Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  And so the chest remained in Blue-Eyed Lotfi's house— hidden, in the interest of appeasing Heshmat's fears, behind a stack of pillows and comforters used only in winter—and slowly permeated the air with the scent of powder and perfume. Terrified of her neighbors' reaction—"You are only confirming their suspicion of Jews," she told Lotfi—Heshmat burned every incense and used the room for storing dried herbs, which emitted a strong scent of their own. Nevertheless, as summer approached and the heat became entrapped inside the house, the chest of cosmetics from France took on an essence of its own and emitted such distinct and overpowering smells that everyone sniffed their way up to Blue-Eyed Lotfi's room and demanded the right to inspect its contents.

  "Prostitutes' tools," one woman accused when she discovered the chest. "The smell of the Devil," someone else affirmed.

  Heshmat pleaded with Lotfi, but in vain.

  "Any day now," she sobbed, "a mob is going to attack us right here outside the ghetto."

  He told her he would fight the mob.

  "What about your children?" she argued another day. "You have daughters, Lotfi, daughters'. What man is going to marry a girl raised with 'prostitutes' tools'?"

  But then one morning they heard footsteps in the courtyard, and saw the door to their bedroom burst open in the dark. Blue-Eyed Lotfi sat up with a jolt and reached for the butcher's knife he kept hidden under his pillow. Then, in the midst of his terror, he recognized Peacock's voice.

  "Leave that and come outside," she said. "Reza Shah has banned the veil."

  The mullahs of Persia threatened war. The men swore to kill. Women cried that they had been robbed of their honor; only whores and adulterous wives went unveiled. For the first time since the Mullah's Mule Incident, all of Tehran stood against Reza Shah. To protest his orders, it was decided, women must continue to wear their chadors.

  Reza Shah posted soldiers on the street, with orders to arrest every woman in a veil. The soldiers tore the chadors off the women's heads, ripped them to shreds, burned the veils, and, in return, offered a dress and a hat—purchased in Paris by Blue-Eyed Lotfi.

  Suddenly, all the women stayed home.

  The war over the veil augured a bigger confrontation between Reza Shah and the mullahs. For centuries, Shahs in Persia had observed the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice. Every year on the day of the feast, a mullah would slaughter a camel in Tehran's Square of the Cannons. A crowd of believers would then attack the camel, grabbing at pieces of raw flesh, and from there they would run to the Palace of Roses, where the Shah would be awaiting them on the Terrace of the Marble Throne. The first person to present to His Majesty a piece of the sacrificial camel's flesh would receive a royal reward.

  The year after he had banned the veil, Reza Shah called the practice of slaughtering the camel barbaric, and canceled the celebrations of the feast. From there he went on to deliver another blow to the mullahs: he inaugurated the University of Tehran, took away from the mullahs the power to influence the minds of the young, and entrusted it instead to secular professors trained in the West. Shortly thereafter, the university opened its Faculty of Medicine where, in direct violation of clerical teaching, human corpses were dissected and studied: Life and death, Reza Shah had commanded, were no longer the domain of God and his agents.

  The mullahs rebelled. Seeking to end Reza Shah's reign, they used the same method that had brought down the Qa-jars: they all left Tehran, and staged a sit-in at Iran's holiest shrine.

  It was a fail-proof device, the mullahs knew. Faced with the prospect of losing a king or losing their mullahs, the people would opt to overthrow the Shah. Reza Shah, on his part, could not force the mullahs back into the city without storming the shrine—an act of which they did not believe even he was capable.

  Reza Shah responded by sending armored troops to encircle the shrine.

  "Come out," the military commander warned. "Or I have His Majesty's orders to bomb the shrine."

  Their rebellion crushed, the mullahs came back to Tehran. The university's Faculty of Medicine continued to dissect corpses. But the matter of the veil remained unresolved: the chador had disappeared, but was not abandoned. Reza Shah could prevent the women from walking on the street with their veils, but he could not force them out of their homes. In Blue-Eyed Lotfi's room the perfume was becoming rancid, and the rouge had melted inside the decorative cases. Heshmat ordered her children to keep out of the way of the neighbors.

  So it was until that morning in the spring of 1937 when Reza Shah rode through Gas Lamp Avenue in his newly purchased Rolls-Royce and saw an old woman, small but invincible, beaming as she paraded without a veil. She wore a beaded skirt and a rhinestoned shirt, a green scarf, white stockings, and satin shoes. She had pearls around her neck, gold on her wrists, jewels on her hands. She had red and yellow ribbons in her hair, rhinestones on the frames of her glasses. As she walked, men stopped, stupefied, and glared at her insolence. Women came to their doors, unveiled, lurked in the doorway, looked around for a reaction, then stepped out into the street.

  Reza Shah Pahlavi stopped the car next to the woman in the rhinestones. He pulled down his window and recognized Peacock.

  He smiled for the first time in anyone's memory.

  Peacock the Jew was seventy years old and a spectacle to behold. She lived in a house on Shah Reza Street, and worked longer and with more intensity than anyone younger than herself. She catered to Tehran's richest and most famous—to Reza Shah's daughters, the wives of his ministers, the brides of the ministers' sons. She walked from house to house, dressed always in the most colorful clothes—in layers of red and green and blue chiffon, sequined shirts and satin shoes and rhinestones on everything. She had shrunk with age, but her back was always straight, and her eyes still magnificent. Her hair was a stark silver, her skin almost black.

  She carried the stones in her pockets—wrapped in pieces of cloth or old newspapers she collected everywhere. She sat in the bedrooms of the ladies of court, or in the offices of influential men, and stuck her hands in her pockets and took out fistfuls of jewels that she spread before the client.

  "Touch them," she would say. "Hold them in your hand and see eternity."

  Still, at the end of the day, when the work was done and there was no place to go but home, Peacock was alone. Heshmat lived close by, but now that the veil was slowly being abandoned, Blue-Eyed Lotfi was running a thriving business out of the basement of his house. He had even talked about renting a shop on the Avenue of the Tulips, and moving his house from Sar Cheshmeh to Simorgh Street.

  "Come live with us," Heshmat asked, but Peacock refused. She sat in her bedroom at night, still in the day's clothes, and reviewed her accounts on an abacus. She took out the jewels from her pockets, set them in neat rows across the table, and opened the newspapers from around each one. She did not look at the stones when she was alone; she stared at the words in the newspaper, and wished she could read.

  The newspapers reported important events, Peacock knew, events that affected everyone's fate. She learned about them only from the conversations of people she met during the day—the bazaar merchants, the peddlers, her clients. Most of them were illiterate like Peacock, and the news they had was barely more than a recounting of rumors they had heard from others. They spoke of places unknown to themselves except through tales of peoples past—of Russia and America and Europe—of Reza Shah's dealing with foreign countries, and of a game he played: setting one enemy against the other to maximize his own advantage, trying to shake loose from the dominance of the British.

  “Imagine that," the merchants exclaimed, “biting the hand that fed him. Without the support of the British, Reza Shah would never have been King. He negotiated with them, got their permission to make a coup against Ahmad Shah. Now he sides with the Germans to get rid of the English."

  It was a mad idea, Peacock recognized—the assumption that Reza Shah could become independent of the English. Ever since the reign of Nasser-ed-Din Shah, everyone knew, nothi
ng happened in Iran without direct involvement on the part of His or Her Majesty's spies. Peacock did not place much stock in the stories she heard. She did not believe the rumors about Germany introducing laws against its Jewish population.

  The merchants claimed that Reza Shah was allying himself with Hitler against Britain. Reza Shah had freed the Jews, Peacock reminded everyone. He would not side with a country that persecuted them.

  But the rumors persisted, and because of them, Peacock wished more and more she could read. The papers, she thought, held the key to the truth.

  In 1937, electricity came to Peacock's street. One night, Blue-Eyed Lotfi came to her house and screwed a glass bulb into the ceiling of her room. Lotfi pulled at a string. Light burst into Peacock's eyes and blinded her.

  She was so excited by the new invention that she could barely sleep at night. She walked into her room after dark, pulled at the string, and stood smiling at her surroundings as if she had discovered them for the first time.

  “Things look different at night,” she confided shyly in Heshmat. “I like watching them when that light shines."

  It was all Reza Shah's doing, Peacock thought gratefully: the electricity that lit her nights, the water that flew in the pipes of Heshmat's new house on Simorgh Street, the hospital where Heshmat's daughter went to give birth.

  "On sheets'.'' Peacock had rejoiced when she saw the girl rolled out of the delivery room. “My God, you delivered on sheets'.”

  Reza Shah was her hero—the boy she had recognized as chosen and who had gone on to fulfill her ancestor's prophecy. Peacock could never believe that he would betray the Jews.

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi went to France to buy stock for his new shop, and came back with a gift for Peacock. It was a radio— a large piece of furniture made of wood and glass that lit up with the turn of a knob, and that Lotfi claimed could talk. “That's heresy," Peacock laughed, but Lotfi attached a cord to the outlet in the wall and turned a knob.

  A man spoke at Peacock. His voice was deep and husky, and he used the formal language one used to address important people. He was about to tell the news, he announced as if he were blessed with knowledge unknown to others. He was going to relay everything that had happened in the world that day.

  “In the Name of God," he began, "His Majesty Reza Shah Pahlavi, King of Kings, today signed a treaty of friendship with Germany."

  He went on to explain about the treaty. He spoke of Germany's leader—a man called Hitler who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. Iranians, except the Jews among them, were also Aryans. There would be a war soon, the announcer promised, a war greater than the First World War, but this time Iran would not be occupied. Her economy would not be destroyed, her people would not starve. This time, thanks to Reza Shah, Iran had taken the side of the mighty and would be rewarded for her foresight. Germany would defeat the English and the Russians. As a token of appreciation, Hitler had promised to give back to Iran provinces stolen from her by the imperialist Czars.

  Blue-Eyed Lotfi would always cry when he remembered Peacock's face that night before the radio.

  Peacock demanded an audience with Reza Shah. She went to his office in the Palace of Joy, and found him screaming at his Prime Minister: Reza Shah always screamed at his servants. The man stood before him, head bent and eyes on his boots, and never once made a sound until he was dismissed.

  “Go," His Majesty yelled at last. "You are not a man of action. You are not a man at all."

  The Prime Minister walked past Peacock with his lips pale and his face chalk white. His hands trembled as he left the room.

  Reza Shah paced up and down his office in the military boots he still shined as in the days of his service with the Cossacks. He did not greet Peacock; he never acknowledged that he had known her before. She was a reminder of the days of his humility, and the very sight of her made the Shah feel as if he were still no more than the orphan boy from Alasht. But he did grant her an immediate audience when thousands of others waited a lifetime for a chance to see the Shah, and were never received.

  "Make it quick," he said as he stopped behind his desk and faced Peacock.

  "Your Majesty—" Peacock stepped forward. She had spent agonizing days trying to solve the riddle of Reza Shah's alliance with Hitler. She would not waste time with her question: "What if there is a war? What if the Germans win the war?"

  Reza Shah pretended he had not understood.

  “What of the Jews you saved?" Peacock insisted.

  Then his eyes softened. He looked at Peacock, and for an instant she saw a man trapped and embittered by the harshness of choices he was forced to make.

  “I will renounce the Jews," he said. "I will renounce anyone to save Iran from her enemies."

  Reza Shah had saved Iran from disintegration. He had conquered the mullahs, built an army to defend the borders and a police to overcome the internal chaos of the last three centuries. He had kept the Russians at bay and the British at arm's length. He had built the first trans-Iranian railway, brought schools and hospitals and vaccines. Tehran's water supply was still contaminated by the sewage that poured into the river and seeped into the wells, but malaria and trachoma and intestinal disease, always endemic, had begun to diminish. Ten years after he had become King, Peacock thought, he looked at his accomplishments and believed himself infallible.

  He was an infantryman from a nonexistent army, and overnight he had become King. He was a soldier trained under foreign occupation, and he had become independent. He was a poor boy, born in a hovel at the end of a village dirt road, who now lived in a palace with halls of mirror and rooms full of treasure. He had become vain and intolerant and corrupt.

  He lived simply, in a bare room in the Palace of Joy, with his mattress on the floor and no luxuries. But he went around confiscating the best of Iran's lands—the most populous villages, the greenest valleys, the lushest forests—to register them in the names of his children. He had a son— the Crown Prince Muhammad Reza, who was so shy he never dared speak in his father's presence. Peacock had seen Muhammad Reza as a boy, riding his Arabian mare around the Square of the Cannons, raising a storm of dust that almost hid him from view. Even then, Peacock remembered, the boy's eyes were languid, and his voice as he commanded the mare, shook with indecision. He was not—he could not have been—the son Reza Shah had wanted.

  Reza Shah had sent the boy to Europe, to a Swiss boarding school designed to educate young aristocracy. Muhammad Reza learned to ski, fly airplanes, drive fast cars. In 1938, at the age of nineteen, he returned to Iran to take his place next to his father.

  He found Reza Shah beleaguered and preoccupied: nothing worked fast enough in Iran, the Shah complained; no one was dedicated enough. The Minister of Finance, Da-var, had recently failed to come up with funds necessary for a public works project. Victim to Reza Shah's wrath, Davar had worked late into the night at his office, then killed himself. He had left a note:

  "I am committing suicide," he had written, "because I am exhausted."

  Reza Shah had no time for failure. He did not attend Davar's funeral.

  But there was a bigger problem: a man by the name of Mossadeq—a rich landowner turned nationalist who had been Reza Shah's enemy for decades. Reza Shah had imprisoned Mossadeq, but the man was old, and doctors had warned His Majesty that Mossadeq would die in jail.

  "Release him, then," the Crown Prince advised his father. "If he dies, he will become a martyr, and we will never escape his legacy."

  Reza Shah was tired and frustrated and dismayed. For the first time ever, he did as Muhammad Reza suggested.

  Then he told the boy that he had arranged a wife for him—Princess Foziyeh, daughter of Egypt's King Farouk and Queen Nazli. Muhammad Reza had never seen Foziyeh, but his older sister, Shams, assured him that he would be pleased with the find. In 1939 he went to Cairo to fetch the bride for the wedding.

  It was going to be the affair of the century, a gala like no other in the East, so sumptuous it would da
zzle the royal family of Egypt and prove to all of Iran's neighbors the great progress Reza Shah had brought to Iran.

  At the palace, Reza Shah hired an enormous staff just to see to the details of every arrangement. He assigned Peacock to a team of jewelers—young men dispatched to Europe earlier that year for a crash course in gemology and jewelry design, and entrusted to them the job of preparing stones for each female member of the family.

  The bride and groom, it was decided, would sail from Egypt to the port of Khorramshahr, on the Persian Gulf, then travel to Tehran aboard a special train built especially for the wedding, and equipped with every conceivable luxury. In Tehran they would first attend a gala reception, European style, hosted by Reza Shah to welcome Queen Nazli. The wedding would take place the following evening.

  Suddenly, Peacock heard that a great disaster had taken place: the bride and groom, Reza Shah had been told by a trembling Director of the Railroads, were indeed aboard the special train. They were accompanied by her mother, a suite of personal maids and nannies, half a dozen ladies-in-waiting. But they were in the middle of the Great Persian Desert—in a place where no man or beast could survive— and their train had stopped: it had run out of food, and water, and electricity.

  Reza Shah imprisoned his Director of the Railroads, and fired every other man in charge of his son's journey. He sent for the travelers on another train, and received them personally when they arrived at the palace. Muhammad Reza was still mortified by the fiasco. Foziyeh was crying to her mother that she wanted to go home. Queen Nazli told Reza Shah that his country was uncivilized.

  They spent the day bickering over Foziyeh's income and inheritance. Since she was to be married to the Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Shah insisted, all of Foziyeh's income from the court of Egypt should automatically be sent to Iran. Queen Nazli refused categorically, and would not negotiate. By the time the arguments ended, the marriage had already been poisoned.

  That night, at the European-style gala, seating arrangements were mixed up, and guests began to bicker with one another over their places at dinner. Reza Shah fired his Grand Master of Ceremonies and the Grand Master of the Court on the spot. But Queen Nazli was not satisfied. She told Reza Shah she was disappointed with the welcoming ceremony. The Shah ordered the palace maids to pack Nazli's bags without her knowledge. The morning after the wedding, he would ship her out of Iran along with all of Foziyeh's ladies-in-waiting.