by Ali Bader
He spent his evenings at the house of the Russian pianist, Ada Brunstein, located on a narrow street behind the Bolshoi Theatre. She had a large room on the upper floor, where a sofa overlooked the street, flanked by small windows that were permanently open. On the opposite side was a large window that overlooked the dense garden. Ada sat cross-legged on a second sofa to the left. On the mantelpiece above the fire stood a nightlight and a vodka bottle. Ada was a petite, blonde woman with full lips and a short nose. She spoke softly and was very happy with him. A world-famous virtuoso pianist, Ada was also cultured and fluent in several European languages. She would receive Moscow’s most important writers in her house, and it was through her that Haidar became acquainted with many of them.
As for how Haidar came to know Ada Brunstein, we only have the account given by the Czech violinist Karl Baruch in his memoirs. He said that Haidar Salman had taken a cruise on the Baltic Sea. On the same boat was Sergei Oistrakh’s son with his pregnant girlfriend. After the son had disembarked, it became known that the girlfriend had run away with the Iraqi composer, Haidar Salman. The girlfriend was the pianist Ada Brunstein.
So Ada Brunstein was Haidar Salman’s new girlfriend. But did she have anything to do with his trip to Paris? That was something we could never ascertain. It was a detail missing from all his letters. Nor did Farida ever comment on it. But all events indicate that Haidar and Ada were closely attached at that time.
Why wasn’t Haidar Salman a faithful husband? He never once wrote about this, as though it were natural to be married and also have mistresses. Throughout his life he experimented with these relationships and sought to avoid unhappy endings. This was predicted by the character of Ricardo Reis in Pessoa’s collection Tobacco Shop.
But why didn’t the disgraceful incident on the boat affect his relationship with Sergei Oistrakh? That was something we never discovered either, as the man died in 1990. We couldn’t get through to any of his family members either.
Whatever the case, Haidar’s relationship with the pianist was common knowledge. In 1965 he travelled with her to Paris, where he took part in the Jacques Thibaud competition. It was his first performance in front of a Western audience – most of his concerts in previous years had been in front of Russian audiences.
On a large stage in Paris, Haidar Salman stood in total darkness except for the spotlight above him. The large audience appeared to him only as ghosts. After breathing deeply, he closed his eyes and rested his bow gently on the strings. As the music soared, he felt the sounds flowing savagely but serenely along with the streaming of his soul. It rose above the wilderness and connected intimately with the Creator, expressing His true relationship with all creatures. Haidar felt that music was to be found in savage isolation while the soul grew within and rose higher and higher. As soon as the music stopped, he heard the applause in the hall. The lights came on and he could see the audience offering a standing ovation. Among those who applauding was the director of the Carnegie Hall, who later invited him to travel to New York and take part in the Leventritt Competition.
He wrote to Farida from Paris:
‘I don’t really know, but this is my first encounter with the Western world. The East carries a great symbolic legacy that I sense as it moves across all time periods. I wished to play music in an Eastern manner. You may find this ridiculous and you may laugh at my statement, but I cannot ignore a dynamic culture whose dimensions of meaning and content reach deep into my soul. When I play music, it’s as if I’m producing colours, clear lovely colours, for I understand the playing of music in terms of serenity and light. The moment I place my bow on the strings, I feel the colours emerge from the sounds.
‘When the bright light of the sun is present, nothing can possibly be absent. I kept playing music in this cold, bleak environment until the audience could feel the brightness of sunny summer days in Baghdad. That was why the audience clapped and clapped.’
Did Haidar Salman visit Baghdad between 1963 and 1967? The evidence indicates that he lived most of those years in Moscow. The reason was his fear of the political regime in Baghdad. He might have visited his family from time to time. But he always used his work at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and his composing as excuses to stay in Moscow. Tahira, accompanied by their son, Hussein, went to Moscow from time to time, either for medical treatment or to spend the summer with him. His affair with Ada, however, remained a mysterious matter, even to those closest to him. Nobody could confirm or deny it. But why did he return to Baghdad in 1967?
Was it because his work at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory came to an end? Was it because his affair with Ada had lost its spark? Or was it the 1967 War, which took place when he was playing in New York?
His visit to New York was a great opportunity for him. He played at one of the grandest halls of the great city, with its famous Statue of Liberty looking out over the ocean and the amazing Brooklyn Bridge. He stayed in the Hudson neighbourhood, the artists’ quarter. Ada always accompanied him when he walked the streets. For the first time they felt free. It was New York. He gazed at the deep darkness of the night, which was broken only by the lights emanating from hotels and huge buildings. He was charmed by the city. With its skyscrapers, its wide, crowded streets, its suspension bridges and the ships that conquered its ocean, New York seemed the total opposite of Moscow. The artists’ quarter where he lived was full of concert halls that were so different from those in Moscow. There were many other differences as well, but the real surprise came when the New York Times, commenting on his visit, wrote the following: ‘This communist did not hide his deep admiration of America.’
Carnegie Hall captivated him, with its historic building shaped like a library. He watched people as they crossed the large court in their elegant clothes as though they were living in a different era, as though they had stepped out of the nineteenth century. The building had two round towers, a thick surrounding wall and Gothic stone windows. He stood there gazing meditatively at the court and the silent walls. From the window, his gaze fell on the icon of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall, her forehead hidden in the darkness and her dreamy eyes lit by lamplight. The New York Philharmonic asked him to join them for a concert in this great hall. It was by pure coincidence that his concert was scheduled for 7 June 1967.
All the evidence suggests that Haidar Salman refused to play while the Israeli forces continued to invade Arab territories. He was so angry that he was shivering all over. His confused state didn’t prevent him from contacting the director of the Hall to cancel the concert. Instead of going back to Moscow, he returned to Iraq while Ada returned to Moscow.
He spent the year after his return from New York in near total isolation, meeting no one. Instead of mixing with people, working in public places or meeting friends, he began to develop in his mind a new type of Sufi music. He hardly left his house on Al-Bolskhana Street in Al-Karradah in Baghdad. He would always sit near the large window, gazing at the verdant garden and watching the changing of the seasons. A kind of deep spiritual mood had taken hold of his soul. At that time, he was looking for a type of music that could not be heard and that he tried to grasp in the growth of trees and flowers. He was looking for a soft music that arose from these life forms that changed and transformed with the seasons. We can only understand his state in terms of a mystical mixture of Islam and Kabbalah. He felt that Mendelssohnian music was invading him little by little, making his soul expand and grow larger and larger. His playing made rapid progress.
During this period, he sent Farida a long letter at the end of which he wrote: ‘Through music I can discover places. I can see the colours of dimension and depth. Music liberates me from fear and takes me to the mysterious and obscure recesses of life. With music I get rid of the body’s filth. But, Farida, what is the body but a return to primary elements and the intense desire for salvation …’
He broke up with Ada Brunstein and spent a difficult year regretting what he’d done to his friend Sergei Oistrakh’s
son. He sent Oistrakh long letters expressing his regret for having made the gravest mistake of his life and asking for his forgiveness. In the midst of this emotional fever of regrets, he was swept off his feet by another affair with an Armenian cellist at the National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. In the middle of his involvement in this affair came the 1968 coup, which put an end to the second character, that of the protected man, and paved the way for the third character, that of the tobacco keeper. Only one year after his return to Baghdad from New York, he was witness to another military coup. He was forty-two at the time. He had some awful moments when Tahira woke him, her face pallid and sallow, telling him in a hoarse voice about the coup. Nobody knows whether or not Haidar Salman thought then of fleeing Baghdad as he had done in the earlier coup. He told Farida that the new coup brought back the spectre of death and the ritual of killing in a renewed form. Coups were always accompanied by a series of public executions on account of alleged conspiracies. It was all reminiscent of the savagery of the Middle Ages. There were anthems and victory songs, men in white shirts hanging by the neck, their bodies dangling in the air, while families sat at their feet feasting as if celebrating a national wedding. In one of his letters in 1969, he described to Farida how he’d watched a woman advance to the middle of the park, stop in front of the corpses dangling in the air and tie up her hair with an elastic band. She’d looked gleefully at the men hanging from the ropes. He’d observed her thick, crimson lips and her high cheekbones, and was stunned to see her erotic pleasure at the sight of such murder and death.
So what was his maxim at that time? It was ‘Have a light head, and a lighter foot. Live your life with the person you love and enjoy the shit and the kitsch’. It accurately described his affair with the Armenian musician, which was mysterious in every sense of the word and which nobody knew anything about. Despite his life having taken a new turn at that time, events brought him back to earth whenever he climbed too high. His contacts with the world were largely pale and colourless. The images of his wife and son began to fade slowly while his interest in music grew. Was he still working on the great symphony that he had dreamed of composing since he’d stood as a fifteen-year old lad in front of the Russian conductor? Was he still thinking of the work he wished to compose after his escape to Moscow?
All those questions were drowned in the Iranian Revolution that changed the course of his life once and for all.
It would be appropriate for us to mention Tahira’s uncle, who was intimately connected with this narrative. His name was Saleh and he was in the habit of visiting their house almost every week to see Tahira. He had a dark complexion and deep, dark eyes. He wore glasses with black plastic frames and his beard was sparse. He buttoned his shirt at the collar but never wore a tie. His hair was also unique, for he left a black lock of hair falling over his forehead. His jacket was always too broad. He was a Muslim intellectual in the Shia tradition. He read books by theologians such as the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati and Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr.
Saleh wasn’t a fanatic in any sense, but was fairly broad-minded. He had a girlfriend at university and didn’t care whether Tahira wore the veil or not. But the real turning point in his life came when the Iranian Revolution took place. He felt ecstatic that he was no longer the humble individual talking reasonably about the revolution to come. The revolution, he said, was the avalanche that would demolish everything, the earthquake that would shake the whole earth to its foundation. It promised salvation for the nation and declared the appearance of the Imam. It predicted the dawning of the Islamic age of the Caliphate, Saleh screamed at the top of his voice. The promise had finally been fulfilled. Haidar tried to talk rationally to Saleh. He had no argument with the revolution, but he was terrified by the popular mood and by the mass psychology, which was at its peak. Sickly Tahira did not see Haidar’s anger those days as he read the papers or followed the news of the revolution on television. But he was angry. He was so angry that he trembled when he saw the crowds on the streets. On their faces he detected a loss of individuality that happened only in traumatic situations. Hundreds of people who were essentially different from each other suddenly became copies of each other, clones. Their wild gestures and absurd shouts were indistinguishable. He stared at the escalating frenzy of the masses. Although he understood the causes of popular anger and the state of political, social and economic turmoil in Iran, he hated mass hysteria. He hated the agitation that took hold of the people and guided their actions.
With his beard and plastic-rimmed glasses, Saleh reeled and swaggered through the house, and declared that the East had changed. Haidar Salman smiled at him and said in a low, scornful voice, ‘But the people cannot create any real change. The people are dangerous, very dangerous, because they represent the disappearance of rational behaviour. The people are against critical thinking. In fact, their thoughts are completely different from mine. Their ideas and movements are driven by pure chance. They do not think, but only flare up and become wild. They combine the most contradictory tendencies and represent the dissolution of the particular into the universal. One word is enough to transform the people into a bull in a china shop.’
‘No,’ screamed Saleh, ‘these people wish to abolish the tyranny of the individual and establish a communal society. They want to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate and the precepts of the prophets.’
Haidar was absolutely terrified, for he never had any faith in the people. Something in them inspired fear in his heart and made him tremble. He was scared of the mob and tried to keep as far away from them as possible. He had very little confidence in angry popular fervour. Perhaps the Farhoud was the reason, when he’d seen the same ecstasy in the eyes of the mob, the ecstasy of sacrificial offerings, which turned individuals into a herd in a state of exhilaration. The mob’s anger would break out at the slightest provocation and was impossible to control. He feared all impassioned appeals to the emotions.
The passion of the mob spiralled higher without end, as was to happen later with Saddam. Extreme agitation seized people’s minds and hearts and drove them to rush forward. When Saddam climbed the podium, the masses beneath ran like maniacs. The same thing was happening in Iran. Like Saddam, Khomeini depended on manipulating the masses with his personal charisma. The people, the public, the crowd went out in a state of agitation, shouting so hard they became senseless.
Poverty, deprivation and loss were responsible for creating charismatic leaders. Those leaders exercised their authority and hegemony in order to compensate for their own sense of inferiority and their absolute spiritual vacuum.
‘Do you think that Khomeini has declared the revolution against the Shah?’ asked Tahira.
The small sitting room looked out onto the garden. The windows were open and the sunbeams cast their golden rays inside the house while the birds sang outside. Tahira poured more tea into Haidar’s cup as she sat in front of him with her oval face, still sparkling eyes and tender lips. She had a beautifully aristocratic expression.
He realized that the country was in a perpetual state of mass turmoil, especially after announcements in the press that Khomeini had left his exile in Neauphle-le-Château, twenty miles west of Paris. He read the papers almost every day and stayed from morning till evening in a state of constant apprehension. He walked along Al-Rashid Street, thinking of the demonstrations that marched out of Tabriz’s mosques and which the security forces were unable to control. Haidar walked past the statute of Al-Rusafi as if unconscious. One image dominated his mind. It was the image of Bloody Friday, when four thousand people lay dead on the ground. His ears tried to pick up the news, for the Tabriz riots had just broken out, which led pro-Shah Iranian officials try to find a solution to the problem. Then the media embarked on a self-critical evaluation of government institutions and the activities of the ruling Rastakhiz Party, with the aim of appeasing the people whose anger extended to Tehran, Qom and Tabriz.
He went home with a heavy heart. He felt that the crazed sce
ne was pressing on his mind. The Shah was sticking to his guns, refusing to acknowledge opposition, whether moderate or extreme. He even described the opposition groups as outlaws and murderers. His categorical refusal was the green light for the opposition to ignore their basic ideological differences and unite against him.
Haidar read in the morning papers that General Nasser Moghadam, the director of the SAVAK, had gone to see the Shah wearing all his medals on his chest and dressed in his pressed military uniform. But the Shah had looked at him haughtily and rejected his proposal for reform. Haidar had heard at a tea shop at Bab al-Moazzam that the great bazaar merchants, almost a quarter of a million shops, had decided to stop working. The sky was clear with just a few white clouds tinged with crimson streaks. Dust rose high into the sky and pollen filled the air. He felt a childish joy that made his heart dance. He stood at the corner of the street, listening to the news of demonstrations everywhere. A man in a black tie told another that demonstrations in Iran had spread to forty cities. When Haidar came closer to the man who was providing this information, he recoiled in fear. When Haidar went home, Tahira was sitting on the sofa, wearing a striped white shawl. Her dark eyes sparkled magnificently like two jewels outlined by kohl. Her complexion showed that even though she was much older, her body hadn’t lost its physical lustre. Nor had her lovely eyes lost their sparkle. She offered him sahoon, the traditional Iranian sweets that Abadi wrote about in his novels. She offered him fresh water out of mosaic and alabaster vessels. Her Iranian maid slept in the shade as though she had materialized out of the books of Gobineau or Chardin a hundred years earlier. He took out the photo album. Tahira had invited him to discover the mysteries of Tehran and its art through a tour of its old museums. She was the one who lured him into horse-drawn carriages to put him in touch with society. For a change, she accompanied him on a visit to Tajrish Bazaar, whose passageways they walked for hours. Then she took him to the wonderful museums and to Marshad Jaafarpour. They climbed Mount Toshal, played backgammon near Al-Ghareeb cave and sat at the celebration of the birthday of Hazrat Fatima. They went to an open-air pool, where Tahira swam in her swimsuit, and then visited the Shahr Park, south of the city. Haidar Salman remembered the Tehran bazaar where Tahira had taken him for the first time. They sat on a bench in the shade of a large tree near the mosque. A Sufi wanderer passed in front of them. There were cypress and sycamore trees. He heard the sound of water falling from a tap. He heard a swallow singing on a huge tree, and beneath it there was a vendor selling a cold ginger drink in copper cups.