Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  Reza Khan called Peacock to the Palace of Roses in Tehran. She had not seen him for many years, since that day in the winter of 1910 when he came to ask her his future. He was older now—close to fifty— and his hair had begun to turn gray. His eyes were as hard as ever—as hard as in the days of his childhood, when he was alone and unprotected and helpless in the home of strangers. But through the decades of war and victory, Peacock realized, Reza Khan had become vain and haughty and intolerant of human weakness. He was not yet King, but he lived in a palace, and he planned a coronation for April of 1926. Peacock, he told her, was to help with the building of a crown, the mending of the Throne of the Sun, which had been tarnished and damaged during the years of Qajar rule, and with the choosing of tiaras for the Queen and her daughters.

  "You will work at night," the Minister of Court explained to Peacock after the Shah had dismissed her. "You must observe total secrecy, and apply yourself with unfailing diligence. Reza Khan demands perfection. He forgives no failure."

  The next evening, Peacock returned to the Palace of Roses and waited at the gates for her escort. Two guards in army uniforms led her through the garden, and into the inner chambers of the palace. She was met by six men : Reza Khan's Attorney General, the ministers of Court and War, the Master of Ceremonies, and the acting Treasurer General—an American who had come to Iran as part of the famous Millspaugh Mission. They led her to a vaulted room. The door was locked, sprinkled with wax seals. Only when all six men were present could any of them open the seals.

  The door opened onto an enormous hall—empty and quiet and lit only by streams of moonlight that poured in through narrow windows around the room. The walls were painted with miniature figures of legendary Persian heroes. The floor was paved with a gem-studded carpet. On shelves and in glass cases, upon tables and inside open chests, Peacock saw the crown jewels of Persia.

  She saw crowns of diamonds, swords sheathed with rubies, scepters of emerald. She saw chests full of gold, warriors' helmets ablaze with precious stones, shields that dazzled the eye. She saw coffers full of loose stones, rows of unstrung pearls, enormous cupboards packed with priceless enamels. She saw a world globe, supported by a solid column of diamonds, with seas made of flat emeralds and continents of rubies.

  The American in the group sighed faintly, and knelt next to a chest of unset stones.

  “Such treasure!" he exclaimed as he thrust his arms shoulder-deep into the jewels. “My God, such treasures!"

  Peacock worked continuously for two months. Every night she was escorted to the vault door by the delegation of ministers. Once inside the vault, she was left alone to work till dawn. Only the American, the acting Treasurer General, insisted on his right to stay. All night long he roamed the halls, dressed up in the regalia of kings, trying on various shields and daggers, and bearing different crowns. On the night of April 24, 1926, Peacock finished her work. The next day she attended Reza Shah's coronation.

  In the Audience Hall of the Palace of Roses, Peacock stood among a host of dignitaries invited by Reza Shah, and waited for the ceremonies to begin. The guests were lined up on either side of a long corridor: at one end was the door through which the Shah would emerge. At the other was the Peacock Throne. In deference to the clergy, who believed music unholy, Reza Shah would conduct his coronation in complete silence.

  The door opened at the end of the aisle. It revealed a child—the crown prince Muhammad Reza—seven years old and dressed in military uniform. As he walked past the guests, he locked his eyes onto the Peacock Throne and never looked to his sides until he had reached his destination.

  The Prime Minister followed the Crown Prince. He held a jewel-studded cushion bearing the famous Kiyan Crown. Behind him was the Minister of Court, with the Pahlavi Crown, then the Minister of War, with the “World-Conquering” sword of Nadir Shah the Great.

  Sardar Asad the Bakhtiari walked in with the Pearl Crown.

  The Minister of Justice carried a gem-studded staff.

  The Minister of Public Works displayed the 186-carat “Sea of Light" diamond.

  There was a pause, then a string of lesser ministers and generals each bearing the treasures of other dynasties: the sword of Shah Abbas, the bow of Nadir Shah, the coat of mail of Shah Ismael.

  The procession stopped. Everyone turned to the door. Reza Shah the Great entered the Audience Hall.

  He wore a royal cloak encrusted entirely with pearls. He had on a cap adorned with the diamond aigrette of Nadir Shah. He walked the length of the aisle and sat upon the Peacock Throne. He removed his cap, and placed on his head the new Pahlavi Crown. Trumpets sounded. Chandeliers glared. In the eyes of Reza Shah, Peacock saw the triumph of a man, come from nowhere, who had become King.

  An hour later, still in full regalia, Reza Shah sat in a gilded coach drawn by six white horses, and rode through the decorated streets of his capital. His guests rode behind him, also in gilded coaches.

  There followed a procession of three hundred fifty mounted warriors from the nomadic tribes, each dressed in their local costumes, then a parade of Reza Shah's new army.

  At the Palace of Joy, his new residence of choice, Reza Shah was greeted by the greatest of Iran's clergymen. In traditional religious ceremony, the clergyman presented to the Shah a sacrificial ram. Reza Shah grasped the ram's horn, brought the animal to the ground, and slit its throat with a single stroke of a knifeblade. Peacock watched him as he killed the ram. His face never moved. But his hands, drenched in blood, shivered in disgust and pulled away.

  A man shall come, riding from the north, with blood on his hands. . . .

  Besharat the Bastard was in Paris on scholarship from the Alliance. He was studying architecture and living above a barbershop when he received news of his father's death.

  “Ezraeel the Avenger has died, God curse his soul, and left you all his money," Assal had dictated to the scribe who wrote the letter. “He must have hated you less than his other sons."

  Besharat the Bastard abandoned school and scholarship and sailed back to Persia.

  He took over the shop, the moneylending business, the house where Ezraeel the Avenger's wife and sons had lived all their lives. He dismissed all the old employees and hired new ones, raised salaries, paid all of Ezraeel's outstanding debts. And he built himself a house.

  It was three stories tall, with glass windows and brick walls, and a garden three square kilometers wide, where life-size sculptures of men and animals lurked in the shadows of giant trees and enameled columns. It had seven tiled pools, filled once a month with water from the garden's own wells. In the center of each pool were winged cherubs—replicas of those Besharat had seen at a museum in Paris. All day long the sun reflected against the large glass windows of the house and glared in the eyes of passersby. At night, servants placed torches in every corner of the garden, so that even on the hills outside Tehran, peasants and travelers could see the lights on the Avenue of the Tulips, and know that Besharat the Bastard had arrived.

  He was caught in the fever of being modern, the sudden longing for foreign ways and new thoughts, which appeared at the turn of the century among the upper classes. Among the Muslims, it led to a condemnation of religious fanaticism and a sudden adoption of European customs. Among the Jews, who had barely stepped out of the ghetto, it forced a realization that to be accepted in the new world they must first shed the vestiges of their past. They changed their accents, improved their appearance, abandoned the strict practice of their religion. Besharat the Bastard ordered chairs to sit on and forks to eat with, spoke French to his friends, and cut all ties with the ghetto. Still, when it came time to marry, he was unable to go against tradition. For two thousand years, his mother told him, marriages had been arranged. Girls were chosen by matchmakers and mothers. Matrimony was a decision best left to the wisdom of elders. Besharat the Bastard would have liked to marry a girl he knew—whose face he had seen, whose voice he had heard. His mother put an end to that thought.

  "Marr
y a girl who lets you see her face before the wedding," she warned Besharat, "and you have married yourself a whore."

  He let Assal work with matchmakers and interview prospective brides. In 1928 she announced she had found the girl. Besharat the Bastard got married.

  They had brought him Naiima, the only daughter of Jacob the Rug Merchant, who had fathered eighteen sons before God gave him a girl. There was a traditional wedding, with the bride and groom taking separate vows of marriage. Later, Besharat the Bastard stepped into the bridal chamber to meet his wife for the first time. He lifted the veil off Naii-ma's face and prayed he would find in her something he could love.

  She was fair-skinned and plump, her hair thick and healthy, her teeth perfect. She had brown eyes, thin lips that hardly moved when she spoke, and a way of walking, even with shoes on, that allowed her to go through stone corridors and up marble steps without ever making a sound or arousing attention. She was a shadow, Besharat thought even before he had touched her, a ghost come to lie in his bed at night, to steal his secrets and never share with him her own.

  "Give me a son," he asked her. "I will demand nothing else of you."

  Naiima of Jacob tried desperately to please Besharat. She realized he did not love her, felt his disappointment every time they were alone together. But she had come to his house determined to stay, and she knew how to win; growing up with eighteen boys, she had learned to fight, to be patient, to persist longer than her opponent. Her first goal was to give Besharat the son he wanted.

  She went to Besharat's bedroom after every purity bath, ate every foreskin smuggled out of the circumcisions she attended. She made secret trips to see old midwives in whose powers she had come to believe, offered generous gifts to rabbis so they would include her in their prayers. She wanted a boy, she told them, not just a child, but an heir for Besharat Khan.

  Two years after they were married, Naiima was still not pregnant.

  "Take me to a doctor," she asked Besharat. "They know things midwives don't."

  Besharat the Bastard resisted the idea at first. He did not like to take his troubles to strangers. He was not about to discuss his wife's fertility with other men. But another year passed, and all of Tehran began to talk of Besharat's childless marriage. Terrified he would be accused of impotence, Besh-arat conceded to Naiima's incessant pleas and took her to see a doctor.

  At the hospital he explained the problem, then asked for a cure. The doctor wanted to examine Naiima—to put his hand, gloved, he assured Besharat, who could not see a difference—up through her crotch and into her uterus. Mindful of Besharat's outrage, the doctor nevertheless carried the insult further, asking that “the husband" present a sample of his sperm—produced on the spot, and placed into a sterilized container—for examination. Besharat the Bastard took his wife home and never called on a doctor again.

  He turned to other cures instead, age-old recipes that had never violated a man's honor.

  “We have been cursed by the evil eye of the jealous," Assal convinced him, and set out to break the spell. She called doctors and old women expert in the art of exorcising the evil eye. She burned wild rue seeds twice a day, and filled Besharat's bedroom with the thick white smoke until his skin smelled of wild rue and his eyes teared. She planted sharp objects—skewers and knives and nails—in every corner of the house and the garden, filled a large bowl with salt water and soaked Besharat and Naiima's undershirts in it for twenty-four hours at a time. She repeated special phrases before visitors so as to guard against their jealousy. She bought live sheep, chickens, and lambs, slaughtered them in Besharat's garden, then wiped their blood on the soles of Besharat's shoes. Still, Naiima's womb remained dry and as quiet as a graveyard.

  Five years after he had married Naiima, Besharat the Bastard realized she would never give him a child. He knew his alternatives: to divorce Naiima, or to take a second wife— provided he would treat both women with equal care and dignity, sleep in both their beds until they were old, and force the natural mother to share her children with the infertile wife.

  Besharat the Bastard thought he could never manage two wives at once. He told Naiima he was going to divorce her.

  She fell to her knees.

  "Marry another if you want," she begged. "Marry a dozen women, but don't send me away."

  Besharat the Bastard was moved by Naiima's desperation. But he persisted in his decision until she produced a real weapon:

  "Well, then," she threatened, "divorce me and I will sleep with other men. I will become a whore, tell everyone they have lain where once only you were master."

  Besharat the Bastard hit Naiima—she knew he would— but after that he never contemplated divorce again.

  In 1933, just as he was about to set off on a journey for France, Besharat the Bastard announced his intention to find a second wife. He left in the spring, when the weather was calm and the long trip aboard ships and trains would be tolerable. Seven months later, he came back with a woman.

  Her name was Yasmine. She had purple eyes and copper-colored hair. She painted her lips amber, painted her fingernails the color of her lips. The first time Besharat saw her, she was wearing a dark blue dress so tight at the waist she could not lean back in her chair. Before she had ever spoken to him, he found himself wondering if Yasmine's children would have her eyes.

  She was a secretary at the cigarette factory Besharat had come to visit. She was the boss's secretary, she always pointed out, the second most important person in the entire business, more capable than the men who occupied higher positions than she did. And she was difficult.

  She never smiled at the nervous young men who brought her silk scarves and boxes of chocolate that had consumed their week's salary, never befriended the other secretaries. She read books all the time, novels and travelogues and historical texts about the Orient and Russia and Africa. She smoked cigarettes in spite of her father's objections, spent hours studying maps of faraway places, learned the names of rivers and seas, retraced borders, memorized facts.

  He told her he was a rich businessman come to trade with the company, that he had a mansion in Tehran, servants and cooks and even a car—one of the seven in the entire city. He told her about Persia, land of poets and warriors, where the air was pearl-white and soft, the sky forever paved with stars, and the earth fertile with the blood of those come to conquer, who had in turn been vanquished. He spoke the French he had learned in the Alliance school in the ghetto. His accent was thick and heavy, his vocabulary limited. Since the tobacco concession of 1891, he explained to Yasmine, more and more Persians had given up the habit of chewing tobacco and turned instead to the Western way of smoking cigarettes. Realizing that the market was vast and uncluttered, Besharat the Bastard sought to import French cigarettes into Persia.

  He came back to the factory every day, stopping at her desk before he went in to see the boss, bragging about his wealth and his contacts in the East, asking Yasmine to join him for dinner—in his hotel, he boasted, as if the very fact that he had rented a hotel room and not a studio in someone's house should impress her. For the first three days of his courtship, Yasmine did not speak to him. On the fourth day she looked up from her desk and smiled.

  She wanted to go to the cinema—a dark, crowded room, she explained, where men and women sat together and watched images bouncing off a white screen. Besharat the Bastard was afraid of the idea. He felt he was about to commit blasphemy. But he was eager to please Yasmine, and so he agreed to take her.

  At the cinema he became convinced that watching those ghosts without bodies—human shapes that disappeared at the flick of a light—was tantamount to devil worship. Halfway through the show, he walked out.

  He waited for Yasmine on the sidewalk outside the theater. She appeared moments later, looking concerned and almost amused.

  "My eyes hurt in the dark," he lied to her.

  They never went back to the cinema again.

  On Sunday they took a carriage ride through the woods
outside Paris. Yasmine sat opposite Besharat, holding her gloves in her hand. She spoke to him for the first time of herself.

  She was an only child, she said, the daughter of parents who had started a family late and were already old by the time she was born. She had been eight years old when the Great War broke out. Her father was drafted, her mother forced to work in an ammunition factory thirty kilometers away from home. They had no other relatives, no one to care for Yasmine. She had stayed alone in her parents' apartment in the middle of Paris. Every Sunday her mother had come back to see her.

  "I walked to school with the neighbors' children," Yasmine told Besharat. "At night I stood in bread lines. Every night someone dropped in the line, starved or exhausted. Two men would step out and move the body to the side of the alley, then come back and take their places in line. Once a day, soldiers set fire to the corpses to prevent the spread of disease."

  Besharat the Bastard watched Yasmine in the dark. Her face was impassive as she spoke, but her lips quivered, and her cheeks grew as pale as her dress. He realized he had never had a conversation with a woman before.

  "The worst thing was the rats." Her voice jolted him. "When the sirens went off and we knew the bombs were coming, we had to rush down into the basement. It was crowded and airless, so dark all you could see were the whites of other people's teeth. There were rats everywhere— each one as big as a cat. When they bit, they took a piece of your flesh. They bit me twice, so after that I stayed in my room and watched the bombs explode."

  Besharat the Bastard proposed to Yasmine the third time they met. She did not accept. He told her he would not let her go until she did.

  He remained in Paris for no reason but to be close to her. He took her to work every morning and spent all day in a cafe outside the factory, drinking tea and smoking Persian tobacco that he rolled into cigarettes himself. In the afternoon he met Yasmine again and spent the evening with her. Her parents were alarmed. Her boss warned her against the stranger with the dark lips. Yasmine was fascinated with Besharat.