Ali Bader - The Tobacco Keeper

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.