Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  He sat back that night, and watched the religious ceremony without emotion. Halfway through the prayer that would bind his son to the princess of Egypt, Reza Shah looked up and saw Peacock next to him. He shook his head. The look in his eyes augured disaster.

  “Things,'' he said, “are not as they should be."

  In 1939 the Second World War began in Europe. Officially, Iran declared her neutrality in the war. In fact, Reza Shah harbored German agents on Iranian soil, and later refused to allow the British access through Iran to Russia. The German Minister, Dr. Schacht, visited the country, and asserted once again that Iranians were “pure Aryans, exempt from the provisions of the Nuremberg race laws."

  "It's the end of you all," the merchants in the bazaar told Peacock, without bothering to hide their excitement. “Hitler's taking over the world, and the Jews are as good as dead."

  They were all her friends. They would have mourned her, even, but all their lives they had heard their mullahs speak against infidels, and now they could not help but succumb to joy at the prospect of seeing Jews eliminated once and for all.

  In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Needing a route through which he could dispatch much-needed supplies to the Russians, Churchill looked once again toward Iran. He asked Reza Shah to expel the Germans from Iran, and to provide free access to Allied troops and transport trucks.

  Reza Shah refused; he never imagined that Hitler might lose the war. Churchill threatened an invasion. Reza Shah ignored him. By the time he realized the scope of the danger he was courting, Allied troops were already descending on Iran.

  On August 24, 1941, Indian forces under British command entered Iran through the south. The next day, Peacock watched Allied planes fly over Tehran, dropping leaflets: Iran, they said, was an occupied country. Reza Shah had been deposed, whisked from the throne and shipped away to exile in South Africa. His son, Muhammad Reza, was placed on the throne by the Allies, then locked up in his palace.

  Peacock had come to believe the voice on the radio.

  "In close concert with our Russian ally," the announcer interpreted Churchill's speech before the House of Commons, "we have rooted out the malignant elements in Teh-ran.

  A woman came to Besharat the Bastard's house, in the days of the Allied occupation when the farms could not produce and the factories had stopped working, when imports had disappeared and the poor starved, when the Russians diverted the rice and wheat of the northern provinces for their own use, and American soldiers spent their dollars buying whores and whiskey. The roads were occupied by Allied troops transporting military supplies—endless lines of military vehicles loaded with food and guns and medicine, traveling painfully through the unpaved roads of Reza Shah's fallen kingdom—while Iranian peasants, their lives bundled on the backs of mules and donkeys as they escaped their ravaged farms in search of food they would not find in the city, waited all day for the right of passage. The Allies required each Iranian to obtain a visa in order to travel within his own country. At inspection points, the peasants arrived exhausted and half-starved, children strapped onto their backs or asleep in women's arms, faces covered with thick dust that made one indistinguishable from the other. They held out their visas and spoke too loudly to the soldiers, who did not understand their language: "Looking for work," they said, smiling optimistically.

  In the cities, the new immigrants joined the thousands of unemployed men and women who lined up outside bakeries and grocery shops, loitered at the doors of the rich, or begged the foreign soldiers for food and money. Their daughters walked the streets at night or gathered in nightclubs where they sold themselves in return for a full meal. Their sons searched for a way to vent their anger, and in the end joined one or another of the political organizations—among them the Communist Tudeh, set up by the Soviet Union— that promised to return Iran to independence.

  The woman who came to Besharat's house was bone-thin and dark, with sunken eyes and the hands of a crow. She appeared once every few weeks, always dressed in widow's black, carrying a shopping bag under her chador: Reza Shah was gone, his son imprisoned in the Marble Palace. No one enforced the ban against the veil anymore.

  From her window on the second floor of Besharat the Bastard's house, Yasmine saw the woman approach the gates, and watched her cross the garden. She seemed smaller the closer she came to the house. When she reached the front door, she knocked so lightly no one heard her. Still, the woman would stand there, a shadow behind the dusty etched glass inset of the front door, and did not dare knock again. In time, someone would see her.

  “It's her again," Yasmine heard Naiima cry to Assal in the kitchen. “It's the Boys' Mother."

  Then the Boys' Mother would call to Naiima, and plead to be let in.

  “Just for a moment," she said. “Just to see Besharat Khan one last time." No one answered her. Naiima and Assal went about their business as if the Boys' Mother did not exist. She would plead for a while, turn her face up toward Yasmine's window, and even beg her for help: Ezraeel the Avenger, she repeated the same litany every time, had left her penniless. Her sons had all married bad women who refused to support her now that everyone was hungry. It was not fair— not even possible—that she should be reduced to such a state as this. She was, after all—she had been—the wife of Tehran's greatest jeweler.

  The Boys' Mother sat on the ground, hugging her plastic shopping bag, and unleashed a storm of tears.

  "Let her in," Assal would order Naiima toward the end of the afternoon. "People will hear her on the street and think we're uncivilized."

  Naiima opened the door.

  "Into the kitchen," she commanded, and the Boys' Mother ran.

  She sat there, on the broken stool reserved for beggars who came to eat three-day-old leftovers, and watched Assal prepare her son's dinner. Assal's clothes were covered with dust, her face blackened as if by soot. The Boys' Mother asked her for a drink of water, or a piece of bread.

  "Go eat at your own house," Assal would say without bothering to look at her. Purposely she would gather all the food left in the pantry from the day before, and throw it away where the Boys' Mother could see.

  During the war years, Besharat the Bastard more than tripled the wealth Ezraeel had left him. Before the occupation, as soon as he heard news of Germany's invasion of the

  Soviet Union, he bought out all the sugar in Tehran and Qazvin and Yazd. Later, during the famine, he sold each ounce for ten times its real price. In his kitchen—this Jew-boy who had run barefoot in the Pit all through his childhood, this bastard son of Assal the Whore who now treated the Boys' Mother worse than a dog—in his kitchen, Besharat the Bastard threw away leftover meat that the Boys' Mother would have given her life to eat.

  So the Boys' Mother watched the food and swallowed her hunger. Right before the start of the evening curfew, Besharat the Bastard came home and had his dinner, then his tea. He talked with his mother, reviewed his accounts, smoked a few cigarettes. Near midnight, he finally agreed to see the Boys' Mother.

  She walked into his room clutching her shopping bag close to her chest. She marched up to him as if toward death, then stopped at the oak table that separated Besharat from the world. She never looked up.

  "I have no money for you," Besharat the Bastard would say, blowing the dust off his desk. The Boys' Mother did not speak. On the floor under her feet, a silk carpet depicted rose-cheeked maidens pouring wine for their lovers after a day's hunt. Besharat the Bastard waited for a moment, then decided that the issue had been resolved.

  "Go home," he said, and busied himself with his papers again.

  Suddenly the Boys' Mother would explode. She would let go of her chador, lunge across Besharat's table, and beg.

  "Look at you," she would say. "Look at you, all clean and comfortable in my husband's chair, spending my children's inheritance, getting fat off my blood. You have to give me something, enough to eat, enough to live. I was his wife for thirty years, married him when I was fifteen and never on
ce disobeyed his word. I gave him sons! Sons! I deserve something."

  The words gushed out of her in a single breath, always ending with a final gesture of humiliation: she unlocked her fingers from around the shopping bag, and released a small avalanche of putrid chicken claws and feet—purchased that day after hours of waiting in line, with coupons, issued by the Allies, that she had to beg for, or buy on the black market. Besharat the Bastard always winced at the sight of the claws.

  “This is it,” the Boys' Mother sobbed, digging her hands into the mass of raw skin and bones, and raising it to Besh-arat's face. “This is all I eat."

  There was no cause for pity, Besharat the Bastard always responded. When Ezraeel the Avenger was alive, back when the Boys' Mother was the wife of Tehran's greatest jeweler, Assal the Whore had often taken her son begging at their kitchen. The Boys' Mother had refused Besharat even her garbage.

  “Go eat at your own house," she had said.

  Besharat the Bastard moved from the Avenue of the Tulips north to Palace Street. He lived across from the mansion of the famous Dr. Mossadeq, in a four-story home where Assal—beleaguered by old age and overwhelmed by new wealth—lost her way in the thirty-seven rooms with connecting doors, the three sets of stairways each leading to a different part of the house, the four-car garage and the three levels of underground storage where Besharat kept his precious new merchandise—rubber that was used to make tires for Allied trucks, and for which he was paid in British pounds and American dollars.

  Inside the house, water flowed from pipes that opened with the turn of a knob, the maids spent hours watching their own reflection in porcelain bowls called toilets, and every night, Naiima walked from room to room—like a muse with a holy touch—and pulled at a string connected to a small glass bulb that suddenly bathed the room with light.

  But even here, Yasmine was captive. She had been married to Besharat for nine years, and they remained childless. Every day she asked him for divorce.

  “Let me go," she demanded, her voice throbbing with hatred. Besharat the Bastard no longer spoke French to her. She had been forced to learn Persian.

  “Send me home, and tell your friends I have died."

  He kept her under constant watch, did not allow her to leave the house, never gave her money. She lived in a room on the third floor, overlooking Palace Street and Dr. Mos-sadeq's house, and he had told her she could never leave: he wanted children, wanted her children, and as long as she denied him, he would keep her prisoner in his home.

  “No womb that has been dry for me," he said, “will carry another man's seeds."

  Assal told Besharat he must give up. He had tried first with Naiima, then Yasmine, then with a host of other women—whores he slept with, not taking off their chadors to see their faces, only to try his luck at making them pregnant. He had taken every opportunity and tried every old remedy, and in the end the world had begun to believe that it was he—Besharat the Bastard—who was sterile, and not his wives.

  “Give it up," Assal told him. She was blinded by age, suddenly more accepting of life's cruelties. “Accept that you will die without an heir. Find someone who will bury you, and be done with it."

  Besharat the Bastard never stopped believing in his own virility: Naiima, he insisted, was infertile. The whores he had slept with all took potions to kill his seed. Yasmine denied him on purpose.

  "It's her way of avenging herself," he told Assal with untamed conviction. "She sleeps with me and keeps herself from getting pregnant just to prove I'm not a man."

  So he went back to her, for two weeks every month, making love without passion or even desire, and immediately afterward he left her bed and shut the door behind him.

  Alone in her room, Yasmine would open her window, lie still in bed, and listen to the darkness. The streets, under martial law, would be quiet but for the sound of night patrols and the laughter of drunken foreign soldiers heading back from the brothels. Near ten o'clock, Yasmine would hear the cars that carried—with special permission from the Allied military government in Tehran—friends and relatives of the young Shah to the Marble Palace, where he received them with his Egyptian wife. The guests would play cards with His Majesty, watch movies, go for midnight swims in one of the palace's many pools. The next morning they would return in the midst of the day's rush, looking absurd in their evening jackets and long, beaded gowns, the men aching from the night's whiskey, the women wearing dark sunglasses and bouffant hairstyles, looking pale under the makeup they bought from Blue-Eyed Lotfi. They would rush home and sleep till dusk, but as soon as they awoke, the street would come alive again. The maids who worked in the houses eavesdropped on their ladies' conversations about the night before, and related to each other every bit of palace gossip they could find. Foziyeh, it was said, was discontent. She was bored with her life, tired of the daily games of tennis, the midday rides on palace grounds, the venomous intrigue between the Shah's older sister, Shams, and his twin, Ashraf. Years ago, when his daughters were of marrying age, Reza Shah had designated two young men—one the son of a Prime Minister, the other a descendant of a powerful family in Shiraz—as his sons-in-law. He had brought the men to the palace to introduce them to his daughters. Both girls had both liked the son of the Prime Minister; he was better looking, taller, more gallant. Faced with a conflict, Reza Shah had let Shams, the older sister, marry the Prime Minister's son. Ashraf had cried for a week, then married the boy from Shiraz and hated him and Shams all her life. Because Shams had championed Muhammad Reza Shah's marriage to Foziyeh, Ashraf tried to undermine her in every way.

  Every night, Yasmine listened to the cars heading toward the palace. When they were all gone, there would be silence, but still Yasmine could not sleep. She was plagued with prisoner's insomnia, the state of permanent frustration that exhausted her without allowing rest. At midnight she would crawl out of bed, her mouth dry from the dust that lingered on her pillow and invaded her lungs and her nose, and lie facedown on the balcony floor. Across the street, Dr. Mossadeq sat up in his living room and listened to his radio blasting the midnight news.

  Yasmine listened to the speaker and tried to understand all the words in Persian. She wanted news of the war, of France under German occupation, of Americans marching into Paris. She lay in the dark, her stomach cold against the balcony floor, and tried to imagine Paris after the bombings.

  “It's destroyed," she told herself. "It's all destroyed."

  She wanted to see Paris and understand that it had changed, that she could not go back—that there was nothing to go back to. She wanted to convince herself that she must stay in Tehran and accept her fate, make peace with Besharat and his wife.

  One night in the autumn of 1943, the radio shut down halfway through the broadcast. The next morning, Tehran's telegraph office closed down, the city's borders were blocked, and the streets were jammed with occupying soldiers in trucks and armored vehicles. Naiima came home from the butcher's shop to announce that the Shah had been arrested. An hour later, Besharat the Bastard brought different news: "It's Reza Shah," he announced, his voice choked with excitement. "They say he has come to make a coup."

  The evening paper confirmed rumors of Reza Shah's triumphant return from exile. The next morning, however, speculation began that it was not Reza Shah, but indeed Hitler himself, who had landed troops in Iran. The Allies, it was said, had closed off Tehran to save the capital. Terror choked the Jews. Besharat the Bastard closed off his house and waited for the outcome of the war on Iranian soil. That night he came to Yasmine's bed, trembling with fear, and made love to her without resentment. Afterward, he stayed in her bed and listened for Mossadeq's radio, which refused to come to life.

  For three days, the shutdown continued. Then, suddenly, the borders were reopened and the radio resumed its nightly broadcast. Tehran, it was revealed, had been the seat of a conference by the heads of the world's greatest powers; they had charted the end of the war, and determined the course of Iran's future.

&
nbsp; Besharat the Bastard sat up in the dark that night, and stared at Yasmine: beneath her cold surface and her furious skin, he felt life about to stir.

  All of Tehran received news of Yasmine's pregnancy. Besharat the Bastard was so grateful for the miracle, they said, he had decided to please God in return: he called the Boys' Mother, and gave her enough money to live on for the rest of her life. She told him she wanted to go to Israel, where many Jews had already emigrated from Iran. Besharat the Bastard bought her a oneway ticket, and even wrote to a friend, asking that he help the woman settle in the new country. In return, he asked only that the Boys' Mother bless his child.

  “It's not for me to bless anyone," the Boys' Mother said. “You have done wrong by the child's mother. No one conceived in bitterness will ever be blessed."

  Besharat the Bastard spat behind the Boys' Mother and wished aloud that her ship would sink on the way to Jerusalem. He brought Yasmine out of her prison and surrounded her with every luxury his wealth could provide. He turned the first-floor living room into a bedroom for Yasmine, hired two maids just to wait on her, brought in a cook just to prepare healthy meals. He allowed the holy sisters of the Jean D'Arc Mission in Tehran to visit Yasmine, let them bring her books and speak with her in French. He called Peacock to the house, and ordered a set of diamonds—a pair of earrings, a ring, a necklace, and a bracelet—that he would present to Yasmine, he said, on the occasion of his son's circumcision. Peacock came in her glittering circus clothes and measured Yasmine's neck, her wrist, her finger that had not swollen in spite of the pregnancy.