Cry of the Peacock: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  She waited for a reaction. She thought Peacock would be astonished or frightened or outraged. Instead, she found her unmoved—as if listening to a story she had heard many times before.

  "I need money," Yasmine went on, trying to keep her resolve intact. She raised her wedding ring to Peacock.

  "Bring me cash," she asked, "in return for this ring. I can't take it off as long as I'm here, but I will leave it for you, I swear, before I go."

  Peacock shook her head in sympathy. For years she had known—everyone had known—that Yasmine was contemplating escape. It was the natural response, and Besharat the Bastard had prepared against it.

  "You could never leave," Peacock told Yasmine. "Even if you had money and a passport, you couldn't get across the border. Every Iranian woman needs written consent from her husband or father to leave the country."

  Yasmine knew about the required consent form; she had heard about it on Mossadeq's radio.

  "All I need from you," she told Peacock, "is enough cash to get me back home to Paris."

  "Madame Yasmine," Peacock insisted, "don't give up your children. Don't give up your man. They will haunt you till the end of your life, leave a hollow space, the size of a baby's hand, that you could never fill inside your heart."

  Yasmine drew her hand away from Peacock, and immediately she was closed and hard and out of reach again.

  Peacock felt old and exhausted. She stood up and left Yasmine without another word. Behind her, Yasmine heard the door close, but did not turn to look. She had forgotten Peacock. In her mind she was retracing the maps she had so often studied as a young girl in Europe, watching herself, free and unharmed, walk out of Besharat's home and across Iran's borders, wearing her winter coat and her high-heeled shoes.

  In 1947, Princess Foziyeh left the Shah; just as the Soviets were leaving Iran, the Queen took her only daughter and moved back to "civilized Egypt." Soon after that, Muhammad Reza Shah's twin sister, Ashraf, found him another wife: Sorraya, daughter of a Kurdish tribal chief, and the most startling beauty Iran would ever remember. She was sixteen years old, innocent and ravishing. She had white skin, high cheekbones, black hair and emerald eyes, and a queen's manners. She liked crocodiles; people said she kept them as house pets in the palace.

  So the Shah married Sorraya, stepped out of his palace to reign, and discovered that his country was in famine. In 1945, Iran had no food and no income. By 1950 she had even run out of bread.

  But the poverty, Muhammad Reza Shah knew, was largely artificial. Iran had oil—oil that was pumped and refined and controlled by the English, oil that had been given away by the Qajars in a concession to the English, who took eighty percent of the profits from the sale of Iran's oil. Now that she was starving, they said she was a bad risk, and refused to lend her money.

  The Shah went to them—politely—and asked to share the oil money on a more equitable basis. He offered a fifty-fifty formula. The British laughed at him. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, they said, pumped Iran's oil, refined it, and sold it. Without English technology, Iran would have to let her oil stay in the ground, give up even her twenty-percent share.

  The Shah came home empty-handed and braced himself for famine. He had done his best, he told the people. There was nothing else to do.

  But inside Parliament, Reza Shah's old enemy, Dr. Mos-sadeq, went to war. In 1944, Mossadeq had initiated a law that forbade the government of Iran to negotiate any oil agreement with a foreign power without the prior consent of Parliament. Now, faced with the Shah's reluctance to confront the British, he stood up before the nation and cried the words that shook the world:

  "Nationalize oil!"

  Yasmine had another girl—also dark—but this time, when they brought her the child to feed, she refused. She put her two hands over her breasts, closed her eyes, and bit down on her lip as the infant cried in her lap and begged for food. Besharat the Bastard came in and ordered her to act like a mother, but Yasmine would not move. He tried to force her, but in vain. Even after they had dragged Yasmine's hands away from her breasts, she fought so hard that she frightened the child, and it could not eat. For two days they struggled. Then Besharat the Bastard gave in and hired a nursemaid.

  "You're not a mother," he told Yasmine, "you're a witch."

  Yasmine gave up her children, and moved back into her old room on the third floor. She found it small and melancholy and buried in dust. It did not matter, she told herself. She would not stay long.

  Inside Parliament, Mossadeq had won the representatives' support for his plan to nationalize oil. He stepped forth and asked the Shah to declare himself on the issue.

  Muhammad Reza Shah came out opposed.

  Nationalization, he said, was illegal and would anger the British. It was also unwise, for without foreign expertise, Iran would be deprived of what little income she was allowed.

  "Traitor!" Yasmine now heard Mossadeq's voice broadcast on the same radio he had listened to every night for a decade. He was accusing the Shah of being a coward, of serving the British at the expense of his own people. Oil, he said, was more than a source of revenue for Iran; it was a matter of pride, of national integrity, of human dignity.

  "Let us starve!" he cried in the course of violent and spectacular speeches in which he became agitated and angry and so inspired by his own vision that he would fall to the ground unconscious and be carried out by his aides.

  “Let us all starve. Let the English leave and take with them their engineers. Let one generation of Iranians sacrifice itself and regain our national resource."

  Afterward, he received journalists and photographers in his home. Yasmine watched them file into the house, heard Mossadeq scream at them the terms of his nationalism. He would appear in his pajamas, sitting cross-legged on his bed, and he spoke so fervently that Yasmine could feel the street come alive with his words. It mattered little, he said, that two or three generations of Iranians would suffer from poverty. It mattered even less that the English would not be there to pump the oil from the ground. Let the oil stay in the earth. A time would come when Iran could train her own experts, and make her own children masters of the land.

  He spoke sincerely, his bald, cone-shaped head shaking with excitement and his face flushed with passion as he captured, in one session, the sympathy of his harshest critics. He had already taken control of Parliament. Now he took the people.

  In March 1952, Mossadeq called on the workers of the Abadan refinery to strike. In Tehran, he forced five consecutive prime ministers out of office, and took the job himself. Eager to succeed, he allied himself with the only organized political force inside Iran: the Communist Tudeh, which shared Mossadeq's enmity toward the British. It was a desperate move—a clear alliance with the Soviet Union—but in the heat of the battle, Mossadeq had lost sight of his nationalist dreams, and wanted most of all to win. He expropriated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and sent the English engineers home.

  Suddenly, the British wanted to talk. Mossadeq refused. He was ruling the country, and he did away with all pretense. He locked the Shah in his palace, and surrounded him with troops loyal to himself. He sent members of the royal family—among them Ashraf—into exile in Europe and America. Afraid that he would be assassinated, he planted soldiers all the way up and down Palace Street and all around his own house.

  "There is going to be a war soon," Besharat the Bastard warned his guests on the first floor of the house. All through that year, the house had been filled with neighbors and friends and curious relatives who came to watch the happenings in Mossadeq's house. Besharat the Bastard was so confident of his vision that he had already taken steps to protect his household against the Tudeh and the invading British army: he had drawn barbed-wire fences all along the top of the brick wall that surrounded the house. He had built shutters for every window, bought locks and wooden poles for every door. He had even filled his basement with food and supplies to last the family three months.

  "Mossadeq has antagonized the Br
itish,” he warned his guests, "and now there is going to be war."

  Upstairs in her room, Yasmine used her hand to wipe the dust off the window glass. Through the opening she created, she watched the soldiers standing guard around Mossadeq's house, and thought about the time they would draw their guns. She, too, was counting on a war—on a day when Iran would plunge into chaos, the police and the army would become engulfed in battle and lose count of their citizens. Then Yasmine would run, in her high heels and her winter coat through the streets of Tehran and across the city's borders and all the way north to Russia, where, years ago, she had arrived on a ship from France.

  Besharat the Bastard returned home only an hour after he had left for the office. He jumped out of the car, and dismissed the chauffeur:

  "I won't need you for a few days."

  He grabbed the keys from the man and stuffed a handful of bills, much more than a week's salary, into his fist. He pushed the chauffeur toward the door, then locked the gates.

  He walked into the house, screaming for Naiima.

  "Send the maids home!" he commanded, rushing toward the kitchen and the backyard where the servants worked. Naiima ran behind him and watched as he ordered the maids and the cook to leave the house immediately. He paid them all—ransom money, Naiima thought, meant to curb their resentment of their masters and perhaps even induce a sense of loyalty. When they had all left the house, Besharat the Bastard locked all the doors, and barricaded them with long wooden poles. He nailed all the shutters closed, and ordered his children again to keep away from the cracks in the doors and windows; members of the Tudeh, it was known, were ruthless fighters who spared no innocents. For weeks they had been walking the streets, intimidating the citizens in order to gain support. Outside every house, they stopped and shoved the blades of their butcher's knives through the cracks in the doors and windows, stabbing unsuspecting inhabitants.

  Besharat the Bastard emptied the safe in his room, and hid the contents inside the sacks of flour stored in his basement. He rolled up the more expensive rugs on the floors and the walls, and dragged them up three stories to a storage room beneath the roof. Then at last he called the household and, trembling, broke the news:

  "The Shah has fled the country," he said. "There's going to be a bloodbath."

  In the summer of 1953 the Shah's twin sister, Ashraf, had been in exile in Europe when she was approached by members of the American CIA. They asked her to return to Iran, smuggle herself into the palace where the Shah was surrounded by Mossadeq's soldiers, and deliver a word to His Majesty. Always the braver and more ruthless of the twins, Ashraf agreed. She returned to Iran with the aid of friends, reached Queen Sorraya, and handed her a letter, the contents of which have never been fully discovered. Two weeks later the Shah and Sorraya boarded a small plane and left Iran in the dark of night. They flew to Baghdad, and from there to Rome. Behind them, the CIA moved in to fight the Russians.

  They did not bring troops; they hired an army in Iran. They paid starving, unemployed Iranians, and asked them to stage demonstrations in support of the fleeing Shah. They enlisted the help of Shaaban the Brainless, leader of a workers' union in Tehran. Shaaban carried around piles of banknotes that he distributed to anyone who would declare himself a lover of the Crown. They spent so much money and stirred such force that Mossadeq became terrified:

  "The CIA has come to kill me," he cried.

  No longer the bold man with the unfearing heart, he ran to his home—this veteran of Reza Shah's jails, who had been willing to sacrifice three generations of Iranians for the sake of pride—and surrounded himself with armed soldiers. On the streets, fighting had broken out between the Tudeh and the Shah's new supporters.

  In the house of Besharat the Bastard, Yasmine had not slept for three nights. She remained at the window, dressed in her street clothes and her shoes, and watched every event on the street. She had no money; she had never seen Peacock after the day she came to warn Yasmine against leaving. But she told herself that she would sell the ring elsewhere, and raise enough to buy food for a few weeks and a ticket out of Iran.

  Above all, she kept herself from seeing her children.

  On the morning of August 19,1952, Yasmine saw American tanks rolling down Palace Street toward Mossadeq's house.

  "My God, it's happened!" Naiima screamed downstairs, running in circles like a blind mouse.

  Gunfire erupted on the street. From her window Yasmine saw Mossadeq climb onto the roof of his house, and run away like a thief in the night. She saw Tudeh soldiers fleeing before American tanks. Seeking shelter, they scaled the walls of Besharat the Bastard's home, crawled through the barbed wire, and landed in his garden with bloody clothes and pieces of torn flesh hanging from their hands and faces. They ran through the dusty, dry rose gardens, and broke down the door to the house. Yasmine was ready. She grabbed her coat and ran.

  Downstairs she heard the sound of her children crying. In a blur, she saw Besharat the Bastard, his son and older daughter in his arms, looking for refuge from the invading Tudeh mob.

  "Yasmine!" he called her, his voice—she was startled at this—ringing with the same urgency with which he had spoken to her in Paris. "Yasmine!"

  She went out the door.

  On the street, she forced her way through the mob, blinded by fear and dust, deafened by the sound of gunshots and the roar of the tanks rolling toward her.

  "Stand back!" someone screamed at her, but she kept running. "Stand back!"

  The tank fired. The force of the explosion hurled Yasmine off her feet and carried her a few yards till she crashed against the side of the gutter. Daylight burst into flames. Yasmine heard the sound of the wounded screaming, and felt the heat of the fires around her. Mossadeq's house was half-crumbled. The Tudeh was on the run.

  Lying there on the ground, Yasmine watched the battlefield on Palace Street and, for the first time since she had left Paris, understood she could not go back: "It's like this," she told herself. "It's all destroyed."

  She saw the streets leading nowhere, the buildings inhabited by rats, the monuments wrecked and obsolete. She saw the invalids who still felt pain in limbs they no longer owned, women shivering in food lines, dropping dead. She saw her parents' apartment, full of cobwebs and her mother's moth-eaten clothes.

  It was too late.

  She tottered back to the house of Besharat the Bastard and accepted her prison.

  Cyrus the Magnificent lived with Peacock for a year—until Laa-Laa sold to Heshmat the apartment building she had stolen from Cyrus. Cyrus the Magnificent rented his old flat back from his mother, but everywhere, he saw reminders of Laa-Laa. He hated her and missed her at the same time. He would have taken her back— even married her, he knew, to keep her from leaving again— but she did not come, and Cyrus grew resentful. Instead of Laa-Laa, he directed his anger at the Russians. In the months after Mossadeq's failed coup, when the Americans brought the Shah home and once again made him King, Cyrus the Magnificent watched the crackdown on the Tudeh and other communist sympathizers with inordinate pleasure. He told himself the Shah was avenging him.

  The Shah had returned to Iran determined not to lose control of his throne again. He captured Mossadeq, placed him under house arrest—he was afraid to create a martyr by killing him—and set out to purge the country of all opposition. In the armed forces he apprehended a thousand officers on charges of conspiracy and sedition. In the cities he appointed military governors to search every house for communists. Day after day, suspects were rounded up and taken away to prison. Trials were short, sentences predetermined. Defense attorneys sympathetic to their clients ran the risk of coming under suspicion. Judges who failed to hand down severe sentences were investigated and abused.

  Throughout the crackdown and the purges, Cyrus the Magnificent felt his anger subside and his wound begin to heal. He still despised Russia, but he forgot Laa-Laa's betrayal and went back to look for her in the house she had bought with money from the sale of the build
ing. She lived there with her new lover, and she had told the servants to beat Cyrus if he ever came calling for her.

  Cyrus the Magnificent never did recover from the humiliation of being confronted by Laa-Laa's maids. Nevertheless, he stayed in Iran, and told himself he would never leave. He still loved America, but he could not bear the thought of being so far away from Laa-Laa.

  He found himself drawn to the increasing numbers of Americans who came to Iran after 1953. They were technical and military advisers, and they brought their families and lived in exclusive enclaves built in the most prestigious parts of the city. They brought their music, their schools, their films. When the first movie house opened in Tehran, featuring an American Western, Cyrus the Magnificent felt he was about to be reborn.

  He had seen the film seven times already, sitting amid a handful of adventurous youths who brought their own chairs—the theater did not provide a seat except on the floor—when someone's mother walked in and dragged her son out of the hall. Within minutes the theater was invaded by frantic parents trying to save their children from the evils of cinema: the local mullah, Cyrus soon learned, had declared movies unholy.

  “The images on the screen," the mullah had declared that day in the course of his afternoon sermon, “come to life by extracting the souls of the people in the audience."

  There was no point in questioning the issue; the mullah in question had confirmed the ruling with a superior, who had in turn asked God in his sleep.

  “It stands to reason," the superior mullah had argued in defense of the theory. “How else could these American actors suddenly learn to speak in Persian?"

  So the theater shut down, and it would have remained closed except that many young men from more educated backgrounds protested, and at last the owner gave in to his greed and reopened with a different film. This time the room filled up. Driven by curiosity, anyone with the slightest taste for danger had come to find out if souls were indeed extracted from among the living.