Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (42 page)

"And now that he's dead," she told Peacock. "Now, Peacock, that he's dead, there isn't even a son to bury him. He gave his all to have a child, and they all get up and leave the country so that in the end there's no one left to bury him. That was always his biggest fear, you know, that he wouldn't have a son to bury him. I can't even get ten men together in this town to pray for his soul."

She called up to Yasmine again.

"Come on down, Yasmine," she bellowed. "It's all over. We don't have to be enemies anymore."

She turned to Peacock.

"The thing is, you see, he never gave a penny to Israel. That's the thing. He wasn't a Zionist. He didn't give a damn about Israel. Now they kill him, they say, because he was a Zionist. It's like the old days, you know, when they said Jews weren't Iranians. They figure we're all Israeli spies, living here just to make money and send it off to Moshe Dayan."

She was about to call Yasmine for a third time, but she hesitated. She had stopped crying. She looked at Peacock with lucid eyes. She had a thought, a question that had gnawed at her heart ever since the first time she realized she was infertile, when she understood that Besharat the Bastard would take another wife and have her children.

“Do you suppose" she asked,—at the end, when nothing else mattered—do you suppose that he thought of her?"

In the kitchen, Peacock found a bag of dried cowslip leaves and made a heavy tea that she forced Naiima to drink. It made Naiima sleepy, and after a while she lay down on the ground and rested her head on Peacock's lap.

Night fell. The house was quiet. Naiima was dreaming of her husband.

He was tall and pallid, terrified as he stood handcuffed in his winter suit. The Guards forced him against a wall. A firing squad aimed at him. Someone screamed. Guns fired.

Besharat the Bastard accepted his death standing up, but just as he was about to fall, he turned to Naiima, and she saw the dark of his pupils before they lost their reflectiveness forever. In them, a young woman with white skin and copper hair raised her purple eyes at Naiima and offered an amber smile.

It was summer,
and the air smelled of tar and wood and gunpowder. By six in the morning the sun was already brutal. By seven, when Peacock woke up, her dress clung to her skin and her stomach turned with the heat.

She had wanted to spend the night on the roof, to escape her bedroom, where the walls perspired heat. Before Khomeini's victory, most people in Tehran had slept on the roof during the summer. Now no one dared stay outside.

Peacock washed her face. She thought she should eat, but it was too hot. She turned on the radio: "revolutionary news" from the front. Taking advantage of the chaos that pervaded Iran's military after the fall of the Shah, Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran in 1980. The war would last eight years and claim hundreds of thousands of lives. Every day, each side claimed complete and unconditional victory over the other.

Peacock left the radio on and went outside. She walked aimlessly past the charred buildings and the skeletons of homes, across mounds of shattered glass, around Revolutionary Guard stations where armed men strip-searched and interrogated pedestrians at random. She saw the shrines— bridal shrines erected on every streetcorner in the name of young boys who had died in the war. It was Khomeini's offering of gratitude to families who lost their sons in the fight against Saddam Hussein: a bridal shrine for the dead son, and a bag of rice for his parents.

Three streets away from her house, Peacock heard children singing a riddle and clapping hands. She turned a corner and came upon a bombed house. She looked inside.

She saw four boys, three teenagers and a child. They were naked, feet chained together and hands tied behind their backs. Around them a dozen girls danced in a circle. They had come to celebrate; they were about to watch an execution.

The boys, Peacock learned, were accused of treason, of conspiracy of thought if not of action, of aiming to bring harm to the revolution of Islam. One had spoken insultingly about the Imam. Two had joined the ranks of the Mujahedin. The last one, barely ten years old, had escaped from the war front and run home to his mother.

''Mama/' he pleaded now to his sobbing mother, who begged three Revolutionary Guards for her son's life. ''Tell them I will stay this time.”

He was so terrified he had lost control of his intestines and dirtied himself. The other boys trembled so hard that the chain connecting all their ankles together clanked as loudly as the girls' singing.

The Guards' leader cried an order. The girls stopped singing. The Guard came forward, gun in hand, and recited a prayer in Arabic.

"Long live the Imam!" he cried.

"Long live the Imam!" his friends repeated the slogan.

The young boy stretched his arms toward his mother and began to run. He managed one step, then tripped over the chain and fell.

Machine guns fired. Peacock watched the blood of children spatter the dirty yellow sky, saw their bodies fall in spasms. She saw their faces in the moment they heard the shots—before the bullets tore them. She heard their parents cry as they watched their sons beg—a last breath, a last prayer.

The boy to the far right landed on his back, his stomach wide open and three holes in his face. The little one drew his limbs inward, and lay still.

"My
people,"
the Shah had said,
"do not want democracy
."

The Guards' leader put away his machine gun.

"Long live the Imam."

"Long live the Imam."

"Death to America."

"Death to America."

"Death to the agents of Zion."

And there was a moment of calm, an instant when Peacock's eyes locked into the Guard's and she found herself purged of fear, understood that she must act, speak out, if only once, before she died. She stepped into the execution yard—removed and rational—picked up the machine gun with an unwavering hand, and placed the barrel on the man's chest. She did not fire.

"Death to you, you bastard, and your son-of-a-bitch brothers."

Epilogue

1982

In the women's prison
where the Guards had taken Peacock, the mullahs ordered an execution. Peacock had been close to the Shah. She had helped the royal family rob the people of Iran by selling them jewels. No doubt she had spied for Savak. No doubt she was a Zionist. Her children were in America and her friends had all been accused of corruption and she herself had threatened a Guard and cried her betrayal in public. The mullahs sent Mehr-Allah the Guard to take Peacock outside the prison and kill her where the body would not be accounted for.

“So how old
were
you?" Mehr-Allah the Guard asked, and Peacock knew her fate. She walked away from her cell, trailed by her cellmate's laughter, and as she felt the hard ground under her feet, she prayed to God for escape.

They went down one gray cement corridor and into another. To their right was a bare wall; to their left, situated at great distances from one another, were the cells. They came up to a vault door. Mehr-Allah the Guard banged the butt of his gun against the metal and cried his name. The door opened. Peacock inhaled her first breath of air in three weeks.

It was night, and the moon smiled at her.

They crossed an empty yard. Someone drove up in a Peykan—Iran's brand of automobile—and Mehr-Allah opened the door for Peacock. He dismissed the driver. There was no need for a second man; Peacock was too frail to pose a threat.

Driving out of the prison grounds, Mehr-Allah looked in the rearview mirror. Peacock was crying.

"Are you afraid?" he asked.

She would not answer.

He drove downtown, and stopped the car just outside the old Jewish ghetto. The streets were deserted under martial law, but there were Guards everywhere. Twice they came up to the car and checked Mehr-Allah's identity.

"I'm putting her out," he told them of Peacock.

He sat in the car, its windows closed, and smoked an entire cigarette. He opened the window only to throw out the butt.

"My son died," he said suddenly. "He walked on a mine—in front of a tank."

Startled, Peacock searched for Mehr-Allah in the rearview mirror. She saw only his eyes.

"Why did you send him?"

There was a long pause. Mehr-Allah sighed.

"Because I
believe."

He took out his gun and left it on the passenger seat next to him. He came around and opened Peacock's door.

She stepped out.

He opened her handcuffs.

"Don't go home," he told her. He was letting her go. "Don't go anywhere you are known."

Mehr-Allah the Guard had killed many for the cause. He knew he would kill more. But on this day of mourning for his child, he despised his anger, and he could not stand an old woman's tears.

Peacock placed a hand on Mehr-Allah's chest.

"Bless you," she said.

Mehr-Allah the Guard saw his enemy become his friend.

"And you," he answered.

Peacock walked under the indigo sky of dawn, through the ghetto and into the Pit, where she immediately recognized Zilfa the Rosewoman's house: it stood intact, between two structures leveled by Iraqi bombs. Peacock went closer. The door was unlocked, the yard full of garbage. But inside, the house was painted with blue stars.

In the bedroom, Peacock found the alcove where Zilfa the Rosewoman had once spread her wedding bed with Monsieur Jean. Peacock sat down, reclined against the wall, and slept with the stars.

She was young, barely a woman, and her eyes were the color of rice fields at dawn. She stood before a sparkling mirror in the sun, dressed in a white gown with a shimmering veil. Her body was tall and lean and sculptured. Her hair was thick, her skin smooth and radiant.

She felt a shadow behind her, and turned. It was Solomon the Man, twenty years old, and come to see his bride. He lifted the veil off Peacock's face.

“You
are
beautiful," he said, and this time Peacock believed him.

Solomon the Man raised the veil above their heads— creating a canopy of light and shadow under which they would be married. The sun, filtered through the veil, was almost white.

He touched Peacock's hand.

"I came back for
you."

A breeze pulled at the veil.

“Don't let go," Peacock warned. Without a canopy, they could not be married.

The breeze snatched the veil out of Solomon's hand.

“Look!" Solomon the Man laughed. The wind carried the veil across the wall of Zilfa the Rosewoman's house, over the roofs of neighboring homes, up into the glittering sky, where it became a small white cloud, and vanished.

Acknowledgments

In our house on Shah Reza Street, the rooms were filled with echoes. The hallways were long and dim and haunted by shadows. The garden—so vast I never thought I could find the end alone—hid the ghosts of strangers who came alive in the moonlight and spoke to me till dawn.

In our house on Shah Reza Street, my grandfather, Khanbaba Barkhordar—known to everyone as Agha (Sire)—walked around with his cane, dressed always in a suit, and commanded the servants as if to demand their soul. He was a tall man with great authority and boundless ambition. Among the first generation of Jews liberated from the ghetto, he had prospered under Reza Shah and spoke his name with the reverence due a god.

He had an only son—my father—whom he cherished most in the world and who was to produce, Agha was adamant, many heirs of his own. My father was seventeen years old when he walked with Agha through the doors of my mother's home on Simorgh Street. He was a gorgeous boy, blond and dashing and dressed in a European suit with his hair greased back in the style of the time.

“But she's only fourteen," my mother's parents protested to Agha when he asked for her hand in marriage. Peeking through the living room curtains, I am told, my mother saw her suitor and declared that it would be he, or no one.

There was a fairy-tale wedding in the officers' club in Tehran. Agha invited a thousand guests, showered the bride with jewels, brought the newlyweds to live with him in the house on Shah Reza Street. My parents had three girls. Agha would have no heirs.

In our house on Shah Reza Street, Agha became old and ill and embittered by life's disloyalty. He stopped going out—his health failing so rapidly he hardly ever moved from his office on the first floor—and instead received his callers at home. I remember the men and women who crowded our house in that era and waited their turn to meet Agha. I remember sitting next to him in the big room with the stone floor and the large French doors that opened onto the rose garden, watching everyone and listening to their tales. There was a grayhaired gentleman, an uncle to the Shah, who came to the house every year and spoke to Agha of the memories of a youth they both mourned. There was a servant, a shivering old opium addict who had lost his ability to work and came once a week only to collect his pension. There was a woman—“The Lady of Light," Agha called her sarcastically—who had married twice and buried each husband when he drank, “accidentally," a glass of poisoned tea. Even as a child, watching those strangers and listening to their tales, I knew their voices would haunt me for life.

Agha tired of his callers, and slowly denied audience to most everyone. In his youth he had accepted no limitations. In his old age he refused to compromise with fate. He remained in the house, barely walking at all, and raged against God as if demanding war. My sisters and I, girls though we were, became his only source of happiness. He insisted that we attend the greatest schools, that we receive the best education, that we be sent abroad—to Europe, where women became ladies—and make him proud. He died when we were still schoolchildren, but my parents shared his dream. At a time and in a world where girls were at best expected to “marry well,'' my parents told my sisters and me that we must work. To them, and to Agha, I owe my first thanks.