The Tobacco Keeper

by Ali Bader

  He said nothing but felt that his silence unsettled them a little. They didn’t know how to react. At that moment, he had no feelings and didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t just lost Tahira, but his entire existence, his personal world. He became a mere number, a person that might easily be replaced. He was like an empty shell, echoing uselessly. Tahira was gone and Iraq was behind him. Hussein’s destiny was unknown. The environment in which they existed had collapsed. So he prepared himself to become someone else, to become the tobacco keeper.

  They walked beneath the cold, winter sun. He suddenly heard the sound of running water and saw trees and farmers’ houses. Men were walking up a grassy hill and the cows were on their way to the fields. Behind him on the left was a pile of wood ready for making charcoal and on the right was a vegetable nursery. There were a few clouds and a flock of birds on the horizon. Life went on, he thought, while Tahira was buried in the dust. Didn’t everyone realize that they would be buried in the same way one day? Nature alone would remain: cruel, silent and constant. It was healing and sorrowful to look at nature, for it alone was eternal and had a monopoly on survival.

  Iran emerged on the horizon. The border and the refugee camp appeared. Greenery invaded the earth. The serenity was breathtaking and the cold wind blew from a new land, a land that had to become his new home. Whose decision was it, then? The authorities decided. The director of the play decided. Life was a huge stage where form was often confused with content. Life as he knew it was made up of actors performing roles. Two days earlier, he had been the Iraqi composer Haidar Salman. Today things were different. The old play was over and he had to find himself a new performance. He was about to enter a new world, a new life.

  The previous play had been tedious and its speeches lifeless. He had to find a new role that had no comical or satirical elements and no paradoxes, a role that was much clearer.

  After the expulsion, he wrote the following to Farida: ‘We must not forget ourselves entirely, even if we surrender to a role that we’ve invented, even when it is incompatible with our personalities, because we have chosen to play that role. But I see that others, instead of playing their roles, are played by them. I wish I could find myself another role and stop playing myself. We often imagine that we control the game, unaware that it actually controls us. We often imagine that we uphold values contrary to those we were raised to uphold. But in truth we are only surrendering to them.’

  When he arrived at the refugee camp, he managed to procure for himself a tattered, dark coat with a worn collar and a shirt with soiled edges. His beard was long, his face was pallid and his hair was a mixture of black and white. He had become so thin that his cheekbones were protruding. He walked with confident steps towards the guards’ tent. The Iranians looked different to him: their faces were surly. They carried machine guns and their beards were long. Photographs of political leaders and revolutionary posters were everywhere.

  The camp leader spoke to him through the translator by his side.

  ‘Mr Haidar, you have friends here in Iran. You know that according to Islamic Shariah we have banned songs and depraved music, but we’ve retained classical music. Would you be willing to co-operate with us? We would like you to compose music about the revolution, about the leaders of Islam. We’ll give you everything you want, including Iranian nationality.’

  ‘I won’t lie to you and say yes. What I really want is to be released from this camp. I know Tehran well and I lived there a long time ago, but I can’t live in a refugee camp.’

  The man looked straight at Haidar. He was quite perplexed, but he felt it was useless to try arguing with this tall, thin man who had intelligent, confident eyes. He let out a sigh and said: ‘It’s lucky you’re not a prisoner. You can move out whenever you want, on condition that you don’t become involved in politics. When you need anything, we’ll help you.’

  Two days later, he received an Iranian ID card on which his name was written: ‘Haidar Salman Merza, of Iraqi affiliation’. He laughed inside himself at this ridiculous comedy. They also gave him enough tomans to last a whole month. Less than two days after his arrival at the camp, he left and headed directly for Tehran, unlike most Iraqis, who went to Jalalabad.

  All he thought about was how to get out of this labyrinth. By hook or by crook he had to find papers to allow him to leave Iran. With clarity of vision, he decided not to stay in the country, but to find a way out. He thought about all this as he walked along Wali al-Asr Street, which had been called Reza Pahlavi Street when he’d walked it for the first time. Ismail al-Tabtabaei’s house was located at the end. It was one of the ironies of fate that he should come now, after the al-Tabtabaeis had completely gone. Ismail, in spite of his advanced years, was detained in a Baghdad prison, all his property and wealth confiscated and charged with collaborating with the Shia movement. His brother Saleh had been executed and his body dumped on the street. Tahira had died during the expulsion. But here he was, at a small café on the main street close to hotel Hazrat Fatima. He examined the waiter who was pouring the tea for him. The man’s beard was long and he looked sullen and morose. Haidar sat, warming his hands with his tea and watching customers as they tossed coins onto the tray of the café owner. They exited onto Joseph Stalin Street, although the name of the street had been changed after the revolution to Sattar Khan, one of the leaders of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. The new names of the streets meant that he got lost a few times. He also decided to brush up his Persian. Since leaving in the fifties and sixties, his command of the language had deteriorated. To practise his language, he decided to buy a Persian book by Ahmad Shamlou, a favourite poet, as well as a dictionary from a large bookshop on Revolution Avenue.

  Tehran’s winter was bitterly cold as he looked for somewhere to stay. He placed his hands in his pockets after wrapping the coat tightly around his body. Walking along the street, he saw two fat men in long coats tailing him. They had thick lips and stern eyes. He felt he was being watched by the Pasdar, the revolutionary guard. Nevertheless, he walked on quietly, observing the changes that had occurred in Iranian life, not only in the women’s clothes and the style of life in general, but in political posters too. This was a new feature of life, a kind of collective imagery represented in murals. High walls offered the perfect space for artists to display their graphic skills. It seemed to Haidar Salman that there wasn’t a single wall left without murals, posters or writing covering it. People were being mobilized through the use of ideological and political propaganda that depended on a minimal use of words to produce the maximum effect.

  The Iran that he had known well had disappeared without a trace, replaced by a new Iran. The posters showed this clearly. Shia themes of traditional Pardeh-Khani narratives now completely dominated Iranian visual culture. Haidar Salman had seen those old images re-enacting the battle of Karbala since the fifties. Now they were everywhere in Tehran, even in the cafés. They represented epic themes in a primitive form, but were now used to embody the revolution. They combined the Pardeh graphics with new revolutionary propaganda. He later explained this to Farida as follows: ‘What’s happening in Iran seems to me to be a kind of Pardeh-Khani art, where a painter controls a large canvas of five feet by twelve. The painting depicts Karbala, a centuries-old battle in which Hussein, the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson, was killed. The painter begins his dynamic project by taking a large sheet of canvas stuck to the wall or hung between two poles. What he does then is to bring people by force into the circle of pain. Everything here is designed to drive you to tears …’

  Haidar Salman realized that this artistic genre was the product of politics but also left a huge impact on it. This art proliferated on coins, stamps and school textbooks, although there was a brief honeymoon between religious groups, on the one hand, and progressive and institutional forces, on the other. Soon enough, Islamic ideologies launched a campaign to reclaim and appropriate the revolution. They organized an army of primitivist and religious artists to mo
bilize people and defeat their rivals and opponents through visual art.

  Only Hotel Azadi remained from the old Tehran. When Haidar walked down Evine Street, he stopped at the hotel. A concierge stood in front of the door in his elegant outfit. Haidar had stayed at this hotel with Tahira during their honeymoon. They’d taken a large suite with windows looking out over the mountains from one side. On the other side, the windows looked over the city. The suite had a small sitting room with a table in the corner. In the evening, they dined in the panoramic restaurant on the upper floor with a view of the whole city.

  What would Haidar Salman do now? I managed to locate everyone that Orhan suggested, especially Dr Khisro. Haidar had known Dr Khisro for a while and would sit with him at Naderi café in Wali al-Asr Street. Everybody confirmed, too, that he’d been involved in a relationship with a girl called Pari. They also suggested that he’d escaped to Syria, either directly or through Turkey, with the help of Farrah Nikdahar and Hassan Qazlaji. So who were all these people and how did he get to know them?

  First, who was Pari? What kind of relationship did he have with her? And how did he make her acquaintance?

  The Pari story actually goes back a long time and cannot be told here. But we can trace the relationship as far as her father Mohammad Taqi, who worked as an accountant for Ismail al-Tabtabaei in Tehran. Haidar Salman had made his acquaintance before Ismail liquidated all his assets in Tehran. At any rate, Haidar, who no longer had any acquaintances in Tehran, felt that Mohammad Taqi was the only person he could turn to. The revolution had produced drastic changes in lifestyle and in the class system, which had driven most of his father-in-law’s acquaintances to emigrate to Europe. He realized that only the poor stayed behind, whatever the changes, revolutions and coups.

  Mohammad Taqi lived in the Hazrat Hussein neighbourhood, the area closest to Hussein Square. On the afternoon of Haidar’s arrival in Tehran, he felt hungry and miserably cold, so he took the bus from Revolution Avenue and told the driver that he wanted to get off at the point closest to Hazrat Hussein. After about a quarter of an hour, the driver, with his thick moustache and hat, signalled for him to get off. Haidar found himself in front of a number of small shops with high metal shutters. In between was a narrow, paved street that led to a poor neighbourhood. He stopped briefly and took a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it and blew smoke into the air. He walked beside thick wooded gardens that lay in front of a group of houses. He saw a casually veiled young woman in her twenties wearing jeans and standing at the door of a small, two-storey house with a beautiful ceramic façade. He stopped and asked her about Mohammad Taqi’s house. She looked up at him with startled large dark eyes, and told him that this was her house and that Mohammad Taqi was her father.

  The young woman spoke a little Arabic and his own Persian was adequate for basic communication. The girl asked him to follow her. With quiet nervousness he obeyed, passing by the screen that stood at the entrance of all Iranian houses to prevent evil spirits from entering. They followed a winding path across the small flower garden to a sunlit living room that was filled with the pale rays of the winter sun. The room was very warm, so he took off his coat and handed it to her. He sat on the sofa facing the girl with the large, dark eyes and fair-skinned, moon-like face. He waited for Mohammad Taqi to come home from his downtown shop on Gragh Barq Street in Tobkhana Square, also named Artillery Square, which became Khomeini Square after the revolution.

  Pari disappeared briefly and came back with a cup of tea. He took the cup in both hands and began to drink. His clothes were very shabby, his beard long, his hair was falling onto his forehead and streaked with grey. The girl eyed him tenderly, thinking that his shabby clothes, pale face, exhausted, thoughtful eyes and melodious voice made him appear more handsome. She was as overwhelmed by his presence as she would have been by a prophet.

  Almost an hour later, Mohammad Taqi came home. He was a tall man with a slight stoop. His old clothes were ironed and his hair was completely grey. Before Haidar Salman could shake his hand, Mohammad Taqi embraced him. He’d known Haidar since the latter had met Tahira. Mohammad Taqi was one of the people whom Ismail al-Tabtabaei depended on in his work in Tehran and who had looked after Tahira when she was a little girl.

  Everyone we met confirmed that Haidar Salman had lived in Mohammad Taqi’s house in the Hazrat Hussein neighbourhood and gone with him to work every morning in Gragh Barq, where he’d watch the passers-by and customers that came to the shop. At Mohammad Taqi’s house, he’d started relearning Persian with the help of his daughter, Pari. Did Haidar and Pari’s relationship become formal? Nobody really knew much about the nature of their relationship. Other people were perhaps less curious than we were. Haidar Salman, however, wrote about it in some detail.

  Pari was twenty and had been divorced for two years from her husband. She had no children of her own and since her divorce had worked at a women’s hairdresser’s on Wali al-Asr Street. She used to spend the morning at the shop. On her return in the afternoon, she’d fling her handbag on the sofa and, in full view of her parents and sister, head straight upstairs to Haidar’s room. She would sit close beside him on the sofa, indifferent to everyone else. She was wildly, though quietly, happy to be with him and never tried to conceal her feelings. Her face radiated sweetness and docility as she sat in front of him and sang in Farsi. He listened to her with great joy. While she sat embroidering a linen sheet for him, he would watch every thrust of her needle. He would sometimes stand silently and look out of the window at the stars encircled by halos of trembling white light. As he stood there, his body was infused with a sweet, quiet power. He sensed Pari’s ripe, youthful body, and was aware of every part of it. He desired her legs, her waist, her arms, her neck and her full bosom, which pressed against the window as they stood together watching the trees in the garden.

  In a letter to Farida, he said: ‘Pari’s body tells me that the world is infinitely large. Every time I stand in front of her, I see the huge mountains behind her and the stars sparkling in the pitch darkness of the night. I feel an infinite power residing within this living flesh. What exactly do I want from her? Why am I so fearful, so hesitant? I don’t really know what to do.’

  During this period, he began taking delightful strolls around Tehran with Pari to the very same places he’d visited with Tahira thirty years earlier. As they wandered through Revolution Avenue or Azadi, he noted the great transformations of post-revolutionary Tehran. The poor south was dominated by religion and the chador, while the north was full of grand houses and large stores playing all kinds of songs and music. In the north, women went about unveiled and discussions were free. Pari would carry a scarf in her bag, which she put on when in the south and took off when in the north. But with the coming of winter the weather was changing fast. Haidar Salman smelt the cold humidity of the earth when he stood with Pari on Azadi Square. He knew that the war with Iraq had taken a new turn. Mobilization and the boosting of morale went on relentlessly. Clerics gave sermons from pulpits with machine guns slung over their shoulders. He felt that a huge explosion was bound to happen. It was as certain as death. In his mind’s eye he could see angry crowds sweeping over the squares. Once again the incensed, raging masses would go on the onslaught. The revolution, he thought, had turned the people into mobs. Distinctions of class had disappeared and easily manipulated groups had emerged onto the scene. The mob would march and burn and destroy with a blind, random force that knew no bounds.

  The streets were damp, the trees bare and the houses miserable behind their rusty fences. At the back of the three-storey stores, beyond the stone-arched entrances and through a swirl of fog, were little yards with small recesses, old pigeon towers and tables fixed to the ground beneath ageing linden trees.

  Haidar felt that things in Tehran couldn’t go on like this, for there were huge campaigns against the liberals. A secret war was being waged against music, the cinema and unveiled women. He witnessed the burning of cinemas and the banning
of free discussion. One day, he was standing with Pari on Wali al-Asr Street, looking at the buildings shrouded in fog. He didn’t want to go to a café, but found his attention caught by a sudden mythical apparition: a girl wearing a blue shirt, leather jacket and jeans was selling newspapers. Around her stood a group of young men and women. They started to engage in a free discussion or what was called an ‘Azadi debate’. Haidar turned to Pari and told her that such scenes would not continue for long. Groups of bearded peasants from the countryside were carrying truncheons and breaking up leftist demonstrations. They would use stones to disperse any group of young people. He wrote to Farida: ‘With the support of the authorities, the militias have begun hounding women on Tehran’s streets, especially in the north. It’s a maddening, infuriating sight. The bearded scum of society are pursuing girls and women with the claim that their veil is “incorrect”. These riffraff shove the women, attack them with abusive words and bundle them into cars.’

  As I told Faris Hassan in Tehran, I firmly believe that at that time Haidar Salman was beginning seriously to plan his escape from Tehran and once again head to Baghdad, either via Syria or Turkey. This was confirmed by Dr Khisro too. Haidar’s decision came from observing the huge changes that were taking place in Iranian society and the political programme of the revolution. He thought seriously of forging papers in order to get to Baghdad. But the questions that now pose themselves are: Who was Hassan Qazlaji? Who was Farrah Nikdahar? And how did they help him escape to Syria and from there to Baghdad?

  I met Dr Khisro at the Naderi café, the same place where Iraqi leftists had met to plan their revolution and which Haidar Salman and Hekmat Aziz frequented. Dr Khisro told me that after his return from Bulgaria, Hassan Qazlaji had seen Haidar Salman by chance in this café. By then, Qazlaji had become an elderly, grey-haired man with glasses. He recognized Haidar Salman immediately, and screamed out loud, ‘You’re the famous musician Haidar Salman!’ He embraced Haidar and asked, ‘What’s happened to you? Look at your beard and your shabby clothes! What are you doing here, Maestro?’