It is certain that Haidar Salman called more than once at Ismail al-Tabtabaei’s address. But he didn’t find him, because the latter was in Baghdad on account of his daughter’s illness. After a few days, when Haidar’s funds began to run out, he contacted Kakeh Hameh in Moscow. He told Hameh that Ismail al-Tabtabaei was not in Tehran and that he was running out of cash. Hameh sent him some money to tide him over until the left-leaning Iraqi merchant returned from Baghdad. During that period, Haidar Salman started to frequent the Khanzad restaurant, which lay at the crossroads of Fakhrabad and Qizard Streets, a few steps away from the main square in Tehran. This was because an Iraqi, Hekmat Aziz, worked at the restaurant. So Haidar Salman often went in the evening and sat by the back door of the restaurant, waiting for Hekmat Aziz to appear with a kebab sandwich wrapped in newspaper, which he would devour at a park nearby.
On the basis of the information that I have, I don’t actually know how Haidar Salman came to know his new friend Hekmat Aziz. Farida sent me a letter in which she thought that Kakeh Hameh was the one who introduced them. But when I questioned Kakeh Hameh about this and told him of Farida’s view, he denied the suggestion, telling me that he only became acquainted with Hekmat Aziz after the 1958 Revolution, when he saw him in Baghdad. Haidar Salman, however, wrote in one of his letters to Farida from Tehran that Hekmat Aziz had gone to Tehran to study architecture at the university. He had then found a menial job in the kitchen of the Khanzad restaurant. This was when he’d started to cooperate with the Tudeh Party and other revolutionary and leftist forces that opposed the Shah’s regime. During the fifties, Iraqis lived the fever of revolution. Revolutionary parties swarmed with young men and women who dreamed of change and hoped to repeat the revolution of Lenin and his bearded men in their own country.
Haidar and Hekmat’s friendship might have been strengthened by such café conspiracies, where they met with young Iraqis of the type that the right-wing newspapers nicknamed ‘kids of the left’ or ‘revolutionary adolescents’. At Naderi café on Pahlavi Street, they met various groups: Iraqi students studying at Tehran University, some junior clerics from Qom who were influenced by Marxism and later became members of Ali Shariati’s movement, and some migrant Iraqi workers in Iran. When Hekmat Aziz learned of Haidar Salman’s financial difficulties, he offered him the surplus food that the restaurant would otherwise have thrown out.
According to Haidar Salman’s account, Hekmat Aziz was a handsome, pitifully thin young man of twenty. He lived in an old, dilapidated apartment surrounded by rubbish in the Tobkhana district of south Tehran, an area of craftsmen, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and poor Jews. Hekmat Aziz was preparing diligently for the revolution, the great coup d’état that would establish the republic of joy in Baghdad. This idea so dominated the hearts and minds of young people in those days that they travelled far and wide in order to bring it about. But what exactly drummed this fiendish notion into Haidar Salman’s head, an idea that was out of keeping with his first character? Was it the impact of the second character, one that was based on rebellion and dissent, the character of Ricardo Reis, which was assumed by the character of Haidar Salman? Was it the image of the protestor embodied in Shia Islam? Or was it something else?
Hekmat Aziz actually offered Haidar Salman what might have been the ideal way to enter Iraq once again, for no method was safer or more certain than the conspiratorial activities of the left. The method might have been a little fanciful and rather farfetched, and it required some patience, but there it was all the same. Revolutionary leftists were being smuggled in and out of Iraq, either through Iraqi Kurdistan in the north or via the marshes in the south. The Jewish musician was never in fact as rash or reckless as Hekmat Aziz, who’d broken with the Communist Party and arrived in Tehran two years earlier. He’d received training in guerrilla warfare while Haidar Salman was a petty-bourgeois with no prior clandestine adventures. All he wanted was to return to Iraq, and for him returning to Iraq meant no more than going back to the place where he used to play music in front of the families of Baghdad.
On the final day of his first week in Tehran, Haidar Salman went to look for Ismail al-Tabtabaei’s house, hoping that he might have returned from Baghdad. After asking several people on the street, he managed to locate the house in the aristocratic neighbourhood to the north of Pahlavi Street. He visited it one evening carrying his suitcase, violin, umbrella, hat and black gloves.
The house, hidden by thick trees, was totally isolated.
He stopped in front of the house and knocked on the brass knocker in the middle of the grand door. After a few moments a maid opened the door, wearing a red pinafore over her beautiful clothes. No sooner had he started speaking to her in English than Ismail al-Tabtabaei came out in person to greet him. He was a handsome, tall, grey-haired, fifty-year-old man in an elegant outfit. He took Haidar straight to a small room upstairs. The room was decorated with strange old drawings and its furniture was faded with age. It was to be his room.
The mere fact of entering the house represented a huge turning point, not only in his whole life but also in his second personality as the protected man, although it was not protected by the first character as in Pessoa’s Tobacco Shop. Haidar Salman became in fact the protégé of the great merchant. From the moment they first met, they both realized that their relationship would go way beyond the simple assistance offered by the trader to supporters of the left. Did not the protected man in Tobacco Shop also believe in the workings of fate and destiny?
The following morning, when Haidar Salman discovered that Ismail al-Tabtabaei had a sick daughter called Tahira, his conviction grew stronger that his presence in that house was an act of providence. The father spent most of his evenings sitting beside his daughter’s bed.
During the early days of his stay, Haidar Salman spent most of his time in his room. He was always extremely shy, reluctant and uncomfortable with the aristocratic lifestyle. He was daunted by the oppressive stillness and opulence of his host’s house. He therefore preferred to spend his evenings sitting alone in his room, dreaming of music. He confined his passion for music to his wild dreams, and in the morning would explore Tehran’s sidestreets, crowded with workers, voices and passers-by. When he returned at noon, the sun would be high above the windows of the house and, after lunch, its golden beams would fill the dining room and hall where Haidar would sit for many hours with Ismail al-Tabtabaei and his daughter Tahira.
Everybody stayed in the sunny hall during the winter. Tahira sat with her pale, withered, beautiful face and her golden hair falling down over her shoulders, while Ismail stayed at her beck and call, his gaze unbroken. Haidar Salman looked down shyly and kept quiet. He seemed to be listening to the noises coming through the window, to the vague sounds of winter that kindled his imagination. It was a mysterious space filled with the scent of trees and melting snow. But a dreary atmosphere gradually infiltrated the room. One evening, when Haidar Salman came home late, exhausted from having walked the length of Reza Pahlavi Street, an idea suddenly hit him. He decided to dedicate an hour each day to playing music to the pale, sick girl who was lying in bed and to her poor father who always stayed by her side.
He had no idea how much his short pieces would raise the spirits of the young woman and make her so much more jovial and optimistic. The father became very attached to him, for the young man not only played the violin for the lovely girl, but took her on outings during the day, particularly after she began to feel much better. Instead of the painful headaches she used to suffer from, she had a sensation akin to an ecstatic dizziness, a feeling closer to passionate love than to illness. Tahira was exceptionally sensitive and highly impressionable. She received the young man into her father’s house with a mixture of profound sadness and joy. When she stood in front of him, the muscles of her face twitched painfully and her eyes filled with tears, for she was burning with love. She came to realize that she was desperately attached to him and could never let him go. Although he reciprocated her thoughts and feelings and continued to treat her with a great deal of tenderness, he tried hard to avoid falling hopelessly in love with her.