‘The president wishes to throw a private party. Give me your phone number and we’ll contact you.’ This was what he’d told him, in a tone between an order and a request. Within a month, Kamal Medhat was playing in front of the president.
Kamal wore his black tuxedo with tails. He stood tall and thin; his face was dark and his eyes sparkled as he held his bow and violin in the spotlight. After a moment of silence, he began, creating out of the melodies a constellation of stars in the air. To his right was Widad holding the tip of her cello. She sat in her chair with the instrument stretched beside her body, like an eternal beloved. Kamal Medhat’s gaze was fixed on the tip of the conductor’s baton and on his eyes. With Kamal Medhat were forty musicians, playing the Opium Concerto. The president sat at the front, surrounded by a cluster of guards.
When the music stopped, Kamal Medhat was jolted back to consciousness by the applause of the president and the sideways smile that appeared from beneath his moustache. He heard the clapping of the ministers ranged in a row and saw the stern looks of the guards. The conductor bowed his head, then stood erect and pointed to the soloist, Kamal Medhat. A beautiful, tall blonde girl carrying a bouquet of flowers advanced and offered it to the conductor. He took the bouquet with a smile and offered it to Kamal Medhat, who moved it to one side and bowed again. He wondered if these politicians and guards appreciated the music and felt its strong rhythm. Did they know that they’d once confiscated and torn up this piece of music? Did they understand its meaning or its dimensions? What was this performance? And what lay behind the thick silence of existence? Chaos? Nothingness? Or the sap of life, free energy released to engulf everything?
What were these presidential rituals? Did they symbolise something else? Such were Kamal’s thought on that day. He wondered where they came from. From religion, for example? Did they symbolize anything else? Did they hide other things? He often reflected on his doubts and uncertainties, for he didn’t know the truth. He wondered whether presidential ceremonies were as absorbing as music was to him. Years later, he wrote to Farida saying: ‘Throughout my life I’ve never been immersed in anything except music. There has always been an ego that watched me and made fun of everything I did. Don’t those great politicians possess a similar ego that watches them and makes fun of their acting and role-playing?’
Kamal realized that the truth was never granted as a gift. Every time he was required to take a single step towards the point of no return, he hesitated and was afflicted by vertigo and a horrifying sense of disappointment. During this period, rumours circulated of a love affair between him and Widad, Amjad’s wife. But what was the truth of this rumour? Widad was a woman of only average beauty, but she was extremely gentle and delicate. Her dark eyes were full of reflections and insatiable hunger. They were lustful and frank. Her lips were savage and highly sensitive, while her looks were sparkling, contemplative and intense. Her unruly hair flew wildly in the air. Men admired her delicate complexion and her fair-skinned forehead. But why would she fancy Kamal, who was so much older than her?
Widad, in fact, saw in Kamal’s personality a kind of madness, a crazy rebellion. He had an aura of savagery that she adored. She saw in him a man without inhibitions, a man with a sensitive, elevated soul. He was like a refined animal. But an animal with an ailment, albeit an intangible, obscure ailment. Widad wanted him at any price. She wanted to possess him even though she knew he was not available, for he never gave himself to anyone but himself. She watched his every move, his every gesture. She tried with all her might to claim him. She might desire him but she could never lay hold of him. His phantom haunted her everywhere: in the glass that she drank from, in the music that she played, in the fragments of broken marble and in the wood that fed the fire. When he played one of Bach’s famous pieces in the hall, she felt totally numb. His music was harmonious and highly polished. His performance of the long first movement of Bach’s opus was superb. He crowned the performance with a cadenza that was brilliant and exceptionally fluid, like a spring gushing out of the dryness of desert dunes. Kamal Medhat added lustre and richness to the arid desert. He burnt his fingers with a flame that glowed from the ashes of ovens.
Only with music could he grasp the balance of nature and return to the moment of creation.
When Kamal advanced smiling towards Widad, she started to stammer. It made him laugh out loud to see her confusion. He felt no pity or sympathy towards her. She, in contrast, pined for him. Every time she sat in front of him, she felt the pain of longing. She saw him falling prey to weariness without being able to offer him a helping hand.
Infatuated, she watched him as he moved around the living room of her house. She adored everything he touched, from the glass to the ashtray. He, on the other hand, never settled in one spot, moving quickly between the bookcase and the fireplace. When he sat down, he sat quietly as though it were a dictate of fate. His clothes had a special charm, for he always wore loosely around his neck, like a bohemian, a scarf as red as bull’s blood, gabardine trousers and a black coat that gave him the look of a monk. When leaving the house, he would kiss her on the cheek. The brush of his beard against her cheek excited her; for her this innocent kiss was erotically charged. One day, she decided to seduce him.
I don’t know when this actually happened, but it may have been some time before the second Gulf War, while Amjad was out of the country. One evening, Widad left the Al-Rabat Hall after giving a concert there in the company of Kamal. When she took hold of his hand, he shivered at the touch. She drove him to her house and tried to seduce him there. But Kamal was scared. She held his hand between her palms and sensed his agitation. He didn’t know what to do. But she enjoyed the state of turmoil he was in, for he was like a little sparrow fluttering and trembling in her hands. In a few minutes, his reluctance disappeared and his anxiety vanished. He felt elated to be loved and wanted.
After moments of silence, he leaned towards her and began kissing her with great passion.
Did Amjad Mustafa love Widad for her money? Widad was the pampered favourite of many men, including her late father, the senior presidential official, and her uncle, an Iraqi ambassador to Europe. This uncle was a middle-aged man with a fine nose and good posture thanks to diet, physical exercise and frequent massages. His tanned complexion came from sunbathing. She was also the favourite of her three brothers, who were all close to political circles in Baghdad. Before Amjad, Widad had been married to an army officer who’d been killed in the first months of the war. She married Amjad a year after the death of her first husband. But her only taste of true love was when she was studying music at the Academy of Fine Arts, with a man twenty years her senior. He was a womanizer who had sex with her in his apartment near the Academy.
Her story with Amjad was both simple and spontaneous. She met him while he was giving a lecture on Bach, and a relationship started. Through her, Amjad established contacts with Baghdad’s high society, which opened its arms to him in spite of his limited financial means. Some people even asked him to introduce them to Saddam Hussein himself. He’d become a famous musician at the National Symphony Orchestra. He harboured a passionate love for Widad, and although his attempts to court her and ask for her hand in marriage were initially unsuccessful, his persistence and resolve finally made her relent.
Such were Amjad’s feelings towards her. But where did Kamal place her within the tapestry of his own life? He was the old, impetuous hedonist, the saintly sinner and the opium keeper. He was Álvaro de Campos, who forced together the traits of all his various personalities. He turned music into a dynamic instrument that could fine-tune his mood and his principles. Wasn’t music, after all, the substitute for real opium? Where did he place Widad, then? Where did the tobacco keeper, who owned a whole warehouse full and not just a shop, place Widad? He was the adventurer who faced the entire universe using all the strategies at his disposal, who carried within his soul the essence of cities as diverse as Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus. He was a legend who, with his manic depression, turned music into a replacement for opium, and sex into a substitute for tobacco. If he failed to create a utopian identity, he overcame his shortcomings through women and music. All he wanted was a woman’s body and a tobacco shop.