oldest and most artistic districts in the Middle East. Dancers and prostitutes who had been trained in the past by the English survived there as curious relics after the end of occupation. Here in this neighbourhood Yousef found an assortment of women. There were those who wore vests, loose gowns, neck scarves or tight trousers. There were also fat women with large earrings and hair tied back in plaits, who squeezed themselves into tight dresses. When Yousef returned to Baghdad in the eighties and visited the area once again, the neighbourhood had changed so much that he asked himself whether women with such different dialects and looks still lived in sacred Babylon. Diversity was the source of the square’s vitality. As the destination of people from all corners of Iraq, it teemed with different dialects, traditions and lives. It was, in truth, an entire country in itself.

  In the late forties, Yousef used to go on almost a daily basis to high-end clubs in the company of his friend Mohammad al-Habib, the son of a rich Muslim trader in Al-Shurja market. Together they rode horses on a day trip to Al-Mansour and its great farms. They went on rides with some other local young men, in Mohammad’s convertible Chevrolet. People said that Mohammad al-Habib would take his friends, including Yousef, on evening rides along the Corniche. On Thursdays, he’d invite them for a sumptuous banquet. And on summer evenings they would dine at exclusive restaurants and clubs where they usually stayed till dawn. After driving around Baghdad, Mohammad al-Habib would gave each and every one of them a lift home.

  In fact, Yousef’s remarkable presence, his distinctive way of talking, his cultivation, his musical knowledge and his elegance were the source of his Muslim friends’ admiration. Yousef felt that a massive force had driven him to live in those times, to be inside the arena and not outside. When he turned twenty-one, his friends held a birthday party for him at an upscale restaurant. The newspapers wrote at the time: ‘Seven Jewish, Muslim and Christian young men threw a large party at the English Club on Al-Rashid Street. After finishing their meal and drinking their glasses of Scotch, they started smashing plates and throwing food at each other. They then ran off.’

  The other transformation that Yousef mentioned in his letters to Farida was his relationship with Mr Rashid.

  Mr Rashid lived in Bab al-Agha on Al-Rashid Street. He was elderly and would laugh non-stop, never leaving his grocery shop. He moved among boxes of Persian sweets and bottles of cooking oil imported from Iran. He would sit with one leg stretched out into the passage and the other tucked beneath rolls of fabric. One of the photographs in Boris’s envelope showed him wearing a grey jacket over a formal, white shirt. He had white teeth and a thick moustache. His eyes were the colour of Aleppan pistachios: a combination of green and brown, slightly lighter than his dark complexion.

  Mr Rashid was the first Muslim for almost forty years to open a grocery shop in a Jewish neighbourhood of Baghdad. He had two lovely daughters: the divorced Lamiaa and the younger Noureya. For a small allowance, Yousef worked as an assistant in Mr Rashid’s shop one summer.

  One day Mrs Rashid was standing on the latticed balcony of her house. She asked him to wait until she called her adolescent daughter to see him. In those days, carnal desires had begun to take hold of him. It was the first time that he saw Lamiaa, Mr Rashid’s blonde daughter. She was wearing a white nightgown that revealed her white legs and her small, rounded breasts. He once went to the cinema with Mr Rashid’s son, Fouad, and saw a passionate kiss on the screen for the first time in his life.

  Seeing Mr Rashid and his daughters confused Yousef and made life with his father much more difficult. This was because he would often compare Mr Rashid’s relationship to his daughters with his own father’s attitude and bookishness.

  After getting to know Mr Rashid and his daughters, Yousef felt the chilling coldness of his father’s house. The warmth and light-heartedness of Mr Rashid’s home made him reject his father’s high bookshelves, his house and perhaps his whole family. The library, and all that it contained of the thoughts of men and laws of life, with all its Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers, was worthless in comparison with the warm, spontaneous feelings of Noureya and Lamiaa. Furthermore, Yousef hated dogs. The dog that had entered his own home as a representative of the canine proletariat had a totally negative impact on him and had deprived him of all feelings of intimacy and warmth.

  Yousef gradually began to feel revolted, bored and saddened by everything at home, including the lifeless family gatherings for tea, the windows permanently closed with heavy curtains, the wooden door, the dead quietness, the kitchen and its Persian cutlery, and the yellow library lamp. Every time he went home Yousef felt lonely and desolate. After dropping heavily into a chair, he would be overcome with a sense of dejection. A dark, heavy colour would descend onto the banisters, the empty rooms and the chill beds, on the walls lined with books and on the ancient furniture. He felt dismally lonely as he went into his room, hearing his father snoring in bed. He would switch on the light quietly and open his music sheets. But he couldn’t play or write. He would sit and think. Facts, ideas, discussions and his father’s sallow, depressed face, all made his life at home terribly hard.

  His father spent all his time in his library, especially after his retirement. If he talked at all, it was about the socialism that could make everyone happy. Mr Rashid, however, was very different, for he never talked about the future, only about the present. He lived in the moment in its excitement and its essence. This was exactly what Yousef demanded of music. He wanted tunes that responded to the present moment. Whenever he saw Mr Rashid laughing or observed him making almost non-stop jokes, he thought of his own, very different, father, the man with the sallow face buried among huge books that he’d inherited from his own father. Like a lone dog, he would sit in the dim light of a single lamp, while Mr Rashid was sitting in his bamboo chair in front of his grocery shop, under the sun, laughing heartily and aloud with people all around him.

  (We stopped, Faris and I, in front of Yousef Sami Saleh’s house in Al-Torah, the famous Jewish quarter of Baghdad. The house stood near a windmill, which was now in ruins. All the maps going back to the fifties had shown it as a mill, although it looked like a derelict building. The house where Yousef had lived was still standing, but was now occupied by an elderly man, his sons and three daughters. From here Yousef had perhaps walked to Mr Rashid’s grocery shop, which was also still in existence. Other houses in the neighbourhood were still intact: the houses of the Shaools, the Sassoons and the Rahoos, as well as other well-known houses.)

  During those years, Yousef pursued his musical education with great passion, and practised his violin with obvious dedication. He stayed from morning till night at the music school where Muslim, Armenian and Jewish instructors taught. He also gave various classical recitals at the English Club in Baghdad. To sharpen his imagination, he read modern Arabic poetry, enjoying its innovations of form and diction. He read symbolist poetry and was fascinated by its imagery, language and modern form. He believed in the importance of the forties’ wave of poets, who distanced themselves from classical Arabic forms. He wrote in his notebook that he felt alienated from traditional martial poetry, which
lacked imagination, and was attracted to the modern spirit, which gave full rein to reflection. The Baghdad of Yousef’s time was going through colossal changes. It was inundated by a flood of new ideas, trends, conflicts, schools of thought and cultures. He was the enthusiastic artist leading the boisterous life of a twenty-year-old young man. He got to know many artists and writers, such as Al-Sayyab, Al-Bayyati and Al-Tikreli, and would meet them at the Brazilian coffee shop. He also knew the rebellious, vagabond poet Hussein Murdan. Like the poets, he tried experimenting with musical forms of expression, especially after witnessing the bitter conflicts that arose out of political pressures or other social forces.

  Yousef was witness at that time to the bitter conflict between new and outdated ideas, between an emergent spirit and another that was fixed and immovable. And although he was caught up in the chaos and populism of modernism, he had perceived the rebellious nature of the young wave and its connection with what was lived and felt, away from the hallucinations and anarchic mysteries of abstraction. He tried experimenting in music too, by composing pieces inspired by the poetry of Badr al-Sayyab, Al-Bayyati and Nazek al-Malaeka. He attempted to transform the humdrum into melody, to add a mythical aspect to still life through music. He wanted to transform the intimate experiences of young people in Baghdad into immortal legends, finding inspiration among women’s fishnet stockings and brassieres flung on beds, in love-letters and telephones, and in kisses, whether snatched or planned.

  Yousef wished to create for himself an image that was similar to that of Hussein Murdan, who was a madman, a lost soul, a cursed renegade and a clown, all rolled into one. He wanted to follow in his footsteps and become the outlawed outsider par excellence. In the midst of the conflict between modernists and traditionalists, the intellectual disputes of Baghdad never ceased. They even reached the coffee houses, where the advocates of free verse and the proponents of classical poetry exchanged blows with chairs. But behind the artistic rivalry was an implicit ideological struggle. Communists and their supporters were on the side of modernity, while the nationalists and their supporters were in favour of traditional poetry and attitudes. Although he felt within his own soul a deep rebellious tendency, he was also affected by the political situation of the Jews in Baghdad, which was becoming a real cause for concern.

  Faced with escalating, anti-Jewish Nazi and Fascist tendencies, the Jews reacted by adopting extremely traditional, religious and Zionist views. They tried to counter extremism by adopting their own extremist attitudes. This was represented by the increasing popularity of Zionism and the establishment of the Tenoua organization. In one of Yousef’s letters to Farida dated March 1966 [Note: The letter was addressed to the Czech musician Karl Baruch in Prague, but written to Farida], he described his meeting with the head of the Zionist secret society in Tehran, Benek Wilson Bennett, a British citizen of Russian descent. He was in control of the Jewish Agency in Tehran and, during that period, moved frequently between Ankara, Beirut, Damascus and Cairo. In 1948 he came to Iraq dressed as a Christian clergyman, ostensibly representing the Kashanian Company for carpets in Iran and Iraq. His assistant in Iran was the director of Orion Express, which had its headquarters in Tehran and a branch in Iraq. Bennett had facilitated the entry of a well-known Iraqi trader called Yehuda Meir Menasha into Iraq on an Iranian passport bearing the name of Ismail Mahdi Salhoun. Yousef had the following conversation with Bennett:

  ‘You’re an important musician and we’ll help you travel to Israel.’

  ‘Do you want me to be a refugee, to be in exile when I have a home and a country?’

  ‘This isn’t your country. One day they’ll tell you to get out of here. Your country is over there. Today it’s me telling you this, but they will tell it to you later.’

  Feigned innocence was Yousef’s latest strategy to protect himself. It was the last means he had of preserving his existence. He spent a miserable night before meeting Bennett at the library. Bennett sat beside him, smiling and being nice to him. Yousef, for his part, was immovable and held his silence for a long time. What Bennett didn’t know was that Yousef was trying in vain to find a new type of reasoning, or a new orientation that was neither Zionist nor nationalist. Gazing at Yousef, Bennett saw drops of sweat frozen on Yousef’s puzzled face. The cheerful hospitality with which he had first greeted Bennett couldn’t hide his concern. But what, thought Bennett, were the ambitions of this obscure musician? Each evening he would obstinately place his music sheet on the stand and soar far away. His audience was made up of middle-class Christian, Jewish and Muslim families, mostly communists and intellectuals, who were transported in their own way while scores of seats remained empty. Those were Bennett’s reflections, while Yousef had very different thoughts: What could he possibly do in Israel, a land he had never lived in or known?

  A heavy silence descended over the place, punctuated by Bennett’s sighs and Yousef’s breathing. Bennett hadn’t read the news item in the Baghdad Times lying on the table beside him, which reported that Yousef Sami Saleh had just been awarded the King Faisal Prize for the violin. It also announced a series of concerts to be given at the English Club in Baghdad in the presence of the most prominent families of the city. What would this young man, who had such superb mastery over the violin, especially Bach’s sonata for solo violin, do in Israel?

  That same day, Yousef went to the English Club to perform a new piece of his own composition. As soon as he had placed the violin on his shoulder and begun tuning it, he heard one of the Youth Brigade insulting him from among the audience, shouting out ‘Jew’.

  Yousef didn’t look up at all. He who had received the highest accolades in the kingdom neither lifted his head nor looked in the direction of the insult, but continued stroking his bow over the strings of his violin. Although he didn’t look up, he could hear the hubbub in the auditorium. He realized that some of the families among the audience had kicked the man out of the hall. This member of the Youth Brigade or Nazi Scouts had sneaked in to ruin the whole concert. After he’d been thrown out, the audience were ready to listen to the new composition. But Yousef stopped playing. His expression changed so much that he became almost unrecognizable. He fumbled in his pockets, brought out a handkerchief and adjusted his bow tie. He then stood up, examined his violin, sat down again, fixed his trousers and adjusted the music sheets on the stand. But instead of playing, he broke into burning tears.

  Yousef realized that things had changed forever. Everywhere was turmoil. Angry young men were roaming the streets dressed in various uniforms, their heads shaved at the sides. He realized that new and violent ideas were circulating in society. There were anti-Jewish statements and graffiti on the walls calling for their deaths. It was a complete reversal. Stories that had never been told before were now out in the open. Massouda Sassoon told him that a bomb had gone off at Massouda Shemtov synagogue. Suleiman Chalabi told him that he’d heard from his uncle Yossi about a bomb that had exploded at the Beit Lawi Car Company. One morning, when he’d just woken up and was lying in bed, he tuned in to the news on the radio. His muscles froze as he heard the news of an explosion at the Stanley Shashou Trading Company.

  At the same time, Zionist sympathies grew stronger among the Jews. They began to stockpile arms, study Hebrew and promote Zionist propaganda in the Tenoua organizations. But Yousef resisted that trend. He wrote in one of his letters to Farida, ‘Before I could find answers or even ask questions, I’d rejected everything. My rejection was spontaneous and unsupported by any logical reasoning. It was just a profound, mute certainty coming from my heart.’ This was what he wrote in an undated letter to his wife. Discussions became more heated and ideas clashed, while his enthusiasm for music grew. He wondered whether music was capable of bringing people together from different backgrounds and cultures. He believed that music could become a unifying force for all sects, religions and ethnicities, so each evening he played at the English Club where Muslims, Jews and Christians listened to his music in absolute silence
and admiration, with pleasure and with passion. He tried to combine Western music, which he loved, with Iraqi music. He developed his style and ideas, and sometimes wrote articles on music for the newspapers. He believed that music was capable of making human minds more daring and more elevated.

  This was how Yousef stood in front of the audience and began, as though in a trance, to produce tunes from his violin. He believed deep in his heart that his music had a magical effect on people, uniting them as human beings in an appreciation of beauty. He heard teachers presenting scientific or pseudo-scientific theories and researches. He read newspapers and was familiar with the public mood. He understood the meaning of sectarianism and realized that a whole movement existed that opposed his presence there. It was very difficult for him to resist or even to prevent himself from being destroyed. He knew without a shred of doubt that dialogue would soon be impossible and that all resistance would be useless. Nevertheless, he withdrew into his inner world, dedicating himself wholeheartedly to music. He wrote dozens of musical scores and filled his notebooks; he analyzed and studied music. He confronted the overwhelming propaganda machine of society with his own personal convictions.

  It was in 1950 that Yousef stood in front of the audience at the English Club in Baghdad performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Hundreds of people sat in silent anticipation. As the tall, slim musician stood holding his violin, the hall became pitch dark except for the spotlight on him. On that day he wore a black tuxedo and patent leather shoes. He raised his violin and after a moment of complete silence he placed the bow on the strings and began to play. He felt himself soaring high as the music flowed from his hands, and his heart almost stopped with joy.

  It was a day of historic importance for him, in the company of a hundred and twenty musicians. In the pitch dark of the hall he was close to losing consciousness. Ten violins sang out together. A high note from one of the violins almost snatched away his soul. The sounds of the music rose higher, punctuated by the light rumba rhythm of the tympani and double bass. In a duet with the piano, his emotions reached their peak. Yousef’s soul burned, ethereal and volatile. He felt that he was infusing magic into the hearts of those who longed for love and human harmony. After just an hour, the lights flooded the hall once again and the sounds of cheers and clapping arose. Everyone applauded – lovely girls, society women, men and boys – while he merely bowed, overwhelmed by a sense of holy reverence in the endless recesses of his soul.