Carnegie Hall captivated him, with its historic building shaped like a library. He watched people as they crossed the large court in their elegant clothes as though they were living in a different era, as though they had stepped out of the nineteenth century. The building had two round towers, a thick surrounding wall and Gothic stone windows. He stood there gazing meditatively at the court and the silent walls. From the window, his gaze fell on the icon of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall, her forehead hidden in the darkness and her dreamy eyes lit by lamplight. The New York Philharmonic asked him to join them for a concert in this great hall. It was by pure coincidence that his concert was scheduled for 7 June 1967.
All the evidence suggests that Haidar Salman refused to play while the Israeli forces continued to invade Arab territories. He was so angry that he was shivering all over. His confused state didn’t prevent him from contacting the director of the Hall to cancel the concert. Instead of going back to Moscow, he returned to Iraq while Ada returned to Moscow.
He spent the year after his return from New York in near total isolation, meeting no one. Instead of mixing with people, working in public places or meeting friends, he began to develop in his mind a new type of Sufi music. He hardly left his house on Al-Bolskhana Street in Al-Karradah in Baghdad. He would always sit near the large window, gazing at the verdant garden and watching the changing of the seasons. A kind of deep spiritual mood had taken hold of his soul. At that time, he was looking for a type of music that could not be heard and that he tried to grasp in the growth of trees and flowers. He was looking for a soft music that arose from these life forms that changed and transformed with the seasons. We can only understand his state in terms of a mystical mixture of Islam and Kabbalah. He felt that Mendelssohnian music was invading him little by little, making his soul expand and grow larger and larger. His playing made rapid progress.
During this period, he sent Farida a long letter at the end of which he wrote: ‘Through music I can discover places. I can see the colours of dimension and depth. Music liberates me from fear and takes me to the mysterious and obscure recesses of life. With music I get rid of the body’s filth. But, Farida, what is the body but a return to primary elements and the intense desire for salvation …’
He broke up with Ada Brunstein and spent a difficult year regretting what he’d done to his friend Sergei Oistrakh’s son. He sent Oistrakh long letters expressing his regret for having made the gravest mistake of his life and asking for his forgiveness. In the midst of this emotional fever of regrets, he was swept off his feet by another affair with an Armenian cellist at the National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. In the middle of his involvement in this affair came the 1968 coup, which put an end to the second character, that of the protected man, and paved the way for the third character, that of the tobacco keeper. Only one year after his return to Baghdad from New York, he was witness to another military coup. He was forty-two at the time. He had some awful moments when Tahira woke him, her face pallid and sallow, telling him in a hoarse voice about the coup. Nobody knows whether or not Haidar Salman thought then of fleeing Baghdad as he had done in the earlier coup. He told Farida that the new coup brought back the spectre of death and the ritual of killing in a renewed form. Coups were always accompanied by a series of public executions on account of alleged conspiracies. It was all reminiscent of the savagery of the Middle Ages. There were anthems and victory songs, men in white shirts hanging by the neck, their bodies dangling in the air, while families sat at their feet feasting as if celebrating a national wedding. In one of his letters in 1969, he described to Farida how he’d watched a woman advance to the middle of the park, stop in front of the corpses dangling in the air and tie up her hair with an elastic band. She’d looked gleefully at the men hanging from the ropes. He’d observed her thick, crimson lips and her high cheekbones, and was stunned to see her erotic pleasure at the sight of such murder and death.
So what was his maxim at that time? It was ‘Have a light head, and a lighter foot. Live your life with the person you love and enjoy the shit and the kitsch’. It accurately described his affair with the Armenian musician, which was mysterious in every sense of the word and which nobody knew anything about. Despite his life having taken a new turn at that time, events brought him back to earth whenever he climbed too high. His contacts with the world were largely pale and colourless. The images of his wife and son began to fade slowly while his interest in music grew. Was he still working on the great symphony that he had dreamed of composing since he’d stood as a fifteen-year old lad in front of the Russian conductor? Was he still thinking of the work he wished to compose after his escape to Moscow?
All those questions were drowned in the Iranian Revolution that changed the course of his life once and for all.
It would be appropriate for us to mention Tahira’s uncle, who was intimately connected with this narrative. His name was Saleh and he was in the habit of visiting their house almost every week to see Tahira. He had a dark complexion and deep, dark eyes. He wore glasses with black plastic frames and his beard was sparse. He buttoned his shirt at the collar but never wore a tie. His hair was also unique, for he left a black lock of hair falling over his forehead. His jacket was always too broad. He was a Muslim intellectual in the Shia tradition. He read books by theologians such as the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati and Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr.
Saleh wasn’t a fanatic in any sense, but was fairly broad-minded. He had a girlfriend at university and didn’t care whether Tahira wore the veil or not. But the real turning point in his life came when the Iranian Revolution took place. He felt ecstatic that he was no longer the humble individual talking reasonably about the revolution to come. The revolution, he said, was the avalanche that would demolish everything, the earthquake that would shake the whole earth to its foundation. It promised salvation for the nation and declared the appearance of the Imam. It predicted the dawning of the Islamic age of the Caliphate, Saleh screamed at the top of his voice. The promise had finally been fulfilled. Haidar tried to talk rationally to Saleh. He had no argument with the revolution, but he was terrified by the popular mood and by the mass psychology, which was at its peak. Sickly Tahira did not see Haidar’s anger those days as he read the papers or followed the news of the revolution on television. But he was angry. He was so angry that he trembled when he saw the crowds on the streets. On their faces he detected a loss of individuality that happened only in traumatic situations. Hundreds of people who were essentially different from each other suddenly became copies of each other, clones. Their wild gestures and absurd shouts were indistinguishable. He stared at the escalating frenzy of the masses. Although he understood the causes of popular anger and the state of political, social and economic turmoil in Iran, he hated mass hysteria. He hated the agitation that took hold of the people and guided their actions.
With his beard and plastic-rimmed glasses, Saleh reeled and swaggered through the house, and declared that the East had changed. Haidar Salman smiled at him and said in a low, scornful voice, ‘But the people cannot create any real change. The people are dangerous, very dangerous, because they represent the disappearance of rational behaviour. The people are against critical thinking. In fact, their thoughts are completely different from mine. Their ideas and movements are driven by pure chance. They do not think, but only flare up and become wild. They combine the most contradictory tendencies and represent the dissolution of the particular into the universal. One word is enough to transform the people into a bull in a china shop.’