Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (33 page)

When Reza Shah had first announced the imposition of the dress code, the country had sighed in unanimous protest: they could not understand the advantage of wearing these angular suits over their own silk and cashmere, woven by hand, in exquisite colors. The suits were made of cotton—a poor man's fabric—that was grown in Iran, stolen by the British, woven in Manchester, and sold back to Iranians at unconscionable profits. The hats required an exact fit, stained easily, and could not be washed. They blew away in the slightest wind, or else squeezed a man's temples and left a white circle around his head where the blood had been drained.

But ever since he had first introduced the law about the new dress code, Reza Shah had exacted obedience from all the men of Persia. Blue-Eyed Lotfi smiled at the recollection of an incident that had amused even the Shah: On one of his many inspection tours around the country, Reza Shah had scheduled a stop in a village near his hometown of Alasht. The village had gone into bedlam at the news; as always, they knew, Reza Shah expected to meet the heads of each community he stopped to visit. He had already warned that they were to appear in European suits.

But no one in the village owned a suit, and no one had ever seen a hat of the kind they were required to wear. Nevertheless, the village decided it must try to fulfill the Shah's wishes. Someone was sent to a nearby town to buy fabric. Photographs were obtained of European men in suits and hats. After that, every able-bodied woman in the village abandoned home and family, and set about the task of duplicating the image in the pictures.

The work was slow and excruciating; no one was used to cutting shoulders and collars. There were no sewing machines, and at night the women could only work by the light of a lantern. Still, by the eve of His Majesty's visit, they had managed to improvise a suit to fit each man in the receiving line.

''What about
hats?”
the village chief screamed when he saw the men try on their suits for the following afternoon. "What are we going to do about
hats?”

There was no time or fabric left to sew hats. In desperation, the men turned to the village "inventor"—the thirty-six-year-old son of a farmer who was too lazy to sweat all day in the fields, and so applied himself to the task of "conceiving brilliant ideas meant to advance the future of mankind" while his wife and parents worked longer hours to compensate for his absence. The "inventor" mulled over the picture of the hat they were supposed to make, then came up with an idea. He ordered the men to gather up all the pieces of tin can in the village. He took the cans to the village tinsmith, who beat them flat, cut them in the shape of top hats, and welded the seams together. They painted the tin black. By the time Reza Shah arrived that afternoon, every man in the receiving line wore a European-style dinner hat.

The Shah walked past the receiving line, pleased at the men's appearance, and stopped to commend the village chief for keeping his people in line with Iran's progress. Just then a hailstorm broke out. Balls of ice crashed against the metal hats with a noise similar to that of gunfire. Reza Shah drew his pistol and turned to find cover. Then he looked up, through the blinding sheet of ice that separated him from the village men, and saw black paint running down the faces of the men, who stood immobile and mortified.

At the Ministry of the Interior, Blue-Eyed Lotfi presented himself to the guard at the door, and asked to see a person in charge.

"I speak French and English and Hebrew," he said. "I can read and write in four languages. I have come to seek a job."

He was taken from one room to another, questioned and interviewed and mostly left to wait. Then he was asked to go home. No one but the Minister of the Interior was allowed to hire help. The minister himself had to ask permission from Reza Shah.

Three weeks passed without news. Then one day a messenger came to the house at Sar Cheshmeh: Reza Shah had reviewed Lotfi's application, and given him a job. He was to go to Paris, on a trade delegation, and purchase five hundred thousand rials' worth of ladies' ready-to-wear apparel.

"I
knew
it," Blue-Eyed Lotfi screamed with delight as soon as the men had left the house. "Reza Shah is going to ban the veil."

He went to France, and took with him all of Heshmat's savings.

"You will lose it," she warned in protest. "You will spend it on junk no one will buy back from you."

She had lost faith in him ever since he had first spoken of the banning of the veil.

"Such absurdity!" She had bit her lip in shame. "The neighbors will hear you and think you've lost your mind."

Blue-Eyed Lotfi had to fight for the money, but in the end he used his prerogative as the man of the house, and overcame Heshmat's resistance. In Paris he bought the ladies' clothing, then set out to find a cosmetics factory, where he spent Heshmat's money on a trunkload of powder and rouge and lipstick, which he brought back to Sar Cheshmeh with a treasure-hunter's pride.

"God help us." Heshmat went faint at the sight of the products. She leaned against the wall, waiting to regain her balance, and did not even look at her husband's disappointed face.

"I must hide this trash before the neighbors come in and see it," she concluded. "Later, when it's dark, we can put it in bags and throw it into the Karaj River."

Blue-Eyed Lotfi had no intention of throwing his future into the Karaj River. Reza Shah—he explained to Heshmat with the same obstinacy with which he had defended his conduct leading to the Mullah's Mule Incident years earlier— was about to ban the veil. Why else would he spend his money on half a million rials' worth of ladies' clothing? He knew that their dependence on the veil had forced the women of the lower classes of Iran into a habit of wearing old and unseemly dresses both inside and out of the house. That was why he wanted the French outfits: to offer them as a substitute for the chador.

"Hush up," Heshmat begged Lotfi as she ran to close the door. "People are going to think you want to run prostitutes from this house. You will bring a massacre right here in Sar Cheshmeh."

Once freed of the veil—Lotfi described his vision to Heshmat—women would feel the need to appear attractive on the street. The days of antimony and rouge made of crushed insect wings were over.

"Look at this!" He took out individual boxes of powder and rouge for Heshmat to see. "Look how beautiful this package is. Smell the perfume in it. What woman wants insect wings when she can have French perfume?"

And so the chest remained in Blue-Eyed Lotfi's house— hidden, in the interest of appeasing Heshmat's fears, behind a stack of pillows and comforters used only in winter—and slowly permeated the air with the scent of powder and perfume. Terrified of her neighbors' reaction—"You are only confirming their suspicion of Jews," she told Lotfi—Heshmat burned every incense and used the room for storing dried herbs, which emitted a strong scent of their own. Nevertheless, as summer approached and the heat became entrapped inside the house, the chest of cosmetics from France took on an essence of its own and emitted such distinct and overpowering smells that everyone sniffed their way up to Blue-Eyed Lotfi's room and demanded the right to inspect its contents.

"Prostitutes' tools," one woman accused when she discovered the chest. "The smell of the Devil," someone else affirmed.

Heshmat pleaded with Lotfi, but in vain.

"Any day now," she sobbed, "a mob is going to attack us right here outside the ghetto."

He told her he would fight the mob.

"What about your children?" she argued another day. "You have
daughters,
Lotfi,
daughters'.
What man is going to marry a girl raised with 'prostitutes' tools'?"

But then one morning they heard footsteps in the courtyard, and saw the door to their bedroom burst open in the dark. Blue-Eyed Lotfi sat up with a jolt and reached for the butcher's knife he kept hidden under his pillow. Then, in the midst of his terror, he recognized Peacock's voice.

"Leave that and come outside," she said. "Reza Shah has banned the veil."

The mullahs of Persia threatened war. The men swore to kill. Women cried that they had been robbed of their honor; only whores and adulterous wives went unveiled. For the first time since the Mullah's Mule Incident, all of Tehran stood against Reza Shah. To protest his orders, it was decided, women must continue to wear their chadors.

Reza Shah posted soldiers on the street, with orders to arrest every woman in a veil. The soldiers tore the chadors off the women's heads, ripped them to shreds, burned the veils, and, in return, offered a dress and a hat—purchased in Paris by Blue-Eyed Lotfi.

Suddenly, all the women stayed home.

The war over the veil augured a bigger confrontation between Reza Shah and the mullahs. For centuries, Shahs in Persia had observed the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice. Every year on the day of the feast, a mullah would slaughter a camel in Tehran's Square of the Cannons. A crowd of believers would then attack the camel, grabbing at pieces of raw flesh, and from there they would run to the Palace of Roses, where the Shah would be awaiting them on the Terrace of the Marble Throne. The first person to present to His Majesty a piece of the sacrificial camel's flesh would receive a royal reward.

The year after he had banned the veil, Reza Shah called the practice of slaughtering the camel barbaric, and canceled the celebrations of the feast. From there he went on to deliver another blow to the mullahs: he inaugurated the University of Tehran, took away from the mullahs the power to influence the minds of the young, and entrusted it instead to secular professors trained in the West. Shortly thereafter, the university opened its Faculty of Medicine where, in direct violation of clerical teaching, human corpses were dissected and studied: Life and death, Reza Shah had commanded, were no longer the domain of God and his agents.

The mullahs rebelled. Seeking to end Reza Shah's reign, they used the same method that had brought down the Qa-jars: they all left Tehran, and staged a sit-in at Iran's holiest shrine.

It was a fail-proof device, the mullahs knew. Faced with the prospect of losing a king or losing their mullahs, the people would opt to overthrow the Shah. Reza Shah, on his part, could not force the mullahs back into the city without storming the shrine—an act of which they did not believe even
he
was capable.

Reza Shah responded by sending armored troops to encircle the shrine.

"Come out," the military commander warned. "Or I have His Majesty's orders to bomb the shrine."

Their rebellion crushed, the mullahs came back to Tehran. The university's Faculty of Medicine continued to dissect corpses. But the matter of the veil remained unresolved: the chador had disappeared, but was not abandoned. Reza Shah could prevent the women from walking on the street with their veils, but he could not force them out of their homes. In Blue-Eyed Lotfi's room the perfume was becoming rancid, and the rouge had melted inside the decorative cases. Heshmat ordered her children to keep out of the way of the neighbors.

So it was until that morning in the spring of 1937 when Reza Shah rode through Gas Lamp Avenue in his newly purchased Rolls-Royce and saw an old woman, small but invincible, beaming as she paraded without a veil. She wore a beaded skirt and a rhinestoned shirt, a green scarf, white stockings, and satin shoes. She had pearls around her neck, gold on her wrists, jewels on her hands. She had red and yellow ribbons in her hair, rhinestones on the frames of her glasses. As she walked, men stopped, stupefied, and glared at her insolence. Women came to their doors, unveiled, lurked in the doorway, looked around for a reaction, then stepped out into the street.

Reza Shah Pahlavi stopped the car next to the woman in the rhinestones. He pulled down his window and recognized Peacock.

He smiled for the first time in anyone's memory.

Peacock the Jew
was seventy years old and a spectacle to behold. She lived in a house on Shah Reza Street, and worked longer and with more intensity than anyone younger than herself. She catered to Tehran's richest and most famous—to Reza Shah's daughters, the wives of his ministers, the brides of the ministers' sons. She walked from house to house, dressed always in the most colorful clothes—in layers of red and green and blue chiffon, sequined shirts and satin shoes and rhinestones on everything. She had shrunk with age, but her back was always straight, and her eyes still magnificent. Her hair was a stark silver, her skin almost black.

She carried the stones in her pockets—wrapped in pieces of cloth or old newspapers she collected everywhere. She sat in the bedrooms of the ladies of court, or in the offices of influential men, and stuck her hands in her pockets and took out fistfuls of jewels that she spread before the client.

"Touch them," she would say. "Hold them in your hand and see eternity."

Still, at the end of the day, when the work was done and there was no place to go but home, Peacock was alone. Heshmat lived close by, but now that the veil was slowly being abandoned, Blue-Eyed Lotfi was running a thriving business out of the basement of his house. He had even talked about renting a shop on the Avenue of the Tulips, and moving his house from Sar Cheshmeh to Simorgh Street.

"Come live with us," Heshmat asked, but Peacock refused. She sat in her bedroom at night, still in the day's clothes, and reviewed her accounts on an abacus. She took out the jewels from her pockets, set them in neat rows across the table, and opened the newspapers from around each one. She did not look at the stones when she was alone; she stared at the words in the newspaper, and wished she could read.

The newspapers reported important events, Peacock knew, events that affected everyone's fate. She learned about them only from the conversations of people she met during the day—the bazaar merchants, the peddlers, her clients. Most of them were illiterate like Peacock, and the news they had was barely more than a recounting of rumors they had heard from others. They spoke of places unknown to themselves except through tales of peoples past—of Russia and America and Europe—of Reza Shah's dealing with foreign countries, and of a game he played: setting one enemy against the other to maximize his own advantage, trying to shake loose from the dominance of the British.