Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  Devastated, Zil-el-Sultan called his seers and asked for the cause of his downfall. They conferred for an entire day, extracted from the prince every promise of immunity for themselves and their families should he not be pleased with their answer. In the end they were unanimous: His Highness the Prince Shadow of the King, had recently distanced himself from a woman with a lucky face. Bring her back, and he would regain his luck.

  Zil-el-Sultan called his Minister of Court.

  “Release Taj-Banoo," he ordered. “Send my carriage to bring her back."

  Hannah returned to the palace in full glory: she was twenty-five years old, a startling woman, strong and confident and aware of her own power now that Zil-el-Sultan believed she controlled his fate. She married him again, regained her title, her wealth in Esfahan, her power within the harem. He swore he would give her anything she wished. She asked that he forgive Tala, and let her leave Esfahan with Solomon the Man. It never occurred to her that she should protect Peacock: she had been sent to Zil-el-Sultan at the age of nine, left alone among strangers with only the mission to keep alive and protect herself. She had been told to deny her past, her family, her longings. Peacock, like Leyla and Joseph the Winemaker, was only a shadow Hannah saw in the dark and often did not recognize.

  She sent Tala's nursemaid to Juyy Bar.

  “Go to Tehran," the old woman relayed Hannah's message. "Nasser-ed-Din Shah is your father's enemy. He will take you into his court if only to spite the Zil."

  The nursemaid came back with news from Juyy Bar. Tala was pregnant, she said, and from the shape of her stomach and the width of her steps when she walked, the nursemaid swore she would have a boy. Solomon the Man had divorced his Jewish wife, and was about to sell his house in Juyy Bar. He had forgotten his three children from Peacock. He had forgotten their mother. He was devoted to Tala and only to Tala, and he would take her to Tehran, he had promised, as soon as his child was born and Tala could travel.

  Joseph the Winemaker was desperate to keep Solomon from leaving. He had heard news of Tala's pregnancy, and of Solomon's plan to go to Tehran. He had gone to Solomon's house a dozen times after the day Tala threw him out. He had begged to see Solomon, asked that he stay in Juyy Bar, take Peacock back, save his children. Tala met him at the door every time, and refused to let him in.

  "My lady of ladies." Joseph the Winemaker bowed to his grandchild, who did not know him. He saw Hannah in Tala's face, saw Leyla in her expressions. "My lady of ladies, you don't know our pain. Solomon the Man is the light of all our lives. When he came here, he brought rain. If he leaves, we will all be lost. My daughter will be shamed. Her children will starve. My lady of ladies, Solomon the Man has a heart of gold. He won't spare us his mercy."

  But Tala was impossible. She had taken over Solomon's life, his mind, his heart. She had made him forget his every loyalty, made him bury even his love for his daughters. Joseph the Winemaker thought the situation through, and realized that Tala must have charmed Solomon with a sophisticated spell. He shared his theory with Raab Yahya, who laughed at Joseph's simplicity and offered a much easier one:

  “The man wanted Love. He found Love."

  Joseph the Winemaker cursed Raab Yahya and every other rabbi in the world. He went home and gathered his life's savings, then went to call on Malekshah the Devil Catcher.

  Malekshah the Devil Catcher commanded powers greater than those of any other witch or sorcerer in Persia. He had spent his youth meditating in the ruins of the ancient city of Rei, capital of the old Persian Empire, seat of the throne of Cyrus the Great, home of Spirit-Princes and Jinn-Kings. As a result of his meditations, Malekshah the Devil Catcher had gained enormous spiritual powers, and once managed to capture the king of a tribe of jinns who inhabited the ruins of Rei. He had released the Jinn-King, but his very act of mercy had placed Malekshah in command of the entire tribe. Now he worked out of a shop overlooking the Shah's Square in Esfahan. For the price of a cow, or the head of a Jew, he ordered the jinns in his service to perform tasks impossible for mortal men. Joseph the Winemaker was terrified of Malekshah, and resentful of the price he exacted for his services. Nevertheless, he went to see him, painfully uttering his wish as he extended to the Devil Catcher a bag full of silver coins.

  "My life's blood," he said as Malekshah's fingers closed around the neck of the bag. "You have here the money I put away to buy myself a shroud."

  Malekshah the Devil Catcher weighed the bag in his hand and sniffed in disapproval.

  "I can't guarantee results," he said casually. "There is only enough here to employ jinns of light. Jinns of darkness are more accurate, but also more expensive."

  The jinns of darkness, Joseph knew, acted quickly and aimed for direct results. They inhabited the night, invisible but strong, and unless summoned to perform a task, they were largely harmless; they only strangled anyone who accidentally stepped on their tails, or walked over their children sleeping on open roads. The jinns of light, by contrast, were playful and mischievous—and therefore less reliable. They amused themselves by leading unsuspecting humans into traps from which escape was impossible. Along the way, they tended to lose sight of their original goal, and often left their tasks half-done.

  Joseph the Winemaker dreaded the thought of having his wish distorted and changed. In his younger days he would have bargained with Malekshah, sworn poverty, pleaded mercy. Today he resigned himself to getting only what his money could buy.

  "Return Solomon the Man to my daughter and my ghetto," he told Malekshah, and watched the bag of coins disappear into a chained coffer.

  Solomon the Man dreamt of his children. He slept in Tala's arms the night of Joseph the Winemaker's meeting with the Devil Catcher, and all night long he saw Heshmat and Sabrina running toward him across a sun-bleached courtyard, with their arms outstretched and their feet bare. They were small and beautiful, their eyes golden, their hair light, their skin perfect. They rushed into his arms and when he picked them up, he felt the sun in his heart.

  He woke up and told Tala he wanted his children back.

  "Impossible," she bristled. "You must leave me first."

  They fought for the first time in four months. Tala wanted Solomon for herself. She resented him for loving others, resented every day and hour he had ever lived without her, despised everyone he had ever loved besides her. She was not jealous of Peacock; Solomon never spoke of her. She was jealous of the children.

  Now, as he stood in the alley outside Solomon's house every day, Joseph the Winemaker heard Tala scream at Solomon in frustration:

  "For you,” she said, "I had my mother go to jail. I broke my father's pride, left the Palace of Forty Pillars to live here among Jews. For you I gave up my home and my title."

  Joseph the Winemaker thought his money was well spent with the Devil Catcher.

  "Any day now," he announced to Peacock, "your husband will come back to you and his children."

  Solomon the Man walked toward his children one early dawn, and the sound of his footsteps awakened Peacock from her nightmares. She went to the door, opened it, and walked out into the cold

  "Solomon," she whispered, and he emerged like a wish. She saw herself in his eyes.

  "Solomon."

  She stood unveiled, her hair, soft and dark and lustrous, long to her waist, her skin the color of the night, her eyes radiant. She raised her hands to him and he touched her, awed by her beauty, as if to prove she was real. She was crying, he realized, and he wanted to touch her face, but he was afraid.

  "Forgive me."

  She did not answer him. She had not understood.

  She took his hand and led him into the basement. He saw his children uncovered on the ground, huddling close to each other for warmth, trembling in their sleep. He fell to his knees and cried.

  Tala had agreed to take only one child: she wanted Ar-ash, because he was a boy, she said, and carried his father's name—because, Solomon the Man knew, though he never dared admit it openly, Arash was the one So
lomon had wanted least, the one he had barely known, the one in whom Peacock had placed her greatest hope. She would take Arash and only Arash, and if Solomon insisted on taking the girls, she would leave him and go back where he would never find her again.

  He looked up at Peacock. She read his mind.

  "No," her eyes flared.

  Her voice shocked Solomon. He was terrified that his daughters would wake up to see him take Arash and leave them.

  "I will send money for you/' he begged Peacock. "I will come back and see you.”

  She knew she could not stop Solomon; a father owned his children even in death. She watched him take Arash. Then he walked out and left the girls. On the floor, Sabrina was dreaming of her father who would come—she was certain—to save her from Peacock.

  Joseph the Winemaker fell ill the day Solomon left Juyy Bar. He stayed in bed, heartsick and dismayed, and lost his appetite completely. Every day he became thinner and more disappointed. After a while he lost his sight, his voice, his hearing. His spine curved and his skin stretched so tightly over his body that he looked inhuman, and so, when he grew a layer of soft hair, like a new kitten, he knew he had come to the end.

  "I have grown the Devil's hair,” he mumbled to Peacock, who could not understand him. "I am going to die and go to hell.”

  Joseph the Winemaker died like a starved child—like his bride of half a century ago, Khatoun, who had been seven years old the night of her wedding. Peacock buried him in 1890, and lived for a while on the revenues from the sale of his winery. Just as she ran out of money, a messenger came from Tehran, bringing food and gold and greetings from Solomon the Man.

  "From Solomon,” he said as he unloaded the sacks of rice and flour in front of Mullah Mirza's basement. Sabrina and Heshmat were dancing around the messenger's horse, touching the bags of food and uttering their father's name as if it were holy. The messenger put down the last sack, then extended a pouch full of gold coins at Peacock.

  ''There will be more,” he promised, pleased with himself and his mission. Peacock saw his smile and felt a storm of resentment erupt in her.

  "Damn him!” she screamed, so loudly the girls froze in their place. She took the pouch from the messenger and threw it back at him.

  "Damn him, and damn you if you ever come back."

  She pushed the man with her fists, kicked his horse, screamed at her daughters that they were not allowed to touch the food. She opened the top of the coal stove in the yard and, before the terrified eyes of her children, threw one bag of flour after another into the fire.

  "Tell Solomon the Man we don't want his charity."

  Only later, when the rage had calmed and she could see through her pain into her children's faces, did Peacock realize the extent of devastation she had brought upon them. For days they sat by the stove, inconsolable, and pleaded to the flames for the food their mother had burned.

  In vain, Peacock tried to explain.

  "Solomon the Man,"she told her daughters, "took my life, my youth, my son."

  Sabrina never forgave her. Heshmat would not understand her until decades later, when she was old, and herself wounded by life.

  "It's your fault," they told Peacock as they cried into the night for their father. "It's your fault he left us."

  The next time Solomon's messenger came from Tehran, Peacock met him at the door with a butcher's knife. The man left without unloading the food. The neighbors did not interfere. Heshmat and Sabrina never even cried.

  "I will find work myself," Peacock said to the audience that stared at her silently outside Mullah Mirza's basement. "I will go to work and become rich, support my own children, buy my own house.”

  They lived from day to day, fighting the ghetto's derision, fighting each other. Sabrina had declared war on her mother and announced she would leave her soon—to become a whore, she said, or to marry a Muslim and shame Peacock for life. She went out all day hunting for food, sifting through the garbage outside the neighbors' homes, begging in Esfahan. She came back exhausted and afraid, faking indifference toward Peacock, insisting that Heshmat should go with her the next day. Peacock swallowed her anger and told herself she would soon end her ordeal—that she would find work, rent a room in a decent house, feed her daughters and keep them from the streets.

  She went to all the shops in the ghetto and asked for work. Then she went to the bazaar in Esfahan, and at last to the homes of Solomon's wealthy Muslim friends. Everywhere she was refused. In the end she found a heap of worthless fabrics—bits and pieces too small or frayed to be used in a garment—thrown away outside a shop. She tied the fabrics into a bundle and came back to sell them in Juyy Bar. She went from house to house, calling all the women, insisting that they buy from her. Every morning she left the house, promising to return with sweetbread and halva. Every night, Heshmat waited for her in the alley outside the basement, and broke into tears when she saw Peacock empty-handed.

  "Look at you,” the neighbors told Peacock in contempt. "You were the wife of Solomon the Man, the envy of the world. Look at you now.”

  Heshmat had found a friend: Saba, who lived three streets away, in a house full of light and warmth. She was an only child, the seed of Ismael the Gut-terman's marriage to a crippled orphan from Yazd. Ismael the Gutterman had been eighty-nine years old at the time of the wedding, and the grandfather of eleven children. He had spent his life shoveling human excrement from the bottom of open gutters on the street, and loading the waste in a wooden basket he carried on his back. He sold the bounty to farmers who used it for fertilizer, and he had made a good living for himself and his children, but his wife died and left him alone. Ismael the Gutterman decided a wife was cheaper than a maid, and sent for the lame girl from Yazd. But even the rabbi who married them swore that Ismael could never meet the demands of matrimony. Ismael the Gutterman had taken his challenge seriously. On the night of his wedding he had filled a bowl with three dozen raw egg yolks, added a jar of saffron and a quarter-kilo of crushed white cumin, then drunk the potion in one continuous gulp. Half an hour later, aching from the rush of diarrhea that would plague him for the rest of his days, he had run to his bride and entered her with a penis as hard as the day he first knew a woman. He had taken the lame girl's virginity, given her Saba, then retired to doze permanently in the corner of the house.

  Still, the lame girl from Yazd was content and grateful for her life. She could have been an old maid, living in her father's house until she died. Instead she had a husband and a home of her own, and a daughter she adored more than God. She surrounded Saba with love and attention, sang her to sleep, cooked for her every day. She brought Saba's friends home and fed them generously, asked them to stay the day, to come back tomorrow. After the first time she went to her house, Heshmat played imaginary games in which she was Saba, and Peacock the lame girl from Yazd.

  But once, when Heshmat went to call, she found Saba in bed, surrounded by her mother and her aunts. They were washing Saba's eyes with cold tea, giving her small doses of opium to smoke. They poured sugar water down her throat and restrained her when she screamed. Saba was in pain, the lame girl from Yazd told Heshmat. She had contracted trachoma.

  “Be careful you don't touch her wounds," Saba's mother warned her. "You could catch this yourself."

  Heshmat watched Saba that day and imagined that she, too, had become ill. She would stay in bed, with Peacock next to her, and even Solomon the Man would come back from Tehran to see his ailing daughter.

  When no one was looking, Heshmat rubbed her finger into Saba's eyes, then into her own.

  That night she felt as if there were salt in her eyes. She floated in and out of sleep and touched the small tumors— like bits of sand that grew harder every hour—that had emerged alongside the inner lining of her eyelids. By morning her face was throbbing and she saw everything through a thick, bloody fog.

  She dragged herself out of bed and called Peacock.

  "Mama. My eyes hurt."

  There was no
answer.

  She felt for Peacock with her hands, then searched for Sabrina. The beds were empty, the house quiet.

  "Mama. Sabrina. My eyes."

  She crawled outside. The sun was warm on her face. It was the middle of morning, she realized. No one would be home until late at night.

  "Mama," she cried, but no one could hear. "My eyes."

  Heshmat's days stretched into hours, and the hours into minutes infinitely long and empty but for the pain and the burning in her eyes, and the fear of the darkness where she was left to suffer alone. Sabrina sat by her bed and washed her eyes, but Heshmat barely felt the water. Peacock held her head and cried with her in pain, but Heshmat never heard her screams. A week passed and the pain grew worse. Peacock rubbed fresh wheat into Heshmat's eyes to ease the pain. On Yom Kippur she fasted for forty-eight hours: “So that God will hear my scream,” she explained to Raab Yahya, “and answer with mercy."

  They had not eaten for days. Sabrina begged in Esfahan, and brought home a bowl of rancid meatballs and spoiled vegetable stew. Peacock knew the meat was not kosher. She accepted it nevertheless.

  “Eat this." Sabrina put a spoon to Heshmat's mouth, but the pain was too strong.

  Sabrina put the plate on the shelf above Heshmat's bed.

  “Never mind," she said. “It will be here in the morning."

  Near dawn, Heshmat woke up hungry, and remembered the meatballs. She felt her way in the dark, and found the shelf. She reached into the plate. The meatballs were moist and round. She put one in her mouth.

  She screamed—her jaws open—and did not dare close her mouth. The meatball was alive. It had legs that moved.

  Sabrina jumped awake and saw Heshmat gagging.

  “Scorpion."

  Without thinking, she reached into Heshmat's throat and grabbed the animal. It stung her palm. This time, Sabrina cried.

  Peacock grabbed Sabrina's hand, opened it, and flung the scorpion to the ground. She emptied the kerosene from the oil lamp onto the scorpion and set it on fire. She put the burnt shell back over Sabrina's wound: a scorpion caught and killed was the best cure for its own venom.