It was difficult for him to convince her. So he said nothing and returned to his violin.
During the subsequent days all the secrets were revealed. He glimpsed a white man and the flash of a black weapon shining before it fell. He saw another statue incline to the right and topple after being pulled from its base. He saw a woman soldier on top of an armoured car aim her rifle and shoot. Men continued running towards a sleepy-looking black American soldier who stood knee-deep in the brown mud and talked, with a cigarette in one hand and a rifle in the other. The sounds reached him through the window before they became inaudible. The soldier’s lips moved continuously while, above the hard collar of his coat, his head appeared slightly larger than a fist. All along the wall, civilians stood near the military gear thrown on the ground. He pointed to the alley and they all dispersed, as fires blazed ferociously in the city. Near the pavement a Marines officer stopped and leaned against the fence. He looked solid in his military uniform. His hair was dusty and a rifle was slung from his neck. Near him lay an Iraqi soldier with a black hole in his temple.
The woman soldier screamed at the people standing on the pavement to go inside. The voice was amplified through a loudspeaker. The sound of bullets rang from afar and the bombs fell on the buildings. Khaki military vehicles roamed the streets of Baghdad with their monstrous noise. Something inside him crumbled and he shuddered.
He sat in his usual place, as he did every day, watching the transformations of the trees and the flowers. The lotus tree stood with its rough, moss-covered bark, its curved trunk and its branches extending beyond the garden fence. The ends of the longer branches sagged low under their weight. He turned up the music on the record player. He heard the distant and enthusiastic voice of a newscaster. The man was not discouraged by the scenes of death everywhere or by the prevailing fear, confusion or screams. He wasn’t worried by the horrific explosions, the raging trench warfare, the kidnappings or the medieval-style slaughter. Human beings were being butchered while others had their limbs and guts scattered all over the place. And after the tens of thousands had been killed, silence descended, complete and disturbing. Nothing remained except the cold stare at the sight of violence on the screen, ambulances carrying corpses covered with congealed blood and the gathering up of limbs in tattered, dirty blankets to be dumped in pickup trucks.
Clothing was neglected; conversation was snatched; talk was small and brief. Words came out badly and failed: the repetition of wretched, superficial thoughts. Statements of generalities that had no meaning, intended to convey nothing.
The return of the sons
The most important chapter of Kamal’s life in those days was the return of his three sons at the same time after the US invasion. Meir came back with the US forces, bearing ideas of democracy and change; Hussein returned from Tehran with the Islamic Shia movement, feeling happy to be back after a forced exile; Omar came from Egypt, bearing measureless anger and spite at the Sunni’s loss of power.
Hussein arrived at his father’s house with the help of the address given to him by Kakeh Hameh. He went into the hall and stood in front of his father, who was taken by complete surprise. His son’s black hair was parted on the side and a lock of hair fell onto his forehead. He had a thick, black beard and wore black-rimmed glasses, a wide jacket, loose trousers and a white shirt without a tie, which he buttoned at the collar: the typical look of one from the metropolis of contemporary Shia culture.
Quiet and reserved, he sat on the chair, his voice faint and his smile tepid. He was an alternative image of the seventies’ communist, who’d vanished completely from Iraqi culture. He spoke quietly about his life, marriage and arrival in Iraq. He wasn’t just narrating his personal story, he was trying to create an identity out of his own tragedy, an identity that found its true significance in tragedy.
Kamal Medhat encountered the same attitude in Omar. Coming from Egypt, Omar wanted to embody the old, nationalist intellectual, with his thick moustache that drooped to hide his mouth, his back-combed black hair, his plump cheeks and his harsh gaze. He represented the Arab image of tyrannical, patriotic masculinity. Now, however, it was mixed with the image of the Sunni man who wished to write the history of his identity by recalling the tragedy of the Sunni’s ousting from power.
Hussein sat quietly talking history to his father. He believed that Shiite philosophy was a philosophy of history: historical determinism. This was because prophetic revelation had come to an end with the Seal of the Prophets. But history had yet to be sealed. He told his father that the Prophet’s role was to communicate God’s revealed Word and to establish the ummah, community of Muslim believers. But the task came to an end with the end of prophecy.
The devout language, the beard and the black glasses concealed the son from the father. The son talked of a religion that ruled and a religion for the ruled. He was convinced that Western civilization was like sunstroke for Muslims. Western culture meant forgetting existence altogether, while the return to Islam was a return to consciousness and existence. Islam was the amalgam of past and present, which would help establish a just society in future. The awaited, promised Imam was the saviour and the reformer. He was both the aim and the result. We had to achieve the revolution, he argued, in order to overturn the society of Cain.
As Hussein spoke, he evoked in his father’s mind Amjad Mustafa’s old patriotic convictions, now reclothed in religious garb. The country was always faced with a dialectic that led it to the precipice, for the contradictions of reality were very different from the acrobatics of ideology. The son expressed the ideas of Mohammad al-Sadr and Ali Shariati, while the father sat gaping, too stunned to say anything. He felt the same about his son Omar, who wished to construct a new identity from the contradictions of his brother’s. Meir also came to talk to his father of the democratic project that would connect the country with the West. The future would see Iraq turn into a Middle Eastern paradise, like Japan in Asia or Germany in Europe. It was a dream image, designed and fabricated at the best Western think-tanks.
But the father, the tobacco keeper, Kamal Medhat, alone was the true representative of the outsider, the marginalized and the exile, opposing all forms of power and rejecting all ideologies. He was the true image of the tobacco keeper.
Kamal Medhat remembered Pessoa’s poem. His three sons were also the three characters of the poem. Meir was born of the character of Yousef Sami Saleh, the keeper of flocks in Tobacco Shop; Hussein was the offspring of Haidar Salman, the protected man; Omar came from Kamal Medhat, the tobacco keeper. They were his three names and his three cases of impersonation. Each of their faces corresponded to one of his assumed identities. He realized that each one of them was a faithful reflection of his own ego. Through their characters he discovered the essential answer to the problem of identity. Each one of them was a facet of his personality, a single entity that was split and multiple at the same time. They were a three-dimensional Cubist painting of a single face.