His father-in-law pointed to a black Chevrolet that was standing outside the house. A bald chauffeur wearing glasses stood beside the car. A second tall, dark man put Hussein in the back, while Haidar sat in the front. The car headed to Tehran in the darkness of the night.
Why did Ismail make this remark to Haidar at that particular moment? Ought he not to have mentioned it at another time and place? Why did he make it clear that he had known all about the affair with Nahida al-Said and had kept quiet about it? Although he could have easily left Haidar to his fate, he had reached out and saved him from the insurgents’ bullets. Did that important merchant who had supported the left and was well-connected with government circles always behave in such a way or was this behaviour inconsistent? If Ismail was simple, decent and tolerant with his daughter, was he the same with other people?
In his childhood, Ismail al-Tabtabaei had tasted all kinds of cruelty and humiliation. His life history provides ample evidence of this. These inconsistencies were the result of a confused, and also inconsistent, upbringing. His father had been a poor Arab from the Al-Mukhayam neighbourhood of Karbala. He had worked as a market porter for Iranian merchants at Bab al-Murad. His mother was from a very wealthy Iranian family in Karbala market. That was Ismail’s first scar. He felt humiliated and disgraced by his father. At the same time, he was excessively proud and boastful of his mother’s elevated origins. He tried to compensate for this conflicting and confused background through his work. He worked hard and doggedly despite all the frustrations that led him to a few failed attempts at suicide. As a result, he immigrated to Iran to find work at the bazaar, but came back equally frustrated when no merchant at the Tehran bazaar in those days was willing to employ a poor Arab living on aubergines. It is clear that his sense of superiority towards others was the result of the ethnic marginalization he had suffered during his stay in Iran. In his dealings with women he became an example of selfishness, emotional tyranny and sadism. His torture of his wife Jehan, Tahira’s mother, led to her death after she had given him his sickly daughter. He loved his daughter in a humiliating, confused way that made him lead a life full of guilt, regret and self-torture. Not because she was the only thing he loved in life, but because he constantly felt that he was the cause of her tragedy, particularly after the death of her mother.
Jehan, his first wife, had come from a well-known, wealthy family of traders who worked at Al-Isterbadi market in Al-Kazemeya. She had got to know him when he was working as an accountant for her uncle. From that time, he had shown a unique competence in his work. She had fallen in love with him and written him letters that overflowed with love. She defied her family’s will by marrying him. Their relationship, however, soon deteriorated because of Ismail’s complex and contradictory personality, for he was both loving and full of hate and spite. He was the helpful, generous man as well as the person who sometimes cut a worker’s wages just to degrade and humiliate him. He was the civilized intellectual who was at the same time attracted to all kinds of filth. On the political level, he symbolised all contradictions. He was a wealthy merchant who vehemently supported socialism against the comparador class in the third world. In his capacity as a red millionaire, he had strong connections with important political personalities in the socialist states. But at the same time, he had equally strong connections with capitalists known for their contacts with Western intelligence agencies. The same contradiction was clear in his relationship with his wife, Jehan, whom he undoubtedly loved but who, at the same time, he abused and scolded through no fault of her own. He wanted her to be respected by people but at the same time he also wished to humiliate her. He was bent on taking revenge for the old and forgotten abuses he had suffered in the past.
Jehan was therefore always confused and tense in front of him, for she had no idea how to deal with him. But she later understood that the man was truly sick, and not just with her. He was a bundle of contradictions and fantasies. Jehan later learned that her respectable husband liked to sleep with prostitutes and had never felt that sex was in any way connected with love. Only prostitutes could arouse him. During this period, Ismail made the acquaintance of an Armenian prostitute in Al-Karkh called Beatrice. She found happiness in being his slave and in submitting to his whims and his desire to dominate. In turn, he found enhanced erotic pleasure in her submissiveness. The things he loved most about her were her stupidity, her sensuality and her lust for sex, drink and food. For him she represented pure carnal pleasure. Everybody knew that he used to beat her so hard that his hands would be bruised. The following day, Beatrice would walk on the street with the cuts and bruises he had inflicted on her. She became pregnant several times and each time he asked her with the utmost indifference to have an abortion.
Hurting Beatrice wasn’t enough for Ismail. He also went to great lengths to wound his wife, Jehan, by letting her know of his relationship with the Armenian prostitute. He made fun of her and humiliated her in front of his guests. He even threatened to leave her for the whore. At night, though, he cried at her feet and implored her like a child to comfort him.
So much for Ismail, Haidar Salman’s father-in-law, and his diverse affairs and contradictions. Were the people around him not right, then, to wonder where Haidar Salman had learned of the date of the coup? Could Ismail have been the source of the warning? Due to his wide contacts with merchants related to various international intelligence agencies, he must have known of the date of the coup. Or we could say that Haidar, with his marked analytical abilities, had simply predicted the event? He had always stated that if we gave legitimacy to arms, the bloodshed would not stop. Could we say also that the second character in Tobacco Shop had outstanding intuitive abilities?
Haidar Salman was once again in Tehran.
He couldn’t stay long inside the stone house with its wooden façade and poplar trees. He couldn’t stay in the beautiful house located in north Tehran, where he’d met Tahira for the first time a few years earlier. It was bitterly cold on that February day. Tehran was completely covered with snow and he felt moody and confused. What could he possibly do? At noon, Tahira called him. Her faint, sickly voice entreated him to travel to Moscow. She seemed to be in the depths of desperation as her tone of voice, her tears and entreaties indicated. She was overwhelmed by despair because she hadn’t received any reassuring letters from him. ‘You didn’t even call me when you arrived in Tehran,’ she complained tearfully.
‘Please forgive me. The events of the coup left me no time to call.’
No excuses could possibly convince her. She sobbed and sobbed, reproaching him for remaining in the country after the outbreak of anarchy. She begged him to join her in Moscow.
Moscow, he felt, would mean a real release from the state of depression into which he had sunk during the past few days. It would free him from the fear of death and torture, and would take him back to music, which brought so much joy and happiness to his heart. All he wanted to know at that moment was news of Nahida al-Said, who he was so anxious about. His hands and lips trembled with apprehension for her. But it was impossible for him to receive detailed news in Tehran. He spent two weeks filling in paperwork for his trip to Moscow, but because there were no direct flights from Tehran to Moscow on account of the Shah’s close ties with the West, he had to go via Prague or Budapest. There was also the SAVAK’s strict monitoring of the Iraqis living in Tehran, particularly those arriving after the coup. But finally he managed to evade them and left for Moscow, taking Hussein with him.