by Gina nahai
"Welcome,” the Queen said, and smiled at Peacock with infinite sadness. She sat reclining against large white pillows. "Our friend Ezraeel Khan promises you have brought Us great treasures."
Quickly, Peacock knelt before the bed and opened the velvet pouch in which she kept her stones. She laid them in small rows across the satin sheets: rubies and emeralds, green and yellow sapphires, cut diamonds the size of apricot seeds, enormous pearls—the best of Ezraeel the Avenger's collection.
The Queen glanced at the stones, then waved her hand.
"Put them away," she said. "No jewel in this world will help lessen the boredom of my life."
She noticed the yellow patch of cloth attached with a pin to Peacock's shirt. She sat up, suddenly interested, and asked Peacock to lift her veil.
"So you're a Jew, then," she said with childlike excitement. "I don't think I ever saw a Jew before."
She jumped down from her bed, barefoot, and circled around Peacock. She gaped into Peacock's face, touched her hair, the top of her forehead.
"But you have no horns," she said without malice. "I was told Jews have horns—small ones, you know, like the Devil." She began to search for a tail. Then suddenly she looked up, visibly scared, and went pale. The Badji had kept an invisible guard outside the room and was now upon the Queen with a threatening face and disapproving eyes.
"Your Majesty must not leave her bed," she said, taking Qamar-ol-Dowleh's hand and leading her back into the sheets. The Queen obeyed her resentfully, climbed into the bed, and waited for the Badji to leave again. She motioned to Peacock to come closer.
"That woman is always spying on me," she whispered, tears in her voice. "It seems I am pregnant, you see. My first one miscarried. This time Hakim Bashi—the Court's doctor—has confined me to bed."
She swallowed her sadness and forced a smile.
"You must come back," she whispered, hoping the Badji would not hear. "The eunuchs don't like for me to have a friend, but I will ask His Majesty's special permission. Now that I'm pregnant, he will grant my wish."
A thought clouded her eyes. She leaned closer to Peacock.
"Tell me," she asked, "is it true you drink the blood of Muslim children?"
Once a month after her first visit to the harem, Peacock was summoned by Qamar-ol-Dowleh to the Palace of Roses; she was admitted under the pretext of offering jewels to the Queen. She went at first to satisfy Qamar-ol-Dowleh's curiosity about Jews, but after a while she became her only friend. Most of the time she found the Queen alone in her bed, crying and homesick and trapped in her own rage.
"The hardest thing about my predicament," Qamar-ol-Dowleh confided in Peacock, "is knowing it will never change."
Peacock became a familiar sight at the harem. She was allowed to mingle with the other wives—always under the Badji's watchful eyes. She befriended the thousands of eunuchs and chamberlains and pages, the courtiers and spies, the door-listeners and detectives. She came to know the mullahs, professional confessors, and star-readers in permanent residence at the harem. She recognized the mascots and interpreters of dreams, the boys and girls with lucky faces, the sneezers and the food-tasters. Everywhere, Peacock looked for Arash.
She could not ask for him, for the Badji would have killed her if she knew Peacock had come to claim a royal child. She listened for his name in every conversation, but he was never mentioned. She wondered if Tala had changed his name. She learned that Tala lived with Solomon in a mansion in Shemiran, that she had many children of her own, that Solomon the Man had become Nasser-ed-Din Shah's close friend—so much so that the Shah had excused Solomon from having to bow before his own children: Tala's children were of royal blood; Solomon the Man was not. Every other husband in that situation would have had to go through life bowing before his own children from the time they were born.
In the end, Peacock asked Qamar-ol-Dowleh.
"It is hard to tell," the Queen sighed. She was moved by Peacock's tale, eager to help, but she had little power, and even less knowledge about the harem. "I see a thousand children inside these walls. I don't know any of their names."
She saw Peacock's disappointment. She reached over and held her friend's hand.
"But suppose you found him," she echoed Ezraeel the Avenger. "What would you do if ever you found him?"
Nasser-ed-Din Shah was going to have the celebration of the century. He had been King for fifty years—by far the most powerful of the Qajar kings—and he planned to commemorate the half-century mark with national festivities. He scheduled a nationwide jubilee for the summer of 1896.
All of Persia began to prepare. Governors of every province were requested to come to Tehran in May. Every regiment of warriors and every nomadic cavalry were ordered to march in parade. In his own honor, the Shah exempted all peasants from two years of taxes. He sent home the few young men still enrolled in his army, and promised amnesty for all prisoners.
In Tehran, triumphal arches were erected on every street, shopowners decorated their stores, and the royal kitchen began to feed all the poor. The Shah's eunuchs gave away new clothes to children. Shrines and holy places declared they would house any and all pilgrims. Mullahs were offered cough medicine to clear their throats so they could chant louder in praise of the Shah. Sacred fountains were enlarged to hold greater quantities of holy water, as miracles were predicted to happen on the day of the jubilee. Nasser-ed-Din Shah himself, close to seventy years old, announced he would empty his harem of his thousand temporary wives, only to replace them with new ones.
Peacock went to the palace now on a daily basis. Qamar-ol-Dowleh wanted no part of the celebrations, but the Badji insisted that the Queen must appear at her husband's side on the day of the jubilee. She had called in weavers and seamstresses to prepare a special gown for the Queen, ordered the stables to build a new carriage for the Queen, and summoned Peacock to bring her the greatest stones in the city. In the midst of the frenzy, just when she had stopped looking for Arash, Peacock found her son.
She had left the palace one late afternoon, and was walking slowly through the gates of the Square of the Cannons. She was not in a rush to get home that night; in the spirit of the celebrations, Nasser-ed-Din Shah had lifted the restriction on walking after dark, and allowed anyone to roam the streets freely. At the entrance to the square, Peacock stepped back to allow passage to a regiment of the youth division of the Persian Cossack Brigade. She saw the young boys riding past her in a cloud of dust, and did not move until she thought they had all passed. She started to walk again, but she felt someone looking at her, and turned around. There was a boy, mounted on a horse and wearing a Cossack uniform, staring at the yellow patch on her chador.
In the twilight he appeared pallid and lost, but his eyes were dark and his features pleasing. She thought he was the same age as Arash. She smiled at him. Then suddenly she felt the fear of death tear through her heart. The boy, she realized, was a younger image of Solomon the Man.
She raised a hand and beckoned Arash. He came on his horse, one hand resting on the gun he had not yet learned to use.
"Take a bow," he ordered, and put the tip of his whip on Peacock's shoulder.
Peacock reached for him. Frightened, Arash pulled back.
"Unveil yourself," he commanded, as if to identify the enemy. "Unveil and introduce yourself."
Peacock opened her veil. Arash went limp. His eyes filled with tears. She raised a hand to touch him, there on his knee that trembled against the horse, but in the instant that she moved, he drew his gun and backed away.
"Die!" he screamed, cursing her for the years of longing and abandonment. "You die!"
Arash the Rebel was one year old when he arrived at Nasser-ed-Din Shah's court in Tehran. He had come with Tala and Solomon the Man, exhausted by the protracted journey from Esfahan, trembling with fear and consternation in his white starched shirt and the padded silk jacket Tala had insisted he must wear. He was terrified of Tala, of her tempestuous moods and impossible demands,
terrified also of Solomon the Man—this father he had rarely seen before, who had suddenly taken him away from Peacock. During the trip he had ridden alone, in a coach, with only a maid at his side. Then, as throughout the rest of her life, Tala the Qajar refused Solomon closeness with Peacock's son. Arash the Rebel had sat in the carriage with the maid, and watched the endless yellow desert— bands of nomads traveling in caravans with camels and sheep and donkeys, the men dressed in loose white and gray clothes, the women in bright red and yellow skirts, or in black chadors. The journey had taken twice as long as expected: Tala refused to wake up in the dark, when the caravan was supposed to start each day. By the time she got ready to leave, the sun was up, and they had to wait in the tents for sunset. They reached Tehran with their animals sick, and their servants heat-stricken.
Arash the Rebel remembered standing in a strange courtyard on the day of their arrival and pulling at his starched shirt as if to release the heat he could not escape. He remembered lying in a cool, windowless room in the King's andaroun—a basement with brick walls, and in the middle, a pool of fresh water supplied by a well. He stayed there for days, perhaps weeks. He was running a high fever, and he refused to eat. Two maids watched him. Once a day, Solomon the Man came to see him.
But the fever had not stopped, and after two weeks the basement had taken on a foul smell—like things decaying before their time. The night maid swore she had seen a child, a boy like Arash but with icy skin and frosted hair, sitting in a corner of the basement, staring at the sickbed.
“It's Jebreel," announced the court doctor, Hakim Bashi. "It's the angel who watches over the deaths of children."
Hakim Bashi ruled that Arash was dying of heartache— for his mother, no doubt—and demanded that Peacock be brought to him immediately. He was told that Peacock was in Esfahan, that it would be weeks before she could be reached and brought to the capital.
"Well, then," Hakim Bashi, declared, "let the boy's father carry the burden of his death."
That night, Solomon the Man came to the cooling room, and showed Arash a picture of himself with Zil-el-Sultan and Peacock: there was Zil-el-Sultan, tall and wide-chested and dressed in a jewel-clad gown. Next to him stood Solomon, and then a girl, dark and thin and terrified, staring ahead of her as if to pierce the cardboard with her eyes.
"Your mother," Solomon the Man told Arash, wondering if he would understand.
Arash the Rebel gaped at the image in the cardboard rectangle, and for the first time in his young life, he spoke Peacock's name. Slowly the foul smell left the basement, the frosted angel stopped visiting, and Hakim Bashi declared a miracle.
Later, Arash remembered getting lost in Nasser-ed-Din Shah's palace—the expansive rooms and endless corridors that stretched before him like a treacherous maze, leading to bejeweled halls with mirrored ceilings, where walls made of miniature pieces of glass multiplied a single image into a thousand, and where hundreds of chandeliers cried infinite tears of cut crystal.
He lived in the Palace of Roses until he was five, then moved to the Palace of the Sun. He rarely saw his father or Tala; they lived in another mansion, and Tala had been pregnant every year since she came to Tehran.
In the Palace of the Sun, Arash was assigned his own quarters and servants: he had outgrown the andaroun, he was told. He was a man and could no longer live with females.
He slept alone in a vast room furnished with every luxury, in a bed so immense that Arash always thought it would swallow him in his sleep. He studied with a tutor every morning and afternoon, learned Persian, French, and Arabic, calligraphy, art, and mathematics, riding, polo, and marksmanship. Once a year he went hunting with the Royal Urdu.
It was the most exciting event of the year, the one time all of the Shah's family traveled together. They went north, to the jungles of Mazandaran, to chase boars. Arash the Rebel stayed in a tent with Solomon the Man. Tala was assigned to the women's camp, but she hunted with the men, and refused to sleep except with her husband. Arash the Rebel watched Tala ride away every dawn on her black horse. She galloped behind a dozen hound dogs, a rifle in her hand and a storm of golden hair on her shoulders, and returned tired but elated, her face scratched and bruised by the branches of trees, her skin glowing with the sweat of excitement as she dragged behind her the day's prize. She was always the last to return to camp. She stumbled off her horse, found Solomon the Man in his tent, and threw herself at him, making love—Arash knew as he stood outside the tent—with such urgency that she would tremble for hours after, and her legs would be unsteady, and every time Solomon the Man raised his eyes to smile at her, Tala the Qajar would blush with pleasure and lower her eyes to hide her love.
Slowly, through the years of his childhood, Arash the Rebel learned to overcome his longing for his mother. He made peace with his own surroundings, and accepted Solomon the Man as the distant relative who sometimes loved him. He kept the picture of Peacock hidden in his private chest, but looked at it less often, and her image began to fade from his mind. When he was seven years old, his tutors enrolled him in the youth division of the Persian Cossack Brigade. Arash the Rebel studied Turki and Russian, and received military training from an older youth named Reza Khan the Maxim. He still lived in the palace, but he spent all his days at the House of Cossacks next to the drill ground in Tehran, and for the first time in his young life he began to make friends and to feel at home in his surroundings. Away from the palace he could forget his life, lose himself in uniform anonymity, and escape the feeling of estrangement he suffered every time he saw Tala and her children with Solomon the Man. He worked hard, embraced the military discipline imposed fiercely by Reza, and at the end of the first year he earned the distinction of graduating first in his class. When the minister of court demanded a Cossack youth to serve as the Shah's escort during the anniversary jubilee, Arash the Rebel was awarded the honor. He was exulted, so proud he rode alone to Solomon the Man's house and shouted the news as he ran through the hallways. Even Tala was pleased. She lifted Arash in her arms and smiled at him with all her resplendence, and for the first time ever, Arash the Rebel thought he would forgive Tala, find his father in Solomon the Man, and let go of the cardboard woman with the green eyes that beckoned him every moment of his life.
Four days before his fiftieth-anniversary jubilee, Nasser-ed-Din Shah made a pilgrimage to the holy Shrine of Shah Abdol-Azzim, near Tehran. It was to be a historic visit, the Shah had promised, for immediately after the pilgrimage he intended to renounce his prerogative as despot, and proclaim himself “the Majestic Authority of all the Persians." In that spirit he had allowed the city authority to relax its watch over the citizens, to stop keeping a record of the strangers who flocked into the caravansaries, and to allow everyone to participate in the pilgrimage with the Shah.
The pilgrimage was scheduled for one and a half hours past noon. Arash the Rebel, part of the royal escort, rode to Shah Abdol-Azzim ahead of the cavalcade. He was accompanied by his Laleh—Master of the Menservants—and his Master of the Bridles. All the way from Tehran to the shrine, the road was jammed with men and women, walking or riding mules and donkeys, who were traveling to Shah Abdol-Azzim just to see the Shah. The town itself was so crowded that Arash could not find a place to leave his horse. The shrine was packed with pilgrims who had wanted to visit the holy man before their King arrived.
Arash the Rebel left his horse with his Master of the Bridles, and went to join the welcoming party. A company of eunuchs, dressed in their most colorful and extravagant clothes, stood at formation in front of the shrine. Behind them was a regiment of the royal army, and then, closest to the shrine itself, a line of young Cossacks.
At exactly half past one, a horseman galloped toward the shrine and announced to the Cossack leader that His Majesty's cavalcade was near. The Cossack leader sent Arash and another boy to clear the shrine of all pilgrims.
His mission accomplished, Arash returned to take his place in the welcoming line. He saw the Shah's cavalcade.
A dozen warriors rode in front, leading twelve eunuchs on Arabian chargers with painted saddles and gold and silver harnesses.
There was a single horseman on a white horse, who cried, ''Stand back," as his charge danced in the air and reared. "Stand back and take heed."
There came a pair of white horses—covered with gold embroidery, wearing bejeweled harnesses with high aigrettes of red plumage. The horses advanced slowly, leading another pair, then a third. Behind them was the royal coach.
The Shah's coachmen were dressed in purple clothes, with gold strings hanging from their shoulders and wrists. The coach was gold, lined with purple velvet. The runners who walked alongside it wore purple crowns, white breeches, and red shoes.
Five hundred mounted men brought up the rear of the procession.
Outside the Shrine of Shah Abdol-Azzim, Nasser-ed-Din Shah's Prime Minister, Atabak Amin-al Sultan, ran forward to open the carriage door. Two high officials held His Majesty's hand and helped him alight. Arash the Rebel heard the crowd gasp and moan in excitement as they laid eyes on the Shah.
Nasser-ed-Din Shah was a big man with a round face, superior eyes, and a strong mustache. He wore a coat of gray and orange brocade, a Western collar, and a black tie over a white shirt. He had a purple shawl, a leather belt studded with enormous diamonds, black trousers, military boots. His lambskin hat, tilted to one side, was adorned with a single diamond as large as an egg. In the heat of summer, he wore a long coat lined with Russian sable.
He greeted his Prime Minister and acknowledged the officials, then turned toward the shrine.
"We shall proceed," he ordered, and quickly the Prime Minister led the way. They were accompanied only by a royal guard, Arash the Rebel, and another young Cossack.