During this period, he became acquainted with an unusual Assyrian Christian woman from Basra called Janet. She was a novice pianist who, after the war, turned to prostitution. She worked at a brothel for young prostitutes in Al-Elweya neighbourhood. She then became a fixture in musical circles. Kamal Medhat got to know her after a concert he gave at the Al-Rabat Hall, where the National Symphony Orchestra played almost every Thursday. It might have been Widad who introduced him to Janet, who was her colleague at the Academy. Janet began to invite Kamal to go out with her. Widad had no idea that Kamal Medhat would like or desire Janet, for she was very thin, malnourished and hysterical. In addition to other undesirable qualities, she was also an alcoholic.
One day, Janet invited the playboy musician with his impressive height and his good looks to her apartment. Having got drunk, she broke the furniture and smashed the windows. She went out of the front door and began to scream so hard that people gathered around. So Kamal Medhat carried her, by force to begin with, back to her apartment. She kept screaming and struggling for a whole hour, after which he took her to hospital. The incident brought their affair out into the open, and aroused Widad’s jealousy immensely.
Widad felt murderously jealous of Janet.
‘How could that wretch, that cockroach, take Kamal?’
In a moment of weakness, Widad approached Nadia al-Amiry and told her of Kamal Medhat’s affair with Janet. Nadia was upset and extremely sad at the news. Although she suffered many sleepless nights as a result of the affair, she didn’t talk to Kamal directly about it. Instead, she called Janet to her house, took out her chequebook and asked: ‘How much, to leave Kamal?’
Kamal Medhat felt that Nadia al-Amiry’s love for him was excessive and extreme. It was a sick and unnatural kind of love, tainted by the enjoyment of pain, something akin to the delight of saints in suffering. She knew that he was unfaithful to her. But his marital infidelities became for her a kind of sacred rite of purification. He was like a spoilt child, so his infidelities were always forgiven.
Janet, on the other hand, was obsessed with sex. She started her life as a lesbian, but was converted at the hands of a male lover who then abandoned her. She then fell into the arms of Kamal Medhat. One day, Widad slapped him in the face and told him that she was the one who’d introduced Janet to him. She wasn’t his pimp, she screamed at him.
For Kamal Medhat, Janet embodied all human contradictions. She was like one of the sacred prostitutes of the Al-Torah whom he’d desired so much while reading the Holy Book in the company of Gladys. She reminded him of all the sacred harlots whose erotic sighs he’d heard coming out of the yellowed pages of the Al-Torah. She was an angel and a vampire at one and the same time. A politician had fallen in love with pale, anaemic Janet just because she was damaged. He couldn’t put her out of his mind, and sent a warning to Kamal Medhat, who had stolen her mind and stopped her thinking of him.
Janet was a true legend. In spite of her ugliness, she managed to attract a huge number of men with her lewd and whoring attitude. One day, after Kamal had left his house, he was astounded to see the car of Janet’s lover intercepting his vehicle on the bridge. A sixty-year-old man got out. He had grey hair that was dyed pitch-black, making his head look like fleece. He took a picture out of his pocket. ‘Do you know this person?’ he panted, his eyes sparkling.
Kamal Medhat was silent for a moment and nodded. He realized that the man was hopelessly in love with Janet, for he held the picture with all the tenderness that a mother would show towards her child, even though she knew how ugly it was.
Janet was obsessed with sex. She did many evil things in her life, but men loved her because she opened her legs like an animal and allowed them to do as they pleased, which respectable women never did.
Kamal Medhat wrote to Farida: ‘At times of war, animal instincts are always on the rise. Sex becomes the antonym of death, and not of love. Nobody really thinks about this, but there are forms of sex that reach the height of perversity and irrationality: lesbianism, infidelity, sado-masochism and all types of tenderness and cruelty rolled together. Such is war. It means the sheer insanity of extremists, fools and hysterics. It means people suffering from hallucinations, paranoia, waking dreams and bouts of depression, despair and crying. It is a hunger for blood and a thirst for filth.’
During a hunting trip to Diyala, Janet insisted on coming, along with Widad, Amjad, Kamal and Nadia al-Amiry. As Janet was standing among the palm trees, she was shot in the chest and fell dead, drenched in blood. An hour later, the police arrested a farmer with a gun in the vicinity. Everybody believed that her politician lover had arranged for one of his guards to kill her.
During this period, Kamal Medhat acquired a reputation for loose and dissolute living that paid no attention to custom or form. He regarded Nadia only as a ceremonial wife and had numerous mistresses. He became a walking, talking sex legend, loved by women for his looks, his music, his complex personality and his fretfulness.
He wrote to Farida: ‘Nadia forgives me everything I do. My lapses are naturally quite bad in some respects but they are also fairly simple. I can’t say that I haven’t hurt her, but my relationships with women make me love life more. It’s not something I can get away from. I often think of her and I’m overwhelmed with dread. One word could be the end of me.’
Did he fear her? Was he scared that she might betray him to the authorities? She, after all, was the only one who knew the truth about him. And then, what was the story of his nightmares? Kamal Medhat would often wake up screaming. Two or three times a week he was seized by nightmares. They came randomly: at midnight, at one in the morning or sometimes at five in the morning.
He tossed and turned in bed, then gave a loud scream. It was a sharp, high-pitched noise like the croaking of a man dying a violent death or one committing suicide by jumping off a building. It was the scream of a man hit by a speeding car. The whole house shook with the sound of his screams. Nadia would wake up and sit by his side. Every muscle of his body pulsed and his heartbeat thumped like a drum. He trembled all over and his voice rose high. His hands were cupped on his face. After the screaming had suddenly subsided, he opened his eyes and looked at Nadia with his eyes flashing. He then fell into a mysterious silence and lay back quietly on his pillow. She held onto him to make sure that he was still breathing and that his heart was pulsing with life.
He once wrote in one of his letters to Farida: ‘How long can a man continue to be afraid? How old should a man be before he eliminates his fears? Here I am at fifty, and until now I’m as scared as I was at ten, or even twenty. How old should I be to be able to sleep without nightmares, tears or fear?’
If this was Kamal Medhat, what was Nadia al-Amiry like?
Nadia al-Amiry was a sick woman who lived a contradiction. On the one hand, there were those who admired and revered her on account of her beauty (or on account of their personal weaknesses), and on the other hand, there were others who did not fall under her spell and felt nothing but contempt for her.