Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (3 page)

“The
whore
"—he pointed at Esther—“must not be put to death, for revenge is not the message of the Torah. She must be shamed instead, in public, so that all who know her will bear witness to her crime and learn the consequences of her betrayal. So that—" he stopped. The silence was deafening. “So that she may go on living, shamed and without honor, never daring to show her face, never able to hide it."

Far away in his teahouse where he still saw Esther's shadow, Thick Pissing Isaac pressed his hands over his ears and cried like a child.

When the rabbi had finished his sermon, David the Butcher's son came forward with his blade. He grabbed Esther's hair in his left hand, pulled it back so that her chin pointed upward and he could see the rapid pulse of the vein that ran up the side of her neck. He began to shave her hair.

David the Butcher's son wished he had never accepted this task. He was a good butcher, quick and honest and cleaner than most. In his shop he could pluck five chickens at one time: He held their legs in between his fingers and slit their throats, plucked them so fast they would dash across the shop with their skin bare and their heads hanging over the side of their necks until the last drop of blood had rushed out of them and they fell to the ground. He could skin sheep faster than any man in the ghetto, clean out the intestines and the stomach before the water for the stew had begun to boil. But a woman's head he had never shaved before. As soon as he put the blade to Esther's head it became entangled, and he had to force it out, pulling her hair and in the process cutting her scalp. Blood dripped from every patch of skin he had managed to lay bare.

He took an hour to shave Esther's head. Hair piled high on the ground around her feet. Blood licked her scalp, her face, her neck. With her hair gone, her eyes looked larger than usual. Her face was pale, thin—like a series of lines etched together into reality. David the Butcher's son looked at her then and knew he had sinned. For weeks after the punishment, every animal he slaughtered in his shop would have empty veins. He would bury them in the ground and take a loss: Kosher laws barred the Jews from eating an animal with no blood. Muslims would not buy meat from a Jew. David the Butcher stuffed the earth under his shop full of dead roosters and lamb, and he knew all along he was paying for his crime against the Soothsayer.

He tied Esther's hands behind her back and raised her on her legs. He reached into a bag on the ground and took out a lamb's stomach—white, slithery, glistening with moisture. He pulled the stomach over Esther's shaved head. Then he lifted her by the waist and placed her on the back of a mule.

He guided the mule out of the square. The crowd stepped back reluctantly. At the end of the street that led away from the square, Parvaneh the Professional Mourner made her way toward them. For thirty-seven years she had been married to a man who dragged himself on two stumps that had never grown into legs. She came forward, looking into Esther's face, the corners of her mouth twitching with disdain, and spat at Esther.

"7 remained chaste."

All of that day, David the Butcher's son paraded Esther in Juyy Bar. He banged a wooden stick on the outside of a tin can and sang as he walked.

"Come one, come all, and see the whore of Juyy Bar."

His voice became hoarse and his arms ached and his feet grew blistered, but still he went on. Long into the night, the punishment completed, he stopped. He untied Esther's hands and gave her back her chador.

“Go," he said without looking at her.

For a long time
after she had left Juyy Bar, Esther the Soothsayer had the sensation of traveling through the familiar. Once or twice she even turned around to look back at the ghetto. Behind her, Juyy Bar shrank under the sun, its gates and many arched roofs getting smaller as Esther walked away from them into the city that had been the pride of Persia for so many centuries.

But here, too, the houses were dirty and crowded and half-ruined. The streets were narrow and dark, the children hungry and haggard. The old men who sat smoking opium on their doorsteps were yellow-skinned and toothless, their eyes eaten by trachoma, their faces marked by the smallpox that had plagued their childhoods.

She came to a long and very narrow street with quiet houses where the doors were closed and the air was heavy with an uneasy silence. There were no people here, no one walking on the street, no children playing. The doors were all painted the same faded gray. From behind some of them Esther thought she heard the hushed whispers of women and the muffled cries of infants. She stopped, overcome by the fear she had carried from Juyy Bar, the instinctive warning of a danger she could not identify: beyond the veil of silence that spread over the street and its houses, she heard the rhythmic, metallic sound of camel bells approaching.

Suddenly she realized there were eyes staring at her, peering through the doors on both sides of the alley. She imagined faces watching her, imagined she heard the sound of breathing and whispers. She had come to the Castle.

This was the street where all of Esfahan's prostitutes lived with their “keepers" and their many bastard children. They stayed inside most of the time, waiting, with their faces veiled and their bodies covered, for night to fall and Muslim men hiding in the darkness to call on them. The men would slip through unmarked doors and into small rooms where they waited, along with a dozen others, for their turn. One by one they would crawl into beds that smelled of sweat and dirt and the bodies of other men. They took from the women's bodies their many diseases and left in them the seeds of children who would grow up fatherless, doomed to watch their mothers lie with strangers every night until the boys were old enough to leave home, and the girls ripe enough to be sold as virgins.

But the Castle was forbidden to Jewish men. The prostitute who held a Jew's body with her own would forever become soiled, and in turn contaminate the Muslims who came to her afterward. Thick Pissing Isaac had told Esther about the Castle. Years ago a Jewish man had taken off the yellow patch on his robe and slept with a prostitute here. His body had not betrayed him, for Muslims, like Jews, circumcised their boys. But in the euphoria of his first experience with love he had forgotten himself, and dared to speak to the woman. She had known his way of speaking, the garbled language of Esfahani Jews that was a mixture of ancient Farsi, Arabic, and incorrect Hebrew. She had called her keeper, who had come with three others, tied the Jew to a tree, and cut off his penis.

Esther heard footsteps and turned around. Behind her in the alley, under an opening in the arched roof where sunlight shone in the shape of a perfect cylinder, she thought she saw Yehuda the Just.

She began to walk again, away from Yehuda the Just, toward the distant music of the bells. She rushed down the alley, past the houses that stretched on either side of her, toward the mouth of a tunnel that opened where the Castle ended. When she had got closer she realized that the tunnel was three steps underground and pitch dark. She went in.

The stale air froze the beads of perspiration on her face. She walked down a dirt track that sloped first deeper into the earth and then slowly rose, up seven steps that took her out of the tunnel and into the abandoned cobblers' bazaar, past the small shops all boarded up and forgotten, toward an opening at the end of the corridor where she could see daylight. Her eyes were fixed on the light, her body overtaken by its own momentum. One more step and she was out.

She stopped. She peeled off the lamb's stomach from her head, threw away her chador. It was dawn in Persia. Esther the Soothsayer was at last free.

All around her
was endless, open space. The street was wide and long, paved with cobblestones and lined with old willow trees that shivered lightly in the late afternoon breeze. The air, pale blue and sweet, smelled of jasmine and apples. Water flowed in the gutters, like streams of liquid glass. Farther behind the trees and the gutters, brick walls reached to the end of the street.

Above her the sky was calm, not oppressive, an infinity of light and colors that stretched over the roofs of houses— red brick and marble and tiles. The horizon was dotted by brown minarets and the blue domes of mosques. Far away, she could see the green jade columns of the Shah's Square: the sun was red, sinking into the glass walls of the Palace of Forty Pillars.

Esther the Soothsayer stood, belittled. She heard the sound of trumpets and drums, of women's cries and men's cheers. A crowd had appeared at the end of the street, an excited congregation of people and colors and sounds. Esther raised herself on the small platform alongside a wall and looked: Agha Muhammad Shah had come to Esfahan. His cavalcade was passing through Char Bagh Street.

Esther the Soothsayer saw a two-humped camel in front, covered with purple embroideries, ridden by the Supreme

Marshal of the Imperial Camel Drivers. Behind it was a train of Arabian camels loaded with trunks, two bells hanging from heavy silver chains on each of their flanks. They were followed by the Royal Mule—cloaked in ornaments and draperies, ridden by the High Chief of the Shah's Mule Drivers. Three hundred other mules followed, charged with tents and equipment, carrying bells of different shapes and sizes.

There was a pause. Then came a procession of riflemen. They were dressed in black tunics and riding boots, rifles slung over their shoulders, each wearing two belts of cartridges. Behind them rode the “Shah's Warriors," carrying no weapons except ornamental swords.

A multicolored parade of high officials and royal attendants, of courtiers and pages, of seers and astrologers and spies followed. The men all wore elaborate outfits of embroidered silk and velvet, rode Arabian horses with tails painted red to show the purity of their stock.

Then came the eunuchs—beautiful young boys with pale faces and arched eyebrows, dressed in bejeweled gowns, looking forlorn and nostalgic.

Esther the Soothsayer left her corner and approached the procession. The crowd was fighting to get closer to the cavalcade. Bodies pressed forward, hands grabbed blindly. He had come to their town, Agha Muhammad Shah, the King of Kings, the Shadow of God. He had come, and the people's lives would never be the same for having seen him.

There was another procession of the Shah's Warriors, then a string of children—boys and girls with lucky faces, whose very presence, the Shah believed, guarded him against evil. A single horseman galloped at full speed:

“HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY!" he cried. “THE SHADOW OF ALLAH!"

A shower of gold poured on Esther. She looked up. The sun had burst into a million particles—tiny circles of shimmering gold that danced in the fluorescent air as two dozen riders threw coins at the crowd.

The Shah's carriage rolled slowly—a giant construction of enameled walls and gold-trimmed doors, decorated with jewels. Around it walked young women with white lace chadors and gold veils. They threw fistfuls of offerings at the carriage—cherry and apple blossoms, almond candies, mint leaves and cinnamon, pomegranate seeds the color of the rubies on the eunuchs' robes, violets and roses and jasmine— mounds and mounds of white jasmine.

The carriage slowed, then stopped. A pale hand moved the velvet curtain shielding the glass portal and revealed the face of His Majesty. Fire moved up from Esther's legs, into her thighs, her stomach, her chest. She knew Agha Muhammad Shah. She had seen him in the quiet of her dreams.

Darkness
was fast seeping into the air. The crowd was moving behind the Shah's caravan into the square outside the Palace of Forty Pillars. Esther the Soothsayer walked with them—to find the eunuch Shah.

She knew Agha Muhammad Khan's future. She had seen his death. Long ago, when she was still in the harem and he was not yet king, she had heard tales of his battles and of his quest for the throne. One night she was caring for the Sheikh's blind daughter—rubbing gold dust into her eyes to make her regain her sight. She had put the child to sleep, and gone to wash her own hands. She had looked into her palm, all shimmery and golden, and seen the Shah die.

Esther the Soothsayer had been frightened by the knowledge, aware that if she revealed it, she would be sought by the King and put to death. For years she had kept the secret to herself, but tonight she had no more fears, and she would speak.

In the year 1789 a new dynasty had come to Persia. For years before that the country had been at war, torn among rival tribes and warriors and heirs to old and defunct dynasties who commanded regional power, but could not unite the entire nation. Then Agha Muhammad Khan had prevailed.

He was a young man, heir to the throne of one faction of the Turkic Qajar tribe that ruled in the northwestern part of Persia. He was ugly and cruel and unforgiving, driven by a rage that came from deep within and that painted his throne in blood. As a child he had been taken prisoner by the leader of the Zand tribe and held hostage in their court at Shiraz. He had been castrated—to ensure he would not father a son that may someday avenge him—but raised with all the esteem due a royal prisoner. Still, every day as he grew older, Agha Muhammad Khan found himself more engulfed by hatred.

In 1789 Agha Muhammad Khan escaped the Zand court, rode back to his tribal lands, and declared himself leader of the Qajars. He waited for the Zand king to die. Then he led an army into Shiraz, blinded the heir apparent, and killed him by torture. From there he rode to conquer Persia.

He fought regional kings and warrior tribes, rebels and thieves and ordinary men he suspected of treason. In Kerman he had his troops rape all the women, blind twenty thousand men, and build a pyramid with the skulls of the victims. In Tiflis he killed the sick and the old, carried everyone else into slavery. In Tehran he promised his brother the governorship of Esfahan, lured him in this way into the palace, then ordered his death. He imprisoned destitute peasants, threatened death, and released them for a ransom. All of Persia trembled at the mention of Agha Muhammad Khan's name.

From a distance, Esther the Soothsayer could distinguish the Shah's Square, surrounded by rows of two-story brick shops with small balconies made of green marble. Night was falling and the square faded in darkness. Moments later a tiny light appeared where the square had been. The light flickered for an instant, then asserted itself. Another flame was ignited, and another. From every corner of the square, light bloomed until the entire structure lit up—shone— glared in the dark.