Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  Thick Pissing Isaac wanted to find her now and inhale her breath. He wanted to close his eyes, lie in the dark, and listen to her speak of the past and the future. He wanted to smell her skin and cry at her breast and ask her—ask her until the doubts had faded and his friends' laughter had subsided, and he could believe. He wanted her now, but she was gone. Thick Pissing Isaac had betrayed her, he realized, and he would find no peace or happiness until he had calmed her rage.

  He went to call on Mama the Midwife, who had been assigned the task of caring for Esther's child. Isaac had heard stories about Noah—people filing into Mama the Midwife's house every day, asking to see the boy, leaving stunned and amazed only to return the next day, and the day after. He had never seen the boy before. He asked to see him now.

  "Why?” Mama the Midwife protested.

  "Bring him."

  Mama the Midwife went into the back room, and returned with Noah still wrapped in Esther the Soothsayer's chador. She pulled back the cover from Noah's face and watched Isaac go pale.

  Noah the Gold was a shining star. He had lustrous skin, golden hair, eyes the color of yellow agates. He had long limbs, strong features, a captivating smile. When they had first brought him to her on the day of his birth, Mama the Midwife had thought he was an angel. She had taken him up on her roof and left him there under a straw basket for God to take. For three days she had stood watch. Every time there was a wind or a change of the weather, she thought that Noah's soul had been whisked away. But when at last she lifted the basket, she found him still alive. She thought God had sent him to change her life.

  “Leave him to me," she now asked Thick Pissing Isaac. “Let me raise him."

  Thick Pissing Isaac was choked with anguish. He shook his head in refusal.

  "It will be my penance," he said, “to raise this child I have made motherless."

  And so Noah the Gold grew up in Isaac's home and learned to accept his pain. In the years that followed, he watched Isaac preoccupied only with his guilt—the vision of the world coming apart, of the house crumbling and the sky falling every time Esther the Soothsayer walked another step. He learned the story of his birth, the fate of his mother. He knew Esther; every night when he slept, she came walking into his eyes.

  "In the beginning, there was a dream," Esther the Soothsayer whispered to her son in the warmth of the light she had brought to his darkness. She took his hand and led him through a path glistening with sunlight—a long, warm tunnel of white—and at the end of it she stopped and painted a tale onto the sky.

  "Astyages, king of the Medes, dreamt that a vine grew out of his daughter's side and consumed Asia. He called his seers to interpret the dream.

  "'The gods are warning you,' his seers told the king. 'Your daughter will one day have a son who will drive you from the throne and conquer Asia.'

  "Astyages believed them.

  "He married his daughter off and sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom. She bore a son. Astyages stole the child and ordered him killed, but a servant saved the boy.

  He took the child into the mountains, and gave him to a shepherd to raise. The king's shepherd named the boy Cyrus.

  “Cyrus became a soldier, rebelled against Astyages, conquered Babylon. There he came upon a tribe of Jews—descendants of slaves brought by Nebuchadnezzar when he destroyed the Second Temple. Cyrus freed the Jews. He commanded the entire Persian tribe, became the founder of the Persian Empire.

  '"I am Cyrus,' he said, 'King of the World."'

  Noah the Gold was three years old when he first heard the story of Cyrus. He was tall and exuberant, filled with the smell of life, undaunted by fear or pain. He went out all day and played with the other boys, pursued them on the street and invited them with his eyes and his smile until their mothers tired of warning them against the bastard son of Esther the Soothsayer. He sat with Isaac's customers in the winery and engaged them in conversation until they forgot that Noah had been the cause of Isaac's downfall. He even went to temple—Yehuda the Just's temple—and after every Sabbath sermon, he stood in the courtyard until the rabbi came to drive him away: “That child is evil," Yehuda warned, but after a while the Jews stopped listening. Noah the Gold became the ghetto's adopted son.

  “The children of Cyrus had a God." Esther the Soothsayer brought with her a breath of light and laughter, a cool breeze of a flame that burned the night open and flooded his darkness with blue sky.

  “Ahura Mazda, God of Persians, fathered twin sons. He gave each the will to choose. The one, Ohrmazd, opted for light and life and benevolence. The other, Ahriman, chose death and darkness and evil. Ahura Mazda divided the world between his sons. Ohrmazd created the heavens and the earth. Ahriman created demons and death.

  " 'It is not,' Ahriman said to his father, 'that I am incapable of good. It is that I choose evil.'

  "To prove to the world his ability for greatness, Ahriman created the Peacock."

  In the teahouse, Thick Pissing Isaac became paralyzed with fear. His world had trembled for so long that after a few years he began to shake with it. His step became unsure and his hands were unsteady and he jumped and jolted so often he could barely hold a cup of tea for fear it would spill and burn him. Noah the Gold offered to work. He was six years old but capable, and though Thick Pissing Isaac had resented him all his life, he had no choice but to accept.

  "On the heels of the Great Emperor came the great invaders." Far in the distance, where Esther the Soothsayer had raised her arm, Noah the Gold saw the armies of Alexander the Greek march on Persia.

  "In Persepolis, the capital of Cyrus, Alexander married a Persian princess—Roxana—and took a thousand Persian wives for a thousand of his own soldiers. Soon after, one night he became drunk on the wine of Shiraz and burned Persepolis to ruin.

  "Behind him came the Turks, then the Muslims.

  "A man rose in the Arabian Peninsula, a prophet and warrior called Muhammad. He spoke of a new God, created a new empire."

  By the age of ten, Noah the Gold ran the teahouse alone. He supported himself and Thick Pissing Isaac, who did nothing now but tremble like a dog and whisper—for he had neither scream nor conviction left in him—"Earthquake. Earthquake. Earthquake."

  To stop the trembling, Isaac drank chamomile brew and cowslip tea, which calmed his nerves and made him sleepy, so that he walked around all the time in a daze, numb from sleep but still trembling like an old opium addict. Then slowly he began to smoke opium. It created a temporary state of calm, and allowed him to sleep without feeling that his bed was about to gape open and swallow him every few minutes. To keep the calm, he smoked larger doses, more frequently, until he became so dependent he refused to move from the side of the brazier where he heated and smoked the opium.

  "For seven hundred years the Arabs ruled Persia, governing through the caliphs in Baghdad.

  "Islam brought an age of enlightenment, a revival of the arts and sciences, a tolerance of other religions.

  "But in the fourteenth century, Ismael I became king of Persia, and declared his independence from the Arab Empire. The Arabs were mostly Sunni Muslims. To mark the break, Ismael I made Persia Shiite.

  "Shiism ruled through its mullahs—God's messengers who spoke to him directly, and conveyed his word to the believers.

  "The mullahs declared the followers of all other religions, even Sunni Muslims, impure and untouchable. The world, they said, should be ruled only by Shiite priests. Everyone else, most of all the Shahs, were usurpers of God's name and undeserving of their wealth and power."

  Thick Pissing Isaac could no longer feel the effects of opium. He resorted to smoking shireh—a much more potent creation that was made from the burned residue of opium, which he boiled into a paste and smoked. But after a few years, even the shireh failed him.

  "Call your mother," he begged Noah in the days before his death. "Tell her to forgive."

  Mullah Mirza was Juyy Bar's oldest and most feared doctor. He was called Mullah—really the title of Mu
slim priests, but which the Jews used to refer to anyone with special knowledge—and Mirza, which meant doctor, designating anyone who could read. He was small and bony, his thin face fringed with a stringy beard that grew down to his navel. Long ago it had been black, then gray, white, silver—until it had finally turned yellow and stayed that color. His eyebrows, thick and bushy and long, had refused to follow the pattern of the beard. They had stayed dark, creating a shocking contrast with the rest of his face. Underneath them his eyes were cunning and sharp, full of boundless greed and the ambition that had been the Mirza's driving force in life and that became more furious the closer he felt himself to the grave. He had three yellow teeth in his mouth—two on top and one on the bottom—rheumatism in his legs, and a bad twitch that made his head and neck jerk to the right whenever he got excited. His fingers, gnarled with age and yellow from the tobacco he smoked incessantly, were nevertheless strong and steady. He was always feeling the objects around him restlessly, as if driven by a compulsion to discover their secrets, or to possess them.

  People said that in his youth Mullah Mirza had set out to become a scientist. His father, a small-time doctor in Juyy Bar, had one day brought home an enormous volume written partly in Persian and partly in Arabic. He attributed the book to the great Persian scientist Zakarayah Razi.

  "In it," he had told his son, "beyond the reach of ordinary men, lies the secret of infinite wealth and everlasting power."

  Poet, philosopher, mathematician, and chemist at once, Razi had devoted his life to the pursuit of alchemy and in the process discovered alcohol instead. Never satisfied with his discovery, he had always felt himself one step away from the formula that would turn any ordinary metal into gold. He had died blinded and impoverished, leaving behind volume after volume made of deerskin, in which he had registered the results of his experiments.

  Mullah Mirza was fascinated by Razi's story. He had opened the book and run his hand over the symbols he could not decipher.

  “My God," he had whispered, “to possess all that gold."

  The next day he had announced that he was going to become literate in Persian and Arabic. His father had laughed.

  “Jews don't learn anything but Hebrew," he had said. "Arabic is the language of the Qoran. The mullahs say that if we study it, we will defile their holy book. Persian is the language of Persians. They say we are not Persians unless we become Muslim. If you want to learn how to read, you have to go to the Rabbi's Torah class."

  Mullah Mirza had no interest in the Torah. He wanted to discover Razi's secrets.

  "I want to be a scientist," he had declared, "become rich, respected, immortal."

  For a while he had entertained the idea of converting to Islam so he would be allowed to study Persian. Then he found a better way.

  He went to the Muslim scribe who sat on a broken stool outside the Shah's caravansary in Esfahan. In return for a small fee, the scribe wrote letters that people dictated to him. At the end of each day he collected his pay and went to Juyy Bar to buy wine.

  The Jews of Persia had a monopoly on the manufacturing of wine. Islam forbade its followers to drink alcoholic beverages. Muslims who could not resist the temptation of drunkenness, therefore, went to the ghetto to buy wine. The sin, they consoled themselves, lay with the person who manufactured the evil brew—not with the one who drank it. In times of hardship, the mullahs often called their people to cleanse the world of "winemaking infidels," and sent mobs to the ghetto to break into every home and burn every basement where Jews had stored wine.

  "I will bring you a jug of five-year-old wine every week if you teach me how to read,” Mullah Mirza offered the scribe.

  "I will never tell of our agreement. If anyone finds out I know how to read, I will accuse another scribe of having taught me. If you take my wine and then betray me, I will poison you.”

  The scribe did not refuse.

  Three years after he had first seen Razi's book, Mullah Mirza had learned to read Persian and Arabic. He moved out of his father's home, rented the basement of David the Butcher's shop on credit, and launched his career as a scientist.

  From that time on, Juyy Bar had watched Mullah Mirza become slowly consumed by his obsession. He locked himself forever in the basement, poring over steaming pots, studying Razi's book until he had learned every line by memory, repeating every failed experiment until he had run out of metals and fuel and acid. Then suddenly he would resurface again. David the Butcher would approach him and ask for his rent: Mullah Mirza had not paid a penny since the day he first occupied the basement.

  “Get away from me," he would attack David with unbeatable righteousness. "How dare you—how Dare you— speak of money when I am about to re-create the world!"

  For a while he would rummage through the antique shops of Esfahan in search of books by other alchemists. He intimidated shopkeepers and housewives into "donating" the ingredients he needed for his experiments, traveled to distant cities and villages where he had heard other scientists were engaged in similar pursuits. Then he rushed back to the basement—armed, he thought, with decisive knowledge—and started again.

  Over time his body began to exhibit signs of exhaustion. His hands became covered with warts and lesions and scars. The mud walls of his basement laboratory baked with the heat and were permeated with the smell of his potions, and the metal safe he had built became stuffed with tiny pieces of paper on which he furiously scribbled his findings. He guarded the safe jealously, always fearing that a rival scientist would try to steal his secrets, accusing people who could not read of spying on him while he wrote notes to himself. Once, when the roof of the basement crumbled under David the Butcher's feet, bringing him down with a pile of rubble into the laboratory, Mullah Mirza greeted him with a sharp skewer aimed at his eyes.

  "Thief!" he screamed. "I will drive this metal through your eyeballs and feed them to the dogs before I let you take my safe."

  From then on, Mullah Mirza slept with one hand chained to the safe.

  He was so engrossed in his quest for gold that he missed the time he should have married. He worked through his adolescence, his youth, his parents' death. He never paid the butcher any rent. He never bought himself a new pair of canvas shoes or a new shirt. People went to him for advice and medical treatment, trusting that he had access to cures unknown to ordinary doctors, intrigued by his extravagant ways, his grand designs, the confidence with which he pronounced himself "master of my environment, conqueror of earthly ills."

  The Mirza in turn had never disappointed an audience. He charged exorbitant sums and delivered exotic, spectacular cures designed more to display his knowledge than to relieve the patient of his suffering. When he made a house call, people in the neighborhood dropped what they had to do and came to watch the old master at work. He spent all his income on books and metal, and yet he was not content. In all the years of his suffering, Mullah Mirza knew, he had come no closer to creating gold than when he first started.

  As he grew older and more frustrated in his quest, Mullah Mirza's treatments became increasingly unorthodox. He no longer limited himself to harmless displays of extravagance—to curing diarrhea with bubbling potions that resuited in terminal constipation, or inserting a long metal rod through the patient's throat into his stomach so as to "rearrange his insides." Now he tested new formulas that he had conceived during torturous nights of experimentation, proposed cruel and unheard-of operations that had left at least three of his patients permanently handicapped, or simply gave himself to displays of such burning rage while treating a simple fracture that his hand became shaky, his mind fogged, and his patient temporarily frightened out of his pain.

  Still, though he would never accept it openly, Mullah Mirza realized that greatness and wealth would forever evade him.

  "It is not my mind that fails me," he raged in the loneliness of his laboratory late at night when he faced yet another unyielding formula, "it is my fortune. I am not blessed enough."

  At f
irst he prayed to God.

  "Give me a clue, a single hint," he would plead. "Show me one answer for everything that you have denied me."

  Then he cursed all that was holy, and declared war on the heavens and the earth.

  "I damn your pettiness," he screamed. "I spit on your stinginess. I curse your jealousy that keeps you from giving to me that which would make me greater than yourself."

  He noticed that people were avoiding him in favor of more ignorant but less threatening doctors. He was enraged—that anyone dared doubt his work or question his methods; that they would allow their fears and their ignorance to stand in the way of "science," and revert to old and useless ways of other doctors for fear of Mullah Mirza's progressive—and therefore, he admitted, risky—methods; that they would desert him now—now that he was on the brink of failure and about to lose hope.

  One morning he climbed upstairs into the butcher's shop and called David's customers to attention. He stood there in his long black robe and his torn canvas shoes—the customers staring at him—fixed his eyes on the bloody knife that David held in his hand, and made a simple announcement:

  “Let it be known that Mullah Mirza is the master physician of this damned ghetto," he said. "From now on anyone who seeks the advice of a doctor other than me will be cursed straight into his grave."

  No one said a word. Mullah Mirza had betrayed his weakness. He was desperate, at last aware of his limitations.

  Years went by, and Mullah Mirza did not recover from that moment in David the Butcher's shop. Slowly he abandoned his experiments and stopped reading his books. After a while he even found himself preoccupied with the same concerns as ordinary people. He suffered his rheumatism, his ulcers. His eyes failed him. He was lonely, disappointed, poor. He had believed he could make a miracle—he could not live with the truth of his failure. He was about to give up hope, when Thick Pissing Isaac died and Yehuda the Just sealed the teahouse shut; since Noah was not Isaac's child, the rabbi said, he could not inherit the property. Fifteen years old and alone, Noah the Gold went looking for work.