by Gina nahai
Driving out of the prison grounds, Mehr-Allah looked in the rearview mirror. Peacock was crying.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
She would not answer.
He drove downtown, and stopped the car just outside the old Jewish ghetto. The streets were deserted under martial law, but there were Guards everywhere. Twice they came up to the car and checked Mehr-Allah's identity.
"I'm putting her out," he told them of Peacock.
He sat in the car, its windows closed, and smoked an entire cigarette. He opened the window only to throw out the butt.
"My son died," he said suddenly. "He walked on a mine—in front of a tank."
Startled, Peacock searched for Mehr-Allah in the rearview mirror. She saw only his eyes.
"Why did you send him?"
There was a long pause. Mehr-Allah sighed.
"Because I believe."
He took out his gun and left it on the passenger seat next to him. He came around and opened Peacock's door.
She stepped out.
He opened her handcuffs.
"Don't go home," he told her. He was letting her go. "Don't go anywhere you are known."
Mehr-Allah the Guard had killed many for the cause. He knew he would kill more. But on this day of mourning for his child, he despised his anger, and he could not stand an old woman's tears.
Peacock placed a hand on Mehr-Allah's chest.
"Bless you," she said.
Mehr-Allah the Guard saw his enemy become his friend.
"And you," he answered.
Peacock walked under the indigo sky of dawn, through the ghetto and into the Pit, where she immediately recognized Zilfa the Rosewoman's house: it stood intact, between two structures leveled by Iraqi bombs. Peacock went closer. The door was unlocked, the yard full of garbage. But inside, the house was painted with blue stars.
In the bedroom, Peacock found the alcove where Zilfa the Rosewoman had once spread her wedding bed with Monsieur Jean. Peacock sat down, reclined against the wall, and slept with the stars.
She was young, barely a woman, and her eyes were the color of rice fields at dawn. She stood before a sparkling mirror in the sun, dressed in a white gown with a shimmering veil. Her body was tall and lean and sculptured. Her hair was thick, her skin smooth and radiant.
She felt a shadow behind her, and turned. It was Solomon the Man, twenty years old, and come to see his bride. He lifted the veil off Peacock's face.
“You are beautiful," he said, and this time Peacock believed him.
Solomon the Man raised the veil above their heads— creating a canopy of light and shadow under which they would be married. The sun, filtered through the veil, was almost white.
He touched Peacock's hand.
"I came back for you."
A breeze pulled at the veil.
“Don't let go," Peacock warned. Without a canopy, they could not be married.
The breeze snatched the veil out of Solomon's hand.
“Look!" Solomon the Man laughed. The wind carried the veil across the wall of Zilfa the Rosewoman's house, over the roofs of neighboring homes, up into the glittering sky, where it became a small white cloud, and vanished.
Acknowledgments
In our house on Shah Reza Street, the rooms were filled with echoes. The hallways were long and dim and haunted by shadows. The garden—so vast I never thought I could find the end alone—hid the ghosts of strangers who came alive in the moonlight and spoke to me till dawn.
In our house on Shah Reza Street, my grandfather, Khanbaba Barkhordar—known to everyone as Agha (Sire)—walked around with his cane, dressed always in a suit, and commanded the servants as if to demand their soul. He was a tall man with great authority and boundless ambition. Among the first generation of Jews liberated from the ghetto, he had prospered under Reza Shah and spoke his name with the reverence due a god.
He had an only son—my father—whom he cherished most in the world and who was to produce, Agha was adamant, many heirs of his own. My father was seventeen years old when he walked with Agha through the doors of my mother's home on Simorgh Street. He was a gorgeous boy, blond and dashing and dressed in a European suit with his hair greased back in the style of the time.
“But she's only fourteen," my mother's parents protested to Agha when he asked for her hand in marriage. Peeking through the living room curtains, I am told, my mother saw her suitor and declared that it would be he, or no one.
There was a fairy-tale wedding in the officers' club in Tehran. Agha invited a thousand guests, showered the bride with jewels, brought the newlyweds to live with him in the house on Shah Reza Street. My parents had three girls. Agha would have no heirs.
In our house on Shah Reza Street, Agha became old and ill and embittered by life's disloyalty. He stopped going out—his health failing so rapidly he hardly ever moved from his office on the first floor—and instead received his callers at home. I remember the men and women who crowded our house in that era and waited their turn to meet Agha. I remember sitting next to him in the big room with the stone floor and the large French doors that opened onto the rose garden, watching everyone and listening to their tales. There was a grayhaired gentleman, an uncle to the Shah, who came to the house every year and spoke to Agha of the memories of a youth they both mourned. There was a servant, a shivering old opium addict who had lost his ability to work and came once a week only to collect his pension. There was a woman—“The Lady of Light," Agha called her sarcastically—who had married twice and buried each husband when he drank, “accidentally," a glass of poisoned tea. Even as a child, watching those strangers and listening to their tales, I knew their voices would haunt me for life.
Agha tired of his callers, and slowly denied audience to most everyone. In his youth he had accepted no limitations. In his old age he refused to compromise with fate. He remained in the house, barely walking at all, and raged against God as if demanding war. My sisters and I, girls though we were, became his only source of happiness. He insisted that we attend the greatest schools, that we receive the best education, that we be sent abroad—to Europe, where women became ladies—and make him proud. He died when we were still schoolchildren, but my parents shared his dream. At a time and in a world where girls were at best expected to “marry well,'' my parents told my sisters and me that we must work. To them, and to Agha, I owe my first thanks.
I owe no less to my husband, Hamid, who came to
meet me for the first time on the grounds of the UCLA campus in the fall of 1980, and told me that I must give new life to the voices of all the men and women I had carried with me from the house on Shah Reza Street. He was young and handsome and brilliant. Like my mother peeking through the curtain on the day of her courtship, I saw Hamid and thought it was he or no one. From the moment I wrote the first word till the day I stopped working, he alone has made me endure. Among his many contributions to the book is its title.
I am also grateful to my teacher, John Rechy, who first saw the book in outline form, and has since worked with me on every line. He demanded structure where there was chaos, refinement where there was mediocrity, patience where there was despair. "In writing, as in life," he said, "you must try to achieve if only a moment of greatness."
I wish also to recognize the invaluable contribution of the late Dr. Habib Levy, Iran's foremost Jewish historian, whose life's work, History of the Jews in Iran, has served as a source for much of the actual history recorded in Peacock.
But above all, my thanks go to the people, whose lives have become the stories in this book. I began with my own memories, and then asked questions. I spoke to hundreds of Iranians, Jews and Muslims, old and young. Through years of interviews and volumes of books, I became familiar with a history—albeit recent—that had been buried by the last of the "ghetto generation" as if to wipe away three thousand years of suffering. I learned that Iran is a nation of paradoxes and contradictions, that its people—Jew and Muslim alike—are victims most of all
to the violence of nature, the cruelties of their gods, and the ruse of their own ignorance. But above all, I learned that the children of Iran are brave and strong—capable, each of them, of achieving "if only a moment of greatness."
In this, I believe, she will find her salvation.