Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  "I may go with you," she told him one night in the third month of their courtship. They sat in a crowded dance hall full of smoke and laughter. "I think I may marry you."

  Besharat the Bastard looked as if he had been stabbed in the heart. His eyes filled with pity. He took Yasmine's hand and walked out of the dance hall.

  On the street, a middle-aged woman with grotesquely painted lips sold roses. Besharat bought them all.

  They walked in silence, Yasmine holding the roses to her chest. Near her apartment, Besharat suddenly spoke.

  "I have a wife in Iran."

  Yasmine opened her arms, stunned, and let the flowers—pink roses so pale they appeared silver in the moonlight—fall into a jagged line on the sidewalk.

  Yasmine made up her mind to go with him. She knew that Iran was backward and undeveloped. She had read accounts of the country's poverty. But she felt another war approaching in Europe, and she thought she could hide from it in Iran. She would go there, she decided, and chase away Besharat's other wife, overpower Naiima with her confidence and beauty. As mistress of Besharat's house, she would live like the wives of colonialists in Africa, hiding from the ugliness of life outside, in the comfort of a small community of foreigners where the ways of the West had been faithfully reproduced. It would be the adventure of a lifetime, a chance to live the tales she had read about all her life.

  She helped Besharat obtain a forged passport on which Naiima's name was not recorded. They were married at the end of winter. On the way back from the courthouse, Yasmine stopped at her parents' apartment to say good-bye. Her mother cried. Her father did not speak to her at all.

  They sailed on a steamship from the southern shore of France to the Turkish border, then embarked on a long train ride toward Iran. From Rezaiyeh, they rode the Trans-Iranian Railway to Tehran. Besharat's car awaited them at the central station.

  “Put this on." Besharat held out a black scarf to his new bride. "You shouldn't be seen with your head bare."

  Tehran was gray and dusty, its streets crowded, its gutters filled with garbage. All the way from the train station to the Avenue of the Tulips, children chased the car, banging on its windows, pushing their scarred faces against the glass, climbing the bumpers and slamming their fists on the roof every time the car came to a stop. Yasmine looked at Besharat. He felt her question and did not reply.

  She recognized the house from Besharat's accounts. Her heart dropped. She would be swallowed by this house, she thought, forgotten among its walls and never again heard from.

  Three men stood urinating against the garden gates. The driver honked, and they ran away, penises in hand and laughing. Inside the garden, Besharat the Bastard reached over and opened Yasmine's door. She stepped out of the car, and found herself surrounded.

  There were four women, unveiled and disheveled, smelling of sweat. They pulled at Yasmine's scarf and examined her. She looked for Naiima among them. The first three were old, the fourth one too young.

  "Go with them," Besharat told Yasmine. "They will show you what you need."

  The women took Yasmine through the yard and into the house, up the black stone staircase and into Besharat's bedroom on the second floor. The room was dark with shadows, crowded with furniture. There were chairs with armrests in the shape of lions' heads, thick velvet drapes printed with blood-red flowers. The floor was paved with stone and covered with Persian rugs.

  Assal grabbed Yasmine's arm to feel her flesh.

  "Too thin."

  Another woman, blinded by cataracts, also felt Yasmine's arm. The young girl—a maid, Yasmine imagined— pulled her hair.

  "Let go!" Yasmine protested. The blind aunt loosened her grip. The maid pulled harder, then released.

  "The hair is real, all right," she announced to the others. "But it looks like someone shaved her head for adultery."

  Assal grabbed Yasmine's breasts.

  "No tits."

  Panicked, Yasmine shoved her aside and went to the door.

  "Besharat!" she summoned her husband at the top of the stairs. Her voice echoed down the staircase. It brought no answers.

  "Besharat!"

  Assal came up behind her.

  "Shut your trap," she said in Persian.

  Yasmine ignored her.

  "Besharat! Come!"

  A hand slammed against Yasmine's mouth. It was Assal, hitting her new daughter-in-law for the first time. Yasmine was startled. Trembling, she waited to regain her balance, then attacked Assal.

  Long after dark, Yasmine heard Besharat's voice in the corridor. He came into the room and closed the door. His face was pale, his eyes dark. She wanted to run to him, but he would not look at her.

  "You can't hit my mother," he said without preamble. "You are the new bride in the house. You must obey everyone else. Even old servants take priority over a new bride."

  Yasmine sat up in her chair, and stared at the man who had brought her roses in Paris. He undressed in the dark, his back turned to her, and slipped into bed. She wanted to ask him about Naiima.

  "I need a bath," she said instead. "I couldn't find the bath."

  Besharat the Bastard was thinking of the neighbors, wondering if they knew that Yasmine had hit Assal.

  "I need a bath," she said again.

  Besharat the Bastard sighed.

  "My mother will take you to the well on the fifteenth of your cycle," he answered.

  Yasmine did not understand.

  "I need a bath now," she answered. "I need to wash myself."

  Besharat the Bastard closed his eyes.

  "You can take a bath twice a month," he explained, "before and after you menstruate. You can't go any other time, and you can't ever go alone."

  They lay next to each other, awake but silent, overcome by the realization that they had made a mistake. Hours later, barely asleep, Yasmine felt a light in her eyes and opened them. A woman stood above her. She had a round face, a thick braid down to her hips. She wore a heavy white gown, her breasts rising against it as she breathed. She brought the light closer to Yasmine and stared at her: it was Naiima, come to examine the enemy and gauge the size of the battle.

  Naiima followed Yasmine, silent and intangible, eavesdropping—though she could not understand French—on her conversations with Besharat. She was always there, like a vision summoned by the breath of a witch, creeping past closed doors and beyond stone walls, appearing in Yasmine's bedroom late in the evening, watching her through the keyhole early in the morning, searching her clothes, examining her sheets. She even took Yasmine to the well.

  She entered the water first and held on to the side of the well. The water was cold, but Naiima did not wince. She watched Yasmine undress.

  "Come in," she signaled.

  Yasmine closed her eyes and submerged herself. When she pushed up for air, a hand pressed down on her. She struggled. Naiima held on for a moment too long, then released. Yasmine tried to escape. Naiima grabbed her arm.

  "Six more times."

  Every morning the women invaded Yasmine's room at dawn and forced her out. In the kitchen, Assal demanded of her the most menial of household chores. Yasmine refused to work. When they hit her, she hit back.

  "Throw her out," Assal commanded Besharat twice each day. "Kick her out, or I swear I will do it myself."

  Besharat the Bastard was embarrassed and enraged at Yasmine's behavior. When he asked her to change her ways, she screamed at him. When he ignored her, she came after him, burst into the first-floor living room where he received guests, and complained of the treatment she had received. When he hit her, she fought back.

  "Lock her up," Naiima advised as she hovered around Besharat, serving his meals. "Put her into a room and keep her there till she learns obedience." She did not wish for Besharat to divorce Yasmine. She, too, wanted children with foreign blood and purple eyes.

  The fighting stopped. Yasmine was sent into the second-floor bedroom, and forbidden to wander. Twice a day she was served her meals. She as
ked for a divorce and a ticket back to Paris. Besharat the Bastard refused. She threatened to escape. Besharat the Bastard locked away her passport and refused to give her money. She tried to calm herself, to regain perspective. She stayed in her room and read. Besharat the Bastard burned her books.

  Yasmine wrote to her parents—lies, fairy-tale accounts of the life and the country she had come to Persia to seek, love stories where Besharat was the unfailing hero. Her mother wrote back at first:

  "Your father refuses to utter your name," she complained to Yasmine. "I can't sleep nights for the anger in his breath, and the burning in my stomach."

  The burning in her stomach became a tumor. The letters stopped coming. Yasmine's were returned unopened, marked "Addressee deceased"; she recognized her father's handwriting on the last batch of mail that came back from Paris.

  She let Besharat sleep in her bed even as she burned with resentment. It was her only weapon, she thought, the one chance she had of beating Naiima and gaining Besharat's confidence until she had found a way to leave.

  "My God," he whispered in the dark as he emptied his seed into Yasmine and exhaled the breath of exhaustion, rolling back with a prayer that inside her, life would grow. "You have the skin of an angel."

  But one morning in the third month of her stay in Tehran, Yasmine woke up to find that her sheets were stained with blood. Besharat the Bastard jumped from the bed, furious, and called Naiima.

  “She's impure,” he told her. “Take her away."

  Yasmine was led into the impurity room on the third floor. She was placed under watch, allowed to touch nothing but her own plate, to sit nowhere but on the two cushions designated for impure women. That night, when she tried to leave the room, the maid stopped her.

  Yasmine did not fight the girl. She waited until the house was quiet. Then she crept out and made her way down to the second floor.

  She opened the door of Besharat's room, she saw Naiima in bed, her head on Yasmine's pillow, making love to Besharat as she stared at the shadow in the hallway.

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi had lost his job. When Reza Shah opened the ghettos, Jews were allowed into Muslim schools, and the Alliance felt that its mission in Iran was accomplished. Slowly it began to lessen its presence inside the country, and by 1936 it had closed the school in Tehran's ghetto.

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi had a wife and seven children to support. He had moved from the Pit, and was renting two rooms in a house on Sar Cheshmeh, just outside the ghetto. He had some small savings—money that Heshmat had put away every year since their marriage—but their rent was high, and he knew he must find work immediately. He kept talking about starting a trade—importing goods from Europe and selling them in Iran—but all his friends told him he was mad. "Things haven't changed that much yet," they said, "no one believes a Jew has anything worth selling."

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi stopped talking to his friends, but did not give up on his plans. When he saw an advertisement in the newspaper—the Ministry of the Interior looking for individuals fluent in the French language—Blue-Eyed Lotfi seized the chance and headed immediately for the Ministry.

  He was dressed in the European clothes Reza Shah had imposed on Iranian men only two years earlier. He had on a hat with a brim, a shirt with a collar and buttons up front, a jacket and pants. Blue-Eyed Lotfi did not like to admit it, but after two years he still felt trapped and uncomfortable inside the new clothes. As he walked the street he saw the other men, also dressed in the new fashion, looking embarrassed and almost pathetic as they tried to find a comfortable corner within the confines of their padded jackets and starched shirts.

  When Reza Shah had first announced the imposition of the dress code, the country had sighed in unanimous protest: they could not understand the advantage of wearing these angular suits over their own silk and cashmere, woven by hand, in exquisite colors. The suits were made of cotton—a poor man's fabric—that was grown in Iran, stolen by the British, woven in Manchester, and sold back to Iranians at unconscionable profits. The hats required an exact fit, stained easily, and could not be washed. They blew away in the slightest wind, or else squeezed a man's temples and left a white circle around his head where the blood had been drained.

  But ever since he had first introduced the law about the new dress code, Reza Shah had exacted obedience from all the men of Persia. Blue-Eyed Lotfi smiled at the recollection of an incident that had amused even the Shah: On one of his many inspection tours around the country, Reza Shah had scheduled a stop in a village near his hometown of Alasht. The village had gone into bedlam at the news; as always, they knew, Reza Shah expected to meet the heads of each community he stopped to visit. He had already warned that they were to appear in European suits.

  But no one in the village owned a suit, and no one had ever seen a hat of the kind they were required to wear. Nevertheless, the village decided it must try to fulfill the Shah's wishes. Someone was sent to a nearby town to buy fabric. Photographs were obtained of European men in suits and hats. After that, every able-bodied woman in the village abandoned home and family, and set about the task of duplicating the image in the pictures.

  The work was slow and excruciating; no one was used to cutting shoulders and collars. There were no sewing machines, and at night the women could only work by the light of a lantern. Still, by the eve of His Majesty's visit, they had managed to improvise a suit to fit each man in the receiving line.

  ''What about hats?” the village chief screamed when he saw the men try on their suits for the following afternoon. "What are we going to do about hats?”

  There was no time or fabric left to sew hats. In desperation, the men turned to the village "inventor"—the thirty-six-year-old son of a farmer who was too lazy to sweat all day in the fields, and so applied himself to the task of "conceiving brilliant ideas meant to advance the future of mankind" while his wife and parents worked longer hours to compensate for his absence. The "inventor" mulled over the picture of the hat they were supposed to make, then came up with an idea. He ordered the men to gather up all the pieces of tin can in the village. He took the cans to the village tinsmith, who beat them flat, cut them in the shape of top hats, and welded the seams together. They painted the tin black. By the time Reza Shah arrived that afternoon, every man in the receiving line wore a European-style dinner hat.

  The Shah walked past the receiving line, pleased at the men's appearance, and stopped to commend the village chief for keeping his people in line with Iran's progress. Just then a hailstorm broke out. Balls of ice crashed against the metal hats with a noise similar to that of gunfire. Reza Shah drew his pistol and turned to find cover. Then he looked up, through the blinding sheet of ice that separated him from the village men, and saw black paint running down the faces of the men, who stood immobile and mortified.

  At the Ministry of the Interior, Blue-Eyed Lotfi presented himself to the guard at the door, and asked to see a person in charge.

  "I speak French and English and Hebrew," he said. "I can read and write in four languages. I have come to seek a job."

  He was taken from one room to another, questioned and interviewed and mostly left to wait. Then he was asked to go home. No one but the Minister of the Interior was allowed to hire help. The minister himself had to ask permission from Reza Shah.

  Three weeks passed without news. Then one day a messenger came to the house at Sar Cheshmeh: Reza Shah had reviewed Lotfi's application, and given him a job. He was to go to Paris, on a trade delegation, and purchase five hundred thousand rials' worth of ladies' ready-to-wear apparel.

  "I knew it," Blue-Eyed Lotfi screamed with delight as soon as the men had left the house. "Reza Shah is going to ban the veil."

  He went to France, and took with him all of Heshmat's savings.

  "You will lose it," she warned in protest. "You will spend it on junk no one will buy back from you."

  She had lost faith in him ever since he had first spoken of the banning of the veil.

  "Such absurdity!" Sh
e had bit her lip in shame. "The neighbors will hear you and think you've lost your mind."

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi had to fight for the money, but in the end he used his prerogative as the man of the house, and overcame Heshmat's resistance. In Paris he bought the ladies' clothing, then set out to find a cosmetics factory, where he spent Heshmat's money on a trunkload of powder and rouge and lipstick, which he brought back to Sar Cheshmeh with a treasure-hunter's pride.

  "God help us." Heshmat went faint at the sight of the products. She leaned against the wall, waiting to regain her balance, and did not even look at her husband's disappointed face.

  "I must hide this trash before the neighbors come in and see it," she concluded. "Later, when it's dark, we can put it in bags and throw it into the Karaj River."

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi had no intention of throwing his future into the Karaj River. Reza Shah—he explained to Heshmat with the same obstinacy with which he had defended his conduct leading to the Mullah's Mule Incident years earlier— was about to ban the veil. Why else would he spend his money on half a million rials' worth of ladies' clothing? He knew that their dependence on the veil had forced the women of the lower classes of Iran into a habit of wearing old and unseemly dresses both inside and out of the house. That was why he wanted the French outfits: to offer them as a substitute for the chador.

  "Hush up," Heshmat begged Lotfi as she ran to close the door. "People are going to think you want to run prostitutes from this house. You will bring a massacre right here in Sar Cheshmeh."

  Once freed of the veil—Lotfi described his vision to Heshmat—women would feel the need to appear attractive on the street. The days of antimony and rouge made of crushed insect wings were over.

  "Look at this!" He took out individual boxes of powder and rouge for Heshmat to see. "Look how beautiful this package is. Smell the perfume in it. What woman wants insect wings when she can have French perfume?"