When Yousef Sami Saleh sat with Kakeh Hameh in Moscow, the latter gave him a great deal of information that would help him become familiar with his new personality as Haidar Salman. The son of a merchant at Al-Isterbadi market in Al-Kazemeya, Salman had angered his family by studying music in Moscow instead of medicine. That was the reason he was unable to return to Baghdad at that time. He wanted to travel to Iran to visit an Iraqi merchant called Ismail al-Tabtabaei. The latter was a real not fictitious person, a wealthy merchant who traded between Tehran and Baghdad and was known for his great sympathy for the left. The history of this second persona was clearly very different from that of the first. Yousef Sami Saleh was naturally required to impersonate and embody this new persona, which was fairly similar to that of Ricardo Reis in Tobacco Shop. Reis was a protected young man from a wealthy, influential family, the son of a very rich merchant, as well as a musician and a rebel. Both Ricardo Reis and Haidar Salman were spontaneous, self-indulgent high-achievers. They enjoyed wealth and the simple pleasures of life, and tried to avoid emotional endings.
All the evidence confirms that Haidar Salman arrived in Tehran early in the winter of 1953, that is, a few months after the overthrow of the Mossadegh government. In this Eastern city the composer embarked on a totally new phase of life and with a very different personal history. He arrived at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport with a small, black suitcase containing a few items of clothing. These were, with the exception of a black scarf and a pair of leather gloves that he’d bought at a small shop in Moscow, the same items that he’d carried with him from Iraq. All he had in his pockets were a few tomans that had been given to him by Kakeh Hameh, his passport and his gloves. He carried the violin that the Czech musician Karl Baruch had given him as a gift. [Karl Baruch later became the best-known violinist in Czechoslovakia, and received numerous prizes and accolades. He fled to the United States in 1975 and died in New York in 1983.] Kakeh Hameh had given him the address of Ismail al-Tabtabaei [a well known Iraqi merchant who was a friend of the Communist Party and had spent many years between Tehran and Baghdad]. Hameh also gave him a book to teach himself Persian in seven days. As he presented him the book, he cautioned: ‘Don’t believe the seven-day thing, though!’
At dawn on 13 December 1953 the plane landed at Mehrabad Airport. When Haidar Salman disembarked, he felt the cold, sharp air strike his face. Snow had been falling and the airport was brilliant white. He walked unsteadily towards the passport control officer. When he stood before him his smile was full of fear. He handed over his Iraqi passport.
The Iranian officer, a captain by rank, asked him to sit on a wooden bench near the passport booth. Without looking at the passport, he placed it to one side and began to stamp the passports of the other passengers, one after the other, until Haidar was the only person left. The young officer then picked up Haidar’s passport and flipped through its pages carefully and attentively while talking to several people on the phone. Haidar was extremely anxious and confused, unable to overcome his anxiety and doubts that the passport officer might discover the passport was fake, in which case his whole life would be in serious danger. Haidar sat on the wooden bench reflecting on his fate, realizing that both his return and his love of music were totally incomprehensible to others. He belonged to a different world from the real one and had a vocation that was alien to his environment. To alleviate the worries and sorrows that had taken hold of him, he started gazing around the airport hall and up at the ceiling. He waited for the official procedures to end, not knowing what to expect either now or later. He looked anxiously through the window and saw some high trees, the sky overcast with clouds and an empty carriage pulled by a pair of horses. When he looked up at the airport ceiling, he saw the Nazi swastika decorating its centre. He later wrote to Farida about this: ‘The airport and the central railway station in Tehran were built in the thirties by Nazi Germany, when there were close relations between Hitler and Reza Shah, Iran’s former ruler. The ceiling was constructed in such a way as to make it impossible for the swastika to be removed without the whole thing collapsing.’
In the morning, having surrendered himself to sleep on the bench, hugging his suitcase, umbrella and hat, he felt a hand patting him on the shoulder. The Iranian officer handed him his passport and allowed him to leave the airport for Tehran. Overwhelmed with unspeakable joy, he felt that he’d been born anew. He had a new personality that had erased the old one and its history. He went straight to a third-rate hotel where he decided to stay for some time until he found the address of the Iraqi merchant, Ismail al-Tabtabaei, the one who traded between Iraq and Iran.
The Tehran of those days left a powerful and lasting impression on his imagination. It charmed him with its undulating hills, its solemn, silent forests, its light-filled, rounded peaks and the statue of the poet Al-Firdawsi, who affirmed the potential integration of heaven and earth. During the reign of the Shah, Tehran was a modern city, with impressive avenues and hotels, luxurious palaces and dense forests. Its grey buildings, constructed in the nineteenth century, showed the influence of English architecture on Nasser al-Din Shah, who began to copy Western architectural techniques and designs. This was Haidar’s first vision of this fascinating, oriental city. In his room, which was made of teak wood and lay on the upper floor of the hotel, he wrote a long letter to his wife, Farida. The hotel was a beautiful old building surrounded and shaded by poplar trees. One wintry afternoon he went down to the hotel lounge and found the owner squatting on her knees, dusting the furniture with a feather duster and arranging the books elegantly on the wooden shelf. A book with a grey cover suddenly fell off the shelf onto the ground. Haidar picked it up, rearranged his scarf and began browsing through it. It was the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar al-Khayyam, translated into five languages, including into Arabic by Ahmed al-Safi al-Najafi. Haidar had previously become acquainted with this poet at the Brazilian coffee shop in Baghdad. So he asked the owner to permit him to borrow the book to read it at leisure in his room. He read the book throughout the night as if to protect his silence and solitude from the falling snow. At dawn, before falling asleep, he wrote a long letter to Farida in which he described Tehran’s bazaars and outstanding museums, including the National Museum of Iran, the National Jewellery Museum and the Gulistan Palace. This fortress, built in the Safavid era, had been turned into a late-nineteenth-century Western-style palace by Nasser al-Din Shah, one of the important rulers of the Qajar era. The letter, which included some verses of al-Khayyam, was the very first to carry the signature: Haidar Salman, Hotel Sarjashma, Tehran, 1953.
This means that from his early days in Tehran, Haidar Salman began to discover this huge imperial city, visiting not only the deprived, congested areas to the south, but also the northern aristocratic neighbourhoods. Each morning, he went hurriedly out of Hotel Sarjashma. With his hands in his coat pockets, his hat on his head and his scarf over his face, he began to explore Tehran’s wide streets. He was captivated by the high, snow-capped Elburz Mountains, the long rows of huge, ancient trees and the winding side alleys that seemed to overflow with the secrets of craftsmen and small traders. He sometimes took his violin and sat in a large city square. On sunny winter days the fountain in the middle of the square seemed to whisper as though it were chirping. So he would play a piece or two on his violin and in the evening would return to the hotel, his ears filled with the sounds of lovers’ whispers mixed with the water that trickled down the mountains and flowed in streams through the streets of the city.