Ali Bader - The Tobacco Keeper

There was a blazing row between Nahida and Haidar, which disturbed all the guests. In a little while, at the request of Hekmat and his wife Widad, they both went upstairs to resolve their problems quietly. Almost an hour later, a tearful Nahida ran down the stairs, but none of the guests were aware of her leaving until she slammed the front door behind her. When he rejoined his friends Haidar was totally drunk. Everybody was in high spirits that night. They roasted lamb cutlets on the fire, sang loudly and danced; at one table, there was a card game going on. Then Haidar screamed. It was hard for those present to understand the meaning of this scream until he told them that Baghdad stood on the edge of a precipice: a volcano of burning lava was erupting and the city was concealing a new weapon, ready for a new day and a new era.

So how did Haidar Salman know about the coup? Who told him that the following day would usher in a huge turning point in the history of the country and that there would be an unstoppable eruption? Did Haidar have any contacts with the insurgents? That was impossible. Everyone who knew him confirmed that his name was on the list of people to be liquidated by the coup.

Nevertheless, Haidar Salman awoke the next day to the clarion call of the coup. He had a hangover and a splitting headache. He was stunned to see the tanks of the nationalists and the Baathists on the streets. He trembled to see the populist trend in Baghdad at its most extreme. The winter sun was casting its slanting rays on the wall opposite, and a deathly hush had filled the house. Tahira was still in Moscow and Hussein was with his grandfather, Ismail al-Tabtabaei. At that moment, Haidar felt a vague anxiety. He had a strong sense of déjà vu as horrific images passed through his head. The country he was longing to return to reminded him once again of the events of 1941 when he was a child.

The phone rang. He ran to pick up the receiver. Hekmat’s voice came over the line, warning him against staying in Baghdad, for the nationalists and the Baathists had issued statements vowing to crush all communists. Orders were given to the youngsters carrying machine guns and wearing National Guard armbands to kill and hang the communists. He hung up, his hand trembling. He couldn’t get any detailed information from Hekmat because the whole country was under curfew. What he could hear was the sound of bullets going from house to house and street to street. Two images haunted his mind and would not be dispelled. He saw Nahida’s face, tearful at his behaviour the previous night, and he saw her coming out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. As she changed her clothes, he looked at her beautiful body, totally entranced by its grace and firm roundness.

The phone in the corridor rang. He raced to it, his heart beating fast. It was Ismail al-Tabtabaei informing him that he had sent him a car to take him away from Baghdad for his own safety. His name was on the list of communists to be liquidated that was being distributed by the insurgents. He felt disturbed and shaken by all the terrifying images around him. He heard constant screams and shouts, and he could not stop trembling and moaning. It was almost ironic that the insurgents wanted him dead while a day earlier he’d been criticising the revolution. The whole thing had no connection with ideologies or ideas, but only with bloodlust and mob mentality. He wasn’t wide of the mark, for as soon as he arrived at his father-in-law’s house, he heard of the massacres and violence that was being carried out against the communists. On his way, he saw military personnel leading blindfolded, handcuffed young men in pyjamas. They were taking them on large trucks out to the desert where they would be executed and buried. After darkness fell, he found Ismail al-Tabtabaei standing in front of the door. ‘Haidar,’ he said, ‘I know about your affair with that artist!’ He spoke in a firm, unwavering voice as he looked downwards.

His father-in-law pointed to a black Chevrolet that was standing outside the house. A bald chauffeur wearing glasses stood beside the car. A second tall, dark man put Hussein in the back, while Haidar sat in the front. The car headed to Tehran in the darkness of the night.

Why did Ismail make this remark to Haidar at that particular moment? Ought he not to have mentioned it at another time and place? Why did he make it clear that he had known all about the affair with Nahida al-Said and had kept quiet about it? Although he could have easily left Haidar to his fate, he had reached out and saved him from the insurgents’ bullets. Did that important merchant who had supported the left and was well-connected with government circles always behave in such a way or was this behaviour inconsistent? If Ismail was simple, decent and tolerant with his daughter, was he the same with other people?

In his childhood, Ismail al-Tabtabaei had tasted all kinds of cruelty and humiliation. His life history provides ample evidence of this. These inconsistencies were the result of a confused, and also inconsistent, upbringing. His father had been a poor Arab from the Al-Mukhayam neighbourhood of Karbala. He had worked as a market porter for Iranian merchants at Bab al-Murad. His mother was from a very wealthy Iranian family in Karbala market. That was Ismail’s first scar. He felt humiliated and disgraced by his father. At the same time, he was excessively proud and boastful of his mother’s elevated origins. He tried to compensate for this conflicting and confused background through his work. He worked hard and doggedly despite all the frustrations that led him to a few failed attempts at suicide. As a result, he immigrated to Iran to find work at the bazaar, but came back equally frustrated when no merchant at the Tehran bazaar in those days was willing to employ a poor Arab living on aubergines. It is clear that his sense of superiority towards others was the result of the ethnic marginalization he had suffered during his stay in Iran. In his dealings with women he became an example of selfishness, emotional tyranny and sadism. His torture of his wife Jehan, Tahira’s mother, led to her death after she had given him his sickly daughter. He loved his daughter in a humiliating, confused way that made him lead a life full of guilt, regret and self-torture. Not because she was the only thing he loved in life, but because he constantly felt that he was the cause of her tragedy, particularly after the death of her mother.

Jehan, his first wife, had come from a well-known, wealthy family of traders who worked at Al-Isterbadi market in Al-Kazemeya. She had got to know him when he was working as an accountant for her uncle. From that time, he had shown a unique competence in his work. She had fallen in love with him and written him letters that overflowed with love. She defied her family’s will by marrying him. Their relationship, however, soon deteriorated because of Ismail’s complex and contradictory personality, for he was both loving and full of hate and spite. He was the helpful, generous man as well as the person who sometimes cut a worker’s wages just to degrade and humiliate him. He was the civilized intellectual who was at the same time attracted to all kinds of filth. On the political level, he symbolised all contradictions. He was a wealthy merchant who vehemently supported socialism against the comparador class in the third world. In his capacity as a red millionaire, he had strong connections with important political personalities in the socialist states. But at the same time, he had equally strong connections with capitalists known for their contacts with Western intelligence agencies. The same contradiction was clear in his relationship with his wife, Jehan, whom he undoubtedly loved but who, at the same time, he abused and scolded through no fault of her own. He wanted her to be respected by people but at the same time he also wished to humiliate her. He was bent on taking revenge for the old and forgotten abuses he had suffered in the past.