Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (11 page)

Ten years after he had first touched Muhammad the Jew, Prince Kazim the Boy-Lover wrote a will and named Muhammad as his sole inheritor. One morning he lay in his tub of honey-sweetened goat's milk, and asked Muhammad for his daily dose of bull's sperm, consumed orally to ensure longevity. Then he closed his eyes, reclined in the tub, and never even felt the blade that slashed his throat.

Muhammad the Jew buried the Boy-Lover, collected his inheritance, and rushed out of Baghdad. He was thirty-four years old and rich. He went back to Esfahan.

In the year 1866,
tragedy came to Juyy Bar. The winter of 1865 had been short and dry. The earth had become sterile. One by one, Joseph the Winemaker began to count the signs of disaster. Infants died in their mothers' wombs. Fear invaded the dreams of young children. The land grew poison, and cattle lay on their backs to die in fields and open roads. Then the Plague arrived.

It was summer, and every day stories of death and devastation reached Esfahan. In the north, where the Plague had first struck, the death toll rose so quickly that mass graves could not be dug in time to bury everyone. In Tehran, Nasser-ed-Din Shah escaped his palace and left his wives behind. He quarantined the area around his summer home in the mountains, and ordered that his soldiers banish anyone who ran to him for help.

Among the mullahs, many followed the Shah and left the cities. Those who stayed behind preached that the Plague had been caused by Jews and foreigners. On the anniversary of the battle of Karbala, in which the Third Disciple, Hussein, had died at the hands of Yazid, the streets of every town and village in Persia throbbed with more than usual grief. Traditional processions of men and boys flagellating themselves to mourn a thousand-year-old death were conducted with additional fervor. Symbolic wakes at which women wept and pulled out their hair by fistfuls rang with greater sadness. But all the while the Plague spread farther, and God's ears remained deaf.

In Esfahan, wealthy Muslims packed their belongings and left the city. The Plague had appeared in the north— they moved southward. Others stayed, listening to the growing quiet, watching the shadow of death approach.

In Juyy Bar, Leyla prepared herself for the Plague. In 1865 she had had her first child—a girl, Hannah, with yellow hair, golden eyes, and hands like white butterflies. She was pregnant again, and she knew the Jews had nowhere to run: the laws of Shiism confined them to their own ghettos. She stored food in the house and waited.

In the north and the east, entire villages were emptied, their populations ravaged so suddenly by the Plague that there had been no time, or survivors, to bury the dead. Cities sank into throbbing boils of blood. The earth became pregnant with bodies.

Every day, caravans of refugees crossed the gates of Esfahan—people running one step before the Plague, leaving behind their families, their homes, their land, casting the smell of death around, carrying the germ of the Plague farther. They brought with them the corpses of those who had died along the way, strapped onto their backs, decomposing in the canvas sacks where the heat and the worms of the desert ravaged what the illness had left intact. In the bazaars they crossed, they stopped and sold the clothes of the dead for a penny that they saved for the burial. By the rivers they passed, they camped and washed the corpses, hoping to cast away the infection. Then the Plague reached Esfahan.

There was a mad run. Everyone from Esfahan's governor to the only doctor in the city—an Englishman who had come years ago from the south—took to the desert. Women and children, priests and soldiers and old, old men traveled along dusty roads of panic, pushing forward as the Plague drew closer to them every day, praying, always praying to stay ahead until finally they were caught—away from their homes, there amid the snakes and the scorpions, under a sun that knew no mercy.

To save herself and her children, Leyla went to hide in an underground cave outside the ghetto. Hundreds of years ago, other Jews had dug these caves to hide from the mullahs. Joseph the Winemaker refused to go. He stayed in the winery to guard his pitchers and his old samovar. He barred the door from inside and sat alone, his hands pressed over his ears to block out the sound of children screaming with pain, his heart beating with fear, whispering in his head, a thousand times a day:

"The next time you take a breath..."

In the cave, Leyla grew with the infant in her womb. She drank the water she had saved, ate the food she had scavenged in the early days of the Plague. At night she saw Esther the Soothsayer in her dreams.

She emerged out of the silence of Leyla's womb as she had come years ago into the darkness of Noah's nights. She came closer every night—watching, always watching the child in Leyla until the child was born, and then Esther the Soothsayer smiled.

Joseph the Winemaker came to see his second daughter.

"Just as well she won't live through the Plague," he said with a cold sadness. "I couldn't feed another female anyway."

Leyla believed him. The child was small, weak, undernourished. She would be the first to fall prey to the infection, the first to succumb to the darkness of the cave. She held her in her arms and waited for her to die.

She waited a day, a week, a month. She did not name the girl, because it would be harder to bury a child she had believed would live. But every day she heard the sound of her cries, watched the movement of her tiny fists as they grabbed for every faint ray of light. By the time the fever caught the child, Leyla had lost the war.

"I have held her for too long,” she pleaded with God. "She belongs to me.”

For a week she sat up, nursing the infant. On the eighth day she fell asleep and dreamt of Death. She woke up and went to the mouth of the cave; it was light in the desert. Esther the Soothsayer was walking toward her.

Esther the Soothsayer
arrived in the light of early morning. She walked through the desert like a vision in the sun, a woman with the feet of a mare, and appeared in Juyy Bar one step behind the Plague.

"It is Death," Leyla whispered to Hannah when she saw Esther. "She has come to take the baby from me."

She prayed that Esther would not stop by her door, that she would go on, claim another child from her mother. Her eyes were fixed on the wooden hatch at the top of the stairs, and she listened.

Esther the Soothsayer came closer, closer. She stopped by the cave. Leyla could hear the desert come alive around her, the air move with her breath. She could see the contours of Esther's body—shadowless and pale, like pieces of a dream seeping through the cracks in the hatch. Suddenly, Esther flung the door open.

"I have come to name your child."

She stood shimmering in the gray light of dawn. Her voice, soft and distant, was like the aching memory of a pain long forgotten. Leyla saw her and pressed her child closer to her chest.

It must be a vision, she thought, come to haunt me so I will lose track of time and let Death creep in.

Esther the Soothsayer was staring at the child. Behind her the sky had become silver blue, and the air trembled with the sound of the morning prayer rising from the minarets of Esfahan.

“Leave us," Leyla told her. She could feel the fever raging higher in her child's body. She could see life fluttering in her hands.

Esther the Soothsayer laughed, and the sand around her moved in waves—the desert an ocean of blue light. She reached into the cave—her hands like the branches of an ancient tree—and took the child.

"In the dawn of time there shall be a passage," she said. "A light shall beam through this child's eyes, and she shall see through it into the world of counterparts where every infant is old, and every commencement has ended."

In Esther's hand the infant was calm, as if suddenly rid of the fever.

"A man shall come, riding from the north, with blood on his hands and the anger of God in his eyes.

"He shall sit on the Throne of the Sun, and with a sweep of his hand he shall reach across this empire to free our people.

"His son shall call himself the King of Kings, heir to the Empire of Cyrus. He shall raise this child from the ashes and give her pride.

"But beware! For the King of Kings shall fall, and his throne shall crumble, and the men of God shall paint the skies of this nation with blood."

She held the child up, against the light, and gave her a name:

"Peacock."

Taratteh the Tulip
performed the local dances of twenty-two Persian tribes. She was a master at the
santour,
learned music by ear, wrote her own songs. She worked with two men—a
tar
player and a
don-baki.
They entertained at weddings and circumcisions, on new year's day and on the night of the feast of Yalda. Always at the end of the show, Taraneh the Tulip painted her face, donned a costume, and acted in a one-woman play.

She had been born in Shiraz, a rabbi's daughter, and she never knew what she looked liked until she was married. Her father did not allow mirrors in the house: a woman who saw her own reflection, he believed, might become vain, admire beauty, contemplate sin. Taraneh the Tulip had only imagined the shape of her body by staring at her older sister when she undressed. Her sister was twenty years old, but unmarried. She lived in a separate room, never ate with her family, never—never—spoke with her father.

“Your sister has sinned," their mother told Taraneh every time she questioned her sister's predicament. Her mother would not explain any more. Taraneh the Tulip always wondered if her sister's beauty had caused her to sin. She wondered if she, too, was beautiful. Once, when she was six years old, she sat in the winter sun and tried to find her likeness in a block of melting ice. The rabbi caught her. To teach her obedience, he shaved her head.

Taraneh the Tulip locked herself in the basement of their house and swore never to leave. She thought she would remain bald forever, sobbed against the wall and repented from sin. But as her hair began to grow and the memory of her punishment faded, she gave in to childish curiosity, and began to explore the basement for the first time. She dug through the junk stored around her, and imagined a purpose for everything she found. She discovered her mother's wedding dress, her father's first prayer shawl. She found the Torah where her great-grandfather had written all of his children's birthdays, the “tear jar" into which her grandmother had wept upon the passing of her husband. At the bottom of the pile, hidden in an alcove in the wall, Taraneh the Tulip found a dowry chest.

"Don't
touch
that," her mother screamed when she found Taraneh at the chest. She had brought Taraneh's dinner. She threw the food on the ground, hoisted her daughter away from the chest, and shoved the chest back with her foot. Her eyes were terrified.

"This damned thing is
jinxed."

Afterward, Taraneh the Tulip heard her mother whispering the tale to another woman, sobbing into her chador as she spoke, interrupting herself every time Taraneh approached. There had been a wedding. The next morning the groom's mother had come to inspect the dowry. She had opened the chest, then immediately awakened the bride and sent her home to her father.

“It was the
chest,"
Taraneh's mother insisted. “The chest is jinxed."

Taraneh the Tulip suddenly realized that the bride in the tale was her own sister.

For ten days in the month of her penance, Taraneh the Tulip fought to conquer her curiosity. She paced the basement from morning to night—her arms crossed as if to avoid sin—and stared at the chest that had released evil into her sister's life. Then at last she resigned herself to hell, forced the lock, and searched through the dowry: there was a pair of silver candlesticks, a few embroidered sheets, a tablecloth. There was a comforter, a small rug. Buried deep in the shroud, wrapped in canvas and rope, Taraneh the Tulip found a
santour.

She put the
santour
on the ground before her, picked up the pair of thin metal sticks used to play the strings, held them each between her thumb and forefinger, and took them to the instrument. She heard the
santour
sigh, and knew she was lost.

She played secretly for ten years—in her father's house, where her sister taught her, then in her husband's. She married another rabbi—her father's brother—and as she hid the
santour
in her dowry chest, Taraneh the Tulip realized she was inviting doom. Two years later, her husband discovered the
santour.
Before he could send her back to her father's home, where she would suffer a fate equal to that of her sister, Taraneh the Tulip ran away from Shiraz and never returned.

She traveled across Persia, chased from one ghetto and into another, and in every place she learned the people's music and dances. When she arrived in Juyy Bar she was twenty-six years old and resolved to stay. The first time Raab Yahya attacked her at his Sabbath sermon, warning the people against "the stranger with the wicked instrument," Taraneh the Tulip realized she must fight. That night she appeared in the ghetto square, dressed in a scarlet gown, her hands and face painted crimson, her hair glowing red. She waited for an audience to gather, took a bow, and then began to dance—a slow, graceful performance that lasted twelve minutes, and in the course of which she managed to re-create a tulip's life from inception to end. No one ever called Taraneh "whore" again.

So she stayed and, to earn extra income, worked as a matchmaker, a cook, a maid. She adopted a child—Salman the Coal Seller—who had been orphaned at the age of three, and had no relatives to raise him. After a while she was invited to play in Esfahan. In 1869 she was called to perform at the wedding of the governor's son to the daughter of Esfahan's Friday Imam. Taraneh the Tulip spoiled the wedding and stole the groom.

It was an unprecedented event, the greatest wedding in a hundred years, and every person of rank and reputation was invited. The groom was twenty years old, educated in Baghdad, and so rich he had waived his right to a dowry. The bride's family were so eager to form the union, they had insisted on a wedding only two weeks after the courtship had begun. The night of the celebrations, they were outraged to find a Jew among the performers. Still, not wishing to spoil the festivities, they had allowed Taraneh to make her appearance. Halfway through her Tulip act, the governor's son annulled the wedding. He had fallen in love, he said, with the Jew in the scarlet gown.