Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  In Saltanatabad—the Palace of Kings—a deputation of the National Council greeted Ahmad Shah.

  ''We pray, under God's shadow, that Your Majesty will serve his nation with justice and honor," the head of the delegation announced to the new King.

  "Please God," Ahmad Shah replied bravely, but his chin trembled and he fought to keep his voice, "I will."

  Tehran was in chaos. The government that had replaced the monarchy had no clear leadership and no plan of action. Having reached Tehran victorious, Sattar Khan and his army of rebels now found themselves without a war to fight. Parliament asked that they surrender their weapons, but they refused. Weeks of stalemate ensued. Yesterday's allies became enemies. In the end, the National Council dispatched troops to bring Sattar's forces under siege and confiscate their weapons. The rebels fought back. In the battle that followed, Sattar Khan— hero of the revolution and the man who had saved Persia from the Qajars—was shot and severely wounded. He died soon after—of injuries, and a broken heart.

  But even with Sattar Khan dead, the new government faced grave threats: the mullahs were fighting the nationalists, and the British government was undermining Parliament. There was no army, no police, no one to restore calm. In the palace, Ahmad Shah cried day and night for his parents. Once, when he could no longer stand the pain of separation, Ahmad Shah would steal a horse from his own stables, and ride in the dark toward the northern gates of his capital. Alerted by spies, the Shah's Russian house-tutor would send Arash to bring Ahmad back. He had been headed for the border, the Shah would confess to Arash, toward Odessa, where his father lived with his ten wives.

  Arash the Rebel cried with the Shah that night. He realized that to avenge himself, he had repeated Solomon and Tala's crime. He knew his revolution had failed. In 1910 he left his post at the National Council and disappeared from Persia forever. Fearing that they had been betrayed by their young ally, the Council searched Tehran and every other province, but came up empty-handed. They whispered tales of intrigue and treason, of mortal death and ghostly departure, but in the end, they never managed to solve the mystery of Arash the Rebel: that he had given all to battle, and realized he wanted none of the spoils.

  In Saltanataband, Ahmad Shah wrote every day to his father—loving pages full of sorrow, in which he confessed his most private thoughts. He entrusted the letters to his closest friend. He waited for an answer. He waited years for an answer. The letters, he would later learn, were taken to the Russian embassy, where they were opened, scrutinized, and left to become matters of public record.

  Reza Khan the Maxim watched the revolution of 1908, then he watched it fail. He saw the destruction of the old system, saw it replaced by anarchy, and wondered if Persia would survive.

  The Tripartite Agreement of 1907 had resulted in a virtual occupation of Persia by foreign powers. They ruled each province through their own embassies, and refused to cooperate with Tehran. Twice in two years, Parliament appointed prime ministers only to see them abdicate in the all-pervasive atmosphere of confusion and impotence. Everywhere, bandits and highway robbers held the population in terror. Self-proclaimed governors defied orders from Tehran. Persia needed an army—a single, unified force to battle the enemies outside and within, to restore calm and allow Parliament to rule. Under the Qajars, her security had been entrusted to independent police detachments: the Russian Cossack brigade, the Swedish-led gendarmerie, the British-organized South Persia Rifles—each of which took orders from a foreign government. Now, without money or leadership, she was farther than ever from creating an efficient fighting force.

  In 1914 the First World War broke in Europe. British and Russian forces, already occupying Persia, closed Parliament and took over the rule of the country. Soon thereafter, Germany found its way into Persia. Seeking to weaken the British stronghold, the legendary German spy Wassmus crept into the south and enlisted ethnic tribes seeking independence. He hired them to fight the British, creating civil war in a country already destroyed by occupation, disorder, and poverty.

  Reza Khan the Maxim was thirty-six years old. His first wife, Hamdam, had been a woman of low origin who did not understand his ambition, and who had given him only a girl. He had abandoned Hamdam and their daughter and married again—this time to a wife of higher birth. He had no friends, not even among the Cossacks, but all his life he had cherished his acquaintance with Peacock. In the days of Persia's greatest tumult, when he felt himself standing on the brink of disaster, Reza Khan the Maxim went back and found the Jew from Esfahan.

  "You said once I could be King," he told her in her windowless room in the Pit. He had been struck by those words, had felt his insides boil with excitement every time he remembered that encounter. Amir Tuman Kazim Khan had told him of a Jew who foresaw the death of kings. Reza Khan wondered if Peacock had the same powers.

  "You must tell me what you know," he insisted. "Tell me my future."

  Peacock smiled. All through her childhood, in times of hardship and disappointment, her mother had whispered to her Esther the Soothsayer's prophecy made on the day Peacock was born. Now Peacock repeated the words for Reza Khan:

  "A man shall come, riding from the north, with blood on his hands, and the wrath of God in his eyes.

  "He shall sit on the Throne of the Sun, and with a sweep of his hand he shall reach across this empire to free our people."

  Reza Khan the Maxim felt the veins in his temples about to burst.

  "How do you know I am that man?" he asked.

  Peacock put her fingertips to his forehead.

  "It says so right here—where Cain bore his mark."

  It was the winter of 1914. Leaving Peacock's house, Reza Khan inhaled the stench of rot rising from the Pit, and watched the children running barefoot in the snow. He went home. He had found his destiny.

  He climbed in the ranks of the Cossacks, and inspired great loyalty among the troops. He was conscious of his lowly status in society, aware that nothing in his past and lineage fit the mold of the traditional nobleman-turned-savior. He could not yet alter his dead father's rank in history, but he knew he could improve his station through marriage.

  In 1915, he took a third wife—the daughter of an army commander—and at last felt he had achieved a suitable status in society. He gave his wife a title, Taj-Malek, the Crown Lady, and told her she would soon be Queen.

  Solomon the Matt was fifty-three years old when Tala left Persia. He let her go and tried to salvage his own life, to start over in a country now hostile and unwelcoming to the vestiges of the Qajars. He tried to forget Tala; she had left as easily as she came to him, blamed Solomon the Man for Arash's treason, and abandoned him without a word of explanation. Still, every time he remembered Tala's smile, Solomon the Man trembled with desire. He sent a letter to Odessa:

  ''Come back, my passion," he told her. "You have been away too long."

  He wrote another note, this time entrusted to a messenger with clear orders to bring back an answer. He suspected that Tala was ill, or imprisoned in the castle at Odessa. He imagined Tala crying through the night into her pillow, calling Solomon's name, digging her nails into the walls of the room she could not leave—how else could she have stayed away so long?—and praying that Solomon would arrive, at dawn when the sky was new, to save her in his arms. Before the messenger had come back—bringing, Solomon felt in his heart, no word of Tala—he left Tehran and embarked for Russia.

  In Odessa he rented a room, unfurnished and cold, and sent word to Muhammad Ali Shah's castle.

  He waited for Tala through days and nights of agony, never leaving the room for fear that she might come while he was gone, tortured at the thought that she would not arrive. He imagined her running to him in the dark, her breath cold and anxious, tearing at her clothes as she fell into his arms and he took her back into the farthest corner of his room, there against a stone wall, and loved her with his hands and his eyes, taking her into his bed and spreading her pale body onto the sheets—surprised,
as always, at the contrast in the color of their skin—touching her so gently that her eyes never moved, and when at last it was over she would stay in his bed, her face radiating their passion, and say she forgave him Arash's betrayal.

  She never came.

  Solomon the Man stayed in Odessa—alone, without work or money or a goal. When his money ran out, he tried to sing at cabarets and teahouses, and found that his music was unknown and unpopular. He sought love from strange women, paid prostitutes just to come and sit with him for a night, but in the end he felt he had disappointed everyone. He went to the palace of Muhammad Ali Shah and came back dejected and ashamed. He drank and drank, and by the time he realized he could not stop, he was old and sick and could find no reason to save himself.

  He developed an illness, a gnawing ache that spread from his stomach into his chest and arms. He became weak and yellow, unable to eat, haunted by insomnia. He lay on the floor of his rented room, barely surviving on the money he made by singing in tearooms, and thought about the life he had left in Persia.

  He thought of the women he had loved, the children, all grown, that he had abandoned or lost. He thought of the strangers he had befriended, the voice that had come to him like a gift from the angels, but which he could no longer command. In the end, when he began to vomit blood, he thought of Peacock.

  He remembered the child he had married—dark and shy and cold as the sparrows in winter. He remembered her magnificent eyes on the night of their wedding, when he had hoped, until the moment he lifted Peacock's veil, that he would find in her Zil-el-Sultan's Hannah. He remembered his daughters. He knew Sabrina had died.

  Solomon the Man sat up in bed, surrounded by shadows and the sound of his neighbors' poverty, and for the first time in six years he understood the cause of his fall: he had lost his luck, abandoned his daughters, and sinned against his wife. He had destroyed Peacock and taken away her son. For this, Solomon the Man was certain, he had been cursed.

  He summoned all his strength, and counted his money; he would go back to Persia, he decided, to Juyy Bar, where Sabrina was buried. He would find his daughter's grave, throw himself on her corpse, and demand forgiveness before he died.

  From Russia, Solomon the Man went to Turkey, then down into Azerbaijan. After two months of traveling, he arrived at Sari—a town in the Persian province of Mazandaran on the Caspian shore. Before the Revolution, Solomon the Man had always heard the Shahs speak of their ''unbeatable'' army in Sari—the one they all claimed was capable of retrieving every province lost to Russia in the last century. Now, as he walked through the town, Solomon the Man looked for the army and found nothing. Instead, he saw hundreds of blind people—old and young and even children, more than he had ever seen in any town or province he had traveled: during the early days of the Constitutional Revolution, the governor of Sari, a staunch monarchist, had blinded everyone suspected of harboring revolutionary sentiments.

  The fabulous army, Solomon the Man soon learned, was composed of two dozen soldiers—half-naked and addicted to opium—who earned their living by toiling in the fields. Their arsenal—that legendary arsenal so vaunted by the Qa-jars—was composed of two cannons. The first one was used only once a year, in the month of Ramadan, when the soldiers fired it to inform the public it was time to break their fast. It had broken wheels, and rested on a pile of bricks. Every time it was fired, it raced backward, and the soldiers would have to pull it forward again, lift it with great difficulty, and place it on a newly built pile of bricks.

  The other cannon was used for churning milk to make butter.

  Solomon the Man decided to find the Qajar palace, and ask for a night's stay. The palace was an ancient structure, built by Shah Abbas the Great in the seventeenth century. Inherited by the Qajars, it had been neglected from the start, and after the Revolution it had fallen into ruin. Still, Solomon the Man knocked at the gates and hoped for an answer.

  "Get lost!" a voice thundered at him through the thick cluster of trees inside the palace grounds. "We're closed."

  Solomon the Man knocked again.

  "Get lost, I said!" the voice raged again, but Solomon was desperate and he knocked a third time.

  The voice approached ferociously:

  "Who is it, I say, that dares my anger?"

  It was a Negro—seven feet tall, naked to the waist, with inhuman muscles and enormous hands. He charged through the palace grounds and attacked the gate with his chest, forcing the metal open and emerging like a demon.

  "Get lost!" he said, but then suddenly he looked into

  Solomon's face and stopped himself. He pulled back, eyes lowered to the ground, and fell to his knees like a slave. He took Solomon's hand and brought it to his eyes.

  ''My life your sacrifice,” he said. "Solomon Khan! My master! Forgive my impudence."

  It was Rubi the Executioner, guardian of the Qajar palace, holder of the governor's Sword of Justice.

  "My life your sacrifice," he was crying on Solomon's hand. "I would have paved this earth with my own eyes had I known you were going to step on it."

  Rubi the Executioner had been born in Constantinople, and sold as a child to a rug merchant who had raised him as a slave. By the time he reached adolescence, Rubi's enormous figure and bulging muscles had made him the strongest of all slaves. A wealthy pasha bought him from the rug merchant for an unprecedented price. But while in the pasha's service, Rubi fell in love with one of the master's wives—a white Turk with flesh as soft as the inside of a dream—and one night he forced his way into the harem and attacked her. He was caught and condemned to death.

  "Tie a rope around his ankles and throw him in the Bosporus," the pasha had ordered his servants, but there wasn't a man in all of Constantinople who dared tackle Rubi. For months the pasha kept Rubi in prison and waited to find an executioner who would kill the slave. At last he was approached by a friend.

  "Sell me the Negro," the friend had asked. "I can use him to kill my enemies."

  For years, Rubi the Executioner murdered people he did not know. When his master had rid himself of every possible foe, he sold Rubi to a Greek slave merchant who took him to Tehran and put him on auction.

  Rubi the Executioner was only twenty-five years old at the time. He knew his age because slaves, like horses and cows, were issued birth certificates when no one else kept a record of their children's births. He was at the peak of his physical strength, but the years of killing and captivity had worn on his soul, and he had become as sensitive and vulnerable as a child. The day of the auction, he stepped on the platform before the bidders, but instead of flexing the muscles of his naked body, he looked at the audience and burst into tears.

  It was a shocking performance, so contrary to the expectation of the bidders that the Greek merchant canceled the auction and, taking advantage of Rubi's weak moral state, beat him for the first time since he was a child. He did not bother to schedule another auction. He knew no one would buy a mad giant they could not control. He was about to leave Tehran with Rubi when Solomon the Man approached him and bought the slave. Then Solomon freed Rubi.

  In 1892, Rubi took a bag of gold, his ownership papers, and his birth certificate from Solomon the Man. He went north, to Mazandaran, and found a job with the governor of Sari. He was entrusted the Sword of Justice, and appointed head of the palace guards. In ten years his name became dreaded throughout Persia. He killed his victims by strangulation, using only his thumb and little finger. He beheaded the corpses, stuffed the heads with straw, and used them to decorate his house.

  When the Revolution displaced Sari's governor, Rubi the Executioner lost his Sword of Justice and his post as head of the palace guards. Stripped of his purpose and rendered without importance, he nevertheless kept on guarding the palace long after he had stopped receiving a salary. He became bored and depressed, suddenly haunted by visions of those he had killed over the years, disturbed by the sight of all the women and children he had blinded at the governor's orders. He became a re
cluse, smoked opium until he was addicted and destroyed, and when Solomon the Man arrived, he had not spoken to a soul in three years.

  “May I be thy sacrifice," he told Solomon as he wiped his tears. "You can't stay in the palace—the rats will eat you alive."

  He laughed to hide his embarrassment, revealing sharp, uneven teeth blackened from constant use of shireh.

  "A man of your stature deserves the greatest of mansions, and I am ashamed to offer you less. But all I have is my own home, and I can only pray that you will forgive my poverty."

  He took Solomon to a dark alley near the palace. He stopped in front of a door, so low even a child could not pass through it upright, and pushed it open with his hand. Rubi the Executioner never locked his door; he knew no one dared enter his house without permission.

  There was one room, damp and bare, with no light except through a tiny window with iron bars. A dirty carpet was spread on the floor. A bundle of sheets and blankets were tucked in a corner. On the walls, Solomon the Man realized in horror, Rubi the Executioner had displayed rows of human parts.

  There were hundreds of legs and arms, hands and ears. There were thirty heads, cured and stuffed and arranged in one neat row: Turkoman chiefs, Rubi explained to Solomon, who had rebeled against the Shah, been captured, and brought to justice by the Executioner.

  "Take my bed," Rubi insisted. "You have but to spend the night here. Tomorrow I will take you to Tehran myself."

  In Tehran, occupying Russian troops were fighting enemy Turkish soldiers on the streets. Persia had become a battleground of the First World War. British troops shot all day at German battalions, and everywhere, neutral Persians were caught in the crossfire and sacrificed. Rubi the Executioner took Solomon to the safest place he could find—the caravansary in Tekkyeh— and from there he set off to find a coach that would take them to Esfahan. He soon learned that the roads were closed—occupied by foreign troops that used them to transport weapons and food to their bases. No one dared travel out of Tehran for fear of being shot by hostile soldiers.