Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (29 page)

From Russia,
Solomon the Man went to Turkey, then down into Azerbaijan. After two months of traveling, he arrived at Sari—a town in the Persian province of Mazandaran on the Caspian shore. Before the Revolution, Solomon the Man had always heard the Shahs speak of their ''unbeatable'' army in Sari—the one they all claimed was capable of retrieving every province lost to Russia in the last century. Now, as he walked through the town, Solomon the Man looked for the army and found nothing. Instead, he saw hundreds of blind people—old and young and even children, more than he had ever seen in any town or province he had traveled: during the early days of the Constitutional Revolution, the governor of Sari, a staunch monarchist, had blinded everyone suspected of harboring revolutionary sentiments.

The fabulous army, Solomon the Man soon learned, was composed of two dozen soldiers—half-naked and addicted to opium—who earned their living by toiling in the fields. Their arsenal—that legendary arsenal so vaunted by the Qa-jars—was composed of two cannons. The first one was used only once a year, in the month of Ramadan, when the soldiers fired it to inform the public it was time to break their fast. It had broken wheels, and rested on a pile of bricks. Every time it was fired, it raced backward, and the soldiers would have to pull it forward again, lift it with great difficulty, and place it on a newly built pile of bricks.

The other cannon was used for churning milk to make butter.

Solomon the Man decided to find the Qajar palace, and ask for a night's stay. The palace was an ancient structure, built by Shah Abbas the Great in the seventeenth century. Inherited by the Qajars, it had been neglected from the start, and after the Revolution it had fallen into ruin. Still, Solomon the Man knocked at the gates and hoped for an answer.

"Get lost!" a voice thundered at him through the thick cluster of trees inside the palace grounds. "We're closed."

Solomon the Man knocked again.

"Get lost,
I said!" the voice raged again, but Solomon was desperate and he knocked a third time.

The voice approached ferociously:

"Who is it, I say, that dares my anger?"

It was a Negro—seven feet tall, naked to the waist, with inhuman muscles and enormous hands. He charged through the palace grounds and attacked the gate with his chest, forcing the metal open and emerging like a demon.

"Get lost!"
he said, but then suddenly he looked into

Solomon's face and stopped himself. He pulled back, eyes lowered to the ground, and fell to his knees like a slave. He took Solomon's hand and brought it to his eyes.

''My life your sacrifice,” he said. "Solomon Khan! My master! Forgive my impudence."

It was Rubi the Executioner, guardian of the Qajar palace, holder of the governor's Sword of Justice.

"My life your sacrifice," he was crying on Solomon's hand. "I would have paved this earth with my own eyes had I known you were going to step on it."

Rubi the Executioner had been born in Constantinople, and sold as a child to a rug merchant who had raised him as a slave. By the time he reached adolescence, Rubi's enormous figure and bulging muscles had made him the strongest of all slaves. A wealthy pasha bought him from the rug merchant for an unprecedented price. But while in the pasha's service, Rubi fell in love with one of the master's wives—a white Turk with flesh as soft as the inside of a dream—and one night he forced his way into the harem and attacked her. He was caught and condemned to death.

"Tie a rope around his ankles and throw him in the Bosporus," the pasha had ordered his servants, but there wasn't a man in all of Constantinople who dared tackle Rubi. For months the pasha kept Rubi in prison and waited to find an executioner who would kill the slave. At last he was approached by a friend.

"Sell me the Negro," the friend had asked. "I can use him to kill my enemies."

For years, Rubi the Executioner murdered people he did not know. When his master had rid himself of every possible foe, he sold Rubi to a Greek slave merchant who took him to Tehran and put him on auction.

Rubi the Executioner was only twenty-five years old at the time. He knew his age because slaves, like horses and cows, were issued birth certificates when no one else kept a record of their children's births. He was at the peak of his physical strength, but the years of killing and captivity had worn on his soul, and he had become as sensitive and vulnerable as a child. The day of the auction, he stepped on the platform before the bidders, but instead of flexing the muscles of his naked body, he looked at the audience and burst into tears.

It was a shocking performance, so contrary to the expectation of the bidders that the Greek merchant canceled the auction and, taking advantage of Rubi's weak moral state, beat him for the first time since he was a child. He did not bother to schedule another auction. He knew no one would buy a mad giant they could not control. He was about to leave Tehran with Rubi when Solomon the Man approached him and bought the slave. Then Solomon freed Rubi.

In 1892, Rubi took a bag of gold, his ownership papers, and his birth certificate from Solomon the Man. He went north, to Mazandaran, and found a job with the governor of Sari. He was entrusted the Sword of Justice, and appointed head of the palace guards. In ten years his name became dreaded throughout Persia. He killed his victims by strangulation, using only his thumb and little finger. He beheaded the corpses, stuffed the heads with straw, and used them to decorate his house.

When the Revolution displaced Sari's governor, Rubi the Executioner lost his Sword of Justice and his post as head of the palace guards. Stripped of his purpose and rendered without importance, he nevertheless kept on guarding the palace long after he had stopped receiving a salary. He became bored and depressed, suddenly haunted by visions of those he had killed over the years, disturbed by the sight of all the women and children he had blinded at the governor's orders. He became a recluse, smoked opium until he was addicted and destroyed, and when Solomon the Man arrived, he had not spoken to a soul in three years.

“May I be thy sacrifice," he told Solomon as he wiped his tears. "You can't stay in the palace—the rats will eat you alive."

He laughed to hide his embarrassment, revealing sharp, uneven teeth blackened from constant use of
shireh.

"A man of your stature deserves the greatest of mansions, and I am ashamed to offer you less. But all I have is my own home, and I can only pray that you will forgive my poverty."

He took Solomon to a dark alley near the palace. He stopped in front of a door, so low even a child could not pass through it upright, and pushed it open with his hand. Rubi the Executioner never locked his door; he knew no one dared enter his house without permission.

There was one room, damp and bare, with no light except through a tiny window with iron bars. A dirty carpet was spread on the floor. A bundle of sheets and blankets were tucked in a corner. On the walls, Solomon the Man realized in horror, Rubi the Executioner had displayed rows of human parts.

There were hundreds of legs and arms, hands and ears. There were thirty heads, cured and stuffed and arranged in one neat row: Turkoman chiefs, Rubi explained to Solomon, who had rebeled against the Shah, been captured, and brought to justice by the Executioner.

"Take my bed," Rubi insisted. "You have but to spend the night here. Tomorrow I will take you to Tehran myself."

In Tehran,
occupying Russian troops were fighting enemy Turkish soldiers on the streets. Persia had become a battleground of the First World War. British troops shot all day at German battalions, and everywhere, neutral Persians were caught in the crossfire and sacrificed. Rubi the Executioner took Solomon to the safest place he could find—the caravansary in Tekkyeh— and from there he set off to find a coach that would take them to Esfahan. He soon learned that the roads were closed—occupied by foreign troops that used them to transport weapons and food to their bases. No one dared travel out of Tehran for fear of being shot by hostile soldiers.

Rubi the Executioner did not give up his search. He went out every day, looking to buy a carriage he would drive himself, and everywhere he spread word of Solomon the Man's return. Crowds of people came to the caravansary to find Solomon. The great-grandson of Old Man Gholi knelt before him and kissed his feet. The Grand Keeper of Tehran's whores wept on his hands and offered him his youngest virgin. Ahmad Shah the Qajar sent his people to ask Solomon for news of his family in Odessa. Then a stranger came.

It was a woman, dressed in a black chador, trembling as she approached the entrance to the caravansary. Solomon the Man saw her but paid no mind; he had been vomiting blood all afternoon, and he felt as if he would faint any moment. The woman came closer and stopped before him. He thought she was a beggar, or that she had mistaken him for another. He wanted to look away, but she would not release him from her stare.

“Can I help?" he asked.

She remained still. Then she opened her veil.

Solomon the Man looked at the face before him and longed to remember. He smiled at her uncertainly, his lips barely parting, and tried to imagine who she could be: a whore, perhaps, that he had once loved; a servant he had left behind; a beggar he had once fed. She touched his arm. His memory, like a dormant plague, began to stir.

Peacock.

He waved her away, rubbed his hand over his eyes, and prayed that she would be gone when he looked again. He felt his vision become blurred. He tasted blood in his throat. Then his legs gave out and he slipped into a spell of unconsciousness deep and everlasting as death.

She took him home and called a doctor. The man came a day and a half later; he was dressed in a European suit, smelled of cologne, and revealed no sign of compassion for his patient. Peacock despised him.

The doctor took Solomon's pulse, listened to his heart and to his stomach. He shook his head. The patient, he announced coolly, would die before the end of the week.

Peacock walked the man out, and slammed the door behind him. That night she called Heshmat to come and watch her father. She was leaving, she said, on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Sara Beth Asher in the Zagros Mountains. God owed her a favor, and it was time He paid.

She rode in a carriage
for eleven days, then trekked on foot through dry desert and dusty plains to reach the tomb. She arrived at sunset, and found a group of pilgrims already camped at the base of the mountain. It would be dark soon. Peacock had to wait for morning.

The next day, she was the first to climb. The others followed, each man or woman carrying a small child on his or her back. The tomb of Sara Beth Asher was a long and narrow cave—so narrow that only small children could crawl through it safely. Bigger persons risked being caught in a passage without air, far enough from the mouth of the cave that their screams would not be heard and they would suffocate before anyone could reach them.

But Peacock had come alone; she had to face God herself. She had to demand the miracle He had never before rendered.

She reached the cave at midmorning, and prepared to enter. A thousand years ago, Sara, daughter of Asher, had been pursued through the desert by hostile soldiers. She had come to the Zagros Mountains and tried to hide in the cave. The soldiers had followed her inside. She had pushed forward, crawling through the sinuous passage, praying for her life. In response, God had created an opening through which she had slipped into the gates of the Promised Land. Behind her, He had sealed the passage with a stone so heavy no man had been able to move it since. But He had made Sara His messenger, and her tomb a place of pilgrimage. As proof of His presence, He had arranged that air would seep through the stone and keep pilgrims from suffocating in the cave.

At the mouth of the cave, Peacock took off her chador and shoes, tied the corners of her skirt together, and pulled her single braid of hair into a bun behind her head. She lit a candle and held it in her teeth. Then she lay on her stomach, took a breath as deep as her lungs, and pushed into the cave.

She crawled through the darkness, feeling the air become thinner, keeping her eyes ahead and hoping to remember which way she had come. The cave, she knew, had many arms. On the way back, disoriented by her claustrophobia and the darkness, she risked slipping into the wrong arm and losing her way in an airless chamber.

Three minutes into the cave, Peacock felt the lack of air and realized that her candle was about to be extinguished.

She pressed forward, her arms tight at her sides, and propelled her body by the movement of her feet. Dirt filled her mouth and nostrils. Wax from the candle melted between her teeth and on her tongue. The flame sputtered, then died. She stopped. She had taken a wrong turn.

Panicked, she pressed her hands under her stomach and retreated. She felt the heat, the weight of her head, the slowing of her blood. She had gone back one body-length when her feet touched a stone wall. She was trapped, buried.

She closed her eyes. Sweat dripped from her lashes. She was going to die here and Solomon the Man would never know—never be saved. She put her head to the ground and lay there. Then suddenly she looked up: The candle's wick, she realized, was still red from the dying flame. She must be close to a channel of air.

She dug her teeth deeper into the wax and pushed herself forward in the only direction possible. She felt a breath—

Sara's breath—on her face. The candle erupted once again into flame. Weeping with relief, Peacock put her head to Sara's gravestone and whispered her prayer:

“Please, God," she asked, “save my husband."

In Peacock's house, laughter bloomed again. Doors were opened and light poured in. Sheets smelled of rosewater and bleach, floors were strewn with mint and lime leaves. Solomon the Man had been given new life and was about to recover.

Returning from Sara Beth Asher's tomb, Peacock found Heshmat waiting at the door.

“It worked," Heshmat cried. “He is awake."