by Gina nahai
They went past the abandoned basement where Mullah Mirza had once tortured himself in search of gold, past the underground temple where the Jews had gathered to pray in the years when they had been forced to convert to Islam but still practiced Judaism in secret. Near the gates of Juyy Bar they saw the large brick building with lopsided walls and a wooden door painted in luminous blue that shone in the dark and that led to the bath.
Peacock wanted to turn back, run away into the darkness, under the satin cold of night. But her hand was caught, her feet were powerless, her voice choked.
She heard Leyla knock, heard a hand lift the wooden pole that barred the door from inside. She saw the vertical lines in the wood where the paint was chipped move away from them as the door opened. She saw an old woman— pale, bony, carved with horizontal lines, eyes gleaming, hair silver blue and hanging down the sides of her face in uneven lengths.
"You again,” the old woman snarled at Leyla. "You still owe me from last time."
It was Mama the Midwife. Her husband was keeper of the bath.
Leyla walked in, sidestepping the old woman, whispering that she would pay soon, dragging Peacock behind her.
They went into a large room with brick walls, a high ceiling, and a pool of water in the center where women came to wash after visiting the well. The room was dark and bare now, but in two hours it would be filled with naked female bodies and the echo of all their voices. Every morning, Mama's husband filled the pool with water from the well that was cold but clean. The women rushed to get into the tub early, before too many others had bathed in it. They climbed down a ladder and sat on a narrow platform to wash the dirt of two weeks off their bodies. By the time the bath closed and Mama's husband drained the pool, the water would be black.
Leyla led Peacock toward a small door at the end of the room, went through it and into the bare backyard of the well. She walked up to the well, then stopped. The midwife came up to her. In one hand she held a lantern that cast a misty yellow light around her and made the lines in her face look even deeper. She placed her other hand on Leyla's forehead.
"That you shall be pure and innocent," she said, "and all your sins shall be washed away, and your body shall be as clean as that of a newborn child."
She pointed with her head toward Peacock.
"Is she going with you?" she asked Leyla.
"Just to watch."
The well was dark and damp. The water level was some forty steps below the surface of the earth. The packed-mud stairs were narrow and unsteady, and gave way because the mud had softened.
At the bottom of the stairs, on a small platform at water level, Leyla stopped to undress. Peacock watched her as one by one she lifted the layers of darkness from her body, her shape emerging slowly out of the shroud of fabric that had forever surrounded her. Peacock was stunned; Leyla glowed in the moonlight like a vision, her hair a stream of gold, her skin the color of warm milk, her body soft, sacred, perfect. She stared at her mother and, before Leyla ever touched the water, saw her drown in the well.
Peacock closed her eyes, terrified, and tried to chase away the vision. Watching Leyla again, she longed to reach across the night, back into the moment of conception, back when she had been formed of her mother's body—back to where there was calm and beauty.
She pressed her lips together and let the tears run down her face. Leyla put her feet into the water. The circles that she made widened until they had reached the contours of the well and then came back, closing in around her legs, her hips, her waist. Holding on with both hands to the edge of the platform, she let the water rise to her breasts, then fill the cavity above them. It went over her shoulders, around her neck.
She stopped. For one fleeting moment the green of her eyes pierced the darkness. Then she was gone.
Gone to the tips of her golden hair. Gone to the extremity of her fingers that only a moment ago had held on to the platform so fiercely. Peacock saw the circles dancing back to the edge of the wall.
Claimed by the ghosts of the drowned women. Claimed by the well.
Peacock ran forward and thrust her arms into the water. Her eyes searched frantically, her arms moved vainly in the water, reaching deeper and deeper until suddenly it felt the cold grip of death as a white hand with long fingers grabbed it. She screamed and pulled back.
Leyla pulled her head out, gasping for air. Her lips were purple, her eyes like glass. A moment later she found the platform with her other hand and freed Peacock.
Peacock stood up, moved back against the wall, and as she saw her mother breathe, she felt the warm sting of urine run down her legs to gather in a small puddle on the ground.
That night Leyla lay on the floor, face up, and waited for her husband to come and claim her. Through the makeshift curtain that separated her side of the room from her parents', Peacock heard Joseph the Winemaker roll over Leyla, whispering greedily, "Let's see if you were worth the wait."
Peacock knew that her mother's hands and feet would be cold as ice as she lay under her husband. She knew that the sound of Joseph's breathing as he satisfied himself would be the same as the night before, when he had slept.
And she knew that all her life she would suffer alone the knowledge of her mother's death.
Taraneh the Tulip returned to live in Juyy Bar.
She had been married thirty-five years when her husband drank a glass of poisoned tea and died in his sleep. A snake had fallen into the teapot; a maid had inadvertently boiled the reptile, and served her master.
Taraneh the Tulip held a year-long wake in Tehran. She hired two dozen professional mourners to weep at the funeral, paid a mullah to live in her house and pray constantly for her husband's soul. She wore black clothes, hung black drapes and tablecloths in her house, covered her furniture and bed with black. For forty days she held open house to friends and relatives. Every month after that, she served lunch and prayers to a hundred women.
When the year of mourning had ended, Taraneh the Tulip packed her black clothes and fired her servants. Alone in the house, she burned every musical instrument she had ever played. She sent for her husband's family; she was leaving Tehran, she told them. She was going back to die in Juyy Bar.
She became ill in mourning. She was old, suffering from rheumatism, always in pain. Her joints were swollen, her hands and feet deformed, her spine curved. She walked with the aid of a cane—this woman who had danced across an empire—and every few steps she had to stop and take a rest. The Jews watched her decay and lamented her loss. Taraneh the Tulip, they said, had willed herself to die.
She bought a room in the ghetto, in a house across the street from Solomon the Man's mansion, and imprisoned herself. She spoke with no one, rejected invitations even to her neighbors' rooms, refused visitors. She went out twice a month, to the bath, and on her way home she stopped at the ghetto square to buy a bowl of lentil stew. The rest of the time she sat in her room, or on the steps above the courtyard, and listened to the sounds of the ghetto.
Every night in his house, Solomon the Man threw a feast and invited a hundred guests. He hired whores from Esfahan, invited dancers and musicians from neighboring cities, called Jews and Muslims to come and drink his wine. He brought a blind donbaki from Ahvaz who sounded a storm better than God himself, introduced a woman violinist from Shiraz who played only in the nude. He brought an old tar player who died from excitement in the middle of a performance with the nude violinist, a Russian piano player, a guest of Nasser-ed-Din Shah in Tehran, who came to Juyy Bar only to find that his piano did not fit through the alley leading up to Solomon's house. He had an Indian dancer who was chased out of town by the wives of the men she seduced, an Egyptian singer whose voice dragged turtles out of hibernation. And then, in his greatest feat ever, Solomon the Man brought a santour player—a young man with yellow skin and Mongol eyes, descendant of Tamerlane the Lame, famous across Asia for his talent with the instrument.
The santour player had come to Esfahan at the invitation of
Zil-el-Sultan, played for eleven nights, and, at the end of each performance, demanded a camel's load of gold. When Solomon the Man invited him to his house in Juyy Bar, he asked for another load of gold.
“Take heed, son of Tamerlane," Zil-el-Sultan warned in anger. “Greed will destroy your talent. Play for my friend, and I will spare your hands. Ask for gold, and I will have them boiled in oil."
Solomon the Man invited the entire ghetto to watch the Son of Tamerlane play at his house. The day of the Mongol's appearance, men closed their shops early and rushed to Solomon's house to reserve their place in his courtyard. Women grabbed their children and climbed onto the roofs of Solomon's neighbors. By sundown every alley leading to Solomon's house was packed with spectators. At ten o'clock, Zil-el-Sultan arrived. An hour later, twelve Mongols—part of the santour player's entourage—marched through the doors of Solomon's house, beating their drums:
"Make way for the Celestial and the Sublime,
The Son of Tamerlane,
The greatest santour player of our time."
Dressed in a bejeweled gown, the Son of Tamerlane rode on a black horse and remained oblivious of the crowd that awaited him, or of his host who welcomed him. He sat cross-legged on a silk rug, unpacked a santour cast in gold and decorated with rubies, and played for exactly one hour. When he had finished, Zil-el-Sultan praised him and Solomon the Man thanked him, but the Mongol was impatient to leave. He was about to pack his santour when he felt a sudden silence and looked up. Taraneh the Tulip stood above him—her back curved, her hands dried and deformed— ready for war. She reached over and took the Mongol's sticks, held them in her clawed fingers, and smiled with her old optimism.
"You think you can play," she challenged, and put the sticks to the santour.
She played for ten minutes, a quick and dazzling tune that was at once electrifying and unforgettable, and by the time she finished, she had destroyed the Mongol's reputation and altered every man's memory of music.
In the spring of 1876, Zil-el-Sultan ordered a week-long celebration in Esfahan. They had had months of rain. The famine, Zil-el-Sultan liked to believe, would soon come to an end. So he decorated the Palace of Forty Pillars and lit up the Shah's Square, invited musicians and poets and artists into the palace, and for seven days and nights poured wine into jeweled cups and broiled sheep over open flames. In all that time he never let Solomon the Man move from his side.
On the sixth night of the celebrations, Zil-el-Sultan called his harem into the main chambers and allowed the wives to join in the festivities. They came dressed in jeweled veils and embroidered chadors—three dozen women with their maids and children and eunuchs—and marched through the receiving hall, giggling and mischievous like schoolgirls at recess. Zil-el-Sultan watched proudly as they filed into the honeycomb of smaller rooms flanking the hall: the size of a man's harem was an indication of his wealth and power.
He drank more that night and talked to Solomon about his wives. He showed him his latest bride—the princess Samira, with the arched eyebrows and the tiny black mole on the back of her neck, halfway between her head and torso, that sent a shiver up Zil-el-Sultan's body every time he kissed it; or his own cousin, the ugly one he had married when she was already old, nearly twenty, as an offering of peace to her belligerent father. Zil-el-Sultan had not slept with her— he could not bring himself to—until his uncle had promised war.
He showed Solomon the Arab woman with the black skin and the golden hair that he swore knew more about love than any of the Shah's whores, the Turk whom the eunuchs believed had drowned two rival wives in the harem pool.
"But there"—he pointed to yet another woman—"that one came to me already dressed as a bride."
Solomon the Man followed the direction of Zil-el-Sultan's attention and saw a woman sitting in the room farthest from the hall. She had on an emerald chador and veil, and she sat with her knees crossed, surrounded by three maids who stood behind her, ready to serve. She did not speak to anyone. She did not smoke a water pipe.
For the first time in six days, Solomon the Man found himself captivated.
"Where did she come from?" he asked Zil-el-Sultan, his eyes still fixed on Hannah.
The prince laughed.
"I don't know," he said. "The eunuchs say she was a Jew."
Solomon the Man inhaled a lungful of opium to conceal his agitation. He was thinking of a story he had heard in Juyy Bar and never believed: the winemaker's daughter marrying a prince and vanishing from the ghetto as if she had never existed, his wife taking the girl into Esfahan one day and returning alone, claiming she had left him for Zil-el-Sultan to marry. Like everyone else who had ever heard the tale, Solomon the Man thought Leyla had sold her daughter to a Muslim and kept the money from Joseph.
"Why did you keep her?" he asked Zil-el-Sultan when he could no longer contain his curiosity. "Was she so beautiful?"
Zil-el-Sultan began to answer, then stopped. He wanted to remember the day he had first seen Hannah, relive the moment of encounter, understand his own motivation for marrying her.
“She was beautiful." He saw the glimmer of two gold coins against tiny palms. His heart warmed.
"She was like an orphan," he tried to explain, "like an offering. I could not refuse."
He missed Hannah. He called a eunuch, who ran forward and prostrated himself.
"Call Taj-Banoo." He had chosen the name himself: it had a lucky sound, a charmed ring.
Solomon the Man watched the eunuch go up to the woman in the far room. He whispered a word to her and she stood up, walked through the crowded receiving hall of the Palace of Forty Pillars without looking in any direction but that of the prince, and approached him through the fog of tobacco and opium and the wave of music and laughter that brushed against her without ever moving her. She stood before Zil-el-Sultan and kissed his hand. The prince introduced her to Solomon the Man.
"My wife," he said, and she looked up. Beneath the veil her eyes were like yellow sapphires. Solomon the Man looked closer, but he could see no more until she had turned around to leave. Then he realized, from the shape of her body under the chador, that she was pregnant. He watched her go and knew he was lost.
Solomon the Man became obsessed with Hannah—to the point of distraction, to the limit of wisdom. He thought only about Hannah, longed for no other woman, wanted nothing but to see her unveiled—to undo the mystery of her presence, see for himself the bride of Zil-el-Sultan's good fortune. He imagined her as a child, standing in the Ali Ghapoo, dressed in a wedding gown at noon, looking in every direction with her throat full of tears, crying under her veil as she prayed for her mother to save her. He imagined her lying in Zil-el-Sultan's bed with her eyes pale and her teeth loose, imagined her—this daughter of Joseph the Winemaker—living in the Palace of Forty Pillars, close to home but never allowed to go back, close to her parents but never allowed to see them or even speak their name.
He looked for Hannah at the palace, questioned the eunuchs so directly about Taj-Banoo that they were offended at his shamelessness and stopped answering. In Juyy Bar he went to the winery and met Joseph, asked his friends about Leyla. He learned all their stories—from the tale of Esther the Soothsayer to that of Noah the Gold and Qamar the Gypsy, and even Leyla's Muslim brother. When he had heard every tale and asked every question, Solomon the Man was still consumed with the need to know. For forty days and nights he did nothing but brood over Hannah. Then at last he thought through a whole night of sobriety, and in the morning went to see Joseph the Winemaker. Hannah, he accepted, was out of reach. Solomon the Man asked to marry her sister.
News of Solomon the Man's engagement to the daughter of Joseph the Winemaker spread faster and incited more animosity in Esfahan and Juyy Bar than any other incident in recent memory. In the ghetto, mothers of eligible young women dug their nails into their cheeks and mourned. Matchmakers ran to each other in a fury as they tried to discover which one of them had made the deal. Young men despaired at the thought of
having Solomon removed from the circle of womanizing and debauchery that had become the object of all their fantasies.
In Esfahan, whores cursed their bad luck and spat. Ladies of nobility felt betrayed and swore in the most wounded tones never to allow Solomon in their midst again. Even Zil-el-Sultan, unaware of Solomon's motivations in marriage, made a royal frown and asked his friend what merit he could possibly find in a monogamous life. Solomon the Man smiled in the face of all adversity and proceeded with the wedding plans as if the whole world were on his side.
He sent to Kashan for his mother to come and take charge of the festivities. She arrived a week later, a big woman with light skin and nothing of the good looks that had blessed her son. She sat in the carriage she had hired with Solomon's money, complaining of the heat and the dust of the desert, and when she arrived at the city's gates and was forced to disembark—for no Jew could ride through a town—she was so large she struggled for ten minutes before she could free herself. She had come with her daughters, all eleven of them, and with another, darker than the rest and even uglier, whom she claimed was an orphan she had raised from childhood. Solomon the Man swore the girl was his sister. His mother, he mused, had disowned her because she could not stand having yet another ugly girl.
Ghadereh Khanum—the Able One—stayed in Solomon's house for a week and held court. She sat with her daughters around the receiving room, their backs against silk cushions and their hands caressing the necks of enameled water pipes that they forced themselves to smoke; it was the habit of ladies of gentry, which they believed they had become, owing to Solomon's wealth. In Kashan they had been rug weavers. They had lived in a hovel and worked from the age of three, sitting cross-legged in front of wooden frames onto which they tied minuscule knots of wool and silk. And they would have worked till their eyes were blind and their lungs rotted from inhaling wool, except Solomon the Man had made them rich. Now they sat in his house and snubbed the visitors who came to offer their welcome.