Ali Bader - The Tobacco Keeper

The tobacco keeper goes back to his shop driven by a divine instinct.’

Spartan wars and the end of romanticism and love

He entered Damascus with the new name of Kamal Medhat and a new passport with a new date and place of birth. This was his third character, the personality that corresponded to Álvaro de Campos from the poem Tobacco Shop . It was the sensual character of the tobacco keeper, the man obsessed with gratifying the senses of taste and touch, the person wishing to live in a stupor off the two previous characters and soar in a world of smoke, pleasure and sex. In every corner of his soul there was an altar to a different god. But would the shadows of the previous two characters vanish for good? Never.

The strength of the new character lay in the fact that although it stood in contrast to the earlier characters, it depended on them and often overlapped. This was the source of Kamal Medhat’s strength. Although he lived in a state of isolation and nihilism, his personality was more solid than the other two. Pessoa created a clear biography for this character. Álvaro de Campos was born on 15 October 1890 in Portuguese Tavera. After studying marine engineering in Glasgow, he travelled to the East to find pleasure, relaxation and laziness. He justified the trip on the grounds of his relentless search for opium to take back home. For the East, opium represented consolation for its honour. Like Álvaro, Kamal Medhat had a well-defined biography. Born in Mosul in 1933, he became a well-known merchant who frequently travelled to Iran and back. He was a man who indulged in enjoyment and pleasure. It would not be surprising, then, if the authorities in Damascus suspected him of bringing a quantity of opium with him from Iran.

This is what we’ll discover from the answer to the following question. On what day did Kamal Medhat arrive in Damascus and how?

The latest date for his arrival in Damascus was early November 1981. But how did he travel? There are actually two contradictory stories. The first alleges that he escaped to Turkey (though Orhan didn’t confirm this view) and went to Damascus through Mardin. The second story claims that he flew from Tehran to Damascus on Syrian Air. The airfare was paid with a sum of money offered to him by Mohammad Taqi’s daughter, Pari. He arrived at Damascus airport in early November, although we couldn’t verify this piece of information because he never mentioned it in his letters. What is certain, however, is that he was arrested on his arrival at Damascus. He referred to this clearly in one of his letters to Farida: ‘When I arrived in Damascus, I was detained by the authorities for four days. I was held in a room that was no bigger than five square metres, together with more than twenty others: smugglers, common criminals and Syrian politicians. They all stank and their hair was infested with lice.’

In prison, he was taken blindfolded through a dark corridor. Two gigantic wardens on either side lifted him by his armpits and dragged him along. Suddenly they stopped, removed the blindfold and allowed him to walk along the corridor with his eyes dazzled and half-closed. There was only a small window looking out onto a yard that was empty but for a single tree.

Kamal Medhat had no idea why he was being detained. But when they seated him on a wooden chair in a small room lit by a dust-covered bulb, with cigarette butts littering the floor, the officer asked him: ‘Be brief. You have opium.’

‘No, I swear to God. I’m a small merchant and I have no use for such things.’

‘We have information that you’re bringing opium with you from Iran.’

‘That’s never been my job.’

At the beginning, the investigator didn’t believe him, although he didn’t force him to confess or torture him. After two or three days of interrogation, he was released. That was the end of his detention. Some of the people we met in Damascus, however, believed that Kamal Medhat did enter Syria with a package of opium that he’d brought with him from Tehran and that he sold it at one of the cafés in Al-Bahsa. The money that he spent in Damascus, they argued, came from selling that package. The question we asked was whether Kamal Medhat himself smoked opium. Nobody, in fact, confirmed this, except one of the political exiles that we met in Damascus, Saadoun Mohammad. He was the one who introduced him to Jacqueline Mugharib. He told me that he once went with Kamal to a secret café in Damascus where he smoked hashish in hookahs specially prepared for the purpose. We can neither confirm nor deny whether he entered Damascus carrying a package of opium. But it is worth noting that he thought music produced a kind of trance similar to the effect of opium. Furthermore, he composed a piece of music, the ‘Opium’ Concerto, which was permeated with Iranian culture. All this made me wonder where and when he consumed opium for the first time. I’m sure that he got it from Iran because opium was widely available there. His first use of opium must have been during his stay in Tehran rather than anywhere else. But when, exactly? Was it in the fifties, when he lived with Ismail al-Tabtabaei at Pahlavi Street? Or in Enqelab in 1963? But that wasn’t a long enough period for him to experiment with opium. Or was it when he stayed at the house of Mohammad Taqi and his daughter Pari?

Concerning Kamal Medhat’s life in Damascus, all the documents confirm that he arrived at noon with his new passport and new personality. He tried to find some space for his new hedonistic, pleasure-seeking character within a politically explosive landscape. His arrival corresponded with the most violent confrontations between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. This was a period rife with ethnic, sectarian, racial and ideological hatred. The region was at the height of uncertainty and indecision. It seemed to have muddy feet and a savage, cruel face. So how would this self-indulgent, indolent character fit into this context?

The cab that Kamal Medhat took crossed the Victoria Bridge with its freshly lacquered handrails. He sat looking out of the window at the people as the cab drove through the streets of Damascus. When he heard the news of a booby-trapped car that had been blown up near the Cabinet building in Seven Seas Square he felt he was inside a simmering cauldron. Any suspicious person on the streets was arrested without much ado. In this environment was it possible, as the double of the tobacco keeper in Tobacco Shop, to find an outlet for his passionate, pleasure-seeking nature? How would he treat his sense of self-importance, his unsettled view of himself and the image he wished to create for his own identity?

‘What’s your name?’ he asked the driver.

‘Ammar. If you want some fun, I have a beautiful young girl,’ the driver said. He was a dark man with thinning hair, sharp eyes, a thick moustache and a broad, athletic chest. Kamal Medhat wasn’t surprised at the driver’s offer to pimp for him, for drivers almost everywhere in the world did exactly the same. But he didn’t feel completely at ease with this driver. He was unsettled by the man’s acne and his high cheekbones. He disliked him and found his conversation tiresome, but he wished to use him to find somewhere to stay.

‘I want somewhere cheap,’ he told him in a low voice, wiping his forehead.

‘Fine, I’ll take you to Umm Tony’s house. She has cheap rooms,’ said the driver.

He looked out of the window at the streets of Damascus, which he was seeing for the first time. It was his first experience with his new identity, name and personal history. He realized that part of his personal history would be created here, while the other part would be tied to the past. This was the first time he felt that he’d usurped the identity and history of someone else, a person called Kamal Medhat. He knew nothing about his history and realized the risk he was taking in coming here to Syria. All he knew about Kamal Medhat was that he’d gone to Tehran from Damascus. He also knew his wife’s name and bits and pieces of her personal history. He later wrote to Farida: ‘Sitting there in the back seat of the car, I knew nothing about my new character. Was I being sought by the authorities here for political reasons? Had I been charged with any offence? I knew that I’d been married for a year to a woman from Mosul who was the widow of a Hama Islamist. When I was questioned, I came to know that the regime was preoccupied by the conflict with the Islamists and had no time for me. That was a relief. But I knew little about the traits of my new character.’