by Gina nahai
Peacock followed her mother to the door. A moment later, Joseph awakened.
"Stand back," he growled at them. "Women have no business peeking out in the middle of the night."
He pulled his pants up around his waist and slipped his feet into his canvas shoes. He was going out, he mumbled, to find the source of the disturbance and stop it. Peacock watched him. His body, like a collection of bones on which hung the skin of a much larger man, moved painfully through the darkness. She found herself praying that he would not discover the intruder, that he would not manage to quiet the voice and drive it away. When he was gone, she went back to the door again and peered out.
In the courtyard, people stood listening—men and women and dreamy-eyed children with large heads and bloated stomachs. For years now, sleep had evaded Juyy Bar. Hunger ate away at the strength of the living, disease drew them to suffering. They wandered through the night, ghosts who nevertheless felt pain, who had memories, sleeping here and there when the life had run out of them, finding no reason to return to their homes where their loved ones had died in their arms, where there was no fire, no food, no calm.
"It is coming from the top of the alley," one of the men said to the others. "It must be a traveler who's lost his way."
The music stopped. Then they heard the laughter—sudden and spontaneous and almost unreal, one man's burst of uninhibited pleasure as striking and fantastic as the music that had sung Juyy Bar awake.
Peacock opened the door and stepped out. Leaning against a column in the courtyard, she drew her chador around her and closed her eyes. She listened, hoping to draw out of the darkness the last echoes of the music and keep them in her heart forever. But the music had faded. There was another sound—a soft, rhythmic hum that she remembered from the past but could not place. She opened her eyes. The air smelled of wet dust—the sweet, sweet smell of life. A drop fell on her cheek.
He had sung—the stranger with the flute—and brought rain to Juyy Bar.
Mad Marushka had arrived. Her crimes had paid off.
She moved into Afagh's bedroom, into her clothes and her bed. She took over Muhammad the Jew's house, invited guests, threw lavish feasts, hired men to sleep in her bed and eat in her kitchen. She placed orders with tailors and jewelers and merchants, spent hours every day in front of the mirror. She painted her cheeks and her eyelids, combed her hair and ran strings of Afagh's pearls through her braids. She tried to capture in her own image the beauty she had never known, the youth she had long since lost. Never once in all that time did she find herself disturbed by guilt, or haunted by Afagh's memory, or even bothered by the fear and hatred that she saw in Ezraeel's face.
Months after his daughter's birth, Muhammad the Jew returned to Esfahan. He rode through the city on his Arabian horse, the stolen ruby still shining above his forehead, a caravan of donkeys with loads of antiques following him from a distance. He reached Esfahan at noon. The streets were silent but for the echo of the midday namaz against the arched roofs of the alleys that led away from the mosques. Muhammad the Jew did not stop to pray. He rode toward his house, through its iron gates and the rose gardens and the fruit orchards that were destroyed by the drought.
He left his horse at the stable and walked up to the main building. The door was ajar. The corridor that led from the garden into the courtyard smelled of horses and other men's sweat. On the balcony, two maids stood with their heads only half-covered, laughing with a young man whom Muhammad did not recognize. When they saw him, the maids tightened their chadors around their faces and ran away. The man remained in place, staring at Muhammad with insolent eyes.
Muhammad the Jew entered the women's side of the house and climbed the steps. The doors of all the rooms were open; the furniture, once immaculate, was in disarray. Here and there the sound of women's laughter rose toward the staircase. Someone came to the door, unveiled, and peeked at him as he went by.
He climbed to the third floor and toward Afagh's bedroom. He pushed the door open and walked in. Drenched in sunlight, the bed was unmade, surrounded by an open mosquito net that rose above it like a pyramid of lace. It was hot. The room, Muhammad the Jew knew instantly, smelled of Mad Marushka.
She stood on the balcony outside the bedroom. She was dressed in Afagh's clothes. She wore her shoes, her jewels, the pearl-studded combs in her hair. She saw Muhammad and came inside.
“Your wife died," she said. "I killed her myself."
Muhammad the Jew never imagined he could rid himself of Marushka now that she had found him. He left everything to her, and abandoned himself to mourning—drowned in the guilt of having left Afagh alone and unwarned. He named his daughter Sanam, and took her to live with him in a separate part of the house. He did not take Ezraeel. He never even answered his calls.
But Sanam was born deformed and retarded. Her head was misshapen, her neck twisted, her eyes terrified. As an infant she cried so hard that the nursemaids smoked opium, hoping the drugged milk would calm her. Later, before she could even walk, she was given to fits of temper so violent they would have to hold her to the ground and force her jaws open so she could breathe. She never learned to speak. She only uttered sounds—shrill, violent cries that sent a tremor up her nurses' spines and kept them from loving her. She never recognized anyone—not even Muhammad the Jew—and no one could touch her. She would scream at the first contact, tear off her clothes, and run naked through the house. The maids would chase her into the garden, where she would climb a tree and hide in the branches like a cat.
Muhammad the Jew called doctors from Tehran and Baghdad and Russia. He wrote to an Englishman he had known in India, sent for advice and opinion from as far away as Europe. Everyone said the same thing: Sanam would never improve. She was better off put to death.
“Give her rat poison," Marushka suggested joyfully every time she saw the maids chasing Sanam. “Put her in a canvas bag and throw her into the river."
By the age of four, Sanam had become dangerous to herself and others. She attacked Muhammad, hit her own head against the wall so hard she fractured her forehead. She dug her bare hands into the hot coals at the bottom of the stove until her fingers had melted together. She dragged boiling pots of water from the fire and threw them on the servants. Once she sat on the flames from a cookfire and never felt herself burn until it was too late. After that, Muhammad the Jew kept her tied to her bed. One by one her doctors stopped calling and her nurses would not come to work no matter what Muhammad paid them, and the maids, unable to stand the child's pain, avoided her at all cost.
“Kill her," they told Muhammad every year as Sanam grew older and more tortured. “Relieve her of her suffering."
He knew he should—that it would be the most merciful of all acts—and yet he refused. He watched her sometimes after an outbreak of madness—when she was restrained and calmed and bandaged in bed. She would lie still for hours, and slowly her face would be freed of its anguish. She would no longer be threatening then, not even ugly. Her skin would glow and her eyes would tear and then she would smile, close her eyes, and fall asleep.
Muhammad the Jew could have killed anyone, he knew, but he could not kill the angel who lay dreaming in chains.
Solomon the Man was the great-grandson of Elias the Beauty, lover to Shah Abbas II, in whose pursuit the Shah had promised, long ago in the seventeenth century, to demolish the entire city of Kashan. The Shah had come to Kashan on his cavalcade of lions and elephants, and at the gates of the city he had been greeted by a congregation of young, handsome men, hand-picked by the governor, to please His Majesty. As he inspected the men, mullahs had prayed aloud for the Shah's health, Armenian priests had recited passages from the New Testament, and the grand rabbi of Kashan had sung Hebrew verses, but Shah Abbas II noticed only one thing:
“A Jew," he later described Elias to his soldiers, "with a face as beautiful as the moon, and a tiny mole on the side of his lip. Bring him to me or I will never sleep again."
But in the Kashan ghetto, Elias had hi
dden from the
Shah's soldiers; he was a married man, recently a father, and he had no wish to become the King's lover.
"Surrender now," Shah Abbas II had said as he sent his troops to the ghetto. "Come to me, or I will destroy Kashan and bury all its children alive."
Solomon the Man was tall and slim, his body muscular, his skin resilient to both age and decay. He had shiny black hair, dark skin, sparkling onyx eyes. There was an air of ease and innocence about him, a way of talking to strangers as if they were old friends, of smiling with his eyes even in the face of pain. Luck, it seemed, followed Solomon around. Providence was kind to him, God smiled upon him.
He arrived in Esfahan in 1875—alone, penniless, with only the flute he had taught himself to play. He had come to seek a fortune, he said, to find the prince Zil-el-Sultan, governor of Esfahan, and display for him his talents. The Jews were disturbed by his presence. They had been in mourning for so long they found no cause for jubilation. Through centuries of life in Persia, they had adopted the mullahs' belief that music and song were the works of the Devil—worthy only of people as low as the Winemaker.
"You must stop this singing," Raab Yahya told Solomon on the third night of his stay in Juyy Bar. "Singing is for whores. Music is for jesters. Find yourself a trade and live like a decent man."
Solomon the Man smiled at Raab Yahya and offered him a cup of wine. The next day he went into the city, found the palace of Zil-el-Sultan, and knocked at the gates.
The guards asked him to leave. His Highness the prince Zil-el-Sultan did not receive Jews, they said. Solomon the Man stayed at the gates and charmed the guards with his good looks and his smile. Then he took out his flute and sang for them. He had sung three verses before his voice carried into the inner chambers of the palace, where Zil-el-Sultan heard him and came out. From then on, Solomon the Man sat with the prince.
He abandoned himself to a life of pleasure and excess. He charmed everyone—king and jester, Muslim and Jew. He never hid the fact that he was a Jew, but the people he befriended did not think him impure. Whores slept with him for free, ladies of class and character paid for his love, and men of lineage and wealth swore on his name.
Once a month in Esfahan, Solomon the Man filled a room with a dozen naked whores and played with them a game of love: he lay on his back, surrounded by the women, and placed a gold coin at the tip of his erect penis. One by one the whores came up to him and tried to lift the coin with their tongues, without using their hands or letting the coin fall. The one who succeeded would keep the coin. If they failed, Solomon the Man gave them another chance.
He had a quality that charmed everyone: an untamed lust for things fair and beautiful, an obsession with love, a willingness to sacrifice everything for immediate pleasure. He had been raised poor, and yet he spent his money as if he had always been king. He sang all night in the palace, and in the morning spent his entire pay on a mule's load of food, which he brought to Juyy Bar and fed to the children. He received gifts from his rich lovers and gave them away to others. He got a bag full of gold from the prince and spent it in one night at the Castle.
“I have a curse about me,” he would laugh with Raab Yahya who came to warn him against the sin of excess. "I was born to live well."
He became rich so fast he never knew what to do with his money. He would build a house, he decided, a white structure with windows and a garden, and a kitchen large enough to feed a hundred people in one day. He wanted to buy land, but there was nothing left in the ghetto: the mullahs did not allow Jews to build higher than a single story. Nonbelievers, they said, must never be placed in a position superior to Shiites. A Jew could not live on the second floor of a home in the same city where Muslims walked on the street.
Solomon the Man knew this, but he bought the best house in the ghetto and demolished it. In its place he built another, two stories high with windows.
Raab Yahya was terrified. “Take it down tonight!" he screamed at Solomon when he saw the skeleton of the house being erected. “Tear it down before they see it and come to drag you through the mud."
Solomon the Man kept his house, and the mullahs' complaints never bothered him. Zil-el-Sultan himself issued an order approving the building. He came to the ghetto when it was completed, and brought Solomon gifts of gold and a dozen whores. They sat together, drinking Joseph the Winemaker's oldest wine until they had fallen asleep.
"It's the end of the world," Raab Yahya declared as he watched Zil-el-Sultan leave Solomon's house in the morning. "Lamb and lion have lain down in the same den."
Solomon the Man would live in Juyy Bar for many years. For those who knew him, his arrival marked the beginning of a new time in the ghetto. From the moment he came, rain began to fall and it did not stop until years later, when the famine had ended and the rivers were filled with life. Days revolved around tales of Solomon's excesses, and nights fluttered with the sound of his music, and every time he laughed, the ghetto was stunned and silenced, as if in the wake of a moment of greatness, when memories are created and history begins.
Taraneh the Tulip brought Leyla news of her daughter. She came to Esfahan once a year and, on that occasion, called at the harem to pay her respects to Zil-el-Sultan's wives. She called on the harem favorite, extended gifts to her and the other wives, then sat chatting with them for the better part of an afternoon. She never spoke with Hannah. She was afraid to look at her for too long, show a sign of recognition, make a gesture that would reveal Hannah's origins to the hundreds of harem spies. After each visit, Taraneh the Tulip went to see Leyla.
"Your daughter has grown," she reported the first year. "Her eyes are full of longing, but she will forget soon enough, and then she will be content."
Leyla did not believe her. She had left Hannah in the Ali Ghapoo and seen her disappear into the palace grounds, and from that moment on she was overcome with the feeling that she had pushed Hannah to her doom—that Hannah would be destroyed by the Zil, or poisoned by his other wives; that when the term of her contract was over, she would be cast out of the palace with no money or protection, unable to return among the Jews, who did not welcome converts, and persecuted by Muslims, who considered concubines prostitutes.
"You must be proud," Taraneh the Tulip told her, but in vain. "Your daughter is the prince's wife. If she learns to protect herself from the other wives, there is no telling how long she will last. The Shah may renew her contract. He may even marry her permanently."
Even Joseph the Winemaker, who had first sworn to kill Leyla for stealing the bangles, now praised her act.
"My daughter," he boasted to the Jews, "Joseph's daughter, is the wife of Zil-el-Sultan."
Still, years after she had last seen Hannah, Leyla woke up nights to go check on her daughter in bed, and waited for her to come home at the end of each day. Then all at once she would remember Zil-el-Sultan, ache for her child, and cry herself to sleep. A ghost came to curse her in her sleep: "You forced Hannah to convert," it accused Leyla. "When she dies, neither Jew nor Muslim will bury her."
Hannah grew up in the harem. She learned to smile, to defend herself against the other wives. She lost her Jewish accent, the frightened expression of her early days. When she reached puberty, the harem favorite rewarded her with a bag full of diamonds. When she had her first child—a girl with Leyla's hair and the eyes of Noah the Gold—Zil-el-Sultan offered her a palace of her own. He let her leave the harem—a sign of respectability for a wife—then immediately sent for her.
"I missed you,” he said, and for many nights after, he kept Hannah in his bedroom.
The last time Taraneh the Tulip went to call, Hannah never even engaged her eyes; she had forgotten the past, Taraneh realized. She had come to think of herself as royalty.
"There will come a time when you will be a woman, and your body will be impure. You will bleed for days, from the place between your legs where you now piss. You will bleed every month, and from the day you start until fifteen days later, you wil
l be impure. If you touch anything that your husband touches, or if you cook anything that anyone may eat, they too will be contaminated. If you lie with your husband you will have sinned. If you conceive a child he will refuse to give it his name. Everyone will curse you, and God will turn his back on you.” Leyla stood in the middle of the room—her tall, slender figure a shadow in the unreal halo of the oil lamp. She was teaching Peacock about the rites of purity.
"When you have counted fifteen days, you will go to bathe in the well. You will submerge your body in the cold water, and become pure again. Then you can touch anything, lie in your husband's bed, and bear children.”
Leyla's voice trembled at the mention of the well. She turned her face away from Peacock, looked down a moment, then walked away.
All of that night she stood by the door, staring into the empty courtyard like a child waiting for an angel. Peacock watched her, full of questions, afraid to ask. Near midnight, Joseph the Winemaker left the empty winery and climbed the steps into the room. He slept, and the air filled with the bitterness of his dreams.
“Women have died in the well," Leyla said after she knew that Joseph was asleep.
"Sometimes one of them goes down there and doesn't come back until the well spits her up hours and hours later. Sometimes she doesn't come back at all." Peacock sat up. The night was still but for the sound of Joseph's breathing. She listened again. Demons screeched in his throat. She went toward Leyla and touched her hand.
They left before dawn. On the street, the doors of some houses creaked slowly open and other women, dressed in black, slipped out to travel along the same route as Leyla and Peacock. In the moonlight, under the thousand stars, they looked like dancing shadows come alive to perform an ancient and mysterious rite that only they knew.
Peddlers carried their junk in small heaps on their shoulders, bound for nearby villages where they knew they would find no customers. Young boys with shaved heads and dreamy eyes swept the fronts of shops where they had been left to sleep—to scare off thieves. Old men with toothless mouths and insomnia-ridden bodies sat by dried gutters on the side of the streets, waiting for morning, or death, to come.