by Gina nahai
"I have held her for too long,” she pleaded with God. "She belongs to me.”
For a week she sat up, nursing the infant. On the eighth day she fell asleep and dreamt of Death. She woke up and went to the mouth of the cave; it was light in the desert. Esther the Soothsayer was walking toward her.
Esther the Soothsayer arrived in the light of early morning. She walked through the desert like a vision in the sun, a woman with the feet of a mare, and appeared in Juyy Bar one step behind the Plague.
"It is Death," Leyla whispered to Hannah when she saw Esther. "She has come to take the baby from me."
She prayed that Esther would not stop by her door, that she would go on, claim another child from her mother. Her eyes were fixed on the wooden hatch at the top of the stairs, and she listened.
Esther the Soothsayer came closer, closer. She stopped by the cave. Leyla could hear the desert come alive around her, the air move with her breath. She could see the contours of Esther's body—shadowless and pale, like pieces of a dream seeping through the cracks in the hatch. Suddenly, Esther flung the door open.
"I have come to name your child."
She stood shimmering in the gray light of dawn. Her voice, soft and distant, was like the aching memory of a pain long forgotten. Leyla saw her and pressed her child closer to her chest.
It must be a vision, she thought, come to haunt me so I will lose track of time and let Death creep in.
Esther the Soothsayer was staring at the child. Behind her the sky had become silver blue, and the air trembled with the sound of the morning prayer rising from the minarets of Esfahan.
“Leave us," Leyla told her. She could feel the fever raging higher in her child's body. She could see life fluttering in her hands.
Esther the Soothsayer laughed, and the sand around her moved in waves—the desert an ocean of blue light. She reached into the cave—her hands like the branches of an ancient tree—and took the child.
"In the dawn of time there shall be a passage," she said. "A light shall beam through this child's eyes, and she shall see through it into the world of counterparts where every infant is old, and every commencement has ended."
In Esther's hand the infant was calm, as if suddenly rid of the fever.
"A man shall come, riding from the north, with blood on his hands and the anger of God in his eyes.
"He shall sit on the Throne of the Sun, and with a sweep of his hand he shall reach across this empire to free our people.
"His son shall call himself the King of Kings, heir to the Empire of Cyrus. He shall raise this child from the ashes and give her pride.
"But beware! For the King of Kings shall fall, and his throne shall crumble, and the men of God shall paint the skies of this nation with blood."
She held the child up, against the light, and gave her a name:
"Peacock."
Taratteh the Tulip performed the local dances of twenty-two Persian tribes. She was a master at the santour, learned music by ear, wrote her own songs. She worked with two men—a tar player and a don-baki. They entertained at weddings and circumcisions, on new year's day and on the night of the feast of Yalda. Always at the end of the show, Taraneh the Tulip painted her face, donned a costume, and acted in a one-woman play.
She had been born in Shiraz, a rabbi's daughter, and she never knew what she looked liked until she was married. Her father did not allow mirrors in the house: a woman who saw her own reflection, he believed, might become vain, admire beauty, contemplate sin. Taraneh the Tulip had only imagined the shape of her body by staring at her older sister when she undressed. Her sister was twenty years old, but unmarried. She lived in a separate room, never ate with her family, never—never—spoke with her father.
“Your sister has sinned," their mother told Taraneh every time she questioned her sister's predicament. Her mother would not explain any more. Taraneh the Tulip always wondered if her sister's beauty had caused her to sin. She wondered if she, too, was beautiful. Once, when she was six years old, she sat in the winter sun and tried to find her likeness in a block of melting ice. The rabbi caught her. To teach her obedience, he shaved her head.
Taraneh the Tulip locked herself in the basement of their house and swore never to leave. She thought she would remain bald forever, sobbed against the wall and repented from sin. But as her hair began to grow and the memory of her punishment faded, she gave in to childish curiosity, and began to explore the basement for the first time. She dug through the junk stored around her, and imagined a purpose for everything she found. She discovered her mother's wedding dress, her father's first prayer shawl. She found the Torah where her great-grandfather had written all of his children's birthdays, the “tear jar" into which her grandmother had wept upon the passing of her husband. At the bottom of the pile, hidden in an alcove in the wall, Taraneh the Tulip found a dowry chest.
"Don't touch that," her mother screamed when she found Taraneh at the chest. She had brought Taraneh's dinner. She threw the food on the ground, hoisted her daughter away from the chest, and shoved the chest back with her foot. Her eyes were terrified.
"This damned thing is jinxed."
Afterward, Taraneh the Tulip heard her mother whispering the tale to another woman, sobbing into her chador as she spoke, interrupting herself every time Taraneh approached. There had been a wedding. The next morning the groom's mother had come to inspect the dowry. She had opened the chest, then immediately awakened the bride and sent her home to her father.
“It was the chest," Taraneh's mother insisted. “The chest is jinxed."
Taraneh the Tulip suddenly realized that the bride in the tale was her own sister.
For ten days in the month of her penance, Taraneh the Tulip fought to conquer her curiosity. She paced the basement from morning to night—her arms crossed as if to avoid sin—and stared at the chest that had released evil into her sister's life. Then at last she resigned herself to hell, forced the lock, and searched through the dowry: there was a pair of silver candlesticks, a few embroidered sheets, a tablecloth. There was a comforter, a small rug. Buried deep in the shroud, wrapped in canvas and rope, Taraneh the Tulip found a santour.
She put the santour on the ground before her, picked up the pair of thin metal sticks used to play the strings, held them each between her thumb and forefinger, and took them to the instrument. She heard the santour sigh, and knew she was lost.
She played secretly for ten years—in her father's house, where her sister taught her, then in her husband's. She married another rabbi—her father's brother—and as she hid the santour in her dowry chest, Taraneh the Tulip realized she was inviting doom. Two years later, her husband discovered the santour. Before he could send her back to her father's home, where she would suffer a fate equal to that of her sister, Taraneh the Tulip ran away from Shiraz and never returned.
She traveled across Persia, chased from one ghetto and into another, and in every place she learned the people's music and dances. When she arrived in Juyy Bar she was twenty-six years old and resolved to stay. The first time Raab Yahya attacked her at his Sabbath sermon, warning the people against "the stranger with the wicked instrument," Taraneh the Tulip realized she must fight. That night she appeared in the ghetto square, dressed in a scarlet gown, her hands and face painted crimson, her hair glowing red. She waited for an audience to gather, took a bow, and then began to dance—a slow, graceful performance that lasted twelve minutes, and in the course of which she managed to re-create a tulip's life from inception to end. No one ever called Taraneh "whore" again.
So she stayed and, to earn extra income, worked as a matchmaker, a cook, a maid. She adopted a child—Salman the Coal Seller—who had been orphaned at the age of three, and had no relatives to raise him. After a while she was invited to play in Esfahan. In 1869 she was called to perform at the wedding of the governor's son to the daughter of Esfahan's Friday Imam. Taraneh the Tulip spoiled the wedding and stole the groom.
It was an unprecedented e
vent, the greatest wedding in a hundred years, and every person of rank and reputation was invited. The groom was twenty years old, educated in Baghdad, and so rich he had waived his right to a dowry. The bride's family were so eager to form the union, they had insisted on a wedding only two weeks after the courtship had begun. The night of the celebrations, they were outraged to find a Jew among the performers. Still, not wishing to spoil the festivities, they had allowed Taraneh to make her appearance. Halfway through her Tulip act, the governor's son annulled the wedding. He had fallen in love, he said, with the Jew in the scarlet gown.
For a year, Esfahan roared in calumny. Then at last Taraneh the Tulip married the governor's son, left Juyy Bar, and went to live in a house with rooms full of music.
When he first returned to Esfahan, Muhammad the Jew built himself a house on Char Bagh Street and hired servants and maids and gardeners. He rented five connecting shops in the Shah's bazaar and filled them with antiques and Persian carpets and silverwork. Dressed in silks and velvet, he rode around town on an Arabian horse, and wore a long top hat embroidered with gold threads and a ruby so stunning that people stopped on the street to stare at him long after he had stormed by.
He had come from nowhere—a stranger with a legendary fortune, with a face as beautiful as a dream, and eyes so bitter few were those who dared engage them. He traveled alone most of the year, traded in antiques and rugs and precious stones. And he lived alone, surrounded by the tall brick walls of his house and the ancient trees that shielded it from sunlight. He never received anyone, never spoke with his neighbors in the bazaar. At night, the maids swore, he never slept.
They heard him pace up and down his room from dark until dawn, looking out the window into the garden that was filled with shadows and the spirits of the evil dead, falling asleep at last with the morning breeze on his face, only to awaken in the twilight to the sound of peddlers screaming their trade. During the day he was watchful and alert and suspicious, always ready to question a servant or an employee about his intentions on any one matter, forever about to engage in an argument with clients or neighbors or even visitors. Muhammad the Jew, everyone said, was a man on the run.
In 1871, Muhammad the Jew traveled to Kurdistan to meet with a tribal chief—Firooz Khan—who had sent for him a year earlier, asking for jewels. Muhammad the Jew rode through bare mountains scorched by the unrelenting sun, across steep valleys strewn with dust and carved with the beds of dried streams and waterways. He found a desolate plain spotted with the black tents of the nomads, made his way through thirsty flocks of sheep and camels searching vainly for a grassy patch. Around the campground, dogs barked at him and blocked his way. A young woman sat unveiled by her tent, weaving a canvas rug as her father slept close by. Kurdish women did not wear chadors. She saw Muhammad the Jew and understood he was the guest her chief had been expecting. She called the dogs away.
Firooz Khan received Muhammad with disappointment. He had wanted to buy jewels, he said, but only weeks before, locusts had ravaged the plain where the tribe camped every year, and now the Khan's cattle were starving in the heat. He had no cash for the stones, no cattle to offer in exchange.
Muhammad the Jew dined with the chief, then went into his own tent to sleep. After midnight he stepped out, compelled as always by a sense of danger, and walked to a clearing behind the campgrounds. He saw a girl with dark skin and black hair, riding naked on a horse. She galloped up and down the foot of the mountain, her horse panting, her own skin covered with moisture. A long time later she felt Muhammad's glare, turned around and saw him, then rode off. Muhammad the Jew recognized the girl who had greeted him that morning.
"Give me her," he asked Firooz Khan the next day. "She will be payment enough for all the jewels you want."
Her name was Afagh. She was fourteen years old and filled with such kindness she charmed even the most hostile of her enemies. Muhammad the Jew loved her so much, people said, that he became kind and accepting and even friendly toward the world. He hired seven maids to serve Afagh, decorated her bedroom with silk curtains and pearl-studded cushions, planted a garden of jasmine on the balcony outside her window. He brought her French perfume smuggled into Bandar 'Abbas aboard European ships, paid artists from Tehran to come and draw her portrait. He threw feasts and invited all the dignitaries in Esfahan, served them wine in golden cups and lamb on jewel-studded plates, then sat back and watched them admire the girl he had found in the mountains of Kurdistan.
Then she became pregnant.
Muhammad the Jew went pale at the news, and begged Afagh to kill the fetus.
"I want no heirs,” he pleaded with her. "I want no trace of me left behind.”
For months they fought. In the end she bore a son. Muhammad the Jew saw the boy and damned him publicly.
Afagh asked that he name his child. He chose the name Ezraeel—Angel of Death—and never touched the boy in his life.
In 1871 famine came to Persia. It lasted longer than anyone could count, and by the time it was over, one-third of the country's population had perished. At first the people ate the carcasses of animals. They hunted for snakes, they fried grasshoppers and flies, even scorpions. They ate the leaves and roots and dried branches of trees. Children stuffed mud down their throats to choke the constant hunger. Pregnant women dug the walls with their nails and chewed on clay. When there was nothing else to eat, they ate the dead.
Decades would go by before anyone who had survived the Great Famine of 1871 dared admit to cannibalism. In ordinary times, Muslims had eaten neither pork nor anything that had been touched by an infidel. Armenians had had only fish on Fridays, and Jews had gone completely without meat unless it was kosher. Now they all fried thin strips of human flesh and swallowed it in order to live.
They waited every day in the cemeteries—scavengers hiding behind gravestones to watch people bury their relatives dead from hunger. When the burial was over, they would dig up the bodies and carve out the cheeks, the biceps, and the buttocks. If the body was too thin and had no flesh on the outside, they would open its stomach and take out the intestines and the liver. Most buried the bodies again, but many left them exposed for the vultures to attack.
In the second year of the famine, the Jews of the Tehran ghetto wrote a letter, composed in Hebrew, in which they asked the Jewish leaders of Europe for help.
“In some way or another, if possible," they prayed, “bring us forth out of this burning furnace of Persia to the Holy Land, or place us under your protective wings, or help us emigrate to other countries."
A year passed before the letter, entrusted to a messenger traveling out of Persia, reached its destination. In time, European and American Jewry would collect nineteen thousand British pounds to send to Persia, “to be distributed among Jews and non-Jews alike." The government of Nasser-ed-Din Shah, seeking to finance his next trip to Europe, fought hard to tax the money, and relented only under great pressure from Europe.
In Esfahan, news of the money brought hope. Food would arrive in caravans, people thought—enough food to save everyone. The mullahs who had always warned against infidels now found themselves hard-pressed to explain Europe's generosity. They said that the food was sent by God— at the direct request of His Holiness the Friday Imam of Esfahan—and that Europeans had taken credit for it unjustly. Members of the royal family who had done nothing to help their own subjects were also embarrassed. They claimed that the food was sent from the Shah's own kitchens, and the funds released from His Majesty's personal treasury. The Jews, who knew the truth, only believed that their suffering had come to an end.
But months went by, many more starved, and the caravan of food never appeared in Esfahan. Slowly the Jews realized that there was no food left in Persia to buy, that what little was imported remained in the hands of the very rich, that the money sent from Europe had circulated among Persian officials and corrupt mullahs until it disappeared into their pockets. Still, they did not dare give up hope. For years after they had di
scovered the futility of their belief, mothers in Juyy Bar put their children to sleep with the promise that when morning came a caravan of food would arrive at the gates of their city.
In the house of Joseph the Winemaker, little Peacock had waited for the caravan so long she woke up every morning insisting that they go look for it.
"It has lost its way," she would cry to Leyla with such conviction that nothing would have made her believe otherwise.
"If we don't find it soon, it will turn back and go to Tehran and we will never see it until we die."
She was seven years old, small and thin and so bony Leyla was always amazed that she could walk. Her skin was dark and aged from lack of nutrition. Her teeth had decayed before they had ever grown. Her body was small and undeveloped. But she had Leyla's eyes—those green eyes that brought a tremor to the hearts of men—and her spirit was hard and raw and unconquered. Sometimes, when they were alone together and Peacock had fallen asleep in her arms, Leyla would look at her child and believe that she was meant to have been beautiful—that in another day and age she would have grown to resemble Leyla herself, that she would have been strong and confident—that destiny, as Esther the Soothsayer had said, would have elevated her to a place of happiness and pride.
Joseph the Winemaker took Peacock begging in Esfahan. He walked into the city, carrying her most of the way because she was weak from hunger and could not walk a great distance. She was eight years old. All the way there, she fought and screamed and swore she would not go.
“They won't feed us," she said. "They don't feed Jews."
Joseph the Winemaker swallowed his bile and prayed for luck. Ever since Muhammad the Jew had returned to Esfahan, rumors had circulated in Juyy Bar that he was the son of Noah the Gold, Leyla's twin brother who had sent the massacre of 1853. People had even traveled into the city, lurked outside Muhammad's home and his shop in the bazaar, waiting to steal a glance at him, and then they had all returned to say Yes, Muhammad the Jew was indeed the son of Noah the Gold. In all that time, Muhammad never sent word to the ghetto for his sister. When the famine started, he bought food from abroad, hired armed men to fight bandits and thieves who raided the caravans, and gave away what he and his servants did not eat. For two years his kitchen fed dozens of people every day—Muslims only, for Muhammad the Jew had left strict orders to reject Jews. Still, Joseph the Winemaker insisted that Leyla go to him for help.