Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  Mad Marushka was trapped in fire. She was in bed, fast asleep, and the window was closed. From underneath the door, flames rushed in and caught the rug. The drapes began to burn, sending columns of smoke toward the ceiling. Fire climbed the bedposts and caught the mosquito net. Mad Marushka awoke with a scream and stood.

  ''Fire!'' someone called outside. Mad Marushka jumped through the burning net, ran to the door, and pulled the handle. It singed her hand.

  "Fire!” someone called again. "Help me!"

  Mad Marushka coughed black smoke. Her skin was blistered from the flames. She wiped her palms against her gown and pulled on the handle again. The door, she realized, was locked from outside.

  She ran to the window—also locked. She reached on top of her dresser, picked up a hand mirror, and threw it at the glass. She thrust her face out and breathed.

  Fire had engulfed the entire house. It had crossed the courtyard and was burning the room where Muhammad the Jew slept with his daughter chained to the bed. It had already silenced the maids in the corridor. Mad Marushka was alone, and about to die.

  She tore off the bottom of her nightgown and wrapped it around her face. She climbed onto the balcony, through the burning jasmines, and grabbed the railing. The metal branded her palm.

  She lowered herself from the balcony, reached for the metal drain that ran down the side of the wall, and descended. She could see the trees burning in the courtyard.

  She could hear the panic of the horses trapped in the stable. When she reached the ground, she covered her face with her hands and ran.

  She ran through the smoke and the flames until she knew she was safe. She fell on the street and began to vomit. Neighbors stared at her—embarrassed by her nudity, revolted by her palms, where raw flesh hung from the bones. A woman covered her with a chador. A child gave her water.

  Mad Marushka felt a gaze scorch through her and looked up. She saw Ezraeel, his clothes intact, his face unsmeared by smoke, staring at her with the eyes of an executioner.

  The next morning the sky was the color of sand. Mad Marushka walked through the desolate garden and into the charred skeleton of Muhammad the Jew's house. She found his corpse in Sanam's room. Their bones had melted together, their skulls had burst in the fire. Mad Marushka searched the house for her chest of jewels—for the antiques, the rugs, the wealth she had once come to conquer.

  "My jewels!" she screamed. "I want my jewels!"

  She hired dozens of men to search the rubble. Crews of workers went through the house with mathematical precision. Young men camped in the garden at night and spent the day hunting for treasure. Children, amused by Marush-ka's quest, played at salvaging the lost fortune.

  "Find my jewels."

  When the prospectors quit, she hired ordinary workers. When the workers gave up, she went to Zil-el-Sultan's palace and demanded that royal troops be dispatched to her aid. When no one else would help, she scratched through the ashes with her own disfigured hands.

  "I was robbed," she concluded. "Ezraeel took my jewels and burned the house to kill me."

  His father's sole inheritor, Ezraeel the Avenger was quickly selling off all of Muhammad's properties, and planned to move to Tehran as soon as possible.

  "Catch him!" Mad Marushka cried every time she saw Ezraeel's shadow approach. "Catch him before he kills me."

  She became convinced that Ezraeel was hunting her, certain he would not rest until he had avenged his mother's death. She saw him in dark corners, woke up nights feeling him lurk above her. She was afraid to stay by herself anymore. She walked the streets all day, wandering, and spent the night with a friend. Even then, she remained awake to guard against Ezraeel.

  People whispered that Marushka was old and grief-stricken and losing her mind. They stopped inviting her to their homes, looked away when she called them on the street. They did not have room for her anymore. They did not have time to listen to her talk of her lost jewels. Mad Marushka realized it was time to go, and so she left Esfahan.

  She had nowhere to go, no money, no plans. She told herself she would manage, that she could start again. But even in the desert, Ezraeel the Avenger haunted her. She had walked only a day when she stopped and understood the game: he was torturing her, she realized, with her own fear.

  She turned around and faced him. It was dusk in the desert. Ezraeel the Avenger held a gun.

  "Do it, then," Mad Marushka challenged. "Do it if you're a man."

  He shot her twice—once in each ankle—and left.

  "The hell with you!" Marushka screamed as she fell in pain. "I lived."

  In Zil-el-Sultan's palace, Tala reigned supreme. She was his daughter, Hannah's daughter, and he loved her more than all his children and even more than his sons. As a child, she had spent all of her time with the Zil. She had sat with him as he received the highest of dignitaries, run barefoot in the audience hall as he consulted his most important advisers. She had come calling to his room late at night, and Zil-el-Sultan had gladly sent away his women just to perch Tala on the bed and watch her laugh.

  She had golden hair—hence the name Tala, which meant gold. She had green eyes, white skin, a body that was curved and long and destined to bring doom to the lives of men. She could read and write, paint and play polo, speak English and French and Russian. She had grown up believing that the world was kind, that nothing was out of reach, that every wish would be fulfilled. When she was eight years old, she told her father she wanted music lessons.

  Zil-el-Sultan was reluctant, but he could not refuse Tala, and so he hired Solomon the Man to teach her. Once a week for three years, Tala sat across from Solomon the Man in the Hall of Emeralds at the Palace of Forty Pillars, and practiced the tar. She was veiled all the time, guarded by two eunuchs who stood on either side of her and refused to leave even for a moment as long as Solomon was in the room. She worked hard and tried to impress, but Solomon the Man never looked at her for more than a moment at a time, and she knew he never thought of her when he left their lessons. Then all at once he disappeared; he had gone to India, she was told, to find beauty.

  Tala was maddened at the news, so enraged by Solomon's absence that she scalded her servant-girl's feet with a hot skewer, then gave her enough gold to buy new legs. Afterward, sobbing in her bed, Tala understood the cause of her anger: she wanted Solomon the Man, and if she could not have him, she would destroy herself and all around her.

  She waited for him to return from India. She was twelve years old when he came. She called him to the palace and dismissed her eunuchs.

  "Look at me." She unveiled herself. "Tell me I am not the one you seek."

  Solomon the Man found eternal passion. The day he saw Tala, he went to Zil-el-Sultan and asked for her hand in marriage.

  The prince turned white with anger. "Damn your insolent soul!" he cried, full of hatred. He put a trembling hand on the dagger tucked into the corner of his belt.

  "Move away," he commanded. "Escape, or I will blind your eyes that have soiled my daughter and raped her honor.”

  He banned Solomon from the palace. He would have killed anyone else who unveiled Tala. With Solomon, he swore eternal rancor and forbade the mention of his name. Then he called Hannah, his Taj-Banoo, and accused her of raising an indecent child.

  "Your daughter,” he raged at his favored queen. "Your daughter has shamed my house.”

  He divorced Hannah, and sent her to his darkest prison. He ordered Tala's eunuchs to keep her confined at the harem, commanded his guards to sever her head if she ever tried to escape. He sent word to all of Esfahan's nobility, making it known that Solomon the Man was the Zil's enemy. Tala sobbed at his knees and begged permission to see Solomon the Man. Hannah sent letters every day, written by the warden in ink softened by her tears, in which she pleaded leniency. Through it all, Zil-el-Sultan remained vengeful and unbending.

  In Juyy Bar, Solomon the Man locked himself in the house for an entire year, and never left his room even to receive guests. He stopp
ed singing, stopped laughing. He watched Peacock move about him, her face full of anguish, her body deformed—Solomon the Man recalled at last—with the weight of a child.

  "Pray it's a boy," Joseph the Winemaker told Peacock as the tale of Solomon's love for Tala became public. When the child came, Peacock heard the midwife cry in jubilation and knew she had produced Solomon's heir. But then she took the boy in her arms, watched him search for her breast, and all at once felt the sorrow of death creep into her bones.

  "He won't be mine," she told the midwife. "I will lose this child with his father."

  She named him Arash, after the Persian hero who had been his people's savior. For a year after the birth, she tried to deny the overwhelming certainty that she would never see Arash grow. Then one night she heard Tala at her door.

  The night Tala came to Juyy Bar, Peacock was awake, listening to the darkness for the sound of her own fate. After midnight she heard the rustle of a woman's skirt and rushed to the door. She looked out. She saw nothing. She thought she had imagined the sound.

  But a moment later she heard Solomon's laugh—that same unmistakable laugh she had heard the night he sang Juyy Bar awake, the sound that had risen into the hearts of God and his angels and brought rain for the first time in a decade. Peacock opened the door and went outside.

  She saw them on the stairs outside Solomon's bedroom. There was a girl, her back turned to Peacock, her long hair reaching to her hips, her dress—green satin—reflecting the moonlight every time she moved. She stood close to Solomon and whispered a word Peacock could not hear. Then she put her hands around his neck and pulled herself up against his chest. Peacock saw the gold bangles on the girl's wrists. She saw Solomon the Man pick her up and carry her inside. The door closed. All night long Peacock heard the bangles clanking in the dark.

  She went to her room and cried into a tear jar. Sabrina came to her. Heshmat awoke with frightened eyes. Asleep in his cradle, Arash—the boy who should have returned Solomon to Peacock—lay calm and unaware. Peacock did not see them. She looked into the night and thought only of Hannah, her sister, who had abandoned her—Peacock had always resented her for this—to marry the Shah's son. She thought of Hannah as she had known her in their childhood: Hannah, who had slept with Peacock in the same bed, their heads resting on one pillow, who had eaten from the same bowl and washed in the same water, Hannah whose daughter had now come to claim Peacock's life. She wondered if Hannah knew that Solomon was Peacock's husband, that Tala was stealing her aunt's life.

  "She must know," Peacock concluded for the hundredth time. "Everyone knows. She knows, but she's become like the people around her—thinking she's better than the rest, that she's entitled to everything she wishes.”

  She resented Hannah, but even as she cursed her, Peacock ached for her sister's warmth, the memory of Hannah's hands reaching for Peacock in the dark of night, whispering through the famine that they suffered together: "When morning comes, there will be a caravan of food.”

  Near dawn Peacock fell asleep, and dreamt she had walked into Solomon's bedroom. The room was large, full of light. It smelled of tobacco and wine, of Solomon's skin, the scent of a woman's perfume. Large pillows leaned against the walls. Clothes trailed on the floor. A water pipe had been left burning till all the tobacco had turned to ash. In a corner, opposite the glass doors that led onto the balcony, the bed glared at her like a shameless whore: the sheets were white, the pillows still marked by the weight of those who had slept on them. Solomon the Man was gone. Peacock searched the mirror for her own reflection, and found only the girl with the satin dress.

  "Look in your palms,” a voice called from behind her. Startled, Peacock turned around. There was a bald woman with amber lips and burning eyes. She took Peacock's hands and raised her palms—reflective, like glass—to her face.

  "Your hands are the true mirrors of your fate."

  Sabrina was screaming at her. Peacock opened her eyes. It was light out.

  "They're still up there," Sabrina yelled. She was eight years old. She understood that Tala was different from the other women Solomon received at the house.

  "I asked to go into the room, but they wouldn't let me."

  Peacock sat up. Reaching past Sabrina, she took the tear jar into which she had cried the night before. She drank all her own tears.

  She picked up Arash, took the girls by the hand. She walked out of the house of Solomon the Man.

  The winter of 1888 lasted so long that by the time it was over, no one could recall when the earth had been warm. Snow piled knee-deep on the ground and then froze. The wind blew so cold it turned the water into ice as it flowed in the gutters. Children slept in their mothers' arms and woke up with blue hands. Gravediggers' shovels could not break the ground, so corpses were left in the open air, wrapped only in canvas shrouds.

  In Juyy Bar, Peacock and her children struggled to survive. They left Solomon's house and went to the only place they could: Mullah Mirza's basement, where Peacock had run to hide a decade earlier, on the day of her wedding. She had known then that Solomon the Man would leave her. She had known it and tried to spare herself the pain of a lost love, but now, twenty-two years old and a mother, she sat once again on the same basement floor and, this time, prayed that Solomon the Man would come back.

  A day went by, then another. Peacock held Arash to her chest, sat the girls next to herself, and, for three days, fixed her eyes on the door. Her children cried for home. Joseph the Winemaker banged his fists on the door, demanding in vain to be let in, but Peacock could not move. She was waiting for Solomon the Man, for the sound of his footsteps, the chime of his voice, the light of his eyes as he walked in through the door—Peacock imagined—to say that Tala was gone, that he had sent her away, back to her father's palace, back to Hannah, who had left the ghetto and betrayed her own blood. He had sent Tala away, Solomon would tell Peacock, and he had chosen Peacock forever.

  On the fourth day, Joseph the Winemaker broke down the basement door.

  "You damned fool," he screamed. "He married Tala this morning."

  Then the light went out and all the colors turned to gray, and for years the world filled with the sound of a deaf scream that only Peacock could hear.

  Sabrina was inconsolable. Arash became ill from the cold and lack of food. Heshmat sat against the wall, her face hidden by her chador, and uttered no sound.

  “It's your fault,” Joseph the Winemaker accused Peacock. "You lost him.”

  He came back every day, looking more depressed and desperate, forcing himself in and bringing food for Peacock and the children. He looked gaunt and exhausted, his bones protruding, his breath short. For eighteen years now, ever since the famine of 1871, he had been thin and getting thinner. Before that he had been an enormous man, his stomach always hanging over his pants, the fat so thick under his skin that he perspired from the mere task of breathing. But the years of the famine had melted the fat, and afterward, Joseph the Winemaker could never eat another full meal; every time he put a morsel in his mouth, he thought he was chewing human flesh.

  He sat down to talk about Peacock's future.

  "It's all over for you," he started every day, and his words sent Sabrina into a shiver. "Solomon the Man is going to divorce you—there is no question about that. What baffles me is why the man is still alive, why Zil-el-Sultan hasn't killed him yet. But that's Solomon for you. Things just don't happen to him as they do to others."

  Peacock barely heard his voice. She ate the food Joseph brought, rocked Arash—crying and feverish—till her arms were numb and her legs had caved in.

  "There's no question he'll divorce you."

  Three weeks went by. Joseph the Winemaker went to Solomon's house to beg that he take back Peacock and the children. He wanted to remind Solomon of his oath of marriage, of his duty as a father. He wanted to explain to Tala her relationship with Peacock, send a word for Hannah and plead on Peacock's behalf. But every time Joseph the Winemaker knocked at Solomon's
door, no one came to answer, and as much as he stood guard, no one ever left the house.

  He imagined that Solomon was dead—buried in his bedroom by Zil-el-Sultan's soldiers just as he was embracing Tala. In the end, Joseph the Winemaker forced the lock on the door, and entered the house.

  He stood in the courtyard, overwhelmed by the quiet, then walked to the stairs that led up to Solomon's bedroom.

  "Solomon Khan," he called, but his voice was barely audible.

  "Solomon Khan," he tried again, without success. He grasped the wooden railing and climbed a few steps. He called again, waited for an answer, then climbed closer to the bedroom.

  He knocked on the door. "Solomon Khan, it is I, your servant."

  The handle was cold in his hand. He pushed it down and walked in.

  Solomon the Man stood in his bed, naked to the waist, circling with the tip of his tongue the nipples of a girl with golden hair and white skin. When Joseph the Winemaker walked in, he turned around, surprised, but his eyes were clouded and he looked as if he did not recognize Joseph at all.

  "Solomon Khan," Joseph the Winemaker stuttered. Then the girl with the golden hair came up, still naked, and forced Joseph out.

  Zil-el-Sultan had lost his luck.

  Tala had defied him, Solomon the Man had betrayed him, and Zil-el-Sultan avenged himself by divorcing Hannah. But the moment he sent her away to jail, he ran out of luck, and lost a kingdom.

  He was the most capable of Nasser-ed-Din Shah's sons, by far the most popular among the people and inside the ruling circles. He had ruled southern Persia with success, proven his ability to reign. But his very popularity had made the Shah resent him. When the time came to name a successor, Nasser-ed-Din Shah bypassed Zil-el-Sultan and named his brother, Muzaffar-ed-Din Khan, Crown Prince. Wounded, the Zil plotted against Muzaffar-ed-Din's life. But his plan was unveiled. Nasser-ed-Din Shah stripped Zil-el-Sultan of all his power, and took away the rule of southern Persia. He left to the Zil only the rule of Esfahan, but even this was punishment: inside Esfahan the Zil was still governor. If he crossed the city's borders, he would be killed by his father.