Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (6 page)

"Thief!" he screamed. "I will drive this metal through your eyeballs and feed them to the dogs before I let you take my safe."

From then on, Mullah Mirza slept with one hand chained to the safe.

He was so engrossed in his quest for gold that he missed the time he should have married. He worked through his adolescence, his youth, his parents' death. He never paid the butcher any rent. He never bought himself a new pair of canvas shoes or a new shirt. People went to him for advice and medical treatment, trusting that he had access to cures unknown to ordinary doctors, intrigued by his extravagant ways, his grand designs, the confidence with which he pronounced himself "master of my environment, conqueror of earthly ills."

The Mirza in turn had never disappointed an audience. He charged exorbitant sums and delivered exotic, spectacular cures designed more to display his knowledge than to relieve the patient of his suffering. When he made a house call, people in the neighborhood dropped what they had to do and came to watch the old master at work. He spent all his income on books and metal, and yet he was not content. In all the years of his suffering, Mullah Mirza knew, he had come no closer to creating gold than when he first started.

As he grew older and more frustrated in his quest, Mullah Mirza's treatments became increasingly unorthodox. He no longer limited himself to harmless displays of extravagance—to curing diarrhea with bubbling potions that resuited in terminal constipation, or inserting a long metal rod through the patient's throat into his stomach so as to "rearrange his insides." Now he tested new formulas that he had conceived during torturous nights of experimentation, proposed cruel and unheard-of operations that had left at least three of his patients permanently handicapped, or simply gave himself to displays of such burning rage while treating a simple fracture that his hand became shaky, his mind fogged, and his patient temporarily frightened out of his pain.

Still, though he would never accept it openly, Mullah Mirza realized that greatness and wealth would forever evade him.

"It is not my mind that fails me," he raged in the loneliness of his laboratory late at night when he faced yet another unyielding formula, "it is my fortune. I am not blessed enough."

At first he prayed to God.

"Give me a clue, a single hint," he would plead. "Show me one answer for everything that you have denied me."

Then he cursed all that was holy, and declared war on the heavens and the earth.

"I damn your pettiness," he screamed. "I spit on your stinginess. I curse your jealousy that keeps you from giving to me that which would make me greater than yourself."

He noticed that people were avoiding him in favor of more ignorant but less threatening doctors. He was enraged—that anyone dared doubt his work or question his methods; that they would allow their fears and their ignorance to stand in the way of "science," and revert to old and useless ways of other doctors for fear of Mullah Mirza's progressive—and therefore, he admitted, risky—methods; that they would desert him
now
—now that he was on the brink of failure and about to lose hope.

One morning he climbed upstairs into the butcher's shop and called David's customers to attention. He stood there in his long black robe and his torn canvas shoes—the customers staring at him—fixed his eyes on the bloody knife that David held in his hand, and made a simple announcement:

“Let it be known that Mullah Mirza is the master physician of this damned ghetto," he said. "From now on anyone who seeks the advice of a doctor other than me will be cursed straight into his grave."

No one said a word. Mullah Mirza had betrayed his weakness. He was desperate, at last aware of his limitations.

Years went by, and Mullah Mirza did not recover from that moment in David the Butcher's shop. Slowly he abandoned his experiments and stopped reading his books. After a while he even found himself preoccupied with the same concerns as ordinary people. He suffered his rheumatism, his ulcers. His eyes failed him. He was lonely, disappointed, poor. He had believed he could make a miracle—he could not live with the truth of his failure. He was about to give up hope, when Thick Pissing Isaac died and Yehuda the Just sealed the teahouse shut; since Noah was not Isaac's child, the rabbi said, he could not inherit the property. Fifteen years old and alone, Noah the Gold went looking for work.

One early morning in the summer of 1811, he knocked on Mullah Mirza's door and offered his services to the "Great Master." He had come to work, he said, in return for food.

Mullah Mirza stared at the boy on his doorstep that day, and, like Mama the Midwife a decade and a half earlier, thought he had been sent an angel. He dragged Noah into the lab, put him before a pot of his most advanced formula, and gave him a piece of rusted metal.

"Make gold," he commanded like God. "Turn the world into gold."

In Mullah Mirza's laboratory
the walls shone. The floor was paved with gold. The chests were stuffed, the ceiling was about to drop from the weight of the treasure that hung from it. Every day Mullah Mirza brought in new loads of tin and metal for Noah to make gold. Every day he laughed like a madman and embraced Noah in gratitude.

"At
last,"
he cried. "At
last."

Noah the Gold looked at the piles of junk about him and gasped at the Mirza's madness.

"But it's just like before," he insisted in vain. Afraid that the Jews would come to steal his wealth, Mullah Mirza had put eleven locks on the basement door, and refused to let Noah out even for an hour. He wanted to keep the discovery a secret, to duplicate the formula, learn Noah's method.

"You work for
me,"
he warned Noah every day. "You make gold only for
me."

He bought out all the tinsmiths, emptied his neighbor's basements. He raided strangers' kitchens, fought the owners, took away cooking utensils and gardening tools. The Jews had never seen Mullah Mirza so excited. When he put the locks on the door, they wondered if he had come upon an important discovery. When he carted the metal home and threw away nothing, they gathered outside his laboratory and asked him about his experiments. Mullah Mirza fortified the door with more bars, and remained secretive. At some point, he realized with complete lucidity, he would have to kill Noah to safeguard the secret of the formula. Once or twice he even had the vision of forcing the boy into the pot of elixir, turning him—this radiant child of God's mercy— into a statue of gold that would preserve his beauty forever. But before he could do so, Mullah Mirza needed to take charge of the formula himself. One late afternoon he gathered all his courage and took Noah's place before the transforming liquid.

"In the name of God . . ." he began.

He was trembling—so moved by the greatness of the moment he could not stop the rush of tears, so pleased to have his dream realized that he dared not proceed until Noah urged him to.

He immersed a steel dagger into the pot, held it for a moment, and pulled it out with a cry of glory that changed instantly into a wail of desperation.

Something was wrong.

Mullah Mirza attacked Noah with inhuman strength:

“You changed the formula.”

Noah the Gold swore innocence.

"Try again," he pleaded with his master, but again the metal remained unchanged. He gave the dagger to Noah. This time it turned to gold.

A thousand times that day, Mullah Mirza repeated the experiment. At dawn the next morning he was exhausted and insane, sobbing with disappointment and rage, begging Noah for the answer.

"But there
is
no gold," Noah pleaded with him a last time. "There never was any gold."

It was then, standing before the boy who had refused him his miracle, faced with the certainty of his life's failure and the mountain of junk metal he had believed was gold, the Mullah Mirza understood:

"By God," he whispered. "I dreamt it all."

And he laughed—so hard that his body bent forward until his beard touched his feet, so long that his face became streaked with tears, and he remained there, a small, crumpled figure devoid of all bitterness, no longer frightening, a tiny old man doubled over in the middle of the floor, laughing away at the absurdity of his life, at the years of seeking and the nights of prayer all in pursuit of the impossible, laughing with such innocence and such abandon that he even made Noah smile until his limbs were stiff and his breath shut down and he fell forward on his head, rolled over, and died.

In the year 1801,
Russia had claimed hegemony over the Persian province of Georgia. Four years later the Czar had annexed the provinces of Baku and Derbent. Contemplating resistance, Fath Ali Shah asked about the state of his army and discovered he had none: he had not paid his troops for years. Those who had not formally abandoned their posts were mostly opium addicts, or peasants who had never received military training. They had no uniforms, no weapons, no generals. In the arsenal at Tabriz—a strategically vital region because of its proximity to Russia—the Shah's emissaries found a few cannonballs, but even those did not fit the guns. They tried to buy lead locally, and discovered that the Shah had spent all the money in the national treasury. They asked His Majesty for money to acquire new weapons, but were refused. Fath Ali Shah would not waste his money fighting Russians over a few provinces, he said. If he had to retrieve the territories, he could easily
scare
the Czar into giving them back.

He announced a formal audience, and summoned a thousand nobles to the Garden of the Marble Throne at the newly completed Palace of Roses.

They came in resplendent garb, each gentleman surrounded by his own troupe of soldiers and guards and pages, their horses—tails painted red—clad in embroidered silks and golden bridles. Next to each nobleman walked his Guardian of the Bridles, who carried, folded neatly on his shoulder, the saddle's covering of embroidered purple and black. Two guards rode in front of the nobleman. A third and most trusted guard rode behind.

Outside the Square of the Cannons before the Palace of Roses, royal pages in bright red uniforms with elaborate headgear awaited the guests. They led the gentlemen through the palace gates into a narrow strip of garden, under an elaborate archway, and into the Garden of the Marble Throne. The nobles began to whisper: the Terrace, usually cloistered by an immense curtain, was open to view. On it was a gigantic throne, carved of green marble, its legs life-sized statues of jinns and fairies.

When all the nobles had assembled in the garden, Fath Ali Shah's favorite eunuchs stepped onto the Terrace. They were five, all white, dressed in long coats tight at the waist and with long, flared skirts. One eunuch stood beside each pillar of the throne. The fifth and most beautiful took his place in front. In his hands he held a jewel-studded cushion on which rested the Holy Sword.

The royal page appeared.

"Make way!" he cried.

"His Imperial Majesty! The King of Kings! The Standard Bearer of Islam! The Shadow of Allah! The Shah of Persia!"

Trumpets blew. Drums roared. Fath Ali Shah appeared, wearing his Robes of Wrath.

He had on a long coat made of red velvet covered entirely with rubies. He wore a three-tiered crown of rubies, a ruby-studded dagger, shoes embroidered with rubies, necklaces and rings and bracelets of rubies.

In the Garden of the Terrace of the Marble Throne, the nobles trembled: Fath Ali Shah wore his Robes of Wrath only to pronounce a sentence of death upon an esteemed enemy. In these robes, and on this same throne, he had ordered the blinding and execution of his own brother. Another time he had watched his Prime Minister boiled alive in a pot of oil.

He climbed the three steps, then reclined on the Marble Throne.

"The ill-omened Russians," he spoke, "have violated the sacred soil of Our country. We have no doubt that our unequalled army at Sari is capable of destroying the fiercest of the Czar's troops. But what would happen, do you imagine, if We were to send Our
household cavalry
to attack them?"

The household cavalry, everyone knew, merely performed the task of protecting the person of the Shah. It would be destroyed in a matter of hours by the Czar's soldiers. Still, to please His Majesty, the nobles cried and groveled at the woes the cavalry would bring upon the Russians.

"May I be Thy sacrifice," one man said, stepping forth. "Your cavalry would drive the invaders back to Moscow!"

The Shah agreed.

"And what if," he went further, "We were to go to the front Ourself?"

It was too much to imagine—the torture Fath Ali Shah could personally inflict upon the Czar.

"So it is settled," he concluded, already pleased with his triumph. "Spread the word and let the Russians be forewarned!"

The war in Azerbaijan lasted thirteen years and ended in defeat. The Czar had not been shaken by Fath Ali Shah's wrath. The Persian army never did manage a real fight. What resistance the Czar faced came from patriotic men and women who fought without conventional weapons, and refused to accept Russian hegemony. But at last, in 1813, Fath Ali Shah conceded to the Czar the provinces already under occupation. To further appease his neighbor, he also agreed to pay to Russia enormous sums by way of reparations. Across Persia, everyone mourned. Mullahs and clergymen called the Shah a traitor and asked for his throne. They said he was weak and corrupt, that he had squandered Persia's wealth and fallen before the strength of infidels. Trembling in his throne, afraid that the mullahs would call Jihad—holy war—against the Crown, Fath Ali Shah called once again for the Jewish soothsayer from Esfahan, and this time she answered.

She appeared one day
at the Square of the Cannons, standing by the side of the famous Pearl Cannon where thieves and murderers took refuge from the law, where old maids sat until Fate sent them a man, and lovers chained themselves together in the hope of achieving eternal union. Through the mist of opium and
arrack
that permanently clouded their visions, members of the Shah's household cavalry saw Esther approach, and immediately recognized the soothsayer in Fath Ali Shah's dreams. She was bald and unveiled, her skin was the color of oil, the air around her smelling of long distances and unknown ways.