Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  One early morning in the summer of 1811, he knocked on Mullah Mirza's door and offered his services to the "Great Master." He had come to work, he said, in return for food.

  Mullah Mirza stared at the boy on his doorstep that day, and, like Mama the Midwife a decade and a half earlier, thought he had been sent an angel. He dragged Noah into the lab, put him before a pot of his most advanced formula, and gave him a piece of rusted metal.

  "Make gold," he commanded like God. "Turn the world into gold."

  In Mullah Mirza's laboratory the walls shone. The floor was paved with gold. The chests were stuffed, the ceiling was about to drop from the weight of the treasure that hung from it. Every day Mullah Mirza brought in new loads of tin and metal for Noah to make gold. Every day he laughed like a madman and embraced Noah in gratitude.

  "At last," he cried. "At last."

  Noah the Gold looked at the piles of junk about him and gasped at the Mirza's madness.

  "But it's just like before," he insisted in vain. Afraid that the Jews would come to steal his wealth, Mullah Mirza had put eleven locks on the basement door, and refused to let Noah out even for an hour. He wanted to keep the discovery a secret, to duplicate the formula, learn Noah's method.

  "You work for me," he warned Noah every day. "You make gold only for me."

  He bought out all the tinsmiths, emptied his neighbor's basements. He raided strangers' kitchens, fought the owners, took away cooking utensils and gardening tools. The Jews had never seen Mullah Mirza so excited. When he put the locks on the door, they wondered if he had come upon an important discovery. When he carted the metal home and threw away nothing, they gathered outside his laboratory and asked him about his experiments. Mullah Mirza fortified the door with more bars, and remained secretive. At some point, he realized with complete lucidity, he would have to kill Noah to safeguard the secret of the formula. Once or twice he even had the vision of forcing the boy into the pot of elixir, turning him—this radiant child of God's mercy— into a statue of gold that would preserve his beauty forever. But before he could do so, Mullah Mirza needed to take charge of the formula himself. One late afternoon he gathered all his courage and took Noah's place before the transforming liquid.

  "In the name of God . . ." he began.

  He was trembling—so moved by the greatness of the moment he could not stop the rush of tears, so pleased to have his dream realized that he dared not proceed until Noah urged him to.

  He immersed a steel dagger into the pot, held it for a moment, and pulled it out with a cry of glory that changed instantly into a wail of desperation.

  Something was wrong.

  Mullah Mirza attacked Noah with inhuman strength:

  “You changed the formula.”

  Noah the Gold swore innocence.

  "Try again," he pleaded with his master, but again the metal remained unchanged. He gave the dagger to Noah. This time it turned to gold.

  A thousand times that day, Mullah Mirza repeated the experiment. At dawn the next morning he was exhausted and insane, sobbing with disappointment and rage, begging Noah for the answer.

  "But there is no gold," Noah pleaded with him a last time. "There never was any gold."

  It was then, standing before the boy who had refused him his miracle, faced with the certainty of his life's failure and the mountain of junk metal he had believed was gold, the Mullah Mirza understood:

  "By God," he whispered. "I dreamt it all."

  And he laughed—so hard that his body bent forward until his beard touched his feet, so long that his face became streaked with tears, and he remained there, a small, crumpled figure devoid of all bitterness, no longer frightening, a tiny old man doubled over in the middle of the floor, laughing away at the absurdity of his life, at the years of seeking and the nights of prayer all in pursuit of the impossible, laughing with such innocence and such abandon that he even made Noah smile until his limbs were stiff and his breath shut down and he fell forward on his head, rolled over, and died.

  In the year 1801, Russia had claimed hegemony over the Persian province of Georgia. Four years later the Czar had annexed the provinces of Baku and Derbent. Contemplating resistance, Fath Ali Shah asked about the state of his army and discovered he had none: he had not paid his troops for years. Those who had not formally abandoned their posts were mostly opium addicts, or peasants who had never received military training. They had no uniforms, no weapons, no generals. In the arsenal at Tabriz—a strategically vital region because of its proximity to Russia—the Shah's emissaries found a few cannonballs, but even those did not fit the guns. They tried to buy lead locally, and discovered that the Shah had spent all the money in the national treasury. They asked His Majesty for money to acquire new weapons, but were refused. Fath Ali Shah would not waste his money fighting Russians over a few provinces, he said. If he had to retrieve the territories, he could easily scare the Czar into giving them back.

  He announced a formal audience, and summoned a thousand nobles to the Garden of the Marble Throne at the newly completed Palace of Roses.

  They came in resplendent garb, each gentleman surrounded by his own troupe of soldiers and guards and pages, their horses—tails painted red—clad in embroidered silks and golden bridles. Next to each nobleman walked his Guardian of the Bridles, who carried, folded neatly on his shoulder, the saddle's covering of embroidered purple and black. Two guards rode in front of the nobleman. A third and most trusted guard rode behind.

  Outside the Square of the Cannons before the Palace of Roses, royal pages in bright red uniforms with elaborate headgear awaited the guests. They led the gentlemen through the palace gates into a narrow strip of garden, under an elaborate archway, and into the Garden of the Marble Throne. The nobles began to whisper: the Terrace, usually cloistered by an immense curtain, was open to view. On it was a gigantic throne, carved of green marble, its legs life-sized statues of jinns and fairies.

  When all the nobles had assembled in the garden, Fath Ali Shah's favorite eunuchs stepped onto the Terrace. They were five, all white, dressed in long coats tight at the waist and with long, flared skirts. One eunuch stood beside each pillar of the throne. The fifth and most beautiful took his place in front. In his hands he held a jewel-studded cushion on which rested the Holy Sword.

  The royal page appeared.

  "Make way!" he cried.

  "His Imperial Majesty! The King of Kings! The Standard Bearer of Islam! The Shadow of Allah! The Shah of Persia!"

  Trumpets blew. Drums roared. Fath Ali Shah appeared, wearing his Robes of Wrath.

  He had on a long coat made of red velvet covered entirely with rubies. He wore a three-tiered crown of rubies, a ruby-studded dagger, shoes embroidered with rubies, necklaces and rings and bracelets of rubies.

  In the Garden of the Terrace of the Marble Throne, the nobles trembled: Fath Ali Shah wore his Robes of Wrath only to pronounce a sentence of death upon an esteemed enemy. In these robes, and on this same throne, he had ordered the blinding and execution of his own brother. Another time he had watched his Prime Minister boiled alive in a pot of oil.

  He climbed the three steps, then reclined on the Marble Throne.

  "The ill-omened Russians," he spoke, "have violated the sacred soil of Our country. We have no doubt that our unequalled army at Sari is capable of destroying the fiercest of the Czar's troops. But what would happen, do you imagine, if We were to send Our household cavalry to attack them?"

  The household cavalry, everyone knew, merely performed the task of protecting the person of the Shah. It would be destroyed in a matter of hours by the Czar's soldiers. Still, to please His Majesty, the nobles cried and groveled at the woes the cavalry would bring upon the Russians.

  "May I be Thy sacrifice," one man said, stepping forth. "Your cavalry would drive the invaders back to Moscow!"

  The Shah agreed.

  "And what if," he went further, "We were to go to the front Ourself?"

  It was too much to imagine—th
e torture Fath Ali Shah could personally inflict upon the Czar.

  "So it is settled," he concluded, already pleased with his triumph. "Spread the word and let the Russians be forewarned!"

  The war in Azerbaijan lasted thirteen years and ended in defeat. The Czar had not been shaken by Fath Ali Shah's wrath. The Persian army never did manage a real fight. What resistance the Czar faced came from patriotic men and women who fought without conventional weapons, and refused to accept Russian hegemony. But at last, in 1813, Fath Ali Shah conceded to the Czar the provinces already under occupation. To further appease his neighbor, he also agreed to pay to Russia enormous sums by way of reparations. Across Persia, everyone mourned. Mullahs and clergymen called the Shah a traitor and asked for his throne. They said he was weak and corrupt, that he had squandered Persia's wealth and fallen before the strength of infidels. Trembling in his throne, afraid that the mullahs would call Jihad—holy war—against the Crown, Fath Ali Shah called once again for the Jewish soothsayer from Esfahan, and this time she answered.

  She appeared one day at the Square of the Cannons, standing by the side of the famous Pearl Cannon where thieves and murderers took refuge from the law, where old maids sat until Fate sent them a man, and lovers chained themselves together in the hope of achieving eternal union. Through the mist of opium and arrack that permanently clouded their visions, members of the Shah's household cavalry saw Esther approach, and immediately recognized the soothsayer in Fath Ali Shah's dreams. She was bald and unveiled, her skin was the color of oil, the air around her smelling of long distances and unknown ways.

  “Allahuo Akbar!" the soldiers fell to their knees. They were certain Esther was a ghost. "Allahuo Akbar! God is great.”

  They took her into the palace, and sent for the Chief Eunuch. He rushed to Esther with a hundred other eunuchs, avoiding her eyes to guard against her evil, and took her into the Hall of Mirrors: the walls and the ceiling here were composed of a mosaic of small mirrors reflecting the light that poured in from arched portals around the room. Mirrors, everyone knew, protected against demons.

  The Chief Eunuch went to call the Shah. All the way from the Hall of Mirrors to the Royal Quarters, he prayed aloud for his own life: Fath Ali Shah was ruthless to those who interrupted his sleep. The night before, he had spent furious hours trying to gain access to his own harem. He had wanted to sleep with his newest acquisition—a woman called Miriam, who was suspected widely of being a Jew. Early in the day, the Shah had sent the Chief Eunuch to prepare the girl for his arrival. Miriam had bathed in goat's milk and rubbed herself with rosewater, lined her eyes with antimony, and reddened her cheeks with a paste made by crushing the dried insect called shan-djarf. She had waited for the Shah in a bed of roses and chiffon, but the moment His Majesty had tried to touch her someone in the next room had sneezed.

  The Shah left immediately. A sneeze, everyone knew, was a sign from God to refrain from the act one was about to engage in. Back in his quarters, Fath Ali Shah had waited an hour, entered the harem again, and again heard a sneeze.

  He waited another hour. There was another sneeze. The

  Shah realized then that one of his wives must have hired a “professional sneezer"—a woman disguised as a harem maid and hired by a jealous wife to keep His Majesty from sleeping with new virgins. The punishment for a false sneeze, everyone knew, was death. Fath Ali Shah ordered the execution of all the maids, and divorced all the wives in rooms within ear's reach of Miriam's. But he did not dare defy the sneeze: he resolved to wait another hour, in the course of which he fell asleep without ever having satisfied himself with Miriam.

  Outside His Majesty's chambers, three soldiers greeted the Chief Eunuch. He went through the eunuchs' room, into a first bedroom where the commander of the palace guards slept every night in uniform, a naked sword by his side. From there he entered Fath Ali Shah's bedroom.

  “May I be thy sacrifice," he said, trying to awaken His Majesty, who did not respond. The Chief Eunuch bit his lip and summoned courage.

  "May I be thy sacrifice," he said again. "It seems the demon of your fate has come to call."

  Fath Ali Shah turned as white as the pillow he rested on. He remained motionless, his eyes still closed, then sat up and gripped the sheets under him. In another time he would have rejoiced at Esther's arrival. Now, with the Czar at his doorstep and the mullahs calling for his ouster, the Shah feared Esther had come to predict his downfall. He looked up at the eunuch, who saw his wrath and fell immediately to his knees.

  "Forgive me, Your Majesty. It was my misfortune to carry the news to you. If you grant me permission, I will have the woman flogged, cut up, and thrown to your most voracious dogs."

  Fath Ali Shah descended the bed. His hands trembled visibly. He motioned for his dressers to approach.

  "Keep her under guard," he told the eunuch. "Give Us time to prepare for her."

  An hour after noon, the King of Kings arrived at the Hall of Mirrors. He wore a long tiara of three elevations, composed entirely of oversized diamonds. He had on a long jacket made of gold tissue covered with diamonds and decorated with two strings of pearls, each larger than a walnut, that crossed the shoulders. His belt and bracelet were composed of rows of diamonds. His dagger's hilt was covered with diamonds. He summoned the soothsayer, and the moment she turned to face him, he knew by the strength of her eyes that she was indeed a ghost.

  "Speak!" he commanded, and all the eunuchs guarding Esther ran to hide. If he was not pleased with her prediction, they knew, Fath Ali Shah would order torturous death for all those who had heard her prophecy.

  "Tell Us Our fate."

  Esther the Soothsayer smiled at the Shah with blackened lips, and spoke to him with the voice of an angel:

  "You will die old," she said, "at peace in your throne, twenty years and a thousand children from today."

  Esther the Soothsayer slept, and out of her dreams carved a woman, a creature of light like Noah, with a strange beauty and the voice of a muse. She gave the woman to Noah, her last gift, and then left him, sinking so deep into the world of hallucinations that nothing of her remained with him but a fading voice and dreams full of sunsets. Without her, Noah was lost. His days and nights blended into one until sleep and waking were indistinguishable, and dreams cast shadows on the walls.

  He had buried Mullah Mirza, but never overcome his legacy. For years after the Mirza's death, everyone in Juyy Bar had come to Noah, demanding the truth about the gold. What was it, they asked, that had so driven Mullah Mirza

  to ecstasy? Had he found the formula? Had he shared his secret with Noah?

  Even Yehuda the Just came to call.

  "I am the keeper of all souls," he told Noah. "I must know all secrets."

  To convince Noah of his good intentions and gain his trust, Yehuda the Just had even unsealed the teahouse and allowed the boy back into Thick Pissing Isaac's home. Still, every time he inquired about the elixir, Noah the Gold shook his head in denial.

  He opened the teahouse again and tried to gather back his old customers. They came only to ask about the elixir. When he disappointed them, they denied him their friendship.

  Twenty years passed after the death of Mullah Mirza. In Juyy Bar, Noah the Gold ached from loneliness and remained poor. One night in the spring of 1831, he called Esther the Soothsayer:

  "I must have a wife," he told her. "I must guard against the demon of time."

  In 1831 a Muslim child had disappeared in Tabriz. His parents had looked for him in vain, and concluded that he had been stolen by gypsies, or eaten by wolves. Then a young man from the bazaar had brought news.

  "Shokr-Allah the Jew murdered your son," he had told the boy's parents.

  "He stole the child and took him home to draw his blood for Passover. His corpse is still in Shokr-Allah's basement."

  The parents had gone to the Jews' ghetto and searched Shokr-Allah's house. In the basement they had found their son's body—already half-decomposed.

  Shokr-A
llah the Jew swore innocence. He had never seen the body until the boy's parents had discovered it. He only drank wine on Passover. The young man who had accused him owed him money, and he must have wished to avoid paying his debt by having the mullahs kill Shokr-Allah.

  No one believed him. The mullahs ordered punishment not only for Shokr-Allah, but for all of his people: all Jews were held responsible for the crimes of one. The mullahs ordered a massacre.

  This time, they said, they would not offer Jews the choice to convert to Islam and escape death. This time they sought revenge—the blood of Jewish children in return for that of the Muslim boy, the pain of their parents in payment for the grief Shokr-Allah had caused the Muslims. They sent a mob to the ghetto to gather all the Jewish children. In the main square they planted a hundred daggers into the earth, blades upward, and threw the children onto them to skewer their bodies like beasts. Then they slaughtered the older people. Those who had hidden in their basements were locked in and their houses were set on fire. Those who wore gold around their wrists and necks had it carved out of their bodies. Those who begged for mercy had their tongues cut off. For days the mob returned, searching every house and every temple, looting the shops, beating the men, raping the women.

  In Qamar's house, the mob had killed everyone else. She threw herself on the ground and feigned death. Twice the mob came back to search the house for survivors. Qamar pulled her sister's corpse over herself and held her breath until they were gone. One night, when she thought the pogrom had ended, she escaped. In the streets, corpses lay frozen in the winter air. In the main square, the last of the surviving children died in the field of daggers. In the gutters, rainwater would forever run the color of blood. Never again in the history of Persia would even a single Jew live among the people of Tabriz.