Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (9 page)

In the summer of 1848,
Muhammad Shah the Dervish died. His Crown Prince, the sixteen-year-old Nasser-ed-Din, was then far away from the capital in Tabriz. In his absence, riots broke out in Tehran and Esfahan for the succession to the throne. Once again, British and Russian missions in Tehran helped the Crown Prince reach the capital and take over the reign. Nasser-ed-Din Shah ruled for half a century. He never forgot the kindness of his friends.

He was a tall man with a wide mustache and a face that revealed no weakness. He had a strong will, an ambitious vision, a keen sense of diplomacy. He was concerned with history—with his own image in the eyes of posterity. He believed in decorum, in greatness, in wealth.

In Tehran he hired artists and sculptors to beautify his palace, spent entire days posing for portraits where he would appear in royal garb, adorned with jewels and silks. Later, when he imported from Europe the art of photography, he kept a photographer on hand at the palace, and did not miss an opportunity to pose for the camera.

Nasser-ed-Din Shah paid biographers and historians to keep records of his reign, maintained a correspondence with other heads of state to make sure no one would forget him. He held court for foreign emissaries and other kings that he invited to Tehran, made certain they were impressed, that they wanted to come back. He spent an entire fortune financing extravagant trips to Europe, taking every time nearly a hundred of his entourage, staying away for so long that when he returned, he had become a stranger to his own kingdom. The trips, he believed, were worthwhile and indispensable. Persia needed to modernize with the help of the West. The Shah went abroad to represent his nation, and speak on its behalf.

But all the time he pursued the goals of modernization, Nasser-ed-Din Shah based his actions on the prophecies of his seers. For a while he contemplated a search for Esther the Soothsayer. Then he was told, by an able minister who sought to divert the Shah's attention from matters of the other world, that his quest was most certainly doomed to failure; the woman in the Shah's Square at Esfahan, the minister explained, had been a ghost—this much was attested to by none other than Fath Ali Shah himself, who had seen Esther up close, and even exchanged words with her. Ghosts did not always appear in a single form. Rather than conduct a worldwide search for the Jewess from Esfahan—thus alerting foreign powers to his taste for the supernatural—the Shah was better off heeding the advice of his own court astrologers.

Nasser-ed-Din Shah agreed, but on one condition: the person who told his death, he insisted, must be a woman— for even a female
ghost
did not have the power to become a man—and she must be a Jew, for Jews had abilities unknown to believers.

The minister brought the Shah a Jewess, promised her immunity from royal wrath, and ordered that she foretell His Majesty's future:

"You will be poisoned by one of your wives," the woman predicted, and soon met an untimely death. Content that he was now in control of his own fate, Nasser-ed-Din Shah hired three hundred food tasters to try every morsel of food destined for the royal palate. He doubled the staff of spies and eunuchs watching the women in his harem, and, once and for all, gave up the search for Esther the Soothsayer.

Honest the Antiquarian
was Esfahan's leading archaeologist and the richest man in Juyy Bar. He worked out of a tiny shop all the way at the end of the ghetto's narrowest street. He had been there for forty-seven years, married and raised his family in the back of the shop, and in all that time never once cleaned the place. The dust, he believed, gave his merchandise a look of authenticity. It also projected the image of poverty, and thus discouraged Muslims from looting him. He had piled so much junk in the shop that it was impossible to tell the real antiques from the fake. He bought cheap and sold dear, and what he sold was often not antique. In 1796, Honest the Antiquarian had sold the skull of Alexander the Great three times to three different Englishmen in the same travel company. With the money, the Jews believed, he had acquired a single precious stone—the ruby that Shaban the jeweler had offered to Agha Muhammad Shah. Everyone had heard of the sale, but no one had ever seen the ruby. Honest the Antiquarian swore on the grave of his mother he had never laid eyes on anything so precious.

He spent his life sitting on a chair in the back of the shop, watching customers come and go and bargaining over the smallest differences in price. He had stayed there so long he had developed asthma from the dust and rheumatism from lack of exposure to light. When he became older his sons offered to help him run the business, but he refused.

“You will rob me blind," he had told them, "and I won't be able to go after you because you are my own blood."

In time the legend of the hidden ruby had lost its original attraction for the people of Juyy Bar. Still, for many years Honest the Antiquarian resisted the idea of hiring help or letting his sons into the business. But as he approached the age of eighty, he became all but incapacitated. His asthma was so severe that breathing was an all-consuming task. His joints swelled so large he could barely move at all. He was desperate for help, and when Moshe asked for a job, he remembered that the boy was mad, and thought this an advantage for himself—an imbecile would not have the wits to rob him—and hired him.

Moshe worked for Honest the Antiquarian for five years, and every day planned to steal the ruby. He tried to learn Honest's way of thinking, to guess the most likely place the old man would have hidden the stone. He wanted to take the stone, run to Esfahan, and become Muslim. He felt no guilt toward Noah or Qamar the Gypsy. He had no love in him—not even for his twin, Leyla. They had abandoned him in the leecher's hands, and now Moshe would abandon them to their poverty.

He decided early on that the stone was hidden in the shop. It was here that Honest the Antiquarian spent all his time, here—on his chair—that he slept even at night when his joints were too stiff to carry him into his room in the back. He never even left to go to the synagogue anymore— not on Sabbath, not on Yom Kippur. He claimed he could not walk, but Moshe believed differently; ever since the stories of the ruby had first begun to circulate in the ghetto, Honest the Antiquarian had sat in the same spot with his chair against the same wall.

The year Moshe turned seventeen, Honest the Antiquarian let his secret slip out of his hand.

It was summer, and for three weeks no customers had walked into the store. Friday night, Honest the Antiquarian closed the shop early and pulled the shutters, leaving only a tiny crack for air through which Moshe could peek in. He sat in his chair and ate the dinner his wife had brought him. When she was gone, he remained in his chair, his eyes closed and his legs dried in place, coughing violently and cursing God. The heat exacerbated his asthma. He got up and paced the shop, making his way painfully through the clutter and the dust, hoping to shake the cough, numb the pain in his joints, and invite sleep. Then all at once he stopped before the back wall—against the stack of silver goblets he claimed had been used only once—at the wedding of Alexander the Great to Princess Roxana. He stared before him without a move or a gesture, then sat down and fell asleep.

Moshe entered the shop through the back, took an antique dagger, and thrust it in the wall where Honest the Antiquarian had stared earlier. The mud crumbled—revealing a tiny nest into which Honest the Antiquarian had placed his treasure.

Honest the Antiquarian woke up to find the wall broken and his ruby gone. He stumbled from his chair and tried to scream, but his lungs were choked, and his legs would not move.

“Thief!” he cried, but Moshe was already gone—out of the shop, through the ghetto, and into Esfahan, which embraced him, he thought, with the warmth of a thousand suns.

Moshe sent the massacre
to Juyy Bar—on the third day of Ashura, when the Muslims mourned the death of the Third Disciple, on a Sabbath morning when Honest the Antiquarian still sobbed for his beloved stone and Noah the Gold had stopped looking for his son—he sent hundreds of men armed with daggers and clubs and burning torches to destroy what he had already left behind.

He had gone into Esfahan and changed his name, become Muslim. He had found the Friday Imam and told him a story: of the Jews conspiring secretly to get rich, of Mullah Mirza learning to read Persian and Arabic, of Noah the Gold having made a pact with the devil through which he could create gold. The Imam did not wish to verify Moshe's claims. He ordered a pogrom.

So they came, and for three days in the summer of 1853 they tore through Juyy Bar and burned the temples and the shops and houses. They dragged Noah the Gold out of his teahouse, and set his hair on fire. They found Yehuda the Just's wife still sitting in her courtyard, and took her out into the street, where she withered and died. They took eleven converts on the first day and many more later, and every day they came back until they had gone through all the houses and harmed everyone, but still they were not satisfied; they wanted Yehuda the Just—the leader of the Jews— and he was nowhere to be found.

He had dug a hole for himself and stayed there—abandoning his family and his people—and he withstood hunger and thirst until he was certain he would die, and then suddenly he gave himself up. The day he walked to his death, Yehuda the Just was ninety years old and alone. He had lived for close to a century, and never risen above the moment—long ago, before he knew the fear of dying—when he had condemned Esther the Soothsayer. He had judged her unfairly, and elevated his own rank in the eyes of his people, but in the end he was still a rabbi in a damned ghetto long since forgotten by God. He would die, and no one would remember his name.

So he walked to the ghetto square, and stood before his executioners. His eyes were entirely white, his skin yellow with fear. They showed him the blade that would cut him open, and he began to cry, but still he refused to close his eyes. They brought him a Torah and commanded that he spit on it. Yehuda the Just looked up at the men in front of him, and for the first time in his life committed an act of greatness: he spat at his killers instead.

Someone raised a blade and cut Yehuda the Just from the side of his neck down into his stomach, so that his insides boiled out like a fountain, and his head screamed even after it was severed from his body.

They hung each half of his corpse from one side of Juyy Bar's gates. He stayed there for seven days, rotting in the sun. At night the dogs barked at him before they ate his flesh.

Mad Marushka
had wanted to be rich. In her youth she had dreamt of marrying a man who would take her away from her house in Baku—to Moscow and St. Petersburg and Europe. She had imagined herself riding alongside her lover across open roads, standing on board steamships and trains as she journeyed with him toward a new world. She had wanted passion and adventure and everlasting love.

At sixteen she had married a merchant who sold antiques and studied them as art. He was a good man, kind and gentle and undemanding, but he never understood Ma-rushka's passions. He had white skin, pale lips that moved in a soft whisper even when he was not speaking, and a wooden leg that he hung by the side of the bed every night and tied to his knee in the morning. For twenty-three years, Mad Marushka had lain in bed every night and felt the coldness of her husband's fingers against her flesh. She had thought of the world she would never see, and imagined her skin turning white where he touched her. Every night she had prayed he would die in his sleep.

She was a small woman with dark skin, curly black hair, and bones that stood in sharp angles and made her look evil. She had the body of a boy, her mother had always said when she was younger, and lust that only men were capable of. Raised on the Persian-Russian border, she spoke both languages. She was a Jew, like her husband, but she cared nothing for God or his prophets. Mad Marushka bore allegiance only to her own passions.

She had three sons, conceived in anger, who always felt, deep in their bones where the chill of Baku never thawed, the indifference of the woman who should have loved them. At forty, with the boys all grown up and married, Mad Marushka opened her door one day and found love.

It was Moshe—now Muhammad—traveling through Baku on his way into Russia. He sought a place to spend the night. He was eighteen years old, tired and hungry, and still radiant with beauty. Mad Marushka recognized in his face the same longing for escape that had robbed her of every moment of peace in her own life. She took him in.

Against her husband's objections, she let Muhammad eat at their table, then put him to sleep in her sons' old bedroom. That night, as he lay in bed, she stood naked in his doorway.

She was dark, and she made love to him standing, the door still open. By the light of the candle she clung to Muhammad in the room where she had spent her youth, where she had come to see her children every night and prayed that they would vanish—like shadows forced away by light—so she could run into the world and chase her dreams. Afterward she took him outside, in the freezing cold, and with her tongue drew circles up and down his chest and his stomach and his penis until he dragged her back into the house and up the stairs into her sons' bedroom and made love to her again while her husband listened from the next room.

For weeks they kept at each other, shameless and wild, until Marushka's sons could no longer stand the shame of her dishonor and came home to kill their mother's lover. Mad Marushka shielded Muhammad with her own body.

“Touch him," she told her sons, “and I swear I will kill you all myself." Her cruelty frightened Muhammad. He realized he should leave her, but the next day her husband died and Muhammad became trapped.

The husband died quietly, suffocating in his sleep without a sound or a whimper, so that when Marushka found him in the morning, she would not have known that he was dead but for his joints that were chalk-white and stiff. She did not call her sons. She called an undertaker and buried her husband immediately, without observing the rites or even holding a wake. Then she sold off their properties.