by Gina nahai
"I was born here," Peacock had said in response. "My daughter is buried here."
She had lived through a century of war and upheaval. She would see the end.
The Shah left on January 16, 1979. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned. Almost immediately, the leaders of the revolution confiscated the wealth and properties of the rich. Peacock lost everything but the house she lived in.
Nevertheless, she stayed in Tehran—alone but for Naiima, who came calling once every few weeks. They had known each other for years, ever since Peacock had first brought the diamond necklace that Besharat gave Yasmine on the occasion of her son's birth. Naiima had always disliked Peacock, but now that they were alone and trapped in war, she came to seek her company. Besharat the Bastard, she told Peacock, refused to leave his house. He had already warned Naiima that the revolution was going to destroy him. One by one, Naiima's servants had quit their jobs, then returned to the house—the women in chadors, the men wearing beards—to warn Naiima of her day of reckoning.
"I can't make Besharat leave, you see," Naiima cried to Peacock, who offered no response. "It breaks my heart to see him so resigned, so unwilling to protect himself. This man was a lion, you know. In his days of glory, no one in the world could have matched his courage or his vision."
On the streets, armed bands of Komitehs—revolutionary councils—and Pasdars—revolutionary guards—conducted massive roundups and on-the-spot executions. Suspects were arrested in their homes, or dragged into parked vans in every neighborhood, where they were summarily tried and sentenced.
“There is no room in revolutionary courts for defense lawyers," the leaders of the revolution had declared. “They keep quoting laws to play for time, and this tries the patience of the people."
On February 15, Khomeini carried out his first formal executions. The victims were four of the Shah's top aides, betrayed by him and handed over—in a last attempt to save his crown—to the opposition. Among them was Nassiri, an army general who had served the Shah since the beginning of his reign, and gone to war for him against Mossadeq in the 1950s. Nassiri was taken onto the roof of the former girls' school in Tehran, and shot in the head. His picture, along with that of Prime Minister Hoveyda, appeared on the front page of the evening paper.
Thousands of executions followed. Khomeini gave his people a mission to defend the revolution of God against its enemies, to end the corruption of the rich and the infidel, to stop the influence of the Shah's former agents. Scores of unemployed youth enlisted in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They were given plain green uniforms with yellow-and-blue badges encased in plastic and attached to their breast pockets. They were given arms—weapons confiscated when the armed forces joined the revolution—and sent out to gather suspects. But they were not trained in the use of the weaponry at their disposal, and they did not understand the awesome power of their tools. Every day a dozen children died accidentally as they played with hand grenades and machine guns. Scores of unsuspecting adults were hit by gunfire from weapons in the hands of playful youths. They were called martyrs—heroes of the revolution.
In Tehran's Behesht Zahra Cemetery, the line to bury the dead was half a kilometer long. Mourners carried the corpses up to the gates of the cemetery, then stood in line for an entire day waiting for undertakers to wash and bury the dead. By nightfall, many were still waiting. They left the corpses in the open air, there outside the gates of "Zahra's
Heaven," and went home to sleep. The next day the waiting would continue, but at the end, many returned disappointed. Undertakers refused burial to anyone who had been killed by the revolution. Enemies of Islam, they said, did not deserve a Muslim burial.
Naiima could hear the jeeps rolling in her sleep. There were thirty Guards—eight jeeps—and they all had their machine guns aimed to fire. They broke down the gates of Besharat the Bastard's house in Zafaraniyeh, and drove through the desolate garden with the dried flower beds full of dust, where for years nothing had grown. They charged through the front door, blasting it off the hinges in an explosion of dust that mushroomed around them till they were blind. Naiima heard the explosion and sat up in her bed.
"Oh, God," she whispered. "It's happened."
She called for the maid to come and drag her out of bed. She could hear the Guards running through the house, tearing at every room and calling out for Besharat the Bastard. Naiima screamed for the maid again, then suddenly remembered the woman was gone—quit, like all the other servants. Only Mirza Muhammad, the Cook, had stayed with Besharat, but he was a religious man, and he would never enter a woman's bedroom.
Naiima struggled, and at last descended from the bed. As she stepped onto the ground, the weight of her body raised a cloud of dust from the floor. Her nightgown was made of two large white sheets sewn together at the top. Her hair was long and white, hanging around her gigantic face, which dripped with the sweat of fear and exhaustion. She took her crutches and lumbered out of her room on the first floor. Her feet, round and fleshy, left prints in the dust.
A dozen Guards were running up the marble staircase to the second floor. The rest were scattered through the house, searching the living room and the kitchen, the yard, the bathrooms. They were stabbing the walls, emptying closets and drawers, tearing the covers off the furniture, ripping through the drapery and the rugs, poking holes into the air vents and the ceiling as they looked for incriminating evidence: money stashed away; a bottle of whiskey left over from the days of corruption, or bought on the black market for eighty times its original value; pictures of the Shah or his family, once required in every household to prove loyalty to the Crown, now evidence of opposition to the Imam. They went through the rooms no one had used in twenty years—where dust lay in a blanket three centimeters thick, undisturbed and sovereign in the house of Besharat the Bastard.
“Stand back!" a Guard screamed as he saw Naiima appear at her door. She recognized Mustafa the Orchid—the gardener Besharat had employed in their house on the Avenue of the Tulips. Naiima froze. The Guards were running up the stairs to the second floor. They found Besharat the Bastard's room, and kicked it open.
"Rise! Rise! You're under arrest!"
Besharat the Bastard stood dressed in a three-piece suit, his heavy leather shoes polished to perfection, his face shaved, his hair—thin and gray—combed back with precision. He stood next to the carved wooden table with the screaming lions' heads—the fingers of his right hand gripping the surface of the wood—and he did not move as the guards invaded his room. They put a machine gun to his chest.
"Are you Besharat the Jew, son of Assal of the Pit?"
Besharat the Bastard lowered his head in assent.
"You're under arrest for the crimes of Zionism and corruption."
A Guard pushed him from behind, and Besharat the Bastard started to walk. He moved with difficulty, his joints having atrophied from disuse, the suit he had not worn for years hanging loose from his frame. He came to the top of the stairs and saw Naiima, her face white, covered with a film of sweat and dust, her hands, like red balloons, clutching the corners of her chador under her chin.
"Besharat!” she implored as their eyes met. "My Besharat!"
She watched him descend the stairs. He was thin, old, helpless. In his eyes she saw a world of sorrow.
"Move!" The Guards' leader poked Besharat with the barrel of his gun.
At the bottom of the stairs, Mirza Muhammad the Cook knelt before him and kissed Besharat's hand.
"Agha," he sobbed, "I told them they are wrong. Yesterday the Komiteh stopped me to ask about you, and I told them you never bothered a soul. Agha, these men are non-Muslims, the enemies of Islam. Agha, they are worse than the Shah, worse than the Savak."
Mustafa the Orchid put his gun at the back of Mirza Muhammad's neck, and shot him.
"Let's go," he said, and shoved Besharat again.
At the door, Naiima wailing behind him, Besharat the Bastard stopped for a moment, looked at the explosion of blood and flesh t
hat had been Mirza Muhammad, then turned his head and searched above the stairs. He saw no one.
He crossed the gravel pathway that led through the garden. A jeep waited for him. Trailed by the dust and the sound of Naiima's shrill screams, Besharat the Bastard greeted the Guards quietly. Just as he was about to board the car, he looked up at the house, and caught Yasmine watching him from her window.
They remained frozen, staring at each other. Besharat the Bastard raised a hand and waved at Yasmine, asking for absolution.
Yasmine saw a tall stranger, handsome and arrogant and unsure at the same time, standing outside her parents' apartment in Paris, waving at her one glorious morning as she stepped out in the white and lavender dress she had worn to her wedding. Her mother was wailing behind her.
“My child," she said, "I will never see you again."
"The Forces of Revolution execute Zionist Criminal." Peacock stared at the headline in the evening newspaper, and felt her stomach burst with fear. She went to Besharat the Bastard's house.
"Ya-Allah! Ya-Allah!" she cried through the dust-filled corridor, but there was no answer. Naiima was not home. Peacock found Yasmine in her room.
"Ya-Allah, Madame Yasmine," she said as she entered uninvited. Yasmine turned away from the window. Her face was streaked with tears.
"I learned the bad news. I have come to offer my condolences, to see if I may lend a hand, to help with the burial and the wake."
Yasmine's eyes were like glass. Her face, wrinkled and deformed for lack of teeth, revealed nothing of the beauty she had once boasted. She made Peacock feel small and incoherent and expendable.
"I thought we could go to Evin and claim the body," Peacock persisted. "We may be able to arrange for a plot in the old Jewish cemetery."
Yasmine turned her back to Peacock, and stared out the window.
"Do what you like," she said. "He had it coming."
Hours later, Naiima came home. She trudged through the garden and into the house, panting from the weight of her body, and the moment she saw Peacock, she burst into tears.
"Peacock, Peacock," she sobbed as she struggled to walk faster. "They killed him. They killed my Besharat."
She grabbed Peacock's hand in her own wet palms.
"I was there, you know," she started again when her tears had subsided. "I was at the prison when it happened, begging for his life and promising dollars, and all of a sudden a Guard walks in to say he's just been shot."
She broke out sobbing again. She went to the bottom of the steps, and howled for Yasmine.
"Come down," she said. "We're both widows now."
She sat down on the floor. Her face was a deep purple. Her breath was about to shut out.
"And now that he's dead," she told Peacock. "Now, Peacock, that he's dead, there isn't even a son to bury him. He gave his all to have a child, and they all get up and leave the country so that in the end there's no one left to bury him. That was always his biggest fear, you know, that he wouldn't have a son to bury him. I can't even get ten men together in this town to pray for his soul."
She called up to Yasmine again.
"Come on down, Yasmine," she bellowed. "It's all over. We don't have to be enemies anymore."
She turned to Peacock.
"The thing is, you see, he never gave a penny to Israel. That's the thing. He wasn't a Zionist. He didn't give a damn about Israel. Now they kill him, they say, because he was a Zionist. It's like the old days, you know, when they said Jews weren't Iranians. They figure we're all Israeli spies, living here just to make money and send it off to Moshe Dayan."
She was about to call Yasmine for a third time, but she hesitated. She had stopped crying. She looked at Peacock with lucid eyes. She had a thought, a question that had gnawed at her heart ever since the first time she realized she was infertile, when she understood that Besharat the Bastard would take another wife and have her children.
“Do you suppose" she asked,—at the end, when nothing else mattered—do you suppose that he thought of her?"
In the kitchen, Peacock found a bag of dried cowslip leaves and made a heavy tea that she forced Naiima to drink. It made Naiima sleepy, and after a while she lay down on the ground and rested her head on Peacock's lap.
Night fell. The house was quiet. Naiima was dreaming of her husband.
He was tall and pallid, terrified as he stood handcuffed in his winter suit. The Guards forced him against a wall. A firing squad aimed at him. Someone screamed. Guns fired.
Besharat the Bastard accepted his death standing up, but just as he was about to fall, he turned to Naiima, and she saw the dark of his pupils before they lost their reflectiveness forever. In them, a young woman with white skin and copper hair raised her purple eyes at Naiima and offered an amber smile.
It was summer, and the air smelled of tar and wood and gunpowder. By six in the morning the sun was already brutal. By seven, when Peacock woke up, her dress clung to her skin and her stomach turned with the heat.
She had wanted to spend the night on the roof, to escape her bedroom, where the walls perspired heat. Before Khomeini's victory, most people in Tehran had slept on the roof during the summer. Now no one dared stay outside.
Peacock washed her face. She thought she should eat, but it was too hot. She turned on the radio: "revolutionary news" from the front. Taking advantage of the chaos that pervaded Iran's military after the fall of the Shah, Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran in 1980. The war would last eight years and claim hundreds of thousands of lives. Every day, each side claimed complete and unconditional victory over the other.
Peacock left the radio on and went outside. She walked aimlessly past the charred buildings and the skeletons of homes, across mounds of shattered glass, around Revolutionary Guard stations where armed men strip-searched and interrogated pedestrians at random. She saw the shrines— bridal shrines erected on every streetcorner in the name of young boys who had died in the war. It was Khomeini's offering of gratitude to families who lost their sons in the fight against Saddam Hussein: a bridal shrine for the dead son, and a bag of rice for his parents.
Three streets away from her house, Peacock heard children singing a riddle and clapping hands. She turned a corner and came upon a bombed house. She looked inside.
She saw four boys, three teenagers and a child. They were naked, feet chained together and hands tied behind their backs. Around them a dozen girls danced in a circle. They had come to celebrate; they were about to watch an execution.
The boys, Peacock learned, were accused of treason, of conspiracy of thought if not of action, of aiming to bring harm to the revolution of Islam. One had spoken insultingly about the Imam. Two had joined the ranks of the Mujahedin. The last one, barely ten years old, had escaped from the war front and run home to his mother.
''Mama/' he pleaded now to his sobbing mother, who begged three Revolutionary Guards for her son's life. ''Tell them I will stay this time.”
He was so terrified he had lost control of his intestines and dirtied himself. The other boys trembled so hard that the chain connecting all their ankles together clanked as loudly as the girls' singing.
The Guards' leader cried an order. The girls stopped singing. The Guard came forward, gun in hand, and recited a prayer in Arabic.
"Long live the Imam!" he cried.
"Long live the Imam!" his friends repeated the slogan.
The young boy stretched his arms toward his mother and began to run. He managed one step, then tripped over the chain and fell.
Machine guns fired. Peacock watched the blood of children spatter the dirty yellow sky, saw their bodies fall in spasms. She saw their faces in the moment they heard the shots—before the bullets tore them. She heard their parents cry as they watched their sons beg—a last breath, a last prayer.
The boy to the far right landed on his back, his stomach wide open and three holes in his face. The little one drew his limbs inward, and lay still.
"My people," the Shah had said, "do
not want democracy."
The Guards' leader put away his machine gun.
"Long live the Imam."
"Long live the Imam."
"Death to America."
"Death to America."
"Death to the agents of Zion."
And there was a moment of calm, an instant when Peacock's eyes locked into the Guard's and she found herself purged of fear, understood that she must act, speak out, if only once, before she died. She stepped into the execution yard—removed and rational—picked up the machine gun with an unwavering hand, and placed the barrel on the man's chest. She did not fire.
"Death to you, you bastard, and your son-of-a-bitch brothers."
Epilogue
1982
In the women's prison where the Guards had taken Peacock, the mullahs ordered an execution. Peacock had been close to the Shah. She had helped the royal family rob the people of Iran by selling them jewels. No doubt she had spied for Savak. No doubt she was a Zionist. Her children were in America and her friends had all been accused of corruption and she herself had threatened a Guard and cried her betrayal in public. The mullahs sent Mehr-Allah the Guard to take Peacock outside the prison and kill her where the body would not be accounted for.
“So how old were you?" Mehr-Allah the Guard asked, and Peacock knew her fate. She walked away from her cell, trailed by her cellmate's laughter, and as she felt the hard ground under her feet, she prayed to God for escape.
They went down one gray cement corridor and into another. To their right was a bare wall; to their left, situated at great distances from one another, were the cells. They came up to a vault door. Mehr-Allah the Guard banged the butt of his gun against the metal and cried his name. The door opened. Peacock inhaled her first breath of air in three weeks.
It was night, and the moon smiled at her.
They crossed an empty yard. Someone drove up in a Peykan—Iran's brand of automobile—and Mehr-Allah opened the door for Peacock. He dismissed the driver. There was no need for a second man; Peacock was too frail to pose a threat.