Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (32 page)

He waited for Yasmine on the sidewalk outside the theater. She appeared moments later, looking concerned and almost amused.

"My eyes hurt in the dark," he lied to her.

They never went back to the cinema again.

On Sunday they took a carriage ride through the woods outside Paris. Yasmine sat opposite Besharat, holding her gloves in her hand. She spoke to him for the first time of herself.

She was an only child, she said, the daughter of parents who had started a family late and were already old by the time she was born. She had been eight years old when the Great War broke out. Her father was drafted, her mother forced to work in an ammunition factory thirty kilometers away from home. They had no other relatives, no one to care for Yasmine. She had stayed alone in her parents' apartment in the middle of Paris. Every Sunday her mother had come back to see her.

"I walked to school with the neighbors' children," Yasmine told Besharat. "At night I stood in bread lines. Every night someone dropped in the line, starved or exhausted. Two men would step out and move the body to the side of the alley, then come back and take their places in line. Once a day, soldiers set fire to the corpses to prevent the spread of disease."

Besharat the Bastard watched Yasmine in the dark. Her face was impassive as she spoke, but her lips quivered, and her cheeks grew as pale as her dress. He realized he had never had a conversation with a woman before.

"The worst thing was the rats." Her voice jolted him. "When the sirens went off and we knew the bombs were coming, we had to rush down into the basement. It was crowded and airless, so dark all you could see were the whites of other people's teeth. There were rats everywhere— each one as big as a cat. When they bit, they took a piece of your flesh. They bit me twice, so after that I stayed in my room and watched the bombs explode."

Besharat the Bastard proposed to Yasmine the third time they met. She did not accept. He told her he would not let her go until she did.

He remained in Paris for no reason but to be close to her. He took her to work every morning and spent all day in a cafe outside the factory, drinking tea and smoking Persian tobacco that he rolled into cigarettes himself. In the afternoon he met Yasmine again and spent the evening with her. Her parents were alarmed. Her boss warned her against the stranger with the dark lips. Yasmine was fascinated with Besharat.

"I may go with you," she told him one night in the third month of their courtship. They sat in a crowded dance hall full of smoke and laughter. "I think I may marry you."

Besharat the Bastard looked as if he had been stabbed in the heart. His eyes filled with pity. He took Yasmine's hand and walked out of the dance hall.

On the street, a middle-aged woman with grotesquely painted lips sold roses. Besharat bought them all.

They walked in silence, Yasmine holding the roses to her chest. Near her apartment, Besharat suddenly spoke.

"I have a wife in Iran."

Yasmine opened her arms, stunned, and let the flowers—pink roses so pale they appeared silver in the moonlight—fall into a jagged line on the sidewalk.

Yasmine
made up her mind to go with him. She knew that Iran was backward and undeveloped. She had read accounts of the country's poverty. But she felt another war approaching in Europe, and she thought she could hide from it in Iran. She would go there, she decided, and chase away Besharat's other wife, overpower Naiima with her confidence and beauty. As mistress of Besharat's house, she would live like the wives of colonialists in Africa, hiding from the ugliness of life outside, in the comfort of a small community of foreigners where the ways of the West had been faithfully reproduced. It would be the adventure of a lifetime, a chance to live the tales she had read about all her life.

She helped Besharat obtain a forged passport on which Naiima's name was not recorded. They were married at the end of winter. On the way back from the courthouse, Yasmine stopped at her parents' apartment to say good-bye. Her mother cried. Her father did not speak to her at all.

They sailed on a steamship from the southern shore of France to the Turkish border, then embarked on a long train ride toward Iran. From Rezaiyeh, they rode the Trans-Iranian Railway to Tehran. Besharat's car awaited them at the central station.

“Put this on." Besharat held out a black scarf to his new bride. "You shouldn't be seen with your head bare."

Tehran was gray and dusty, its streets crowded, its gutters filled with garbage. All the way from the train station to the Avenue of the Tulips, children chased the car, banging on its windows, pushing their scarred faces against the glass, climbing the bumpers and slamming their fists on the roof every time the car came to a stop. Yasmine looked at Besharat. He felt her question and did not reply.

She recognized the house from Besharat's accounts. Her heart dropped. She would be swallowed by this house, she thought, forgotten among its walls and never again heard from.

Three men stood urinating against the garden gates. The driver honked, and they ran away, penises in hand and laughing. Inside the garden, Besharat the Bastard reached over and opened Yasmine's door. She stepped out of the car, and found herself surrounded.

There were four women, unveiled and disheveled, smelling of sweat. They pulled at Yasmine's scarf and examined her. She looked for Naiima among them. The first three were old, the fourth one too young.

"Go with them," Besharat told Yasmine. "They will show you what you need."

The women took Yasmine through the yard and into the house, up the black stone staircase and into Besharat's bedroom on the second floor. The room was dark with shadows, crowded with furniture. There were chairs with armrests in the shape of lions' heads, thick velvet drapes printed with blood-red flowers. The floor was paved with stone and covered with Persian rugs.

Assal grabbed Yasmine's arm to feel her flesh.

"Too thin."

Another woman, blinded by cataracts, also felt Yasmine's arm. The young girl—a maid, Yasmine imagined— pulled her hair.

"Let go!" Yasmine protested. The blind aunt loosened her grip. The maid pulled harder, then released.

"The hair is real, all right," she announced to the others. "But it looks like someone shaved her head for adultery."

Assal grabbed Yasmine's breasts.

"No tits."

Panicked, Yasmine shoved her aside and went to the door.

"Besharat!" she summoned her husband at the top of the stairs. Her voice echoed down the staircase. It brought no answers.

"Besharat!"

Assal came up behind her.

"Shut your trap," she said in Persian.

Yasmine ignored her.

"Besharat! Come!"

A hand slammed against Yasmine's mouth. It was Assal, hitting her new daughter-in-law for the first time. Yasmine was startled. Trembling, she waited to regain her balance, then attacked Assal.

Long after dark, Yasmine heard Besharat's voice in the corridor. He came into the room and closed the door. His face was pale, his eyes dark. She wanted to run to him, but he would not look at her.

"You can't hit my mother," he said without preamble. "You are the new bride in the house. You must obey everyone else. Even old servants take priority over a new bride."

Yasmine sat up in her chair, and stared at the man who had brought her roses in Paris. He undressed in the dark, his back turned to her, and slipped into bed. She wanted to ask him about Naiima.

"I need a bath," she said instead. "I couldn't find the bath."

Besharat the Bastard was thinking of the neighbors, wondering if they knew that Yasmine had hit Assal.

"I need a bath," she said again.

Besharat the Bastard sighed.

"My mother will take you to the well on the fifteenth of your cycle," he answered.

Yasmine did not understand.

"I need a bath
now,"
she answered. "I need to wash myself."

Besharat the Bastard closed his eyes.

"You can take a bath twice a month," he explained, "before and after you menstruate. You can't go any other time, and you can't ever go alone."

They lay next to each other, awake but silent, overcome by the realization that they had made a mistake. Hours later, barely asleep, Yasmine felt a light in her eyes and opened them. A woman stood above her. She had a round face, a thick braid down to her hips. She wore a heavy white gown, her breasts rising against it as she breathed. She brought the light closer to Yasmine and stared at her: it was Naiima, come to examine the enemy and gauge the size of the battle.

Naiima followed Yasmine,
silent and intangible, eavesdropping—though she could not understand French—on her conversations with Besharat. She was always there, like a vision summoned by the breath of a witch, creeping past closed doors and beyond stone walls, appearing in Yasmine's bedroom late in the evening, watching her through the keyhole early in the morning, searching her clothes, examining her sheets. She even took Yasmine to the well.

She entered the water first and held on to the side of the well. The water was cold, but Naiima did not wince. She watched Yasmine undress.

"Come in," she signaled.

Yasmine closed her eyes and submerged herself. When she pushed up for air, a hand pressed down on her. She struggled. Naiima held on for a moment too long, then released. Yasmine tried to escape. Naiima grabbed her arm.

"Six more times."

Every morning the women invaded Yasmine's room at dawn and forced her out. In the kitchen, Assal demanded of her the most menial of household chores. Yasmine refused to work. When they hit her, she hit back.

"Throw her out," Assal commanded Besharat twice each day. "Kick her out, or I swear I will do it myself."

Besharat the Bastard was embarrassed and enraged at Yasmine's behavior. When he asked her to change her ways, she screamed at him. When he ignored her, she came after him, burst into the first-floor living room where he received guests, and complained of the treatment she had received. When he hit her, she fought back.

"Lock her up," Naiima advised as she hovered around Besharat, serving his meals. "Put her into a room and keep her there till she learns obedience." She did not wish for Besharat to divorce Yasmine. She, too, wanted children with foreign blood and purple eyes.

The fighting stopped. Yasmine was sent into the second-floor bedroom, and forbidden to wander. Twice a day she was served her meals. She asked for a divorce and a ticket back to Paris. Besharat the Bastard refused. She threatened to escape. Besharat the Bastard locked away her passport and refused to give her money. She tried to calm herself, to regain perspective. She stayed in her room and read. Besharat the Bastard burned her books.

Yasmine wrote to her parents—lies, fairy-tale accounts of the life and the country she had come to Persia to seek, love stories where Besharat was the unfailing hero. Her mother wrote back at first:

"Your father refuses to utter your name," she complained to Yasmine. "I can't sleep nights for the anger in his breath, and the burning in my stomach."

The burning in her stomach became a tumor. The letters stopped coming. Yasmine's were returned unopened, marked "Addressee deceased"; she recognized her father's handwriting on the last batch of mail that came back from Paris.

She let Besharat sleep in her bed even as she burned with resentment. It was her only weapon, she thought, the one chance she had of beating Naiima and gaining Besharat's confidence until she had found a way to leave.

"My God," he whispered in the dark as he emptied his seed into Yasmine and exhaled the breath of exhaustion, rolling back with a prayer that inside her, life would grow. "You have the skin of an angel."

But one morning in the third month of her stay in Tehran, Yasmine woke up to find that her sheets were stained with blood. Besharat the Bastard jumped from the bed, furious, and called Naiima.

“She's impure,” he told her. “Take her away."

Yasmine was led into the impurity room on the third floor. She was placed under watch, allowed to touch nothing but her own plate, to sit nowhere but on the two cushions designated for impure women. That night, when she tried to leave the room, the maid stopped her.

Yasmine did not fight the girl. She waited until the house was quiet. Then she crept out and made her way down to the second floor.

She opened the door of Besharat's room, she saw Naiima in bed, her head on Yasmine's pillow, making love to Besharat as she stared at the shadow in the hallway.

Blue-Eyed Lotfi
had lost his job. When Reza Shah opened the ghettos, Jews were allowed into Muslim schools, and the Alliance felt that its mission in Iran was accomplished. Slowly it began to lessen its presence inside the country, and by 1936 it had closed the school in Tehran's ghetto.

Blue-Eyed Lotfi had a wife and seven children to support. He had moved from the Pit, and was renting two rooms in a house on Sar Cheshmeh, just outside the ghetto. He had some small savings—money that Heshmat had put away every year since their marriage—but their rent was high, and he knew he must find work immediately. He kept talking about starting a trade—importing goods from Europe and selling them in Iran—but all his friends told him he was mad. "Things haven't changed
that
much yet," they said, "no one believes a Jew has anything worth selling."

Blue-Eyed Lotfi stopped talking to his friends, but did not give up on his plans. When he saw an advertisement in the newspaper—the Ministry of the Interior looking for individuals fluent in the French language—Blue-Eyed Lotfi seized the chance and headed immediately for the Ministry.

He was dressed in the European clothes Reza Shah had imposed on Iranian men only two years earlier. He had on a hat with a brim, a shirt with a collar and buttons up front, a jacket and pants. Blue-Eyed Lotfi did not like to admit it, but after two years he still felt trapped and uncomfortable inside the new clothes. As he walked the street he saw the other men, also dressed in the new fashion, looking embarrassed and almost pathetic as they tried to find a comfortable corner within the confines of their padded jackets and starched shirts.