Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (7 page)

“Allahuo Akbar!"
the soldiers fell to their knees. They were certain Esther was a ghost.
"Allahuo Akbar!
God is great.”

They took her into the palace, and sent for the Chief Eunuch. He rushed to Esther with a hundred other eunuchs, avoiding her eyes to guard against her evil, and took her into the Hall of Mirrors: the walls and the ceiling here were composed of a mosaic of small mirrors reflecting the light that poured in from arched portals around the room. Mirrors, everyone knew, protected against demons.

The Chief Eunuch went to call the Shah. All the way from the Hall of Mirrors to the Royal Quarters, he prayed aloud for his own life: Fath Ali Shah was ruthless to those who interrupted his sleep. The night before, he had spent furious hours trying to gain access to his own harem. He had wanted to sleep with his newest acquisition—a woman called Miriam, who was suspected widely of being a Jew. Early in the day, the Shah had sent the Chief Eunuch to prepare the girl for his arrival. Miriam had bathed in goat's milk and rubbed herself with rosewater, lined her eyes with antimony, and reddened her cheeks with a paste made by crushing the dried insect called
shan-djarf.
She had waited for the Shah in a bed of roses and chiffon, but the moment His Majesty had tried to touch her someone in the next room had sneezed.

The Shah left immediately. A sneeze, everyone knew, was a sign from God to refrain from the act one was about to engage in. Back in his quarters, Fath Ali Shah had waited an hour, entered the harem again, and again heard a sneeze.

He waited another hour. There was another sneeze. The

Shah realized then that one of his wives must have hired a “professional sneezer"—a woman disguised as a harem maid and hired by a jealous wife to keep His Majesty from sleeping with new virgins. The punishment for a false sneeze, everyone knew, was death. Fath Ali Shah ordered the execution of all the maids, and divorced all the wives in rooms within ear's reach of Miriam's. But he did not dare defy the sneeze: he resolved to wait another hour, in the course of which he fell asleep without ever having satisfied himself with Miriam.

Outside His Majesty's chambers, three soldiers greeted the Chief Eunuch. He went through the eunuchs' room, into a first bedroom where the commander of the palace guards slept every night in uniform, a naked sword by his side. From there he entered Fath Ali Shah's bedroom.

“May I be thy sacrifice," he said, trying to awaken His Majesty, who did not respond. The Chief Eunuch bit his lip and summoned courage.

"May I be thy sacrifice," he said again. "It seems the demon of your fate has come to call."

Fath Ali Shah turned as white as the pillow he rested on. He remained motionless, his eyes still closed, then sat up and gripped the sheets under him. In another time he would have rejoiced at Esther's arrival. Now, with the Czar at his doorstep and the mullahs calling for his ouster, the Shah feared Esther had come to predict his downfall. He looked up at the eunuch, who saw his wrath and fell immediately to his knees.

"Forgive me, Your Majesty. It was my misfortune to carry the news to you. If you grant me permission, I will have the woman flogged, cut up, and thrown to your most voracious dogs."

Fath Ali Shah descended the bed. His hands trembled visibly. He motioned for his dressers to approach.

"Keep her under guard," he told the eunuch. "Give Us time to prepare for her."

An hour after noon, the King of Kings arrived at the Hall of Mirrors. He wore a long tiara of three elevations, composed entirely of oversized diamonds. He had on a long jacket made of gold tissue covered with diamonds and decorated with two strings of pearls, each larger than a walnut, that crossed the shoulders. His belt and bracelet were composed of rows of diamonds. His dagger's hilt was covered with diamonds. He summoned the soothsayer, and the moment she turned to face him, he knew by the strength of her eyes that she was indeed a ghost.

"Speak!" he commanded, and all the eunuchs guarding Esther ran to hide. If he was not pleased with her prediction, they knew, Fath Ali Shah would order torturous death for all those who had heard her prophecy.

"Tell Us Our fate."

Esther the Soothsayer smiled at the Shah with blackened lips, and spoke to him with the voice of an angel:

"You will die old," she said, "at peace in your throne, twenty years and a thousand children from today."

Esther the Soothsayer
slept, and out of her dreams carved a woman, a creature of light like Noah, with a strange beauty and the voice of a muse. She gave the woman to Noah, her last gift, and then left him, sinking so deep into the world of hallucinations that nothing of her remained with him but a fading voice and dreams full of sunsets. Without her, Noah was lost. His days and nights blended into one until sleep and waking were indistinguishable, and dreams cast shadows on the walls.

He had buried Mullah Mirza, but never overcome his legacy. For years after the Mirza's death, everyone in Juyy Bar had come to Noah, demanding the truth about the gold. What was it, they asked, that had so driven Mullah Mirza

to ecstasy? Had he found the formula? Had he shared his secret with Noah?

Even Yehuda the Just came to call.

"I am the keeper of all souls," he told Noah. "I must know all secrets."

To convince Noah of his good intentions and gain his trust, Yehuda the Just had even unsealed the teahouse and allowed the boy back into Thick Pissing Isaac's home. Still, every time he inquired about the elixir, Noah the Gold shook his head in denial.

He opened the teahouse again and tried to gather back his old customers. They came only to ask about the elixir. When he disappointed them, they denied him their friendship.

Twenty years passed after the death of Mullah Mirza. In Juyy Bar, Noah the Gold ached from loneliness and remained poor. One night in the spring of 1831, he called Esther the Soothsayer:

"I must have a wife," he told her. "I must guard against the demon of time."

In 1831 a Muslim child had disappeared in Tabriz. His parents had looked for him in vain, and concluded that he had been stolen by gypsies, or eaten by wolves. Then a young man from the bazaar had brought news.

"Shokr-Allah the Jew murdered your son," he had told the boy's parents.

"He stole the child and took him home to draw his blood for Passover. His corpse is still in Shokr-Allah's basement."

The parents had gone to the Jews' ghetto and searched Shokr-Allah's house. In the basement they had found their son's body—already half-decomposed.

Shokr-Allah the Jew swore innocence. He had never seen the body until the boy's parents had discovered it. He only drank wine on Passover. The young man who had accused him owed him money, and he must have wished to avoid paying his debt by having the mullahs kill Shokr-Allah.

No one believed him. The mullahs ordered punishment not only for Shokr-Allah, but for all of his people: all Jews were held responsible for the crimes of one. The mullahs ordered a massacre.

This time, they said, they would not offer Jews the choice to convert to Islam and escape death. This time they sought revenge—the blood of Jewish children in return for that of the Muslim boy, the pain of their parents in payment for the grief Shokr-Allah had caused the Muslims. They sent a mob to the ghetto to gather all the Jewish children. In the main square they planted a hundred daggers into the earth, blades upward, and threw the children onto them to skewer their bodies like beasts. Then they slaughtered the older people. Those who had hidden in their basements were locked in and their houses were set on fire. Those who wore gold around their wrists and necks had it carved out of their bodies. Those who begged for mercy had their tongues cut off. For days the mob returned, searching every house and every temple, looting the shops, beating the men, raping the women.

In Qamar's house, the mob had killed everyone else. She threw herself on the ground and feigned death. Twice the mob came back to search the house for survivors. Qamar pulled her sister's corpse over herself and held her breath until they were gone. One night, when she thought the pogrom had ended, she escaped. In the streets, corpses lay frozen in the winter air. In the main square, the last of the surviving children died in the field of daggers. In the gutters, rainwater would forever run the color of blood. Never again in the history of Persia would even a single Jew live among the people of Tabriz.

Qamar the Gypsy had traveled east, toward Rasht, on the Caspian Coast. She crossed the mountains around Tabriz,

climbing high on treacherous roads where only bandits dared travel, across valleys so deep they swallowed entire caravans. Around Rasht the jungles were lush and dense, alive with the smell of sweet rain, roaring with the cries of panthers and leopards. Beyond them, in the flatland bordering the Caspian Sea, were the rice fields—light green and gold and silver at dawn. She stopped. She had heard the voice of Esther the Soothsayer.

“There is a boy in Juyy Bar with agate eyes," Esther said. “Find him. Give him children of light and laughter."

Qamar the Gypsy found her way to Tehran, and then to the holy city of Qom, where the greatest of mullahs received religious training. There she met a caravan of pilgrims and followed them south. The pilgrims were mostly poor men, traveling on foot or riding emaciated camels and donkeys. On their backs they each carried a large canvas bag with the remains of a relative or friend who had asked to be buried in the holy Muslim cities of Najaf and Karbala. There were shrines in those cities—consecrated places where for centuries the dead had been buried. They were placed tier on tier upon each other—to wait for the day when Allah would descend to earth and carry them all to heaven.

Qamar the Gypsy followed the pilgrims from a great distance. They were men on a holy mission and would not allow the presence of a Jew to spoil the purity of their vows. They walked in the early morning and late afternoon, resting at midday when the sun was too hot, and at night when the desert froze. Afraid to be seen by them, Qamar hid all day, and followed their trail in moonlight, guided by the sound of camel bells and the voice of Esther the Soothsayer. Even then she could smell the corpses that the pilgrims carried in their sacks. The laws of Persia and the Ottoman Empire required that bodies be buried for a year before being transported, to reduce the danger of spreading plague. But in the land of Islam, only the law of God was observed. The men carried the corpses fresh. To keep them clean, the pilgrims washed them in streams and rivers where others drank. To contain the smell of rot, they placed green apples in the sacks. They stopped in every village to buy new apples, and gave the old ones to beggar children who bit into them gratefully.

Noah the Gold
whistled in the dark. He stood outside the teahouse late at night after his customers were gone, and whistled a tune he heard inside his head. The neighbors were terrified.

“Stop that sound," they screamed. “The ghosts of darkness will hear your tune and come to strangle us all."

Noah the Gold knew about the demons who responded to whistles in the dark. Still, the tune in his head was clear and compelling, and he whistled it until he had summoned Qamar the Gypsy.

She was small and thin, with a tiny waist and the feet of a porcelain doll. She had dark skin, tear-shaped eyes, and a halo of reddish-brown hair that flew about her like a wild sunset. She came to Juyy Bar without money or a friend— running, she claimed, from a massacre in the Tabriz ghetto, at the heart of the province of Azerbaijan. She spoke a language that was a mixture of Persian and Turkish, and understood little of the dialect in Juyy Bar. She arrived when the weather was gentle, and on her footsteps she brought the cold air of Tabriz—turning the summer in Esfahan into a winter of blizzards and frozen snow.

“I have run before the Plague," she told Noah with her voice that was as cool and soothing as the wind she had brought, "from beyond the mountains of Elburz, and on my way I have seen a world of wonders."

Noah the Gold took Qamar into his room and did not let her go. He kept her in his own light, clung to her as if for every breath. He touched her skin, inhaled the smell of pine trees and rain in her hair. Qamar's hands were calm and undemanding, her eyes never probed, her tongue— patient and calm—left a cool trace everyplace it touched. Weeks later, enraged at the scandal of a man and woman sleeping together without being married, Yehuda the Just forced his way into Noah's house and performed the rites of marriage between him and Qamar. Even then, they would not stop holding each other. They made love at noon, in a darkened room with the wind howling at their doorstep. At night, when the house was calm, they sat in the moonlight and talked with their faces close to each other. Against the columns of red mud that surrounded the courtyard, their shadows moved softly—like two figures dancing to a silent tune that only they could hear—and all those who saw them then believed they were creatures of a charmed life.

In the summer of 1834,
Fath Ali Shah went to Es-fahan. One night in the palace, he stood surrounded by his Royal Dressers, donning a bejeweled gown that he would wear at dinner. Suddenly he dropped to the ground.

Twenty years after he had faced Esther the Soothsayer in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Roses, Fath Ali Shah died. He left behind three hundred sons, and more than a thousand grandchildren.

Immediately upon the Shah's death, war broke out in Tehran: the Shah's three hundred sons all claimed a right to the throne. Each contender was backed by a different segment of the aristocracy, or another foreign power. Fath Ali Shah's Crown Prince, Abbas Mirza, had predeceased his father. Abbas's son, Muhammad Khan, was at last pushed at the throne with the intervention of the British military mission in Azerbaijan. The Russians, too, gave the King their blessing; he was a feeble man—in body and spirit alike— and he promised not to resist the foreigners in their endeavors in Persia.

Muhammad Shah's Prime Minister, Hajji Mirza Aghassi, recognized that the King had inherited his grandfather's belief in mystical powers, and immediately set out to use them for his own advantage: instead of ordering a new search for Esther the Soothsayer, Aghassi indoctrinated the Shah in the principles of Sufism, and from then on spent most of his time performing spiritual exercises with the King. The late Abbas Mirza's Vizir, Qa'im Maqam, recognized the danger of a ruler who had lost touch with reality and the world, and tried to warn the King against the ruse of his minister. He wrote letters to Muhammad Shah, lecturing at him as if he were still a schoolchild, enumerating all of the nation's ills without adding even a flavoring of pleasant lies. He told the Shah that he was making a fool of himself before the entire nation, that the two men at the head of the nation—the Shah and his Prime Minister—were being called ''the two dervishes of Persia." He claimed that Aghassi had indoctrinated the Shah in the path of asceticism only to render him powerless. Muhammad Shah was annoyed and angered by the letters: Qa'im Maqam, he believed, must understand a king's prerogative to see nothing but beauty, and hear nothing but pleasantries; Maqam had written the letters to torture the Shah and take away his peace of mind.