Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (15 page)

"You must be proud," Taraneh the Tulip told her, but in vain. "Your daughter is the prince's wife. If she learns to protect herself from the other wives, there is no telling how long she will last. The Shah may renew her contract. He may even marry her permanently."

Even Joseph the Winemaker, who had first sworn to kill Leyla for stealing the bangles, now praised her act.

"My daughter," he boasted to the Jews,
"Joseph's
daughter, is the wife of Zil-el-Sultan."

Still, years after she had last seen Hannah, Leyla woke up nights to go check on her daughter in bed, and waited for her to come home at the end of each day. Then all at once she would remember Zil-el-Sultan, ache for her child, and cry herself to sleep. A ghost came to curse her in her sleep: "You forced Hannah to convert," it accused Leyla. "When she dies, neither Jew nor Muslim will bury her."

Hannah grew up in the harem. She learned to smile, to defend herself against the other wives. She lost her Jewish accent, the frightened expression of her early days. When she reached puberty, the harem favorite rewarded her with a bag full of diamonds. When she had her first child—a girl with Leyla's hair and the eyes of Noah the Gold—Zil-el-Sultan offered her a palace of her own. He let her leave the harem—a sign of respectability for a wife—then immediately sent for her.

"I missed you,” he said, and for many nights after, he kept Hannah in his bedroom.

The last time Taraneh the Tulip went to call, Hannah never even engaged her eyes; she had forgotten the past, Taraneh realized. She had come to think of herself as royalty.

"There will come a time
when you will be a woman, and your body will be impure. You will bleed for days, from the place between your legs where you now piss. You will bleed every month, and from the day you start until fifteen days later, you will be impure. If you touch anything that your husband touches, or if you cook anything that anyone may eat, they too will be contaminated. If you lie with your husband you will have sinned. If you conceive a child he will refuse to give it his name. Everyone will curse you, and God will turn his back on you.” Leyla stood in the middle of the room—her tall, slender figure a shadow in the unreal halo of the oil lamp. She was teaching Peacock about the rites of purity.

"When you have counted fifteen days, you will go to bathe in the well. You will submerge your body in the cold water, and become pure again. Then you can touch anything, lie in your husband's bed, and bear children.”

Leyla's voice trembled at the mention of the well. She turned her face away from Peacock, looked down a moment, then walked away.

All of that night she stood by the door, staring into the empty courtyard like a child waiting for an angel. Peacock watched her, full of questions, afraid to ask. Near midnight, Joseph the Winemaker left the empty winery and climbed the steps into the room. He slept, and the air filled with the bitterness of his dreams.

“Women have died in the well," Leyla said after she knew that Joseph was asleep.

"Sometimes one of them goes down there and doesn't come back until the well spits her up hours and hours later. Sometimes she doesn't come back at all." Peacock sat up. The night was still but for the sound of Joseph's breathing. She listened again. Demons screeched in his throat. She went toward Leyla and touched her hand.

They left before dawn. On the street, the doors of some houses creaked slowly open and other women, dressed in black, slipped out to travel along the same route as Leyla and Peacock. In the moonlight, under the thousand stars, they looked like dancing shadows come alive to perform an ancient and mysterious rite that only they knew.

Peddlers carried their junk in small heaps on their shoulders, bound for nearby villages where they knew they would find no customers. Young boys with shaved heads and dreamy eyes swept the fronts of shops where they had been left to sleep—to scare off thieves. Old men with toothless mouths and insomnia-ridden bodies sat by dried gutters on the side of the streets, waiting for morning, or death, to come.

They went past the abandoned basement where Mullah Mirza had once tortured himself in search of gold, past the underground temple where the Jews had gathered to pray in the years when they had been forced to convert to Islam but still practiced Judaism in secret. Near the gates of Juyy Bar they saw the large brick building with lopsided walls and a wooden door painted in luminous blue that shone in the dark and that led to the bath.

Peacock wanted to turn back, run away into the darkness, under the satin cold of night. But her hand was caught, her feet were powerless, her voice choked.

She heard Leyla knock, heard a hand lift the wooden pole that barred the door from inside. She saw the vertical lines in the wood where the paint was chipped move away from them as the door opened. She saw an old woman— pale, bony, carved with horizontal lines, eyes gleaming, hair silver blue and hanging down the sides of her face in uneven lengths.

"You
again,” the old woman snarled at Leyla. "You still owe me from last time."

It was Mama the Midwife. Her husband was keeper of the bath.

Leyla walked in, sidestepping the old woman, whispering that she would pay soon, dragging Peacock behind her.

They went into a large room with brick walls, a high ceiling, and a pool of water in the center where women came to wash after visiting the well. The room was dark and bare now, but in two hours it would be filled with naked female bodies and the echo of all their voices. Every morning, Mama's husband filled the pool with water from the well that was cold but clean. The women rushed to get into the tub early, before too many others had bathed in it. They climbed down a ladder and sat on a narrow platform to wash the dirt of two weeks off their bodies. By the time the bath closed and Mama's husband drained the pool, the water would be black.

Leyla led Peacock toward a small door at the end of the room, went through it and into the bare backyard of the well. She walked up to the well, then stopped. The midwife came up to her. In one hand she held a lantern that cast a misty yellow light around her and made the lines in her face look even deeper. She placed her other hand on Leyla's forehead.

"That you shall be pure and innocent," she said, "and all your sins shall be washed away, and your body shall be as clean as that of a newborn child."

She pointed with her head toward Peacock.

"Is she going with you?" she asked Leyla.

"Just to watch."

The well was dark and damp. The water level was some forty steps below the surface of the earth. The packed-mud stairs were narrow and unsteady, and gave way because the mud had softened.

At the bottom of the stairs, on a small platform at water level, Leyla stopped to undress. Peacock watched her as one by one she lifted the layers of darkness from her body, her shape emerging slowly out of the shroud of fabric that had forever surrounded her. Peacock was stunned; Leyla glowed in the moonlight like a vision, her hair a stream of gold, her skin the color of warm milk, her body soft, sacred, perfect. She stared at her mother and, before Leyla ever touched the water, saw her drown in the well.

Peacock closed her eyes, terrified, and tried to chase away the vision. Watching Leyla again, she longed to reach across the night, back into the moment of conception, back when she had been formed of her mother's body—back to where there was calm and beauty.

She pressed her lips together and let the tears run down her face. Leyla put her feet into the water. The circles that she made widened until they had reached the contours of the well and then came back, closing in around her legs, her hips, her waist. Holding on with both hands to the edge of the platform, she let the water rise to her breasts, then fill the cavity above them. It went over her shoulders, around her neck.

She stopped. For one fleeting moment the green of her eyes pierced the darkness. Then she was gone.

Gone to the tips of her golden hair. Gone to the extremity of her fingers that only a moment ago had held on to the platform so fiercely. Peacock saw the circles dancing back to the edge of the wall.

Claimed by the ghosts of the drowned women. Claimed by the well.

Peacock ran forward and thrust her arms into the water. Her eyes searched frantically, her arms moved vainly in the water, reaching deeper and deeper until suddenly it felt the cold grip of death as a white hand with long fingers grabbed it. She screamed and pulled back.

Leyla pulled her head out, gasping for air. Her lips were purple, her eyes like glass. A moment later she found the platform with her other hand and freed Peacock.

Peacock stood up, moved back against the wall, and as she saw her mother breathe, she felt the warm sting of urine run down her legs to gather in a small puddle on the ground.

That night Leyla lay on the floor, face up, and waited for her husband to come and claim her. Through the makeshift curtain that separated her side of the room from her parents', Peacock heard Joseph the Winemaker roll over Leyla, whispering greedily, "Let's see if you were worth the wait."

Peacock knew that her mother's hands and feet would be cold as ice as she lay under her husband. She knew that the sound of Joseph's breathing as he satisfied himself would be the same as the night before, when he had slept.

And she knew that all her life she would suffer alone the knowledge of her mother's death.

Taraneh the Tulip
returned to live in Juyy Bar.

She had been married thirty-five years when her husband drank a glass of poisoned tea and died in his sleep. A snake had fallen into the teapot; a maid had inadvertently boiled the reptile, and served her master.

Taraneh the Tulip held a year-long wake in Tehran. She hired two dozen professional mourners to weep at the funeral, paid a mullah to live in her house and pray constantly for her husband's soul. She wore black clothes, hung black drapes and tablecloths in her house, covered her furniture and bed with black. For forty days she held open house to friends and relatives. Every month after that, she served lunch and prayers to a hundred women.

When the year of mourning had ended, Taraneh the Tulip packed her black clothes and fired her servants. Alone in the house, she burned every musical instrument she had ever played. She sent for her husband's family; she was leaving Tehran, she told them. She was going back to die in Juyy Bar.

She became ill in mourning. She was old, suffering from rheumatism, always in pain. Her joints were swollen, her hands and feet deformed, her spine curved. She walked with the aid of a cane—this woman who had danced across an empire—and every few steps she had to stop and take a rest. The Jews watched her decay and lamented her loss. Taraneh the Tulip, they said, had willed herself to die.

She bought a room in the ghetto, in a house across the street from Solomon the Man's mansion, and imprisoned herself. She spoke with no one, rejected invitations even to her neighbors' rooms, refused visitors. She went out twice a month, to the bath, and on her way home she stopped at the ghetto square to buy a bowl of lentil stew. The rest of the time she sat in her room, or on the steps above the courtyard, and listened to the sounds of the ghetto.

Every night in his house, Solomon the Man threw a feast and invited a hundred guests. He hired whores from Esfahan, invited dancers and musicians from neighboring cities, called Jews and Muslims to come and drink his wine. He brought a blind
donbaki
from Ahvaz who sounded a storm better than God himself, introduced a woman violinist from Shiraz who played only in the nude. He brought an old
tar
player who died from excitement in the middle of a performance with the nude violinist, a Russian piano player, a guest of Nasser-ed-Din Shah in Tehran, who came to Juyy Bar only to find that his piano did not fit through the alley leading up to Solomon's house. He had an Indian dancer who was chased out of town by the wives of the men she seduced, an Egyptian singer whose voice dragged turtles out of hibernation. And then, in his greatest feat ever, Solomon the Man brought a
santour
player—a young man with yellow skin and Mongol eyes, descendant of Tamerlane the Lame, famous across Asia for his talent with the instrument.

The
santour
player had come to Esfahan at the invitation of Zil-el-Sultan, played for eleven nights, and, at the end of each performance, demanded a camel's load of gold. When Solomon the Man invited him to his house in Juyy Bar, he asked for another load of gold.

“Take heed, son of Tamerlane," Zil-el-Sultan warned in anger. “Greed will destroy your talent. Play for my friend, and I will spare your hands. Ask for gold, and I will have them boiled in oil."

Solomon the Man invited the entire ghetto to watch the Son of Tamerlane play at his house. The day of the Mongol's appearance, men closed their shops early and rushed to Solomon's house to reserve their place in his courtyard. Women grabbed their children and climbed onto the roofs of Solomon's neighbors. By sundown every alley leading to Solomon's house was packed with spectators. At ten o'clock, Zil-el-Sultan arrived. An hour later, twelve Mongols—part of the
santour
player's entourage—marched through the doors of Solomon's house, beating their drums:

"Make way for the Celestial and the Sublime,

The Son of Tamerlane,

The greatest
santour
player of our time."

Dressed in a bejeweled gown, the Son of Tamerlane rode on a black horse and remained oblivious of the crowd that awaited him, or of his host who welcomed him. He sat cross-legged on a silk rug, unpacked a
santour
cast in gold and decorated with rubies, and played for exactly one hour. When he had finished, Zil-el-Sultan praised him and Solomon the Man thanked him, but the Mongol was impatient to leave. He was about to pack his
santour
when he felt a sudden silence and looked up. Taraneh the Tulip stood above him—her back curved, her hands dried and deformed— ready for war. She reached over and took the Mongol's sticks, held them in her clawed fingers, and smiled with her old optimism.