Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (20 page)

In vain, Peacock tried to explain.

"Solomon the Man,"she told her daughters, "took my life, my youth, my son."

Sabrina never forgave her. Heshmat would not understand her until decades later, when she was old, and herself wounded by life.

"It's
your
fault," they told Peacock as they cried into the night for their father. "It's your fault he left us."

The next time Solomon's messenger came from Tehran, Peacock met him at the door with a butcher's knife. The man left without unloading the food. The neighbors did not interfere. Heshmat and Sabrina never even cried.

"I will find work myself," Peacock said to the audience that stared at her silently outside Mullah Mirza's basement. "I will go to work and become rich, support my own children, buy my own house.”

They lived from day to day, fighting the ghetto's derision, fighting each other. Sabrina had declared war on her mother and announced she would leave her soon—to become a whore, she said, or to marry a Muslim and shame Peacock for life. She went out all day hunting for food, sifting through the garbage outside the neighbors' homes, begging in Esfahan. She came back exhausted and afraid, faking indifference toward Peacock, insisting that Heshmat should go with her the next day. Peacock swallowed her anger and told herself she would soon end her ordeal—that she would find work, rent a room in a decent house, feed her daughters and keep them from the streets.

She went to all the shops in the ghetto and asked for work. Then she went to the bazaar in Esfahan, and at last to the homes of Solomon's wealthy Muslim friends. Everywhere she was refused. In the end she found a heap of worthless fabrics—bits and pieces too small or frayed to be used in a garment—thrown away outside a shop. She tied the fabrics into a bundle and came back to sell them in Juyy Bar. She went from house to house, calling all the women, insisting that they buy from her. Every morning she left the house, promising to return with sweetbread and halva. Every night, Heshmat waited for her in the alley outside the basement, and broke into tears when she saw Peacock empty-handed.

"Look at you,” the neighbors told Peacock in contempt. "You were the wife of Solomon the Man, the envy of the world. Look at you now.”

Heshmat had found a friend:
Saba, who lived three streets away, in a house full of light and warmth. She was an only child, the seed of Ismael the Gut-terman's marriage to a crippled orphan from Yazd. Ismael the Gutterman had been eighty-nine years old at the time of the wedding, and the grandfather of eleven children. He had spent his life shoveling human excrement from the bottom of open gutters on the street, and loading the waste in a wooden basket he carried on his back. He sold the bounty to farmers who used it for fertilizer, and he had made a good living for himself and his children, but his wife died and left him alone. Ismael the Gutterman decided a wife was cheaper than a maid, and sent for the lame girl from Yazd. But even the rabbi who married them swore that Ismael could never meet the demands of matrimony. Ismael the Gutterman had taken his challenge seriously. On the night of his wedding he had filled a bowl with three dozen raw egg yolks, added a jar of saffron and a quarter-kilo of crushed white cumin, then drunk the potion in one continuous gulp. Half an hour later, aching from the rush of diarrhea that would plague him for the rest of his days, he had run to his bride and entered her with a penis as hard as the day he first knew a woman. He had taken the lame girl's virginity, given her Saba, then retired to doze permanently in the corner of the house.

Still, the lame girl from Yazd was content and grateful for her life. She could have been an old maid, living in her father's house until she died. Instead she had a husband and a home of her own, and a daughter she adored more than God. She surrounded Saba with love and attention, sang her to sleep, cooked for her every day. She brought Saba's friends home and fed them generously, asked them to stay the day, to come back tomorrow. After the first time she went to her house, Heshmat played imaginary games in which she was Saba, and Peacock the lame girl from Yazd.

But once, when Heshmat went to call, she found Saba in bed, surrounded by her mother and her aunts. They were washing Saba's eyes with cold tea, giving her small doses of opium to smoke. They poured sugar water down her throat and restrained her when she screamed. Saba was in pain, the lame girl from Yazd told Heshmat. She had contracted trachoma.

“Be careful you don't touch her wounds," Saba's mother warned her. "You could catch this yourself."

Heshmat watched Saba that day and imagined that she, too, had become ill. She would stay in bed, with Peacock next to her, and even Solomon the Man would come back from Tehran to see his ailing daughter.

When no one was looking, Heshmat rubbed her finger into Saba's eyes, then into her own.

That night she felt as if there were salt in her eyes. She floated in and out of sleep and touched the small tumors— like bits of sand that grew harder every hour—that had emerged alongside the inner lining of her eyelids. By morning her face was throbbing and she saw everything through a thick, bloody fog.

She dragged herself out of bed and called Peacock.

"Mama. My eyes hurt."

There was no answer.

She felt for Peacock with her hands, then searched for Sabrina. The beds were empty, the house quiet.

"Mama. Sabrina. My eyes."

She crawled outside. The sun was warm on her face. It was the middle of morning, she realized. No one would be home until late at night.

"Mama," she cried, but no one could hear. "My eyes."

Heshmat's days stretched into hours, and the hours into minutes infinitely long and empty but for the pain and the burning in her eyes, and the fear of the darkness where she was left to suffer alone. Sabrina sat by her bed and washed her eyes, but Heshmat barely felt the water. Peacock held her head and cried with her in pain, but Heshmat never heard her screams. A week passed and the pain grew worse. Peacock rubbed fresh wheat into Heshmat's eyes to ease the pain. On Yom Kippur she fasted for forty-eight hours: “So that God will hear my scream,” she explained to Raab Yahya, “and answer with mercy."

They had not eaten for days. Sabrina begged in Esfahan, and brought home a bowl of rancid meatballs and spoiled vegetable stew. Peacock knew the meat was not kosher. She accepted it nevertheless.

“Eat this." Sabrina put a spoon to Heshmat's mouth, but the pain was too strong.

Sabrina put the plate on the shelf above Heshmat's bed.

“Never mind," she said. “It will be here in the morning."

Near dawn, Heshmat woke up hungry, and remembered the meatballs. She felt her way in the dark, and found the shelf. She reached into the plate. The meatballs were moist and round. She put one in her mouth.

She screamed—her jaws open—and did not dare close her mouth. The meatball was alive. It had legs that moved.

Sabrina jumped awake and saw Heshmat gagging.

“Scorpion."

Without thinking, she reached into Heshmat's throat and grabbed the animal. It stung her palm. This time, Sabrina cried.

Peacock grabbed Sabrina's hand, opened it, and flung the scorpion to the ground. She emptied the kerosene from the oil lamp onto the scorpion and set it on fire. She put the burnt shell back over Sabrina's wound: a scorpion caught and killed was the best cure for its own venom.

Minutes passed. Sabrina's hand swelled and her face became gray. Realizing that the poison had entered Sabrina's blood, Peacock put her child on her back and ran to the house of the nearest doctor.

“A knife," the man called, but by then Sabrina's eyes were fading. He cut a hole around the bite and looked for the poison. It was too late. Sabrina was cold and still.

Peacock held Sabrina's corpse until the hardness of death had set in and the child's arms were petrified. At the burial she washed Sabrina, walked her into the grave, and covered her shroud with violets she had picked in the wild. Then she went home and nursed Heshmat's eyes.

''We should leave this town," she heard Heshmat whisper in the dark. "We should go where people don't die."

The next month they were gone.

They set out for Tehran
in the summer of 1892. They traveled for weeks in the vast and unyielding desert, and along the way, many in their caravan fell ill and died from the heat. One morning they looked into the horizon and saw a stunted city without domes or minarets, surrounded by a deep moat and, beyond it, a mud wall. This was the capital of the Qajars, the city they had chosen over Esfahan—over Shiraz and Kashan and Yazd—to house their throne.

The wall around Tehran was pierced by arched gates decorated with tiles. Through the gates, Peacock's caravan entered a long stretch of sand broken only by a few ruined houses where no one lived. Tehran was dry and dusty and unfertile. Not far to the north, along the shore of the Caspian Sea, the land was lush and green and generous. But Tehran was cut off from the Caspian by the mighty range of the Elburz Mountains—the peaks so high they stopped precipitation and humidity from reaching the desert on the southern side of the mountain. Riding through the wasteland outside the capital, Peacock could see the snow that covered the Elburz year-round. It was here, thousands of years ago on this frozen mountain, that Arash the Archer had thrown the arrow that saved Persia.

Their caravan stopped in Tekkyeh—Tehran's central square, where four large thoroughfares crossed. Here a horse-drawn trolley provided public transportation for Muslims. Herds of livestock blocked most of the square as they passed through the city. Dozens of mules, camels, and donkeys, flocks of hens and turkeys muddled through the crowd of pedestrians. Veiled women rode alone. White-turbaned mullahs sat on padded saddles. Beggar children stopped every rider.

Peacock and Heshmat left the caravan and advanced on foot toward the Jewish ghetto. Away from the Tekkyeh, streets narrowed into winding lanes between long stretches of mud walls. They were unpaved, dusty, covered with garbage from all the homes, plagued with dogs that fought the beggars for trash. The air, trapped under the arched roof of the alley, sizzled with heat and the smell of putrefaction. There were no trees here, no gardens in sight.

Peacock and Heshmat found themselves lost in the crowd of vendors and children, of mullahs in brown robes and green turbans, of half-naked dervishes covered only with loincloths. There were Arabs in white robes, blue-eyed foreigners in strange attires and riding in fancy coaches. A gentleman in expensive clothes rode an Arabian mare. Behind him, a dozen servants guarded his fool, the madman he kept on hand—such as all gentlemen owned—to amuse him with his lunacy.

Soldiers with torn uniforms and no weapons sold rotten fruit on the streetcorner. Palace guards loitered in the shade of a wall, smoking opium and chewing dates.

Outside mosques, government buildings, and the homes of the rich gathered masses of beggars—many among them blind, crippled, or mad. In every district, thieves, murderers, and pimps had formed their own union, with designated areas of operation and religiously observed rules of conduct.

They found the Jews' ghetto. It was smaller than the Juyy Bar in Esfahan, less crowded. Its streets—paved with up to a foot of mud and garbage—were covered with arched roofs that retained heat in the summer and humidity in winter. Its houses, made of raw, unbaked clay, were cracked and lopsided and forever threatening to collapse in one of Tehran's violent quakes. But the ghetto was positioned at the center of town, exposed to Muslim quarters through six gates that were open except in times of approaching pogroms; closer to the Shah, the mullahs were less powerful, and the Jews safer.

It was almost dusk when Peacock and Heshmat set out to find a room. They knocked on people's doors and asked if they could rent a room on credit, or sleep in a courtyard until they had found a home. They went to the ghetto's main synagogue, then the two smaller ones. Even the rabbis turned them away.

"Go to the Pit," everyone said. "You can sleep there on the street."

The Pit was the ghetto's square, its slaughterhouse and open-air garbage dump. It was never cleaned; every time the Jews tried, the mullahs stopped them. Enclosed on all sides with shops and houses, the garbage was piled higher in some places than the structures around it. Here the poorest of the ghetto's vendors sold rotten fruit, stewed lamb's entrails, and lentil soup. The doors of all the houses were broken, the windows sealed with patches of cloth, the rooms crammed with people and disease. Outside, the sun baked the blood of slaughtered animals as flies devoured what little the butchers threw away. Dogs fought hungry children for scraps. Lice crawled up the legs of pedestrians.

Peacock stood at the edge of the Pit and held Heshmat.

"We should never have come."

It was almost dark. They haggled with a vendor about the price of a bowl of lentils, split the food in half, and ate quietly. All around them on the street, others were preparing to sleep. When the food was finished, Peacock spread an old chador on the ground, used her bag of fabrics as a pillow for herself and Heshmat, and sat next to her daughter, waiting for night to fall. Slowly the moon rose and the sounds of the ghetto faded as men returned to their homes and women gathered their children into their beds and around their fires. Forsaken by the day, the Pit-dwellers sat around the edge of the square—the moon painting fear onto their faces, the night awakening their sense of desperation—and stared at the mountain of waste that was their home. One by one they stopped fighting their shame, lay down their heads, and prayed for sleep. The more recent arrivals, like Peacock, refused to lie down. She was sitting up with her back against a wall, Heshmat's head in her lap, and she had just closed her eyes when she heard a cry.

"You there!"

Peacock looked up.

"You, there. Don't sleep yet."

From the other side of the square, an impeccable white cloud moved toward her across the darkness.

It was a woman, dressed in layers of white, her hair, dry as corn leaves, unbraided and long around her shoulders. When she came closer, Peacock saw that the woman was old, her face covered with a cake of white powder, her lips painted amber. "I am told you sell fabrics."