His new residence also placed him in the middle of the action. It allowed him to see the world, to be among those who witnessed the bands that played on Al-Rashid Street to mark the establishment of the kingdom that year. He saw the military brass bands as they marched up and down the streets. In one of his letters to Farida, dated 1956, he mentioned another band made up of twelve musicians who used to liven up small dance parties at the English Club carnivals and the Laura Khedouri Club. It was the first year that national contests for dabka dancing were organized in the royal gardens. These carnivals were hugely successful despite the threats by clerics to ban them. Muslim alleys competed against each other in traditional wrestling while Christian alleys competed in the manufacture of arak and the organization of bellydancing parties. That year, there were at least three Jewish dancers, as well as two Muslims and one Armenian. For the first time in his life Yousef wooed a Kurdish girl, who lived on Al-Rashid Street. To the surprise of the whole neighbourhood the girl, called Dina, responded to his advances. Yousef, who had never performed live before, conquered his shyness and played the violin in front of an audience. For some reason, there was a shift in inter-communal relations that year. A Muslim officer got engaged to and married a Jewish woman who worked at the Khedouri Sassoon schools. A Christian man married a Jewish woman, while a well-known Jewish man fell in love with his Muslim maid and contemplated suicide when his family rejected his proposal of marriage.
It was a kind of emotional unrest that struck the neighbourhood of Al-Rashid Street in the forties, a widespread turmoil that took some people very much by surprise.
But what became of Gladys? Where was she now? And what had happened to his love for her? She was his first love and perhaps his last. In spite of all the relationships he had in those years, he never forgot her. It wasn’t that he just couldn’t forget her; it was in Gladys’ nature to be unforgettable.
Gladys had clearly left an indelible mark on his life, especially after she married a physician called Fawzi. Her escapades and scandals were not only the concern of her family, but were also the talk of the whole of Baghdad. Every evening during the daily ritual of tea and biscuits that brought the family together and lasted until very late at night, Yousef would listen attentively to the details of her adventures. He was intrigued by the stories but could not forget his love and admiration for her. Although they all resented her, criticised her, condemned her conduct, and hated and insulted her, Yousef was captivated by her wild life, which swung between extreme luxury and numerous infidelities. Gladys had married a handsome, wealthy physician of her own free will. She lived her life between her opulent home and her trips to Europe, torn between her new love — her husband’s Muslim driver — a husband who loved her, and a third lover who pursued her like a shadow.
It was well known that her surgeon husband, Dr Fawzi, had been equally notorious for his own womanizing. But he, after his marriage to Gladys, had become a respectable family man. Rumour had it that it was he who had saved her life when she’d had a car accident while out driving one day, during the heaviest rainfall in Baghdad’s history. Gladys was his beautiful, indifferent patient. He had fallen in love with her at first sight and spared no effort to convince her to marry him. But she was not faithful to him, and in no time at all, rumours began to circulate about her. Everybody knew that she’d fallen for his Muslim driver.
In a long letter, Yousef described how he’d listen greedily to the stories about this unfaithful woman, full of admiration. He loved to hear news of her. At that time she was pregnant, but she cared neither for her husband nor her baby. With real anxiety Yousef realized that love brought incredible pleasure and knowledge, and might also rescue people from loneliness and loss; but it could sometimes be painful, as with Gladys and her husband.
In the same year as Gladys’ scandals, he met the famous Russian violinist, Michel Boricenco, in front of whom he gave his first solo violin performance. In a small auditorium at the English Club in Baghdad he played Bach, Paganini and Ysaÿe. As a tribute to his virtuosity, Boricenco presented him with a fine violin and bow. That May, the Iraqi-British war broke out, accompanied by a national uprising inspired by Nazism. There was wholesale anarchy throughout the country. The Jewish community were victims of assaults, looting and murder. Massouda Dalal — Yousef Sami Saleh’s aunt and Gladys’ mother — was burnt alive before his very eyes and her property looted.
Letters
In writing Yousef Sami Saleh’s biography, or at least in documenting him by means of his era, his life, his thoughts and his youth, which were all similar or to a great extent comparable to the character of the keeper of flocks in the poetry collection Tobacco Shop, I have referred to the two phases of his life in Baghdad as outlined in his letters to Farida Reuben. The first extended from his childhood in Baghdad up to the Farhoud Incident in May 1941, which followed the rise of the Nazi organizations in Iraq and which saw the death of hundreds of Jewish victims in Baghdad. The second covered his life from the time they moved into their new home in the Hassan Pasha neighbourhood until his emigration to Israel in 1950. The Farhoud Incident, following the May 1941 revolution, occurred at the same time that everybody was busy talking about Gladys’s adventures. The burning of Massouda Dalal, Gladys’ mother, during the incident had a devastating effect on Yousef’s life and destroyed Gladys completely.
The incident changed the life of everyone in Baghdad. It can be described as a real turning point in the history of this society, being the first attack of its kind against its own citizens, and opening the door to civil conflict. Although historians have devoted little attention to it and have done nothing to address our collective amnesia, we can safely say that all the subsequent civil strife in Baghdad may be traced back to what happened on that fateful day in 1941.
Was this incident like any other in Yousef Sami Saleh’s life? Can it be considered as just one of those things that happen to people, whether or not they are violinists, whether they’re like the hero of Tobacco Shop, and whether or not they’re Jewish? But this was no ordinary incident. It instilled terror and humiliation in Yousef’s heart and marked the end of the family’s evening rituals, when Yousef had listened to the stories of Gladys while eating cakes and drinking tea. The beautiful stories of love and infidelity that had so captivated the family were now replaced by the news of Hitler’s victories and the voice of the Iraqi Younis Bahri, whose ‘Hail to the Arabs’, broadcast on the Nazi radio from the Italian city of Bari, incited the people against the Jews. Instead of the accounts of Gladys’ amorous pursuits, Yousef heard Younis Bahri’s voice speaking enthusiastically about the victories of the Axis on all fronts and predicting an all-out defeat for the Allies at El-Alamein in North Africa. In those early days, Yousef had no interest in this kind of news, the news of things happening elsewhere in a very remote place. He was far more interested in what Gladys was doing with her three lovers: the husband, the driver and the third man who followed her like a shadow. What he wanted most of all was simply to recreate her in his wet dreams. He was more eager to imagine her desires, moans and lustings than to hear about Hitler’s offensive, or any other, for that matter. That is, until the zero hour, the moment when the massacre happened before his very eyes. It was an incident that induced horrific images in his dreams instead of Gladys’ naked body. He began to see figures that seemed to come out of a Breughel or Bosch painting, with huge noses, deformed bodies, frightening smiles and cloven feet.