Cry of the Peacock: A Novel Read online

  CRY OF THE PEACOCK

  GINA BARKHORDAR NAHAI

  CROWN PUBLISHERS INC., NEW YORK

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, Inc.,

  201 East 50th Street,

  New York, New York 10022.

  Member of the Crown Publishing Group..

  CROWN is a trademark of Crown Publishers, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barkhordar Nahai, Gina.

  Cry of the peacock / Gina Barkhordar Nahai.

  p. cm.

  1. Jews—Iran—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552. A6713C79 1991

  813'.54—dc20 90-20311

  CIP

  ISBN 0-517-57479-9

  Book Design by Shari de Miskey

  10 987654321

  First Edition

  Fo my parents,

  who gave mi courage

  My husband, who said J should write

  My children,

  who have not seen the Persian sky

  For the memory of my grandmother,

  Heshmat Nik-Fahm Meraj,

  Who died in America dreaming of Jran

  Prologue

  1982

  In the women's prison where the Guards had taken Peacock, six people slept in a cell designed for one. They sat on the floor, occupying every rat-infested inch, blindfolded and handcuffed for weeks in a row until they developed an infection and were executed or released. They ate twice a day—bread and walnuts thrown before them on the floor that was soiled with feces. Every morning the Guards took a number of prisoners outside before a firing squad. They removed the prisoners' blindfolds and lined them up against a concrete wall thickened with blood. They shot them—sometimes with real bullets, sometimes with blanks.

  The mullahs used fake executions to extract a confession, or raise the amount of bribe each prisoner would offer for his release. The regime of God was avaricious and without mercy. It often arrested people not for any crimes they may have committed in the past, but for the single purpose of forcing them to pay the money they had hidden away or invested abroad. When all the money had been paid and all the confessions were made, the guns would be loaded and the prisoner would fall.

  Blindfolded and bound in her cell, Peacock could hear the executions and count the number of prisoners who came back alive. She had been in jail for three weeks, and still no one had decided her fate. She had arrived one summer afternoon surrounded by Guards, sitting in the back of a military jeep with her face unveiled and her hair uncovered. She had sat there in her clothes that shocked the eye and defied all Islamic codes, in layers of bright chiffon and fiery silk, yellow scarves and sequined shirts and a gold-embroidered belt above a crushed velvet skirt.

  She wore white schoolgirl stockings and satin shoes decorated with rhinestones and beads, a dozen gold bracelets, countless strands of pearls, rings on every finger. Her pockets were stuffed with gold and precious stones. In her shoes she had thousand-rial bills. Still, it was not her clothes that so shocked the mullahs, it was her age. Peacock the Jew was so old, they said, she remembered God when he was a child.

  The mullahs had prisoners as young as six, and as old as ninety. They arrested women who had tried to stage a counterrevolution, and those who had worn nail polish and makeup. They imprisoned communists and nationalists, Jews and Baha'is, and, most of all, Muslims who refused to abide by the mullahs' rules. But they had never arrested someone as old as Peacock, and they were at a loss as to what to do with her.

  The Guards took her into a detention cell. A woman in a full-length dress with long sleeves, and wearing a scarf to hide her hair, strip-searched Peacock and took all her jewels and money. She sent Peacock for interrogation.

  ''How old are you?” a young mullah asked Peacock without looking at her.

  She stared at him.

  "Answer!” he commanded.

  He still had not looked at her.

  "How old are you?"

  "I was born the year of the Plague."

  He looked up.

  "What plague?"

  He knew nothing of the past.

  "What plague?" He stood up, breathing on her.

  "Answer." He smelled of sweat and American whiskey.

  I was born the year of the Plague, Peacock wanted to say, and raised in a cave underground, with lice crawling the

  walls and scorpions in the dark and worms in every gulp of water I drank.

  "What plague?”

  The Guards took her into a cell. Weeks went by. She listened to executions every day. Her cellmates asked her the same questions.

  "How old are you?"

  The woman to Peacock's right was a Communist who said she believed in genocide. The one to her left was a housewife who never knew why she was arrested. Mehr-Allah the Guard, who stood in the corridor outside, was a father who had sent his children to war only because he believed they would die and go to heaven.

  "Peacock!" he cried one morning as bullets exploded in the courtyard. He had come for her. They had decided her fate.

  "Peacock!" he cried again, and she stumbled to her feet. The door opened. Mehr-Allah the Guard removed Peacock's blindfold. Light burned through to the back of her head. She stood up, dizzy, and held on to the wall for balance. When she could see through the light, she realized that Mehr-Allah was scrutinizing her.

  "So how old were you?" he asked as if her life were over.

  Peacock let go of the wall.

  "I am a hundred and sixteen years old," she said, "and still, I intend to live."

  Inside the cell on the floor, the Communist who said she believed in genocide wet her pants with laughter.

  1796

  Esther the Soothsayer was tall and wideshouldered, her skin dark and shiny as the oil she rubbed on her stomach and hands to make them soft. Her eyes, black as the waters of the Gulf, were always dusted with a glossy powder made of silver nitrate. Her lips were thick, and red like the heart of a young bird. Her hair was long and wild and as dark as her eyes, her voice deep and throbbing and filled with mystery.

  She had been born in the south, in the port city of Bandar 'Abbas, on the Persian Gulf. Like many Jewish women in the area, she had grown up working as a harem maid to the wives of wealthy Arab and Persian men. She sewed the women's clothes, braided their hair, delivered them of their children. And she practiced sorcery and witchcraft.

  She said that she could look in the palm of a newborn child and tell of its destiny, make potions and write spells that made barren women pregnant, kept fear out of the hearts of old men, returned husbands gone astray. She went around collecting tools—pieces of cloth, skeletons of animals, lizards' and cats' tails, and strands of hair from dead virgins. She kept them all together in a locked chest for the day when one of her ladies came to her asking to poison a rival wife, or rot an in-law with smallpox.

  ''I bring you magic and good fortune and the knowledge of the dead," she whispered to the ladies of the harem in the Muslim accent she had learned to substitute for her own ghetto language.

  "I can reach into your past, unveil the secrets of your sorrow. I know your sins and your longings. I can make your wishes come true."

  Esther the Soothsayer could see the future in her dreams.

  Long ago, when she was still a child, she had foretold the death of sailors lost in the furious waters of the Persian Gulf. Later, before the first
British ships had ever docked at Bandar 'Abbas, she had spent entire nights describing them to the women of the harem.

  “They will come floating across the Gulf—giant mountains of wood—and aboard them will be men with eyes the color of the sea and skin that glistens like the moon."

  Breathless, the women had listened to her tales of the future.

  “The men will leave the ships and come into the city. They will seek our women, give them children with mist in their eyes and faraway mountains in their dreams. They will rob the rich of their wealth and the poor of their honor. But in return they will leave us with a gift far more precious than what they took: the knowledge," her voice had throbbed inside the harem walls, “of the world beyond."

  She knew more than she said—tales so strange and unlikely that no one would have believed them, secrets so dark and frightening she held them to herself. She knew how to read people's eyes, walk into their dreams when they were asleep, and probe their minds.

  But with all of her powers, Esther the Soothsayer was trapped in a life of loneliness and bondage. She was a Jew, born of a mother who had worked and died in the service of the Sheikh's family, inherited by him and doomed to spend her youth and desire as a slave without a face, until she was too old to work and they sent her back to die in the ghetto outside Bandar 'Abbas. She could never marry: no one but a Jew would marry her; no Jew would marry a girl who had been raised in a harem. She could have no children, no home of her own, no freedom.

  Every night in the harem, she watched the wives paint their faces and color their lips, perfume their skin, wait for their husband to come and choose from among them. Afterward she lay in bed and imagined the wife in the folds of the Sheikh's arms, their bodies clinging like snakes, the sound of their breath marking the passage of time. She thought of the world outside the harem, outside Bandar 'Abbas. She thought of places she had seen in her dreams. She was fifteen years old and her flesh burned with the call of desire.

  She began to leave the harem at night. She would wait till the wives had sunk into their beds and the eunuchs were asleep. Then she crept out across the vast, dry gardens of the Sheikh's house into the streets of Bandar 'Abbas. She wore a thin white veil reserved for Muslim women, took off the patch of yellow cloth that all Jews sewed on their clothes. She went to the harbor, breathing the air that smelled of burnt wood and the cries of fishermen lost in the waves, and watched the shadows of fishing boats and palm trees, as transparent as ghosts, reflected on the dark waters. She waited, her body moist with the unrelenting heat of the south, her hair damp and salty, her ears scratching with the sound of rats' feet running up and down trees. Sometimes a man would approach her.

  ''Take me away." She would smile at him with eyes darker than the night. "Love me till I'm old."

  He would take her to his wooden shack by the sea and lay her naked on his rug. Esther the Soothsayer would close her eyes and pray for love. She smelled the vodka in her lover's sweat, the fear of the sea on his breath. At dawn she walked back with him to the harbor and watched him row slowly toward the sharks.

  She went back every night, waiting, hoping for the man who would open his heart and feel her warmth, hold her in the morning and ask that she stay. She used all of her powers to convince the men, wrote spells and hid them in their hair, hung talismans above their beds. She walked into their dreams when they slept, conjured up the love they would never feel for her on their own. But all of the spells failed and all of her powers came short and still, Esther the Soothsayer was alone.

  For three years she looked in Bandar 'Abbas. In the end, she came back empty-handed and more alone. One night she cried and prayed to the darkness for escape: “Save me," she asked the ghosts she knew so well. “Help me change my fate."

  She fell asleep and dreamt of a land she had never before seen or heard of: a world of calm and plenty, a place where men loomed bigger than God, and gold blossomed in every field. She saw a palace, a structure built entirely of glass, where a king slept unafraid of the daggers of assassins. She saw men who commanded the power of God; women who walked the earth with pride; money and jewels and beauty such as she had never dared imagine.

  “I will go there," she swore to the darkness. "I will walk there and never stop till I die."

  The next day she took all her money and bought a place on a caravan bound for the north. For three weeks they traveled—the men riding in front, sitting cross-legged in wooden boxes that hung from the backs of camels and mules, the women walking behind the animals. At night they camped on the road, or in caravansaries along the way. Esther the Soothsayer kept to herself and pretended to be Muslim. When they reached Esfahan, she left the caravan and went to find the Jews' ghetto. She had come far enough, she thought. Destiny had lost track of her.

  The Jewish ghetto of Esfahan was called Juyy Bar. It was a collection of houses and shops, an old square, four synagogues, three public baths. It stood on barren ground—the earth beneath it composed of an impenetrable layer of clay that served as a good foundation for homes, but created shallow wells that soon dried. The wells were infested with worms—long, milky white creatures that crawled in staggering numbers from a never-ending source in the earth. They slid down the walls and into the water where they laid their eggs. Across the ghetto in Esfahan, the river Zayandeh-Rud—Life-giver—irrigated hundreds of acres of land and returned some of the best crops in the country. But water was controlled by the mullahs, and they denied it to the Jews.

  In Juyy Bar, the Jews lived like ants trapped inside an underground hole. Their houses were all one-story high, built of mud and clay. The rooms were small and dark and without windows, separated from the courtyard by columns of red mud that were cracked and lopsided and on the verge of crumbling. In the courtyard there was a pool of stagnant water where women washed the day's clothes and dirty dishes, children bathed in the summer, and frogs screamed through the night. In one corner was the only toilet—an open hole in the ground. Next to the toilet was an underground oven that all the tenant families shared.

  The Jews, as anywhere else in Persia, were considered impure and untouchable. They were not allowed to live and work outside their ghetto, to plant their own food or drink from public waters. The men wore red or yellow patches on their clothes, the women covered their faces with thicker veils than those reserved for Muslims. Anything a Jew touched became soiled forever. If accused of a crime, a Jew could not testify in his own defense. He could not even step out of the ghetto on a rainy day for fear that the rain may wash the impurity off his body and onto a Muslim's. Esther the Soothsayer looked at the ghetto and went cold. She had escaped the harem, she realized, but not her bondage.

  She tried to find a place to live, and was met with refusing eyes and probing questions. The Jews had been talking about her since she arrived. They said that she was a whore because she had traveled without a man, that she was godless because she claimed to know the future. They were suspicious because she spoke a different dialect, ate different food. They insisted on knowing why she had left Bandar 'Abbas.

  "I have come to change my destiny," Esther the Soothsayer told them as if she were God. "I have come to leave my fate and find a new life."

  No one understood.

  She must have been driven out, they decided—punished by her own people and banned for a crime she had come here to hide. She must have been a thief, an adulteress, a whore. She must leave Juyy Bar and take away her corruption.

  “Go!” Rabbi Yehuda the Just screamed at Esther in his Sabbath sermon. "Leave, and take your talismans and your spells.”

  Esther the Soothsayer could not fight the ghetto. But she had come to Esfahan for a reason, and for that she wanted to stay: out in the heart of the city that had once been the capital of Persia, she had been told, there was a palace built entirely of glass. She thought her dream had called her here.

  She knew that if she were married, the Jews would not chase her out. She looked around and found Thick Pissing Isaac: a big man wi
th a bald head and a shyness that made him look away every time she passed by. He owned the teahouse at the far end of the ghetto and lived alone. As a child, he had once sat with his friends to eat a bowl of soup. There was not enough for everyone, and the boys had started to fight. Desperate to eat and too shy to fight, Isaac had stood up in the midst of the quarrel and urinated in the soup. Then he had sat down, crying, and finished the food.

  Esther the Soothsayer liked the story of Isaac's childhood. She liked his eyes that never dared look at her, his loneliness that reminded her of herself.

  So she went to call on him—in his dreams at first, where she appeared every night and spoke his name—and by the time she knocked on his door late one night when all of Juyy Bar was asleep, she knew he would not refuse her warmth.

  Thick Pissing Isaac lay terrified in his bed. He was awake, hours after midnight, listening to Esther call him. For many nights now he had been dreaming of her—a tall creature he thought he had seen before but could not place. In his sleep he had tried to remember who she was, strained his mind until it was dark. She stood so close to him he could smell her skin. Now at last she had spoken, and her voice had forced him awake.

  So he went to her, drawn by her call and the need to feel her. He found her standing by his door, a shadow in the night, and even before he had touched her he knew that she was naked under the black chador, that her hair was unbraided and long and dark as her eyes, that her skin was soft, and her tongue blistering red.

  She walked in and slipped into Isaac's bed—under the old comforter that smelled of tobacco and dust—and taught him what she had learned of love in the long and murky nights of Bandar 'Abbas. She went back to him every night, hiding in the darkness as she traveled the distance between his teahouse and the rubble where she stayed by day. Afraid his neighbors would see her come in, Isaac waited for her in the light of a candle, then closed the door and prayed that no one heard their whispers. He offered her tea and dates and all the food in the house. He was startled by her passion, filled with a thousand questions he dared not ask. He waited for her to speak first.